So she and I nodded obediently at Itohan, but I had no intention of stopping. What for? I wasn’t finished with the older brother, not yet. I had spent weeks trying to crack him open the way I wanted. I played soft and sweet, I pretended to be Ada since she was the one he loved. I brushed her fingertips over the back of his hand as he drove and gave him shy smiles till we were alone, and then I slid my palms over his jeans, but he stopped me. Maybe he could smell the difference between her and me, between the grassy lemon of her and my coppered scent. I don’t know what it was—maybe he just knew her well enough to know who I wasn’t. But he wouldn’t surrender and it made me angry. I told him I loved him and he still wouldn’t surrender, he wouldn’t let me touch him. I had arrived in Georgia wrapped in a red rage, and after Ewan, this second refusal blinded me with fury. He denied me at his own risk.

So the night before Ada was leaving, I slid her out of the guest room and into the younger brother’s room. He was the type I knew, easy and predictable. I fucked him with Ada’s body, with his older brother in the next room, asleep and still in love with Ada, with their mother down the hall next to her Bible. The next morning, I sat the older brother down and pretended to be Ada and told him that she had never loved him, a trick I learned from Soren. I watched his heart crack and fall into shimmering pieces of dust, and it was good, it felt correct. This was the lesson: I can fuck you or I can fuck you up—simple.

After I hurt him, he still got up and drove Ada to the airport. You see, what I realized later was that he wasn’t like the others I targeted. He was gentle; he didn’t deserve to be punished. But we had lost Ewan and I was there and I was born into what I was born into. I have always been a weapon and I am not obliged to be fair. My only mistake was that I forgot one small detail: Ada did love the older brother. Very much, in fact.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had gone too far.

Chapter Eleven

You will always be in the process of change because every time you get born into a basilisk, that basilisk consumes itself so you can be born into another basilisk.

We

As?ghara could not be left alone; that would be unnatural. When something stands, something else stands beside it. So on the day she was born in Virginia, there was another one born with her as she tore through that window. His name was Saint Vincent, because when he sloughed off As?ghara’s side, he fell with holiness on his hands.

The Ada named him and he remained in the marble of her mind because he couldn’t survive her body. Saint Vincent was long fingered and cool, with slow and simmering hungers. He was strange; we could never quite place him, where his parts came from. He was not expected to come through the window, but he did and so he was born in a portal, a son of flux space. What we mean is that he was not godspawn like As?ghara. He belonged nowhere, except maybe to the Ada. He was gentle, soft as a ghost. That was good—he was no threat to As?ghara, he would not compete with her for control.

No, Saint Vincent preferred to move inside the Ada’s dreams, when she was floating in our realm, untethered and malleable. He molded her into a new body there, a dreambody with reorganized flesh and a penis complete with functioning nerves and expanding blood vessels, tautening easily into an erection. Even As?ghara was impressed; she couldn’t mold or build in our realm the way that he could. Saint Vincent used the dreambody as his. He wove other bodies in our realm for him to ride, for him to place astride his hips, swallowing him up. When he came, his pleasure was a concentrated burst of light, anchored and distilled in his groin. It was different from what As?ghara experienced with the Ada’s body—those orgasms would spread in a diffuse wash that drowned her. This separation of pleasures was good: Saint Vincent stayed in our realm and in the marble of the Ada’s mind, while As?ghara met him in the marble but moved in the flesh.

He was no less holy for the things he did with the dreambody—you must understand that we see holy as removed from flesh and therefore purer. Saint Vincent was uncontaminated, quarantined, even. Perhaps in another world, where the Ada was not split and segmented, she and Saint Vincent might have been one thing together. After all, she was always being mistaken for a boy when she was a child, when her hair was short for the first time. Perhaps he had been there all along and we just never noticed, we were so young.

The Ada had liked being seen as a boy. She felt like it fit, or at least the misfit of it fit, the wrongness was right. She was perhaps eleven years old then. Her chest was flat, her hips were narrow, her hair was short, and there must have been something about her face that wasn’t delicate enough. When she went swimming at the local sports club with Lisa, adults would stop her in the women’s changing room.

“Why are you in here?” they’d ask, or, “Why are you wearing a girl’s swimsuit?”

The Ada felt like a trickster, which felt right. She could move between boy and girl, which was a freedom, for her and for us. But when she turned twelve and started bleeding, everything was ruined. The hormones redid her body, remaking it without consent from us or the Ada. We were distressed at this re-forming of our vessel, very much so, because it was nothing other than a cruel reminder that we were now flesh, that we could not control our form, that we were in a cage that obeyed other laws, human laws. We had no choice in this warping, this unnatural maturing. There was blackish blood, a swelling chest, hair sprouting like an evil forest. It pushed us into a space we hated, a marked plane that was too clear and too wrong.