Chimera Part Twenty One

~ The snake behind me hisses
What my damage could have been.
My blood before me begs me
Open up my heart again.
And I feel this coming over like a storm again. ~

Darkness bleeding into the sky as Romulus sulkily drove away at a crawl to rival a tortoise, a sky bleeding like Tam's heart did as she half-dragged a stumbling Aspen up to the house. He was silent, utterly silent, except for ragged breaths that seemed to saw at her. The dimming light pooled shadows on his face, and threw their silhouettes onto the grass, long and wavering in the evening, though no shadows could ever stretch as far as those in his eyes.

"Come on," she urged softly, pushing him inside the house. The golden light flooded over her, and lit the three white streaks in his hair as the smell of baking fish wafted out from the kitchen, and filled her with comfort. Home, oh, everything would be all right here; if it wasn't right here, it would never be.

But it would be. It had to be. The thought made the lump in her throat rise up like an air bubble through water, and she had to blink rapidly to stop tears.

"Hey, Tam!" her little brother called from the living room above the sound of the television. "Where've you been? You said you were going to pick me up from soccer, and-"

He hung around the doorway, a stocky, dark-eyed boy who was tall for his age, and had the same curly black hair as Tam herself did, cropped short but still utterly untameable. "-Mom was *really* mad that-"

And then Billy saw Aspen, saw the mud caking him, the pale face and the way he was leaning on Tam, and the words were strangled sure as if a noose had choked them off..

"Aspen..." he said uncertainly, and his eyes flicked to Tam, letting her glimpse the uncertainty and the fear there and reminding her that however tall her brother was, he was still her little brother, and more innocent than he played at being. "You okay?"

Tam felt Aspen's grip tighten slightly round her arm, fingers cold and clammy as seaweed before he only shook his head dumbly. He had no words any more, she knew that as if it was etched on her heart. This ran beyond his voice, beyond his grasp, beyond any kind of expression.

Billy swallowed, and one foot edged back on the threshold, as though he wanted to run away. "I'll get Mom."

"For what?" her mother said, appearing behind him, dusting her hands. Immaculate as ever, she had an apron on over her elegantly tailored suit, and a knife in the other hand. She blinked as she saw Aspen, and for a moment Tam had the horrifying thought that her mother's opening words would be to scream about the mud on her carpet-

"Dear god, what have you been doing?" Jodie Slone gasped, and her voice brought Celia creeping down the stairs to gape at the scene. There was utter bemusement and concern on her mother's face as she took in the state of Aspen, and the emptiness in his face. "Tam, honey, are you all right?"

Tam found that however hard she blinked, the tears wouldn't go away. "Mom..." Her voice was husky, and she had to clear her throat. "Mom, Aspen's...in trouble."

Their eyes met, and she felt a sweeping relief in knowing that her mother understood that this was not some fight, or some kind of teenage stunt; this was serious.

"Billy," her mother said briskly, "go and find Celia, and run down to the shop to get me some potatoes. We've run out."

He gave her a confused look. "But Mom, you've-"

She fixed her Nike look on him - the one that declared Just Do It. "Now, Billy. And take Celia with you. My purse is in my briefcase, and buy yourself some ice-creams at the parlour."

Her little brother hesitated, shifting uneasily, but it was too good a treat to be turned down, and her mother's look was intensifying to the point of combustion. The other three stood like statues as Billy and Celia dashed out of the house, until the door clicked shut.

Her mother let out her breath. "Lord," she murmured, and crossed herself. "What have you been doing, my lad?"

Aspen didn't answer; he was looking at her mother with the same blankness that he had showed Tam since they had left the woods and driven back. It was as though he had given himself into her hands to do with him what she would, and the thought of anyone allowing themselves to be moulded like that disturbed Tam beyond belief.

"Tam?"

"I don't know," she answered honestly, and the tears escaped, making her scrub at her eyes. "Mom...please..."

Her mother's mouth twisted in the way it always did when she was making a decision; Tam had seen the gesture as she agonised over sales, and pondered over her children's lives. "All right, explanations later," she announced finally. "Is he hurt?"

"No, but..."

Jodie Slone waved a hand. "All right, Tam," she murmured. "Let's get him out of those filthy clothes, and let him get some sleep. There's no point in taking him to the surgery now; they're closed."

He was like an automaton. Tam managed to get him up the stairs, his long frame shivering every step of the way, while her mother made him some herbal tea that was likely to be liberally dosed with Nytol. The horrifying void in his face was terrible, but the haunting anguish in his eyes worse, and Tam could hardly look his way as she sat him down on his bed for fear that she would burst into tears. She could only wrap her arms about him, and wish the warmth from her body into his.

It was a long half hour before her mother could convince Aspen to let her check for broken bones, despite all Tam's urgings and whisperings, and another ten minutes before he would take the herbal tea. For once, her mother didn't refer to him as 'hoodlum', but was gentle with him as she had been when Tam had fallen over as a child.

His teeth were chattering by the time he had finished the tea, gripping the mug so hard she was afraid it would shatter, and that blank mask was beginning to crack, but he showed no response to anything either of them said. Only contact got any reaction, and that was near-violent.

"Now," her mother said firmly, "are you capable of undressing yourself, young man, or am I going to have to do it?"

Something approaching mute horror flickered in Aspen's eyes, and he shook his head fiercely. It was the first real reaction he'd had, and Tam saw her mother give a tiny nod of satisfaction.

"Thank heavens for that," she muttered. "All right, we're going to wait outside and if you are not in bed, and at least pretending to be asleep when I open the door in five minutes, I will not be amused." The words were gentle, though her stare said that however traumatised he was, her mother would put up with only a limited amount of histrionics.

~*~

"Mom," Tam wailed as she shut the door and then burst into tears. "Oh, Mummy, I love him so much, I just want him to be all right."

Horrified herself by the boy's unresponsive vacuity, Jodie Slone did her best to hide her shock. She had grown used to the young man who had lived in their house these past months, and come to like his combination of sweetness and daring. Privately, she considered him an excellent match for Tam - if still a little uncouth - and had adopted him like one of her own children.

Now, she hugged her daughter, and bit her lip at the childish name that Tam hadn't called her in at least a decade. "Hush honey," she said, rubbing the girl's back. "He'll be all right."

"But what if he isn't?" her daughter sobbed, tears soaking into Jodie's shoulder, and her body shaking almost as intensely as Aspen had. "Mom, mom, you don't understand, he's had...things...they've, and he's all - and you can't, I mean...Mu-um!"

"Come on now," she said soothingly, guiding Tam down the stairs and into the kitchen. "You need to calm down, sweetheart. Getting upset won't solve anything. We'll have a good hot cup of tea, and you can tell me what's wrong - and tomorrow I'll give Doctor Morrison-"

"No!" Tam's head jolted up, and the eyes staring at her were wild and afraid. "Not a doctor, Mom!"

"He needs help." Jodie sat her down, watching Tam's distraught face. Ah, this the child she had raised, and panicked over, and worked for and lived her life for, and loved more than she had thought she would. And she'd sometimes made the wrong decisions for her daughter, but she'd always done what she thought was right, and this, she knew, was right. "More than we can give him."

"No!" Tam clung to her wrists, mutely pleading.

She had never seen this intense desperation in her daughter, this fervour that Jodie had sometimes caught flickering in the boy when he was anxious about Tam. And it made her glad, yet afraid; glad her daughter could feel that mystical, famed true love that Jodie had never had for her ex-husband, but afraid that such violent feelings would tear her child apart.

"We *are* what he needs. Just people who want him, and people to show him he's not wrong or poison or evil-"

She started to cry again, taking huge racking gulps of air and scrubbing frantically at already red and puffed eyes, wiping at her nose and unable to stop the mewing sounds. Jodie waited for the tears to stop, and handed her a tissue.

"Do you want to tell me what's wrong with him?" Jodie enquired. "Sweetheart, I've seen a lot of things in my lifetime, but never anyone like him." The only thing she had seen that was even close had been on her travels in India, years and miles long gone. The eyes of the lepers that crawled the narrow streets, yes, they had had something of that pain, and something of that emptiness too.

Tam pressed her lips together, as if speaking the words would harm her. "He was...hurt. By a man. When he was...a kid. And something happened today. I don't know what, Mummy, he wouldn't say."

The words didn't quite sink in and Jodie let her eyes fall shut for a moment. So that was why the boy was so defensive. And maybe why he had looked at her family with such awe when he first came to live with them.

"Honey - a doctor-"

"No!" Tam jumped to her feet, knocking her chair over. "Please, Mom, no. Can't we just see if he gets better first, with us? Then if...if he doesn't..." Her voice trembled, and died.

Jodie held her breath, and tried to decide. But finally, Tam's anxious, beseeching face swayed her. "All right," she said flatly. "A few days. If he's the same then, he's going to Doctor Morrison."

Tam tried to smile, but it came out as a grotesque parody. Poor little darling, Jodie thought, looking at her, She truly loves that boy.

"And," she added, "Just for tonight, and because I think I can trust you, you can stay with him." And she had seen the way the boy was clinging to her daughter. She didn't like it much, but she had to accept that perhaps in that at least, Tam was right. He did need her daughter.

Tam nodded, and busied herself wiping her eyes and trying to clean herself up. When the pair of them went back up, and Jodie left her daughter perched on the boy's bed, looking down at his face with something near despair, she didn't miss the tear-streaks on the boy's cheeks, or the foetal position his body was curled into, or the way he was shivering even in drug-induced sleep.

~*~

Chatoya Irkil turned over in her bed again, kicking her feet restlessly against the tangle of sheets. Sleep had lost its path to her this evening, and dragged oblivion with it, leaving her to the night which spun out as flax might on a spinning wheel.

And in her head, the voice whispered and rustled and murmured, dangling fragments of words before her, globules of thoughts clinging to her head like thick and fallen cream. She knew those sumptuous tones; of course she did; that voice had purred threats in her ears, and gripped her with each syllable.

Now it was a constant sound in her mind, as though Blue stood behind her, whispering intrusive secrets to her, but into a changing wind that dragged the sounds to and forth, towards her and away from her.

Shut up! she screamed at him. God, don't you ever stop thinking?

Sometimes, she heard her own name, and heard exasperation with it. Other times, names of her friends, and places, and once, a whole tantalising sentence that scuttled past her like a loose cockroach; andwhenshe'shereIwillhavetheFour...

Chatoya groaned aloud, and pulled the pillow over her ears. Fine, perhaps she had wanted to know what Blue was thinking, but she would have liked the whole script, not just the pre-release trailer. The noise was utterly infuriating. Too subtle to make any sense, too irregular to be ignored, alarmingly like Blue himself.

But she knew it wasn't entirely fair to blame him. Because there was that other thing, that other problem lurking deep inside her heart like a ancient starving troll, biting at her continuously.

The wolves.

God, so stupid, so illogical. Wolves couldn't get in here, not into her house, into her room. But still, she thought she could smell that rank and rotting odour on the air, and hear the pant of their breath.

Stop it! They can't get in here, you know they can't.

But fear doesn't feed on logic.

Goddess, bring me peace, she begged from inside the safe little cocoon of pillow and sheets. Or at least earmuffs.

~*~

His fingers traced the patterns on the parchment reverently, quivering somewhat. Iager felt more awake than ever he had been, even in the war and even in that moment when he had crushed her soul from the world, and left only a name hanging in its place. Maybe she had been his one, and with her gone, he had dropped into a world that was a dream.

He stayed alone, and mourned his loss. Longed to lay himself down by a brimming lake, and snuff out his life in the still waters that hid their secret so well, but never dared to.

Darling Ryar, he thought, and read the marks on the scroll with difficulty. The old ritual language, used solely for spells of a dangerous nature so that none but the most learned might use them when they had been taught the tongue, but he had not read it in years too many to bother counting, and had never been able to speak it. All he knew was that time had slipped out of his hands like a joyful dolphin, and flipped itself from him into mortal seas.

No, he could not cast this tonight. Perhaps not tomorrow, nor for as long as days. How strange, that where years had once swarmed past like bees, now days crawled like larvae. He would have to transcribe it, line by ochre line, into mortal words, and a language he could speak. And then...

If he closed his eyes, he could see her moon-pale hair swishing as she played her music with such fondness, swaying so slightly and so temptingly. And the seashell shards in her eyes always seemed brighter when she was done, as her stare became wild and frothing with force as white water rapids. Yes, and Ryar had never known the way that even Fireblade would sit and watch her while she lured heaven to her, and made it song, never known how she could make something flicker in his heart, low and small though it was.

She had never known, but she would.

There was no room for logic and he pushed it away ruthlessly. Ignored the doubts, and the fears, and the reasonable voice that said; your hands at her throat, and her pulse pushing against your fingers, and her eyes kindling with that wildness that was brought not by music but by discord, and you think there will be forgiveness? Too tired to run, and too loving to fight, and too empty to reason, and too...

Too good to change.

She could never change. But he had. He had to have; where once he had been fire, the element that he drew his power from, now he was only ashes.

He had been fire, and she, the thirteenth daughter of a thirteenth son, she had been water. There had been five of them, five elementals; he had been fire, and she water, and in a way, both had perished. Bhari had lived and breathed earth like the desert beast she was but who knew if she still lay interred in it, Hael had soared away wildly into the skies she loved and perhaps melded into the horizon as she had always sworn, and Kheo had been the arching ether, the indefinable, the inscrutable, a catalyst to the other four; not really one of them, the fifth, the last, the strangest. King of all Dragons and killed, he had heard, in the last battle.

Where the four had walked, all else ran.

Where the five had walked, all else died.

