He did not find out until they stopped, just stopped in the snow on the side of the road. It would get bitterly cold in the car if they stayed there, cold enough that even Sebastian, who took enough life to be warm sometimes, could be in danger of freezing. Lenny was on the verge of pointing that out – for himself, he would not have dared, but Sebastian could be harmed as well, or at the very least could be extremely uncomfortable.
But Sebastian spoke first.
“You told me you didn’t have anyone,” he said abruptly. “You said you lived alone, your progenitor died.”
Lenny swallowed and nodded warily. “Yeah,” he agreed.
“When?”
“When…?”
“When did she die? You did say ‘she’, right?”
Lenny nodded again, but stayed silent. He mistrusted this line of conversation. Sebastian could not possibly have anything good to say about Kate.
“Blonde, short,” Sebastian pressed. “Really, really short. I see her sometimes, sort of out of the corner of my eye, but not when I actually look. Always when you’re messing with that ring. You married her, I guess.”
Lenny’s hand curled into an involuntary fist as he pressed his ring into his thigh.
“See, you know what I’m talking about. She died at the end of the war, didn’t she? World War Two. And you don’t know how it happened.”
Lenny choked.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Look, um, I don’t know how to, uh… Do you want to know?”
In all likelihood, anything Sebastian had to say would be a lie. Lenny knew that. Sebastian would have said anything to keep his edge, his advantage, and though Lenny had vowed repeatedly to stay, there was no telling what minor coincidence could have convinced him that Lenny meant to run.
But Sebastian knew when Kate had died, and that Lenny had not been with her. He might know more. It had been years – fifty-six years, the last time Lenny had really been aware of the date – but he did not feel any closer to getting past her than he had ever been.
“How would you have found out?” Lenny asked, controlling his voice as well as he could. “Have you b-been asking about me?”
The other possibility was that Sebastian had been picking Lenny’s brain. There was no guarantee Lenny would remember something like that, not if Sebastian didn’t want him to, but if Sebastian wasn’t willing to own up to clandestine questioning, Lenny was not going to push him.
“And wait. Wait, wh-what do you mean, you’ve seen her? How?”
Sebastian frowned. “I’ve seen her, okay? I’m not blind, you know.”
“How?”
“With my eyes, dumbass. Anyway, I was asking about Leland. He just took the hell off, so it gave me some time to find out what he’d been up to. Thought it might help. Anyway, I found out he was staying with a friend in Bangor, someone who knew him back then. During the war. They were spies together or something. I was just asking about him, I swear. I mean, until I got to asking about other things.”
Sebastian rummaged through his pockets and handed Lenny a folded sheet of glossy paper. Lenny took it, unfolding it gingerly, and at first, he was not sure what he was seeing. The photograph had not been developed properly, given the subject matter, and the image looked like a double exposure. He had expected that, though. It was the reason he had nearly always been absent for school photos, despite years of berating from numerous principals.
What surprised him most were the people.
He recognized Kate immediately, despite the blurry, ethereal quality of her image and the cropped, mannish haircut he had never seen on her before. Around her were a number of men, all of them towering over her miniscule frame, barely five feet tall even in her stacked-heel boots. They all were walking down a street lined with gnarled trees, talking to one another, unaware of the photographer. Kate’s face had long ago been circled in red wax pencil that had mostly worn off over years.
Everyone in the photograph wore identical uniforms – tall boots, long coat, double-lightning bolt insignia at the collar, death’s head at the cap. A stark, black swastika at the arm.
Everyone. Even Kate.
Sebastian could have fabricated a story easily, but fabricating a photograph was harder. Seeing that face again was a pleasant pain – Lenny had no photographs, not after the fire in ’65 – but he squeezed his eyes shut against it as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
He had been stupid, once. Naïve and already old enough to know better. He had been stupid, and she had confronted him about it. He still did not like to remember that, how he had been stupid, and then he had been stubborn, and he had been the reason Kate had left. He had always thought she would come back eventually, once events proved him right, but events proved him horribly wrong, and she was gone, and he had never had the chance to apologize. He knew she had friends on the Continent, and he had envisioned her staying with them, the people she had known before she knew him. He had not envisioned her wearing the insignia of the SS, marching through Berlin with the minions of Hitler. The image was wrong.
A hand barely brushed his shoulder, and his eyes snapped open.
“Hugo. Hugo, stop that. Are you okay?” It was Sebastian, not the priest, and his voice was uncharacteristically nervous.
Lenny blinked at the ice riming the inside of the windshield. Sebastian’s breath smoked in the frigid air, and his skin cracked. A trickle of dark blood oozed out and froze. He hurried to crank the heater up, but the vents warmed the car only slowly. Outside the car, a shade moved, blonde and black, marred with a splash of angry crimson. It faded as the heater did its work.
“She wouldn’t,” Lenny managed. But he couldn’t be sure. She had regained her choice, her free will, after decades of struggle, though he had never known whether he had given it back to her or merely motivated her to reach for it. Then he had been stupid, had broken her faith. Enough to make her let go again? Enough to make her choose to fight for a despotic regime? No.
