The safest course, it seemed, was to flee. Olivia could take Bron and Mike and run away. But first she would have to tell her husband what she was, what Bron was.
How would he react if he knew? Could he give up his cattle, the ranch that his family had spent three generations building? She knew the answer.
This was all so messy.
It was complicated by the fact that Mike didn't trust Bron, and Olivia had to wonder at that. Mike was so often right.
So at 1:03 a.m., Olivia lay thinking furiously. She often found that she didn't sleep well. She was a creature of the night, after all.
Her cell phone vibrated on the table, a soft buzz. She snatched it before it could wake Mike. The caller ID identified Father Leery.
Mike was snoring gently, a sign that he was out cold.
"Hello?" Olivia whispered.
"Hi," Father Leery said jovially. "I know that it's late, but I suddenly remembered that you were supposed to bring the potato salad tomorrow, for the church picnic, and I wanted to remind you."
It had to be a code. Father Leery didn't have much of a congregation, and Olivia never went to his functions. Phones are far easier to wiretap than most people realize, so he was trying to be discreet.
"Sure, I'll be there," she said.
"Good," he said. "I'll be talking about the 'Dangers of Mortality,' for my sermon in the morning. I hear that there was a terrible auto accident this afternoon in Saint George, and a poor young teen died on the highway."
Olivia's heart sank, and she suddenly felt as if she would retch.
"Died?"
"Thrown from a car when it rolled," Father Leery said. "Let it be a warning to us all to travel safely. Better yet, just stay home."
He hung up, and Olivia lay in a panic. She'd never felt such guilt. Her skin seemed to crawl, and her heart pounded. She struggled for air, even as she fought to keep her dinner down.
She wanted to run. The Draghouls would certainly be looking for vengeance. They'd launch a full-scale hunt. But Father Leery had just warned her to "stay home." He understood the Draghouls far better than she did.
Olivia had never killed anyone before. She'd never even considered it. She felt sick. She loved children. The boy who'd died would have been high school age.
Was Riley the one who'd died? She hoped not. Then again, she remembered what Bron had said. Seeing him was like staring into the face of death.
Olivia hadn't listened to the news after dinner, hadn't checked it on the internet. Part of her had been afraid to do so, fearful of learning what she might find.
How would Bron react? It would be better if he never found out. But there would be talk at school. He was bound to hear about this.
Would Bron flip out when he heard?
She wondered what to do. Right now, there was nothing that Olivia could do. When Bron heard the truth, she could wipe his memory. But he was likely to hear about it over and over for months. She'd have to remove the memories again and again, and each time that he heard the news, he'd relive the shock of learning that he'd been involved in a killing.
That would be torture.
Olivia couldn't be a part of that. It would be better if Bron knew the truth, figured out how to handle it. But could he handle it? Did he have that kind of internal strength?
She looked over to Mike. He wouldn't wake, she knew, between now and sunrise, when he'd begin to get anxious to check on his cattle.
She stealthily climbed from bed and glanced through the dormer windows. An endless array of stars filled the sky, smoldering and burning.
She crept from her bedroom on the balls of her feet. The thick carpeting made her soundless, and she slipped down the hallway to Bron's room. When a floorboard creaked, she halted for a long moment before moving on.
She opened the door; it squeaked on its hinges. Bron lay in bed on his side.
She worried that he might wake, so she studied his eyes. They were closed, but she knew that he might be faking.
What if Bron caught her? Would he imagine that she'd come for a tryst?
He was handsome in his sleep, so serene and peaceful, like the bust that he'd carved. His face was perfect, flawless.
She crept to the side of his bed. There was no twitching or fluttering in his eyes, no catching of his breath. That reassured her that he was asleep.
The masaak brain had two major quarters, and two minor quarters. The major quarters correspond to the right and left hemispheres of the human brain, but the minor quarters, only an eighth the size of a hemisphere, were mirrored appendages on the brain stem. All of the quarters were connected by a small bundle of nerves that acted as a bridge, very similar to the corpus callosum.
Often at night, the right hemisphere of both the human and the masaak brain, the part that focuses on emotions, would wake and begin to dream. When that happened rapid eye movement indicated that the dreamer was only half-asleep.
For what Olivia was about to do, Bron needed to be totally passive, unconscious.
She almost felt that she should speak to Bron, offer some words of comfort, but she dared not even whisper.
Just as a lion hides its daggers in its paws, so Olivia kept her own weapons hidden. Now she tightened some muscles in her wrists, and unsheathed, as the masaaks called it. Instantly, ridges that looked like callus formed in an oval on each of her fingertips and thumbs.
She stepped to Bron, reached down, and gingerly took the right side of his head into her left hand, placing each finger carefully over the right hemisphere of the brain—the forefinger above the frontal lobe, the middle finger over the parietal lobe, the ring finger over the occipital lobe, and the pinky upon the temporal.
She sent a thought pulse through her hand and locked onto his mind. Sparks flew from her fingers. Immediately his right eye opened, and his body seized, his back arcing off the bed.
He gagged, as if he were starting to rouse. She grabbed the left hemisphere of his head with her right hand, twisting his face up toward the ceiling, and his left eye flew open, too, wide with fear.
She seized both halves of his mind.
Someone's in the room! he thought-screamed. Adrenaline coursed through his veins, urging him awake.
She drew out all of his conscious thought, discarded his fears, and just held his head for a moment until the adrenaline wasted away. She placed her thumbs up under his eyes, just beneath the supra-orbital ridge, as she gained full control of his mind.
"Don't worry," she whispered into his dreams, "I'm not here to harm you. I'm here to bring you fairy gifts. For so many years you've been asleep to your potential. Now it is time for the dreamer to awake."
She probed the surface of his dreaming thoughts—chaotic and random and emotionally charged, as they tended to be at this time of night.
She went first to the day's events. The fact that she had fired a gun at a young boy deeply disturbed Bron.
Olivia didn't like to remove another's memories. It was a type of violation. But it could also be a form of surgery, like removing a painful splinter from a hand.
Perhaps it had to be done. Perhaps with her kind it was just an instinct. Olivia simply discarded some of Bron's memories: the gun in the glove compartment? Gone. The bullet shattering the window? It never happened.
Bron would only recall that the window had broken, perhaps as Riley pounded on it and screamed.
She searched deeper into his mind, looking for damaging incidents, the kind that cause the most pain. Sights and sounds began to flash—images of Mr. Golper beating Bron on a bridge on a crisp winter's day, while Bron tightly held a burlap bag that contained his kitten. Bron had known that so long as he held out, the kitten would live.
She heard girls mocking his worn clothing at a school dance last fall, and felt the jolt as a foster mother slapped his face and bloodied a lip. Bron's body wracked with sobs as he cried himself to sleep the night after a grim Christmas when he was six, when Santa brought toys for his foster parents' real children but none for him.