![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
springgreenTitle: Ever After, Once Again
Rating: Er. R? Yay for blood and resurrection and shadow men.
Spoilers: For all the trilogy, but set so far in the future that it probably doesn't matter
Summary: Take one Mary Sue, make her the granddaughter of the original heroine, add in the sexy villain of the piece, stir, fold in a gratuitous ending fix, mix in angst and darkness galore, serve half done. Jenny picked the wrong guy, is all. (aka, this is a work in progress)
Notes: This is based on the Forbidden Game trilogy by LJ Smith, who used to write YA horror/romance sort of in the style of Christopher Pike. Except, with more soulmates and vampires. I used to love it I don't know why I am writing fic for this, given that me, my sister and my cousin are the only people on the planet who have read these, but... it took over my brain like alien spawn?
I like comments. A beta would be rewarded by lots of exclamation points and grovelling.
----------------------------
Summer doesn't understand many things about her life.
She knows she was named after Great-Aunt Summer, but she doesn't know why.
She doesn't know why her father won't talk to her grandparents, but she suspects it has to do with their haunted house. She has only visited her grandparents twice, and the second time, a chill breeze accompanied her the entire time. She mentioned it to her grandmother, and she was never allowed back again.
Summer doesn't know why her father's face freezes when he looks at her growing collection of tarot cards or her stack of fantasy books. Nor can she understand his panic attack when she buys Haindl's rune oracle, even though she already has the Haindl tarot deck.
She thinks it has something to do with the white scars on his back.
Summer doesn't know why her grandparents hate each other. They still live in their perpetually cold house together, but they never talk.
She doesn't understand why her father still won't let her go out with friends after sunset, even though she is twenty. She cannot date boys who have not met her father and both grandparents, even though none of them talk to each other anymore. She doesn't know why she grew up without Monopoly, Risk, Snakes and Ladders, or any of the other board games her friends had.
Summer doesn't know why she sometimes believes there are eyes watching her all the time. She thinks this started after her second visit to her grandparents' place. Somehow, she knows the eyes are blue.
She wonders why the Devil crosses her in every tarot reading she has ever received.
Summer is about to find out.
-----
Summer sleeps. Occasionally she dreams, and when she does, and when she remembers it all, it is always the same dream. A dream journal, filled with scribblings on surreal happenings that sometimes, always eerily, come true in life, sits on the corner of her nightstand, always within reach. Summer never knows when she will dream again, and when she does, she wants to be prepared.
She wakes up suddenly, startled, and instinctively reaches for the journal, flips it open, feels around for a pen. It is almost a ritual by now, the pen settling comfortably in the groove in her middle finger, the journal's weathered pages expectantly awaiting the ink. As thought overtakes action, she realizes, with no great surprise, that there is nothing to write. It was the monster dream, the one that had sent her crying to her father more than once as a child. After he found out she had been consistently having the same dream for nights on end, the look in his eyes stopped her from running to him again. Summer sometimes feels as though the look rules her life.
She wishes, at times like these, she had closer friends. She has friends, although she is shy and strange, but she cannot tell them many things about her own life, because she does not know herself. Often, she does not wish to explain the oddities that are her life, ones that she is aware of only because she found out in kindergarten that other people have two parents. Other people do not believe in ghosts and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, but then, other people have never spent a night in her grandmother's house. If she had these friends, perhaps she could tell them about the dreams.
To her relief, Summer does not ordinarily remember her dreams. She used to think this was because she did not dream, but her introductory psychology course told her that everyone dreamed. She still remembers the story of the cat that went crazy because they cut out its pons, its dream center, and she wonders how that would feel. Sometimes she thinks it would be a relief. Other times, she thinks insanity is the same as dreaming, only for all hours. If she were insane, she would be living her dream.
The dream is how she knows that the eyes are blue.
-----
As a child, she used to talk to the air. She stopped when she saw the look. These days, the look no longer stops her.
She can feel herself growing in strength, batting at the bars her father and her grandparents have set around her. Two weeks ago, she came home before sunset like a good girl, but after dinner, she locked her room and climbed out the window. She didn't do much, just walked around the block and sat on the roof outside for most of the night, but now she knows she can.
Her father never noticed she was missing.
Summer isn't surprised by this. Her father never realized she had gotten her period until a few years after the fact. She thinks that if she had never given him the grocery bag with her tampons to unload, he never would have found out. She wished desperately afterwards that she hadn't given in to the temptation, because after that, her father sat her down and talked to her about sex. She had known about sex already, of course. Locker room stories and the internet had taught her far better than her father ever could, and the voice from the air is a better teacher than all of them combined. Her father tried to paint sex as a safe act, as something loving and sheltering, but Summer knows better than that.
She knows that sex can feel like something that burns you from inside out, immolating everything that was you, or that it can be cold and rote, a series of actions that cumulates in sticky fluids and discarded condoms. Sometimes she thinks she knows too much, until she remembers the many mysteries that make up her life.
The voice in the air tells her that she is strong, stronger than everyone around her. She doesn't bother telling it that she has known this for a long, long time. She still talks to it, albeit surreptitiously. She has never told anyone about it, because it comes on a cool breeze, even on the hottest days, when the house is so still that she can hear the rasp of her breathing. Subconsciously, she knows it has something to do with the blue eyes that watch her, but she dares not let her mind connect the two, for fear of her dream.
She does, however, know that she is being prepared for something, that she is meant for something more than the clockwork jobs and papery lives that her friends will go through. She knows this despite her father's constant insistence on practicality, a trait that contrasts sharply with his buried fear and his strange, unbending rules. Yet, because he is her father, she majors in economics, fully intending to apply for an internship at a successful consulting firm. This way, her father says, lies money. What he doesn't say is that this way, too, lies normality. He doesn't need to.
She has a normal life. She smiles, and she talks, and she does passably well in her classes – enough to give her the GPA she needs for her future job and MBA, but not enough to make her truly stand out. She knows she is quietly funny, and she would not lack for friends if she truly wanted them. But all the people she meets are shiny, happy people, people with bright eyes and gleaming smiles. And while she too can do that, there are parts of her life that are dark with ignorance, pieces of her that are rooted in something very deep and very old. She once tried to join a club of students who were interested in tarot and in divination, but they flustered her with their talk of light and security. Her version of the tarot takes her to strange places, and she has frightened more than a few people when they find that her spread always comes out peopled with the Major Arcana. Even when they have been taken out of the deck.
She has been afraid for much of her life, fettered by fear and restrained by doubt. Her life has not been her own, because it has always been shadowed over by her father's worries and by her constantly absent grandparents. But she has been slowly learning that she can take back her life. This is why she keeps her dream journal; it gives her a modicum of control over the strangeness that is her own mind. She knows, though, there is something deep within her that is unbendable and hard as diamond, something that she suspects her father and her grandparents have tried to take away from her. She won't let them do that anymore. She is getting sick of the secrets and the lies that are her life.
-----
The dream comes more often now, sometimes even twice a night, so that she feels like she is living through an endless loop of time, running like a hamster in a wheel.
