Innocence

by Samael Wolf

  Because he was right. Although Esti had been the one to put Zackary Orkin to death, the only reason she even knew of his existence was because I had told her about the abuse, and when it came down to it, how much did I really trust my judgment? I’d spent so much time trying to rationalize why I was okay with what Esti had done, surely that reflected on my own inner turmoil, a desire to know that what I had done was also justified. What if I hadn’t seen what I thought I had? What if, in fact, all the supernatural creatures I thought I was encountering was all in my mind and the abuse was just another figment of my overworked mind simply letting go of reality?

  “You’re a bad girl. You were naughty. You should be punished,” Jeffrey chimed in dully as I wavered, my determination to flee slipping away.

  But only for a moment. I looked upon the boy’s blank countenance and in light of that corpse-like vacuity, my inner crisis suddenly felt selfish and unworthy. No, I thought fiercely. I had worked this all out already and this certainly wasn’t the time to rehash a crisis of conscience. I didn’t know what his father was doing to him, but I doubted it would end well if I gave up now.

  I realized at that instant that Orkin was somehow manipulating my thoughts, forcing them down a path of despair and self-recrimination. As soon as I realized that, I could see the cord which connected the phantom and myself. As if it couldn’t abide my gaze, the cord retracted as swiftly as a whip, disappearing into the abyss that was his body. Watching it recede, a flash of welcome anger burned through me, dissolving my remaining uncertainty. I still no longer wanted to run, but now for an entirely different reason.

  “Let Jeffrey go,” I demanded, standing as tall as I could. I had no idea what I was doing, but the spirit rocked back, probably more out of surprise than anything.

  “The boy is mine,” Zackary hissed. The light radiating from him seemed to spin, splaying blotches of pale illumination over the walls. “Once I kill you, I’ll have them both forever. Nobody’s going to take them away from me.”

  I’d touched a nerve there, but he didn’t give me much chance to pry any deeper. This time I could easily see the tendrils that lashed out at me and I ducked and scuttled away as quickly as I could, wincing as I stepped on sharp plastic building blocks that I hadn’t noticed on the floor. Whatever they could do to me, I wanted no part of it!

  Undeterred, I did some lashing out of my own. “No one has to take them away; you lost them both when you started abusing them.”

  The phantasm howled in rage and it was suddenly all I could do to keep the tendrils away from myself. They struck like snakes at my face and chest, and I think if they’d done anything else, there would have been no way I could have avoided them for as long as I did. Everything slowed as they darted at me again and again, but my body could only react so fast and I was in a new environment which his son had unknowingly built into an obstacle course. It wasn’t long before my foot caught on something that looked like a small plastic barn and I lost my balance.

  I never hit the ground. Four cords embedded themselves into my torso. There was no pain, but my awkward descent halted as if I’d become tangled in an anchored rope. There was one sharp pulse, a sensation of being yanked upon, and then—

  Everything became darker, grayer, and less significant. It didn’t hurt; in fact, my body felt numbed. I couldn’t get my feet beneath me with the way the tendrils had me suspended, but I almost didn’t care. It felt similar to the morning after Esti had drained me of life and I had a suspicion that’s exactly what was happening, except this wasn’t intended to be harmless. Too late, I began to struggle in earnest, trying to find some point of leverage so I could pull the tendrils out of myself.

  Another pulse, this one more forceful and drawn out, as if all the blood in my body were drained all at once.

  My arms went limp as the strength was pulled out of my body. My vision shrank to a disorganized collage of muddied colors and then faded entirely as my senses failed, leaving me well and truly blind for the first time that I could remember. Terror sparked briefly before a third pulse seemed to rip the marrow from my bones and stole even that from me. I could no longer feel the cords or the pull of gravity upon my body, only a soul-crushing fatigue. Surely another pulse would end it, and at that moment, I couldn’t remember why that would be such a bad thing. I was ready to surrender and let it take me.

  Esti, don’t come looking for me, please—

  This time the pulse stole thought itself and I fell down deep into the pit of my own being, into the darkness behind my eyes which stretched on for eternity. I understood in the abstract sense that I had stopped breathing and was probably dying, but it seemed utterly insignificant. Even my concern for Esti was inconsequential. If she died to this phantasm, what did it matter? How could anything possibly matter? It was time to just… let go.

  Another pulse throbbed through me.

  I let go and fell past the point of no return. I felt my heart twitch feebly, unable to sustain life even a minute longer. There was nothing, no reason to care, no reason to hold on to myself. If anything, I was surprised I had lasted as long as I had. I had to die now. What more was left?

  The next pulse rocked me like the waves of an ocean, receding and then washing back to shore. It was almost soothing, but although I was consumed with the urge to rest, some perverse last ounce of something still kept me tethered to my failing body.

  Let go. Let it end already.

  This time the pulse hurt. Sensation flooded back into my limbs as if simply to let me feel it. I wanted to cry out in protest, but I didn’t seem to have a mouth, and the thoughts searing through my mind were barely my own. Was Orkin trying to make me a puppet like he had Jeffrey? If so, it felt like he was doing it all wrong. Rather than feeling my will steal away, I swear it was coming back. I could feel my jaw clench as another pulse rippled from one end of my body to the other, and this time I sensed confusion and rage behind it.