Sebastian only shrugged. “I don’t know what she would or wouldn’t. Anyway, this guy was supposed to be taking her out. Got delayed when they found out why that would be harder than they’d thought. But by the time he got there, someone had already gotten her. Said he was complaining about it to Leland later, turns out Leland did it. He was supposed to be picking up some information, but his contact never showed up, and she did. So he killed her.”
“Don’t lie to me. Don’t lie to me, Sebastian. I said I’d stay, but if you t-try to use Kate against me…”
“I’m not. I’m not a liar. Have I ever lied to you?”
Lenny frowned. “No.” Not that he could remember, though he was aware that his memory was not a good indication of actual events.
They sat in silence for a while, until Sebastian put the car back in gear. He seemed to have some difficulty; it was possible the ice was interfering with something. He kept his foot on the brake, though, and stared straight ahead.
“What are you going to do?”
Lenny’s eyes narrowed. “Was there something p-particular you were hoping I’d d-do?”
Sebastian shrugged. “I was trying to help. I saw something that looked familiar and thought you might want to know about it.” That sounded true. “Keep in mind that when it all started, nobody really knew what all was going on over there. There were plenty of people in those uniforms who had no idea what was going on. I can’t see you caring that much about someone who would know and still go along with it.”
That sounded true, as well, or at least earnest, though the thought of Sebastian making an attempt at comfort was almost as wrong as the idea of Kate wearing a swastika.
The car rolled back onto the highway, swirling eddies of snow in its wake.
“Thanks,” Lenny whispered, mechanical.
“Think about it,” Sebastian replied. Then his tongue flicked over his lips in an anxious gesture. “Just don’t change,” he amended. “Don’t know what I’d do with you if you let it change you. Damn.”
“You’re going to kill him, aren’t you?” he heard himself ask.
“Been thinking about it. He ticks me off. I’m getting tired of this game.”
“’Kay,” Lenny murmured, unable to make himself care. “Just give me some warning so I can g-get out of the way.”
* * *
KIM WAS NOT aware of the exact moment things changed. She thought they had probably been changing gradually over several years, tiny differences building up slowly like the thick callus her bronze anklet had left on the skin beneath it. She did not know whether magic could atrophy, but if it could, hers was positively bedridden. It had burned hot inside her, at first, but the binding in the anklet suffocated it until it was only an ember, and all she had left were her books.
She could feel Lenny somewhere, vaguely; that magic was indelible. But like the phantom pains of an amputee, the sensation gradually shifted from an awareness of a friend in need to an illusion of something that wasn’t there. She grew used to it, and it became unreal, something she ignored when she could, because she doubted she would ever be allowed to go. Even if she did go, nobbled as she was, she could only go to die.
So she stayed with the Votadini, acting as ambassador, until they realized she was barely even a wizard anymore and kicked her out. She went home to find that she had been replaced by a distant cousin, one who could be trusted to lead the family once her mother and grandfather were both out of the picture. That did not bother her as much as she had expected it would. She was a researcher, an academic, not a politician, and part of her was perfectly happy to know she could stay that way. Besides, keeping her place in line would only be possible if she were disconnected from Lenny, and that would only happen if he died. It seemed like a pretty fair deal – she got to stay out of the mayhem of wizard politics indefinitely, and no one got killed.
She asked a few times if she could organize an expedition, once the problems abroad had subsided. There was no immediate danger from the Votadini, but Sebastian Duran remained a monster, and someone ought to take care of him. She asked and was refused, asked and was refused, until she simply stopped asking. Because Lenny was a friend, because she had felt his heart and knew he was a good man, she never forgot. But because she was human, and humans grow and change, she moved on.
* * *
THE TOWN FELT tiny, despite being larger than some of the places they had passed through. Sebastian found a motel and paid in cash he had lifted from a corpse at one of their previous stops. Two rooms, this time. Lenny took the key Sebastian handed him and drifted up the eye-wrenchingly yellow stairs to sit alone in the room above the bowling alley someone had inexplicably attached to the motel. It was either too late at night or too early in the morning for the racket that would inevitably rise from the lanes later, and he did not look forward to the noise, but the silence was almost disconcerting. He had become used to someone else being there, even someone he feared. The room seemed very large and very empty.
He sat on the edge of the bed with the curtains drawn and stared at the photograph until his eyes ached and the image crawled and writhed across the paper. The sun came up and still he sat. He was peripherally aware of Sebastian leaving and entertained a guilty hope that, when he came back, it would all be over. But Sebastian came back and left again, came back and left, just like always before, except that this time, he let Lenny stay out of it.
After a day, Lenny’s throat burned. The sun set, and there came a soft rapping at his door. He tried to ignore it, but his body ignored him, and he got up to answer against his will. Sebastian and the priest both stood there quietly, occupying the same space in a way that made Lenny dizzy.
“Shouldn’t have said anything, should I?” Sebastian asked with a hint of remorse, as the priest whispered “You’ll find a way past this.”