The voice in the air gets louder all the time, and the temperature around her gets colder. She wears cardigans and sweaters even on the hottest days, and she thinks back to her name and is amused.
Summer knows something is about to change.
-----
Her father calls her down one day, and they sit side by side on the worn couch in the living room, each staring ahead, trying not to acknowledge each other. Finally, her father turns toward her and tells her that Grandma Jenny is dead. She hasn't thought of her grandmother as a "Grandma Jenny" for a very long time. She is not sure how to react. She loved her grandmother once, a long time ago, enjoyed the scary stories she told, but now, those memories are overlaid by recollections of sternness and perpetual no's. Now her grandfather is alone in that cold house of theirs. Although her father's voice trembles as he gives her the mundane details -- time of death, cause of death, death, death, death echoes in her brain -- she doesn't know her father well enough to tell if it shakes out of sorrow or out of fear. She suspects the latter, but then, that doesn't take too much brainpower on her part. She is fairly certain that her father hasn't talked to his parents in over ten years.
But apparently, now, he must. They are returning to the cold house to bury her grandmother, and Summer does not want to go. She notices suddenly that she is hot, has been hot for the past few days, and quickly sheds her cardigan and wilts in the summer heat.
Summer dreams at night now, and she remembers them all. This night, she wakes up again, chilled. She has to get up and dig around her closet to find her comforter, recently abandoned for a thin cotton sheet. Huddled up and warm at last, she lets her hand roam over the nightstand, fingers searching for the familiar textures of cloth binding and cheap plastic, finally unearthing the dream journal and a Bic pen, mutilated by years of chewing on the end. This time, instead of allowing the open journal to flip back shut, she writes. The dream is different, but she knows it is still the same dream from childhood.
The next night, she wakes up in an unfamiliar room. The smell of camphor and mothballs and age seeps into her nose as if for the first time, as though sleep has erased her sensory memory. Randomly, she remembers that rabbits have a system so their noses never dull, and she wonders if this is what is happening to her. She sniffs a little more, experimentally, halfway expecting a whiff of musk, but nothing predatory stalks her now. At least, nothing her dull nose can discover. Finally, she remembers that she is in her grandmother's house, in her dead grandmother's bed. Her grandfather took over the guest room long ago, and her father is sleeping in his old room, which leaves this wide, strange bed for her.
She does not like this room, does not like how she must blindly grope around to find the light. Her bedroom at home is known to her, as familiar to her as the contours of her own face, the dark a quietly reassuring presence. Here, though, it is suffocating, laden with memories that are not her own. She finally turns on the small lamp next to the bed after nearly knocking down her glass of water, and the buzzing blue light of the fluorescent bulb hurts her eyes. She cannot find her old pen, probably because it slipped her mind during the hurried packing, and instead, she must flip through her grandmother's drawers to find another one.
The nightstand drawer is filled with old papers, yellow and musty, and Summer shuffles through them with a kind of awe. She has always loved old things, often felt as though she lives more in the past than in the now. She wonders what was written on those papers -- were they simply old bills and bank statements saved up? She is tempted, wants desperately to flip through them, to feel the crinkly, dry paper in her hands, smell the combination of faded ink and herbal medicine. She wonders if her grandmother did things like collect photographs of her, the only grandchild, if she put scented sachets in her drawers, if she knitted cardigans. She doubts it. Her family is too strange for such things. As she reaches in for the papers, her hand brushes against something pleasantly cool and hard. Summer wraps her fingers around it, lets her thumb rub the grain of some wood.
It is a stave, around the length of her forearm, carved from a dark wood. She suddenly notices the underside is not as smooth as the side lying in the palm of her hand and turns the stave over. Nordic runes, diamond bright, are etched into the surface, and Summer's head begins to spin.
She has only used her deck of rune oracle cards once out of respect of the look, and the wealth of information and images carved on this single piece of wood astounds her. They wend their spidery way across the surface, each rune completely distinct yet impossible to separate from the others. The carvings are emphasized, filled by some unknown substance that renders them slickly liquid and filled with light. Summer leans in and sniffs, wondering if it could be nail polish.
She has completely forgotten about her dream and her journal and instead reaches over to turn off the light, allowing the faintly glowing runes to illuminate the room.
She can sleep now.
Her fingers close around the stave, and she dreams of shadows and ice and a blue-eyed boy she has known for all her life.
-----
He watched her sleep, watched the thin blankets over her chest move so slowly up and down, up and down. As he watched, he remembered the many other times he watched another girl of her age sleep and dream, how he used to count that girl's breaths, amazed at the life flowing through her.
This girl was like her yet not, dark where she had been light. Jenny had been his sun, his torch, burning oh so brightly against the night of his world, her smiles flaming. But not for him. This girl looked like Jenny, so much that it hurt him, but she wasn't.
But because of a promise, he watched all the same.
-----
Summer wakes up to the sound of angry voices, and she is confused. Her life has been one of deadly silences, of unsaid words hanging heavily like dust in the thick air. She can't hear the words, but she barely recognizes her father's voice, for it is twisted, laden with hatred and rage and a seething pain that she cannot reconcile with her calm, frightened father.
Another voice snakes in next to her, one far more familiar to her than that of her father's.
"Don't you hate it when they go on like that?"
Summer nods, wary, her hands clutching the stave as though somehow, it will help her.
"I hate them," she says. "I hate being here."
She also hates the way her voice trembles, not strong at all, not like she could be.
"I knew your grandmother. Very well," the voice continues, and, like always, it is soft, yet perfectly distinct, each word hitting the air and crystallizing, like a drop of water turning quickly into brittle ice. The voice is comfortable, the only sure thing in a world gone upside down.
"I knew your father and grandfather as well. They weren't like you." It croons in her ear, telling her things she already knows.
She doesn't reply, just lets the sounds of its whispers wind their way through her hair, around her neck, shivering as the cold air brushes past her lips.
"I like you, Summer," the voice drawls, slowly, dripping honey and sugar. "Wouldn't you like to meet me?"
She can almost taste it on her tongue, and she knows it would burn like the surreptitious sip of scotch she took from her father's liquor cabinet, warming her up and setting her insides aglow. She desperately wants to see the face behind the voice she's known so long, the voice that's deepened and ripened with age, the one that makes her doubt all the girls' gossip about sex.
And suddenly, while she tries to still her wildly beating heart, her father storms through the door, stopping abruptly, his eyes fixed on the stave in her hands.
She's almost forgotten she holds it still, unconscious that during the entire unheard conversation, she's been running her fingers up and down the cool wood, taking pleasure in tracing the runes with her skin.
Her father looks from the stave to her lidded eyes, and Summer smiles a little to herself. She's not Daddy's little girl, never was. Daddy just hasn't quite figured that out yet.
He turns around suddenly, but not before she sees the look in his eyes. It's different from the normal look, the one that used to stop her from doing bad things, like staying out at night or talking to strange boys. No, this look goes deeper than fear, and Summer is suddenly certain that her father has seen his worst fear come back to mock him.
