Chapter 2
Near an hour later I was giving my voice a short rest, still with an arm around her and staring at the patterns thrown on the opposite wall by the light seeping through the rain-splattered windows, brooding on the past and the present and the possible outcomes of the immediate future. Time moved very slowly in the wake of this passive waiting and I found it hard to endure the silence filling each infinite second.
Random memories tugged at me, giving up their snippets of folly or wisdom. I was becoming increasingly out of sorts as the time passed, more uncomfortable than I've ever been before in my alien Human skin as I tried not to dwell on any one thought too long, my mind replaying all the incidences of fear, betrayal, anger, impotence, hopelessness, despair, and blunder upon blunder on my part throughout my life in an endless loop. There was no way I could ever push back the time to take back my failures, nothing for me to do but continue to wait. Each and every out-of-sync sound that intruded was causing me to tense until it could be identified and safely dismissed.
The walls of this place were paper thin, the store itself empty enough to be an amplifying sound chamber, making me an unwilling audience to the bitter argument resulting from the late and drunken return home of one of the building's upstairs tenants. The argument quickly escalated into a noisy battle, clear enough to hear every shouted word, every thrown object and then every blow, just as I then heard the wild mating bout in celebration of the apologies which followed before all finally settled into calm and quiet once again.
I was becoming more and more worried over what was happening, my imagination hatching a crawling dread that crept through the corridors of my mind, demanding the keys to every room. I've had to deal with friends and colleagues who've suffered from all manner of mental and emotional trauma before, but this felt somehow different from anything I'd ever known or witnessed.
Mel hadn't so much as moved the entire time we'd been there. She was sitting exactly the way I'd positioned her, her head on my shoulder, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes still staring sightlessly into the distance.
"Mel? Can you hear me?" I plaintively asked for what had to be the twentieth time.
From the way she was just sitting there she could have been made of wax.
I realized then that I was unconsciously stroking her throat but had no idea how long I'd been doing it, as though her warmth, her life, was vital for my continued survival. Moreover, I couldn't seem to stop myself. Primitive though it may be, I must admit that there is something truly astonishing about the touching of flesh.
Not for the first time I found myself wondering what her sense of my touch might be. Or if she even had a sense of it. She'd once told me that it felt weird ... sort of nice but ... weird', and usually she simply seemed to just allow it, almost as if she were granting me some form of courtesy.
It was then I first recognized that, from the very beginning, without any thought or question, I had been consistently behaving with this Human female just as I once had with my Nallia...
That strange thought froze in my mind, both startling and unsettling as I began to examine it.
Even among the most highly evolved species, no male can become more dangerous, more vicious, than one rising in defense of his mate. It taps into the deepest strata of the primordial core all life comes from, even we Cirronians. I was behaving as if that was how I was seeing her and it was exactly what I had been giving her, all that and more.
But why was I behaving like that?
More to the point, why should it feel so right to be doing so?
If only I could decipher what this elusive connection between us actually is, what it stems from, its source, I would know the answer. I was convinced of it. I closed my eyes a moment, feeling her soft skin yielding beneath the still constant rhythm of my hand, allowing my mind to touch the sensation once again until it rose in a multi-layered symphony of undertones and my senses expanded into it.
We Cirronians are both blessed and cursed with what we call Ancient Memory, the rich and detailed inherited engrams of our ancestors. My mind attempted to sort through those eons of surfacing memory, searching for an anchor of time or place or circumstance, some manner of reference however tenuous or obscure. But no matter how I tried to sift back through them, find the chord this connection was striking, there was ... nothing.
Nothing at all.
Yet of all the Humans I'd met she alone seemed to trigger something deep within me, the feel of her presence somehow different enough from the bland sameness of other Humans that I'd been able to recognize and distinguish it from the start. It had been enough to draw me to her side when I'd first arrived on her world, enough to embolden me to return to her later and seek out her help.
If not an actual memory, then exactly what was this? An instinct? But from where? And how could that be?
Every time I reached for it, tried to find the wellspring, tried to understand, it slipped away like a cunning wraith, defying my every attempt at analysis and leaving me wondering all the more if it were only a trick of my own mind.
