by Kara Silver
She knew all that, could feel and see it all around her, in every atom, every molecule. It shouted and blared its existence at her, its strands weaving themselves around her, of her. This was her space. Her world. She’d done all this, created it. Lived it. Kennedy paced the study, rearranging books, tidying files, repositioning photographs, moving the small objects that decorated the shelves and tables. She paused by a case-fronted case displaying a collection of handwritten, barely bound notes. Field journals, notes on indigenous societies, their rituals and customs. Their markings. She’d made some of them and collected others’ works too. Going back a century. Kennedy frowned. She should check something. For something. What? She opened the case.
“What are you looking for?” Richard asked, still typing. “Want me to cook dinner?”
“I’m not. And no. I know it’s my turn.” Kennedy picked up a vase of almost-dead flowers. Really, they had to get better at housekeeping. The mirror that the vase had blocked was now clear, if dusty. Was it her turn to clean? Probably. Probably had been for a while. She wiped her sleeve over the glass, studying herself, wondering why she was frowning. What did she have to glower about? Her hair…hadn’t been this red when they’d met, she thought. She’d probably got so used to hennaing it when it faded with the years and the sun that she overdid it now.
“You’re gorgeous,” Richard called over, seeing her primping. “Can’t think what you see in me. Never could.”
“You caught me at a weak moment.” Kennedy dodged the balled-up sheet of paper he lobbed at her. What you see in me. The phrase echoed, beat at her. She looked around the study, designed to be a comfortable, practical working environment and filled with the fruits of their academic study. It was perfect, as was the rest of their house. What you see.
She saw…Kennedy Smith-Parker, vibrant red hair, deep green eyes. She…used tinted contact lenses, she thought. Thought? She should know. She moved closer to the mirror, looking for what, she didn’t quite know, but Richard distracted her with some query about work.
Work. She loved her work. Adored it. But didn’t live for it. She had a great balance between her professional life, with all its responsibilities and opportunities, and a great marriage with her soulmate. Kennedy rubbed her thumb over her wedding ring, making it twist on her finger. It had worn a groove, left a mark.
Mark. And in a second, she knew what was wrong, what was lacking, what she wanted to see in, or rather on her: her demon mark on her demon bone. She yanked at her blouse, tearing it from her shoulder and twisting to see her back in the mirror. But her skin was smooth, no raised scarification. Not like the drawings she’d captured and other ethnographers had recorded going back a hundred years, in the field notes she now grabbed from their places.
“These! This!” she cried, thrusting them at Richard, whoever he was, away when he reached for her. “Where’s mine? Because if it’s not here”—she turned again to the mirror—“then this is—”
“Not real,” a male voice finished for her, but it wasn’t Richard’s light New England tones. It was deeper and more gravel-like. Fitting for—
“Aeth!” And with that, Kennedy toppled backwards through the mirror, away from this possible-life, back once more into the void.
19
Kennedy cried. She let herself sob huge, fat, ugly tears, all alone in the nothingness. In the void, no one can see you cry. She hoped no one could hear her, either. The worst thing was that she was afraid to examine what she was crying for, but the sense of longing, of loss beat at her, until she gave in and indulged herself, wallowing in it. Which made her cry harder. But, it had been so real, so solid. She’d touched the things in the study, read the research paper taking shape on the screen.
“I don’t understand!” she screamed at whoever was doing this to her. “Is that supposed to be my future? If I work harder and get better grades? So it’s what, some half-assed motivational video, but like, personalised to me? Because, wow, that’s some effective targeted marketing.” She wasn’t joking—she really didn’t understand. So that was, or could be, her future, if she…wasn’t a demon? How was she supposed to stop that? Or was some alternative timeline future? If so, how was she supposed to have achieved that?