She doesn't care.
The second the door is closed again, she says in a voice as flat and devoid of emotion as possible: "Tell me what to do."
It whispers more honeyed words in her ear, and she laps it up, craving the sweetness like a drug.
-----
Tom curses Jenny's name under his breath as he hears his son's news, hating the fact that even though she is dead now, finally gone, her decisions remain to haunt them. He hasn't seen his son or his granddaughter for thirteen years, and those years have not been kind to any of them. His son is a coward who has tried for too long to hide from the world, and his granddaughter beyond his comprehension.
He sees the ripples that the past has made growing larger, and he knows that soon, he too will be swallowed by the waves. But he will rectify this if it is the last thing he does.
He calls up Audrey and Summer, the only two who have survived the years, asks them to come to Jenny's funeral, but Summer's already frail mind cannot bear the thought of her still-beloved Jenny dead in a box, and Audrey is too heart-broken and bitter to even bother. He tries to explain to her that Michael was and is missed by them all, but he only gets in a few words before she hangs up on him.
He doesn't know enough to do anything, never really had a chance to read up on the runes. His son, though, is a different matter.
"Nathan, please," he asks his son's condemning eyes. "She needs to be kept under control. You, of all people, should know what she could be capable of."
"Fine," his son snaps. "But only until tomorrow. Then I'm taking her away from all this, out of the country if it's necessary. But I swear by all that's holy, she will be kept safe. Even if it's from herself."
Tom nods. It's good enough.
-----
Julian was disoriented the first time he came back, his mind clouded and confused by the clashes of sound and color, his senses reeling from shock. He heard Jenny's voice, smelled her skin, met the bright green of her eyes. Yet, he was still not quite in the world, bound to the stave on which his name was carved, one which had not yet soaked up life-giving blood.
She had given him freedom for freedom, wanted him to do something for her.
"You love me, right, Julian?" she asked, and he could not refuse her anything.
-----
Summer jiggles the doorknob again, hoping that somehow, it will twist like it should and free her from her prison. She is momentarily shocked when, as she backs away in frustration, the doorknob turns of its own accord to let in her father.
She doesn't bother asking him why he's doing this, because she knows already, even before he lunges for the stave. Only, she doesn't know why she can't simply let him have it, why only her hands must touch the wood and the sacred runes. So she lashes out, thirteen years of bottled anger boiling to the surface to explode in her muscles, granting her an unexpected strength.
"You can't have it!" she screams, and she loves how the words tear out of her throat, loves the force and the noise. She's finally breaking away from all the restraints that have shackled her since childhood, and she'll be damned if she lets her father take that away from her.
"It's for you own good, Summer; you have to listen to me. It's evil, it's why we all live the way we do. It's for you own good, now, listen to me!"
She strikes out at her father, catching his cheek with her fingers. She is sick of being told what to do because it is good for her, tired of trusting her father, who can never make the right decisions, and she burns with the desire to do something just to let herself know that she's alive, that she's not just some puppet of her family's.
Her father stares at her, shocked.
Summer takes the opportunity to wrest the stave out of his limp hands and runs out of the house, away from the must and the camphor and the shackles of memory and age and into the scorching summer heat.
She finds a hotel in the area, paying for it out of the savings account set up for graduate school. She has to search long and hard to find something in this tourist town that isn't quaint and charming, but in the end, she is rewarded with a hotel made of glass and steel. The sharp lines and clean smells of the room delight her, and she glories in the burnished metal décor. She knows now why she has been fascinated with the past, and now, she is no longer interested. Her family's past has taken over her life, draped her with its cobwebs and layers of dust; it has attempted to make her as immobile as it, tried to drain her of her will and leave her nothing but an empty doll.
She wants nothing more than to leave it all behind her now.
She calls again on the voice, and it wraps around her, cold as always, and she asks it what she must do. She's ready now.
The next day, she calmly spreads pages from the complimentary hotel newspaper on the bathroom floor and carefully checks the edge of the razor blade. Quickly, she slices down across her wrist and holds her arm over a glass. She grows dizzier as the blood flows, yet she is fascinated by the color, darker than she had imagined. When she has around a quarter of a cup, she quickly binds her wrist with a towel, ignoring the blood that still seeps from underneath to stain her fingers.
She coats the stave in her own blood, and the temperature of the room drops noticeably, enough to make her shiver. Her eyes widen as the dark wood absorbs the liquid, the runes flashing ruby. She doesn't allow herself to be frightened, not when she's out on her own for the first time, and she hurries to trace each individual rune over in her blood before it coagulates.
"Isa," she begins, her voice shaking slightly, and as her finger traces the straight vertical line onto the stave, the walls ice over and the room begins to shake. The names of all the runes and their meanings pour into her head and into her blood, and she again remembers the shot of scotch, but this, this is so much more potent and heady. She feels drunk, as though her world is spinning around its axis, and as the power courses through her body, she laughs at her father and at her grandparents' house, and she scorns their fear.
She doesn't notice how numb her fingers are, nor does she find it strange that her blood, both in the cup and in her veins, is steaming hot.
Her voice is hoarse and strained as she finishes the last rune on the stave, and she has had to refill the cup twice. Her head is spinning, and for a second, she is worried that she has given up too much blood. Everything surrounding her is coated in her blood, still wet and rawly red despite the hours that have passed, yet, the stave itself remains free of the dark liquid. The only hints that it has been drenched in it are the gleams of ruby and garnet in the runes, jewel-bright and beautiful. It hurts to breathe in the room now because the icy air assaults her nose and mouth, and she can feel the icicles forming in her hair.
She is almost done though, and she refuses to give up now. She paints the final rune, uruz, for piercing through the veils of the world, on the wall, and suddenly, her voice is not her own anymore. She chants in Nordic now, her voice keening and wailing, sharper than the cruel frost of the room, and the spell crescendos as her voice suddenly returns to her and the ice on the walls and ceiling melts, drenching her.
There is a maelstrom of wind and water, of fire and air in front of her, and she is forced to shield herself from its relentless fury.
It stops, suddenly, as the stave clatters to the ground from her nerveless fingers, and in front of her on the tiled floor, a figure begins to form.
He is all ice hair and baby soft skin, too pale and slender for this world. She feels a sudden desire to see his face, and before she knows it, a blood-stained finger has brushed against his skin, which feels at once soft as an old flannel blanket and as hard and firm as rock. The blood fingerprint she leaves disappears before her eyes, his skin soaking it up like the stave, and suddenly, the blood everywhere melts away, leaving her, soaked to the skin and shivering with remembrance of the cold, standing in a room full of crumpled newspapers and this man.
She notices as he slowly begins to stir, and his head starts to turn her way.
When the dark lashes sweep up to reveal brilliant blue eyes, eyes a color that her grandmother could never describe, Summer feels lost, a small child again, drowning in the sheer blueness.
Quietly, she names him.
"Julian," she says without understanding how she knows this.
