Nightingale

Chapter 7 The Laying on of Hands

Late that night, Olivia watched Mike go out on his "evening rounds" of the ranch. He pampered his prize cattle as if they were children. Olivia wanted a real family, but sometimes felt as if Mike already had his own "youngsters."

Mike didn't like crowds, Olivia knew. He was so large that he'd had a hard time growing up. Kids at school had made fun of him, calling him Monster Mike. Most people were afraid of him. They couldn't see his gentle nature.

Animals seemed to recognize his goodness, though.

Olivia had never seen Mike hurt a living creature. Earlier in the spring, when a pair of barn swallows had disappeared, Mike had gotten so worried about their young that he'd searched the barn and outbuildings until he found their nest, the baby birds chirping for food. He'd spent weeks nursing them to health.

But Mike's compassion didn't extend to strangers. So Olivia went out to the barn, looking for him, hoping to put him at ease about Bron.

Olivia hated that she had to lie to him so often, hide things. She was in love with the giant, but the few times when she'd tried to tell him the truth about herself, he'd grown afraid.

The barn smelled clean, of fresh alfalfa, salt licks, and only a little of steer. She crept through it quietly.

She found Mike in the corral, beneath a hanging heat lamp, scratching the head of a pregnant cow, saying good night to his animals. His Labrador retriever, Sheila, sat quietly at his side.

The banded Galloways had a thick patch of hair on their heads, several inches long, to protect them from the cold. Their scalps looked almost human.

As Mike scratched the cow, she rolled her eyes back and laid her muzzle along his arm, then stuck out her tongue, probing for a treat. Sure enough, Mike pulled a carrot from the pocket of his jeans.

"Don't take those from my garden," Olivia said. "You promised."

Mike nearly jumped out of his shoes, surprised by her voice, made doubly afraid because he knew that he'd been caught.

"Damned store-bought carrots aren't any good," Mike said. "They've got no minerals in them. Besides, you're one to complain about waste. You want to buy that kid all new clothes? You've only known him for a couple of hours!"

Olivia had dreaded this argument. "He needed the uniforms. He can't get by without them. He's a good kid."

"He's practically grown," Mike said. "It feels like you're moving another man into our house. It's not enough that you spend all of your time with those kids at school...."

Olivia drew close to Mike, wrapped an arm around his waist, and pulled him toward her. After seven years of marriage, she didn't doubt Mike's fidelity. But their love life had grown predictable, and as he realized that all the loving in the world wouldn't give him a baby, he'd lost some interest.

"I like my kids. You like your cattle. We love each other. What's so wrong with that?"

She had imagined that Mike was half-teasing, but saw an angry curl to his lip. He stared at his cow, rubbing it on the ridge between its horns.

"I always figured that when we got a kid, we'd get a younger one—one that we could raise. This kid's almost all grown...."

"On the outside, maybe," Olivia admitted, "but on the inside he still has a lot of growing to do, and a lot of healing."

"Never figured you to be one for gathering strays," he complained. Mike turned to gaze at her. The gleam from the heat lamp just behind her back reflected in his eyes. "That boy doesn't seem to have a liking for cattle. Didn't even ask about them during dinner."

"He was just surprised to see them. He's always lived in the city. Besides, we talked about them in the car, on the way here."

Mike shook his head regretfully. "Any proper kid would be jumping out of his boots at the sight of these cattle. Little kids all want to be cowboys when they grow up."

"A lot of little kids do," Olivia agreed. "But I'm sure Bron has his own plans."

Mike bit his lip. "You've got that right. You know what boys are like at sixteen."

She gave him a questioning look, but knew where this was going.

Mike continued, "Their minds are swimming in hormones at that age. That kid up there in the house, he's lying in bed, dreaming about you. You've got him all worked up, and don't even know it. He's probably sweating all over his sheets, hotter than a bull after a heifer. It's not his fault, of course. He won't be able to stop where his mind goes. It's just nature."

"Not all boys are that way, I'm sure," Olivia said, trying to deflect Mike's jealousy. "Give him a chance."

