Page 9 of Red Demon

Iden got his last wish. I didn’t see him die. But his scream rumbled through the trees and echoed off the gorges. That sound has yet to stop haunting my dreams.

Chapter 4

Another Dream

Faruhar

Idon’t ask her name. I imagine she doesn’t even have one.

“May I tell you everything?” The words catch in my throat—I haven’t used my voice in a while, I guess.

“Why, Chaeten-sa?” she asks, her gaze a soft blur above a red dress. Every detail shifts like smoke. Her eyes, the color of moss after rain, might have been brown a heartbeat ago. I watch as they drift to blue ringing a sandy gold in the next moment: Asri eyes instead of the Chaeten green they started. The surrounding tavern lights breathe with me, shadows flickering and details of the room shifting with an impatience I can’t control. Today is a bad day, one where it’s difficult to focus on what’s real. I try to hold her details steady: the black hair, the blue dress.

I give up.

There is a woman with warm brown skin I want to see most of all, one whose smile glowed, a woman who held me when I was small. I can’t make the woman in front of me be the one I trust. I’ve never had that much control. But the shifting figure in front of me is not trying to kill me yet. Good enough.

“I want to tell you everything because you aren’t real,” I say. “It still helps, sometimes.”

She’s laughing—a breathy, amused sound that does little to chase away the unease clawing at my insides. “You were always such a strange girl,” she says, her words tinged with … something. A threat, I guess. When in doubt, it’s that.

“Always? Do you know me?” She wouldn’t be the first person I forgot.

If she answers, I lose the words in the wind’s rush, a phantom gust that chills me. Then the lights in the room dim, flicker like dying stars. I lose focus on her brown eyes, her green dress.

“I told you not to come back,” a different woman says. She kneels down to me on the floor, although I was sitting in a chair a moment ago. I’ve become small, and I hate that. It’s easier for people to hurt me when I’m young. They attack more often. So I, in turn, attack more often too.

At some level, I know this means this must be a memory or a dream, nothing real and happening now. It all feels the same, though.

“They know what you are,” the woman says.

“So tell them to stay away,” I hear myself say in a child’s voice.

“You should go before they try to kill you.” Her image shifts too fast to know if that’s concern in her face, or if I need to kill her too.

“Again? I just got here.” The word tastes sour on my tongue.

I can see her face now. Hard, resigned. But a soft face that looks similar to the one I trust. I study it, hoping to recognize her. No, this other woman simmers anger in a way the one I trust never could, even when I deserved it. The one I trust was crying when I saw her last, and that was my fault. The woman I trust had a name, even if I lost it.

“Who did you kill this time?” The woman wears a cloak now, a scarlet shadow obscuring her form. Someone else, and I’m overwhelmed by it all.

It’s easier to look away, to let none of them be real. I can react to threats as they come and allow myself to feel nothing. But for my sister’s sake—for Bria—I pay attention, just in case I see someone real, not another shadow that deserves death. For her sake, I do everything. There’s no blood around me yet, and no bodies. So far, so good.

It’s a man’s face I see now, Chaeten with dark skin and short black hair, his arms crossed. There’s no hate in him, just confusion. So I talk.

“Here’s everything I know. I can focus better if I stay near the same people every day. When things stay the same between days, a place or a person, I remember more. My sister said I should make myself useful.” When I turn, the man is gone. No one stays long.

I wish I could control what I feel on bad days. There should be a way to create something other than the feeling of running alone in frozen woods. I can only keep the feeling of what happened, the rooms and scars those memories leave behind, the starving cold sky.

The woman I trusted as a child would know what to say. She never killed anyone, even the people that needed killing. Is she dead now? Did I kill her too? I know what I’m good at.

I’m back indoors at a table. Warm. A man, bronze skinned now, passes me a bag of coin and a portrait. “Can you kill him?”

“Yes,” I say. “Why?”

He just nods at the envelope, and I open it, the words blurring like wet ink after I read them. “Okay,” I say. I accept it. He must have given me a good reason. At least I can do half of what Bria wants by helping this man. I’m around people, and it’s useful: the best I can do. It’s too difficult to follow all the rules at once.

I’m in a little cabin now, at night. I hear footsteps in the darkness. Someone watches from the other side of the room.