Originally Human

Chapter 6

MICHAEL and I left the island shortly after seven o'clock that evening.

The causeway stretching between Galveston and the mainland is man-made. Like a long umbilical cord, it holds fast to its feckless offspring—a mother refusing to release her child to a separate fate. The bay was a ruffled blue mosaic on either side as we crossed from child to parent, and the sun rode low in the sky on our left. Traffic was light.

"Do you realize," Michael said, awed, "that this was all done without magic? All of it—the bridge, the roads and buildings… everything."

"Ah—yes. I knew that." I didn't look at him. Michael wasn't quite as distracting clothed, but his thighs gave the crisp new jeans a lovely form, and the t-shirt Erin had bought him was the color of his eyes—a paler blue than the ocean, but just as unfathomable.

Best to pay attention to driving my rig. It handled beautifully, but I'd driven it very little since purchasing it last year to replace my old one. Not that I'd bought it in my own name. I'd been planning to leave for some time, but I'd kept putting it off…

"I should have realized that," he muttered, his attention fixed on the Powerbook in his lap. Michael liked my laptop even better than television. "Sorcery is illegal here, you said." He shook his head. "Strange. Very strange."

"I guess magic is pretty easily come by in your realm."

"Mmm," he said, lost once more to cyberspace.

Michael had so much to learn about this world. After Erin left to buy clothes for him, he'd done another healing on himself. He'd come out of that popping with questions. More questions than I had time to answer—or the patience, frankly—and many I couldn't answer. So I'd handed him my laptop and shown him how to Google. He'd picked up the basics quickly, though he had to hunt-and-peck on the keyboard. I'd warned him not to believe everything he read, and he'd vanished into cyberspace while I packed up my life.

He was connected through my cell phone now. Yesterday I would have worried about the charges he was piling up; Molly Brown didn't have much money. But I wasn't Molly Brown anymore.

My fingers drummed once on the steering wheel. "For heaven's sake, shut that thing off and look at the ocean before it's a blue smear in the rearview mirror. Who knows how long it will be before you see it again?"

Suddenly those eyes were focused entirely on me. He closed the laptop. "Will it be a long time before you see it again, Molly?"

"Probably." A very long time. I'd returned to Galveston once, and doubted I would ever go back again. It hurt too much. Places changed. People changed even more… except for me.

"Your friend was upset by your leaving."

"I told her." Already we'd left the causeway. Bayou Vista, a subdivision with all the houses on stilts, was on our left. Ahead lay wetlands. "I told Erin a long time ago that one day I'd have to leave. People grow suspicious if you don't age."

"You'd be in danger if people suspected your nature. I understand that. Yet you told Erin about yourself. And me," he added thoughtfully.

"You needed to know, and you have to hide your nature, too. You aren't likely to give me away. Erin…" Already the memory hurt. Time would soften that, I knew. Eventually. "I didn't tell her. She figured it out."

"How? You're careful. You must be, or you wouldn't have survived. I've read some history now," he said, giving the laptop a pat. "This world has been hard on anyone able to use magic, but especially on those of the Blood."

I snorted. "True, but I'm not of the Blood."

"Of course you are. You may not have started out that way, but you are now."

"But those of the Blood do start out that way. They're born to it."

He was amazed. "You don't know, do you? I didn't find anything on the Internet about it, but I thought surely… some things are such common knowledge that no one bothers to write them down."

"What are you talking about?"

"Molly, originally you were completely of your world. The curse changed that. Now you're of more than one realm. That's really all it means to be 'of the Blood'—that you're inherently of more than one realm."

"You are not making any sense."

He shook his head, as baffled by me as I was by him. "What do you think magic is?"

"I… the Church teaches that it's evil, a contravention of God's laws. Most people don't believe that these days, but… I guess I don't know," I admitted. "It's like sunlight. It just is."

"Yet people in your world study sunlight and try to discern its nature. They're called physicists."

"You've absorbed an awful lot from the Internet in one day."

"I am an excellent researcher."

"Modest, too."

"Pardon?"

"Never mind. I suppose there are people who study the nature of magic?"

"Yes. They're called sorcerers. Not the most trustworthy beings," he admitted. "Though there are exceptions, sorcerers are known more for obsession than altruism. They can cause great havoc. But so, too, have your physicists caused havoc with their splitting of the atom."

