The driver’s window framed the father. Haggard, bored, distracted, and bitter. A jock-type with a soft jaw and receding hairline. Of no interest at all to Doctor Nine. This one wouldn’t even have fantasies dark enough to be interesting.
The window behind the driver showed the profile of a pretty little girl with pigtails and pink cheeks who was bent over the piss-colored glow of a Game Boy screen, her face screwed up in concentration and her mind distressingly empty.
But then, as the Mulatto slowed the car just a little, Doctor Nine came abreast with the rear window, back where the luggage was usually stored, and there, with her face and hands pressed against the smoked glass, was a pale figure that stirred something old and deep in the Doctor’s heart. She was the same age as the other girl, perhaps nine; but as unlike her twin as two creatures can be, born in same spill of shared blood. Dark unkempt hair and luminous brown eyes, large in the small, pale mask of her face.
Doctor Nine looked at her, totally aware of her. He could feel the intensity of her mind, the sharpness of it, the need of it. Just as he could feel the ache and the pain as she rode through the night surrounded by these meat sacks that pretended to love her and pretended to care for her when in reality they probably feared her.
As they should. He smiled at the thought and tested his senses against the razor sharpness of her need, knowing that she could and would cut, given the chance, given some direction.
Doctor Nine moved his consciousness deeper into the young mind and found that, though young in years, the hunger he encountered was every bit as old as that which coiled and waited within his own soul. Her darkness was too lovely, too profound to be trapped in the cage of meaningless flesh which contained it. Her soul was a screaming thing, locked by circumstance in the fragile shell of the human form. It shrieked for release.
Doctor Nine felt her fear and her need, and measured them against each other. He would not come to her to relieve her fears; nor would he come to satisfy her needs. He might come, however, if her need was strongest of all, stronger than all of the other splintered and badly formed emotions, because to him, need was the only true emotion.
He exerted a fraction more of his will and the little girl lifted her sad eyes toward his window. He made her see him through the dark glass, and as she turned toward him she saw him and she knew him.
From dreams she knew him. From dreams that her parents and her sister would have called nightmares; dreams that, had she been unlucky enough to share them, would have sent them shuddering and screeching into the nearest patch of light. As if light could protect them. He knew — could feel and sense and taste — that this little girl had dreamed of him, that she knew his name as well as she knew her own pain. As well as she knew her own need. Doctor Nine looked into her mind and knew that there were no gods in her dreaming world, just as there were none in her waking hell. When she looked into darkness, whether behind closed eyes or under the bed or into the moonless sky she saw only him. He was always there for her kind. Always.
Doctor Nine smiled at her.
The little girl looked at him for a long time with her owl-brown eyes. When she finally smiled it was a real smile. A smile as hot as blood and as sweet as pain. Her small mouth opened and she spoke a single, silent word, shaping it with her need and her love for him.
“Please.”
The SUV veered suddenly and turned onto a boulevard and headed south toward the smutch and gloom that was clamped down around the heart of this city. It vanished from sight in a moment and the Mulatto rolled to a slow stop at the next corner. Everyone in the car stopped and quietly turned toward Doctor Nine.
Above them the nightbirds wheeled in the sky. Then one by one they peeled off and followed the SUV down the boulevard. Soon only the big roadster was left, alone and waiting.
Without haste Doctor Nine reached forward and touched the Mulatto’s shoulder.
“Follow,” he murmured.
The Mulatto nodded and turned the car around and then turned again to enter the boulevard. Spike and Zasha exchanged a glance.
“Something…?” Zasha asked casually, hiding the interest that brightened her eyes.
Doctor Nine nodded.
“What?” Spike asked. “That car we just passed?”
Another nod.
“Too late, Boss,” muttered the Sage. “We’ll never find it again.”
Zasha jabbed his shoulder with a long fingernail. “Of course we will,” she said, looking to Doctor Nine for approval.
They all looked at Doctor Nine, and he endured their stares mildly. After a long while he said, “We’ve been invited to a coming-out party.”
He smiled at them.
Soon, all of the others laughed.
The night followed them like a pack of dogs.
Chapter 4
Bethy wondered how it felt for Millie to die. It was something she tended to think about, even when she was killing a cat, or a dog. Poison sometimes hurt and so she stopped using it. Not because she wanted to spare pain — that was just a silly thought — no, it was because pain was such a distraction. Medicine was so much easier. No pain, just a fuzziness and a sleepy feeling that was warm and a little fluttery, like moth wings in the head. Bethy knew because she had tried the pills herself. First one of them, then two. The most she’d ever taken at once was six.
According to the Internet four was supposed to be fatal. She tried six just to confirm a theory …a suspicion, or a hope. The moths had fluttered around in her head for a deliciously long time, during which Bethy had so many strange thoughts. Almost feelings, but not quite. Close enough so that she guessed that anyone else taking the drug would have had true feelings. It gave her perspective on what Millie’s reaction might be.
Millie was probably having such feelings now. And thoughts, too — Millie wasn’t completely incapable, Bethy had to remind herself of that and to be fair to her sister. Millie’s expression kept changing as if she’d had a sudden idea but when she spoke, which was less and less often now, her words were a junk-drawer jumble of nonsense, half-sentences and wrong word choices. Bethy found it interesting and she wished she could read minds. She bet that a mind-reader could make sense of what Millie was trying to say. Mind-readers didn’t need actual language, she was sure of that. Then she wondered if a mind-reader could read an animal’s mind, and if so, could they translate the thoughts into human words? Would an animal’s thoughts change as they died, especially if they realized that they were dying? She hoped she would find out one day.
Maybe she could ask Doctor Nine. She was sure that he was coming tonight. She was sure that she had seen him out there, driving in a big car that was the color of night. When she looked at the window she could see that there were dark birds lined up on the sill and on the power lines across the street. The birds belonged to him, she had no doubts.
“B …Bethy…?”
Hearing Millie speak now — very clearly except for a purely understandable hitch — broke Bethy’s reverie.
“Yes?” Bethy asked, utterly fascinated by anything Millie would say at this point. She pulled her diary onto her lap and picked up her pen.
“I don’t feel…” Millie lapsed back into silence, her eyelids flittered closed.
Hm. What did that mean? I don’t feel. Feel what? Bethy wondered. Was Millie losing her emotions? Did they die first before the rest of the body?
No, she didn’t think so. She’d read about dying confessions, which was guilt; and about dying people saying nice things to comfort the people sitting around a death bed, which was compassion. Weird, but there it was.