Bite Back Box Set 2

by Mark Henwick

It doesn’t stop. I black out. I keep coming to and it’s still happening.

  Pain.

  And it won’t stop. It’ll go on forever.

  I will never be free of this.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  “That is your fear speaking.” Speaks-to-Wolves with Martha’s face sits opposite me again, smoke curling around her. “You are free of what happened to you when you choose to be free of it.”

  When I choose.

  “It is not easy, child, but it is your choice.” Her voice is firm.

  I have been free of it.

  “You have hidden it inside you. That is not free. That is as wrong as the way you first tried.”

  The way I first tried. I could remember that. Yes, I knew that was wrong. Very wrong. Not just for me.

  “Good,” she says. “Now, go and live it again. Wear it down, like water dripping on stone. And then you must find the way to turn it all into power. You must find the way forward. Only you.”

  The way forward.

  There’s a word living in the beat of my heart, pulsing through my veins, but it makes no sense.

  Redemption.

  Why would I need redemption? This was not my fault. I refuse to accept that.

  Redemption. Redemption. Redemption.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  The basement is empty and silent. The sound system has been turned off. The plasma screens are cycling through screensavers.

  I roll my aching body off the mattress and dry heave onto the floor.

  There’s blood on me. Dry spit. Beer. Scratches.

  Used condoms litter the floor.

  I heave again.

  I know what’s happened, but it’s all blurred and fragmentary. Like the picture a jigsaw would make if you forced the pieces back together the wrong way.

  My clothes are tossed to one side. I drag myself over and try to put them on, staggering and falling several times.

  I must get out. Get away.

  They mustn’t see me. I mustn’t see them. The knowledge will be in their eyes forever. I can’t stand the thought of them looking at me like that. Whore, they’ll say. Whore. I never knew it had such an ugly sound.

  My hands are shaking too much. Shame. Fear. Disgust. It’s stopping me from getting my clothes back on.

  So, I must have no shame. No fear. No disgust. As if it never happened.

  Thinking that helps. I get my jeans on, fumble with shoelaces.

  Have to tie them. I need to run.

  No emotion. Nothing. None.

  Better. My fingers now manage to tighten the laces.

  A deep breath. No fumbling.

  I pull on my shirt and jacket.

  Dressed, I creep up the basement stairs.

  The hall is empty.

  I can hear them above, in one of the bedrooms on the second floor.

  No emotion. Get out. Get away. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Survive. Nothing else matters.

  I open the front door and run away.

  Numb. But even after I creep into my house and scrub myself until my skin is raw, I can’t erase the sight of them standing around me, looking at me, pointing and jeering and yelling. Whore. Whore. Whore. It’s like a whip. It’s like being beaten.

  Chapter 6

  “You never told anyone?”

  I blinked. I’d nearly missed the question. I’d slipped back into reliving the last session in my head. It had been twelve days since we’d first visited the basement of the Forsythes’ house, and we’d just done it again. Twelve days of wearing it down every day.

  It hadn’t been as bad as the first time, but that was still enough to leave me feeling dazed as well as exhausted.

  Bad habit, not concentrating. Gotta break that.

  “No,” I answered.

  Too brief. Too unresponsive.

  I cleared my throat. “Once I buried it, it seemed easier to let it stay buried.”

  Diana and Bian sat with me, cross-legged on the floor.

  They were careful what they said after a session, but I knew what they were thinking—really bad idea to bottle it up like that.

  Well, it was un-bottled now.

  Was it any better?

  I’d barely thought of Forsythe in ten years, outside of the odd nightmare, quickly suppressed. Now, he was with me all the time, like a phantom at the edges of my sight.

  When I stopped and thought of him, the first word was always how? How could he have done that to me? How could he have gone back to school the next day as if nothing had happened? How could he fool everyone into thinking he was such a great, cool guy?

  From there it descended. What did he think of me? Did he realize I was a person? Had he been mentally damaged in some way that made him do that?

  Was it my fault?

  No!

  “Enough of the past,” Diana said, interrupting my thoughts.

