behind, like she was a dog. Held her down and made her submit because he was stronger. Plowed into her without regard for the pain she definitely had felt.
"Please get out of me." Her words were shaky, and the word please killed him. She could only request it of him, as she was completely overpowered.
He pulled free of her and got off the bed, stumbling like a drunk.
Cormia turned onto her side and tucked her legs into her body. Her spine seemed so fragile, the delicate column of bones utterly breakable under her pale skin.
"I'm sorry." God, those two words were such empty buckets.
"Please just go."
Considering how he'd already forced himself on her, honoring her request now seemed significant. Even though leaving her was the last thing he wanted to do.
Phury went into the bathroom, put his clothes on, and headed for the door. "We need to talk later - "
"There is no later. I'm going to put in to be a sequestered scribe. So I will record your history, but not be a part of it."
"Cormia, no."
She looked over her shoulder at him. "It's where I belong."
Her head went back down on the pillow.
"Go," she said. "Please."
He had no conscious awareness of walking out of her door or going through his own. He just realized sometime later that he was back in his room, sitting on the edge of his bed, smoking a blunt. In the silence, his hands were shaking and his heart was a broken drum machine and his foot was tapping on the floor.
The wizard was front and center in Phury's mind, standing with black robes waving in the wind, his silhouette jagged against a vast gray horizon. In his hand, balanced on his palm, was a skull.
Its eyes were yellow.
I told you that you would hurt her. I told you.
Phury looked at the tight roll of red smoke in his hand and tried to see anything other than ruination. He couldn't. He'd been a beast.
I told you what was going to happen. I was right. I've been right all along. And by the way, your birth wasn't the curse. It wasn't that you were born after your twin. You are the curse. Whether there had been five babies born with you or none, the outcome of all the lives around you would have been the same.
Reaching for the remote, Phury turned on his Bose system, but the instant one of Puccini's luscious, beautiful operas flooded through the room, tears boiled up into his eyes. So lovely, the music, and so unbearable as he contrasted the magical lilt of Luciano Pavarotti's voice with the grunting he'd uttered when he'd been on top of Cormia.
He'd held her down. Pinned her arms. Mounted her from behind -
You are the curse.
As the voice of the wizard continued to pound at him, he felt the ivy of the past overtaking him once again, all the things he had failed to do, all the differences he hadn't made, all the care he'd tried to take, but had fallen short on... and now there was a new layer. Cormia's layer.
He heard his father's last wheezing breath. And the crackle of his mother's body going up in flames. And his twin's anger at having been rescued.
He heard Cormia's voice, worst of all: Please get out of me.
Phury covered his ears with his hands even though that did nothing to help.
You are the curse.
With a moan, he pushed his palms into either side of his skull so hard his arms shook.
You don't like the truth? the wizard spat. You don't like my voice? You know how to make me go away.
The wizard dropped the skull into the tangle of bones at his feet. You know how to do it.
Phury smoked with desperation, terrified of everything that was in his head.
The blunt wasn't even touching the self-hatred or the voices.
The wizard put its black claw-toed boot on top of the yellow-eyed skull. You know what to do.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Up north in the adirondacks, deep in a cave in Black Snake State Park, the male who had collapsed at the coming of the dawn two days ago could not understand why the sun was shining on him and he wasn't up in flames. Unless he was in the Fade?
No... this couldn't be the Fade. The aches and pains in his body and the screaming in his head were too much like what he felt on Earth.
Except, what about the sun? He was bathed in its warm glow,