ASHER
I do my best to focus on the pavement in front of me, making sure the large all-terrain tires of my Sahara stay between the perforated yellow lines of the winding mountain road. I haven’t said a word since I started the SUV and pointed the tires away from the cabin and toward my house on the outskirts of Fraser. I’m holding onto my rage by a fragile, fraying thread. I want to hate Aurelia for making Mena tell her what is most likely the worst sin on her soul, but I can’t. I have this needling suspicion that if Mena could have, she would have kept that horror from me, she would have never told me a single shred of the horror she lived through. It makes me simultaneously need to hide her away to keep her safe and to let her fly free. She has been cooped up in a cage for so long, I don’t want my hands to suffocate her. I don’t want to be another cage.
But I also want to go to the depths of hell just to rip the flesh from the bones of the bastards who touched her and then kill them all over again. Slowly. Painfully. In ways that would haunt them and make the Devil himself shudder in horror. It scares me that I have that much depravity in my soul, but then again it doesn’t. John has done the same or worse for Olivia, and for better or worse, he taught me how to be a man.
“How much did you hear?” she asks, her voice a quiet rasp in the silence of the cab.
“I came in at ‘what would you say if I told you I killed my rapist?’ and it was a fight to stay sane after that. I didn’t want to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t make myself leave,” I admit, shifting my eyes from the road for the first time since I turned over the ignition. She’s stopped crying, but her cheeks are still damp. I take my hand off the gearshift and reach for one of the hands trapped in between her knees. She weaves her slender fingers with mine, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
“Are you angry I heard?” I ask, hoping if she is, she forgives me soon.
“No. If the tables were turned, and I heard something so… horrible happened to you, I wouldn’t have been able to leave either. You and I do our best to protect one another. I can’t explain it, but I can’t stand to see you hurt, and I know you can’t live with seeing me in pain either.”
“I’m sorry you had to tell her that. I’m sorry it happened to you. I don’t know how much guilt you have weighing you down, but I know you don’t deserve to carry it.”
“Maybe.”
“No, maybe. You were put in a situation where there was zero chance of a happy ending. You were put there on purpose by a woman who wanted to punish you for some dreamed up infraction that had nothing to do with who you are as a person and everything to do with what you are. If the shoe were on the other foot, Aurelia would have been in the same boat as you in that cell.”
“Maybe,” she whispers, her brow puckered in a deep frown, and she is silent for a long while.
“You hungry?” I ask trying to get her mind off all that has happened in just a few short hours since the sun came up. It’s not too far past lunch and I can’t remember the last time I ate.
“Yeah,” she mutters, aloof, but she still rubs her thumb against my forefinger.
“We can stop in Granby to pick up some supplies before heading to the house.”
“I’m not sure how good I’m going to be in public.”
“Things have changed quite a bit since the last time you’ve been around other people. If you don’t want to go in, you can stay in the car while I get what we need and I can get something quick to make at the house,” I suggest.
Her mouth twists as if she’s tasted something bad and she shakes her head no. I don’t blame her. Leaving her in the car would sting, but I would have if she needed me to. I’m glad she doesn’t want to be without me, as conceded as that sounds in my head. The shortcut to Granby is open for the next month or two until the snows move over the mountain and this pass closes for the winter months. I pull into one of the few grocery stores in this small mountain town and thrust the gearshift to neutral before setting the emergency brake. Mena is practically plastered to the window, taking in the cars and signs and people.
Granby is a small ski town, only about two thousand people in permanent residence with plenty of transient tourists in the winter months.
When I get out of the SUV and round the hood, she is still staring out the glass slack-jawed. I try to cast my mind back to the 1960’s to what this town might have looked like then. So many decades have passed in my lifetime that I have trouble singling out just one, and it makes me want to ask what her life was like before her capture – before her life went to hell.
“You coming?” I ask as I open her door.
“Yeah,” she says, shaking her head and jumping down from the cab. She shivers a bit in the brisk mountain air, and I wrap an arm around her shoulders. Our steps fall in sync, her long legs matching my pace with ease. I grab a cart at the entrance and start at the non-perishables, picking up paper products, a pack of extra light bulbs, replacement batteries for the flashlights and alcohol.
“What did you do before?” I ask, not elaborating on what ‘before’ means.
“I was a Gentry,” she says absently as she inspects a package of disposable lighters as if they are the strangest thing in the whole world. “I worked in funeral homes or hospitals – though it is much harder to phase at a hospital – and ferried souls. I lived quietly, moving every five years or so.”
