by Gregory Ashe
Cian wasn’t sure if he nodded or not. So much blood had rushed to his face that he thought his head might fall off.
“It’s nothing new to me,” Harry said. Then he paused. “You don’t have to stay here, Cian. Go get some sleep.”
“Harry—”
“Save us both the embarrassment, Cian. Your dislike of me has been patent. At least now we’ve cleared the air.” He looked away and added, “Good night.”
“It’s not—it’s not what you said.”
They were the hardest words Cian had ever spoken. They were barbed and slippery all at once, and Cian had to yank them out one at a time, ripping out his own guts as he did.
“Not that I’m a fag?” Harry asked. He turned back to Cian, pulled his knees up to his chest, and wrapped his arms around them. “You can say it.”
Cian shifted in the chair. The wood squeaked.
He didn’t know what to say.
But Devil take him if he was going to leave.
Several long minutes passed. Harry relaxed by inches, like a man coming off the rack. He looked over at Cian. The air might as well have been gunpowder that they were both breathing, waiting for the next word to be a spark.
“I’d kill for a smoke,” Harry said to the room.
The gunpowder smoldered.
Cian grabbed a pack from the dresser. He passed one to Harry and lit it. Then he lit a second for himself and dropped back into the chair. The two men smoked in silence. The scent of the tobacco leeched some of the bitterness from the air. Cian’s shoulders dropped as he took another drag. He rubbed his eyes.
He knew what to say.
And Devil take him if he was going to be a coward now.
But it still took him the length of the cigarette to drag up his courage kicking and screaming. He ground out the butt in an ashtray. Then he looked at Harry, who was staring at the corner of the room as though he were going to ask it to dance.
“His name was Ollie, wasn’t it?” Cian asked.
Harry didn’t answer. He took another long draw on the cigarette. In the darkness, that speck of orange was like a light in port, signaling someone home. Cian didn’t know who. Someone lost, he thought. Someone who had been lost for a very long time.
Then Harry nodded.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Cian asked.
“Please don’t do this. Don’t pretend.”
Cian waited again. The minutes measured themselves out to the flare of Harry’s shrinking cigarette.
“When you were hurt, you said his name,” Cian said. “A few times, actually. You said you weren’t going to let someone take him. Did he die?”
Harry nodded. He dropped the cigarette butt in the ashtray. It glinted like a dying star.
“I’m sorry,” Cian said.
“His name was Oliver Dupont,” Harry said. It had the sound of an iceberg meeting a ship. A sudden, fatal break in the silence. “He was two years younger than me. Our families were great friends.” Harry leaned back against the headboard, stretching his legs out.
“Was he . . .”
Harry rolled his eyes, and Cian tried to swallow his tongue. “Yes,” Harry said with a small smile. “He was . . .” He exaggerated the pause and then smiled again to take the sting from the mockery. “I loved him. I don’t know how he felt about me. I thought he felt the same. Now,” Harry shrugged. “We were young. Who knows?” He stopped. His eyes were drinking up the shadows in the room. Cian remembered a bit of mythology. He remembered a river that made you forget. He thought, right then, that Harry was trying to drink deep from that river, like putting his mouth to the Mississippi. Cian was fairly certain that there wasn’t enough forgetting in the world. Not for someone like Harry Witte.
“What did you mean when you said you wouldn’t let them take him?” Cian asked.
“That’s a long story. The short version is that the Children took him. By the time I found them.” Harry paused and shrugged again.
“That’s why you hunt them. That’s why you do all of this.”
“It’s part of why. The story is too long. I won’t bore you. But what happened to Ollie was my fault, at least in part. I won’t let it happen to anyone else.”
The room swallowed up the last words. The words disappeared into the silence like snowflakes into a drift. Harry turned his head away, brushing at his eyes.
“You healed yourself,” Cian said. “Using magic.”
