Lover Unveiled, page 30
• • •
In the great hall of Zxysis the Elder’s castle, Sahvage felt as though a veil had fallen from his eyes, his sight now clear, though he had been unaware that it had been obstructed, the world around him no longer beset by fogged haze, though he had assumed all was as he believed it to be.
And what he saw revealed before him was terrifying.
“Who art thou?” he whispered again as he stared down at Rahvyn, his cousin, his charge, his only family.
Behind him, the headless bodies of the stand of guards jerked in their pools of blood as the last of their animation deferred unto death’s cold call of im-motion. And afore him, Rahvyn was unbowed, even in the face of the beating she had been given, of the violation that had occurred unto her virtue.
But she had good reason to fear nothing, did she not.
Lifting her arms, she looked at first one, and then the other, of the steel cuffs that had bitten into her fragile wrists. They dropped off as if commanded to do so, clanging to the stone floor.
“I am who I have e’er been,” she said in that voice of power. “Only unleashed, the now.”
Zxysis had somehow known of this power within her, Sahvage thought.
It was clear that the aristocrat had cobbled together the stories from the village and seen the trailheads for what they were. Meanwhile Sahvage, who had supposedly been the closest to the female, had missed the trajectory.
She needed not his protection.
She needed no one’s.
“We shall go our separate ways, Cousin.” Now her voice changed, returning closer to that which he had known. “You have discharged your service unto me, the vow unto my sire, your uncle, fully met. And as I know you shall not leave me, I shall leave you—”
“Rahvyn, where is Zxysis. What did you do to him?”
The smile that pulled at the corners of the female’s mouth terrified him. “What he did unto me. No more, no less. I repaid his attentions by getting inside of him.” Rahvyn limped over to where a black cloak had been thrown over one of the banquet seats. Pulling it around herself, she faced him. “You shall not find me. Do not even try.”
On a reflex, he protested. “My duty unto you is sacrosanct—”
“And I hereby release you of the burden.” Abruptly, her eyes softened. “Sahvage, you are free. Of it all. No more worries concerning me that distract you from your true calling. You shall be the most powerful fighter that e’er have served the Black Dagger Brotherhood. Glory shall be yours, for the race shall ne’er have seen such a protector as you.”
“No! My defense of you is more important than—”
“Not anymore.” She blinked away tears and lifted her chin. “Be well, Cousin. I have so much faith in your future. I urge you to join me in this optimism, even as I depart from your life. This era is over.”
“Rahvyn!” he yelled as he rushed forward.
But she dematerialized from the great hall, leaving naught except her scent . . . and the bloody carnage she had caused.
“No!” he yelled. Even as he knew not what he was denying.
Dragging his hands into his hair, he paced around. And around. And around in a tight circle. But naught changed. Not what his charge had done, not what he had seen with his own eyes. With a curse, he released the hold upon his head and went to stand over the dead. The tangle of bodies and unhanded weapons were layered in a mess, blood glistening on leather togs, on flesh, on stone . . . on bright steel scabbards and gunmetal-gray rifles.
“Rahvyn,” he whispered, “what else have you done?”
Except there was no Rahvyn anymore, was there.
As the realization struck, an urgency called unto him with the clarity of a brass bell, and he took care to arm himself with the weapons of the dead before he hastened down the broad thoroughfare that marked the way unto the drawbridge. As he jogged in silence and with speed, there was much to surmount. A field of debris marked the stone pavers: clothing fragments, foodstuffs in their nettings and pouches, pages from diaries and books littering the way unto the exit.
A flurry of people, fleet of foot and panicked of mind, had of recent rushed forth upon this very route, their objects of secondary import to their very lives.
What had scared them so? ’Twas a question he feared the answer to.
When the fortification’s grand entrance presented itself, Sahvage slowed.
Then he stopped.
The view through the vast opening provided a ready vista of the cleared field surrounding the castle. Trampled rivulets through the grasses illustrated the scatter of the inhabitants who had fled, and the drawbridge, which had remained lowered, was likewise covered with the same detritus trail.
“Whate’er did they know,” Sahvage whispered as he stepped through the great iron-and-steel gates. “Whate’er did they see whilst they abandoned this entirety.”
Drop. Drop . . . drop.
At the soft sound, Sahvage glanced down beside the fall of his robing. There, on the old, worn surface of the drawbridge’s wood, a puddle glistened in the moonlight.
