“Magic.” This time it was Kit who tried to pull away, but M’cal held her, and she did not fight him. Just sighed, closing her eyes. She felt weak, lightheaded. “I know about magic, M’cal. But what I do isn’t that. I don’t know what you call it, but I’m no . .. witch.” Not like her grandmother.
“You have power, Kitala. A great deal of it. And even if you are using nothing more than instinct to direct it, your potential is immense. You would not have been able to save yourself otherwise. No one turns aside such a call. Not even the witch can do that. It is why she protects herself with this.” He tapped the bracelet.
“That’s not what I do,” Kit protested. Yet, even as she spoke, the fiddle strings sang in her mind, and she felt something new within the music: a lightness, like a shot of sunlight in her soul, as though in her heart she stood on the edge of a cliff, ready to fly.
M’cal’s eyes narrowed; his hand flexed against her waist. “Then what do you think you do, Kitala? What are you sure of?”
“Death,” she said, the word slipping from her lips. She could not believe how easily it happened; for a moment she thought she imagined it. But, no.
Death.
She had said it, and M’cal was still looking at her, frowning.
He had no chance to ask. Kit heard a soft knocking sound. They both flinched, but there was not enough time to move before the door opened. A boy poked his head into the room. He could not have been older than sixteen, but there was something in his eyes that looked more ancient than dirt. He was painfully skinny, dressed in a loose T-shirt and black jeans, with a metal-studded belt slung loose around his hips. He wore a Mohawk, spiked blue, and a tattoo of a dragon curled around his forearm. A cigarette slanted from his mouth.
“Fuck,” said the kid, staring at M’cal. “It really is you.”
“Billy,” M’cal said quietly, shocking Kit. He said nothing else, but very gently untangled himself from her, continuing to pull the fiddle-case strap over her head. When that was done he stood and faced the boy. Each movement was careful, methodical, controlled. He did not look Kit in the eye. His expression was totally flat, all his raw emotion gone. It made her afraid—and curious.
Billy entered the room and shut the door behind him. He gave Kit a cautious glance, and to M’cal said, “I’m not interrupting anything, right?”
M’cal said nothing, and Billy shrugged. “Well, okay, yeah, I get it. I’m interrupting. But I thought I saw you come in, and it looked . .. bad. Not normal. And it’s been a while. You left.”
There was an accusation in those last two words; hurt, as well. A thread of emotion entered M’cal’s eyes: pain, regret. “I had to go away, Billy. I had no choice.”
“You picked up somewhere else.”
“Like I said.”
“Yeah. S’okay.” Billy scuffed his tennis shoes on the floor and gave Kit a sharp look. “You Mikey’s friend?”
M’cal hesitated. Kit said, “Yes. I’m his friend.”
“You sick?”
“I was.” Kit glanced at M’cal. He still refused to look at her.
The boy seemed satisfied with her answer, and took another step toward M’cal—hesitant, like some beaten dog ready to run. Kit checked for track marks on his arms. She did not see any, but there was a nervous quality to the boy that was either natural or the edge of some high. He scratched his arms, the side of his head; fidgeted.
“Cooley’s dead,” Billy blurted out.
“Is that so?” replied M’cal.
“Reena said you were talking to him the night he died.”
“I do not remember.”
“Right.” The corner of the boy’s mouth curled; it was a surprising expression, both sweet and sinister. “Just wanted to say thank you.”
M’cal did not bat an eye. “Who is the new management?”
“No one. We’re, uh, taking care of ourselves. Each other.”
“What about the man downstairs?”
“He won’t try anything. He only handles women. Fags make him sick.”
“You live in this neighborhood?” Kit asked. The boy looked surprised that she spoke, but he nodded, still scuffing the floor, swinging back and forth on one foot. “You ever go down to that Youth Center on Templar? Talk to an Alice Hardon?”
Billy looked affronted. “Fuck, no. Those bitches don’t know shit.”
