“Youdoknow them.You feel them as well, or… or maybebetter… than I feel you.Their blood sings in your veins, their hearts beat in time with yours, their—”
Cyrus suddenly let me go, his eyes refocusing, and his face flooding with far more concern than he’d shown before.“Lia, what thehell?”
“I don’t know.I don’t know what’s happening—”
“We need a healer—”
“For what?”I demanded.“We had one.She said I was fine—”
“You are not fine!”
“Iamthough.I’m just… something else, too.But what, I don’t know—”
“What about that vampire, the one you went to talk to—”
“He didn’t have much to say.”I leaned back against the wall, feeling guilty at the fear and confusion I’d helped to put on Cyrus’s face, which was what I should have been feeling, too.
All of this should have been a crushing weight, and to some degree, it was.He was right: Iwasafraid, I was terrified for my clan, and enraged at the council and anyone else who would dare to harm them.But there was more than that, a strange, pervasive sense of joy, so vast and overwhelming at even the thought of them, of all of us together…
It didn’t make sense; I knew it didn’t.But I wasn’t worried about them, I realized.Forthem, yes, for what other people might try to do to them, but notaboutthem.Because I knew them, as well as I had ever known anybody in my life.
They weren’t strangers I had picked up in Tartarus without even realizing it; they were family.Myfamily, and yes, it didn’t make sense, but that’s where we were, nonetheless.Only, no, I realized.
That’s whereIwas.
Cyrus was very much not there, and indeed, was rapidly going in the opposite direction.And that was so very wrong.I wanted him to feel the joy I did, to understand—
Inese was a middle-aged woman from Georgia who’d had a small farm and a roadside fruit-and-nut stand, where she sold produce, homemade pecan logs, and bags of pralines from her kitchen.Until the son of a clan leader shot it up in a drunken spree, killing her husband, who had tried to defend their home.She’d run away over the fields, fleeing in the moonlight through brambles and pecan trees, so afraid, so afraid, so afraid.
I could see the moonlight on the leaves, hear her harsh breathing, and smell her panicked sweat, along with the candy she’d been making before her world was ripped apart.She’d splashed into a small creek, hearing the clan after her, her clan, and yet now they were hunting her.She’d almost splashed out the other side before remembering something from an old movie, and submerged, moving downstream instead, to mask her scent.And all the while her heart had had that same rhythm: so afraid, so afraid, so afraid.
She made it to her clan elders, but they didn’t believe her.Or maybe they did; some of their eyes were sad, but they couldn’t go against the chieftain, who was protecting his boy.And who made hervargulfin fear that she’d go to the human authorities, leaving her without help even while his son and his friends were hunting her.
She’d fled the state and then that part of the country, slowly making her way to Vegas, where she’d found a community of sorts in Tartarus, where everybody was hiding from something.Until the Black Circle came and grabbed her, not for a fighter but as she’d heard one say to another, for practice.Like a bait animal to be used to train fighting dogs, her fate was to be ripped apart, and that old nemesis had paralyzed her: so afraid, so afraid, so afraid.
They hadn’t even bothered to put magical cuffs on her, like they had some of the others.She was too old, too weak, too obviously terrified to need them.They had shoved her into a warded pen, crushing her into a mass of other terrified people, feeding her emotions until she thought she might die of them.
Others had tried to escape, but she had only cowered there, in a corner, unable to move, to think, even to cry out, her fear long since gone beyond that.
She was as silent as she had been that night, when her world fell apart.But this time, she couldn’t even run.Couldn’t do anything but wait for the fate that had stalked her heels for so long.
But then something happened, a call ringing out around the room, something she’d never heard before and yet knew instinctively.The pen she’d been in had suddenly opened, and she was thrust out into a scene of carnage like nothing she’d ever seen.It should have terrified her, as everything had since that night six years ago when she’d watched through a kitchen window as her husband was butchered.
Yet, suddenly, for the first time in memory, she wasn’t afraid.She wasn’t hunched over and cowering low to the ground, in a sign of submission that transcended species.She wasn’t running.
Because she’d just been reminded that she wasn’t bait, wasn’t prey, wasn’t some little harmless thing to cower in a corner.She wasWere, and she was furious.Let them fearherfor a change—
“Lia!”Cyrus shook me, his facethunderous, snapping me out of it.“We need a healer, one from the Circle this time.You’ve been influenced—”
I grabbed his arm because he was already headed for the door.“I haven’t!”
“And if you had, how would you know?”he demanded, his eyes wide.“Spells were being slung everywhere in that fight, and you haven’t been yourself since!You stared downSebastian, got in his face, baredteeth—”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly—”
“And you are now?”he stared at me.“You just blacked out for almost a minute, went catatonic!”
“I was just… remembering—”