Red. Brilliant red.
Sahvage turned and looked up—“Dearest Virgin Scribe.”
Up above the grand and formal entry, speared upon the iron stanchion that carried the silks of seat’s the bloodline, was . . .
Zxysis the Elder.
And it went without any question that he was deceased.
As if the impaling wasnae a clue.
Verily, his skin had been stripped from his bones and muscles: Everything that had once bound his corporeal form was gone, his intestines drooling out of his pelvis, organs seeping free from under his rib cage. His face had been preserved, however. Those features that defined his identity within the glymera and this household and village had been left untouched, his expression one of utter horror, his lips stretched wide over his bared teeth, his blind eyes staring in terror out over his landed estate.
“Rahvyn—”
A brilliant light exploded into the sky, so bright that it readily outshone the moon, so painful that he groaned and lifted his arms to shield his eyes. Stumbling back, Sahvage sought the protection of the stone walls of the castle, and when he was under their cover, he attempted to sight what he could withstand of the celestial being.
Whate’er it was traveled across the velvet heavens, eclipsing the twinkle of the stars, seeming to suck up all illumination from overhead. And as it reached the horizon to the north, there was another brief intensification—and then it burned out to nothing.
In its departure, all was as it had been before.
Except no, that was not true upon the earth. None of what was around him was as it should be.
And Rahvyn was wrong.
She had not freed him with her departure. She had framed him for the killings she had wrought against her abductors.
None would believe that he had not dispatched Zxysis and his guards as they had been: His reputation within the Brotherhood not only justified the nomenclature he had been given upon his birth; it preceded him where’er he went.
The bodies in the great hall. Zxysis’s o’erhead, skinned as an animal, pierced as a carcass. And whate’er else had been done to whome’er else had hurt Rahvyn. All would be accorded unto Sahvage, and thus the glymera would come looking for him, demanding explanations he would not be able to provide. And the Brotherhood would be put in an untenable situation, for they knew what he was like in the field—and they knew what his charge had meant to him.
They would also know the whispers of the village around the castle, the old females and young who spoke of magic in the forests and inexplicable happenings in the town.
To protect his charge, Sahvage had been content to accept the curse of being called warlock when he was as far from being one as any mortal. And besides, Rahvyn’s magic had been harmless . . . or at any rate, naught to be afraid of.
He closed his eyes and pictured Zxysis.
No more for the harmlessness.
Thus, nay, Sahvage was not free, no matter what his cousin maintained. Her actions had condemned him to death—
With an abrupt pivot, he turned to the way he had come.
And then he set off at a run.
As he came up to decapitated guards, he leapt over the bodies and the blood. Onward, still, he went, unto the steps he had at first ascended . . . and past them farther into the castle’s lower levels.
When he came upon the storage room he had awoken in, he took a torch inside and placed it in a mount just within the door. Going over to his coffin, he put his weapons down and replaced the lid as it had been—and it was then, courtesy of the torch’s frothing light, that he noted the warnings that had been carved into the wood. A cursed dead was herein, the symbols announcing it on all sides.
Sahvage looked around. Then promptly removed the lid once more—and picked up bags of flour that were close by, three of them, four of them, more of them still, laying their weight where his body should have been. Finally, he lowered the lid and used the stone from a grinder, wrapped in a sack, to hammer home that which he had disrupted. Finally, he retrieved the scabbard he had purloined. Utilizing its stout point, he carved his name in the lid and on the vertical panels, for that had not been among what had been inscribed.
Reshouldering the rifle, he took the torch and returned unto the corridor. Checking both ways, he confirmed that the resonant quiet persisted—although that would not last. Superstition would keep vampires away, and humans likewise, but only for a time. The greed of thieves would soon enough overwhelm their senses of self-protection, and there was much to be pilfered from within. And this would serve his purposes. In the course of such trespassing, his coffin would be found, and of all the things within the castle walls, it was the one that would not be touched. No soul would want to assume dominion over such an artifact. Yet word would get out.
Eventually, the Brotherhood would find his final resting place, but whether they accepted the remains—or whether they would discover his duplicity? Who could say.
Sahvage, however, would not be around to ascertain the outcome of his purported dead body. Instead, he was going to search for his cousin until he found her, and then, when she was thinking with proper logic, he would ensure that the pair of them stayed hidden. And his supposed death would ensure that was possible—
Tap.
