by Jenna Kernan
“No.”
She shifted in her seat, uneasy now. “You’d make an excellent thief.”
“I suppose, if I lacked a moral compass. I’m an FBI special agent, remember?”
She didn’t smile. “And you’d make a fine rapist.”
Cesar couldn’t let that accusation slide off his back so easily. “I don’t use my powers to take advantage of women. I use them to help find bad guys.”
She held his gaze for a good long while and he glared back, waiting for her to call him a liar. It was a deal breaker. He didn’t need her or anyone else badly enough to have them call him that.
“All right then, Soul Whisperer, Truth Seeker and the invisible man.”
“Memory Walker.”
“Cesar?” She stared earnestly at him and he wondered what else she could possibly want to know. “Before, when you mentioned not learning you were a Soul Whisperer until after you hit puberty?”
He knew he was sitting across from her, but he also saw ahead to what she was about to say and at the same time, back to the day he learned what he was. He didn’t want her to go there, to finish what she started, but he sat there in mute silence waiting for her to ask, fearing for her to ask, knowing she would ask.
“What where you about to say, before you stopped yourself?”
He paused, feeling the familiar clamping down in his gut as he lowered his shields against such invasions.
Cesar exhaled through his nose as if trying to remove a dreadful stink from his nostrils.
Her voice was a low whisper. “I think you must have touched a dead body. Am I right?”
He lifted his water glass, all that was left to him by the overzealous waitstaff, and took another swallow, but was unable to dislodge the lump in his throat. Most days he only thought of Carlos a time or two. But some days were worse.
He read sympathy in her encouraging smile.
“Who was it, Cesar?”
He fiddled with his tie clip for a moment, trying to decide. It would be good to say it out loud to one who understood some of the issues faced by Halflings. He gave himself permission to tell her part of it.
“We were living among the humans in Illinois. Just three families, Dream Walkers, Truth Seekers and a few Peacemakers. My dad was a Truth Seeker and my mother a Dream Walker. He was elected to the state judiciary and she worked in a hospital. They supposed that we would have one of their gifts.”
If she wondered who “we” included, she did not ask, just sat still as he went on. He drew his napkin through his hands, strangling it beneath the snowy white cloth, trying to pretend she wasn’t listening.
“That’s usually the way. I manifested the Truth Seeker gift very early. Niyanoka are born with our gifts, but my brother, Carlos, did not seem to have one.”
There, he’d said his name aloud. He glanced at her. Bess kept her steady dark eyes fixed upon him, but did not interrupt or try to fill the long silence.
“It troubled my parents greatly. My father used his ability to ask Carlos if he had any powers and my mother walked in his dreams, but his capabilities remained a mystery. I tried once, but I got such a headache I had to quit.”
“Strange,” she said. “Our second form comes only after we are grown.”
“Spirit Children occasionally develop late. It is not unheard-of, but it caused a strain. We moved a lot. There is a ten-year maximum per locality for Niyanoka with children, twenty if you don’t. Keeps folks from noticing that we don’t age.”
Bess nodded her understanding of this. Likely she moved around as well. “But my parents were ready to leave early. I’m not sure if it was because they were embarrassed about Carlos or because they were both ill. Our healers suggested a different climate. Carlos didn’t want to leave his friends, human ones. He didn’t understand yet that such friendships were temporary. We moved and Carlos was miserable. He didn’t like the small town in Georgia. There was nobody his age close by. I was fourteen, was interested in girls and I didn’t want him bothering us.” He pressed his hand over his mouth as the wave of grief made his stomach flip. He closed his eyes at the memories.
He’d never told anyone this much, not a human or a Spirit Child. Yet here he was about to spill his guts. He pulled back, clamping his lips tight and shaking his head. He wouldn’t say it aloud. Not to her. Not to anyone.
His coffee arrived and the waiter confirmed that she did not want coffee or tea, then deposited her cobbler and vanished into the crowded room.
