Chapter Twenty-One

Tamara massaged her temples, breathing deeply, concentrating on the rhythm of the rise and fall of her chest.

“Why are they giving me so much trouble?” she asked herself, trying not to focus on the negative energy she could feel herself exuding. “Where can I improve my own actions to make the whole situation better?”

She felt like she was in a self-help program.

The main problem had come when the boy randomly turned up in the kitchen during Mond’s mathematics lesson one room over. Tamara had been demonstrating a few simple derivative equations when she heard the pantry door open and close. She handed the chalk and slate to Mond and told her to continue working on the example problems while she went to investigate the origin of the noise.

What she found in the kitchen nearly made her vomit. The boy, wearing nothing but the drool-encrusted blanket he’d been sleeping with for the past three weeks wrapped precariously around him, was sticking his head into the pantry, covering his face with confectioner’s sugar and rubbing unpeeled banana mush all over his body. When he heard her come in, he looked up and grinned stupidly, his dark yellow and disgusting, his eyes red and swollen. He laughed a low and slow laugh, and began slapping his arms, making the pasty substance fly off him in little chunks.

Tamara had nearly kicked him right there, wishing she had the stomach to just kill the boy and be done with it. And the visual of his soiled face and revolting garb would have been enough to push her over the edge in that moment, but then Mond walked into the room.

“Boy? Is that you? I can hear you. What are you doing?” she asked. She ran to him and put out her hand, wiping the tips of her fingers against his coated chest. “What happened to you?” she gasped. “Why... what is that smell?”

Tamara had successfully kept them from seeing each other for the past two weeks, and as such, she had stopped really caring about the boy’s hygiene or appearance, as it had all been a façade for Mond’s sake anyway.

Mond turned like lightning to look up at Tamara. Her startling milky eyes didn’t meet Tamara’s but the fury and hatred clearly visible on her face frightened Tamara. She envisioned the past few months of mother-daughter bonding attempts slipping away, as if down a bottomless pipe.

“Fix it,” Mond ordered. “Make him better.”

“It looks like he hasn’t been taking his medicine correctly, Mond,” Tamara said. “I didn’t realize—”

“You’re lying,” Mond said, her voice high, with a texture like gravel tossed on cement. “You’ve kept him from me so I wouldn’t see, and those medicines are making him like this. Fix it. Now.”

Tamara, speechless, and feeling practically breathless as well, caught off her guard by the ferocity of Mond’s words and the harsh expression on her face, stood stupidly slouching and still.

“Fix it!” Mond yelled. Her voice was unnaturally loud, even for an adult male four or five times her size, and Tamara thought he saw a flash of red glint across her eyes.

Tamara grabbed the boy’s arms, coating the palms of her hands in crusty banana paste. She began pulling him towards the stairs, planning on throwing him into a hot bath and soaking his blanket in a tub for a day or so, and he fought her every step. He mumbled and growled incoherently; Tamara felt like she was pulling teeth from the mouth of a loud and confused buffalo. Mond followed them both up the stairs and tended to the boy as Tamara struggled to set up the water. Tamara tried to protest, tried to hide the boy’s nakedness from Mond, even though she had sightless eyes, but Mond gave her a look that had a hint of death and suffering, and Tamara instinctually fled from it.

The cleaning of both blanket and boy took several hours, and when he was finally back into a bed with clean linens and Tamara and Mond were ready to return to the math lesson, Mond was beyond her ability to pay attention. She spent the rest of the light of day asking Tamara questions about the medications the boy was taking and why Tamara insisted he take them.

“They help him with his headaches,” Tamara kept saying. “They were hurting him so badly, and I remember when his mother had a similar issue, so I asked a doctor and he told me that these pills would help.”

“Why was he so messy, then? What about them makes him be so... dirty?”

“That has nothing to do with his medicine, Mond,” Tamara said. Not that the girl had calmed down, she seemed more amenable to believing what Tamara had to say. “That’s just how he is. He’s not like you and me. He’s more like a... like an animal or a monster.”

