“Blisters?” the barghest asked.

I nodded, miserable.

“Here, let me,” he said. Soon, his big hands were around mine and then I felt the warm tingle of his healing powers sweep into my skin. I sighed, rocking back on my heels and shutting my eyes wearily.

I’d slept well the night before, despite what had been a rough half hour full of mad hypnagogic fantasies all beginning with some ridiculous premise, like my sleepwalking, or getting up for a glass of water, or needing to pee. Each fantasy ended the same way, however, with my coming back to bed only to trip and fall onto Anyan’s penis. Luckily, my overtaxed sex drive was combated by sheer weariness and jetlag, so sleep eventually crept up on me like an over-the-hill ninja. When I really dreamed, it was of sitting with a black dog in a sunlit meadow, while bees buzzed around us and flowers bloomed. When I woke up, I felt like I’d been given a portent of good things to come.

There was no lounging in bed for me, though. Anyan had immediately scooted me into breakfast and then, as soon as I’d finished eating, ordered I get dressed, bring the labrys, and follow him outside. I thought he might be interested in a first date of naughty ax-play, but instead he just wanted to start my lessons.

Lessons I very obviously needed. For the only other time I’d fought with the ax, I’d let the creature take over my body. In that fight with the now deceased Phaedra, I had been amazing—only it wasn’t, of course, really me. It was the creature, controlling me through my mind. But it wasn’t there to help me, now. I kept reaching towards the place in my mind where I knew I could contact my ancient friend, but all I got was the mental version of sleepy static, with an occasional flash of a dream or a faint emotion.

It had warned me it was going to sleep, and, in fact, had wanted me to destroy the last sigil that could free it because it wanted to be able to sleep deeply, in peace. But I hadn’t thought it meant it would fall off into some kind of coma.

Which left me in charge of its power: its own champion, with no idea what I was doing or how I was supposed to do it.

Awesome.

At least Anyan was a good teacher, and knew how to ax-fight. The part of me that went squishy when I thought of him thought about the fact that Anyan was good at everything, and that he also looked hot while he was being good at things. For example, watching those long arms, roped with muscles, swing that ax around as he demonstrated the various moves I would be learning had left me no more enlightened about what to do with the labrys, but it had left me slightly breathless. And pretty sure I knew what to do with the barghest, if not the ax.

Sop him up with a biscuit, the libido purred, borrowing Grizzie’s favorite phrase.

“Jane?” Anyan’s voice interrupted my reverie, and I looked up at his face. I realized I’d been staring at his hands on mine. And might have been purring.

“Hmm?” I asked, dreamily.

“I said that you’re all healed,” he must have repeated, his eyes crinkling with laughter at my reaction to him. But before I could be at all offended he thought my overt lust for him was funny, he brushed a kiss against the knuckles of my right hand. “And now I want to see you charge up this thing. I want to see how it works,” he continued, as he dropped my hand and moved away a step. “How much power you have, as well as control.”

So I dutifully raised the ax so that its double-head was about level with my eyes. Then I closed my eyes, and reached out to it…

The power was immediately there, and even through my eyelids I could see the charge that had lit up the labrys. I felt its force lick up and down my spine, incredibly strong and both mine and not-mine. It was like I was pregnant with a life force that was both part of me and utterly foreign.

“That’s enough, Jane. Can you shut it off?”

I frowned again in concentration, my eyes still shut, as I pulled my inner focus away from the power now residing within me. After a few seconds, the light in front of my eyelids dimmed, and the world was plunged into darkness. I blinked my eyes open slowly, letting them adjust to the dawn light and focus on Anyan.

The barghest was matching my expression, frown for frown.

“How do you do it?” he asked. “How does it come to you?”

I lowered the ax slowly, then let its double-head rest against the floor again. I thought hard, trying to figure out how to articulate what it felt like to access the power with which the creature had gifted me.

“It’s like there’s a door in my mind that I can open or shut. Behind the door is the power.”

