by Lily Markova
My vision is returning to normal. This time, Freya does look frightened, letting go of my hand right away and dashing out of the house. I thumb my fourth finger—I won. I’m still here, but the ring is no more. I am free of my Snow Queen.
Krystle towers over me with her mouth flung open, and I can see a rapacious hope dawning in her eyes. She is thinking the same thing I am. Somehow, some incredible how, Freya Aurore’s alive.
In Immortown, this bodes nothing good for her.
Freya
“You did what, again?”
The table Chase and I are sitting at appears deceptively empty to the waiters, so nobody offers us a menu. The Molko isn’t very popular this evening: The only other visitors are a frazzled-looking teenage girl drinking coffee in the corner behind a folding screen, smoking cigarettes every twenty minutes, and writing something in a green notebook; and, of course, Aria and Yannis sitting opposite each other near the window. Aria looks lovely. She traded in her glasses for contacts, gathered her curls into an intricate chignon, and in this simple but flattering azure dress looks little like the disheveled, “indoor” version of Aria muffled up in her bathrobes. Yannis, too, clearly primped himself up for their rendezvous: His shirt is well-ironed, and even from here, I can smell the cologne. On their table, there is a bottle of red wine, a luxuriant bouquet of irises, and desserts.
“Those are her favorite flowers,” Chase says, taking a moment to scowl at Yannis in between scowling at me. “You signed our death warrant, you know. You gave away our secret, and not to just anyone—to the Skarsens themselves.”
“Was I supposed to just let him be erased?” I say miserably. “Nobody deserves that.”
“You said he’d burned Immer. If erasure is capital punishment for ghosts, then Kai Skarsen deserves it more than anyone else here,” says Chase, giving me another respite from his scowling as Yannis covers Aria’s hand with his; she seems to stiffen somewhat, but doesn’t withdraw her hand. “But then again, I guess it doesn’t matter who knows anymore. We can’t escape anyway. We’ll die here sooner or later, so I’d rather get it over with now, before we’re too old for this place.”
“They only know about me.” I feel like a traitor.
“They’re not that thick. They can sense me, and now that they know it is possible for someone alive to get into their town, it won’t be difficult for them to put one and one together—you and me.”
“Chase, I’m so sorry,” I say, but he only lifts the corner of his mouth sourly. “I had no time to think it through.”
Even if I had had the time, though, I don’t think I would have acted any differently. I wouldn’t be able to watch him be erased limb by limb, knowing it’s in my power to help. I’ve already run away once, leaving someone to die. I won’t make the same mistake twice. And had it been Krystle instead of Kai, I’d still have given her my hand, even though in my book, she deserves to fade into oblivion like nobody else—she could have her “peace,” which she so generously granted my brother.
Yannis and Aria pay their bill and leave the café. We follow. Yannis all but capers around Aria, chattering about his latest novel, and every so often, Aria bursts into rather contagious laughter. Still, Chase and I are silent all the way back.
“Thank you so much for tonight.” Aria smiles when they stop in front of Iver’s house. . .her house. “I had a great time.”
“No, it’s—thank you,” replies Yannis, his cheeks coloring. “Look, Aria, I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a while now. . . . Since we first met, basically, I think. . . . I would have said something sooner, but you see, you had other friends then. . . .”
“Yeah, nice move, moron,” mutters Chase. “Remind her about me, why don’t you, way to go!”
“Yannis, you don’t need to say anything—”
They gaze into each other’s eyes, and Yannis leans in—and doubles over, clutching his stomach.
“Chase!” My voice is much too high-pitched with shock. “Objection!”
“Couldn’t help myself,” he grumbles, rubbing his fist. “Geez, does he carry his stupid books around under his shirt, too, or something?”
Aria supports Yannis’s shoulders to prevent him from toppling over altogether. “Are you okay?”
“Yep, must be the Korean food,” says Yannis, who is internally dying of shame, by all signs.