Mike sighed, leaned against the fence, in resignation. "If you're going to get him a car,

make sure that it's easy on the gas."

She looked up at him and raised a brow. She hadn't even had to ask. "A car?" Olivia had been wondering how to bring up the problem.

"Well, you work all those odd hours, and I can't imagine him wanting to stay at school till midnight. I can't always take the time to drive down and pick him up."

She was an actress, of course, so now she acted. "You're right," she said as if it had just dawned on her. "We will need a car.... It would have to be pretty cheap."

"And it has to be good in the snow," Mike enthused. "Make it a front-wheel drive. And it doesn't have to be cheap—which means 'broken down' or 'likely to fall apart' in my book. It needs to be a good investment. If we have to sell it in a couple of weeks, I don't want to take a beating on the price."

"Don't worry," Olivia said. "I'll find us a bargain."

Mike grimaced, went back to scratching the head of his cow. He took a deep breath. "I think I know why you like that boy."

"Why's that?"

"He kind of looks like you—same hair, same color of skin. He looks like he could be your own blood."

"He does look like he could be our kid, doesn't he?" Olivia agreed.

Mike grunted thoughtfully and shook his head. "Olivia, don't get your hopes up. We don't know that boy, and I've got a bad feeling about him."

"Bad feeling?" Olivia asked. She knew that it came from jealousy. Mike was uncomfortable with strangers anyway. Now she'd be spending time with this kid, spending money on him.

"Yeah, look in his eyes," Mike said. "He's a cold one."

Olivia nearly laughed. Mike didn't really believe that, did he? But she saw from his sober expression that he did, and that worried her. Mike was sensitive to the nature of other people. She'd seen that over and over again. He was a superb judge of character. Mike went on, "Yeah, there's something wrong with that kid."

Olivia lay awake that night worrying. The car chase had her terrified, and she kept replaying events in her mind, trying to figure out whether the Draghouls would be able to find her. Mike couldn't possibly know what kind of danger Bron presented. He was just a boy, but even if he was the best kid in the world, a Gandhi in the making, his presence posed a threat to the entire family.

The Draghouls had to suspect that she—a feral—had stolen one of their nightingales. And if they tracked her down, it would mean an end to her cozy world.

She suspected that they would leave her alive. She was too talented to simply waste. And Bron would be left alive, too. But the Draghouls would alter them, change them in ways perverse and deadly. Mike? He might get a bullet to the back of his head.

She was risking everything for a boy she'd hardly met. Am I a fool, she wondered, or am I just trying to be heroic?

The truth was though, she had been taking this risk all of her life. Every time she went to school to teach, she interfaced with others. Eventually, her luck was bound to run out.

The safest course, it seemed, was to flee. Olivia could take Bron and Mike and run away. But first she would have to tell her husband what she was, what Bron was.

How would he react if he knew? Could he give up his cattle, the ranch that his family had spent three generations building? She knew the answer.

This was all so messy.

It was complicated by the fact that Mike didn't trust Bron, and Olivia had to wonder at that. Mike was so often right.

So at 1:03 a.m., Olivia lay thinking furiously. She often found that she didn't sleep well. She was a creature of the night, after all.

Her cell phone vibrated on the table, a soft buzz. She snatched it before it could wake Mike. The caller ID identified Father Leery.

Mike was snoring gently, a sign that he was out cold.

"Hello?" Olivia whispered.

"Hi," Father Leery said jovially. "I know that it's late, but I suddenly remembered that you were supposed to bring the potato salad tomorrow, for the church picnic, and I wanted to remind you."

It had to be a code. Father Leery didn't have much of a congregation, and Olivia never went to his functions. Phones are far easier to wiretap than most people realize, so he was trying to be discreet.

"Sure, I'll be there," she said.

"Good," he said. "I'll be talking about the 'Dangers of Mortality,' for my sermon in the morning. I hear that there was a terrible auto accident this afternoon in Saint George, and a poor young teen died on the highway."

Olivia's heart sank, and she suddenly felt as if she would retch.