“I don’t understand.” She whispered it, this time, calmer now, then cleared her throat and scrubbed her sleeves over her eyes. Nothing to see here. Literally. “Just me, myself, and I. And you know what? No matter what you do, what you throw at me, I’m always me. No matter what kind of nice, chocolate-box, picture-perfect future you try to tempt with me, you can’t fool me. Because showing me a future like that? It’s too good to be true.”
“Kennedy, no!” came a voice. A familiar voice.
“Aeth?” Stupidly, she looked all around. “Just hang on—I’ll find you!”
“Would you just shut up for once and fucking listen?”
“Aeth?” She’d never heard him swear. Things must be going badly for him. Her heart squeezed in pain. “I’ll—”
“Stop fucking giving them ammunition!”
“But it’s all right! Whatever they show me, I know it’s not my place!” She clapped her hand over her demon mark. “I’ll look for this and—”
“And what if it is your place? And what if…” His voice trailed off, no matter how much she strained to catch it.
“Don’t worry. No bright, shiny future can tempt me. And I’ll remember everything,” she promised the blackness.
“And if it’s not the future? And if there’s nothing to remember?”
“I don’t get you,” Kennedy started to say, then scrabbled backwards, as the dark sort of lightened and whitened. A moment later, she choked back another sob. “Aeth!” She flung her arms around him. “You’re…here.” She frowned. “And you’re sort of squishy. Sorry, but have you put on weight?”
He laughed. “Not exactly. Just as you shouldn’t be here, so you’re incorporeal, I’m corporeal. Does that make any sense?”
“Of course. And by that I mean no.” Kennedy was startled to find they were both sitting, backs against some wall or other, and her hand was in his. He did look…different, was as close as she could get. And feel different. She peered hard into his grey eyes, even touched his dark-blond hair. He was…unreally more real? Was that a thing? “If I’m not supposed to be here, how am I?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s because we have a strong bond. Too strong. Which”—he spoke over her interruption—“which is my fault. As is what I suspect will happen next.”
“Okay.”
“Remember, it’s a reality of your own perception.”
“Don’t want to know what you’re on.”
“And I don’t know if it’s more your punishment…or mine.”
“Aeth, you’re scaring me. No, that’s not true. Freaking me out, is more like it.”
“Remember what I said, about it not being the future and there being nothing to remember? Hold on to that. Promise me!”
“I…” was all she managed before she was dragged away, struggling and fighting, and submerged, emerging…different.
* * *
“School again? I went yesterday!” wailed Kennedy, ducking her head from side to side as her mother tried to place a beret on it. Dark green, it matched the plaid of her uniform dress and her knee-length socks.
“You started yesterday,” corrected her mother. “You said you liked it.”
Kennedy considered, her head on one side. “I liked that I could read and write and work numbers. Most of the class couldn’t. Mrs Clarke was happy about that.”
Her mother knelt down to look into her eyes. “And what did you feel then, with all that happiness and warmth directed at you?”
“Oh, nice!”
“As nice as the fruit bar snack at break?”
“Better!” Kennedy assured her mother.
“See?” Her father came to join them, reaching out to stroke both their heads. “And you were nervous. And you know, Kennedy, it only gets better! The
more you do, the more you achieve, the more you gain—well, it feels marvellous.”
“You’ll understand as you get older,” her mother promised. She stood and held out her hand. “Come on. Time to walk to Welles House.”
“Daddy as well again too?”
“Oh, yes, sweetie! I arranged to go into work later every day this week, so we can both take you along.”
“Pumpkin Pie again too?” Kennedy cheered.
“Of course.” Her father whistled to a yellow Labrador and clipped its lead on. “Nothing less than a full escort for our little demon.”
He led the small procession out of the large detached house in the London garden square. Kennedy, laughing and shrieking, jumped up to catch falling leaves as they blew past her. It was a short walk to her primary school, the small place her parents had put her name down for the day she was born. Kennedy’s red-brown pigtails swung and her green-brown eyes shone with each skip and jump. She loved her family and her life. Even this school thing wasn’t that bad.
