by Alma Katsu
He bumped against me. “You know that’s not true. I wasn’t unhappy. But I know what you wanted, Lanny. You wanted Jonathan to love you the way you loved him, to love you above all others, to be his one great love. I suppose that was all I wanted: to be your great love. That was foolish of me, since there would always be Jonathan, but . . . none of us is immune to our heart’s desire.”
I sensed his time was short. I was conflicted—unsure what to say, for it was clear that he wanted to be refuted. He wanted me to tell him that he was the great love of my life, and what difference would it make if I lied to him as he teetered on the brink of annihilation? Yet I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that it was Adair, not Jonathan, I loved more than anyone. After years of chasing after Jonathan, I’d come to love him like a brother; he was the one connection I had to my past, to my family, to my home. He was the only one to whom I felt any sort of obligation, not Luke. I was the one who’d brought Jonathan into this mess; I had to do everything in my power to get him out. I took a deep breath, decided which course to take—and spoke.
“Isn’t it enough to be one of my great loves? I’ll never forget you, Luke. You were the best man I ever had in my life. A much better man than Jonathan.”
He snorted. “A better man than Jonathan? That’s not much of an accomplishment, is it? From everything you told me, he was—a jerk, to be blunt. I don’t know why you’ve come here after him, Lanny.”
“I have my reasons. He needs me—let’s leave it at that. I don’t want to talk about it right now.” Meaning I didn’t want to use up the last minutes of his life talking about Jonathan.
He blinked at me, as though fighting to see through a film. “You know, I’m about to be sent into the great unknown and I still don’t know what I was supposed to do with my life, what it was supposed to mean. I want resolution. There must be a reason you’ve been sent to me, Lanny. You’re the immortal one. You must know something that isn’t revealed to us ordinary people. I want answers.”
“I don’t have an answer for you, Luke, other than to say you were a wonderful father and partner. Your daughters love you. You made me happy every day we were together. Maybe that’s what your life was about. Isn’t that enough?” I kissed his forehead. His last moments were upon us. He was dissolving, blurred in some spots, thinned in others. He looked like a ghost.
He’d closed his eyes, leaned against my cheek. “Now that we’re at the point of sharing secrets, I have something to tell you. I always thought it a shame you couldn’t have children. You’d have made a wonderful mother.”
“Me?” I blurted out a laugh.
“You were great with the girls,” he said softly, as though he were falling asleep. “Always so patient. They loved you right from the start. It made Tricia a little jealous, you know.”
“Shhh,” I said. His hand was getting colder in mine. The air in the room seemed thin all of a sudden, as though we were on a high mountaintop. I’d woven our fingers together tightly now, feeling the stretch as I accommodated his larger hand in mine. However, his grip was weakening by degrees and the bulk of his hand felt lighter with every second. He was fading before my eyes, drifting away piece by piece—his end was truly here.
I ran my fingers through his hair, but it was as though I were raking frigid air. He was almost gone; the hospital room was almost gone, too. It was freezing, as though a window had been thrown open on the coldest Maine night—no, surely colder than that—and the blinks and hisses and chirrups of the hospital room ceded to the rasp of empty, endless space. Infinity was calling. Eternity comes for us all in one form or another, and it had found Luke. We teetered at the edge of a huge abyss and I sensed that if I wasn’t careful, I’d be pulled into it. This was the abyss Adair had told me about, and now that I faced it, I understood his horror. It was impossible to believe that our consciousnesses could live on in that absolute emptiness. If they did, how lonely they must be; how bereft an existence they must have in the flat black void. This was what Adair had saved me from for a great long while by making me immortal. I could not save Luke from it. This was the inescapable end.
“Good-bye,” I said to Luke in a last gesture of tenderness, but he was already gone.
Within seconds, furniture and hospital equipment started disappearing all around me. Afraid of what might happen to me when the last piece vanished, I hurried to the door, cracked it open, and peered out. The passage was empty, so I crept out. It seemed positively quiet and serene here, now. I proceeded to retrace my steps, thinking that I might come across the door from my nightmares and, behind that door, Jonathan. But as I turned a corner, I came face-to-face with a demon.