The steaming coffee nearly burned him as he tried to swallow it. Bess did not touch her cobbler and seemed more intent on his story.
Cesar thought about what came next and the black grief rushed in like a rising tide, swallowing him whole. Then Bess laid a hand upon his and his breathing got easier. A gentle calm rippled out from the point of contact, carrying with it the recognition that her curiosity came only from concern for him.
She released him, sitting back. One look at her and he knew she had not come away from the brief touch so well. She clamped her jaw, working the muscle there as he took in how pale she now looked.
“Finish it,” she whispered, keeping her intent gaze upon him. Her eyes told him that she already knew.
He recognized that she had experienced his grief as he had absorbed her serenity. He didn’t want her to know what happened next.
It occurred to him only then that he could tell her and then afterward make her forget the conversation. He could unburden himself, release the demons he carried locked in his heart and let one person know how deeply he bled. Then he could take back the memory, reabsorb the tiny bit of energy that held those recollections, so that she did not have the power to use this information against him.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll finish. This was summer, 1893. My friends and I built a tree house way up in a big old oak behind the house. I wouldn’t let Carlos up there. It was off-limits. He tried to talk me into letting him up, but I chased him off. Told him it was his fault we had to leave our old home.”
He rubbed his temples. She reached for him again, but he lifted his hand to stop her.
“Don’t. I can do this without your help. Carlos left the house that night.” Cesar’s voice broke. “He climbed up into that damned oak tree and shinnied out on the limb.”
“Oh, Cesar. No.” She reached again.
He pushed his chair back, evading, while needing to hurry to get this out before the tears choked him. “I heard him scream and I was the first one there. When I touched him I could see from his eyes. I thought I was falling.” Cesar pressed his hand over his eyes at the memory, still feeling that drop. “I let go then, not understanding what was happening.”
He removed the protective cover of his hand and stared at her, needing her to understand that terrible day. The day he lost his brother and discovered what he was.
“I was touching my first corpse and I was experiencing his death. I started screaming for Mom and Dad. I told them how he fell.”
Cesar used his index finger to follow the crease in the center of the tablecloth but in his mind, it was over a hundred and twenty years ago and he was crying in the wet grass beneath the great oak with the fireflies blinking all about him.
He spoke just above a whisper, the shame choking him, but he forced his words past the clamping fingers of disgrace. “When I told them all that, my father thought I’d been there and I hadn’t stopped Carlos. He attacked me, slapped me in the face while my mother screamed. I tried to tell him that I didn’t know until after I’d touched him. If I had understood what would happen next I would have let him beat me, kill me. Anything would have been better than having them discover what I was.”
“You didn’t know until that day you were a Soul Whisperer.”
He lowered his head. “You have to touch a body to know. My father figured it out. When he had me by the neck, he read the truth. It was as if I had suddenly become contagious. He leaped away and dragged my mother back toward the house. ‘Whisperer,’ he told her,
and pulled her inside. I wasn’t welcome under their roof after that.”
“But you were only fourteen.”
He shrugged. “My parent’s told the cops that I had pushed my brother to his death and they arrested me.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I learned about my memory gift in reform school. Came in handy to erase the guard’s memories.”
“What about your parents?”
“I haven’t seen them since that night.” He finally lifted his head and saw her pitying expression. That ripped a new hole in him. Thank God she wouldn’t remember this conversation. He couldn’t stand to see that look again.
“But you did nothing wrong. I don’t understand how they could abandon you.”
“It’s just custom. Soul Whisperers are unclean.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“They do. They all do. I lost my mother and my father and my little brother all in one day. I wish I could tell him…?.” His voice failed him and he rubbed his knuckles over his mouth while he composed himself. “I wish I had let him up in that damn tree house. It was such a pointless way to die.”
“Cesar, it was an accident.”
