“The present solved by the past.” Cady gave a heavy nod. “It’s a good idea.”
“But first … Finn, the man you saw, the—the body.” Zac met Finn’s eyes and glimpsed the deep wells behind the flatness. Words were clotting in Zac’s throat, but it was time to end their suspicion for good.
“You were right,” David said when Zac couldn’t continue. “He was executed according to our unanimous decision.”
“Why?” Finn said.
“We took his life to pay for those of the mortals he had taken. And to prevent further murders.”
“He was Elderfolk?” Cady said.
“Aye.”
“And he killed mortals?”
“For pleasure. Evil in him grew with the years. He did not know remorse.”
David’s words were a slug to the stomach, their truth notwithstanding.
Cady’s voice took on a hush. “How did … I mean, what was …?”
“The method? The only effective one, unless you know of another. He was drugged unconscious and then …”
Hesitation didn’t suit David, especially for Zac’s sake. Zac met his eyes and nodded.
“An old saber of mine,” David said. “Guillotined.”
Of course David would use the most polite verb possible.
“You were close to him.” Cady’s words were gentle.
She was addressing Zac, not David. The bite of gall rose in his throat. “And I never guessed.”
“Nor did Simon,” David said.
The new barking laugh escaped. “So?”
“So would you censure him as you do yourself?”
Agh, David, shut up. Zac rubbed a hand over his face. No, he wouldn’t blame Simon. Simon wasn’t the resident lie detector. Zac looked away from them all. David’s words had pierced like a hot poker straight to the festering sore inside.
His knee was jumping under the table. He tried to be still, but all he wanted to do right now was find a gym mat and throw himself into a few handsprings. Instead he had to find the edges of the mask and slide it back into place, the mask that seemed ready to crack down the middle if he said a word.
“It means a lot,” Cady said, “your telling us.”
He didn’t want it to mean anything. Or ever to have happened. Stupid to bring it up. The relevance of a moment ago felt lost.
“Yeah,” he said to keep them from studying his silence. “Well.” He cleared his throat. “Cady, if you’re like us, you need more than cold cereal to finish recovering. We could keep talking over breakfast.”
Breakfast with strangers while they grieved friends. After Colm died, Zac spent two days ranging the streets and sand dunes around town like a tethered spirit. He’d wanted to book a flight home. He’d ignored David’s texts. All the while he’d known he couldn’t seal the gaping hole with solitude, that solitude only ever made devastation worse for him. But the knowledge hadn’t strengthened him enough to reach out. Not until, days later, David sent another text asking if he’d left town. The second it lit his screen, Zac had recognized the lifeline for what it was. Had finally texted back.
In those days at the bottom of a chasm, a meal with a stranger would have been the last thing he said yes to.
Finn, however, was nodding.
“I guess we could,” Cady said.
“I can’t,” David said, facing Zac. “I’ve a store to run. I’d be unfair to leave Tiana alone again.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll try to join you this evening,” he said to Cady and Finn, “if you’re still in town.”
Cady blinked as if she thought the words an underhanded dismissal, but David would have told them straight out if he wanted them gone. Zac would clarify later.
He recommended the diner. Sure, he’d eaten there yesterday, but he wouldn’t choose an inferior restaurant simply because he was wearing a rut with this one. Cady and Finn followed him, Finn again behind the wheel. Cady would be feeble for another day or so and needed to sleep through most of it.
As he parked, Zac glanced down at the floor on the passenger side and swore. Colm’s box. The coins. He shoved the box under the back seat, invisible to anyone who might peer into his windows, though they’d have no way of guessing the fortune inside something so dilapidated.
When he locked the car, he seemed to be securing something dark and dirty.
SEVEN
They entered the diner by nine, two steps ahead of the breakfast rush. Everyone in town seemed to come here on weekends. Zac offered his best photo-shoot smile to Luann, and she rolled her eyes and laughed. Within a minute, she was motioning them across the cozy restaurant to a booth.
“The perks of fame?” Cady said as Luann left to fetch three menus from behind her hostess podium.
“They know how I tip.” Zac smirked.
They were shrugging out of coats and claiming seats as they spoke, but before Zac slid in on the opposite side of Finn and Cady, someone approached over his left shoulder. He turned.
At first he saw only her hair. She’d colored it silver with an underlayer of charcoal. It looked trendy and, framing her lineless face, kind of weird. Her eyes were violet blue, a color no more real than that of her hair. She might be of legal drinking age, or she might not. She was staring at him as if he’d hung the entire solar system.
That look never felt right. He enjoyed signing slips of paper, glossy photos, even T-shirts for grinning fans. Guys who called him “dude” and asked technical questions about the stunts he’d performed, girls who prattled about being nervous and then asked some human interest question—his favorite book, his favorite band. Sometimes he was ogled, which he didn’t mind. Sometimes he was moved by stories of struggle, victory, loss. Sometimes, after they’d gone, he had to walk off the pressing ache of their emotions as they’d told him how much his fund-raisers meant to them, what one or another organization had done for their own family in time of need.
All of it, he wouldn’t trade for the privacy Simon and David preferred.
