Chapter 7: Bloodstones

“I see, in her future, a shadow darker than her own, but what I cannot see, is who this shadow belongs to. I know not whether this shadow is ally or foe.”

Excerpt from the diary of Panpar

Whitney lay on her bed, legs crossed at the ankle, arms folded over her stomach, blind eyes closed in quiet thought, with two black circular stones placed over her eyelids. Tommy fell asleep but Whitney, her mind in a whir, couldn’t do the same.

At first she left the damage from the bullets be, choosing to keep the wounds as a reminder of what happened--a token of her fragility. Ultimately, touching her fingers in her synchronized pattern, mind focused on the damaged tissue there, allowed her body to do its healing. Keeping the wounds wasn’t an option because the bullets did more damage than she first realized. When she took a shower, the skin surrounding the impacts was black and blue. She touched her ribs and the pain was so excruciating, it became obvious that two of her ribs were broken. Whatever protection her bracelet provided was enough to stop bullets, but not enough to prevent at least some serious damage.

She was trying to puzzle everything into perspective, but making sense of it was a bigger puzzle than her mind could wrap itself around.

A week ago, she had a simple life. She woke up every morning, slipped her mind into her brother’s and pretty much sat in the passenger seat while he did whatever he was going to do for the day. Making her previous life uneventful. She had nothing exciting to look forward to and nothing complicated to weigh her down. Her biggest fear, before three days ago, was Tommy finding a girlfriend and leaving her stranded. Other than that, she had it easy.

Things were definitely different.

So different that Whitney was finding it difficult to face all of the changes. So different a part of her mind was even negating those things. The rational part of her brain began shutting down when she tried to think about Nethermore. There was no way she went to a place in between realities. It was impossible for her to have another twin sister in a completely different reality. Accepting that was accepting Tommy wasn’t her twin brother--that her life wasn’t real at all, and that she wasn’t just a passenger in her brother’s mind, but a passenger in her own life as well. A passenger in another body.

Was that what she was? Had she somehow taken someone else’s life entirely when she came from that other reality to this one?

Even if she could accept the new reality of what her life was becoming (as if she had a choice) there were still problems with any and every path she could take.

If Isolem Treff somehow initiated today’s events, he had done so to send her a message. ‘Don’t tread on me’, ‘leave me and my plans alone or nobody you know is safe’. She met Isolem face to face, and even though their encounter hadn’t lasted more than a few hours, she learned enough about him to understand a little about how he thought, and that was how he thought. He sent her a warning and he did it by showing her he could, even from the other side of the veils, threaten the lives of the two people he knew would hurt her the most.

A part of her wanted to heed his warning--to go back to who she was a week before, a passenger in her brother’s mind, a simple girl with a simple life, with little to worry about and nothing to fear. Maybe even try to see where things could go with Kam. Perhaps, allowing herself to be a regular and normal teenage girl, giving in to the first real crush of her life, a crush on a teenage boy all the other girls wanted, and who seemed to have eyes only for her. To let herself go, living on the edge just a little bit, exploring new possibilities. The same way she let herself go in the bathroom at the mall, despite the presence of his parents. It felt good to do that. It felt good to cast aside her reservations and to let herself think with her heart instead of her rule-ridden brain. It felt good for his masculine arms to hold her and have his strong, yet tender, lips kiss her.

It felt good to be young and to act her age.

There was another side of the coin. She was also figuring out she wasn’t just a normal teenage girl. It was a fact she and Tommy knew since they were little. Their abilities weren’t new news. They weren’t entirely normal and there had to be some reason for their abilities almost in the same way a singer knows she can sing, or a writer knows he can write. These talents are given for a reason and shouldn’t be wasted, shouldn’t be hoarded selfishly, but given to the world to hear, to read, to see.

Whitney reached up to her closed eyes and removed the black stones resting there. She kept those stones, placing them in her pocket (once she realized how important they were) and almost forgot they were there (at least until she had undressed for the shower) and pulled them out. Those stones were the extra stones she hadn’t used to make Kat’s necklace. She turned them over in her fingers, sliding her thumbs up and down the smooth surface, feeling the round contour.

Both hers and Tommy’s talents weren’t as innocent as a singer’s, an artist’s, or a writer’s. Their talents didn’t have anything to do with being creative in the sense of entertainment and their talents weren’t anything like the talents of a doctor or lawyer or even an architect. Their talents centered on killing things. Whitney was coming to realize that. Her twin sister, Jo-Vanna, told her that as well. That’s what they were meant to do; kill things.

Giving in to her desires, of kissing a boy, of entertaining the idea of allowing a relationship to blossom, of letting Kam’s feelings for her grow into something even more than it was, just wasn’t a good idea. Her initial instinct to ‘not go there’ was a wise instinct because the only thing she could accomplish was hurting him even more. It was because of her (whether Tommy wanted to own it or not) Kat lost her happiness (that’s how she was phrasing it in her mind). Isolem Treff took Kat’s happiness, which was the most obvious part of Kat’s personality. It was who Kat was. It was the necklace that allowed Isolem’s mental bond to be completed.