As the years passed, Kennedy became a junior triathlete, refining her techniques in running, swimming and cycling, working to improve her times. If she felt as though she’d trained somewhere before, done something similar, this was still great. She basked in the applause and praise, gloried in the medals and trophies she won, fed on the accolades and approval, the warmth and even the envy.
“Mummy?” called twelve-year-old Kennedy one morning. She squinted at her back, trying to see it in the floor-length mirror in her bedroom. “I think I’ve got something here. On my shoulder. Or top back. I thought there was before, because it itched or burned, but now there really is. I can see it!”
“Ah. Yes. I see. Yes.” Her mother finished examining Kennedy’s shoulder blade and stepped back, rebuttoning Kennedy’s cardigan with great care. She hugged her hard.
“What is it?”
“Nothing to worry about, darling. It’s perfectly natural. And we’ll talk about this tonight, when Daddy’s home, okay?”
“Why not now?”
“Because Daddy wants to be here when we talk about it.”
“Oh.”
She didn’t understand, but nodded. She didn’t really understand that evening, when her parents explained what she was, what they were, what it entailed, what it implied…what it promised. How, if she was before a crowd, the centre of attention, creating emotions in people, reactions she could taste, she’d be strong and full.
“Like Daddy with his articles and interviews! And mum with her piano playing.” Kennedy caught on quickly. “Oh, and me with my athletics?”
“Exactly. You started doing it, feeding, when you needed to.”
Kennedy’s eyes were wide, and she nodded fast and hard at the explanation of the need for secrecy, for discretion. And when the buzz, the energies and the emotions of the audience no longer sustained her sufficiently, her parents showed her what to do then. That despite her background, the elevated place her parents held in the social and economic scheme of things, she should frequent less salubrious areas and places, to befriend and spend time with what they referred to as unders, feeding vicariously through the raw excitement and thrilling risk of their petty criminal lives.
The gang Kennedy came to hang out with did drugs. Oh, Kennedy didn’t indulge, despite their mockery and incomprehension. She was getting her buzz from them, particularly the one man she’d singled out as her significant other. And he was significant, important, in that he was her primary source. Her food stock. Even though, like the vague memories of other training, she had misty visions, dreams, perhaps, of not needing to feed. That her demon mark had an extra symbol on, marking her as something different, a thing that didn’t need the food. But as much as she examined it, her mark bore no extra trace.
Growing into adulthood, Kennedy had difficulties understanding and regulating her changing, demanding urges to feed. Her boyfriend, for want of a better word, was an empty husk, strung-out not on the hard drugs his friends assumed to be the culprit, but by being in thrall to her.
“Kennedy!”
She whipped round at her mother’s voice, dropping the under whose name she could barely recall, despite the fact they’d been ‘dating’ as humans would have called it, for several months. “Mum! What are you—and Dad!— doing here?”
Here being a squalid flat in a part of London people from their background didn’t usually visit. A district that most would never even have thought about, except with a shudder.
“How do you feel, sweetie?”
“Empty. Hungry,” Kennedy answered her father bluntly, truthfully. “I’ve been feeding, but it’s not enough.”
Her parents exchanged glances. “You need more, darling,” her mother explained. “You’re strong and powerful. You need a huge boost that will be sufficient for a good long while.”
“But he’s…” Kennedy indicated the comatose figure of the creep she’d been using. “Almost drained,” she whispered.
“So? Finish him.” Her father glanced around the dingy room. “You’re basically doing him a favour, princess.”
“No one will miss him or question anything,” her mother added.
“But he’s…alive.” Kennedy stood, facing them. “And if I…he won’t be. It seems wrong,” she added.
“For whom?” her father countered, gearing up as though to engage in one of the moral and philosophical arguments he was famous for.
