Part Three

Thursy knew she was high-strung.

He didn’t have to look at her like that.

She thought that maybe he was staring because she couldn’t stop shaking. One of her legs was drawn up to her chest so that she could hold onto it like she would a booey in the ocean, but the other was dangling off the chair, quivering. Water was dripping off her big toe into a puddle on the polished wood floor.

He had wrapped her up in a huge blanket made of satin and stuffed with down. She was probably ruining it with all the water in her hair and on her skin.

The guy was kind of scary looking. He had pitch black hair so thick she wasn’t sure she could have drawn a brush through it and eyes the same color, and he was staring at her with a frightening intensity. She was under the impression that he always got what he wanted, and tonight he wanted something from her.

"Would you like some tea?" asked an older woman, starling them both. The guy glanced at her from the coffee table he was sitting on and Thursy felt herself jolt, pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders.

"No," she said in a raspy voice, and shook her head. The head that was mysteriously connected to her body again.

The thought made her wince. The older woman gave her a kind smile – she appeared younger when she smiled, almost girlish – and said, "Let me know if you need anything."

Then she left Thursy alone with the guy.

He was in his early twenties, not human but not anything else she recognized. He had on a rumpled white dress shirt stained with watery blood and black slacks. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows.

"Where am I?" Thursy asked. She was surprised that she could still speak.

"New York City."

He had a softer voice than she had expected. He spoke as though he thought she was fragile.

I am fragile, Thursy thought, and closed her eyes. She needed Scotch here, forcing her to breathe slowly, or Yared standing in the doorway loving her because he couldn’t love himself. She wanted to see Kiria’s annoyed, affectionate frown-smile and eat Kvyn’s miracle-cure deep-fried meats.

New York City was thousands of miles from the home she could never return to. Everyone she loved was gone.

There was just…him.

"My name is Osprey Worray," he told her. "You’re safe here."

"Safe?" Thursy repeated. She almost laughed. "I’m safe? Do you know what they did to me?"

"I know."

She barely heard him. "Those people were my family, my friends. They watched me grow up and then they just…just broke my neck and cut me up into pieces, like I was some stranger who didn’t live with them for sixteen years."

"I know," Osprey broke in. "And if you weren’t safe there, how could you be safe anywhere else? How can you trust me when I’m a stranger, and your own mother betrayed you."

He didn’t know the whole story, she thought, or else he would have known her parents were already dead.

But it did appear that he understood.

"What happened?" she asked. "What am I doing here?"

He considered uncertainly. His startling intensity, Thursy realized, was a product of Nature and not a true reflection of him. When he spoke, she saw a touch of kindness behind his piercing black eyes and knew he wasn’t scaring the hell out of her on purpose.

"When people are executed," he explained, "it violates them. You know that, you can feel it now. Sometimes that violation wakes something up inside them, a power much stronger than anything they knew in life. Their body refuses to die, no matter how it's cut or mangled or burnt. That's what happened to you."

She could see it. She had been so shocked that she hadn't been able to be truly angry, but Scotch had. Scotch was the one who shouted at the pack to look at what they were doing, Scotch was the one who swore and called them filthy names.

Scotch had left. He and the human had gone to the highway.

Thursy shook herself. Water was dripping out of her hair and into her eyes, and she used a corner of the blanket to mop her face. "Someone in your pack called someone else, and about three this afternoon I heard what had happened. I flew out to Oregon and brought you back here."

"The pieces of me," she clarified. She could still hear Simone saying, "Cut the torso in half."

Osprey nodded and massaged the back of his neck with one hand. His motions blended into one another so that he was never jolted and never still. Watching him was soothing.

"I put you back together in an ocean water bath."

She remembered now. Sometime during the execution she had lost track of her eyes, and then her ears, and eventually fallen into a state resembling entrapment. Consciousness returned like a slap to the face in a pond of freezing water that seeped up her nose and into her mouth when she screamed.

Then Osprey had lifted her out of the water, his hands wrapping around her arms just above the elbow. She blacked out at his touch.

There had been some sort of tunnel, she thought now. A tunnel of years and nights where people like intermittent streetlights glowed and died out. No matter where she traveled she was always walking down alleys and never the main roads, always hearing conversations that she wasn't a part of.

She became aware of Osprey wrapping her in a blanket and setting her in the armchair. Now she sat in that same armchair and felt like the last ten minutes had been a thousand years, during which time she had gone through multiple reincarnations.

"Why?" she asked.

He looked at her oddly. "Why did I bring you back? You would never have died, you would have stayed in that between-state for all eternity. Like Reka."

He nodded his head slightly and Thursy realized there was someone else in the room, a short, pole-thin man in his sixties. He was dressed in a hospital gown, laying on a sofa set backed into the corner of the room. His eyes were open, but he didn't move.

"Who is he?"

"He's like you, and me, and the woman who was here a moment ago, Elomi. We were executed the same way you were, and none of us died. Reka's executioners cut him into twelve pieces and buried him under twelve different houses. Seventy-five years later I dug him up and put him back together, but he's never recovered."

Thursy felt her lips tremble in a curse. "That could have been me," she whispered.

"But it wasn't," Osprey told her quickly. "And it won't be. You're safe here."

She realized now what he meant.