“But have you heard of Alice?” M’cal asked.
The boy’s eyes narrowed. “What’s going on?”
“She was kidnapped,” Kit said. “According to her friend, she was looking into something she shouldn’t.”
“People need to mind their own fucking business,” muttered Billy. “All kinds of shit someone could get into.”
“Something the cops have a hand in?”
Billy snorted. “Take your pick.”
Kit hoped he was exaggerating.
M’cal stirred, taking a step toward the boy. “If you hear anything, will you let me know?”
Billy did not immediately answer. He looked at M’cal with a hard, clear gaze, and then glanced at Kit, studying her with the same intensity.
“You’re done, aren’t you?” he said to M’cal. “You’re leaving.”
“If I can,” M’cal replied, without hesitation. “You should, too.”
For a brief, startling moment the curtain dropped and all Kit could see on Billy’s face was raw, naked sorrow—but it disappeared in the blink of an eye, and he became once again nothing but a shuffling punk.
“I’ll ask around,” he mumbled, eyes downcast. “I owe you.”
“You do not—” began, but the boy walked to the door. He stopped just before leaving.
“Where do I find you?” he asked Kit.
“My hotel,” she said. “The Hyatt. I might not be staying there long, but I’ll leave a message. Ask for Kit Bell, room 2610.” Her room number, so casually given, when with Edith she could not say the same. Something had made her hold back.
Billy nodded, gave M’cal one long last look—a hungry, hard gaze—and left.
Kit watched him go. She did not say a word, just sat staring at the door as it closed. Sat some more, thinking about everything she had just seen and heard. She looked at M’cal, and found him staring back. She could not read his expression. He looked bored, but she knew it was an illusion. M’cal was not, she thought, the kind of man who ever felt bored about anything. He was too smart for that, his life too difficult.
“Billy seems like a good kid,” she said carefully.
“He is,” M’cal replied.
“He’s also a prostitute.”
Long silence. “Yes.”
“So are you.”
M’cal’s gaze finally faltered. “I have done such work. In this neighborhood and others. It was how I knew we could come here to rest and hide. I have . . . used this room before.”
Kit tried to get off the bed and stand. Her legs gave out, but M’cal was suddenly at her side, his arms around her waist, holding her up, engulfing her.
“The witch made you do it,” she murmured, and a tremor passed through him; all that fine control finally melting away. His arms tightened, and he carried them both back to the bed, where they lay on their sides, curled around each other; a cocoon, made of them. The mask was gone. His eyes were haunted but not broken. She saw resolve, acceptance. Anger.
“It was part of the hunt,” he told her. “But it was also one of her ways of degrading me. Breaking me.”
“By having sex with strangers?”
“There was no sex,” M’cal said, though there was a bleakness to his voice that made Kit sick. “Sex was not her objective. Not in those situations. What she wanted—what she has always wanted—was my soul. And because she could not take it, she found other ways to shame and corrupt me.”
“By making you feel like a thing, an object for sale. Nothing but flesh. No soul, no heart that mattered.”
“You understand.”
She understood that she wanted to find this woman and beat the living shit out of her. Acts of cruelty were nothing new to Kit—she had seen enough of it in her life—but this, no matter how strange or impossible, went beyond what her sense of justice could accept. It was too terrible.
Maybe her anger showed; maybe her disgust. A faint sad smile passed over M’cal’s face.
“Little warrior heart,” he murmured. “I wish I had met you first.”
Kit closed her eyes. No words, no thoughts—all she could do was feel, and what flowed through her, slow and warm, was a familiar mix of loneliness and sorrow, her secret companion, a cold, hard knot only music could soften. Always on the go, always on her own, with only her fiddle as a friend.
But this time, what she felt was not for herself alone, but for M’cal too; his isolation, his grief, his forced betrayal of dignity and heart. She felt raw for him, cut; so full of emotion she could not speak with it.
