Innocence

by Samael Wolf

  I could certainly just leave it vague and say that I thought I’d seen her confront a man we knew to be abusive and dangerous. I could fish for more information and hope Sae divulged something that would help me decide what I should do or say to Esti. That was my first impulse. I was still very conscious of how insane it would sound if I described exactly what it was I’d seen, and how I’d seen it. It was already a large step for most people to accept that I could be blind and yet describe the photo they had in their wallet while it was still in their pocket. Now I was expecting someone to believe I had not only identified someone from the audio of a video, but that she was some sort of demon?

  The idea of confessing it all was intimidating, but I could do it. I could say exactly what I suspected, what I feared, and hope that Sae was open-minded. I wanted to. I hated this new uncertainty about my vision. At least I could know if it was just a hallucination. At least I wouldn’t be alone in wondering whether I was losing my grip on sanity.

  I think that was what tipped the scales. I’d been independent much of my life and had no experience having my own reliability thrown into question. I’d been questioned, even threatened with exposure as a fraud, but my senses had never given me a reason to doubt their veracity until now. I needed someone who could offer me some sort of objective place to stand before I sank under the tide of doubt and fear which threatened to overwhelm me.

  When the customer had been served and had retreated to a distant table to drink, I turned back to her and committed myself. “The cop who died Saturday night was abusing his wife. I saw him threaten to shoot her Wednesday while I was here. I told Esti about it and I think she tracked him down somehow.” Conscious even of the three customers who were nowhere near us, I lowered my voice further. “What I can do with my synesthesia applies to everything I sense, including audio. I listened to a video someone put online. I saw Esti do something that stopped that man’s heart.”

  I took a deep breath and then plunged into the worst of it. “And if you could tell me why I ‘saw’ her having wings when that happened, I’d very much appreciate it. Even if all you have to say is that I’m crazy.”

  Sae didn’t call me crazy. What she said instead was, “Well, crap. You weren’t supposed to see that.” She snorted as I gaped at her. “You wanted the truth, I’m giving you the truth. Kei warned us that you’d figure it out sooner or later.”

  “Figure what out?” I asked numbly, wondering who ‘Kei’ was. The similarity of their names made me wonder if it was one of the three siblings she supposedly had. I’d heard Ley before, and now Kei… what was next?

  Sae considered me a moment. “Honestly, I’m not sure how much I should tell you. You don’t look like you’re handling what little you know too well, and there’s a lot more where it came from.”

  ‘A lot more.’ I shook away the urge to delve into this rabbit hole, reminding myself what I had come to find out. “Esti. I need to know anything you can tell me about her. Why did I see her with wings? Did she kill that man, and if so, how?”

  She gave me a crooked smile. “You should ask her yourself. I can promise you, she’s more scared of you than you are of her. By the way — incoming customers. I’ll see you later, Sanmei.”

  As I turned to greet the couple who had just walked in, Sae carried her apron back into our employee room and shut the door. I wasn’t entirely surprised when I checked inside the room 20 minutes later to find it empty, despite the total lack of windows or doors to the outside world. This time I knew she’d done it on purpose, so that I would know for sure. I had to assume this was her admission that the remainder of Thursday night had actually happened, but what—if anything—that meant, I had no way of knowing.

  Esti was home by the time I got back from work that evening. I had thought of, and summarily discarded, at least a dozen ways of broaching the subject. In retrospect, I wish I’d given it more thought. Marching up to the couch and saying “My room, now,” might have given her the wrong impression. It certainly did Cassie, who’d been sitting next to Esti while she worked on something out of a notebook.

  “Ooh la la,” Cassie crooned suggestively. “Esti, are you wearing your collar tonight?”

  “Something tells me I probably should have!” Esti agreed, but at least she came with me willingly. I tried to ignore the laughter, but my face was burning as I led Esti into my room and shut the door. Without waiting for my prompting, she sat down bouncily on my bed, grinning cheekily. “I take it you’re interested in revisiting last Wednesday?”

