A Wild Light by Liu Marjorie

Author:Liu, Marjorie [Liu, Marjorie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2010-05-26T04:00:00+00:00

IF I had known where the armor would take us, I would have been more specific. I would have said that Jack could wait. That my questions could wait. That the demons in the veil could wait and rot in their hell—while I did the same in mine. I would have said all those things if I had known.

Grant and I stepped from the void into a kitchen.

It was an old kitchen, with cream-colored cabinets, dusty green polka-dot curtains, and a checkered linoleum floor that, after almost seven years, carried a bloodstain not even the boys had been able to scrub out.

Home. In the room where my mother was murdered.

Sunlight poured through the windows. The air tasted hot, and smelled musty and tired. I didn’t have any strength. My brain and heart were somewhere else.

But when I saw the stain—when it sank in—the rest of me caught up.

My knees buckled. I sat down hard on the floor, swaying backward. I would have stretched out all the way if my shoulders hadn’t connected with the old Frigidaire. I leaned against it, overwhelmed, lost in cracked-eggshell walls and peeling-linoleum countertop. The kitchen table was still there, the heavy wooden chairs, just as I’d left them; and the board I had nailed over the north window, where the bullet had blasted through the glass and ripped apart my mother’s head.

I could still smell the cake. Chocolate.

“Maxine,” Grant said, falling down on the floor at my side. I held up my hand, wishing he would stay silent. Everything, too much. Demons. My mother. Me.

Us, said the voice of the darkness, as it curled beneath my heart. It is not complicated.

I was losing my mind. This was it. This was what Jack had been afraid of, what my ancestor had faced. Losing her mind to the thing resting so heavily inside—part of me, but not. Overwhelmed by voices, crawling with hunger, consuming demons . . .

I tasted that ash in my mouth, and leaned sideways, gagging.

Grant pulled me into his arms. I tried to push him away, but he was strong, and I wanted to be held. I needed an anchor. I balled his shirt up in my fist.

“I’m a monster,” I said.

He shook his head. “Never.”

“You saw, you heard—”

“Maxine,” he interrupted roughly, but said nothing else. I remembered that glimpse of his eyes, looking at me as though I were a stranger—and the shame, and grief, that roared after that memory were almost more than I could bear. Zee twisted, and the others did the same, rough—then gentle—tugging on my skin until I wanted to hit myself, hit them, and scream. I didn’t own my body. Not inside, not out.

I stared at the bloodstain on the floor. My mother.

No one owns you, she would have said. No one but you.

“I’m sorry,” Grant whispered. “For everything.”

“I asked for it,” I said. “That night. Cake.”

He stilled, then said, very softly, “Maxine.”

“We could have gone out,” I told him, unable to stop. “Would have been a public place.

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