So she touched him. She opened her eyes and brushed her thumb over his lips. He seemed to savor it, more than she expected, as though he was unused to such a thing. Perhaps he was. His eyes darkened, and his hand crept up her waist; slow, tentative.
Do not touch me,
Kit remembered him saying outside the Youth Center, and she imagined what that would be like, to live knowing that one touch could compel murder.
You already know,
she told herself.
Just one look and you know. Every time you look at someone, you run the risk of seeing death. Alice, M’cal, so many others.
But at least she did not run the risk of killing. Not by her own hand. Though she wondered if doing nothing was not the same. A more distant murder. Her fault for staying silent.
She almost told him right then. Almost said, You are going to die. But the words would not come, and her own throat felt raw, broken.
You are accepting his murder with your silence. Even though he did not accept yours. Even though for Alice, a woman you barely know, you are risking your life. You made the leap for her. Why not him?
Because Alice was a stranger, Kit realized. An unknown, distant. Even now, Alice was fixed in her head as a woman little better than a caricature, someone in trouble who needed help. Help that Kit could not deny, despite herself. But M’cal, on the other hand . . .
It’s become personal with you. You care.
Shocking, how much she cared. It was an involuntary emotion, a compulsion not unlike falling in love with Mozart or the fast pluck of a rangy banjo, the crest of the sun on some rosy spring morning in the Smoky Mountains with the dew glittering like diamonds on the green crisp leaves of trees. Natural, brilliant, easy. And though she had struggled not to think of it, to refuse those emotions, they bubbled up inside her heart like laughter or acid or a sob. The truth hurt. The truth overwhelmed.
She did not want to tell M’cal, because saying the words would make it real. She did not want to tell M’cal, because for the first time in her life, after all her careful isolation, her efforts to keep her heart free of entanglements that she knew would end in violence, she had finally found someone she was afraid of losing and whom she knew, without a doubt, would be lost. Sooner, rather than later. Against his will.
I
need to tell you something,
she said in her mind, but the words remained frozen on her tongue. No strength.
Later,
she thought.
You still have time. He’s not going anywhere. Not yet.
But soon. She had to tell him soon. She only hoped he believed her, that he did not call her a freak, a liar, crazy—like others had, so long ago.
As if,
whispered a small voice.
M’cal will believe you.
Kit watched his eyes: so blue, so haunting. Inhuman. “The woman who . . . holds you. She makes you kill. Why?”
“Power. My kind have a gift for song. Music is at the core of our culture. But some of us can do more with that gift than others.”
“Like steal souls.”
“Yes,” he said gravely. “And more. It is a warrior trait, passed down from a time when there were great battles within the world. So much strife that it touched even my kind, within the sea. My ancestors could turn back armies with nothing but their voices. Kill with nothing but a song.”
M’cal traced his fingers over her cheek; light as a feather, easy and gentle. “What I take is the essence of a human, everything that makes that individual want to live. It is a terrible thing to do, Kitala. Better to die outright, I think. But that desire, that vitality, is immensely powerful. It is the essence of life. The quickening of it. And the witch has learned to harness it. She takes what I steal, and it makes her strong and young. Gives her, temporarily, the skills and knowledge of those who have been stolen.”
Bitterness touched his gaze as he added, “There is a great irony in this, Kitala. What I do to others is exactly what the witch has done to me. Forcing those women at the Youth Center to speak to us. Forcing the men who hurt you to kill themselves.”
She caught his hand, held it. “You fought for me. You implied that was impossible.”
“It depends on the compulsion, on the witch’s mood. Though I would be lying if I did not admit that she has . . . relaxed . . . when it comes to controlling me.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that in the beginning, when she first captured me, I always fought.
Always.
I suppose I had convinced myself that I was still fighting.” M’cal shook his head, a look of disbelief flickering over his face. His voice softened with incredulity. “I now see that was not the case. The witch wore me down, and I never realized it, until you.”