by Garon Whited
“Pointless?” I prompted.
“You’re… you have so much… I never understood, even before. I was a poor woman, a prostitute, yet you came to me and healed me and made me your woman. You gave me immortality, riches, and love—and I have never understood why!” She half-leaned, half-toppled into me, clutching at my shirt. “You can work magic and weave spells! I can barely manage to focus enough power to light a candle, and that only with elaborate preparations. You have talent, you have skills, you have knowledge and wisdom and goodness! Under all the money and the practice and the lessons, I’m still that pitiful prostitute you rescued from the plague. I don’t understand how you can love me!”
I lifted her hand and kissed it, stroked her hair.
“Do you understand love?”
“No!” she sobbed.
“Neither do I. I’ll need help to even try. Will you help me?”
She moved from weeping to crying. We shifted a little and I started to rock her.
“Yes,” she whispered. “But you can’t love me.”
“Oh? Stop me.”
“I am not a good woman, dear Eric.”
“I’m not a good man. I tend to eat people.”
“No, truly; I mean it.”
“Could be. If it matters, I’ll let you know.”
She lifted her head with a nearly-convulsive shudder.
“I drove Terri away from you.” She dropped her eyes, not willing to meet mine, and her hair fell forward around her face.
I paused and took stock.
Disbelief. That was the start of it, followed by the realization it could be done—a bit of skillful devouring to take the thoughts and feelings of love… yes, it could be done. There was relief at the explanation; it answered the why that had so confounded and confused me.
There was also anger, hot and bright. How dare—how dare—the bitch interfere! Messing around in the head of the lady I love? I wanted to take her neck in my hands and squeeze. I wanted to hit her—hit a woman! My hands were shaking.
Sasha did not move. She just sat there, waiting, willing to take anything I dished out. I could see it in her posture, in the lines of her body. If I wanted to beat her half to death and then leave her bleeding on the floor, she’d have taken it and not uttered a word of protest—because she deserved it and she knew it. Not only did she know it, but her guilt twisted inside her like a snake eating her heart until she had to confess.
Surely that counts for something. Doesn’t it?
Then again, if she hadn’t done… what she did… then I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t be half-over Terri and bouncing nicely into Sasha’s bedroom. I wouldn’t be a vampire, I wouldn’t be wealthy, and I wouldn’t be studying magic.
No, none of that could excuse what she’d done. But…
I wouldn’t be in love with her.
As I realized that, I couldn’t stay angry. I tried. I thought Terri deserved that much. But Sasha… Sasha needed me so much more than Terri. Vulnerable women bring out the best in me. I’m glad something does, even if the timing is sometimes inconvenient.
“So?” I asked, finally.
She looked up at me, tearful and shocked.
“What?”
“I said, ‘So?’ What of it? Yes, I love her; maybe I always will. Yes, that hurt a lot, at the time. But I’m here now, with you. Let the past be past; learn from it and move on. We are where we are now.”
She stared at me with a mixture of expressions I couldn’t interpret. Surprise, amazement, shock, disbelief…
“You… you mean that?”
I shrugged. “Okay, my past is doubtless interesting; whoever I was is obviously a great man. Since I don’t recall it, we have to deal with the now. Maybe I can learn enough about my history to not repeat it. You’ll have to help with that. Likewise, I don’t care who or what you were. You are Sasha; I love you. I don’t make that statement lightly.
“So,” I continued, “when some guy from the depths of your past knocks at the door and wants to talk to his wife, I’m going to tell him she isn’t here—mine is.”
She squeezed me harder and wouldn’t let go—and I didn’t ask.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24TH
Swords by day, sorcery by night. What a schedule!
I’m doing pretty good at some of the more complicated spells. My predecessor managed to figure out a spell for stopping musket balls; it merely required some refinement for use against the more highly-energetic bullets of today. It was a good exercise in magical theory. Testing it, though, is something else again. I don’t like being shot at, and the spell was designed for use on the person casting it.
Bulletproof vests. Definitely.
I’d never had to really work at anything like this before. I fooled around with swordplay as a hobby, and I’d studied a little magic in the course of historical and fantasy subjects. Now I was having a crash course in both. I felt like a stereotypical recruit in boot camp.
It began to get old after the first few days. I don’t know if I would have stuck with it without Sasha’s insistence. But she did insist, and I humored her… and I started to notice some real progress. Have you ever worked really hard on something and noticed the work was paying off?
Now imagine all you had to do was read and think and remember. It’s like learning a new language, almost, when the time comes you start to think in it. Except when you start learning to think in it, you can do things—like change color faster than a chameleon. Or ignore gravity. Or even create a ball of fire out of nothingness and hold it in your naked hand.
Would that motivate you? It motivated the dickens out of me!
I needed motivation for studying; I was tired on a routine basis. Sasha was fast—very fast—and skilled with a blade. I knew I was making progress as a swordsman. I could feel it. But she kept stepping up the pace, kept pushing me harder as I got better, and it looked more like my progress was sitting still or even backing up a trifle.