  If I wasn’t going to die yet, I might as well find out what was going on. With will I didn’t know how I still possessed, I forced my senses to respond and was rewarded with another flare of pain, but also lucidity, or at least enough clarity of mind to be baffled at what I ‘saw’ as my synesthesia managed to assemble a visual of what appeared to have thwarted my undue departure from the mortal coil.

  My body literally appeared to be on fire, but much like Zackary Orkin, I didn’t think it was a physical conflagration which consumed me. The flames shone brilliant white, and unlike the light trickling from the spirit, these did illuminate the room with incandescent radiance. Looking at my chest, the flames seemed concentrated most intensely around the tendril which penetrated my heart.

  Let go, the thought echoed again in my mind, but this time it lacked the siren song of defeat or the coercive acidity of the spirit. I realized Orkin was just as surprised as I was, but it wouldn’t last forever and I was still in a precious position. I forced myself to breathe and the pain of my heart giving a reluctant thump of grudging acquiescence nearly made me faint right there, but somehow the light wouldn’t let me recede into unconsciousness, and I wasn’t done yet anyway. I gulped air greedily while I could, then gathered myself into as tight a ball as I could and twisted.

  One cord snapped loose; I felt its departure like an icicle stabbing through my shoulder. One arm dropped loose and I forced it, through pins and needles, to grasp the tendril spearing me through my side. It felt like folding my hand around a winter breeze, but my fingers seemed to close around something physical all the same. Another twist and that came loose as well, and gravity seemed to do the rest. I slid to the floor and one more tendril slithered away from me as my body reporting a confusing array of injuries that weren’t really there, but I had no time to take stock of them.

  “You should be dead! You have to die!” Zackary Orkin screamed, and my newly reawakened vision obliged me with a glimpse of the last cord connecting us heart to heart and the bolt of black electricity surging through it toward me.

&nbs
p; I knew what to do just as surely as I knew that I’d only get one shot at this. I grasped the remaining cord in one hand and scooped purifying flames into the other. “It’s time to let go,” I panted as I slapped fire into the connection and sent it racing straight into his heart. The flames met the pulse of dark energy and consumed them, streaking into what passed for the phantasm’s body. I felt them hit, and in the span between heartbeats, I felt his life fall into my hands.

  Time came to a halt.

  In that tableau of clashing wills, I realized I had a choice. I could channel this power and burn Zackary Orkin from the face of existence. I could do as he had intended to do to me and draw his essence into myself, stealing his powers for my own. I could even draw upon the perversity wrought upon his soul and use it as a template for my own purposes, gaining dominion over death itself. In that instant, I held life and death in my grasp and understood how I could use either, if I should so desire it, to work wonders and miracles and terrors and abominations. There was something which had been done to him and I could touch it, draw upon it, and make it my own. Doing so would change me in ways that would be both great and terrible.

  I felt godhood within my reach. All I had to do was stretch out and claim it, and the consequences which befell the world in my aftermath would be a small price to pay for what I would be capable of doing thereafter. I’d aspired to become a doctor? I could remake the world so that illness and injury never again befell an innocent. I could create paradise and shape perfection out of chaos. The possibilities would be infinite, if I only dared expand my horizons.

  Let it go.

  I sighed regretfully and instead, while instinct still guided me, gave the spirit of Zackary Orkin a gentle reminder of what he had been and where he could yet go.

  Superheroes always have to make the difficult choice.

  Estilogue

  “I don’t think you get it, Sanmei! You exorcised an oppression. A young one, maybe, but still! You need to go to Omiyage so someone can train you in your gift, or who knows how—“

  Sanmei was having absolutely none of it and cut me off with a sharp gesture, flailing her hands in frustration. “I gave you my final answer the moment you said I wouldn’t be able to come back,” she said flatly, her expression pinched in a scowl. Given how reserved she normally was, I had definitely pushed her too far, so I shut my mouth and nodded. I didn’t like the odds of swaying her to my side after that. For Sanmei, an outburst like that was a sign she was well and truly upset, and that might mean I was well and truly fucked.

  I raised my hands in what I hoped she’d read as a conciliatory manner. “Okay, okay,” I said, trying to placate her. “We’ll figure something else out. Something that doesn’t involve having to leave. Okay? I’m sorry I pushed so hard for my solution. We’ll find a different one together.”

  Sanmei’s expression didn’t change, but she stopped flailing and huffed softly, turning away and busying herself by combing her hair using her fingers. No doubt about it, I was in the dog house tonight. This was my own fault for getting so attached to her. No, if I was being honest with myself, for falling in love with her. I wasn’t objective anymore, just a besotted idiot trying to have my way in every world I was involved in. I approached behind her and put my arms around her shoulders, resting my cheek against her hair. She didn’t do anything to make the gesture seem welcome, but she didn’t move away, either.

  “What is an ‘oppression,’ anyway?” Sanmei muttered after a few minutes of silence, and I sensed the worst of the storm had passed.

