“There are power bars—”
He sniffed. “A misnomer if I ever heard one. Not only don’t they confer any appreciable power, I’m quite certain they sap mine. They taste bad and make me depressed.” His violet eyes grew dewy.
“Everything makes you depressed. If you ever got out of bed—”
“What point is there in getting out of bed when you make me stay in these stuffy, dirty chambers?”
“I don’t make you do anything. I merely asked—”
“Your ‘asks,’ boulders around my neck,” he said woefully. “I’m as unseen as I was on Olean.”
“That makes two of us.” Refolding the poem along the creases, she tucked it back into the box, stretched out on the bed, sword at her side, and closed her eyes. She didn’t undress. She never undressed. Sleeping was dangerous enough. She’d had enough of waking up to battle nude. Although it had certain advantages—blood was much easier to wash off and it often disconcerted the hell out of a human male enemy—she preferred not to.
Shazam got up immediately, turned around three times, lay back down then bounded right back up, bristling so hard the mattress vibrated. “You smell bad. Like a predator. I’m not going to be able to sleep with you smelling up my air. Who touched you? Why did they?”
“I’m not taking a shower,” she said without opening her eyes. “I’m too tired. Besides, we’ve both smelled worse.”
“Fine. I’m not cuddling, then.”
“I didn’t ask you to cuddle. I never ask you to cuddle. I don’t even use that word.”
“You don’t have to. Your expects, bars on my cage.”
“I merely suggested in exchange for grooming, since you have all that fur and blaze like a small sun, you might keep me warm. Some of those worlds were cold.” And still, she often felt she had ice in her bones.
“It’s not cold here. And you haven’t groomed me all day. It was a long day. I was alone the whole time. Because you make me stay in here.”
“You would attract too much attention out there.”
“I would stay in a higher dimension.”
“Until you thought you might get some attention.”
“I like attention.”
“I don’t.”
“Did you ever like attention?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’re ashamed of me. Because I’m fat. That’s why you don’t want them to see me.”
She slit her eyes open just barely, lids heavy. “I’m not ashamed of you. And you’re not fat.”
“Look at my belly,” he said tearfully, clutching it with both paws and jiggling.
She smiled. “I like your belly. I think it’s a perfectly wonderful belly, all soft and round.” Yesterday, he’d been convinced his ears were too big. The day before that it had been something wrong with his tail.
“Maybe you’re ashamed of yourself. You should be. The fur behind my ears is getting matted.”
“You’re beautiful, Shazam. I’ll groom you tomorrow,” Jada said sleepily.
“It’s already tomorrow.”
She sighed and stretched out her hand. Shazam head-butted it ecstatically.
Jada worked her fingers into the long fur behind his ears and began gently detangling. It was beyond her how he got so matted all the time when he slept most of the day and rarely left the bed.
He turned his face up, eyes slanting half closed with bliss and rumbled in his broad chest. “I see you, Yi-yi.”
Yi-yi was what he’d named her that day long ago on Olean when she’d named him. He’d been saying the same words to her every time she awakened or fell asleep for four years, and wouldn’t rest until she said it back.
“I see you, too, Shazam.”
Sometime later they curled together and slept as they had on so many worlds, Shazam’s head nestled on a pillow of her hair in the hollow between her neck and shoulder, one paw wrapped around her arm, one leg sticking straight up in the air, twitching as he dreamed.
Part II
the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun
the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.
—Adrienne Rich
The legend of a monster is invariably worse than the monster.
Unfortunately the monster is usually quite bad enough.
—The Book of Rain
12
“Yet it was there I felt the crossroads of time…”