Whisper (19 page)

We were swinging around, aiming at an oncoming demon mount, when he lurched beneath me. He attempted to save himself, splaying out a desperate leg, but our momentum wouldn't allow such a thing. He stumbled further, throwing his head up in a last-ditch effort to keep the ground at bay, but it was useless. All at once we crumbled from our glorious vantage point into a collapsing, skidding tangle of limbs and slamming body mass.

The ground gouged out beneath us, spitting charred weeds and earth up around us as we crashed. Char threw his neck to the side, shifting his entire body weight, and while it saved him from tumbling head over heels and snapping his own neck, the next thing I knew he was overturning to the side, crushing my leg beneath his body, pinning me, rolling
over
me.

And the only thing I could think was: how blue the sky was, lying on my back looking straight up, past the smoke, past the black earth flying in clods through the air. It was a breathless thought. Not once did it occur to me that it might be breathless because my lungs had just been crushed by a thousand pounds of horse grinding me into the ground.

Char's momentum carried him across and off of me, and distantly I was aware of him coming to rest somewhere on the ground beside me, the weird vision of seeing hooves flailing against the sky the memory that lodged in my head before his careening mass settled. Then I lay there, entranced by that patch of sky above me, the blinding lights and colors of the fantasy world sparking at the corner of my vision. I heard nothing.

Worse: I felt nothing.

But the sky had never been so beautiful.

*

A very few memories stuck in my head from my time on the ground, there on the battlefield. The underbelly of a horse, leaping over me, raining dirt and drops of blood onto my form. A black rider pulling his horse up next to me, looking down at me with fearsome, bloodshot eyes, drawing his weapon as if to put me out of my misery only to be dethroned by an attacker before he could go through with it. A vulture, drifting in lazy circles overhead through the dust and smoke.

Jay's face.

My Jay.

And then it was all a blur as I was dragged out of there, through the mayhem, across the ground I couldn't feel. But somehow, by the time we reached camp, I was walking. Being dragged by nothing but my arm, on my own two feet. I was distracted, momentarily, by a pixie flitting by, my eyes trailing after her over my shoulder. But then my focus jolted; I was thrust forward, spun around to face the one dragging me.

“What the hell, Willow?” the image of Jay's face was demanding in front of me, and it was then that I snapped out of it, and the savage, whimsical state of mind that had taken over my body drained out of me. I looked at Jay for the first time, noticing what he was saying. “What were you thinking? You can't whisper to guns and men intent on bashing your
head
in.”

I blinked, disoriented, and shifted to take on a more civilized stance. And then rational thought – for me – came rushing back, and I plowed over Jay's words to pose a dire question of my own.

“Char?” I asked, half-panicked.

Jay stared at me. “Damn it, Willow,” he said when he could bring himself to respond to that. “You nearly got yourself killed like an idiot, should be dead and destroyed this very instant, torn asunder and plowed into dirt, and you're worried about the
horse
?”

A defensive flash rose in me. Of course I was worried about the horse. What if I had gotten beloved Char killed, just like that, before my very eyes? What if he lay broken and twisted out on that field, cold where I left him, a tragic product of my reckless actions? Or worse –
not
dead, but suffering? Lying there in torment...

But the look that rose to Jay's eyes was so pained, so angry, that just its existence wiped out the relevance of my concern. He looked away, barely containing some outburst that might have downed me again for my foolishness all by itself. I became less aggravated as I read the pain in his features, becoming almost complacent.

As I looked at him, though, it occurred to me that the unspeakable torrent raging on his face was not the only thing humbling me, making my own feelings dim inside me. Something else was wrong, draining me of my usual intensity. As I stood there I wavered, ever so slightly, and a confused frown touched my face. What was this strange feeling glazing over all the others?

When Jay's eyes returned to me they paused, seeing something there as well. For a moment neither of us reacted, uncertain, but then a look even more horrible entered his eyes, and once the floodgates were open every ounce of anger and hurt that had been there before gave way to something entirely more alarming: fear.

Jay stepped forward right as I collapsed, his arms catching me crudely and his fingers fumbling to find purchase among my grungy, blood-spattered clothing. Only as he worked me around in his embrace so he was cradling me on my back, and one hand came away to reposition me, did I see that it was soaked in blood. Fresh blood.

The kind that could only be coming from one of us, then and there.

Mine.

Seventeen –

I
couldn't tell if it was dreams, or fantasy, or the place one goes as they're fading from life that took me, but whatever it was, it was where I went when the tax of my wound overtook me. Only with the occasional, fading heartbeat was I aware of my body, jostling limply where I was draped in Jay's arms, as he carried me for what felt like a thousand miles through rain and storm and desert.

I dreamed of cold diamonds of rain beading on my face, running off like tears that I could not shed in my unconscious state, mixing with the blood caked on my skin, turning pink and prism-like as they fell. When Jay carried me through the desert I licked the remaining beads off my lips, quenching an age-old thirst, replete as they slid like pristine gems down my throat.

I turned my head where it lolled, gazed into the wake of land stretching out behind us, and as it flickered between desert and rain I saw the white stallion in the distance, following us. I watched him as we walked, numbly entranced, until my eyelids lulled shut, and there I found a deeper place to dream.

Jay and I rode double on that stallion, bareback, mane whipping up in our faces, Jay's arms lashed about my waist. We galloped across a green land, the velvety moss staining the stallion's hooves, fetlocks, and legs. It was flung up as he ran, caked to his underside, caked to our feet. We were wild, free, together. One with the earth and animals. We breathed wind. Threw our heads back and drank the rain.

