by Marjorie Liu
“We are their unwanted children,” Karr told Soria, suffering a hard, throbbing ache in his side. “We are their mistakes.”
And then, as if his words were a blade, his pain intensified. He doubled over, hissing, clutching his side, feeling with breathtaking clarity the sensation of steel entering his body. Something warm and wet touched his hand. Blood. His scar was bleeding. Quite a lot, really.
Karr stared at his hand, which was glistening red. His knees buckled and he fell hard, dimly heard Soria call out his name as another rush of pain rippled through him. It was difficult to breathe.
He was dying again. Only, this time, he was not ready.
Chapter Eight
There was blood on her tennis shoes. It was so dark in the alley, she hardly noticed—not when Karr bent over, hissing in pain. But she heard the drips, and felt them, and looked down.
Blood. On the concrete, on her shoes, forming a puddle between herself and Karr.
“No,” she whispered, stunned. “Karr.”
His knees buckled and she grabbed his arm. It was like trying to hold up a mountain. He went down and she followed him, hitting the ground so awkwardly the breath was knocked out of her. Her eyes kept working, though, and she got an eyeful of his stomach; there was enough light from the windows lining the alley to see the dark gaping slash in his gut that had not been there only moments before.
Wrong, she told herself. There had been a scar. She had a vague recollection of it: on his side, near his abdomen—which was too close to parts of his body she had been trying desperately not to look at.
There was no choice about the matter now. Soria crouched on her hands and knees, trying to see what she could of the bleeding wound. It looked fresh, which should have been impossible.
“Shit,” she muttered in English, looking around for anything that could be pressed against his stomach. She was ready to yank off her own shirt, when down at the end of the alley she saw fluttering. Laundry.
Soria ran—quietly as she could, low to the ground, as if that would help keep her unseen, though most windows she passed had shades. She stopped at the alley edge, and found herself in a small courtyard filled with potted plants and bikes, as well as a small tree growing from a patch of dirt and grass. Some cars were parked around it. The courtyard angled out of sight around another apartment building, presumably with proper street access.
Sheets fluttered from several lines pinned to the hooks, just below the first-floor windows. Easy access. Easier, if she had another arm. She missed that the most—the ability to do some things with a little more ease. The doctors had suggested prosthetics, but with her stump up near her shoulder and bionics still so experimental, she had decided to make do.
Her arm ached as she tried to drag down a sheet. She still felt the grip of that man’s hard fingers, digging in, his other hand grabbing her sleeve and stump, fondling it with a grin. He had been in the brothel lobby when she had come down the stairs, a drunk and stupid man who had followed her outside while the Mongolian muscle tried negotiating for more money.
Half a woman, she could still hear the man in black saying. Half of a good hump, but I’m willing to do you a favor.
Well, fuck that—and fuck him.
The sheet came down. There was another clothesline nearby, with jogging pants and a large T-shirt. She hesitated, not even certain they would fit, quite certain she was pushing her luck, but the temptation was too great. She tossed the sheet over her shoulder, grabbed a dangling pant leg, and yanked hard.
The line twanged loudly. Soria heard a creak from inside the apartment, a low voice. The jogging pants came loose and she ran like hell, back into the alley, feeling like a ghost with the sheet piled loose, flowing down her back.
Karr was still on his knees, hunched over. Blood pooled around him. Soria tried to move his hands to push the sheet over the wound. It was hard to breathe, difficult to think; her heart was hammering so hard she wanted to vomit. It had been a while since she’d seen so much blood. The last time, it had been her own.
There was a bleeding rip in his flesh that looked a stab wound. Soria made Karr lie back, and gathered layers of cotton over his gut. She pressed down, and his slick red hand covered hers. His palm and fingers were huge, his touch firm.
“The scent is stronger,” he rasped. “Close.”
She understood. Nothing to do about it, though. If a shape-shifter found them, so be it. This was all she could handle. It was hard enough to breathe as blood began soaking through the sheet.
“How did this happen?” Soria muttered. “You were fine.”
Karr said nothing, jaw clenched tight, eyes squeezed shut, golden light trickling from beneath his lids like spectral tears. She touched his brow, which was slick with sweat, and then his throat, searching for a pulse. What she got instead was a sharp pain in her head, a wicked throb that radiated from her brow—and deeper, like a worm was wiggling its way into the center of her skull. She rocked forward, gasping. Suffering, briefly, a flood of images and sounds that rolled into her head like a wave of hot water.
None of it made sense, just impressions of fur and sunlight, red rock and grasslands spread across an aching sky-kissed distance. She saw blood and heard screams, caught a flash of golden-eyed children laughing, swung into the air by two strong hands—and a sword, glinting in the darkness, held by a man with the face of a wolf.
Tau, she heard. Forgive me.
The whispered words echoed painfully through her head. Soria fought them. It had been a lifetime since she had suffered someone else’s memories, but she dug deep, searching for an anchor—the blood on her fingers, hot and wet—and focused on that to ground herself.
She wrenched free of Karr’s mind, fell forward, slumped over his warm body … and felt as though parts of her body were very distant. A large hand touched the back of her head.