It was disheartening and embarrassing. I was routinely humiliated and pounded flat by a slim little woman. I’m the tall one, the strong one, the big macho guy… and I can’t touch her with a practice sword if she doesn’t let me.
She noticed my growing frustration and took steps.
She didn’t say anything. She just found a couple of good motivational techniques—stick and carrot, essentially. If I screwed up, she smacked me good with whatever we were using—wooden sword, flat of a blade, whatever—and made me feel embarrassed. Every time I did something new exactly right, consistently—say, a dozen times in a row or so—she would drop whatever she was wearing and make love to me on the spot.
Okay, swordsmanship. Motivation. Yeah. That was covered.
The phone rang this afternoon. Since I was working on a new trick—using fencing parries with a broadsword—I was outside, running through the motions over and over again as the pitching machine shot baseballs at me. I stepped out of the line of fire to watch her jog to the door. We were both dressed in shorts and shirts, barefoot. It looked a lot better on her. Sasha went in and picked up the extension near the patio door while I stepped back into practice. She spoke for a bit and stuck her head out.
“Dear?”
“Hmm?” I answered, deflecting a baseball.
“It’s a Travis. Do you want to take it?”
I paused the pitching machine and nodded. She handed the phone to me and started a little practice routine of her own.
“Hello,” I said, watching her move. She wasn’t running through sword-drills as much as she appeared to be dancing. Or maybe it was a sword-drill, just a very complex one, and she made it look easy. Probably the second.
“Eric! Jeez, where have you been?” he demanded.
“Sorry, but things have gotten a little hectic. I know it’s been a while.”
“A while? Is that what you call it?”
“Sorry.”
He seemed to be a trifle rankled but let it pass. “Well… okay. Can you talk?”
“
Not right now, no. Maybe I can get free later, though, and we can check out Hutch’s date-of-the-month.”
“She’s right there?’
“Yeah, sounds good,” I replied, still watching Sasha. She was moving faster. “I’d love to.”
“Can she hear me?”
“No, I don’t think so. I want to be home early tonight. How does three o’clock sound?”
“Okay, she can’t hear me, but she can hear you. I understand. Ummm. Can you meet me somewhere? I don’t want you to be anywhere near my place. You’re a shady character and I have a reputation to protect.”
“Keen. Seen any other old friends, lately?”
He paused to think about that. “Seen any more ruffians, you mean? No. But my place got burgled. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of any of your religious fanatics.”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see. Sasha was beginning to scare me. Her movements still looked fluid and effortless, but she was a whirling ball of steel-wielding death. Taking her along now seems like a damn good idea. I wondered to myself if I could throw an orange through her personal space—and whether it would be peeled or sliced on the far side.
“That sounds good,” I answered. “How’s the student union sound to you?”
“Fine. You said three o’clock?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, later.”
He hung up and I switched off.
Sasha wound down her routine and smiled at me, panting slightly. She came over and kissed me on the cheek.
“You haven’t seen your friends in some time. Do they think you dead?”
I grinned back at her, appreciating the joke. “No; they think I’m infatuated with a wealthy heiress. Travis wants proof I’m not languishing in your dungeon as a slave to your unnatural lusts.”
She laughed aloud and subsided into giggles. There were a few beads of perspiration on her brow. She kissed me lightly and looked up into my face.
“And do you consider my lusts to be unnatural?” she asked.
“What, no concerns over my languishing?”
She giggled again. “I’ll handle this first, please.”
“Since I share them, I can’t regard them as unnatural, now can I?”
“There’s a logical flaw in that somewhere, but I’ll let it go, my lord.”
“And the languishing?” I persisted.
She smiled and kissed me again. “No, I don’t think you languish. Satisfied?”
“Very,” I replied, waggling my eyebrows at her and leering.
She laughed again and pushed me away. “Go tend to your friends, my lord; we cannot have them dropping by unexpectedly. And please be home by dark.” She wasn’t calling me “my lord” seriously, this time. Sometimes she means it; sometimes, it’s just a term of endearment, like “dear,” or “honey.”
“Sure. If I won’t make dark, I’ll call.”
She nodded, still smiling. I went to shower and change, then drove into town.
We had an early dinner in the student union for two reasons. First, it was a public place. It would be hard to anticipate I would be there, and equally hard to be at all quiet about a terrorist attack on random customers. Second, the Antonio’s serves a really great pizza. We got a booth along the far wall and huddled over the food.
I finished one pizza on my own; Travis kept plugging away at his, so I helped while we talked. I explained a lot about magic and filled him in on recent events.
“You’ve been busy.”
“Don’t I know it,” I replied. I showed him my hands. “See the raw places?”
“Shouldn’t you have calluses?”
“You’d think so. I’m building some, just really slowly. A lot slower than I should. I think it has something to do with the regeneration at night. I notice I don’t need to shave as often, either.”
He nodded. “Normal biological functions might be bypassed in the dark. I guess that’s a good thing. You wouldn’t want to have your hair growing at the same rate you regenerate.”
