In
My memory is not complete. There is something broken in me but I can't define what this is. The it that is missing. They tell me it's because I come from a broken home, abandoned at a tender age. They say that it's trauma - I turn my face away, maybe they're right. I wouldn't know the answer because my memory is not complete.
I sit on the fire escape overlooking a narrow alley that leads onto The Crawl, a bustling light filled place which is busy at morning because of the sprawling business and night, because of the lucrative opportunities for prostitutes.
There something jarring about the city. I don't feel like I belong in this place; mostly it's the smell that bothers me: metallic and smoggy and then sweet like the aftermath of cigarette smoke escaping a stranger's mouth.
I clutch the pendant that hangs at my throat, it's a reflect action now. The pendant is a gift from some distant point of my life, it's a silver plated foxglove. It's quiet ugly but after these longs years it's a comfort in my hand.
Inside the apartment my foster parents are bickering. I don't know what about. It always seems insignificant to me and so hide in the semi- solitude of the fire escape surrounded by the suffocating swarm of the city. Sometimes I stare at the moon and strange images flash past my mind's eye of two shades of skin pressed against one another beneath the silvery rays; one looks like alabaster and the other shadow. It means nothing in the end.
Someone whistles in the alley below and I peer between the bars to see the unmistakable figure of Jewel Smoke – not her true name – but one I know her by. She beckons my down from my perch and I go down obediently negotiating the rickety ladders and balconies of the fire escape with the confident air of having done this many times.
Jewel is known because of her eyes that are the myriad shades of citrine, emerald and at times amethyst. She is known as Smoke because she supplies the drug of the same name, it is a herb that has a distinctive smell, it blooms similar to orchid but it is not known as such. It is called Smoke and Jewel is called Smoke too.
"The Claw tonight." She says her eyes flashing iridescent in the lamp light.
I nod and smile with lips closed together because I don't share her fascination with the place, the press of sweat slicked bodies, the air dense with carnal purpose, it is not a place for the faint of heart because the denizens could eat you alive.
Although I'm not in the mood for company, I am mindful that Jewel may one day become useful to an orphan like me. Maybe she already was.
She lays her lips against mine and I grin to supress a shudder, they're always so cold, lifeless. It's not something I've ever gotten used to. She doesn't do it for pleasure, she does it possessively and I don't know why I allow it. I don't particularly like it. I am not her possession.
"Let's go." She sighs deeply. Whatever she had expected has now passed and she is resigned. She takes my hand in hers and pulls me away from The Crawl and toward The Claw.
The night has a creeping chill, it is autumn giving way to the first breath of winter and the air is crisp and everything takes on a faint sparkle. I cling to Jewel's hand and I don't know why, her skin is rarely warm and offers no real comfort. My own motives are unclear to me but it pleases her and she grips me harder.
We do not join the back of the queue but walk hand in hand between the arches and into the pungent and seething mass of The Devil's Claw. Jewel's eyes are the dark glitter of garnet as they pass over the indomitable bouncer; his eyes glance away. Everybody knows Lady Smoke.
The insides are much the same as the night before and the night before that; it is a warm press of darkly dressed, intoxicated young people, their faces flash in the strobe lights and I look away.
"I'll be right back, sugar." Jewel lays a kiss on my cheek and moves away in the serene and supremely arrogant way only she can.
The Claw was her domain, both a place for business and pleasure and it is not my place to make a fuss.
Like some things in life, The Devil's Claw requires presence and not participation. I can stand unnoticed like an ineffectual grotesque lingering on the edge of a building. I am stone. Heedless to the offers of a drink, of Smoke, of those inviting smiles. They are no temptation to me, the drink, the Smoke those hungry smiles.
As with much my incomplete life I keep myself to myself. I am not ready to participate yet. That is until I see someone who I've never seen before and that someone sees me.
I know he's angry because his teeth are clenched together, there is a tightness in his square jaw that looks painful. His dark lashes veil a pair of bright eyes, the colour hard to discern in the so-so light of the alley behind the club. "Do you remember me?" His voice is so low it is almost a growl but it doesn't scare me.
I know he won't hurt me. I don't know how I know this.
"Should I?" I ask and watch him blink, he is surprised and irritated and beneath this all is a slow burning longing.
"I want to hurt you." He says and he is sincere, I can see his fingers clenching and unclenching with the need to lash out. I am an easy target but still I am not afraid.
"Where have you come from?" I ask. I note he is tall and the shadows caress his skin revealing muscle against the slenderness. He is muscled in a way a keen swimmer is but more than this, there is a canny suppleness to him that I cannot compare.
"You know where I come from." He replies acidly.
His tone hurts some part of myself I never knew could be hurt; I have never let anyone close and so I flinch and lower my eyes from the hard angles of his face.
I lick my bottom lip, a tell-tale sign of a decision being made before my hand darts out and I brush his bare arm with my fingertips. He jumps back as if I've hurt him with a mere touch or perhaps it is disgust I see in his expression.
"You don't get to touch me, Sae."
Sae. Is that my name? They had given me a different name: Mary Doe. The latter because they didn't know where I had come from the first because this was the name of the woman who had found me. Sae is a decidedly different name. It is the name of a girl that smiles and laughs and loves and hopes. All these things are unfamiliar to me.
He sees something of the cogs turning in my head and a shadow of knowledge flitters through his eyes. Yellow. His eyes are yellow and unlike anything I have seen on a person, it reminds me of buttercups and in the glare of the light they look like hard yellow discs.
"Mare." Jewel bursts through the back door of The Claw. She always knows where to find me.
Jewel's demeanour changes at the sight of the boy - I don't know his name. I think I should if he knows mine.
"Not another step." He says softly but there's no mistake, it is a warning whether to Jewel or to me I can't discern because his eyes are hard yellow discs of hatred. Jewel goes strangely still. Unnaturally still.
"I don't take commands from animals." She replies coolly. "And neither does she." She nods toward me.
Her words are cruel and the sound of it rings in my ears like a carillon bell; an apology dies on my tongue as he growls as a dog growls when threatened. His teeth are bared and they are sharp. Unnaturally sharp. Something whispers in my mind. Is that memory? "He doesn't mean any harm." I intercede faintly but Jewel pays me no mind.
Perhaps the change in his appearance should have horrified me. It didn't.
"She is not one of you." Jewel says smugly. "She will never be one of you. Why else do you think Maira chose this for her? If you do what I think you're going to do you'll get yourselves both killed."
Then it happened. Something in the taste and temperature of the air changed. Something inside me changed. I watched as he doubled over pressing his fingers to the ground and there I watched as his hand became the paw of an animal. I remembered. His ears twitched when he was nervous. His ears were sticking straight up. I knew his tail wagged when he was happy. His tail pointed straight.
"Come and get it, doggy." Jewel murmurs as her mouth forms a misshapen grin.
They're going to fight, the air is static with imminent violence, and I can almost hear the tooth and claw and flesh colliding.
"Enough." The two syllables sound hard and loud from between my lips and the wolf slinks into the darkness and Jewel glances at me with her plucked brows arching dangerously.
Ms S