“Wait until I’m unconscious before you do it,” I said. I couldn’t tell if he was paying any attention to me. “Then pour the blood down the toilet. Don’t leave any for them to use, if you can.”
That same stubborn silence. It didn’t even make me angry anymore; I was so inured to it.
I sighed and raised the knife to make the first cut to my wrist.
Then the glass broke against the floor, and a hand gripped my wrist tight, and suddenly we were across the room, against the wall, me pinned by the wire-taut weight of Shiny’s body.
He pressed against me, breathing hard. I tried to pull my wrist from his hand, and he made a tight sound of negation, shaking my arm until I stilled. So I waited. I had managed to graze my wrist, but nothing more. A drop of my blood welled around his gripping hand and fell to the floor.
He bent. Slow, slow, like a tall old tree in the wind, fighting it every inch of the way. Only when he had bent to his fullest did he stop, his face pressed against the side of mine, his breath hot and harsh in my ear. It must have been an uncomfortable posture for him. But he stopped there, torturing himself, trapping me, and only in this manner was he able, at last, to speak. It was a whisper the whole time.
“They did not love me anymore. He was born first, I came next. I was never alone because of him. Then she came and I did not mind, I did not mind, as long as she understood that he was mine, too. It was not the sharing, do you see? It was good having her with us, and then the children, so many of them, all perfect and strange. I was happy then, happy, she was with us and we loved her, he and I, but I was first in his heart. I knew that. She respected it. It was never the sharing that troubled me.
“But they changed, changed, they always changed. I knew the possibility, but after so long, I did not believe. He had been alone for eternities before me. I did not understand. Even when we were enemies, he thought of me. How could I know? In all the time of my existence, it had never occurred, not once! Even apart from them, I knew their presence, felt their awareness of me. But then… but then…”
At this point, he pulled me against him. His free hand, the one that wasn’t holding my wrist, fisted in the cloth at the small of my back. It wasn’t a hug; that much I was sure of. It didn’t feel like a gesture of comfort. It was closer to the way he’d held me after his release from the Empty. Or the way I sometimes gripped my walking stick when I was adrift in some place I didn’t know, with no one to help me if I stumbled. Yes, very much like that.
“I didn’t think it possible. Was it a betrayal? Had I offended them somehow? I didn’t think they could forget me so completely.
“But they did.
“They forgot me.
“They were together, he and she, yet I could not feel them. They thought only of each other. I was not part of it.
“They left me alone.”
I have always understood bodies better than voices or faces or words. So when Shiny whispered to me of horror, of a single moment of solitude after an eternity of companionship, it was not his words that conveyed the devastation this had wreaked on his soul. He was pressed against me as intimately as a lover. There was no need for words.
“I fled to the mortal realm. Better human company than nothing. I went to a village, to a mortal girl. Better any love than none. She offered herself and I took her, I needed her, I have never felt such need. After, I stayed. Mortal love was safer. There was a child, and I did not kill him. I knew he was demon, forbidden, I had written the law myself, but I needed him, too. He was… I had forgotten how beautiful they could be. The mortal girl whispered to me, in the night when I was weak. My siblings were wrong, wicked, hateful to have forgotten me. They would betray me again if I went back to them. Only she could love me truly; I needed only her. I needed to believe it, do you understand? I needed something certain. I lived in dread of her death. Then they came for me, found me. They apologized—apologized! Like it was nothing.”
He laughed once, here. It was half a sob.
“And they brought me home. But I knew: I could no longer trust them. I had learned what it meant to be alone. It is the opposite of all that I am, that emptiness, that… nothing. I fought ten thousand battles before time began, burned my soul to shape this universe, and never before have I experienced such agony.
“The mortal girl warned me. She said they would do it again. That they would forget they loved me. That they would turn to each other and I would be alone—left alone—forever.
“They would not.
“They would not.
“Then the mortal girl killed our son.”
He fell silent here for just a moment, his body utterly still.