-----
In a fashionable studio on the Upper West Side, Audrey drops the picture of Michael and curses as the glass breaks. She suddenly feels the splinters of glass on the floor pierce through her heart, and she wishes desperately that Michael were alive, that he were here, steadying her. He's not, though. And instead of her own reflection in the broken glass, she sees blue eyes.
-----
Summer is napping, anticipating a visit from her grandchildren. Her eyelids flutter open, and she thinks she hears a familiar voice, something from her past, something from those forgotten months of her life. But she can't remember, and somehow, she believes this is for the best.
-----
Across the town, Tom tastes despair and failure once more. Something unpleasant is on the back of his tongue; yet, when he thinks about it, the taste disappears. He remembers this, unlike Summer. He remembers hours and minutes of this, of constantly scraping his tongue against his teeth, remembers how it made the seconds go by like years. Jenny's kiss used to get rid of it, used to eradicate the taste of the Shadow World, but Jenny's kiss stopped doing that many years ago. Bad things come in threes, Tom knows, just like the fairy tales said, just like how the glittery eyes in the shadows are real.
-----
Nathan wants to run into his mother's arms again, wants to find his father, because the scars on his back hurt, they bleed, and they inflict an old pain on him. But his mother is dead, and his father is angry, and neither of them cared enough for him to prevent the scars in the first place. And now his daughter, his stupid little girl, she has been bad, she has done something very, very wrong.
And there will be hell to pay, once more.
-----
Summer sits in the middle of the hotel room, frozen to the ground. The smell of her blood clings to her hair and to her clothes, and all the melting ice could not, or would not, wash it off. But she smells different now, wilder. She doesn't think she is imagining it. Something about the man or the monster curled on her bathroom floor has gotten into the air so now she smells ice and the crispness of snow, even in the middle of a sterile hotel room.
She's not as strong as she thought, she realizes, as her entire body quivers with fear and anticipation.
-----
Julian slowly, very slowly, regains his senses. The floor beneath him is hard and cold, with a nubbly towel under his hip. He hurts. He is too new, and everything bruises him. The white everywhere stabs at his eyes, and the hum of the lights invades his head like flies. And yet, he is old, and he recognizes this. But it never hurt like this before, never felt as though he's been remade from inside out. And this time, he cannot smell Jenny, cannot feel her golden presence. She's not here, she's not cradling his cheek and asking him if he still loves her with a desperate look in her eyes. Yet, he vaguely remembers frightened green eyes staring into his. Suddenly, the smell of blood and magic hits him, and he knows. He has been remade. He has been renamed.
He is real again. A smile curves dangerously across his face at the realization, because now, he cannot be bound by obligation or by anyone's will save his own.
Still, he wants to find out who did this. And one burning question is in his mind. He wants to know what has happened to Jenny, wants to find out if her desperate bid for escape worked.
So very shakily, he gets to his feet. Each second, he marvels at the feel of the wall against his fingertips, of the glass and metal of the shower door at his back. He carefully steps on the crumpled newspaper scattered on the floor, just to feel it crinkle and fold under his feet.
He opens the door, and suddenly, he cannot hear or see or smell or taste or feel anything but her. It's Jenny. She's curled up, her arms hug her knees to her chest, and her well-known, well-loved face rests on her knees. He wants to comfort her so she no longer shakes, he wants to watch her breathe, he wants to know that she is quivering because she is afraid of him, because she wants him.
He doesn't know what he wants.
Jenny has seen him, and she startles, her green eyes widening. Something in the way she moves, something in her expression clues him in. This isn't Jenny. His senses stop deceiving him, and he notices her hair is dark brown, not golden, notices the slight irregularities in her features that aren't Jenny. The ever-present clean scent of pine needles and soap that he always thought of as Jenny isn't there, and in its place is blood, sweat, and fear.
He remembers now that Jenny is dead. That this is Summer, who he's been watching for years. He remembers his ghostly half existence. But now, everything has changed, and he has this snippet of a girl to thank. Except she is not Jenny, except Jenny is dead, and he wants to hurt her because she is not golden blonde and clean and pretty. He thought being flesh again would make him free, but he was wrong. He is still bound, bound by words and by blood. So he will not hurt her. Well, he thinks. Not too much.
-----
He's standing there, naked, in the middle of the room, and Summer can do nothing but ogle and then desperately try to avert her eyes. She's dreamed of him for years, but he is here now, in the flesh, and he is perfect. She jumps a little as he stares at her. She can feel him inside her, and the overt hunger in his gaze frightens her and excites her. Finally, she understands her father's warnings about boys, she understands the electricity that those airbrushed romance novels are always talking about.
What she doesn't understand is what this is. She is falling, yes, but not in love. Her panties are wet and her skin is on fire; her heart is beating madly. And his expression changes. Somehow, right before her eyes, he turns sleek and deadly beautiful, no longer a man entranced. Somehow, this only makes her wetter, hotter, more desperate.
"You're not Jenny," he says, and his voice is now rough. It's not the seductive and slow voice that talked to her through the years, it's not the honeyed purr that persuaded her to bring this man, this demon, back to life. But no, she thinks. He did not persuade her. This is her own doing, and she alone is to bear the weight of this. He used to tell her that she was strong, but now he looks at her as though she's despicable, as though her very presence hurts him.
She won't understand this until later, when she finds an old, faded picture of her grandparents' wedding. She will stare at the photograph, at her grandmother's face, which is eerily like her own, but somehow purer and finer. She will grow to hate her grandmother because she is light to Summer's dark and because she can never escape her past, especially when it has been carved into her very features.
"No," she says in return. "I'm not."
And she stares him in the eye, and she dares him to wish she were her grandmother. He doesn't, though, which brings a smile to her face. She may have fallen, she may have landed somewhere not even remotely close to the normal life her father wanted her to lead, but this is much, much better. Past be damned. Summer is tired of its bars and prohibitions, of the way it silently and stealthily caged her in this world. She doesn't care that he so obviously loved her grandmother, because her grandmother is not here. It's only her, and the long stretch of open road below of her now, which she fully intends to travel.
Yes.
Her first step is to gently step up to him, her legs unsteady. He looks surprised at first, and a little lost, and Summer remembers again who she is not. But she doesn't want to be defined by negatives anymore. His softness quickly dissolves, and his smile creeps out like the edge of a knife. It's a challenge, she knows, and she meets it, kissing him, cutting her lips on his smile and his teeth.
She's never had fruit more exotic than an apple, but her blood tastes like pomegranate seeds on her tongue, and in that instant, she knows he'll take her to another world, another place, another life.
She likes the thought of that.
-----
All Julian can think is that her blood tastes of cobwebs and ashes. Even the scent of magic reminds him of another day, another dizzying return. He's watched her since she was a child, and he knows that look in her eyes. She thinks she's breaking all the rules, breaking out of her cages, but he knows that all she's doing is a variation of an old pattern. He recognizes the look in her eyes because he knows her, but also because he knew Jenny, and he saw her green eyes narrow the exact same way when she brought him back.
This time, though, he's not chained with love, and he's not obligated to unlock her cage.
He kisses her back, and there is no passion or tenderness in the act. She's not Jenny, but she'll do.