We weave through the entire store, mostly to let Mena inspect each item that catches her eye, and I ask her questions when she’s semi-distracted, learning little snippets of her life. The flu pandemic she lived through in 1918 New Orleans, the consumption outbreaks in 1880 and 1890. Most of her stories are about the work she did, but not much about her or her family.
Even peppering her with questions, Mena is still a mystery to me.
We load up with everything we’ll need for at least a week at the house. Mena can’t believe how many choices there are in products from the different kinds of toilet paper to the fact that there is more than one brand of light bulb. When the store starts to get busy, her questions dry up and she sticks even closer to me, wedging herself between the cart and the shelves, avoiding people as much as she can. I pick up the pace, grabbing the things I think we’ll need and skipping the crap I know we won’t. The checkout process mystifies her, I can tell by her wide eyes and the eyebrows that have practically crept into her hairline, but she doesn’t ask any questions. We leave after paying a sum that makes her eyes nearly pop out of their sockets, and load the Jeep to the brim before driving the last twenty-five minutes to my secluded home on the banks of the Fraser River.
I escape here every chance I can get, which isn’t much. I come here so rarely. I’m not sure why I bought a house separate from John and Olivia. Maybe it is because here I feel myself. I feel like this place is mine. It is a modest home in comparison to the Grand Lake cabin, with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a nice two-car garage to house my cars and toys. It is peaceful, my closest neighbor is maybe a few football fields away – a small foothill separating us from view. The river is low here, practically a creek in some places, but this year the snows melted late and the waters rose higher than I’d seen them in the last five years.
Mena assesses the house; a gentle upturn of her mouth tells me she likes the look of my home, but she stops herself from crossing the threshold, stepping back off the porch and retreating to the open space near the Jeep.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her, worried.
“I need to bleed my power. I used to do it daily before I was captured. It helps me keep myself under control. I’d hate to blow up your beautiful house,” she says with a self-deprecating twist to her mouth. “Where can I go?”
“Any place is good, there isn’t anyone with a line of sight to this house. Just not too close to the Jeep, if you don’t mind. Cars nowadays are mostly run on electronics.”
“Duly noted,” she says as she walks beyond the Sahara, putting about a hundred yards between herself and the SUV. She considers it for another moment before walking just a bit further and then she stops. I unload the groceries as she paces back and forth in the tall grass near the bank of the river. I put the milk, eggs, ice cream and butter in the fridge and abandon the rest to go back out to watch her. She finally stops pacing and picks a spot a little farther from the water.
Then the light show begins, and I’m glad she’s doing this during the day so her Aegis is masked by the sunlight scorching through the fat cumulus clouds. Her light strobes like a beacon, bolting from her in great wide arcs of electricity, reaching like fat fingers to the sky. They coalesce into a sphere around her body. It gets brighter and brighter, a jarring buzz coming from the beams before exploding in a sea of fragmented shards of light. She stumbles, crumpling in the scorched grass like a puppet cut from its strings. The ground is blackened in a fifty-foot circle of ash around her, some of the gritty sand on the banks of the stream melted into a crackled glass. I don’t think, I just travel to her, my feet burning from the residual heat coming up from the earth. I snatch her from the ground and move back to the porch before my shoes start to melt.
“I’m okay,” she mumbles, her eyes closed, her head listing to the side enough for me to notice the bright red blood coming from her nose and ears. She’s breathing and talking at least, but it makes me wonder how much power she drained if she can’t even stand.
“Princess, I need you to open your eyes for me,” I murmur against her forehead, my fingers buried in her hair, clutching her to my chest.
“Gimme a minute. I’ll be good in a minute,” she haltingly mumbles, her eyes cracking open. “That was harder than I remember.”
“I fucking hope so. Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me,” I rumble. “Don’t do that again. Fuck the house, and the truck and anything else that you could blow up. I only give a shit about you. The rest is just stuff. Never hurt yourself like that again, do you hear me?” I growl, my voice pitched low so I don’t yell, but fuck, I want to.
She nods against my shoulder, but that just isn’t good enough. “Promise me. Promise me you will never hurt yourself like that again.”
“I wasn’t trying to this time. It’s been a long time since I’ve drained myself. I’ve spent the last fifty years having Iva leach my power from me, sorry if I’m a little rusty,” she grumbles back, sassy.
Iva drained her like this… My mind blanks. She’s had to do that over and over again for the last fifty years? I can’t stand it. I can’t fathom the pain she’s gone through. I can’t imagine the agony of it.
I can’t…
I cup her face and kiss her, rubbing my tongue against hers, hoping my kisses and my touch is enough to heal the weight of her scars.