Naomi needed me. She needed me now.
What could have happened? She was with my father, the Formyndari Hunter. She was in a house with another Lumi who was the center of attention. She couldn’t be much of a target.
She needed me now.
“I have to go,” I gasped. “Something’s wrong. I have to go.” I stepped into the shadow of the cabinet and shaded.
I found Naomi in my aunt and uncle’s breakfast nook, my little cousin watching her with shy solemnity.
“No, I’m not hurt,” Naomi was saying, and I pulled back just before I became visible, staying in the shadow of the drapes to her right.
“Then why are you crying?”
She dabbed at her running mascara with a napkin. “Because…” She sighed shakily. “Because my friend isn’t here and I miss him.”
I felt my fingernails dig into my palms. She had missed me enough to Call me here without even realizing it? Not uncommon for a befasted Lumi separated from her Shadow, but rare indeed for those not yet befasted. I swallowed a cold thread of panic. Could we have somehow…? No, I’d know if I was befasted. It wasn’t the sort of thing one mistook. This was probably a side effect of her presence at this ceremony, with its charged atmosphere and glut of bond-pairs.
She had Called me, and I had come, just like a good puppy. Now that I was here, she was calm, reassured — not consciously, just as she hadn’t consciously Called me, but her still-forming Compass had to be communicating my presence on some level, easing whatever panic attack had triggered it. I wondered what would happen when I left again.
I watched as she befriended my little cousin, not an easy feat. It was clear to me, though probably not to him, that she didn’t know what to make of his protean pre-covant appearance, but it didn’t seem to repell or unsettle her like it did so many others. I wondered what his big sister looked like now.
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
“I don’t have one yet. I’m only this many.” He held up four fingers.
“You don’t have a name? What do people call you, then?”
“My mommy and daddy call me Son. Or Sonny. My sissy calls me Pipsqueak.”
Of course she didn’t know how unusual it was that my parents had given me a name, a real human-style name with a birth certificate to back it up. My aunt and uncle were exceptionally old-fashioned in their disinclination to name their children at all — the more common happy medium was to use things like ‘Baby’ or ‘Junior’ or ‘Angel,’ things that could be written off as childhood nicknames — but they were not alone. When I played with Westley as a child, I called him Brother, because it was what his sister called him. His parents, like my aunt and uncle, just called their boy Son.
“For a girl,” Naomi was saying, “maybe Rachel or Elizabeth, or Lily. And for a boy… I don’t know.”
I wouldn’t be there when she had her baby. Would probably never know if it was a boy or girl, what she named it, whether she kept it. The thought didn’t hurt exactly. But it didn’t feel good, either.
“Duncan is naming my sister Joy,” my cousin was saying. “I think that’s pretty.”
“I think that’s pretty, too.”
I could hear my aunt’s distinctive gliding steps at the door. Unlike Naomi and my little cousin, she was experienced enough to very possibly notice my presence. I shaded back to the Orphanage dining room.
“Everything okay?” Westley asked.
“Yeah. False alarm.” I tried one more time to shake off the restless need to return to Naomi, along with the image of her face warming and brightening as she befriended my shy little cousin, and failed at both. “Give me that chart again. Let’s get back to business.”
NAOMI
Dinner had too many forks and not nearly enough fried chicken. My nervousness had crashed back, like a cold hat falling over my eyes, the moment I left the breakfast nook — but my appetite had survived unharmed. I ate as many buttered rolls as I could get my hands on, and gave the little boy my share of the fish-like substance with the orange sauce. Dr. DiNovi, on the other side of me, raised an eyebrow but looked more amused than offended. I didn’t dare check our hosts’ reactions.
At the head of the table, Damon’s Aunt Gloria sat on the left hand of a stately-looking man with gray hair at his temples, who kept glancing at the girl on his right with that Father of the Bride expression, mingled pain and joy. Joy, I remembered, was the Shadow girl’s new name. She was darling, a little curvy thing with golden curls and dimples, who seemed unable to release the hand of her new Lumi, a chunky-bodied, pleasant-faced boy about my own age. I thought it to the Lumi’s credit that he looked every bit as starstruck as she did.