She glanced away from Reka's still form and around the room at things she had only seen on television. The grandfather clock with its ceaseless pendulum, the porcelain figurines making pirouettes, the brilliant view out the window of the rushing street. The barrage of smells and sounds and things to touch was amazing. Just this strange comforter wrapped over her, this chair with armrests her hands had never cupped before, were amazing. There was an ocean of life around her.

But it was too much. She was a single grain of sand being knocked back and forth by giant waves.

She could never truly be safe here. The world outside the village was endless and full of dangers she couldn't even guess at. She was unschooled and easily tricked here, so had no weapons and no advantages. No skills, even.

"I can't stay here," she said, eyes on the rhythmically changing traffic lights from below. She knew what red and green meant, but the rest of the traffic laws meant nothing to her. She would have killed someone in the first five blocks.

Osprey was silent for a moment. Then he said, "You can't go back."

"They're my pack," she told him. "I belong there. My brother and I are part of the three High Families, we make all the decisions in the pack. When the gold rush hit California, it was my grandmother who led them to Oregon. They need me."

"Less than twenty-four hours ago, they tried to kill you."

"Then maybe I need them," she admitted, looking back at him. "I don't know how to survive here, with these humans and their weird lives. I belong with the pack."

"You belong here," he told her, "with me and Elomi and Reka. With others like you."

"Like me?" she repeated. "I'm pack, I'm not like you."

His eyes darkened so as to be soulless. "You died at dawn and were born again at dusk," he reminded her. "But it's not over. You're going to change in the next few days and when it happens you'll realize how very different you are from your pack. You can't go back, and I can't fix that, but I can help you."

She felt as though he wasn't listening. "I need them," she repeated.

His voice grew hard. "Not as much as you need me."

Her hands clenched around each other. He was still a stranger, she was still afraid of him. He could do anything he wanted with her and she was powerless to stop him.

"Don't look at me like that," he said, and she forced her eyes to the floor.

"I didn’t mean..." Osprey murmured. "Thursy, please. You have to let go of that life, those people. You're outside of the pack now."

Outside. Exactly. So far outside she couldn't even smell the sap of the great stump or see the tip of Mount Aurora in the distance.

"Whatever your obligations to them, Death has released you. Their concerns are no longer yours."

She would never lead the pack. The question of alliance to Circle Daybreak or the Night World was out of her hands. It was up to Simone and Galdwyn and Tish…

Thursy froze. She quit breathing, quit thinking.

There were five votes. She and Yared hadn't been sure which side to fall in with, but Galdwyn and Tish were obviously interested in asking the lamia for protection. Nobody knew how Simone would vote.

"Thursy?" Osprey asked, and she sucked in a great lungful of air.

She had overheard Preza muttering that Yared couldn't speak, could only moan, wasn't making any sense. If he was incapacitated, then he would be in no shape to vote. With Thursy "dead," that left only Simone, Galdwyn, and Tish.

Even if Simone sided with Circle Daybreak, it would be one against two. Night World wins.

Galdwyn wanted to win, wanted it bad. But badly enough to kill Kiria, frame Thursy, and somehow drive Yared insane?

"I don't think I killed Kiria," Thursy breathed. Her heart broke. "I think Galdwyn set me up."

"What?"

"I think I was framed, and the man who did it is now running the pack. My pack."

She could see Osprey shaking his head through a haze of thoughts. She had to go back, had to warn the others of what was happening. Galdwyn couldn't be allowed to make any decisions concerning their fate.

"I have to go back," she said.

"Absolutely not."

"I have to tell them what he did. Who knows what else he's capable of."

"If you go back-"

"They can't kill me again," she said, lifting her head defiantly.

"No," Osprey agreed, "they can't. But they can slice, dice, and separate you like they did Reka, and that's probably worse."

The expression on his face set her back, and she had to look away. She knew that he had lived much longer than she in the real world and knew better what was possible and not possible, but she would see this through. She had to.

"There's another pack member on the outside," she said, speaking as she thought. "My…friend. He abandoned the pack to be with a human. If I could find him, he could go back and tell them the truth."

Osprey closed his eyes. The room literally felt warmer afterward. He ran his hands through his hair and said, "I can't let you."

For a few minutes she had forgotten that she was his prisoner.

"Don't think me cold," he said. "I know what they mean to you. I…felt it, when I lifted you out of the tub. I don't know how or why, but for an instant I understood what it was like to be part of that family. But I won't risk you."

"Risk me?"

She wasn't even aware of his eyes when she looked at him then. He wouldn’t risk her?

"People hunt us. One or two, probably even a dozen I could fight off if I was willing to kill, but not a hundred, and I won't go into the ground. I won't let you or El or Reka go in either. The old woman in your pack knew what you are. If I hadn't come, she would have known what to do to keep you from coming back."

He made it sound as if his domination over her was some sort of protection. As though she should be grateful and agreeing.

"Scotch won't betray me," she said. "I know he won't. When they announced the execution he shouted at them for hours."

"I thought you said he defected."

"Yes, but only yesterday. Or the day before yesterday, I guess it is now. But Scotch and I were very close. I can trust him."

The weight of his gaze fell upon her and Thursy forced herself not to shrink back. She could sense him grinding her words in his mind.

"Very close?" he asked.

She swallowed. "Yes."

He didn't ask, How close? He just sighed and said, "Tell me how to find him."