Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “I’m sure I’ll be better in the morning,” Lan said, heading for the bed. “You can go.”

  “At least let me plait your hair or it’ll dry in knots.”

  “It’ll give you something to complain about tomorrow. Go on.”

  Serafina muttered her way to the door, but then only stood with her hand on the latch, looking back.

  “My bloody hair is fine!” Lan snapped, then realized Serafina’s gaze was focused beyond her, at the room itself. Batuuli’s room.

  “Such a mess,” Serafina said softly, wistfully. “She would have had me flayed for allowing this to happen. She really was the sun, you know. She was the light of all lights, as terrible as she was beautiful.”

  Lan fought with it as long as she could. “No, she wasn’t,” she said at the end of it. “He just made you think she was.”

  Serafina gave her a quizzical look. “You say that like you think it ought to make a difference to me. When you think of all the people Lord Azrael has killed, does that make a difference to you?” She waited for an answer. There was none, so she said, “Your hair will be awful in the morning,” and let herself out.

  Lan ran her fingers through her hair (nearly dry and, yes, starting to knot up) and went to bed. After sleeping in the ferry so many nights, it should have felt dangerously luxuriant, but it didn’t. Too tall, too firm, too empty. She lay awake for what felt like hours, tossing from one side to the other, punching her pillows and trying not to think too much about the dry forest of bones surrounding Haven and all the ways love did not reason.

  * * *

  She woke to a hand stroking up her leg under the sheets. It was a gentle touch and she was tired. If it had been a human hand, it might not have roused her, but it was his hand, cold and rough with scars, and her fresh-washed and lotioned skin was baby-sensitive. It was his hand…and his touch was welcome. Lan smiled without opening her eyes, content for the moment just to be petted, to feel herself shaped into a woman and brought to life, like in the old story about the statue and the pervy sculptor.

  His hand reached the sensitive hollow at the back of her knee and withdrew. She heard the soft metallic clink and rustle as he undressed, and then the blanket was raised.

  “You found me,” she said sleepily.

  “And woke you,” he said after a pause.

  “I’m a light sleeper. And I think I want to wake up for this. Please, continue.”

  “With pleasure.” His hand returned to her leg, but in a distracted way. When she peeked up at him, she could see him gazing around at the white-and-gold walls of Batuuli’s bedroom. “I confess, I find the venue somewhat disturbing.”

  “The Red Room didn’t have a bath,” she explained, rolling onto her back so she could see him bending over her, the light of his eyes glowing off her skin as he brushed his lips along the curve of her thigh. “But your room does, which is where I wanted to go in the first place. You sent me away.”

  “An error I have been an hour seeking to amend.”

  “Looked in the Red Room first, did you?” Lan indulged a peevish smile, thinking of all those stairs. “Serves you right.”

  His claws pricked at her thigh, but she could hear a smile in his voice, not a warning, when he said, “You tease me at your peril, child.”

  “Who says I’m teasing? I’ve been stuck in that van twice as long as you, remember? And before that, I walked to Norwood all the way from Eastport. I’m knackered. No, you don’t,” she said, catching at his wrist as he attempted to slide his hand up along the outside of her hip. She moved him where she wanted him most, arching back into the bed with his first obedient strokes. “Far,” she sighed, “far too tired to roll around with you tonight.”

  He watched her move against his hand, his eyes blazing and dimming with the same rhythm she set. “I have missed you, my Lan.”

  “How much?”

  He tore the sheet away in a sudden snapping movement, unveiling her to an audience of just one, but his growl of appreciation ended on a disconcerted grunt. He touched her belly very gently, then her thigh, then leaned out and switched on the little lamp by Batuuli’s bedside.

  “I got a little vigorous with the scrubbing,” she explained. “And I think I’m a bit sunburnt. It’s all right. It was a lot worse earlier.”

  “My brave Lan…to have endured such hardship to win me back.” He reached for the sheet with a rueful sort of smile. “My passions can wait until you are healed. Abstinence, however long endured, is not fatal…and even if it were, I could not die of it. I am content to lie beside you.”