After dessert — a creamy confection of dark chocolate and mint — we filed back into the main room, which had magically acquired rings of seating around a white circle of cloth on the floor. The air was charged, suddenly, buzzing with happy anticipation as we settled into our seats. Curvy little Joy and her Lumi stood in the white circle, her father standing between them.
I hadn’t paid attention to their clothes before, beyond noting that Joy’s white gown, loose and silky, was more like a kimono than a wedding dress. Now I could see than Duncan was dressed the same way, only in black. They each had red ribbons trailing from their necks and both wrists.
“White and black, of course, are for light and shadow,” Dr. DiNovi murmured to me, “and the red is for blood.” His voice went dry. “According to my son, they’re the three colors most associated with death in various cultures.”
Joy’s father was holding her hand; as I watched, the room went silent, and he transferred her hand to Duncan’s. “I surrender to you, Duncan Woods, son of Eve, this my only daughter, a child of Lilith, in the expectation of her care and keeping.”
Duncan’s voice shook a little as he replied, “I accept your daughter, this Shadow Joy, and do vow her care and keeping.”
A faint ripple of approval passed through the room.
“That was part one of the ceremony, the Naming,” Dr. DiNovi said quietly. “Next comes the actual befasting.”
Joy and Duncan knelt, and her father pulled out a knife, the kind that’s sharp on both sides, and said, “Synhaema.”
“Tenebrial,” Dr. DiNovi said. “Translates roughly as ‘blood together.’”
My eyes went wide. What exactly was about to happen here?
Duncan took the hand not holding Joy’s and offered it palm-up to Joy’s father, looking nervous and embarrassed but eager. “Synzoe.”
“‘Life together,’” Dr. DiNovi translated.
One side of the knife slid across the boy’s wrist, a shallow cut that bloomed bright with blood.
Shaky but smiling, Joy, too, offered a wrist. “Synthana.”
‘Death together.’
Her father turned the knife to the other edge for Joy. The line of blood across her wrist seemed darker than Duncan’s, but maybe that was a trick of the light.
“Synaeon,” Joy’s father said — ‘forever together’ — and looped a silver chain around the two bleeding wrists, now pressed together.
“That’s the important part,” Dr. DiNovi whispered. “The mingling of blood. Everything else is ceremonial.”
The couple stood, clinging to each other as if they had been separated for many long and difficult years, and the audience burst into cheers and applause. There was a strange tenor to it, and glancing around I realized that there was hardly a dry eye in the house. Several couples were embracing with as much fervor as the newlyweds — newlybefasts — and all the ones I could see were at least holding hands. Even Dr. and Mrs. DiNovi had arms around each other’s waists, looking at each other with the sort of goofy expression I could never have imagined on Helen’s face.
I missed Damon. Worse than last time, worse than anything ever, and I could not keep back sobs. I thought of him in a white circle, looking at another girl with Joy’s shining-eyed adoration, and wanted to be sick. No, he’s mine — he’s mine!<
br />
Rather like that awful dream. I felt cold with shame and misery.
He didn’t care anything for me. Even if he did, I’d have no right to claim him like a seashell on the beach, and I knew I shouldn’t want to. If he could be claimed that easily, he wouldn’t be Damon and I wouldn’t want him.
I wanted to claim him. I wanted him to look at me the way Duncan and Joy had looked at each other. The way he would have looked at Claire. But he never would. He wanted me gone from his life. Wanted me to leave him alone with the memory of the girl he’d really loved.
The cheering guests tossed a large circular cloth, heavily embroidered in red and black, over the heads of the newly befasted, and they disappeared in its shadow before it had settled to the ground. I cried harder, my hands clutching empty air, and knew mine were the only tears in the room with no joy in them at all.