So why am I so fascinated with this Human female? Why do I feel this urge – more, this abiding need – to be with her, even though she's completely alien to me and I hardly even know her? The intensity of my response to her was – and still is – a continuing source of surprise and wonder. It's almost as if... as if our destinies are intertwined somehow, as if she will be instrumental in correcting a terrible wrong in my life that I will be unable to stop without her intervention...
Would you listen to me? I don't even subscribe to destiny'. And I sound like Bendal spouting off with another of his asinine prophetic dreams.
Yet every time I tried to think of a more rational explanation my mind kept returning to that same thought. I can't seem to convince myself otherwise and no other explanation seems to ring as true as that one.
No other explanation feels quite as right.
It had to be in my own mind, I finally decided. It had to be. What I am right now is trapped in the dichotomy that often happens with morphing: I'm being unnaturally influenced by the embedded instincts of the lower order of life I'd made of myself, a primitive form that has nothing whatever to do with what I really am. It was the only answer that made any logical sense. It's impossible for a connection such as this to exist between us at all.
Yet still it felt so true, so real. So right. And the longer I maintained contact with her, the more I tasted of it, the more I was left wanting for the stronger and surer it seemed to resonate and draw me in.
As always before I reluctantly gave up trying to solve the impossible enigma and allowed my hand to drop, opened my eyes and again anxiously searched her face.
By that point her aura had become very still, so preternaturally so that I hardly had any sense of her lifeforce at all. Her eyes continued to stare straight ahead and right through me, seeing only a terrible emptiness that utterly denied my existence, that didn't even know her own.
Her features had gone slack and her pallor ... It wasn't just that she'd become so unnaturally pale. She seemed devoid of all color, almost transparent, as though every last drop of her blood had been leeched out of her body, all the life drained from her soul. The only visible sign that proved she was still alive was the steady rhythm of her pulse throbbing at the base of her neck.
"Come on, Mel! Snap out of it!" I blurted out, then winced at the harshness of my tone. "I am sorry, Mel," I apologized. "I didn't mean to sound like that. You're safe now. Tevv can't hurt you and there's ... nothing here to be afraid of. Come back to this world. Please?"
No reaction.
I took her hands in mine, over-riding the impulse to try shaking her into awareness or repeat Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!' in her face over and over again until she became tired of my voice and stopped looking like one of those plastic mannequins piled in the store's back corner. By then any response at all would have been more than welcome.
"Mel!"
What else could I say? Or do, for that matter? I'm not a psychiatrist, and even if I were I knew very little about the psychology of this species, had no idea how to treat a Human in such a state. I'd gotten her away from the motel, had made certain that she was warm and relatively comfortable, and that was all I could really do for her.
Getting to my feet I let go of her hands, cringing as they flopped bonelessly on the sofa chair, each with a clearly audible thud'. I neatly repositioned them on her lap, and then took a step away from her.
Surely this withdrawal couldn't last too much longer...
Or could it?
Her empty staring was starting to frighten me. My mouth had turned so very dry that I had to keep licking my lips, although that didn't help at all.
I tried to convince myself that although withdrawal usually lasts only minutes, sometimes hours, occasionally it might last a few days or even a few weeks.
But I also know only all too well that sometimes a mind will flee for a lifetime.
The heavy silence was becoming stifling. I began to waffle between blind panic and this terrible sense of ... disconnection, as if I had somehow ceased to be real. I shivered again, suddenly feeling incredibly, terribly cold, and took several deep breaths, trying to calm down, trying to regain control of myself.
I had given her a glimpse of just how dangerous Daggon can be. She'd witnessed how I answered Tevv's brutality with my own, how I'd dislocated his elbow, wrist and shoulder, broken his collarbone and at least half his ribs, and had hit him hard enough to rupture some of his internal organs. And then she'd seen how I deliberately made his Collection as painful as I could. To tell the truth of it, I would've gladly drawn it out for many long minutes if she hadn't needed my immediate attention.
Was that what she had fled from?
Why couldn't I have just Collected him? Why did I have to make him scream in agony like that?
And far worse, why did I have to let her see how much I enjoyed being the instrument of his pain?
But I knew why. I could still feel Tevv's residue jangling along my neurons.