“Next time, I’m cooking,” Aria answers with a good-natured laugh. “How about something safe?”
Another awkward pause ensues, where they, blushing but smiling, look into each other’s eyes. Aria takes one more step closer to Yannis, so that there are only a few inches between their faces now.
“Chase, we should go,” I say quietly. “Even though they can’t see us, it doesn’t mean it’s okay for us to just stand here and watch them have their first kiss.”
“Aria!” bellows Chase, infuriated even more by my words. “I’m still here! You’re the only reason I haven’t given up trying to come back, and I—” He looks back at me quickly, biting his lip, then shakes his head and adds, in a more resigned tone, “Should have told her back then. . . .”
They can’t hear us, and their lips are about to touch.
“Aria!”
At the last moment, she draws back and gives Yannis a clumsy hug instead. “I, uh—I’ll see you at school.”
“Sure. I’ll—good night,” answers Yannis with a strained smile, avoiding her eyes. He departs, murmuring something about being an idiot.
When he turns the corner and vanishes from sight, Aria sighs, looking embarrassed and crestfallen. “It’s unfair that I still miss you, Chase,” she whispers into the empty street, before vanishing too, inside the number eight.
***
I return to the hotel alone, letting Chase haunt the living town by himself a little longer. It seems to have helped him calm down: When he comes back, he looks much more collected than the mess of a man I left on Caulfield Street.
“So. We’re alive,” Chase says, arching a meaningful eyebrow as he takes a seat beside me on the red sofa. “Shut it!”
He picks up the bell from the coffee table and hurls it in the direction of the mirror, where a candle has just finished writing the letter K. The candle thumps to the floor; Dude slinks up to me and starts tugging at the sleeve of my sweater.
“I said back off!” Chase sends his way such a menacing look that Dude instantly hares off to shiver by the fireplace. “How is it possible that we’re still alive? How did we even get here?”
Perhaps he’s not as collected as I hoped after all.
“Chase, we have figured it all out, haven’t we?” I say cautiously. “When things disappear from Immortown, they in fact travel to Levengleds, and when they come back, they transport whoever touches them to Immortown too. What is it with you? You’re not drunk, are you?”
“No, my head just can’t seem to contain it all,” says Chase, rubbing the dark circles under his eyes.
“Yeah, thinking about this makes my head spin too,” I admit. “As long as we’re touching something, it can’t be erased, can’t take us to Levengleds. Because we’re too ‘heavy,’ as you say. But you were teleported over to Immortown by a book! A book on quantum tunneling, granted, so it must have been a pretty bulky affair, but still. . .”
“I guess the force that draws erased objects back to Immortown is too powerful. Everything must return to its place.”
“Maybe when forgotten ghosts fade away, they simply penetrate into Levengleds, too? What if, for some reason, they can’t go back? Or they just don’t want to. . . .”
Chase raises an eyebrow at me again, this time a skeptical one. “Levengleds would be thrown into disarray if its streets filled with the walking dead, don’t you think?”
“You said it yourself, no one in Levengleds would bat an eye even if their home transformed itself into the Drunk Dead,” I remind him.
“Yes, but going to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and running into your late buddy there is a bit over t
he top. Nobody knows what happens to ghosts when they fade away, Freya, just as the living don’t know what awaits them after death. No one bothers to return to write a blog post about it. Most likely, you just cease to exist.”
I have so many questions that Chase is probably going to start charging for his ghostology tutoring services soon. “But why don’t human ghosts themselves ever get erased and thrown out into Levengleds, like buildings and. . .rings?”
“That happens too—rarely, but it does. And no, they don’t come back, even if their erasure wasn’t collateral. I highly doubt they make it to Levengleds. None of us can ever be sure that he—or she—is completely safe.”
“Us?”
“Them. Us. What does it matter now? You and I too will become ghosts soon. We can’t go back to Levengleds the same way we got here, can we? Shame.”
