The Thing About Weres

In the middle of that barren patch of grass stood a single tree. Very much alone.

“That’s me?” I said.

She nodded, her expression first sick, then oddly satisfied.

The black walnut tree was twisted and diseased. That’s me? I’m sick? At eye level was a prime example of my citadel’s decay—the remains of a stunted, now dead, lower limb. Where bark had been stripped, bare wood gleamed, bleached by the sun, raddled by beetles. Battered and somehow sad, the exhumed skull of a long-buried sinner.

“I’m a mage?” As I watched, a leaf dropped. “I’m an ugly, dying mage?”

“You are not a mage,” he said flatly.

But I sure as hell am a goner. Look at that tree. There’s too many broken branches. Too many see-through portions where the inner core has died, and all that’s left is a shingle of worm-eaten bark and a hole exposing a deep cavity of crumbling wood.

My citadel’s rotting from the inside out.

“The lights,” whispered Mad-one. “Master, there are two—”

“I can see through her eyes.” Though he’d chosen a flat voice, I could feel his dismay spilling inside me, foul as dirty water over the top of a levee.

Hah. The old guy had to be rethinking the “chosen one” concept. I let my stunned gaze wander, my lips puckering in gleeful schadenfreude. Take that, Old Mage. If I was going out, I was doing it in style. My inner fire wasn’t going to be contained by the skin of my cyreath.

My light was everywhere.

In fact, a startling, flowing interplay of richly colored illumination wove around my tree’s canopy—my own fuck-you version of the aurora borealis. Twisting and lovely, but a tad ethereal for my taste. I was more enchanted by the way my northern lights’ reflection cast a patchwork of color on the ground—a dappled rectangle of red- violet here, some sapphire and royal-blue wavering squares over there.

My gaze swept the clearing.

Well, my, my. I was a veritable spectrum of hues. Jewels by my feet, and over there, where weak daylight still shone and grasses grew, another palette. Brighter. Wavering patches of gold, blurred blotches of vivid green, and small dapples of raspberry and blue—magic and love and open fields set to a whimsical poem of light.

Pretty, I thought, inexplicably drawn toward those.

Life—in the end, it all comes down to point of view, doesn’t it? You see long lustrous hair hanging down the back of a jacket that owed a lot to the Edwardian period and you might think “girl,” until you pass the person, and you change your opinion to “short, wannabe rock star.”

And so it goes, even in a world made from dreams. From the edge of the small clearing, I had perceived one impressively massive and sadly dying black walnut. But four paces forward and five steps to the right changed my entire perspective.

Oh dear Goddess.

I would have covered my mouth in shock if my hands weren’t full.

Not one tree stood in the clearing—but two.

Or, if you wanted to get really picky, whatever you call it when a walnut sinks a tiny filament of hope into the ground that takes root. The seedling develops into the beginnings of a tree, which in turn grows. Upward. Reaching for the sky like every other living thing. Then suddenly—for reasons only known to the Goddesses—the trunk of that tree decides it must split, and in one blind twist of fate, one black walnut becomes two.

Still joined at the same thick base.

Two trees, one root.

Twins.

Though comparatively speaking, my side of the black walnut—and that had to be mine, because what grew on the right above that split in the trunk was about a third the height and girth of my brother’s—was doing better than Lexi’s. From what I could see, no chancre spots befouled my foliage.

Not dying … at least not my portion of it.

My gaze swung upward, searching for the heart of me. It was easy enough to spot—I simply followed the path of the green-blue illumination, and found it lodged in the crotch of two wonderfully robust boughs. Huh. My cyreath was the same size and shape as everyone else’s. Different color, though—the majority of the Fae had a sunnier undertone, whereas my gold had a greenish cast, with intermittent flickers of blue. Overall, it was relatively hale and hearty in appearance, other than for one long, slanting brushstroke of raspberry staining its skin, and another patch roughened into a small and ugly scar.

For a second, I stared up at the gray blemish feeling bleak. The pain of Mum and Dad’s loss reduced to a single ashen callus? It should have left a bigger blight.

But what about Lexi?

Mouth dry, I searched for my twin’s soul in the other half of the conjoined tree. Leaf and limb had made an effort to disguise its location, but the spiraling heat of his self-destruction had seared away the green canopy above his cyreath. His true light spewed upward from the thinning thatch. Plum purple with hurt, bruised midnight blue with pain.

Oh Lexi.

“What is his curse?” the mage demanded.

A sister who didn’t wake him when the boogeyman crept in.

“No more of this foolishness! You will not guard your secrets!” the Old Mage roared. “Go to his citadel. Place your hand on it and show me his soul.”

So my brother’s soul—what was left of it—could be fingered by another mage? His memories picked through like bangles and bracelets at a flea market? Had Lexi cringed when the door to the room of magic was pushed open? Fearing the dark? Fearing the touch?

“No!” I set my teeth together.

Much good my bravado did me. A moment later, my foot jerkily lifted, lurched forward, and took me a step closer to the black walnut.

Do not yield to him. Sweat popped out on my upper lip as I bore down on that overwhelming need to shuffle toward the black walnut.

Do it for Lexi. Do it for yourself.

“You are trying my patience!” he shouted.

My toe hoed a furrow of resistance into the soil. My nails dug into his sagging cyreath. Small rebellions. But mine. I will not cooperate. I never cooperate.

That’s when the pain came. A dull ache in my ear—only an irritation—that instantly grew hotter—a tolerable burn—and then it became a molten-hot knife held sizzling against the me of me—hellfire, inside my head—and yes, I did move.

Toward my unsuspecting brother. Toward my own self. Toward the obliteration of inner vows. Toward the rebreaking of us—because we were broken, we had been for quite some time, and now, we were going to be broken again.

Fae-me’s scream was shrill and disbelieving.

Too late she understood the fate of those who were the chosen.

So we stumbled forward. Whimpering, sweating, stumbling. Our talent for obstruction defeated. Truth be told, if we could have shot to that conjoined tree, we would have.

And if we could have done it babbling, “No, no, no,” …

Well, we would have done that, too.

The wind, when it came, was a definite windfall in terms of my personal fortunes. It whipped down from the sky with a moan to shake our citadels. A blinding maelstrom of twigs and leaves and fluffs of moss flew about us. It sent Mad-one flying backward with a startled shriek. It forced me to huddle over his cyreath, eyes tearing, shoulders hunched.

And then, the hurting, digging blade stopped twisting itself inside my head.

I fell to one knee in absolute relief.