I could sort of sense things about them now, bits of information and personality coloring the energy floating between us. Like how I now knew that they were brothers who were almost a perfect complement to each other. Compliment being another way of saying exact opposite. There was more information there, waiting. But I could still feel the other being hovering near, searching for a weakness or an opening to slip back into us. I wasn't about to appease my curiosity when all of our lives or at least our freewill may be at stake. One thing I was getting pretty strongly from both of them was a strong desire to stay free from whatever is still lurking about. Glad we're finally on the same team.
I snagged that seeking tendril of power and held tight even when I felt power building on the other end to try and make me let go. It felt like holding the end of a lightning bolt, equally as real and intangible to the senses. Although it felt more like it should hurt that actually causing me any pain. I felt the hovering blood hunger change then. I wasn't a vampire, or at least I'm not just a vampire and whatever I am now wants power. However I can get it.
I felt the moment of panic when the other felt the tidal wave of its power hit mine and just get swallowed away. No dueling back and forth in a lengthy game of one-up-manship, I don't have time for that. Besides, the rush of more power was filling me up with that warm tingly feeling. Like a heated blanket over too cold skin. It was good but it skated that line between pleasure and pain so closely that I could have gotten very distracted if I let myself.
She, and now having tasted that much of her power I'm sure it's a she, was definitely going to take this badly. I really debated whether I should take the time to follow the trail of energy back to her. To try and end this for good right here and now before she attacks me in my sleep, but I just don't know enough about all this metaphysical stuff to be sure I can win on her turf. And even though I won the battle over the brothers, if we didn't get a move on, her army was going to win her the war.
I looked back at the wolf, wolves, and saw all our energy swirling together. It was really quite beautiful. My energy moving through theirs in twisting patterns of color. It took me a moment to notice that were gradually sorting out into two distinct auras with mine marbling through each of theirs. It was doing what I'd wanted it to do without my conscious thought, bonding us without restriction on their will. Not infringing on their personalities or drawing on mine. Cool. I thought of how the woman had trapped the boys, kept them unchanging and static. What might that feel like for the people it was being inflicted on? And I'd been having attacks about losing control.
I got the briefest thought that they wished they could be like they had been. Obviously not my thought. Strongly felt thoughts of theirs kept popping up in my mind like hearing an echo from the other end of a cave. There was a new pressure building now. I felt like they were thinking at me really hard, hoping I would hear them. I tried to reciprocate, thinking back at them.
How were you? Happiness and relief filled me that I knew wasn't my own.
Separate. Two.
What?! Weren't you always like this? Together how you are now. I guess I'd been thinking that they were conjoined twins and that the control had been about them staying wolves. The grotesque cruelty they were describing... I felt nauseous.
No. Once so long ago it seems like dream we were two, twins, but separate men. Different men. We fell in battle and this is how our enemy punished us.
Oh God. Tears stung my eyes. To be trapped like that. I had no words. No way to comprehend the violation. I didn't know what I could do to fix this but it had just jumped to the top of my list. I now regretted not going after that witch. Even the slimmest chance of victory was worth avenging this... obscenity. A tear landed on the back of my hand in a warm splash distracting me from the black spiral of my thoughts. I looked down and saw a drop of blood. I raised trembling fingertips to my cheeks and looked at them. Dark red blood stained the tips. I was crying tears of blood for the twin warriors that had been turned into a single monster.
It only took the briefest thought about wanting them to be separate and my power just rose and began to pull their energy apart. It was getting easier to wield, my power. It wanted to do and be what I needed. There weren't't complicated spells and rituals necessary to shape it. It was like my will manifest as action. If the situation wasn't so dire I might have played with it, tested it out and seen what my current limitations are. This is too important for that. I couldn't fuck up and leave those boys as they are or worse. I have to get it more than right the very first time.
I could see that as their energies were segregated their bodies began to pull apart like soft clay sculptures that had been pressed together. But it was taking more effort and concentration from me to continue making progress. My power really did want to give me what I wanted, I just had to know with concrete surety what that is. Everything I'd ever learned in an anatomy class was blending with all the extraneous knowledge I've gleaned just from being friends with a doctor and running through my mind at a mile a minute.
Maybe it's my control issues but I know I'd feel more certain that I wasn't about to screw up and turn them inside out if I could have more direct control of what's happening. I remembered that feeling of becoming the wind of my own making and then I was among the paisley swirls of color moving intricately over around and trough the twins.
