The Demon Abraxas (35 page)

He’d taught her to doubt her own thinking and she began to make sense of that. These memories Drake showed her were full of her own beliefs about herself, what had happened, what was right or wrong. She thought she was evil or broken because of these events, but was she?

Drake played the memories again, and this time Ana actually watched them. She saw a terrified girl who was unsafe in her own house, being hit and taunted by Mack, who was in his own way only passing down the violence and neglect that came to him from their father. Yes, that was her, and it had happened very long ago. It wasn’t happening now, and she wasn’t that girl any longer. Curiosity opened in her and she watched the incidents again. She could see them without the rage and fear. She remembered how she had decided she was broken, dirty, awful—how she decided she must be to blame for Mack’s assaults on her—and the steps of her life that led from that decision forward. Those decisions came from the culture she grew up in, the small town, her mother, the girls at school, the people she saw on television; she hadn’t come to any of them by her own volition.

Ana had a moment of pride that she’d chosen to fight rather than give in to those feelings of worthlessness, and now she could understand that worthlessness came, not from the abuse itself, but from her belief that it happened because there was something fundamentally wrong with her. Being attacked was terrifying, painful, violating, but it was a wound she could heal physically—it was her belief about herself that carried the damage.

Then, when she attacked Gunnar, it cinched the belief that she was damaged, worthless and evil. Only a messed up, broken kid could knife the brother she loved. Except that now, viewed on the back of Mack’s persistent abuse, it made perfect sense. She had refused to remain his victim and she was willing to fight for her freedom. At the time, with the limited understanding she had, she couldn’t have done anything else. And she hadn’t killed Gunnar, though she condemned herself internally as if she had. She’d seen him in the street days ago, a fully functioning man who was about to become a father, yet she’d clung to the image of herself as a monster. There was no truth to her self-recrimination, only the persistence of her thoughts about these memories. The thoughts weren’t real, or true, or worth keeping.

She could choose a new set of meanings about those events. She could choose to believe that she’d been brave and resourceful and willing to stand up for herself. She could forgive the girl she’d been and value her.

Drake must have sensed that his tactic wasn’t working because he moved out of her memory to her nerves. Accepting physical pain came easily now, cleansing as it poured through her. She waited, feeling along the surface of her skin, just outside the pain he gave her. Could she contain him? What could she do to this creature inside her body? The relationship had to go both ways. If he was in her, she must be able to influence him too.

She gathered herself at the edge of her body and brought her will inward, squeezing. Her awareness rested beside the pain, opening itself to the experience, and a peace grew in her. The pain didn’t mean anything. There had been a time, recently, when she thought she deserved it because of what she’d done, but now she could understand that pain just happened, it was part of being alive.

At worst Drake could stop her heart and she would die and everything would go on. Cars would run, lights change, the sun come up and down. Gunnar was safe and she had to believe that Abraxas would find the right help for Sabel and she would recover. Drake could not destroy the life she had lived, nor could he destroy the essence of herself, the person she now knew herself to be.

Ana felt him squirm in her. She closed more tightly around him. Where there had been anger before, she felt empty. Her emotions had been torn apart when he went through her memories. She couldn’t remember what fury felt like, but she knew he had to be contained. That knowing held her together with an iron focus.

He stopped struggling against her and shifted from a broad presence through her body into a narrow thing like a drill. Then he bored straight through her. Ana couldn’t hold him. She couldn’t hold herself together. The world fell apart.

* * *

Sabel was cold.
That’s because Ana isn’t here
, her mind told her. Ana should be next to her, holding her, pressing warm skin on hers.

Someone was touching her, but it felt all wrong. The hands were brusque and businesslike. They moved her left arm up and shifted it before putting it down again. She opened her eyes on a white ceiling and a woman’s curious face. Her mind quickly registered: nurse, machines, bed with sides—hospital.

“Ana?” she asked.

“Your friend is here too,” the woman said.

