“Don’t say that!” Evan said.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t answer, don’t clarify. You’re talking crazy!”
“Like I won’t survive the night,” I said. “Or I won’t be me anymore. If I lose my eyes or my mind, they’re the only part of me that are still Blake. If they go, then it isn’t much different from being killed by a dragon or a crone or whatever else. I’m having a really hard time picturing life as it’ll be in two weeks. A few errands I should run, favors I owe. Ur, the witch in the Drains, the Abyss. But when those errands are done…”
I reached for the word, the phrasing.
I couldn’t figure out Rose’s expression as she stared at me, which made it even harder to finish.
“Flying together!” Evan finished for me. He pecked me in the side of the head. “I knew you were being too reckless, going after that dragon! You sound like you’ve already lost your mind, you lunatic! We’re supposed to go flying!”
I reached up and cupped him in my one hand. I closed my fingers gently around him, until only his head poked out.
“Flying! Adventures! You, me, and maybe Green Eyes if she has to come along and if she promises to stop calling me a chicken nugget! Winging through the air without a care, dang it! Over water so Green Eyes can do the dolphin thing and jump out of the waves! And then we’re supposed to fight monsters, and I go full throttle firebird Evan and raaaaaaaagagargh!”
The incoherent sound he made as he finished was a little more emotional and raw than he might have intended. More like he was screaming at me than finishing his sentence.
He sat there, panting hard, tiny body swelling against the confines of my hand with each huff.
“Raaaaaaaaagh!” he tried again, just as raw.
“Evan,” I could just barely hear Rose speak.
“I want that,” I said, meeting his eyes. “Believe me, I want it. Maybe not the fighting monsters part. Maybe a bit more quiet instead, sitting around, enjoying each other’s company, but I want it. Really really truly. The problem is that I’ve come this far by trusting my gut, and my gut isn’t telling me very good things.”
I looked from Evan to Rose.
“I didn’t know,” Rose said.
“Until I said it out loud, I’m not sure I did, either,” I said. “I don’t know if I can stop anymore. I don’t know if I like what might happen if I keep going.”
“All this time, I’ve been so frightened about the possibilities, that you could turn on me at any moment, that everything I am could be consumed and subsumed, a monster taking my place, and you don’t even care?”
“I care!” I said, wings spreading, advancing a step.
I became aware that Knights who’d been standing on the other side of the clearing were now pointing guns at me.
Rose’s expression, the fact that she now had one hand on her gun, which was still around behind her back.
“I care,” I said, relaxing my posture. “I want to ride a damn motorcycle again, I want to hang with Evan and my other friends and fail at art and try my best at being a broken human being, helping people. I want it so bad it aches.”
“I want it too,” Rose said. “But when I looked at the two of us, I can’t help but feel you burn brighter, or darker, or colder, I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense. I don’t like what happens when you burn, Blake, when you go after things you wanted, and I couldn’t help but feel you wanted it more, somehow. Enough that you’d tear yourself to pieces, even as you fought me over this life. Destroy us both. And there was this feeling, this belief, that I was the only one who could win and not destroy us both in the process.”
“That’s how we are, isn’t it?” I asked. “I have the desire, the want. You have capability, without…”
I tried to find the word.
“Instability? The ability to do without changing in the process?” Rose suggested.
“Fragility, more than instability,” I said. “I see it more as loss, taking damage to something fundamental. Ties back to the mirror thing, the vestige.”
“I think I remember that from the book, actually.”
I shrugged. “Probably. You got the artsy-fartsy creativity, damn it. Harder for me to be original when waxing poetic.”
Rose sighed. “Shit.”
“Shit,” I said.
‘Where do we go from here?”
“When I look at where we stand, if I face the fact that one of us is bound to kill the other if we keep up this senseless tug of war over Russel Thorburn’s fractured life…”
I trailed off, gestured inarticulately.
Evan struggled, and I realized I was still holding him. I let go of him and he flew around, settling on Rose’s head, at the hairline.
“…I don’t want to be the sort of person who wins that fight, I guess,” I said. “Because I can’t help but feel like I can’t do that without becoming the monster I’m afraid I’d have to become.”
There was a long pause, as if the both of us were afraid to say anything.
Rose glanced around, as if remembering where she was. She turned, saw the guns, and gestured to the others. Telling them to stand down. The guns that had been pointed at me were lowered.
Evan seemed to consider, then flew over to my shoulder.
“Nincompoop,” he said.
“I’m a bit of a nincompoop,” I said.
“A huge nincompoop. A massive butt.”
“Massive.”
“Yeah,” he said.
There was another silence.
I realized Rose couldn’t talk. Not without risking saying something that would challenge my resolution.
“Rose,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I forfeit.”
I saw her swallow hard.
“If I try to win this tiny war of ours, over Russel Thorburn’s life, or Ross’s life or whatever his name was, and you or your husband haven’t crossed some line? Assume I’m too far gone. Evan, that goes for you too. You can both tell the others without lying.”
“I’ll exercise my own judgment, thank you very much,” Evan said.
“That’s a good idea,” Rose told him. “I’m biased, kind of comes with having your life on the line”
I glanced up at the sun, filtered by heavy clouds and the branches at the edge of the clearing. “The errands I needed to run.”
“I already made promises to deal with Ur. I could do it in your name. The final stroke.”
“It’s art,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind leaving some kind of mark behind.”
“I can do that,” she said. “The Abyss… that’s a little trickier.”
“I’ll do what I can to look after the Abyss tonight,” I said. “There’s also the witch in the drains… I made a promise to her. I don’t know if it counts if it’s on my behalf or if you’ve destroyed me and taken on some of my essence, but it’s more complicated, a flower to the grave of a Zoey Artana, I’m not sure exactly where, but-”
“Write it down?” Rose asked.
She fished in her pocket for paper.
Working the pen proved difficult with wooden hands.