“Love must be fed, Rowan.”
“You are saying I have to choose between you and Michael?”
Silence.
“Did you make the others choose?” She thought of Mary Beth in particular, and Mary Beth’s men.
“I see far as I told you. When Michael stood at the gate years ago in your time, I saw that you would make a choice.”
“Don’t tell me any more of what you saw.”
“Very well,” he said. “Talk of the future always brings unhappiness to humans. Their momentum is based upon the fact that they cannot see far. Let us talk about the past. Humans like to understand the past.”
“Do you have another tone of voice other than this beautiful soft tone? Could you have spoken those last few words sarcastically? Is that how they were meant to sound?”
“I can sound any way that I like, Rowan. You hear what I feel. I do feel in my thoughts, in what I am, pain and love. Emotions.”
“You’re speeding up your words a little.”
“I am in pain.”
“Why?”
“To end your misunderstandings.”
“You want me to make you human?”
“I want to have flesh.”
“And I can give you flesh?”
“You have the power. And once such a thing is achieved, other such things may be achieved. You are the thirteenth, you are the door.”
“What do you mean, ‘other such things’?”
“Rowan, we are talking of fusion; of chemical change; the structural reinvention of cells, of matter and energy in a new relationship.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Then you know, as with fission, if it is achieved once, it can be achieved again.”
“Why couldn’t anyone else do it before me? Julien was powerful.”
“Knowledge, Rowan. Julien was born too soon. Allow me once more to use the word fusion and in a slightly different fashion. We have spoken so far of fusion within cells. Let me now talk of a fusion between your knowledge of life, Rowan, and your innate power. That is the key; that is what enables you to be the doorway.
“The knowledge of your era was unimaginable even to Julien, who saw in his time inventions that seemed purely magical. Could Julien have foreseen a heart opened on an operating table? A child conceived in a test tube? No. And there will come after you those whose knowledge is great enough even to define what I am.”
“Can you define yourself to me?”
“No, but I am certainly definable, and when I am defined by mortals, then I shall be able to define myself. I learn all things from you which have to do with such understanding.”
“Ah, but you know something of yourself which you can tell me now in precise language.”
“-that I am immense; that I must concentrate to feel my strength; that I can exert force; that I can feel pain in the thinking part of me.”
“Ah, yes, and what is that thinking part? And whence comes the force you exert? Those are the pertinent questions.”
“I do not know. When Suzanne called to me I came together. I drew myself up small as if to pass through a tunnel. I felt my shape, and spread out like the five-pointed star of the pentagram which she drew, and each one of these points I elongated. I made the trees shiver and the leaves fall, and Suzanne called me her Lasher.”
“And you liked what you did.”
“Yes, that Suzanne saw it. And that Suzanne liked it. Or else I would never have done it again and not even remembered it.”
“What is there in you that is physical, apart from energy?”
“I do not know!” The voice was soft yet full of despair. “Tell me, Rowan. Know me. End my loneliness.”
The fire was dying in the grate, but the warmth had spread all through the room, and it surrounded her and held her like a blanket. She felt drowsy but sharply alert.
“Let’s return to Julien. Julien had as much power as I have.”
“Almost, my beloved. But not quite. And there was in Julien a playful and blasphemous soul that danced back and forth in the world, and liked to destroy as much as to build. You are more logical, Rowan.”
“That is a virtue?”
“You have an indomitable will, Rowan.”
“I see. Not broken with humor as Julien’s will could be broken.”
“Pree-cisely, Rowan!”
She laughed again under her breath. Then she fell quiet, staring at the shimmering air.
“Is there a God, Lasher?”
“I do not know, Rowan. In time I have formed an opinion and it is yes, but it fills me with rage.”
“Why?”
“Because I am in pain and if there is a God, he made this pain.”
“Yes, that I understand perfectly, Lasher. But he made love, too, if he exists.”
“Yes. Love. Love is the source of my pain,” he said. “It is the source of all my moving into time and ambition and plans. All my desires spring from love. You might say that what I was-when I was only what I am-that I was poisoned by love, that in the call of Suzanne I was awakened to love, and to the nightmare of want. But I saw. And I loved. And I came.”
“You make me sad,” she said suddenly.
“Love mutated me, Rowan. It created my first dissatisfaction.”
“Yes.”
“And now I seek to mutate into flesh, and that shall be the consummation of my love. I have waited so long for you. I have seen such suffering before you, and if I had had tears to shed, they would have been shed. God knows, for Langtry I made an illusion of myself weeping. It was a true image of my pain. I wept not merely for Stella, but for all of them-my witches. When Julien died, I was in agony. So great was my pain then, that I might have moved away, back to the realm of the moon and the stars and the silence. But it was too late for me. I could not bear my loneliness. When Mary Beth called, I came back to her. Quickening. I looked into the future. And I saw the thirteenth again. I saw the ever increasing strength of my witches.”
She had closed her eyes again. The fire was gone out. The room was full of the spirit of Lasher. She could feel him against her skin though he did not move, and the fabric of him lay as lightly as the air itself.
“When I am truly flesh,” he said, “the tears and the laughter will come from me by reflex, as they come in you, or in Michael. I shall be a complete organism.”
“But not human.”
“Better than human.”
“But not human.”
“Stronger, more enduring, for I shall be the organizing intelligence, and I have great power, greater than the power inside any existing human. I shall be a new thing, as I told you. I shall be a species which as of now does not exist.”
“Did you kill Arthur Langtry?”
“Not necessary. He was dying. What he saw hastened his death.”
“But why did you show yourself to him?”
“Because he was strong and he could see me, and I wanted to draw him in so that he might save Stella, for I knew Stella was in danger. Carlotta was the enemy of Stella. Carlotta was as strong as you are, Rowan.”
“Why didn’t Arthur help Stella?”
“You know the history. It was too late. I am as a child at such moments in time. I was defeated by simultaneity because I was acting in time.”
“I don’t follow.”
“While I appeared to Langtry, the shots were fired into the brain of Stella, and brought about instant death. I