Until they had been divided in the war. Ryar had betrayed them all. And he had done what was his duty, and done what was his right, and for the first time, regretted.

Yet he would bring her back, and not recall those times and those people they had been. He would not think of what was lost, only what would be gained.

Only...

~*~

Cougar Redfern slept deeply, curiously vulnerable in whatever dreams moved his lips and flexed his hands. The moon was shut out by the thick curtains, and the world by the locked door. Only a clock flashed wolf-eye green in the dark, and if a photograph was crumpled on the floor, who would notice in the shadows?

In the light, it might have been a witch girl with hair as black as his own, bent over backwards in the arms of the boy who was stork-tall, and stork-pale, both of them younger and posing with imitation starlet smiles.

But it was dark.

Roads away, Lisa Ochai flipped through her sketchbook for a while, pausing on several pages, and began the skeleton of a new picture with long, loose lines of pencil. Wavy hair, and deep-set eyes, and too-prominent bones, and a mouth meant for smiles but surrendering to gloom. And then she snapped it shut, and lay back in a world that was neither hot nor cold, but indifferent since she had become a vampire.

Jepar Jubatus was curled up on the pillows, his soulmate still beside him, but her back turned to him. Her breathing even, easy to listen to in the dark but hard to bear. Even sleep was a wall between them. His eyes were open, and it was as though a piece of the night barricaded outside had crept in through them. He bowed his head, and scrunched up his body a little tighter, and eventually his breathing whooshed like the tide.

In the clearing, the remnants of the Pack who did not trail after the gliding moon huddled together under torn sleeping bags, among the dirt and the rubbish, some in fur-form, some in flesh. Amid the heaped bodies, Felicity Serafine had fallen asleep onto Cern's shoulder, much quieter than usual that evening, her coppery hair disarrayed and haloed about her strained face and a wolf tucked against her legs.

The witch boy had slept too, eventually, lying back with care so as not to wake her, and not complained when Donna pushed folded-up coat under his head for a pillow, and told him not to catch pneumonia, because now he'd decided to live, dying of the cold would be plain stupid.

In the small, neat guesthouse, Sandrine slept light and dreamlessly, a knife under her pillow and strapped to her leg under the covers. Her skin was beaded with perspiration in this unfamiliar heat, and took on the appearance of scales. Close to her goal, so close she could almost feel the kill in her hands.

She sighed in her sleep, and half-awoke to smile lazily at nothing at all but her own recollection.

Goodnight, dear prince.

~*~

Blue Malefici was cross-legged on his living room floor, plucking at the strings of a guitar. Sleep had eluded him - perhaps the only thing that ever had - and now the low, mellow notes fitted into the night like stained glass in stone walls. His hands moved without haste, sure and searching, but he heard nothing of what he played. He was occupied with the cacophony that jangled and rattled in his head, jigsaw pieces of her thoughts.

Witch of mine...

Witch unwanted, witch uncalled for, witch of mine all the same. Ever questioning, with a jungle fever in her when she angered - which was, of course, so delightfully often - and a shroud upon her when she sorrowed, and so, so entertaining. Of all the games and all the people he had played, Chatoya Irkil was the most challenging; luck ran with her like a unicorn dancing over waves, and there was nothing on earth that could kill luck.

Blue made his own luck.

He had been making it so carefully now, carefully as a spider weaving a web. Barely visible ties, stronger than anything. But it required one last touch, one last perfect touch before he could let it blow away in the dawn, and strike at his prey. For his prey had to be subdued.

He got up silently, and stole out into the night. Ah, she fought like a cornered rat, his witch, with a fierce and blind instinct.

Cornered rats will fight. Poisoned rats...

Blue made his own luck.

~*~

She lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling. Thoughts swirled in her mind, an unstoppable flock of swooping grace that bore her away from the soft nest of sleep and kept her in this thrumming awakening.

I'm shaking, she thought dumbly. I can't sleep...dear Goddess, what if they're waiting? The wolves will be there again, ready to attack me...

She sat up with a gasp, putting her hands over her face. She rocked for a moment, the motion somehow reassuring, while she tried to block away her fear. It was stupid. Irrational. Wolves couldn't come here; this was her sanctum, her safe place, her home.

"You're being stupid," she said aloud, rubbing the heels of her hands in her eyes. The pain helped her mind clear a little. "No one can get in here."

"Oh...I wouldn't go that far."

Somehow, she wasn't surprised. Why should she be? He never turned up when she expected him, and always appeared when it was most unsettling to her. Why should now be any different?

Chatoya looked up and stared at the dark silhouette of Blue Malefici. "You already have."

She wanted to switch the light on. The light would push away the darkness. Maybe he would disappear, like her darkest fears always did under the broiling sun.

But she knew he was real. No one in their right mind would hallucinate Blue.

"Sharp words." He glanced out to the night, smeared with dull stars and unlit by the moon. She should have heard him, Chatoya thought. If only he wasn't so inhumanly silent. He sat there, sat on her windowsill with a calm arrogance that made her want to kick him. "From a dull wit."

"Is there a reason why you're here, or is it just the next phase of your stalking diploma?" She reached for the knife under her pillow. Even when he wasn't moving, Blue managed to radiate menace.

His answer startled her. "I thought you might like to take a walk."

"A walk. I'm sorry, do I look like I'm called Rover?"

He was serious. Or at least, if he wasn't, it was buried deep under the vibrant depths of his icy stare. "Witch of mine, I can think of far better things to call you."

"And I can think of far worse things to call you. Why are you here?"

"I repeat, I thought you might like a little exercise. I'd suggest we take it lying down, but I have the feeling you'd protest." The teasing starts of a smile, edging at the corners of his mouth.

Not as much as I should be. "You thought right. Stop playing around...what do you really want?"

He shrugged. "Sleep seems to have abandoned me tonight...every time I shut my eyes, I can hear your thoughts. It's...irritating."

She eyed him suspiciously, her hand closing around the blade. Good. She was that fraction safer now. "Maybe it's deliberate."

"Maybe is a dangerous game to play," he said. It sounded light, but from the way he slid onto his feet, nothing but an elegant shape of darkness, it had sparked something. Chatoya wished she didn't bait him so often.

Sometimes she really did ask for it.

"Imagine this," he continued, "Just maybe, there's a lady witch with her knife in her hand who'd love to put it through my heart."

"Maybe you don't have one."

He was slithering closer, watching her from the tilt of his head. Blue could stare like no one she had ever met, right through your eyes, into your soul until he dredged up the paltry secrets you thought you had hidden.

And if he felt like it, he'd let you know he knew.

"A heart? Maybe, dear my lady, I don't. But if I have no heart...then maybe I can't be killed."

"No one's immortal." She gasped as his hand closed around her wrist.

His thoughts filled her like an alien sea, strange and cold, making her shudder at what lay coiled in the very depths of his mind. Taking her over, drowning her in the puzzle of desire and murder and control. In Blue's mind, there were no maybes. No uncertainties.

When he let go, Blue was holding the knife and looking amused. "Chatoya Irkil," he said mildly. "How many knives do I have to take off you before you realise that stabbing me is not an option?"

She glared. "As many as it takes before one finds its way into your throat."

"Vicious," he drawled. "But this knife wouldn't kill me." She drew back, afraid, as he put the point to her throat, his hand perfectly steady. "You, however...I could kill you."

She met his eyes, curling her hand into fists to stop them shaking. "Maybe you won't."

"Maybe," he whispered, "is a dangerous game to play." And then he drew the knife back, and with one gesture and a burst of dragonfire crackling statically in the air, melted it into a sphere. "And maybe I thought you would like to walk. Or would you rather lie in the dark and pray for the nightmares to go away?"

He was unnerving her. As always. Still, Chatoya thought, at least she was getting better at not showing it. "Why would I go anywhere with you?"

His eyes flared like knots of electricity, illuminating the clear lines of his face. "Even I'm better than the wolves." His smile had no humour to it. "Face it...if I wanted to kill you, I could. If I didn't mind my own untimely demise. What can I do to you?"

She choked back a scornful laugh. "Torture me hideously?"

The smile warmed a fraction, like honey in the sun. "I see no need to torture you...you do such a good job yourself. You wrap yourself in pain, Chatoya Irkil, and one day, you won't be able to struggle free."

Squinting at him didn't make his expression any easier to read. Still impassive, still cold and distant. Still a threat to her safety and sanity. And yet...she was intrigued. It made Chatoya squirm to even admit it, but she had to wonder what he wanted with her. Curiosity would get her every time.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

~ I am too connected to you to
Slip away, to fade away.
Days away I still feel you
Touching me, changing me,
And considerately killing me. ~

~*~

Chimera Part Twenty Two

~ Heaven holds a sense of wonder
And I wanted to believe
That I'd get caught up
When the rage in me subsides. ~

Salvaje Chusson stared after the car as it drove off in a screech of dust. The Elders of this place had been most accommodating, particularly after the large cheque he wrote them. Their morals - like so many - were made rather more elastic by small numbers followed by many zeros. Even so, they couldn't wait to hurl him onto the road, and let him find his own shelter until the sun inched up.

There was a faint sheen to his skin, even in this mild night; the car had been stuffy, and the miles long. He had wanted to run, to slide into coyote form and streak across the desert that tugged at his soul like a sandy lodestone. But they scarce trusted him as it was, and he needed the compliance of Ryars Valley's Elders to steal in, and meet this strange lady who claimed Pursang as her own.

He was all warmth and health to look at, this silent and slight coyote shapeshifter; in daylight, his skin would have been a warm golden haze, olive-oil smooth and a subtle echo of his eyes which were a curious bronze, and aglow in the shadowy gloom. Strange, desert hair, honey and chocolate and burgundy wrapped tousled into a sinful mess. He was all warmth and health.

Inside, Vaje was frozen through and decaying.

He'd known it for years, and it no longer stirred him. He didn't really live, but he existed and for now, until he could see a way from the sheer, razor-bladed pit he was penned in, it was enough. There was revenge, and death, bittersweet on his hands, and more than memories.

Pursang...god, how had he got into this rut? He'd have fought them without mercy once, shredded them like violets. So different, then, when he had had a soulmate, a wife, a friend who knew his heart's every pulse, and they had all been the same person.

Life had been...satisfying then. She'd been easy to love, the only easy thing in a life hard as a leper's luck. There had been a reason to put up with human prejudice, and the hatred of his own kind.

But then his wife died trying to keep a Nightworld monster from their son, and all their love and all their fearlessness meant nothing when they were side by side in the damp earth's clutch for worms to chew on. And when he learned at last that the cause was Nightfire, he'd gone to them, burning with vengeance, burning with the only thing that could keep him alive.

They'd looked at him without pity, and offered him no recompense nor anything that could fill the throne in that chamber with no doors and no windows where she had once sat. They had offered him only murder, and a life among them.

He'd refused, but he had nowhere to return to with her gone, and every year in the deep and iron midwinter they would come to Salvaje Chusson with their offer, and every year he would refuse.

Year after year after year, until they sent the right person to ask the right question at the right time, and Vaje became what he had once loathed. And now - he was here.

He threw open his mind, spreading it like a net over this place. His heartbeat softened and slowed, until it was no longer the woodpecker hammering on his senses, and he became merely passive.

God, this place was *steeped* in magick, lying with a moon-like pallor across the hills and the valley, and even the little town. Hundreds - no, thousands - of minds in sleeping, oblivious as birds in the sky unaware they flew, a few in waking; too vague to make out, and-

Wait. Someone stronger; a mind-touch he knew. That same fizzing, crackling knot of lightning balled and leashed, Blue Malefici, cold and corrupt and strong enough to stand out from the throng. Over...by a place where the magick ran deeper, a space flushed with power, and the tinny tingle that meant water.

Another mind there too, but this one unfamiliar and almost as strong. A soft, deep green, and a warmth radiating from it that drew Vaje, warm as grass in the sun. Whoever...she, yes she, was, her thoughts were delightfully tangled and unknown as a cloud forest, soaked with the same magick as the place itself.

I wonder...he thought. I wonder if that could be this mysterious lady. What other witch would be crazy enough or fearless enough to go out alone with Malefici and stand any chance of coming back alive?

The thought brought a twinge of sadness, hitting an old bruise. Memories of a girl who had been crazy enough or fearless enough to throw herself in his path. The girl had longed melted into dirt and dust, but his recollections painted her anew each day. If this witch could lead - then let her.

And as he melted away towards those firework minds, Vaje knew he would discover if she could.

~*~

The roads were deserted at night, and even the glare of the streetlights seemed thin and cold to Chatoya. He walked beside her, saying not a word but simply gazing about him as though it were a summer's morning, and it was a meadow they walked in, not the dangerous chill of Ryars Valley in the evensong.

"Where are we going?" she repeated, struggling to match her pace to his.

A keen glance. "You told me that I had no feelings. I hardly think that's true." His voice was bored. Squinting at his face, she saw the same expression.

"You once told me you would rip my soul in two," she answered. "Are you keeping your promise?"

"Of course." He looked at her directly, his eyes unreadable abysses. "I'm always keeping my promise, Chatoya Irkil."

"Why can't you call me by my first name?" she said angrily. "It's always 'witch of mine' or 'Chatoya Irkil'. You're hiding behind courtesy."

The gritty road crunched, and she stumbled. He didn't help. "Courtesy or intimacy - it's your choice."

"Not right now, it isn't," muttered Chatoya, kicking at a stone. The buzz of his thoughts had dulled to a mere rustle, though still the odd sound caught and confused her. "All I've heard all day is *you*."

"Count yourself lucky, then," he purred. "I have had to hear *you* all day. And I assume it's you giving me this wretched headache."

