“You don't have to go,” she suggested. “You could come with me.”
“Come with you? I do not understand.”
Wendy shrugged, a gesture intended to be careless, but the edges of her lips were white and her eyes were watchful. “It's not like anyone can see you; you could come right in the front door like you used to. We could…hang out more. In my room.”
“Hang out.” The emphasis she put on the words clearly left little to Piotr's imagination.
She leaned forward and pressed a soft, chaste kiss to his lower lip, drawing back the moment the electricity began to zing between them. “In my room.”
“Are you sure that's a good idea?” he whispered. He still looked hesitant, like he wanted to step away, but Wendy burned brilliantly under his palms, carefree and intent on dragging him home.
“Rule number one,” she reminded him, and the dangerous twinkle was back. “Call it research.”
Groaning, Piotr took her by the shoulders and hugged her tightly. Her pulse rippled through him, catching and hooking into his very core. “If I weren't already dead, milaya moya,” he sighed, tilting her head up and slowly sliding into another kiss, “you'd be the death of me.”
Guilt warred with worry as Piotr and Wendy approached the bookstore the next morning. The sun was rather high in the sky and Piotr was concerned that he may have already missed the other Riders. He'd wanted to leave earlier but Wendy, waking early, was gone before sunrise. She'd spent the morning at the diner with Eddie and had come back both sulky and bemused. They had, she declared, made up, though for how long still remained to be seen.
After the previous night he'd decided to give Eddie a chance. Once upon a time, he reasoned, Wendy might have had a thing for this Eddie, but that time must be long gone. And there were more important things to stress about than the people his living girlfriend—his girlfriend!—surrounded herself with.
“Wait here,” Piotr told Wendy, sitting her on a bench across the street from the bookstore. “I'll go in and explain.”
“Good idea,” she whispered, trying to appear inconspicuous. The streets, even this one, were thronged with milling tourists enjoying the holiday and doing last-minute shopping in San Francisco. Wendy, who'd brought a backpack along, settled herself on the bench and drew out a thick novel, The Stand. Glad that she wasn't clinging, Piotr dodged through the crowd toward the shop, wishing that he'd thought to bring her here before now. Elle was going to have a fit.
He was right.
To be fair, the remaining Riders heard him through to the end before Elle lost it. Thankfully, his reflexes were as quick as hers, and Piotr was able to duck and dodge out of the way as Elle began chucking books, bags, and whatever other refuse she could get her hands on directly at his head. She pegged him a few good times before Lily intervened, stepping between Elle and Piotr and holding up her hands to catch the missiles.
James, who'd always kept Piotr at a distance, did nothing to help the situation; he merely lounged on the stairs to the second floor and smirked as Elle ranted and raved. Piotr caught his eye once or twice with a wordless plea to step in, but James was having too much fun to intervene. When Lily interceded the smile dropped off his face and he sulked, disappointed that Piotr hadn't been injured in the barrage.
When she'd calmed enough to do more than throw things and scream, Elle (hands on hips) demanded, “What kind of balled up BS is all this? You get goofy over some hotsy-totsy jane and you expect us to just be jake with it?”
At first Piotr wasn't entirely sure he'd understood her—when Elle really got going her flapper patois took hold and often even Dora had trouble untangling the verbal knots of her speech—but Elle's furious expression and pointed sneer spoke volumes. “I expected you to be my friends,” Piotr replied coolly, crossing his arms across his chest and resting against the counter. “The kind that support one another.”
“We are your friends,” Lily began, “and we always will be, but—”
“But? What but?!” Elle picked up one of Dora's abandoned sketchpads and waved it in the air, shaking it nearly under Piotr's nose. “I got a beef with ol' Pete here and I aim to have my say. This palooka's got some nerve if he thinks he can just waltz on in here and think we're gonna goosestep in time to his little suicide parade.”
“Suicide? I'm already dead!”
James shook his head. “Man, there are worse things than being dead. You know that. And if this girl Wendy is the Lightbringer like you say she is, then you're not just playing with fire, you're downright taunting it.”
“Wendy would never hurt me.”
