mistakes.
You won’t have time to leave. You’ll have to help me fight. Obey me, and we can kill him.
That thought cut through their confusion, as I had hoped it would. Here was a way to destroy what threatened them. Here was Doro, whom they had been warned against, but whom most of them did not really fear.
Sit down, or lie down. Wait. Do nothing. l’m going to need you.
Doro started toward Karl. I sat up, scrambled over close to Karl, and laid a hand on his shoulder. He glanced at me.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s as okay as it’s ever going to be. Get out of here.”
He relaxed a little, but, instead of going, he sat down on the end of the bed. I didn’t have time to argue with him. I began absorbing strength from my people. Not Karl. He would have collapsed and given me away. But the others. I had to collect from as many of them as I could before Doro attacked. Because I had no doubt that he was going to
attack.
DORO
Doro stood still, gazing at the girl, wondering why he waited. “You have time to try again to get rid of Karl if you like,” he said.
“Karl’s made his decision.” There was no fear in her voice. That pleased Doro somehow.
“Apparently you’ve made yours, too.”
“There was no decision for me to make. I have to do what I was born to do.”
Doro shrugged.
“What did you do with Vivian?”
“Nothing at all after I thought about it,” he said. “Faithful little pet that she is now, Vivian hasn’t looked at me for well over a year. Karl’s women get like that when he stops trying to preserve their individuality?when he takes them over completely.” He smiled. “Karl’s mute women, I mean. So, when Vivian, who no longer had initiative enough to go looking for lovers other than Karl, suddenly came to me, I realized that she had almost certainly been sent. Why was she sent?”
“Does it matter?”
Doro gave her a sad smile. “No. Not really.” In his shadowy way, Doro was aware of a great deal of psionic activity going on around her. He felt himself drawn to her as he had been two years before, when she took Jesse and Rachel. Now, he guessed, she would be taking a great many of her people. As many as he gave her time to take. She remained still as Doro sat down beside her. She looked at Karl, who sat on her other side.
“Move away from us,” she said quietly.
Without a word, Karl got up and went to sit in the chair by the window. The instant he reached the chair he collapsed, seemed to pass out. Mary had finally taken him. An instant later, Doro took her.
At once, Doro was housed with her in her body. But she was no quick, easy kill. She would take a few moments.
She was power, strength concentrated as Doro had never felt it before?the strength of dozens, perhaps hundreds of Patternists. For a moment Doro was intoxicated with it. It filled him, blotted out all thought. The fiery threads of her Pattern surrounded him. And before him … before him was a slightly smaller replica of himself as he had perceived himself through the fading senses of his thousands of victims over the years. Before him, where all the threads of fire met in a wild tangle of brilliance, was a small sun.
Mary.
She was like a living creature of fire. Not human. No more human than he was. He had lied to her about that once?lied to calm her?when she was a child. And her major weakness, her vulnerable, irreplaceable human body, had made the lie seem true. But that body, like his own series of bodies, was only a mask, a shell. He saw her now as she really was, and she might have been his twin.
But, no, she was not his twin. She was a smaller, much younger being. A complete version of him. A mistake that he would not make again. But, ironically, her very completeness would help to destroy her. She was a symbiont, a being living in
partnership with her people. She gave them unity, they fed her, and both thrived. She was not a parasite, though he had encouraged her to think of herself as one. And though she had great power, she was not naturally, instinctively, a killer. He was.
When he had had his look at her, he embraced her, enveloped her. On the physical level, the gesture would have seemed affectionate?until it was exposed as a strangle hold.
When Mary struggled to free herself, he drank in the strength she spent, consumed it ecstatically. Never had one person given him so much.
Alarmed, Mary struck at him, struggled harder, fed him more of herself. She fed him until her own strength and her borrowed strength were gone. Finally he tasted the familiar terror in her mind.
She knew she was about to die. She had nothing left, no time to draw strength from more of her people. She felt herself dying. Doro felt her dying.
Then he heard her voice.
No, he sensed it, disembodied, cursing. She was so much a part of him already that her thoughts were reaching him. He moved to finish her, consume the final fragments of her. But the final fragments were the Pattern.
She was still alive because she was still connected to all those people. The strength that Doro took now, the tiny amounts of strength that she had left, were replaced instantly. She could not die: New life flowed into her continually.
Furiously, Doro swept her into himself, where she should have died. For the fifth time, she did not die. She seemed to slither away from him, regaining substance apart from him as no victim of his should have been able to.
