ruptured, and cold rain spattered against the windows.
VIOLET HAD been awake for more than an hour, and during most of that
time she had been a hawk, swooping high on the wind, darting down now
and then to make a swift kill. The open sky was nearly as real to her
as it was to the bird that she had invaded. She glided on thermal
currents, the air offering little resistance to the sleek fore edges of
her wings, with only the lowering gray clouds above, and the whole
huddled world below.
She was also aware of the shadowy bedroom in which her body and a
portion of her mind remained. Violet and Verbina usually slept during
the day, for to sleep away the night was to waste the best of times.
They shared a room on the second floor, one king-size bed, never more
than an arm’s reach from each other, though usually entwined. That
Monday afternoon, Verbina was still asleep, naked, on her belly, with
her head turned away from her sister, occasionally mumbling wordlessly
into her pillow. Her warm flank pressed against Violet. Even while
Violet was with the hawk, she was aware of her twin’s body heat, smooth
skin, slow rhythmic breathing, sleepy murmurings, and distinct scent.
She smelled the dust in the room, too, and the stale odor of the long
unwashed sheets and the cats, of course.
She not only smelled the cats, which slept upon the bed and the
surrounding floor or lay lazily licking themselves, but lived in each of
them. While a part of her consciousness remained in her own pale flesh
and a part soared with the feathered predator, other aspects of her held
tenancy in each of the cats, twenty-five of them now that poor Samantha
was gone. Simultaneously Violet experienced the world through her own
senses, through those of the hawk, and through the fifty eyes and
twenty-five noses and fifty ears and hundred paws and twenty-five
tongues of the pack. She could smell her own odor not merely through
her own nose but through the of all the cats: the faint soapy residue of
last night’s bath pleasantly lingering with the tang of lemon-scented
shampoo; that always followed sleep; halitosis ripe with the ghosts of
the raw eggs and onions and raw liver that she eaten that morning before
going to bed with the rising sun. Each remember of the pack had a
sharper ol factory sense she didn’t, and each perceived her scent
differently from what she did; they found her natural fragrance strange
yet intriguing and familiar.
She could smell, see, hear, and feel herself through their senses, as
well, for she was always inextricably linked with Verbina. At will, she
could swiftly enter or disengage from minds of other lifeforms, but
Verbina was the only other person with whom she could join in that way.
It was a permanence which they had shared since birth. She could never
disengage from her twin. Likewise, she could control the minds of
animals as well as inhabit them, but she was not able to control her
sister. Their link was not that of master and puppet, but special and
sacred.
All of her life, Violet had lived at the confluence of rivers of
sensation, bathed in great churning currents of and scent and sight and
taste and touch, experiencing the world not only through her own senses
but those of surrogates. For part of her childhood, she had been so
overwhelmed by sensory input that she could not cope; had turned inward,
to her secret world of rich, varied, and found experience, until she had
learned to control the quenching flood, harnessing it instead of being
swept away. Only had she chosen to relate to the people around her,
absolutism, and she had not learned to talk until she was six years old.
She had never risen out of those deep, fast current extraordinary
sensation to stand on the comparatively dry of life on which other
people existed, but at least she learned to interact with her mother,
Candy, and others to a limited degree.
Verbina had never coped half as well as Violet, and probably never