“No, indeedy! I’d need to carry around hedge-shears to whack it off every half-hour or so. And drawing that much mass from me would probably make me very hungry.”
Travis looked at the empty pizza pan, then at me.
I grinned. “Don’t say it.”
He chuckled. “Okay. So what’s the plan with the fanatics?”
“I’m thinking about it. I don’t think they’ll take the deal.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that. I was worried.”
“I think they’ll lay a trap. But I hope to trap the trappers, because I have no intention of keeping to the deal.”
“You mentioned something about that. Sasha was calling up other daybloods to help with your plan?”
I shook my head. “No takers. The idea is to meet the Fist—the fanatics—for the fight, but to avoid actually facing them. I hope to sneak or charge through their magic door, wherever that opens, and beat the living bejeezus out of anybody and everybody. Ideally, the place—hopefully a headquarters of some sort, wherever it is—gets reduced and prisoners get taken. I would like to at least find their base of operations and run like hell; knowing where it is will be valuable.”
Travis nodded. “You realize that if security is breached, they’ll relocate?”
“Yeah, but it might take a while. At least the bastards get inconvenienced. Apparently, nobody’s ever managed it before.”
“Well, that will be something. Maybe they won’t be expecting trouble.”
“And maybe they will. The guys who weren’t soldier-like seemed rather surprised to see me. I doubt they will take that little occurrence lightly. If I were the one opening a magic doorway, I’d be a bit concerned if someone opened it from the other side.”
“Could be. Doesn’t that make this more dangerous?”
“Yep. But I don’t like the idea of being a target for the next thousand years, either.”
“I guess there’s something to that. How about you just find their doorway and throw a small nuke or a large bundle of dynamite through it?”
I thought about it. “Might work. But what I need, more than anything, is to find out who they are, not just kill everyone near at hand. I want to get the leaders, the people with the money and the power, or they’ll just be back.”
“Hmm. You have a point. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“I don’t think so.”
“If you think of anything—”
“—let you know. I will.”
Travis nodded. “Okay.”
As I drove back home—fairly quickly; I had some time before sunset, but I would rather not get caught in the car—I reflected on Travis. He is doubtless the best friend I have. Maybe his older brothers, Matthew and Carl, come close—but Travis is the best, bar none. I’m not sure why we we’re friends, really; he’s a brick and a bear. I am, by comparison, a cerebral wimp. Maybe it was a sort of union-of-opposites? We didn’t even like many of the same things. It was weird.
I was glad of it, though.
Lost in these thoughts, I failed to notice the smoke until I was nearly home.
The front gate was a twisted mass of wrought iron, lying mostly flat on the drive. The tire-spikes were up, and someone had left rubber on them. When I keyed the access at the roadside panel, they did not retract; the power must have been cut. So I decided to test the puncture-proofing on the tires and went over them anyway. No problem. Nice tires.
I went up the long drive at a somewhat unsafe speed. I think I can be excused.
The house, despite my best efforts, apparently had not been enough of a fortress—nor quite fireproof. Large sections of it were not yet burning, but the central portion had several large holes in it and flames roaring out. More rocket launchers? Maybe. Probably.
I leaped out of the car and shouted for Sasha. It didn’t even occur to me there could be ambushers lying in wait. If there had been… Well, I probably wouldn’t be here.
No answer to my shouting. I dashed in
to a non-burning section of house, still shouting for her. I came right back out, however, because the fire-suppression system was doing its job in those sections; good thing the hostile chemicals were not on automatic release. It was still impossible to breathe in there. So I ran around the house, looking in windows, still calling for her over the rushing sound of the flames.
No luck. No sign of her, either—until I got out back, into the rock garden. I noticed there was smoke rising some distance from the house.
I found a charred place, about twelve or so feet in diameter, like an explosion went off there.
In the exact center, there was a glassy, fused area, as though someone had played a blowtorch over the ground, melting it… in the shape of a sprawled human figure.
It was getting close to sunset at this point. I waited in a body bag as it went down. Once it was fully night, I came out and hurried to the circle of scorched earth.
She did not rise from the ashes.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 25TH
It keeps running through my head. Over and over. I keep jumping on top of a large rock to see what’s smoking… and there’s a Sasha-shaped glassy spot. Like she caught fire. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what could have done that. But I can see it in the mind’s eye, imagination. She’s running away, she’s hurt, and some sort of rocket hits her… and she’s engulfed in flames. She falls, screaming… and burns.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 27TH
I’ve been thinking. Thinking a lot. Things have changed, somehow.
I’ve been spending my transitions in body bags out at the ruins; I didn’t see much point in going anywhere else. Not the brightest move on my part, perhaps. If they’d come back while I was alone, things might have gone badly. Maybe they thought I’d died in the fire. Maybe they assumed I ran. I don’t know.
While I was there, grieving, trying to put my head in order, there was something that began to bother me. I was utterly devastated by the loss of Sasha… but it was a colder, more distant thing than I had felt when I first saw the outline. I thought it might be a good sign, a sign I was going to be able to cope with the loss. It kept getting more distant. Like I was watching it from the outside, and it was fading away.