Whisper (32 page)

Slowly, but without hindrance, I moved forward from my stationary observation point, and simply closed the distance between us. He stomped when he recognized me advancing, issuing a fierce warning sound from his throat. When that didn't work he weaved his head back and forth, working up a fiery breath, threatening to unleash it if I came any closer. It was a bluff, though – somehow I knew.

At my failure to heed the warnings, he half-reared, insistent, but then dropped back down to all-fours and fell silent, his fits having finally met their indifferent match.

That's it, lover...

I fought down the elation that clamored to celebrate as I drew dangerously close to him. I could feel the warmth emanating from his body now, could smell the scent of meat that came with carnivore territory.

His nostrils flared, taking in my own scent. They dilated and contracted, more rapidly as I came to stand in front of him, each breath testing what I was made of on a more intimate level as I drew nearer.

Then I surpassed that great head of his, never taking my eyes from his, and drew alongside him. Fighting the quiver of fingers, I lifted my hand slowly from its place at my side, canceling the space between us, watching him for signs... His ribcage heaved, his breaths nervous and untrusting – but it was this swelling from within that pressed his own side against my palm.

Suddenly, I had my hand on him.

He was unnaturally hot, which could have been expected, but the degree of heat surpassed what I had surmised. Despite the flame that I knew resided in him, I hadn't expected it to feel so transparently as if some terrible, furnace-worthy fever raged inside him. I could feel it, though, radiating hotter and hotter – and it made me think it might very well burn him up from the inside out, if he aspired to engage it too ambitiously.

My brow crumpled in further concern, dismayed by every additional depth of this creature I explored.
It's just one unfortunate contingency piled on top of another with you, isn't it?
I directed a stream of empathetic telepathy. Poor thing. I willed soothing vibes into my hands, and ran them slowly over his ribs. And it was as if the greater life went out of him. He did not melt like a pool of butter into my fingers, but the aggression became a thing of remission. I could see it in his eyes, still, a demon ripe to lash out at anyone else who crossed him – but not me. Not the one that brought soothing waves with her.

I felt his breath beneath my fingers, saw the soul in his up-close eyes, and the only conclusion I could come to was this:

“You aren't this fire, are you?” I murmured knowingly to him. “You're just the instrument. The tragic, enduring instrument.” I moved back up to his head, dared to stare him straight in the face and take that face in my hands. He resisted at first, his neck going erect, his muzzle rising so that he breathed directly into my own face.

His breaths poured into my face, rang in my ears like the tide, and the voice of that beautiful lost shore returned to my inner being. My lips parted, stricken with euphoric awe. I wanted to laugh, but I was breathless with amazement for its return, having forgotten what it felt like.

I heart it, Jay. I hear it again...

I gazed in awe at the instrument before me – the instrument I had no sooner pegged for the catalyst that it was than it proved its nature manifold, and brought that other, unexpected tune back to my ears.

In that moment I saw the creature before me in magnificent light. An unfortunate but enduring bridge of evolution, that came up for air from underneath the burdensome cards it was dealt kicking and screaming, putting up a fight, rising like a phoenix from the ashes.

That conviction, and the instrumental metaphor that came to mind considering his nature, brought a name to my lips that demanded to be spoken, bestowed upon him. It fit as a name predestined by God himself, and I opened my mouth as its honorary messenger, and breathed it upon him:

“
Crescendo.
”

Twenty-Nine –

C
rescendo. That thing in music that brought everything up to climactic speed, when the chords got bigger and louder, an ordinary melody suddenly taken to greater heights, a finale-like sound hammered out on the fateful keys. Crescendo. That thing that enhanced the music to the point where the instrument trembled with the power of it, struggling to contain the unfurling spirit of it.

Crescendo. This creature before me. This rising, evolving beast with a war song inside him.

The demon inside you writes your music no more,
I declared to him, as though there were no question of him hearing the prose of my thoughts.
I will ride you. And you and I will command the drums by which you will hammer the earth that spawned you back into submission.

*

It was Toby who found me, when dawn came and went and the awakening of the world found me in that corral still. He wandered up, perhaps drawn by the unusual silence emanating from the region that kept the demon horse. Wariness lit his face when he saw me. And for the first time, he sounded like Jay when he spoke:

“What are you doing, Alannis?”

“What does it look like I'm doing?”

“Something you should never have seriously considered for a moment.”

“Who says I had to consider it? This is my calling.”

He eyed the beast that stood without aggression behind me, willingly sharing my company now. “I'm getting the Lieutenant.” This was out of his comfort zone – and out of his element.

Good for him.

When he returned with Sonya, minutes later, the demon horse had taken himself across the pen behind me, searching for breakfast. The Lieutenant's face was a cross between stony and stormy – with some of Toby's wariness mixed in.

“Miss Wilde–” she began, but I stopped her.

“I think you might want to reconsider your words, and perhaps whatever method you're using to win this war right now, before speaking,” I said boldly.

She shut her mouth a moment. Considered me. “Why?”

“Because,” I revealed from the center of that death-trap of a corral, my voice ironic as I confessed my new discovery: “I can whisper to demon horses.”

*

I stood at the threshold of Jay's tent, remorse in my stance, but also – some quality that willed him to listen. He looked up, and knew. I couldn't say what he knew, and in all fairness I don't think he could, either. But he knew
some
thing. Could read the nature of something in my stance. On my face. In his gut.

