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switch, and the scant illumination from the fluorescent bulbs shining through the door and in the cracks of the blinds of the window above the couch where I lay cast the entire office in faint light. She started to open her mouth to say something but stopped. Her face went from a hint of a smile to a moment’s discomfort and settled into unease. “Just rest,” she said, and closed the door as she left.
    She’d acted like a mother to me since the day we’d met, protecting me more than once from the machinations of Erich Winter when she could. But she wasn’t my mother.
    My mother was dead.
    I lay on the couch, and the tears I’d held back for so long came out in small, muffled sobs, hot liquid burning as it ran down my cheeks. I kept on that way until I had no more tears or sobs left inside, and some time after that I fell into a deep, restless sleep.

Chapter 5
    Apiolae, Roman Empire
    280 A.D.
     
    No one touched him and no one wanted to be near him, and for Marius, that was just the way it was. By age six, he’d worn out his welcome nearly everywhere in town, and skeptical eyes followed him any time he was around. You could only engender extreme pain with your touch and talk to yourself so often before they got wary, and they were wary of him and more.
    He’d been fortunate enough to have found a mean old man of the village who suffered him to live with the animals in the barn, always with a wary eye on him. He kept a stick to poke at Marius to keep him at length, but that was fine. It was rarely employed and never needed, because Marius had learned to keep his hands to himself at a very young age.
    He lay in the fresh hay that he’d just placed in the bottom of the barn in his own little paddock that he’d claimed when he’d come here. He lay there and ate quietly, a meal of cheese that he’d made from goat’s milk and honey he’d collected from the bees out near the cliff. The old man had taught him much, enough to survive if he had to.
    The smell of the barn was strong, though not much stronger, in his opinion, than that of the old man’s house, on the few occasions he’d had to go in there. The old man’s musty stink was different than the animals and less palatable to Marius’s nose. Here, things were familiar.
    There was a rustle in the goat pen and he looked up. They were always a little restless around him. They could almost instinctively tell that his touch was not good for them and kept their distance. It wasn’t as though he tried to touch them, and their fur protected their skin some even when he did.
    Because you’re a murderer, and they know it. You’re a demon, a spawn of Pluto—
    “No, I’m not,” he said, almost casual about it. He nibbled on the piece of cheese in his blackened, calloused hand, tasted the sharp tang of it on his tongue. “You keep saying that, but I’m not.”
    Everybody thinks it. Everybody knows it. You’re a dark child, a destroyer of everything you touch.
    This was how it always was. Every day. Marius tried to ignore her, but he knew eventually she’d get through to him, provoke him.
    She always did, somehow.
    “The animals seem fine,” he said, swallowing the piece of cheese. “I haven’t destroyed them.”
    Yet.
    He sighed and took another nibble. He was getting older, nearing his late teens. He was a man, by all rights, and should have been seeking his own fortunes, his own house. His own family—
    You can’t have a family. You’ll destroy them, just like everything else . The voice was harsh, near-screeching, and so deep in his head that it felt as if his ears rattled with each low word spoken.
    “I won’t—” He felt a sharp surge of anger and then paused to let it subside. It was like this, always. Every day. He soothed himself and took a drink of the goat’s milk in the skin next to him. It was refreshing on a hot day like this. It gave him a moment to compose himself before he ranted into the barn air. It wasn’t as though the old man