Hunting someone down who needs hunting down; learning their strategies and weaknesses; matching my wit and skill and strength against them; feeling that surge of adrenaline as the fierce joy of battle sings through my veins; and above all else, the feeling of power and triumph as a fallen opponent looks up at me in terror, knowing that they've been bested and that I'm the one to have done it.
I'm all too well aware of my love of the violence, of the terrible and wonderful addictiveness of the power that winning brings. It's barbaric and savage, I know, but it's the final confrontation at the end of a Track that I've always loved the most. So in the heat of the struggle, in seeing and feeling Tevv's desperation, his near madness, I had given in to my most beloved and despised of instincts and attacked without mercy.
And while that might make me a monster in some eyes, I really can't apologize for it. It was exactly the sort of thing that had to be done.
The silence was becoming more and more oppressive as I cleared my throat.
"Mel?"
Still more silence.
"So it's ... just you and me now," I ventured.
I knew that sounded depressingly lame, but what does one say to a Human in a condition like this?
"You'd probably laugh at me right now if you could," I continued, finding myself wishing she would. A little laughter, even one of her gently teasing remarks, would have been far better than her ongoing silence.
"Mel?" This time her name came out as a hoarse croak and I began to shake, could hardly breathe as a horrible sense of guilt and overwhelming loss engulfed me.
"I really don't know if you can hear me or not," I said, "But in case you can ... I want you to know that ... I'm not going anywhere. I'm right here and I'll still be right here for you when ... when you come back."
It was eerie carrying on a one-sided conversation with a living, breathing being who was behaving like a very poorly reanimated corpse.
That horrible thought made me reach for her throat again just to feel the connection of her pulse through my fingertips, even though it was plainly visible and the faint but real sensation of her lifeforce welling in the back of my mind all proved beyond question that she was still very much alive.
I removed my hand and rubbed the side of my face, resisting the urge to smash something, anything. Rarely have I ever felt so helpless, so completely useless.
Again I took both her hands in mine and, yes, they truly were small and delicate, the fingers slim and finely molded. For an instant I remembered how they had felt on my Human body, so soft and gentle yet still so strong and sure. At some point I had just surrendered control of my body's responses to her without even realizing it. And there had been that wondrous yet terrible ache deep within, a sweet and languid smoldering lacing through my belly as an emptiness that cried out to be filled, my flesh beginning to throb everywhere she wasn't touching me, burning where she was.
A shiver of a different sort curled up my spine. The longing to be touched by her again, to feel her hands on me again, to have that sweet current of euphoria wash over me again and somehow have that emptiness filled became nearly overpowering. I longed for it perhaps more than I'd ever wanted anything else.
I knelt down before of her then, putting myself directly in her line of sight, still trying to get her to see me. Mounting despair made my heart feel like a dead weight inside my chest. I hoped it didn't show on my face.
"Mel? Please..." I found myself begging. "Please come back. I ... I need you."
She blinked, then rapidly blinked a few times again, and just like that she was simply there.
"Mel?" I said again, starting to rise, not quite daring to believe in the miracle of her sudden return.
"YOU GODDAMN BASTARD!" she shrieked, the sound part pain, part fear and part the bloodlust keening of an enraged animal as she surged up from the sofa-chair and violently shoved me away.
Off balance and taken completely by surprise, I was knocked back, slipping on some scattered hangers and falling against an empty display case with enough force to break it and shatter the glass.
Panting, her arms held stiff at her sides, her hands spasmodically opening and closing into fists, she glared down at me as I lay there in the rubble.
"WHERE WERE YOU?" she demanded through clenched teeth.
There is a Human saying I've heard, if looks could kill'. A picture of Mel at that very moment, with the unbanked fire hotly blazing in her eyes, her nostrils flared wide, the color fevered high on her cheeks, would be all the definition ever needed.
It was one of the most beautiful and welcome sights I've ever seen in my life.
"I was..." I started to explain.
"GO TO HELL!" she screamed, cutting me off, and then she abruptly turned and fled, slamming open the front door and bolting out into the night at a dead run.
Mel was on automatic now, barely knowing anything at all, operating solely on instinct. And her instinct, still deeply immersed in the terrors of that motel room, demanded that she flee.
I grinned, then began to laugh with relief as I extricated myself from the debris.
Mel was fine!
Then shouldering her forgotten purse I went to follow in the path of her Track.