Disclaimer: A head peeks out behind a curtain for a moment before a girl suddenly gets shoved onto the stage fully by an unseen force hissing, "Get it on with!"

Stumbling, Faith comes to a halt in front of the audience, waving nervously. "Um, hi. This is sorta the first time I'm doing this and it's a great honor and,... um, where did I....Right."

She fumbles for a moment, patting down the pockets of her jeans, before throwing a desperate glance toward the left. Her eyes light on something off stage and she quickly darts behind the curtain once more, comnig back a second later, holding a crumpled piece of paper.

She unfolds is, smooths it agaisnt her thigh once and then clears her throat, reading aloud, "Despite what this may look like, I, the author, own nothing of this piece of work except some plot. The characters and settings are property of the genius L.K.Hamilton and Joss Wheden, who both rock really hard. The lyrics belong to the band Three Days Grace and were kind of... liberated from the song 'Get Out Alive'. No hamsters were harmed during the production of this text. Thank you for your attention. You may now proceed on to the fic."

A/N: The bunny wouldn't leave me alone and after I was told it didn't suck I posted it. Ginormous thanks goes to the support crew, Anneliese for being my sounding board and giving me a first opinion and Amusewithaview for a quality beta job. A review or two would be nice as I'm being Ms. Insecure about this, still.

Spoilers for The Harlequin, especially from page 115 on, where this story sets in.



+

Tidal Wave

+

This is my last time she said
As she faded away
It's hard to imagine
But one day you'll end up like me

+

"Why do I matter to you?" I asked even as I cuddled closer to Richard whose frame was solid beside me on the bed, even in this dream world. Micah and Nathaniel slept in this dreamscape, unable to wake because the creature at the foot of the bed, this vaguely human shape made from shadows and darkness, was keeping them under just like she kept my own feline beasts under wraps, stopping me from reaching out to them, using them against her. Cats were her animal to call and she would not let them wake in this place she created to confront me, maybe even kill me.

And I firmly believed that she could. I hate admitting that anyone has more power than me but this…being, she was so powerful it made my teeth ache. The Mother of All Darkness, the vampires called her. She was the one who made them all, made us all, shape shifters, vampires and rumour had it, even the necromancers. We lived on her sufferance. A few months ago she’d come to me and her presence had been enough to melt a cross into the palm of my left hand. Right now she was asleep thousands of miles away from the bed me and the guys were sleeping in and there was a cross under my pillow. Yet here she was, standing in the middle of my dream, threatening to kill me.

Until a few moments ago I’d been sure that the cross incident had been what chased her away the last time she’d come to me. Now I wasn’t so sure. She seemed untouchable, there at the foot of my bed, talking calmly. Threatening to kill me before she let the Harlequin, the vampire version of the wild hunt and their police, get their claws into me. Jean-Claude, she said, she could accept as my master, but not the Harlequin. And I didn’t like that I seemed important enough to pull the whole ‘either me or no-one’ routine on. Frankly, she didn’t seem like the type to fear competition. In fact, she was the very reason the Harlequin was in our town, breaking its own rules. The Vampire Council was scared shitless because Mommy was stirring in her tomb, pardon, bedroom. They were so afraid of her awakening that they forgot their own rules and let loose the Harlequin, a force so terrible vampires were forbidden from even speaking of it without a real reason.

And here she was, wanting me for herself. Not good. Not good at all.

She cocked her head, or what I assumed was her head because she was darkness and shadow without real form, to one side and seemed to stare at me long and hard. I didn’t try to not squirm. There’s really no shame in squirming under the full brunt of Marmee Noir’s attention. Richard was still there beside me, holding on to me and to my left a low growl suddenly trickled through the dark of the room. The wolf. I’d forgotten about her. She was… a dreamscape manifestation of my wolf, one of the were-animals I had been infected with. In this place, she could take solid shape. I put a hand on her back, stroking softly, calming her down a bit.

Then I took a deep breath and repeated my question. “Why do I matter to you?”

“You are powerful, necromancer.”

Well, that was a great answer, wasn’t it?

“I don’t understand,” I told her honestly. Beside me, Richard tensed. He obviously didn’t like me making small talk with the Mother of All Darkness. But hey, if she was going to try and kill me, I had a right to know why.

“Let me rephrase my answer,” Mommy said, her voice still as even as it had been throughout our conversation. Only when she’d addressed Richard had there been any emotion in it. She didn’t like him much, probably because he was beyond her control. Wolves were not her animals. “You are too powerful, necromancer.”

There was something in the way she said necromancer, in the slight tilt of her voice at the end of her sentence. Emotion. Feeling. Something real that sounded almost like…. I’d been told before that the Council did not tolerate necromancers and killed them on sight. I’d believed it had been one of their silly little rules, nothing more. But now, as she stood there, a hint of something in her voice, for a split second a thought crossed my mind that had never occurred to me before. Was she afraid of necromancers? Of me?

Before I could open my mouth, the vague shape at the foot of the bed suddenly exploded into black nothing. It had been made out of shadows and now they seemed to fall apart once more. Darkness spread from where she’d stood like a blood flower, spread to encompass first the bed and then the whole room. Her laughter came like an icy shower from all around us, pouring out of the sticky darkness that surrounded us, echoing, disorienting and unmistakable amused. My wolf flinched away from the sound, surprised, and Richard’s arm tightened around me to the point of pain.

Mommy Dearest was laughing all around us, laughing so hard that as a human she probably would have had tears in her eyes. And with that laughter came a wave of power that could have knocked a building over. Jean-Claude and Asher could use their voice to seduce people, sometimes to carry other emotions, though with less strength behind it. Their voices held power. But this, this was beyond power. This voice wasn’t made for sex, for seduction. This laugh was simply death. I think that up until that moment, I hadn’t really understood the stricken panic that most vampires exhibited at the mere mention of her name. I’d been scared, alright, but not nearly enough. She could kill, truly kill with that voice alone. One word and you were dead. She was just that powerful.

And that thought helped ground me. Death, that was my forte. I had power over the dead and with that reminder of who, of what I was, the laughter ceased to be quite as powerful. Tidal wave instead of tsunami. But I could breathe again. I concentrated on who I was, Anita Blake, necromancer, animator, leopard queen, lupa, human servant…

Suddenly it stopped. The change from roaring laughter to dead silence was so sudden I actually swayed where I sat. Just as if someone had hit a switch, it was over. No more laughter. The darkness around us thinned again, lost that living, breathing touch and when I looked, the vague shape was back at the foot of the bed as if it hadn’t ever left. Spiffy trick, that. Richard was still beside me, breathing hard. My wolf was cowering on my other side, but not posed to fight anymore. You can’t stay in fight mode forever.

