Bladed Wings (15 page)

              Something else, Timothy needed something else.

              He buried his spiked tendrils into the demon one more time. That didn’t stop him.

              It wouldn’t work. Doing the same thing wouldn’t work. That damage didn’t matter. With tiny breaths, Timothy’s eyes were on the white light at the blade’s tip. He blinked and did something else; he didn’t need to win, just had to live, just had to wait until the demon’s body died. That’s why Timothy recalled his tendrils for one more strike. This time they shot down, and they hooked around Terrance’s arms. Timothy yanked, the tendrils ripping Terrance off of Timothy, flinging him across the pavement.

              Scrambling to his feet, Timothy felt every bruise, every cut. He won. Jenny would be safe.

              That’s what Timothy thought until Terrance began to move again, got to his feet as he watched without the strength to stop him. Bent over, he stumbled two steps.

              Timothy let go of one of his tentacles. It dissipated somewhere back into his soul, however those mechanics worked. That remaining tendril shot out and struck Terrance between his eyes. He fell back, though the tendril clung to Terrance’s body. One last burst of strength, every drip of energy funneled into one splash, and he threw his blade. Timothy pulled the tendril, enough to yank Terrance to one side and throw off his aim.

              But it was good enough to slide past Timothy, ripping through his pant leg and slicing a shallow cut across his thigh. Timothy’s tendril remained even as Terrance’s dropped forward.

              The demon’s heart stopped, its brain went dark, and Timothy felt the surge. An explosion of energy shot through his tendrils like power cords. Straight up those lines of shadow, he felt the pulse of strength shoot into him. The shadows darkened, denser and stronger, the demon soul fed.

              The world spun as Timothy lost all sense of balance and reality. He forgot which way went up. His left felt like down. The air tasted like chocolate, and he let himself fall to the ground, solid and sure even as it felt like a ceiling. This was harder, so much harder than Cipher. Eyes closed, the world spun and shook for a few minutes. Then he had the courage to open his eyes and check his wounds. His shirt was torn. The gash on his leg was still there, but it didn’t bleed and it almost felt old, like he’d had it for a couple days. Terrance healed wounds in minutes; maybe Timothy would do the same now.

              Crawling to his feet, Timothy chanced nausea and glanced around. The parking lots were empty. As usual, apartment lights glowed but no one bothered with the outside. So Timothy crawled over to the light post and leaned against it. It was cold and hard and probably hurt his back, but not fighting felt like every kind of paradise.

Isis hopped down from the darkness. At first Timothy didn’t know the sparrow, flying around at night, was Isis until it glowed and grew into a young woman dressed for summer. Timothy was still down, his back pressed against the lamppost. It was cold and wet, yet he didn’t have the energy to move.

“You fed on it?” she asked.

              “How long were you watching?”

              “Not long,” Isis said. “You both burned up so much energy, I felt it, and wanted to see what I was missing.”

              “Would you have helped?”

              “Probably not. If it looked like you’d die, I’d go tell Cordinox about the new player.”

              “He’s dead?” Timothy asked with a glance at the body.

              “It’s dead,” Isis said. “I wouldn’t really call this thing a person.”

              “What was he?” Like after the last fight, Timothy’s jaw pulsed with new waves of pain for every word.

              “A demon.”

              “And you call him an it?”

              “Why not?” Isis asked. “If it’s not a person, it must not have a real soul, right?”

              “Do you?”

              “Nope. And that’ll probably make me really strong, and then I’ll do whatever I want, right? And that should be good. But I’m sad about it.”

              “What are you going to do with him?”

              “Check him out. See if we can use him.”

              “Do I want to know what that means?”

              “Probably not,” she giggled.

              Timothy pressed his ribs. They ached, but there weren’t the sharp stabs of pain so he guessed none of the bones had broken. When he checked his arms and legs, those wounds had already healed. The pains faded, almost gone. Forcing himself onto his feet, Timothy decided he needed food. A couple of hamburgers would do it—that or an elephant.

              More than an hour later, Timothy got back to his apartment. Walking almost hurt. He couldn’t remember ever eating so much.

When he got back to his place, the first thing Timothy heard was, “Did you ask her out yet?” Jeremiah didn’t bother to glance up from his textbook. Timothy ignored him. He went back to his room and looked in his mirror. The bruises were almost all gone. He watched, fascinated to see his skin clear, the purple dissipate back into healthy skin. “Well?” Jeremiah asked, looking up this time. As usual he was slouched across the chair, his feet dangling over one armrest.

              “No.”

              “Ouch. Bad move man. Bad move.”

              “It’s not a game.”

              “Of course not,” Jeremiah said. “Games don’t have consequences, but life does, and life requires strategies. So what’s your next move?”

              “I don’t know,” Timothy said as he sat across from his roommate. “I haven’t thought about it since I first told you.”

              “Shame. You should think faster if you know you want to win her.”

              “She’s not a prize.”

              “Of course not,” Jeremiah agreed again. “Just someone you really want.”

              “What do you think I should do?”

              “Go tell her you’ve been in love with her for months and beg for the chance to love her the way she deserves?” he suggested.

              “That’s almost romantic.”

