The Irreversible Reckoning

by T. Rudacille

  ***

  In the open space behind Don’s house, the trees were hung round with lights to illuminate the stage that had been erected for him. Hundreds of chairs were arranged in neat rows, though some were higher than others due to the rising and falling of the rocks. People were decked out in their “Don Day Best,” which, I’m sure you realize, was our Pangaean, Red Anarchist version of the Earthean phrase “Sunday best.” What you might not realize is that the phrase was coined out of snark, not reverence.

  Don Day was on Sunday, ironically. Well, it was on the free-day, the day before work resumed. I say it’s ironic because on Earth, Sunday was a day of worship for moral, faithful people (ideally, anyway), whereas our Don Day was a day of our village coming together to listen to Don, the least-moral person I knew besides Tyre and his ilk, prattle on about whatever it was that went on in his mind. But when he exited his house, followed by two young, blonde woman (at which Alice and I rolled our eyes, because I had told her the story of Don’s blonde), a hush came over the crowd that had been talking animatedly just a few seconds earlier. Beside me, Alice sat cross-legged in her long, flowing black dress, her blonde hair straightened and shining in the light. Instead of watching Don and many members of the council take the stage, I was watching her, and when she looked over at me, her blue eyes glowing in the light from the tree-lamps, and mouthed, “What?” with a hint of a smile on her glossy lips, I grinned and shook my head.

  “You’re dumb.” She whispered, but her cheeks were flushed a little redder, and she was still smiling as her hand came down to grasp mine.

  “You’re dumb.” I whispered back.

  “Shut up.”

  “You shut up.”

  “Stop!”

  “You started it!”

  She giggled quietly, and several faces, all wearing expressions ranging from irritation to incredulity at our disrespect to utter fury, turned in our direction.

  “Problem?” Alice asked them, her smile vanishing to be replaced by her usual look of steely rage. The people glaring at us knew all about her, how she was the youngest Commander ever to lead a band of troops, how she had the highest Old Spirit kill rate of any Commander, how she brought in the most Commanders who wanted to do the most talking. No one was going to say anything to either of us. They could glare, but they wouldn’t open their mouths.

  “Yeah!” I shot at them, not loud enough so the whole crowd could hear, but loud enough so they could, “My girl’ll kick your ass!”

  “Stop!” She said, before laughing again.

  “Ahem.” Don said, and he was looking at us, which caused us both to burst out laughing. We quieted down, though, when he said, “Alice, will you be taking your seat up here on stage with us? Will John?”

  “John is not here, because he had a pressing matter to attend to, and I am fine right here with my husband. Thank you, though.” She replied with a fake air of cheeriness.

  “Alright.” Don replied stiffly, “If I may begin.”

  “By all means.” I said, and Alice snorted through her nose to keep from laughing any harder.

  “In my quiet reflection today, I found myself pondering the answer to one of our existence’s most fundamental questions.” Don said, and Alice and I, seated in the absolute last row, were able to look around and see all of the faces, all of the eyes fixed on the man speaking, all of the pathetically rapt attention given to a maniac who thought he was God and King.

  “It’s not the question of why we’re here. It’s not the question of why we’re immortal and ageless. It’s the question of, are we animals, or are we men and women? Or are we both?”

  “Oh, God…” Alice groaned, and on the other side of the aisle, she caught Eli’s eye when he looked back at us. He was slouched down in his chair, legs open, and when he looked back at us, he rolled his eyes. Beside him, Melinda was sitting up straight and tall, her eyes on Don, her attention rapt, certainly, but her eyes ablaze with a look of fury that was undeniable when she glanced over at her husband every few minutes.

  She should hardly have been able to blame Eli for being so obviously uninterested; the vast majority of the council members on stage were ones who frequently voted against Don’s measures, and did not buy into the propaganda surrounding his rule. I watched a few of them yawn, and a few of them roll their eyes, and as I watched them, I counted thirty of the forty-five council members on stage, not including Alice, John, Eli, and me, and out of the thirty, twenty-eight were against Don on most issues. I pitied them, having to keep up the façade of harmony and togetherness for the sake of the people in our town.

