The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 10
Then Naree steps out.
And she is glorious.
I don’t know how, but by some trick of nature, the sunset sinks into Naree’s thick black hair. It gilds her skin. It turns the sequins of her dress into an inferno: orange-gold melting into the deepest plum. Her shoulders are bare, her throat collared by a circlet in the form of a snake. It is her only decoration; the only one she needs. I breathe out, slowly.
“You know,” Tanis whispers, voice harsh with emotion, as Naree pads barefooted towards us, hand-in-hand with Bee, who is dressed like an angel complete with a fuzzy golden halo (the fact it resembles a toilet brush tarted up with tinsel is irrelevant to the moment). “You know, I never thought this was going to be my life. If the price for this happiness is living through everything I did, I’d do it again. I’d do it ten times. I’ll do anything for them.”
“I think—” I clear my throat. Fitz sidles to an appropriate distance, the rings in the cup of his palm. “That the feeling is mutual. I get the feeling that Naree would go through Hell for you.”
“Fuck that,” Tanis glances over her shoulder, a wry smile crooked like a gun with its safety off. “My girl would take over Hell and have us lord over it as queen and queen, assuming anyone was stupid enough to even think up a stunt like that. I mean, look at her. Who’d risk her wrath?”
“What are we talking about?” Naree grins as she draws into earshot, Bee migrated into her arms. If the bittersweetness of the situation appals me at all, Naree shows no sign of it. “Is this more end-of-the-world crap? How amazing I look? It’s about how amazing I look, isn’t it?
“A little of column A, a little of column B.” I manage a lean smile. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you a priest.”
“Pfff.” Naree straight-up cackles, her glee bright as as the love on her face, her fingers coming to twine with Tanis’s own. The lamia kisses her knuckles, a courtly gesture. “Like we could have gotten a Catholic priest who does gay weddings on short notice.”
“Amanda could have found you one.” Fitz nods towards the avatar, standing in a garbage-bag-bloom of a baby-blue bridesmaid dress. The expression on her face has suffered its way into a kind of worn-down repose. I don’t know which of the two mandated this outfit, and I am not going to ask.
“Eh. Doesn’t matter.” A flutter of Naree’s gloved fingers. “Not like I believe in that crap, anyway.”
“I’m still struggling to see how you’re holding onto your atheism in this epoch of bonafide killer gods,” I mumble.
Tanis offers me an arctic look. “No one asked you.”
“Fair enough.” Coughing into a fist, I let my attention veer away, and take in the sight. One day, someone will ask what the dimensions of happiness are. I’ll tell them it is the width of a home and the span of two lovers’ smiles. “Ladies and gentlemen—”
“Ladies, he says.” Naree giggles into her palms. “You clearly haven’t seen how Tanis eats—”
“Ssh,” Tanis says.
“Love you too.”
“Anyway. We are gathered here today to see these two wonderful people united in”—I pause—“unholy matrimony, I guess. Technically, because of my infernal associations and the lack of nuance in Western culture, I’m—”
A grossly dissonant clatter of chords. Cason bellows from indoors: “Get on with it! And could you speak up?”
“Sorry!” I yell back before clearing my throat with even more purpose. Bee smushes a tiny hand into my nose, ecstatic at the opportunity for mischief. “If anyone has any objections, I’m sure that Tanis will, quite literally, tear them from your tongue.”
“Damn straight.”
“So, let’s skip along past the parts I don’t really have a clue about and get on with it. Do you, Tanis, last name unknown because that’s how we roll, take Naree, last name also unknown because the end times don’t give much room for formalities, as your lawfully wedded wife for so long as you two may live—”
“Longer. I’ll love you longer than that.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
Tanis ignores me. She laces one hand with Naree’s, the other she raises for Bee’s inspection. After some deliberation, the little girl presses her hand onto her mother’s raised palm. When Tanis speaks again, her voice is throaty: “Even after there is no more Earth to walk and Tartarus has gone to dust and there is nothing but the void, I’ll still love you. I’ll still call you my wife. You are my everything, Naree. Since the day I first met you, you’ve been a light in my life. No matter where the future takes me, I’ll follow your light home. I promise you. I love you. I will always, always love you.”
