From the Author
Excerpt:
"Promise you'll be nice. Please johnny, promise."
Nice? I could hardly answer. The emotional syrup gushing from her little girl, masochistic, young azure eyeballs, just dying to forgive me so that she'd not have to entertain the notion of fighting me--was beyond my comprehension. How could such denial exist? I was fire. I was pain. I was the breaker of all secured reality. I could not feed the conformist, the weak, the fearful. No. I wanted to set her eyes on fire with one shot of my breath. Giving victims what they call for--that was my passion. Hell upon the whiney little self-deprecating humans bathing in `woe is me.' Morstis ad libensentis victimas. Death to willing victims.
She said, "Why won't you respond to me?"
I forced false words, "I will be nice." I did want to obliterate her . . . at times--times like this. Actually doing it, well, that was always the hard part. Repressing this Dragon-size lust to destroy felt increasingly impossible. I had to get a grip or she'd cancel whatever trust she had left for me. Without that, bringing her to full power would prove undoable.
I rang the doorbell that played the first line of an Old French lullaby. I cringed. But Jen didn't see. I inhaled the cold with monster vigor to quell the fire inside me, but not even one flame quelled. Come on Granny. Speed up those wrinkled old stilts you walk on. Had to deposit Jen and fly. Had to appease the irrepressible new, yet ancient me.
"I'm nervous," Jen said.
"No need," I replied, hoping I sounded normal.
Brass bird wind chimes sounded delicately to the right of us. The brass birds bumped into each other over barren bushes. Angel stuff. The heat was on. My power lust turned hotter. If only the brass birds were a flock of flesh, I'd make them crash into each other, beaks ripping into feathers, blood exposing guts. I yearned to make the whole world collide, beginning with the intensification of religious wars all over the world. World War Three. Everyone, everywhere would be fighting, losing the last of their humanity. Soon . . . soon.
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I stopped mid-suck. But my fury remained.
Her whisper carried pain, "Why do you hurt me!"
I removed my Tazmarkian lips and said meanly in her ear, "Isn't that what you want?"
Her tears had seeped into the corners of my snout. Blood had trailed down her neck blending with the wash of tears that thickened where our bodies pressed together. I still felt wild. I still wanted to harm her. I couldn't. Love, was it? Was it?
She was etched into me: azure eyes, simplistic and true, hopeful inflections in her voice, ever viewing people's brightest side; the power to heal, the power to f. . . . . . . heal--one thing I could never do. My human form returned.
I loosened my grip. My head dropped to her shoulder. I drew her hand from the wall and placed it over her neck wound so she could heal it. Her tears dripped with intermittent sniffles as dazzling white light flowed from her palm into her wound. Her gentle weeping stirred me, instead of evoking the usual kill. I could not kill her. Not her.
I stepped back to view the damage I had done. She stood there straight and still, eyes closed, trembling, one hand on her wound flowing Divine Light--the other limp at her side, in a kind of shock. Blood had soaked into her yellow hair and pretty blue dress.
Guilt. Now, guilt. I think it was guilt--not meager guilt, but intense guilt, the way I'd witnessed it on humans. Of all the stupid human emotions, guilt was the most dim-witted. Had I really been reduced to that? Damn I was feeling low. I was beginning to curse the day I'd opened the door to human emotions. I had been better off without them. How could I have craved them, craved this?
Jen's hand drifted down her smooth neck, puncture free. Her eyes opened--flecked with sorrow more than fear, and she stared into mine quietly, tears still dripping down her cheeks finding passage to her neck.
I magically made the blood on her vanish. Her hair was clean and yellow and her pretty dress was blue again, though I doubted she'd ever see it that way. I slid off my black glove and wiped away her tears with my finned hand, hoping I could wipe away the pain she felt from my dastardly deed. But still tears fell. She didn't understand how much she called for suffering. She didn't know it strained me not to comply, especially with jealousy and hunger in the works.
Her sad stare searched the darkness of my eyes for something redeeming. With quivering lips, she swallowed hard. "You love me. I know you do, or I'd be dead. Something awful drove you to hurt me, something that has made you dangerously agitated. Tell me what happened to you, johnny."
