cutting. Rose was cutting, while the others stood close around her (in a knot), shining down a dozen flashlights, illuminating a slow-motion murder.
Andi tried to bolt up from the recliner, but she had no body to bolt with. Her body was gone. Where it had been was only pain in the shape of a human being. The pain of the child’s dying, and of her own.
Embrace it. The thought was like a cool cloth pressed on the burning wound that was her body. That’s the only way through.
I can’t, I’ve been running from this pain my whole life.
Perhaps so, but you’re all out of running room. Embrace it. Swallow it. Take steam or die.
8
The True stood with hands upraised, chanting the old words: sabbatha hanti, lodsam hanti, cahanna risone hanti. They watched as Andi Steiner’s blouse flattened where her breasts had been, as her skirt puffed shut like a closing mouth. They watched as her face turned to milk-glass. Her eyes remained, though, floating like tiny balloons on gauzy strings of nerve.
But they’re going to go, too, Walnut thought. She’s not strong enough. I thought maybe she was, but I was wrong. She may come back a time or two, but then she’ll cycle out. Nothing left but her clothes. He tried to recall his own Turning, and could only remember that the moon had been full and there had been a bonfire instead of headlights. A bonfire, the whicker of horses . . . and the pain. Could you actually remember pain? He didn’t think so. You knew there was such a thing, and that you had suffered it, but that wasn’t the same.
Andi’s face swam back into existence like the face of a ghost above a medium’s table. The front of her blouse plumped up in curves; her skirt swelled as her hips and thighs returned to the world. She shrieked in agony.
“We are the True Knot and we endure,” they chanted in the crisscrossing beams of the RVs. “Sabbatha hanti. We are the chosen ones, lodsam hanti. We are the fortunate ones, cahanna risone hanti.” They would go on until it was over. One way or the other, it wouldn’t take long.
Andi began to disappear again. Her flesh became cloudy glass through which the True could see her skeleton and the bone grin of her skull. A few silver fillings gleamed in that grin. Her disembodied eyes rolled wildly in sockets that were no longer there. She was still screaming, but now the sound was thin and echoing, as if it came from far down a distant hall.
9
Rose thought she’d give up, that was what they did when the pain became too much, but this was one tough babe. She came swirling back into existence, screaming all the way. Her newly arrived hands seized Rose’s with mad strength and bore down. Rose leaned forward, hardly noticing the pain.
“I know what you want, honeydoll. Come back and you can have it.” She lowered her mouth to Andi’s, caressing Andi’s upper lip with her tongue until the lip turned to mist. But the eyes stayed, fixed on Rose’s.
“Sabbatha hanti,” they chanted. “Lodsam hanti. Cahanna risone hanti.”
Andi came back, growing a face around her staring, pain-filled eyes. Her body followed. For a moment Rose could see the bones of her arms, the bones in the fingers clutching hers, then they were once more dressed in flesh.
Rose kissed her again. Even in her pain Andi responded, and Rose breathed her own essence down the younger woman’s throat.
I want this one. And what I want, I get.
Andi began to fade again, but Rose could feel her fighting it. Getting on top of it. Feeding herself with the screaming life-force she had breathed down her throat and into her lungs instead of trying to push it away.
Taking steam for the first time.
10
The newest member of the True Knot spent that night in Rose O’Hara’s bed, and for the first time in her life found something in sex besides horror and pain. Her throat was raw from the screaming she’d done on the lawn recliner, but she screamed again as this new sensation—pleasure to match the pain of her Turning—took her body and once more seemed to render it transparent.
“Scream all you want,” Rose said, looking up from between her thighs. “They’ve heard plenty of them. The good as well as the bad.”
“Is sex like this for everybody?” If so, what she had missed! What her bastard father had stolen from her! And people