Gah.

I second this wholeheartedly. Lovely, Dana.

I don't much like GG, but I do like that. I can't attest to veracity, obviously, but it's incredibly evocative.

And I want one.

Yay! Thanks, guys. I love it when a story sneak-attacks.

I keep thinking about how one might rewrite it as a long poem. With, like, three-line stanzas.

I am so obsessed.

What, my little thing?

You know what, if you want to play with it, you're welcome to.

It's like a Bitchfic remix.

Early query:

I'm halfway through the next to last bit of "Needfire". Should have it done by the weekend.

Any suckers, er, takers out there, to read it beginning to end when done, and beta for me?

Really? Neat. I'll do that.

t ed. xpost

Here's a new bit:

---

"Well. Then you will learn the hard way, will you not? I will tell you one thing more, petite, and then no more. There will come a time when you will choose. Are you slayer, or are you sorceress? And trust no one to defend you. Trust yourself. Goodbye to you, Amadee."

A shimmer, the circle breaking. I was alone in the darkness, weeping with my loss, as though my heart would never again be whole.

• * *

On the day before my eighteenth birthday, Rupert and I packed a lunch, took his newly purchased Martin guitar, and went off to spend the day in the Chilswell Valley.

The months since the fire had been odd ones. I was still living in the single room in Turl Street, paying for my room and my life's necessities with the small allowance I had demanded and now received from the Council. Richard had found and puchased a small building in the Woodstock Road, one undersized shopfront and two rooms behind. He lived in the two rooms with Rupert, and had opened another bookshop in the commercial space. There was obviously no room for me under his roof, and we were all just as pleased to have it that way. I had not spoken a single unnecessary word to my Watcher, nor he to me, since the night he had found me in Rupert's arms, and been unable to mask his hate. And all the time, alone in my bed, I would call out in my spirit for my father. He never came; he never answered.

I had taken his last words to me to heart, though. All my spare time - except for those hours with Rupert - were spent in studying myself, understanding my power, deepening and quickening it. I weeded through my heart, my mind, and came to know myself. It was astonishing, that a tiny extra bit of self-knowledge could exponentially increase what I could do with the witchcraft that was my sorcerer's birthright.

And Rupert - I had come to understand that I honestly loved him. I had no friends of my own circle or my own age. All those I knew were friends of Rupert. I never came to know them well, although I saw a lot of them - Simon, and Robson, a deliberately mysterious girl called Dierdre, and a boy named Ethan who set my warnings bells jangling wildly. But all of them had this in common, that they were young, young in every way. I came to know that I had never been young, I had been born old. These people, these friends of Rupert, used the word "love" as if it was something easy, and light, with no more meaning than the fortune in one of the cookies that came, along with packets of soy sauce and hot sweet mustard, in tiny plastic bags from the Chinese carryout in the Iffley Road.

Following a long period of calm, the week leading up to my birthday had been weirdly busy. For ten weeks or so after the destruction of the Carolan, things had been very quiet; I had gathered from things Rupert let slip that something about that night seemed to have quieted the demons and vampires alike, in places as far away as New York City and Prague and even California. Then, suddenly, a rampaging gang of demons dressed like American bikers, setting fire to parked cars. Vampires, five attacks in one night, then the next night, nine of them. I had had a very tiring week.

Dana, I'm late (stupid fargin' computer) but it's lovely, even without knowing who the he and she are.

Deb, another several dozen paving stones in the way along this story. I wonder if Olivia was a contemporary. I had the impression in "Hush" that she is at least a decade younger than Giles. I love the precise location of the Chinese takeaway!