Thank you to the wonders of you who commented last time round; it was utterly adored, and brightened up my day hugely - you deserve your own galaxy! Thanks: Diomede, Aquilla, Starwisher, Queen Kat, Sapience,Me, Starhawke, Dwayberry and last but not at all least, Meg.
Comments are muchly, hugely, fantastically adored and pored over, not to mention slavishly worshipped. The lyrics are from Tom McRae's Streetlight (Album: Tom McRae).
Hope y'enjoy!
Ki
Chimera Part Two
She's a phonecall in the dead of night
A stranger's voice I recognise
She's a radio playing in the dark
She's the name you'll find written on my heart
"Here I am," she whispered mantra-like in her dull tones, and looked up into the abyss of the sky that was the same blue as his eyes. "I know you've seen me...but it doesn't matter. I'll find you all the same."
She'd had a name once. It didn't matter. Names were only for other people. She knew who she was.
She'd had a home once. It didn't matter. Home was only a place to run. But she didn't run; she chased.
She'd had a family once. It didn't matter. Family were only people to bother about. She'd killed them herself, and razed the house to the ground, and that had set her free.
Everything had become so very clear after one day that had changed her life.
After one person that had changed her life.
One person she was hunting now.
X - X - X - X - X
Chatoya sighed with relief as she pushed open the door of the Black Dahlia, her friends' refuge and would-be lair of depravity. She had healed her aches from her encounter with Blue, but she couldn't wish away the scars he left on her life and emotions. He was draining as a fever.
She was trying to think how to broach the subject. Say, guys...I met Blue today, and he wants me to raise-no. Hey, you remember we were watching Night of the Living Dead-no, that wouldn't work.
Because the thing was, she knew what they would say. Leave it. Don't do it. It was how the friendship game worked. Whatever your true thoughts, you said what was best, what would hurt least.
Friends didn't tear scraps from your heart. Friends didn't lay words at your feet like broken glass and watch you walk over them. Friends cushioned your falls, and made your world a warm, cosy place. Friends lied.
If you want truth, go to your enemy.
She walked into the Black Dahlia in time to see a large segment of the wooden roof fall on Cougar.
"Ow..." his muffled voice said from under various pieces of masonry. "That wasn't meant to happen."
She might have been worried - after all, wood and vampires didn't mix - but when something did Cougar Redfern serious damage, everyone knew. Strangers were awoken from their slumber; dogs began to bark. She suspected at least one coma patient had struggled out of unconsciousness to try and escape the howls of vampiric agony.
All that was visible was a pair of feet and a flailing arm, and clouds of dust billowing in the slanted rays of sunlight that came through the new and unplanned skylight.
Cougar's pitiful moan drifted up from the heap of wreckage. "Oh god. I'm the world's biggest pincushion."
"Well, if you will lose your temper," Lisa said warningly, going to dig him out. "Oh, hon, we're sending you to anger management."
"I don't need any bloody anger management!" a muffled roar came back. "My anger is damn well managed! There are hotels less better run than my fragging anger, there are-"
"DIY again?" Chatoya interrupted dryly, dangling a length of torn wire in her hands. "Destroy it yourself?"
Lisa Ochai, her dark skin streaked with dust, snorted. "You know Cougar. He's just like a rabbit with an inner ear imbalance." They shared a conspiratorial grin.
"What?" came the stifled query.
"She means you'll screw anything up," explained Chatoya. She pulled out a plank to reveal the lamia's face, scratched and dirty, but otherwise his usual fetching self. "What were you doing?"
"Changing the lightbulb," he said in an injured tone, pulling one arm free of the rubble. "Not my fault it wouldn't come out of the damn socket. Nothing broken, thanks for asking. Just a few cuts and splinters."
She dusted some of the dirt from his hair. "Hold still and I'll heal you."
"Right idea, wrong verb," he purred playfully. "Why are you here, babe, apart from to see me?"
"You're so arrogant," she said, and gave him a jolt of magic that healed his cuts and made all that spiky hair stand on end. "I don't want your body, Redfern, only your humble submission."
He gave her a coy look from simmering hazel eyes. "Ooh, will you whip me?" He collapsed in laughter at her expression. "Okay, I'll stop."
"Speaking of stopping," Thom Ausner put in. "My cousin's coming over here for a couple of weeks. He's taking a tour of the world in his gap year, and he asked if it would be okay-"
"You told him to come here?" howled Cougar. "Thom, are you mad? We're...us...and he won't get that! You know how everyone else thinks of us round here, and they're used to us!"
