Twilight Fall

"You could write in cursive by the time you went to kindergarten. You used to sit and copy my homework assignments for practice. I timed you once. It took you only three minutes to copy a five-page book report. You started catching things you dropped before they hit the floor. Then there was that day in the garden, when you grabbed a bird that flew past your face, and Audra screamed—"

"Shut up." Alex clenched her hands into fists and turned away from him. "It's a coincidence. That's all."

"You were a normal little girl before then," he told her. "Then we went to Audra's, and your hands could move faster than I could see."

"It's a fluke. John." She threw out her arms. "Luck of the gene pool, that's all. It kicked in when we were adopted. So I'm fast. There's always somebody faster."

"No, there isn't," he said. "You're the fastest surgeon in the world. Just ask TIME magazine."

"You think they did something to me to make me like this." She laughed. "Fine. If that's the case, then what did they do to you? Besides make you into a religion-obsessed jerk?"

"You remember the dinner game?"

Alex shut up.

"Every day when we were coming home from school, you would ask me what Audra was making for dinner. And I told you, and I was always right."

She shrugged. "You cheated. You probably asked her every day before we went to school."

"I never asked her once. I could smell her cooking ten blocks away from the house." He came to stand beside her. "When we went to church on Saturdays, I could hear people in the confessionals, whispering their sins to God."

"Those booths were soundproofed."

He smiled down at her. "One Saturday you told Father Seamus you'd taken my baseball bat and ball and broken old Mr. Murphy's back window. You used your allowance to buy a new ball, and then you rubbed it around in the dirt to make it look like mine."

Alex gaped. "You saw me break Mr. Murphy's window?"

He shook his head. "I was at altar boy practice that day. I didn't know until I heard your confession on Saturday. I heard all of them."

"You knew all my sins."

"I knew everyone's." He looked at the first rays of light coming over the horizon. "Smell, hearing, taste, sight—all of my senses became acme. It's why I became a priest. I thought it was a gift from God, to make me more aware of the world and the suffering of humanity."

"But now you think something happened to us while we were at the Catholic orphanage? Something that made me fast, and upped the wattage on your senses?"

"I don't think it was an orphanage, or run by the Catholics." He met her gaze. "I think the Brethren took us. I think they experimented on us, the same way they did with those kids in Monterey."

Alex started to argue the point, and then grabbed her brother as he began to pitch forward over the wall. John muttered something and slid through her hands to fall unconscious on the rocks.

* * *

Chapter 12

Valentin had brought down the plane. He had not killed himself or Liling. Now all he had to do was keep her from bleeding to death.

Valentin carried Liling away from the lake and toward the woods. While he had been unconscious, she had somehow dragged him out of the water. She had assumed from the condition of his body that he had stopped breathing, and had attempted to revive him. Now he had to find help for her before she bled to death from the gunshot wound.

He felt her skin. It was wet from the lake water, cool to the touch, almost cold. He saw her slight breasts rise and fall, but he could sense her heartbeat slowing. She could be going into shock: he had to get her warm.

The structure he had seen from the air sat back against a wide swath of thin pine trees. It was a cabin, although the windows were dark and it appeared deserted. He kicked open the door and carried her inside.

Valentin placed her on a battered-looking couch, stripped off her wet garments, and checked her wound. He was astonished to see it was healed over, until he remembered the makeshift bandage he had put over it; the blood he had shed on his jacket must have sealed the wound.

He pulled the dusty quilt covering the back of the couch over her, tucking it around her body before he straightened and looked around the room. The cabin had not been lived in for some months, but he saw signs that it had been regularly occupied. There were electrical outlets, lamps, chairs, and a small radio. The fireplace was empty, but next to it was a small electrical space heater.

Liling murmured something, and when he put his hand to her brow she felt a little warmer.

There was no time to chop wood and try to light the fireplace. Something had to supply electricity to the cabin, and Jaus went through a hall to the back of the house. Outside he found a small, slat-sided shed with a large generator and several cans of petrol inside. He managed to fuel and start the generator, which sputtered into life.

