by A. R. Kahler
Now it was my turn to shrug.
“I guess I’m just interested in knowing more about you. Seeing as, you know, you’re going to take over my body when this is over with.”
“I think you’ve already proven that I’m not taking over your body anytime soon.”
But wasn’t she? Or was she just not trying as hard as she should have been? It felt like sharing a studio apartment with a stranger. Only . . . that wasn’t the right analogy either. Because the more I thought about it, the more this particular space seemed built for two.
“You know what I mean. You’ve been watching me forever. I’ve known you a few days. We have to save the world together. So, I guess I figure we have catching up to do. You know . . . goals, dreams, boyfriends. Girlfriends?”
She paused.
“You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”
“Who?”
“Don’t play stupid. It doesn’t suit you. Mimir. That’s how you survived the fall. He found you. I should have known.” She rounded on me. “What did he show you?”
“Nothing.”
“You can’t lie to me, Shadechild. What did he show you?” She stepped forward, and I was acutely aware that of the two of us, she was the one who knew how to use a weapon.
“Things!” I said. I forced my voice down. “He said I needed to understand you so we could work together. That’s it. He showed me a few things to prove it.”
There was an anger in her violet eyes I hadn’t expected. But I knew that look well. It wasn’t just hatred; it was fueled by hurt.
“He had no right.”
“And you had a right to watch me?”
“To help you.”
“Well, maybe I can help you.”
She laughed bitterly. “Can you raise the dead?”
“No. But I can help you avenge him.”
For a moment she just stood there, looking me up and down. Assessing.
“No one can avenge Bragi’s death. He is gone, and there is no use mourning his loss. He invited it,” she said. I could tell she didn’t fully mean it. Especially since we both knew, if she hadn’t met him, he never would have been placed on the offering block. “But perhaps, in finding your lover, we can save you the same fate.” Then she turned and continued walking.
I didn’t dispute her word choice this time. Chris and I might not have had the same length of connection that Freyja had known, but I was starting to realize that I wanted to.
I wanted him to become someone I didn’t want to lose. Which meant I had to find him first. And somehow kill the god that wanted his life.
“Wait,” I said, the thought stalling me in my tracks.
“What?”
“Down here, we’re separate. I mean, you aren’t in my head or body or whatever.”
“And?”
“Is the same true for Chris?”
“I would imagine so.”
“So they’re separate. Him, and the god?”
She noticed my train of thought.
“Perhaps.”
“So we can kill him. Here. Without touching Chris.”
She smiled. I couldn’t tell if it was pleasure or bloodlust, and this time I didn’t care to make the distinction.
“Perhaps you have found a way to avenge Bragi after all,” she said.
“I want to do it.”
“What?”
“The god. I want to be the one who kills him.”
“You are a mortal girl with no training,” she said. “And he is a godchild who has been taught to fight from the day he was born. What chance do you have?”
“He’s the reason we’re down here. He’s the reason Chris resorted to . . . to this. I want to be the one to kill him.”
“I will not agree to such a thing,” Freyja said. She had to raise her voice; the roar of water was louder, and the air was damp. “I won’t risk everything for your pride.”
My heart fell.
“But,” she continued, “if the opportunity arises, I will indeed let you be the one to strike the killing blow.”
“Thank you.”
“And here I thought you’d lost the taste of blood after your ex.”
If it wasn’t for Chris’s image in my head, I would have stopped cold. Because at her words, I swear I heard Brad’s laugh echoing through the falls.
• • •
“This is it!” Freyja yelled out. The roar of water was nearly deafening here. It wasn’t my imagination, either—there actually was a roar coming from the falls that tumbled into and out of the shadow, tumbling against nothing, save for itself. A roar like guttural anger. A roar laced with screams.
I didn’t know what I expected when we neared the falls. Maybe something like Niagara, or some dark rain forest pit. After a few more minutes of walking through a low tangle of roots that barely passed over my head, the roots above opened up and we stood on a ledge that jutted from them like an offering tray. And I realized we were far, far away from the bottom. I mean, I heard crashing water—surely that meant that somewhere, farther down in the shadows, there was a bottom. Right? The water cascaded down in front of us, a rushing, frothing spray that seemed to glimmer and roil. I couldn’t see through to the other side. I looked closer.
Scratch that. I didn’t want to see through to the other side.
What I did make out was enough. There was no mistaking the shapes twisting and screaming through the water as they fell. Bodies. Thousands of them. Tumbling through the darkness with naked flesh and muffled agony.
“You can’t be serious,” I muttered. If the Underworld was what you made of it, who had made this? It seemed straight out of some Greek punishment. Here was Styx, carrying the damned through Hades.
“Everyone’s hell is different!” Freyja yelled. She stood at my side, staring at the water with contempt. And fear. “But some ideas take hold in humanity, and they cut deeper fissures in the fabric of this place. Ideas become permanent. Myths become reality.”
“And these people . . .”
“Are spending eternity as they expected to. We cannot change their fate.”