  “Way back in the day,” Don continued, “Twenty-six years ago, some of us lived on a faraway land, a land that is dead now. In the final days on that land, we began to undergo a drastic change. The powers gifted to us by the One God ran awry. Our hearts attacked other hearts, ripping them open for our prying minds. Our bodies were stronger and faster than ever before, our teeth were long and sharp, when we needed them to be. Creatures stalked us, dark creatures who could change their shape, who could steal identities. But we escaped, and once here, on this land, our drastic change came full circle. We could control our gifts. We could change over to our animal forms at will. But why? Why are we these advanced beings? Why, when we were on Earth, were we not what we are now? Surely our challenges were the same: we faced the same conflicts, the same battles, the same wars. We saw the same pain. We witnessed the same deaths. We fought this same fight. So, why were we merely human? Why were not evolved, like our Purissimissian brothers and sisters we would come to meet and know and love?”

  He paused for effect. Alice laughed, I smirked, Eli sunk down further in his chair because he was asleep already.

  “The answer is that, though our battles were the same battles and our pain the same pain, we had lived so long under the restraints of what we will call ‘the Way of Man.’ I want my formerly Earthean friends to look back. Way back, twenty-six years ago. I want my Purissimissian friends to close your eyes and imagine. What were our lives before this? The world was falling to ruins; every country seemed to be at war, even with its neighbors. Even with its allies. In every major city throughout our world, people were falling ill with a mystery plague, losing their homes, losing their jobs, losing every cent they had ever earned and saved. Cities were falling, new governments were rising and falling, and all the while, down tumbled who we will call ‘the Littles.’ The little man, the little woman. And who rose, during this time? The Fat Man. The Fat Woman. As people traded sex and precious possessions for rations cards or clean water to drink in the fallen cities, or agreed to years of servitude to the Fat Man and the Fat Woman just to put a loaf of bread on the table, as young men and women fought and died for anything that would keep the world running, the Fat Man and the Fat Woman sat atop their hoarded goods, their food that they had banned, their booze, their cigarettes… And what did they give us? Some drugs to keep us docile and just enough—just a tiny little bit—to keep us from causing any more havoc than we already had. In short, to keep us living ‘the way of Man.’ So, why would the One God bless us then? Why would he bless us in our docility, in our passiveness? Every day, in every country, all around the world, we could have risen up and said ‘enough is enough.’ We could have stopped the train of destruction in its tracks and destroyed it, knowing that from the ashes of it, a newer, better world would rise, a world that would be what we made it. But we did nothing. We allowed the Fat Man and the Fat Woman to continue their rule, and our world fell.

  “Now, my natives of this land, imagine how it must have been for us when we came here. We had seized our chance at salvation, and we were rewarded, with these new gifts and these new animal traits. What we will call, ‘The Way of Nature.’ Your late, great leader, the one true Rexprimus of this world (I know that you all call me by that name, and though I am honored, I do not stand close to King Adam)… He ordered us to choose. What some viewed as an order given out of his prejudice towards our kind, I
know, because of how close I was to him, that what he was ordering us to do was choose: The Way of Man, or the Way of Nature. And if you are sitting here, it means that you have chosen the Way of Nature. The one true way. The One God did not give us these gifts so that we would repress them. He made us who we are because it is his way. If you feel it, it is his way. If you want something, it is because he wants it. Live and let live, my brothers and sisters. And remember, Endless Anarchy, Red Revolution.”

  In a forceful, unanimous shout, and with one fist raised high in the air, everyone shouted, “Endless Anarchy! Red Revolution!”

  Even Alice and I shouted, because though we hated Don (and we really did hate him), we loved our kind. We loved our people. We were proud to be Red Anarchy.

  The crowd stood, clapping, as Don took a bow, and all around me, I could hear voices of both men and women gushing about how brilliant and inspirational he was, and how lucky we all were to have such a strong leader.

  Alice and I were standing, too, and I was clapping. When I saw that she was not clapping, but instead was looking all around with her brows furrowed, and her nose wrinkling as she smelled the air, I began to smell the air and look around, too. Our senses were heightened all the time because of how alert we always had to be when we were on the road. Because they were heightened, we had memorized the “heart patterns” of every person in the village, as well as their smells. Suddenly, there was a disturbance in the heart patterns, and a new smell mixed into the collective. Someone was there who should not have been there, and before we could realize who he was, we saw the blinding flash of white far off in the crowd.

