Fall of Light (28 page)

“I don't know. Did I?”

“Oh, yes, you did, in ways you never have before.”

“Why did we do that? What happened?”

“Part of it was just letting go of all those wrappings you keep around your talents and your heart. Do you
ever
remember having fun, Opal?”

“Lots of times.”

“Like?”

“Taking the kids to the county fair.”

“Hands to hold, noses to wipe, vomit to clean up, children to keep track of, everybody asking for money, none of them happy for very long.”

“Taking the kids to the beach.”

“Sunburn, sand in their swimsuits, salt water in their eyes, always watching to make sure they're not drowning themselves or each other. Who carried the cooler? Who made all the sandwiches? Who shook the sand out of the towels at the end of the day? Who took the blame when we got home late because Flint ran off and got lost?”

“Bathing the kids. Tucking them in at night. Some of that was really—”

Shadow Opal waited for her to finish, and Opal inexplicably found herself in tears.

“You had tender moments,” said Shadow Opal after Opal had rubbed her eyes without managing to stop the tears. “That's not the same as fun.”

“When I was working on
Dead Loss
—when Corvus and I first met—”

“You focused on the job. Did you ever notice he asked you out for drinks after work? You always said no.”

“He asked me out?”

“Six times. You filter out anything that might be fun. I'm tired of that.”

“So you—so
we
—find ourselves on
Girls Gone Wild
? Scratch that—put ourselves there on purpose?”

Golden-eyed Opal looked past her. “Wilder than that,” she muttered, “and oh, it was delicious. Delightful. Astonishing. He has powers he hasn't shown you yet, and he's part of a larger community here, with its own agenda. You weren't there, though. You still didn't have fun. You abdicated while I made you these memories.”

“You made memories?”

“They're here.” Shadow Opal glanced toward the study door. “Want to see?”

Opal shuddered, then shook herself like a dog shaking off water and headed for the door. Shadow Opal opened it for her and led the way into the hall beyond. They traveled down a hall that got darker and narrower as they went. At its very end was a thick steel door barricaded with bolts, bars, and locks.

“You're good at this sort of thing,” said Shadow Opal.

Opal put her hand on a padlock the size of a pumpkin, with a cartoonishly large keyhole. “I did this?”

“You've got a lot of doors like this scattered around. Lots of things you don't want out roaming, I guess. I don't know how I got out.”

“How do I open it?”

“Give me a key.”

“A key?” Opal looked down at what she was wearing. The same olive green denim coverall she had just shrugged into back in the real world, with lots of pockets, and black boots. She pushed her hands into the pockets, pulled things out. Tape, scissors, lip gloss, a tin of Altoid peppermints, a Swiss Army knife, six quarters and two shiny pennies, a packet of airline pretzels, a wad of Kleenex. A pad of paper, a telescoping pen, two paper clips.

“Close enough,” said Other Opal. She took a paper clip, held it in her closed hand, produced a skeleton key. “Are you ready?”

“No,” said Opal, “but go ahead.”

Other Opal touched the key to the locks—she didn't even have to turn it. They snapped open one by one. Finally the door was no longer locked. Other Opal stood back. She gestured toward the doorknob. “Your turn.”

Opal gripped the doorknob, turned it, opened the door, and looked in at the altar in the forest.

Everything about the scene was different from the way it had been when she'd awakened. Here, the forest was a wilderness of strange, exotic trees, with leaves the shapes of violins, harps, hearts, arrowheads. The greens shone in many vibrant shades, and the tree bark was rich colors as well, red brown, cream yellow, slivers of peeling, textured silver. The altar glowed with gray light. A version of Opal stood on it, embraced by a version of Corvus in his Dark God shell. Phrixos's energy wasn't there. Opal stood rigid on the stone, though wrapped in his embrace. No one else was present.

“Relax,” said the Dark God, in Corvus's beloved voice, the voice she had listened to many nights as she fell asleep, audiobooks that murmured to her in different hotel rooms, the voices of different characters, all, somehow, contained inside Corvus and let out to play. “Let go, Opal. Let go.”

She watched her other self melt. The starch leached out of Opal on the altar, and she leaned against Corvus's chest. His arms supported her. His head dipped so he could speak near her ear. His voice softened; still, she heard every word.

“You don't have to be in charge. You don't have to take care of everyone but yourself. Let me take care of you,” he whispered, and she melted more. Her eyes closed. Her mouth smiled.

He eased her down onto the rock, cupping the back of her head so that it didn't bump. He held himself above her, stared down at her face. “Let me hold you. Let me be in you. Let me be part of you.”

Opal on the altar let him do all those things, moaning with delight. Her fingers unclenched, her shoulders eased, her body lay boneless, as though she no longer had to hold up the world. Her face relaxed into bliss. It lost the rigid look of someone who knows who she is.

Opal turned away, headed toward the door back into the hallway, but Shadow Opal gripped her shoulders and turned her to face the altar again. “Stop running away,” she said. “Stop standing aside. Be there.” Shadow Opal pressed on her shoulders, and Opal found herself compressing, deflating, narrowing into something not herself until she was something her other self could hold between her hands. Shadow Opal pressed her palms together, and Opal felt a disorienting upending of the world, a shriek of colors, a breeze brushing tastes against her, a swirl of scents, and then she blinked eyes open and looked up into Corvus's face, the monster she had made and grown to fear and love. His eyes glowed with green light around pupils slit up and down like a cat's. He closed them and pressed close, and then his lips touched hers and she gave herself up to that sense, his heat and pressure and tenderness, gentle in everything he did; he had buried himself in her, but he held himself up enough to not crush her; he had to tilt to reach her mouth, but he managed, despite his length. Something of the god worked in him to make it possible, and everything about him embraced her, made her feel safe in a way she could never remember feeling before.

