Iris

Chapter Eight

“So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

~Ernest Hemingway

***

Paris in movies and books and songs never really prepares you for Paris. The City of Lights wasn't just electrified with streetlamps or signs in shop windows. There was a pulsing brightness about, vitality, manna, life, whatever, flowing throughout it, filling its veins and arousing its voice. Yes, Paris really was something else.

We stood in front of the Danse Macabre, Iris and I. I'd noticed lots of things about her in the short time I'd known her, and now was no different. Even as she looked up at the pulsating, flashing, nearly offensive signs, I could see that dark sadness in her eyes, the crippling pain one feels after slowly extracting poison, or surviving a catastrophe. I supposed Iris had done both. She couldn't have looked more than college-aged, but standing beside her, I felt like a small child.

We weren't a team like Phoenyx and me; or at least it didn't feel that way, not at all. To the human eye (which neither of us, admittedly, could claim to have), we were just two girls who looked vaguely underage standing outside a ladies' club. Just two other Parisians, or perhaps tourists, who'd taken a wrong turn at "Bad Day" and ended up somewhere close to "Hell." We shouldn't have been out of place, and odd pairing--the man passing us didn't even blink. But I could still feel the hollow knocking of distance between Phoenyx's sister and I, as if when she said she trusted me she had been lying. As if she wasn't ready to admit that she had to be Sherlock, and that I was the only Watson she was getting, so that would be that.

Iris didn't look like she trusted many people. I supposed that was fair. After all, she was a princess and a warrior, a lady and a soldier, one who had seen death and destruction alongside progress and order. Who has seen everything from gods and goddesses to the death of her family and destruction of her people to the red balloon with white dots, its string wrapped around a lamp post in a rather melancholy way as the breeze caught it every so often.

And me? Little ole formerly human now host me? My entire existence orbited around some scheming goddess living inside of me. Her enemies my enemies, her allies my allies. I had virtually no say in what happened to me, which fights I wanted to pick, which people I wanted to be friends with. I should have been completely miserable about it, just as Iris should have been miserable that her people were dead and her brother was taking his clothes off for a living. But I've run up hills that those before me had puked their guts out on at the top. I've opened my microwave door at that perfect moment, that split second, between the one falling to zero and the beep like a bomb going off. And I too have seen that red balloon with white dots. And she's fought through demons and time and hardship and seen things that I've never seen--never hope to see--and I knew that there was no one else I wanted to walk into that club with.

As we stepped towards the door, Iris in the lead, I caught a glimpse of her face, which was illuminated by the flashing club lights, harsh against the black night, a night in its prime, not early and not morning, just midnight.

Her dark eyes glistened with either fear of the unknown or faith in her cause; I've never known there to be a difference in the two. She was so old beside me, but she must have been at least a little nervous; it wasn't hard to slip into her thoughts at all . . . 

***

Canem live so much longer than humans; you'd think that would teach us something. But all my peoples' history books are ashes among the salted earth. I wish I could just ask Mama or Papa for advice--how best to go about my attack, how it would be trying to control Phoenyx . . .