But then there were fans like the gray-haired young woman in front of him, whose fixation ran so strong she couldn’t hide it. Not that she was trying. It made his skin itch. It made him want to turn her away, tell her to find a worthier idol.
“Hi,” he said and smiled.
“You’re Zac.”
“That’s right. And you are?” Cut to the chase. Move her along.
“Rachel.”
“How’re you, Rachel?”
“Well, I’m talking to Zac Wilson.”
She wasn’t digging in her purse for a pen and paper. She wasn’t moving at all, unless he counted her shift from one foot to the other. He didn’t offer an autograph because she might not want one. She might be nervous because she’d approached to tell him off about something he’d said online. Or not said. It had happened before, though rarely.
“Just a normal guy here.”
“Yeah.” She pointed to herself. “Same.”
Before the pause could become awkward, she glanced past him to the booth and saw Cady and Finn. Her lips parted, the only outward giveaway of a viscous discomfort that rolled off her from nowhere. It might be an aversion to intruding on his private breakfast. It might be something else altogether.
She met his eyes again. “Why do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“The stunts. The tightropes and the free climbing—all of it. Did you want fame or something else?”
He’d been asked the question before but never so bluntly. She was holding her breath for his answer. Zac weighed the truth and the veneer and gave her a measure of each.
“Fame was the last thing in my head when it all started.” Truth. “I wanted to challenge myself physically, that’s all.” Veneer. “But when my video channel blew up, I decided fifteen minutes in the spotlight could be fun. And then I decided I should try to do something helpful with it, as long as I have it.”
“You’ve had more than fifteen minutes.” The words were matter-of-fact, but cu
riosity lay underneath them as well as something more somber.
“It’ll end.” Was already starting to, and would continue when his followers got no more stunts to watch.
“Why challenge yourself? What was behind it? I mean—I’m not sure if that question makes sense, but …” Another glance at the booth behind him, and her face flushed, emphasizing the colorless hair framing it. “I’m sorry. I’ll go. I’ve just been wanting to know, and I saw you—”
“Hey.” He said it quietly, because she looked ready to bolt or cry. “You’re not intruding, Rachel.”
“Oh.” Barely a whisper.
Who knew what she had experienced, was experiencing even now—emotional neglect, he would bet on, if not something worse. He pictured her leaving the diner and going home to lovelessness, and he swallowed and peeled one more layer off his veneer. Just one. Maybe it would help her.
“We’ve all got some tough things, right? Part of living.”
She nodded.
“The stunts were a way for me to challenge my tough things.”
The idolizing look had melted into something truer. She was quiet for a moment.
“Hope that makes sense,” he said when she didn’t seem inclined to move away.
“Oh, yes.” A decided softness held the words.
“Good.”
“Thanks, Zac.”
“My pleasure.”
“I’ll let you get back to your friends.” Her face filled with a naked, artless longing that heightened the pressure in Zac’s soul.
“Good to meet you,” he said.
She hurried from the restaurant with her head down. He sank into the booth across from Cady and Finn, both of whom were watching him.
“Perks of fame?” Cady’s question came quietly.
“Doesn’t happen often. And when it does, it’s not usually that intense.”
“You were kind.”
He scoffed and picked up his menu, though he knew it by heart. Just then their server came for drink orders, a merciful distraction.
Kath looked at each of them and deadpanned with wide eyes, “Why, hello, Mr. Wilson.”
He rolled his eyes, and she laughed.
“You really do know everyone in town, don’t you?” Cady shook her head and opened her menu.
Zac pointed at Kath. “No messing with these guys, okay?”
“Now, Zac, you know I only mess with celebrities.” She set water glasses in front of each of them.
“We’re safe then,” Cady said. “Utterly unknown.”
“In that case, what can I get you to drink?”
Cady ordered cranberry juice; Finn, grapefruit. Zac went with coffee, which wasn’t his usual daily choice but had become necessary to brain function. Stupid freaking night attacks.
“What did she mean about messing with you?” Cady said as Kath walked away.
“Oh, that. The first time I ate here, she told me I was the second most famous person ever to walk through the doors, after a soap opera star. I agreed that I paled to any soap opera star, and she burst out laughing.”
“So there’s never been a soap opera star here?” Other than ordering his juice, it was the first time Finn had spoken since they sat down.
Zac shrugged.
“You didn’t ask her?”
“I guess it didn’t matter.”
Finn’s brow furrowed. “What was the point then?”
“Baiting me. Seeing how seriously I take myself as an internet celebrity.”
“Oh. Right.” He shrugged and returned to his perusal of the menu but after a few seconds looked up again. “Social subtext. My brain misses it sometimes.”
Zac hadn’t intended to comment further, but if Finn was inviting him to … “And here I am taking it for granted.”
“Hang around me long enough and you won’t.”
The guy was so different when he wasn’t feeling cornered. Or terrified for his friend’s life, or bowed over with a migraine. Shoot, Cady was right. Zac had no experience with Finn except at his most desperate.