“I love you too.” The words come so softly from Naree’s lips, I almost do not hear.
I look between them, swallowing. I wonder about the history there. You can see it in the way they hold hands: not like new lovers, no, not like people who’d never lost nights to the idea that one day this person would be gone, leaving them alone in a bed suddenly colder than they remembered. When I trust myself to speak again, I continue, voice husked of what little gravitas it ever had. “Do you, Naree—”
“Don’t worry, I got this.” Again, that radiant smile. Maudlin reactions aside, I’m beginning to feel slightly extraneous to the proceedings. But that’s okay. This isn’t about me. “Tanis Barlas. From the moment we started talking online, I knew you were going to be the one, that this was it, that you were going to be my one and only for so long as we live. Did you know I have nightmares about the what-ifs? What if we’d never met? What if you’d caught me on a bad day and decided you couldn’t care for someone like me?”
“That wouldn’t have happened.” Tanis half-stumbles over the words in her hurry to get them out.
“Ssh. It’s my turn to monologue.” Naree straightens. “I don’t believe in souls, or eternity, or an afterlife, or any of that crap. My faith in those things is currently in review. But I know I love you, and I will want you as my wife so long as even an atom of me still exists in the universe. They say that our reality is nothing but a simulation, so I’m kinda feeling optimistic. I’m going to figure out how this works and I will make us last forever while you go save the world.”
“Naree…”
“So, you gotta come back. You better fucking come back.”
To everyone’s astonishment, or at least mine, it is Amanda who speaks up first: “If we have to buy her passage home with our lives, we will.”
“Would it completely wreck the moment if I took this opportunity to point out that you, at least in context of this particular body, are a clone and there’s a million of you waiting in a vat somewhere?”
“Only seventy-five.”
“Well, that’s egg on my face.” I raise a hand and count to ten. “But it’s not like I’ve got anything to really live for anymore. Dying to make sure two lovers come back together doesn’t seem like a bad idea. I’m in.”
Fitz crooks a wan smile. “For Bee.”
“For Bee,” the rest of us echo.
TEN
CHEAP BOOZE IS like drunken anonymous sex: excellent in theory, hollow in implementation. The gas station beer doesn’t last long in the polls, not with the memory of Naree’s chocolate stout still coating the back of our throats. We try to get Tanis to part with her bourbon, but even the endorphin-rush of impromptu matrimony isn’t enough to convince her. Which, as kids today might phrase it, sucks.
But no one pushes too hard. It’s a wedding; decisions are the prerogative of the brides squared. We drain our inventory of low-price alcohol, make two and a half trips back to the gas station to restock. The third jaunt is my fault, aborted because I felt a fell compulsion to provide the wedding party with something other than cheese and crackers.
“Cheese beer soup,” I slur happily.
Cason sits up from the couch. “I’m game.”
“With bacon,” I continue.
“No one’s arguing, Rupert.” Fitz flails an arm at the room. Tanis glances over, an eyebrow cranked up to her hairline. She perches on the lip of a windowsill, Naree clamped between her thighs, one arm in the small of her new wife’s back.
“Beer. Soup,” she deadpans.
Naree smacks her. “Like you wouldn’t eat the pot yourself.”
A shrug follows. No longer irradiated with menace, Tanis has become an easier person to study. The reptilian element is less overt than I’d have thought, manifested primarily in the way light sometimes pools in her eyes and that liquid, loose-boned grace.
“He calls himself a chef,” she retorts, a challenge drowsing in her smirk. “He should be able to come up with something better—”
“Hey,” I say. “Hey. Excuse me. It’s not my fault your kitchen’s a wreck.”
“Easy.” Smiling, Naree wags a finger at me, pirouetting away from Tanis, who reaches out a second too late, fingers grazing the hem of Naree’s tasselled dress. “It’s our house you’re takin’ shots at.”
