Lord of the Last Heartbeat

by May Peterson

  I couldn’t save them. Looking into the faces of their deaths was the least I could do.

  This one looked about seventeen. Plain worker’s clothes, threadbare at the elbows and knees. Wide mouth, sandy hair, eyes slightly puffy from trauma. He was probably homeless; Vermagna’s streets were filled with bedraggled war survivors. Thirst would have led him to my gate, the clear stream flowing down the hills.

  But thirst wasn’t what had killed him. That had been my wife. Her calling card was the gash where the kid’s heart once was, an exit wound delicately offset by a sprinkle of ice shards. Some crystals remained unmelted, like fine snow, on the torn fabric of his shirt.

  “He must have jumped the gate.” Rosemary was shaking her head. “I can’t believe anyone in this city is still brave enough to try.”

  I sucked on the cigarillo, killing the blood scent. “How long do we have?”

  We both glanced at the front door, where the answer was plain in the flurries of snowflakes painting the steps. We never had more than minutes, but now the message was clear: hurry the fuck up.

  My wife, Lady Eirlys Bedefyr, never lingered to loom victoriously over her victims. I didn’t know if she considered whether they deserved to die, if she was even able to care. She was locked in her own corridor of hell, just as I was, carrying out our allotted tasks. I could only reason that it was her curse that compelled her supernaturally to murder, against her true wishes, and that she would stop if she could. But her winter raged on, and the ice kept spreading.

  The strangers weren’t her real prey, anyway.

  I snuffed the cigarillo out on my wrist, picking up our new guest. “Well. Better do this thing.” The boy was so light in my arms that he may not have been real, except for the heat that was still in him, staining my dead skin with memories of life.

  Rosemary stepped beside me. She wouldn’t have rustled the flowers under her feet without intention, but her presence made a difference. “Cecilio is inside already. I think he was hoping she’d hear him this time.”

  I sighed. “Fucking brilliant. Stay close to me.” She clasped my shoulder. Time to jump in.

  I wished she and Cecilio didn’t have to see this, but they rarely turned from her ladyship when she appeared. And I preferred them being there to not knowing where they were, wondering whether the curse had taken them at last.

  To think the only remnants of my life I’d have left would be my valet and my groundskeeper. I didn’t think Cecilio had even particularly liked me when he was alive. To be fair, I hadn’t liked myself much, either.

  Inside, the cold was abrupt, surreal. Frost had spread over the carpet, leaving its mark on the walls. Cecilio was there, his black livery stainless as always, ashen hair bleached in the cool light. He nudged the door wider as I entered, but his gaze did not leave the center of the foyer.

  And there was Eirlys, her back turned. Seeing her was always a shock. She didn’t look like I’d once expected ghosts to look, shrunken or transparent, less substantial than she was in life. Instead, her existence seemed to fill the entire hall and rob all else of significance. She stood tall and vertical and pale, like a knife stab straight down to hell. The black hair swinging over her back could have been dark wings. Ice crystals formed a circle around her feet.

  “My—my lady.” Rosemary sounded small.

  I felt ridiculous, and ashamed, and hollow, like I always did. Holding this dead boy in my arms, come to join her in battle again. I should never have gone out last night. Should never have lifted the lid of my coffin, or hoped for a breath of relief.

  “It will open soon.” Cecilio’s voice had a muted, dreamlike quality to it. “But we have time.”

  We had nothing but time. This poor kid was about to find that out, joining the legion of souls who’d died on my land. When death had done its work, the passage would open. Evening’s Verge, gateway into the Deep, the spiritual realm where ghosts roamed their private eternities. It was from there that a primal bear spirit had taken pity on me and brought my questionable ass back to life.

  Until that gate opened, I could talk to Eirlys. Try, once more, to see if there was any part of her left.

  I was afraid of what I’d ask her. Why this one, Eirlys? Does your curse choose the victims, do you have a say in who goes next? Did you imagine he was me when you stabbed him through the chest? I would rather you take me.