She wanted to laugh, and she wanted to cry. How strange it felt, being here, at the mercy of someone else, having let loose of all the things she usually kept track of, her lists of things she needed, things she planned to do, things she would check to make sure everyone else around her had what they needed and knew what they were going to do next.

Most of her work was preparing. She spent hours setting up the makeup and tools she used for her job, even though she could have worked faster and better without them. She planned ahead, usually, so she would be where she needed to be in plenty of time. Cars she drove never ran out of gas, and if she had to change a tire she always had a well-inflated spare. When she cooked, which she only did if she were expecting company, she had all the ingredients and instructions ahead of time and never missed a step.

She had spun webs of control around everything she touched.

A vision from Christmas vacation came to her.

Mother might not remember the strings she had threaded through everything and everyone around her, but the image of it was clear in Opal's memory, a horrifying truth revealed by her sister's magic during a family meeting: their mother had bound her children, husband, relatives up in magic threads that trapped them in the family home; only Opal had escaped. She had moved out into the world and spun threads of her own.

Opal opened her hands and let go of all those controls.

She opened her heart, let it lie revealed, unprotected. Corvus's whispers as he embraced her nudged her heart, as he drove into her, nested inside her. The edge of pain and yearning that rode him bumped into her heart, touched her own longing for something she had never yet found, wove into it. She found herself up against his heart as well, a large mass of all the colors of amber spiderwebbed in silver and gold, pulsing, with many chambers, slivers of secrets and wonders, memories and wounds, slender syllables of bliss and tiny grains of pain.

She slipped her hand inside his heart, let things flow across her palms and along her fingers. She tasted loneliness, longing, tenderness, fear. Solitude: long stretches of solitude.

“What are you doing?” he whispered. He had stilled above her and within her. His forehead rested on her cheek.

“I don't know,” she said. Why had she thought it was his heart she touched? It wasn't shaped like any heart she had ever seen in an anatomy chart, or even in horror movies where people ripped the hearts out of each other's chests. She turned her inward vision toward what she had been thinking of as her own heart, and saw a landscape of walls. She went toward the first wall, looking for a door, but she couldn't find one, so she climbed up the wall—it had things sticking out of it, sharp things, but she found a way up them without cutting her feet.

Why did she have feet, she wondered, when she was shifting across impossible landscapes? There was no reason she should be one form or another. She paused, standing on a wall in her own heart, and thought, usually I work with surfaces; but I have practiced greater shifts. I have turned my siblings into objects of convenience on occasion, though not often, and not after they got their own powers. I have changed myself in all kinds of ways, sometimes so much that I had trouble remembering what my previous form was. Now I want to be something that can fly above walls and see beyond them.

She stared down at hands that looked like the hands she wore in waking life, then glanced down at her breasts, her front, her legs beyond the slope of her stomach. She was naked now, three steps away from the coverall-dressed self she had been and still another step from the physical body she wore in the waking world. How many layers down was she? She had left Corvus in midquestion, but it was Corvus in memory, not in real life; she could pause a memory without upsetting anybody, surely.

Shift,
she thought, and she turned into winged mist, a thin and less connected-to-itself creature.
Eyes,
she thought after a moment's blind confusion, and she grew several eyes. She looked up, down, forward, backward, inward at the same time. It took a while to integrate all the visions into a coherent picture. The color of the sky had changed from standard blue to scarves of varied colors, blue, green, shades and nuances. Seeing many directions at once, vision was a three-dimensional experience. She was enveloped in sight the way she would be embraced by warm water in a hot spring.

She hovered above the courtyard protected by the first wall and saw a pale statue of a child in the center. The child had blind white eyes and short curls. It gazed toward the ground, its mouth in a faint frown, brows drawn together above its nose. The cloud that Opal was drifted closer to the child, saw her own features on the statue. Another younger, frozen self. She rose again and headed inward across the landscape toward another walled fortress. This one had a roof over it, but when she flew closer, she found that there were chinks in its armor; she flowed in through one of them and found herself in a chamber. Light shone in through the stained-glass walls, a mosaic of many different colors of red and dark orange, ruby, crimson, rust, coral, salmon, sunset colors. In the center of the chamber, on mounded velvet cloth, nestled a red jewel—or if it were a paler color, she couldn't tell, because the colored light coming through the walls and striking gleams off its faceted surface stained everything it touched.

She drifted down to the jewel. How vulnerable it was to anything in mist form. She had built all these walls, but did they really protect her? In this landscape, people could be so many other ways than merely human-shaped. She had protected herself so far, though—or had she? She and her shadow had still not found out where Phrixos had gone or what he had done while she held him inside, and now she was layers deep into herself and didn't know how to navigate.

She touched the red jewel. Passion flared through her, washed her up out of the walled landscape, back into Corvus's arms.

“Stop slipping away,” he whispered. He braced her and pumped into her, and it sent her spasming over the edge into complete loss of control.

He smiled when she came back to herself. “How was that?”

“Terrifying.”

He kissed her, his lips soft. “Was anything about it good?”

“Are you fishing for compliments?” she asked, strangely detached from what had happened, but not outside of it anymore.

“No. I'm trying to learn you. Maybe next time I'll do better.”

“Corr. This isn't even real. I don't think you're real. I don't know where we are, but look at these trees . . .” She lifted her head and looked, then gasped. She was back out in the real world, on the altar, with people and cameras all around them, and some of the people were waking up.

“I don't claim to be an authority on reality,” he murmured, “but—”

15