Rating: Er. R? Yay for blood and resurrection and shadow men.
Spoilers: For all the trilogy, but set so far in the future that it probably doesn't matter
Summary: Take one Mary Sue, make her the granddaughter of the original heroine, add in the sexy villain of the piece, stir, fold in a gratuitous ending fix, mix in angst and darkness galore, serve half done. Jenny picked the wrong guy, is all. (aka, this is a work in progress)
Notes: This is based on the Forbidden Game trilogy by LJ Smith, who used to write YA horror/romance sort of in the style of Christopher Pike. Except, with more soulmates and vampires. I used to love it I don't know why I am writing fic for this, given that me, my sister and my cousin are the only people on the planet who have read these, but... it took over my brain like alien spawn?
I like comments. A beta would be rewarded by lots of exclamation points and grovelling.
----------------------------
Summer doesn't understand many things about her life.
She knows she was named after Great-Aunt Summer, but she doesn't know why.
She doesn't know why her father won't talk to her grandparents, but she suspects it has to do with their haunted house. She has only visited her grandparents twice, and the second time, a chill breeze accompanied her the entire time. She mentioned it to her grandmother, and she was never allowed back again.
Summer doesn't know why her father's face freezes when he looks at her growing collection of tarot cards or her stack of fantasy books. Nor can she understand his panic attack when she buys Haindl's rune oracle, even though she already has the Haindl tarot deck.
She thinks it has something to do with the white scars on his back.
Summer doesn't know why her grandparents hate each other. They still live in their perpetually cold house together, but they never talk.
She doesn't understand why her father still won't let her go out with friends after sunset, even though she is twenty. She cannot date boys who have not met her father and both grandparents, even though none of them talk to each other anymore. She doesn't know why she grew up without Monopoly, Risk, Snakes and Ladders, or any of the other board games her friends had.
Summer doesn't know why she sometimes believes there are eyes watching her all the time. She thinks this started after her second visit to her grandparents' place. Somehow, she knows the eyes are blue.
She wonders why the Devil crosses her in every tarot reading she has ever received.
Summer is about to find out.
-----
Summer sleeps. Occasionally she dreams, and when she does, and when she remembers it all, it is always the same dream. A dream journal, filled with scribblings on surreal happenings that sometimes, always eerily, come true in life, sits on the corner of her nightstand, always within reach. Summer never knows when she will dream again, and when she does, she wants to be prepared.
She wakes up suddenly, startled, and instinctively reaches for the journal, flips it open, feels around for a pen. It is almost a ritual by now, the pen settling comfortably in the groove in her middle finger, the journal's weathered pages expectantly awaiting the ink. As thought overtakes action, she realizes, with no great surprise, that there is nothing to write. It was the monster dream, the one that had sent her crying to her father more than once as a child. After he found out she had been consistently having the same dream for nights on end, the look in his eyes stopped her from running to him again. Summer sometimes feels as though the look rules her life.
She wishes, at times like these, she had closer friends. She has friends, although she is shy and strange, but she cannot tell them many things about her own life, because she does not know herself. Often, she does not wish to explain the oddities that are her life, ones that she is aware of only because she found out in kindergarten that other people have two parents. Other people do not believe in ghosts and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, but then, other people have never spent a night in her grandmother's house. If she had these friends, perhaps she could tell them about the dreams.
To her relief, Summer does not ordinarily remember her dreams. She used to think this was because she did not dream, but her introductory psychology course told her that everyone dreamed. She still remembers the story of the cat that went crazy because they cut out its pons, its dream center, and she wonders how that would feel. Sometimes she thinks it would be a relief. Other times, she thinks insanity is the same as dreaming, only for all hours. If she were insane, she would be living her dream.
The dream is how she knows that the eyes are blue.
-----
As a child, she used to talk to the air. She stopped when she saw the look. These days, the look no longer stops her.
She can feel herself growing in strength, batting at the bars her father and her grandparents have set around her. Two weeks ago, she came home before sunset like a good girl, but after dinner, she locked her room and climbed out the window. She didn't do much, just walked around the block and sat on the roof outside for most of the night, but now she knows she can.
Her father never noticed she was missing.
Summer isn't surprised by this. Her father never realized she had gotten her period until a few years after the fact. She thinks that if she had never given him the grocery bag with her tampons to unload, he never would have found out. She wished desperately afterwards that she hadn't given in to the temptation, because after that, her father sat her down and talked to her about sex. She had known about sex already, of course. Locker room stories and the internet had taught her far better than her father ever could, and the voice from the air is a better teacher than all of them combined. Her father tried to paint sex as a safe act, as something loving and sheltering, but Summer knows better than that.
She knows that sex can feel like something that burns you from inside out, immolating everything that was you, or that it can be cold and rote, a series of actions that cumulates in sticky fluids and discarded condoms. Sometimes she thinks she knows too much, until she remembers the many mysteries that make up her life.
The voice in the air tells her that she is strong, stronger than everyone around her. She doesn't bother telling it that she has known this for a long, long time. She still talks to it, albeit surreptitiously. She has never told anyone about it, because it comes on a cool breeze, even on the hottest days, when the house is so still that she can hear the rasp of her breathing. Subconsciously, she knows it has something to do with the blue eyes that watch her, but she dares not let her mind connect the two, for fear of her dream.
She does, however, know that she is being prepared for something, that she is meant for something more than the clockwork jobs and papery lives that her friends will go through. She knows this despite her father's constant insistence on practicality, a trait that contrasts sharply with his buried fear and his strange, unbending rules. Yet, because he is her father, she majors in economics, fully intending to apply for an internship at a successful consulting firm. This way, her father says, lies money. What he doesn't say is that this way, too, lies normality. He doesn't need to.
She has a normal life. She smiles, and she talks, and she does passably well in her classes – enough to give her the GPA she needs for her future job and MBA, but not enough to make her truly stand out. She knows she is quietly funny, and she would not lack for friends if she truly wanted them. But all the people she meets are shiny, happy people, people with bright eyes and gleaming smiles. And while she too can do that, there are parts of her life that are dark with ignorance, pieces of her that are rooted in something very deep and very old. She once tried to join a club of students who were interested in tarot and in divination, but they flustered her with their talk of light and security. Her version of the tarot takes her to strange places, and she has frightened more than a few people when they find that her spread always comes out peopled with the Major Arcana. Even when they have been taken out of the deck.
She has been afraid for much of her life, fettered by fear and restrained by doubt. Her life has not been her own, because it has always been shadowed over by her father's worries and by her constantly absent grandparents. But she has been slowly learning that she can take back her life. This is why she keeps her dream journal; it gives her a modicum of control over the strangeness that is her own mind. She knows, though, there is something deep within her that is unbendable and hard as diamond, something that she suspects her father and her grandparents have tried to take away from her. She won't let them do that anymore. She is getting sick of the secrets and the lies that are her life.
-----
The dream comes more often now, sometimes even twice a night, so that she feels like she is living through an endless loop of time, running like a hamster in a wheel.