"Died?"

"Thrown from a car when it rolled," Father Leery said. "Let it be a warning to us all to travel safely. Better yet, just stay home."

He hung up, and Olivia lay in a panic. She'd never felt such guilt. Her skin seemed to crawl, and her heart pounded. She struggled for air, even as she fought to keep her dinner down.

She wanted to run. The Draghouls would certainly be looking for vengeance. They'd launch a full-scale hunt. But Father Leery had just warned her to "stay home." He understood the Draghouls far better than she did.

Olivia had never killed anyone before. She'd never even considered it. She felt sick. She loved children. The boy who'd died would have been high school age.

Was Riley the one who'd died? She hoped not. Then again, she remembered what Bron had said. Seeing him was like staring into the face of death.

Olivia hadn't listened to the news after dinner, hadn't checked it on the internet. Part of her had been afraid to do so, fearful of learning what she might find.

How would Bron react? It would be better if he never found out. But there would be talk at school. He was bound to hear about this.

Would Bron flip out when he heard?

She wondered what to do. Right now, there was nothing that Olivia could do. When Bron heard the truth, she could wipe his memory. But he was likely to hear about it over and over for months. She'd have to remove the memories again and again, and each time that he heard the news, he'd relive the shock of learning that he'd been involved in a killing.

That would be torture.

Olivia couldn't be a part of that. It would be better if Bron knew the truth, figured out how to handle it. But could he handle it? Did he have that kind of internal strength?

She looked over to Mike. He wouldn't wake, she knew, between now and sunrise, when he'd begin to get anxious to check on his cattle.

She stealthily climbed from bed and glanced through the dormer windows. An endless array of stars filled the sky, smoldering and burning.

She crept from her bedroom on the balls of her feet. The thick carpeting made her soundless, and she slipped down the hallway to Bron's room. When a floorboard creaked, she halted for a long moment before moving on.

She opened the door; it squeaked on its hinges. Bron lay in bed on his side.

She worried that he might wake, so she studied his eyes. They were closed, but she knew that he might be faking.

What if Bron caught her? Would he imagine that she'd come for a tryst?

He was handsome in his sleep, so serene and peaceful, like the bust that he'd carved. His face was perfect, flawless.

She crept to the side of his bed. There was no twitching or fluttering in his eyes, no catching of his breath. That reassured her that he was asleep.

The masaak brain had two major quarters, and two minor quarters. The major quarters correspond to the right and left hemispheres of the human brain, but the minor quarters, only an eighth the size of a hemisphere, were mirrored appendages on the brain stem. All of the quarters were connected by a small bundle of nerves that acted as a bridge, very similar to the corpus callosum.

Often at night, the right hemisphere of both the human and the masaak brain, the part that focuses on emotions, would wake and begin to dream. When that happened rapid eye movement indicated that the dreamer was only half-asleep.

For what Olivia was about to do, Bron needed to be totally passive, unconscious.

She almost felt that she should speak to Bron, offer some words of comfort, but she dared not even whisper.

Just as a lion hides its daggers in its paws, so Olivia kept her own weapons hidden. Now she tightened some muscles in her wrists, and unsheathed, as the masaaks called it. Instantly, ridges that looked like callus formed in an oval on each of her fingertips and thumbs.

She stepped to Bron, reached down, and gingerly took the right side of his head into her left hand, placing each finger carefully over the right hemisphere of the brain—the forefinger above the frontal lobe, the middle finger over the parietal lobe, the ring finger over the occipital lobe, and the pinky upon the temporal.

She sent a thought pulse through her hand and locked onto his mind. Sparks flew from her fingers. Immediately his right eye opened, and his body seized, his back arcing off the bed.

He gagged, as if he were starting to rouse. She grabbed the left hemisphere of his head with her right hand, twisting his face up toward the ceiling, and his left eye flew open, too, wide with fear.

She seized both halves of his mind.

Someone's in the room! he thought-screamed. Adrenaline coursed through his veins, urging him awake.