Chatoya knew what he meant, even if she didn't agree. She recognised that they were collectively a little odd, but she liked it that way. If she didn't like the trouble that came with it, she'd become used to it.
"Last time I got hold of the sour grapevine," Lisa recalled, "Toya was a naked Satan worshipper, I was Dracula's daughter, and Cougar was a cult leader."
Thom smiled faintly. Old Soul, and old friend, he might not have had Cougar's knockout looks, but he had his own brand of charm, and very little ruffled him. "When I listened in, Cougar was Satan, and we were all his minions."
"See?" Cougar declared, without denying a thing. "Your cousin will not understand."
Thom merely gave him a cool look, and pushed his wire glasses a little further up his nose. "Look, he's my family. Unlike you, Cougar, I like my family. I get on with them. I don't try to decapitate them at every possible opportunity. Sean's family looked after Kirsty all last summer - remember?"
"Oh, is that where she went?" said Chatoya, intrigued.
Since his mother had died three years back, Thom had been looking after his sister - his father had moved back to Ireland when Thom was six, and by some illegal wrangling, the human boy had ended up here.
He nodded, his pale eyes still fixed on Cougar. "And they sent over that massive slab of chocolate you all liked so much-"
"What, the Cadbury's stuff?" the vampire said incredulously. Unbeknown to many, the lamia was a terrible chocolate addict. "Well, if he brought some more, I guess we could put up with him..."
"Typical," Thom retorted. "Is it their kindness to my family? No, it's the fact they sent a bar of chocolate. You lot are all as shallow as a parking lot puddle." He shook his white-blond head despairingly.
"And proud to be it!" agreed Cougar, getting to his feet and shaking out his long legs. "Now...do we have a tarp to fix the roof with?" The other three sighed, and got down to work.
Every so often, a silence would fall, and she would think: now, now is the moment to tell them. To just casually drop it in. Tell them about the spell, or about Blue, or anything-
But someone would speak, and the moment was lost.
And then Cern Akafren came in, and she had no more hesitation in her heart.
He had never been a chirpy person, but he had always had a quiet contentment about him, a secret little smile that said the world was being good to him in ways other people could only envy.
Now...she hated the bruised colour of his violet eyes, the defeat and pathos in them. He was so, so grotesquely thin that it hurt her just to see him, and made her bite her lip and turn away because the first glance was always a shock.
Sometimes they would sit him down and try to convince him to eat something, and he would, but his eyes would look beyond them and he didn't say anything at all.
Even raising the dead seemed a fair price to pay for his life. Even.
But gods...oh, bright Goddess, she was scared
X - X - X - X - X
They buried me long ago.
It was a three o'clock thought, sounding in the lonely night.
She was sat downstairs in the empty living room. Staring out of the window, Chatoya tried valiantly to ignore the scroll beside her.
It seemed so innocent; just a tight roll of paper. Life from death, and death from life.
With the light gone, there were no distractions. There was the great dark vault of the sky above, the silence waiting to be filled, and herself. It was a terrible, empty place. The night; for so many a great and secret sea, but for her...a blank page.
Strange how the silence was so often ripped by her voiceless screams.
Strange how the page was not written upon, but scrawled upon in crazy, desperate lines.
Strange how time evaporated into nothing as she stepped between the years like a sorceress walking from the flaming pyre, untouched and aloof. Back to that time when she had first met Blue, this strange and dangerous being who cared nothing for anyone, who had no mercy, no compassion, no regret.
How young I was. How foolish I was.
How little I have changed.
She could hear the snaky shades of his voice, saying words that had fossilised into part of her being, as perhaps Blue Malefici had. He was the shadow of her soul.
The world hurts, he had told her once, the only time she had seen him lose control.
And now that she stood alone, as she had before, she saw how true it was. She had hidden her tears, forbidding them to fall because in her own way, she was proud.
She had watched while her friends found love, and sometimes soulmates; witnessed them grow happy, and grow up, and change in ways that were sometimes drastic and sometimes subtle as a blink. Watching, always and only observing. She had seen them all hurt by love, and healed by love because that was how it went. To love someone utterly, you had to bare your heart to them and say:
This is yours to do with as you want. I am yours to savour, to treasure, to adore...
And to crush.
