Lips Touch: Three Times(23)
Author: Laini Taylor

Esme nodded, sobbing raggedly, and for a few moments they stared at each other like strangers. Then Mab wrapped her arms around her daughter and held her close, rocking her and whispering, "I’m so sorry, my darling. I’m so sorry I frightened you," and they both wept until their breathing calmed.

"What is it, Mama?" Esme whispered. "What did I do?"

"You didn’t do anything, darling. It wasn’t you I was talking to."

"Then … who? Esme sat back and looked at her mother.

Seeing the blue eye again, Mab shuddered and whispered, "Avo afritim. Bless and protect us." Her face and lips were white and bloodless as paper as she told Esme, "Cover your eye, darling. They might be … using it."

Esme put her hand up over her eye and said, "Using it?"

"Has someone spoken to you, Esme? Has someone stared into your eyes and made you stare back?"

"What?" asked Esme. She was rarely out of her mother’s company to meet strangers. "No."

"Have you seen any one-eyed birds?"

"One-eyed birds?" Esme repeated. With a sick feeling she remembered a trip to the seaside when she was a little girl, how her mother had kicked and shrieked at a one-eyed seagull like a madwoman and chased it away, then clutched Esme tight like a doll all the way back to London on the train.

"One-eyed anything. Crows, pigeons, cats," Mab persisted.

Esme shook her head again.

"Has anything happened, anything strange?"

"Strange?" Esme asked, an unaccustomed edge of bitterness to her voice. "Our whole life is strange!"

She hadn’t even realized it for so long, how small and unreal their life was, just the two of them in a world of their own creation. All around them roared a great city, a tumult of engines and voices, yet they knew no one. They had no friends and no family and never even answered the door when neighbors knocked.

But if they knew no one, somewhere out there in that seething world of folk, someone knew them, because someone sent them diamonds. They arrived by post, loose in plain airmail envelopes with no return address. Mab kept them in a saltshaker and every few weeks they took the Tube to Hatton Garden, knocked on the back door of a jeweler’s shop, and sold one or two to a fat woman with a mouth like a prune. They called these trips their "diamond days," and went afterward to small, neat shops to buy artichokes and cherries and pink boxes of baklava, books and sheet music, pearl buttons and embroidery thread and lengths of antique lace.

Everything was strange and nothing was! Was it strange that Esme had never been to school, or to a hairdresser, or even to a doctor? It was Mab who had taught her to read and count and play the violin, and Mab who trimmed her hair, and as for the doctor, neither of them had ever fallen ill. They drank a daily dose of tea that Mab mixed from herbs, and that was the extent of their medicine. A few months ago when Esme’s bleeding had first come, her mother had turned pale and wept, so Esme thought for a panicked moment that she must be dying, but Mab had explained in a rush that it meant she wasn’t a child anymore. That she could breed. She’d made it sound like something animals did — breed– and she’d had such terrible nightmares that night she’d awakened the whole building with her screams.

It was also on that night, when her mother’s screams woke her, that Esme thought she glimpsed a man standing on the church steeple across the street, staring in her window. But when she looked again, her heart giving a great lurch, there hadn’t been anyone there.

That day and night, the bleeding and the screaming, had knocked something askew for Esme, like a picture swinging crooked on a wall. She loved the life she lived with her mother. It was beautiful. It was, she sometimes thought, a sweet emulation of the fairy tales they cherished in their lovely, gold-edged books. They sewed their own clothes from bolts of velvet and silk, ate all their meals as picnics, indoors or out, and danced on the rooftop, cutting passageways through the fog with their bodies. They embroidered tapestries of their own design, wove endless melodies on their violins, charted the course of the moon each month, and went to the theater and the ballet as often as they liked — every night last week to see Swan Lake again and again. Esme herself could dance like a faerie, climb trees like a squirrel, and sit so still in the park that birds would come to perch on her. Her mother had taught her all that, and for years it had been enough. But she wasn’t a little girl anymore, and she had begun to catch hints and glints of another world outside her pretty little life, one filled with spice and poetry and strangers.

Twice now the boy from the flower shop had smiled at her, his whole face flushing pink as he did, and when he was behind her in line at the bakery last week, he’d held her long braid gently in his hand, thinking she wouldn’t feel it, but she had. She hadn’t turned around, but she’d blushed and stammered ordering her cakes, and she’d left in a rush, imagining she could feel his touch all the way up her braid and tingling at the nape of her neck. She didn’t even know his name. She didn’t know anyone’s name.

"What’s wrong with us?" she demanded now. "Why are we such freaks? Why don’t we have any friends? Why don’t we have any family?"

"I know our life is … different. I just…" Mab faltered. "Darling, I just didn’t know how to do it. I did the best I could!"

"What do you mean?" Esme cried in frustration, as for the first time her confusion broke out of her and overwhelmed her calm, quiet nature. "You didn’t know how to do what? Live?"

"No! I didn’t! I had to learn it all, Esme, after you were born. How to cross a street and turn on a faucet and light a match? How to tie shoes? Use money?" She took a deep, uneven breath, hesitated, and then said quietly, "And I had to learn how to look at someone without being afraid they would come in through my eyes and wear my skin like a costume while I was shoved into the shadows of my own soul!" Her voice quavered and rose with a hint of hysteria. Esme stared at her, baffled by her words, and she knew that whatever had happened, whatever was happening, the pretty little life she had always known was coming to a close. Something new was beginning.

"What are you talking about, Mama?" she asked, more gently. She was on her knees, with her hair falling loose around her and radiating out across the floor, as red in the dawn light as a spill of blood. In her white nightgown she looked very young and very fragile, and Mab reached out a shaking hand and clasped her daughter’s fingers.

"Esme, you haven’t seen any…" she began uneasily but her voice gave out and she swallowed and started again. "You haven’t seen or heard any … wolves, have you?"