When Harry answered, his voice was thick. “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “It was the only way. The venom is not natural.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
Harry turned back. “Yes. Very. But I didn’t have any other choice. I’m not ready to die, Cian. The Children have too much to pay for. I took a risk. This time, it paid off. I live to fight another day, for whatever that’s worth.”
“I’m glad,” Cian said. “We were worried.”
“We?”
“God, yes, Harry. I was terrified. I mean, I don’t know shit about any of this.” Cian surged to his feet, shoved his hands in his pockets, and stalked across the room. He pulled back the curtains and stared out at a wall of darkness broken by pale lumps of snow. It reminded him of France, of the bodies in the fields, of moonlight on dead flesh. He let the curtain fall back into place. “You die, and I’m left without a clue in the world. The Children? Cultic magic? Ancient gods awakening? I might as well go piss in the wind for all the good I’m going to do.”
“Poetic,” Harry said with another small smile. “I’m touched.”
Cian took a deep breath and left the window. Harry was watching him. Cian would have rather faced a loaded gun.
“You think I don’t like you because, well, you know.”
Another smile played at the edge of Harry’s mouth. He nodded. “You’ve made it fairly obvious.”
“That’s not why, although I’d be lying if I said I were . . . hell, I don’t know.”
“My point.”
“No, damn it. Give me half a second. I don’t care about that. The truth of it is, Harry, you remind me too much of someone I knew.” Cian marched across the room. His bandaged hand was hurting, and he pulled it out of his pocket, forcing himself to relax. Fresh, dark spots marked the cloth. “You weren’t in the military. That’s what you said.”
Harry shook his head. “Morally unfit,” he said. Then a grin. “Father almost died. He would have rather had me declared mentally unfit, but it was too late.”
“Mentally unfit wouldn’t have been too far off.”
Harry’s face went cold for a half a second, and then Cian grinned. Harry wrinkled his nose and laughed. “I asked for that, didn’t I? All right, go ahead. Military.”
“You know I was in the army. In France, I had this lieutenant. A lot like you, Harry. Nice guy, smart, funny. Everybody liked him. Good looking too, and all the local girls were practically crawling out of their dresses to get at him. The men, they loved him. Hell, we loved him. He was on our side, he looked out for us. When we went into battle, he was right there too. Nobody thought anything would go wrong with Harley Dunn by your side.
“I remember watching this boy, his name was Felix something, I think he was a Jew. Anyway, he’d caught a stray bullet. It was bad, clipped an artery, he was bleeding out in the trench. He screamed murder. I was sitting right there, calling for a medic, trying to do anything I could. It didn’t make any difference. And then Lieutenant Dunn got there. He took Felix’s hand, told him things were going to be all right, and the boy quieted down right away.” Cian paused. The ache in his hand had doubled, and his eyes stung. “He died a few minutes later. Quiet as a lamb. I think he thought Harley really was going to make things alright. Hell, I half thought it myself.”
Cian stopped. He looked at Harry. The other man sat and watched him. The silence crawled up Cian’s skin on spider legs.
“Anyway, that was Lieutenant Dunn, and you remind me of him. The way Pearl and Freddy and, hell, Irene—especially Irene—the way they look at
you reminds me of the way those men looked at Lieutenant Dunn. Of the way I looked at Lieutenant Dunn.”
“What did he do to you?”
Cian grinned, and he wondered why his face felt like it was breaking. It was a funny story. Damned funny. He couldn’t quite catch his breath, though, and the room was hot.
“There was a girl,” he said, and he tried to laugh.
Harry didn’t move.
“Her name was Corinne,” Cian said. “She had these eyes. Dark eyes, and skin like you never saw at home, and she was French. Of course. They were all French. But Corinne, she was the kind of girl every man wanted.”
He paused and looked at Harry.
Harry waved his hand. “No offense meant, present company excepted, all of that. I get it. Go on.”
“For whatever reason, she took a fancy to me. We had pulled back to the village. She and I saw each other every day, whenever I had a free minute.” Cian tried to laugh again, and this time, the sound didn’t even make it out of his throat. “I didn’t speak a lick of French. She knew about ten words in English. It didn’t matter.”
