Page 116 of Gifted & Talented

“You’re not the only failure in this house,” she imagined Thayer might say. Except no, she couldn’t even picture it, the idea of Thayer admitting that something had gone wrong. He had always known the answer, every answer. Even now, Eilidh found it difficult to believe he couldn’t fix her, couldn’t save her.

Christ, it was one thing to bury your father, but how do you bury a god? How do you part with your faith?

Eilidh rose to her feet and walked to the bathroom, startled to find it occupied.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. I was in there wrestling with Monster, who didn’t really allow me to change his diaper anymore, but also found the concept of pee to be incredibly anxiety-inducing, so much so that he couldn’t reasonably be expected to use the potty, despite the myriad literature on the subject that had been read to him. “I’ll be out in just a second.”

“No, take your time.” Eilidh felt she was intruding on something, so she turned to leave, though she returned with a sense of someone about to dive into icy waters—getting it over with, even though it would hurt. “Do you… know what to do about Arthur?”

I considered it for a moment. “No,” I admitted.

“Do you have any idea how to make the darkness go away?” She gestured vaguely overhead. “Or put a stop to any more… apocalypse things?”

She meant the previous day’s swarm of flies, which had only been defeated by Arthur’s magical malfunction, so possibly two wrongsdidmake a right. “Mm, no,” I said. “I have even less knowledge about that.”

“Do you have even the vaguest guess about what’s happening to me?”

“No.” I barked a laugh. “Not a clue.” I had finally managed to drag the pull-ups over Monster’s bare derrière despite his attempts to headbutt me in the sternum.

“Oh.” Eilidh turned to leave again, and then stopped. “So then why did Meredith and Arthur think you could fix us?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I actually didn’t think there was anything especially profound about it. They thought of me because everything they understood about magic came from me, but that had never meant I actuallyknewanything. And if I’d ever really believed that I could fix it, I was definitelyjust playing along because the attention felt validating. But how do you fix something like a plague?

“I guess we could consider letting Moses’s people go,” I suggested.

“Ha, ha,” said Eilidh glumly.

She turned away again but stopped.

“It’s not from a god, though,” she said to nothing. “It’s smaller than that. It’s, like, this thing.” She rested a hand on her collarbone, instantly embarrassed. She looked up at me—down, really, seeing as I was substantially shorter—and added sheepishly, “It lives in my chest.”

“Your heart?” I asked.

She looked a little stunned.

“No,” she said, recovering. “It’s more like… a creature?”

To her relief I seemed unsurprised. “Oh. Okay. Well, lots of things can possess you. Little ghosties and whatnot.” Monster had climbed onto the toilet and was playing with a light switch, so we were having this conversation in the midst of a toddler-DJed rave. “When did it start?”

From the back of Eilidh’s mind flashed a carnal spray of blood. “Right after I had my surgery.”

“Surgery?” I tucked some hair behind my ear. Eilidh considered me for a moment, realizing she had never looked at me properly. She didn’t remember me from when we were younger, and I don’t know the specifics of what she saw, because I didn’t ask her about that. But I had a feeling then that she was seeing something good, and in my defense I had really grown into my cheeks. Aging certainly had its pitfalls, but optically my thirties suited me.

“I used to be a dancer,” Eilidh explained. “I danced ballet professionally. I trained for basically my entire life.”

“Oh.” I did know that because I had kept tabs on all the Wrens almost compulsively, and because Thayer had told me about what happened to Eilidh when we met those few times after he found me at the Wrenfare store where I work. I just wanted Eilidh to tell me her story in her own words.

“Yeah,” she said, and nodded to herself like she was about to embark on something hard but necessary. Again, the icy deep. “I got in a car accident. I shouldn’t have even been in that taxi. I was late to rehearsal and the weather was bad. But I could have walked,” she said, arguing with nothing. “I could have gotten up in time. I could have—”

“Was it always there?” I interrupted.

Eilidh looked up at me, traveling a long way from her desperate attempt to rewrite her own story. “What?”

“The thing in your chest.”

“Oh, the monster.” She blinked. “Sorry,” she said, “I forgot you call your son Monster—”

“The monster in your chest,” I confirmed. “Was it always there?”

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