I could not have said — or even wondered — how much time passed; my inner landscape was entirely without landmarks. Then something stopped — a dull, sleepy pain, a measured tug I had been only peripherally aware of. Something shifted, and I slid downward, away from soft, vague, glowing colors and into warm sleep.
.
I woke in a room so bland that I figured it had to be in Sweden. For a few minutes I drifted in and out of dreams wherein I painted flamingos on the ceiling and stuck glow-stars to the off-white walls.
“Are you awake, Naomi?” a voice asked, and I opened my eyes. Priscilla Kirby was standing over me with a tray.
“Nuhh?” I said.
“Wake up and eat.” She set the tray in my lap — I was propped in a more-or-less sitting position — and I stared with muddled curiosity at the plate of chocolate chip cookies and glass of orange juice. Was it breakfast or dessert?
Priscilla stepped back, and the fog lifted from my mind with startling swiftness when I saw Damon standing against the far wall. He looked different. Healed up, of course, but there was something else, too. He wasn’t so deathly pale as he had been, and his face seemed… not so tight, somehow. Just a hint of color in his cheeks, just a slight relaxation in the pull of skin across bone…
“You look like a flower,” I said muzzily. “Opening up in the sunlight.” I demonstrated the concept with my hands, faintly aware that the mental fog hadn’t lifted as much as I thought.
He was staring at me, sidelong and wary, almost frightened. He spoke, his voice hushed, awestruck.
“It doesn’t hurt.”
CHAPTER NINE
Games
NAOMI
“So, we’re free to go?”
“As long as you hurry,” Priscilla said with forced cheer. “My colleagues might drop in any minute.”
I fought my way free of the bed, and Damon extended a hand to steady me. It wasn’t a friendly hand, exactly, but it steadied me. Still wonderstruck by his improved health, and the fact that he didn’t appear to be trying to kill me, I made no protest when he nudged another drink-box of orange juice into my hand. I hate orange juice, so I sucked it down as fast as I could.
“You should know, Miss Winters, that your legal liability has expanded to include your new Shadow,” Priscilla said, turning her back to Damon as if he weren’t in the room. “A Lumi is responsible for her Shadow’s actions. If he does turn out to be guilty of a major crime, particularly committed after your befasting, you’ll be punished right along with him.”
“Understood,” Damon growled.
I glanced uncertainly up at him. What do you say to someone who just had three months of your life shoved down his throat? Also, dude, your teeth were in my neck, and you swallowed my blood. That’s a little weird to think about.
The door to Bland Room Number Three opened, and Lincoln poked his head through. “Um, they need to go. Like now.”
“We’ll be along soon to collect your orphans’ alibis,” Priscilla said.
“Oh, they’re used to the drill,” Damon sighed. “Come on, Naomi.” He wrapped his arms around me with all the tender sweetness of a man diving into arctic water.
He released me in the shadow of the dogwood tree outside the Orphanage, the tree Darling had been perched in on our first visit. It was empty now, but I could hear notes from a clarinet drifting from the house, and the two most childlike orphans — Paris and Jewel — sat in a wooden swing on the other side of the yard, feet dangling. Jewel laughed and sipped air through a cigarette. Damon, facing away, didn’t seem to notice them.
I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. He just looked at me, in that ticked-off-and-freaked-out kind of way, and though he had dropped his arms he didn’t step back from me. His uncertainty made me feel more awkward than his burning anger ever had.
Standing so close, I couldn’t help remembering… I swallowed and, without really meaning to, reached toward the bandage on my throat. I had a matched set, now, teethmarks on either side. Hurrah for symmetry.
Was it my imagination, or did the color rise in his cheeks? “It shouldn’t scar,” he said. “Another side effect of the somna. Does it hurt?”
“No.” With an effort, I dropped my hand. “And — and you don’t either. You said.”
He tried to speak a couple times, but seemed to change his mind before it came out. Finally he said, “The pain never quite goes away. You learn to… move past it. Accept that it’ll never stop.”
“That must make it pretty strange. For it to stop after all.”