  “Sure you are. That’s why you spent an hour looking for me, is it?”

  “It is.”

  “You’re a liar and so am I. Come here.” She kissed him, hooking an arm around his neck and pinning his mouth to hers aggressively until he grudgingly began to respond. “Take me back,” she whispered, biting and teasing at his broken lips. “Take me back, take it all away, take me, Azrael, take me right now!”

  His hands were cautious at first as he caressed her very pink arms and shoulders, but it really didn’t hurt anymore and her little moans and shivers proved encouraging. His restraint dwindled as her responses became more urgent and when he bent to press his mouth where his hand had so expertly played, the little waves of pleasure he’d been coaxing into life became a surge of cramping heat. He caught her bucking hips, imprisoning her for the lash of his tongue, making pleasure into a weapon he could stab into her, stab and twist. Again and again, he brought her right to the edge, only to cut her on it. When he raised his head at last, she could only fall shaking into the sweat-drenched bed and watch as he rose over her.

  There was no more foreplay to speak of, nor was it particularly missed. He drove into her and she pulled him in with equal passion, raking at his back with her blunt nails and hooking her ankles around his hips to hold him fast. There was no talk, only those silly, inelegant sounds lovers make at even the best of times: grunts and hisses and sighs and groans that grew in volume and in urgency until it was a wonder they didn’t bring the guards running in from the hall. The headboard rattled. The dust dropped off the curtains. The bloody lamp got kicked off the nightstand and smashed on the floor and none of it mattered. He came hard, filling her with fire, snarling into her mouth; she came screaming into his, writhing in exquisitely braided pain and pleasure as his heat cooled in her belly.

  “Have you forgiven me?” he murmured, still lying heavily atop her, sharing her final shivers.

  Lan nodded, catching his hand where he gripped her hip and guiding it to her breast. As he bent agreeably to suckle, his tongue flicking at her nipple between careful (and not so careful) kneading, she said, “Have you forgiven me?”

  “No,” he growled and let her feel the sharp points of his teeth, only to burn away these little pains with slow passes of his scarred lips. “But I will. Ah, Lan. You bring out the very worst in me. This is not how I would have renewed our time together.”

  “Felt fine to me,” she said after a short pause. “I mean, sure, you’re a bit rusty, but I wouldn’t say that was the worst you’ve ever been.”

  He laughed and suddenly rolled, tumbling her over and around him to fall gasping against the very edge of the mattress. He held her down, there at the pivoting point of gravity, and pressed his mouth against the pounding vein in her throat, saying, “You have always been a terrible temptation. I came here tonight to sleep with you.”

  “Mission accomplished,” she said breathlessly. “What now?”

  “Now? Now I want you to sleep with me.”

  “I can do that,” she said, holding out her arms.

  He filled them at once, forcing her down into the rumpled blankets as he embraced her. His mouth closed golden on her breast, the very point of his tongue tracing intricate knots around her aching nipple. His scarred hands moved over her, not caressing as much as claiming, and she opened to it all, her body right at the edge of use and abuse, but still wanting more.

  And
then he covered her up again. He kept his hand on her, pinning the corner of the blanket to her shoulder as he kissed her, then settled himself beside her once more—his arm around her waist and the solid chill of his body pressed to hers, made tolerable only through the barrier of the blanket.

  “You really meant sleep?” Lan asked, after a stunned second or three. Struggling up on her elbows, she caught his arm and gave it a hard shake. “You don’t sleep!”

  “Very rarely,” he reminded her. “Seldom more than once a year.”

  “And it has to be tonight?”

  “Ah Lan, mercy!” he groaned. “I was making my bed ready when you found me. All this time since, I have been waiting, but the need has become intolerable. Why do you think I insisted that you rest the very instant we were back again within these walls? It was so I could rest!”