Mond looked crushed when Tamara said this. Her face slowly fell until every emotion but concern and despair had left it. Her eyes, though nondescript in and of themselves, were much more expressive than any other eyes Tamara had seen. Sometimes Tamara saw feelings deep within them that she could not understand.

“A... monster?” Mond asked. “What does that mean? How can he be anything different than I am?”

“You’re a smart girl, Mond,” Tamara said. “Think about the differences between him and you. He doesn’t take these classes with you because he’s not as intelligent. He gets sick more easily than you do and is not as talented or as good looking as you are.”

“I don’t think he’s bad looking,” Mond said. “That’s not any way to judge someone objectively.”

“You can’t see him, Mond. You can’t know what he looks like. He’s hideous, like a dog or a horse, not a human like you and I.”

None of this was true, but Tamara knew she was dancing on a taught string now, and the only way she could safely herd Mond back to her side of the field was to make the boy an untouchable, therefore taking the merit out of everything he said or did.

“I haven’t seen him with my eyes,” Mond said thoughtfully, “but I think I know what he looks like. It’s like I’ve felt his presence so often that I’ve assigned a visual component...”

She continued to talk, to theorize about her relationship with the boy and what it was based on, what her blindness subtracted from or added to it and what his abstractness, as she called it, subtracted from or added to it.

But Tamara stopped paying attention. She was caught up in the fear that bubbled under the surface as Mond described the boy. They had grown closer than she had seen or guessed. How much did Mond know about him, and how much did he know about her? How much had they interacted; was it to the point where nothing she said to Mond was safe from his ears? If they were passing secrets back and forth, Tamara could never be sure of her bond with Mond, because she would never be able to know if the boy was coming between them. She would have to do a lot of deconstructive work to get Mond to pull loyalty away from him.

Tamara hadn’t imagined there would be so much politics in raising children. Mond was only six-years-old. How was it possible she was already so complex?

“It’s not enough to say I haven’t seen him, you see,” she was saying when Tamara tuned back in. “I haven’t seen him like you have, perhaps, but I know he is not a ‘monster,’ as you say he is.”

“Have you considered the possibility that he is a master of deception?” Tamara suggested, choosing her words closely. “That he can imitate a creature deserving of your sympathy so thoroughly as to fool you into caring about him in the way that you do?”

Mond seemed to chew on this for a moment before speaking again. “If that is the case, how have you managed to remain undeceived?”

The question took Tamara by surprise. It wasn’t as though she hid her dislike for the boy — to do so would have been nearly impossible, not to mention very taxing on her emotions — but she had hoped that Mond would connect it with necessity, with the monster she had been portraying him as.

“I... it’s hard sometimes,” Tamara lied. “I find myself overly empathetic, too, on some days. But then I remember that he killed his mother, my sister, and I strike those feelings from my heart.”

How many times had she driven that point home? How many times had she called him a murderer? It made her feel like some sort of activist every time she said it, and the feeling never got old.

“How did your sister die?” Mond asked for the first time.

Again, Tamara found herself having to sift through her thoughts to find the correct ones to say out loud. “It was a slow... a slow, painful process,” she said. “Over the months that she was pregnant with the boy, he sapped her first of all her energy, youth, and life, until, in the third month, she was bedridden entirely, and then he attacked her brain, draining her personality and intellect until she was an empty shell, broken, a shattered image of the woman she had once been.”

“How do you know that it was his fault?” Mond asked. “Maybe your sister was unfit to carry a baby. Do you have any conclusive proof that another baby would have behaved differently?”

Tamara felt as though she had been slapped in the face. In the long time since her sister’s death, no one had ever come close to insulting her memory, and aside from the boy’s mere existence, nothing had dredged up the pain from those nine long months. Mond, just then, had done worse damage in one short sentence than anyone else had done in four years.

“My sister was not ‘unfit’ for anything,” Tamara said, keeping her calm. “The doctors couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t understand it, and she couldn’t understand it. There was nothing wrong with my sister that would cause her body to do that to itself naturally.”