He returned inside and plugged in and brought the space heater beside the couch. Liling was shivering under the quilt. He stripped out of his own dripping clothes and drew back the quill, lifting her up and sliding his body under hers. He turned her in his arms and held her close, wishing he were a human so he could warm her better.

"We're safe now," he said, rubbing her with his hands to encourage her circulation. He felt the warmth of the space heater penetrate the quilt. "Can you hear me. Liling? We're safe."

He was lying to her; they were not safe. He had not seen a telephone or radio in the cabin; he had no way to contact anyone. They were alone in an uninhabited area. She had a bullet inside her body, and she had lost a great deal of blood, both to him and from the wound. Too much for a human. He would be lucky if he could keep her alive until morning.

No, she would live. He would keep her alive. They had beaten insurmountable odds. She was young and strong. She had pulled him to safety. They would survive this and he would get her to safety.

He had to, because it was not safe here.

Valentin closed his eyes and held her tightly. He had taken enough blood from her to sustain him for several days, but soon his body would demand the only nourishment it could take: human blood. When he went without feeding, he would grow weak, but after a time his body would demand to be fed. That need would become voracious with every passing day, and then it would take over his every thought. When that happened, he would no longer have a choice. He would feed on any blood he could obtain.

They were not safe because there were no other humans here from whom he could feed.

Only Liling.

Liling stood by the lake to watch the swans. They glided around the glass-smooth surface, serene and content, silent as the moonlight.

"They are beautiful." Martha Hopkins came to stand beside her. "He's come for you." She gestured back at a cabin near some pine trees. In the doorway stood a man, but not the one she feared. "So will the other. Who will you choose to kill this time, Lili?"

She saw fire in the shape of her body reflecting on the surface of the lake. When the swans came too near, they burst into flames and sank beneath the water.

The same would happen to the man who stood watching for her. "I'll run away."

"As you always do." Martha nodded, agreeing with herself. "But the fire will not die."

Liling walked up to the cabin, but it seemed the man was gone. Inside, she saw a series of narrow, upward-spiraling corridors of stone, lit only by smoking torches. Blue and green ivy leaves growing around the curved block frame made a bower of it, but she saw small nets of cobwebs lacing the vines, and heard tiny things rustling in the darkness beyond the arch.

"Is someone here?" she called out, her voice echoing a hundred times.

When no answer came, she stepped inside the arch. Nothing jumped out at her. The torches here were dead, but she could smell plants, water, and flowers.

"Demon ground." Martha said, tucking her arm through Liling's. "You should recognize it. It's where they spawned you."

Liling had been called worse. "We were not demons. We were children of the wind, the fire, the water, and the earth." That was what Mrs. Chen had said.

"You hid so much from that old woman." Martha turned, looking at a bench filled with clay pots of gray plants blooming with tiny white flowers. "As you hide from him."

She thought of the others who had perished in the storm. "I didn't mean to do it. I didn't know it would happen."

"Ignorance is not an excuse." The nurse turned and walked away.

Liling followed Martha into the hothouse but saw only gray and white. The flowers became larger until they were camellias, only the blooms appeared blighted and deformed, with tiny worms crawling in and out of holes they had eaten in the petals.

"Don't you like them?" Martha asked, caressing one of the ugly blooms. "After all, they're his favorite flower."

Liling ran past the nurse to the nearest door, jerked it open, and stepped through. Outside the door was a drawbridge guarded by two large, unhygienic-looking guards with matching spears, helmets, and metal chest-plate things over the filthiest leather clothes imaginable. Both eyed Liling, straightened, and stared out across a rolling hundred acres or so of what might have been wheat or waist-high dead grass. The field was ringed by pine and oak forests so dense she couldn't see space between the tree trunks.

She looked back over her shoulder at soaring walls of black stone. No sound but the wind threshing grass and whistling through the gap-toothed stone of the battlements. Across the enormous field, the tree line was interrupted by something large and white that glittered like frost in the sun.

Valentin.

Liling couldn't walk to the ivory castle; it was too far away. She stepped up to one of the guards. "I need some transportation."

The guard bowed and took off at a fast trot to a big barn to one side of the castle. The other watched her from the corner of his eye, as if expecting her to take his head off.

She smiled at him, "I don't give."