  She waited until my heart rate settled. “This therapy has two distinct stages, though they may overlap. The first is contained in the reliving sessions we’ve been doing.” She paused and waited while we all took several quiet breaths. “Those sessions require helpers: xenagia, the guide, and stirythes, those who walk the paths with you and lend you their strength. We’re needed until those experiences we relive with you no longer have power over you.”

  I knew what had to come second.

  “Then you have to be alone.”

  Despite knowing it was coming, my heart skipped a beat. I’d come to count on the strength of many in facing those memories.

  Speaks-to-Wolves: You must find the way forward. Only you.

  “Only you can bring this to a conclusion,” Diana unknowingly echoed Speaks-to-Wolves. “Only you will be able to choose exactly how to go forward so that everything that has happened will be a source of strength and not weakness.”

  I hadn’t thought of it as ever being a strength. On my own, I’d first tried to disconnect from all my emotions. That had been wrong. Then I’d tried to bury it at the bottom of my mental strongbox. That had worked surprisingly well until Obs decided to use my own strongbox to bury what they’d done to me. All that coming apart had been what had driven me rogue.

  As I’d become aware during the last two weeks of therapy, my hope had been to neutralize what had happened to me, make it not matter. To erase it even.

  But to turn it around, to make it a strength? What did that need?

  Be all Zen and simply let it go? Rip Forsythe’s throat out? Prosecute him in court?

  A strength? How?

  Diana was watching me closely.

  “I don’t know what it needs,” I said.

  “We don’t expect you to, right away. Think of it as a discovery you will make.”

  “It feels…” I frowned and closed my eyes, tried to capture something elusive that shimmered just beyond reach. “It feels as if it isn’t that simple.”

  “It’s natural to be concerned,” Diana said.

  That wasn’t it; not exactly. It was as if there were two sides to this question of strength, or two elements to it. As if there was something inside and something outside.

  I opened my eyes. Bian leaned forward to speak, but Diana put a restraining hand on her arm.

  Diana and Bian didn’t completely agree about my therapy.

  I knew that. Bian had asked a question after the first difficult session. I’d been upset by it, but today my mind seemed to slip away from focusing on what that question had been.

  I knew why. In the same way I might have been sedated in hospital, back when I was human, Diana had put some light boundaries in my mind to stop me from ruining the progress we’d achieved. A form of compulsion.

  I knew all that; in fact, she’d asked my permission first. It seemed sensible, but now I was starting to question it. When did I get rid of it? How could I trust anything I thought I knew while it was there?

  In the way of these things, that shimmering thought that had been escaping me seemed to coalesce into a word as my attention moved elsewhere
.

  Redemption.

  The sudden reappearance of that word in my mind confused me.

  Why did I have to redeem myself?

  Part of me just wanted to kill Forsythe and walk away. And part of me knew there was something important missing from that. My heart rate ticked up.

  Frustration. And anger.

  “I need to talk about something else,” I said.

  Anything.

  “Of course,” Diana said quickly.

  “Tullah.” I picked the person I felt most concerned about. “You said she was hiding from the Adepts. Have you heard anything? Is she okay?”

  Another glance between Diana and Bian.

  Even with everything they’d done for me, this was getting irritating. I understood all about the need to take it easy, not get me upset, but like any patient, I was getting cranky. Rational thought was losing out. And Diana had just sort-of suggested I was ready to move forward.

  “She’s still in hiding,” Diana said. “We didn’t really have time to explain before, and I’m not sure—”

  “Please,” I said.

  Strangely, Diana seemed to like it that I’d pushed back.

  Maybe that was how she judged when it was really time to move on—when I was strong enough to complain about being handled with kid gloves.

  I pushed that down to think about later. I was too tired now.

  “Very well,” Diana said. “I told you she was hiding from the Adepts, but I didn’t tell you which ones.”

