Gifts of the Blood (6 page)

Him: “You’re wobbly, for a human.”

Me: “You’re inhumanly fast.”

Abigail’s belly was white and star-shaped. Ethan’s warm fingers moved in lazy figure eights across its surface. I stared. Cats rarely expose their bellies; it’s a sign of extreme trust. Abby only did it with Logan, and only once or twice, when she’d fallen asleep. He’d had her since she was a kitten. With others, she rarely got past the hissing and hiding phase. But there she was, fully awake and playful, stretched out belly-up across a total stranger’s lap.

Human. Inhuman.

My nausea morphed into the cold ache of fear. Maybe I had hit my head harder than I realized. Maybe I was crazy, after all.

Abigail’s purr increased in volume before doubling and deepening until it sounded like there were two cats next to me writhing in ecstasy. Ethan stared down at her, his fingers still moving across her belly, his light eyes half-lidded and his mouth slightly open, the edges curled as if discovering a smile. I realized the other half of the double purr was coming from the back of his throat.

“You speak cat.” I think I meant to be funny, but my voice came out flat and strange. His mouth snapped shut and his fingers quit moving, to Abigail’s indignation. She yowled but he ignored her, his blue-green eyes trained on my gray ones.

“Caspia,” he said evenly. “You said you drew me.” I nodded carefully. “Does anyone else know of this drawing?”

I blinked. He was so matter-of-fact, so accepting. Even my own brother had trouble accepting what I could do. Ethan’s unconditional acceptance unnerved me almost more than his inhuman speed, his ability to win total strangers’ trust, his strength, his appearance in my sketch, or the fact that he spoke cat. “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m crazy? Aren’t you going to tell me it’s impossible? That no one can draw the future?”

“I know you’re not crazy,” he said patiently, but his tone didn’t match his eyes. His eyes looked stormy. Instead of a steady glow, the light behind his blue-green eyes began to flicker exactly like gathering lightening. He flexed his hands against his thighs, the heather gray fabric of his pants mysteriously free of cat hair. He seemed agitated.

“Amberlyn,” I blurted out. “She saw the sketch, but she doesn’t know what it means, and she didn’t seem to recognize you. And I tried to tell Logan, but you see how well
that
went.”

He nodded once, and then dropped his head as if in prayer or deep thought. He put a hand on one elbow, as if to guide me or keep me from running. “Can you show me this drawing that frightened you so badly you screamed the first time you saw me?”

I shrugged, trying to act like I didn’t care, but truthfully, suddenly I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to produce the frightening, damning drawing that would prove to him I was crazy and strange. I pointed at my knapsack, leaning up against my dresser, mere feet from where we sat. “It’s over there,” I said in a hoarse whisper, unaccountably afraid of something I’d been eager to show Logan earlier. He looked at me once, sharply, before kneeling to retrieve my black, ribbon-bound sketchbook in one easy motion. He held it out to me.

When I took it from him, our fingertips brushed.

His skin was like hot porous metal, radiating up my arm in electric spirals. I sucked in a breath and held it. My fingers trembled as I unbound the book. I tried, unsuccessfully, to still my shaking hands. I had to settle for going slowly so as not to damage my work. I flipped past still life drawings in charcoal and pencil of fruit, flowers, and classmates. Pastel drawings of the historic district, Old Town Square, and our ivy-draped patio followed. Finally, I came to the landscapes: Eddington Forest, the St. Clare and Navau Rivers, and the final sketch from today of the Riverwalk. I took a deep breath as I came to the last one, meeting his intense, flickering eyes over the edges of the page.

I let go of the breath I’d forgotten I was holding and didn’t take another one. It was gone. Smooth cut edges hugged the spine where my drawing had been excised clean away.

Someone had taken my drawing. As my gray eyes locked with Ethan’s narrowing river-colored eyes, I felt a sensation like drowning. Something important was happening, something I didn’t fully understand. If the drawing had been “a gift of the blood,” as my Gran used to say, then its theft whispered to the same long buried instincts, awakening them, urging them to watchful protectiveness.

If someone could steal the products of my strange ability, what else could they take?

The winter will take him.

Logan.

