“Most of the time? Some of the time? Maybe,” Johnny said. “But not always. You’re lying to yourself about who and what he is.”
Johnny’s doubts lanced Fana so deeply that she had to take a breath. Knowledge was hiding in her that she still wasn’t ready to see.
But she couldn’t keep living with paralysis in the face of Michel’s superior gifts. Michel didn’t want to control her the way he had ridden Johnny and the others, or he would have already. Michel’s memories had shown her how he hated his father’s control of his mother. The Shadows had devoured much of Michel’s conscience, but not that. Not that.
Fana wanted to pass her belief on to Johnny as a gift, but she couldn’t. He would never give her permission to massage his mood, and she wouldn’t do it in secret. If she did, how could she expect Michel to respect the sanctity of her thoughts and will?
Instead, Fana leaned closer to Johnny, brushing her face against his scent of life from the garden. Before she realized it, she’d pressed her lips to his, kissing him. Her kiss lingered.
Fana had often thought about kissing Johnny. In her imagination, his lips were not so dry. So firm and unyielding. And the beating pulse in his lips would have been from desire, not the steady drum of fear. In her imagination, his lips hadn’t tasted of salt water.
Johnny pulled away. “Don’t,” he said, his voice agony.
“Wisely spoken,” her father’s voice said.
Another surprise. Dawit and Fasilidas were watching from her doorway. Fasilidas was muting his disapproval, but not her father. Johnny stood abruptly and walked away from her, hands deep in his pockets, his head down. Johnny’s anger was bright and hot.
“Does Michel have your singer?” Dawit said.
I don’t know yet, she told her father silently. But I’ll find out.
Johnny whipped around and took three quick strides to Dawit, giving his shoulders an abrupt shove. “You call yourself her father?” Johnny said. “A warrior? She’s giving herself to that monster! What the hell are you going to do about it?”
Her father tolerated Johnny’s push the way he would have humored a toddler.
Fasilidas bristled at Johnny’s disrespect toward the man he considered the Blessed Father, but Fana sent him a mental pulse to keep his distance. This was a private argument.
“I respect my daughter’s choice—do the same, youngster,” Dawit said. As Fana had hoped, there was compassion in his voice. “Who besides Fana has cause to loathe Michel more than I do? I trust her intuition. Life’s machinations are bigger than you or me.”
Johnny … Fana called to him, but what else could she say to him? She felt such a strong compulsion to massage his emotions that it frightened her. She couldn’t interfere with the minds of the people close to her, especially Johnny’s. Wouldn’t Michel feel the same compulsions with her? He would not treat her better than she treated others.
Johnny did not look back at her before he stormed out of her room.
Fana’s mind was blank. Stripped.
Dawit took Johnny’s place on the pillow, sitting gently. He held Fana’s hands.
“This is grief—what we feel after a death,” Dawit said. “Loss. Leaving. I would bear it for you if I could, Fana. It’s the bitterest taste of all. I believe this is why Khaldun tried to protect me and my Brothers here. We would lose nothing. Risk nothing. But now we’ll never know what we would have been.”
Thanks, Dad, Fana said.
Why hadn’t she realized how much it would hurt to leave Johnny behind?
Eighteen
A canopy of conifers’ spindly needles blotted the sky in deep, soothing green. Filtered light painted crisscrossing mazes against the stoic trunks gathered around Fana like sentries. Remnants of new rain sparkled in the trees, crowns of jewels.
Fana knelt to touch the damp soil’s blend of earth, pebbles and dead leaves and twigs melting back to their beginnings. She held the soil to her nose. Breathed it.
Home.
“You miss the woods,” he said. Directly behind her.
Fana had allowed herself to forget why she was back in her woods in Washington, in the five-hundred-acre backyard of her childhood home. A year ago, she had made herself forget the sound of his voice, which had been one of his best instruments. His dash of an Italian accent, which sometimes sounded more Hispanic, depending on his mood. The mature, seasoned timbre. Michel’s voice was hard to listen to.
She had found her fiancé.