“Humankind!” Kennedy shouted. She darted her gaze all around the room, looking for something. “This, this draining of humans, their lives, however we do it, and especially like this…it’s not right. It can’t be.” She didn’t know how she knew, that all her parents had told her, shown her, was mistaken, but she did. It wasn’t normal, or natural. It was cruel.
“Darling. You’re weak at the moment. And, anyway, you’re young. You don’t really know… You have a lot to learn.” Her mother went to hug her.
“I know that,” Kennedy spat. “But you know what? I don’t feel weak.”
“It’s true.” Her father took a step back. “She’s receiving…something. From somewhere.”
“It’s…” Kennedy snapped her head up, awareness and memory filling her eyes. This life slid to the side and another one slipped in to replace it. Oh. Of course! She took a minute to absorb it, to filter and understand, her parents staring in worry and concern. “And I’m studying. Training.” Kennedy advanced on her parents. “With a guardian, actually. And he wouldn’t like this.”
“A guardian?” Her father paled. “Who? What’s his name?”
And Kennedy, possible eighteen-year-old Kennedy there, with her rich, well-connected family and her rich, well-connected life, looked up as if she could see Aeth, and laughed. Then her face fell. “No, wait! Where are you going? Where are they taking you? Who’s talking—saying you’ve failed?”
Her lips firmed and her eyes narrowed. “Oh no, you don’t! Not without me!” she cried, and leaped upwards, out of that life where she was a princess, the world at her feet, people her minions, her fodder. She rejected that false reality, preferring to take her chances in the void.
20
Aeth failed? Answering for his failure? Kennedy was incensed. If her heart panged, at leaving that version of her life, one in which she had respect, means, and, Christ, loving parents, the fear she felt for Aeth squashed it down and out. “He didn’t fail!” she railed against anyone who thought that. “He trained me, and you can see how well I’m doing.”
“And what did I say about not giving them any ammunition?” said Aeth’s voice.
“Wait. Have we got telepathy now? That’s a good thing, right? And you actually said ‘stop fucking giving them ammunition’.”
“So fucking stop!” he demanded.
She did stop, as in, came to a stop, the free-fall over. And it was with a crash, leaving her lying winded with every bone in her body jarred. She just hoped nothing was broken too badly. She struggled to her feet. Where was this? On top of a big ro
ck pillar somewhere, was as near as she could place it. She strained to see though the gloom, then a huge smile spread right across her face. “Aeth!”
If she could, she would have hugged him, but that wasn’t possible, with him across a divide of nothingness from her, on his own stone platform. “Told you I’d rescue you!” she called.
He glared, folded-armed. “And exactly how is this you rescuing me?”
“Well, I can come through this stone to yours and we—”
“No!”
Her ears rang from his yell.
“This isn’t the same substance. Your abilities don’t work here. You’ll be, what’s the verb, smithereened, if you do.”
“Gotcha. And told you that was a verb.” She looked around for something, anything to use to get across to him.
“Oh, yes, and what makes you think I need fucking rescuing?”
“What is it with the foul mouth here? Wherever here is?”
“Is it the Plain of High Heaven?”
Kennedy jumped at the strange voice. It came from a young girl, tiny and very pale and with dark almond eyes and short ink-black hair, who occupied a pillar at a distance to Aeth’s right.
“The Garden?” came from behind Kennedy, from an olive-skinned young woman atop the high platform opposite the first girl.
Aeth sighed, loud enough to be heard from where Kennedy was in the middle. “Curly, you want to take a shot?”
“The Hall of all the Gods?”
Kennedy turned to look at this speaker, a huge brawny Nordic-looking man, standing across from Aeth. The four of them made a square. She’d seen that configuration before, also up on high, in her own realm, with the quartet in their other forms.
“And my name is not Curly,” the man added. “It’s Halvard.”
“Yes, just like those two aren’t Larry and Moe. Oh, and seeing as we’re all here, perhaps Moe can do the honours of explaining just how she came to fucking sell tickets and bring a passenger along for the fucking ride?”