  “FOR THE TRUE ONE GOD!” His voice shouted, and Alice and I watched as the Light Bomb sailed through the air and landed on the stage. Everything occurred so quickly, and yet in my eyes, it happened in slow motion. Several men and woman rushed the stage to shield Don from the blast. Others turned to run, including Elijah, who was shielding Melinda with his body as he ran towards us. For just one nanosecond, Alice’s body tensed and then lurched forward, because her first instinct was to try to help, but her second instinct—the smarter, more feral, more selfish one, the one that wanted to guarantee her survival—told her that there was no help she could possibly offer.

  Light Bombs, like Sun Harnesses, weaponize pure sunlight, or so it is said. Somehow, the light is funneled into the heavy, bionic metal shell and capped, and when the cap is broken, just like with a grenade, the shell detonates. When that happens, bodies are not just incinerated, they are eviscerated, and though they are weaker than nuclear bombs in some respects, like that they do not spread toxic radiation nor do they cause destruction as widespread, they will blind anyone within a ten mile radius if one looks directly at them as they detonate, and the outward spread of heat is formed like a thin cord, so that if one is standing, the cord of heat will sever a person in half.

  My body was over Alice’s, and I prayed that the cord would go over top of us, but all the while, I was thinking of how it was luck of the draw, and sometimes lack of luck, depending on what happened: sometimes, the detonation shot up, so the cord went high, taller than anyone’s height, but sometimes, the detonation sunk low, cutting across the ground where people fell out of reflex. Like I said, luck of the draw, or lack thereof.

  I felt the heat pass over head, and heard the splintering of wood. My shirt singed, but I felt no pain, so hopefully, I had not been burned, though the cord had come close. Maybe it was my adrenaline pumping that kept me from feeling pain, or maybe it was because the cord really was as sharp as they said, so sharp that one wouldn’t feel a thing until your top half was sliding off your bottom half. I wanted to reach back and feel for blood, or for some gaping wound, but I did not want to let go of Alice. The Light Bomb made no noise, so all I could do was wait until the blinding flash of light that I could still see even behind my tightly clenched eyelids died away.

  When it did, I could breathe again. I could hear again. But I did not want to look.

  “You good, Eli?” I asked.

  “Fuck, man… Fuckin’ A, man…” He said shakily.

  “Melinda?” I asked.

  “I’m alright.” She said, “Alice?”

  “Fine.” Alice said below me, and when I opened my eyes, all I could see were Melinda and Elijah, lying on the ground, him on top of her, holding both of her hands. My eyes stayed locked on them, because I did not want to look up. I did not want to see the destruction or guess how many lives had been lost.

  “Eli!” A voice was calling, “Alice! Quinn!”

  “We’re here, John!” Alice called, and she held up her shaking arm so he could see.

  “Oh, my God!” He threw himself down beside us and hugged us both. “What the fuck just happened?!”

  “An Old Spirit found us. Again.” Alice replied, and she stood up and looked straight ahead, where the stage had been. When I looked, I saw that there was no stage. There was no sign that there had ever been a stage, so you had better believe that there was no sign of there ever having been people to sit in front of or on it. The explosion had taken out the stage and at least ten rows of chairs. My feet pivoted, turning me so I could see a three-sixty scope of the area. Sure enough, I saw more bodies slashed in two than I had ever wanted to see.

  “A fucking Light Bomb. A motherfucking Light Bomb.” John murmured beside me furiously, “On civilians!”

  Even after all he had seen them do, he couldn’t fathom it. Even after he had watched Tyre allow men to beat and rape his wife because of crimes she had committed on Earth, even after he had watched Mary and Rich Bachum decide who would “see Heaven”—regardless of whether who they decided upon was a man, a woman, or a child—and even after he had watched them make their sacrifices, he couldn’t believe their evil, and honestly, I couldn’t, either. Alice said that it was because we were so inherently good, while she was not. I had my disagreements with that, obviously. But I couldn’t come up with a better explanation for mine and John’s disbelief.