He tapped his index finger on the lip of the saucer, impatient at being told the obvious. “I know that.” He hadn’t meant for his voice to sound so sharp. He reined himself in. “Accidents can be prevented. I could have…” He shook his head. Carlos was gone and he couldn’t do a damned thing about it, then or now.
His stomach heaved and he realized he was a breath away from humiliating himself by puking. He clamped a hand to his mouth, pinched his eyes closed and swallowed hard.
Cesar’s other hand remained on the table and it was a small reach for Bess to place hers upon it. Sympathy danced over him like warm summer rain. Their eyes met.
She sat back. He watched her hand retreating to her side of the table.
“Thanks,” he said.
She nodded.
He noticed his damned hands were shaking. He drew them around the coffee cup.
Bess’s shoulders were uncharacteristically hunched over and she looked grim as if bone-weary from what he had told her or was it from what she had felt when she touched him? When she touched him again, he’d take back his memory.
“You’re very hard on yourself. Teenagers make mistakes. It’s what they do best. They are also self-absorbed. It’s hardly surprising that you were not mindful of Carlos’s needs. Your brother would not want you to hurt like this.”
“His pain was worse.”
She stared at him with those dark eyes, wide and full of compassion. “If you could speak to him, what would you say?”
“What difference does that make now?”
“Humor me.”
“I’d ask his forgiveness. I’d tell him I miss him still.” How he got the words past the squeezing fingers of grief that clamped around his vocal cords, he did not know.
Bess leaned forward, reaching across the white linen tablecloth to grasp his hand. He met her partway, allowing himself to experience the gentle comfort of her touch. Just a moment longer, he told himself, knowing that while he was bathed in her compassion, she suffered the burden of the visceral pain tearing through him.
He stroked his thumb over her knuckles and closed his eyes, searching for where she had hidden their conversation, finding it easily. Then he concentrated on calling the energy back to him. An instant later he pulled back, forcing a smile.
“How do you feel?” he asked. He knew the process of retrieving a memory could leave the other person feeling momentarily disoriented or even sick.
“Fine. Well, sad, of course.”
Some people retained the emotion of the conversation if not the details, so her feelings were hardly a surprise.
She gave him a quizzical look. No wonder, since she likely didn’t recall the past several minutes.
“How’s that cobbler?”
She frowned. “I’m not sure… Cesar, are you all right?”
“Me? Why?” He held his brittle smile like a mask before him, but the dread was already creeping through him like poison.
“Because I don’t understand. One moment you are telling me about your little brother and the next you’re asking me about cobbler.”
Chapter 7
She remembered all of it. Cesar fell back in his seat so hard that the wood gave way. The crack sounded like a rifle report and the vibrations seemed to reverberate in his ears like white noise.
He couldn’t take it back.
The realization slapped him in the guts. His mouth went dry as he hardened his lips into a grim, tight line and straightened.
“Cesar? You’ve gone pale.”
He sat like a store mannequin, rigid, frozen. What had he just done? Revealed a secret to a woman who hated him. Given an enemy power over him.
Bess suddenly seemed preoccupied with her cobbler. He noted she didn’t eat, but just prodded, succeeding in getting the insides to spill out.
She did not look up as she asked her next question.
“Did you try to take the memory, Cesar?”
When their eyes met he saw the accusation there. She was smart, this one. She would make a marvelous ally and a terrible enemy.
“I didn’t know I could not take it back.”
“So this is some game you play. Confessing your secrets and then stealing them back?”
When he first touched her he discovered that he couldn’t use his Truth Seeking gift on her. Why had he assumed that his Memory Walking would work on her? Had his need to unburden himself so blinded him that he could not see the real possibility that she would recall everything?
“I’ve never spoken of this to anyone.”
She nodded her acceptance of this. “I’m not sure that counts since you believed I wouldn’t remember.”
He had just wanted to connect with another like him, if only for a moment. But his attempt had backfired, exploding in his face like a mortar.
