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Soulmates weren’t magic, any more than Listening was. Sure, you could probably use the bond for magic, same as you could use blood, or hair, or sex. But it didn’t take magic to make one, or feel one.
The religion of science would have you believe that a soulbond was the result of compatible genetics. A combination of pheromones, mirror neurons firing off in a particular sequence, and a good healthy dose of social conditioning.
Hollywood would have you think it was as simple as love at first sight. Curtains blowing in the wind, passionate kissing in a downpour, a pull so powerful it wiped out every other relationship in your life like a tsunami hitting a Thai beach.
Wizards had a less romantic view, in my experience. We already knew eyes were the windows to the soul. A soulmate bond was just a variation of a soulgaze. It was one more way to see the world through a different light, though lesser, as the view came through a very narrow and particular lens.
No amount of study could have prepared me for the soulgaze I shared with Gentleman Johnny Marcone.
And when the gaze ended, while I still reeled, it was like another one started up, but without the visual. Cujo's big hands were on the wheel, Marcone was half turned to me in his seat, same as before. Still, everything was changed. The car felt about ten degrees hotter as a full body sensation of -- something -- layered over me.
"All right, then," Marcone had said smoothly, as though he wasn’t surprised in the least, as though his eyes hadn’t flickered in recognition of my anger, and his smile hadn’t widened with my fear. Like I couldn't still feel the strange insulation of what I shouldn’t have had any way of knowing was his respect.
The intensity of John Marcone's soul frightened me. The cool, controlled way he accepted mine, and filed me away for storage and later use, frightened me. The intimacy frightened me.
He’d expected the gaze. If he’d anticipated the bond too, I don’t know what I would’ve done.
An echo of foreign curiosity persisted long after Marcone’s Caddy drove away from my office, leaving me sucking in deep breaths in the building’s stairwell.
I’d thought a lot about soulmates when I was a kid. It was a natural enough fantasy for an orphan that got bounced around a lot, I think. More than the trappings that always came from catching someone’s eye in the movies – like a house, a dog, and a big Rockwell turkey at Thanksgiving – I liked the promise that loneliness would be temporary. That even though I hadn’t met them yet, there would one day be a person as meaningful to me, and me to them, as the ones I’d already lost.
After Justin, and Elaine, I'd thought I knew better than to expect anything that resembled a picket-fence ideal. If I was honest with myself, which I avoided when I could, as a rule, I'd have said that I doubted there was a person in the world that deserved to have me inflicted on them as a soulmate.
I apparently hadn't put away every childish hope. The following days helped me shed the last of them.
Gimpy Lawrence lay dead on the floor. His blood seeped out from under his body and spread, a slow crimson pool, outward. Hendricks and Spike worked with unfeeling professionalism around us, pouring booze up and down the perimeter of the Varsity.
“I think it would be best if you and I did not encounter one another in the future, I cannot tolerate more interference in my affairs.” Marcone spoke in the same cool, assured tone I’d come to expect from the man. It was perfectly pitched to cut through my haze of shock.
Under it, through the tendrils of the bond that flared to life with our gaze, I could feel what he felt.
In the stories, they said that it could be hard to pick apart what belonged to you and what belonged to your soulmate, but I knew the exact shape of the seam between us. Marcone felt no regret for the death of the man between us, though he resented the necessity, and he didn’t share in the fear I felt at the prospect of me having to go against the Shadowman alone.
Marcone was a refrigerator. His frustration, at his wayward employee, the impending loss of his property, at me, here, now, me, at all – was a distant sensation, easy to set aside. His interest was more pervasive, but that too ebbed and waned as the calming oil of decision rose to the top of everything.
It took a moment for me to pull out of the clean, organized calm that was Johnny Marcone’s soul. My own body felt wrinkled afterwards, not too big or too small, but poorly fitted all the same. I hid my shaking hands in my pockets. The turmoil in my gut felt more like the half-chewed contents of a garbage disposal than anything that could be labeled and filed away.
Call it a gut feeling, but I doubted that if I looked at the thing that had sprung up between Marcone and me with my Sight, it would have the same golden haze I’d sometimes felt between the dance partners at the senior center.
“I think that’s an excellent idea, too,” I said.
I’d known how things would go as soon as we got each other’s measure.
Even if his business wasn't repellent, his wealth and power weren’t built on suffering, and our first meeting hadn't involved his thugs muscling me off the street, it wouldn’t have worked.
Tigers were solitary creatures.
“Excellent,” Marcone said. “It is good to have someone who understands.”
A brush, against my mind, of simple, animal satisfaction, made it clear he meant it.
And then he turned back to his men, and away from me.
And if I spent the next few hours wandering the city, lonely and lost in a despair greater than any I’d felt since I was six years old and woke up to find my dad cold in the motel bed next to me? Well. At least that was all mine.