“You see? You should not be able to shake my power this easily.”

“Believe me,” I said, still breathing hard from the effort it had taken to pull back from the venom of her laughter just an inch, “That was not easy.”

If she hadn’t been who she was, I might have honestly thought I could hear a hint of exasperation in her voice as she amended, “You should not be able to shake my power at all.”

“Sorry," I said, not particularly sounding it.

Richard finally seemed to wake from his silent trance beside me and hissed, “Anita!”

I could smell his fear, his sheer terror in the air but had no chance to react because suddenly that shape of shadows wasn’t at the foot end of the bed anymore but right in front of me. I jerked back from it before I knew it. My wolf growled and Richard looked like he was about to actually attack Mommy Dearest, fight winning over flight. He wouldn’t leave me alone. I was absurdly grateful for that suddenly. But she made no move to come closer than the ten or so inches that separated us. Her head was to one side once more, and her face was intent as she studied me, looking for something. What, I had no idea.

My arm shot out to block Richard from coming closer and potentially trying to attack Mommy Dearest even as I realized that I could actually see her expression. I could see her face, blurry, but it was there. She was getting more solid, more tangible than shadow and dreams. Good for me. Solid, I could fight. Richard stopped dead in his tracks, chest against the palm of my hand, watching with startled eyes, surprised at my actions, I thought. The wolf sat beside me but made no move to attack. She was a part of me. Most of the time we got along in these situations.

I didn’t know how long we stayed like that, me and Mommy face to face, flanked by two wolves, one human one not, none of us moving. But after an eternity she seemed to find what she’d been looking for because she nodded once and before I had a chance to react, one hand, more solid that it was supposed to be, shot out and hit Richard in the chest, throwing him backwards and off the bed as she ordered, “Wake.”

He flew off the bed in a graceful arch, body bent with the force of her shove and then he fell as if in slow motion, disappearing from my sight. I tore away from her gaze still fixed on my face and threw myself to look over the edge of the high bed, looking for him, his unconscious form, but he was gone. I jerked back round to face her, anger and fear warring for dominance.

“Where is he?” I demanded and some of my anger sounded in my voice. Good.

She didn’t seem phased. Not good. “Awake. Come, we have much to discuss.”

She was on her feet next to the door before I’d finished blinking, acting as if nothing ever happened.

“What did you do to him?” Anger, sweet anger, was winning over the fear and my voice regained some of its usual edge. Good, steady voice. Panic doesn’t look good on me.

She didn’t even look at me this time as she repeated, “Awake. Unharmed. Come now. Your cats will wake when we leave this room.”

I looked at Nathaniel and Micah still asleep side by side. I’d forgotten about them. For a moment I contemplated my choices. I could struggle, but I knew from experience that I couldn’t wake while she didn’t want me to. I could stay here. But she could use force to make me move and the guys were safer without her here, even if they didn’t wake. I could argue the validity of her promise to wake them, but I had no way of fighting it anyway. I ground my teeth as the truth sunk in. I was out of options.

Well, except one. Play along and see what she wanted. Or…

“What do you want from me?”

This time I was positive of the annoyance in her voice. Human emotions from the Mother of Darkness. Who’d a thunk?

“You asked a question. Since I will kill you, I deemed it fair to answer. Now come.”

The sharp tone of her voice was enough to actually get me moving. Wow. She’d almost rolled me with her voice alone and I really didn’t think she was trying. I climbed to my feet quickly, keeping one hand on my wolf at all times, afraid that when I let go of her, she’d fade. I needed what little backup my own animal could give me where we were going. Wherever we were going. I came to a halt next to her by the door, for the first time noticing I was still naked. Huh, funny how that slips your mind in a crisis. She opened the door with a flick of her hand and motioned for me to step through.

I took one last look back at Nathaniel and Micah, praying to God that they would be unharmed but knowing better than to argue again. I didn’t want to piss her off. Not tonight, not when she had two of my boys as hostages.

Then I stepped through the door.

+

I stepped through the door and stood… in my living room at home.

What the hell? If I hadn’t still felt the wolf under my hand I might have thought I’d woken. Everything, down to the last detail was there. Even the basket full of unfolded laundry Nathaniel had left on the couch the last time I’d been the room was there. How the hell had she done that, I wondered, gaze dawn involuntarily to the figure beside me. The room was bright with the white couches and walls and the big windows letting in the early morning sun. It was no place for the Mother of Darkness and I was honestly surprised to see her standing there in a shaft of light, looking well, not comfortable, but not like she was going to spontaneously combust either. But then the light through the windows was, technically, only the memory of light, wasn’t it?

Still, it seemed wrong that instead of fading like vampires did when daylight approached, she had gained texture as we stepped through the door. The outline under her heavy black cloak was solid now and even the cloak itself seemed made of fabric instead of shadows suddenly. It looked like something Requiem would wear. Actually, it looked exactly like the cloak Requiem had worn the evening before. I frowned.

She didn’t look at me as she went to inspect the room like a guest might have. “I have borrowed your memories to create something you could understand. Sit.”

I had to hold back a growl. I was quickly getting tired of being ordered around and treated like an insolent child. Not to mention that she had messed around in my memories without my permission and I had been hijacked into my own dreams. Talk about major pissed off and now that it was only me and her and no defenceless third party anymore, I had no trouble letting my anger resurface just a bit. So instead of sitting down, I went over to the basket of laundry and fished out a long black button down shirt made from cotton. I’d given it to Jean-Claude once because he only owned silk shirts. He’d worn it a time or two but it wasn’t really his cup of tea, so I’d given in and just started falling back on it when I ran out of clothing while at the Circus. That’s how it had gotten into our laundry.

I slipped it over my head quickly before making my way over to the windows and leaning against the planes of glass. The sunlight might not have really protected me, but it felt good on my skin and it gave me a sense of comfort I was in dire need of. My wolf settled at my feet, lying her head on her crossed front paws, never taking her eyes of Mommy Dearest. I was glad. Walking with Marmee Noir through your own dreams and actually treating her like she was sort of… human, without trying to fight her tooth and nail, it was too strange for words. The thought that she might be playing tricks on me crossed my mind but I dismissed it. She was so powerful that either she didn’t need them or, if she needed them, she would have leeched all the resistance out of me, not only a part. I was pretty sure the stress of the day had just finally caught up and mellowed me enough to think before jumping the proverbial gun, in this case my anger.