  There are times when I wish there were such a thing for me as shutting my eyes and counting to ten. Unfortunately, eyes open or closed made little difference, so I just had to summon up patience and courage from somewhere else.

  “Let’s play a little game,” I said, seating myself more gracefully next to Esti. “Bear with me a minute. Let’s pretend this is our first time meeting and we’re being introduced by a mutual friend, someone who knows us both very well. We’ll both have to introduce ourselves, and we have to be honest because there’s someone nearby who’s going to pick up on any lies we might tell. Are you with me so far?”

  Esti blinked at me. “Uh, I think so. Can I ask where is this going?” Was it just my imagination, or did she seem abruptly nervous?

  I made an effort to smile reassuringly, the way I would around a customer put off by the coffeehouse’s unusual décor. “Please just play along. I’ll even go first.

  “What I would say is, ‘Hello, my name is Sanmei Long. I’m studying to become an emergency physician. I’m actually blind, but I have a form of synesthesia which allows me to function as if I could see, most of the time.’ “

  “Although you being blind is probably why you never close your eyes, even during sex,” Esti put in. I flushed brightly, but still took note that her grin seemed forced. She was trying to derail me.

  “Yes, but you don’t know that yet,” I chided her gently. “I would also say, ‘Sometimes I can even see things that most people normally could not. I can see that you’re wearing a blue bra,’ and darn you for not having something else I could use as an example. ‘Sometimes I can even get a picture of the people on the other end of the phone line. Or even in a video of Officer Orkin’s unfortunate last moments.’ “

  Esti’s eyes widened, but her reaction, otherwise, was far more tightly controlled than I would have expected. Only the soft hammering of her heart betrayed her. I could actually hear it thrumming steadily in her breast. She gave no response beyond a single very slight nod of acknowledgement.

  “If it helps, Sae is the mutual friend,” I added belatedly, reaching over and taking her hand. It wasn’t until I touched her that I realized how very tense she was, as if she were about to bolt from the room. Or disappear, the way Sae did. I had to admit I was dealing with things I had no comprehension of, which made her nervousness almost laughable. Sae had been right; I was far out of my depth. But I was trying.

  Esti swallowed. “Did she put you up to this?” she asked grimly.

  “She told me to ask you,” I affirmed, and then bravely added, “shortly before vanishing into thin air.” I didn’t add that I had reason to suspect it was the second time she had done that.

  Esti closed her eyes and let out a long, frustrated sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose. “That damn cat. Okay then. That’s a thing she does.” That last came out in a sarcastic sing-song tone. She opened her eyes and smirked ruefully, finally returning the pressure on my hand. “Did she tell you about Omiyage?”

  It didn’t occur to me to lie. I shook my head. “I don’t know who or what that is, so I don’t think so. I was kind of focused on you at the time.”

  “You do know how to flatter a girl.” Esti took a deep breath and let it out with an elongated “ohhh-kaaay.” Pursing her lips, she nodded to herself. “Alright then, I think I know how to approach this. Are you going to freak out if I show you something?”

  Surprised, I shook my head slightly. “I don’t think so,”
I said uncertainly. “Would it happen to be a pair of wings?”

  Esti simply nodded, closing her eyes. “And then some. If you have to make noise, try to make it sound like something I can brag about to Cassie later, okay?”

  Before I could even begin to formulate a response to that, Esti changed. There were no magic words or flashy gestures. She did seem to concentrate, but that was the only outward sign that what happened next was a conscious evocation on her part. The room darkened, shadows lengthening and curving toward the bed. I drew in my feet onto the bed, transfixed by the sight. Blind or not, I could tell when a room was dark, and although the ceiling light had been on for Esti’s benefit, that light was now choked by the ever-expanding threads of shadow which streamed like rivers of ink from every shaded surface. And then they detached from the walls and become three-dimensional.

