And now we're going to talk about it, she thought as Eric stopped. Okay. I don't have to think, just say the right words. She forced herself to look at him.
He turned the haggard, haunted face on her and said, "I want you to stop it."
Funny choice of words. You mean end it, break it off, put it quietly out of its misery.
She couldn't get all that out, so she just said, "What?"
"I don't know what you're doing," he said, "but I want it stopped. Now."
His green eyes were level. Not apologetic, more like demanding. His voice was flat.
Thea had a sudden sense of shifting realities. All the hairs on her arms were standing up.
Caught without a working brain, she said, "I- what are you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about." He was still looking at her steadily.
Thea shook her head no.
He shrugged. It was a you-asked-for-it shrug. "Whatever you're doing," he said with terrible distinctness, "to try and make me like Pilar, it has got to stop. Because it's not fair to her. She's upset right now because I'm acting crazy. But I don't want to be
with her. It's you I love. And if you want to get rid of me, then tell me, but don't try and foist me off on somebody else."
Thea listened to the whole speech feeling as if she were floating several feet above the ground. The sky and desert seemed too bright, not warm, just very shiny. While her brain ran around frantically like Madame Curie in a new cage, she managed to get out, "What could I possibly have to do-with you liking Pilar?"
Eric looked around, found a rock, and sat on it. He stared down at his hands for a minute or so. Finally he looked up, his expression helpless.
"Give me a break, Thea," he said. "How stupid do you think I am?" Oh.
"Oh." Then she thought, don't just stand there. You bluffed him before. You talked him out of knowing he'd been bitten by a snake. For Earth's sake, you can talk him out of whatever he's thinking now.
"Eric-I guess we've all been under a lot of stress...."
"Oh, please don't give me that." He seemed to be talking to a clump of silver cholla, eyeing the halos of awful spines as if he might jump into them. "Please don't give me that."
He took a deep breath and spoke deliberately. "You charm snakes and read guinea pigs' minds. You cure rattler bites with a touch. You tap into people's brains. You make up magical potpourri bags and your insane cousin is the goddess Aphrodite." He looked at her. "Did I miss anything?"
Thea found another rock and backed up to it blindly. She sat. Of everything in the universe, right then what she was most aware of was her own breathing.
"I have this feeling," Eric said, watching her with his green eyes, "that you guys are in fact the descendants of good old Hecate Witch-Queen. Am I dose?"
"You think you win a prize?" Thea still couldn't think, couldn't put a meaningful remark together. Could only gabble.
He paused and grinned, a wry and painful grin, but the first one she'd seen today. Then the smile faded. "It's true, isn't it?" he said simply.
Thea looked out over the desert, toward the huge, bare cliffs of rock in the distance. She let her eyes unfocus, soaking in the expanse of brown-green. Then she put her ringers to the bridge of her nose.
She was going to do something that all her ancestors would condemn her for, something that nobody she'd grown up with would understand.
"It's true," she whispered.
He breathed out, a lonely human figure in that vastness of the desert.
"How long have you known?" she asked.
"I... don't know. I mean, I think I always sort of knew. But it wasn't possible-and you didn't want me to know. So I didn't know." A kind of excitement was creeping into his haggardness. "It's really true, then. You can do magic."
Say it, Thea told herself. You've done everything else. Say the words to a human. "I'm a witch."
"A Hearth-Woman, I thought you called it. That's what Roz was telling me."
At that, Thea was horrified out of her daze of horror. Stricken. "Eric-you can't talk about this with Roz. You don't understand. They'll kill her."
He didn't look as shocked as she might have expected. "I knew you were scared of something. I thought it was just that people might hurt you-and your grandma."
"They will; they'll kill me. But they'll kill you and Roz, too-and your mom and any other human they think may have learned about them-"
"Who will?"
She looked at him, floundered a moment, and then made the ultimate betrayal of her upbringing.
"It's called the Night World."
"Okay," he said slowly, half an hour later. They were sitting side by side on his rock. Thea wasn't touching him, although her whole side was aware of his presence.
"Okay, so basically, the descendants of Maya are lamia and the descendants of Hellewise are witches. And together they're all this big secret organization, the Night World."
"Yes." Thea had to fight the instinct to whisper. "It's not just lamia and witches, though. It's shape-shifters and made vampires and werewolves and other things. All the races that the human race couldn't deal with."
"Vampires," Eric muttered to the cholla, his eyes going glassy again. "That's what really gets me, real
vampires. I don't know why, it follows logically...." He looked at Thea, his gaze sharpening. "Look, if all you people have supernatural powers, why don't you just take over?"
"Not enough of us," Thea said. "And too many of you. It doesn't matter how supernatural we are."