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“Now would be a really good time,” I muttered in the general direction of David, hoping he could hear me, but no miracles arrived to scoop me up.
I was going to have to make my miracles myself.
“Hey,” I said. I kept my voice as normal as possible as I stepped away from Paul and began moving toward the Demon and Lewis. “Hey, you. Bitch. You don’t really want him, do you? You just want a big hole ripped open so you can get home. Or bring in a few friends. Whichever.”
She glanced sharply at me, and as our eyes locked I felt that balance under my feet shift again. Violently. Oh, man. It wasn’t just Lewis who was causing this.
It was me. Both of me. We were a destabilizing influence here.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “One tu
“Why should I?” she asked. Reasonable question, delivered in the same reasonable tone I was using. “This way he can’t act against me.”
“This way the two of you will end up ripping the place in half, not opening up a doorway. Not good for either one of you. Come on. I know you like this planet. It’d be a shame to ruin it for everybody.”
She laughed. My laugh. “If you want him, I’ll trade,” she said. “Come here.”
The last thing in the world I wanted was to do it, but I didn’t see much of an alternative. Of course, she might be lying, but I wasn’t a pushover, and if she wanted to hollow me out or kill me, I’d demand a lot of her attention.
And Lewis would break free.
“Don’t you do it,” Paul was muttering at me. “Don’t you fucking dare. I’ll kill you.”
“Line forms to the right.” I smiled at him, just a little, and then walked over to my evil twin.
The static in my head was now white noise, blotting out thought, erasing everything but instinct.
I put my hand over hers, where it held Lewis, and pulled it away.
The second the contact broke, Lewis collapsed. Paul, Kevin, and the other Wardens dashed in and did a combat-style drag on him, all the way to the corner, where the van pulled up. Paul threw Lewis inside, slapped the side of the van, and it sped away.
Clearly Paul wasn’t taking any chances.
Blackness smothered me, thick and more painfully intense than ever before. I barely even noticed, though, because now that I was holding her hand, I saw a network of lights flaring inside of her, rich and complex, like a bright snarled ball that sparked in millions of colors.
Oh.
That was mine. My memories. My lost experience. My past.
And I reached in and took it. Or tried to. I grabbed one end of the memory chain, the Demon grabbed the other, and the race was on.
Light and shadow. Infant memories, indefinite and barely there. Faces. Noise. Colors. Perceptions sharpening as I aged. I sped through it, imprinting it on the area that was dark inside of my own head. I didn’t need training for this; there was only one place this stuff could go, and in only one order. Memory, for me, was a spool, and I unwound it faster and faster, flickering images and impressions that I could examine later, when I got time… My mother crying. Sarah. Disneyland. A storm building, breaking, finding its perfect mate inside of me.
Childhood, so many rich moments, so many terrible things. I aged, changed; the world shifted with me and around me. Boys. Boyfriends. Heartbreak. Always the weather, my perfect enemy, hunting an opportunity to betray and destroy.
Power. Purpose. Training. Princeton.
A younger Lewis taking off my clothes in a basement laboratory, introducing me to a whole new level of pleasure and intensity.
Glass shattering with the force of our power combining as our bodies did.
Lewis gone, spirited away. My life consumed with work, achievement, ambition.
Bad Bob. A Dji
A shattered Dji
A blur of events that I couldn’t even separate, ending in more destruction, more death, my own transformations.
Blue sparklies. A hole in the aetheric. Demons. The fate of the world, again, on our shoulders.
Human again. Faces flashed by at an increasing rate, because I could feel the tension of the Demon on the end of the memory chain, pulling back, and I couldn’t stop now to even try to comprehend what I was seeing.
A glimpse of Jonathan, ageless and cynical and passionate about what he loved.
Fighting for my survival in a flood, and rising in the arms of my lover above the foaming, deadly currents.
The Mother of Storms taking notice, at last, and coming to end the cycle of violence.
Imara conceived. Imara born. Imara-
The memory chain shattered into a million crystalline fragments, and I lost my hold.
It all started to go away. I was losing it. No!
The Demon didn’t waste time with my trauma. She cut to the chase and plunged her hand into my chest, just like she’d done with Rahel.
If she couldn’t be me, then she was going to damn sure make sure I wouldn’t be, either.
The sensation that raced through me was horrifying. I’d been through bad stuff; this was beyond. I’d felt it through Kevin’s memories, and it was even worse this time, because there was no escape.
She simply bored her way through me, ripping apart whatever she didn’t need, and I felt my co
It couldn’t live that way for long. I couldn’t.
Although I felt like there was less and less of an I. It was draining away from me, like sand out of a broken glass, slow but inexorable. I was losing my childhood again. My mother’s face was fading away. I lost the memory of my first date, and the nervous excitement of buying my prom dress, and the scratchy elegance of the corsage my date had bought me. I lost the memory of his name, too.
Evil Twin didn’t care about my troubles. She let go of me, but I didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Hair blew across my face, obscuring my view of her, but it didn’t matter. She could see. I didn’t need to, because now I was fully, completely under her control. I couldn’t fight, because I needed every ounce of strength to slow down the steady erosion of my past.
She was simply going to drain me dry, and then I’d be gone. Erased. Finito.
The Wardens were circling us, trying to decide which one was the good Joa
Not that anyone could.
The Demon accessed my Warden powers, blew a hole through the peaceful, artificial shield of Seacasket, and accessed a huge draw of power from the aetheric. She used me to do it. My control shattered, and the memories dissolved faster.
I lost my college years. I lost Lewis, swept away in a tide of oncoming darkness.
I felt the clouds gathering overhead, a soft gray pressure turning rapidly dark, and under the Demon’s direction I rubbed air molecules together, creating friction, heat, driving the engine of a tiny but incredibly concentrated storm. Not my choice, but definitely my fault. The storm broke with a snap of lightning, and drenched a square-block area of sidewalk, catching nearly every Warden in its path.