Secondhand Shadow

by Elizabeth Belyeu

  I had left Naomi unguarded, and the knowledge crawled on me like a flame. I couldn’t go back. Who could I trust to guard her in my stead? Wasn’t Galatea around somewhere?

  I paused mid-step on the staircase as I realized the matter was about to become moot; Naomi’s location was growing rapidly nearer to mine.

  No point in wondering who was driving her or how she knew where to go — neither required a great leap of insight. The question was what to do when she got here.

  The idea of running away was tempting, and no more than she could expect. But I needed to talk to her, I supposed; make preparations for the breach, which I was determined would happen tomorrow, if we could get even a half-decent blood stockpile.

  The fact that I was frantic to see her might also be a factor.

  I wanted to talk to her alone, that was for certain. No need for the others to even know she was here. I slipped out the back door to wait in the yard.

  NAOMI

  “Over here, Naomi.”

  Startled, I veered away from the Orphanage door toward Damon’s silhouette under the dogwood tree. The only light was leakage around the window curtains; I couldn’t make out his expression, and the closer I got, the more nervous that made me.

  “What are you doing here?” His voice was weary, pained.

  “I wanted to see you.” Mine was small and shy, and could offer no apology for my behavior.

  “That guy gave you his number.”

  It was the last thing I expected him to say, and it warmed me a bit to hear the roughly-repressed jealousy in his voice.

  “I took it to make him feel better. I’m going to throw it away as soon as I pass a trash can.” I stood only a few feet away from him now, but he was still obscured by the dogwood’s blossom-laden branches.

  “You should keep it,” he said. “That’s the kind of guy you should be with, a normal guy.”

  “Normal? Oh, like Tyler?” I ducked under the branches, anger sparking courage, and had the pleasure of forcing him back a step. “Like Tyler, who begged me to elope with him and then cheated on me within half a year?”

  “Not all men are like that.”

  “Exactly. I’ve found one that isn’t. I know you wouldn’t hurt me—”

  “Wouldn’t I?”

  He kissed me.

  The kind of kiss that broke spells, woke princesses — please let me be awake — starving, desperate, as if he thought he would never see me again — we were both starving—

  My first kiss with Tyler had been shy, awkward, both of us laughing at our own embarrassment. And that had its charm. But this…

  He may have begun it as a bizarre sort of punishment — for which of us? — but it slipped his control very quickly. He’d let the skin-hunger genie out of the bottle, and it wasn’t going back. Not if I had anything to say about it. I tried to put my arms around him but the leather jacket was in the way, that had to go — gloves, too, yes, much better — much, much better…

  Everyone said a new Lumi glowed and I hadn’t felt any different, but now I felt incandescent, hot bright light streaming from my skin everywhere he touched — face, hair, neck, hands — why was he kissing my hands? That’s quite nice, but back over here, thank you, yes, and I knew there was a reason I liked long-haired guys, I liked them very much…

  Our nerve endings had always gotten along better than was reasonable and they were calling the shots now, which was just fine with me because there was a steady current of pure warm happy flowing from his skin to mine. I didn’t want to stop ever, oh was it hard to stop after being married and getting used to not-stopping, and besides why should we stop? Even the Pope said it was okay if you’re befasted…

  At that point possibly an attempt was made to remove someone’s shirt, but that was when he flinched like I’d hurt him or frightened him and he stopped kissing me, instead holding me with my head tucked under his chin. His heart was beating even faster than mine, which I wouldn’t have thought was possible. I burrowed into the soft, salt-smoke-ginger-scented place where his neck met his shoulder.

  “Breach is tomorrow,” he said, hoarse and gasping.

  I went rigid, and he held me tighter, stroking my hair in silent apology. But he did not take it back. He said it like he might say he was going to the gallows tomorrow, but he did not take it back.

  I swallowed, forced words through my tightening throat. “So. You can hurt me.”