"Figuratively or literally?" she said sweetly, though the words perturbed her. She *had* had the beginnings of a world class headache slathered along her temples earlier. "Maybe I should take up self-mutilation."

"It could only be an improvement."

The barb didn't even pierce her armour. Throwing words wasn't the danger any longer; it was grenades she was looking out for. "On you - certainly."

He turned his head, and she saw the bow of his mouth curve. "Touché. Ah. We're here."

Here. Where was here? Just another stretch of road, screened by trees. "Oh good. I'm glad I didn't go about in the blistering cold for nothing."

He turned to her and stared. As always, it silenced her. Yet this time, she held his eyes, though it made her soul shudder to do so. There was nothing human in his eyes. No compassion. No mercy. No love, nor even hate. But she looked deep into those things, and refused to bow beneath them, though they were mesmerizing, and numbed her from the marrow outwards.

"Shut your eyes."

Had he gone round the twist? "What?"

"Shut your eyes."

"Why? What are you going to do?"

Blue cupped her chin, and his hands had the warmth his eyes did not. "Scream in sheer fury in a minute, I suspect." Unnerved, for his sizzling thoughts had hushed, she reached for his mind to find it fortified and bleak. "Aren't you at all curious, witch of mine? It seems to have brought you here."

Was he serious? What if it was another lie?

If he lies, he lies. What can he do to you? He has no hold over you...all he has is a whisper of a promise, and that's nothing at all. He can only hurt you if you let him, and you won't. There is too much blood between you.

Her eyes fell shut almost without her consent. "Keep them closed," he ordered and then picked her up. Puzzled, Chatoya obeyed. He had carried her once before, but she had been afraid then. She was afraid now, but the fear was different. It was a fear of herself as well as of him.

He can only hurt you if you let him, and you won't.

She was warm in his arms, and she had no fear he would drop her. That wasn't his style. She kept her eyes closed, and let her head settle into the curve of his neck. She could hear his heart...yes, he had one, beating slow and steady as if he didn't carry her weight.

Strange sounds like water lapped the air as he walked, ending a silence near sacred. Then without warning, dragonfire tickled over her skin. It felt alien, wild and hot, something that should not be near her.

"I'm going to put you down," he said in her ear, fitting deed to words. Her body was warm with dragonfire, though a strange weight reached from her feet to her knees. "Look down, and open your eyes."

She obeyed...and gasped.

She was standing in the sky. A sky that moved and breathed and lived as surely as she did. Around her feet, stars darted and trailed glimmers of hazy turquoise, amethyst and jade lights. And she looked up, and there lay a different sky, still and sombre, its stars white and fixed.

"What...what..." It took her breath away. She didn't think she would ever see anything as beautiful as standing between two heavens, with a world moving around her feet.

Beside her, he leaned forwards, cupping his hands into the sky...no, it was water, though the dragonfire kept her from feeling the chill. As a tiny star flitted into the bowl his cupped palms made, he lifted them, and she saw what he had caught.

It was a faerie.

She had heard of these ancient water elementals, knew they existed. But not here. Surely not here.

But it was, a tiny creature with translucent wings, and eyes that squinted dazedly at them. Had it been human, its arms and legs would have been too long, and its hair, longer than it, an unnatural blue, but here in a night of secrets, it was perfect.

He freed the creature and turned to look at her. "I've always appreciated beauty," he murmured. "And this place is more beautiful than most."

"It's old magic," she found the words to say. "It brings strange creatures here."

He looked at her, not through her or into her - *at* her. "Yes, we are here."

"That wasn't what I meant."

"Wasn't it?" He shrugged. She could only watch him, more confused than ever. "What? Have I upset your idea of the ruthless killer yet again? It's easier for you if everything is black and white, isn't it? Then you can hate me, and pretend that I'm evil, and that I'm just some empty rotting thing. I'm not. I have feelings. For the most part, I keep them to myself, but it doesn't mean I'm not moved occasionally, witch of mine."

"Why do you call me that?" she whispered, as she had before.

That treacherous smile glittered like hope. "I thought you might appreciate it more than 'yo bitch'."

"That's not what I mean. You won't call me by name."

"And you can't call me by mine," he pointed out evenly. "I can say your name...but you have never said mine. You can't even look at me without being afraid."

She met his stare then, just to prove him wrong...and realised he was right. "Isn't that how you want it?"

"It's how I made it," was the cool answer. "I was merely stating a fact. You, on the other hand, were asking questions."

She turned away from the soft derision in his voice to watch the tiny rainbow lights of the faeries, walking deeper into the water. It was up to her waist now, but the chill didn't touch her. "You don't like questions."

"Not so. They have a place and a time. As does everything."

"Yeah," Chatoya muttered. "Not here and not now."

She heard the swish of the water. "Questions, perhaps." She was surprised when his arms curled round her, but pleasantly so. In this unfettered night, there was only the two of them; no longer bounded by rules or morals or other people. "Other things...right here, and right now."

"What things?" she said, her voice so quiet that a whisper would have seemed a shout. She let her hands drift onto his, and relaxed a little, though her instincts warned that the tiger's smile still showed its teeth.

"Oh, this and that." Was Blue being *playful*? She couldn't see it. But she felt it as he kissed her neck softly. "This..." and she twisted round to face him, and kiss him like she had that night at the prom, with the dark surrounding them and the ethereal lights sparkling in the obsidian lake. "...and that," he murmured.

The waters seemed to leap with light, and she stared as the faeries flung themselves out of the water in a delightful, quicksilver dance. It was as though a rainbow had shattered and taken wing.

"They're so beautiful," she breathed, inadvertently echoing his own words to her. Her face was confused, her hair a liquid black fall. This enchantment...how could someone like Blue know about this place?

He lowered his head to breathe in the scent of her skin, and stilled. He had seen the marks on her neck, yet said nothing - and that perhaps, was worst of all. Nothing to do but wait as he looked at her. Silence stretching like a guitar string, the note rising sharp and thin.

"But useless," he murmured in the end, his tones a spill of murky elixir. "Like so many things."

"Why do you have to be so cynical?" she demanded, twinges of anger biting at her. "Can't something be beautiful without a purpose?"

"Certainly," he replied, his knuckles brushing her cheek. It felt as if faeries danced under her skin, lighting her with sprays of crystal colours. "But such creatures are often destroyed."

"By people like you," she said without thinking, anger splintering lightning-swift in her eyes. It was true and cruel, and she regretted it the moment the words left her mouth.

He caught one of the slender beings easily, closing his fist around it. "Very pretty," he said dryly, "and they glow bright enough...but they don't burn." His eyes were dark and chill as the grave. "Just like you. There's no danger about *you*, witch of mine...so you should be careful about using words as a weapon."

"Better words than knives," she said sharply, unable to stop herself. She couldn't let him stand there as though he was better than her, when he breathed the air of others. "My weapons don't kill people."

His voice was freezing, colder even than the lake's depths. "Oh, was roasting that wolf just an accident?"

She slapped him, not even caring about the whiplash mind-link that flared briefly.

That had been three years ago, three years, damn him! She was shaking with fury. "Was killing my twin?"

"Oh, your revolting little brother," snapped Blue. There was true rage in his voice that she had never heard. "Haven't you dealt with that yet? Yes, I killed him, no, I am not sorry, yes, I did earn a hefty amount of money, no, I do not give a damn about anyone else. I think that covers the rest of this discussion."

"It hasn't even started," she hissed.

Not a blink, but she felt the stabbing shock of cold as the dragonfire shield about her vanished and yelped shrilly. She couldn't stand, every muscle was cramping and there was nothing, no one to help her...

"It just finished," he said, his voice offhand and emotionless again.

Falling forwards, because her screaming muscles wouldn't hold her up, the cold reaching every part of her body and she couldn't breathe because the water was pressing in on her like stone.

She knew he had turned and walked away, but she didn't care. Her eyes were open, but burning with pain and all around she saw pretty, flickering lights and wondered dimly if they were faeries or just death. Numbness creeping over her, but she was sinking, sinking, her lungs two pits of acid because soon she would have to take that first, deadly breath of lakewater.

How could you, she thought at him, but she couldn't even reach out to his mind. No need; it was a serpentine twine in her own. Why do you have to hurt me? I thought you didn't take the easy way out.

And then her lungs gave out, and incredibly spiky pain jabbed her chest, pain that soon dimmed and faded like the world did.

He can only hurt you if you let him, and you just did.

~*~

One step onto land, and a strange sense of peace...

Her voice smashed through his shields like a barrage of knives, shattering and loud and overwhelming. Blue shuddered, and stumbled. For a moment, his body wasn't his, was weighted and burning, and cold at the same time.

It vanished, and he drew a deep breath, and took another step away-

This time, it was louder, and a fireball exploded in his chest, her voice all around him, hacking at him like his family so often had on those long and lethal hunts. The world about him receded, and for the first time in his life, Blue understood what it meant to be without superhuman strength, without power, without anything but the knowledge you were glass swaying on a cobweb that could snap at any instant.

The stars spun above him in a dizzying whirl, and seemed to become wispy aquamarine lights that flitted and danced before his vision, and he realised that he was gasping for breath in a world filled with air.

Willpower. That was all it took. Push it away, push it back though it weighs more than broken dreams and borrowed time; he felt the night flow back in on him, until the stars were still chips of white, until he thought his heart would burst into scarlet pulp with the effort. Her voice dying in a glorious swansong, and he would be alone at last, alone and fre-

It was as if their souls had collided, and the shock of it knocked him to his knees. Cold, a great cold and moving rush about him - and spreading into his lungs, wide and icy. This was *ridiculous!* Blue Malefici had never surrendered to anything, or anyone, and he wouldn't let some

(Hecanonlyhurtyouifyoulethimandyoujustdid.)

goddamned

(AndisthisdeathoristhisloveandisitrightorisitwrongIjustdon'tknownow)

crafty

(andisitmeorisityouorisitusandwhocantell?)

witch

(juststopitstopitcan'tyouseeweneedeachother)

And somehow, he meant to say best him. But the thought that eased from his consciousness, pushing through the drowning darkness like a string of bubbles, was:

Die.

Even with that thought, the pressure lessened, and Blue could tell his thoughts from hers again. And he knew very well that this infernal link was manipulating him into this, yet he also knew with far more conviction - now he knew he had never truly believed it before, for he was Bane Malefici, invincible, invulnerable, incredible - he knew that her death would mean his.

"Hell!" A voice he knew, tinged with a curious accent. It was a voice that sounded as if it had learned English in Shakespearian times, and indeed, had. "Malefici? What was *that*?"

He got up, and an ominous tightness in his mind, like the air before a storm, warned him that any kind of delay would result in a slow death from drowning, on dry land if needs be.

"Nice of you to turn up, Chusson," he said flatly, without a glance in the coyote's direction. His legs felt unusually leaden, and as he stepped into the water, realised that the dragonfire that had bubbled under his skin so long was useless. All his power was draining away from him, and yes, he knew where to - draining into her, keeping her alive. "Feel like saving a drowning girl?"

"To do what with her?" Footsteps behind him, half loping to catch up with Blue. "Hey! Where'd that witch go who was-she's *in the lake*? And you put her in there? And you want me to help you get her out? What the hell is this, some kind of perverse bungee killing?"

The water was up to his knees, and far colder than he had realised. Salvaje Chusson, he recalled dimly, had a curious code of honour. He believed in killing quick, in the execution, not the murder. There was a peculiar streak of justice in him that not even Pursang and Nightfire in all their almighty corruption had been able to drive out.

"She's Pursang's new head," Blue told him, and heard the yelp as Vaje stepped into the glacial water. "Watch out, it's a little nippy."

"Nippy?" the incensed voice came back. "*Nippy*? This is about as nippy as a vampire in an abattoir! If you've managed to kill her then why are you saving her? She ain't going to last long in Pursang..."

"Because," Blue lied patiently, grimacing at the thought that he would probably have to make this explanation to every single dim-witted idiot who'd climbed up Pursang's greased ladder of authority to the top, "she's not quite the fool she appears. She's cast a rather vexing little enchantment that ties my life to hers. She dies...I die."

There was a moment of awed silence. "Well, bugger me," Vaje said finally. "Been a long time since anyone got the drop on you, hasn't it?" He gave a bark of laughter. Blue knew without glancing around that the coyote would be wearing that sharp-toothed, brilliant smile of approval. "Maybe I'll be polite around this lady."

Blue was listening to the swansong in his mind, very faint now, trying to locate her. Just...he ducked under the water, ignoring the shooting stars of faeries and his hands caught the clammy smoothness of flesh. The pressure in his chest was tightening again, but it vanished as he stood up in the water, dripping, with Chatoya Irkil in his arms. Her hair was a black, heavy curtain on his arms, but she was surprisingly light.

And not at all to his surprise, the moment he got her out of the water, she started breathing again, and coughed up lakewater, twisting in his arms. Amazing recovery, Blue thought sourly, noticing his powers flow back under his skin like a warming glow. Killing her, obviously, is not an option then. Particularly not anymore, as she can hear my every waking thought when we're not touching.

"Put me down," she croaked, and gave him a good elbow in the ribs.

"I thought I just tried that," he muttered under his breath, and unceremoniously dropped her on dry land. "You're rather resilient, witch of mine."

Velvet eyes stared at him, stubborn and strong, though she was swaying slightly. "I thought we'd discussed this spontaneously trying to kill me thing."

Blue gave her his most angelic, and undoubtedly most irritating smile. "What actually happened was you asked me not to, and I ignored you. However...I have no urge to repeat the experiment."

The witch wrung out her hair with hands that had no strength; a few drops slid through the air, but she seemed near-boneless.