  I finally coughed out an attempt. “Eirlys.” I stepped toward her. Her shoulders flinched. “We can’t keep adding more bodies to the pile. I imagine you can’t stop yourself. But there has to be some way I can fix this.”

  It felt like making her a punching bag, demanding a conversation she couldn’t give. The curse had taken her voice. All her words died with her, never to be said. And when everything you touched turned to ice, there weren’t many other ways of communicating.

  She turned, slowly, to meet me. This, too, I never seemed to be able to prepare for. Her face was something out of a nightmare. People said that the dead looked like they were sleeping. Eirlys didn’t. She looked choked on betrayal, and her outrage grew deeper, stronger, with time. The lines of her face were ink stains, framing eyes that burned as they fell on me. Her hands, fisted around her sword, were marred with eternal frostbite. And then the exit wound. A rupture in the heart, blackening her funereal gown with blood.

  The worst part was how tired she looked. More tired than I felt, which was fucking saying something. She was dead. Theoretically, nothing further now could happen to her. But each time I saw Eirlys, it was like she’d fallen apart a little more. There was once a time when I could have taken her hand, and smiled, and assured her that we’d be all right, and she would have smiled back. And for that moment, I would have been right—even if just for a moment.

  That moment would never come again. Because I had driven her to kill herself.

  “My lord.” The composure in Rosemary’s voice had returned. Fear made it necessary. “It comes.”

  Eirlys whirled back to the center of the foyer. My gaze followed hers, to where the light was gathering. Where the cold seemed to deepen.

  Awkwardly, intimately, I cradled the boy’s body so that his head was lying on my shoulder. He would be here any second now. And so would his welcoming party.

  The incubus.

  A voice chimed into the chill air. “That’s...me.”

  Our unlucky guest of honor sounded even younger than he’d looked. I took one last glance at his inert face, and raised my eyes.

  The boy was hovering next to me. He stared at the bundle in my arms, the rapidly cooling remnants of who he had been. His outlines flickered faintly, a ghost newly formed and unused to his chains. Now I saw him in motion—glinting eyes, nervously trembling lips—it was unbearable. Fresh guilt lanced me between the ribs.

  I flattened the bitterness out of my smile. “In the flesh, which you won’t need anymore. If it means anything, I would have welcomed you into my home. I’m sorry that—” I nodded at his wound “—this happened.” I clamped down, swallowing everything that wanted to tumble out but would only confuse or frighten him. I’m sorry that you’ll be buried here. Sorry that I’m disgustingly rich while you probably had nothing. Sorry for what’s about to happen.

  “The story just seemed so...typical.” The boy’s gaze skittered like a moth—over me, Cecilio and Rosemary, the snow, Eirlys’s grim back. “A ghost killing trespassers. I didn’t...” He ran phantasmal fingertips over his shape. “I really am dead.”

  I swallowed. “You’re in good company. All the best people are dead.”

  And the body count rose every year. Each new soul added to the list seemed only to make the curse stronger, galvanize the chains that snared these ghosts together.

  A grinding screeched through the hall, shaking the floor, as if the earth beneath were being torn. Except it wasn’t the earth. It was the air.

  A thread of li
ght cut the room vertically, like a door opening on the solemn world of my house. Evening’s Verge, doorway into the Deep. No heavier door had ever swung.

  Two panels spread from the crack, pieces of a fractured sky. As they congealed, chains came into view, crawling like insects across the doors’ surfaces. The moan of reality splitting apart grew until it swallowed all other sounds.

  The doorway seemed to flood the hall, destroy its dimensions. I shielded my eyes and uselessly covered the corpse’s face with my jacket. The Verge could flex its jaws anywhere, as long as death’s hand was there to open them.

  The bubble popped. Other sounds touched me. Cecilio, chanting his Portian vulgarities. The whistle of Eirlys’s sword as it flicked up in her hand. And the boy whose name I did not know, gasping with terror.

