Authors: Tananarive Due
His hands shook because he couldn’t press his palms to her face and kiss her, only for fear that she would pull away. Johnny caressed the electric skin on her arms. “You
will
make mistakes,” he said. “But leave your Blood—our mission—inside me. Please, Fana. Don’t leave me with nothing of you—nothing of yours.”
Her eyes gently melted into
yes
, and Johnny’s flesh tremored.
“You have to die, Johnny,” Fana said. She stared earnestly, to be sure he understood. “It’s not like a dose of Glow. For the Blood ceremony, your heart has to stop. It’s real death. You’ll feel it.”
Johnny’s heartbeat shook his knees. He’d known his heart would have to stop, but he hadn’t thought about what it would be like to die.
Fana was right. He wasn’t ready.
But Fana wasn’t ready for Michel either. She needed him.
“I want you to share your Blood with me, Fana,” he said. “Whatever it takes.”
Fasilidas, do not disturb me
, Fana said to her guard beyond the door.
Tell Teka and my parents I need to be alone
.
YES, BLESSED FANA
, he said, but she heard him wondering why Johnny was with her. Fana had promised a wall of privacy to her parents, Johnny, and Caitlin, but Fana knew her teacher’s thoughts, and those of her guards. Fasilidas constantly probed Johnny for clues that she was sharing her bed with him, roiling with envy and disgust. But Fasilidas wouldn’t dare probe Johnny while he was in her presence.
She and Johnny were truly alone. It was a small act of magic.
Johnny was rubbing her bare arms beneath the folds of her robe, a simple gesture that rocked her. She and Johnny had decided not to touch long ago, so Fana hadn’t known how much she enjoyed his warm, calloused hands. It was clear to Fana now: her mother had orchestrated the meeting to bring them together. Fana was as irritated as she was grateful.
With Johnny standing in front of her, their unfinished story in his eyes, she couldn’t ignore her grief. If not for Michel fooling her heart with lies, she might have loved Johnny first. The Blood would be her goodbye gift to him, but he deserved so much more.
Now she had to kill Johnny, just when she wanted to savor his love the most.
“You have to be sure,” she said. “There’s no going back.”
His nervousness filled the room; the flood of his perspiration, the flurried whisper of his racing heartbeat. “I’m sure.”
Was Michel watching? Fana remembered her promise not to defile the Blood, but she had never agreed on mutual language, a definition of terms. He had only mentioned the concerts. Still, Michel wouldn’t like it; she couldn’t lie to herself about that. They would argue about whether or not she had broken her word. There would be consequences. Fana’s heart sped, waking. Maybe Johnny’s nervousness was contagious.
“Are
you
sure?” Johnny said, reading her thoughts from her eyes.
“If this is what you want—I’m sure,” she said. “Lie down. We don’t have much time.”
After a quick glance at the door, a reflex, Johnny rushed to the spongy pallet where Jessica had dreamed so many months away. The pallet still smelled stale and sharp, but Johnny might not notice. Mortals couldn’t smell scents and odors the same way.
Fana sat beside Johnny like a nurse at his bedside, slipping so easily into the pose. She had never before visited the room he called his Bat Cave, but now she saw how ridiculous the pretense of distance had been between them. No wonder Fasilidas could see it, and everyone else. Fana was a virgin, but she and Johnny had been lovers all this time.
“I won’t let him change me into his image,” Fana told Johnny, a promise.
“He’s telling himself the same thing. He’s ready for you.”
Fana laid her finger across Johnny’s lips:
shhh
. Would talking about Michel conjure him?
The ground shook when we fought
, Fana whispered.
We both nearly bled to death. I’ll talk to him this time. And I’ll listen
.
“Will he listen?” Johnny said. His hands were clasped across his chest, his nervous fingers locked. Fana rested her hand on top of his. Johnny’s skin shivered beneath her touch.
“He might,” Fana said. “But I don’t know the future, Johnny.”
Sometimes she could find a piece of the future in her dreams and visions, but hindsight made clues clearest. Aside from her visit to Michel’s thoughtstreams, Fana hadn’t dreamed about him in a year, when she had imagined them inside the beautiful Frida Kahlo painting he had used to seduce her,
Love Embrace of the Universe
. While Mom had been lost in her dreams, Fana had been exiled from hers; even in meditation, her visions were hazy now.
