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is—how is it I do not forget to breathe?”
    “Trust your body, you aren’t used to having it to yourself. Some things will come naturally, like breathing. There are needs you don’t have in the spirit world, which is where you’ve been held while you were dragged about. Do you know how old you are? How many winters have you seen?”
    She closed her eyes, touching fingertip to thumb and moving her lips without words. “Twenty, maybe more. Time is everything and also nothing. Everything is… fleeting here, but so permanent at the same time. The sounds and sights and the feelings. How does anyone keep track of it all?”
    “One day at a time. Focus on the smaller things first. Have you thought of a name?”
             
She nodded. “Jaqueline. I don’t know where I got it. Just a name, I suppose.”
    Ander swallowed. “It is a good name.”
    “I don’t know where I got it.” She looked down at her hands, flexing them slowly. She tilted her head, each movement new and alien. “A thousand names. People, demons, stars and wind. It all belongs to her. I don’t know what I am. Everything I was… is her. Ambrosine.”
    Ander cringed at the name. “Not anymore.” He placed a hand on Jaqueline’s shoulder, but drew away when she flinched. “You-- she was a monster. You are something new. Decide what that means.”
    Tears fell from her eyes again as Jaqueline leaned forward and whispered two desperate words. “Help me.”

 
     
     
     
     
    T hey helped each other for one winter. Ander taught Jaqueline the careful methods of study and control that he had abandoned so long ago. The demon was still inside her, but it was she who had control now. Ander saw to it that she learned how to keep that control. He burned his old lists and spent evenings mapping out each tattoo on Jaqueline’s skin. After a time, Jaqueline offered to explain the meanings of each mark, each dedicated to the harnessing of some rare power that she now possessed. After the first month she offered demonstrations and lessons of her own. Ander was as eager to study during the long evenings as he was to teach during the day. He learned discovered things about his own powers he had never known. He could not remember when he stopped needing the sleeping draughts, though each night he still dreamed of his wife’s death.
    Ander came to realize as the days grew longer that Jaqueline would leave soon. Their lessons had grown fewer and farther between as Jaqueline proved the control was hers now. She spent long hours walking alone in the woods, sometimes as a shadow or a creature of the wilderness. He noticed she liked to change shapes, to shed her human form. He guessed that it helped her distance herself from her time as the demon’s vessel. This was necessary if she was to heal and become whole. She spoke often of the power she held, of the places she had been and the things she had seen, but she never offered to speak about the fact that she had been a prisoner inside herself for her entire life, forced to watch herself carry out unspeakable deeds and endure terrors few could imagine, and Ander did not ask about them. But he could tell she did not feel right being a part of the world and would seek to distance herself from anything that she might become attached to, even him. Sometimes she would not return for days and he wondered if she had gone for good that time, but each time he was wrong.
    She confirmed his thoughts on one warm afternoon as they sat together on the hillside that overlooked the valley. “I’m leaving.”
    Ander nodded, looking ahead. “I know. You know I’m not keeping you here.”
    “Yes. But I was. I needed your strength.” Her words were distant, as they often were. Something about Jaqueline was always elsewhere, wandering. Ander smiled a little.
    “You are always welcome here.”
    She looked down at her lap. “There is one more thing I must do. I want to give you something.”
    Ander raised a brow