I briefly considered checking whether the living room was connected to the rest of my house and if yes, going for a gun or two, but then decided against it as Mommy set down one of the little penguin statues Nathaniel had brought home last week to surprise me. She turned to face me but her gaze strayed past me to flit about the room, taking it in. It was then that I noted I could actually make out where her gaze went. I could see her face! It was still blurry, unfocused but loads better than in the bedroom. It had lost some of that spooky quality.

“You could not before?”

I glowered at her for a long moment before tensely replying, “No.”

She shrugged but it looked wooden, wrong. Like a little child copying a gesture from their parents. It was recognizable as a gesture but it didn’t seem to fit the body that executed it.

“I forget these things, these human things.” Dimly I wondered whether we were still talking about her human appearance or the room she was still inspecting. I shuddered a bit and it had nothing to do with wearing only a shirt. All vampires I had ever met, even the oldest, some of them several millennia old, they were still human somewhere underneath or at least knew how to imitate human behaviour. She was not. There was nothing human about her, probably never had been. She wasn’t like her creatures, a human that had become something more. She just was. I didn’t think she had ever been human at all, despite the body she wore now, the body I’d seen sleeping in that cavernous room on the other side of the world.

I shook my head, deciding not to dwell on things that scared me needlessly. Instead, stick with the matter at hand. I considered playing nice, sticking with protocol and vampire etiquette but then I realized that it was useless. She read my thoughts most of the time anyway. Besides, I wasn’t good at playing games.

“You said I was too powerful. If you’re not afraid of my power, then why try to kill me?”

She sat then, sat in the middle of my sparkling white sofa like she belonged there, sinking into the soft cushions and all the stiffness of the grave and unpractised gestures fled her as she turned into a heap of boneless grace.

“You are a necromancer.”

I gave myself major brownie points for not rolling my eyes like I wanted to. “We covered that already.”

“The power you hold over the dead is too great. I cannot let you live and gain more power.”

“Yes but why?” I uncrossed my arms and took half a step forward, tired already of our games. If she didn’t start getting a lot clearer soon, I was just going to try and boot her out. Who knew, maybe it would work now that she was that much more solid.

“Do you know what I am?”

The question was so stupid it actually stopped me in my tracks. I gave her an incredulous look. “You are Marmee Noir, the Mother of All Darkness.”

She did that head tilt thing again and the hood of her cloak actually slipped enough for me to see her eyes. They were green. Sweet Mary, they were a startling, brilliant, shiny green. They were the same colour as Micah’s eyes when he wore something that brought out the green of his eyes instead of the gold. And yet, as they looked into mine, I felt no pull, no vampire powers. She wasn’t trying to roll me after all and her gaze, it was as human as anything about her ever was.

“I am balance.”

I couldn’t keep the frown off my face as I settled back against the window. It seemed we were finally getting somewhere. I wondered how the boys were doing and then pushed the thought away. It was no use. “You are the Mother of Darkness, how can you be balance? And what do you mean with balance anyway?”

To her credit, she didn’t squash me like a fly for my insolent tone. Actually, I noticed, we were being rather civil to each other. Well, civil for an old as dirt vampire and me. Wonders never cease, huh?

“I am darkness in a world of light. I am shadow in sunlight. I keep the balance in this world. I even the score that keeps the world from falling apart.”

Cosmic balance keeper. Well, I’d heard worse claims from vampires before. And she was more than any other being I had ever seen or heard of. “How can you even the score when you are one of the bad guys? You don’t seem neutral to me. Shouldn’t a keeper of balance be neutral?”

“I am neutral.”

This time I did take three steps toward her and bent so I could look under her hood properly. It had fallen back into place so her face remained in shadow but her eyes stood out now that I knew what colour they were. No sense in hiding them anymore, I guess. I could feel my wolf at my back, on her feet again and waiting, itching, for a fight. It didn’t come.

“You are the Mommy of all monsters. How the hell is that neutral?”

A flicker of power, a hint of jasmine and the scent of air after strong rain, a quick look of annoyance that flitted over her shadowy features. “Human,” she spat, “You do not understand.”

She didn’t stand in the classical sense. Instead she just stopped sitting. One moment she was in front of me, the next she was several feet away, standing behind the couch, putting it between us. I could feel the first stirrings of her anger in the air and quickly amended, mostly because I was honestly curious where she was getting with her claim at neutrality, “I’ll try. Explain it to me and I’ll try to understand. You need to give us humans a bit of credit. We’ve learned a lot since you went to sleep.”

At least, that was what I hoped. I had no idea how long she had already been sleeping. It could have been anything above a millennium, really. Two, three, seven thousand years. All I knew that it had been a long time ago that she’d decided to go to sleep.

She inclined her head after a moment’s hesitation. “One last try, necromancer. Because you intrigue me.”

I nodded because I didn’t trust my mouth to not mess things up. I was wishing just a bit that I’d gone looking for weaponry after all. Too late now, I guessed.

“Have you not noticed that my creatures are all beings of perfect balance? Human and animal, in one body. They are light and shadow spun into one being. All of them. They are keepers of balance. And so am I. It is my punishment.”

I didn’t think she meant to say that last bit out loud but she did. Funny, how an all powerful being could slip up just like us lowly humans. It amused me until I understood the implications of what she was saying. Powerful and old as dirt creature being punished, for what? By whom? And most importantly, why?

I looked at her and didn’t need to ask to know that she was in my head again, or rather in my dream thoughts. The fact that she was in my head had been established a while ago. I looked at her, trying to meet her eyes and found her as still as the old vampires sometimes get when they don’t want to betray their emotions. This total stillness of the grave that made it so hard to remember that they could be more than blood sucking fiends. She hadn’t meant to say what she said, hadn’t meant for me to catch the implications of her slip but she’d been too slow to keep me from making the connection. Because by now, I had not doubt that she could have done it. Actually, I was about ready to believe her claim of being a goddess. Not because she was truly divine but because she was simply that powerful. If you can do everything you can dream of, aren’t you a god?