Bess lifted a scoop of cobbler onto her fork. “Seems you’ll have to deal with the fallout.”
She slipped the bite of red cobbler into her mouth. It appeared she had trouble swallowing. It made him pause to study her reaction, instead of dwelling on his own. Upset, he decided, judging from the erratic pulse of her aura. But was she upset by what he had just tried to pull or by what he had revealed? He didn’t know but was quite certain she wouldn’t let him touch her right now.
Bess set her fork upon the plate and gave the dish a little nudge away from her. Then she lifted her dark eyes to him.
“I’ve spoiled your appetite.”
She didn’t deny it.
“Do you pray for him?”
They both knew that to enter the Spirit World a man or woman must walk the Red Road and live a life of balance and responsibility to oneself, one’s community and to the earth. Otherwise a soul was condemned to the Circle of Ghosts. Once there, only time and the earnest prayers of the living might bring release. Was she implying that Carlos needed his prayers?
“He was ten. What sins could he have had?”
“Just a question.”
She could find Carlos, he realized. Sweat popped out on Cesar’s face, drenched his back and armpits. She could actually speak to him. Cesar’s ears buzzed again. He was unsure if he wanted to ask her to do that. He did not want to be in her debt, nor was he certain he could bear to hear from his brother. His heart seemed to shrink into a hard lump, like a clod of cold mud.
“I pray for him every day.” He lifted the cup and drained the contents. It was dark and bitter, like his thoughts.
Cesar bobbled the cup and it clattered to the saucer. Bess said nothing.
The waiter presented the bill and he offered his card. He was helping Bess on with her coat, which had reappeared, when the card was returned and they headed out.
Cesar offered Bess his elbow, uneasy now, as if the ground beneath him was no longer level. He tried to suppress his surprise when she took it.
>
It was so unexpected to have someone know what he was and still not flinch when he touched her. He let his fingers brush her neck, experiencing again the electric sizzle that passed between them. What was that, anyway?
He lifted his cell phone but she shook her head.
“Let’s walk a bit.”
“The air is damp and you need to take it easy.” She didn’t argue but simply withdrew her arm and turned away from the road, walking down the pier. The woman was obviously used to doing as she liked.
He walked at her side, breathing in the salty mist that made the lights hazy. When they reached the end, they stood side by side. The waves slapped against the pylons with a rhythmic thrum he could feel through the soles of his shoes. The motion reminded him of the pounding rhythm of sex. He checked to see if Bess was shivering, but she seemed warmer than he was. She stood with her nose lifted to the wind, which blew her thick hair out behind her in an undulating black curtain of silk.
“So when do you use this Memory Walking, exactly?” she asked.
He hesitated, preparing to lie out of habit and then deciding to tell her. “Mostly after examining witnesses for investigations I don’t want humans to remember. You have the same law. Humans can’t find out about us.”
She stared at him, her head cocked in a way that did remind him of a bird. Her face glowed pale in the high florescent lights of the pier, making her aura invisible to him. An inky lock of hair blew beneath her nose for a moment before she tucked it behind her ear.
“What about on Skinwalkers?”
“Before tonight, I never tried Memory Walking on one.”
“You’ve never apprehended one?”
He wondered if she noticed his hesitation before he shook his head. It was true. He’d never apprehended one. But it was only part of the truth.
“And if you did?”
“If apprehended, I’d turn them over to your people by arrangement in the treaty. Human criminals are delivered to their judicial system. Niyanoka are remanded to our legal system—”
She interrupted. “I’ll bet that doesn’t happen a lot.”
Did she mean that Skinwalkers weren’t turned over or that Niyanoka were not prosecuted? Either way, she was right. He hoped his aura wasn’t showing his discomfort and inched farther into the circle of artificial light. Bess knew too much about him already. He didn’t want her to know about the only time he’d taken a Skinwalker alive and then failed to deliver the suspect.
