“Winning your empire. Is there anybody whose life you wouldn’t risk for your Goddamn empire?”
“No.”
For a moment, she glared at him angrily. Then the anger faded as though she didn’t have the energy to sustain it. Doro was accustomed to the look. All his people faced him with it at one time or another. It was a look of submission.
“What I’ve decided to do,” said Doro, “is give you the life of one of the actives if you need it. If you have to make an example of someone, I’ll let it pass as long as you keep control of yourself and don’t go beyond that one.”
She thought about that for a long moment. “Permission to kill,” she said finally. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”
“I hope you won’t have to use it. But I don’t want you totally handicapped.”
“Thanks. I think. God, I hope I’m like Rachel. I hope I don’t have to kill.”
“You won’t find out until you get started on someone.”
She sighed. “Since this is all your fault, will you stay around for a while? I won’t have Karl. I’ll need somebody.”
“That’s another thing.”
“What?”
“Stop telling the actives that the one show of power you’ve given them, the one thing you’ve done that they can’t resist or undo, is my fault.”
“But it is …”
“Of course it is. And the moment they realize I’m here, they’ll know it is. They don’t have to be told. Especially when your telling them sounds like whining for pity. There’s no pity in them, girl. They’re going to feel about as sorry for you as you do for Vivian, or for Rina.”
That seemed to sober her.
“You’re going to have to grow up, Mary,” he said quietly. “You’re going to have to grow up fast.”
She studied her hands, large, frankly ugly, her worst feature. They lay locked together in her lap. “Just stay with me for a while, Doro. I’ll do the best I can.”
“I had intended to stay.”
She didn’t bother hiding her relief. He got up and went to her.
MARY
There were incidents as my actives straggled in. I had pried through their minds and gotten to know all of them except Rachel before I even met themso that none of them surprised me much.
Doro beat the holy shit out of Jan almost as soon as she arrived, because she’d done something stupid. I don’t think he would have touched her, otherwise. One of the two kids she’d had by him was dead and he wasn’t happy about it. She said it was an accident. He knew she was telling the truth. But she panicked.
He was talking to hernot very gentlyand he started toward her for some reason. She ran out the front door. That, he doesn’t allow. Don’t run from him. Never run. He called her back, warned her. But she kept going. He would have gone after her if I hadn’t
stopped him.
“She’ll be back,” I said quickly. “Give her a chance. The pattern will bring her back.” I wondered why I bothered to try to help her. I shouldn’t have cared what happened to her. She had taken one look at Rachel and me and thought, Oh, God, niggers! And she was the one Doro had chosen to have kids by. Surely Rachel and Ada would have been better parents.
Anyway, Doro waitedmore out of curiosity than anything else, I think. Jan came back in about thirty minutes. She came back cursing herself for the coward she was and believing that Doro would surely kill her now. Instead, he took her up to his room and beat her. Beat her for God knows how long. We could hear her screaming at first. I read the others and found what I thought I’d find. That every one of them knew from personal experience how bad Doro’s beatings could be. I knew myself, though, like the others, I hadn’t had one for a few years.
Now we just sat around not looking at each other and waiting for it to be over. After a while things were quiet. Jan was in bed for three days. Doro ordered Rachel not to help her.
Rachel had enough to do helping Jesse when he came in. He was the last to arrive, because he wasted two days trying to fight the pattern. He came in mad and tired and still pretty cut up from a fight he’d gotten into on the day I called him. I had found out about that by reading his mind. And I knew about the little town he owned in Pennsylvania, and the things he did to the people there, and the way he made them love him for it. I was all ready to hate his guts. Meeting him in person didn’t give me any reason to change my mind.
He said, “You green-eyed bitch, I don’t know how you dragged me here, but you damned well better let me go. Fast.”
I was in a bad mood. I had been hearing slightly different versions of that same song from everybody for two days. I said, “Man, if you don’t find something better to call me, I’m going to knock the rest of your teeth out.”
He stared at me as though he wasn’t quite sure he’d heard right. I guess he wasn’t very used to people talking back to him and making it stick. He started toward me. The two words he managed to get out were, “Listen, bitch”
I picked up a heavy little stone horse statuette from the end table next to me and tried to break his jaw with it. My thoughts were shielded so that he couldn’t anticipate what I was going to do the way he did with the guy he beat up back in Donaldton. I left him lying on the floor bleeding and went up to Rachel’s room.
She answered my knock and stood in her doorway glaring down at me. “Well?”
“Come downstairs,” I said. “I have a patient for you.”
She frowned. “Someone is hurt?”
“Yeah, Jesse Bernarr. He’s the last member of our ‘family’ to come in. He came in a little madder than the rest of you.”
I could feel Rachel sweep the downstairs portion of the house with her perception. She found Jesse and focused in tight on him. “Oh, fine,” she muttered after a moment. “And me with nothing to draw on.”
But she went right down to him. I followed, because I wanted to see her heal him. I hadn’t seen anything so far but her memories.
She knelt beside him and touched his face. Suddenly she was viewing the damage
from the inside, first coming to understand it, then stimulating healing. I couldn’t find words to describe how she did it. I could see. I could understand, I thought. I could even show somebody else mentally. But I couldn’t have talked about it. I began wondering if I could do it.
Rachel was still busy over Jesse when I left. I went into the kitchen, sort of in a daze. I was mentally going over a lot of Rachel’s other healingsthe ones I’d gotten from her memory. What I had learned from her just now made everything clearer. I felt as though I had just begun to understand a foreign languageas though I had been hearing it and hearing it, and suddenly a little of it was getting through to me. And that little was opening more to me.
I pulled open a drawer and took out a paring knife. I put it to my left arm, pressed down, cut quickly. Not deep. Not too deep. It hurt like hell, anyway. I made a cut about three inches long, then threw the knife into the sink. I held my arm over the sink too, because it started to bleed. I stopped the pain, just to find out whether or not I could. It was easy. Then I let it hurt again. I wanted to feel everything I did in every way I could feel it. I stopped the bleeding. I closed my eyes and let the fingers of my right hand move over the wound. Somehow that was better. I could concentrate my perception on the wound, view it from the inside, without being distracted by what my eyes were seeing. My arm began to feel warm as I began the healing, and it grew warmer, hot. It wasn’t really an uncomfortable feeling, though, and I didn’t try to shut it out. After a while it cooled, and I could feel that my arm was completely healed.
I opened my eyes and looked at it. Part of the arm was still wet with blood, where it had run down. But where the cut had been, I couldn’t see much more than a fine scar. I rinsed my arm under the faucet and looked again. Nothing. Just that little scar that nobody would even see unless they were looking for it.