“Yes.” Fana answered quickly, even brightly, hoping to compensate for her unwillingness to turn her head and look at him. “I told you, I grew up in the woods. Until I was seventeen, this was all I knew.”
There had been her mother’s clinic in Botswana, of course, but there wasn’t much about those days she wanted to remember. Forgetting was a mercy given the very young. She remembered enough.
“But I don’t have to tell you that,” Fana said. “You’ve seen.”
“A glance.” He sounded closer. He was only a yard behind her. “Too quickly.”
Michel had chosen the meeting place because Fana had called for his thoughstreams, and now Michel had merged them seamlessly, like warm fingers slipping into a glove. He might have allowed her to pull away from him, but she didn’t try. She had shut him out too long.
He had found her woods. Fana recognized the pathways in the gaps between the trunks, the fallen branches that smelled like sap, the rings of saplings. In the periphery, she saw the faint lances of orange light that fenced the property, the firefence that should have kept her and her family safe. But not from him.
He was roaming inside her. He saw everything he had burned to the ground.
“I did not set the fire,” Michel said. Then he corrected himself. “But, yes, I caused it.”
To him, an admission was an apology. He sighed, and this time he sounded farther away. Fana was glad when he retreated. He had promised not to touch her—to try not to, she recalled—but he might forget his promise if he was too close to her. She could feel how much he wanted to touch her hair.
“I could appear to you as one of your chatter monkeys,” Michel said.
“Too silly,” she said, almost smiling. Already, she might think about Michel every time she saw a chatter monkey now. An unwelcome association.
“I don’t mind being silly for you,” he said.
“No. But thank you for offering.”
Would she be this painfully polite in life? Maybe all of Teka’s meditation had only been preparing her for banter with Michel. She could have done this a long time ago! If she’d believed she could face him sooner, the plague victims might not have died.
But it would not be this easy in Mexico. Nothing was quite the same in the physical world. The world below was so far away already! No wonder the dead forgot where they had been unless someone called for them, and often even then.
“I won’t show myself to you here,” he said. “If you prefer.”
“Thank you,” she said. “That would be helpful.”
Fana quickly turned her head, testing him. He kept his word—he was nowhere in sight. Only the trees lined up behind her. The creek bed was swollen with gurgling rain racing toward her house. She could almost see her house’s wood planks through the maze of tree trunks.
“Shall I change my voice?” he said on the breeze. “You can hear any voice.”
“I’m used to your voice now,” she said. “It’s all right.”
Red hibiscus flowers appeared in the branches, Michel’s own creation. She loved hibiscus plants, but they had never grown wild on their property in Washington. Michel gave her a sea of blooms in red, pink, gold, and orange, the colors of dusk.
“I love hibiscus flowers too,” Michel said. “But there is sadness in them. The blooms last only a day, and then they die. Fiery beauty for a gasp of time.”
Yes. That was how their meeting had been. Beauty destroyed by lies. She wouldn’t let his flowers make her forget why she had come.
“Stop the outbreaks,
Michel.”
Michel didn’t answer. For the first time, she wished he weren’t invisible, that she could see his thoughts on his face. Nothing stirred in the wind to show his mind.
While she waited, Fana followed the creek, walking down the path. Toward the knoll.
Fana stopped at the edge of the woods, still sheltered by trees. She was fifteen yards from the wooden steps to the kitchen’s back door. The kitchen light shone brightly through the closed curtains, and purposeful shadows moved beyond the curtains. Gramma Bea’s biscuits were baking in the stove, a perfection of scents. If Fana had been alone, she would have gone to the kitchen to sit with Gramma Bea and talk for a while. Yes, Fana knew why her mother loved her Dreamsticks—but too many memories were a distraction. It was so taxing to live in two places at once, shuttling between realms.
“Please stop the outbreaks, Michel.”
“I heard you,” he said gently, as if it pained him to hear her beg.
A breeze blew through the treetops, whistling in the pine cones. The whistle seemed to call for her, from her left. Behind her again.