  It was surreal. It was amazing. Afraid? No, I was in awe, a primal part of my brain reveling. I wanted to thrust my fingers into those ghostly streamers. No, I wanted to dance among them. It was real, every bit of it, and far more beautiful than I could have imagined. A thousand points of geometry converged and somehow I could see distinction between every one of them as they spun upon umbral vertexes, forming globules of darkness that drifted together like waves on an ocean of a thousand shades of black. It should have overwhelmed me, but instead I was delighted.

  I became aware that one of the places the shadows were meeting were upon Esti, joining to either side of her spine beneath her scapulas. She shrugged out of her shirt, pulling it over her head with practiced ease, and the translucent coils carved a tight spiral in the air around her. Somehow the murky threads wove together, knitting substance from their impossible, ephemeral nature. The wings I had seen, smaller than my vision of them through the video had suggested, took shape and stretched gracefully, revealing thin curving bones protruding against a gray fleshy membrane.

  My heart gave up its reins and I wept at the sight of them. I didn’t care that my method of sight was a hallucinatory trick of the mind. What I saw was beyond my comprehension and I ached to know more. Esti smiled and opened her eyes, revealing their serene blue depths to have changed to a carmine hue like that of blood. Her presence crashed over me and I fell backward, the swirl of tenebrous gossamer filling every ounce capacity I had to process anything. Esti was suddenly over me, straddling my waist and leaning down until we were face to face. I could do nothing to stop her, didn’t want to stop her. I yielded gratefully, waiting for rapture.

  Esti touched my lips with her fingers, then cupped my face in her hand and whispered a command: “Forget everything that you’ve just seen and everything related to it.”

  The shadows flared and converged on me, sweeping into my mind and drowning out everything in a haze of millions upon millions of ebony stars collapsing into an infinity of the void. Her power seized me without compromise and swept through my consciousness, scouring it clean. I breathed out, and with it came onyx. The room became lighter and the demoness once again took form in my mind, watching me expectantly.

  I wet my lips. “How could I ever forget this?” I asked, gently refusing the directive.

  Esti blinked and everything seemed to crash around us. The shadows receded, her wings evaporated into a short-lived black mist, and her eyes dulled to a soft blue again. She stared at me long enough that I had time to become conscious of her presence — in an entirely different and much more embarrassing manner.

  “Your memory wasn’t wiped just now, was it,” she uttered, regarding me in stunned horror.

  I inclined my head in confusion. Various emotions arose and played out as I returned her expression with its twin. “It was supposed to be?”

  We stared at each other. Then a snort of disbelief and exasperation broke the silence. Esti threw back her head and laughed softly, thin, almost choking giggles spilling out of her. “Well… shit!”

  “ ‘My name is Esti Maite. I was born in Italy to Basque and German parents, that much is true. What you don’t already know is that my father was a demon.’

  “A demon, or at least the kind I’m familiar with, isn’t a fallen angel or even necessarily evil. It’s the energy we feed off of and how we get it that gives us such a bad reputation. It requires doing something which puts the person in a state of high emotions and vulnerability. There’s a lot of ways to do that, but the ones that work best, you guessed it, are pain and sex, which is how demons got to be known as tempters and torturers. You can guess which one I lean toward.

  “Yeah… I fed on you Wednesday night. I needed the boost if I was going to hunt down Officer Asshole. I didn’t expect it to give you so much trouble, though! Usually I can feed from people and they don’t even notice it. Maybe wake up a little extra tired the next morning like they slept wrong, but that’s all. I don’t know why you were affected so badly, but I won’t do it again. Yes, that’s a promise.

