I can't remember a time when I didn't know the story. I've always known it, from the cradle and beyond. Once I would have said the womb; but these days such things are more uncertain.

It's the oldest tale I know, that of the syni molniya. It stretches back to the beginnings of our family, our world; forward to time immemorial. The long-lived ones, who look just like any other unless you cut them, who walk the world with wary eyes and call the lightning from clear skies. Like the other tales of my childhood, I never doubted its truth.

And I never understood how real it was. Not until the day I failed to die.

There's a lot of detail, in the tale. The distance between them, the wars they must wage, each on the other. The loneliness of the years and the curse of the hours, the fire that leaps beneath their skin, the mystery of their origins. How they roam the earth searching, always searching -- though for what they search changes with the telling. Life, death, mortality, the families they lost, the children they can never have, the friendship they're doomed to always lose. It's a good tale, a great tale. The story Dedushka loved to tell best, and the tale I loved most to hear; and as a blueprint for a new life, it totally and utterly sucks.

But it's all I have to go on, now that Death has rejected me and blue lightning has taken up residence beneath my skin.

Dedushka always claimed they were everywhere we were, living amongst us and fighting amongst us and dying amongst us, and only chance or each other to give them away. He was right, more right than he ever would have dreamed; for everywhere I go, there they are. In cities, in forests, across oceans and plains and deserts. In the middle of Siberia and a Russian winter, Shanghai, New York, and a town that's barely a dot on the shores of Lake Michigan, they have found me. In the Highlands of Scotland and the valleys of Wales I've run from them, the smell of cordite strong in my nostrils. In Dublin and Sydney, Durban and Kiev and Delhi. With their wars and their ways and their presence rifling dirty fingers through my brain, they are there. With their blades bright and sharp and their eyes cold and hard, and--

They. Oh, god. We, now. I am they, they is us, we. Five years on I should be used to this, should I not? How true is this? And still I cannot help but wonder -- if this is true -- just let it be, let me be, please, God, help me. This can't be happening to me. This can't have happened to me.

This can't be happening. Burning in my brain, feeling the flame, the smoke, death in the air -- dirty fingers picking at my brain, poking the squishy bits inside out and plucking the rest like the strings of a guitar. The music of the syni molniya.

Someone's here. And if it's the man I shot three towns back, if he's followed me the way his glittering eyes promised he would as he looked down the bullet-warm barrel of my gun, I'll have to take his sword and whack off his head and -- damn it all, anyway. It's not right. Who made you God to say I'll take your life from you? Who gave you the right to invade my life, my mind, my soul? Damn you all, just fucking LET ME BE!

Vodka raw down my throat, cheap vodka, bad vodka; all I can afford and all they have in this dive of a bar, anyway, and how the hell can I still be this hysterical over a cheap light show this far down the line?

But I can still remember how it felt to shoot another human, the first time I had to aim my gun at one. I can still remember how it felt to stand over his bleeding body and know that he wasn't getting up again, ever; that he was dead and I had made him so, that the lightning running beneath my skin had finally made a murderer out of me.

And I can still remember the shock when he caught up with me a week later, the raw terror that held me immobile and the shark's grin he wore as he stalked toward me, long naked sword in hand and vicious laughter spilling from his snarled lips.

The tales do not mention that. The syni molniya, they live long, if they can. And if they do not, if they are lucky -- they die, Dedushka told me, much like any other.

He was half right, I suppose. They do die. We do die. Just not quite like any other.

Pure luck it was, that I survived that night; and I'm still not sure how I did. He had a sword and skill and a deadly purpose; I had a raw terror that froze me into marble and the unpredictability of sheer panic. I had a gun I had no time to use, and no idea of how to kill him anyway, since the conventional method hadn't worked. And when the dust had settled and the silence stretched the air like the skin of a drum, he was headless on the ground and I was just as terror-stricken and panicked as the instant he walked into view. I'm fairly sure he didn't lie down and cut off his own head. But for all of me, he might as well have.

I don't know what I expected, then. I'm not entirely sure I was capable of expecting anything. Of doing more than stand there like the fool I was and wait for the sign, a sign, any sign. Was he dead, this time? If I stood here and watched, would his arms start crawling and creeping, B-movie style, dragging his body behind in a blind search for his head? Would the lightning beneath his skin act as a current, draw the two halves together? Tension in the air, nerves ratcheting tighter with each breath he didn't take and the sure knowledge that something was coming crawling over my scalp.