Mond looked thoughtful. “Maybe you’re deceived by some force, Tamara, just as you suggest I am deceived by the boy. Maybe your sister deceived you.”

______________

Again, more stuff I'm going to have to fix later, like my changed tense in the middle there. Also, unpublished here was Tamara's recitation of a Sociology textbook.

Chapter Eighteen

“I don’t like those pills, Mond,” the boy said. “I don’t know what they do, really, but I know they’re not... not good for me.”

“Don’t they help with your headaches?” she asked.

“Yeah, they stop the pain, but they stop everything.”

“But the headaches were really bad for you. Remember how you used to scream at night because they hurt so badly? You don’t do that anymore, do you?”

“No,” he said. “I guess you’re right.”

Tamara leaned away from the door with a smile. Mond was defending her. The boy couldn’t stop her now that Mond was on her side; he wouldn’t dare try. He wouldn’t want to.

She crept down the hall into her own room and closed the door behind her before turning on the light. She crossed to the desk and pulled out the chair to sit. The little brown book in the top drawer had a red ribbon sticking out the bottom of it; she opened it to that page — a blank one — and pulled the fountain pen out of its holder next to the notepad.

She recounted her day minute for minute, detailing the mundane without attempting to romanticize it. She described the unforeseeable progress Mond was making in her chess game, how she’d mastered the Sicilian defense, Dragon Variation and how, without cheating and telling Mond that there were better moves she could make, even Tamara was having a hard time escaping her traps. They played the games verbally and Mond had surprisingly little trouble keeping mental track of what the board looked like. One day, she would wise up and they would have to stop playing; Tamara would have nothing further to teach her.

At this point, her pen stopped, poised over a new line. Tamara pondered the unsettling truth of the last sentence. So many of the things Tamara was teaching Mond were having to end too quickly, as Mond was learning them too quickly and at too advanced a level for Tamara to keep up her role as instructor. Would there eventually come a time when Mond would have to leave, go to some sort of academy so more learned people could give her more sophisticated lessons? Tamara shuddered and put the thought out of her mind. Their tutoring sessions were going so well, and they meant everything to Tamara. She couldn’t imagine giving her daughter up to let some strangers fill her mind with things she didn’t herself know.

She continued writing. She included a dry list of all the ingredients she had put in the dinner salad, the new dosage she had parceled out for the boy, and then came to the conversation she had eavesdropped on just a few moments before.

Then she came to the bottom of the page. She couldn’t think of anything further to write, elaborating on her day. So she added the line, “Tomorrow, Mond will learn to dance.”

Chapter Sixteen

“Your calligraphy is lovely,” Tamara cooed over Mond as the little girl struggled to control the pen that was too big for her hands. She had mastered straight lines with little effort, but the curves were giving her trouble as the top of the pen swung out of her control. “Grip it tighter at the base there and it should make the writing easier.”

The Ms and the Ns in her name that she was practicing writing in repeated lines over the paper looked well-practiced, like she’d been writing for years. But the Os and the Ds an anything she wrote in the rounded lowercase was more elementary, about on the same level as the letters Ben could write.

Tamara pretended not to know that Mond retaught all of her daily lessons to the boy at night when they were supposed to be sleeping. She knew she would have to do something to end it eventually, but she also had noticed a frightening downturn in Mond’s overall appreciation of Tamara, and she guessed that it was directly linked to the way Tamara treated the boy. The more apathy she showed at this point, the better it would be for the mother-daughter relationship she was trying so hard to foster.

She had been able to convince Mond that she shouldn't see the boy during the day anymore. She hadn’t told her it was because his medicine made him look and act something more akin to a hibernating ground squirrel than a human. Every once in a while, Tamara would hear a loud thump from the room upstairs where he was penned in. She never reacted to it in a way that Mond would notice, but she couldn’t help wondering what could possibly be happening up there when he was about as mobile as a calcified starfish.