Teka said it was her price for blocking out Michel.
Fana stared into Johnny’s brown eyes, overflowing with anxious life. She could always tell a mortal by the eyes: their hunger to engage, to confront, to find language for their thoughts.
“Once you have the Blood, don’t run out into the world like you think you’re invincible,” Fana said. “Find a safe, quiet place to sit with it. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Uncle Lucas can help you transition, since he’s been through it. Go to him right away.”
Johnny only nodded, barely listening, fogged with fear. Fana fought a strong, sudden urge to probe him, to peel him open. Her awareness licked at a glaring omission in his thoughts.
“You haven’t told me everything,” Fana said.
“Then you’ll have to live with that,” Johnny said. “Like the rest of us.”
Did Johnny mean to try to kill Michel? Even without a probe, Johnny’s fondest hope seemed to leak from his body language, his eyes. Johnny expected the Blood to solve far too much. But how could she deny him? Her blood was Johnny’s, too, and always had been.
“Give me a chance to do this my way,” Fana said. “The Blood won’t protect you from him any more than it could protect you from me. Even less.”
She saw a quicksilver flicker in Johnny’s eyes. He didn’t like remembering how easily she could kill, how different and dangerous she was. She would give him the Blood—but she would show him everything that lay underneath it, her true face. And Michel’s.
She owed him that.
Fana rooted around her mother’s desk for something sharp enough to make her bleed. The search took longer than she expected; her mother didn’t keep sharp objects within easy reach. Fana checked the sturdy length of her right thumbnail and decided that should be enough for the thin skin at their wrists.
She would stop his heart with her thoughts, then cut them both to give him a drop of her Blood, in the ancient way. She might not need the ceremony’s incantation, but she knew the words from her father’s memories. Only her father had heard Khaldun’s words the night he gave fifty-nine men the Living Blood.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
.
Johnny’s heart was beating so hard, he might be shaking the walls. Or was it hers?
“You’ll be awake,” Fana said. “If you’re strong enough for the Blood, you’re strong enough to die. But I’ll try to be fast.”
Johnny blinked, his eyes red. “Okay.” He sounded brave, but he looked ready to vomit.
“Now you’ll see how easy it is for me to stop your heart.”
“I always knew that,” he said, his voice feeble. He tried to smile.
Johnny’s pounding heart called to her, a perverse music. Her hands stroked his, mapping his throbbing pulse. Fear had a smell, she remembered. Pungent. Terrible at first, and then …
“Close your eyes, Johnny,” Fana said.
Fana’s probe dove into Johnny’s warm body, past his skin and pores. His essence blazed around her, and she surfed the brightly strobing stream, yanked and flung through his pores, riding on his blood. She was inside him.
She imagined the quivering mass that was his heart, finding its thunder. She’d never tried to burrow inside a body before—she’d been afraid to try to heal Johnny with her mind a year ago, after Michel had made Johnny shoot himself. But now she’d gone in with ease. She could have repaired him herself! Her mind brushed the bullet’s lingering damage, pieces frayed and shredded that the first drops of her healing Blood had kept alive.
But now she would
give
his blood Life, forever replenishing.
Johnny’s heart was powerful in its youth, but it was already dying, a little each day. Fana ventured a glancing touch across Johnny’s heart. Her presence sent his heart flailing, its warm throbbing suddenly frantic, disordered.
Johnny’s heart bucked so strongly that it brought a cry to his lips. Outside the door, Fasilidas misunderstood Johnny’s cries for pleasure.
Fana leaned over Johnny’s wide-open, wondering eyes. She could have spared Johnny more pain, but then he would have lost the lesson.
You’re dying now
, Fana whispered.
YOU’RE DYING NOW
.
Fana’s voice: outside, inside, everywhere. Johnny didn’t need the voice; the pain told him, making him forget everything else.
Johnny clutched his chest, trying to claw his way out of his dying body. His chest, his back, his neck, everything radiated blinding pain. He arched his back, trying to escape, and bands of agony enfolded him. An invisible tank had pinned him, slowly flattening him.
Johnny tried to pray, but he couldn’t catch hold of words.