Dedushka's tales never mentioned how the lightning was called from clear blue sky, either. Just that they could do it -- we could do it. I'd decided, in the weeks since Death had refused to claim me, that it was a talent I obviously hadn't acquired. I could make sparks, light a match by letting loose the lightning that roamed beneath my skin, but nothing more -- it was a poor trick Death had played on me. A poor trade, indeed. Syn molniya I might be, but I couldn't even do that right. I'd rather have my family; I'd rather have the man I was then, the man the lightning stole from me with my father's pride and my grandfather's love and my own self-respect. I never asked for this, never wanted an immortality that lasts only so long as I can hold it well-bathed in blood. Never wanted the memory of Dedushka's grief-stricken eyes already branding me a stranger. I don't want this lightning creeping just beneath my skin, nor the party tricks it comes with. Mostly, I do not ever want the essence of another syn molniya staining my body and my soul. And, oh, how I would love someday to be given a goddamn choice.

The last thing I expected from his corpse that day was for it to call the lightning. It seems so obvious, so reasonable, now; open the door wide enough and of course the lightning must come flowing out, unstoppable as a river in flood. There's a hell of a lot left out of Dedushka's tales; but not much beats that. Chop off a head, call the lightning; and all hell breaks loose, framed in the flickering violence of light flashing intense through everything it touches.

Cheap light show. One way to put it, I suppose. But really there aren't any words; not for the moment between the sword-stroke and the storm, when it's all you can do to stand and wait for the sign to flick the switch of death. It's the beginning of the end; the cheapest thrill in the world; the deadliest gamble there is. Your soul against his; and his comes armed with the anger of a thousand thunderbolts and the force of a million hammers pounding on your fragile self. If their presence picks and pokes and plucks at your brain with sharp fingers, their lightning tears your soul apart in swift and terrible vengeance; until all that you are is a frantic leap of electrons shaking in your bones and the cold slide of sweat chilling cold. Until all the world is strike upon strike of frozen fire, grabbing hold of your toenails and turning you inside out from your hairline on down. And still there are no words.

I used to have words for everything. Words used to pour from me, into me and through me and around me, leaping to my mind and pen like fish to a lure. From my Dedushka the gift of language, that of the Old Country and that of the New -- and of one or two in between, besides. From him the skill and patience to ply it. Like everything else, the lightning steals it from me. Each time I shoot, every drop of blood I spill, each sword I'm forced to lift wipes words in its wake. Every day I wake with less and less to say, and one day soon I will wake with no words left in me at all; with no me left to keep them in.

If I live to wake another day. My luck is in, tonight; except of course there is no luck in this. The years have taught me well, in some things. Never enter a room with only one exit, and never rely on the direction that comes with the grasping fingers in your brain; because more often than not whichever door you choose will hold the tiger. Wait, and see what door he comes in; leave by the other and when you shoot, do it fast and do it right.

God, I hate guns. I hate the way they look, the way they feel, their weight in holster or hand. I hate the smell of cordite, the slimy slide of gun-oil over my skin, the sharp click of the clip sliding into place. I hate the fact that this ritual is as familiar to me as the rites and rhymes of my childhood; as practiced as the steps of the dances my Dedushka taught me, as embedded in my life now as the lightning that crawls beneath my skin. I hate that every time I take out my gun, I hit what I aim at, whether it be bottles or rabbits or human flesh.

Most of all, I hate that the only alternative to cultivating this deadly skill is giving in to my own death. That everything I was would despise all I have become, and still I cannot want to die. That day after day I sight down this barrel and shoot away another piece of myself.

I really hate guns.

I've never seen this one before in my life. Perhaps my luck is in, after all. Tall, dark, beard stubble and sunglasses tilting down off his nose as he blinks in the bar's dim dinginess. He's overdressed for this place in suit and coat, molasses-slow Southern accent murmuring polite words that garner frank stares of amazement as he pushes through the crowd. Polite, they don't know what to make of, here. The steel threading his voice, they do.

But I've never seen him before. He might not be hunting me. He might let me leave, and I might yet escape this place without losing another piece of myself to the matte black shatter of my gun's hunger. Please God. There's an alley out the side door, and all I need do is make it through the other end.

And perhaps Lady Luck is thumbing her nose at me again. "Going somewhere?" he drawls in that slow voice of his, and I never heard him coming, never heard the slight creak of the door as it opened, never heard the soft 'click' as it shut that carries through still air like a gunshot. Fuck. I'm going to have to shoot him after all.

But I've never seen him before; so at least I won't have to take his lightning, too.

I turn, gun solid and loathsome in my hand.

I really, really hate guns.

Especially when they're pointed at me, and there's no time to bring my own to bear before there's a bullet biting its way through my skin trailing lightning in its wake and too late to run too late to fight and the only thought in my mind a scream because I don't want to die.