She’d invaded my mind despite the cross under the pillow. She’d pushed Richard out although he wasn’t her animal. She read my thoughts when no other vampire I knew could do it anymore. She was just that fucking good. So to hell with it, if she meant to kill me she would do it anyway. The only thing I had left to defend me was my wit and my charm. And we all know how big I am on the charm.

“What did you do to be punished?”

“I am,” she started, forming the words slowly, pronouncing them too clearly to sound fluid. Had English been invented when she’d gone to sleep? Had Latin for that matter? She tried again, “I am a keeper. I keep the balance.”

I tried to sound as patient as I could as I dug deeper and repeated my question. We weren’t getting anywhere. “But why?”

“I am,” she trailed off, shaking her head, “I have no words for what I try to say. Certainly not in this language. I have not revealed so much to any being before you.”

I shrugged, “Why are you telling me?”

A pensive look, as if she was contemplating lying to me but then she said, “You remind me.”

That was all. Very useful. I would have preferred a lie or nothing at all. I hated riddles with a passion, especially because I wasn’t very good at solving them.

“I’m surprised you speak English at all,” I amended, changing the subject before we were at each others’ throats again because I just knew I was going to draw the shorter straw. Just call it intuition.

She made a motion with her hand as if swatting a fly, dismissing my comment. “Is that what we speak?”

I nodded, dumbly. Sensing my confusion, or reading my damn mind again she elaborated, “I took it from Belle’s mind when I followed her to you.”

Well, it did explain why she sounded a bit old fashioned and had a funny accent. Belle’s, Belle Morte’s accent was hard to place, but hers seemed to have twice as many foreign influences in it. I wondered, for just a moment, how many different languages she had spoken, how many of them forgotten and buried now, except in her mind. So old. The thought was enough to feel the weight of her actual age press against the back of my mind suddenly, willing me to taste it, to find out how old she really was. I resisted. I didn’t think I could swallow the full brunt of what she was.

Again she waved in dismissal. “I am a keeper. I keep what was once lost. A…guardian, a….”

This time her frustration was obvious. She even grunted with annoyance and her eyes flashed with a hint of anger as the smell of rain came back, invading my nostrils, making me dizzy. The world went fuzzy around the edges as the brunt of her frustration at her own inability to express herself hit me. It seemed like something a child would do, not an ancient being such as her but it once more underlined just how far beyond all I knew she truly was. Such a human thing as language seemed entirely strange to her. How did she communicate, I wondered. But I knew the answer. In thoughts, in feelings. In death. She was darkness. She didn’t need such trivial things as words and phrases to whisper her secrets into the ears man and monster.

She moved again, leaving the spot she’d stood in to reappear by my side, grabbing my arm before I had a chance to protest. The touch made my knees weak even through Jean-Claude’s shirt and her own cloak. It made me wobble and the world tilt on its axis for a second as she held on tight and then the living room around us disappeared.

+

She let go of my so abruptly I almost fell. I stumbled backwards a few steps, my left foot catching on something hard, and finally fell on my bum. The air shot out of my lungs and I was left gasping and floundering, trying to catch my breath through the sudden onslaught of vertigo and the lingering feeling of Mommy Dearest’s anger burning down the back of my throat. The power of the dead was supposed to be cold but hers was hot, so hot, like trying to drink lava and it faded slowly, too slowly, making me ache all over.

But fade it did and by the time I caught my breath I was already looking around. We were standing in a place that was definitely not out of one of my memories anymore. All around us the earth was a barren wasteland. There were no scorched remains of anything that might have given me a clue as to where we were. No buildings, no animals, not even plants. We stood in the middle of an endless plain of black earth, the stench of sulphur acidic and heavy in the air. The rolling sound of thunder echoed in the distance, loud enough to make the ground beneath us vibrate with the force of it. The clouds above us were too thick and too low to be real clouds as and I stared up at them from my spot on the uncomfortably warm ground, flakes like snow hit came to gently rest on my face and in my hair. Grey snow. I picked one flake off my shirt and rubbed it between two fingers. It left a dark grey stain. Ashes. Sweet Jesus, it was raining ashes.

I scrambled frantically to get to my feet, to get up off the ground that, as I realized now, was covered in layers of ashes. My wolf was beside me again suddenly. I’d lost sight of her back in the living room and hadn’t remembered her until now, as she pushed her large furred head into my thigh, reminding me that she was here and that she was something solid to cling to. And cling I did for a moment before I almost chocked wondering just what was burning around here when something caught me eye.

There, in the distance, something was moving. It was impossible to say how far away it was because there were no landmarks to use for orientation but slowly the blob came closer. My gaze was fixed on it, unblinkingly but I still had to ask, “Where are we?”

Her voice was closer than I’d thought it would be, only a couple of feet from me to my left. “I cannot tell you, so I will show you.”

I jerked around, staring at her wide eyed before I knew it, “This is your memory? This place actually exists?”

She shook her head, unfazed by the fact that we were standing in a place that made hell look cosy. “It existed once. It does not now.”

That calmed me down somewhat. Calmed me enough to remember that something was coming closer to us. I turned back to where I’d seen the figure last and was surprised to find it impossibly much closer already. Close enough to make out its basic form and that was definitely human. And female. It, she, was short, as short as me, I guessed, maybe shorter and came toward us with the walk of one who was dead on her feet. She was naked and covered from head to toe in the smudged and smeared remains of the ashes falling form the heavens. Her hair was wild and dirty but underneath it all, I thought I caught a hint of blonde. Gold maybe, without all the grime stuck in it. Gold like Asher's? Again a wave of worry hit me and the desire to be home, with the guys around me, happy, safe and sound. I took a deep breath to steady myself, buried my hand deeper in the wolf’s fur and pushed the thoughts of safety away. The faster I got this over with, the faster I’d get home. That was the theory. Yeah, right.

But the blonde hair irked me. It seemed strange. I hadn’t expected to find anyone blonde in Mommy’s head, for whatever reason. Maybe because ancient usually equalled brunette in my mind. I’d never met anyone over a thousand years old with blonde hair. Most people just weren’t blonde, if you thought globally. So, strange blonde woman swaying toward us, dirty, sticky and a big fat unknown in an already precautious situation. My only consolation was that we were inside a memory. Belle Morte had sent me living memories before. They seemed real, tangible even, but you could not influence them and they could not influence you. It was a watch-and-learn-only kind of thing. This was undoubtedly a living memory, but even one such as Marmee Noir could not give a memory enough substance to harm me in the waking world. I simply refused to believe that. It was better for my sanity.

