Chapter 27
Periwinkle
Footsteps crunch through the gravel next to the trailer I’m huddled under.
A wry voice carries into the thicker darkness. “Do you want to come out and talk about it, Peri, or would you rather I pretend I can’t tell you’re hiding in the shadows.”
It’s Sorsha. The phoenix shifter helped us a little in handling the first weird rift we found, but I don’t know what she can do about this. I couldn’t even get her in a position to tackle Viscera with her fiery powers.
On the other hand, when she says it like that, I do feel kind of ridiculous staying tucked away under here.
The men I marked are spread out through our fake movie set, pulsing concern and their own flavors of guilt, as if they’ve done anything wrong. How could they have when they didn’t even get close enough to Viscera to invite her to dinner, let alone capture her?
I don’t know what to say to any of them. I’m not sure I want to hear what they’d say to me.
And while I’m shying from my failure, Viscera might be turning yet another part of the city into her violent version of vigilante art.
Talking to Sorsha definitely couldn’t hurt, could it?
Shaking off my reluctance, I emerge from the low crawl space and the shadows one after the other.
Sorsha looks me over, taking in my now standard outfit of leather jacket and vividly colored dress, the twist of my mouth, and my drooping head where my hair flickers shades of bruise-purple and sickly yellow into the dusk.
“What do you want to talk about?” I ask, as if I don’t know.
Can ignorance still be bliss if it’s feigned? It seemed worth a try.
She cocks her head with a swish of her bright red ponytail and motions to me. “Let’s take a walk. Sometimes it’s easier to think when your legs are moving to get your mind moving too.”
I haven’t heard that theory before, but it sounds reasonable. And I’m relieved that she walks onto the field in the direction away from the trailers rather than toward the men I’ve been avoiding.
“From what I’ve gathered, this isn’t the first time your powers have gotten away from you and had a negative effect,” Sorsha says after a moment.
My grimace deepens. “No. But I thought I’d gotten so much better at controlling that part of my nature. I don’t know why it happens in the first place, and then— It was so important that I keep Viscera there and calm… and I still couldn’t do it.”
“It wasn’t all on you, though. No one managed to catch her.”
“I was the one the plan depended on. And…” I swallow hard.
“It all comes down to me. My powers connected me to the rest of my team, and all those bonds do is mess us up. It’s like…
like the shadowkind creatures we saw that merged into each other when they warped.
They couldn’t function properly because they were tripping over each other, and they couldn’t pull themselves apart… ”
So Hail had to put them out of their misery.
“And I wanted to stop Viscera so badly that I made her even more eager to break the city,” I finish. “One more way I threw everything out of whack.”
Sorsha hums to herself. She extends her hand palm up, and a flame flares into being above her skin. “Did I ever tell you about the time I nearly burned up the entire world?”
I stare at her. “No. Why would you do that?”
I don’t remember reading anything about the phoenix in the records about problems between shadowkind and humans…
but Rollick does seem to be friends with Sorsha, as much as the formidable demon has friends.
Maybe certain details got strategically left out of the shadowkind history books to protect those who’d be implicated.
She laughs, the sound as dry as the air.
“I didn’t exactly want to. Not really. But that’s what phoenixes are meant to do—flame out and be reborn.
And when you’re a rare, unstable, unprecedented hybrid human-shadowkind who’s also a phoenix, it turns out you could be powerful enough to take an awful lot of what’s around you down with you.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world wouldn’t automatically rejuvenate. ”
I try to picture the smiling, upbeat woman beside me hurling destructive fire at everything around us. My brain cannot process the image. I’ll just have to take her at her word.
“But you didn’t,” I say.
“Obviously, or this place would look a lot more charbroiled. But here’s the thing: you didn’t burn down the whole world either.”
I can’t stop a giggle from popping out of my mouth. “I couldn’t even if I did want to.”
“That’s the whole point, though, isn’t it?
” Sorsha arches an eyebrow at me. “You’re beating yourself up over doing a little damage, but you could have powers capable of a whole lot worse.