Just as he was about to run off, Sahvage turned to the sound.
Tap. Tap.
In the unnatural quiet of the castle, the soft noise stood out far more than its soft volume would have permitted under any other circumstances.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap—
Leave it be, he told himself. His mandate with regard to a prompt exodus was clear—
Taptaptaptaptap—
As a cold premonition brushed the back of his neck, his will directed him unto the exit. His body, however, proceeded in another direction.
Such that he followed that strange, soft sound.
As Sahvage went silent and seemed to retreat into his own mind, Mae put her hand on the edge of the tub.
“I can’t let you go,” she whispered to Rhoger. “And I promise I won’t. I know how to fix this.”
She meant the words, especially the last ones, but the refrain was weak, as if she had used the syllables too often and was wearing out their strength. Or maybe they had never had any power to begin with, just the panic-fuel of her desperation—and how far did that ever take anybody in real life?
“No changing your mind,” Sahvage murmured.
She looked back at him. “Never.”
The word had more vigor than she did. But it was like if she stood up to him, she was standing up to Fate, and that had to be her mindset . . . in spite of the fact that she didn’t have the Book yet. And she was taking what Tallah had told her on faith.
“All right,” he said finally.
“Are you leaving?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Mae closed her eyes and sagged with relief. “I promise, it’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be fine. We’re going to be fine.”
Yes, and then what, she wondered. Even though she knew the answer to that when it came to the two of them.
Sahvage would go on about his life. She would go on about hers. And it was in the nature of nothing-in-common that the pair of them would diverge. As they had no intersections to begin with, nothing was going to keep them together.
Getting to her feet, she gathered up the ice bags. “Let’s go back to the cottage.”
Funny how normal it felt to say that. Then again, a person could get used to anything—and unused to it, too.
As she stepped out of the bathroom, he moved his legs to the side and then stood up, too. And when she shut the door, it was firmly—except did that change anything? Like she could lock out the awkwardness? The lie of hers?
Nope.
“I’m going back to my place,” he said.
“Okay, you don’t have to stay. I mean, at the cottage, or with—”
“Yeah, I do. Now more than ever. But I need clothes.”
He didn’t look at her as he walked out toward the garage, and she rushed after him, grabbing her purse and her keys from the washer. As she locked the house up, he nodded at her and dematerialized through the gap in the shutter. Left alone, she glanced at the trash that had still not been taken out—and remembered the reason why.
On impulse, she got in her car and started the engine. Maybe they’d need a vehicle. Or maybe she just needed to drive around.
As she was backing out—because she’d been so distracted coming back from the Shell station that she’d broken her father’s parking rule again—she thought about how the Book was taking its own damn time . . . and tried not to see the lag for what it was:
A sign this was all a big folly. And she was a desperate fool.
K-turning in the street, she thought of Tallah, home alone at the cottage. With a curse, Mae hit the gas and headed out of her neighborhood, consumed by obsessions about shadows and brunettes and huge males naked in bathrooms—
Unable to stand the chaos in her head, she turned on the radio. She’d left the station on NPR, and some dulcet-voiced woman was droning on about public funding for libraries, so she switched to FM.
“—serial killer here in Caldwell. The CPD reported that another man and woman were found dead last night. The bodies were discovered at club Eight-Seven-Five, and both of their hearts had been removed—”
Mae’s eyes went to the radio, and she cranked up the volume.
“—just as the others’ had been. The identities of the newest victims are being withheld at this time, pending the notification of families. The count is now up to five couples, including the most recently identified pair, Ralph DeMellio and Michelle Caspari. Allegedly, DeMellio was involved in an underground fighting ring, and authorities believe that he was killed shortly after one such fight. Footage found on Instagram suggests he had faced an opponent with a distinctive tattoo covering his chest—”
Mae’s left foot stomped on the brake—
The blare of a horn behind her drowned out the rest of the report—and then the world exploded, the strike of the rear-end collision blowing Mae’s head against the rest as the airbag broke out from the steering wheel and her car careened off her lane with a scream of locked tires.
All momentum stopped with a furious impact, the Civic’s front grille striking something that had no give in it.
