I know. I don’t have anything else to give. Just…make sure Kade will be safe.
The cub is important. He will survive.
Figuring that was as good an assurance as I was going to get, I closed my eyes and stepped forward, into her white light.
They didn’t see it, with the hysterical action going on within the surgery, but I did. Just as I had asked, I watched Aidan’s body knit back together, slowly at first, the wrench I felt only slight. But the pace picked up, and my heart beat harder and harder as it did, the gaps between the beats expanding until it was the ponderous sound of a gong being struck, years going by between each pulse. My vision began to grey when I saw him blink rapidly, when people stopped panicking and started to see. It faded as the last of his skin was remade, and then I fell to the floor.
38
To say I was surprised to realise I was taking one breath, then another, was an understatement.
Flick!
My name was shouted a million times in chorus, the sound deafening, but even when I put my hands over my ears, it didn’t stop. Because it came from inside me, deep in this pool I hadn’t realised I possessed. And as if in noticing it, the sounds, that feeling of holding something infinite grew.
Initially, it felt like sunlight on your skin. Just those gentle, shifting, dappled points of light as you lay under a tree on a warm day, each one caressing you like fingers, covering your whole body. Then it swelled, growing more insistent. I was raised up, pulled from whatever darkness I lay within, drawn up and up, until my eyes flicked open.
“This is not the way!” one of the matriarchs hissed at us, her face screwed up into an expression of pure venom. “Look at his eyes! This interloper! Where is his mother? She has a case to answer to.”
I struggled to make sense of it, this cold, clinical box of a room with all its harsh reflective surfaces. Everything in here hurt my eyes to look at, but I blinked rapidly, trying to stop the ache.
Because everything did. My body was limp now, I realised, held by strong arms, other hands roaming my skin. They were the spots of light I recognised, my eyes threatening to close again.
Flick…Flick…Flick…
My name no longer a shout, it was a beat, tugging my heart along, forcing it to keep a regular pace. It came from those hands and the chest I was held against. They grounded me, kept me from floating away. Had always done so, I realised.
I felt the drops of water on my skin, and it soaked each one up as its due, a curious energy filling me as it did so.
“Let me…” A voice the sound of a heart being crushed slowly in a vise pleaded. The hands around me, the arms that held me were reluctant, covetous, but they opened and I was moved. Pulled close, draped over someone’s body like a doll.
“My Flick…” he whispered, his words lighting upon my skin, working their way under it and into the core that beat within me. “No, love. This isn’t what I wanted. You can’t…” His voice broke on the pleas, unable to force anymore out. It didn’t matter, I felt them, dropping like depth charges inside me, the subsequent explosions radiating out through every cell. “Come back to me. Come back to us.”
So much unwitting power in those words, that they knew not what magic they wrought. They were a call to action, as more arms surrounded me, interlinking with my bearers until I was contained in a cocoon of them, their combined weight sparking a heat.
“Come back to us, Flick.”
This voice was different, holding a steely core, one that would not be denied.
“Flick, come back. Never leave us. Be our pack. Come back, love. You promised us ‘but.’ I need a chance at ‘but.’”
It wrapped itself around me, this insistent voice, grabbing me in a grip of iron and tugging me out of the darkness I floated within.
Which brought him.
He was just a pair of red lights in the gloom, that soon resolved themselves as eyes. Eyes that burned with an unearthly light, the largest black wolf I’d ever seen.
I am death, entropy, decay.
I couldn’t reply. I was only a consciousness, able to observe, but no more.
I am endings where she is beginnings. I am power, violence, aggression. I am force. I am anger.
That disturbed my unnatural calm, the word dropping into the pool I held within me, sending ripples out.
I am raging against the dying of the light. I am the death of light. I am chaos, the breaking down of rules and barriers, and the stifling construction of them.
And I’m sick of your fucking litany, I replied finally. Live, love, pray? Seriously, you sound like a fucking five-dollar wall hanging from Kmart.