by Chloe Garner
“I should have known,” she said. “O’na Anu’dd was trying to warn me. It wasn’t about five wraiths.”
She tossed Lahn into the air, flipping her end over end, catching the handle in tighter and tighter motions. She reached the point where she wasn’t putting enough loft into the blade to get a full rotation, and she practiced the careful touches at the points of the blade to maintain loft, first one-handed, then two-handed. One touch per circuit for just the handle, then two touches, handle and point, then three touches. Left-right-left; right-left-right. Four touches. Left throw, right touch, left touch, right tap at hilt, left catch. Her right wasn’t quite dexterous enough to do the mirror. Sam jerked at her consciousness hard.
“Stop,” he said. She held the handle, letting the leather wrap come to rest against her skin. She ran her thumb over her fingertips on the right. No salt sting. She’d done it clean.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Be sad. If you really are. Be upset. I get that. Don’t be… this.”
“And what is this, Sam?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
She put Lahn back away, looking at the walls without seeing them. She felt herself nodding, but couldn’t stop. She stood.
“I’m going out,” she said.
“Where?” Jason asked.
“Don’t care. Dark,” Samantha said.
Sam grabbed her elbow.
“Can I talk to you?”
She looked up at him, willing to take a lifeline if he had it, but increasingly aware of how her palms itched. The sensation of Lahn plunging into half-rotted flesh sprung into her mind and she closed her eyes, hungry for it. When she opened her eyes again, they were standing in the bathroom.
“Why are you doing this?”
She was spinning, cutting through air, demons, unclean human flesh in her head. She felt her hands sway with the motions.
“You weren’t here,” she said.
“What?”
“When you died.”
He frowned.
“No.”
“I did this when you died, too,” she said. “And when Justin died.” Her head bobbed, keeping a time to the whirling. Unstoppable. “That’s why you haven’t seen it before.”
He held her shoulders. She shook him off.
“Be angry,” she screamed.
“At who?” he asked.
“Everything. It was never, ever supposed to be like this.”
“But this is how it is.”
“Then you’ve lost,” she said. He tried to grab her again and she twisted away. She wanted to bite. To kick. The heels of her hands against flesh and bone. The phantom of Lahn twisted in tight spins in her mind. She threw the door to the bathroom open and Jason looked up at her.
“Do you want me?” she asked.
“Not enough, Sweetheart,” he said. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth.
“Then spit in his eyes and pull me a demon,” she said. She walked out the door and started down the sidewalk, only extreme discipline keeping Lahn in her sheath. She walked with her eyes closed, her head moving in exact time to the swirl of motion in her head, now. Every few steps, she took a new snapshot of the world outside her head, then closed her eyes again, hands weaving at her sides.
Sam was angry. Upset. But it wasn’t right. It wasn’t about Caroline or death or darkness or any of the evils. He was upset about her. Angry at her.
She froze. Something strange had just happened.
She turned and ran back down the sidewalk, opening the electronic lock with the palm of her hand, too impatient to get her key out.
“Sam,” Jason said, looking up from Sam. “What just happened?”
“What did you do?” she asked, dropping to her knees and lifting Sam’s head. She couldn’t feel him. He existed, and she could feel that his body wasn’t in pain, but his mind had… She didn’t know where it had gone. She took his pulse. Jason backed away.
“I did what you do,” he said. “It was kind of a joke. What happened?”
She looked up at him, stunned.
“You shouldn’t be able to do this,” she said. Sam began to convulse and she pulled his shoulders up into her lap, holding his head still between her elbows. She closed her eyes and delved into the physical part of his mind that she could still find.
It was spasming, a frantic, uncontrolled reaction to… She looked back up at Jason.
“Help me get him on the bed,” she said.
“Is he okay?” Jason asked.
“If I can keep him stable, he should be. You didn’t get anything out of my bag?”
“What kind of idiot do you think I am?” Jason asked, lifting Sam’s shoulders so she could slide out of the way. She took his knees and they lifted, putting him in the middle of the bed. He convulsed again and Samantha knelt over him, sitting with her knees on his shoulders. She held his head still, closing her eyes and finding the raw, gaping hole to the other side that Jason had blown in Sam’s mind. Now that it was done, she didn’t want to just close it. Sam would make use of it in a way that his brain could handle. She just wanted to keep the two sides separate to give him a fair shot at it.
“What happened?” Jason asked. She felt him sit, but didn’t open her eyes.
“Psychic episode,” she said. “You leveled him up by accident.”
“What?”
“In most things that you learn, there are discontinuities, where something big changes. Then you work along at incremental gains again until you hit the next big discontinuity. I called it leveling up, once, and Carter… Never mind. I was going to try to take him over the edge a bit more carefully, but…” She was tempted to look over at him, again. “You shouldn’t have been able to do this.”
“I didn’t mean it,” he said. “Tell me he’s going to be okay.”