As the airbag deflated with a hiss, Mae drooped forward, her consciousness fuzzing out . . . and then returning in a fog. In her car’s headlights, through some kind of steam rising out of the busted hood, she read a sign mounted on a brick wall: Poplar Woods.
She’d run into the marker for the development next to her own.
Fumbling with her seat belt, she released the latch on her door and popped things open. On a loose list to the side, her body fell out, her arms and legs not listening to the commands she gave them, and with all the grace of dead weight, she spilled onto the ground, dirt going into her mouth, her nose. She flopped onto her back and took some deep breaths.
A frantic face entered her field of vision. It was a human man with rimless glasses, a receding hairline, and a cell phone up to his ear.
“I couldn’t stop in time!” he said. “You threw your brakes on so quick—I’m calling nine-one-one—”
“No, no—don’t call—” Mae put her hand up, like she could somehow take that phone from him. “No, no—”
“Hi? Yes, my name is Richard Karouk. I need to report a—”
With an abrupt gasp, Richard Karouk stopped talking, his eyes flaring wider behind those glasses. Then there was a clicking sound, and his mouth dropped open.
Blood flooded out onto his business shirt and his nice jacket, a bright red flush.
As he slumped to the ground in a heap, a figure in a bustier and a set of skintight black leather pants was revealed. The brunette.
And she had a long steel knife in her hand that was stained red . . . red as her lips, her nails.
“Hi, honey.” She smiled. “Looks like you hit your noggin and totaled your car. Thank God I’m here when you need a friend.”
• • •
Sahvage did not go back to the shitty place he was crashing at. Instead he re-formed on the top of a rise in a public park, and as he stared across at a wide, sluggish river, he decided the lights of the houses at the opposite shore were like a galaxy fallen to ground. Twinkling, distant . . . untouchable.
Is there anything I can say to make you change your mind?
No.
That exchange with Mae replayed in his head a couple of hundred times, and of course, the repeat thing did not change her reply—even though he had some delusion that maybe the discourse would improve over time, the needle in the proverbial LP record finding a different groove, a better one.
With a curse, he took out his phone. And as he made a call, he knew that he was setting himself to as immutable a course as Mae was on. Then again, her intentions drove his. And it was what it was.
After a terse conversation, he ended the connection and put his phone away.
In the great hall of Zxysis the Elder’s castle, Sahvage felt as though a veil had fallen from his eyes, his sight now clear, though he had been unaware that it had been obstructed, the world around him no longer beset by fogged haze, though he had assumed all was as he believed it to be.
And what he saw revealed before him was terrifying.
“Who art thou?” he whispered again as he stared down at Rahvyn, his cousin, his charge, his only family.
Behind him, the headless bodies of the stand of guards jerked in their pools of blood as the last of their animation deferred unto death’s cold call of im-motion. And afore him, Rahvyn was unbowed, even in the face of the beating she had been given, of the violation that had occurred unto her virtue.
But she had good reason to fear nothing, did she not.
Lifting her arms, she looked at first one, and then the other, of the steel cuffs that had bitten into her fragile wrists. They dropped off as if commanded to do so, clanging to the stone floor.
“I am who I have e’er been,” she said in that voice of power. “Only unleashed, the now.”
Zxysis had somehow known of this power within her, Sahvage thought.
It was clear that the aristocrat had cobbled together the stories from the village and seen the trailheads for what they were. Meanwhile Sahvage, who had supposedly been the closest to the female, had missed the trajectory.
She needed not his protection.
She needed no one’s.
“We shall go our separate ways, Cousin.” Now her voice changed, returning closer to that which he had known. “You have discharged your service unto me, the vow unto my sire, your uncle, fully met. And as I know you shall not leave me, I shall leave you—”
“Rahvyn, where is Zxysis. What did you do to him?”
The smile that pulled at the corners of the female’s mouth terrified him. “What he did unto me. No more, no less. I repaid his attentions by getting inside of him.” Rahvyn limped over to where a black cloak had been thrown over one of the banquet seats. Pulling it around herself, she faced him. “You shall not find me. Do not even try.”
On a reflex, he protested. “My duty unto you is sacrosanct—”
“And I hereby release you of the burden.” Abruptly, her eyes softened. “Sahvage, you are free. Of it all. No more worries concerning me that distract you from your true calling. You shall be the most powerful fighter that e’er have served the Black Dagger Brotherhood. Glory shall be yours, for the race shall ne’er have seen such a protector as you.”
