“Not unless best means luckiest.” It comes out pretty well, but the cold twist above my wounded guts reminds me how much I still miss him. Not that it matters now. If you believe the religious types, I might see him soon enough.
“Tizarre. .” Her voice has gone to hush. A drop of moisture splashes on my chest.
“Tizarre had such a crush on him. .”
Another drop. I resist the urge to taste it.
“She used to write about him. Poetry. Sometimes to him. In her diary.”
“Yeah?” I have had as much as I can take of this maudlin crap. “She’d have been disappointed. He was queer.”
“He. . what? He was?”
“Most likely. We never talked about it. But I’m pretty sure. Only way she would have gotten anywhere with him is if she suddenly grew a dick.”
“Caine, you-” I can feel her shift in the darkness. Maybe shaking her head. “Why do you have to be such a. . an asshole all the time?”
Oh, for shit’s sake. Here we go. “I wonder that myself.”
“You’re so. . hostile. So angry. Are you always like this?”
“Sometimes I’m worse.”
“That’s what I mean. You say it like a joke, but it’s not. Not really. You always have something rotten to say about everything. Even yourself.”
“Hey, I’ve got an idea for a good time-why don’t I bleed to death on your lap while you outline my defects of character?”
“Hnh. And to think I–I thought-”
“What? You thought what?” It comes out harsh: a lot colder than I meant to sound. Because I really want to know.
Because she and Tizarre-Tizarre and her crush on my friend. . I mean, what about Marade? Did she ever have a crush of her own?
From balls to brain I ache with hope that she’s always had a thing for bad boys. .
Because my body doesn’t care where we are. My body doesn’t care how broken I am. How much I hurt. My body doesn’t care about anything except the smooth warmth of her skin. The soft full arc of breast against my arm. Because right now all I can think about is that one mind-bending kiss.
But all she has for me is a resigned sigh as she shifts her grip so that she can cradle me in her arms like a baby. “Are you ready now?”
Ahhh, shit. “Yeah. I guess I am.”
Without apparent effort, she lifts me off the floor and stands.
“Khryl’s Healing is a power of Love.” Her voice has recovered that Ivanhoe swing: she’s got her Knight on now. “It is His Love for those wounded in the service of Valor that knits flesh and bone. But because my flesh is Its channel, His Love can only follow my own.”
Really? My breath goes short, and not from pain. “Marade, I-”
“Shut up.” Her real voice, with a snap to it. A fresh sigh brings on her Knight again. “You must be silent, Caine. You must. To find love for you in my heart is. . difficult. At best. And when you speak-”
One more sigh, short and bitter. “When you speak, it is impossible.”
››scanning fwd››
Years pass in a thermite blaze.
Sticking her fingers into the holes on either side of my thigh was bad enough; when her whole hand goes into the wound in my gut, my control breaks.
It’s so wrong-her fingers wriggle and slide and I can feel them, I can feel every one of them and I reject, I deny, I refuse to feel but there is a savage intimacy to it, beyond extreme, a secret sharing profound and profoundly wrong that surges up my throat like vomit and I shudder and moan-
She’s reaching inside, pushing through the torn viscera, groping into the hole that fucker’s fighting claw ripped in whatever the hell the organ might be-liver, stomach, large intestine, I don’t know, it hurts so much I can’t remember which is what-and when her attention turns to Khryl’s Love, the white phosphorus it ignites inside me burns spastic jerks through my arms and legs and bangs my head on the floor.
Faint pearly iridescence like faerie fire crawls her skin again, and when the screams start to rip upward from my gut to the top of my head, she brings her shimmering arm to my lips.
“Bite down,” she says, distant. Clinical. “Go on.”
I take her salt-sweet skin into my mouth and latch onto her ulna and taste dust and sand and sweat and muffle my screams on her flesh as every twinge and pang and ache that would make a misery of the weeks of healing this wound would require is crammed into five shattering minutes that transcend agony.
When my knitting belly has finally pushed her hand back out, she lays it along my flank; the iridescence fades from her skin and we collapse together into the absolute darkness, gasping exhaustion in each other’s arms. “Y’know. .” I wheeze out the words. “No matter how. . well it works. .that shit is never gonna be popular.”
“Nor should it be.” Her voice is faint, but her breathing is already regularizing: she’s in a lot better condition than I am. “Khryl’s Healing is for heroes. His Love does not spare your pain, but requires that you embrace it. Even love it: the badge of valor.”
“Yeah. . sure. But. . I don’t think the pain loves me back. .”
I swear if I’d lived through this, I would’ve finally quit smoking. I really would.
We lie together in silence for a while. The darkness is a comfort now.
I remember once my dad saying, on one of his bad days-I think it was a belt he beat me with that time, but I’m not sure; the beatings all kind of blend together-but I remember lying curled up on my cot, bleeding, shivering with hurt and shame, and I remember him saying in that thick dripping lunatic’s voice: Just think about how good you’ll feel once you stop hurting.
I thought it was a joke-one of those harsh psycho attempts at humor that were the way his love for me would try to punch through the walls of his bad craziness-but, y’know, right now I wonder if he knew something I’ve never figured out until just now. Because now that I’ve stopped hurting, I feel great.
More than great.
Because I’m still naked with Marade, and her skin is infinitely soft over spring-steel muscle, and her taste is still on my lips and I’m not busted up anymore.
And I felt it-felt it through the Healing. Felt it like an arc of lightning through her hands into my heart. She somehow managed to find a way to love me.
Oh, lord. Holy stinking crap on a stick. That didn’t take long. Better roll over. If she touches my dick by accident, she’ll think I pulled a knife.
She’s shivering. It’s not cold here.
Her shivers grow into trembling, then to shaking, and her breath hitches into quiet, half-stifled sobs, which gives me a soft-on faster than naked pictures of my grandfather.
I’ve heard some guys get hot for women in tears. To each his own, I guess, but I think that’s kinda sick. Something about Marade sobbing like a little girl is as wrong as the feeling of her hand inside my belly.
“Hey-hey, Marade, come on. .” I scoot around her-leaving some ass skin on the rough stone of the floor, but forget that-and slip my arm around her shoulders. She buries her face in the hollow of my neck. Tears trickle down my chest. I hold her and stroke the long dusty cascade of her invisible hair, murmuring the same kind of meaningless shit I used on Stalton.
And it works this time, too.
“I just. .” she murmurs against my throat as her shaking slowly quietens, “I just keep thinking-hoping-dreaming that they might somehow take pity on us. . that they might bring us home.”
I know which they she’s talking about: the bosses. Our bosses. “They don’t do that. Not for us. Not ever.”
“But they-sometimes, sometimes they do. Emergency transfer. You know they do. We’ve all heard-”