"You're the new boss?" Vaje said, staring at her with unabashed fascination. Chatoya turned slowly, as if she hadn't recognised his presence, and squinted in the dark at the man before her. "You don't look like you could hurt a fly."

Blue refrained from saying that a crippled, wingless fly could probably have knocked her flat, and shrugged. "People rarely are what they seem. Your wife, I believe, was reputed to be stronger than iron." He watched for the flicker of pain in Vaje's eyes, the knife sliding in neatly, and added, "Died with her throat torn out, didn't she?"

There. The coyote's face contorted, as Chatoya gave him a look that was a slice of pure resolve and Blue noted it with interest. Six hundred years, and the grief was still pouring forth; still there to be used, still there to prod Salvaje Chusson where he would. And while both of them were off-guard, Blue introduced them, and waited for the reactions.

"Chusson?" his witch said, and he narrowed his eyes at the stark black marks on her neck. Yes, he had a fairly good idea of who had done that, and an even better idea of what to do about it. "As in..."

"As in," Vaje confirmed sharply, and stepped closer to sniff at her. "Irkil? The weather witches? The nice ones?"

"Do have fun," purred Blue, enjoying the mistrust they were eyeing each other with. "And if you must, Salvaje - manhandle her with care."

As he sauntered off, vaguely disturbed by the night's events and this strengthening soulmate link, he missed the last intriguing piece of conversation as Vaje Chusson stood and stared at this bedraggled, half-frozen girl. Chatoya knew she had to look dreadful, and also knew that she had to pretend she didn't feel it.

"By all the gods, how'd something like *you* end up messing around with something like *him*?" he demanded.

"Desperate times make for strange bedfellows," she muttered darkly.

His eyebrows hiked up. "Literally or metaphorically?" He paused, and then shrugged slightly. "Though if I may say so, either way you're going to be screwed."

I hope not, she thought, terribly drained and terribly aching. Ignoring the comment, she glanced at the small bag he was carrying. And his dishevelled state; soaked from the knees down, though she herself felt like a block of ice. "I suppose you want somewhere to stay."

"And to change," he said dryly. "I'd prefer not to get acute hypothermia, and I'm pretty certain you will if we stay here much longer. Hey-" he added as she turned, and gave her a feral grin. "I like your style. I've never seen anyone take on Blue Malefici and come out alive. That's almost winning."

Is it? she thought. Then why does it feel so much like losing?

~ In this white wave I am breathing
In this silence
In this world where you are silent
I believe. ~

~*~

Chimera Part Twenty Three

~ To eternal sleep we belong
Feeling the rapture of the world
Beneath the violence of this curse
From the poisoned gift of love. ~

Chatoya spent a sleepless night listening to the ever-irritating drone of Blue Malefici in her head, herself shivering under the arctic hurricane that he was; something in his mind had picked up to a near-frenetic and primal pace, until she wanted to cry out at the maddening and intrusive sound.

And just as she was beginning to drop off with dawn prying through her curtains, her head under her pillow and her body slumped into near-blissful relaxation-

"Oh my *god*, who are *you*!" Lisa screamed from outside, the last word rising so sharply that at the end of it, Chatoya was sure that only dogs could hear her. The noise jolted her upright, her sleep-fuddled mind reaching for logic, and explanations.

Oh Goddess, she'd let that shapeshifter sleep on the couch, hadn't she? And left him a towel, pointed out the shower and the kitchen and-

"Toya!" The vampire's voice was a furious shriek now, and almost automatically, Chatoya scrabbled out of bed, searching blindly for clothes, hoping she didn't reek too much of the lakewater, hoping that Blue would become suddenly comatose and shut up. "Toya, there's a *flasher* in our house!"

"If you'd just listen-" she heard the oddly accented voice begin.

There was a feral scream of "Get out!", and a series of deafening thumps.

She galloped out of her room and onto the landing, to see Lisa pinned to the floor by a damp shapeshifter who was wearing only a towel, and an incensed expression. His hair was bristled and gleaming dark bronze and russet, his skin a paler bronze that shimmered in the light and his hands pale-gold and tense as he tried to keep the enraged vampire from giving him what would probably be the mafia equivalent of wash and go.

Both of them saw her, and Chatoya had to fight to stop from laughing at their faces. There was something very similar in the narrowed-eyed fury mingled with livid uncertainty

"She walked right *in* on me-"

"He was in our *bathroom*, completely *naked*-"

She had to cover her mouth to stop the grin from showing. The shapeshifter was dripping water on Lisa, who had a distinctly alarming set to her mouth, the braids of hair splayed on the floor and clacking against the panelling as her head nodded with her words.

Vaje Chusson glared down at the made vampire, his eyes swirling with a darkly glittering ochre. His voice was a near-growl, rolling with musical inflections. "I was having a shower! I don't usually take them fully clothed-"

The African girl squirmed, obviously trying to get a hand free to pummel him. "Well, do you usually walk into other people's houses and take them?"

"When I'm staying there, yes! Don't you ever *knock*?" He slammed her shoulders back against the floor. "Don't even think about it, Peeping Thomasina."

"Staying here?" The made vampire stopped struggling, and rolled her head to stare at Chatoya.

Uh oh. There were a limited number of ways she could explain the overnight appearance of a rather ravishing shapeshifter, and none of them were going to throw her into a good light.

Lisa's voice was sliding up to ultrasonic quality. "He's staying here?"

She nodded, and Lisa's brows shot up. The African girl had water on her cheeks and on her clothes, and pushed at the shapeshifter absently until he let her up, watching her with understandable wariness.

"He," and she pointed at a somewhat bedraggled Vaje. "Is staying," she pointed at the floor. "Here."

"Sharp, isn't she?" he remarked to the air. "Good job you're pretty, girl, 'cause there's not much going for you upstairs."

A pair of furious brown eyes swung to him, and Lisa took a step forward. "One more word," she said calmly, a corner of her mouth flicking up in a way that wasn't at all pleasant, "and you lose that towel and all your remaining dignity."

"I lose the towel," countered the coyote, and Chatoya looked from one to the other and thought; surely *not*. "And you'll lose a limb."

"Yeah? Well, you'll lose a member," she drawled pointedly, and just as the shapeshifter opened his mouth for a retort, Chatoya jumped in, uncertain whether to be amused or worried.

"Please! Can you just...call a truce?" She saw their eyes clash, metal with wood, and something flickered there like a thunderstorm being birthed. There was something very similar about the two of them; that sense of primeval strength tightly harnessed, of a surface that did not show the depths. "Lisa, this is Vaje. He's..."

"A friend of the family," Vaje snapped shortly. "I'm her godfather."

The lie was so preposterous, Chatoya nearly choked. Her parents had been strictly conservative, and the chances of them letting someone like Vaje, in all his bronze and biting glory, near any of their family, was somewhat remote. Still, Lisa didn't know that.

Lisa gave him a scathing and sweeping look that took him in from the tousled hair to the poised feet. "Godfather."

"Yeah," he declared. "Part One. The best, naturally. Parts Two, Three and Four will be along shortly, but are all inferior imitations."

Chatoya could only watch as Lisa smiled reluctantly. Without knowing it, Vaje had struck exactly the right note. And Goddess knew he was certainly attractive, even when he was fuming and sniping. After, she amended mentally, they got over the...bathroom incident.

"You have four godfathers?" Lisa turned to her, her tones claiming that she believed this not at all, but she wasn't going to argue it in front of Vaje. "Four? I know three is traditional for witches, but four?"

"One for luck," Vaje elucidated with a stinging sweetness that said enquiring further might lead to another bout of wrestling.

"After you, she'd need it," muttered the vampire, but she subsided with a we'll-talk-about-this-later glance. "Are you done in the bathroom?"

"Are you going to walk in on me again?"

Chatoya could read Lisa like a book, and there was that little flicker in her cheek that said maybe she wouldn't mind too much. "No," the made vampire murmured. "And your towel's slipping."

He gave her a glare and stalked into the bathroom. The door slammed firmly, and Lisa let out her breath in a gush.

"Don't tell me who he really is," she ordered, eyes still trained on the door. "I don't want to know. Just - is he dangerous? And - are there really another three...godfathers?"

"He's...here to protect me," Chatoya revealed. It was close enough to true; he was Pursang, he was under her orders and if she wanted protection, he was obliged to give it. "One of Dark's, I think. He is dangerous...but not to us - and there are another three. They're here to safeguard us all, after...Jal."

I'm lying, she thought, and knew Lisa would believe it because it was scudding along the lines of truth. I know it's the most stupid thing on earth I could possibly do, but I'm doing it as easily as Blue might. Don't tell a complete lie, only a half-lie because there's enough truth to brush away the guilt.

Lisa nodded, her shoulders relaxing. "Fine." Still looking at the door in a dangerously thoughtful way. "Are they all as...as..."

"As?"

"Damn good-looking?" A wicked smile curved her mouth, and for the first time, she looked her old wicked self, a self she hadn't been since Cern's soulmate had died, and something in Cern had died. The witch and the vampire had always been close, and Chatoya knew it had hit Lisa hard.

"Probably," Chatoya allowed. "They're all Nightworld."

"Vaje, huh?" Lisa murmured softly, and a line formed on her brow. "The name sounds familiar."

Chatoya shrugged. "Nothing to worry about," she answered, and knew it to be another lie.

~*~

Cougar Redfern was just settling down to do some serious brooding, not to mention indulging in a wash of self-pity and sullenness when the doorbell rang. Gold eyes flaunted a flashfire irritation as he got up to answer it. He was alone in the house; Jepar had stayed over at Tali's last night, while Thom was grimly pursuing Kirsty, who had vanished to wreak havoc elsewhere in the valley.

He flung the door opened to find no one there, and stomped back into the lounge feeling decidedly murderous. Admittedly, this was nothing new, more a sort of family hand-me-down, rather like buck teeth and heart trouble, but it was rapidly reaching boiling point.

He stopped short as he found Blue sitting in the lounge, sprawled on one of the sofas with his eyes agleam. The old familiar indifferent smile played about his mouth, and though he held no knife, no gun at all, Cougar knew that his brother could cut him deeper and kill him easier than anyone else on the planet.

Blue used people's own natures against them.

He had always been perceptive; as a child, Blue had been the one who knew which words would throw a simmering argument into a blazing inferno. He knew which smile would twist his older sisters round his little finger, and which glance would frighten others into submission. People were no locked and ornate treasure chests to Blue, but cardboard boxes to be torn, and pulped, and hurled away.

"Oh, if it isn't my little brother - or should that be bother? I suppose you've got another knife you'd like to stick in my back," Cougar snapped flatly. He was in no mood to be messed about by Blue. "Which is it today? Ruby? Sandrine? Mother?"

"Chatoya Irkil," Blue purred, the smile widening into radiance. He didn't move, but simply stared up, and his eyes were the rolling chaos of a stormy arctic sea. Darker than usual; the colour that was unreadable, and empty, and bruising in its force.

Cougar felt his insides freeze, and wondered frantically just what Blue knew.

He met the level gaze, and fought it. Not human, not the eyes of any vampire on the planet. These brimmed with a cool, ageless confidence, with things that should not - should never - have been.

"What about her?" he answered.

The smile took on a more pleasant tilt as Blue's fangs gleamed. "Tastes good, doesn't she?"

Cougar stayed silent. So this was what it was about? Oh yes, he remembered how someone had dared to sample one of Blue's meals back on the enclave - and how little of them there had been left to bury. Blue had never had many possessions so instead, he kept people.

Strange lustrous threads flickered adder-tongue like in his little brother's irises. "But not, I think, yours to taste."

He couldn't stop the rage that laced his tone like cyanide. "Not yours, either."

"Wrong."

God, anger was good in his veins, warming like coffee on a cold morning. Anger he hadn't let roll free in days, weeks, months, years. Anger that was sinking into a slow churning inky black, anger that could murder and feel no regret.

"She's not a thing," Cougar hissed, each word a spearing jab. "Toya is a person, and she doesn't deserve you as a soulmate, you bloody viper. She doesn't deserve to be saddled with a monster like you for the rest of her life."

Something Blue's stance changed indefinably. No longer lazy, but suspended, that instant between silence and storm. "A monster?" For a moment, he seemed that scornful child that Cougar had managed to loathe and love at the same time. Family was family. "Maybe I am. But I don't hide from what I am. I don't pretend that I don't love seeing these quivering mortals powerless, I don't pretend that their blood isn't sweet to drink, and sweeter to steal. I don't pretend that I can live this staid, empty suburban life."

Blue got to his feet in one effortless motion.

The words were flung at Cougar through the shadowy wrath that cloaked him, flew like grapnels to grab him and cling.

"I accept what I am," his brother drawled into the patient silence.

"So do I," Cougar spat at him, but knew the fury was overwhelming him, taking him over like it always did; and he was letting it, like he used to. All he wanted - all he needed - was to forget about the goddamn consequences, and forget about his friends and his family and his stupid futile love.

"Do you?" A lift of shoulder that should have been scarred or bowed from a childhood harsh and horrific. "I don't think so. You don't know what you are. Look at you! Wrapped up with vermin, fighting your own kind. Fighting your own family." His voice so compelling, and in it Cougar thought for an instant he could hear the vermin screaming and sobbing, as if Blue had devoured their very souls when he pilfered their lives.

God, oh god, he had forgotten this feeling, this sense of near-floating high on a wave of emotion. No need for control, because you only needed control when you needed to be able to stop. But who could stop this? Who?

"You've forgotten yourself." The words oozing in, and the cadence of that voice familiar as it had been a decade ago, when Cougar's father had hit him that first time, and Blue had been the only one of his six siblings to offer anything but contempt and amusement.