“No! My defense of you is more important than—”
“Not anymore.” She blinked away tears and lifted her chin. “Be well, Cousin. I have so much faith in your future. I urge you to join me in this optimism, even as I depart from your life. This era is over.”
“Rahvyn!” he yelled as he rushed forward.
But she dematerialized from the great hall, leaving naught except her scent . . . and the bloody carnage she had caused.
“No!” he yelled. Even as he knew not what he was denying.
Dragging his hands into his hair, he paced around. And around. And around in a tight circle. But naught changed. Not what his charge had done, not what he had seen with his own eyes. With a curse, he released the hold upon his head and went to stand over the dead. The tangle of bodies and unhanded weapons were layered in a mess, blood glistening on leather togs, on flesh, on stone . . . on bright steel scabbards and gunmetal-gray rifles.
“Rahvyn,” he whispered, “what else have you done?”
Except there was no Rahvyn anymore, was there.
As the realization struck, an urgency called unto him with the clarity of a brass bell, and he took care to arm himself with the weapons of the dead before he hastened down the broad thoroughfare that marked the way unto the drawbridge. As he jogged in silence and with speed, there was much to surmount. A field of debris marked the stone pavers: clothing fragments, foodstuffs in their nettings and pouches, pages from diaries and books littering the way unto the exit.
A flurry of people, fleet of foot and panicked of mind, had of recent rushed forth upon this very route, their objects of secondary import to their very lives.
What had scared them so? ’Twas a question he feared the answer to.
When the fortification’s grand entrance presented itself, Sahvage slowed.
Then he stopped.
The view through the vast opening provided a ready vista of the cleared field surrounding the castle. Trampled rivulets through the grasses illustrated the scatter of the inhabitants who had fled, and the drawbridge, which had remained lowered, was likewise covered with the same detritus trail.
“Whate’er did they know,” Sahvage whispered as he stepped through the great iron-and-steel gates. “Whate’er did they see whilst they abandoned this entirety.”
Drop. Drop . . . drop.
At the soft sound, Sahvage glanced down beside the fall of his robing. There, on the old, worn surface of the drawbridge’s wood, a puddle glistened in the moonlight.
Red. Brilliant red.
Sahvage turned and looked up—“Dearest Virgin Scribe.”
Up above the grand and formal entry, speared upon the iron stanchion that carried the silks of seat’s the bloodline, was . . .
Zxysis the Elder.
And it went without any question that he was deceased.
As if the impaling wasnae a clue.
Verily, his skin had been stripped from his bones and muscles: Everything that had once bound his corporeal form was gone, his intestines drooling out of his pelvis, organs seeping free from under his rib cage. His face had been preserved, however. Those features that defined his identity within the glymera and this household and village had been left untouched, his expression one of utter horror, his lips stretched wide over his bared teeth, his blind eyes staring in terror out over his landed estate.
“Rahvyn—”
A brilliant light exploded into the sky, so bright that it readily outshone the moon, so painful that he groaned and lifted his arms to shield his eyes. Stumbling back, Sahvage sought the protection of the stone walls of the castle, and when he was under their cover, he attempted to sight what he could withstand of the celestial being.
Whate’er it was traveled across the velvet heavens, eclipsing the twinkle of the stars, seeming to suck up all illumination from overhead. And as it reached the horizon to the north, there was another brief intensification—and then it burned out to nothing.
In its departure, all was as it had been before.
Except no, that was not true upon the earth. None of what was around him was as it should be.
And Rahvyn was wrong.
She had not freed him with her departure. She had framed him for the killings she had wrought against her abductors.
None would believe that he had not dispatched Zxysis and his guards as they had been: His reputation within the Brotherhood not only justified the nomenclature he had been given upon his birth; it preceded him where’er he went.
The bodies in the great hall. Zxysis’s o’erhead, skinned as an animal, pierced as a carcass. And whate’er else had been done to whome’er else had hurt Rahvyn. All would be accorded unto Sahvage, and thus the glymera would come looking for him, demanding explanations he would not be able to provide. And the Brotherhood would be put in an untenable situation, for they knew what he was like in the field—and they knew what his charge had meant to him.
They would also know the whispers of the village around the castle, the old females and young who spoke of magic in the forests and inexplicable happenings in the town.