I watched a young girl tumble past me, her skin so pale, it was almost translucent.
“Is Chris in there?”
“No. He is deeper. And this will take us there faster than walking.”
“You can’t be serious,” I repeated. My brain was too far gone to be witty. So many people. So much pain . . . it seemed to call out, to resonate.
“I am,” Freyja said, looking to me. “Remember, you’re the one who wanted to save him.” She smiled. It looked forced. “I assume you saw my training. If you learned one thing, let it be this: Stay focused on your goal. Focus on that, and nothing else. Do not be distracted. Do not be waylaid. Myth is filled with men and women who lost sight of their goals and thus perished. Think of Chris. Think of his return. Hold this above all things.”
I opened my mouth to say I was focused. Find Chris; kill the bastard responsible for this.
Then she shoved me off the ledge.
My heart fell into my throat as I tumbled through the air. As I hit the water, as my body went numb. As something grabbed my ankle and pulled me into the torrent, and the rest of the world vanished to water and memory.
“You look beautiful.”
“Thanks,” I replied. Gods, what was wrong with me? That he could say that and I’d feel my chest rip and tighten, half contented, half terrified. Because I knew what it meant. “Beautiful” was a contract. An obligation as well as an entitlement. “You look . . . handsome.”
He laughed and sidled in closer. We were at his place, in the living room, and his parents had given us those annoying looks parents do when they “give you some room” while clearly insinuating that they’ll have an ear to the wall in case any funny business happens. It made my skin crawl.
But I was also grateful, because it meant he couldn’t try anything.
Except for this. Except for leaning in just a little bit closer, his arm draped over the sofa
behind me like he was blocking off an emergency exit. One leg was on the coffee table, and he was so close, I could smell his breath. My heart still hammered. Even though he was being “perfectly respectable” and not looking at anything but the TV. Brad knew I was uncomfortable with intimacy. And he was okay with that.
Which should have made me more comfortable with his brand of closeness.
In truth, it just set me on edge.
The movie was a blur on the television. How was I supposed to focus on the screen when he was so close? When I knew what the movies wanted me to do—to lean in and snuggle against him and wince away at all the scary parts, bury my head against his chest so he could laugh and rustle my hair and use that as an excuse to touch me? When in truth, I wasn’t scared of the shitty slasher movie. I was scared of the boy I was supposed to be dating, which was beyond stupid, since he had literally never done anything to warrant it.
My mother told me to honor my intuition.
My intuition was shit.
“You’re tense,” he muttered.
“Scary movies do that,” I lied.
He chuckled.
“Want a massage? Or we can watch a chick flick—”
My heart stopped with the idea of a massage. “No. This is fine.” My voice squeaked. Damn it. It wasn’t for the reason he probably thought.
The last thing I needed was an “emotional” movie around him. Because then he’d really think I was broken when I didn’t cry at the right parts. Or he’d want me to melt against him once the sappiness kicked into gear. To be like a normal girl.
That was the trouble. I never reacted properly. Not to him. Not to movies. Not to friends. Not to life. It was like I was playing the wrong role, placed in the wrong body. I just never seemed to fit.
“Well, just let me know,” he said. He leaned in a little closer.
“Brad . . . ,” I began, my words edging on warning.
“I’m not going to do anything. Trust me.”
I couldn’t tell if it was a plea or a demand. It didn’t matter. It didn’t. I should have wanted to. But I couldn’t. Because I felt so screwed up, I couldn’t imagine any relationship with me ending in anything other than disaster.
He reached over with his free hand, and I had a terrible moment of thinking he was going to put a hand on my leg, but he only grabbed the popcorn from the coffee table in front of me and placed the bowl in my lap.
Blink. Shift.
“So you don’t date? Like, ever?” Elisa asked, grabbing some popcorn from the bowl on my lap. She lay sprawled on my bed beside me, her limbs draped over or next to mine, her pajamas smelling of lavender and detergent. Our whole room smelled like that, since we’d just done laundry together.
“Nope,” I replied. I didn’t want to admit that the slasher film we were settled in to watch was one I’d already seen. Because then she’d ask who I saw it with, and that wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have with a girl I’d only known a week.
Though, after a week of living together and having a dozen different Islington “firsts”—first visit to the Dark Note, first all-night movie binge, first time having her model for a sketch before we both burst out laughing—she knew me better than anyone back home.
“What about your student mentor, Ethan?”
“Ethan? No. Boy’s gay.”
“Could be bi.”
I laughed. “Like you?”
She threw a kernel at me.
“What, you want me to prove it?”
She leaned over and puckered her lips. I giggled and pushed her back.
“If we make out, we can’t be roommates! You read the rules.”
She sighed dramatically and leaned back. I continued.
“No one in my school was out about being bi. And the one gay kid I knew kept it quiet.”
She sighed and leaned back.
“Bi erasure at its worst,” she said. “But yeah, I had a girlfriend last year. We split when I found out I got in to Islington.”
“For how long?”
“A few months. It got pretty serious.”
