jamie
from the destruction, out of the flame
He grimaces.
Or, he might have if the face were not smooth, featureless. If there had been a brow to furrow.
He grimaces but all that changes is the narrowing of those freakish yellow eyes. The corners of his ink-black mouth tremble, but there is so scarcely any part of him that is not wracked with tremors.
He is not used to the noise, the sharp edge, the hard language.
And it would have been so easy for him to dissociate. So easy for him to dissolve into his darkness and his fog. Because the thing staring back at him is not his sister, though it has her eyes. It is not his sister, though the smell of her smoke curls sweetly in his mouth.
How desperately the shadow thing’s brain wants to withdraw, retreat. It is some valiant war, the battle he wages in his own head. This is his sister, his Livinia, and she needs his help. She says she’s a coward but he knows it’s not true. Of course it’s not true.
They are a strange pairing, no doubt. The darkness and the lioness, their oddly colored eyes locked. And even if he does not know how to read the facial expressions of a feline, he can sense the pleading.
He sinks closer, driven perhaps by the knowledge that should she try to sink her teeth into him she would come away disappointed. He had tried to touch her but found that the change in her had not inspired any change in him. He was still only vapor. So he curls himself around her and lays his weightless head across her spine. Still, he cannot feel her and doubts that she can feel him.
“I will go with you,” he wheezes. “I will make sure you get there.”
He does not know the danger of it. He does not understand the changes in her or the impulses of a predator. He has never eaten, never tasted blood, though he has often had to swallow the urge to sink those shark’s teeth into the meat of a vulnerable throat. Perhaps he understands better than he realizes.
you need a villain, give me a name