Stop
, he tried to say. His inability to speak made his limbs shake. Johnny had lost control of his body, a too-familiar horror. His arms and legs wouldn’t obey. His body flung itself to the
floor, but he barely noticed the impact. The weight on his chest was crushing him.
Just one more breath! The air was too hot, too thin. Johnny heard himself gasp to the depths of his lungs, and he still couldn’t find air. He was drowning in himself.
stop stop stop stop
Johnny no longer knew whom he was begging, or who might be listening. He was alone.
He begged the void,
Stop. Please
.
TOO LATE
, the void said in a voice he did not know.
Johnny’s heart would not go gently. It had cowered from her at first, but now it was fighting her with surprising strength, suddenly slippery. Fana was hurled away from his heart, and she scrambled to find it again.
If she lost Johnny’s heartbeat, she might lose her moment to give him the Blood. Sometimes the ceremony failed, or was interrupted. Her father had failed with Kira. Fana didn’t want to break her promise to Johnny. He had expected to live again after he died.
Just when Fana needed to concentrate most, she felt her attention tossed in so many directions—to Fasilidas, by her door; to her father, packing his bag in the next room; to her mother, praying in the rock garden. Even to Michel, a growing throb in the distance.
She was losing Johnny, hurting him more than she wanted to.
Too long
.
Fana tried to visualize the bright light of the Rising, but none of the floating sensation that guided her in meditation came. Johnny’s cries sounded like a distant kitten’s mews. He was so far from her! Fana was drowning with him as doubts assailed her. Was Michel sabotaging her? Was she working against herself?
Then, she understood: she had never stopped a heart with the power of the Rising! What had made her so certain she could? Why was she so surprised when she couldn’t do anything she chose?
There’s another way
. Fana’s own voice cleared her thoughts.
When she was three, Fana had thought the words
bye-bye
and stilled a soldier’s heart. She had drained Kaleb’s blood while she
scribbled pictures. It had been easy! But she’d had help from the Shadows then; their humming was always waiting to be unburied. She needed to practice, or how would she learn to use the Shadows instead of only being used?
Like Michel, the Shadows were always waiting for her. Since Michel, she’d had to keep them at bay in her sleep, in her meditation, in her waking hours; it was less work to let the Shadows in than it was to shut them away.
Fana’s vision dimmed, a blanket over her. Light fled the room. Had the sound always been there? The walls vibrated with buzzing, as if they were covered with bees.
Fana remembered what she’d forgotten about the smell of fear: yes, it started out pungent … but then … Fana inhaled, her nose brushing Johnny’s face, and his waves of fright caressed her skin. Fear baked from him like hot bread.
Sweet. After a time, fear smelled sweet.
A scream came. Fana held on to the fascinating sound, savoring it, falling into it, climbing in and out of it. A playground to her senses. The Shadows roared with bliss.
But that’s Johnny
, someone reminded her. Or maybe she reminded herself. Still, the scream rocked and dizzied Fana, whirling inside her. Filling her. Tickling her.
Don’t wanna die for a while. I think I’ll fly for a while
.
The singer’s voice. A memory even the Shadows couldn’t hide.
Slowly, too slowly, the spinning stopped.
Johnny’s fear seeped away, replaced by a tide of euphoria that swept out his pain as his body settled to die. Fana heard Johnny’s last thought:
THANK YOU, LORD
. Her thoughtstreams almost followed him, caught up in his euphoria. The Rising, so elusive before, swept her high. Through Johnny, she heard music somewhere in the blinding light….
But Fana steadied her awareness, blocking out the music and the lights, forcing herself back to the physical world. She pressed her feet against the hard floor to bring herself back.
Johnny’s heart was still. Slick, limp warmth.
“Fana,
no
!” her father shouted, so commanding that Fana
almost left Johnny’s heart again. But she held on. She hadn’t heard her father come in. All she knew was that Johnny’s heart lay still, and his pain was gone. “You’re
killing
him—”
“Give me your knife,” Fana said.
Wildness churned in Dawit’s eyes as he understood. “Use my blood, Fana—not yours.”
“We want it to be mine.” With her thoughtstream, Fana squeezed Johnny’s heart to circulate his blood. Once. Twice. Not enough to bring him back; just enough to prepare him.
Hurry, Dad!