“Exactly. I’ve been… braced against it for so long, I feel like some crutch I’ve been leaning on is…” He trailed off and rubbed his forehead. “It’ll only make it harder to go back.”
Some small, unacknowledged hope flickered out, like a candle guttering. “Go back?”
He sighed and leaned back against the trunk of the dogwood, causing a small rain of white petals. The hard edge of resentment in his voice faded. Somewhat.
“Naomi, I understand why you befasted me. How could I not, now? But it doesn’t change anything. This still isn’t what I want. There’s no sense breaching now, with Audrey the way she is, and the Formyndari breathing down our necks. But this is temporary. In a week or two, Audrey will be better, the Liberty case will either be solved or will have gone cold again, and I’ll be gone. Back to my old life.”
I couldn’t keep a hard edge out of my voice, something akin to sarcasm. “Back to being pale and starved all the time? Back to pain that never stops?”
“Yes. If that’s what it takes, then yes.”
“If that’s what it takes for what, Damon?”
“For me to be myself. Without… anyone else. Without needing to… needing…” He reached toward me, perhaps to brush a dogwood petal from my hair, but ended with his hand curved against my cheek. I leaned into it, just a little. I couldn’t help it. His voice dropped to a whisper. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “To lose yourself to someone else so completely.”
I thought of Tyler. “You might be surprised.”
“Damon?”
We both spun toward the voice, guilty as kids who’d broken curfew. It was Jewel, peering across the yard at us, still in her patched jacket and gloves. The bizarre cigarette was gone, but she still looked out-of-place in the sunlit grass, spring breeze stirring her white-gold ringlets. She belonged in a Dickens novel, huddled in a doorway in the freezing rain, or a-bed in some grand manse, fading romantically away from The Consumption or The Cholera.
“Damon! Oh, thank goodness!” she called. “We’ve been so worried! Are you all right?”
They herded us inside, Jewel practically fluttering. The other orphans, gathered in the living room, leaped from their seats at the sight of us.
“Damon! What happened?”
“We wanted to break you out, but Westley said—”
“Dove, go get Westley, tell him Damon’s back!”
“Sit down, sit down, tell us what happened!”
Damon tried to sit, but the couch was covered in things the orphans had thrown down when they stood — long needles, half-shaped mittens and sweaters, bags and piles and balls of yarn. It looked like a rainbow had been pressed through a noodle-maker.
“Who knits?” I asked, startled.
“All of us,” Darling admitted, cheeks reddening as she cleared a space.
“The prodigal returns!” Adonis came through the doorway, smelling of earth with a weed in his hair, and clapped Damon on the shoulder. And jerked back as if burned.
The orphans fell silent, staring. Jewel and Galatea reached out hesitantly, feeling Damon’s skin. Skin that was no longer sickly pale and cold to the touch.
“It’s true,” Galatea said. “It’s true. You’re befasted.”
“Temporarily,” he said, and I winced. “I don’t know how, I don’t know why, I have no explanations for you. It’s only temporary. But until the… situation is resolved, I expect everyone to be nice to N
aomi.”
He pulled me forward, and I gulped, feeling eyes burning into me.
“It’s not possible,” Adonis said, but Paris cut him off.
“Clearly, it is. And it looks like Dove’s been quite a busy little chef today, shame to let that get cold.” He headed toward the dining room, and the others began to drift after him, looking over their shoulders at me, expressions ranging from flat shock to sickened horror.
Darling lingered behind. Either I was crazy, or her hair had grown noticeably since the day before. “Be grateful it’s temporary, Naomi,” she stage-whispered. “I don’t expect this lout could do much to keep a girl happy.”
Damon cuffed her across the head, not half as hard as he could have; she dodged, laughed, and winked at me before passing into the dining room.
Damon stepped through ahead of me, and I hesitated on the threshold. Only that wink made it possible for me to step inside.
I was just in time to see Dove and Westley materialize from the shadow of the refrigerator that seemed to serve as the front door, shade-wise. Their only contact was Dove’s hand on his shoulder. No bear hugs necessary among Shadows — he had mentioned that.