She took three long, slow breaths. Her chest ached but it was a memory, not any real danger. The leash was reset and dormant, but it was still there.

She glanced around and saw a curtain dividing the middle of the room. She’d been out long enough for them to put her in a room and they’d expected to keep her overnight. Judging by the color of the sky outside the window, it would be dawn soon.

“What happened?” she asked the nurse. “How long was I out?”

“About seven hours. We set your fingers and put you on oxygen, and then your breathing started to improve. Can you tell me what happened to you?”

Sabel looked down at her left hand where the smallest two fingers were set with a splint. Had she fallen on her hand? There was a dull ache but the painkillers were doing their job. She thought about the nurse’s question.

Did she mean being attacked by a demon? That couldn’t be it. And the leash wasn’t visible in any way. Therefore she thought that Sabel had some kind of physiological condition that had been triggered by the other events. What could she say that would allow her to get out of here with the fewest tests?

“I just blacked out,” Sabel said. “I don’t know if it was the fear or maybe the pain.” She held her bandaged and splinted hand up a few inches.

“Have you had breathing difficulties in the past?”

“Allergies and the usual. I can get short of breath if I really exert myself, but my regular doctor never thought it was worth worrying about. She probably didn’t expect me to get attacked by a gang of…whatever those guys were. Where is Ana? Is she okay? Can I see her?”

“She’s not awake yet,” the nurse said.

“But she’s all right?”

“We’re doing everything we can to make sure that she will be.”

“I want to see her.”

“Give me a few minutes,” the nurse said.

It was more than a few minutes but she came back with a doctor who cleared Sabel not only to walk the halls of the hospital but to go home that morning, provided she agreed to talk to her regular doctor about what he thought was a severe asthma attack. Sabel played along with his concerns and got the discharge papers signed. She changed back into her clothes in the small restroom and went to find Ana’s room.

Ana had a two-person room to herself but it was crowded with Lily, Gunnar and Ruben. On the bed, Ana looked sunken and empty. Her consciousness wasn’t there.

“Hey,” Gunnar said when he saw her. “Heard you rescued me.”

She smiled at him. He had dark eyes like Ana’s but they were deeper and haunted, and his smile was similar.

“I just tipped off the cavalry.”

“I leave town for a week and this is the trouble you get into,” Ruben said. He was a hair taller than Gunnar and broader through the shoulders, but seemed less substantial.

“How is she?”

“There’s some swelling in her brain and they’re worried that she’s not waking up,” Lily said. “Abraxas is back in her and trying to find her consciousness. He says Drake did something to try to drive her out of her body so he could have it. It didn’t work the way he expected and he fled, but she’s not in there now either.”

Sabel glanced at Ruben but he didn’t seem surprised. They must have filled him in on the salient points while she was unconscious.

“You okay?” Gunnar gestured at her bandaged hand.

“Broke two fingers. Falling I guess.”

Lily shook her head. “Drake broke them. He was going to work his way through all of them to get Ana to turn herself over to him.”

Sabel stared down at the splint on her hand and tried to imagine it. Did Ana fight him? She must have if he ended up inside her body. Sabel put the hand against her belly and held it close.

“You started going into shock,” Lily said. “And that witch magic didn’t stop. Abraxas said Ana was worried you were going to stop breathing and she sent him to find…help.”

“Oh.” The word sounded so small to her ears but a hundred thousand words couldn’t have expressed what she felt. She stepped up to the side of the bed and touched Ana’s hand.

A band tightened in her chest and she winced. There was enough residual demonic energy in Ana’s system with Abraxas back in her body to trigger the leash again. Stupid thing. She would demand that Josefene take it off that night, but for now she stepped back so she wouldn’t risk passing out again and getting stuck back in the hospital bed.

She picked an empty chair across from the foot of the bed and sat.

* * *

Sand. Ana liked sand. Sand was on beaches and beaches were nice. That feeling on her back, it was warmth. That was a feeling she could have more of.

Ana
, someone said.           