The voice in the air gets louder all the time, and the temperature around her gets colder. She wears cardigans and sweaters even on the hottest days, and she thinks back to her name and is amused.
Summer knows something is about to change.
-----
Her father calls her down one day, and they sit side by side on the worn couch in the living room, each staring ahead, trying not to acknowledge each other. Finally, her father turns toward her and tells her that Grandma Jenny is dead. She hasn't thought of her grandmother as a "Grandma Jenny" for a very long time. She is not sure how to react. She loved her grandmother once, a long time ago, enjoyed the scary stories she told, but now, those memories are overlaid by recollections of sternness and perpetual no's. Now her grandfather is alone in that cold house of theirs. Although her father's voice trembles as he gives her the mundane details -- time of death, cause of death, death, death, death echoes in her brain -- she doesn't know her father well enough to tell if it shakes out of sorrow or out of fear. She suspects the latter, but then, that doesn't take too much brainpower on her part. She is fairly certain that her father hasn't talked to his parents in over ten years.
But apparently, now, he must. They are returning to the cold house to bury her grandmother, and Summer does not want to go. She notices suddenly that she is hot, has been hot for the past few days, and quickly sheds her cardigan and wilts in the summer heat.
Summer dreams at night now, and she remembers them all. This night, she wakes up again, chilled. She has to get up and dig around her closet to find her comforter, recently abandoned for a thin cotton sheet. Huddled up and warm at last, she lets her hand roam over the nightstand, fingers searching for the familiar textures of cloth binding and cheap plastic, finally unearthing the dream journal and a Bic pen, mutilated by years of chewing on the end. This time, instead of allowing the open journal to flip back shut, she writes. The dream is different, but she knows it is still the same dream from childhood.
The next night, she wakes up in an unfamiliar room. The smell of camphor and mothballs and age seeps into her nose as if for the first time, as though sleep has erased her sensory memory. Randomly, she remembers that rabbits have a system so their noses never dull, and she wonders if this is what is happening to her. She sniffs a little more, experimentally, halfway expecting a whiff of musk, but nothing predatory stalks her now. At least, nothing her dull nose can discover. Finally, she remembers that she is in her grandmother's house, in her dead grandmother's bed. Her grandfather took over the guest room long ago, and her father is sleeping in his old room, which leaves this wide, strange bed for her.
She does not like this room, does not like how she must blindly grope around to find the light. Her bedroom at home is known to her, as familiar to her as the contours of her own face, the dark a quietly reassuring presence. Here, though, it is suffocating, laden with memories that are not her own. She finally turns on the small lamp next to the bed after nearly knocking down her glass of water, and the buzzing blue light of the fluorescent bulb hurts her eyes. She cannot find her old pen, probably because it slipped her mind during the hurried packing, and instead, she must flip through her grandmother's drawers to find another one.
The nightstand drawer is filled with old papers, yellow and musty, and Summer shuffles through them with a kind of awe. She has always loved old things, often felt as though she lives more in the past than in the now. She wonders what was written on those papers -- were they simply old bills and bank statements saved up? She is tempted, wants desperately to flip through them, to feel the crinkly, dry paper in her hands, smell the combination of faded ink and herbal medicine. She wonders if her grandmother did things like collect photographs of her, the only grandchild, if she put scented sachets in her drawers, if she knitted cardigans. She doubts it. Her family is too strange for such things. As she reaches in for the papers, her hand brushes against something pleasantly cool and hard. Summer wraps her fingers around it, lets her thumb rub the grain of some wood.
It is a stave, around the length of her forearm, carved from a dark wood. She suddenly notices the underside is not as smooth as the side lying in the palm of her hand and turns the stave over. Nordic runes, diamond bright, are etched into the surface, and Summer's head begins to spin.
She has only used her deck of rune oracle cards once out of respect of the look, and the wealth of information and images carved on this single piece of wood astounds her. They wend their spidery way across the surface, each rune completely distinct yet impossible to separate from the others. The carvings are emphasized, filled by some unknown substance that renders them slickly liquid and filled with light. Summer leans in and sniffs, wondering if it could be nail polish.
She has completely forgotten about her dream and her journal and instead reaches over to turn off the light, allowing the faintly glowing runes to illuminate the room.
She can sleep now.
Her fingers close around the stave, and she dreams of shadows and ice and a blue-eyed boy she has known for all her life.
-----
He watched her sleep, watched the thin blankets over her chest move so slowly up and down, up and down. As he watched, he remembered the many other times he watched another girl of her age sleep and dream, how he used to count that girl's breaths, amazed at the life flowing through her.
This girl was like her yet not, dark where she had been light. Jenny had been his sun, his torch, burning oh so brightly against the night of his world, her smiles flaming. But not for him. This girl looked like Jenny, so much that it hurt him, but she wasn't.
But because of a promise, he watched all the same.
-----
Summer wakes up to the sound of angry voices, and she is confused. Her life has been one of deadly silences, of unsaid words hanging heavily like dust in the thick air. She can't hear the words, but she barely recognizes her father's voice, for it is twisted, laden with hatred and rage and a seething pain that she cannot reconcile with her calm, frightened father.
Another voice snakes in next to her, one far more familiar to her than that of her father's.
"Don't you hate it when they go on like that?"
Summer nods, wary, her hands clutching the stave as though somehow, it will help her.
"I hate them," she says. "I hate being here."
She also hates the way her voice trembles, not strong at all, not like she could be.
"I knew your grandmother. Very well," the voice continues, and, like always, it is soft, yet perfectly distinct, each word hitting the air and crystallizing, like a drop of water turning quickly into brittle ice. The voice is comfortable, the only sure thing in a world gone upside down.
"I knew your father and grandfather as well. They weren't like you." It croons in her ear, telling her things she already knows.
She doesn't reply, just lets the sounds of its whispers wind their way through her hair, around her neck, shivering as the cold air brushes past her lips.
"I like you, Summer," the voice drawls, slowly, dripping honey and sugar. "Wouldn't you like to meet me?"
She can almost taste it on her tongue, and she knows it would burn like the surreptitious sip of scotch she took from her father's liquor cabinet, warming her up and setting her insides aglow. She desperately wants to see the face behind the voice she's known so long, the voice that's deepened and ripened with age, the one that makes her doubt all the girls' gossip about sex.
And suddenly, while she tries to still her wildly beating heart, her father storms through the door, stopping abruptly, his eyes fixed on the stave in her hands.
She's almost forgotten she holds it still, unconscious that during the entire unheard conversation, she's been running her fingers up and down the cool wood, taking pleasure in tracing the runes with her skin.
Her father looks from the stave to her lidded eyes, and Summer smiles a little to herself. She's not Daddy's little girl, never was. Daddy just hasn't quite figured that out yet.
He turns around suddenly, but not before she sees the look in his eyes. It's different from the normal look, the one that used to stop her from doing bad things, like staying out at night or talking to strange boys. No, this look goes deeper than fear, and Summer is suddenly certain that her father has seen his worst fear come back to mock him.
She doesn't care.