Infuriated, Elle threw down the pad and began poking Piotr hard in the chest. “Listen to you! ‘Wendy would never hurt me,’” she mimicked in a high nasal falsetto, tucking her tongue between her teeth on each vowel so she lisped. “Maybe not you, but what about the rest of us? What about the Lost? That girl's job is to exterminate our kind!”
“She's setting us free—”
Elle snorted and poked him again. “Free! Listen to yourself, Pete! Did what happen to those Walkers look like ‘free’ to you? They were burned up from the inside. That's sick. That's just wrong. And you kissed it.”
“This I will not discuss with you,” Piotr snapped. “It is none of your business, Elle.”
“Fine, neckin' with the freakshow aside, what about the Lost, huh? You said she and the Lost have some sort of wacko connection, right? Well, you ever think that maybe your gal Friday out there was the one who took ‘em? Maybe she's not killing off the Walkers, maybe she's just in league with them, had them come on down here and scoop the Lost up for her. You yourself said you told her where we all were before you knew she was the Lightbringer.”
“Your point being?”
“My point being that I think it's awful convenient, her just happening to hang ‘round the park when you got yourself ambushed over Specs.”
“It is nothing like that,” Piotr protested. “She could have come and reaped all of us anytime she wanted, but she did not! She's not that sort of person.”
“Sure she ain't, Pete. Sure. The glowing tentacle monster that eats our kind up like we were penny candy ain't like that. I guess that means you, Mr. Petey Optimistic, ain't stuck on her at all!”
“Do not call her that,” Piotr snarled. “Wendy has a duty—”
“A duty! Hah!” Elle threw up her hands and laughed long and hard, but there was no mirth in the sound, only shrill, venomous sarcasm. “The monster's got a duty. She's all about doin' the right thing, making sure everything in the Never's copasetic, right? Sure she does! She understands all about duty, I bet. That's why she kept you, Piotr, not just any ol' Rider but the big cheese who started the Riders, away from us when we needed you most. That's why you, Mr. Hi-You're-Dead-Here's-How-The-Afterlife-Works himself, was off neckin' with a monster when you should have been here running a shift!”
“Ny ti i svoloch',” Piotr said flatly, slapping her poking hand away. “Insane, Elle. I have no clue what you're talking about.”
“Course you don't,” she spat. “Ol’ Petey never has a goddamn clue ‘bout nothin' these days, monsters and Riders included.”
Piotr stuffed his hands in his pockets, weary now of the shouting and yelling but at a loss for how to stop it. “Elle, you're not being fair.”
“I'm not bein' fair? I'm not? Fine. Fine, Petey, I'll be fair to you. I'll be fair because I'm sick of it. I'm sick of protecting you, of playin' along. You wanna drop us for some livin' dame? Fine! Then I'm gonna lay a little truth on you before you walk out that door and go back to your precious Lightbringer. I'm gonna talk and you're gonna sit here and listen! That fair enough for you?” Piotr, frustrated, turned his face away.
Elle twisted until she could look at James, still lounging on the stairs, elbows resting on knees and avidly following the debate. “Jaime-boy, tell the truth. Have I or have I not known this piker for years? Ain't we had a caper or two?”
“Long as you've been dead,” James
replied in his slow and thoughtful way, lifting one tightly braided dreadlock and examining the end. “Long as I've been dead too.”
“Ha-ha,” Piotr grumbled, “this is not the time. This trick I've heard before.”
“So Pete, you've known me goin' on a century,” Elle continued, ignoring Piotr's protests. “And James for almost two. If I remember right, you found me in a speakeasy and Jaime-boy hauling cotton south of the Mason-Dixon line.”
Terror gripped him, set his stomach boiling with acid and anger. This joke had gone on long enough! “Elle,” Piotr whispered through lips pressed tightly together, edges bled white from the pressure, “stop. This is enough.”
She was on a roll and couldn't hear him, or simply chose not to. “Whether you remember it or not, you've traveled some, Pete, and you took us along for the ride. Hell, you and Lily've been dead together longer than most of the Walkers ‘round this town've been walking. Ain't that right, Lily?”