“It’s as simple as that?” Anyan asked.

“Yes and no,” I replied. “Because I feel like that’s all I can do, shut it off or turn it on. I don’t know how to use it, really. Although I guess we’ll never need a flashlight…”

“Can you ask the creature?” Anyan interrupted. “Because you’re going to need full access to that power, as soon as possible.”

I tried that place in my mind that had once held the creature’s communication.

“Nope,” I said, shaking my head. “I think it’s sleeping. Really, really deeply,” I added, when Anyan looked like he wasn’t going to take “sleeping” as an answer.

“Damn,” he said, looking at me with concern. I saw, then, how worried he was about me. In turn, I realized why.

“I’m being set up as some kind of hero, aren’t I,” I asked, my voice small.

His only response was a somber nod.

I suddenly wanted very much to sit down, so I did. Dragging the ax behind me unceremoniously, I walked to the small set of steps leading from the house into the garden and I sat down heavily. Anyan followed, squeezing in next to me and wrapping an arm around my waist. I let my head fall on his chest.

We sat there in silence, for a moment. I don’t know what Anyan was thinking about, but I was thinking about what it meant for me to be a hero. It took a few minutes for me to realize I had no idea, but I knew whom to ask.

“What does it mean?” I asked quietly, peering up at him.

“What?” he asked.

“Being a hero.”

Anyan thought for a minute, and when he responded his voice was serious.

“It can mean a lot of things. In this case, though, it means a lot of things it shouldn’t. It means that people are going to want something from you. They’re going to want you to be someone in whom they can invest their hope. But this is also the Great Island—a country legendary even by supernatural standards for its politicking. Many of our monarchs and monsters have emerged from this place.

“That’s why we’re here, probably,” Anyan said, stroking a big hand down over my hair like he was petting a cat. “It’s said that whoever holds the Great Island holds the power of our kind. So it’s no coincidence that any large battle fought would be fought here.”

I shivered at the words “large battle,” and his grip on me tightened, the hand in my hair still stroking gently. Then his fingers found my chin, and he raised my gaze to his.

“So your having the power of the champion means that people are going to want to use you, here. People will want either to take your power, or to make you work for them, or to knock you out of the game. In the New World, the politics you’ve seen are nothing compared to here. There is space to breathe and to be left alone, for the most part, where we grew up, and beings like us came to the New World for the same reasons humans did: to be free. But here, everything is ancient.”

I nodded, understanding to a certain extent. “I think it must be the same for humans, in some ways,” I said. “The difference, you know, between Americans and Europeans.”

“Maybe,” Anyan nodded. “Certainly Europeans have to deal with a lot more history every day, in a way Americans don’t so much. But there’s one important difference.”

I cocked my head curiously, enjoying Anyan lecturing me. He didn’t talk this much that often, and I loved this chance to see the side of him that was wise and patient.

“British history is not only long but also alive in many ways, yet all but the most recent players are dead,” he said. “Imagine if in their parliament, there still walked Henry the Eighth, or Queen Elizabeth, or Shakespeare, or William Wallace?”

Suddenly understanding, I blanched. “That’s what it’s like for the supes,” I said, “Isn’t it? The Alfar that lead them are the Alfar that have always led… and there’s no where to escape them, on an island of this size.”

“Exactly.” His lips pressed against my forehead, and I snuggled closer. “History isn’t really history, on the Great Island. It’s more like the supes here live with multiple presents layered one on top of the others, making the future hard to imagine and the past impossible to escape. It’s why there are so many fullbloods here, like Gog and Magog, in the rebel camp. Halflings have it rougher than ever here, but so does everyone else.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“We trust no one but each other, and maybe Blondie. While she definitely wants something from us, at least I think we know what that ‘something’ is. As for everyone else, even if they’re otherwise decent creatures, they will have an agenda, having grown up here. They will have something they want from us or for us, like Blondie does, but we’ll have no idea what it is until it’s too late.”