I watched as the newcomer, the memory, came closer to us. I stood, one arm wrapped around myself the other hand buried in the by now dirty grey fur of the wolf, trying to make as small a target for the falling ashes as I could. For some reason I didn’t want to explore, the rain of ashes disturbed me deeply. Instead I found myself wondering where we were. Was this the end of the world, I asked myself, or the beginning? It seemed that the end of the world would look different, more ruins and rotting carcasses, you know? But the dawn of time should not have little blonde girls running around either. So what was this?

“Both.”

“What?”

“For something to begin, something must first end. We stand on the ruins of an old world, the seed of what will once be your world.”

I wanted to ask more. What the fuck, came to mind but I was distracted by the walking memory coming close enough to make out her features. Her face was small, pixyish, with a slightly upturned nose and high cheekbones. Her eyebrows were darker than her hair, her lips full but dry and bloody. And she had the biggest green eyes. Green eyes. Like Micah. Like…oh shit. I did a lot of jerking around lately but I did it again, spinning to face Mommy over the wolf pressing against the length of my leg. Suddenly it didn’t seem all that comforting anymore because she had finally lowered her hood and stood beside me, only barely as tall as me, I noticed absently, staring at me with green eyes from exactly the same face as the one of the naked memory less than ten feet away.

I don’t know how many times I looked back and forth between them, looking from face to face and finding them identical except for one thing. Mommy Dearest had cold eyes, eyes that were so empty of anything even remotely human they might as well have been made of glass. The eyes of the memory were different. More real. There was emotion in them, pain, hate, anguish and most of all: anger. A rage so all consuming it made even me, the queen of anger, the mistress of wrath, shrink back from it. My rage was hot and scalding like the power of a lycanthrope. It burned when it rose in me and gave me power, gave me strength.

The anger I read in those green eyes that were still walking toward us at a snail’s pace, was cold. It was as cold as a glacier and probably as old. It had had time to cool and I knew, from looking into the eyes of Marmee Noir, that in time it would fade entirely, freeze up and fall far, far beneath the surface. These eyes, they were those of a vampire, a shifter. Someone who had once been human and now was more, or maybe less. Something supernatural with natural eyes. They were something tangible and they scared me absolutely shitless because they meant that Mommy had once been human, too. They meant that what she was could be duplicated, could happen to any of us, potentially. It meant this twisted, perverted and otherworldly creature beside me had a human core somewhere, miles and miles below, buried beneath millennia over millennia of darkness.

+

We watched her walk, me with fear and lead in my stomach, Mommy with mild amusement and an otherwise plain face. She kept her features uncovered now that I knew what she looked like and I couldn’t help but feel it was a bad sign. I knew of only one person who had ever seen her and still lived and Valentina never talked about it, even under the threat of pain and death. It reminded me of a kidnapping. When the kidnappers keep their face hidden from their victim, it means they intend to let them go. Only when they show you who they are do things go downhill real fast.

But there was nothing I could do, except watch her walk. And walk. And walk. A week, a day, a century. I didn’t know how long but to me it seemed endless. I wanted to ask why we were watching this but I didn’t really dare disturb the silent vigil we were holding. The memory just kept on walking in a world that never changed. There was no day and no night, no sky visible beyond the heavy grey of the endless clouds and the ashes just kept on falling. I’d given up trying to figure out what was burning, had stopped that line of questioning for the sake of my own sanity. And the memory kept on walking, the only measure of time were the frequent stumbling tumbles she took into the dirt, from exhaustion or maybe from desperation. Never changing, and we watched it all.

Lucky for me, the memory finally changed.

She stumbled, the memory, over a rock, not much bigger than a fist. It was proof of how exhausted she was after decades of walking, of falling and getting back up with no food, to water, no shelter. This place was probably the closest to hell you could get. Hell, it probably was hell. She stumbled and this time she didn’t get back up. Instead she landed on her hands and knees in the dirt, the ashes and burnt earth and for a long moment, she stayed like that. She stayed very still on the ground, spine bowed in exhaustion, head hung tiredly, her hair a matted mess that hung around her face and to the ground.

Then she reared up, like an animal struck, like a tidal wave of fury as her anger finally exploded outward in a scream that made my ears bleed and my head spin. It wasn’t only sound, it was emotion, it was death, and it was power. Her scream cut across the plain, around me and my wolf, like a sonic boom, almost knocking me over, too. It hurt, it physically hurt to hear that scream and the question that echoed inside it, bouncing off the clouds and the dirt, hitting me in the face again and again, a thousand slaps, a thousand fists.

Why, that scream wanted to know. Why? Whywhywhywhy? Why?!

Slowly, the scream faded and its echoes got lost across the vast plain. I waited for an answer, an explanation form modern time Mommy standing rock still beside me, but neither came.

Finally, as the memory sunk to the ground, rolling into a tiny ball, closing her eyes, the Mother spoke.

“You need to see,” she said and again the world faded around us.

+

I didn’t know how I knew, but the instant we landed in the cavernous room I knew that this memory was even older than the last one. We were in a circular cave now. In the centre of the room the ground was even, too even to be natural and I thought I could make out faded patterns carved into the rock surface. I could see maybe ten feet before the darkness became too heavy for me to see through. I thought I could make out tunnels that led away from the cave, and there, to one side, an empty rusted set of chains bolted to the floor and walls. The chains were thick, too thick to be handy and I wondered what they were meant to hold.

I was moving forward before I realized what I was doing, trying to get a better look at the tunnels leading away from this place because, frankly, with the bondage fun equipment, it seemed damn scary. Big surprise there! Before I’d even taken two steps however, a dainty hand clamped down on my arm with a force that could bent metal and pulverize bones. I looked at that hand, noticing for the first time that the grime and sooth from the last memory was gone from me. I sighed in relief before remembering the matter at hand and asking, “Scared of the dark?”

The look she gave me was the most human I’d witnessed so far. It was plain annoyance. Her face, stiff with disuse and age had softened over the long hours we spent in her memories, regaining some more human traces, enough to make it easier to connect the Mother of Darkness to the naked figure from the last memory.

“That is no darkness,” she informed me, waving her free hand at the shadows beyond the centre of the cave where we stood. I took a short moment to appreciate the sheer irony of the Mother of All Darkness warning me of the dark. Then I got distracted. Beside me, still refusing to back away from me, the wolf growled at the dark. I looked closer, eyes narrowing and after a moment I saw what she was growling at. The darkness was too thick, like tar, and too animated. It flitted about, grinding against the stone walls, digging into the floors. It seemed almost…alive.