To protect his charge, Sahvage had been content to accept the curse of being called warlock when he was as far from being one as any mortal. And besides, Rahvyn’s magic had been harmless . . . or at any rate, naught to be afraid of.
He closed his eyes and pictured Zxysis.
No more for the harmlessness.
Thus, nay, Sahvage was not free, no matter what his cousin maintained. Her actions had condemned him to death—
With an abrupt pivot, he turned to the way he had come.
And then he set off at a run.
As he came up to decapitated guards, he leapt over the bodies and the blood. Onward, still, he went, unto the steps he had at first ascended . . . and past them farther into the castle’s lower levels.
When he came upon the storage room he had awoken in, he took a torch inside and placed it in a mount just within the door. Going over to his coffin, he put his weapons down and replaced the lid as it had been—and it was then, courtesy of the torch’s frothing light, that he noted the warnings that had been carved into the wood. A cursed dead was herein, the symbols announcing it on all sides.
Sahvage looked around. Then promptly removed the lid once more—and picked up bags of flour that were close by, three of them, four of them, more of them still, laying their weight where his body should have been. Finally, he lowered the lid and used the stone from a grinder, wrapped in a sack, to hammer home that which he had disrupted. Finally, he retrieved the scabbard he had purloined. Utilizing its stout point, he carved his name in the lid and on the vertical panels, for that had not been among what had been inscribed.
Reshouldering the rifle, he took the torch and returned unto the corridor. Checking both ways, he confirmed that the resonant quiet persisted—although that would not last. Superstition would keep vampires away, and humans likewise, but only for a time. The greed of thieves would soon enough overwhelm their senses of self-protection, and there was much to be pilfered from within. And this would serve his purposes. In the course of such trespassing, his coffin would be found, and of all the things within the castle walls, it was the one that would not be touched. No soul would want to assume dominion over such an artifact. Yet word would get out.
Eventually, the Brotherhood would find his final resting place, but whether they accepted the remains—or whether they would discover his duplicity? Who could say.
Sahvage, however, would not be around to ascertain the outcome of his purported dead body. Instead, he was going to search for his cousin until he found her, and then, when she was thinking with proper logic, he would ensure that the pair of them stayed hidden. And his supposed death would ensure that was possible—
Tap.
Just as he was about to run off, Sahvage turned to the sound.
Tap. Tap.
In the unnatural quiet of the castle, the soft noise stood out far more than its soft volume would have permitted under any other circumstances.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap—
Leave it be, he told himself. His mandate with regard to a prompt exodus was clear—
Taptaptaptaptap—
As a cold premonition brushed the back of his neck, his will directed him unto the exit. His body, however, proceeded in another direction.
Such that he followed that strange, soft sound.
As Sahvage went silent and seemed to retreat into his own mind, Mae put her hand on the edge of the tub.
“I can’t let you go,” she whispered to Rhoger. “And I promise I won’t. I know how to fix this.”
She meant the words, especially the last ones, but the refrain was weak, as if she had used the syllables too often and was wearing out their strength. Or maybe they had never had any power to begin with, just the panic-fuel of her desperation—and how far did that ever take anybody in real life?
“No changing your mind,” Sahvage murmured.
She looked back at him. “Never.”
The word had more vigor than she did. But it was like if she stood up to him, she was standing up to Fate, and that had to be her mindset . . . in spite of the fact that she didn’t have the Book yet. And she was taking what Tallah had told her on faith.
“All right,” he said finally.
“Are you leaving?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Mae closed her eyes and sagged with relief. “I promise, it’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be fine. We’re going to be fine.”
Yes, and then what, she wondered. Even though she knew the answer to that when it came to the two of them.
Sahvage would go on about his life. She would go on about hers. And it was in the nature of nothing-in-common that the pair of them would diverge. As they had no intersections to begin with, nothing was going to keep them together.
Getting to her feet, she gathered up the ice bags. “Let’s go back to the cottage.”
Funny how normal it felt to say that. Then again, a person could get used to anything—and unused to it, too.
As she stepped out of the bathroom, he moved his legs to the side and then stood up, too. And when she shut the door, it was firmly—except did that change anything? Like she could lock out the awkwardness? The lie of hers?
Nope.
“I’m going back to my place,” he said.
“Okay, you don’t have to stay. I mean, at the cottage, or with—”
“Yeah, I do. Now more than ever. But I need clothes.”
