Aurora

Next time I smoked over to Grant's I learned that Erynne had brought in the girl from Sunnydale. Aurora Dark turned out to be small, slender and just on her way out of childhood. Something had slammed that door right in her face, though.

Aurora was the mind with the vibes that sometimes felt like a lost child and sometimes like a creature so old that it'd outlived its world. When I'd sensed that down in Sunnydale, as a focus for a whole bunch of hunters in the dark, I'd wondered if she was something new, that was using the lost child aspect as bait.

Then, it had been necessary to "look" carefully to sense the bereaved-of-all-my-world aspects that reminded me of some vampires, or the very strong sense of Wiccan power that ran beneath it. When I met her, though, she was talking quite freely about losing everyone and being uncertain about staying with the group because friends were just more people to lose. I think she said that, if you don't care about anybody, then nobody you care about can get hurt.

I've heard that a lot, of course, plenty of humans, and demons too, decide that they just can't endure the pain of getting involved, and shut themselves off. They don't often talk about it - singing's another matter, of course. I didn't think she was anywhere near that stage, though. Some of the pain was fresh and she may never have forced the feelings under.

(Something more had happened to her, though. I'd got the feeling that she'd killed somebody, but I didn't want to ask a question and maybe break the mood.)

As it was, I just listened while the kid thought it through, and decided that even though she'd changed, things were different when she'd had friends, and that it was better to be happy while she had them and miserable if she lost them than to feel the way she did.

By that point I'd hardly said a thing (except to admit that I'd caused the sudden outbreak of rock concert in Sunnydale. She claimed she's been more startled than scared, anyway.) I told her that I was staying at Grant's some of the time, and that didn't seem to bother her any. She just nodded when I said that it makes the place safer.

Before I'd quite realised it I'd added that I could pick up people's feelings and I know how she feels about the dying thing. I've lived long enough to have lost more than I can count, I told her that Grant's older than he looks, and he'd had too much of the same trouble. She seemed to get the message that most of the people in that house were doing their best to see that the rest stayed safe.

( I'd been thinking too much about loss myself, over the last few weeks - and from the way things are going I'll have more of it to think about.) The kid'd kept her problems out where she could see them, though, and I thought she'd heal. Maybe that's why I added that people tend to sing to me about how they feel and, from what I've heard, one way to end up with inconsolable grief is to close it off so it can never heal.

.........................

Afterwards I kind of thought about that. Normally, I do gigs. It means that my home dimension's kind of a jumping off point, but I don't normally stay long in one place when I'm working. I'm in sole charge during operations, and I work with a team, but I keep my distance, of course. But now I've got the Mechanical Minion. According to Cathy those firewalls are pretty good and anything I do tell to that computer is likely to be kept real confidential..............