  I took my time in answering. This wasn’t information that would make her more curious about the supernatural world. It figured; now that she was asking questions, the answers were things that would probably make her less inclined to want to see more of the hidden world.

  “Oppressions are like corrupted ghosts, I suppose. Angry spirits covet or resent life, but oppressions want to dominate it. They do that by sucking out people’s willpower and turning them into puppets. The older they are, the more puppets they can make and control at once. They get a spark of the Great Negative in them and it lets them absorb energy from others, and the more they eat, the bigger that spark becomes. Count your lucky stars that they usually get destroyed long before they have a chance to get very large.”

  She sighed quietly, leaning back against me. “ ‘The Great Negative.’ What a rabbit hole this is. Every time you answer one question, you leave me with two more.”

  I squeezed her reassuringly, while inwardly I was busy calculating. I wanted to tell her everything, but there was still so much she didn’t know, and parts of it could turn your hair white, sometimes literally. I doubted she’d appreciate how much I left out when I answered her questions, but in some cases, knowing something was as dangerous as confronting it face to face. I hadn’t told her who created the oppressions, for example. Knowing wouldn’t do her any good, especially if she wasn’t willing to run to the ends of the earth and beyond.

  Let’s just hope it was a coincidence that she encountered one so close to home. If the Beast is here, then both of us are probably already dead and this is an elaborate fantasy he’s made for us to spin our wheels in while he does something awful to our souls.

  “I’ll tell you as much as I can about anything you want to know,” I finally promised, which was as worthless an oath as I had ever made, but it was the best that I could do. “Omiyage could tell you more, but that’s a moot point now.” I felt her tense as soon as I said it and cursed myself. This was going to be delicate treading for awhile. “Moot, I said. I’m not saying you should go or not. I just mean it is a school dedicated to this sort of thing, and I only know so much myself.”

  She nodded tersely and changed the subject. “You’re sure that Jeffrey’s going to be okay?”

  We both knew he was, but I said the right things and we discussed more harmless subjects for awhile before she excused herself to go to bed, understandably tired after the day she’d had. I’d arrived after the fact to find her upstairs, cradling the kid in her arms like a sleeping baby. He’d been drained badly, but the damage wouldn’t be permanent. He’d feel like crap for a few days and then get over it, and I’d already done my part to ensure he wouldn’t ask any inconvenient questions later on.

  I retired to my room and flopped down on my bed, resisting the urge to roll around in my hair and throw a hissy fit. I’d been warned, hadn’t I? Oh, I’d certainly been warned. They’d said she wouldn’t want to leave home, that she had a life here on this world and I wasn’t to do anything which could take that away from her. It was my own damned fault for falling for her and winding up so entangled in that life that I’d be lucky if I didn’t wind up living out the rest of my life here.

  Shutting down that part of my mind, I tried to focus on how I was going to compose my report for the next opportunity when I got a window between worlds to send a transmission back to Omiyage. None of us had counted on so much happening here, much less in such a short span of time. I had been intended to just watch and report back if I saw signs that other people were taking an unhealthy interest in Sanmei, combat supernatural threats and keep her safe, happy, and hopefully completely ignorant of the larger picture. Now she had been threatened, was most certainly not happy with me, and far too sharp on the uptake for comfort.

  I groaned and pinched the bridge of my nose. Oh, right. And the Beast might be hunting her.

  What in the hells am I going to tell her sister?

  Words from the Author

  In the mid to late 90s, a hapless newbie stumbled on a website called WBS.net and discovered a chat room dedicated to a form of collaborative storytelling and it was all downhill from there. I logged into Nia’s Tavern whenever I possibly could, but it wasn’t until WBS was purchased by Disney-ABC and its chat infrastructure underwent heavy renovations that my writing hobby became a driving passion. I grew up writing stories with people, generating hundreds of thousands of words every week in TocTik’s Bar and Grill and othe
r roleplaying venues. Alas, people grow up, grow apart, and nothing stunts online collaboration more surely than the calling of adulthood.

  It turned out that I’m not very good at growing up, so when the roleplaying rooms closed and people went their separate ways, I kept writing and writing, and eventually I had… a big ol’ pile that better resembled a mess than a novel. I gave it a good long look one day and decided I’d really like to do something with it and this was the result.

  I moved to Seattle a few years and fell in love with the city, so it didn’t take long to establish it as the central location for this book. Some of the locations are based upon real places; for example, the No-Name Coffeehouse bears a suspiciously strong resemblance to the Wayward Coffeehouse, but similarities end with the theme. If coffee and vegan sandwiches in a shop paying homage to science fiction sounds like your kind of thing, why not stop in? You might even see me there.

  Follow me on Facebook for announcements and discussions at DragonEyesNovels.

  I’d like to thank the following people for their support:

  Nicole, Rebecca, and the Deranged Magpie for being my beta testers (that’s what the hip kids call it these days, right? My mom says I’m cool…)

  AziSpaz for the awesome cover art

  The many good people of #creative for their endless words of encouragement

  All my friends, for their ceaseless patience when I babble about my projects

  And [your actual name here], for being an awesome audience

  In my defense, I was left unsupervised!