"No," Cougar muttered, trying to shake it off.

"Yes. You've forgotten what you are. You've tried to pretend that you can be different, you've tried to block out the calling of your blood. But it's wrong; you know it's always been wrong. You can't deal with vermin - how can they possibly understand you? They *fear* you."

The world seemed hardly real; this cosy, comfortable little house, with its vermin pictures, vermin sentimentality scattered all about.

"You've always known..."

He fought, and tried to remember what existed beyond the anger, but he could only think: she didn't want me. I loved her, I would have walked through poisoned worlds and lava for her. I gave her everything I was and...

This strange sense of falling, falling, falling.

She

Didn't

Want

Me.

No one could fight this. No one could have any kind of shield against the roaring sweetness that crashed through him. And he didn't want to fight anymore. He didn't want to feel the pain, and the rejection and the dull, insipid safety of vermin life any longer.

And through that inky enraged flood, the delighted, darkling tones.

"You're just like me."

And he was alone, but it made no difference; he had always been alone, and he would always be but it didn't matter when there was this to surrender to.

~ You've tried to pretend that you can be different, you've tried to block out the calling of your blood. ~

Was this how Jallakri ap Ganra had felt when she tore out Ruby's throat? Was this how Blue felt as he slid through his icy, blood-slick world? Was this what power meant?

~ They *fear* you. ~

Yes, he thought, standing and trembling in the midst of that homely room, yet not at all at home. I know that. I've always known.

Maybe I should give them

(her)

reason.

~*~

"Crap," Lisa muttered, and stared at the sad pile of near-cooked batter on the floor. "Maybe it's the ingredients."

"Maybe you're just lousy at cooking, lady," Vaje Chusson hinted, and stepped back at the ferocious glower the girl turned on him. Pretty girl, he thought, admiring the long shapely limbs, and the flawless skin that had the velvet texture of melted chocolate. Pretty crazy too, and pretty fast.

"Wait till you taste my cannelloni." She glanced at the oven, where the pasta dish was cooking.

"About a hundred years would be long enough," he said dryly, and matched his words with a wry grin so she wouldn't hurt him. He had to admit, when she'd attacked him, his shoulder had definitely popped out of joint.

She arched an eyebrow, plucked to perfection, and waved the spatula at him with a definite air of menace. "Be nice to me, coyote boy. I could spread some very incriminating rumours about you."

He chuckled, and had to admit he liked this made vampire's boldness. He'd liked Chatoya Irkil too, liked the way she'd not complained about his presence, liked the way she had handled Malefici. A witch, and she'd put Malefici in a pinch.

Thinking of witches made him think of Faith Tacarnan back in Vegas, though she was probably long gone by now, onto the next killing. Beautiful, if not the sweet smiling thing she had been when he'd met her six hundred years back. Beautiful, and bitter.

She's convinced him to join Pursang in the end; a bolt from the blue, or from Blue at any rate. The right person, the last remnant of his lost life and lost wife, the right time; the day She had died and the world had plunged into darkness, the day he'd dreamt of Her, and longed for Her. And the right question.

Someone touched his shoulder-

He reacted instinctively, and the African girl was locked into his grip with his arm about her throat. Her breath stayed even, slow, though her heartbeat lashed wildly.

He let go, and muttered an apology. If he could have seen himself, he might have understood why she had dared touch him; the aristocrat's face that contrasted so sharply with the rough and husky voice had been distant and hurting, taut with times gone.

"I sense a stroll down Memory Lane." The African girl tapped her neck gingerly. "Tigers waiting in the shadows?"

"Ah, what do you know of shadows?" Vaje flicked his fingers. "Look at you, lady. You're a kid. What have you got to be afraid of?"

A curious expression drifted over her face. He'd been wrong to call her a pretty girl, he thought. The eyes held a lovely clear shade of brown, and her mouth was shaped and smiling, but twisted wrongly. The way she looked at him made him feel a child again, though if he were mortal he'd not even be dust now.

"I'm not as young as I look," was all she said, then bent down to scrape the pancake from the floor. "So, godfather, Toya tells me you're here to protect us."

So was that the lie she was spinning? Aye, he could see why she'd not want this girl to know about Pursang. There was something relentless in her that he didn't like. A fiery determination, something that could make her very dangerous if she was pushed.

Little did he know Lisa saw the same in him and disliked it just as much.

"Yeah," he allowed, eyeing her shamelessly. Stunning body, all the toned motion and sinewy strength that Vaje liked to see. If she were a coyote, she'd be able hunt all night, and chase the moon along her curving path. "Though I got the impression you didn't need my protection."

She flung the remnants of the pancake into the sink. "I don't. But...I'll indulge Dark's protective instincts. Don't think I trust you an inch though."

He wouldn't be fool enough to make *that* mistake.

~ Once I asked you to fly
Tonight I recreate the vow:
Do not fail to love me as I have failed to die
With you... ~

~*~

Chimera Part Twenty Four

~ You take away
I feel the same
All the promises you made to me you made in vain
I lost myself inside your tainted smile again. ~

Chatoya Irkil was wrapped up warm as she made her way out to the lake. There was an unwavering conviction, rooted like an oak in her, that the dragon would be there. Fireblade.

Fireblade. If she shut her eyes, she heard her mother's voice whispering of how he drank in the agony of others, and fed upon suffering. The great dragon, the one who commanded fire; last and greatest of the Drax.

"Guess who put the mental in elemental?" had been Cougar's dry wisecrack yesterday. Yesterday, that day that had been so different. Now she was tugged deeper into this dangerous whirlpool, drawn into this world of murder and mercilessness that Blue inhabited.

She stopped short. His voice had become silent again, and she waited, the breeze brushing past her ears.

Blinking, and suddenly she saw *herself*, her black hair bound and wind-ruffled; and she was reaching for the arm of that still witch-

Her body turned itself to catch Blue Malefici's wrist, and she found herself staring into the blue eyes that she had been watching through only moments before. Eyes of wondrous colour, filled with a rainbow of blues that ranged from that core cobalt to the winter-sky ribbons flicking out and the navy flecks invading the thin, thin rim of gold about his pupil.

"Very good," he said softly, and when most she needed to know his thoughts, they were silent. Subtle shadows under the sooty lashes, as though sleep had evaded him too. "Whither do you wander, witch of mine? Chasing a dragon perhaps?"

Involuntarily, her hand crushed tight about his wrist, yet he seemed not even to notice. "You shouldn't have given him that spell."

"Why?"

Chatoya let go of him. "He killed her! Do you think she's going to wake up and hurl herself into his arms? If they fight...goddess, Blue, have you ever *seen* dragons fight?"

His eyes flickered with strange lights. "No. No, sweet spellcaster." But somehow she had the impression that something she had said had startled him. A sudden snowfall-softness to his mouth before the brief, dreamy interlude was gone. "But rest assured, I will take care of Fireblade. You should know by now that I lay my plans with great care. In fact, I lay all things with care."

Pointedly ignoring the double-entendre, she carried on. "And I didn't find that little stunt last night amusing."

"Really?" Goddess, he was infuriating when that small, slow smile curled up his lips. "I found it most enjoyable. Oh..." The sarcasm was raw in the careless brush of his fingers against her cheek, and something sore yet alluring trailed beneath his touch like scalding honey. "You mean your brief and unsuccessful attempt to discover gills?"

Chatoya took step a step forward, and his eyes widened mockingly. "I mean your brief and unsuccessful attempt to murder me. You need me for whatever it is you're planning." And whatever it is, I'm going to fight you every inch of the way.

A finger touched to her lips, and left there. "I have no need for you," Blue purred. His voice was a little drowsier than usual, yet still filled with that effortless threat that action might replace mere speech. "Except to keep my vital signs visible."

Except to play seducer with me, she thought, and the thought melded into another, mad idea. And what...and what if I play you at your own game? You depend on my naivety, on my foolish goodness, on all those things you see as worthless and use only to manipulate me. You manoeuvred me - brilliantly, yes, I must admit - into taking Pursang.

He didn't even glance her way as he sauntered away, chillily serene as the grey sky above, but his words were a stark invasion in her mind, his telepathic voice the slice of starless hell, not mere sound but texture too, sliding on her thoughts as the glassy smoothness of volcanic rock might.

~ Watch out for Ysandron. ~

And though Chatoya sensed he no longer spoke to her, his mental voice quivered distantly like an echo bouncing along a tunnel.

~ Two are here. Closer...closer to the Four, and th... ~ It faded as subtly as mist in the broiling sun.

Instinctually, her hands fumbled her coat closer about her, even though the sun had slid out from behind the slate clouds.

What is it you really want, Blue Malefici? Who are the Four...and how can I make you tell me?

Four. The four advisors for Pursang? She didn't think so.

I need to read your mind. I need your defences down. And the only time - the *only* time you let me inside your mind is when you're playing games with me.

Maybe...

It's a dangerous game, but two can play it.

~*~

"Keeeee-rist!"

There was a thump, and Lisa cautiously put down the book she was reading to rise with the quicksilver motion of a meerkat. That wasn't Vaje's voice, which was all sandpaper snarls; he'd gone to meet one of the other godfathers.

"Nice place!" Young. Male, and closer. Filled with an energy that wasn't somehow *right*. Lisa couldn't put any word more specific on it, because she could only feel the intruder dimly on her senses, but it was as if someone had played a major song in a minor key. "Anyone here?"

The African girl slid out of the study to peer into the lounge, and there, among the greens and blues of their comfortable den of depravity, spotted someone standing. A short, slight someone who ambled over to the mantelpiece and fingered a photo, who picked up her - *her* - A3 sketchbook that she'd left on the coffee table to leaf through it, who glanced at the TV and-

A pressure in her head, as though thread had been drawn tight on her skin.

It flicked on without the boy moving, and as he swivelled his head to look around, Lisa saw his face.

Sweet, really, with those baby-blue eyes that had a calculating gleam as he eyed the silver and bronze chess set, and a cherubic mouth that was turned up in idle approval. "Ve-ry nice," he murmured softly, then froze, causing Lisa to concentrate on emptiness as his mind flickered out, questing. So. Sensitive.

Cheeky, she thought, anger gently rising in her veins. Walking into our house, running your filthy hands over our things. Running your mind over me.

The boy heaved a breathy sigh, and gave his head a little shake to fling the mud-brown hair back. It was curiously cut, long in some places and short in others so it fell in an artful tumble; if Chatoya had been there, she might have told Lisa that it had the same effect as Jacqui's had - designer mess.

"Sure know how to pick 'em, Sal," he said to himself chirpily, and Lisa's eyes narrowed. Sal? An accomplice. Had someone been watching the house? The large bag he carried would certainly fit enough of their valuables. "Better get started."

A distant snick told her someone had just come in the front door. Vaje, had to be. Good, if he was back he could help her with this.

The boy picked up her mobile phone and her fury snapped like a cracker.

Lisa charged, screaming a primordial warcry that curdled the air, and curdled the boy's face in sheer shock. Carpet squashing under her feet, and she leapt, air giving way before her, coiling her body into a fast, firm spring that would-

Something smashed into her in midair, knocking her away from the boy. The painful impact with the floor crushed her breath from her as one arm twisted under her, and she skidded inelegantly forward a few feet in a pile of warmth and motion in a beautiful imitation of an out-of-control rhinoceros.

For a few seconds, she couldn't move. What on *earth* was that? A kinetic punch from the vampire? No...someone ungainly scrambled into a human tumble with her.

"What is *wrong* with you, lady?" an all-too familiar voice snarled. Lisa untangled herself brusquely for Vaje, not hesitating to give him a good kick on the way. He was looking decidedly flushed, and his eyes whirled with firefly flickers. "Do you molest everyone who walks into your home? God, you jump to conclusions so much you should take up pole-vaulting. He wasn't even in your shower!"

She stared at him, stunned at his audacity. Not, however, for long. "He just *walked in*!" she shouted. "Who the *hell* is he?"

The strange boy's fangs were out, and his eyes the azure-tinged silver of a highly vigilant - and unfortunately undamaged - vampire.

"He's a *visitor*! He's going to ruthlessly take advantage of your hospitality - he's going to eat your food, and watch your TV, and spend thirty bloody minutes in the bathroom gelling his hair!" Vaje howled back.

"I've got it down to twenty," the boy offered, his voice holding a hint of a sharp whine. It was soft despite that edge, almost a little childish. "Are you going to get off her, Sal, so I can practice a touch of torture?" The merry eyes sparkled. "Or is this one for play?"

Something in the words sent a ripple through Lisa. It was the way he spoke; the tranquil relaxation that said the boy meant it as a genuine comment. That for him...hurting her would be entertaining. A pleasurable act of science. Not a job, but a hobby.

Dear god, Darkstar was digging out all the nuts for this assignment.

Salvaje Chusson's face was set and stubborn, and Lisa was suddenly very glad he was here.

"No, she is not for play, Ross," he snapped. "And I told you to *knock* before you walked in."

Ross ignored him - Ross, yes, it had to be *the* Ross, the Nightworld assassin who had disappeared a year ago, to the delight, and chagrin of many - and focused on Lisa. "Sure you don't want to play?" he enquired sweetly. "I know some *very* fun games."

A low rolling growl curled into the air.

"Scrabble, for one," the vampire said blithely. "So...I'm a godfather. And hey, I'll go to the mattresses with you any time."

"Letch," she said under her breath, at the same moment as Vaje darkly muttered, "Creep."