This happened while Mond was practicing her calligraphy. “Why don’t you go back to cycling through the whole alphabet, Mond,” Tamara said. “I’m going to go make us some lunch. Would you rather steamed asparagus or some of that spinach soufflé from last night?”

“Spinach,” Mond said quietly, her lips pursed tightly as she struggled to make the arch in her lowercase a.

Tamara stood up and walked out, closing the accordion door behind her. She stalked carefully around the corner to the stairs and up them, stepping over the three that creaked. The room at the top of the stairs had a large, darkly stained door with two locks high up on the frame. Tamara deftly undid them and burst into the room, using the door both as a shield and as a weapon, whichever was needed.

But when she got into the stark, gray, dimly lit room, she was relieved to find that her startling entrance was not necessary. The boy was lying on his side in his bed, just as she had let him that morning, eyes half open, and a thin line of drool dripping out of his mouth.

“Good boy,” Tamara said with a sigh and a grimace. In his present state, he reminded her all too much of the last few weeks she had seen her sister. He always resembled her too closely for comfort, but now, with his lifeless gaze and vulnerable position, she could easily have mistaken him for his mother.

“You’re the monster here, you know,” Tamara whispered as she walked out the door and closed it quietly behind her. “Between the two of us. I’m just protecting myself. You’re the monster.”

Chapter Twelve

The room was silent, but Tamara couldn't shut out the voices of her inner angels and demons yelling at her, attacking her for what she'd done.

"I didn't mean to hit her," she said out loud. There was no one in the room with her, but still she pleaded as though someone would hear her and console her. "He was right in front of me, and I meant to hit him, but then...I don't know how she did it," she said. "I didn't mean to hit her."

She repeated those lines over and over again, promising some unseen being that she was innocent.

After what felt like hours, Tamara felt herself calming and coming back into her center. It was a hardened core inside of her, left over from her childhood in Medias, and though it had long strings of unraveled emotion dangling off it like yarn coming apart from a sweater, it was still strong enough to come back to like a warm fire on a cold night. When she needed it most, she could just let herself collapse back into it and become the simpler person she used to be.

She pulled herself together and drew her stature into poise, thinking of her sister in her graceful times. She stood up from the chair she had been cowering in and walked with purpose out into the hall.

She could hear them down at the end of the line of rooms, squeals of laughter from both of them floating down the hallway. Tamara closed the distance in four strides and slowly stuck her head around the doorframe.

The laughter stopped abruptly. “She’s here,” both the children said together. The boy clambered over the small table they were sitting at and put himself in front of Mond, staring daggers back at Tamara.

“I’m not going to hurt her, boy,” she said. “It’s never been her I was after. You come with me; I have some pills for you to take. I’ll leave Mond alone if you come quietly.”

He continued glaring at her. Mond stood up, and in doing so was still only barely taller than the boy was as he crouched in front of her. “I’ll take the pills,” she said, her voice quiet, mouse-like.

Tamara rolled her eyes. “I don’t need you to take the pills, Mond. It’s not you I’m worried about.” She looked the boy squarely in the eye. “They don’t hurt at all. Your mother took them while she was pregnant with you, so you’ve technically taken them before.” She put out her hand, indicating that the boy should take it and walk with her down the hall to the bathroom where the medicine cabinet was. He looked at it uncertainly. Tamara saw Mond lay a tiny hand on his shoulder and grip it tightly for a moment. As if that had been his cue, the boy stood up and nodded. He didn’t take her hand, but she hadn’t really wanted him to. She despised the feel of his skin; so smooth like her sister’s had been, and warmer than skin should be, as warm in life as her sister’s had been cold in death. Everything about him was unnatural and she hated the mere sight of him.

She walked behind him in the crowded space of the hallway, pushing him along by slapping him on the back every few steps. He was walking too slowly, fearfully. When they got to the bathroom, she pushed ahead of him and pulled out the pill canister she had stolen. She opened it and took out two pills, one pink and one green. She went to the sink and filled a ceramic cup halfway to the top with water. Then she turned around to face the boy who was backed heavily against the wall, as though he were trying to keep as far away from her as possible without leaving the room.