  He gave a tiny, bitter laugh. “Told you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Breach

  DAMON

  Taking Naomi back to my parents’ house myself was a bad idea, but I couldn’t bring myself to trust anyone else. Staying instead of just dropping her off was a worse idea. But my parents weren’t home, and I couldn’t just leave her alone.

  While she changed clothes in the bathroom, I paced. There wasn’t enough room for it, but I paced anyway, from bed to door and back again.

  You are a very stupid boy, Damon. You’ve done enough, tonight, to ensure that you’ll not get a decent night’s sleep for a decade. And every minute you spend in her company makes it worse.

  I leaned my forehead against the bathroom door. It was worth it. Oh, it was worth it.

  I snatched myself away from the door. No more of that. You might be willing to pay the price later, but what about her? It’s not fair to her.

  I turned to pace again, and two papers on the desk fluttered to the floor. I scooped them up, set them down… picked them up again.

  Both were drawings of me. One was a profile, surrounded by a thick-sketched frame of oddities — crows, swords, storm-tossed ships. I cringed. Am I really that melodramatic? In the other drawing, I was asleep, head tipped back against a chair. When had she drawn that? This one also had a ring of items around it — mostly toys, this time. Trains, rockets, kites, storybooks. Tin soldiers. Puppies. There were letters woven into the framework, I realized. On the profile picture, they read DAMON. The sketch with the puppies said GABRIEL.

  I stepped back from the drawings as if they’d caught fire.

  “My end-of-term art project,” Naomi said behind me, her voice tight with embarrassment. She brushed past me and slid the papers into the desk drawer. “I had to do something and it’s too late to change it.”

  “It’s fine. Whatever.” My attempt at a casual dismissal failed rather thoroughly.

  “Any idea where your parents went? It’s pretty late to be out on the town.”

  “They work the fancy party gig.” I shrugged. “One time they hit the mayor’s house and two charity balls in one night.” I inched away from her as discreetly as I could. She was wearing an old nightgown of my mother’s that I recognized from my childhood; the Mommy vibe should have been off-putting. It really, really wasn’t.

  “You don’t have to stay,” she said, wrapping herself in a blue-striped afghan. Maybe I hadn’t been as discreet as I thought. “I’m sure they’ll be home soon.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone.” It occurred to me that she might not want me around. But we were low on options. Hopefully she was right, and my parents would be home soon. “I’ll… just stay over here. Don’t mind me.” I sat down at the desk and pulled a book off my shelf.

  She shuffled herself into the bed and pulled her laptop within reach. Mom or Dad must have taken her by her apartment, I realized, because I hadn’t packed that. I hadn’t packed her a toothbrush, either. I had basically grabbed a random handful of fabric and stuffed it in a bag. Not my greatest moment.

  I had brought her here so that I wouldn’t have to be around her. It had seemed like a sound plan. How had we ended up here together? With little more than an afghan between—

  No. Isn’t one massive mistake enough for tonight?

  “Oh, you’ve got to be hungry,” Naomi said suddenly.

  An excuse to leave the room! I leaped from my chair. “Yes. Very. I’ll go get something from the kitchen.”

  The relief of being away from her was quickly overrun by the need
to come back; I grabbed a box of Cheerios from the cabinet and tried not to take the stairs three at a time on my way back up.

  She eyed the cereal box and lifted her eyebrows. “Milk?”

  I tossed her the box. “Mommy doesn’t let me have milk in my room. It might spill.”

  She rolled her eyes, then stirred a hand through the cereal, and pulled it out grasping a handful of Cheerios, muttering something about folic acid. She passed the box to me, and crunched hers one at a time as I took my seat at the desk.

  Silence fell, of a sort; a white-noise weave of crunching cereal, tapping keys, turning pages. It was nice to have something in my stomach, but I needed more distraction. I tried to immerse myself in the book I had picked up.

  .

  ‘I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too.’

  .

  Gatsby. Great. ‘Cause things worked out so well for Gatsby.