Chase doesn’t really sound upset; on the contrary, he seems rather smug about something. I expected Aria’s confession to have distressed rather than gratified him. Yes, maybe it’s natural that he should be relieved Aria hasn’t forgotten all about him either, but the two of them still can’t be together. How can he be so fine with knowing this hurts her just as much as it hurts him?
No, there must be some way for us to go home. Erased objects return here because, unlike with trapped souls, Immortown is where they truly belong. . . . If only there were something in Immortown that would also belong to Levengleds, to the living world, as Chase and I do. . . .
Chase stretches, a casual movement that somehow ends in one of his arms’ wrapping, as if accidentally, around my shoulders. Slowly, I turn to face him fully—to fully convey my puzzlement at this suspicious development—but instead of retracting, the offending arm pulls me in abruptly so that I’m practically half lying on top of him, and he kisses me.
“What the hell are you doing?” I scramble off the bastard, pausing only long enough to administer such a head-turning slap to his brazen face that my palm nearly ignites. Generally, I’m against needless violence and not a fan of the cliché reaction that is hitting a guy for kissing you out of nowhere, but after—
“After what Aria said? After you couldn’t let her go, couldn’t let her move on?”
“Just wanted to make sure there’s nothing inconvenient going on between us,” says Chase, grinning, as he sinks lower into the cushions with an air of such nauseating complacency that I consider sacrificing my other hand in the name of needless violence.
“What is it with—you!” My eyes fall upon the crooked K Dude has traced on the mirror, and I leap out of the seat, my newfound streak of aggression nagging me to outright murder.
“What have you done to Chase?”
“Oh, don’t yell. . . .”
Chase rolls his eyes, and for a moment his sprawled body appears double. Then, Kai steps aside, straightening up and dusting himself down, the corners of his lips—ugh, I can’t even stand the sight of them—tipping lower than ever in disgust, while Chase’s head lolls back unconsciously against the armrest.
“He’s asleep, relax,” says Kai with another, dismissive eye-roll. “He won’t wake up for a while, though—got to recover the strength I borrowed from him. I knew I could do it!” he adds, brightening up again, to my annoyance—but at least, in this moment of pure self-satisfaction, he does look and sound a lot like India, which, counter-intuitively, makes him seem a bit less sinister than usual.
“Oh God, Kai, what do you want this time?” Knowing better than to trust a Skarsen to tell the truth, I check Chase’s pulse. Alive.
“I came to thank you,” says Kai, far from sounding grateful—if anything, his matter-of-fact tone suggests I’m slow-witted for not having worked out why he’s here on my own. To further drive home just how appreciative he is, he lights up a cigarette, too, the scumbag.
I wave a hand to disperse the smoke stinging my eyes. “Oh, here to thank me, are you? There are special words for that, you know: ‘thank’ and ‘you.’ And the best part is, to say them, you don’t even have to go around possessing friends of someone who saved you from evaporation.”
“I needed to know if you and Chase could go back home. You wouldn’t exactly be eager to spill it out to me, would you? And you,” he says over his shoulder, “you get in my way one more time, and I’ll make you regret it so, so much, is that clear?”
A patch of air in front of the mirror trembles, and Dude scampers off up the stairs.
“Leave Dude alone! What is wrong with you?” I’m fuming so hard by now I don’t even care if the local tyrant decides to personally execute me for back talk.
“Dude? What—? Never mind. Get your coat, it’s chilly outside.”
I shake my head. “Good thing I’m not going anywhere.”
“Wrong. We’re going for a walk.”
I shake my head again, turning away and intending to ignore him for the rest of my life, however short that may be. “For the last time, I’m not going anywhere with you. I don’t have a death wish, unlike you all.”