I crowbar myself out of the armrest and stagger towards the kitchen island, counting each step, one after another in single file. I’m a five-foot-eight man with a criminal history. I don’t think I’m legally allowed to be a lightweight. Outside, the sky looks washed-out, the black soaked through with orange-blue light pollution. Like home, I decide, hiraeth a needle scratched over glass, leaving a fine crack in my mood. But like any kind of damage, it can be remedied with a strategically placed cover.
“I’m not taking shots at you,” I howl, louder than needed, louder than longing for a country that wouldn’t think twice about revoking my citizenship. It’s probably fortunate that Amanda has command of the kidlet in the makeshift nursery, or there wouldn’t even be this pastiche of a wedding party. “But I might be taking offense at the fact you haven’t gone grocery shopping in ever.”
“There’s kimchi.” Naree pouts.
“Kimchi does not a pantry make.”
That brings her up short. She breathes in, lets it go in a brisk huff. “Also, there’s gochujang paste.”
“Again, that’s not enough—you know what? I’m just going to check the fridge one more time. Maybe you have lap cheong. And eggs. I could do something with lap cheong and eggs, a bit of sweet potato, some bacon. You’re American.”
“I …” A beat and breath wisps past, before Naree adds in laughing tones, “I would be offended if I didn’t actually love bacon. So. Carry on.”
Triumphant, I swing open the refrigerator door. Earlier reconnaissance had divulged—well, not nothing, but a surfeit of below-average ingredients. Withered mushrooms; tofu past its sell-date; rotisserie chicken, delicately nibbled; a riveting display of baby foods, contained within individual jars, some home-made, some not; barbeque sauces; a single cucumber mysteriously haloed in the misty light of the bulb.
Then something blinks.
Eyes in the back wall of the refrigerator. Human, entirely so. Down to the sockets sunken into the white plastic, the lacing of capillaries, as though of someone who’d not slept well for days. Blue eyes, blanched pale as frost. I jerk away, tripping with a loud yelp. The others come staggering over as I backpedal, the door swinging half-shut. My heart is in my throat.
“What the fuck?”
It takes thirty seconds to realize I hadn’t been the one to say it.
“Eyes,” I babble. “You had eyes in your fridge. Also, thank Guan Yin. I thought it was the fridge talking.”
Naree looms into view. “Okay, your jokes are starting to get just a little bit—”
“No, no. Like. Actual eyes, in the back of your fridge.”
“Are you drunk?”
I look in Fitz’s direction. He isn’t wrong, per se: I am drunk. Ignominiously so, in fact. But hardly drunk enough tohallucinate. “You really asking me that?”
Even inebriated, Tanis is preternaturally quiet. She sinks to a crouch beside me, staring into the cold light from inside the fridge. The stillness of her itches at my hindbrain.
“What did you see?” she asks.
“A pair of blue eyes in the back of the fridge.”
“Rolling around on a shelf?”
“No. Embedded in the back wall.” I unfold from the floor, dusting myself off. “You guys wouldn’t happen to be having a demon infestation, would you?”
“Could it be those—” Cason has changed since we began our debauchery. The softness is gone: he’s still about forty pounds above optimal, stomach cambering fractionally over his belt, but now there’s something different. A tautening of his stance: shoulders back, arms ready, an aura of anticipation, his gait light. Boxer, I decide. Before he made the epiphanous change to ‘dad.’ “You know.”
“If it is, it isn’t very good at hiding.” Tanis grinds through clenched teeth, voice low, peculiarly soporific, quietly predatory in a way that hints at the moment before the lunge, the strike, the kill. “Which is useful.”
“Rupert might just be seeing things,” Fitz quips, lofting himself onto the kitchen island.
“Not sure if you parsed it the first time, but I feel like it is amazingly hypocritical for a prophet—”
“Chronicler.”
“—whatever, to have the temerity to question my grip on sanity, when you routinely get assaulted by ambient, buh, radio signals.”
“Hey. It’s a profession.”
“You’re a malfunctioning satellite dish. Shut up. Also, what were we talking about?”
Cason’s voice floats over, even-keeled. “Amanda might have an idea.”