  You don’t want this to work out, remember?

  I closed the book, but that left me with nothing to think about but Naomi, and Cheerios, which were considerably less interesting than Naomi, so I opened it again. And read the same page three times without comprehending a word of it.

  The sound of Naomi typing, which had been like rain on a roof at first, gradually slowed to fits and starts, then stopped altogether. She was watching me. I gripped the book harder and would not turn around.

  That kiss had been an even more massive mistake than I thought. Now that I knew what it was like to kiss her, it was a hundred times harder not to.

  You’ve never been a slave to your hormones before. Don’t start now.

  Ha. Liar. Before covanting, Shadow children had no hormones to speak of. Afterward, Claire could and did control me with the slightest touch. True, I’d lived a monk’s life for the last thirteen years. But I also hadn’t run into anyone I was more than remotely attracted to.

  Still, if it was only a matter of hormones, I thought I could lock it down easily enough. Any orphan who hunted without killing was accustomed to self-denial. Denying her was the true difficulty. Wouldn’t it be worth the pain later, to make her happy now? I couldn’t kid myself that she didn’t want me. That had not been a one-sided kiss.

  You’ll just give her the wrong idea, false hope. She deserves better than that. If you really lo — if you care about her at all, the best thing you can do is leave her alone.

  “You awake?” she called softly, and I realized I had closed my eyes.

  “I’m awake,” I said. “This book is even duller than I remember it being.”

  “Gatsby? For a high-school-English-class book, it wasn’t too bad. Short, at least.”

  “Shorter is better,” I agreed. “When I was fourteen, Mother wanted me to read War and Peace. No joke. It was like a Charlie Brown movie. But Dad took my side, and for once, we prevailed.” I had to smile at the memory.

  “You don’t talk about your mother much,” Naomi said. “You smile when you talk about your dad, but when you mention your mother, you… well, you don’t smile.”

  I shifted uncomfortably. “I love my mother.”

  “Yes. But you don’t smile.”

  “We… She doesn’t…” How to explain this without making my mother sound like a much worse person than she was? “Mother was raised to believe that kathairna were abominations in the sight of God, demons, soulless killers. She had a hard time handling it when her son became one.” It would be neither appropriate nor useful, I decided, to repeat things said while her Lumi was in intensive care with my teeth marks in his throat. “Anyway, Shadows are always Daddy’s boys — or Daddy’s girls. Daddy is human, see — functions as a lesser, surrogate Lumi for the kids until they covant.”

  “That sounds… pretty weird.”

  “It isn’t. There’s no romantic component. Daddies just do the food-touching and healing and stuff. And seem a lot closer to the center of the universe than most.”

  “What fun to be a Shadow mom. Blurry babies who like Daddy better and then start new lives somewhere else when most kids would be picking out prom dresses.”

  “It’s the subject of several songs,” I admitted. “Not that Shadow fathers had it much better, traditionally.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, back in the Old Days, marriage was mostly a matter of prudence and convenient arrangement. Not many Lumii were able to marry their Shadows even if they wanted to. If you’re going to debate parenting problems… at least a Shadow mother knew the children were hers.”

  She grimaced. “Considering the average Shadow’s jealous nature, that sounds like a recipe for trouble all around.”

  “You have no idea,” I said, and tried to block the razorblade memories — Claire, my Claire, kissing someone else, clothes tearing and falling to the floor—

  “This is none of your business, Romeo!”

  She always chose the stupid ones, the selfish, violent ones who would blacken her eyes when she got uppity. If that was what she needed, why did I covant her? Why not someone who could treat her the way she wanted to be treated? Or did Shadows like that even exist?

  “So are you going to tell Mommy and Daddy Dearest about your big plans for tomorrow?” Naomi asked.

  “No. They’d try to stop me. And once they’d failed to stop me, Dad would insist on being there, which lowers his life expectancy considerably.”

  “So it’s all for their own good,” Naomi said dryly.

