She shook her head in denial. "No, that's not what you said. You put the order there that matters most to you. All you care about it is you."
"I did not say that."
"You don't have to." Tears began to flood her eyes until her vision drowned in misery. "Your words betray your thoughts." She tried to leave him, but he stopped her. She tried to gain her release. "Let me go!"
"Not until you learn to be reasonable."
Learn? She was not some infant who needed lessons. She was a woman full grown. How dare he not see that. "I'm not the one who's changing. There's something dark inside you that wasn't there before."
He scoffed. "You don't know what you're talking about."
But she did, and that knowledge beat painfully inside her.
He leaned down, his eyes glacial and foreign. "If you love me, you will tell him."
Why did she have to prove her love? Was it not enough that he saw it with his own vision?
She wrested her arm from his grasp. "I must go."
He didn't speak as he watched her walk away.
A shadow unwrapped itself from his and peeled itself from the wall. As full figured as a man, it walked toward him to stand behind his shoulder and whisper in his ear. "I told you so, didn't I? Women are ever fickle. There's no man who can keep one forever satisfied."
"Butterfly is different. She is all things good."
"And you are not."
No, he wasn't. He was a warrior, and his skin had been bathed in blood more times than he could count. It didn't pay for him to show mercy or patience. He wasn't supposed to.
At the right hand of his chief, he had slain innocents aplenty. It was his job. But now that they were at peace, he was lost.
Until he'd seen the Butterfly. She had tamed the savage inside him. Made it content to sit before hearth and watch her gentle ways. He didn't understand it. But so long as she was with him, he had no desire to pick up knife or spear.
He wanted only to please her.
Abigail blinked as the vision faded. When it was gone completely, she realized she was still standing in front of the wall with Choo Co La Tah behind her.
"Now you know," he said quietly.
Baffled, she turned to meet his kind gaze. "Know what?"
"Who you really are. Who Jess is."
More images flashed in her mind like a short-circuiting strobe trying to drive her mad. They came so fast that she could barely see them, and yet somehow her mind registered it all. "I don't understand."
He placed his hands on each of her arms. "You are the Butterfly, and Jess is the Buffalo. Peace and war. Two halves who were supposed to make one."
She shook her head in denial. "What have you been smoking or snorting or inhaling?"
"Do you not feel the connection here?"
Weirdly enough, she did. But that only freaked her out more.
Choo Co La Tah sighed as he realized she still wasn't ready for the truth. For all these centuries, he'd hidden her and waited for her to find a way to free herself from the curse. And still she was bound.
What a pity.
Maybe in her next life ...