Medic Cory's face intruded, briefly, through a crack in the sky, looking down in on us, but I could not be bothered with it. I reached my arms up, drew a curtain of fog over the sky, shutting him out. This was my private world. Jay's and mine.

The stallion slid to a stop at the top of a hill, reared up, pawed the sky as if to laugh in Cory's face. Jay and I tumbled off, rolled down the hill one over the other, laughing, moss in our hair. I was wearing a dress – some foolish white dress – and by the time we reached the bottom of the hill it was green, clear through. Soiled and stained and torn, and beautiful. Earthly and tantalizing.

Jay plucked a piece of moss out of my hair, and smiled at me. “My willow,” he murmured, sweetly. My chest swelled with pride, with love, with all the things that make breathing a painful, beautiful, alive experience. The fondness swelled in his eyes, and his fingers wove themselves into my hair, clutching it at the back of my skull in a heartfelt, desperate fist. It was then that the fondness was poisoned by pain, some choking pain, and my brow creased, not understanding.

“What is it, Jay?” I asked, clutching his wrist gently in encouragement. He only tilted his head, as if to get a good look at me, to etch my appearance into memory.

“My Willow...” he murmured again, quieter this time and with more finality.

A strange desperation bottled up inside me, not understanding. What was wrong? Why wouldn't he tell me? For he wasn't, I could see, going to tell me.

“Jay...?”

He pressed his forehead to mine, closing his eyes, and fear soured my fantasy. He held me there, close, scaring me with the rare, heartfelt display of affection. Jay would never act that way, unless...

His eyes opened, wrought with the most heartbreaking mix of fondness and sorrow, agony and resignation. Then he rose, his fingers trailing out of my hair, over my forehead, and he backed away.

“Jay, what are you doing?” My voice cracked, ever so slightly, wanting answers that I knew he was not going to give. He backed up another step, relentless, and then did the awful deed and turned away, presenting his back, and walked away up the hill.

I stared after him, shocked and betrayed, helpless to do a thing to stop this fantasy from unraveling. Why was he doing this?

It was only as he was almost to the top of the hill, arms swinging at his sides, that I noticed the large, black mark that wrapped around his forearm where his sleeve was rolled up to elbow height. My heart fell into the pit of my stomach, seeing it, and suddenly things began to make terrible sense, even though I could not say completely what they meant.

For, written across his arm in big, bold letters, in the honorary script I knew too well, was the name,
Willow.

*

I had strange dreams, after that. Feverish fantasies. An awareness dawned on me in a tangle of crimson sheets, Jay's head bowed over my torso, kissing my bare stomach. A breath of pleasure turned to a breath of pain, as I raised my head and found he was doing no such thing, but in fact licking the wound that slashed me open there. He raised his own head, and met my eyes with bloodshot, dilated,
hungry
ones, licking blood off his lips.

I tried to scream, but then he was bending over me, concern etched into his ordinary, un-affected face, smoothing sweaty hair back from my clammy face. There were strange reflections in his eyes, though, weird shapes and scary faces, and I was wrought with frustration finding myself unable to turn to look, to identify what cast them nearby, my body stiff and unresponsive, unable to do anything but keep my eyes riveted to his.

His eyes were innocent, confused, wondering what my distress was about, but of course he couldn't see the reflections. I made some strangled noise, trying to tell him about them, to warn him that there were strange things in our vicinity, but my voice wouldn't work. There were gears broken inside me. Clock hands stuck in my throat. A doctor was working somewhere beside me, his motions shadowed and blurred, but I felt him insert some tool into my body, crank it.

The gears churned back to life inside me, like maggots deep under my skin, and the clock hands resumed ticking in my throat. The ticking increased, though, faster and faster, and my eyes grew wide with alarm only just before the bomb I sensed inside myself went off.

*

When I came to next, I was alone in a dusky field, the expanse glowing with the pearly sheen of moonlit clouds above me. About a million crickets chorused around me, making my awakening an eerie, ethereal experience. I lay there, blinking dew from my lashes. When I attempted to move, I found myself weighed down, gowned in a soaked white gown that sprawled all around me.

I lay my head back against the earth, resting, thinking. Where was this? This plane of solitude and pearly darkness? Of dew that drenched a dress like the ocean?

I was helpless to rise in such a dress, and so I didn't. My thoughts roved and ranged, coming up with nothing, and so finally I gave in to the natural calling of the night and dozed off there in the eerie field, surrounded by miles and miles of nothing but whispery grass and chorusing crickets.

*

When dawn came, the sky was white. White and draping, and the whispery grass had turned to a hard slab of ground beneath me. My drenched dress was dry, and tucked neatly around my body. A sheet.

My eyes roved over what I realized was in fact a tent. I had a terrible headache, I found when I moved. My lips were cracked, my skin tight, my abdomen sore and flaming. A cool breeze was wafting through the tent flap, smelling of manure.

I weighed the factors carefully, calculating everything in my head, and concluded:

This.

This was the one that wasn't a dream.

Neck creaking, I carefully turned my head to one side. There was nothing to be seen in the tent, though. Only me, on some sanitary bed of recovery. I exhaled a pathetic sigh of effort, winced. Breathing anything but shallowly hurt.

Alright,
I thought.
I'm awake.
Who was going to be the one to come check on me?

I twiddled my thumbs for the better part of a half hour, for lack of a better way to call someone to my bedside, before the ones on their own timing thought to stop in.