  “The Denver community, I guess?” Tullah’s mother, Mary, had run the Denver Adepts, but the community had been taken over by an Adept called Weaver. He was bad news. He wanted to harness the power of Tullah’s dragon spirit guide for himself. I wondered if he had the power. I sensed Kaothos had been growing, even in the time Tullah and I had spent down in New Mexico.

  But Diana was shaking her head. “She’s hiding from all communities at the moment, but the real problem is not any local communities. It’s the Empire of Heaven.”

  I frowned. “But Liu and Mary asked me to contact the Empire’s Adepts and ask them for advice on creating a community for Kaothos. Why is Tullah hiding from them now?”

  Had I screwed up again?

  I’d persuaded Bian to allow me to talk in a video conference with Xun Huang, Diakon of the Empire of Heaven. During the conversation, I’d asked to speak to Adepts from the Empire, and I’d said dragon spirit guides were a subject of interest. The intensity of his sudden attention had been a bit unnerving, but there had been no indication he posed a threat.

  Bian said, “When you and the dragon broke the lock holding Diana, there was apparently a shock wave in the energy.”

  I was stunned. “That reached—”

  “All the way to China, yes,” Diana said. “Such an abrupt and powerful manipulation of the energy causes ripples that can travel around the world.”

  “The Emperor immediately dispatched Huang and a team of Adepts to New Mexico,” Bian said. “When they didn’t find Tullah or Kaothos, they widened the search. They did not,” she added, “contact us—or any of the Adepts known to us—to ask us to pass on an offer of assistance to Tullah. Mary and Liu found that…troubling.”

  So did I.

  “You think they want to take Tullah and Kaothos by force?”

  Bian shrugged. “Better to be safe.”

  “Don’t worry, they’re safe, and Kaothos is protected. Huang won’t find them,” Diana said. She pursed her lips. “Since you were the first person to raise this with the Empire, when Huang eventually comes here to Los Angeles, he’ll want to discover whether you have any knowledge of their whereabouts.” I opened my mouth, but she waved away any further questions. “You will be in no danger from Huang. Skylur and I will see to that.”

  Bian added, “Huang has to come to LA. His presence is allowed in the country only by Skylur’s guarantee of safety. The purpose of that guarantee was to get all the Houses to come here and debate the new Assembly. So, unless Huang comes to LA and engages with the debate, he’ll be trespassing in Skylur’s mantle and subject to the usual penalties. Ironically, this has all worked out to achieve one of Skylur’s objectives—to get the Empire to participate in the Assembly.”

  So I hadn’t screwed up. Maybe I’d even helped Skylur’s cause.

  “What are they like?” I asked.

  “The Empire?” Bian snorted. “Difficult. Arrogant. Powerful. Huang himself seems like the mildest-mannered Diakon you’ll ever meet, but there’s a reason he’s in his position.”

  Although Panethus had more Athanate as far as we knew, the Empire of Heaven was effectively one House, with every Athanate sub-House linked directly by oath to the Emperor. The same went for every pack of Were or community of Adepts in their domain.

  Diana smiled. “Now, let’s speak of other things.” She switched to Athanate, speaking slowly and clearly. “Tell me about the House Farrell charter that you and Pia are working on.”

  My days weren’t entirely filled with therapy sessions and sleeping. I worked out with Yelena and the others. I had teleconferences with Pia and David. I learned handy skills I’d been intending to for ages, like lock picking. And I worked hard to understand both the Athanate society I was now part of, and the language itself.

  Every visit, Diana spent time with the language. Sometimes we listened to the broadcasts from the conference. Skylur had hoped that being able to hear all the proceedings would convince a majority of Athanate Houses to go home and leave it to their representatives. That ploy wasn’t working yet, but the broadcasts went on, encrypted and streamed out through the dark web on a secure site run by Altau, called Tartarus. I’d had to look it up—Tartarus was the name of a region of hell in Greek mythology: an abyss of torment and suffering. I thought that suited the conference well.

  Diana spoke to me in the most simple phrasing, but Athanate was a maddeningly difficult language with a huge vocabulary and complex nuances: there were sixteen ways to say I love you. And at least thirty-two standard ways you could modify that phrase.