DAMON
The second Call was even stronger, and it was even more essential that I resist it. She had to be at the ceremony proper by now, and I could not afford to do that to myself.
I withstood the Call the second time, though it left me gasping and clammy and weak. When I became aware of my surroundings again, I was standing in the Orphanage kitchen, bent over the sink with the water running. My face was wet; perhaps I had tried to counter the pain with cold water. It hadn’t worked.
There was a knife on the counter by the sink; two fingers on my right hand were touching it. It was one of our deboning knives, very sharp. You could cut yourself wide open and hardly feel it. Severe blood loss was one of the few things that could kill a Tenebri.
It would be like a befasting in reverse, to glide that knife over my wrists. If I held my hands under the running water, I was fairly certain I could achieve unconsciousness before I lost control and drained somebody. No mess to clean up, just a little pile of dust. I wondered who would find it.
The thought jarred me out of my trance. Which of my unlucky friends would get to sweep up my remains? Who would get to break the news to my parents? Who would get to tell Naomi that I would rather die than live with her one more day?
One more day. I can do that. I have to. One more day.
I pushed the knife away with one shaking hand and caught the reflection of my own eyes in the dark window.
Breach. Come on, do it. Breach. Breach.
CHAPTER SIX
Hell
NAOMI
If the DiNovis noticed my puffy eyes and runny mascara as we got into the car, they didn’t mention it. I knew I liked these people.
“I’m not sure how to ask this politely,” I said as we headed out of the driveway, “but how do they… get on in the world? People like the cat girl, I mean, and the Opposite-Sex Twins — surely they can’t be openly romantic — and even Martha. I mean, people have to notice eventually that she never actually has the baby.”
“Very few of the blatantly… unusual Shadows live out in society,” Dr. DiNovi said. “They follow the more traditional model.”
“Which is what?”
Dr. DiNovi sighed. “Shadow as… fantasy lover, imaginary friend, dearly beloved pet. You have to understand, Helen and I are quite progressive. When we married — well, for one thing, we married, in addition to befasting — I arranged a birth certificate and social security number for Helen. Our son was born at home, with a Shadow midwife, but the event was registered with all proper process. Both of them exist, legally and socially, as separate entities from me. It’s an idea that’s catching on, certainly, as society gets more controlled. Living off-grid is harder every year. But in the old days it was different. Helen might never have been seen by anyone but me, might have ridden around in my shadow all day and had no independent existence at all.”
“Sounds like a great set-up for case studies on how power corrupts,” I murmured.
“Yes, rather,” Dr. DiNovi said.
“But… why are Shadows secret at all? I mean, obviously they have to be now, unless they want to be vivisected in a Top Secret facility, but they’ve been around forever, right? Why aren’t they just an accepted fact, like gravity and the pyramids?”
“We were, once,” Helen said. “Mostly before written history. But people have always feared, and will always fear, those who can do things they can’t do. Particularly once you add out-of-control kathairna into the mix. Shadows have been called witches, demons, fairies, incubi… Outside of a few Lumilia communities, it became safer for Shadows to either pass as human, or stay secret. Given our usual natural reticence, the latter option saw more use.”
“And of course, the longer they stayed secret, the more they were a mystery, and that much more feared if they did break secrecy,” Dr. DiNovi added. “Something of a vicious cycle, really.”
I was quiet for a while, thinking. “Is that what Damon’s afraid of? Being forced into the — well, the shadows, for the rest of his life?”
“Among other things,” his mother said.
Another long pause. “How much does breach hurt?”
They glanced at each other uneasily. “A lot,” Dr. DiNovi said. “For the Shadow. Not for the Lumi, though, at least not exactly. I’ve heard it compared to surgery under not-quite-sufficient local anesthetic — you can feel that something strange and wrong is being done to you, but it doesn’t hurt, precisely. A Disney vacation, compared to what the Shadow goes through. If, ah… Should Damon breach, you’ll need to stay far away from him. There’ll be nothing you can do to help him, and he’ll be so out of his mind… well, it’s nearly certain he’d kill you.”