“Cian,” Harry said.
Cian shook his head. “Anyway, I’d seen Harley talking to her, but it was always innocent. I knew Corinne only had eyes for me. It was the first time I’d been in love. You know what it’s like.”
“I do.”
“One night, I was supposed to be on watch. I traded with another guy. I’d already planned to meet Corinne. I went to find her.”
He stopped.
Her face pressed against the stone. The terror and pain in her eyes. Dunn behind her.
The sound of his breathing. Ragged.
“Dunn was . . . was having his way with her, or whatever you want to call it. His trousers around his ankles, Corinne pressed up against the wall, crying. I should have been shocked or horrified. I just felt cold. Like this wind was blowing and it had pushed everything out of me. I pulled out my pistol and shot Dunn. Right in the head.”
The crack of the gun. The sudden silence.
“Corinne ran. I knew she was hurt and scared. I didn’t blame her. I ran too. I’d just killed my commanding officer. I knew what that meant. I didn’t care, though. Dunn deserved to die. The fact that he could do that to Corinne—” Cian took a breath. He felt calmer now. As though someone had cut him in half at the waist. That kind of calm. “I hid out in the forest for a few days. I remembered other places we’d been. Girls Harley had taken an interest in. Bits and pieces of stories. Corinne hadn’t been the first. At least she was the last.”
“I’m so sorry, Cian.”
Cian shook his head. “I went back, you know. This part of the story doesn’t really matter, but I’ll tell you anyway. So you know that God believes in irony. I went back, late one night, for Corinne. I climbed up to her window and knocked. She opened it, saw me, and started crying.”
Her eyes had been so dark in the moonlight. She had never been more beautiful. He had wanted to tell her that. He hadn’t known how. Not in French. Certainly not in English.
“Then she shut the window and screamed for help.” Cian picked at the bandage on his hand, pressing on the cuts that hid underneath. The pain was distant. “I ran. I haven’t stopped running.”
Harry got out of bed. His movements were stiff and slow. He wore a pair of drawers and that was it. He crossed the room and put his hand on Cian’s shoulder. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.
“I haven’t told anyone that,” Cian said. His voice sounded like it was coming down a paper cone. “Sorry.” He wiped at his face. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“I am sorry, Cian,” Harry said. “Truly.”
“It doesn’t matter. It never did.”
“It does matter. I don’t know what I can do to tell you I’m not that man. But I’ll try my best to show you that I’m different.”
“Hell, Harry, that’s why I told you this. I’m not stupid. I’m just slow. I know you’re not Harley Dunn. It took me a while to realize it, and I’m sorry for the way I’ve treated you. That’s all I wanted to say.” His eyes were still hot, and he wiped his face again. “God, honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“I do,” Harry said. He gripped the back of Cian’s neck, a firm, friendly, and shockingly intimate touch, and then dropped onto the bed. “Neither of us is nearly drunk enough for this.”
Cian laughed and rubbed his nose. “We can fix that.”
At the Majestic, Irene took a bath. It wasn’t a relaxing bath. It wasn’t the kind of bath with her favorite soap and the heat soaking into tired muscles. It was an angry bath. Lots of unnecessary splashing. Scrubbing at invisible patches of dirt. And, for the most part, thinking about Cian Shea, who was an ass.
When she’d finished bathing, though, and the water had begun to cool, she got out and dried herself and combed her hair. The bruises along her back and sides were purpling like a summer sunset. The worst of the pain had passed, and now she was left stiff and sore. It wasn’t a bad analogy for her life with her father. After Francis, when Father had refused to believe Irene, she had thought the pain was too much to bear. But then life had gone on, the way it always did, and now she was only the slightest bit stiff and sore.
Irene sighed, set down the comb, and stared at the woman in the mirror. The other Irene stared back, her lips pursed, and looking decidedly judgmental.