  An ear-splitting scream sounded behind us, and when we all turned simultaneously, we saw a woman lying on the ground, her hands over her eyes, screaming that she couldn’t see. Her shriek was the first sound to break the dense, ringing, throbbing silence that had been left in the bomb’s wake, but more soon joined in. It was like our entire world had been hanging, suspended in air, and that high-pitched wail was what sent it hurtling back towards the ground, where it shattered upon impact.

  “It’s alright.” I told her, as I tried to pull her hands away. She let go of her eyes with one hand to slash out at me, and I tried to remember her name, “Mrs. Forsyth, it’s Quinn Wesley, Alice Wesley’s husband!”

  She kept screaming, because what did it matter to her who I was? She was blind because she had looked, and her husband was dead beside her, severed in the middle of his chest, but I didn’t know if she knew that. But when she began to ask, “Where is Isidore?! Where is he?! Is he alright?!” it became impossible for me to pretend like she already knew her husband was dead and I wouldn’t have to tell her.

  “Not now.” Alice told me right as I opened my mouth. “Mrs. Forsyth, it’s Alice Wesley. Quinn and I are going to wait with you until the doctors get back from the Infirmary.”

  I turned around to see Melinda holding a child who was grasping her eyes and sobbing. I was horrified to see that the little girl’s tears were tinged with red.

  “Shh, sweetheart. It is alright. It is alright, sweet baby.” Melinda whispered, and the little girl screamed a little louder, and held onto her arms. I recognized her as the little girl who lived at the very end of our street, where she rode her bike around and around the cul-de-sac with her little brother and their friends. Her parents were both carpenters, and I remembered a few years earlier how they had made Alice and I a new kitchen table when our old one was worn out.

  They were dead, too.

  Elijah had her little brother, who was only about two, and he was holding him, walking him away from the carnage
as he wailed and shouted, “Mama! Da-da! Mama! Da-da!” over and over again, so shrilly I could barely make out his words.

  Close your eyes, Brynna’s voice said in my mind, because she tended to pop up when I needed her. She was a hologram that existed in my mind and only appeared when I couldn’t cope, when it was all too much, when the sights before my eyes burned into my retinas like the searing glare of the Light Bombs.

  Close them, the hologram of her said. Her voice was neither gentle nor harsh, but right in the middle, exactly as I remembered her tone to be, always.

  Alright. Now count with me, Quinn. One…

  “One…”

  Two…

  “Two…”

  Three.

  “Three.”

  Now go.

  She dissolved away, and as always, my heart felt the pain of her absence all over again. Though I could say that I wanted to stay at home for a while and give the war a rest, I could not say that the pain was dulled. It never would be dulled. Feeling her there, as clearly as I could see the fading light of day around me, and then not feeling her, was like being shielded from a winter night by a warm blanket, only to have the blanket immediately ripped away. It was to feel relief and then lose it, only so you could know relief and ache for it more because you knew it.

  “We need Healers now!” Melinda barked, “Where are they?!”

  “They’re coming. John’s got them now.” I walked a few steps away from her and the girl, “John! Get her first!”

  John came over, carrying a stretcher with the help of one of the Medics.

  “Alright, sweetie, I am going to put you on this stretcher…” Melinda began to say.

  “NO!” The little girl cried, and she let go of her eyes to hold Melinda with both hands. All around her eyes, the skin was scorched, and her irises were white, while the whites of her eyes were red with blood.

  “No, sweetie, I am going with you. I am going with you to the infirmary.” She told her, “Baby!” She called to Eli, “Let me take him, too, so you can help out here.”

  Eli handed over the brother, who went to Melinda easily. Then, he put both of his hands on her face, looked at her for a long second, and kissed her. He pushed her long black hair away from her face and then kissed her again.

  “I love you.” She said.

  “I love you. Be safe. I’ll see you at home.”

  She nodded and walked off with the paramedic. John was already helping Alice get Mrs. Forsyth onto a stretcher, and I realized that with all of my observing, I was being of no help at all. I ran to a man who had dislocated his shoulder when he had dove out of the way of the explosion.