  “What—what the fuck is that?” He clawed at my arms, at his own body, as if desperate to hide in it. But he hadn’t learned to materialize, and his hands wisped through me. His entire image trembled, like ice beginning to shatter.

  I’d tried out so many answers when they reacted this way. It’s your death, and I’m sorry it had to be this way. It’s something I’m not going to let hurt you. Don’t worry. You’re safe with me. I won’t let it take you. Not this time. Not this time. All of them either empty or lies. I wouldn’t let the incubus take ownership of his body. But I had proven over and over again that I didn’t have it in me to salvage his soul.

  That was why Eirlys was here.

  The Verge was like her, cold and perfect. She might have been facing the mirror image of her own afterlife. She was still as no living thing could be still, blade raised against the screeching doors as the naked light of the void violated what was once our home. All the souls we’d failed to save were waiting.

  They were faces lost in a sea of tangling chains. Ghosts like this boy’s, swimming in the Deep, throats and arms weighed down by the chains of their curses. My curse. The curse I had spawned, that bound here forever the soul of anyone who committed the unforgiveable sin of dying on my land. That curse had grown an intelligence as persistent as invasive mold, an intelligence that gave the curse life, power, malice. It imprisoned refugees, soldiers, nuns, children. Nameless beings with their discarded lives written on their faces. Some of them Eirlys hadn’t even killed. Some had died of disease, or starvation. And they all raised their calls as soon as the doorway opened, as if hoping that this time someone would hear them.

  I heard them—their faces were stamped on my heart. Over a hundred souls, lost forever. Unless I could find within me the purity, or righteousness, or simple strength to break the curse my actions had put on them.

  Chains bright as coals snaked from the threshold. One of them wound around the boy, clasping into a manacle at his neck. “Oh my God, get it—get it off me!” His hands flinched from the metal. “Fuck! That’s cold!”

  I wanted to twist the links in my fingers, in my bear’s paws, and feel them crack. But even if I got the metal to break, it would just reweave itself out of the ether.

  A dry clatter-clink signaled bonds materializing for Cecilio, then Rosemary. The incubus always did this, claiming their souls as its own, but never took them. As if to say, I could, if I wanted. But it’s not like they’re going anywhere.

  Maybe because they’d been the first Eirlys had killed. Maybe it was to keep her earliest victims near her, near me, so in our absent, twilight moments we could forget just a little. Just the right amount to be not enough.

  Eirlys was only the ghost who was never chained. Maybe no chain was heavy enough to hold her, not even one forged by the curse. Maybe—I held my breath—she really would win someday. Though her own curse was strong, she seemed inured to the intelligence that tormented the other souls: the incubus. It didn’t own her like it did the rest of us.

  I slung the body over my shoulder, and encircled the ghost with my arm. The virtue that kept me alive and had let me contain the incubus this long was in my touch, flashing silver. He solidified into my embrace, shaking and eyes wild with panic.

  There was nothing I could say, no promise I trusted not to be a lie. But I held him there against me, letting him shiver like a sick child under the sear of his chains. Maybe it was the feeling of something real, something that wasn’t so cold—but he started to cry. Soft and frightened, pawing at his manacle out of reflex. It may have been dawning on him that the moaning faces beyond the gate all had chains keeping them here, at the threshold, unable to either move on or return to the world of their lives. I closed my eyes against the light of the Deep and held him for as long as I could.

  There was a metallic screech and the boy’s spirit jerked away. I opened my eyes to a flash of white, flakes of snow thickening the air. Eirlys had descended on us. Her sword broke through the chain as if it were rotten wood. For the barest of seconds, we made eye contact. It was the deepest communication I had had with her in years. Something in that moment said, We can do this. Hold him still. I’m going to try. We’ll save this soul. I’m going to try.

  It was almost unbelievable that a ghost with such lucid intention on her face could be so clouded as to have killed him in the first place.

