The Scholomance (82 page)

“So true.”

“But I am for
damn sure leaving and I’m taking Connie with me, so if you’ve got a point to
make in all this, you’d better get to it.”

Horuseps pursed
his lips slightly. “Again,” he said, “and for only the second time, you
disappoint me. I truly believed you’d guess on your own.”

“Guess what?”
she demanded, at the end of her patience. “I swear if you don’t start talking
straight—”

“You healed your
arm.”

“What?”

“You healed your
arm.” Horuseps nodded at the bloody smear drying on her wrist. “How?”

She looked at
it, baffled, than at him. “I made it malleable, of course. What in hell—”

“I didn’t hear
anything.”

“You didn’t…Weeping,
creeping
Christ
, man! Make sense!”

“I did not hear
a Word,” said Horuseps, enunciating very clearly.

Mara started to
object and then stopped, confused. Had she said one? Horuseps waited, examining
the nail-less tips of his fingers as she stepped back to the Panic Room and
dialed through the last few minutes. She saw his finger punching down into her
arm, saw herself staunching blood, mending veins and tendons, sealing skin. She
never spoke a Word.

“No doubt you
think this is nothing unusual,” Horuseps said when she returned. “That with
true mastery of an art, every student achieves the ability to recite without
consulting the page, so to speak. Not so. As I told you at the very beginning,
magic eludes the human mind.”

“I’m not…not
getting you.”

“It isn’t the
first time, either. Stop and think. I’ll wait.”

Mara merely
stared at him, shaking her head in spurts of uncertainty and frustration.

“No? You’ll have
to take me at my word, then. But it’s true.”

“It doesn’t mean
anything!” she insisted. Her stomach was starting to cramp, cold and hot at the
same time.

“Oh yes. Yes, it
does.”

“I’m just better
at it than they are!”

“You’re better
at lots of things, I imagine. No doubt you’ve grown accustomed to that as well,
never given it a second thought. Perhaps you’ve just assumed it’s all due to
your skill as a mentalist.”

“It is!”

“Mentalists come
here, my precious. All the time. A little sip of power whets the appetite so,
and what you call telepathy, although rare, is not unheard of in Adam’s line. His
children have degenerated some, but he is still one of the high-born. You, my
darling heart, are no mere mentalist. If you ever really stopped to think about
it, you’d have suspected long before now. But you’re not very imaginative, are
you?”

“Wh—What are you…”

“And you don’t
get sick, do you?” Horuseps lifted up a lock of her fine, pale hair. “Or easily
tired. You’ve never cried, not even as an infant. Not when sad, not when in
pain…not even when grit dares to abrade them. Your strange, light eyes make no
tears.”

“I know what you’re
going to tell me!” Mara shouted, slapping his hand away.

“I mentioned,
didn’t I, that some of the children that come of us are human? Not many, not
often. Like opposite ends of our dark spectrum, demon and human, with nephalim
as the broad ribbon between us. Ah yes. But I don’t believe I mentioned what we
do with them.”

“And it’s a lie!”

“We let them go.
We’re really not so monstrous as all that, you know. We let them go, we let
them grow…and children do so love to wander…”

“You’re wrong!”

“Blood doesn’t
always stay thin, it would seem.”

“I know what I
am!”

“Sometimes it
only recedes.”

“I know!”

“Like the tide.”

“You shut up!”
she screamed, oblivious to the power streaming out of her in forks of dark
fire, oblivious to all but the rage. “You’re lying to me!”

“And sometimes,
apparently, the tide comes in again.”

Mara roared and
hit him. She didn’t have to move to do it. She didn’t have to speak. Horuseps
flew back and hit the statue of Adam, snapping it in three pieces. He landed
hard in the middle of them, oozing black blood from a dozen cracks in his
chitin. He was laughing.

“You really must
learn to control that temper,” he said, sitting up. “Ah, but you are young yet.
So very young.”