“I wouldn’t have even said it if I had thought you could actually trigger something,” she said. She took a breath. “Get me a glass of water. Do they have ice? Cold is better.”
Sam shook again and she lifted her weight further over her knees to give her better leverage when his body tried to throw her to one side or the other. Jason waited until the convulsion passed before he stood. She dove her focus deeper into Sam’s mind again.
He was there. She finally found him. He was isolated from the desperate reaction of his body to the episode. Calm. Curious. Watching. That much, at least, was reassuring. He held her away, sensing the instability of his position, and she retreated, attending to his brain. There was a lot of seep, but his brain wasn’t pulling away from it like it had when he first triggered. It knew how to process the dark seep. At some points, she felt the defenses he had built up against it, hard sections of his mind surrounding the softer, lighter sections. They metabolized the darkness in swirls of power and defiance. She was startled at how well-built they were. She had only had access to a few psychics after she had learned how to look at brains like this, but none of them had had similar mechanics for dealing with the darkness. These fortified regions, though…
Sam convulsed again and she held his head still, trying to narrow down the possible sources of the worst upset. Jason sat down next to her and she took her time, making sure Sam was stable for another minute before she sat back onto a heel to take the glass of water Jason offered her.
“Is he okay?” Jason asked. Samantha drained the water in huge swallows, closing her eyes to feel the small stores of cool, light energy revive. She handed him the glass.
“Another,” she said. He waited and she closed her eyes, reviewing the shape Sam’s brain had taken.
“He’s incredible,” she said. “Maybe as strong as Abby. Someday. I want to do what I can to help, so there isn’t any more damage than I could prevent, but he’s holding his own.”
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked. She brushed Sam’s hair away from his forehead. His feet kicked in a smaller convulsion and she paused, making sure she didn’t get any h
ints of distress from him.
“I don’t think so. This is one of those that I kind of believe it wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t supposed to.”
He looked at her for a long time. She could feel the echoing emptiness underneath her professionalism, and she tried to keep her focus on Sam. He finally looked down at the glass in his hands.
“I’ll get you another,” he said. She nodded a thank you and turned to put her knees back on Sam’s shoulders, diving back into his brain. The hole was repairing and reshaping, directing the access to the parts of his brain that were shielded. She refrained from helping there, rather pulling the seep out of the softer parts of his mind that were reacting the worst. He shook again and she smoothed over a particularly undefended region, adding a block of her own that would fade over a few days or that he could pull away himself, if he wanted to. She observed for another minute, then let him go, sitting back on her heel again and taking the glass Jason offered her. She drank most of that, then rolled away, setting the glass on the night stand and sitting on the other bed, elbows on knees, to watch Sam.
“When did you last sleep?” Jason asked. She shook her head.
“Don’t remember.”
“You should sleep.”
“I’m not leaving him until he’s normal again,” she said.
“How long?”
“Don’t know.”
He came to sit next to her.
“You want to play cards then?”
She looked over at him and smiled.
“Okay.”
<><><>
Hours passed. They played cards for a long time, then gave it up, ending up laying on the bed staring up at the ceiling. Samantha’s focus was wearing thin, but Sam was still somewhere else.
“You as bored as I am?” Jason asked.
“Probably not,” she answered. “Caroline will be in Pennsylvania somewhere right now.”
“Yeah.”
He rolled over onto his side, propping his head up on his fist.
“Why do you let it get to you so bad?”
“What?”
“Her dying. Annie dying. The guy in the parking lot in Oklahoma. Alexander’s brother. Any of them?”
She swallowed and scanned the ceiling.
“Life is all there is. Light, dark, it’s all a fight over life. Dying isn’t the end of it, but it’s the part that’s only there because of the darkness. I have to fight it, even if I can’t win.”
“You’re buddies with the angel of death. You call him a blessing.”
She smiled, the thought of O’na Anu’dd lightening her mood some.
“Every bad decision you make. Every evil thing anyone ever does. If we didn’t die, there wouldn’t be any consequence. If it weren’t for death, we’d all be the deepest kind of evil, because why not? That he exists means that there are consequences in this life and that there’s hope for something better.” She looked at him. “Have you ever believed that this is all there was? This was as good as things are ever going to be?”
“Didn’t ever really think about it,” he said. She turned to look back up at the ceiling. “No. I didn’t.”
She thought about Caroline again. The pain. The fear. O’na Anu’dd standing over her. Then she was just soggy tissue. An idea of something that would never exist again. She felt the invisible idea of Lahn again in her hands.
They were silent for a long time.
“You want to make out?” Jason asked. The idea of Lahn vanished.
“Yeah.”
<><><>
Sam fell asleep, dropping out of his psychic event directly into a dreamless sleep, but he was present again. Just over there. Jason was snoring. Samantha was drowsy, drifting, waiting for Sam to return so she could fall away as well. She closed her eyes and lost a period of time she couldn’t measure, then found herself in a lucid dream.