The insistence Elle sank into each word chilled Piotr to the bone. Lily wasn't denying the wild claims and Piotr knew that James, infuriating as he was, had never been much of a liar. But what Elle was claiming was sheer, unadulterated insanity, and impossible to boot. Piotr couldn't remember his own death—few ghosts could—but surely he'd remember having died more than two centuries before. Wouldn't he?
“Net,” Piotr murmured louder, shaking his head. “I don't believe you.”
“She's telling the truth,” James said. “You're older than Moses, Peter. You're older than anyone any ghost I know's ever met. You're damn near ancient.”
“Believe me or not, Petey-boy, I think I'm tired of givin' two tin shits about it,” Elle sneered, thrusting her fists on her hips and wagging her head from side to side for emphasis. “Worrying about you all the time just ain't cuttin' it for me anymore. I'm just pointin' out that you ain't exactly playin' with a full deck lately, and unless you've been lyin' this whole time then you never remember us, Pete. You never do.”
“A couple decades pass and it is like meeting a new you,” Lily agreed, voice pitched low and quiet, but calm and firm. She looked apologetically at Piotr, spread her hands wide, and dropped them to her sides. “Your accent and some Russian phrases remain, but the rest, your memories and recollections…they are new like snow, like the clear mountain stream. When I first met you, you were like the great and wise Yanauluha; you guided me in my struggles and taught me much of the ways of the Never. You were serious then, but kind, and knew how to calm the troubled waters of my mind. But years passed and with them passed the man I'd known. Who you are now is not who you were then. You are not a bad man now, but different.”
Piotr groaned, rested his fingers at his temples, and massaged, hoping to drive away the tension headache that was building there. “You sound like you miss this ‘old me’ a lot.”
Lily did not reply, but her cheeks grew dark.
“Great,” Piotr muttered. “Fabulous, what a great bunch of friends you all are.”
Roughly, Elle coughed, then bent over. Piotr was startled to realize that Elle, strong and nettlesome Elle, was crying. Her hands opened and closed convulsively, her shoulders shook. Lily moved as if to comfort her and was waved away.
“All that time,” Elle croaked, furiously swiping the tears off her cheeks, “all that time we've spent with you, fretting over you, looking out for you and yours, all that time not knowing if or when you were going to start sliding into being someone else, and now you've thrown us over. And for what? Because you're stuck on some dizzy sheba who don't even have the decency to be dead? One you can apparently touch but, you know, just not for that long?” She sneered and spat on the floor, mere centimeters from Piotr's shoe. “Well ain't you the biggest sap I've ever seen.”
“You've got a right to be upset,” Piotr began tensely, forcibly keeping himself from wrapping his arms around Elle and simply hugging her. Elle rarely cried and he hadn't meant to hurt her feelings; Piotr felt lower than low for doing so. “Before the kids were taken I hadn't been around, pulling my shifts as I ought to have, you've got a point there. You and I…I wasn't happy hanging around. I felt I was an imposition.”
“So you dumped the kids?” James asked derisively.
“Net,” Piotr retorted, annoyed and wishing James would quit needling him. “I assumed that with all those Riders staying here I could be away more often, but I know now that no matter how uncomfortable being here made me, I could have helped. I should have helped.”
“Damn right, you should've,” James grumbled, lapsing into a sharp and pointed silence.
“Pros'tite, I'm sorry for that,” Piotr continued, ignoring James. “I truly am. But the rest of it…this Yannihula—”
“Yanauluha,” Lily corrected. “The first shaman.”
“Yannihula, Yanauluha, it doesn't matter! This talk like I've been some other person, it is insane, Elle. Nothing but crazy, creepy talk. Why do you keep going on like I've been around forever? I didn't start the Riders; I haven't been dead that long!”
For a brief moment Piotr hesitated—no matter how impossible it seemed, there was a chance, slim as it was, that they weren't teasing him but in fact were telling the truth—but, try as he might, Piotr couldn't bring himself to believe it. This was his afterlife, right? Piotr was certain, he could feel it in his very bones, that if what they'd been saying was true, if he truly had been forgetting things and slowly shifting personalities over centuries of existence, that somewhere deep inside he would have sensed such dichotomy before now. He would have!