***

My entire body shook violently as I smoothed out the last drawing I’d completed before I drew Ethan. It was one of my better ones, really. Our cat Abigail slept underneath a wooden shelf that held a dying plant on our ivy-screened patio. It was done in pastel crayon. I’d spent a lot of time getting the exact hue correct; orange is tricky, after all. Also, Abby is really fluffy, so I’d put in a lot of detail. I felt the warm weight of him next to me, on the edge of my bed. I kept shaking as I flipped the page, searching for some clue besides a cut edge to prove my Riverwalk sketch had once existed, but there was nothing. A big fat tear pooled onto the page and sank into the paper, blurring a patch of Abby’s fur. He lifted the sketchbook from my hands. “There you have it,” I gasped, almost too shocked to breathe. “The horrifying drawing of the future. A fluffy orange cat.” More tears followed the first.

“You’re a talented artist,” he began, and I burst into more tears. He jumped up, agitated, and tried to give the book back to me. “What?” he demanded anxiously. “I mean it! You are! Orange is tricky!” At his almost exact echo of my thoughts, I crumpled sideways onto my bed and curled up into a ball, my shoulders shaking so violently with muffled sobs I could feel the bed tremble. It was too much. It had been a long day of too much, and now my drawing was gone. He stared at me, incredulous. “I was trying to make you feel better, and I upset you, again.” He fisted his hands in his hair. “I’m terrible at this. I tried to make you feel better earlier today, and I upset you so much you started screaming, and then, when I tried to calm you, I almost broke your wrist. There’s obviously a reason we’re not supposed to get involved.” I gaped at him, crying silently, wishing he would start making sense because I couldn’t handle two dubiously sane people at the same time. He grabbed a t-shirt from the floor and shoved it at me. “Here. Take this. Or is it supposed to be tissues? I don’t see any, and I’m afraid if I leave you’ll start screaming again.” He paced, his fist against his mouth, occasionally stealing covert glances at me. I held the t-shirt in one hand, the closed sketchbook in the other, and let silent tears roll down my face unchecked while I let my brain just lockdown and refuse to process any further information.

He nodded to the bed. “May I?” he asked, as if afraid. I nodded. He carefully put at least a foot between us as he sat. “I believe you about the drawing,” he said heavily. He smiled a little. “In fact, I much prefer it as an explanation for your reaction to me earlier today than to think you felt that way on your own.”

“Oh.” I turned my head so he couldn’t see my blush. I hadn’t thought about how insulting my first reaction to him must have been. But then, until just a little while ago, until his matter-of-fact acceptance of my ability, I hadn’t cared. “Oh! I meant do you believe that someone took it?”

He shook his head, exasperated. “Obviously. The edges were cleanly cut.”

“But… why? Why would someone do that? And how would they know?”

He was silent a long time, staring off at the patches of moonlight that crept in through the big bay window that took up most of my bedroom’s front wall. His eyes were a little unfocused, his head tilted as if listening intently. I studied his profile, thinking of him as lines and angles, of mysteries and secrets. Logan must have fallen asleep; the apartment was silent. The only noise was the faint sound of people and traffic from the square. “I don’t know,” he finally murmured, as if the silence had given him an answer. “I wish I did. But I don’t like it.” My scraped-up side pressed into the sheets beneath me. It throbbed dully, reminding me of other aches. Full-body tiredness crept across me like steam from a hot scented bath I suddenly wanted. I felt pleasantly foggy and slow.

“Ethan,” I murmured into my forearm. I wondered where he would go. Did drawings come to life have places to sleep? I imagined him picking random paintings from his imagination and stepping into them. “If I was a drawing come to life,” I said, swinging my legs over the side of my bed, “I would pick a different famous painting every night to sneak into.” He had moved, again without me noticing, to the very center of my bay window. He stared at the sky as if looking for something specific. I joined him there, leaning my forehead against the cold glass. “Starry Starry Night,” I sighed. “I’d like to sleep under a sky like that.” The full chill of October after dark hit me, seeping through my thin ripped t-shirt and chilling me all the way down to my toes. I shivered violently, but it didn’t break my dreamy lassitude. “Do you have a place to stay, Ethan?” I heard myself ask. I knew I should be horrified, giving a stranger-than-stranger the option to stay, but I wasn’t. I just shivered some more and looked at the sky, trying to see what Ethan found so fascinating up there. I could see only light pollution haze and a few pinpricks of white, meant to be stars.