Love and fear were never far apart. And for her, the fear was so overwhelming, the knowledge of all those she had loved - and because of that love, lost - vast and consumptive. While her friends dared love and heartbreak, she had held back in her knowledge that if love was eternal, people were not: with love walked death, a shadow hovering at the door, a cold wind whistling through the bedroom.
Time had flown past, suns rising and setting one after the other, and through it all, she stood unchanged.
When Blue had killed her family, he had cut out her heart too, and left her crumpled in the dirt. Yet these contrary, compassionate people, these friends, had dragged her to her feet, and wrapped their lives about her like a web to hold her up, and told her the things that people had to say.
They said: I'm sorry.
But my family are still gone.
They said: It will be all right.
But I am alone.
They said: We love you.
And she knew now that she should have told them the truth, and perhaps they would have let her shrivel away. For in the darkness of the night, with her doubts and fears congealed about her, with all her daylight dreams stripped away, and reality stark before her, the truth was plain. She knew she should have said:
But I am empty.
X - X - X - X - X
Three o'clock thoughts that woke Blue Malefici from his sleep, and made him sit up from the coil of tangled sheets. Most people took time to remember who and what and where they were.
Not Blue. He went from sleep to awareness in the time it took to swing an axe.
She was a mile away, but Blue could feel Chatoya Irkil's emotions like they were his own, and it irked him. This piece of emotional self-mutilation was all very amusing, but not while he was trying to sleep.
Her thoughts thrummed in his head like a melody, and though he fell back with a languid stretch that made moonlight bend across the planes of his body, and pulled his pillow over his head, they wouldn't go away.
Three o'clock. He might be a creature of the night, but only by appointment.
With a faint sigh, he swung his feet out of bed and onto the floor, moving to the window. Doors, Blue often considered, were for people without imagination. Cat-flaps on a grand scale.
He slithered outside, pausing to stare at the sky and wonder how she found it so empty. For here lay an endless vista of stars, scattered like broken hopes across the indigo wash. The night, after all, was only the day in a different colour.
If she was going to keep him awake, he could at least get some entertainment out of the little fool.
X - X - X - X - X
What had she done in the years spent running?
Nothing. She had lived with these people who she called friends, but who were in truth only people moving at the same speed from different shadows. Again and again, she had given herself to them utterly, and again and again, she had been handed back unchanged and unhealed. Still empty.
She was a vessel to be filled, but she didn't know with what.
Love had come and gone. Hate had flitted by. Happiness was a bird on the wing, and desolation a half-hearted fling. She had been grazed by emotion, and the marks had faded except for fear and sorrow, which were a double-edged blade made of eternity.
And she was this.
Then the voice rang out. It was the voice to end the earth, a voice resplendent in darkness, drenched in cold. If stars could speak, this is what they would have sounded like.
It was a moment before the words made sense in her mind, grown sluggish and hollow in pain.
"I don't think I've ever met anyone more in need of a stiff drink." Blue sauntered into her vision. "What is it about people round here and a complete inability to lock doors?"
The answer stumbled onto her lips, and escaped. "It was locked."
He shrugged. "Well, it isn't lockpick-proof."
She felt him in her mind, moving like honey. "Why are you here?" She blinked as certain facts registered and jolted her from her trance. "And what are you wearing?"
He looked down. The shorts were fine, if frayed and tattered. It was the t-shirt. More accurately, the slogan, in glow-in-the-dark floating letters.
It said: "Assassins..."
"Do it for money."
"Are trained to do it."
"Will send you to heaven."
He gave her a long, cool look. "What?"
This was too surreal. She was in the middle of her living room, of the night, of a conversation...with Blue wearing a suggestive T-shirt. It didn't match up with how she was feeling.
"I don't need this right now," she told him bluntly.
A slow, sizzling curl of a smile began as he strolled to sit in front of the fireplace. He stared at the empty grate for a second, and flames burst into the hollow. "The torture is all on your part, witch of mine. I don't tend to torture people in my sleep. I'm good - superlative, in fact - but I still need to sleep. Which incidentally, I'm not doing at the moment because you woke me up."
The words made anger surge in her; her voice was almost a hiss. "How dare you? You did this to me. You killed my family. You..." But she let her thoughts trail off, because she had almost said to him, you destroyed me. And she wouldn't give him that satisfaction.
The laugh reminded her of Cougar 's, sinister and delicious. "Destroyed you?"
Too late.
"Stop it," she said, her voice thin and fierce.
"No. You're stronger than that. Right now it's late, and you're feeling miserable because you're scared of that spell. But destroyed?" The words were laced with amusement wicked as arsenic. "When I've taken you to pieces and scattered you to the winds...then you'll know what destroyed means."