My blood froze in my veins. Maybe two feet separated us. He could’ve reached out and snatched my arm.
But he didn’t. Instead, he lowered his huge head and brought one topaz eye close, looking me over. He snorted and his brimstone breath washed over my face. He was one of those demonic creatures, yet there was something familiar about this one, something in his expression, a haughty yet wistful look I’d seen before.
The demon pulled himself up as tall as he could, given the low ceiling. He swished his tail elegantly. Again, he fixed me with his golden eye.
“Lanny.”
I recognized the voice, even though it was one I hadn’t heard in a long time. “Dona? Is that you?”
The demon snorted again and turned his massive head away from my curious stare, embarrassed. “It is I.”
I hadn’t seen Dona since we’d lived under Adair’s roof in Boston, in the early 1800s. He’d been one of Adair’s companions, too, a foul-tempered aristocratic Italian who’d had little use for me then. I couldn’t help but think how the mighty had fallen; the always fastidious Dona couldn’t be happy to have been turned into a beast. He had been a beautiful man in life. It must’ve galled him to be transformed into this creature.
“Dear God! Dona! I thought I’d never see you again! How long have you been here?”
“Not so long, I suppose, and yet it feels an eternity. An eternity as this monster that you see, with a tail and horns, more beast than man. . . .” His eyes were large, their expression soft and quite touching, even if they were an eerie golden color. He reached up and ran a hand distractedly down the length of one silky, long ear, perhaps a nervous habit, perhaps to confirm that he was still in this unfortunate form. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized what it meant to find Dona here. As had been the case with Savva—who, it occurred to me now, would surely transform into a beast as vile as this before long—Dona could be in the underworld only if Adair had taken his life.
As if reading my thoughts through my expression, the demon flashed a look of anger. “I didn’t ask to be released, you know. I was perfectly happy when Adair found me. I was at peace. I wasn’t harming anyone. But Adair insisted that my time was over. It didn’t matter that I begged him to spare me; he took my life and sent me here.”
Shocked, I couldn’t speak for a moment, and when I could, the best I could say was, “I’m sure he didn’t mean it. He didn’t know where he was sending you or what would happen to you.”
Dona seemed unconvinced. His tail switched. “Adair always was like that, you know,” Dona whispered. “A bastard. Never thinking of us as having wishes and desires of our own. Never thinking of us as anything but servants to him.” The demon made a sound halfway between a bellow and a moan. “I wish for God to damn him, as we have been damned. Damn him to hell.”
It didn’t seem a good idea to let Dona get carried away by bitterness at that moment; I needed his help. I laid a hand on his blackened arm. “Dona, I may be crossing a line . . . I know we were never close in life, but I need your help. I am throwing myself on your mercy.”
He cocked his large head, waiting.
I drew in a deep breath, preparing to be rebuffed. “You see, I came here looking for Jonathan. You remember Jonathan, don’t you?”
He snorted derisively at this and rolled his eyes. “Of course I reme
mber him. Anyone would remember Jonathan. He is impossible to forget.”
“Have you seen him here, Dona? I heard he was being kept by the queen of the underworld.”
At this, Dona shied back, like an animal that had been bitten and startled by some ghastly insect, his ears twitching in irritation. “Oh, why do you ask me this? There’s nothing you can do for him. He is here with the queen and she will not give him up to you. Trust me on this—I am part of her retinue, you know. We demons serve the queen of the underworld. That appears to be our reward, for putting up with Adair in life. I suppose he would say that it is the price we must pay for having lived so long.” He snorted again, in disgust this time.
I looked into his golden eyes. “I’m not afraid of her,” I lied.
“You should be.”
“Dona, can you take me to him?”
“It is hopeless.”
“I just want to see him and speak with him. Please, Dona. I’ve come this far—don’t make me go away empty-handed.”
