“There’s nothing left,” I said, and I meant it. “I’m done, in so many ways, Sarah.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said softly, and eased herself down onto the floor next to me. “I still love you, Ryan. At least, I’m pretty sure I do. But right now I don’t want to be with you. You make me angry and you make me afraid and you make me hurt, and I don’t want any of those things right now.”
“It’s our house.”
“After what I went through because of you, I think I’m entitled to it a little more than you are, at least until we figure things out.” She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were bright, too bright. “Oh, God, Ryan, I told you a hundred times to quit that stupid job. Why didn’t you listen? Why didn’t you listen?”
I put my arms around her, awkwardly. “I don’t know,” I said, and meant that, too. “It was just what I did.”
“I hate you,” she said, and put her arm around me to pull me closer. “You stupid, stupid man. Look what you did to us.”
“I know,” I told her. “It’s my fault. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s our fault,” she finally said, and then neither of us said anything for a while.
We didn’t cry. Neither of us. I’m not sure we had any tears left after what we’d gone through. Instead, we just sat there and held each other until the sun came up and made rainbows on the floor as it danced through the broken glass.
She pulled away finally, slowly. I just sat there and let her go.
“You should get going,” she said, and levered herself to her feet. “I’ll call you in a couple of days. That will give us both some time to think.”
“All right,” I said, using the wall to lift myself up. “Do you think I can handle that suitcase?”
She swung it off the bed and dropped it at my feet. “I think you can handle just about anything, Ryan. You just have to decide you want to.”
“I love you,” I propped the suitcase up on its wheels. She didn’t say anything, just followed me as I thumped it down each step in turn. The hard plastic of the wheels did a great job of ignoring the carpet on the stairs and resonating with the staircase underneath.
When I was at the door, she stopped, three steps up. “I know,” she said. “That’s not enough anymore.”
I walked out the door and closed it behind me.
My car was in the driveway. It only took me three tries to get the suitcase into the trunk. Once it was in there, I popped it open. Sarah had been very thorough in her packing, as well as deliberate. Everything of mine that mattered to me, with one exception, was in there, but then again, she was the reason I was going. But books, DVDs, my flash drive—all the things that would make up the lines of a sketch of me, she got right.
Then again, she usually was.
I thought about the flash drive for a minute. Where it had come from, what was on it, whether I'd ever have any need for it again. I thought about dropping it on the concrete of the driveway and grinding it into powder. Blue Lightning had done as much to herself. Surely I could do it now.
In the end, it went back in the bag. Just in case, I told myself. Just in case.
I got into the car and turned the radio on—no plugging in the iPhone, not for me right now. The radio was tuned to the local classic rock station, which had been the 80s station, which had been God knows what before that, but for the moment I liked it where it was and what it was playing. It fit my mood, or what was left of it.
I started her up and threw her into gear, backing down the driveway and into the street. Sarah didn’t come running out to tell me to stay. She didn’t press her face against an upstairs window and gaze out at me longingly. She didn’t do anything melodramatic or stupid or grandiose, and that was one of the reasons I’d loved her.
Part of me wished that just this one time, she would have.
But no, she was right. Space was a good idea. Space, and time for healing and for figuring out next steps. She’d call, or she wouldn’t, and if she never did I wouldn’t be able to blame her.
The song ended. Another one kicked in, Pink Floyd’s “Dogs of War.” I thought about changing the station, then found myself grinning like a fool and turning it up, until my windows were rattling. “The hell with it,” I said, and tore out along the street. The sun was up now, blinding in my rearview. It kept me from looking back.
Really.
It did.
The End
Writer, game designer and cad, Richard Dansky was named one of the Top 20 videogame writers in the world in 2009 by Gamasutra. His work includes bestselling games such as TOM CLANCY’S SPLINTER CELL: CONVICTION, FAR CRY, TOM CLANCY’S RAINBOW SIX: 3, OUTLAND, and the upcoming SPLINTER CELL: BLACKLIST. His writing has appeared in magazines ranging from The Escapist to Lovecraft Studies, as well as numerous anthologies. The author of the critically acclaimed novel FIREFLY RAIN, he was a major contributor to White Wolf’s World of Darkness setting with credits on over a hundred RPG supplements. Richard lives in North Carolina with his wife, statistician and blogger Melinda Thielbar, and their amorphously large collections of books and single malt whiskys.
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So reads the business card from Limbus, Inc., a shadowy employment agency that operates at the edge of the normal world. Limbus’s employees are just as suspicious and ephemeral as the motives of the company, if indeed it could be called a company in the ordinary sense of the word.
In this shared-world anthology, five heavy hitters from the dark worlds of horror, fantasy, and scifi pool their warped takes on the shadow organization that offers employment of the most unusual kind to those on the fringes of society.
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William (Billy) Burke and William Hare were two real-life, beer-swilling, fist-fighting lowlifes who managed to stumble their way into infamy in Edinburgh, Scotland in the late 1820’s. Step by step, they graduated from the unemployment line to petty thievery, to grave robbing, and then on to cold bloody murder – ultimately becoming Britain’s first documented serial killers.
What history doesn’t know about, or consider is the possibility that Burke and Hare may not have been acting on their own; and the blame for those heinous crimes might not entirely be theirs. Two mysterious strangers have arrived in the city – an old sculptor and a stunningly beautiful actress – both of which use their money and influence to manipulate the young Irishmen into searching for an ancient artifact rumored to have the awesome power of Heaven and Hell combined.
Seized by the vicious killings of Jack the Ripper, Victorian London’s, East End is on the brink of ruin. Elizabeth Covington, desperate and failing to follow in her beloved father’s footsteps, risks practicing medicine in the dangerous and neglected Whitechapel District to improve her studies. News of a second brutal murder spreads. Elizabeth crosses paths with a man she believes is the villain, triggering a personal downward spiral taking her to a depth of evil she never knew existed. Only she knows the truth that drives the madness of a murderer.
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