  I began to talk, breaking up complex ideas about my House. I wanted to include Were and Adepts and humans, as well as the recognized Athanate categories. How I thought rights and obligations balanced. What size my House should be. How we would run it. Modern thoughts on a culture that had existed for thousands of years. It was a good thing it was so difficult putting it all into simple sentences; I stopped thinking about how arrogant Diana would find my ideas.

  In fact, I was unable to think about anything else while I struggled to answer her questions. Good therapy, and no doubt her intention all along.

  And she gave no indication that she thought my charter was a bad idea, which I found encouraging.

  An hour later we were interrupted by a telephone request from Skylur; she had to leave.

  I expected Bian to join her, but since she’d lost the position of Altau Diakon to Naryn, her official duties seemed to have reduced.

  “You look as if you need to nap,” she said when I yawned. “Therapy does that to you.”

  “I’m not tired,” I lied.

  “Okay. You sit there anyway and I’ll make some tea.”

  I didn’t get to taste the tea.

  Chapter 7

  Morning, sort-of. It was either ridiculously early or way too late. My sleep cycles were well and truly messed up.

  As Bian had said, Athanate therapy did that.

  It also made me disoriented as I woke. Dreams and therapy sessions and things I did yesterday all blurred together.

  It helped to focus on the number of days, first off.

  Twenty-nine? No, thirty days.

  My therapy had been going on now for four weeks, since we came in from New Mexico.

  Four weeks of wearing it all down, as Speaks-to-Wolves called it. The memories I’d walled away: those last few days at South High; losing my team in the jungle; Petersen’s Obs team experimenting on me.

  I’d stopped screaming.

/>   And even though I was now able to look at all of those memories without flinching, every session took its toll.

  I slept. Better than I had in years. And when I wasn’t in therapy or asleep, I drove myself. Partly a natural aversion to thinking about my therapy, and partly, I suspected, the light touch of Diana’s compulsion.

  Athanate language. Athanate law and customs. Working out till my muscles screamed. Sparring.

  Everyone took a turn at sparring with me, but my usual partner was Yelena. My platinum-haired Carpathian was good, almost as quick and nasty as Bian. Every session I learned new tricks as I earned new bruises.

  She and I shared the training of the rest of my House.

  Jen and Alex. Julie and Keith. And Vera. Yelena was much more careful with the others than she was with me—I took that as a compliment. And she was fitting into my House effortlessly. Which was good, because an Athanate House needs a Diakon as well as a Mistress, and I was coming to the conclusion that fate had handed me the perfect candidate.

  I enjoyed watching them all.

  Julie, Keith and Alex had been overconfident about their hand-to-hand skills. That had lasted exactly one session with Yelena.

  Jen was utterly focused on getting as much from every lesson as she could. She’d told me she never wanted to be in a position of feeling helpless again, and now she was doing everything she could to work toward that.

  But the best to watch was Vera. A couple of months ago, she’d arrived as a woman just starting to make a reluctant peace with the encroaching symptoms of age—her joints had hurt, her bones had been getting brittle and her memory had gotten a little erratic. Now she was hurling herself around gleefully on the practice mats. She’d rediscovered the invulnerability of being young, thanks to the rejuvenating effect of being bitten by Athanate.

  Bian had nominally been in charge of her treatment, but she’d delegated to Yelena.

  An arrangement that seemed to suit them both.

  When I’d had enough of hard mental and physical work, and needed to do something restful, I swam.

  Jen had found us a house in the Hollywood Hills, beyond the traffic-snarled grid of Sunset, in where the pale roads snaked up and up between steep sides and tall green hedges. A shimmering white house stacked against the slope that felt, from the inside, like we were living in a wedding cake: all split levels, interior balconies and spiraling staircases. It was owned by some movie star, presumably the same person responsible for putting a mirror on every wall. In its favor, it had the most beautiful infinity pool. No chlorine; a pure salt water cleaning system, and a view from the lip of the pool right down the valley and into the city itself.