“Come,” Michel said.
Fana followed the song in the wind. When they climbed over the knoll, they saw that the woods had been replaced by a wide river the color of mud. They stood at the center of the bridge, looking at the city spread before them on both riverbanks. Apartment buildings that were hundreds of years old stood crowded on cobblestone streets.
At the corner marketplace, a loud bidding war for a large goose broke out, a dozen men and women shouting over one another. Glass crackled as something broke beneath them. The cars and miniscooters looked like they didn’t belong near the ancient buildings, their exhaust misting the air. Cars’ honks dueled with the seagulls’ wails. And beyond the physical sounds, the mingled thoughtstreams sounded like shrieking. Like a creature in pain, or in a panic.
“I always lived near cities,” Michel said. “Such a racket. Especially at night.”
Fana was glad she hadn’t grown up in a city. How would she have tolerated the noise? Her own house had been hard enough, with her mother’s nightmares about her dead sister keeping her awake. Mom had been facing down her regrets in her dreams long before she’d rediscovered Dreamsticks in Lalibela.
A bright royal-blue curtain blew like a flag from a second-story balcony just beyond the bridge. Michel’s squat shadow walked toward the billowing curtain, so Fana followed him in the bright afternoon light. The building was better kept than its neighbors, its white paint new. The curtain was gilded with gold that gleamed in the sunshine.
Boys’ conspiratorial giggles sprayed from the open window.
Suddenly, Fana knew the place, the river, the corner market, and the bright blue curtains. She had seen this place in Michel’s memories before.
Two boys in short pants playfully tussled over a soccer ball on the balcony. One child was pink skinned, the other the color of bronze. The darker boy’s hair grew to his shoulders in a mound of springy black curls. Both boys were beautiful.
The soccer ball fell to the street twenty feet below, and the boys rushed to the balcony in time to see it crushed beneath a truck’s tire. The truck spat out black smoke. They cursed at the driver in Italian. Then they went back inside.
“On weekdays, Papa brought me with him to his apartment where he met his women disciples,” Michel said. “Twenty at a time, sometimes. But there was one in particular he liked, Constanza, and she always brought her son, Nino. When we ate our rosemary bread or ricotta e cioccolato—oh, that wonderful cake!—Nino dutifully said ‘Bless the Blood’ over his food while his mother communed with divinity, or so she hoped. But Nino was my first good friend. I didn’t think of him as a mortal. There was no prophecy, no Letter. Just boys playing.”
He sounded mournful.
“Yes,” she said. “I had a friend like that—Moses. When I was three.”
The streets suddenly fell utterly silent, even the seagulls near the river.
Then a cry pierced the quiet. A child’s shriek of terror, or agony, or both.
“I let him see me fly,” Michel said. “Just to the ceiling fan, I thought. To amuse him. Papa had told me never to show off to the mortali, but boys love showing off. ‘I can do this,’ or ‘I can do that.’ Boys play that game in every language. But Nino was shocked. He went as pale as the dead. He cried out as if he’d seen the devil himself.”
Wind kissed the nape of Fana’s neck, and she couldn’t tell if it was Michel or the storm brewing just north of them, where the sky brooded dark. Were the clouds hers, or Michel’s?
“He threw a lamp at me,” Michel said. “The way one would at an insect, or a bat. Only when I was angry, really angry, did I let myself feel how much I enjoyed his fear.”
The shrieks in the room changed tenor, the pitch rising. More pain than fear. A child’s cry of Per favore! Per favore!
Fana did not want to see Michel hurt his friend. She turned away.
“For me, I put my friend in a coma when he teased me,” she said. “Then, a storm. A hurricane. People I’d never met …”
Cold rain fell on them. Michel’s warm breath huffed against her cheek as he instinctively pulled her closer, giving her a canopy against the rain. Gently, he steered her back to the bridge.
“Yes, I know,” he said. “But others before that, no? All when you were three. You must have been confused, to have been so young. I’d had an accident with a nanny before Nino, but that was different. I didn’t really understand. After Nino, I had an appetite.” The wind whispered the last word, appetite. “Papa told me my appetite would make me strong. So he fed me—and it did.”