She spun around
and there was Kazuul on the stair behind her. He caught the hand she swung at
him, slapped aside her spear of thought, and turned her forcefully around. She
fought him every step as he dragged her to the center of the room. He did not
speak, but merely kicked Horuseps aside and shoved her face-down over the
gleaming mirror-like surface of Adam’s chest.

Her reflection
snarled back at her with his calm face and burning eyes behind her. Her
reflection…

Her eyes were
glowing. Her open mouth glinted with the points of fangs. She saw herself as
she had been in the eyes of the murderous pilgrim at the foot of this mountain.
He’d believed then she wasn’t human, that he lay with a demon. ‘We are not
human,’ Horuseps kept saying, looking right at her, and ah God, they had never
lied to her, there had been a thousand terrible truths even from the first day!

In panic, Mara turned
her Sight upon herself and Saw—as with the true shape Ruk yet carried beneath
his monstrous husk—the real Mara that had always hidden, dormant, enshelled by
humanity. Something in her tore, like the skin of a bitten apple, impossible to
unbite, as power grown vast and beyond her control bound itself that true form
and ripped it from the inside…out.

Mara screamed,
ignorance shattered, as bone exploded through her skin in dozens of tiny,
bloodless thorns. She grabbed one blindly, ripped it out, and immediately
doubled over, shrieking agony.

“Little fool,” Kazuul
growled, not unkindly. “It will only grow back with greater pain. Rail as thou
wilt, thou canst deny thy nature no more than thou mayest pluck down the sun.”

“I’m human!” she
groaned, tearing out another spike. “I’m human, I am!”

“No longer. Once
thee might have hidden in thy mortal disguise all the years of thy life and
even shared a mortal death in ignorance, yet thy fate wast sealed the hour that
ever thou didst enter here. Thy heart hath devoured thy flesh, and now thou art
wholly Golgotha.” He turned her around, ignoring her struggles, and forced his
mouth over hers in a kiss she, however hatefully, did ultimately return. “And
thou art mine,” he rumbled, releasing her.

She didn’t run. She
wanted to cry, but her eyes stubbornly refused to make tears.

“Tis not so
great a change as thou fearest,” Kazuul said. “And I shall ease what can be
eased to soothe thy way.”

She looked at
him.

He held out his
hand to her, his eyes gently burning. “Come, my Mara. This mountain is all my
lair and every door shall open at my command. I shall give
her
to thee,
as freely as thou didst enter here, if thou wilt only stay.”

Her breath
caught, but she didn’t seem to need it…not like she used to. She stepped back,
seeking Horuseps in a turmoil of confusion, but found him merely smiling up at
her from where he sat on the floor, one arm tossed casually across his knees. His
mind was open to her now, open and clear and welcoming. He called her sister.

“Mara.”

The demon’s
hand, outstretched.

“Only stay,” she
said. Her voice hardly shook at all. She was cool. “And you’ll find her for me.”

“And restore
her. And see her safely set down among her people.” His arm showed no strain,
no sign of ever falling empty. “If thou wilt give thyself to me wholly.”

“To a Master?”

“To a mate. To
be mine own. To take me for thine.”

Every door,
open.

“When?” Mara
whispered.

Kazuul
considered her without smiling, without triumph, without lowering his open
hand. “When thou hast seen thy friend away and know me to be honest. When she
is safely laid in her mortal life and all memory and ambition for this place is
gently ended. When thou art content to give and give without regret, beloved.”

“I hope you’re
fond of long engagements,” Horuseps murmured.

Neither of them
looked at him.

“I told thee
once,” Kazuul said. “I’ll have naught but thine own self, thy truth, and the
whole of thy heart.”

Was this what it
came to? Her life for Connie’s? Her freedom? Her
humanity
? Mara squeezed
her eyes shut, grabbed at a horn and tugged, but not hard enough to pull it
free. Her breath scoured through her lungs, hissing out through the bared fangs
of her mouth, but they were not sobs; she could make no tears.

“Until then,
come. I shall uncover her, make well her fragile mind, deliver her to Adam’s
realm, and ask no vow upon thy life to seal thy promise. Mara, come,” he said,
not without a dark compassion. “The hour is late. And when we are done and thou
art returned to my chambers…I’ll draw thee a bath. Beloved. Come.”