Tanis, ever pragmatic, spares no time for our nonsense. She tiptoes over to the fridge, curls a finger around the door and waves Naree back. Her wife complies with easy fluidity, although not before taking possession of a cast-iron frying pan.
Tanis nods once to us before swinging the door open hard enough to slam it into the wall, cracking the dry plaster. We jump as one, swearing in a scatter of languages. Cason vaults over the island, Fitz goes the other way. Naree, despite initial expectations, torpedoes towards the appliance, pan over her head.
But there’s nothing.
Condensation whorls out of the refrigerator, lapping at the sepia tiles. The single cucumber glows in the luminance. We stand there in puzzled communion with the gods of wait-what-happened, before Tanis breaks the silence with a faint, “Huh.”
Naree lowers her weaponry, equally flummoxed, and picks her way over. “That was a bit… anticlimactic.”
“Well, I’m sorry nothing jumped out to kill us.”
Tanis, however, does not relax. Her silhouette remains framed in the white glow, every muscle still taut. “Huuuh,” she says again, dragging the sound out. When she does deign to withdraw a step, even that comes across as a move to allow more room to manoeuvre. Tanis paces like a trapped carnivore. Now and again, she repeats herself, whispering, “Huh.”
Fitz takes first swing at the silence. “If you say ‘huh’ one more—”
“There’s something there.”
We freeze.
“Like, a cucumber?” I manage.
The lamia glares balefully at me but says nothing, features pinched and pensive. She swings the door of the refrigerator shut and opens it again, only to slam it closed for a second time. The ritual repeats itself several times over, abrading everyone’s nerves, before at last Cason, of all people, cracks.
“What is it?” He leans over the kitchen counter, both palms on the formica, and tries in vain to peer behind the offending appliance.
“I don’t know,” says Tanis. “That’s the problem. But I know it’s there.”
“That isn’t very helpful,” I note, helpfully.
Another glare.
“Whatever that thing is, it doesn’t seem particularly smart. I can still smell it.” Her tongue dips out of her mouth, just for a half-second, tasting. “It’s here, and it thinks it can hide in plain sight? Or at least, that’s what it feels like. Something less stupid would have squirmed away to regroup.”
Cason palms a shoulder and begins rolling the joint on its axis, back and forth, back and forth, a boxer testing his flexibility. “So, let’s kill it.”
“I see someone’s channelling his grandfather.”
“Yes.” His face is impassive. “If that’s what will keep Bee safe. In case you’ve forgotten, there’s a child in the next room…”
“I don’t know about Fitz or Rupert, but we haven’t.” Naree returns her frying pan to its hook and leans a hip against the kitchen island, Tanis still walking angry circuits in front of the fridge. “I also don’t think this banter is going to help. Let’s discuss what we know. First, it exists. Second, it seems to be interested in someone in the room. Third, no one else has seen it and we’ve all been here since like seven. No one except for Rupert. Now, how is Rupert different from anyone—?”
“Oh, fuck me. If there’s another possessed crocodile god coming to eat me, I swear I’m just going to jump into the oven which, by the way, is a very nice oven—”
My left-field flattery knocks Naree askew. “Uh. Thank you?”
“—and, you know, just start basting myself with garlic butter until my thigh melts off the bone. How about that?”
“Is it normal that I’m actually starting to get hungry?”
No one humours Fitz with acknowledgment. Tanis, who’d stood with her head cocked throughout Naree’s analysis, nods once to herself and closes the distance between us. She claps both hands on my shoulders, a very fraternal gesture; the friendliest she’d ever been. And I might, perhaps, have relished the olive branch if it hadn’t come with Tanis’s fingers biting into my flesh.
“Ow,” I inform her, hopefully.
“Rupert,” Tanis says, paying no attention at all to my discomfort. “I need you to listen to me. If Naree is right, and I trust Naree to be right—”
“Thanks, babe!”
“—you’re going to need to keep this together. If you start panicking, you’re going to put everyone else at risk. We’re right here with you. You’re not alone. We need you to keep calm so we can figure this out.”