“Thank God!” Westley cried on seeing Damon, and proceeded to show that some hugs were, in fact, necessary. To my surprise, he turned and hugged me, too. “I’ve been at your father’s, Damon — don’t even give me that look, I was trying to find out where they’d taken you and why. He didn’t know anything about it. You might want to reassure him that you’re alive when you have a minute. What happened, anyway?”
The crowd, myself included, descended on the spread of food in the kitchen like pigs to the trough as Damon delivered an edited version of the truth, heavy on the humorous exaggeration, light on the angst and romantic tension. The bite itself had to be mentioned, of course, and though he glossed over it rather smoothly, the orphans did not seem to be fooled. I caught several of them glancing at me sideways, expressions ranging widely; Westley look approving, Paris unreadable, Jewel startlingly hostile.
I heaped my plate with fried chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes, and hard-boiled Easter eggs, blithely ignoring the fact that I would not have eaten half these things seven months ago. Since I got pregnant, my usual picky eating habits had evaporated; everything tasted good, except on the days when everything tasted like maybe someone ate it before me. I’d stopped worrying about portion sizes, too. Maybe the orphans were eating for entertainment purposes, but I had a baby to build, and he needed raw materials. I half-listened, steadily shoveling food, as Damon received a progress report on Audrey — no change — and several other people I’d never heard of.
As he spoke he cracked and peeled an Easter egg, the inside streaked green from dye leakage. I wondered who among these grim folk was the egg-dyer. Childish Jewel? Ah, but it was Dove who had multicolored stains on her fingers.
Damon was rolling the egg in salt and pepper when Jewel, squeezing through the crowd of chairs, tripped and nearly fell. In his hurry to catch her, Damon dropped the egg, which bounced off his plate and onto the table. I caught it before it rolled into my lap and put it back on his plate.
The crowd of chattering orphans went quiet as Damon, turning back to his conversation with Westley, picked up the egg. I didn’t understand until Damon bit into the egg and nearly dropped it again, eyes wide.
I had touched his food. He was getting his first actual meal in… how many years?
He cleared his throat, took another bite with an admirable attempt at indifference. “Anyway, Wes, what I meant is that it may not be the traditional arrangement, but if it works, it works. Tell Ruby—”
And conversation started up again, washing over the incident like waves over a message in the sand.
Out the corner of my eye, when no one else was watching, I saw Damon wolf down the rest of the egg, eyes closed, with an expression of wonder and relief, intense as pain. I quietly reached over and brushed my fingers through the rest of the food on his plate. I knew he was looking at me but I avoided his gaze, pretending to be unaware of my hand’s actions. Bad Lefty, poking through people’s plates. Can’t take you anywhere. I didn’t dare look up until he was safely absorbed in his dinner.
Watching him sidelong, I hugged a strange, sparkly bubble of satisfaction to my chest. Giving Damon food seemed to tap some deep maternal need that I hadn’t known I had. Maybe I’d be a decent mother after all.
“I need to go talk to my parents, let them know everything’s okay,” Damon said when his plate was empty. “Will you be all right here, Naomi?” He glanced significantly at Westley, who nodded.
“Yeah, I guess so.” The idea of him leaving me was surprisingly unwelcome, a mild flashback to his wrenching absence at the befasting ceremony, but I put a lid on it. I was not going to prove him right about demanding, possessive Lumii.
It still hurt like crap when he shaded out.
Adonis pushed back his chair and took a deep breath, as if bracing himself for great pain. “I’ll go upstairs and sit with Audrey for a while.”
Westley clapped him on the back. “One of us will relieve you in a bit.”
“Loser gets babysitting duty?” Galatea suggested with a mischievous smile. She held up a battered pair of hiking boots.
Every eye in the room locked onto those boots, the air suddenly frozen with excitement. Like bringing a plate of bacon into a room full of dogs.
Galatea tossed a boot to Westley, who looked down at it, and then around the room, with a sort of beleaguered amusement. “Guys, you know this never ends well.”
Someone — Darling? — started a low chant, the others quickly joining in. “Boots! Boots! Boots! Boots!”