She didn’t know what the word meant.

But sand, that was a good thing. And she had fingers, she remembered that fingers could move and touch the sand, pick it up, run it through them. Blinking in the sunlight. Golden specks in the light.

Look at me
, he said.

His voice made her glad, so she did what he asked. A pillar of fire, a handsome face with golden eyes, no smoke, just flames making a chest and arms that reached out to her. She didn’t know she could embrace fire, but she did and rested against him.

Ana
, he said again, because that was her name after all.

Yes?

You need to come back to your body.

I’m not in my body?
She thought she remembered that she could be in the sandy place and her body at the same time, but it did feel different now.

No.

I did have a body, didn’t I? Where is it?

It’s in the hospital.

Is it sick?

Only if you stay away from it.

Drake got away
, she said then, remembering how she’d left her body.
I’m sorry
.

Abraxas laughed.
Let me show you his ‘getting away.’
He pointed at the sky and made an image appear some distance away from them like a mirage. Ana saw against the bright blue a blazing comet that arced away and fell to the sand near them, resolving into a lizard-like creature the size of a dog. It was burned badly and whimpering, tail held tight between its legs, limping and running away. She understood that this was only a representation of what had happened to Drake when he fled her body, but it was good enough for her to begin to understand how badly she’d hurt him.

I can’t be certain that’s the form he took, but it’s close,
Abraxas told her.
He is over eight hundred years old and you are just thirty. I cannot describe to you the humiliation and limit you placed on him. None of his fellow princes will deign to work with him for a century, none of his former allies will help him. He is as good as banished.

Abraxas, he hurt me. There are holes in me, blank places. I’m not the same.

I know,
he said softly
. Some people would choose to suffer about that, to go away, to be wounded. But not you. You’ll come back with me and you’ll grow, won’t you. You’ll use this as an opportunity.

If I regret that later, can I still be mad at you?

If it helps.

Ana pushed herself away from Abraxas and looked around. She and Abraxas were in a sandy plain between two dunes.

Ana, just come back with me,
he repeated.

He held out his burning hand and she wrapped her fingers around his. She expected pain but got none, only a thick feeling like her head was swathed in cotton and her tongue five times too big to fit in her mouth.

Ana opened her eyes, wincing at the bright glare of the lamp. Gunnar was asleep next to her bed, his long body extended like a plank, precariously balanced on edge of the little chair under him. A tiny white glow came from the foot of the bed and as her eyes focused she made out Sabel sitting cross-legged in an armless plastic chair with a book in her lap and a tiny book light illuminating a single page.

“Hey,” Ana said. The word came out as a rough breath with hardly any sound to it, but Sabel’s head came up immediately.

“Hey yourself,” she said quietly. “You got back.”

Ana nodded.

Sabel unfolded herself from the chair and set the book down. She picked up a plastic cup with a straw from the table beside the bed, poured water into it and held it out for Ana to sip. She did gratefully. Her mouth felt like she’d been lying facedown in the desert of her dreams.

“How long?” she whispered.

“Just over two days. We’ve been taking shifts.”

Ana reached up and touched the back of Sabel’s hand. Sabel put the cup down and took Ana’s hand, but Ana saw the muscles around her eyes and jaw tighten.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” she said.

Sabel shook her head but she dropped Ana’s hand and stepped back from the bed. “I haven’t been able to get in touch with the others to get it off. Too hard to focus.”

“It’s okay, we have time.”

That made Sabel laugh quietly. “Time,” she said.

Seeing the little smile on Sabel’s lips reminded her of part of an image: a glimpse of Sabel’s body laid out bare on a wooden floor, black lace on pale skin, the feel of the curve of her neck under Ana’s lips, the smell of a meadow of wildflowers in the hot sun.

“Sabel,” Ana whispered. “When Drake fought me inside my body, he went through my memories. He destroyed some of them. I don’t know where all the gaps are yet, but I remember kissing you. That happened, right?”