The vampire flung wide his arms, though his eyes retained that watchful glitter. "So, as Sal obviously isn't feeling up to showing his manners, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Ross, and I'll be your godfather for the next few days. I've got it right, haven't I?" he added to the coyote. "We're pretending to be godfathers?"

The withering stare he got was an answer. "Subterfuge was never your strong point," Vaje snapped.

Ross beamed, and Lisa had to admit grudgingly he had an elfin charm; yet he sent ice-chip fear whirring through her brain. She knew with a bone-deep certainty that however amiable he was, it was utterly false.

"Keeping quiet was never yours," the vampire hissed. "I haven't forgotten you, Chusson. I don't forgive and I don't forget."

The coyote wore a mask of contempt; looking between them, they created a strange tableau. Ross, his youth made evergreen by the blessing and curse of being made a vampire, with his angelic face, and Vaje, a dark and fallen demon if ever one had walked, with subtle lines at his eyes and his mouth, and the hard face of a shapeshifter touched by time as rain weathered limestone. But which image was truer?

"Isn't it time for your next hit?" Vaje asked with deadly gentleness. "Don't think I don't know what's in that bag, Ross. You and your needles, and your goddamn bags of white powder and weed. You're a mess."

A strange strain in the vampire's face, and his clean-cut façade dropped like the curtain on a play. "Yeah? So what, Sal. The world's a mess. You try having a conscience forced on you, and try killing."

"Don't do it then." The coyote turned his head away, and curtly helped Lisa to her feet. His hands were cool from the wind outside, and rough on her skin, but held a certain control, a courtesy that diminished her fear a little. Gone was his wry humour of earlier.

The vampire's eyes bulged, and he seemed about to attack Vaje, but stopped himself. "I have nothing else."

A silence, heavier than lead as the two glared at each other. Gods, Lisa thought, gods, what have we got ourselves into? I don't want that guy protecting me! Dark had to send us the two guys with a Past. Not a past - a Past.

Toya's going to love this.

~*~

He was there, sitting on the bench as maybe she had been that first time when this dragon, dressed in a lie, had sought her out. No human disguise this time; the livid tiger-streaks of his hair were a silhouette of the past against that bland grey sky. How alive had the world been then? Had everything burned like he had?

Chatoya stepped off the crunching gravel path and onto the damp, scraggly grass beside it. Nor was she entirely sure why; why sneak up on the boy who stared out onto the restless mirror of the lake?

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

Iager didn't look towards her, for his eyes swept over the lake. His voice had been sorrowed, yet in it, Chatoya had thought she heard the roar of a volcano.

She studied the waters, and remembered how it had glinted in moonlight, and how the rainbow shards of the faeries had darted about it. And Blue's arms, about her in the night, deliciously tight, melting into the grip of the waters, passing her into death's grasp. His hands, cupping a myth, and tangled in her hair, and the weeds of the lake twisted in her fingers. His lips, moving slow and soft, asking and demanding, and the feel of the lake moving on her skin like ice picks.

Beautiful - oh yes. Beautiful, but deadly.

"Sometimes," she answered, and moved to sit beside him. "Is she..."

"The tears wash her tomb." An ache tolled in his voice. "I called a storm here to hide her forever, and it wept when I could not."

"Please," she said, the words springing to her tongue in a rush. "Please, don't do this. Don't use that spell. It's from Blue, and I can promise you, he doesn't mean any good."

He rolled his head to face her, slow as a statue. There was utter anguish in his eyes, and inhuman power too, but after facing Blue, it scarcely touched her, except to burn a little instead of freeze. "What more evil can it do?"

"I...I don't know." When I look at you, I smell smoke, she wanted to say. I feel it choking my lungs, and stifling my screams. I see a world torn apart in your gaze, and the passing of the years has done nothing to ease you; what makes you think it can ease her? What makes you think she will even return?

But she saw the answer. He didn't know, but believed with a fanatical fervour. He had to. Mere reason was no answer for this. No words of hers would stop him.

"Put out the light, and put out the light," he quoted dreamily. "I have put her out, and I shall light her again, and you will see...I hear her in my dreams, and I hear her in my every waking moment. She is here already, but I will bring her to reality."

"And what will you bring the rest of us?" she asked. "Suppose she wakes mad, or decayed, or not at all? What will you do then, Fireblade?"

"I am not Fireblade!" He was on his feet, agitated and near-violent before it faded into that grey and drawn sorrow. "Never again. Go away, witch girl. You will never understand. Love and lose, and then we will talk of consequences."

If you are alive to. If I am alive to.

She thrust away that morbid thought, and left him to lave the lake with his yearning. And prayed, oh prayed, that the Lady of the Lake was lost already, and would never return.

~*~

Storms start from nothing at all. From the flap of a butterfly's wings, stirring air into turmoil, and sending ripples through a world too tender for such slight disturbance. One touch in the wrong place, and a hurricane is born.

Butterflies, spreading wide their wings in the sun, wings the flaming flaunted gold of the eyes that squinted into the sun with a calculated thought.

Strange how in the midst of this swirling stormy rage there was a little pit of absolute silence, black and hollow as the crypt Almost peace, the peace of having given yourself up to primal power, and knowing that you were to be carried along upon without any care for consequences.

Maybe there would be consequences later. But there would not be the wounded, angry hurt of before, the bitter sting of that rejection because

(She)

there would be so much else to hide it, to bury it as soil was hurled onto bodies, shovels of dirt piling up. There would only be the hurt of others, *their* bemusement, *their* sorrow, *their* rage. God yes, this was what he had missed, the sheer glory of knowing where to thrust the knife.

(didn't)

The world seemed a brighter sharper places, ice-sharp, knife-sharp, pain-sharp. Every colour in the garden flared bright, throbbing in the chill. And Cougar Redfern waited with patient breath and impatient heart for that first strike. Once the first strike was made, it was easy to make the next and the next and the next. Cruelty cascading on cruelty like he had let it all those years ago, before he conceived the lie that he wasn't like that.

(want)

"Hey..." A blond head appearing in front of him, wearing the charming smile. He saw it through new eyes - or was it only old eyes, the true way to see. The person in the eye of the storm took in the warmth, and the vivacious bounce to the walk, and then laid a price on the cheetah's pelt.

What...

For a moment, his head resisted, and then the anger surged and whipped him around in its dervish dance.

What would I pay for him to die?

(me)

"Look," Jepar said, emerald eyes filled with gentle concern. "Can we talk? I've got something on my mind."

Cougar glanced at him almost lazily. "That's a first, then."

His tone was cold, enough to make Jepar frown a little. But otherwise, he passed it off. Stupid, a voice in Cougar's head sang. That'll see you dead.

"It's about Toya." The shifter settled himself on the grass, and wrapped his arms round his knees. "I'm worried about her. I mean, the prom...and her getting jumped by wolves. She's been different lately."

"I don't want to talk about her," he said harshly.

Jepar scrubbed at his temples. "Sorry. I forgot you...her...I mean...bugger."

The smile stretched naturally onto his face, the crocodile's smile, false as the crocodile's tears. "Don't worry about it, Jepar. We all know how dumb you are. Isn't that what Tali's realising?"

Motion frozen, and then Jepar uncoiled himself, unconsciously sliding into a defensive position. "What do you mean?" The British accent stronger, more clipped.

"Well..." Cougar arched one eyebrow. "Seems obvious to me that she's getting bored with you. She's a dragon now. You're...nothing to her."

"It isn't like that-"

"Or did you just settle for second-best? After all, it didn't work out with Toya, did it? But then - that's to be expected. We both know what a cold bitch she can be."

The green eyes, fresh as the grass, spring-innocent, were wide and Jepar seemed too stunned to speak. "Wh-hat? I can't believe you just *said* that! That's such crap..."

"Is it?" the lamia murmured lightly. "Hey, Jepar, why don't you ask your soulmate where she disappears off to every Wednesday?" He stopped himself short. That was new. He hadn't even *known* Tali went anywhere on Wednesdays - where had that thought come from?

The cheetah's hackles were up now, and there was a new wariness to him. For a moment, he was the boy Cougar had first met in Ryars Valley four years back, hunted and haunted. "How do you know about that?"

I don't kn-and then the rage swept over him, rage that didn't care where the facts came from, and only knew they were there.

"I thought everyone knew," he said carelessly. There. The flicker of pain in Jepar's eyes. "Ask her, Jepar. And hey - don't take it too hard. They're all like that."

"Like what?" Paranoia, panic in his face. "She just goes walking."

Cougar chuckled, and the sound was strangely familiar, that soft, confident laugh. "Sure she does." He got to his feet, and the angry self was satisfied with the hurt on the cheetah's face. Better someone else than him. Let them hurt. Let them feel the way I felt.

And the treacherous self sprang up, protesting loudly - but that's my friend, that one of my closest friends sitting there, what the hell am I talking about? Unease and wrath warred, but what could fight that storm?

It doesn't hurt so much, he caught himself thinking as he left. It doesn't hurt so much now.

~ 'Cause you can feel my anger
You can feel my pain
You can feel my torment
Driving me insane
I can't fight these feelings
They will bring you pain
You can't take away
Make me whole again .~

~*~

Chimera Part Twenty Five

~ Sleeping quiet afloat in the air
Searching for you there
Miles and miles away from your touch
Aching everywhere. ~

Do the dead dream?

He tilted back his head to the moon faint and hazy in the sky, and the motions sent a light wash of dizziness over him. Secret moon, silent moon, silver-shot as her hair and hanging as distant. He would have reached out and plucked it from the sky for her, would have torn himself to pieces at her word.

Maybe he would have to.

Iager lowered his head to the lake, darkening to pitch in the young evening. Under there, she was under there. And the spell...

Finished at last. It was locked away, hidden from prying eyes and prying hands and Iager waited with fervour for the half-moon when he could cast it at last. The half-moon, an old witches' trick; the time when the sky stood between darkness and light as the soul itself did, when the pull of other worlds was strongest

God, he could hardly wait the handful of days it would be. So he remained here, close to her, calling her silently but hearing nothing in reply. Her tomb was washed by her element, and her body lay imprisoned still in stone. In his minds' eye, he saw her as he had left her, with the glittering cascade of hair spread beneath her, and her throat necklaced by the livid purple imprints of his hands, though he knew in truth she was long dust.

You will love me, he thought. I will make it right this time.

Do the dead dream? He didn't know, but surely if she had dreamed, Ryar would have dreamed of him, of them. Of their children, who were dead or sleeping, of those slow and sensuous nights of silence in a burning world, of the touches that had bound them and the words that had tied them.

He refused to think of the differences that had broken them.

All he thought of was her full-throated voice, pouring out across the hovering air, and the plush of her indigo eyes, and the way she said his name. All he thought of was the curve of her shoulders, and the taste of her skin, and every memory he had never known would mean so much.

Do the dead dream?

Nightmares, perhaps.

~*~

Evening was a strange affair. The air was chillier than the morning, and Chatoya knew that winter was coming. Season of ice, season shrouded in hanging sheets of mist, season of pallid hell and pastel promises. Blue's season.

He was in her head, his voice moving like fog on the wind, scattering and shredding words that tantalised and infuriated her completely. A pounding headache had set in, but even the slow throbbing ache couldn't distract her from the pieces of his soul nipping at her.

And when you were dining with at least one confirmed sociopath, you wanted to be as alert as possible.

Ross. Only one name; no one knew of any other. Ross, with a cherub's cute smile, and round wide eyes that danced in a wash of white against clean pale blue and the jet perfection of his pupil. Pastel-soft and a smile to make heaven hush, all framed by that muddy hair that reminded her of nothing so much as Jacqui's styled mess. Hair to rake your fingers through, wisping at his neck like smoke spilling over the air.

He was enticing as a Botticelli painting, and savage as a neurotic tiger.

"This is good chow, lady," Vaje remarked, stabbing at the last of his rare steak. So rare it oozed. The gory mess had made Chatoya shudder, but she politely put aside her revulsion to concentrate on her salad.

It had been difficult though, with Ross's eyes trained on her. Lisa had hissed something about him being on drugs, and looking at his wild and jagged smile, and the slightly uncontrolled way he was handling his food - as if he were drunk - she didn't doubt it. Drugs for vampires were in a class of their own, no pun intended. Smack, coke, dope - they did nothing. Part of the kick of drugs was how dangerous they were.

Vampires put sawdust in theirs.

It had made Chatoya laugh the first time she heard it - but Cougar hadn't laughed. Only said quite calmly, with his eyes the solemn hazel they always were when he was serious, that it was just as lethal to vampires as to humans that way. That it sent vampires crazy.

"She'd be better," Ross said softly, the whine in his voice grating on her. Kicked puppy, or power station about to go nuclear? She didn't know or care which.

Chatoya looked up, fork midway to her mouth, to find his lips slack, parted and his feral eyes on her, sketching lines above the faint blue tracery of her veins.

"She has a name," she said harshly. After Blue, she couldn't say she feared him in the same way - but something made her wary. The serrated violence was waiting to move from his expression to his actions. "And she's no one's snack."

"Certainly not Malefici's," Vaje murmured, pushing chips around his plate. His bronze hair was curling a little from where Lisa had thrown water over him and hurled him out of 'her' kitchen. Chatoya - who knew exactly what Lisa was like when she was cooking one of her famous dishes - had kept well clear and spent the hours trying to pretend Blue was not invading her mind.

Lisa arched an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"

"We had a...run-in," Chatoya said weakly. She hadn't wanted Lisa to know; she didn't need another round of you-know-what-he's-like. She knew. She knew with more than mere mind but with her very being; she knew because his soul twined about her like two threads of a song, dropping hints of all he was at every instant. "Nothing major."

