Hold the Light (42 page)

"Must you need Hell to understand damnation?" the woman in the grass continues. Her breaths shorten as a red stain in the back of her dress swells and seeps blood. "Have you learned nothing while pitching a fit on the ground, engrossed in just one touch of the gift's despair?

Must you experience the same torture as your brother?"

"It's mine," Amber answers, and I reward her by lessening the tormenting voices. "You can't have it."

"I do not want it and neither should you. End it now," Veronica gasps and pleads as she pathetically twitches, blood now pouring from her back. "As your brother did. He died to avoid repeating the same mistakes you are about to make. He buried it and now you are digging it up. You are looking for power that is not there - it is an illusion. Fate is uncontrollable. Let it go before it controls you."

"You really are a gift," Amber says to me. I cannot help but be touched so I quell every haunting wail that rattles her head. She turns her back, unabated by Veronica's so called advice and limps away. "I can feel it...feel you."

"No!" Veronica shouted as much as her failing voice allowed. It came out horse and paltry.

"Put it back in the earth! You do not understand. It is not what you think. You will destroy everything!"

Not hearing another word of Veronica's gurgling, blood choked pleas - it is just another voice I must quiet for her, Amber stares at me lovingly, at her little lump of a gift.

You will make me whole again and we will be together. We can do any...

Ambers scheming thoughts bullied the end of the gift's contemplation off and it listened with silent attention. This, the time before joining, is often the best part anyway.

"...whether it is cursed or not, wrong or foolish, such a gift as the ability to fold fate or hem destiny to fit my taste, has to be taken. Needs to be taken. Stupid not to take - as long as this works..."

Amber can't help smiling as she remembers the deal she whispered just as she bent to pick up the dull coal-like gift. Amber can't help repeating it aloud. It was just so fitting after what George, who had to die to make this work, had said to the gravestone.

"
You
are the lantern and
I
am the light," she said, turning her thoughts out aloud, reiterating the flip of the phrase that she had pledged to the gift and been pondering for some time. "I give myself to save the gift."

The moment she speaks those words again, a blue shine rolls along the dull shell of the gift. Watching the cobalt hint at the greed in her eyes, the gift titters with joy of having another host to consume, yet completely misses her furtive cunning. But not for long.

Amber can't help but wonder. Can the gift fear its own end? Does it realize, for she can sense its cognizance, that she gave her life to save it? That therefore it and only it is now in destiny's crosshairs, since it is the only thing left she cares for.

She is the soul collector now, the aim of fate's torture - the gifts torture - except that the gift is now the first and only target of such torments. It must target itself. And, she feels - almost knows - that the gift couldn't bring itself to kill itself. So it must come begging to her, its savior and enslaver, for reprieve. And come it will.

And the price it will pay, as it folds fate for its continuing survival, will be the servitude of twisting destiny to fit her fashion alone.

And even more amazingly, she just realizes that in doing so the gift would be put into a perfect and almost paradoxical loop, sinking the gift further and further in her debt.