“Mind your own business,” Irene told her.
Cian had been worried. Worried about her. And frightened. And because he was a man, with half the brains of a bedpost, instead of just saying he’d been worried, he got angry and huffed and puffed. For half a second, Irene had been frightened too, and so she’d pushed him right back.
The Irene in the mirror had a look that said, I told you so.
Irene walked away from the dressing table. She was afraid she’d give herself a black eye if she stayed there a moment longer.
But walking to the other side of the room and fumbling with her cigarette case did nothing to help. She lit a cigarette, drew deeply, and breathed out a thin line of smoke. The cigarette didn’t help either.
Because of that kiss. That damned kiss. She could still feel it. Hotter than a cigarette. Smoother than smoke.
Damn Cian and damn that kiss.
After another pull on the cigarette, Irene ground the tip out in an ashtray. Then she started getting dressed. One of her more conservative dresses: purple, with a high neck, paneled with rose and maroon. Her stockings, her black heels, the little white hat with purple trim. Her clutch. Her coat.
At the door, though, she stopped. They had lost the box and, more importantly, the mask. Again. All this madness had started with the mask. But what happened when they found it?
That was the real question.
Harry would destroy it, given half a chance. As would Pearl, or even Cian. All they could think about was the threat that the mask represented: inbred priests calling up a forgotten god. But what would happen to Cian if the mask were destroyed?
Irene needed that box. She needed it so she could look her father in the eye and be free. Finally free. Did Harry care about that? Did Pearl? Perhaps, a little. But they had other concerns. They wouldn’t sacrifice the mask for her.
All of which meant that Irene had to find the mask first.
She left the hotel and hailed a cab. At the Old Cathedral, she paid the man extra to wait for her and hurried across the frozen pavement. Behind the cathedral’s pillars, the massive double doors were closed. Irene hammered on the wood, but the doors were so thick that she couldn’t hear a sound.
“Marie-Thérèse,” she called.
The wind snatched the word away. Irene clapped a hand to her hat to keep the wind from taking that too.
When Irene had come here the last time, Marie-Thérèse had been gone, and there had been signs of a struggle. The spirit had been driven away, Harry had said. Driven away by something powerful. The same person that had summoned the snowstorm to trap
Irene? The same one who had called up that creature to hunt her? Patrick had said it had to be someone powerful. Harry had implied as much.
The cathedral, though, offered no answers, and Irene’s legs were freezing. She hurried back to the cab and climbed into the back.
“Late to be out,” the cabbie said. “What’s your husband thinking?”
“I don’t have a husband,” Irene said. “And I can do my own thinking, thank you very much.”
“It isn’t decent,” the man grumbled. “Ought to be at home in bed.”
Irene opened her mouth to respond and then paused.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s a fine idea. Take me home.”
Instead of the Majestic, though, she gave the cabbie her father’s address. Who better to ask about the box and the mask? The box had, after all, been delivered to her house. Her father had been expecting it. He had been terrified when it disappeared and yet had refused to tell the police about it. He had denied its existence, until Irene had revealed that the box was lost. And then—
Through the thick coat, Irene probed the still-healing bruises.
And then he had been angry.
She checked the revolver in her pocket. It was a small thing. Like her. But it had enough kick to stop a man.
Even her father.
The cabbie took her around back. Irene paid him from her dwindling reserves of cash and climbed out. She let herself into the kitchen. The smell of hot oil still clung to the stone and copper, but it was old now, faded. The house was dark and silent. It was late, later than Irene had realized. Her parents would be asleep.
In the stillness, Irene followed the darkened hallways, relying on long years of familiarity to navigate creaking boards and unseen steps and the endless series of decorative tables and lamps and vases that were her mother’s sentinels. When she rounded the next corner, though, Irene paused. The lights were on in her father’s study.
She found the revolver, closed her eyes, and counted to ten. Ten deep breaths.
In the darkness, she could practically smell Cian. Could taste his lips on hers.