“And now you only talk about boys,” I ventured.
“Because there are male dancers here and holy shit, have you even seen how flexible Kyle is?”
“And we’re sure he’s straight?”
“Mostly. Honestly, I don’t really care if he also likes boys. Just so long as he likes me. Which he does. Because I have first-hand experience regarding his flexibility.”
She smiled and stared off dreamily. I started to laugh.
“You move fast.”
She shrugged. “Love is a game and I plan on winning. Which is why I still think you should—”
“Nope.”
“Not even—”
“Especially not.”
“And you’ve never—”
I silenced her with a look. She knew that look. I was pretty certain all girls knew that look.
“Oh.”
That was all she said. And as she leaned against me and went back to snuggling me, I knew that was all she’d ever say. It was how I knew I was safe with her, how I knew that all this was okay. The closeness—physically and emotionally—didn’t feel like a danger. She’d never press too hard or demand too much. Probably because she had been in my shoes too.
Up until the point they’d been coated in blood.
For the first time in my life, I actually felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. Being who I was supposed to be. And as I held her closer and listened to the softness of her breathing and closed my eyes to ignore the movie I hated because of Brad, I gave my thanks. Because life was finally throwing me a bone.
Things were finally going right.
Blink.
“Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse,” Ethan said.
He slouched against me in the hall in the visual arts building. There was maybe an hour until sign-in, and there were a dozen places we could have been hanging out. But we were there, in the arts hallway, sitting on top of our coats and staring at a student’s interpretation of an Escher painting—made of toothpicks.
He wasn’t talking about the art, or the cold hall and the snow drifting outside.
“Boys suck,” I said.
“Yes, but this one sucked so well.”
I laughed so hard, I started to tear up.
When I finally got the laughter under control, I squeezed him closer. “I thought I was supposed to be the one comforting you.”
“You are. You’re here. That’s all I need.”
“No. You need a boyfriend who doesn’t take you for granted.”
“I thought you’d stand strongly in the ‘you don’t need a boyfriend’ camp.”
“You don’t. But when do you have one, he better damn well be worth it.”
Ethan sniffed and buried his head against my scarf.
“He could have at least told me.”
“What? That he was going to cheat on you with a freshman flautist boy? Fuck that.”
“It wouldn’t have been cheating if he told me.”
“Now you’re just defending him.”
“I’m trying not to feel like shit. And if I make it my fault, I can hate myself a little bit less for ever trusting him.”
His words hit deep. For a moment I couldn’t say anything. Could only sit there and try to force out Brad’s face. His scent. His hands on my hips and the cold wall against my back. Can you ever forgive yourself for trusting him? For ignoring your instincts? But I pushed it away. Down. This was about Ethan and his stupid ex, Stephen.
“New rule,” I said.
“Celibacy?”
“We aren’t talking about me,” I said. “No. No more dating theater kids. They’re trouble.”
“Too much drama.”
“Badum-cha.”
He sighed.
“I’m starting to think you’re right.”
“Of course I am.”
“No,” he said, pushing himself to sitting so he could lo
ok in my eyes. “About dating. About boys in general. It’s too much trouble and you just get hurt.”
I shrugged and looked away. I’d never told him about Brad. But my strict aversion to dating was enough to fill in the blanks.
“Next year will be different,” I said. I didn’t know who I was trying to convince. “We’ll be older and wiser, and everyone knows seniors get more action than the rest of the school combined.”
“I don’t care. I’m swearing off men. You’re all I need.”
He wrapped himself around me.
“I love you, Kaira,” he said.
Brad had said that to me once. After a few weeks of dating. After a dinner at our one nice restaurant in town.
I’d told him thanks. Because I didn’t like lying. To anyone other than myself, at least.
“I love you too,” I replied now, and, closing my eyes, kissed him on top of his head.
Shift.
“And in the end,” the voice said, “your love will spell his death.”
His voice sent chills down my spine. I knew it. I remembered it. How could I forget it?
I tried to make him out in the gray, but there was nothing there. Nothing but cold and shadows and the rushing water. Or perhaps there was something, in the corner of my vision, like a watermark. An inverted stain, a lightening of the dark. I couldn’t make him out, but he scared me. He scared me more than Brad or Freyja or death ever could.
“You think you have come so far,” he said “You think you have learned. How to love. How to move on. And it all amounts to nothing. Because in the end, I will kill them. Everyone you have ever loved. They will all die at my hands. And I will let you watch.”
I felt him sweep his hand, felt the gray world ripple, and then I was back at Islington. Only it wasn’t the Islington I’d left.
I couldn’t fight the scream as I ran over to Elisa, who was sprawled on a bench with an arm over her head like she was posing for some dramatic painting. Only her other arm was missing, her legs bent at odd angles, and I could tell from the way her hair fell that part of her skull was collapsed.
“Elisa, no,” I choked. Tears clouded my eyes and I wiped them away.
“There is no fighting it,” the shadow whispered behind me. Not vengeful. Pleased. “This is what the gods will.”