Last Rights
Excerpt One: Jasmine and Jade“Jasmine.”
I stood in shock, staring at the woman in front of me. Her voice was like listening to a cat purr in my ear while it lent its warmth to my chest. Her hair flashed red in the night, pulled back tightly behind her freckled face. She flashed green eyes. Jade eyes. She was what people always expected of me, exotic, interesting.
Sexual.
“You are Jade.” She said this as if to remind me that I had a voice and a name, to tell me that I must speak again, that I must talk now. That is the purpose to a summit I suppose, but her appearance has left me startled, unable to gather myself. I reach out my hand, hoping that the act of friendship and greeting will help me make a connection both to her and in my mind; a connection that could spark my speech patterns back to life again. She takes my hand and pulls me into an embrace. She breaks the personal space that I’ve kept around myself for most of my life, and unwillingly I am pulled into her space. We share one of the most intimate of moments, while our wing tips brush against each other, and our hearts beat in unison as they touch beneath our chests. We are hidden from view by the expanse of our wings, a white and black cocoon shielding us from view. I am suddenly glad that I met her alone, because my people would have jumped at the chance to attack her now, blamed it on the startled invasion of privacy, and said she was trying to stab me or some such nonsense. Now that I have seen her, seen her cool demeanor and her confident gaze, I begin to believe that all we have stood for was some such nonsense.
She releases me. My mind fires to life with a million questions, and yet I can’t voice any of them. She smiles, leaning over to me again. She runs a hand along the sleeve of the leather coat I am wearing. Daniel’s coat. “Nice fabric. Odd for a Seran. I thought you wore white cotton clothing.” She smiled, addressing the stereotype so directly that I couldn’t help but smile in return. I am glad she is their leader.
“It isn’t mine. It belongs to…” I falter. How do I describe Daniel to someone like her? Boyfriend sounds like such a ridiculous word in the face of such a person. So childish, so familiar when she is so worldly.
“Your lover?” She looks surprised.
“No!” I answer too quickly. My face turns red in the pale blue light from the sign next to us. This rooftop suddenly seems extremely open and exposed. “He is my…companion.”
“It’s a shame. The other kinds are much nicer.” She crosses her arm, cocks her hip, and looks at me again. Something has changed in her, like superiority is being displayed. It is like she has suddenly realized that I am not what she wanted. I feel ashamed, and I know I haven’t done anything, except be myself.
“You asked me to meet you here. It doesn't seem very neutral, but I accepted.” She didn’t change her stance, barely moved her head.
“We all like the rooftops, I have seen your kind on them. We like to look down on the humans below us.” I adopted her stance, but she only smirked at me in my imitation. “I won’t bother with formalities. I want this to be over. We don’t like death.”
“Neither do we, no matter how much you tell yourselves otherwise.” She finally moved, walking to the edge of the roof. She sat, legs crossed, arms to her sides. Her pose would have been so innocent if she was a young schoolgirl, but instead it was flirtatious and confident. “Yes, we feed from it. We drink the last breath of the dying as a way to replenish our energy. But we do not cause that death, we are merely drawn to it. As you are drawn to pain and suffering. You don’t enjoy it. Or do you?”
“Of course not! But we can heal, perform a service. We can help calm their minds and bring them our peace. We only want to help.”
“As do we.”
“How do you help anyone?” Her confidence began to make me angry. I wanted to yell at her, to tell her that her kind and their violent and selfish ways had caused far too many deaths before the war even started. I wanted to list all the things I knew about the Skerans, confront her with facts. She interrupted me before I could start.
“Have you ever been with someone as they died? Held onto them mentally and calmed their frantic mind? Have you ever touched a mind as it blinks out? It is a violent act, when the soul is ripped from the body on its last breath.” She stood, began pacing about the rooftop. “I have never seen a Seran at a death bed. Seran’s are life, we are death. Day and night, it’s an obvious contrast. The Seran’s abilities, your empathic powers, your healing, it is all meant to prolong life. But all of you know that often it is simply the time for one to pass on. And you leave them. We step in, we help the mind, and we help it let go. The soul clings to the body, each knuckle turning white as it struggles to maintain its grip. As we take their energy, we are pouring our assurance into the body. We help them, finger by finger, to let go and fall because we know that they must fall. Most of us don’t enjoy it, but we see the purpose.”