“Jay...” I started, regretfully, trying to be gentle. But there was no way to say it that would rest well with him. The Lieutenant had asked me if I wanted her to do it, but I had refused the offer. While he would have taken it better, coming from her – he would have no choice, but to – he deserved to hear it from me.

He stood as I struggled. Faced me.

So he was prepared to be a man about whatever it was, but somehow that didn't help me. “I...used my gift, on the demon horse,” I managed finally, spitting out a starting point. Ignoring the inevitable dismay and trepidation that pained his eyes at the revelation and where it was going, I plowed onward. “Last night... I went in there. I whispered to him. I
tamed
him–”

“Is that what this is from?” he asked knowingly, raising a hand to a bruise on my cheek, practically daring me to answer.

When I found no answer that rebuked the suspicion, my mouth closed, and my shoulders slumped. And that muscle in Jay's jaw tightened, and he tore his eyes away from me, unable to meet mine with the pain in his own. I cast about for something to say that would appease him, hating what I did to him. But there was nothing for it.

He stared at the tent wall. At nothing. At whatever nameless painting was plastered there.

“I can whisper to demon horses, Jay,” I said regretfully – in that moment genuinely sorry that I could. “We have one in our possession, and I can ride it. I know I can't...win any kind of approval with you, not with this. But I wouldn't presume to. You can't want me to go out there. It wouldn't be fair to ask you to come to terms with it. But I told the Lieutenant, and... We need to gain back some ground out there. She says we need to send Gabriel a message.”

I paused there, letting it sink in. “I'm the messenger, Jay. If I go out there on top of one of Gabriel's own steeds, one of his unbridled beasts that he thinks only he can presume to control...”

Jay met my eyes then, and the impact of the pain in them nearly crippled me. He held my gaze, for once letting the intensity of his emotion show. In that terrible moment, I thought: Jay was a beautiful, deep, vulnerable creation of a human being. He may have everyone else fooled, but not me.

“Go save the world, then,” he spoke at last, but his voice resonated with shrapnel-like bitterness. He knew he couldn't keep me, but he would never send his blessing with me to death's doorstep. I could see, in his eyes, that in that moment he would have given anything to trade places with me. To have it be him irrevocably caught up in this mess instead of me. But it could never be. Such a sentiment was useless. Utterly, irrevocably useless.

“I don't
want
to, Jay,” I said as if I needed to convince him. As if convincing him of that had some sort of value.

“You have to,” he said, and it wasn't so much in understanding as it was a charge. Almost a command.

I lingered in the tent, reluctant to leave on such terms. Reluctant to leave at all. I had finally been willing to listen to him, and now...

“Make sure he gets the memo,” Jay charged me, and I knew a gracious dismissal when I saw one. Heart in my throat, I nodded – to myself, because he was no longer looking at me – and backed out across the threshold.

*

As we crafted my debut appearance atop Crescendo, my dreams took on some new themes. I dreamed of coughing, and stumbling through a forest. Unsure of where I was going or where I came from. My lungs were wracked by congestion, pulling me into hunched convulsions as I wove deeper and deeper through the trees, throwing my hand out to use their trunks for support. Until at last I came to a grove of Eucalyptus, and collapsed among the sinuous, white-gray spires. Their strong scent washed over me, and I looked up into the feathery, gray-green treetops as the sharp aroma gradually cleared my lungs of what plagued them. A breeze stirred through the delicate bows of those heights, creating a soothing whisper far above me. I let out a sigh of relief, my abdominal muscles happy to find release.

But then my symptoms changed. Fever came over me, leaving me sweating and panting and pushing myself away from the ground to air out one moment, only to collapse into a shivering heap that sought the fetal position the next. I began to crawl – crawl out of the grove, in search of something else. I dragged myself over the ground for what felt like hours, one painstaking inch after another, until the trees began to change. They stooped from their heights, becoming more haggard, and yet – more graceful as well. Lengthening their branches until they drooped and swayed.

Willows.

Winter was coming, and the trees began to shed their leaves upon me. Even their bark began to peel and fall to the ground, and I curled up in the resulting nest of wood-grain tatters, let the stuff cover me – leaf and bark alike.

And gradually, my fever dissipated as well. I was lulled into a peaceful sleep, there under the dormant willows, and when I awoke – it was into the real world.

I half expected stray leaves and bark scraps to spill off my form as I rose, but it was only my covers that fell away. I sat in my tent a moment, hugging my knees in thought, mulling over the dreams. A grove of Eucalyptus... A nest of willow-bark...

It seemed I had taken to recalling old wives' tales that I had heard, regarding the healing powers of these agents. For some reason my subconscious had pinpointed these two entities, wanting me to lend some attention their way.

Casting my covers aside, I rose and forsook my tent, trudging right out into the day. I needed to get my hands on these things, somehow. “I need some willow-bark and Eucalyptus,” I declared when I found Sonya.

She looked up from her plans, processed my announcement. Then she glanced to the nearest Private in her presence. “Get her some willow-bark and Eucalyptus,” she charged, and off he went to see to it. Just like that.

“He can do that?” I asked, looking after him. “Just...go and get it?”

“One way or another,” Sonya replied. “Bless his heart.”

*