  “What’s he got, Quinn?” Eli called to me as he helped tie a tourniquet on a sobbing man’s half-severed arm. “Don’t worry, sir. They’ll get this fixed up in no time.” I heard him say.

  “Dislocated shoulder!”

  “We got a dislocated shoulder!” Eli shouted back to another paramedic. “We got a dislocated shoulder, and a cord-cut, upper bicep! Everyone else is eye damage!”

  The Medics had lost some of their number in the explosion, so they were terribly short-staffed, and knowing that we did not have the medical personnel to tend to all of our injured made the panic in my heart kick up a notch.

  “You got him?” I heard Alice ask Eli as they stood at either end of the stretcher.

  “Got him.”

  “Alright. Lift.”

  “You ready?” John asked me, and together, we lifted the very last victim and began to head off to the Infirmary.

  Before we rounded the corner, though, we heard the heavy whooshing of air upwards. We heard it just in time for us to realize that we needed to dive for the ground and cover our eyes. We heard wood exploding outwards, the splintering of the supports that held the infirmary off of the ground, the deafening thud as the huge wooden structure that was the infirmary crashed and exploded into a million pieces, with countless more of our people inside. The cord sliced through trees this time, and in a blur, we were up, running, avoiding being crushed by the tree trunks as they fell, all of us still carrying our injured people. Several cottages were flattened, and the screams were endless.

  “Melinda!” Eli bellowed, and he put down his end of the stretcher and zoomed off, screaming her name desperately. John went after him, for the sake of the injured people who might have miraculously survived, but more so for the sake of his son, whom he knew would need him if Melinda was gone, which I knew she was.

  “Quinn?” Alice asked.

  “What, baby?”

  When I looked back at her, she was staring up the path, her eyes moving slowly back and forth between the two detonation sites. Tears were glistening in her eyes, but I knew that they were only tears of rage.

  “What is it, baby? Talk to me.”

  Fiercely, she whispered:

  “You still want to stay home?”

  Violet

  “Not too burny, Vi. It tastes yucky when it gets all burny.” Millie told me as I helped her hold her stick over the fire that Macie, Akio, and I had started in our backyard. “Right, Akio?”

  “Exactly right.” Akio replied, agreeing with her as he always did.

  So much about Millie reminded me of Penny. Her willfulness, her boldness, her adorable bossiness… She was the combined image of both of her mothers, somehow, while Penny was simply the spitting image of Brynna, but still, the maternal resemblance, in whatever form, was another strong reminder. Sometimes, when Millie became very animated, and began to talk very fast, using her hands, I could swear, if I closed my eyes, that it was Penny sitting right beside me. Millie was three, so three years younger than Penny had been when she had died. As I held her little hand, steadying the stick so that the marshmallow she was holding over the fire was close enough that it would toast quickly (because Millie was so excited to eat her s’mores that she was becoming impatient) but far enough away that it wouldn’t burn (which would make us have to start the process all over again), I could not look at her, because for a second—for just one, strange second—I had convinced myself that we were back home in Shadow Village, and it was Penny sitting beside me.

  I had not wanted to swap Millie for Penny. I had not wanted to revoke Millie’s existence, not even if it would have brought Penny back. I just somehow forgot which little girl was sitting beside me, the one who had miraculously survived, or the one I had tragically lost.

  “Baby.” Akio said softly in my ear. His hand came to rest gently on my back, and when I jumped slightly, he apologized. “You’re drifting.”

  I nodded, and then reached back to squeeze his hand in silent yet emphatic thanks for pulling me back. The marshmallow on the stick was perfectly golden brown, just the way Millie liked them, and she squealed with glee and clapped when I pulled it out of the flames.

  “Can I blow it? Can I blow it?” She asked excitedly, because some of the flame was still clinging to the gooey surface, charring it black.

  “Of course, baby. Hurry, though. Blow! Blow!” I told her, and I giggled when she pulled in a huge breath of air, puffed out her cheeks, and blew as hard as she could to extinguish the flame.

  “It’s perfect, Vi.” She told me, and she ran over to Macie, who was coming out with the homemade graham crackers and the store-bought chocolate that had cost over half my paycheck but was worth every penny.