I stared. I stared at her, at my own hands, at the scar from the bullet that shattered my wrist and killed my twin. I stared at the leather of the jacket Daniel had loaned me before I left, thinking of the calming words he’d whispered to me about Joseph’s death when I called him in the middle of the night, crying from the nightmares.
“You were never told that I suppose.”
“Never.”
“That does not surprise me. You’re all so stuck on your secret identities, you’re holy gift. You never find each other, let alone know truly what your purpose is. Your purpose was lost long ago to you all. Oral histories only continue when one is allowed to share them. Tell me, what were you told about the Skerans? The first thing you ever learned about us?”
“You are wicked.” I remembered my grandmother, her eyes gleaming as she saw the paramedics take my parents from the streets. The strange man, the EMT, he had leaned over my mother in a peculiar way. I had asked her what he was doing to my mom, tears streaming down my face. I thought he was praying, his eyes were closed in such concentration.
He is a wicked man, Jade.
I didn’t understand then why someone so evil was there helping my mother, but when she died only moments later, I knew he was evil. He wasn’t praying, and he wasn’t saving her. My mother died in great pain and I blamed him for it. It wasn’t until a year later that my grandmother finally told me what he was, what he had done to her.
Jasmine’s laughter tore me from the memories forcefully. Her laughter echoed through the city, seeming to stretch beyond the lights and fields all the way to the mountains in the distance. “Wicked?” She smiled. “The first thing I learned of your kind was that you were Pious. What an interesting and obvious contrast. Yes, we are wicked if you listen to the ministers in the streets. We are wicked if you follow those strict rules that someone wrote down after they’d forgotten how to talk to our God. We are wicked because we are not bound. We are wicked because we are death, because we are night, we are black, and that is wicked. We are wicked because you are not. And isn’t that really the heart of it all?”
She walked behind me, but I did not turn to watch her, “Tell me, what is your greatest temptation? Be honest with me, I want to know.”
I stopped, swallowed hard and ran my finger along the cuff of the jacket I was wearing.
“You mean, you have spent your life without a lover? Without the comfort that physical affection can give? I suppose you’ve never even fallen asleep on the couch watching television with him, have you?” She walked into my field of vision again.
“It…isn’t it wrong?”
She laughed again. I felt like an eight year old, being teased by her teacher for not knowing her multiplication tables, like a student who didn’t get the joke but was being constantly subjected to it. “Well, I mean,” I stuttered, trying to explain myself, trying to stop her superiority, “Not that it’s wholly wrong, but that it only leads to greater temptation and I can’t give in to that, so I avoid it.”
“You avoid it because you are tempted, but you are tempted because it isn’t entirely wrong. Are you ever tempted to commit murder? No, not the idle thought that you wish you could kill someone. And don’t think about the Skerans in this either, that is a different situation. In your day to day life. Have you ever really truly contemplated murdering your coworkers? Neighbors?”
“No.”
“Because you are confident in your judgment that it is wrong. But you are not sure about your judgement about love or sex.” She glanced at me as she said that, hoping to catch me blush as she pronounced what we were actually discussing. I refused to give her the satisfaction. “You do not know for sure what you believe, you can’t justify how it is wrong, and so you are afraid to think on it too seriously.”
“That isn’t true.” That can’t be true.
“We live our lives on feeling, we do not resist temptation because that which tempts us is not always wrong. We might be taught that it is wrong by society, but we live in a different society, with different rules.” She stopped and looked me in the eye, “We scare you.”
She broke the eye contact but only for a moment. She swiftly stepped closer to me. “There is good in this world, and there is bad. There is light and dark, justice and injustice. There is always a balance. For every Skeran born, there is a Seran. Until this war of yours, we were equal on this earth. You have upset this balance. Now I fully intend to upset yours.” She grabbed my face in her hands, one palm on each side; she touched her forehead to mine. “Give in to him. Follow your heart; follow the strange feelings you have quelled for so long. Do not do this for me, for your race, for anything other than yourself. Do what you want and only that, but do anything that you feel. Just once, do this and come back to me. Then we will be able to talk, then perhaps we can reach a peace.” She let go abruptly, and jumped to the edge of the roof. She willed her wings back into herself, a look of ecstasy the only insight I had to her mind. She jumped down three rungs on the fire escape and was gone.
And I was alone on the rooftop again, shivering in Daniel’s jacket. I pulled it closer to me and smelled his scent on my shoulder, remembered his gentle hands on my face as hers had just been. I left, and went to him.
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