You’re hardly the most dangerous shadowkind out there.
Your mistakes aren’t that horrifying. You’ve got plenty to be grateful about. ”
She snuffs out the fire beneath her fingers.
I can see what she’s getting at, but her story doesn’t comfort me much.
“It’s not just about the damage I did. It’s the damage I didn’t stop from happening.
Ever since I came to the mortal realm, I’ve hurt so many people without meaning to, and every time I have the chance to balance things out…
No matter how much I try to only bring people happiness, more things go wrong.
The men I care about can’t use their own powers effectively because our emotions get all muddled now.
How many more people will Viscera hurt because I couldn’t stop her—and maybe riled her up more? ”
Sorsha considers me for a few moments with a pensive expression. “I might have a few ideas about that too. Let’s head over to the Everymobile. We’ve gotten our thoughts moving around plenty. Now I think the conversation needs drinks.”
Having something filling my throat other than uncomfortable words sounds good to me. Especially when my feet are starting to twinge with familiar aches.
As Sorsha leads me to the hulking vehicle parked down the road from the trailers, she slings her hands in her pockets and murmurs a couple of lines of a song I can’t make out.
Then she glances over at me. “How are you normally thinking about your powers, Peri? And, well, everything else around you? What do you mean by ‘balancing things out’?”
I grope for the right words to explain. “I’ve had so many accidents, and the sorcerer who held me captive forced me to use the harmful side of my powers to blast people he wanted to attack.
I feel every single being I hurt. I have…
sort of a list, in my head, of the total number.
Whenever I can make someone feel happy instead, I can knock that number down. ”
“I assume you’d eventually like it to be zero.”
“I’d like it to be in positive numbers. More happiness than hurt.” Imagining that brings a bittersweet ache into my chest—the joy I’d feel if it happened, the fear that I’ll never get even close.
Sorsha nods. “So you’re always trying to make people happy and encourage other positive emotions.”
“Yes. I don’t know why it’s so hard.”
“Probably because both human and shadowkind beings are too damned complicated.”
Before I can ask what she means by that, she opens the door of the RV we’ve just reached. It swings out with a jangle like a phone ringing in an old movie and a brief flash of rainbow strobe lights.
I peer at the doorway. “What was— Does it normally do that?”
Sorsha laughs and beckons me inside. “The Everymobile has been with us through a lot of adventures. Even passing through normal rifts into the shadow realm leaves it a little warped—in interesting rather than dangerous ways. Usually.”
The RV’s front room holds a tiny kitchen across from a padded bench that forms a semi-circle around a narrow table. Some of the cushions are a neutral beige; others sparkle with a silver gloss. A pinwheel spins on the ceiling between two light fixtures.
I sit down at one end of the bench, and a little green creature comes hurtling out of a doorway at the far end of the vehicle. It looks like… a tiny dragon?
The shadowkind creature freezes at the sight of me and lets out a squeaky sort of grunt.
Sorsha clicks her tongue at it. “Now, Pickle, you know to be nice to guests.”
The little dragon studies me as if sizing me up. It’s so cute I can’t help smiling, even though I’m not sure there’s anything nice about the trickles of smoke that puffed from its nostrils.
All at once, the creature flings itself onto my lap and flops there. I rub the smooth green scales on its back tentatively, and it gives a raspy rumble that’s almost like a purr.
Sorsha grins. “There you go, already making friends. Now let’s see…”
Grabbing a mug, she turns on the tap at the kitchen sink and makes a face at the sand that hisses out. She turns the faucet off, waits a few seconds with her foot tapping, and tries again.
This time water burbles into the sink, but apparently that’s not what she wants either. She gives it one more try, and on the third gets a gush of steamy, dark brown liquid.
When she sets the first mug in front of me, the scent that reaches my nose immediately soothes my nerves. “Hot chocolate! I need a sink like that.”
“If only it came with different faucets for every flavor.” Sorsha sits across from me, cradling her own mug. “Before we talk about how to fix your problem, let’s touch on how I solved mine. How do you think I managed not to burn the world down?”
