The Host(235)

It smelled odd—stuffy and a little moldy. I remembered the smell… but surely I’d never smelled it before in my life.

I saw nothing but dull red—the insides of my eyelids. I wanted to open them, so I went searching for the right muscles to do that.

“Wanderer? We’re all waiting for you, honey. Open your eyes.”

This voice, this warm breath against my ear, was even more familiar. A strange feeling tickled through my veins at the sound. A feeling I’d never, ever felt before. The sound made my breath catch and my fingers tremble.

I wanted to see the face that went with that voice.

A color washed through my mind—a color that called to me from a faraway life—a brilliant, glowing blue. The whole universe was bright blue.…

And finally I knew my name. Yes, that was right. Wanderer. I was Wanderer. Wanda, too. I remembered that now.

A light touch on my face—a warm pressure on my lips, on my eyelids. Ah, that’s where they were. I could make them blink now that I’d found them.

“She’s waking up!” someone crowed excitedly.

Jamie. Jamie was here. My heart gave another fluttery little thump.

It took a moment for my eyes to focus. The blue that stabbed my eyes was all wrong—too pale, too washed out. It wasn’t the blue I wanted.

A hand touched my face. “Wanderer?”

I looked to the sound. The movement of my head on my neck felt so odd. It didn’t feel like it used to, but at the same time it felt the way it had always felt.

My searching eyes found the blue I’d been looking for. Sapphire, snow, and midnight.

“Ian? Ian, where am I?” The sound of the voice coming out of my throat frightened me. So high and trilling. Familiar, but not mine. “Who am I?”

“You’re you,” Ian told me. “And you’re right where you belong.”

I pulled one of my hands free from the giant’s hand that held it. I meant to touch my face, but someone’s hand reached toward me, and I froze.

The reaching hand also froze above me.

I tried to move my hand again, to protect myself, but that moved the hand above me. I started shaking, and the hand trembled.

Oh.

I opened and closed the hand, looking at it carefully.

Was this my hand, this tiny thing? It was a child’s hand, except for the long pink-and-white nails, filed into perfect, smooth curves. The skin was fair, with a strange silvery cast to it and, entirely incongruous, a scattering of golden freckles.

It was the odd combination of silver and gold that brought the image back: I could see a face in my head, reflected in a mirror.

The setting of the memory threw me off for a moment because I wasn’t used to so much civilization—at the same time, I knew nothing but civilization. A pretty dresser with all kinds of frilly and delicate things on top of it. A profusion of dainty glass bottles containing the scents I loved—I loved? Or she loved?—so much. A potted orchid. A set of silver combs.

The big round mirror was framed in a wreath of metal roses. The face in the mirror was roundish, too, not quite oval. Small. The skin on the face had the same silver undertone—silver like moonlight—as the hand did, with another handful of the golden freckles across the bridge of the nose. Wide gray eyes, the silver of the soul shimmering faintly behind the soft color, framed by tangled golden lashes. Pale pink lips, full and almost round, like a baby’s. Small, even white teeth behind them. A dimple in the chin. And everywhere, everywhere, golden, waving hair that stood away from my face in a bright halo and fell below where the mirror showed.

My face or her face?

It was the perfect face for a Night Flower. Like an exact translation from Flower to human.

“Where is she?” my high, reedy voice demanded. “Where is Pet?” Her absence frightened me. I’d never seen a more defenseless creature than this half-child with her moonlight face and sunlight hair.

“She’s right here,” Doc assured me. “Tanked and ready to go. We thought you could tell us the best place to send her.”

I looked toward his voice. When I saw him standing in the sunlight, a lit cryotank in his hands, a rush of memories from my former life came back to me.

“Doc!” I gasped in the tiny, fragile voice. “Doc, you promised! You gave me your oath, Eustace! Why? Why did you break your word?”

A dim recollection of misery and pain touched me. This body had never felt such agony before. It shied away from the sting.

“Even an honest man sometimes caves to duress, Wanda.”

“Duress,” another terribly familiar voice scoffed.

“I’d say a knife to the throat counts as duress, Jared.”

“You knew I wouldn’t really use it.”