I took half a step back into the centre of the room, looking at Mommy for an explanation. She gave me a sardonic little smile that I was pretty sure she’d copied out of my head and straight off Jean-Claude’s face.

“What is that?” I asked.

She shook her head and pointed one hand toward the chains. I opened my mouth to tell her I’d noticed them already, when I noticed that around us the place has changed. The chains weren’t empty anymore. Instead they now held…her. Marmee Noir, as she’d been in the last memory, but not. This was earlier and the rage in her eyes, oh it burned. Burned like my own anger did, like the fire of the sun, enough to burn everything it touched away. She was struggling against the chains holding her down, against the non-darkness that was rippling and rubbing against her and even from where I stood I could hear her heavy breathing.

“You’re human,” I whispered softly, afraid to say it out loud.

“You believed I was born as I am.” She sounded amused.

I nodded. I mean, I’d considered the idea that she had been human once, had known it to some degree already but seeing and knowing are two very different things sometimes. And here it was, proof that the bogeyman of bogeymen had been human once, had been born, had had a mother and a father, maybe even siblings. She hadn’t risen from darkness, perfect and cruel. She’d been made. The devil wore a human face. I backed up a few more steps until the backs of my knees hit the wolf and I almost stumbled.

Suddenly images started flashing against the dark walls. I didn’t know whether it was part of the memory or if Marmee Noir was adding background information for me, but I watched nevertheless. The faces of people flashed, only glimpses, women, men, girls, a lot of girls, some longer than others, some fuzzy around the edges as if the memory was fading and dim. The corpses were next. A woman, too young for her white hair, stabbed and left for dead. A man torn to shreds, a blonde a haired man exploding in a shower of sparks and light, a brunette couple exploding at sunlight hit them, an old man with a sword through his head, another woman with her head hacked off. And then the girls, there were dozens of them, all dead in some cruel and brutal way. Killed in their sleep, in a fight, with their own weapons, with claws and teeth and bare hands. Dead, all of them dead beyond the sight of their bodies, cities crumbled and towns fell into giant craters. Homes burnt and water turned into hot fog, making breathing hard.

Apocalypse. It was the only word for this slide show of horror. Flitting there in front of my eyes, projected against the rough walls of a dark cave, I was watching the end of the world, a world.

“Guardian,” an incorporeal voice suddenly echoed through the cave, “Guardian of Hell.”

The chained memory looked around her, ceasing her struggles. For someone chained down and defenceless, she seemed rather calm.

“What the fuck do you want?” Whatever I’d expected to fall from the mouth of the human Mother of Darkness, that wasn’t it. Beside me, the real Mommy snorted, sounding like Jason. I glared at her.

“Stop sifting through my memories for expressions to borrow,” I told her, not really afraid of her retaliation. She was showing me the damn story of her life, her weaknesses. She wasn’t going to jump down my throat in the middle of it. I turned back to the spectacle at hand, watching the chained blonde growl at the dark.

“I did my duty. Now let me go.”

“Duty?” the voice was furious. “It is by your hand that the world fell!”

But human Mommy didn’t seem fazed. She hissed right back, venom dripping from her words, “How dare you? I didn’t call the First from the abyss but I killed it. I woke my whole line. I won. I destroyed the root of all evil. I saved the world a dozen times over!”

Funny, until now I hadn’t really considered the possibility that once upon a time, Mommy might have been one of the good guys. When she’d said punishment, I’d assumed evil deed. Saving the world didn’t sound too bad. If she was telling the truth. But from the fire in her eyes I was pretty sure she was. Mommy was a regular hero. Yipi!

Another snort from beside me. “I saved the world, yes. But I destroyed the balance. I took evil out of the world and everything came crumbling down like a, how do you say, a house of cards, yes.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “So you were innocent?”

“No. I was…bitter, resentful. I had lost everything. I fought to protect those I loved for as long as I could and thus the world ended.”

“You didn’t mean to,” I clarified, trying not to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Can you tell God, “I didn’t mean to end the world,”?

She nodded. Ok, so she’d ended the world. Bad thing to do, obviously. She’d done it to protect her people. Now that was something I could understand perfectly. Which scared me a bit. But still, it didn’t quite fir with what I’d seen so far. “How does that connect to your punishment?”

She didn’t answer verbally, choosing instead to simply point me back to the memory. It still looked the same as it had the last time I checked.

“Guardian,” The voice came again, “You will be punished for this.”

“You going to kill me?” There was an eager note in her voice as she asked and Jesus, I realized that it was what she wanted. She wanted to be dead. I’ve been through a lot of shit but never, never have I ever wished I could just die. Never that.

And then that voice spoke one damning word that echoed through the room, “No.”

She started to struggle again, to fight against her bonds, rearing away from the darkness that was no darkness at all that was suddenly closing in on her. Her struggles gained in force rapidly and for a moment I thought she’d really break loose, when suddenly the dark closed in on her, crashing over her like a wave, burying her alive. She looked like she wanted to scream, but she didn’t. She was biting her lips so hard her chin was smeared with blood and then I realized why. That dark, vile substance I had once mistaken for simple shadows was trying to enter her. Fine tendrils were crawling up her nose and into her ears already and more was pressing against her jaws, trying to force her mouth open and Sweet Mary, squirming, trying to work its way between her closed legs and…

I wanted to look away from the sight of this faceless, bodiless mass made of shadows and darkness violating her body so brutally, so absolutely without mercy or remorse. But I forced myself to watch, to witness her pain and her fear because she was so afraid. Even with her mouth shut tight, her eyes were big with terror. She didn’t want this but she knew, oh how she knew that there was no escaping this. The images were starting to become choppy, fading out at the edges and I realized that she was fighting to stay conscious.

And the voice again. “You will be a Guardian for real. Forever. By the Power’s decree, that is your punishment.”

And the world went black.

+

We were back in my living room.

Just like that, we were back and I had to squeezed my eyes shut against the sudden onslaught of daylight and the lingering feeling of nausea at the memory of what I’d just witnessed. Standing next to me, she was without a doubt one of the monsters, cold and ruthless and far beyond human. But less than thirty seconds ago I’d seen her as a human and no human, no matter how evil, deserved what she got. Not after all she’d been through. It was just wrong.

