Page 78 of Bizarre Bonds
“Back then, my fire would flare out of its own accord when I was angry or upset. Kind of like for you, when the destructive energy comes out of you.”
I perk up. Maybe she can help. “It is like that. It builds up inside me until it explodes.”
Sorsha turns her mug between her hands. “I used to try to hold the fire in. Ignore the anger, suppress any stress that might stoke it. But then humans did something really horrible to someone I love, and the rage took over. That’s when I almost burned everything down. The anger had already burned away every other consideration inside me.”
I knit my brow. “So how did you stop being angry?”
A soft smile touches the phoenix shifter’s lips. “I had help. Other people I loved called out to me and broke through my anger. I remembered all the things Ididn’twant to destroy. Afterward, I realized that part of the problem was that I’d tried so hard not to give in to my anger at all. I bottled up so much, got so scared of what I might do with my powers, that I only added to the stress I was under.”
“And you’ve never gotten to that point again?”
She shakes her head. “Sometimes I want to use my fire. Sometimes Ineedto. There are things in this world that need to be destroyed, and things that are going to hurt whether we like it or not.”
Every particle of my being balks at those words. Sorsha contemplates my expression. “You don’t like accepting that fact.”
“I don’t think we should have to,” I say. “Whycan’tpeople only be happy? Why does there have to be so much pain?”
Her tone gentles. “I think too much of anything can be a problem. From what Rollick’s told me, you blast out energy when you get overly excited too, don’t you?”
A shamed flush heats my cheeks alongside a flicker of orange through my hair. My gaze drops to the tabletop. “Yes. It’s either way. That’s how the bonds happened too. Whenever the emotions inside me get too big to contain, something bursts out. That’s why it’s so hard.”
Sorsha lets us sit with that thought through a sip of her hot chocolate. “I’m just wondering… What if the reason you yo-yo back and forth between those extremes is because you’re thinking ofeverythingin extremes?”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“You see happiness as the only acceptable emotion. You try to avoid pain and sadness at all costs. If you’re always pushing in one direction, it makes sense that it’d be easy to stumble too far that way—or to rebound too fast in the other direction. Like a vicious cycle, always swinging around from one side all the way to the other, when the safe space is in between. A little happy, a little sad. A little pleasure, a little pain.”
My fingers clench around the mug’s handle. “But if I let both happen… how am I ever going to make up for all those people before?”
Sorsha lifts her shoulders in a shrug, but the vibe she gives off tastes like sympathy rather than disregard. “Maybe you won’t. I don’t know if I’ve helped more people than I accidentally hurt before I got a handle on my powers. I just know I’d have hurt even more if I hadn’t sorted myself out. Is beating yourself up for things you couldn’t control in the past making it easier to do good in the world right now?”
The question hits me like a punch to the chest. For a second, I can’t breathe.
“No,” I admit. All the anguish, all the guilt—it’s tangled up inside me, searing sharper and hotter whenever anything else upsets me.
What would it be like to go forward as if with a plate washed clean? To believe that only what I do today and tomorrow and every day after that matters, not what happened before?
It’s hard to imagine that too, but a strange flutter passes through my pulse when I try.
I thought the problem was that I couldn’t keep the men I’ve marked happy enough, that I was passing on too much distress and failing to soothe theirs.
What if… what if Ihavebeen fighting the parts that are scary or uncomfortable too much? What if we all should look at what we actually have, good and bad?
We might find out we can make more of ourselves than we realized. We are still a team.
The thought brings up a memory of Viscera’s vicious grin. I tried so hard to calmherdown and turn her toward happiness rather than rage…
I sit up straighter, so abruptly Pickle startles with a disgruntled chirp. “I think I might know how we can bring Viscera in.”
28
Periwinkle
When I’ve finished explaining the gist of my plan to the full group in the yard of the fake film set, Drey raises his eyebrows. “You want us to stop the crazy shadowkind who’s going around destroying things… by destroying more things?”
Riva elbows her shadowblood mate. “Hush. It’s not like anything else we’ve tried has gotten us far.”
I twist my hands in front of me. “I don’t want to ruin anything that’s important to the people in the city. I figured we could find an area that’s mostly abandoned, or maybe evacuate the buildings… No one should getreallyhurt because of us.”