“Ah,” I said, and there the conversation rested, until they dropped me off at home.
.
I didn’t see Damon that night. I didn’t see him in the morning. I knew he was there — it was the same feeling as when he’d hidden from Jana at Movie Barn — and when I concentrated, I could even get an idea of his location in the room. But he didn’t show himself. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure I wanted him to; the befasting ceremony had brought up all manner of awkward things I wanted to say and couldn’t. But why was he was avoiding me?
Jana always gave me the Saturday morning shift, nine-thirty to twelve-thirty. Carmen was asleep when I left, and still in her pajamas when I got home, hunched over a bowl of Lucky Charms.
“Where’s Tall-Dark-and-Studly? I could stand to see him first thing in the morning.” Her voice was more cheerful than her sleep-heavy features would indicate.
I shrugged and attacked some loaf bread with a spoonful of peanut butter.
“Ooh, not talking. Trouble in paradise?” Carmen quirked an eyebrow.
“Just because we’re not joined at the hip doesn’t mean we’re not… it doesn’t mean…” To my horror, I felt my throat close up, and shoved some peanut butter sandwich into my mouth to cover the lapse.
Carmen cocked her head at me. “How did you meet this guy, anyway?”
I chewed, slowly, and swallowed. “He’s Dr. DiNovi’s son.”
“Dating the professor’s son. That might improve your GPA,” Carmen said approvingly.
“It’s not like that.”
“What is it like?”
“Right now it’s like standing on the ledge of a sixteenth-story window and looking down.”
Carmen’s eyebrows rose. “Fun.”
“Totally.”
She stirred her cereal. “You know, it’s not every day you find a guy who doesn’t care that you’re having someone else’s baby.”
“That’s it exactly. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care because he doesn’t care.”
“Um… What?”
I took another bite of sandwich, and tried to swallow it past the humiliating lump in my throat.
“For a guy who doesn’t care, he looked awfully pleased to have made you jealous Thursday night,” Carmen said.
“What?”
“When I was flirting with him and you were glaring lasers at me? He liked that. Not me flirting, you glaring. I would definitely take that as a compliment, if I was you.”
<
br /> “That’s — he can’t help that. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Yeah? Ask him.”
I stood up. “I’m going for a walk. I need to… organize my thoughts. So I can get that paper done.”
“Have fun,” Carmen shrugged.
I tried not to slam the door behind me.
I didn’t see Damon on the sidewalk. I didn’t see him the whole time I was walking, though I knew was with me. Usually behind and to the left.
When I reached the Ilium U campus, I sat down on a bench outside the English building, dark and abandoned this Saturday morning. I waited. And when nothing happened, I addressed the shadow of a Doric column to my right.
“Today’s the day, huh?” I said, and felt a Mack truck of Duh hit me in the head. Just maybe his silence today was related to the horrific event on the horizon that he probably didn’t want to think about and probably couldn’t help thinking about?
A figure formed in the shadow, dark and indistinct at first, then growing rapidly three-dimensional. His bright green eyes seemed to come in last, making him whole and real. “Probably today. It’s hard to say for sure.”
I was quiet a moment. “I’m trying to imagine anything more fun than waiting for catastrophic, soul-destroying pain to hit.”
He shrugged.
“I asked your father about it on the ride home last night. He said it wouldn’t hurt me. Not exactly comfortable, but not painful.”
“Good.”
There was a surprising amount of relief packed into that word. Heartened, I kept talking. “He said the best thing I could do for you when it happens is just stay far away. But I was wondering if there was anything I could do while we’re… waiting.”
“Not really. Westley’s getting things set up. The other orphans will take care of me. It’s not the first time we’ve helped someone through a breach.”
Breach. It sounded like the ground ripping dark chasms into itself. Like babies born the wrong way, killing themselves and their mothers both. Like broken contracts, shattered relationships, love and honor lost forever.
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