She shuddered
once, her hand still pressed to her inhuman brow, but then she lowered it, let
his enfold it as they both knew it always would, and followed him away.

*
         
*
         
*

“M-Mara?”

“I’m here.”

“I can’t…I can’t
move.”

“Just relax. I’ve
got you.”

“I was dreaming,
wasn’t I?”

“Yes. It’s over
now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I missed you.”

“I know that
too.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Just relax.”

“Mara?”

“I’m here,
Connie.”

“I want to wake
up now. Please? I want to go home.”

“Soon, honey.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I love you.”

“…”

“Are we still
friends?”

“Always, Connie.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Just rest.”

*
         
*
         
*

The found her on
the roof of a hospital in Bucharest: a young lady, unconscious, naked, with a
child’s gold-colored locket in the shape of a heart clutched in her hand. She
received the best care, better by far than her situation warranted, but all
those who touched her felt the same illogical and overwhelming desire to
nurture and care for her, beyond all cost, beyond all reason. She slept for
three days and woke without memory.

She spoke only
English. The American Embassy was contacted with photographs and fingerprints. In
ten days, her family arrived. They said her name was Constance Vitelli. They
took her home. No one spoke the name of Kimara Warner to her, not then, not
ever again. That came when they touched her, too.

But she dreamed
sometimes, and the dreams were like the tides: they receded for days, for
weeks, sometimes for months, but always rolled in again. In her dreams, there
was a room, like a control center of some sort, where the walls were all glass
and concrete, and a terrible storm full of colors and voices raged outside. Inside,
there was a girl, a few years older than she herself (because she was always a
child in these dreams, always trapped at the bosomless, freckled age of eight),
and they sat on the floor together and talked, the way that children do. In the
dreams, the other girl looked sad, even when she smiled, but Connie was always
so happy to see her, always hugging on her and crying when the time came for
her to wake up.

But the dreams
always washed away in the morning, and as the years moved on, that tide came
less and less. For Constance Warner, who had no history, the dreams became her
only childhood, and the older girl, her only friend. It seemed sometimes that
she only drifted through what was left of her life, looking for something she
couldn’t remember, wishing for power that didn’t exist, and waiting always to
wake up dreaming.

Years later,
cleaning out the closets after her mother’s funeral, she found a photograph of
herself at some childhood birthday party, where she sat centered in a sparkly
hat, surrounded by brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, grandfathers…and one
young, unsmiling girl with ice-grey eyes: the girl from her locket, the girl
from her dreams. She asked everyone she knew, everyone she could think of, but
no one seemed to know who she was and the same expression always seemed to sink
down over their faces when she asked them—a lost, sick, confused expression
that made her feel a little guilty just for asking, as if she were hurting them
somehow. Eventually, she stopped asking, but she never stopped wondering.

She found six
other pictures eventually, and framed them all. She carried them with her
through all the cheap little apartments and government housing she inhabited,
as a kind of talisman to keep the dreams coming. She had them with her when she
was taken to the senior care home, childless and alone, the last of her family,
just an old woman who stared out the windows all day and had less to forget
than the other old women, but who forgot it all anyway.

There was only
one tired young nurse with her in the room the night that old Miss Vitelli
died, roused from her magazine by the old women mumbling in her sleep, as she
so often did. “You were my best friend, Mara,” she said in her quavery way, as
the nurse heaved herself up and came to check on her. “I loved you.”

And taking the
ancient, delicate hand to check the fading pulse, the young nurse heard, or
thought she heard, a thin sound, like a breeze through the last leaves of
autumn: “You were mine, you know, my one and only. I loved you the best that I
knew how.”

“I’m so sorry,”
the old woman whispered as the nurse stared bewilderedly around her in the
dark.

“It’s all right.”

The pale-eyed
girl in all those cracked photographs seemed to stare at her, stare at her. She’d
never liked to look at them. There was something really creepy about that kid.