Vaje snorted, but must have caught her piercing look, because he flicked Lisa's hair so the coloured beads clicked and said, "Lady, she does to Malefici what you do to strangers."

The made vampire batted his hand away. "Turns them on?"

Chatoya nearly choked on a lettuce leaf. Lisa and Vaje definitely had the tingle factor. She'd never seen her friend quite so...elated. The pair of them had done nothing but argue and wrestle all evening; after the water-throwing incident, there had been a fight over the TV remote. Vaje had won, by a dislocated shoulder and a snapped wrist. She wasn't sure if it was lust, or the first round of the WWF.

The coyote frowned. "Not quite," he murmured, though the look he gave Chatoya was distinctly odd. Contemplative almost, but with a hint of something else - realisation? - thrown in.

"Malefici didn't kill her?" Ross inquired, voice suddenly sharp and full of new interest. It made her spine go cold; she didn't want Ross's attention, she didn't want him in her house! How ever he looked, the turth lay in his gestures and his speech.

And she had no soulmate connection to save her from him.

~*~

The words had been twisting about Jepar's head all day.

~ Seems obvious to me that she's getting bored with you. She's a dragon now. You're...nothing to her. ~

Cougar's words, the words of one of his closest friends. He remembered the strange look on Cougar's face - that tight, narrow look that Jepar had only seen once before and never wanted to again. The look that warned of anger boiling under the surface that might explode like liquid fire. The look the lamia had had when Sonj died.

Toya hurt you, didn't she? Jepar thought dully. She didn't mean to, and she would never want to, but she did. Is that why you can see what I've been trying not to? Tali isn't mine anymore.

I don't know whose she is, but not mine.

It was time to work it out. It was time to - to end it, if she wanted to. If everyone else could see it...god, he had thought that maybe it was just his imagination, but he had to stop lying to himself and admit something was wrong.

He let himself into her house - she'd given him a key, and he remembered with a pang how proud he had been of that. It had been somehow, more than a key to her house but to her too. To her life and all that meant. To the laughter, the tears, the anger, the calm.

She was in her house, throwing clothes into the washing machine and he felt her, a great pool of power in his mind, all earthy softness filled with aquamarine beauty. Power, tempered by time and experience. Even crouched over the machine, thrusting an array of clothes in with one leg tucked under her, she was graceful to him.

"Jepar?" She slammed shut the door, and threw in some powder, giving him a perfunctory glance. His chest tightened. That was it. Just a glance. "What are you doing here?"

"Can't I come and see my girlfriend?" He forced himself to unclench his hands. Shouldn't have sounded that sharp. That cruel.

Tali shrugged, and gave him a kiss on the cheek that made the connection wriggle like a fish. "Of course you can." Her little, tranquil smile. The one that spoke of safe, controlled emotion. "What's up?"

"You're up." There. He'd said, he hadn't let himself think about it. He'd said what had been on his mind for so long.

Her body recoiling from him a little. "Me?"

"You."

"What do you mean?"

"Where do you go?" Jepar demanded, unable to keep the hurt from his voice and hating it. It reminded him too much of that time when first she had told him what they were to each other; when he had spent days filled with pain at her betrayal. "Where do you disappear every Wednesday? Why won't you let me go with you?"

Alisha stepped back, and there was something unexpectedly fragile in her eyes that he hadn't seen in a long time. The coolness vanished and there was only vulnerability replacing it. "Jepar..."

"Where?" he said, stepping towards her.

"I..." She licked her lips. "Jep, I can't tell you."

Hot, stabbing pain in his chest. What if she was doing it again, what if she had betrayed him for someone else. Was he not enough, was he wrong, had Cougar been right? Was his darling, amazing dragon bored?

She saw it, of course she did, and a kind of horror appeared. "Surely you don't think..."

Jepar found he could only look back, helpless and aching. I want to know you, he wanted to say. I want things to be perfect, like they were. I don't want you to be almighty and afraid to show what you feel.

The sapphire eyes shut. "Oh my god, you do. You really do."

"Tali," he began, uncertain of what he would say; unable to deny the suspicions, but unwilling to admit he didn't trust her. Wanting so much to tell her everything he felt, and how much, how unbearably much he loved her and yet was never sure she felt the same.

So, so lovely. She was a pretty girl, he knew that anyway, but to him...more. Every shimmer of her earth-rich hair, every red glint from it was mesmerising; every word was precious and every touch, every gesture to be savoured. But the touches had been less, and the words stilted until he was no longer sure. Beauty was truly in the eye of the beholder; one person's god was another's god help me. Even her flaws; the crooked line of her mouth, noticeable only to one who knew her face intimately, was endearing.

They stared at one another, emerald and deep blue, fitting together so smoothly as they always had. We haven't changed, have we? he thought. Eight hundred years and so many lives, but we're still those silly, scared kids who played with fire and were so surprised when they got burnt.

"Why aren't you happy?" he burst out. "You're not, are you?"

She breathed in harshly. "I..." Her face crumpled a little. "No. I'm not happy." Then the cold strength, dragon-coldness flowed over it. "I've been unhappy for a while."

Jepar could hardly form the words. It hurt. It hurt to hear that. "Why? It's me, isn't it?"

"No, it's..."

But he was sure her voice lacked conviction. "Where do you go? Why are you trying to get away from me?"

"Fine," she said abruptly, her face a tense mask. "Come on then."

"What-where?" Caught off-guard.

Her hand closed about his, slender but hardened from pounding against the earth in shape after shape. "Come on," she insisted. The soulmate link tingled in his head, fizzing like sherbet, but there were no words between them there.

Jepar let her drag him out along the road and through the chill sun. They must have looked so ordinary to anyone; teenage couple, hand in hand, yet silent and grim. He was bemused when she stopped by the Black Dahlia, the abandoned club Circle Strange were gradually making their own. The key was - as ever - in the door, because most of Ryars Valley were too canny to break into anything of the Circle's. Cougar's temper was practically a celebrity in its own right.

She unceremoniously dragged him inside, and shoved him down onto one of the sagging sofas, whose springs gave way a little more; Jepar winced as metal barbed his thigh. "I was saving it," she said shortly, moving over to one of the cupboards and heaving off the half-rotted wood. "But I guess you can have it a little early."

"Huh?" was all he could managed, utterly baffled. "You come here?"

"It's private." And he couldn't help admiring how gracefully she moved. My dragon. My dragon, who should never have been one. Sorcery made you, and maybe it saved you, but...my dragon can be so cold. "Good for keeping secrets."

His heart iced over at that. "I..."

Something in her hands as she turned back to him, her hair sliding from the grips that held it, catching on her horns. A black, rectangular thing that he realised was a book.

"It was supposed to be a birthday present," she explained, and something close to shyness made her sit beside him so demurely. "But you can have it now. It's not finished."

He took it, stunned. Opened the cover, a leather-covered A4 book. And there on the front page...

"Dear Jepar," he read aloud, his voice softening at the words. "Sometimes I don't know how to tell you how much I love you, so I don't say anything. This is to say all the things I can't."

He turned the page, a wonderful joy opening in him like a flower. Pictures, sketches - one Lisa had drawn of him that Alisha must surely have begged and pleaded to get hold of. Bus tickets, cinema stubs, photo graphs, a petal from a flower he had given her, pieces of poetry, little phrases, descriptions of days they had spent together. Only half-full, but the work in it was...was...

"That's...amazing," he murmured slowly, wonderingly, and closed it. A flushing guilt filled him. "God. God, Tali...I'm so-"

She put a finger to his lips, and the electric contact stopped him. A little smile, the one they shared so often for their private jokes, the moments that were theirs alone. He hadn't seen it in a while. A shake of her head.

"I am unhappy, Jepar," she told him, and again he saw that slight crumbling of her smooth mask. "But not because of you. Not *ever* because of you."

He hugged her impulsively, and strange balmy relief washed over him. Not me, he thought. Not me. She loves me. Her head nestled into his shoulder, and the relief was chased by bafflement. "But...why?"

A stiffening of the shoulders toned and honed by the long hours of running together, the soft peach that was smooth and warm to touch. He had a terrible urge just lie with her in his arms, and never leave this dusty little room. Never to face the weariness and the fret and the agitation of the world outside.

"Why?" A brittle laugh and the eyes she raised to his were a deeper sapphire than usual. "I hate what I am. I hate what David made me. I'm a monster. I'm inhuman."

"Tali," he said, shocked, instinctually drawing her close into him until her bones dug painfully into him, a good fierce pain. "You're not a monster! Who have you hurt?"

"Asides from you...no," she planted her hand over his mouth. "I didn't mean that, Jep. I just...I can't explain."

He pulled her fingers away, brushing her knuckles with his lips. "Try."

A moment of silence, but a silence he could bear. A hush patient, comfortable.

"I feel so out-of-control," she began, a little tentativeness quavering her voice before it hardened into her ever-present confidence. Alisha had a self-belief like no one he had ever known; perhaps it could make her a little harsh, and quick to judge, but it made her direct too, made her strong against a world that had shown her little mercy. "Dragon power - its incredible. It's there all the time, pushing at me, wanting me to do...things."

"Things?" He stroked her hair, and never knew how much it moved his soulmate. Each small gesture a symbol of a want for her, a need for her, an intimacy that trussed them.

"Things." Deep breath. "Horrible things. I can't even describe them, Jep. They just flash in my head. It wants me to burn, and to hunt and it always, always wants blood. Blood and pain, they feed it. Sometimes it's so faint I can hardly hear it but other times - especially at night - it's screaming in me. And when I change, it swamps me and I can hardly breathe or feel. Sometimes, I'm even taken somewhere else. Somewhere burning and filled with huge roaring noises." A shudder rippled through her. "I hate it, I hate it! I don't *want* this. I never did, but I had no choice."

"I know," he whispered, feeling helpless. "I'm sorry."

Yes, he knew how little choice she had had. It seemed to him sometimes that all Alisha's choices had been stolen from her because of one choice made wrongly, one slip that had scored her path for eternity. A dragon eager to become mortal had traded her powers for Alisha's humanity, aided by a man who wanted Alisha for himself. David y Pelathas had killed the dragon-cum-mortal, but had not expected Alisha, in her new and glorious powers, to turn upon him.

"I don't want them anymore," she said hopelessly. "I'd give them away, if I could. If I knew how. But David threw that stupid spell away when he'd done it, and everyone who'd want dragon powers...well, let's just say none of them are likely to be stopping at Sanity Central."

He didn't say anything, but his mind was already fixed on the one person he knew who had had dragon powers thrust upon her.

But would she...?

Could she?

Should she?

~*~

Beautiful evening. Beautiful world; winter skies, smeared with a haze of pastels and fires all wrapped about each other. Pastels and fires, like the cold and heat that burned Cougar Redfern in his anger. He stared up at them as he strode around the streets of town, ignoring every person who glanced his way. The young mother with her baby and her skirt smeared with pureed food, and the gang of giggling kids sitting outside the ice-cream parlour, and the despicably cute couple kissing on the sidewalk that Cougar felt obliged to elbow in the back as he passed.

Damn it. Damn it! His head was splitting from fighting this irrational rage. What had he said to Jepar? God, he'd always been annoyed by how *happy* the cheetah was, but in a low-level gently envious way. Not with this burning hate. This wasn't right, this wasn't *him*.

Gold eyes flashed like lightning dancing. And who was he? Did he even know?

Been so long. So long since I remember not pretending, not lying. Lies on the enclave, lies here, lies in my heart. No escape, only having to be so goddamn good, treating vermin like people and leashing that utterly foul temper. So much time wasted in pretending to be nice, pretending to be normal, yeah, pretending to be *vermin*.

And what had it got him?

Pain. Sonj dead, and Therill dead, both mouldering now. The hollow loneliness, with Toya oh-so polite and friendly, and his soulmate, the one who supposed to be everything, fled from him because he was too alien even when he was being like her. Pain and loneliness and boredom.

Look at Blue. His little brother, who had never even pretended humanity, carving paths through flesh, his footsteps puddled in blood, hated and feared but yes, respected. Yes, maybe even loved by some, though who could say how many of those saw beyond the glamour or the power to that black and rotten core? Respected. Admired. Doing as he wished and never harmed for it.

If Blue could, why couldn't he?

But the thought was horrific. Repugnant.

He'd seen too much of what Blue could do. And yeah, wasn't it easy to hurt? Didn't it make something inside you bend and flex when you poked at the festering wounds in someone's soul? Wasn't the power terrible and intoxicating?

I swore I would never be him, Cougar thought stubbornly. If he closed his eyes, Carinna's sliced throat, ribbons of scarlet and white and pink, filled his vision. I would never do that.

But anger's good. Anger feels so right. Isn't it all I have? Isn't it-

A strange feeling. One he had experienced before; the sense of eyes boring into you, launching a prickle up the spine. But this was not physical, but psychical. He would scarcely have noticed if he hadn't known it, because he had felt it once before, he had drenched his mind in it.

Yes. There had been the taste first; the coppery sweetness, pouring into his mouth, thick on the tongue and slick in the throat. And the aroma of human skin, smelling like the kettle-ash they used to wash the slaves' clothes and sweat and underneath, the hot, darling scent that was all her own.

"Cougar," Sandrine said, as she stepped out of the shadow of the building. She must have seen him coming; her eyes he had felt. "How are you?"

And then she did something he didn't expect.

Power thrust at him like a treacherous knife, power that was not the incredible wave of Blue, or the jungle swarm of Chatoya but a thin, honed force of pure emotion that threatened to pierce his mind.

Dear god, she had made her emotions a psychic weapon.

His shields saved him - barely - and he couldn't stop the gasp that revealed more than he wanted her to know. Hell, he'd never known a human use themselves like that. Making their very soul a blade. But he just...hadn't expected it. He knew how to defend himself now.