              “You know you only get one shot, right?” Timothy figured he looked confused because Jeremiah added, “You’re her friend right? But you haven’t been. I mean dude, it took you six months to talk to the girl. But now she’s broken up, so you have to redefine yourself. You don’t want to be her friend. You want something more, something tender and intimate, all of those clichés that keeps Disney in business.”

              “Your sense of romance never ceases to amaze me.”

              “Be sarcastic all you want, but we both know I’m right. You ask her out once, and that’s your chance. She’ll say yes or no and that’ll be it. No pressure, right?”

              “No pressure.”

              “You don’t think she could change her mind later?”

              Jeremiah said, “She could in the same sense she could decide to eat her hand or drive down someone’s grandmother for the jollies of it. Physical potential? Sure, she could do it in theory. Will it actually happen? No.”

              “I don’t believe you.”

              “Have you ever changed your mind?”

              “A girl’s never asked me out.”

              “Then you just have to trust me.”

              “Because you know everything.”

              “Now you’re learning,” Jeremiah chuckled at the universe. “I’m the guy who always reads. I have to know what I’m talking about, right?”

              “You’re the guy who likes talking, whether or not he’s right.”

              “Evidence?”

              “You’re wrong now.”

              “Prove it.” Jeremiah said, “Ask her out. Do it wrong, some way you know will fail. Tug her pigtails as you demand she go get some pizza with you. Then try it again a few days later. Let’s see what happens.”

              “No.”

              “Because you know I’m right.”

              “Because I’m not willing to risk her to prove a point,” Timothy said.

              “How gentlemanly.”

              After a second to think about what his friend said, Timothy shook his head. “I care about her. I really care about her. Have you ever felt like that about someone?” Jeremiah had wormed his way through a couple of relationships. He was the guy who’d date a girl if he thought he’d learn something new. Attraction wasn’t important, just the information he could win. And in a year and a half, Timothy didn’t know if Jeremiah ever cared about the girl, not just what she might teach him.

              “No.” Sharp and concise, it rang accurate, the same way Jeremiah would answer an equation, “And that’s why you should trust me.”

              “Because of a lack of experience?”

              “Because I’m objective. I get into relationships without feeling.”

              “Like a sociopath?”

              “Like a scholar. No one else watches people like me. You should believe me.” It wasn’t a bad argument, and it made something in Timothy’s stomach drop. If Jeremiah was right, that’d mean he had one shot, one chance to ask Jenny out. And then he would know if he got to be with her, if everything he wanted and hoped for six months might happen.

              “What do you think I should do?”

              “What do you know about her?”
              Timothy ran through her favorite movie, favorite song, favorite dinner, favorite flavor of ice-cream, all of those tiny factoids he grabbed each time he saw her. He never studied for his classes this hard. Every time he saw her was like a pop lecture where he had to try to hold onto every piece of information because that might be the one that would make something happen. And they were so much fun to remember.

              “You could do something elaborate. Go rent every romantic comedy produced in the last ten years and rip off one of their ideas. If she recognizes it, then you’re sweet for the effort. If she doesn’t, then you’re brilliantly creative and still an awesome guy for the effort.”

              “Wouldn’t that scare her off?”

              “Depends on whether or not she’s already picked you. If she hasn’t, then yeah, that’d probably be a little nerve-twitching.”

              “What else?”

“Dinner,” Jeremiah suggested.

              “Dinner? That’s not very creative.”

              “Nope, but it’s subtle enough that you could say you’re friends if you imply your love and she implies she doesn’t love you back. Silent cruelty. Kind of funny.”

              “Great,” Timothy muttered, letting their conversation die because he needed to think. But thinking didn’t give him a good answer to any of these problems. Thinking just reminded him of how he didn’t have a good answer to any of these problems.

              “Before you go into this, I have to ask because curiosity is my favorite vice. Do you think she cares about you?”

              “We’re friends,” Timothy answered, dodging the obvious question.

              “But does she care about you? Do you think you have a chance with her?”

              “I don’t know.”

              “Of course you do. Everyone has an instinct. You can look at her, at the way she talks to you, the way she sounds. People are predictable. You have an inkling, all of those observations adding up to one jolly conclusion.”

              “Unless this is too important and I can’t see her, not the way she really is.”

              “Are you that irrational?”

              “When it comes to Jenny?”

              “Good point.”

              Timothy didn’t know.

              No answer. No good answer. Nothing he could accept.

Even as he scrunched his eyes shut with a few minutes left before his alarm screamed at him, Timothy couldn’t guess the right answer. Rolling over, on his back, on his stomach, on both sides, he tried to find the truth. With every thought, there was one big and glaring, gigantic reality that stared down at him.

              That stood as the baseline fact of his life. There were other pieces of information he was pretty sure about. The sky was blue, mostly blue in Sacramento. Two and two were four. Pandas were black and white. Traffic could add a special kind of frustration that could only come from shoving a human in a metal box and making him pay attention to how fast he wasn’t moving. Those were things he could kind of know.

              But he knew, really knew, that he didn’t know. He didn’t know Jenny. If he tried really hard and squeezed his feelings for her to the big corner at the back of his mind, he could try for rational the way Jeremiah suggested. And that could kind of work. It worked like shoving an elephant in a closet. He could think about how Jenny invited him out twice; then he could remember she did that to get another perspective on her boyfriend—the boyfriend who Timothy just killed. Ignoring that thought, Timothy remembered that she seemed happy when he was around.