He didn’t look at her as he walked out toward the garage, and she rushed after him, grabbing her purse and her keys from the washer. As she locked the house up, he nodded at her and dematerialized through the gap in the shutter. Left alone, she glanced at the trash that had still not been taken out—and remembered the reason why.
On impulse, she got in her car and started the engine. Maybe they’d need a vehicle. Or maybe she just needed to drive around.
As she was backing out—because she’d been so distracted coming back from the Shell station that she’d broken her father’s parking rule again—she thought about how the Book was taking its own damn time . . . and tried not to see the lag for what it was:
A sign this was all a big folly. And she was a desperate fool.
K-turning in the street, she thought of Tallah, home alone at the cottage. With a curse, Mae hit the gas and headed out of her neighborhood, consumed by obsessions about shadows and brunettes and huge males naked in bathrooms—
Unable to stand the chaos in her head, she turned on the radio. She’d left the station on NPR, and some dulcet-voiced woman was droning on about public funding for libraries, so she switched to FM.
“—serial killer here in Caldwell. The CPD reported that another man and woman were found dead last night. The bodies were discovered at club Eight-Seven-Five, and both of their hearts had been removed—”
Mae’s eyes went to the radio, and she cranked up the volume.
“—just as the others’ had been. The identities of the newest victims are being withheld at this time, pending the notification of families. The count is now up to five couples, including the most recently identified pair, Ralph DeMellio and Michelle Caspari. Allegedly, DeMellio was involved in an underground fighting ring, and authorities believe that he was killed shortly after one such fight. Footage found on Instagram suggests he had faced an opponent with a distinctive tattoo covering his chest—”
Mae’s left foot stomped on the brake—
The blare of a horn behind her drowned out the rest of the report—and then the world exploded, the strike of the rear-end collision blowing Mae’s head against the rest as the airbag broke out from the steering wheel and her car careened off her lane with a scream of locked tires.
All momentum stopped with a furious impact, the Civic’s front grille striking something that had no give in it.
As the airbag deflated with a hiss, Mae drooped forward, her consciousness fuzzing out . . . and then returning in a fog. In her car’s headlights, through some kind of steam rising out of the busted hood, she read a sign mounted on a brick wall: Poplar Woods.
She’d run into the marker for the development next to her own.
Fumbling with her seat belt, she released the latch on her door and popped things open. On a loose list to the side, her body fell out, her arms and legs not listening to the commands she gave them, and with all the grace of dead weight, she spilled onto the ground, dirt going into her mouth, her nose. She flopped onto her back and took some deep breaths.
A frantic face entered her field of vision. It was a human man with rimless glasses, a receding hairline, and a cell phone up to his ear.
“I couldn’t stop in time!” he said. “You threw your brakes on so quick—I’m calling nine-one-one—”
“No, no—don’t call—” Mae put her hand up, like she could somehow take that phone from him. “No, no—”
“Hi? Yes, my name is Richard Karouk. I need to report a—”
With an abrupt gasp, Richard Karouk stopped talking, his eyes flaring wider behind those glasses. Then there was a clicking sound, and his mouth dropped open.
Blood flooded out onto his business shirt and his nice jacket, a bright red flush.
As he slumped to the ground in a heap, a figure in a bustier and a set of skintight black leather pants was revealed. The brunette.
And she had a long steel knife in her hand that was stained red . . . red as her lips, her nails.
“Hi, honey.” She smiled. “Looks like you hit your noggin and totaled your car. Thank God I’m here when you need a friend.”
• • •
Sahvage did not go back to the shitty place he was crashing at. Instead he re-formed on the top of a rise in a public park, and as he stared across at a wide, sluggish river, he decided the lights of the houses at the opposite shore were like a galaxy fallen to ground. Twinkling, distant . . . untouchable.
Is there anything I can say to make you change your mind?
No.
That exchange with Mae replayed in his head a couple of hundred times, and of course, the repeat thing did not change her reply—even though he had some delusion that maybe the discourse would improve over time, the needle in the proverbial LP record finding a different groove, a better one.
With a curse, he took out his phone. And as he made a call, he knew that he was setting himself to as immutable a course as Mae was on. Then again, her intentions drove his. And it was what it was.
After a terse conversation, he ended the connection and put his phone away.