  “Precisely.”

  “The fact that it’s more convenient for you is irrelevant.”

  “I admit it. I would consider my parents’ deaths extremely inconvenient.”

  She was quiet a moment, conceding the point. “I have your father’s class tomorrow. And Biology lab. And work. So when were you planning on squeezing in this little breach thingamajig?”

  “It’ll depend on how quickly we can get a stockpile together. Probably mid-afternoon.”

  “I work from one to five.”

  “Five, then. I’ll pick you up from work.”

  We were both quiet now. The breach was real now, concrete, with a date and time stamped on it. By six o’clock tomorrow I would be strapped to a bed, screaming, and the link pulling me toward Naomi would be gone.

  The hum of Naomi’s laptop ceased, and I heard clicks and thumps as she put it away. Then rustling covers and squeaking springs as she slid down into the bed and buried her head under the covers.

  NAOMI

  At first I was conscious only of the mild rib-kicking that had nudged me awake, and then slowly aware of how warm and comfortable I felt, crowded into the little bed with the baby and… not Tyler…

  Oh.

  I decided to stay still and not let on that I was awake, but my body was already snuggling in closer. He shifted with a foggy, pleased-sounding murmur, and didn’t wake.

  How had this happened? Had he just invited himself over during the night? The last thing I remembered—

  Oh. I remembered now, a nightmare — the same awful dream about Grampa Charlie’s funeral, but this time blood spattered the walls, smeared into words I couldn’t read, soaking the carpet underfoot. As usual, I was looking down at my own body in the coffin — this time torn and twisted and scarlet-streaked, just like Martin Iverson. I started crying, terrified more for the baby in my arms than for myself.

  “Take him! You have to!” I tried to hand the baby to Damon. “You have to look after him! Quick, you have to take him before he dies, too!”

  Damon stepped back, would not put up his arms. “No.”

  “Please!”

  “No. I won’t.”

  And then I had woken up, with Damon trying to calm me, and I babbled and sobbed and struck at his hands and chest until he held me too tight to move. And I would not be calm until he promised that if something happened to me, he would look after the baby, at least until Tyler or my parents could come for
him. Then he held me and stroked my hair until I went back to sleep, without ever having truly woken up.

  I was awake now, all right, and it came to me distantly, like some irrelevant bit of trivia, that I had apparently decided to keep the baby.

  Crap. Now I really am going to have to tell my parents.

  That would come later. Right now, I could just snuggle with Damon and pretend like he wasn’t going to be lost to me forever, and possibly dead, in less than twelve hours.

  You bought him time, at least. If he screws it up now, it’s his own choice and his own stupid fault.

  A tapping sounded at the door. “Naomi? Breakfast!”

  Damon came awake with a start, and fell off the bed.

  “Naomi? You all right in there?”

  I choked a guffaw, looking down at Damon, wide-eyed on the floor. “I’m fine, Dr. DiNovi,” I called. “I’ll be right there.” I dropped my voice to a whisper as Dr. DiNovi’s footsteps thumped off down the hallway. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Ow. I’m fine.” He stood, rubbing his tailbone. “I’m getting out of here before my parents catch me. I’ll see you after work.” He bent close enough to give me a goodbye kiss, then froze.

  I didn’t.

  He leaped back. “No.”

  “Why not?” Staggered by the half-second’s contact, it was hard not to sound like a sulky child.

  “Because you’ll only make it worse for yourself later. Don’t, don’t make it worse—”

  “That’s my problem, isn’t it?” I stood and glared at him. “I’m twenty-two years old. I can take care of myself.”

  “You’re doing a bang-up job of it so far.”

  “Well, that’s not going to be your problem for much longer, is it?”

  He turned away.

  I grabbed his shoulder, turned him back. “Look, you have a right to make your own choices. You’re choosing to be stupid. Fine. So am I.” I twined a hand into his collar and pulled down until I could reach his lips with mine.