Breathe, she told herself. Deep breaths.
It was difficult. Not since she was six years old had she suffered a reaction this strong, and that last episode had been the final one until now. Being around people had made her sick as a child, because she would see things in their lives that she did not understand. This caused her headaches, periods of unconsciousness that doctors blamed on some rare brain disease.
Brain disease? Close enough. Her father had been in the military. They had moved a lot. Soria had been called a freak by bullies in ten different countries, and survival in new schools and foreign environments required certain skills. One day, language had become one of those, to the exclusion of everything else her mind had previously tried to do.
She had been declared a prodigy at the age of seven. There were still articles about her on the Internet, which her parents liked to dig up and send every now and then. Little universal translator, some had called her. Able to hold a conversation in any language, no matter how rare, just as long as she spent time listening to that foreign tongue. Time spent with an actual native speaker, together, in person.
Of course, only a small part of language had to do with words. The rest was culture, time, experience. Language was a thing of constant change, with only some root variables remaining the same. After all these years, Soria still did not understand how she did what she did, or why her gift focused merely on languages, but she supposed mind reading was still part of it. At least the headaches and blackouts had stopped.
She held herself very still, as if that would keep her conscious. Beneath her cheek, Karr shifted ever so slightly, and this time she became more fully aware of his fingers buried in her hair. She glanced sideways but his eyes were still closed.
Several cars passed the alley, one after the other. She heard the distant wail of sirens, but those faded. There was no way to know how much time they had before someone found them. It was a miracle they had gone this long without interruption, though that was no guarantee that one of the windows along the alley didn’t have a pair of eyes watching their every move.
Soria pushed herself up until she swayed o
n her knees, dizzy. The sheet covering Karr’s wound was a bloody mess. He needed a hospital—but he was not going to get one. Some things had to stay secret. All it would take was a blood test, one single transformation, the goddamn glow in his eyes, and it would be done. Everyone—all the shape-shifters hiding now, in careful anonymity—would be fucked.
Or not. There was no way to know how the cards would fall, just probabilities. Soria was no precog, and even they could be lousy at telling the future.
You have to do something.
Contacting Roland was out of the question. All the help he had provided her—like Robert and Serena—was suspect. She was on her own.
So. Hospital. Maybe it was worth the risk. If she could get Karr to one.
She pressed her palm on his chest, and then his cheek. “Karr. Wake up. I cannot move you on my own.”
He stirred, but not enough to do her any good. She stood, staggering, and was just about to raise a ruckus for help—God help them both—when his hand shot out and grabbed her ankle. “Wait,” he breathed, so softly she could barely hear.
“I am going to get you help,” she said, wishing her voice sounded stronger. “Let go.”
“No.” He drew in a deep breath, tilting back his head. “The pain is gone.”
Yeah, she had seen movies where the dying talked all kinds of shit about pain being gone … just before croaking. She was not comforted.
Karr, however, began tugging at the sheet packed down on his wound. She knelt, trying to stop him. His hands outnumbered hers, though, and he yanked the sheet away. Soria winced. But Karr’s fingers danced over the spot and he whispered, “Look.”
She did, eyes wide. The hole in his side was gone. All that remained was a thin white scar, sticky with blood. Touching it provided proof; the wholeness of the flesh was not merely her imagination.
Karr grabbed her wrist. His eyes glinted golden in the shadows. “You saw it, too.”
“I saw you dying,” she whispered. And other things in your mind.
“It felt as though I was being murdered all over again,” he replied hoarsely, struggling to sit up. Soria lost precious stunned seconds watching him before trying to help. He did not need it. Every moment he moved seemed to make him stronger, which was something she envied. Her own guts felt like jelly, and if her heart beat any harder it would burst.
“No one cut you,” she said. “No one else was here.”
Karr touched the white scar in his side, probing and teasing the flesh. It was bloodstained but healthy. No gaping hole, which Soria remembered so clearly.
“Magic,” he murmured, sending a chill down her spine.
She glanced down, and focused on the jogging pants, remembering how much of a risk-taker she had felt while stealing them. Some pitiful irony.
She bent unsteadily to pick them up, and thrust them at Karr, her hand shaking. She felt a similar tremor race down her missing limb, then lifted the sheet as well, unwilling to leave so much bloody evidence. There was nothing she could do about the concrete, but someone would definitely notice a gore-soaked sheet, and perhaps send it to the police.
Karr stared at the pants in his hands before passing them back to her. “Hold these a moment longer.”
Or just toss them aside, she thought, trying to clutch everything against her chest.
Karr turned, and stared up the side of the building, which was more than ten stories high and covered in pipes, windows, air-conditioning units, and all manner of vents and hooks. His hands flexed, claws pushing through his nails as his arms lengthened, muscles bunching tight beneath his glowing skin. Soria checked both ends of the alley, afraid he would be seen. But no one was there, and she glanced back in time to see scales ripple over his limbs.
He looked even taller, stronger, a faintly leonine cast to his face that matched the tangled mane of blond hair covering his eyes. He met her gaze, solemn and thoughtful. “Put your arm around my neck,” he said.