"True. So what is magic?"

"One theory holds that it is the stuff between the realms, the current they swim in. Others believe it's the energy created by the realms' interaction. That magic is the friction caused by their, ah, rubbing against each other."

"But they're pulling away from each other, not rubbing up together!"

He made a disgusted noise. "I should expect that sort of thinking from a place that outlawed all sorcery. The realms shift, yes. Constantly. There are theories about this movement, but no one truly knows how or why they move. For some reason, your realm seems to connect to very few others. I believe it must be in… call it a backwater. A stagnant place."

"I think you just called my world a swamp."

He flashed me a grin. "I wouldn't dream of it."

That grin startled me. Aroused me, too, but everything about him aroused me. Grins are different than smiles. Smile can mean all sorts of things, but a grin is an offer of friendship.

A male friend… oh, there was temptation more treacherous than any sexual pull. I jerked my mind back to the subject. "Wicca is based on the magic of this world. It doesn't tap into other realms, or the space between the realms, or whatever."

"Magic continually seeps into all the realms, is absorbed, and can be used. Systems like Wicca use this kind of magic, which is part of the natural processes of each world. It's much weaker than using nodes directly, but safer."

I nodded. It fit what I knew. "And nodes are places where this world used to connect to others?"

"More or less. You might think of them as spots where the fabric between realms is weaker, making connection more likely."

"You mean that connection can happen elsewhere? It's possible to travel between realms without a node?"

"Theoretically, yes—ley lines carry node energy, after all. But it would be rather like crossing the Alps on foot instead of in one of these automated vehicles of yours." He patted the dash and added, with something of the air of one complimenting a backwards child, "Quite ingenious, really, the way your people have overcome this realm's condition."

"Wait till you see Houston." Light was fading even as traffic thickened, with all the little road tributaries emptying their currents of cars onto I-45. We'd left Texas City behind, and were passing an undeveloped stretch. I put on my headlights.

Two things occurred to me. Michael had distracted me quite nicely from my grief at leaving my home and my friend… and he knew an awful lot about magic. Things he must have remembered.

I planned my next question carefully, hoping to stir more of his memories. "When I was young—and that was a very long time ago—"

"How long?" he asked, interested. "You mentioned something about three hundred years."

"I was born in Ireland in 1701."

He nodded, apparently finding nothing odd about that. "And you were cursed when you were…" He cast an appraising eye over me. "Not quite fifty?"

A laugh sputtered out. "Michael, never guess a woman's age so accurately. It isn't diplomatic. But no, I was twenty."

"You are a very attractive fifty," he assured me. "But you shouldn't be. Fifty, that is. Your body should have been fixed at twenty."

"We're getting off the subject."

"But if something is wrong, if you are aging when you shouldn't be—"

"I did it on purpose, all right?"

He considered that a moment. "You can change your physical appearance?"

"Not exactly. I can grow older, if I choose. It isn't easy." A gross understatement, that. I prefer to avoid thinking about how I'd acquired the crow's feet by my eyes. There's only one way to age a body like mine. Starvation.

"Why did you want to look older?"

"You ask more questions than a two-year-old!"

"I want to know about you, Molly."

Heaven help me, but he softened me in a way I couldn't seem to fight. I sighed. "For one thing, I could stay in one place longer if I looked older. People notice if you stay twenty. They don't notice so much if you always look middle-aged."

"And the other thing?"

I grimaced. He was both perceptive and persistent—useful traits, even appealing at times. But annoying at the moment. "I wanted… friends. Women friends. I missed that rather badly." I glanced at him, wondering if he could understand. "When I looked twenty and oozed sex, men wanted me and women disliked me. Now… well, I use a touch more power to get what I need from men, but not much. Half of seduction is simply wanting the person you're with. So most women don't see me as a threat, especially the younger ones. They don't think of a woman of my apparent age as sexual."

He chuckled. "The young always think the world was born when they were."

"Oh, listen to the graybeard. You're what—twenty-six? Twenty-seven?" I held my breath.

"Hardly," he said dryly. "You ought to know better than…" His voice drifted into silence. I stole a glance at him. He was staring straight ahead, stricken. "It was there," he whispered. "For a moment it was all there, but it melted away."