  “Mama, look!” She told her, before running back to me. “Look at how perfect Vi cooked my marshmallow.”

  “You cooked it, baby!” I corrected her, “I only helped.”

  “Let me see.” Macie said, and she sat down beside us and observed the marshmallow. “What a wonderful job you both did!” She kissed my cheek and then she kissed Macie’s. “Alright, now these graham crackers are a little softer than normal for some reason, but they will do.”

  “Oh, they’re fine.” Akio replied, “You’re so harshly critical of your own cooking.”

  “Well, this glorious Earthean dessert deserves only the high
est quality ingredients, because it is just so magnificently delicious. We must save some for Lucy, though we all know how she looks upon all things fun and sweet and wonderful with much disdain.”

  Akio and I laughed rather hard at that, because only Macie could get away with poking fun at Lucy’s austerity, and only Macie could do it in a way that was simultaneously hilarious but not mean-spirited. She was merely expressing the truth about her wife, who, as I am sure you have realized, could suffer quite sadly in the Fun department. She was no stranger to joking, though her sense of humor was dry, but as far as outwardly expressing delight or amusement, she was more likely to run naked through the streets of our village.

  “Alright, now, only one, Millie Mae.”

  “Oh, Mama, please, can I have two?! Mummy always lets me have two!”

  “Mummy” was Lucy, and though Lucy was austere with all others, she was softer with her perpetually three-year-old daughter than the golden-brown marshmallow I was pulling off the stick right then.

  “Yes, well, Mummy is not here yet to try and wrestle you into bed once you are bouncing off the walls, as they say, from the sugar!”

  “When is Mummy coming home? She promised me she would be home before sundown.”

  “Well, you know Mummy has been taking care of all the sick people, Mill.” Akio told her, “She’s the best there is, so sometimes they need her to work late.”

  “Did she say that?” Macie asked me quietly, and luckily, Millie was so busy tearing into her s’mores with obvious delight that there was no way she had heard the slight tremble in her mother’s voice.

  “Macie.” I reached over and grasped her hand, “She is fine. Relax.”

  “That bloody Caspar Elohimson…”

  “I know.”

  “His father was a good man. He must have gotten his illness from his dreaded mother.”

  “You’re right.” I said, and I squeezed her hand a little harder, “She’s alright. There were a few more outbreaks of the Blood Plague, but she’s fine. Caspar is probably busy chasing after underage girls.”

  When she had said his name, it had not stirred anything inside of me. But when I had said his name, my meeting with Paul came back to me in a sweeping motion. My palms began to sweat, and as discreetly as I could, so that she did not sense in my heart the sudden topsy-turvy, I pulled my hand off of hers and began to busy myself making another s’more to cover the moment of internal turmoil.

  “Mama, I’m done!”

  “Dang, girl!” Akio told her, “You tore that up!”

  “It was so good.” She said, beaming to show the chocolate in her teeth and all around her mouth, “Mama, can I please have just one more?!”

  “No, Millie.” Macie replied, a little more curtly. She was slipping, I could see it coming. If Millie kept pushing her, she would lose her grip. She would either begin to cry, or she would yell. She had never laid a hand on her daughter; Lucy had told her that if she did, she would take Millie and leave. But still, her outbursts scared Millie, though once they passed, Millie forgot them. Because she was so young, and so sweet, and so profoundly innocent, and because she loved her mother so much, she never saw Macie as anything but perfect, even when Macie lashed out. Somehow, I think she knew her mother was sick, though none of us had ever told her.

  “Millie, Mama says no.” I said, “We can have s’mores another night.”

  “But Mommy…” Millie started to say.

  “But nothing.” I said firmly, though God, it was hard to speak firmly to her. She opened her mouth to begin her tantrum, but I gave her a look of half jocular warning.

  “Come on, little sugar fiend.” Akio said, and with ease, he picked her up and threw her over his shoulder, which, as usual, elicited hysterical giggles from her. “Let’s go clean you up, and then we’ll go try to climb to the top of the tree in the front yard.”

  “But we never even come close!”

  “Well, this time, we’re going to make it all the way to the tippy top, you mark my words!”