“Come on, Freya,” he says quietly. His tone is different, funny now, private—as though some unnatural edge that I didn’t notice was there has been removed from it, as though we’d both known all our bickering was only pretend but he were tired of it now—playtime’s up, let’s talk business. “I need to tell you something,” he says, “and what I don’t need is any extra ears—”
“The idea of you sprouting extra ears is very enticing,” I interrupt quickly, chuckling at the mental image against my better judgement. There’s no way I’m making it out alive from this conversation.
“—any extra ears hearing it,” he finishes, sounding half annoyed, half, I could swear, amused. “Enticing,” he mimics. “Perv.”
A rather hysterical laugh bursts from me before I can stop it. Hearing the word “perv” out of Kai Skarsen’s normally villainous mouth is not something I could have ever expected, and unexpected is the component that makes hilarious things so hilarious, after all.
“Fine,” I say grudgingly.
If he were planning to kill me, he’d probably have done it by now. Maybe he has some news about Iver. I cram a cushion under Chase’s still-unresponsive head, throw a blanket over him, grab my coat, and give Kai a tired nod. The lightened mood between us seems to be dispelled again, and I can feel some of the previous tension resurface as we leave the hotel, neither saying another word.
While we walk on like this in the dark and in silence, I think I might sink into depression or lose my mind.
At last, Kai stops and sits down on the park bench where I once met Tom Lezero, and picks up a rain-soaked Nausea.
I know now that the world exists, and it makes no difference to me, I recall the approximate essence of a quote from the book.
“Huh, always knows how to please me, that Tom,” he says with a wry little smirk.
I face away from him to look out on the matte surface of the pond illuminated greenly by the streetlamps, which make the shiverless blue water lilies seem as though they themselves are aglow.
“What is it you wanted to tell me?”
“It’s about my family.”
“I don’t care,” I say, closing my eyes in exasperation for a moment. “I only care about my family. My brother, who doesn’t want to be found. . .”
. . .and my mother, who wants to find me—but it’s not something Kai needs to know. With all this mayhem, I forgot to call her. Phone her. Damn it.
“I need you to understand, Freya.”
Even though I suspect it would cause him to spontaneously combust if he ever said “please,” Kai does sound as though he is asking rather than demanding for once, so I give in. “Well, since I’ve already come all this way. . .shoot.”
“It all starts with my sister. India has always been very impulsive—”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I mutter, low enough that he can’t hear, as my hand flies instinctively to my throat, which still remembers the touch of steel.
“—and I faile
d to protect her from herself. I was too busy working; I thought I’d found mine in drawing, and so I immersed myself in that completely. Over and over again, I flung myself at what felt like a stone wall in attempts to break my way through to a vague dream I wasn’t even sure was behind that damn wall. I was afraid that if I let myself get distracted, I would die in the crisp wrapping all of our potentials come in, never opening it, never learning what was inside. I fenced myself in, shutting India out, shutting out everyone I cared about, one moment feeling as if my drawings were the only thing that mattered, the next realizing they meant absolutely nothing.”
I’m no stranger to such thrashing around. Before Iver’s death, I didn’t know anything more agonizing than the feeling I’d get after I played a part, recited half a thousand lines, and said nothing with them; the feeling that I had put my entire self into something, and nobody really needed it.
“She needed my support, and I wasn’t there,” continues Kai. “Our parents fought a lot. We hoped that moving to Immer would change things somehow, but just a month later, they got into such an ugly shouting match that India lost it and stabbed herself with a kitchen knife. I think she only meant to get their attention. . . .”
India told me she’d wanted to die, but I don’t interrupt. I know how it feels to realize that someone could have the same blood as yours powering their heart, could look at the world through eyes the same color as yours, and yet see that world in such a different light, yet loathe the feeling of that blood coursing through their veins. I know what it feels like, to find out that someone you love more than anyone else had been in that much pain and instead of letting it show, instead of giving you a chance to try and save them, chose to end their own life, chose to ignore that theirs wasn’t the only life they would be ending. I hope Kai’ll never know.