16 Evan's Story

"No, not that sort of 'someone'. A new friend who needs help. Something very, very weird happened just now, and he got hurt. I think he's in shock, too. Well, he doesn't want to go to the emergency room. We'll be home in about twenty minutes, like usual." She ended the call and only then pulled out of the parking space.

Evan looked at the girl with both eyes. He didn't even know her name, but he knew her. She had an aura unlike any he had ever seen before. He had compared it in his own mind to sunlight on fresh snow, almost too dazzling. Her face matched her aura, too. She was quite simply beautiful, inside and out.

And he was a morose weirdo with a disfiguring birthmark.

"So, can you tell me what, um… what those things were?" she asked.

"I don't know what they're called. I just know…You were born in China, too, same as me and Faith, right?" he asked.

"Yes. By the way, my name is Valentine," she replied, sparing him a glance away from the road. "Valentine Xuelan Townsend."

"Heh. That's pretty. Me full name is Evangel Christian Wheelwright. I go by Evan. Faith was called 'Faith Hope Charity Wheelwright.'"

"Those are pretty unique names." Valentine said.

"Yeah. Our adoptive parents were religious nutters. They weren't always so, or so their older kids said. See, they had two kiddies of their own, David and Janice, before they wandered into the fold, but Davy and Jan got out of there as soon as they could. So the church got together and stumped up the money for replacement kids, so to speak, and they went to China to pick out children they could save from being brought up by heathens, children who'd be properly grateful. All of this does match up and answer your first question, by the way. Eventually."

"Boys don't usually get put up for adoption unless there's something pretty badly wrong with them physically, or so I've read." Valentine said, sounding sympathetic.

"Aye, and there is something wrong with me—that birthmark you mistook for a black eye. It's called a port-wine stain. The fancy medical term for it is nevus flammeus. It's usually harmless, just that the capillaries grew funny, unless it affects the eye. And on me, it does. I used to get headaches so bad when I was a wee lad, that I'd cast up everything in me stomach and black out. I'm mostly blind in me left eye, and there's a good chance it'll spread to the right. That's why I got put up for adoption. I was not quite four when they took me to the orphanage, and I spent a couple of years there.

"The Wheelwrights came to adopt Faith by prearrangement. I was an afterthought. That was nineteen years ago. I'm betting that's when you were adopted too."

"Yes, I was." Valentine replied.

"Those things, whatever they are, were looking for a girl who was adopted from China and about to turn twenty-one but they didn't know which one, but that's getting ahead of me story. The Wheelwrights adopted us and brought us back to England. I can only just remember getting there and not understanding a word of English. Anyhow, they homeschooled us so we wouldn't get corrupted by anti-religious types in the schools, and we were brought up to be properly grateful, but then…

"Then I got old enough and understood English well enough to tell them what I saw. Me left eye…I can see things with me left eye that others can't see."

"Isn't altered vision a normal symptom of glaucoma?" Valentine asked. "My aunts have a friend who has it. He complains of seeing halos around bright lights."

"That's not what I see. I see—call them auras, call them chakras, call them whatever you like—and other things. I can see illness in the body, I can see fae creatures, I can see demons and ghosts—. Let's just say I have the Sight.

"Now, being religious nutters, this didn't rest well with the Wheelwrights. They tried to beat it out of me. They tried very hard, over the years." Evan made a flogging gesture with his injured arm, and hissed with pain.

"Oh, no! I am so sorry," Valentine was driving, so she couldn't look away from the road for very long, but Evan thought she put an ocean of empathy into her voice.

"It didn't work. Eventually they went too far, the authorities investigated, we got taken away from them and put in the care of Mr. Wheelwright's old granny. Gran was good to us. She lived in a little village in the back of beyond that was mostly full of old people. I was the only able bodied lad around, so I took to doing things for them. Working their gardens, fixing their roofs, mending the caulking on stone walls. I got to be pretty strong after a few years of doing that, so I went to school to be a landscape architect."

"Being younger, Faith stayed behind to look after Gran, and after Gran passed, she stayed on in the cottage. She got a job in the chemist's shop. One weekend, I came home to find there were strangers on the bus back to the village. Strangers who were pretending to be tourists, but they were—I could see there was something wrong about them. Something foul. Not to mention they smelled off and looked like they hadn't slept in a week."

"It was…them?" Valentine asked.

"Yes. Only she was wearing the body of somebody else then. Since I knew better than to go around saying what I saw or confronting them, I kept me mouth shut. Didn't want to end up in a mental ward, see?

"That was a mistake. A few days after I got back, I saw the woman talking to Faith in the shop. I was going around to help out the old folks, like I did before. When I got back that night… they came knocking on the door. I answered it. The man bit me. I think they can make different venom, the acid kind, and something that paralyzes, because that was what happened to me. Faith came to see what was going on, and they jumped her.

"I watched—I couldn't so much as turn my head—as they took off the top of her head—and ate—," Evan stopped. "The sounds…And they talked about how tasty—. Then the woman put her hands up to her head and put her wig on Faith—only it wasn't a wig. Her body fell down, and Faith got up again. Only of course she wasn't Faith. They complained that 'She wasn't the right one," and they left. I was left there lying on the floor for hours. By then the body they left behind was a puddle of putrid sludge.

"But they'd left a trail behind—not a physical one. A sort of spiritual trail on the world, like the silvery trace a snail leaves behind it. So I followed them, and they came here to find you. It took all the money I had, but I did it. I think—no, I'm sure—you are the one they were looking for."

"What? Why?" Valentine asked, shocked.

"Because to me Sight, you—your spirit, maybe your soul—Faith was like the light in the window of your house that sees you home. You are—bright as the morning after a fresh snowfall. Almost too bright to look at. I don't think they had the Sight, or they'd have known Faith wasn't the one they wanted—but maybe it didn't matter. Maybe when they found her, they were just hungry."