Which meant that they were ganging up on him for some crazy reason; getting together to make Piotr feel bad for not being around when the Lost were taken, and for meeting with Wendy behind their backs. This was simple, petty revenge and nothing more, and he was ashamed of them and for them that they would stoop to such lows. Lily especially. Such meanness was normally beneath her.
So long as he'd begun, he might as well finish the fight and say goodbye to these petty people who were supposed to be his friends. Piotr straightened and firmly said, “I'm worried about you, Elle. About all of you.”
“He is worried about me,” Elle sighed, and then laughed. “Petey the boy wonder here is worried ‘bout little ol’ Belladona Tinker. Well, ain't that the cat's meow, folks?”
“I am,” Piotr said. “I'm disappointed. This joke has gone on long enough.”
She nodded, the picture of thoughtfulness. “I have one thing to say about that.”
Straightening to her full height, Elle slapped him.
“You worry about me and I'll worry about everything else,” she snarled. “Maybe, just maybe, if you'd been really worried before, maybe you would've been here when we needed you. Isn't it funny, Pete, how the one time you run off for more than a few days they just magically appear and take us out? Like they knew one of our best fighters was gone!”
“Yeah,” James chimed in.
“Or,” Elle said, gaining steam, “maybe if you hadn't had your head down in your pants and your hands down hers, Specs and Dora would be a little more here and a little less gone!”
Flabbergasted, Piotr could only open and close his mouth, jaw gaping like a fish. His hand drifted to his cheek, examined the heat there, the sting and momentary swelling where her palm had cracked against his cheekbone. Then Piotr grew angry.
“Ej! Smotret' nyzhno! Listen to me, you—you arrogant bigmouth,” he growled, hands clenching into fists. “Wendy isn't like that. She's great! She's fantastic! And unlike some of the people I know, she likes me for who I actually am, not who I'm apparently supposed to be. Or was. Or whatever! And as for Dora—”
“Elle, Piotr, stop,” Lily said reproachfully. She stood, shifting herself once again between Elle and Piotr, and shot James a hard glance for not stepping forward with her or stopping the fight earlier. “This talk is going nowhere. You are thunder booming in the distance. Neither of you is thinking straight and you're only hurting yourselves.”
“Da, that's obvious,” P
iotr said, stepping back. “Wendy's waiting outside. I think I've heard all I need to in here.”
“If this girl's on the level, then she oughta prove it,” Elle called as Piotr stormed away. “She oughta step up and pull her weight a little more; maybe do some real business instead of just bumping off a Walker here and there. If she's all fired up about duty and doin' her job then she ought to go take care of the White Lady herself instead of pickin' on ghosts like us. If you weren't so goofy over this dame, you'd see that.”
“And if you had any faith in me, you'd trust me to know when someone's a good person or not,” Piotr yelled over his shoulder. He paused at the door, hand pressed against the thick wood, and glanced back. They stood in a line in the far archway, Lily and Elle on either side of James like slim bookends leaning against one wide and battered book. The gloom loomed behind them.
“I'll be back,” Piotr added, relenting at the sight of Lily's mouth tucked in at the corners and Elle's wide and watering eyes. “With Dora and the others. I promise.”
“You're going to get yourself bumped off,” Elle said, clear and low, as he began leaning toward the door. “Soon's you let your guard down. I'd lay a million clams on it. Two mil.”
For old time's sake Piotr smiled; the expression felt brittle on his face; he half-expected the smile to crack and sift to dust before he could flee the building. “I'll keep that in mind, Elle,” he called over his shoulder as he stepped through and back onto the busy and sweltering street. “Take care. Dasvidania.”
Picking his way through the crowd, Piotr expected to find Wendy still sitting on the bench with her book in her hands, but the bench was empty save for Wendy's battered paperback. The wind ruffled the cover back, exposing dog-eared pages and filling Piotr with a sense of foreboding. He glanced left and right, seeking some sign of her, but the sun was high in the sky and the crowd was thick with holiday shoppers using the narrow side street as a shortcut to more fashionable places to be. Wendy was nowhere to be seen.
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