Arkeshi shrugged. “This is the limit of my knowledge. I have never interacted with a spirit form.”
Laina stared through him again, failing to focus her eyes on the place where he stood. “Try to get closer,” she suggested.
We’re already skin-to-skin, thought Will. We can’t get any closer. He pressed forward, feeling a springy resistance as the boundary of her flesh rejected him.
“He’s trying,” said Darla. “But there’s a wall around you. Try to be less negative.”
“I’m not negative!” Laina bit back, but her friend gave her a look of obvious disbelief. “I just don’t like him,” she added.
“The bodysnatcher was wicked, but there was some truth in his words,” posited the Arkeshi. “You are dishonest with your emotions.”
Laina bit her lip, but she didn’t argue. Facing Will again, she opened her arms, and her expression changed. The perpetual glare faded and something more vulnerable appeared. “I’m open,” she said hesitantly. “Let me help you.”
At that point Will was a foot or two distant, but the look in her eyes drew him in, as though a channel had opened. He felt a rushing sensation, and then the world dissolved into a chaotic riot of sensations. Laina was gone, and when he looked around, he saw that only he and Darla remained. “What?” he muttered.
But it wasn’t his voice. It was distinctly feminine. His eyes widened in alarm, and then he felt her. She was inside him. Will? she asked nervously.
He closed his eyes—her eyes. Laina? As the name formed, he felt the connection between them. They weren’t two souls in one body; they were one oversized soul in a single body. The boundaries between them had vanished, and their thoughts and emotions were rushing back and forth, like waves on a beach. As her name crossed his mind, so too did all the emotions he felt regarding her—anger, annoyance, concern, worry, and behind it all, a fearful love that he was always afraid to admit.
And she was much the same. Her anger was greater, and when her thoughts turned to him, he felt her self-loathing. Laina hated him with the passion of her own self-loathing, and behind that was a similar tentative love, mixed with pity and compassion. Drowning everything else, was an ocean of guilt.
Will began to cry as he felt it all, especially the guilt.
Laina had known all along, since she was a child. She had always been intelligent, and even as a girl she had quickly deduced the reason her father went to visit the remote village of Barrowden, and who the dirt-smudged peasant boy that lived there must be. She had known, and she had hated him—and pitied him. Laina had loved her family, and when she looked at the peasant child in Barrowden, she had felt guilt, for she knew she possessed a treasure he could never have.
She had known, and she had buried the feeling behind a wall of guilt so high she couldn’t even fathom its meaning. It was invisible to her. Every flaw she had found in herself, in her father, in her mother, and even in Tabitha, she pushed into that dark place, heaping it full of her rejection and scorn.
And while Will found himself inundated by that river of sorrow, Laina experienced his own heart. His pain and sense of rejection, his desire for love and belonging, feelings he could never give voice to in the light of day. He had felt continually unworthy, an outsider begging for things that he didn’t deserve.
Will sank to the ground, hugging himself as the misery threatened to swallow him whole. The feelings were so powerful that he wanted to die. No, she wanted to die. Laina had devoted herself to the suffering of the poor, secretly trying to assuage the guilt she didn’t even know existed within her. Filling her days with a passion for charity that had driven her from the age of fourteen until the present, as she stood on the cusp of full adulthood.
It’s all right, he told himself, speaking to her. We were children. It wasn’t our fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.
She felt his acceptance, his forgiveness, and something similar came from her in return, but they were still