Sara stared at me with cold, but fiercely angry eyes, the kind that I just couldn't stand her directing at me...but that I found facing me way too often. I still wasn't quite sure how she managed to get that particular mix of expressions on her face without hurting something. I usually just assumed that it was part of the magic that made her what she was, and went with that, since thinking about it took too much time.
"Why in the world do you have to do this every single time!?" she screamed at me, which earned her a blank look (hopefully) from me. Blank, because I honestly had no idea what she was talking about. Obviously she was pissed with me, and I knew that she probably had good reason to be in such a state. But, what she was pissed about, I had no clue whatsoever. And hopefully because I've been told that most of the time when I try to convey a state of confusion or ignorance I look like I'm being smug or snotty, and that was most certainly not what I was trying to do. I wanted Sara to be less pissed at me, not more so.
"Do what?" I asked, and she stared at me some more, her expression keeping its anger, but at the same time adding in a good dose of stunned disbelief. Then she bit her bottom lip between her teeth, hard enough to make a small trickle of blood flow out before the magic that ran through her worked to stop it almost immediately.
"This!" she raved, waving her arms around. I looked around, though I knew what surrounded us. We were in the middle of a patch of bare, lifeless land, which wasn't in itself all that surprising. What was strange, was that both Sara and I knew that a few hours earlier it had been a rather popular park in the city where we lived, and that it had been quite green, and full of people. And the change...well...that was not my fault.
For the most part.
It was all Daddy's fault. Really, it was! I hadn't done any of the destruction, not even a little bit, though I had been tempted at the time. I had been good, though, and had kept myself from letting the magic come from me as well. Besides, Daddy was doing a fine job of reducing the park, and some of the beings in it, to ashes without me. He probably wouldn't have hesitated in turning that same wrath on me if I'd tried to help anyway.
And that was exactly what I told Sara. I explained to her that it was Daddy, not me, who destroyed the park, and that the only people who died were some of the minor demons that had been plaguing our entire family, particularly Seth's boy, for the past couple of months. It was what they deserved, really, since they were stupid enough to pick a fight with Daddy and his kin. Sara didn't really buy it, though.
"...you provoked him..." she said flatly in response to my frantic denials of any sort of fault. "He wouldn't have been quite so destructive if you hadn't goaded him into it."
"But!" I exclaimed.
"But nothing!" she retorted, hands on her hips and anger etched across her face yet again. "He was going to kill those demons; I know that. I'm not mad about that. But he knows better than to go around destroying parts of human cities, and I know that too. So do you. So why did he go and incinerate the park to the point where we probably won't even be able to plant anything here for the next couple of years, hmmmm?"
She had a point there. Daddy would have done that regardless once, but that was long before I was even born. Nowadays he tried to keep his temper in check, the same way I did. And he didn't go around destroying stuff that wasn't his, even if it made him feel better, even if it made the killing easier. But I had been there when he went and killed all those demons, and I had said a couple of things that had fueled his anger to a high it hadn't reached in a long time. It was good for him, but not for the park, or the demons...
So I hung my head and faced Sara with what I hoped was a sufficiently sorrowful expression on my face. "I'm sorry?" I said to her.
She stared at me for a few moments, and then shook her head. "Mou, stop looking so pathetic!" she exclaimed, grabbing my hand and storming in the direction of the nearest exit to what once was a park. "That's what I hate about you... Can't you ever do something without taking it to extremes!?"
She looked back at me briefly with a slightly sheepish smile on her face. It was her way of apologizing, not that she had any real reason to do so. So I smiled back, and before long we were laughing together as if nothing had happened.