  “Now then… I’m only half demon, so my powers aren’t as strong and I have to feed more often to use them. Powerful demons are changed by their essence, but mine is so weak that I look fully human unless I’m drawing upon it. The only big thing that separates me from you most of the time is the way I can put out pheromones that kick people’s libido into overdrive. Otherwise I have a few powers, but mainly illusions and hypnosis, and apparently neither of them work on you. I honestly have no idea why. I already knew you were someone special, Sanmei, but the way you interact with my powers is proof that there’s even more to you than I’d guessed. I’m serious! Okay, and maybe I was hoping you’d overlook that part if I flattered you enough. Sorry.

  “Sae is something else. I’m not even sure what she is, but no, she’s definitely not human. She has powers I seriously don’t even understand, but if she didn’t tell you about them, then maybe I shouldn’t either. It’s her privacy. The only thing I can say for sure is that she’s apparently able to transform herself, because the first time I met her, she was some sort of cat person with ears and a tail, and now she looks like any human.

  “Speaking of that: About Omiyage? Listen, I know you’re not going to like it, but I think it would be better if you didn’t pry into that. All you need to know is that it’s nothing that will ever hurt you or anyone you know. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s something that needs to be kept secret, at least for now. You’ve got a life that’s going to be full of plenty of excitement without Omiyage getting involved.

  “Tell you what. There are things that could happen which would make it better to know than not to know. I promise that if any of those things ever happen, I’ll tell you everything. Heck, I’ll show it to you firsthand. But I don’t see it happening unless your life winds up being ‘interesting’ in the way the Chinese meant it in their favorite little curse.

  “… No, I never used my pheromones on you. You’d know if I had. Well, because you’d have torn off your clothes and jumped me. Yes, they really are that powerful!

  “Is that a challenge? Oh, you are really going to regret this.”

  Chapter Five

  It was Wednesday morning, I was in class, and I, Sanmei Long, wanted to cause a scene. I wanted to scream and kick my feet and tell the instructor that what she was teaching was useless nonsense. I wanted to jump up on the tables and dance to relieve the boredom gnawing at my heels. Of course I did none of these things; I was just being completely and thoroughly melodramatic because despite everything I had seen and heard last night, today I was trapped behind a desk for the next several hours and then I had work for another eight. Sae had said I might regret not having my memory of her nature erased, but it was only now that I properly began to appreciate her warning. It was hard to carry this kind of secret alone, especially with how little impact it seemed to have made on my life. My outlook had changed completely, and yet here I was, surrounded by dozens of people who had no idea and never would.

  It had taken half the night and a hundred questions to get as much as I had out of Esti, and even then I felt like she’d held a lot bac
k, and not just the parts she acknowledged she didn’t want to tell me about for any number of reasons, some of which were even persuasive. The argument which carried the most weight was that apparently the presence of beings like Esti and Sae was a lot less pervasive than I might have thought, and it was entirely possible I could go the rest of my life without ever bumping elbows with anyone else who had even a dabble of the supernatural about them. Telling me about others would only make me wonder where they were, and the more people who knew of their existence and went looking, the more dangerous it could become for them. That was a legitimate concern.

  But even the circumstances in which I’d learned this made me wonder how many people like Esti were out there. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about her having killed Zackary Orkin — dangerous abuser or not, it was vigilantism at the very least. When the justice system failed people like Esti, how many of them took the law into their own hands? How many inexplicable deaths and disappearances were actually caused by predators and victims with powers that defied conventional explanations? There didn’t have to be many of them out there for their presence to have an impact on society. All it took was a single person to create a tragedy.

  Or avert one, I thought, remembering how close Orkin had come to killing Sophia, his wife, that afternoon. I think that was what clinched it. I couldn’t be sure whether calling the police and trying to get them to take a tip against a well-respected member of the outfit seriously would have had the desired outcome, or whether it would have exacerbated the situation to murder. I’d heard in my classes that domestic abuse frequently worsened when the abused partner tried to leave, and it seemed like someone with the resources of the police department could be especially dangerous to try and escape from. I couldn’t really blame Esti for wanting to make absolutely certain Sophia and little Jeffrey were safe.