The Harlequin   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

His lips were dry, nervous, afraid, but I did something I'd never been able to do before: I was able to draw a little bit of the ardeur . I understood, as if the light had finally dawned, that the ardeur didn't have to be an ocean. It could be a single drop of rain, to wet the lips. I gave that tiny bit of power to him, breathed it into his mouth. I found the broken piece inside him that Columbine had cut. She had cut it with pain and force, and offered them a warning. She had showed them torture, fire, to burn and destroy them, if they refused her. I offered a kiss. I offered gentleness. I offered love. If I hadn't tasted Malcolm's power only moments before, maybe I couldn't have done it, but his intent was so pure, so unselfish, that it was like the ardeur had learned a new flavor. I offered that flavor to them. I offered them a choice. I gave them cool water and safety. She offered terror and punishment. She was threat. I was promise.

I won them back with a kiss, a touch. They poured from the pews, and I moved among them. Damian and Nathaniel helped me, moving into the crowd, touching, a kiss here and there. There was a gentleness to the ardeur that I had never felt before. Columbine's power died under a wave of kindness. A wave of touch, and chaste kisses. A wave of offering help. We will save you. We will take away your pain . She should have remembered that people have given everything they own, everything they are, to be taken care of, and to have their pain gone. It's the lure of cults: the promise of a good family; it's what people think love is, but love isn't absence of pain, it's a hand to hold while you're going through it.

Columbine screamed her frustration, and she broke the pact. She reached out to Giovanni. I felt her touch him. Not the hand that she took, but her power. The power that we had been pushing back suddenly took a leap. I felt it like a huge tidal wave rising above us. I turned and looked up as if there should be something to see, but there was nothing. Then that nothingness hit. It was like standing in the middle of a whirlwind of fire. Every breath was agony, death, but you had to breathe. Power seared down my throat, and I fought to scream, but there was no air. There was nothing but pain.

A voice came out of that pain and said, «I will make the pain stop. Be mine, and it will stop.» I screamed my defiance to that voice in my head, but it was the kind of pain that eventually would break you. Eventually, you'd simply say yes, anything, everything, just to make it stop.

Vaguely, I felt the carpet of the floor underneath me. I knew I was writhing on it, but the pain ate all other sensations.