“Take them both quickly,” she said and held out the pills and the cup for him to take.

Again, he looked at them uncertainly, but did not take them from her. “What are they for?” he asked. Without Mond at his side, he sounded less sure of himself and more frightened.

“What do you mean?”

“What will they do to me? Why do I need them?”

Tamara rolled her eyes. “If we’re lucky they’ll have a side effect that keeps you from asking so many stupid questions,” she said. “They’re to keep you from killing anyone else like you killed you’re mother. Or don’t you remember that?”

She wanted to slap him, she always wanted to slap him, but Mond hated it when she did, so she bit him with her words instead. He was only four years old, even though he looked about eight, but she knew he understood what it meant to insult someone, to make them feel bad. She watched his frightened brown eyes turn dull with solemnity and hurt.

He took the pills, without losing eye contact with Tamara, swallowed them dry. Something about the sharpness of his eyes had always made her unable to look away whenever he wanted her to watch him. She could tell that he understood his powers, even if he didn’t realize that no one else had them. This knowledge made him dangerous. She had seen the danger in her sister; she had seen the child inside her take control over her body and mind. The pills had quieted the danger then. They would do it again. She had been without them for four years and it had nearly driven her to suicide. Mond was the only thing she lived for anymore. As soon as she was spoiled by the presence of this devil in their house, Tamara knew she only had the one option left. She fought that with every passing second, clinging to Mond, knowing in her heart that they were meant to be mother and daughter and that this obstacle of a child whom she could not kill but she could not let live should not be allowed to separate them.

For half a minute, Tamara and the boy stared into each other’s eyes, refusing to be the one to back down first. The constant fight should have kept Tamara fit and on her toes, young and proud and strong, but something about the boy made her weaker and paler and smaller. It would be hours before the pills would do any good, so she gave up, conceded defeat for now, and left to play with Mond and give her her daily lessons. The boy didn’t move when she did, so she closed the bathroom door behind her and jammed the handle so he couldn’t get out. He didn’t protest. He was well aware of the constancy of her hatred.

Chapter Eight

Tamara wiped the mud on her hands off on the hips of her pants, closing her eyes and breathing as deeply as her sore chest could afford her.

“Ma’am? Can I help you?” The shop owner tying his apron around his waist asked from his storefront.

Tamara opened her eyes and didn’t bother to hide the pain and exhaustion that showed in them. “I’m afraid it’s past that now.”

He shrugged and walked back into his store, leaving her alone to slump down into the bench under the window.

You’re stronger than this, she told herself. They’re children; they can’t bring you this far down. You can’t let them.

She massaged her temples, trying to coax rational, coherent thought back into her mind. She had had a plan; she needed to get back to it.

Standing up slowly, she collected herself into the tall, graceful creature she felt like on her good days. There was no way to cure her appearance of its hopelessly disheveled nature, but she brushed the excess dust off her clothes flattened her vest against her stomach. She reached inside of herself and searched for the memory of her sister and the strength that it granted her. She crossed the street to the pharmacy and entered through the tall glass door.

No bell sounded when the door opened, and when it shut, the room around her was silent. No one stood behind the counter, and the dust particles hanging in the streams of sunlight were the only other disturbance of the store’s utter stillness. Tamara walked quickly and quietly to the counter and peered through the door into the backroom. The door to the back alley was open there and there was no person to be seen. Taking her chance, she jumped the counter dove into the storeroom aisles. She knew what she was searching for, or at least she would know it when she saw it. There was a name for the pills she needed, but she didn’t know it. She had seen them before in a container on her sister’s bedside table during the last few terrible months.