The second the door is closed again, she says in a voice as flat and devoid of emotion as possible: "Tell me what to do."
It whispers more honeyed words in her ear, and she laps it up, craving the sweetness like a drug.
-----
Tom curses Jenny's name under his breath as he hears his son's news, hating the fact that even though she is dead now, finally gone, her decisions remain to haunt them. He hasn't seen his son or his granddaughter for thirteen years, and those years have not been kind to any of them. His son is a coward who has tried for too long to hide from the world, and his granddaughter beyond his comprehension.
He sees the ripples that the past has made growing larger, and he knows that soon, he too will be swallowed by the waves. But he will rectify this if it is the last thing he does.
He calls up Audrey and Summer, the only two who have survived the years, asks them to come to Jenny's funeral, but Summer's already frail mind cannot bear the thought of her still-beloved Jenny dead in a box, and Audrey is too heart-broken and bitter to even bother. He tries to explain to her that Michael was and is missed by them all, but he only gets in a few words before she hangs up on him.
He doesn't know enough to do anything, never really had a chance to read up on the runes. His son, though, is a different matter.
"Nathan, please," he asks his son's condemning eyes. "She needs to be kept under control. You, of all people, should know what she could be capable of."
"Fine," his son snaps. "But only until tomorrow. Then I'm taking her away from all this, out of the country if it's necessary. But I swear by all that's holy, she will be kept safe. Even if it's from herself."
Tom nods. It's good enough.
-----
Julian was disoriented the first time he came back, his mind clouded and confused by the clashes of sound and color, his senses reeling from shock. He heard Jenny's voice, smelled her skin, met the bright green of her eyes. Yet, he was still not quite in the world, bound to the stave on which his name was carved, one which had not yet soaked up life-giving blood.
She had given him freedom for freedom, wanted him to do something for her.
"You love me, right, Julian?" she asked, and he could not refuse her anything.
-----
Summer jiggles the doorknob again, hoping that somehow, it will twist like it should and free her from her prison. She is momentarily shocked when, as she backs away in frustration, the doorknob turns of its own accord to let in her father.
She doesn't bother asking him why he's doing this, because she knows already, even before he lunges for the stave. Only, she doesn't know why she can't simply let him have it, why only her hands must touch the wood and the sacred runes. So she lashes out, thirteen years of bottled anger boiling to the surface to explode in her muscles, granting her an unexpected strength.
"You can't have it!" she screams, and she loves how the words tear out of her throat, loves the force and the noise. She's finally breaking away from all the restraints that have shackled her since childhood, and she'll be damned if she lets her father take that away from her.
"It's for you own good, Summer; you have to listen to me. It's evil, it's why we all live the way we do. It's for you own good, now, listen to me!"
She strikes out at her father, catching his cheek with her fingers. She is sick of being told what to do because it is good for her, tired of trusting her father, who can never make the right decisions, and she burns with the desire to do something just to let herself know that she's alive, that she's not just some puppet of her family's.
Her father stares at her, shocked.
Summer takes the opportunity to wrest the stave out of his limp hands and runs out of the house, away from the must and the camphor and the shackles of memory and age and into the scorching summer heat.
She finds a hotel in the area, paying for it out of the savings account set up for graduate school. She has to search long and hard to find something in this tourist town that isn't quaint and charming, but in the end, she is rewarded with a hotel made of glass and steel. The sharp lines and clean smells of the room delight her, and she glories in the burnished metal décor. She knows now why she has been fascinated with the past, and now, she is no longer interested. Her family's past has taken over her life, draped her with its cobwebs and layers of dust; it has attempted to make her as immobile as it, tried to drain her of her will and leave her nothing but an empty doll.
She wants nothing more than to leave it all behind her now.
She calls again on the voice, and it wraps around her, cold as always, and she asks it what she must do. She's ready now.
The next day, she calmly spreads pages from the complimentary hotel newspaper on the bathroom floor and carefully checks the edge of the razor blade. Quickly, she slices down across her wrist and holds her arm over a glass. She grows dizzier as the blood flows, yet she is fascinated by the color, darker than she had imagined. When she has around a quarter of a cup, she quickly binds her wrist with a towel, ignoring the blood that still seeps from underneath to stain her fingers.
She coats the stave in her own blood, and the temperature of the room drops noticeably, enough to make her shiver. Her eyes widen as the dark wood absorbs the liquid, the runes flashing ruby. She doesn't allow herself to be frightened, not when she's out on her own for the first time, and she hurries to trace each individual rune over in her blood before it coagulates.
"Isa," she begins, her voice shaking slightly, and as her finger traces the straight vertical line onto the stave, the walls ice over and the room begins to shake. The names of all the runes and their meanings pour into her head and into her blood, and she again remembers the shot of scotch, but this, this is so much more potent and heady. She feels drunk, as though her world is spinning around its axis, and as the power courses through her body, she laughs at her father and at her grandparents' house, and she scorns their fear.
She doesn't notice how numb her fingers are, nor does she find it strange that her blood, both in the cup and in her veins, is steaming hot.
Her voice is hoarse and strained as she finishes the last rune on the stave, and she has had to refill the cup twice. Her head is spinning, and for a second, she is worried that she has given up too much blood. Everything surrounding her is coated in her blood, still wet and rawly red despite the hours that have passed, yet, the stave itself remains free of the dark liquid. The only hints that it has been drenched in it are the gleams of ruby and garnet in the runes, jewel-bright and beautiful. It hurts to breathe in the room now because the icy air assaults her nose and mouth, and she can feel the icicles forming in her hair.
She is almost done though, and she refuses to give up now. She paints the final rune, uruz, for piercing through the veils of the world, on the wall, and suddenly, her voice is not her own anymore. She chants in Nordic now, her voice keening and wailing, sharper than the cruel frost of the room, and the spell crescendos as her voice suddenly returns to her and the ice on the walls and ceiling melts, drenching her.
There is a maelstrom of wind and water, of fire and air in front of her, and she is forced to shield herself from its relentless fury.
It stops, suddenly, as the stave clatters to the ground from her nerveless fingers, and in front of her on the tiled floor, a figure begins to form.
He is all ice hair and baby soft skin, too pale and slender for this world. She feels a sudden desire to see his face, and before she knows it, a blood-stained finger has brushed against his skin, which feels at once soft as an old flannel blanket and as hard and firm as rock. The blood fingerprint she leaves disappears before her eyes, his skin soaking it up like the stave, and suddenly, the blood everywhere melts away, leaving her, soaked to the skin and shivering with remembrance of the cold, standing in a room full of crumpled newspapers and this man.
She notices as he slowly begins to stir, and his head starts to turn her way.
When the dark lashes sweep up to reveal brilliant blue eyes, eyes a color that her grandmother could never describe, Summer feels lost, a small child again, drowning in the sheer blueness.
Quietly, she names him.
"Julian," she says without understanding how she knows this.
