"I'm sorry if we woke you," Joseph said.
Wenxia waved him away. "I was cooking. And a good thing, too! We will eat well today, my boy. Dumplings and candy!"
Joseph kissed the top of the old woman's head. "Six and I have been traveling all night. We need to rest."
"You know where your room is." Wenxia hesitated, her gaze flickering to Six. Joseph raised his brow, and a smile touched the old woman's mouth. She turned around, humming, and left the room.
Six watched her go, then looked at Joseph. "She is your family."
"There are many different kinds of family," he said, leading her up the rickety stairs. "But yes, she's mine and I'm hers, and it's all good. I met her a long time ago through my father. She really was rich, but everything was taken from her during the Cultural Revolution. A mob killed her husband right in front of her, strung him up from a tree. Then she and her son were sent north for re-education on one of the state farms."
"Where is her child now?"
"Dead. He cut his hand on something rusty. It happened early on. She's been alone for a long time."
Joseph pushed open a door at the end of the hall. He stood in the entrance, unmoving, looking at his hands. "You know, if you're not comfortable, there's another room."
Six hid her smile and pushed him gently aside. The room was small and dark, filled with richly carved antiques that gleamed and smelled of lemon oil. A large window looked down over the canal they had passed over. She could see more of it now. The sun was rising.
Joseph did not turn on any lights. He moved behind her, sliding his arms around her waist and tugging her close. He kissed the back of her neck.
"First, we make you well," he murmured. "Then, we see about everything else. Sound good?"
"Yes," she said, and allowed herself to be drawn to the bed. They sat together on the mattress. Joseph made her lie down, and then leaned over her body, his eyes dark, his mouth set in a hard line. Six did nothing but study his face. It had been a long time since she had allowed herself to be in a position so vulnerable. To even be alone with a man for such an extended period of time, let alone rely on one, in any capacity outside her work.
It was not as uncomfortable as she thought it might be. Or maybe she had been around the wrong men. Either way, Joseph made her feel safe. And that was rare, indeed.
"This could be easy, or it could be difficult," he told her softly. "You've been infected, Six. A body can reject that poison, but sometimes it doesn't want to."
She struggled with her fear. "I cannot imagine that."
"It happens." Joseph trailed his finger down her cheek. "But not this time."
"You are very confident."
Joseph gathered up her hand and pressed it to his lips. "Are you ready?"
"What do I do?"
"Just be yourself," he said quietly. "Be yourself, Six, and do not let go of that."
Six closed her eyes. She felt Joseph enter her mind, like a hand dipping beneath still water. It was an odd sensation; she knew he must have done it before, but this was the first time she was aware, and it was profoundly intimate. A part of her feared the contact, wanted to censor herself, but she remembered his voice—be yourself—and she took that to heart and let herself, simply, be. And for a moment she felt the world open up inside her mind, her life spreading before her in all its infinite moments. No sadness. Just wonderment.
But then the pain began, and Six forgot serenity.
Joseph's mother had always impressed upon her son the importance of telling the truth, but of course, his mother had never been able to keep any friends past the shelf life of an honest answer, and so Joseph had learned through example that the occasional white lie was sometimes appropriate—and indeed, necessary—to keeping the people he cared about happy.
In Six's case, it involved a particular omission on the subject of pain. As in, vast unending quantities of pain, most definitely (as he had been told) on the level of giving birth to a baby the size of a large watermelon. And then discovering that you were having twins.
Joseph saw no need to add to Six's burdens.
Unfortunately, he forgot to take into account the fact that she was an incredibly strong woman prone to committing violent acts, and that as the person she would blame for causing her pain, he might just be be in for a little of it himself.
"What are you doing to me?" she gasped.
"This is part of the process," he said. "Now, try to relax."
Six glared at him and grabbed his hand. She was not a screamer. She was a squeezer. And she refused to let go.
It was difficult for Joseph to focus past the pain. He was quite certain she was crushing bones. He managed, however, by sinking deep enough into Six's mind that the discomfort became a distant thing, less nagging than a mosquito bite.
And there, held in the darkness, he began to heal her.
The process was different for everyone, or so he had been told. In his experience, he had brought back only two from the brink—another omission he did not think Six needed to know about—and on both those occasions the trigger had been unique. For one woman, it was the remembrance of her child's birth that made her fight the hardest—and for the man, it was nothing more than a random sunset recalled from memory. Visceral reactions—reactions beyond mere fear or desire—infusing bodies with the mental strength necessary to fight off the infection caused by vampire contact.
The mind was more important than the body. It was always more important. Especially when dealing with vampires, whose only weakness was the mind, a lack of spirit. Bolster that, strengthen the roots of the soul, and nothing could take hold.
But Joseph immediately ran into a problem; specifically, with himself. He could not hide from her. His thoughts were open. His memories, fair game. And though she did not search his mind, as he sank deeper he felt her presence on the periphery of his most private mental spaces, and it was an unexpected intimacy that he could not shut off.
You are afraid, Six whispered. You are afraid of me.
No, he told her. I'm afraid of myself. What you see, I see. And there are things I have done that I don't want to relive.
Like the bones, she murmured, and Joseph remembered that hot flash of her touch in the massage parlor, the memory it had called—a fluke, he thought—but now it happened again, a strike of deep connection, and he felt her gaze once more upon the worst of his memories, years past, twenty-five and on the go, this time to Africa. The Red Cross, because he wanted to help and they needed people. Sierra Leone, because that was where the need was the greatest.
But all I found was death and rape and atrocity, he told Six. There was no end to it. And one day, when we were taken to a mass grave to bear witness, I started talking to the dead. I asked them, who. I asked them, where. And when I knew these things I found the men responsible, and I made them—
Joseph stopped. He tried to suppress the memory, but Six would not let him. He felt her warmth surround his thoughts, unrelenting, and after a moment he yielded to her. He let her see. Allowed her to watch how he had possessed the bodies of murderers and torturers and brought them to the graves of their victims, forcing the men to rest amongst the decay and filth of the dead. And when they were truly buried, he showed Six how he had summoned the memories of the dead, spirits who still wanted vengeance—and shown them what lay in their midst, and that it was their chance to take a pound of flesh.
And they did, Joseph told her. Not literally, but enough. Those men died. Died of fright, maybe. Or suffocation from the bodies I made them rest under. Either way, I was the one who killed them.