Fana did not remember having an appetite, but maybe that was why she’d shut down for so many years as a child, fleeing to her head. Maybe Khaldun had joined her thought planes to help her forget the appetite the Shadows had shown her. But why hadn’t Khaldun ever told her about Michel? Why hadn’t he helped Michel, too?
They had reached the center of the bridge again. The city now looked more a life-size painting, everything frozen, the colors brightened. Instead of storm clouds, the sky was awash in strokes of light like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The two boys were leaning over the balcony, frozen in solidarity as they waved their fists at the truck. Michel was a painter, she realized.
“No further outbreaks,” he said, “until you come.”
“And after I come?”
“I have conditions too,” he said, ignoring her question.
Fana waited. He had waited a year, so she could be patient with his conditions.
“Stop defiling the Blood,” he said. “No more concert spectacles.”
“Until I come.”
“Yes,” he said, reluctant. “Until you come. And …”
He didn’t have to say Johnny’s name. His voice told her.
“Were you watching me?” Fana said.
“I smell him on you.”
The waters below them rippled as if from a school of feeding fish: Michel’s anger.
Fana wrestled with embarrassment. “A goodbye kiss,” she said. “You’ve had others.”
“When you come, there won’t be others,” he said. “How could there be?”
“I promise you, Michel—no one will touch me.” In the physical world, her voice would have been shaking with unmistakable resolve.
The wind sighed, far from satisfied, and the waters’ rippling spread to a bigger ring. Nothing would be gained by talk of touching. Still, she pleased him every time she spoke his name. Naming him was a small enough courtesy.
“I shouldn’t have kissed him, Michel,” Fana said, and the waters calmed.
A confession could sound like an apology. Kissing Johnny had felt like a mistake from the moment their lips touched—because it had been so unfair to Johnny. Unfair to her.
“I don’t want to think about him when I’m with you,” she said. “If that’s all right.”
“That would make me happiest, Fana. If you don’t think about him,
I’ll forget him too.” He spoke gently enough, but the threat hung in his words.
The woods reappeared on the other end of the bridge. He was inviting her to return to her own thoughtstreams. Light glowed from the kitchen window, where the curtain had been pulled back. Someone inside was watching her.
“You can show yourself now,” Fana said.
And so he was there—standing beside her on the bridge, three inches taller, his smooth hands folded across the railing as he stared down into the calm waters. She had made herself forget how handsome he was, too. His honey-colored face was hairless, his lips faintly pink, dark eyelashes as full as a child’s. Shiny black ringlets of loose, springy hair cradled his ears. The sight of him also brought scents: clove cigarettes and mango.
His face pricked her, hard. He was Charlie.
Despite everything, he still seemed to be the persona he had created for her to love when she had run away from the woods: a brave teenage mortal risking his life on the Underground Railroad. Her beloved phantom had been molded in Johnny’s image, but she had loved Michel’s face first. Michel had known whom she wanted before she did, fooling her the way her father had fooled her mother. History repeats, she remembered.
Fana glanced at him sidelong, careful to move no closer. “Hello, Michel.”
“Hello, Fana.” His eyes swallowed her before they skipped back to the water. “I’m sorry I was so … terrible … to you. To your family. I became the creature Nino saw when he threw the lamp at me. I will not be that creature again. Not with you.”
Michel’s voice was so weighted with shame that the wind could barely lift it.
His idealized painting of Tuscany faded in the rising mist. A joyless castle appeared before them on a mountaintop, the sole structure visible in the fog. She had dreamed of it once.
“Let Phoenix go, Michel,” Fana said.
“I never sent for her,” he said. “A network is a living thing, with a mind of its own.”
“Then don’t interfere when we find her,” she said. “I won’t come to you until Phoenix, her husband, and her son are free.”
“She’ll be free,” he said. “As long as you don’t use her to defile the Blood.”
My Soul to Take Page 18