Suddenly, she heard the back alley door close and footsteps tromp carelessly across the cement floor towards the counter. Knowing she was hidden from view between two near-walls of pills and pillboxes, Tamara, though shaken, continued her search. After what seemed like long minutes, she came to a clear canister with hundreds of tiny pink and green pills inside. The address on the prescription label was several towns away. Tamara carefully removed the canister from the shelf, looking around for any others of its kind and finding none. She placed the pills into her side pouch, careful not to let them shake around in their container, then slowly made her way to the back door. The doorknob was big and brass and heavily rusted, so Tamara steeled herself for she was afraid would turn out to be a chase.

Taking hold of the cold handle, she tried to turn it, but met impassible resistance. She turned harder. The rust fought her. She bit her lip and gave a final heavy turn with her wrist. The handle gave a creak, earsplitting in the otherwise-silent storeroom, and budged only slightly. Tamara, her forehead sweating now, winced as she heard the druggist’s stool swivel around. She looked around at him, her eyes wide with fear at what she knew had to come next.

“Hey!” he yelled, springing to his feet. “What do you think you’re doing back here?”

Tamara pulled a palm-sized package wrapped in tissue out of her pouch and held it out in front of her. A blue haze began to thicken around it. The druggist stopped walking abruptly and instinctively put his hand out.

“Don’t!” he yelled. “The medicines! They’ll turn to poison! You’ll kill hundreds of people!”

“You can’t know that I was here,” she said, her voice shaking slightly, but her face set.

“I swear I won’t tell anyone,” he said. “You can silence me how ever you want, just please don’t drop that mushroom.”

Her hand with the package stuck straight out in front of her, threatening to turn over and let the package fall. “This is all I have,” she said. “You can’t know I was here.”

He shook his head frantically, pleading with her with his eyes, his hands, his words, whatever he could. She blinked and turned her hand over like lightning.

As the package fell and the tissue came unwrapped, the druggist ran and dove to catch it, but he fell short by mere inches. Before he hit the ground, Tamara had leapt around him and sprinted back into the front room. She looked back in time to see the package, now slightly unwrapped to reveal a small mushroom whose cap had come off, emitting long strings of thick blue gas that immediately some of which began to spread out over the whole room, while one wrapped itself like a strand of rope around the druggist’s neck. Tamara stood transfixed, watching his hands grope and claw at the impenetrable force constricting his air. She finally pulled herself away as the wandering strands seeped their way under the caps of the pill canisters and the druggist’s eyes began to bulge.

Chapter Five

“Well,” Tamara began, keeping her voice low and collected, “you remember my sister. She was calm and dutiful; I believe you yourself once went so far as to call her obsequious.”

Yes. I remember your sister. I remember you, as well. For instance, I remember the day you left me and gave your word that you would never come back.

“I’m not coming back,” she protested. “I’m here on behalf of my sister. She’s dead.”

Naturally.

“Naturally?” Tamara asked, still keeping the usual shrillness out of her voice. “There was nothing natural about her death.”

I mean, naturally she has died after trauma like what she has experienced.

Tamara paused, keeping her thoughts off her face. “You knew, then.”

I can feel when one of mine dies. I did some investigation into the circumstances surrounding her. It was a terrible tragedy, but losing life to give life is as strong a fate as dying on the field of battle.

“The life she gave was not worth her sacrifice, and she did not give it willingly,” Tamara said coldly.

Is there something wrong with the child?

“The child sapped her mind until, when he was born, she was little more than a well preserved corpse possessed by a spirit.”

You have harsh feelings against this boy then?

Tamara hesitated. “I am apathetic; I care only about my sister’s final wishes,” she said. “In her last lucid moments, she told me how deeply she hoped for a good home for her son. He is in my care now, but you’ve known me since childhood; I am not a mother.”

It’s too late for that, Tamara. You cannot hide your emotions as well as you think you can; I can feel your hatred for this boy. You don’t mean to bring him here because there is a better home here than with you. You bring him here because you can’t stand to look at him.