  “Macie.” I said gently, when she pulled her knees to her chest and dipped her head between them. Her breaths were coming in slowly, and rasping in the back of her throat. “Come on, Mace. You have to breathe.”

  “I cannot.” She told me, and when I pulled her to me, she raised her head from between her knees and rested it against my chest. “I should not have snapped at her. I should not have…”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “It is not hers, either!”

  “No.” I replied, “It’s no one’s fault. It’s okay, Mace. She doesn’t even realize you snapped at her.”

  “I am just a ticking bomb. The slightest wrong word… The littlest thing…”

  “It’s okay. We all love you, do you hear me? It doesn’t matter.”

  “You all should not have to tread carefully just to speak to me. It is not fair to you.”

  “We love you so much, Macie.” I told her again, because truly, there was nothing more important to say to her. Nothing else expressed how little her condition mattered to us, how insignificantly it impacted the way we felt about her. We just loved her. That was all we could do. Just love her to pieces, and support her while she was powering through one of her hard days.

  “I love all of you. You all are my entire world. You are my heart. My greatest loves. And Lucy… She is the love of my life. I cannot imagine my life without her.”

  “You don’t have to imagine that. You’ll never know life without her. Not if I can help it.”

  I remembered my promise to Paul. He was smart to come to me, because he knew of my deep, eternal hatred for Caspar Elohimson. But more importantly than my hatred, he knew of my instinct to protect those I loved from him. More powerful than my will to exact revenge was my inherent, instinctual need to protect Lucy, Macie, Millie, and Akio.

  “Illa is gone. Our sweet Illa is gone. Millen is gone. If I lose my girls, or Lucy…”

  “You won’t.”

  “He sends her home to me with bruises around her wrists and obvious signs that his hands have been on her, where they should not be. How dare he think he is worthy to put his hands on her? How dare he force himself on my Lucy?” Her sadness and shame were dissolving into fury, and that was dangerous. The last time they had done that (a few weeks earlier) she had fought me physically when I tried to stop her from leaving our house and storming Caspar’s. She had punched and kicked and bitten me, because to her, I was not me, I was simply an obstacle. I was standing in the way of the lioness who was going to protect her pride.

  “Macie, stay with me.” I told her, because the last time, she had fought me for over an hour, until Lucy had come through the door and wrenched her off of me.

  “You will send for me the next time she slips into that.” Lucy had snapped at me angrily, “Do you understand me?!”

  I had been shocked by her anger, thinking somehow that it had been my fault, or at least, Lucy had thought that it was my fault. But after she had calmed down, she had come to me.

  “She is much older than you, and though she looks frail, she is very strong.” She said after she had wrapped her arms around me, which was something she never did. “Look at the damage she has done to you.”

  “Will she remember doing it?” I had asked.

  “Probably not. But she will know that she has hurt you, because I will tell her, and then maybe she will not lose control in this way.”

  After protesting purposely making Macie feel guilty, Lucy had relented. She had cleaned up the wounds and sent me off to bed with a pain-killing tonic and an appreciatory kiss on the forehead, which was quite rare for her also, believe me.

  “Macie.” I said to her, “Lucy will be home any minute. You have to calm yourself d—”

  “Would someone like to explain to me what Mr. Ogawa is doing in our front yard?” Her curt voice demanded from the back porch. When Macie and I whipped around, and Lucy saw that Macie’s eyes were full of tears, she began to walk briskly t
owards us. Her face showed no sign of consternation, but her quickened stride showed her worry.

  “Oh, my love.” She whispered, and she dropped to her knees in front of Macie, who only cried harder. “I should have sent word that I would be late.” She kissed Macie gently, “I should have sent word. I am so sorry. My love, my Macie. I am so sorry.”

  “I’m going to give you two some time…” I started to say.

  “Yes, well, clear your event planner for the rest of the evening, because I am going to wring your neck for deliberately disobeying my very clear order to keep Akio away from this house, Violet Mae Olivier!”

  “Looking forward to it, Lucy.” I replied sarcastically.

  “Don’t make it worse for yourself!” She snapped at me, but I was walking away, and Macie was crying against her chest. As I walked up onto the porch, I heard Lucy still apologizing, and when I looked back, she was kissing her again.