“Jesus,” she replied in English; and then: “You are not going to climb that building.”
A grim smile touched his mouth. “Do it.”
“I do not take orders from you,” she muttered. “I am not your human servant.”
“No,” he agreed quietly. “But this city is not safe, and this is the fastest way to leave it.”
She gritted her teeth, running through options … but her brain was fried, and this was the best she could do: to climb walls, to be carried by a man who was probably going to sprout wings or bleed to death. Hopefully not at the same time.
You could have been in New York for your interview at the U.N., she told herself. Translators were always welcome—there, or in any corporate setting. Big money for easy work. But no. She was here. Living a life less ordinary.
Soria stepped close, slinging the sheet and jogging pants over her shoulder. Karr had to bend down so that she could reach around his neck. He was very warm and bloody, but beneath that strong metallic odor she caught a whiff of something sweet, like rain.
It was surreal, being so close to him. He had held her before, but as a dragon, a monster. Now he was a man, and it was far more discomfiting, partially because he was naked. But also because being near him, crushed close by the hard strength of his arm around her back, made her heart do a funny little twist that was wholly unexpected and more than a little unnerving.
His cheek brushed against hers, his breath purring and warm on her neck. “Put your legs around my waist.”
Soria cleared her throat. “Are you sure this is necessary?”
His hands clamped down on her hips, lifting her off the ground. She gasped in shock, just hanging there, expecting him to drop her one hundred thirty pounds of dead weight. But he held on, giving her a steady, patient, and somewhat wry look.
“I tracked you through this city,” he rumbled, eyes glinting. “Shouted and pointed at by humans, and followed by your … po-lice. I will not go through that again.”
She did not have the strength to argue. Hoping he couldn’t hear how quickly her heart was beating, Soria hooked her legs over his hips, tightened her grip around the back of his neck, and stuck herself as close to his body as humanly possible. He was large, broad, made of nothing but bone and sinew—not a man who had ever slept in a soft bed or eaten a meal that he had not fought for.
You can never trust him, she remembered Serena saying. It is in his blood. His kind are broken from the inside. All they are good for is war.
Yet his strength was gentle, and his voice soft and deep when he murmured, “Hold tight. This will be awkward.”
It was already awkward, but she nodded, tight-lipped, and held on with all her strength as he let go of her hips and reached over their heads. She heard his claws scrape metal, imagined him grabbing the iron bars over the first-floor windows—and then he surged upward, hoisting them off the ground. Her back scraped the wall. She could not see what Karr was holding on to, or using as toeholds, but his process was careful and inexorable, and took them on a zigzagging path that reminded her more of an ascent across a rock face than a building.
Her arm ached. So did her stump. She focused on breathing, and struggled to tighten her legs, trying not to think about how useful a fire escape would be about now.
Karr murmured, “We are almost there.”
“Good,” she muttered. “Maybe you should have put me on your back.”
“If you slipped, I might not be able to catch you.”
Soria said nothing. She was already slipping, just a little each time he moved. The pain in her left arm was growing by the second, making it hard to breathe.
Halfway up, Karr paused by a window and grabbed the edge of a sill with one hand, digging in his toes along the edge of a narrow pipe she glimpsed at the corner of her eye. With his other hand, he reached around her waist and hoisted her a little higher up his body. Soria buried her face against his neck.
“Are you scared of heights?” he murmured.
I am now. “Just keep going, Tarzan.”
He was silent a moment. “Tar-zan?”
“A … mythical person. Raised by monkeys, lives in the jungle, swings on vines.”
“Ah.” Karr began climbing again. “He sounds like my cousin.”
Soria started to laugh—then realized he might be serious.
They reached the roof. It felt like a lifetime. Karr released her gently, and she staggered away from him, bending over with her hand braced against her knee. The sheet and jogging pants tumbled off her shoulder. She wanted to kick them, but settled for staring at bloodstains splashed on white, blood on her hand, blood on her shirt. She was sticky with it and started gagging, covering her mouth, choking with the effort to not be sick.
Karr drew near. She turned her back on him and forced herself to straighten, breathing deep, wiping her eyes. Winds shifted, blowing cool and sweet against her face. She tried to savor the sensation, but the silence of the man behind her burned.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Ask.”
“I think it would be cruel to do so,” Karr rumbled, which made her turn to look at him.
“I do not understand you,” she said.
“You do not know me,” he replied. He rubbed his hands, golden light trickling up his forearms. “Perhaps it is better that way.”
“You had your chance to go. You still do.”
“And you? Will you journey south?”
Good question. Erenhot glittered beneath them, spread like a web of jewels. She wanted to rub her aching arm, and ghost fingers tugged—but without the usual accompanying pain.
Soria glanced at Karr again: coiled and lean, golden light sparking over his chest and face, leaving behind a bloom of scales. He was a haunting, alien sight, filling her with both fear and wonder. “If I do, will you come with me?”
Karr gazed out at the city. “Thousands of years. Those are numbers I cannot comprehend. And yet I stand here and can almost believe it is true. I died, and time moved on. But that still leaves me with nothing. And no one.”