He looked from my hand, still on his arm, to my face. “All right, I will show you where he’s being kept. After that, you’re on your own, do you understand me? You can expect no more help from me.” And with that, he turned—hooves thumping heavily on the hard-packed ground—and began to lumber down the passage, leading the way.
SIXTEEN
Somewhere along the twisty path that Dona led me on, we stopped being in a place that looked like Adair’s fortress. Without my quite noticing how or when it happened, I suddenly realized that our surroundings had changed. The walls were gone. The ceiling overhead had disappeared. The world around us had shifted, broken apart and fallen away, and we were now in a place that was like the underworlds of folklore, the ones depicted by Dante and Milton, a dark, foreboding world that reeked of sorrow and regret.
We trudged through what appeared to be a cavern, though it was hard to tell as we walked through darkness with only the path in front of us lit, as though we were being followed by a spotlight. It could have been moonlight, I suppose, only there was no moon visible overhead. I heard rustlings and what sounded like whispers in the shadows to either side of the trail, but could see nothing. The tidy packed-earth floor of the passage had given way to a dirt path set on a deceptively gradual decline. I had the rather morbid sense that damned souls were hovering in the darkness just beyond sight or hearing. I could feel their gazes, desperately hungry, following us as though they wanted something we had.
“Tell me, Dona, where are we? What is this place?” I asked, growing uneasy at the changes to our surroundings. All of a sudden, I was unsure whether I could trust him.
He didn’t so much as look over his shoulder to address me, but kept loping along. “Have no fears; you are safe with me,” he said rather rotely.
“I feel as though we’re being watched.”
“We are,” he acknowledged. “The souls are curious about you. They’ve never seen a live soul in the underworld before. They’re drawn to your living energy.”
I thought of the place we’d just left, with its hall of doors that led to pieces of my past. Fez and St. Andrew had been filled with souls and yet they hadn’t paid me the slightest attention. This place was different. Walking through this open space with souls hovering just out of reach, I finally felt that I was in the underworld, the place of our terrors and nightmares, and I felt vulnerable.
“What is this place, Dona? Are we in hell?”
He grimaced. “Hell—what kind of question is that? There is neither heaven nor hell. There is only the underworld.”
“But it must be a different part of the underworld. This is so unlike the parts I’ve seen already,” I protested.
“Tell me what have you seen, then,” he replied. So I told him all of it, how the entirety of old Fez had unfurled before me as I’d walked down the boulevard on Savva’s arm, how I’d been taken back to St. Andrew of 1823 or thereabouts, exactly as I’d known it as a child, how I’d been transported to Luke’s hospital room—all of these scenes set just beyond the doors inside Adair’s fortress, or so it had seemed. How I’d seen old acquaintances but seemed to be invisible to everyone else.
Dona dismissed my account with a toss of his head. “It sounds as though you were brought back to a specific place in time to see those acquaintances. You were given a nice visit; don’t be ungrateful.”
I wasn’t about to give up, though. “But how is that possible?” I asked, dogged. “That time has passed. How can we step back into it as though nothing has happened?”
“How should I know?” he snapped suddenly. “Does it look as though I have any authority here? No one tells me anything. I can’t explain how it works; I only know that such things happen. That’s the way things work around here, and you’ll soon find out as much for yourself.” Then he glanced slyly over his shoulder at me; he had his own questions he wanted answered. “So, you knew Savva in life. Is that so?”
I flushed. “Yes. It was a miracle that we met that day. It was in Fez—”
But Dona cut me off, snorting with disgust through his broad, wet snout. His horns gleamed wickedly in the wan light from overhead. “Then you know what a selfish, spoiled whelp he was. I abhorred him. He was nothing but trouble, and an impossible liar. He would say or do anything for attention. I don’t know what Adair saw in him, to make him one of us . . .”