“All right, all right!” Something about the set to his shoulders, the gleam in his eyes, made me think Westley was not so reluctant as he pretended. “But if we’re playing Boots, I’m on Teya’s team.”
“Of course,” Galatea said.
“Me, too,” Paris said. “See how long the girly-girls over there can stand up to such a steamroller team.”
Jewel crossed her arms and snorted, looking him up and down. “Oh, I think we can take you, squirt. Right, girls?”
Remembering their fight earlier, I hardly expected Dove and Darling to take to the idea, but all seemed forgiven now.
“Prepare your butts for a whupping,” Darling said, with a solemnity that cracked into laughter when Dove attempted a scowling war-face.
“What about me?” I asked diffidently.
Paris laughed — nearly a cackle. “Oh, you are not playing. You can referee.”
“First person to go near Naomi pays triple penalties,” Westley said. “Team captains are Galatea and Jewel. The game does not start until we get outside. Understood?”
“Yes, Mother,” several orphans chorused.
I could feel my uncertain smile devolving into a nervous wince, watching the tension of shoulders and spines, the fierce smiles with too many teeth. Not an unhappy tension. That was the nervous-making part. I had a hunch that pandemonium was about to break loose, and they were going to enjoy every second of it.
Westley tossed the other boot to Jewel. “Ready, set, go!”
With an explosion of howls and whoops, the orphans tumbled past me and out the door, shedding gloves and jackets like confetti. I was carried along perforce.
“Get behind something, Naomi,” Westley grinned, chucking my shoulder as he passed.
The game, I realized, had already started, assuming ‘game’ was orphan-speak for ‘mad screaming free-for-all.’ Galatea and Jewel chased each other in twisting circles, their respective teammates running interference, all of them shouting and snarling and laughing and moving at speeds that put the NBA to shame. I watched wide-eyed from the other side of a tree.
Each team seemed to be trying to steal the other’s boot, and so reunite the pair. Galatea had longer reach, Jewel better maneuverability — at one point, she seemed rather to climb Galatea’s long form, like a kitten climbing its
owner, only to find that Teya had tossed her boot to Westley. Dove and Darling converged on Westley, who threw the boot back to Galatea, who made a grab for Jewel’s boot, but she had passed it to Darling, who lost it to Paris, who was tackled by Jewel… It was like watching a barroom brawl in fast-forward. Without the jerky motion of fast-forward, though; the orphans all moved as smoothly as water. Whitewater.
The ‘game’ didn’t seem to recognize anything like fouls or boundaries; I watched as Darling chased Paris up a tree, snapping at his ankles. He escaped by scrambling onto the roof and throwing his boot to Westley, who dropped it when Dove clocked him in the head with a tree branch. Galatea and Jewel both dove for it, snarling and scratching. Galatea seemed victorious until Darling shot through the fray with some bizarre move that actually flipped her off the wall of the house. Her possession of the boot was short-lived, however, as Westley caught her on her way out of the flip and slammed her into the ground. Meanwhile, Dove and Paris fought for the other boot, twisting through and around the wooden swing like Olympic gymnasts.
It was impossible to follow both boots. I tried to pick one and keep track of it — from Darling to Westley, who feinted toward Paris, passed the boot behind his back to Galatea, who dodged neatly around Dove and Jewel, passed it back to Westley, who made a grab for Dove’s boot but was blocked by Darling. Wait, no, Paris had it, Galatea, Paris again, Darling, Westley again no Darling Dove Paris Jewel no where’d it go—
It was a good thing no one expected me to keep score.
On the whole, I noted, Westley and Galatea seemed to function as a single entity, passing the boot behind their backs, covering each other’s fumbles almost before they were made. Paris was more of a wild card, dancing along the edges of play with long curls flying, darting in to make the occasional precise strike and withdraw again.
Galatea’s team had both boots now, Paris trying to pass his capture to his team captain, who had Darling dancing around one side of her and Jewel on the other. Darling was smiling, in a fierce, bloodthirsty kind of way; Jewel had her teeth bared, too, but not in something I could call a smile. What she lacked in size I had already seen her make up in speed and ferocity.
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