“That is not the case,” Tamara said, trying not to take the bait and lose her composure. “Of course you’re too wise for me to fool you into thinking that I want this child as my own. My intentions for coming here are more than what I’ve said. But they do not have to do with any emotions I have in or out of this boy’s favor. I am scared for the safety of people Out There who come into contact with this boy and his obviously formidable powers.”

You think that because your sister died due to complications in childbirth, her son is obviously the culprit? Do you realize how often these things—

“My sister went mad. She did not just die.” Tamara’s voice went flat and she struggled to keep from gritting her teeth.

Silence.

“I am asking for help,” Tamara said. “Before I left, you said I needed to do that more often.”

You’re not asking me to help. You’re asking me to relieve you of a burden.

“He will be safe with you and the rest of the world will be safe without him.”

What is his name?

Tamara blinked. “What?”

What is the boy’s name?

“He—he doesn’t have one. He was just born and his mother is dead.”

What was his father’s name?

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I didn’t know him.”

And you didn’t name the child yourself?

“No. I don’t…I am not….my daughter’s name is Mond because of the moons in her eyes. I don’t name things well.”

You have a daughter?

“I took her in two years ago.”

I thought you said you were not fit to be a mother.

“I’m not. Mond and I are only together temporarily. Until I can find her a better home.”

A pause. If I am to take the boy, I will take the girl as well. As payment.

Tamara’s eyes widened in shock. “Payment? In what way does a child ever count as currency?”

You don’t want the boy. You do want the girl.

“I just told you, I’m finding a different home for Mond.”

I can feel your lies, Tamara. You think the girl is worth something. Either I take both or I take neither. Come back to me once you’ve decided.

Tamara could hear the finality in his words. Even though she didn’t want to end the conversation—it didn’t feel over for her part—she knew there was nothing she could do now. She turned and left the clearing. She had a long, cheerless walk through the once-familiar hills. She had forgotten the rank smell of decay.

Chapter Two

“This…this thing,” Tamara yelled in disgust, pointing to the writhing creature on the bed, “is not, cannot be, and will never become my sister. My sister was a woman of poise and perfection and this thing is three parts animal.”

“I don’t understand,” the doctor called over the screams of the woman on the bed. “The baby is perfectly healthy. He was extremely large for a newborn—”

“She was in intense pain through labor,” the midwife offered.

“She has been degenerating into this mass of worthlessness for the past nine months,” Tamara yelled. “She started out the beaming lady she always was and slowly lost her mind to that vampiric demon-child—”

“You’re not suggesting the fetus did this,” the doctor said sternly.

“I know it did. It took until she had nothing left to give. It sucked her dry until she turned into this half-dead urchin…”

Suddenly the baby screamed. Not the regular cry of a needy child, but a shrill, hawk-like scream. Everyone in the room went silent, even its mother, who rolled to her side, laying her hair in the pool of sweat that had collected on the pillow.

The scream droned on, higher and longer that the baby’s tiny lungs should have been able to support it. The mother joined with a low, guttural moan, her eyes rolling into the back of her head.

Tamara, who had been on the verge of angry, hot tears for the past several hours, now let go and wailed, running from the room.

The sterile white hallway outside was short for the number of strides it took Tamara to barrel down it. And then she was out into the brisk dawn, the sun sluggishly pulling itself over the distant hills of Medias. Looking into those hills, Tamara let out a scream of her own: frustrated, pining, and fearful.

The child must die, her first thoughts.

You could never kill a newborn baby, her second thoughts.

My sister will die soon, herself.

That child will be mine to care for.

Mond will be his sister and he will kill her.

He will do to me what he has done to my sister.

Someone has to take this child away from the world, strip him of any power, and keep us all safe.

The hills were scarcely more than knolls, especially from this distance, but Tamara knew the secrets of Medias, and it knew hers, so the size of those hills was something she felt and didn’t see.

She turned around to the midwife lodge and judged how much time she had to herself, then turned back and sprinted towards those hills. Someone had to do something, and it wouldn’t be her. She had done too many things in her lifetime. It was someone else’s turn now. Someone who couldn’t say no.