Warm fingers draped a soft leather jacket around my shoulders. Behind me, he lifted my tangled dark brown hair from beneath the collar of his jacket and smoothed it so it hung across my shoulder blades. I leaned backwards into his touch as Abigail had nudged him for petting. Later, I would wonder at this. Later, I would be angry at myself for relaxing so completely and unwisely with someone who’d scared me senseless earlier that very day. But for now, I was conscious only of Ethan’s fingers untangling my hair and a growing sense of peace, stronger than anything I’d felt since before Logan’s diagnosis.

“What else, Caspia?” he almost whispered, warmth and the scent of new growing things all around me. “What other paintings would you visit, if you could?” His arms wrapped around me, tight with nervous care. Sleep pulled against me like waterlogged socks.

“I want to live in that Escher drawing,” I murmured. My eyes fluttered closed. “The house with all the crazy stairs.” I felt movement and warmth.

“
Relativity.”
He supplied the name absently, as if his thoughts were far away. I opened my eyes to find we were no longer by the window, but back on my bed. I lay stretched out on my uninjured side, covered with his jacket. He knelt by the side, his blue-green tinted eyes clear again and even with mine. I reached out for him but my hand felt so heavy I pulled it back under his jacket. I remembered feeling sedated when I first woke up, after meeting him for the first time in Mrs. Alice’s shop and panicking like hell.

“Hey,” I tried to demand, but I sounded more like I’d been drinking. “Did you do something to me earlier? Outside Mrs. Alice’s shop?”

"Other than scare the hell out of you, you mean?” He snorted. “I sincerely hope so.”

“You are
so
not answering my questions,” I accused through half-closed eyes.

“You are so resistant to… routine persuasion,” he sighed. He traced my half-closed eyes with his fingers. The gesture seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “I think you might be in danger,” he said.

“Is that why I drew you? Why you came?” I asked.

He looked absolutely, positively grief-stricken. “I’m not here for you at all.” He visibly sagged after the words left his mouth, like he’d just admitted to the darkest sin of all. “But it didn’t make a difference, did it?” He laughed bitterly. “I… interfered. Like my half-cursed brothers. I’m no better.” He moved so quickly I couldn’t track him. One second he was staring at me by my bed, and the next, he was at the window, palms flat against the glass as if in supplication.

I tried to sit up but sleep threatened to drag me under like a drug. “How do you
do
that? Move so fast?” I complained. “And what do you mean, I’m in danger? Or that you interfered? With
what
?”

“How is it,” he countered, turning to me, his voice low and dangerous now, “that you’re still awake and asking questions?”

“I’m stubborn like that.” I tried to sound fierce, but I wasn’t very convincing. I could barely keep my eyes open and my vision was starting to fuzz. “And don’t forget your jacket when you get the hell out of my…”

“Keep it.” My eyes were mere slits, struggling to stay open against a sudden vivid light. “You might need it. It offers some protection against… cold, and… other things.” He sounded frustrated, and the light flared painfully. Still I tried to keep my eyes open, desperately curious about the light, about Ethan, about…

“Sleep, Caspia. I’ll see you again. Sleep.”

The voice came from inside my head. I fell into the same warm white blankness from before, when I’d hit my head outside Mrs. Alice’s store. Soft white warmth enveloped me, but this time it had Ethan’s voice, his scent, and his strength. For the second time in one day, I relaxed into deep, calming sleep. But unlike before, this time I dreamed.

Light. Sheltering light softer than thought wrapped around me while storms gathered and lightening lashed the ground as far as I could see.

Chapter Five:

Neighborly

From underwater, I watched as two huge clear globes of air fought their way drunkenly to the surface. They exploded on contact, sending ripples and waves in outward spreading circles while smaller silver bubbles of air followed them up. I hugged my knees to my chest, ignoring my burning lungs and blinking rapidly as the hot water stung my eyes. Long strands of reddish-brown hair floated lazily past my face like aimless seaweed. I ignored them, determined to shut out the world as completely as I could for as long as my lungs would let me.