Chapter 273 Lucia's Rescue
POV: Lucia | Shelter, then London streets
I feel Finn go scared at nine fourteen, which is not a time I know from a clock but from the specific quality of the feeling arriving in the middle of something else, which is Isla checking my arm for new manifestations from yesterday's wolf-ears-and-fangs event, and the scared feeling has a quality that is different from my own scared feeling, which is how I know it is Finn's, the specific other quality of it, the fact that it is coming from outside me rather than from inside me.
I have been feeling Finn since the first day he arrived, which I have not told anyone because I did not have language for it until the past few days, and the language I have arrived at is that Finn is someone I can feel when the feeling is strong enough, which is not everyone and which is specifically Finn, and the feeling is not words or images but quality, the quality of how a person is doing the way you know how a room is when you walk into it.
Right now Finn's quality is the worst it has been since I started being able to feel him.
"Finn's scared," I tell Isla. I say it with the directness I use when something is true and when the directness is the thing that will produce the fastest response, which is the response the situation requires. "I can feel him. He's very scared."
Isla looks at me with the medical assessment quality and then with the other quality, the mother quality, which is different from the medical one in ways I understand from the inside of being on the receiving end of both. "Where?" she says.
I close my eyes, which is what I do when I am trying to get more information from the feeling, and the feeling has a direction the way sounds have directions, not perfectly clear but real, and the direction is the Rookeries streets to the south and east of the shelter, the section that I have not been in but which I know from the map Ash showed me.
"South," I say. "East. Not far."
Isla has her coat before I finish the sentence and Ash is already in the doorway, which means Ash heard the first part and assessed the situation in the time it takes to hear the first part, which is one of the things about Ash that I have been observing my whole life and which is the quality of someone who moves toward problems rather than away from them.
We move through the shelter and into the streets with the quality of people who are moving fast without running, which is the quality of urgency managed rather than expressed, and I am in the middle of the three of us, Isla ahead and Ash behind, and I am following the direction of the feeling the way you follow the direction of a sound, adjusting as the feeling adjusts, moving toward the quality of Finn's scared.
It gets worse as we get closer. This is not information I expected and it is information I wish I did not have because the getting worse is the specific quality of scared that has found a new dimension rather than simply intensifying, which is the quality of scared that has something concrete in it rather than just the general quality of a bad situation.
The street corner where the feeling is strongest has three packless wolves standing in a configuration that I understand from the quality of it even before I can see clearly, the configuration of people who have surrounded something and who are deciding what to do with it, and in the middle of the configuration is Finn, who is standing very still with the specific quality of someone who has decided that stillness is the safest available option.
He sees me and the quality of his scared changes, which I feel at the same moment I see his face, the quality shifting from the pure scared of someone alone to the different quality of someone who is scared but who now has something to look at other than the thing that is scaring them.
The three wolves look at me.
I understand in the moment that they look at me what is about to happen, which is the same thing that happened yesterday with the wolf ears and the fangs, and I understand it not as a decision but as something my body has decided, the specific bypassing of the part that makes decisions in favor of the part that responds to the specific combination of Finn's scared and my own protective quality, and the responding produces something that is the largest version of what happened yesterday.
The partial transformation is not something I control. I know this from the inside of it, the specific quality of something happening that is mine but which is also larger than my management of it, the wolf part and the vampire part expressing simultaneously in the way they expressed yesterday but more, the ears and the fangs and something else, something in the quality of the posture and the eyes that I cannot see but which I understand from the effect it produces in the three wolves, which is that they step back.
All three of them. The step back is not the respectful step back that Finn produced from the True Pack wolves last night. It is a different step back, the step back of people who have encountered something that their categories do not accommodate and who are defaulting to the oldest response to things that do not fit your categories, which is distance.
"What is that thing?" one of them says. He says it to the other two, not to me, which is information about how he is categorizing me right now, and the categorization is frightening in a different way from the street wolves being frightening, which is that I understand what they are saying and I understand what my body is doing and those two things together have a quality I do not have language for yet.
"Come on," I say to Finn. I say it in my regular voice, which is the voice I always have, and I am aware that the regular voice and whatever my face is doing right now are not fully aligned, but the regular voice is real and Finn hears it as real because Finn is seven and he knows my voice. "Let's go home."
He takes my hand and we move toward Isla and Ash and the three wolves do not follow.
Behind us, on the street corner and in the windows above it, are the people who were in the streets at this hour and who saw what happened, and the number of witnesses is in the dozens, and the dozens are already doing what the dozens do, which is talking.