“I guess I was lucky, that it didn’t all come at once. The convulsions didn’t start until after I went through puberty, and that was really late. So I already knew how to shield, and keep my emotions separate from others.” Watching the dancing flame, she turned her hand up to catch Victor’s. “Plus, I end up … bonding, I call it, with people I’m close to. I think I mentioned that. And those emotions … my body seems to consider that energy normal. So my family can’t actually trigger me that way.
“Which is probably why things went weird when I went to college, because I was all alone, and most of the people I was reading weren’t familiar at all. By the end of the year, that first year, I was … it was pretty bad. And then something happened, I don’t even remember it clearly … and I could turn the emotions into fire.” Summer put the finger of her free hand out toward the candle, and the flame moved through the air to light on it. “It’s part of me. I can’t be burned by it. I can choose if it burns anything else. I can shape it, and direct it, whatever I like.
“So of course I imitated the Human Torch and taught myself how to fly with it. The wings are just for show.”
“Yeah, I remember you talking about that and I don’t exactly understand what it does or mean really. From what I gathered, you can feel my emotions but does it entail anything besides that?”
Victor nodded then shuddered as he remembered how he had coped before he accepted that he had been born and bred to be a killer. ”Yeah, college can be hell sometimes.” He watched her reach out towards the flame, fascinated. “That’s incredible,” he smirked then, “of course, imitating the Human Torch, what else would you do?”
She grinned at him, sending the flame back to the candle. “What — oh, the bonding. It’s, um. It’s hard to explain.” Summer chewed on her lip for a minute, trying to think of the right words. “I guess the closest analogue would be the mind melds, from Star Trek. When I bond to someone, it’s mostly involuntary on my part, though, and they usually don’t know anything about it. But what it means is that even under heavy shields, unless I’m drugged, I can still sense that person. No matter what. Distance doesn’t matter. Their feelings are a whisper in the back of my mind.” She paused again, flicking her gaze up to Victor. “I’m bonded to the girls I met in college. One of them lives in Hawai’i. I can still feel her.”
“Wow, she’s in Hawaii? That’s incredible that you can still feel her emotions. I suppose it might also be difficult.” He shook his head in bewilderment, “Trying to sort of all of those emotions and your own must be an interesting process.” He stopped then and thought a moment. “So you said that we bonded, correct? I’ll do my best not to be too much of a pain then with the bloodlust.” He smiled, half joking, half not. “Do you keep in touch with your friends from college?”
“I said we could.” She smirked at him, laughing. “If we keep doing what we were doing last night, then definitely. But it’s a lot easier to handle bonded emotions than almost any other. They aren’t obtrusive, and they don’t affect me physically.” Summer’s eyes went distant for a moment. “It’s the people I’m not bonded to that are the problem, that way. Someone else’s pain, someone else’s desire, someone else’s desperate hope. You asked, why have I been alone so much? That’s why.”