  The broken chains misted and flowed back into wholeness. Eirlys swung her blade again, her movements more precise, even more full of grace and strength than they had been in life, shearing the metal into splinters. The chain reformed around her blade as if she were slicing through water, but she did not relent. She was going to fail—we always failed. But standing there, watching her try again, I wanted to believe that maybe this time she’d be strong enough. Or I would be. Or God would decide we’d had enough.

  The chain pulled taut between us; the boy jumped. Eirlys’s head snapped to attention. I had to work fast. The owner was tugging the leash of their new pup.

  A voice crawled through the space of the room, like a thousand unseen insects settling over my skin. “Now this is a pleasure. I do so enjoy us all getting together.” A face took shape in the gleam of the Verge, smeared with a lurid smile.

  The incubus.

  So much for time.

  I adjusted the dead weight in my arms and popped the link from my cuff. With a roll, I had the heel of my hand against my jaw. The slice of my canine was surgical, painless by now. A pulse of supernaturally charged blood welled from my palm down my wrist.

  My senses seemed to glaze over in the presence of the incubus. Whenever it appeared, I had to question everything down to the most insignificant memories to see what had been it in disguise. Its power was that of my curse, the supernal weight of a hundred phantasmal chains. Each of the ghosts linked by those chains fed its cadaverous consciousness, the intellect that arose out of the debris of murder and war. It took a different appearance each time, adopting shapes and memories from its host souls, and I could only imagine its difficulty choosing. Which nail to hammer in today?

  The face in front of me now was of a street waif, one of those children so raw and stripped down by starvation that their age was impossible to tell. This girl had probably been one of many left homeless when the fires had ravaged Vermagna. Now the incubus glared from her empty eyes, set in a face covered with soiled bandages, the chain dangling from a hand wasted to the point of being skeletal. It wasn’t enough that it had climbed like a parasite out of her death; it had to appropriate her image too.

  It stepped forward. The chain, jangling like a live thing, began dragging the boy’s spirit toward it. He whimpered, flailing for me, and I grabbed his hand.

  “Oh, well,” I told the incubus, swallowing rage. “You know how it is. Hard to find time for visits these days. No one seems to want to come round anymore.”

  My arm tightened around the boy, but the only salvation I could give would be for the corpse. My blood spread dark wing shapes through his soiled clothes, lathing his discarded flesh with virtue.

  I breathed in the cool of the darkness in which I had awaken
ed after death. A darkness that had said, you I will preserve. You will become as I am. My blood began glowing.

  The incubus tipped back the childlike head, neck swinging as if broken. “You’re losing your touch as a host. I daresay—”

  Eirlys appeared behind the incubus, sword arcing through its borrowed throat. The girl’s head thudded unceremoniously on the floor. With terrifying speed, Eirlys whirled and severed the torso, sundered ribs. The incubus’s body didn’t bleed, didn’t cry out. It merely crumbled, torn to pieces, in a heap at Eirlys’s feet. Only then did she pause.

  It couldn’t have worked. But as she sheathed her blade, as the shape failed to move, a renegade hope almost dared stir.

  Then the childlike voice piped from beside me. “Well done, my lady! If it were possible to kill me, surely that would have been just the thing.”

  The incubus reshaped midair, floating carelessly amidst gentle, stolen laughter. It was not a child, nothing that could feel. I chanted that to myself silently as it leered at me, at the body in my arms.

  In the next instant, all its playful mockery dropped away. “Did it really seem possible that you could starve me?” The human inflection melted from its voice, replaced with an alien intensity. “There are enough lives in this world, enough holes in the wall, to give me time. I’ll offer you a little reassurance. You could not have kept this—” a flick at the boy’s spirit, a nauseating smile “—from me. Not for long.”

  I held its gaze and said nothing. Do not engage. I had never quite figured out if it could read my mind. But if I let it any deeper into my head, not even my immortality would save me.

  Eirlys watched me through the gauzy ether of the incubus. The remains of the incubus’s first illusion lay still at her feet, like a memorial of the original victim that she had killed. The ice flecking her face looked like a pall of disease.