I pause. “You… decided you liked it better when it isn’t charbroiled?”
She barks a delighted laugh. “I guess that’s the gist of it. But I think you know that with these things it isn’t as easy as deciding, or you’d just decide never to hurt anyone.”
“True.”
“Back then, my fire would flare out of its own accord when I was angry or upset. Kind of like for you, when the destructive energy comes out of you.”
I perk up. Maybe she can help. “It is like that. It builds up inside me until it explodes.”
Sorsha turns her mug between her hands. “I used to try to hold the fire in. Ignore the anger, suppress any stress that might stoke it. But then humans did something really horrible to someone I love, and the rage took over. That’s when I almost burned everything down.
The anger had already burned away every other consideration inside me. ”
I knit my brow. “So how did you stop being angry?”
A soft smile touches the phoenix shifter’s lips.
“I had help. Other people I loved called out to me and broke through my anger. I remembered all the things I didn’t want to destroy.
Afterward, I realized that part of the problem was that I’d tried so hard not to give in to my anger at all.
I bottled up so much, got so scared of what I might do with my powers, that I only added to the stress I was under. ”
“And you’ve never gotten to that point again?”
She shakes her head. “Sometimes I want to use my fire. Sometimes I need to. There are things in this world that need to be destroyed, and things that are going to hurt whether we like it or not.”
Every particle of my being balks at those words. Sorsha contemplates my expression. “You don’t like accepting that fact.”
“I don’t think we should have to,” I say. “Why can’t people only be happy? Why does there have to be so much pain?”
Her tone gentles. “I think too much of anything can be a problem. From what Rollick’s told me, you blast out energy when you get overly excited too, don’t you?”
A shamed flush heats my cheeks alongside a flicker of orange through my hair. My gaze drops to the tabletop. “Yes. It’s either way. That’s how the bonds happened too. Whenever the emotions inside me get too big to contain, something bursts out. That’s why it’s so hard.”
Sorsha lets us sit with that thought through a sip of her hot chocolate. “I’m just wondering… What if the reason you yo-yo back and forth between those extremes is because you’re thinking of everything in extremes?”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“You see happiness as the only acceptable emotion. You try to avoid pain and sadness at all costs. If you’re always pushing in one direction, it makes sense that it’d be easy to stumble too far that way—or to rebound too fast in the other direction.
Like a vicious cycle, always swinging around from one side all the way to the other, when the safe space is in between.
A little happy, a little sad. A little pleasure, a little pain. ”
My fingers clench around the mug’s handle. “But if I let both happen… how am I ever going to make up for all those people before?”
Sorsha lifts her shoulders in a shrug, but the vibe she gives off tastes like sympathy rather than disregard.
“Maybe you won’t. I don’t know if I’ve helped more people than I accidentally hurt before I got a handle on my powers.
I just know I’d have hurt even more if I hadn’t sorted myself out.
Is beating yourself up for things you couldn’t control in the past making it easier to do good in the world right now? ”
The question hits me like a punch to the chest. For a second, I can’t breathe.
“No,” I admit. All the anguish, all the guilt—it’s tangled up inside me, searing sharper and hotter whenever anything else upsets me.
What would it be like to go forward as if with a plate washed clean? To believe that only what I do today and tomorrow and every day after that matters, not what happened before?
It’s hard to imagine that too, but a strange flutter passes through my pulse when I try.
I thought the problem was that I couldn’t keep the men I’ve marked happy enough, that I was passing on too much distress and failing to soothe theirs.
What if… what if I have been fighting the parts that are scary or uncomfortable too much? What if we all should look at what we actually have, good and bad?
We might find out we can make more of ourselves than we realized. We are still a team.
The thought brings up a memory of Viscera’s vicious grin. I tried so hard to calm her down and turn her toward happiness rather than rage…
I sit up straighter, so abruptly Pickle startles with a disgruntled chirp. “I think I might know how we can bring Viscera in.”