“So that’s your punishment?” I asked, “A Guardian forever? You keep the balance between good and evil because you destroyed it once?”

She nodded, not meeting my gaze for the first time.

“Any chance for parole?”

“My sentence ends with my death,” she informed with and her voice was too flat, too empty.

“There’s more to it.”

She lifted her head to look at me again and I wished she hadn’t. There was too much in those green green eyes. “I cannot die.”

I’d thought about immortality before, tried to figure out how I’d react if Jean-Claude’s marks had indeed stopped my aging. I’d tried to picture living one hundred, five hundred and in my worst nights, even a thousand years. But never in all those sleepless nights had I ever considered not being able to die at all. How much is a life worth when you can’t die? How can anything, anything at all matter when you know with certainty that it will fade and you will not. Even mountains change and eventually they will crumble. But this creature, this woman, the Guardian of balance, the Mother of All Darkness, she would outlast even them.

Had she made the vampires to keep her company? Had she tried to create them in her image, to live forever so she wouldn’t be alone? Had she made the shifters as her pets? Had she gone to sleep in the hope of simply fading away one night? Had she walked in the light to see if she would burn? Had she possessed my just to feel me stumble at the edge of death as my own cross burned in my hand? Had she?

I was almost positive that that was the reason for everything she did. And I could not find it in me to be angry. She was in love with death and he would never hear her pleas. And never in this case, gained a whole new flavour. And as I said, I couldn’t be angry at someone who was lovesick and trying to be heard.

So instead I sat down on my white couch and asked her, “What were you like, before?”

She shrugged again, a Jean-Claude shrug this time, pretty to watch but impossible to interpret in any way. No anger at her invasion of y privacy. She was just trying to be more human and I think it was for my benefit.

“My memories are hazy. Yet I believe, I believe that I was somewhat like you.” Her head tilted again in that animal gesture she did so well, “I believe this to be the reason you fascinate me so. Why I showed you what no other has seen before.”

Now, how do you react to being compared to the ultimate bogeyman? Yeah, thought so. It was….a disturbing thought, to put it mildly. And yet as I thought back to what I knew, the rage burning in her eyes, the power inside of her like a living being…Her rage was cold now and her power hot, while mine was the other way around, but before, as a human… I thought of her, struggling against those chains, fighting a fight she knew she could not win, eyes wide and mouth tight. Thought of her protecting her loved ones, winning her battles at all costs. And I believed that she might have actually been right. We weren’t so different, under all the metaphysical bullshit. It was scary to know that somewhere deep inside my soul, I probably had the potential to become like her, a creature beyond all human reason and understanding. She was like the ocean, like the stars, like the air. There, and real and tangible but we would never understand her anymore than we understood why oceans existed. Oh, we knew the how, alright, but the why? That was written in the stars.

I was scared and elated, afraid and shocked and happy and so relieved I could have broken down and started sobbing there and then. And then she pulled me back down to earth.

“It is why I have to kill you.”

I took a moment to catch my breath and remind myself how this whole thing had started out, with her telling me she’d come to kill me. Right. Back on track.

“Do you really have to?”

“Necromancers are a threat to the balance.” Her voice was empty again, cold and free of emotion. She'd kill me just like that. She hated her job, but she’d do it just because there was nothing else for her to do. She would slaughter me and those I loved although she liked me, although I reminded her of herself. She’d kill me just because I was a potential threat. It was a whole new dimension of ruthless. The voice in the cave had called her the Guardian of Hell but I wondered whether she kept it outside or inside.

“I don’t want to die.”

She chuckled and her voice ran down my spine like graveyard soil and hell fire. “Creatures such as you never do.”

Ok, that didn’t work. Different approach. “I don’t want my powers either. I didn’t ask for them, you know?”

She could kill me. She probably would and all because I was a necromancer. I had grown to like my powers recently, even depend on them but as I had no doubt that she would kill me because I was a threat, I had to wonder what I’d pick if there were a way to take away my power. Would I prefer to live powerless over dying?

The answer? Any day.

“I know. It is part of what reminds me.”

She wasn’t telling me no. That had to be a good sign, right? For once I wished I could have been as could with words as Jean-Claude and Asher. That I could have charmed my way out of this. But I was better at shoot now and talk later. With words as my only defence I usually fell back on sarcasm and this sooo wasn’t the time for that.

“There’s got to be a way, a different way. Anything. I really don’t want to die and rip the others with me.” I thought of Jean-Claude and Richard, of Nathaniel and Damien who would all die with me and I thought of Micah and Asher, who would miss me, I hoped. I really, really, really didn’t want to die. Not like this, not yet. Hell, maybe not in the next century. I was just starting to accept my life, accept myself. Things were almost good for the first time since my mother died and I didn’t want to kick the bucket in the middle of it.

She stared at me long and hard, not with those green eyes that had become almost familiar, but with twin flames of green fire that were too bright to look into. She stared at me with all her power in that gaze and I looked away. I looked away and waited for her to pass judgement. Once more I considered running for a gun but I wouldn’t even reach the door, would I?

“No.” It took me a second to realize she had answered to my internal monologue. No, just no. I wouldn’t make it to the door. There was no way to escape this. This was one situation that I wasn’t going to get out of again.

“I could bind you to me and neutralize your power. I am neutral and so are my subjects.”

I wrinkled my nose and frowned hard. “Sorry,” I admitted, “But I really don’t think I want to belong to you.” I wanted to add, even to save my life but I didn’t think I had to. Besides, it wasn’t polite.

“You could swear a blood oath to me.” She stared past me for a moment, looking at something I could not see before she continued, “Even now, Belle is trying to gain influence over you. She could not touch you if you were mine.”

It was my turn to stare sightlessly ahead. Blood oath myself and our people to the Mother of All Darkness. It would mean safety from her, as we would officially be neutral and safety from Belle Morte, who’d been a pain in the ass for more than a year now. And if Belle couldn’t touch us, then neither could the rest of the Council. We would have been safe. Our people would have been safe. And all we had to do was swear fealty to Marmee Noir. Not something I’d usually call the easy way out.

“A blood oath and that’s it, no strings attached?”

She smiled. It was a bit scary, that smile, so wrong on a face that looked human but not. “You still intrigue me and so does Jean-Claude. I am….curious.”

“Can I think about it?”

She gave me a nod before warning, “Not too long.”