“Probably not,” Lenny answered them both.
Sebastian tried to push past him into the room, but the doorway pulled him up short. He frowned and put up a hand, unable to pass through, then turned on Lenny with incredulity.
“What did you do?” he demanded.
Lenny shrugged.
“Are you living here now, or something? Are you planning on staying here? How did you get a threshold up?”
Lenny shrugged again. “D-didn’t mean to.” It was the simple truth; he did not plan on staying, just could not imagine what could possibly come next. Nothing, he realized. In his head, nothing came next. The entirety of his existence had condensed into the present, and neither the future nor the past meant anything. The motel room was as home as he was going to get, the closest thing he had to a personal space, and part of him could not fathom the concept of leaving. He could sit on the end of the bed until his brain shut down, maybe longer than that. Maybe he could stay until he withered away, and no one would be the wiser.
The priest looked concerned, as though he understood or at least suspected what had happened. Lenny found it an irritating reminder of the job he was not performing, and he made a point of seeing with his eyes instead. Sebastian looked furious. That was better. That generated no guilt.
“You said you wouldn’t go,” Sebastian hissed. He slammed a fist against the empty air above Lenny’s head, bouncing off the protective barrier. “You are so mistaken if you think you can hide from me in there. I will burn you out of there if I have to. This is all for you, you ungrateful swine!”
The air flashed so cold, the window cracked, and without pausing to think, Lenny stepped out into the snow, grabbed Sebastian’s collar, and dragged him down to look him in the eye.
“Don’t ever claim to kill for my sake,” he said, voice calm. “I’m not to blame for your actions. Don’t threaten me and expect gratitude. Don’t ever talk to me about Kate again. You are not better than Leland. He’s done nothing to me that you haven’t done, too. If you want to do something for me, stop making ghosts. I’m not your cleanup crew. And don’t ever pretend that you give a damn about me. If I stay, it will never be because you deserve it.”
Sebastian swatted Lenny’s hand away and stumbled back against the railing, confused and outraged. Near his collar, the flesh of his throat was reddening with frostbite. He bared his teeth in a snarl and surged forward to slam Lenny into the wall.
Lenny weathered it with cool apathy until his blood caught fire and his muscles clenched, bones ablaze, and Sebastian left him there with his agony.
They fell into routine again. Sebastian came and went, came and went, came back once or twice stained with a fresh death. Lenny stayed inside and avoided Sebastian as often as he was able. Sometimes, he regretted his outburst, mostly because it had not made any real difference. Sebastian was angry with him, of course, occasionally seemed wary, no longer made any attempt at conversation, but people died, and Lenny did not dare try to leave, and Sebastian did not let him.
A few times, Sebastian tried to get things back to the way they had been. He stuffed Lenny into the car, and Lenny sat silent and sullen in the passenger seat as they drove into the next town. Sebastian pointed out the funeral of a local high school student, leaned over and grinned in Lenny’s face.
<
br /> “Just for you,” he said.
Lenny did not respond. He watched a boy hurry out of the funeral parlor, red in the face and sucking at an inhaler as though afraid his lungs were about to collapse. The boy stopped suddenly, doubled over with his hands on his knees, obviously fighting nausea. Lenny took a map from the glove compartment and smoothed it out in front of him; he did not want to have to look at a mourner.
But Sebastian grinned all the wider and got out of the car to make some inane exchange with the boy, something about directions to Colorado Springs. Lenny squeezed his eyes shut and folded the map away. He caught the message and understood.
“Don’t,” he said quietly, when Sebastian had ducked back into the car. “No more children.”
Sebastian twisted in his seat with an expression of mock affront. “I would never touch a child,” he swore with weird, sing-song vehemence. “But they’re not children once they hit puberty.”
“I hate you,” Lenny whispered.
After a week, Lenny took off his wedding band and started to keep it in his jeans pocket instead of on his finger. He kept the folded photograph with it. He did not let himself snap, instead waiting until he was certain Sebastian was gone to sneak out and find what he could. He kept himself going, but only barely, because anything more would attract attention, and though he half-fantasized about fading away in the musty motel room, he did not feel like being run through with something sharp.
Sebastian had no such scruples.
It was the eighteenth of December, 2003 – Lenny had, just for once, taken a newspaper from the motel lobby – when Sebastian strolled through the parking lot, whistling cheerfully and drenched in blood. Lenny rushed him inside before someone could see.
“What do you think you’re d-doing?” he demanded, dampening a towel in the bathroom’s rust-stained sink.
“Sending a message,” Sebastian replied. “Reaching a climax. I’m not chasing the sorry bastard any further than this. I’m tired. Thinking about going to ground. It’s got to be pretty safe, by now. If the wizards were going to catch up, they would have done it years ago. So I hurt him the best I can, then kill him. Then we’re done.”
Paranormal After Dark: 20 Paranormal Tales of Demons, Shifters, Werewolves, Vampires, Fae, Witches, Magics, Ghosts and More Page 411