Impulsively I reached for his hand and squeezed it. His fingers closed around mine tightly. "But that's good," I said gently. "That means your memories aren't gone. They're just hiding for some reason."

He drew a ragged breath. "Yes. Yes, of course. And I have been remembering some things. Nothing about myself," he said with a lack of emotion that, by its very dearth, revealed much. "But facts, concepts, theories—they float up when I'm not watching."

"Then you'll have to spend most of your time not watching, won't you?" I gave his hand another squeeze and, reluctantly, let go. I needed both hands to drive.

"That makes sense, but it's easier to decide than to do."

"Like being told not to think of the number ten," I agreed. "I've got a couple of ideas, if you want to hear them." I paused long enough for him to object. He didn't. "First, I wondered if I was wrong about you being a sorcerer. You know so much—"

"I am not a sorcerer."

My eyebrows climbed. "You're very sure about that."

"I can't be a sorcerer. It… isn't allowed. And I don't know why I just said that, so don't ask. But it feels true."

Interesting. "Well, what about a scholar?"

I felt more than saw his head turn towards me. "A scholar?"

"You said you were a good researcher, and I think you must be. You've picked up an amazing amount in such a short time. You read very, very fast. You know languages and theories of magic and odd facts, and just have that manner—as if you've always loved facts for their own sake, not for what you can do with them."

"Truth. Not just facts—truth."

I smiled.

"A scholar…" His voice was musing, but with a lift to it. He liked the idea. And that was all he said, but I was content to let him follow his thoughts. I had a few of my own demanding attention.

Neither of us spoke again until the sun was well down. We'd reached Houston's greedy, spreading fingers—not the city proper, but Friendswood, one of the many small towns that lay in its path. People sometimes compare big cities to anthills, but I think they're more like mold.

Anthills will only grow so large, but mold keeps right on spreading.

I'd slowed to accommodate the heavy traffic when, out of the blue, he asked, "How did Erin figure it out?"

"What?"

"You said you didn't tell Erin what you are, that she figured it out."

"Good grief. You have quite a memory." I winced. "I mean—"

"I know what you meant. And yes, I think I normally have an excellent memory."

"Do you remember everything?"

"No, but what I do recall is accurate." He paused, as if considering something new. "It seems that either emotion or intent can fix things in my memory."

"Hmm. Works that way for most of us. I wonder if emotion or intent could also make you forget."

He shifted in his seat, looked out the window, then back at me. "What an uncomfortable thought. Why would I do such a thing to myself?"

I didn't know, either. "So, what was the first thing I said to you?"

"You hoped that I spoke English. Molly," he said, and amusement ran through his voice, a silvery ripple in a dark current. "You might distract me, but I'll remember what I asked, and ask again. In that way I am rather like that two-year-old you mentioned. They persist, too. Do you not want to tell me how Erin figured out about you?"

"Not really." The habit of secrecy was strong… as was a sneaky little wish that he would think well of me. Foolishness. Both the wish, and the desire to base it on misdirection. I was what I was.

So why not tell him? "All right," I said, signaling that I meant to take the next exit. I wasn't hungry—well, not for food. But he must be. It was nearly eight. "I… used to know Erin's great-grandmother. So when I moved back to Galveston—"

"You'd lived there before?"

"I was there for the Great Storm. Anyway, I knew about Erin and I was curious, so I sort of kept an eye on her. She liked to walk on the beach at night."

"So do you."

"Yes, but I'm hard to hurt."

"She came into danger?"

"There were two of them that night," I said, remembering. "Two pond-scum bastards who followed her, just as I was. One had a knife. He grabbed her, held the blade to her throat. The other ripped open her shirt."

His breath sucked in. "Did you kill them?"

"You're more bloodthirsty than I realized."

"Perhaps you preferred to let the law kill them."

He was certainly clear on how rapists should be treated. I couldn't say I disagreed. "They had heart attacks. One lived, one didn't."

"How? What did you do?"

"Just a minute," I said, easing the big Winnebago onto the access road. "I want to pull in at that gas station and top off the tank. The sign says they have diesel."

"Are you avoiding my question again?"

"It's easier to show than to tell, that's all."

"I'd rather not have a heart attack."

"You keep asking questions, you can't complain if some of the answers aren't comfortable."