She was in a space. Simply the ability to recognize the idea of space made it something strange. Sam was sitting on a concrete bench, facing away from her.
“Abstract concepts don’t go in dreams,” Samantha said. “Space. Narrative. Dreams fill in what happened before as part of what is happening now. This isn’t a dream.”
“I just thought it was pretty,” Sam said. She smiled.
“What do you see?”
“I’m sitting in a park,” he said. “What do you see?”
The space changed from a back yard to a park, the same sense of open air, green and light, cold concrete. She came to sit next to him.
“What happened?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Jason triggered something, didn’t he?”
“Psychic event,” she said.
“Am I dead?” he asked.
“Asleep.”
“Why are you here?”
“I don’t know.”
He didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to. She didn’t need to look at him to know where he was or what he looked like or what he was doing. She was aware of all of it as a part of the dream. She looked out over the park.
“I felt you helping me,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“How bad was it?”
“You were seizing,” she said. “Scared Jason pretty good.”
“And you?”
“I didn’t like that you were gone,” she said.
“Me, neither.”
“What did you see?”
She felt his hesitation.
“It was different.”
“How?”
“It was three visions. Of the same thing.”
“Tell me.”
Still he hesitated. She waited.
“It was about you. It was… different. It wasn’t about what was going to happen…” He paused. “You had a baby. You were in the hospital and you had just had it. The first version, I was standing with you, and Jason was holding her. And we were all happy, but I knew that you cheated with him sometimes, and that’s just how it was. As long as I didn’t think about it, we were all happy.” She started to argue with him, but he held up a hand that she didn’t have to look at to see. “The second one, you were with Jason and I was holding my niece. And we were happy, but it was sad, because we wanted to be together, and Jason knew that. And in the third one, Jason was holding her and I was with him, and we were…” he paused and smiled. “We were so happy about her, but a man I couldn’t see was holding your hand, and none of us were really happy. Not really.”
There were so many ‘I would never’ statements in that. She struggled with them, feeling attacked, even though she knew he hadn’t accused her of anything.
“I know you wouldn’t,” he said.
“You need to talk to Abby,” she said.
“Should I tell her?” he asked. It felt private. She got that, but she didn’t know what to do with it.
“If you need to,” she said. He took her hand and wrapped his fingers through hers.
“Jason was just silly he was so proud of her,” he said. “The way he talked to her…”
“Sam, I can’t even think about having kids,” she said.
“Do you think that’s what it was about?”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want kids?” she asked.
“Never really thought about it. We don’t have space in our lives for that.”
“Someone once told me that having kids is like having your heart live outside your body. I would spend every second of my life worrying about them, and that wouldn’t be enough. Someday, a demon would make it through and take them. The payoff would just be too high, to get Anadidd’na Anu’dd’s children.”
“Did you want kids, before?” he asked.
“I never decided.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“Feels like… I wish I got to pick what I saw.” He squeezed her hand. “It’s not what I think about you.”
“I know it isn’t.”
�
��This is nice,” he said after a minute.
“This is weird,” she said. He laughed, putting his cheek down to rest on the top of her head.
“I’m sorry I ignored you so much the last few days.”
“I shouldn’t have needed it,” she said.
“Still.”
She thought about the inevitability of it, him wandering off in a serious relationship with someone, eventually. Tried to push the thought away.
“I think I’m falling asleep again,” he said. She felt the fuzzy un-reality of sleep creeping up on her, as well.
“Yeah.”
“You’re asleep?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Sleep well.”
She felt guilty, thinking about lying in bed next to Jason, but drifted away before Sam had a chance to ask about it, before she had a chance to worry over it too much.
<><><>
She woke to the sound and feeling of Sam wandering around, packing.
“Hey,” he said, feeling her wake. She sat up, remembering. Remembering lots of things.
“Where’s Jason?” she asked.
“Bathroom,” Sam said.
“Morning, Sweetheart,” Jason called. He came out of the bathroom with a towel over his shoulder. She was relieved to see that he was wearing a tee shirt. She couldn’t see the marks she had left on his shoulder. Sam looked at her strangely.
“You okay?”
She took stock. In all…
“Yeah. I am.”
Jason put his shower kit in his bag.
“You just going to lay around all day?”
“Where are we going?”
“New York,” Jason said.
“I need to talk to Abby,” Sam said.
“I thought you’d like to be around friends for a little bit,” Jason said.
“Friends,” Samantha said. “Uh huh.”
“Allies,” Sam said.
“We can just head south instead, if you want,” Jason said. “Find a beach and pretend not to be here for a while.”
“Read,” Sam said. “I haven’t spent a week reading…”
“Nerd,” Jason commented.
“No, New York is good,” Samantha said. “It’s time.”