-----
In a fashionable studio on the Upper West Side, Audrey drops the picture of Michael and curses as the glass breaks. She suddenly feels the splinters of glass on the floor pierce through her heart, and she wishes desperately that Michael were alive, that he were here, steadying her. He's not, though. And instead of her own reflection in the broken glass, she sees blue eyes.
-----
Summer is napping, anticipating a visit from her grandchildren. Her eyelids flutter open, and she thinks she hears a familiar voice, something from her past, something from those forgotten months of her life. But she can't remember, and somehow, she believes this is for the best.
-----
Across the town, Tom tastes despair and failure once more. Something unpleasant is on the back of his tongue; yet, when he thinks about it, the taste disappears. He remembers this, unlike Summer. He remembers hours and minutes of this, of constantly scraping his tongue against his teeth, remembers how it made the seconds go by like years. Jenny's kiss used to get rid of it, used to eradicate the taste of the Shadow World, but Jenny's kiss stopped doing that many years ago. Bad things come in threes, Tom knows, just like the fairy tales said, just like how the glittery eyes in the shadows are real.
-----
Nathan wants to run into his mother's arms again, wants to find his father, because the scars on his back hurt, they bleed, and they inflict an old pain on him. But his mother is dead, and his father is angry, and neither of them cared enough for him to prevent the scars in the first place. And now his daughter, his stupid little girl, she has been bad, she has done something very, very wrong.
And there will be hell to pay, once more.
-----
Summer sits in the middle of the hotel room, frozen to the ground. The smell of her blood clings to her hair and to her clothes, and all the melting ice could not, or would not, wash it off. But she smells different now, wilder. She doesn't think she is imagining it. Something about the man or the monster curled on her bathroom floor has gotten into the air so now she smells ice and the crispness of snow, even in the middle of a sterile hotel room.
She's not as strong as she thought, she realizes, as her entire body quivers with fear and anticipation.
-----
Julian slowly, very slowly, regains his senses. The floor beneath him is hard and cold, with a nubbly towel under his hip. He hurts. He is too new, and everything bruises him. The white everywhere stabs at his eyes, and the hum of the lights invades his head like flies. And yet, he is old, and he recognizes this. But it never hurt like this before, never felt as though he's been remade from inside out. And this time, he cannot smell Jenny, cannot feel her golden presence. She's not here, she's not cradling his cheek and asking him if he still loves her with a desperate look in her eyes. Yet, he vaguely remembers frightened green eyes staring into his. Suddenly, the smell of blood and magic hits him, and he knows. He has been remade. He has been renamed.
He is real again. A smile curves dangerously across his face at the realization, because now, he cannot be bound by obligation or by anyone's will save his own.
Still, he wants to find out who did this. And one burning question is in his mind. He wants to know what has happened to Jenny, wants to find out if her desperate bid for escape worked.
So very shakily, he gets to his feet. Each second, he marvels at the feel of the wall against his fingertips, of the glass and metal of the shower door at his back. He carefully steps on the crumpled newspaper scattered on the floor, just to feel it crinkle and fold under his feet.
He opens the door, and suddenly, he cannot hear or see or smell or taste or feel anything but her. It's Jenny. She's curled up, her arms hug her knees to her chest, and her well-known, well-loved face rests on her knees. He wants to comfort her so she no longer shakes, he wants to watch her breathe, he wants to know that she is quivering because she is afraid of him, because she wants him.
He doesn't know what he wants.
Jenny has seen him, and she startles, her green eyes widening. Something in the way she moves, something in her expression clues him in. This isn't Jenny. His senses stop deceiving him, and he notices her hair is dark brown, not golden, notices the slight irregularities in her features that aren't Jenny. The ever-present clean scent of pine needles and soap that he always thought of as Jenny isn't there, and in its place is blood, sweat, and fear.
He remembers now that Jenny is dead. That this is Summer, who he's been watching for years. He remembers his ghostly half existence. But now, everything has changed, and he has this snippet of a girl to thank. Except she is not Jenny, except Jenny is dead, and he wants to hurt her because she is not golden blonde and clean and pretty. He thought being flesh again would make him free, but he was wrong. He is still bound, bound by words and by blood. So he will not hurt her. Well, he thinks. Not too much.
-----
He's standing there, naked, in the middle of the room, and Summer can do nothing but ogle and then desperately try to avert her eyes. She's dreamed of him for years, but he is here now, in the flesh, and he is perfect. She jumps a little as he stares at her. She can feel him inside her, and the overt hunger in his gaze frightens her and excites her. Finally, she understands her father's warnings about boys, she understands the electricity that those airbrushed romance novels are always talking about.
What she doesn't understand is what this is. She is falling, yes, but not in love. Her panties are wet and her skin is on fire; her heart is beating madly. And his expression changes. Somehow, right before her eyes, he turns sleek and deadly beautiful, no longer a man entranced. Somehow, this only makes her wetter, hotter, more desperate.
"You're not Jenny," he says, and his voice is now rough. It's not the seductive and slow voice that talked to her through the years, it's not the honeyed purr that persuaded her to bring this man, this demon, back to life. But no, she thinks. He did not persuade her. This is her own doing, and she alone is to bear the weight of this. He used to tell her that she was strong, but now he looks at her as though she's despicable, as though her very presence hurts him.
She won't understand this until later, when she finds an old, faded picture of her grandparents' wedding. She will stare at the photograph, at her grandmother's face, which is eerily like her own, but somehow purer and finer. She will grow to hate her grandmother because she is light to Summer's dark and because she can never escape her past, especially when it has been carved into her very features.
"No," she says in return. "I'm not."
And she stares him in the eye, and she dares him to wish she were her grandmother. He doesn't, though, which brings a smile to her face. She may have fallen, she may have landed somewhere not even remotely close to the normal life her father wanted her to lead, but this is much, much better. Past be damned. Summer is tired of its bars and prohibitions, of the way it silently and stealthily caged her in this world. She doesn't care that he so obviously loved her grandmother, because her grandmother is not here. It's only her, and the long stretch of open road below of her now, which she fully intends to travel.
Yes.
Her first step is to gently step up to him, her legs unsteady. He looks surprised at first, and a little lost, and Summer remembers again who she is not. But she doesn't want to be defined by negatives anymore. His softness quickly dissolves, and his smile creeps out like the edge of a knife. It's a challenge, she knows, and she meets it, kissing him, cutting her lips on his smile and his teeth.
She's never had fruit more exotic than an apple, but her blood tastes like pomegranate seeds on her tongue, and in that instant, she knows he'll take her to another world, another place, another life.
She likes the thought of that.
-----
All Julian can think is that her blood tastes of cobwebs and ashes. Even the scent of magic reminds him of another day, another dizzying return. He's watched her since she was a child, and he knows that look in her eyes. She thinks she's breaking all the rules, breaking out of her cages, but he knows that all she's doing is a variation of an old pattern. He recognizes the look in her eyes because he knows her, but also because he knew Jenny, and he saw her green eyes narrow the exact same way when she brought him back.
This time, though, he's not chained with love, and he's not obligated to unlock her cage.
He kisses her back, and there is no passion or tenderness in the act. She's not Jenny, but she'll do.