"Oh, did I startle you?" she asked derisively, and her avid gaze was a warning in itself.

Something so dramatic about the little flourish of her hands as she executed a mock curtsey. He scowled at her, knowing the slicing power that his eyes held; there was a meteor skimming the stratosphere in them. "Shouldn't your line be, 'I've been waiting for you, Obi Wan?'"

"Drop the Obi and add a few letters, and we'd be closer," she purred. How could someone who looked so *normal* have that power? Cougar had felt strong emotion before - he-ell, he practically was one - but he'd never felt anything so powerful, so corrupt and rotten to the core like years and years of anguish, hatred, hunger forced into one lump that had decayed into a fetid, overpowering poison. "How are you?"

A nonchalant shrug. It would do for an answer, especially with the precarious ashy eyes fixed on him. "As well as can be expected. Tell me something, Sandrine...why are you so convinced the dragon is your assassin?"

The unexpected question made her blink. That was all. This was a far cry from the girl who cried the first time he fed from her, and laughed the last. "Oh. He isn't. I lied."

"You what?" he said before he could control his response. "What do you mean?"

Sandrine chuckled but it was a dry rasping sound. "Cougar...you're still so naïve." A faint dreamy smile. "God, you were easy."

"Excuse me?" he said, fascinated. Empty eyes, and that pensive smile. It was like the two halves of her face had been mixed and matched.

She stepped closer, and there was a disturbing slinkiness to it. "You've always been so easy to fool. So trusting - I used to find it sweet, and it made me feel better on that goddamned enclave, that pit, that hellhole, that *prison*. But it's just pathetic. A little push here, a nudge there....you're nothing more than a puppet. Always so angry, Cougar. My angry angel. How'd you like to see heaven?"

"Unless you're talking about Halle Berry stripping," he drawled, mentally sweeping the area for any ambush, "never would be good." Her venom shocked him. But it didn't hurt - it was nothing compared to what she'd thrown at him. A test?

"You've forgotten how to trust your friends," she admonished. "Walking on your own so late. None of them even know you're gone. And do they even care?"

"I can look after myself."

Sandrine's face was brighter than he had seen it. Livid with animation, like someone was moving the muscles without understanding the emotions.

"Oh, that's your big deception, isn't it?" she said, and tilted her neck so he could see the shimmer of her scars, the place where his teeth had sank in over and over. "I saw it so often when you fed. You used to bewitch me, those first few times but then I saw past it to you. And that's the big joke!"

He didn't understand what she was talking about at all, but his fangs were out, his body tight as a wire, and Cougar could feel the power nudging gently at him, waiting for release.

The dirty, sunken eyes studied him slowly. From head to foot in a way that made him feel entirely worthless and somehow unclean. "You think you can take care of yourself," she told him almost gently, her voice holding the first hum of emotion. "But the truth is that you need caring for so desperately that you can't handle being alone."

Emotions knifed into his spine. Anger, injustice, fear. "That's not true!"

"You ring yourself with people. You argue just so you know they'll stay, and you give in if it ever looks like they'll leave, truly leave. You're weak, Cougar, but you think you're strong."

He hadn't noticed how close she had gotten, this she-viper. A snarl escaped him, and as she stepped forward, he raised his fist.

A flash of Chatoya, doing the same to him. Those mossy eyes, a jungle fever of emotions.

No. Sandrine was not Chatoya. Whatever she was now, it was wrong. Maybe even monstrous. She had lied to him, and her eyes were dead.

"I am not weak."

"You need people."

Standing in surburbia, under a streetlight that was just beginning to warm up, pulsing sienna. So surreal, standing with his past contorted into a most dreadful present, and hearing words that sounded as though they came verbatim from his little brother.

"So?" he shot back, letting his voice grow dark and harsh. "That doesn't make me weak,. It makes me hu-"

"Human?" Her voice cut sharp. But she was less human than he. How could that be? "Sad, Cougar. So sad. You're one of them now, whatever you think. You've thrown away your heritage. You could have been so much, but you are nothing, while I...I have fought to be what I am."

"In dire need of medication?" Cougar suggested sweetly.

A flick of her eyebrows, and nothing on that oddly childish face. "Feared."

It was his turn to appraise her, from the faded sandy hair to the ballet dancer's long feet. "Sorry, Sandrine, but I'll save my pathetic screaming for bigger perils. Like Blue." He ignored the faint warning tingle in his mind.

"Oh...Blue." The sandy hair was lank in the artificial light, but there was nothing dull to her voice. God, here lay the life. There was a rasp to it, near sensual, near agonised. Balancing on that needle-fine point between pain and pleasure which were one at their extreme. "Blue. Oh yes. I remember what he did. I remember what I saw. And take it from me, Cougar Redfern, he will get exactly what he deserves."

"From you?" The thought of this ragged little wreck of a human being taking on Blue was laughable. Insane. "As if."

The parchment smile. "I'm more than you think."

"Oh, please," Cougar said witheringly. "Take it from me, not even a white cat and a piranha pool is going to make you into a world-class villain. A straitjacket might make you into a normal citizen though, so stop trying the creepy act and go away. And if you follow me again, I'll drain you dry and leave your corpse for the wolves."

He gave her a sweet, fanged smile and turned to go. Yeah. He was heading straight home to find Toya. To warn her that Blue was up to something and Sandrine was in on it. Had to be.

"A little advice, Cougar." He refused to face her. She was vermin, however nuts. He didn't fear vermin.

"What?" he said shortly.

He never even knew what happened next. All he knew was that something smashed through his shields like a black arrow of horror; his world was beyond colour, beyond sound, beyond sense and into pure feeling that knocked him to the floor. His world was red anger and sizzling hatred and worse of all, moaning sorrow that tore at all he was.

Emotion as a weapon.

He'd thought it quirky. But it wasn't. It was fatal.

He was reeling, his world filling back in slowly, speckling into focus. And he ached. He ached, and he burned and he writhed. How could she live with this? How? She'd flushed her emotions into him, used that bloodlink with such alacrity and now he was pinned by something he couldn't fight any more than he had ever been able to.

Her mouth spilt into a bigger smile, and Cougar had the unnerving hallucination that this wasn't Sandrine at all but some cleverly made puppet as Sandrine stood over him. "Nothing," she said.

And that was what he was hurled into.

~*~

Chatoya locked her door for the first time in years. Strange, but she had always felt safe in her own home; but now, Ross's frosted eyes stung her. Something not quite right about him, and worse, maybe something she recognised, though she wasn't sure what.

Vaje and Lisa had stayed downstairs, playing a half-serious game of chess and arguing over just about anything possible. If Lisa said something was black, Vaje would find it white. But despite that, they seemed to get along.

She sighed and slid her head back on the pillow. So nice to finally sink down onto her bed at the end of what had been a too-long day. Her head felt woolly and aching, heavy from too little sleep and too many problems. And always in the background, the wicked dance of Blue's mind, moving to its own alien rhyme and rhythm.

Hour followed hour, draining by slowly while she turned agitatedly, and tried to ignore his insistent thoughts. The sky slipped into the indigo pool of dark where so many Nightworlders dipped their souls, and a few scattered stars glittered in the gap between her curtains.

And still she couldn't sleep. She was too hot, too cold, too uncomfortable...

And he *wouldn't* shut up. Didn't he *sleep*?

She sat up with a half-groan, half-snarl, hands tugging at her hair in the faint and futile hope that would get *rid* of him. Kicked at the duvet, tangled about her and wondered if she could just bewitch him.

But he was half a spell himself, with the thrall of those blue beyond blue eyes, stretching out beyond even the reach of the sky, immeasurable and amazing; eyes like the heart of winter hopes, and a spirit like heaven's despair.

Another hour, and more useless thoughts that flipped around her. Thoughts of drowning, and of clammy water in her mouth, dank and dirty. Memories of power pulsing through her, and of reaching out blindly in those last moments of consciousness, grabbing at anything and reaching...

Him.

Blue. Yes, she had glimpsed his mind for one moment, like a shaft of light striking into a pit to find the darkness held crystal walls that flung back startling radiance. There had been things she hadn't expected - emotions she hadn't known he could possess and frightening memories she had shied from, sensing only their jagged and deformed shape.

Wait. He had gone silent. Either he was asleep, finally or...

"What do you want?" she asked, half-sitting up to peer at the other side of the room. No, he was hard to feel in her mind now, but he was a silhouette where the stars had lain, those sharp features soft and shadowed in the deceptive night. "To find out if I've grown gills?"

"You've grown a sharp tongue of late," Blue answered lightly, and she thought she saw flickers of firefly gold lighting his face, near ethereal. He glided over to her, and flicked the lamp on without so much as a by-your-leave. She squinted in the brightness, until his face slipped into focus. "And as it happens...no. My purpose is perfectly innocent."

Chatoya doubted Blue had ever been perfectly innocent, but refrained from saying so with what she thought was considerable tact. Besides, he could probably hear the thought anyway.

"What I want," he continued, his voice low and harmonious, without any of its usual mesmerising power, "is some sleep."

"Have you tried hot milk?" she proffered flippantly.

Contempt curled in his tones like wet paper in the sun. "You are trying my patience. As ever."

"Things have changed now," she said quietly, and saw something curious flicker in his eyes, like a diary page caught on the wind and fluttering past her before she could read its secrets. "You need me. I don't think you've ever needed anyone."

His eyes narrowed a little, but only in a sort of marvel, as if she had become someone else. "Perceptive of you, sweet Chatoya Irkil, but somehow - really rather blind. Everyone needs people."

"Even you?"

A faint, strange smile quirked his mouth. "Even me. I hate to break it to you, but even us cold-blooded killers have to have something to hold on to. Even I fear, and anger, and...well, let's not lie, I don't love, but certainly I desire."

She searched the striking face, the sinful curve of a mouth that was too lavish for such slanting bones and slanting morals, and the winter-pale skin that had its own unusual opal luminosity, and the slumped heavy eyelashes, shadowing the eyes that were ice sliding down the soul.

"You don't show it," she murmured, aiming the easy feint at him.

His voice held a snap; he pounced on the words as if he had been waiting to hear them. "Could you bear it if I did?"

Emotion. How often had she seen what Blue truly was? She didn't know; so many sides to him that she could no longer tell which were the only flashing facets and which were the heart of the diamond that he was; a thing shaped by time and pressure, a thing that could have been only coal if not for the weight of mountains piled upon his soul, the aeons of life.

She answered honestly; she would not allow herself to take on a guise. She was in his world now, and somehow, it seemed that to even forsake one piece of her own safe and tender world would be to mutate from mortal to monster. "I don't know. And I don't suppose I ever will. You're too good at games, Blue. You only know how to win."

"And what's wrong with that?" her soulmate challenged. A finger lifting her chin with surprising gentleness, easing down the line of her throat. His thoughts were hidden from her then, and she wondered if that was why he had done it. "What else is there in this world?"

More, she wanted to say. What about friends, and loves, and family? But then she realised that none of those were anything to Blue. "Maybe nothing - for you."

"You'll learn." His face held something close to regret. "You're naïve to think otherwise. Winning is all that matters. And you must play the game to win, Chatoya Irkil - and if you want to play the game, you're going to have to learn to care less. Or at least let the world think you do."

"Why so much advice? You were drowning me yesterday."

Blue shrugged. "That was before I realised you were immortal as far as I'm concerned. If you die, witch of mine, it's going to be most inconvenient. This link has bound us...beyond belief. And even us evil archvillains need our sleep."

"What are you proposing?" she said, watching the gold thrusting at the edges of his iris like the tide. Yes, faint shadows on his face, and a little slowness in his voice. Even Blue, it seemed, had his weaknesses.

"To stay here, of course," he said quite casually.

Chatoya nearly choked. "Here? In my house?"

He was obviously finding it amusing. "In your bed, witch of mine."

"Forget it."

"Think about it. The only time I have any peace at all of late is when I'm touching you. Short of cutting off a limb to carry round - which is an option, but rather messy and not entirely easy to explain - neither of us are going to get any sleep. And while it won't kill me, it may eventually kill you."

She knew you could die of lack of sleep, though it took more than a couple of days. Still, Chatoya knew she would need all her wits about her in the next couple of days. "I don't trust you."

"I'm not asking for your trust."

"Well, you're not sleeping in my bed without it."

He smiled, that sparkling and dazzling curve of his mouth that was quite enough to knock her breath away a little. The famous Redfern charm, and if Blue had used it more, she thought, who knows where he would be now? "Touche. Well, witch of mine, you can go another day without sleep if you will. You can face the four most dangerous men you're likely to meet in Pursang, and I assure you - they'll tear you to shreds."

He wasn't touching her now, and the truth tolled in his words like a funeral bell. Oh, these men might not be Blue, but just thinking of Ross's face made her shiver.

"We have to lay some ground rules," she said flatly.

Blue rolled his eyes. "If ground rules it must be..."

"No licking, no kissing, no grabbing, no hurting and most emphatically, no biting."

"So...skip the foreplay then?" he drawled. "Oh, do stop looking so prim and proper, witch of mine. If I wanted to hurl you on the bed and ravish you, I would have done so by now. I have better taste."

She felt a childish urge to remind him of the ball, and of just what he had been doing before he decided to drown her, but kept silent. No telling just what his reaction might be. When you are in a cage with a hungry tiger, don't open your cuts.

"Fine," she said shortly. "You can stay. But you behave."

The heavy eyelids dropped, shielding that gold-washed azure. "But of course."

~ What you are
What you are
What you are
Is the voice behind the dream. ~