Celia Friedman - When True Night Falls

“Your little friend is loyal,” he noted. “But never fear, there are compensations. You’ll share an adept’s vision for nearly a decade; there are men who would kill for a single year of that. Although admittedly, some don’t cope too well when the vision is withdrawn.” Again the claws touched his face, this time not so gently; the contact made his skin crawl.

“Don’t take him!” the girl yelled. “Take me! I’ll do it!”

The rakh smiled coldly. “I took a woman for a host once,” he told them. “I lived in her for nearly forty years. When I left her at last, her mind snapped; apparently the gender change combined with the loss of adeptitude was a little too much for her.” He bowed toward Jenseny, a mocking salute. “So I thank you for the offer, little one. But I think I’ll stick to my own sex this time. As well as my own species.”

He turned back to Damien, about to speak.

“You could see like I do!” the girl cried.

Damien realized in an instant what she meant, what she was doing. “Jenseny, no!”

The rakh studied him for a moment, then turned back to the girl. “And how is that, little one?”

“Don’t,” Damien begged. Struggling in vain to get free, to go to her. “Don’t tell him!”

But she didn’t listen, or else she just didn’t care. “I can see the tidal fae,” she said proudly.

The rakh was stunned. “What?”

“I can see the tidal fae,” she repeated. Defiantly. “And more than that. I can Work it a little. Hesseth said I could learn to Work it more, only we didn’t have the time . . .” The last words were choked out as memory overcame her; she lowered her head, trembling. “Only now she’s gone,” she whispered.

“Is this true?” the rakh whispered. It was not so much a question addressed to her as a key to a Knowing; Damien could feel the fae gathering around him as he used it to test the truth of her words. “Gods of Earth,” he whispered. “You can.”

He walked over to her, knelt down, by her side, put a hand to the side of her face. Though there was fear in her eyes, she did not back away. His fingers wiped a narrow path through the grime and the tears on her face and then fell back, releasing her.

“Why?” he demanded.

“Jenseny-” Damien began, but one of the guards struck him and he went down, hard.

“I don’t want to be alone,” she said. “And I don’t want to be afraid any more. I’m tired of running and I want to have a place to live and I want the voices to stop. I think you know how to stop them. Don’t you?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Do you know what it is I do? Do you understand it?”

“Does that matter?” Damien demanded from where he lay. He was struck in the back and in the side; one blow landed right in his kidneys, and the pain nearly blinded him.

“I saw you move into that body,” she told the rakh.

“And I can see that he’s still inside it, too. You’re sharing it, aren’t you? The two of you together. I could do that. You could use my eyes to see the tidal fae . . . and I wouldn’t have to be alone any more.” She choked on those words, and the pain in her voice made Damien’s heart lurch in sympathy. “Not ever again,” she whispered.

The rakh stood. For a long time he just looked at her, assessing the situation. “It would be hard to rule in such a body,” he said at last. “But to see the tidal fae—to Work it!—that might be worth the inconvenience.”

He turned back toward Damien, who lay gasping on the carpet. “Take them back down,” he commanded. “I need time to think. I need—”

“Don’t put me back with him!” the girl cried out. “He’ll try to stop me, try to talk me out of it . . . he might even hurt me if he thought I’d help you. Please, don’t put us together.”

Oh, Jenseny. His eyes fell shut as despair filled his soul to bursting. Please don’t do this. He’ll hurt you like no one else ever could, and you won’t be able to get away from him. Not ever.

“All right,” the rakh agreed, and he told his guards, “Take her to the west wing and watch her there. He can wait in his cell until I’m ready to deal with him.” The venom in his voice left no doubt as to what Damien’s eventual fate would be.

Strong hands hauled him roughly to his feet; vomit welled up in his gut as pain shot through his back, and he struggled to keep it down. Spears of fire lanced through his left side with every step, and his feet were numb beneath him. How much damage had they done when they beat him? How long would he last if he couldn’t Heal himself?

Down, down, down, they took him, down into the earth. Far beneath the crystal palace, whose walls still burned with the killing light. Miles beneath the place where Tarrant lay, his body left to catch the first,rays of dawn. Down into the insulating depths where earth-fae was sparse and hope was nonexistent and pain was the only companion he had left.

Don’t let him hurt her, God. Please. She’s young and she’s scared and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Protect her, Lord, I beg of you.

Alone in the darkness, Damien Vryce wept.

Jenseny waited.

It was a small room they had brought her to, cluttered with furniture and wall hangings and so many scatter rugs that she could hardly see the crystal walls surrounding. That was all right with her. The Prince’s architecture still burned with the false sunlight that had disabled Gerald Tarrant, and she couldn’t look at it without sharing his pain, his terror, his despair.

Jenseny remembered.

That moment in the big room, that awful moment when the Prince’s essence had left one body and moved to the next: she couldn’t get it out of her mind no matter how she tried. Not just because the change itself was terrifying. Not just because the image she had seen in that instant was so like the one that marked her father’s killer: a slavering beast with blood on its jaws, hungry to devour its next victim. Hesseth had explained to her that the visions she saw didn’t necessarily reveal what things really were, but their inner essence. So she understood that the Prince and her father’s murderer might look the same because they both fed on death, and not because they really were the same kind of creature. That wasn’t a problem.

It was what she had seen in the instant after that still chilled her soul. Snippets of a vision so bizarre that try as she might she couldn’t explain it away. A white, shriveled form that might once have been human. A vast sea of green and brown mud, foul-smelling. Small things that fed on slime and rot and a wormlike creature that crawled along spongy flesh . . . the images were so real that they were with her even now, and none of the techniques that Hesseth had taught her did anything at all to control them. Only knowledge would do that, she sensed: knowledge of what she had seen, and how it connected to the rest of this nightmare.

Jenseny feared.

This wasn’t like running away from her father’s house, when she knew that the creatures who had killed him were coming after her. There was a chance they might not catch her, after all. It wasn’t like quivering beneath the onslaught of the solar fae, like she had that first day out. Even then she knew the sun would set in time. It wasn’t even like cowering in the corner of a Terata dungeon, watching as malformed children and crippled adults beat members of their own tribe to death. Because even then she had prayed for freedom, and in some small corner of her soul she had dared to believe that somehow she might gain it. This fear was different. This was the kind of thing you felt when you had made a choice so terrible that you wanted to take it back more than anything in the world, but you knew you couldn’t. It was like jumping off a cliff and then having to wait those terrible seconds while the ground rushed up at you, and maybe you wanted to change your mind now, but it was too late, too late, sometimes there’s just no turning back . . .