She drew out all of his conscious thought, discarded his fears, and just held his head for a moment until the adrenaline wasted away. She placed her thumbs up under his eyes, just beneath the supra-orbital ridge, as she gained full control of his mind.

"Don't worry," she whispered into his dreams, "I'm not here to harm you. I'm here to bring you fairy gifts. For so many years you've been asleep to your potential. Now it is time for the dreamer to awake."

She probed the surface of his dreaming thoughts—chaotic and random and emotionally charged, as they tended to be at this time of night.

She went first to the day's events. The fact that she had fired a gun at a young boy deeply disturbed Bron.

Olivia didn't like to remove another's memories. It was a type of violation. But it could also be a form of surgery, like removing a painful splinter from a hand.

Perhaps it had to be done. Perhaps with her kind it was just an instinct. Olivia simply discarded some of Bron's memories: the gun in the glove compartment? Gone. The bullet shattering the window? It never happened.

Bron would only recall that the window had broken, perhaps as Riley pounded on it and screamed.

She searched deeper into his mind, looking for damaging incidents, the kind that cause the most pain. Sights and sounds began to flash—images of Mr. Golper beating Bron on a bridge on a crisp winter's day, while Bron tightly held a burlap bag that contained his kitten. Bron had known that so long as he held out, the kitten would live.

She heard girls mocking his worn clothing at a school dance last fall, and felt the jolt as a foster mother slapped his face and bloodied a lip. Bron's body wracked with sobs as he cried himself to sleep the night after a grim Christmas when he was six, when Santa brought toys for his foster parents' real children but none for him.

Olivia found so many more harsh memories ... so many.

For her, viewing another's memories was as natural as breathing, and ripping the memories from a person's head was child's play.

She didn't dare take all of the painful memories. Such memories forced people to grow. They were like weights. Carry a little and you get strong. Carry too many, and they break you.

Besides, removing a recollection could be tricky. A memory of the kind with Mr. Golper helped shape a person's worldview. Even if Olivia removed the vile thing, Bron's habitual thoughts, his way of seeing the world, would remain for awhile.

But in time, healing might come. Eventually, he would look into his memory, and would not understand why he felt so hurt and angry, and perhaps his thoughts would be free to form new paths.

Olivia hoped for healing.

She reached for the most damaging memory that she could find—one where Bron huddled as a child while his foster father, Mr. Lewis, slapped and choked his favorite foster mother.

It was a loathsome memory. Bron remembered Helen Lewis well, her tears streaming down a bruised face.

Bron had run from the room and tried to call 911, in order to protect her. But it was Helen Lewis herself who rushed in and hung up the phone. "Don't call the police," she'd begged. "If you call them, they'll take my husband away, and they'll take you away, and I'll be all alone!"

Bron had let her disconnect the phone. Of course, within eight hours, once the paramedics were shown Mr. Lewis, huddling naked in a fetal position on the floor, he was taken to the hospital.

Without a father in the home, social services removed Bron, too. Helen was left all alone, despite her pleas. Often Bron wondered if she was happy, if she'd had a good life.

Olivia gently pulled the foul memory of the fight from Bron's head, and held it for a moment. It was as loathsome as a wriggling worm or a dead rat.

Olivia didn't want that ugliness infesting her own memory, so she simply abandoned it, tossed it away.

Bron would never recall what had happened to Mrs. Lewis when he was eight. As far as he would know, the parents would have had a happy, supportive relationship.

Then she went into his recollection of the morning after, when Bron had risen to find Mr. Lewis, naked and huddling in the kitchen, beside the refrigerator.

Moments later, his wife had called the paramedics. Mr. Lewis had died that afternoon.

Olivia wiped the memory clean.

In the future, Bron would only recall tales of Mr. Lewis dying in some hospital.

She decided to leave the memory of being chased by Draghouls. Bron needed to know that he had enemies, and she suspected that even if he learned of a teen's death, he'd be able to handle it.

Olivia considered what she'd done. She hadn't practiced like this on anyone in years.