David had said they’d speak of their first encounter no more, but Zac wanted to know. He’d back off if Finn took this wrong, but he seemed open now. Zac folded his arms on the table and leaned toward the man. “So about that time you shot David in the head.”
Cady’s bristling could have been felt from across town. Across the table, Zac let her glare jab him like porcupine quills. He couldn’t say he didn’t deserve it, but thus far Finn had preferred the direct approach.
Finn’s gaze was level. “Yeah, about that.”
“You wanted to talk to us, and a blink later you wanted to escape us.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d like to know both of those whys, if you don’t mind.”
“’Course,” Finn said. “I thought you knew how to survive anything, even age, after you lived through the canyon fall. I wanted to know how you did it in case Sean and Holly weren’t the only ones of us to start aging. Wanted to be prepared.”
“But?” Zac said when he paused. Might as well get through all of it now that they’d started.
“I watched you for a day, just caution at the time, but then I saw you with that man Colm.” He hunched his shoulders. “It’s why I was sure you’d somehow killed Holly and Sean.”
“And why you resorted to gun violence?”
Finn missed or ignored the sardonic levity in Zac’s tone. “Mostly, yeah. And sometimes I feel cornered, whether I am or not.”
The place wouldn’t have mattered, Cady had said. There might be more to it, but Zac knew when to back off.
“Thanks,” he said.
“’Course.” Finn shrugged. “Your right to ask.”
The three of them sat quietly, somehow more settled with each other than they had been before Zac pushed the question.
After a minute Cady said, “Recommendations for the out-of-towners?”
Zac huffed a laugh. “I was one myself the other day.”
After Kath came back and left with their orders, Cady said, “All right, let’s try it, solving the present with the past. Do you think our ages make a difference?”
“If the serum’s expiring, David should have aged first.” Zac poured one creamer and two sugars into his coffee and sipped it. Still too bitter. He added another packet of sugar.
“So individual physiology must affect it, right? David’s an entire generation older than we are. Than we were, I mean. Than they were.” Her chin trembled.
If he could do something to help them, he had to find it. For now he would let one of them break the silence.
“I don’t fully believe it,” Cady said at last. “That they simply grew old, after all these years. It’s the reasonable explanation, but I don’t believe it.”
“Not believing it doesn’t change it.” Finn’s voice was flat.
Zac couldn’t look at them without putting himself in their place. Imagining if he had lost Colm this way, not an execution but a mystery. Not a killer but a true friend. If Simon and Moira were dead right now, he didn’t know how he’d stand it.
Cady sipped her water and cleared her throat. “Finn’s right. Let’s compare histories. Let’s see if that leads anywhere.”
Strange how difficult it was to believe they were his age. For so many decades there had been only one missing longevite on his mind, and finding David had completed the family. Now here across from him sat two more who had been moving and breathing, thinking and talking in the world all this time.
“You said you were dying of an infection, and the serum healed you.”
Cady ran one finger around the rim of her juice glass. “Fever broke, redness and swelling disappeared in a few hours, and then the wound did too. Within a day, it was as if I’d never torn my arm at all.”
“Sounds familiar.” A shudder ran down his back. To this day he could press his hand to the exact place the bullet had entered his body, though he too bore no scar.
“You were healed in a day?”
“More like two, but that makes sense.”
“Bad injuries?”
“Ambushed by some robbers.” He forced a smirk. “Pretty much a John Wayne B-movie. Doc took a bullet out of my stomach, but I wasn’t going to make it.”
“Oh.”
“And Finn? What’s your story?”
Finn looked at him a long moment, and the depths behind his eyes seemed to bottom out. “A mob beating.”
“A … gang? Outlaws?”
“Townsfolk. Law-abiding men. Thought I killed a friend of theirs.”
“But you didn’t.”
Finn gave a slow blink. “I didn’t.”
Not a painless topic, but if he wanted to change it, he seemed the type of man to say so. As long as he was willing to talk, Zac wanted to listen. A hunger had opened in him to know them. Really know them. Maybe they could see it, but he didn’t care.
“Wasn’t there any law around?” Zac said.
“By the time Doc was called, I was mostly dead.”
Right. Let him tell it in his own way, his own sequence. Zac shut up.
“They broke both my arms. And there was lots of bleeding, you know, internally. They left me after a while, and then somebody brought Doc, asked him to give me morphine.” Finn shrugged. “He gave me the serum too.”
“Both your stories fit with ours.” David’s injuries had been accidental, but his body had been as broken as Finn’s.
Finn nodded. “And once a year, we deal with that resetting process. Rejuvenation, you called it.”
“For a few days?”
“Or longer, depending on the person.”
“And it varies for the women,” Cady said. “The month, I mean. The men are predictable, but one year it happened to me only seven months apart, and then the next year it was more like fifteen. We told the guys it must be something to do with our blood. You know, female …”
She blushed, and Zac hid a smile. Apparently David wasn’t the only one who clung to some of the antiquated proprieties.
“I get it,” he said to spare her, and she nodded. “We only have one chick, Moira, but now that I think about it, she’s kind of like that. I remember one year she rejuvenated in the spring and one year it was fall.”
From Sky to Sky Page 7