my perfect enemy, hunting an opportunity to betray and destroy.
Power. Purpose. Training. Princeton.
A younger Lewis taking off my clothes in a basement laboratory, introducing me to a whole new level of pleasure and intensity.
Glass shattering with the force of our power combining as our bodies did.
Lewis gone, spirited away. My life consumed with work, achievement, ambition.
Bad Bob. A Djinn holding me down, choking me with a Demon Mark, forcing me to face my own fears and mortality at the same time. Bad Bob died; I lived, crawling away from the wreckage of the fight.
A shattered Djinn bottle. Bad Bob's slave freed. My quest for Lewis. Meeting a stranger on the road, a vagabond named David I couldn't quite resist.
A blur of events that I couldn't even separate, ending in more destruction, more death, my own transformations.
Blue sparklies. A hole in the aetheric. Demons. The fate of the world, again, on our shoulders.
Human again. Faces flashed by at an increasing rate, because I could feel the tension of the Demon on the end of the memory chain, pulling back, and I couldn't stop now to even try to comprehend what I was seeing.
A glimpse of Jonathan, ageless and cynical and passionate about what he loved.
Fighting for my survival in a flood, and rising in the arms of my lover above the foaming, deadly currents.
The Mother of Storms taking notice, at last, and coming to end the cycle of violence.
Imara conceived. Imara born. Imara-
The memory chain shattered into a million crystalline fragments, and I lost my hold.
It all started to go away. I was losing it. No!
The Demon didn't waste time with my trauma. She cut to the chase and plunged her hand into my chest, just like she'd done with Rahel.
If she couldn't be me, then she was going to damn sure make sure I wouldn't be, either.
The sensation that raced through me was horrifying. I'd been through bad stuff; this was beyond. I'd felt it through Kevin's memories, and it was even worse this time, because there was no escape.
She simply bored her way through me, ripping apart whatever she didn't need, and I felt my connection to the aetheric suddenly cutting off. It was like the sun disappearing during a total eclipse, and something in me screamed, trapped and terrified and suffering.
It couldn't live that way for long. I couldn't.
Although I felt like there was less and less of an I. It was draining away from me, like sand out of a broken glass, slow but inexorable. I was losing my childhood again. My mother's face was fading away. I lost the memory of my first date, and the nervous excitement of buying my prom dress, and the scratchy elegance of the corsage my date had bought me. I lost the memory of his name, too.
Evil Twin didn't care about my troubles. She let go of me, but I didn't move. Didn't speak. Hair blew across my face, obscuring my view of her, but it didn't matter. She could see. I didn't need to, because now I was fully, completely under her control. I couldn't fight, because I needed every ounce of strength to slow down the steady erosion of my past.
She was simply going to drain me dry, and then I'd be gone. Erased. Finito.
The Wardens were circling us, trying to decide which one was the good Joanne, which the bad; the problem was that the deck was now stacked, and they were screwed no matter what choice they made. Kevin and Cherise were hanging back, watching with identical expressions of sick horror; more than anyone else, they understood what was happening to me. Not that they could help me.
Not that anyone could.
The Demon accessed my Warden powers, blew a hole through the peaceful, artificial shield of Seacasket, and accessed a huge draw of power from the aetheric. She used me to do it. My control shattered, and the memories dissolved faster.
I lost my college years. I lost Lewis, swept away in a tide of oncoming darkness.
I felt the clouds gathering overhead, a soft gray pressure turning rapidly dark, and under the Demon's direction I rubbed air molecules together, creating friction, heat, driving the engine of a tiny but incredibly concentrated storm. Not my choice, but definitely my fault. The storm broke with a snap of lightning, and drenched a square-block area of sidewalk, catching nearly every Warden in its path.
As soon as they were standing in a thin layer of water, she forced me to slam a