I agreed, absently noting that her speech patterns were smoothing out. Wonder where that came from. Then something else occurred to me. Something that shouldn’t have slipped my mind in the first place. I concentrated hard for a moment and was rewarded when a plain white mask dropped into my outstretched hand.

“Can you call off the Harlequin,” I asked, waving the mask. I didn’t explain that they weren’t sticking with the rules. I was pretty sure she knew already.

She frowned and it looked suspiciously like my own frown. “I would have to wake for that.”

“You don’t want to wake? You have been stirring?”

This time, I thought, the smile was all her. No copying. “It is as close to dead as I get.”

I blinked. She was sleeping now. She’d taken me on a trip down memory lane and messed around with people on the other side of the world. If that was as close to death as she got then I really didn’t envy her.

“Sorry,” I said.

She waved me off. “I might have found something to amuse me for a while.”

Beside me my long forgotten wolf was suddenly growling as if sensing something I couldn’t. Still, I had to ask, “So will you call them off?”

She was in front of me faster than the blink of an eye, one hand pressing against my chest, pushing me backward, kicking me out of my dream with a wicked smile on her face and underneath, underneath that smile, I saw something very human. She was laughing.

+

I woke to the sight of half a dozen faces above me, looking down with worried expressions. Micah was the first to notice my open eyes and he immediately scrambled to help me sit up, knowing I wouldn’t stay flat on my back if I could help it and probably even if I couldn’t.

Richard stroked big hands over my face and hair as if making sure I was real. “Shit, Anita, what happened? She just kicked me out. She shouldn’t even be able to do that, but she did and we couldn’t get through to you.”

He was babbling. Richard babbling usually meant things were really bad.

“How long was I out?”

“Almost three hours.”

I frowned, surprised. It had felt so much longer. “Only?”

Over my head, the guys exchanged worried looks. I crossed my arms under my breast. Great, they thought I’d finally lost it.

+

Less than twelve hours later, things were going pear-shaped. Ah, hell, they already were. I’d saved Richard, Jean-Claude and myself from certain death in a rather unpleasant way only to get clawed up by a weretiger that belonged to the Harlequin and was damn hard to kill. We had to burn her and take head and heart and I still wasn’t really sure she was completely gone. I did, however not get much of a say in things as my stomach was kind of inside out at the moment and Edward was currently rushing me to the doctors. Only that the doctors were all busy with Cisco, who had his throat torn out by a rampaging tiger and Peter, who hadn’t fared much better except he still had his throat in one piece. Which was kind of good.

What wasn’t good was the fact that I was feeling no pain, Cisco was flat lining and Richard was just stumbling into the room, half dead. I looked away from Cisco, eighteen year old Cisco who shouldn’t have been here, shouldn’t have been dying. But he was. Richard stood beside him, almost doubled over from pain and exhaustion already, grabbing his arm, shoving what little power he had left down into the still body on the gurney. Across from me, Peter was all mummy, wrapped up from neck to hip. The white bandages were barely five minutes old and already turning a lovely shade of red. He was probably going to change. If he survived. Poor Peter, sixteen and a shapeshifter. And me? I still didn’t feel any pain and that usually meant bad things, especially combined with the look on Edward’s face. The look that was only ice and death and not directed at something he intended to kill.

Micah came to a stop at the top of my gurney, touching my hair, giving me strength against the desperate flare of Richard’s power at the other end of the room, feeding me what he had, his eyes too worried, his face too closed up.

“It’s not going to be enough,” Nathaniel whispered beside me, watching the Ulfric try to feed Cisco his beast, to make him change and help him heal. Trying to save his life.

I nodded in agreement when suddenly a gentle wind started to sweep through the room. It smelled of flowers and something else. Rain.

Marmee Noir was here.

The wind grew stronger and stronger until even Edward and Peter, the two humans in the room, noticed.

”What’s that smell,” Peter asked as Edward pulled his gun, pointing it at the ceiling, looking around for a target. The smell grew stronger and stronger until I was sure I could feel with with more senses than just smell, and with it came the first wave of power. It swept across the room, ruffling hair and causing everyone to stop what they were doing. The next wave was battering against my shields like fists and feet and the one after got close to smashing them with the sheer force of it. Nathaniel was clinging to me like a lifeline, Micah was digging his hand in my shoulder, trying to hold on to his control and his humanity and then the next wave came.

It shattered my shields like brittle paper walls, digging its claws deep into my stomach, deep into the part of me that was hurt. Nathaniel’s hand let go of mine as he sunk to the ground and changed in a spray of wet goop, beast overpowering the human. The nurses followed, then Jamil, Cherry, Richard, the doctors and finally even Micah. They all fell to their knees and their beats exploded out of them eagerly, happily. And still the power pushed harder, dug deeper. A few feet away Peter screamed and started to claw at his bandaged chest but he didn’t change, thank god, he didn’t change.

My own chest felt too small, too tight, like new skin over an old wound and I didn’t have to look to know I was healed.

“What is that,” Edward asked, and even he looked like he was fighting to remain on his feet.

“The Mother of Darkness,” I answered but my voice was thin and weak and I didn’t know if he heard me before the final push came and suddenly Cisco’s still body arched off the gurney and grey fur started to flow around his body and torn form. A moment later I could see his chest rising and falling again as the change was completed and a giant rat lay on the blood soaked sheets, still injured, but healing so fast. And breathing. He was breathing again. The machines had stopped their high pitched whine of death.

The power eased up a little and suddenly the shadows were pulling together, growing denser, too dense, next to my bed, where Nathaniel had stood less than a minute before, as a human. Now a giant leopard cowered at the foot end of the bed, next to Edward’s feet. The shadows grew more and more solid until I could make out that familiar shape, naked this time, as naked as she’d lain in her tomb when I had caught a glimpse of her.

“Nivia and Mercia are dead. The Harlequin has been called home.”

Edward had his gun down and was aiming at her chest, despite the fact that it was flickering like a bad movie, fading in and out of existence.

“How do I kill it?” He asked.

Next to me, Marmee Noir laughed a laugh that was all her. It was a sound like graveyard and wicked secrets, a sound of amusement and playfulness. She gave me one last look, inclining her head to me in the slightest of greetings and then she was gone like the wind, taking all her power with her, leaving two formerly half dead and one dead person perfectly healed.

I turned to Edward and leaned forward enough to push his gun arm down.

“You don’t,” I said, “You just don’t.”

I was smiling.

+

Fin

+

Opinion?