"You can't hurt me!" she said, enraged by his arrogance. "Been there and done it and bled all over the t-shirt, remember? You're my soulmate, Blue, and we both know that you're not going to risk killing me and losing all your precious powers, and your sanity and maybe your life."
He tilted his head back in the firelight. "Ah, there's that fight of yours...you know, I believe I actually prefer you this way to being so ridiculously gloomy. But then, I've always liked the fight."
"No," she said, pushing herself to her feet and glaring down at him. "You like the surrender. You like the power. Other men buy sports cars. You kill. Maybe it makes up for other deficits."
He raised one eyebrow, and the flickering firelight seemed to twist his face into something demonic. "That sounded suspiciously like a challenge to me. And you know I can never resist them."
For a moment, she didn't understand what he meant. Then as he stood up lazily, and smiled his predator's smile, she felt her heart duck into her stomach for a second. She really shouldn't provoke him. It never ended well.
"It was an observation, not a challenge," she said as coldly as she could. "Now get out of my house and take that repulsive T-shirt with you."
"Oh, you don't like it?" he said tranquilly, and stripped the shirt off, throwing it carelessly in a corner.
Chatoya nearly dropped dead in shock. He looked so much more dangerous without that piece of clothing. Gleaming and natural, muscled in the subtle way of a puma that had so much hidden strength. There was a long ridged scar that ran from near his heart down to his stomach, marring the smooth skin, and she had to wonder what on earth had caused it.
"How's this, witch of mine?" he said. He stepped forward again, and one hand gripped her chin, until she had no choice but to look squarely into his eyes. He was warm, warm in a way that had always shocked her. Something like Blue should have been cold as a headstone.
"Worse," she snapped shakily. "Why can't you be normal?"
"Normal? All right, witch of mine, let me act normally with my soulmate." His smile was nothing shy of flirtatious; the free hand was on her waist and sliding upwards.
"If your hand moves any higher," she informed him sweetly, "I may have what they technically term a knee-jerk reaction. Understand?"
"You'd do well to stop baiting me then," he murmured, but there was ice under each word, chipping away at her. His grip had become hard, distractingly painful. "Because I never, ever back down."
"Remember who's casting your spell tomorrow," she reminded, and let the unspoken threat hang like a body twisting in the breeze.
He let go, but his stare was as invasive as a touch. Chatoya resisted the urge to blind him.
"You're much more interesting when you're angry. And for a moment there, you almost looked pretty. So let me give you one final piece of advice."
He smiled, that small, satisfied smile that said the world lay at Blue Malefici's feet, and he damn well knew it.
"Don't ever threaten me again."
"Or what?"
The answer was something she wouldn't have expected.
He moved with an impossible boneless grace, and simply - so simply - took her hand and dropped the barriers he had put up that blocked the soulmate link.
She was dropped into hell. Into his emotions, into the absolute surety of knowing that she was born to kill. She knew what it was to have others' lives cupped in her hands, and to feel the raw pleasure of wrenching them apart, of impossible power boiling under her fingertips, of feeling no guilt and no remorse, of blood soaking every inch of her soul through and through, and of the terrible hunger of always wanting more-
He let go, and she realised she had been about to scream. But instead, she let out her breath on a high-pitched gasp, and stared at him.
"Or that," he said casually. "Until tomorrow."
And he was gone. It was her and the night once more, but she didn't feel empty now.
She was filled with fiery rage, and a yearning to give Blue exactly what he deserved, or because she didn't have an electric chair, as close as was inhumanly possible.
How does he always win? she wondered, and the answer fell into her head like a clock chiming.
Because he always does what no one expects.
What no one expects...
Oh, wait. Oh...now this would be perfect.
Raise the dead? Ryars Valley was full of them.
And quite a lot of them had been sent there by Blue. She'd bet they'd love to see him again...and all they needed was a gateway between this world and theirs, and to open a gateway, all you needed was someone who could sense the spirit world, who had powers drawn from it.
She could hear them clamouring faintly in her ears now. The ghosts, the lost and the forgotten, faint as a breeze. Dancing, gliding, sometimes chilling. Filling her with purpose, crowding about her.
Someone who could sense the spirit world...
Someone like a witch.
I am envious and obvious and desperate for your love
I am shattered by and criticised and still I crave your touch
And I know the time you're killing is mine
But I don't mind