The artist in me couldn't help but use what I know about the hows and whys and make it into the whats. How the sixth and seventh vertebrae form the nape of the neck. How the odd short bottom ribs and the butterfly of the hip bones create the waist. The unbelievable complexity of hands and feet. I have long believed the human body to be the most masterful bit of engineering ever. Anyone who's ever doubted the existence of a higher power hasn't ever studied the human circulatory system.
They were stuck now in some amorphous place with two separate torsos only connected at the hip and leg. Not quite as monstrous as they had been but not quite as structurally sound as they had been either. I was inside them where their hips met I could see the muscles straining as they waited for me to push them that last little bit apart. I was a little stuck on how, I was staring at a single bone and the energy was so tightly woven I didn't see how there had ever been two.
Helplessness began to creep into my mind. I mentally shook my hands out. If I understood more about power and magic maybe this wouldn't be so hard. I could have known tons by now if I hadn't been keeping my head so far down that I'd buried it in the sand. I'd always known there was more to my condition than could possibly be explained by medical science alone. I'd just wanted peace. Maybe I should have taken the blue pill, chosen the easy way out when I'd been offered it. I had kind of surprised myself that I hadn't.
I remembered my reason for not just moving on like I'd planned. That guy who'd been ignored, abandoned, made a spectacle of, his only reward for doing a good deed. Unlike before, I can help now. "STOP freaking out. Figure out what will help," I yelled at myself. Breath.
I went into one twin and then began to pull all of his energy toward me like I was a magnet. I visualized the energy forming the joint of the hip with the femur leading from it down to the patella and the knee. It felt like I formed his leg almost from scratch and left the other leg behind for the other twin. I hope he wouldn't end up with two left feet literally. Exhaustion began to tug at me and I wasn't sure if I had it in me to mentally form all the delicate interlocking bones of the foot and ankle without giving him a club foot. No. Not good enough to try and fail. I'm still breathing and conscious so how can I truly say I've given it my all. These men deserve nothing less than someone's all after what they'd been through. Someone should try and put things right.
It took almost everything I had but at last I was looking down at five complete toes. Triumph flowed through me faintly but couldn't seem to really reach me. It felt like unconsciousness was looming over me but worse and I realized the danger of this form is not that you could die but that you could just dissipate and fade away like you never were. I was here in an act of will and only my will is containing my consciousness outside of my body. I thought of my body now, as I had before, from my senses out and thankfully after a long struggle I opened my eyes and saw what I had freed.
They both looked like rescued drowning victims, soaked all over and heaving thick breaths through raw sounding throats. Ropes of wavy hair coiled over their fingers, over the debris of the alley floor and down their backs past their hips. The pale pre-dawn light hadn't really penetrated the alley yet but their hair seemed to be the color of polished pewter. I would have thought they were elderly except for the bodies revealed through the hair. Maybe the color is the result of stress, they had certainly been through that. Their faces were still averted, staring at the ground and hidden behind a curtain of tangled hair. I wondered if their faces would show the same ravages, if it was a ravage at all. Natural steel grey hair color isn't the oddest thing I've seen tonight.
Olive toned skin showed on their arms and legs, carved with a relief of scars that told their own brutal story of unimaginable suffering. I could already tell they were each big tall men even from their hunched position. Wiry lean muscles stretched sparsely over long limbs and broad shoulders. It looked like they hadn't eaten properly in years but had somehow managed to stay fit in spite of that. Now that their breathing was starting to even out, I could see that the outline of each vertebra and rib hadn't been caused by either the huge contractions of their diaphragms or the crouched positions they were forcing their trembling bodies into. I knew the signs of overt starvation. I'd be surprised if they ate even every other day.
In such perfect unison it made me blink they flowed backward so they were kneeling. I was still a little dizzy from before and the synchronic movement made me feel like I was seeing double so I focused on the street behind them. It wasn't helping me that they were naked, even with hands resting modestly in each of their laps.
Despite their muscles trembling and twitching like derby winners, their innate grace was astounding. I wondered briefly what their lives had been like before their...ordeal. Not a truly adequate word to describe what had happened to them but I couldn't dwell on it enough to define it better right now. Maybe later we'd do the group therapy thing. Now, danger hadn't really passed it had just switched lanes.