So she cleaned away some harmful memories, then peered deeply into Bron's character. He was a humble boy. He didn't think of himself as special. He felt that he had no real talent, and so worried about what others would think about him at his new school. In the past, his art had so often been scorned or ridiculed that he'd all but abandoned it.

Olivia knew that she could change that.

But she found something odd about Bron: he was well practiced when it came to withdrawing from others. He fought any feelings of love. His life was emptier, sadder, than she had imagined.

Olivia had a code in life: give more than you take. Removing harmful memories might relieve some pain, but she wanted to give him something more. She decided to train him.

Training is harder than ripping away memories. Training requires time, concentration. She needed to recall a skill, practice it in her imagination, and transplant the knowledge into her student.

The body can be conditioned to act a certain way by repetition. For example, to run, or to sing, requires that some neural pathways to the body's extremities be trained.

Olivia studied the pathways that led from Bron's amygdala down into his brainstem, and from there to his ears and larynx, and down his arms, legs and into his wrists and fingers.

She could only "train" Bron in things she knew.

For instance, she knew how to unsheathe her sizraels. As she had suspected, Bron didn't. The muscles that he needed to access were atrophied, as were the nerves that led to them. When he'd been given up as a nightingale, someone had caused him to utterly forget those muscles, until they wasted.

She woke them, opened the neural pathway from the brain to the muscles, and let him unleash.

Olivia glanced down at his hands. The sizraels stood out on the ends of his fingers, nice and oval, but the ridges were small.

She didn't know what kind of masaak Bron might be. Most masaaks were at-tujjaarah a'zakira, memory merchants, of one order or another—more than eighty percent. There were rarer breeds, with different abilities, and Bron might be one of those, yet probing his mind would not tell her what talents he held. He couldn't share information he didn't know. She'd have to wait, let him experiment, and see what she could learn.

Now, she considered how best to help him.

Olivia could only share from her own store of knowledge. She'd spent most of her life learning to sing and play the guitar. She was far better in private than anyone had a right to be, better than anyone knew.

Bron yearned to play well, and she could help. She could give him some skills, but that alone wouldn't take him to the top. There was a component that he would have to bring, some innate way of communicating to the world. Lots of people have talent, she knew. She hoped that Bron had it, along with drive.

Many people with raw talent give up on music too soon, she'd learned. They don't have the heart for it. They didn't love it the way that she loved it. For her, creating music was an end in itself, not a path to adulation.

So she began to teach Bron to play. It was not simple. She had to imagine herself playing several songs in a row, envision herself fingering each note on the guitar. She had to let the notes flow through her, and retrain Bron's neural pathways so that he "naturally" held his guitar correctly, struck each note, each chord, precisely.

She had to strengthen the neural ties between the prefrontal lobes—the part of his brain that let him plan-and his medulla oblongata, the center of the brain that allowed people to perform tasks automatically.

Bron's memories showed that he tended to sing with a falsetto, trying hard to mimic his favorite pop singers. He hadn't trained his ear to hear properly, or his vocal chords to seek their full range. He didn't know how to create a vibrato, or to unlock his natural talent.

So she trained him for two hours. It was a grueling session that left sweat beaded upon her brow, while streams of it raced down her arms, down to her sizraels, so that her hands became slick.

When Olivia felt physically and emotionally exhausted, she began to pull out of Bron's mind slowly, and wondered at how much work she had left to do.

There were things that Olivia yearned to teach him. She hadn't even begun to teach Bron finger picking, or multiphonics, or a hundred other things.

But teaching that would take several sessions, and she didn't have the time or energy for it tonight. She needed sleep, like anyone else.

Tomorrow, Bron will wake, she imagined, and he will discover that he has grown overnight, like the beans in Jack's beanstalk. He'll discover talents that he never imagined. He'll play the guitar with greater ease and precision. Hell sing like a natural-born star. Oh, he might not be world-class yet. That will take a few weeks....

Olivia finished and pulled her hands away. She'd left strange white pucker marks on Bron's temples, but they'd fade soon enough, when the blood returned.