One of us? That was hardly a designation one could be proud of. We were all flawed, as was Savva. He was the same as the rest of us. Not that Dona was wrong in his estimate of Savva, not exactly. Savva was difficult at the best of times, and no one knew that better than I, but I couldn’t stand to hear him spoken of that way. “You’re not being fair to him. It’s not his fault. He has problems, Dona, real problems.”
“Don’t make excuses for him. That’s your problem, Lanny, you have a weakness for weak men.” He seemed pleased with himself.
“You can spare me your psychoanalysis,” I told him.
Dona continued, undeterred. “So, Savva is here in the underworld, is he? How does he like being a demon?”
“He’s not a demon—yet,” I said. “Though he told me that he is growing a tail.”
“He’s still in human form! He’s been here how long, and he’s still a human? Some people—the least deserving ones, have you ever noticed?—get all the breaks. I was put in demon form practically from the moment I arrived here. The queen took one look at me and said, ‘Oh yes, you’ll do nicely,’ and snapped her fingers, and that was that.” Dona practically shook with rage. His tail switched hotly from side to side. “I think she chose me because I was so handsome.”
Though immodest, Dona had been handsome: tall and regal, with that famous Northern Italian beauty. A former street urchin who had been taken in by an artist, made his model and his muse—only for Dona to repay the artist by turning him in to the papal authorities for being a sodomite, in order to save his own worthless neck.
He lifted one shoulder in an insouciant half shrug. “And now it’s all gone, taken away from me. I suppose that is my punishment in the hereafter, because in life I was so proud of my looks. Now I am a hideous beast, so ugly that the spirits run away from me in fear. Let’s see how Savva likes it when people run from him, when those boyish looks are gone. When those golden curls fall away and horns burst out of his skull. It hurts like hell, you know: the horns, the tail, the feet turning into hooves. Savva’s good fortune is not going to last much longer.”
“Do all of Adair’s former companions turn into demons?” I tried not to betray my worry that this, too, would be my fate.
“The queen is punishing us for having been with Adair in life—as though we had anything to say about that decision. She’s very jealous, you know,” he said, lost in his own bitter thoughts, failing to explain what she was jealous of. . . . But before I could ask him, the terrain changed suddenly before us and the path simply disappeared. Dona and I both tumbled down the long slope toward the black gully below. Once I’d started tumbling,
gravity took over. I rolled faster and faster; I couldn’t stop myself. The bruising and bumping descent seemed to go on forever. Finally, my body rolled to a halt. I tilted my head back and looked up, but could see nothing; the top of the slope was shrouded in blackness.
And then I realized—the vial was gone. It had slipped from my hand when I’d fallen, probably when I’d instinctively tried to stop myself. In the dim light, I searched the dirt at my feet but found nothing. The tiny vial could be anywhere—hidden under a tussock or rock, buried in the dirt. It was lost, but it didn’t matter anyway. If our signal scheme had worked, Adair would have seen it by now and I would’ve been pulled from this reality and sent spinning back to the earth, to the fortress, to Adair. I would’ve felt the swirl and tug that I’d felt at the beginning. But there was no change, nothing. I was still in the underworld.
I located Dona by the groan coming from the darkness to my left. My intuition told me that I needed to get away from him, that something was wrong. Dona didn’t want to help me; he’d never helped anyone in his life. I’d wanted to believe him because I needed him, but I could pretend no longer. I scrambled to my feet. Dona was groggily lurching upright, like a horse trying to push up from the ground. He was uninjured. Run, every nerve in my body screamed at me. Leave him and run for your life.
But I had dithered too long. I had just decided to make a break from Dona while I had a chance when four demons stepped out of the shadows. A great brightness flickered overhead like a searchlight, and I saw the side of a great stone building behind them, a turret tower, a banner flying high overhead. We’d fallen into a dry moat.
Someone grabbed my elbow. It was Dona, jerking me to my feet and holding me up like a trophy he’d won. “It’s the woman the queen has been looking for. I found her—she’s my prisoner, and I demand to be allowed to present her personally to the queen,” he said proudly.