Lips Touch: Three Times(26)
Author: Laini Taylor

"Or they can use your eyes as windows and climb inside you, shoving their dark animus into your soul and filling it, like brutal fingers thrust into a child’s glove.

"That’s what the stranger did to the pretty Margitay daughter. When he looked into her eyes, she felt a rush of cold fill her, like frigid water from a pump, and then everything fell into shadow. It was morning before she knew herself again. Birds were twittering and she was sagging on her feet, still standing under that black poplar. But there was no stranger before her, only her cat up in the branches. She wanted to think it had all been a dream, but there were leaves in her hair and a hollow ache through and through her, and she knew the demon had not left her pristine as he’d found her. Memories of the dark hours rose in waves to engulf her and she just dropped to her knees there and moaned."

There are other, more savage versions of the same simple story, and they are never told full-voice like a fireside tale, but only in rough whispers beside children’s beds to scare the fear of the night into them, and rightly so.

Druj wear humans. They aren’t supposed to do it but they do, and they wear them harshly, for fighting and rutting and dancing and other such things as make mortal blood flow fast. And when they’re through with them, they leave them where they found them, flow back into their own cold bodies, and return to the forest. The humans live. Over time their torn and bruised souls regain some semblance of their former shape. They live, but they are ever afterward tormented by nightmares.

Four Wolves

Esme fiddled with her eye patch, wondering if the world would look different through her blue eye than it did through her brown one. When she thought her mother wasn’t looking, she lifted the velvet a little and peered around the train car. Everything looked the same.

"Esme!" Mab scolded. "Leave that alone." Esme quickly set the patch back in place. "But people will think something’s wrong with my eye," she said. Already the handsome waiter in the dining car had given her a curious look.

"Something is wrong with your eye," Mab reminded her. "I mean, they’ll think it’s gross. Or missing. But it’s kind of pretty, like one of those dogs, you know, the ones that catch Frisbees?" Mab only looked at her, nonplussed, and after a moment Esme added, "Isn’t it bad enough I look like a boy with my hair cut off? I have to look like a pirate boy?"

"You do not look like a boy," said Mab distractedly. "So I do look like a pirate?"

Mab sighed. "Leave the eye patch on, darling. Please."

Shorn hair or not, Esme did not look like a boy, and Mab certainly didn’t either. When they had hurried to the train station with their violin cases, they had drawn almost as many stares as they would on any normal day when their hair was to their knees and sheeting behind them like red silk. A poetic fruit-seller had told them once that they looked like dryads, and they did still, only now they looked like dryads who had tired of snagging their hair on brambles and sliced it all off on the edge of a knife.

"What have they done to me, Mama?" Esme asked now. "Is it what they did to you?"

"No," Mab said, and the word came out hard as fingers snapping. Esme blinked at her mother, surprised. She was usually so patient, her voice so soft. "This is not what they did to me," Mab said. "I haven’t seen it before. When the Queen would … go inside of me … she liked to look in her mirror through my eyes as if… as if she was me, so I know my eyes didn’t change color, and neither did his…." she trailed off, looking down.

"What?" Esme asked. "Who?"

But Mab didn’t say. She pressed her lips together for a moment and then went on. "Their spies don’t have eyes like that either. They have only one eye and the Queen keeps the other in her tabernacle. Only Druj have those eyes."

"But I’m not one of them!" Esme said. She was suddenly electrified by a horrifying thought. She had never asked about her father. She had never really asked about any of it. She realized now that she’d been afraid to learn what lay coiled at the roots of her mother’s nightmares. She hadn’t wanted any part of a history that could make someone scream like that. But she was part of it. She had come out of it, somehow. She asked, "My … my father wasn’t one of them, was he?"

Mab shuddered. "No, darling, no. The Druj don’t breed."

"Oh," said Esme, relieved. "Then, who was my father?"

Her mother hesitated before saying slowly, "He was a boy, as I was a girl, not much older than you are now. The Queen chose him for me for the color of his hair."

"What color was it?"

"The same as mine, exactly, and the same as yours. It took her months to find him and bring him back on her sledge. I didn’t know anything about the world then, what lay beyond the forest, but now I know he was Russian. His name was Arkady." She had a faraway look in her eyes, remembering.

Esme asked, "Was he nice?"

"Nice?" Mab gave a soft laugh. "Not at first. He hated me like he hated them. He didn’t understand what I was; I didn’t either. He was the first human I’d ever seen. The first time I touched him and felt that his flesh was warm like mine, not cold like theirs, I can’t explain it, my darling, that was the first time I understood I was real. He wasn’t nice at first, but why should he have been? They had stolen him! But in time, between us, there was tenderness."

Esme was silent for a moment, staring at her mother. There was so much she didn’t understand that she didn’t even know where to begin asking. "Mama, what do you mean, what you were? What were you?"

But Mab shook her head and looked out the window. "Enough talking about them, darling. Please."

"But what about my father? Arkady. What happened to him?"

Still looking out the window, Mab whispered, "I don’t know. I don’t know what they did with him, after."

The word "after" hung heavy between them and Esme wished she hadn’t asked. That simple word managed to conjure a whole universe of unspeakable possibilities. "Maybe he got away," she said. "You got away."

"Yes, but I couldn’t have done it alone. I had help."

"From who?"

"One of them. He was a Naxturu — that’s what the wolves are called. Nocturnal, it means. They’re the highest caste of Druj." "Why did he help you?"

"Us, darling. He helped us, and I never knew why. Now eat your soup. We’ve a long way to go. You’ll need your strength."

Esme frowned. "What about you? You haven’t eaten any."