  She wasn’t sure at first just what she was feeling. There were flashes of hurt—she’d only walked away the world to find him, after all, only had to beg him to come back—but what won out in the end was an echo of Azrael himself, saying what she said now, and in much the same smiling way: “You’ve never slept with anyone before, have you?”

  “Never.” He reached out to brush his fingers along her shoulder and she let that feather-light touch lay her down again and bring him back against him. “And I confess I am not entirely at ease. But if…if we are moving on, my Lan, if there is any hope of that at all…I have to be with you tonight.” He frowned, eyes flickering. “I suspect it will be unpleasant.”

  “You say that a lot.”

  “I won’t ask you to stay with me all night. Just until I fall asleep. I’ll understand if you can’t touch me,” he told her, making an effort at a smile. “I’ll not blame you if you have to shift away, but if you can only bear to stay with me—”

  “Don’t.” She put a hand to his mouth, pushing the offer back in before it could come all the way out. “Don’t sell it. Not to me, not to anyone. There’s always one piece you just don’t sell. Besides,” she said, now twining that arm around his neck and snuggling herself uncomfortably close, “I’m all done buying favors in your bed. I love you. Of course you can sleep with me.”

  He rested a cautious hand on her hip and, when she didn’t throw it off, shifted her into the cradle of his arm, keeping the blanket between them. After a few tense minutes, she felt the strain begin to ease from his body. The light of his eyes faded, guttered, and died. Gradually, his breaths deepened and the terrible cold emanating from him thawed, as meat thaws, taking on the same dead temperature as the air in the room. If not for the wet, repulsive sound of his heart beating, it would have been like cuddling with a corpse, but she held him anyway, and when she did finally sleep, it was with him.

  Not beside him. With him. And as unpleasant as it was (and it was. It really was), she was determined to believe that made it the best way to come home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Lan woke too early the next morning in the throes of a violent sick-up. She had apparently been doing it for some time; Azrael was already holding her shoulders, trying to lift her out of the mess since she was oddly incapable of doing that herself. Over and over, she vomited, long after her empty stomach had given up the last drops of bile and she wasn’t doing anything but ripping her throat apart on air. At last, it ended and she fell back against Azrael, limp as a wrung rag, and just breathed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, untangling her from the bedding. “Oh my Lan, forgive me. I should have left as soon as I awakened.”

  She could only shake her head, pushing a weak, “Not your fault,” through her raw throat, but she wasn’t sure she believed it. To think of all the times he’d slipped away from her in the middle of the night and how she’d hated it, but this was what he’d spared her. Even as he lay her carefully on Batuuli’s settee, she was hanging her head off the side and sicking up again.

  “Don’t try to move,” he told her and left, snatching up Lan’s discarded towel to wrap around his hips.

  Move, the man said. Like that was an option. She hurt all over, not in the way of a sunburn, but more as if her body were one giant pulled muscle. Her head, ears and eyes throbbed, like she had a hangover without any of the fun of getting drunk. Worst of all was the taste in her mouth—like bile, batteries and rotten meat all mixed together.

  She lay, shivering and sweating at the same time, with scarcely enough strength to keep from spilling to the floor, until the door opened again and Azrael returned with a small army of accompanying footsteps. The lights came on, stabbing into eyes she hadn’t realized were open. She managed to get her hands up to cover them, only to have the cold hands of the deadhead doctor pry them away again. Elsewhere in the room, servants quickly and wordlessly stripped the bed and mopped up the mess; Serafina was among them, her voice shrill as she admonished this or that one to be careful, this was Egyptian cotton or goose down or cashmere, but even as sick as she was, Lan knew the real reason was that it was all Batuuli’s and probably ruined now.

  “Bit of a sunburn,” the doctor remarked, feeling at the pulse in Lan’s wrist.

  Lan dragged her eyes open and looked down at her herself. The pinkness she had noticed in the bath the previous night had not faded much and actually looked worse in a broad band around her belly…where Azrael’s arm had rested in the night.

  “That’s what Serafina told me,” Lan said dully, although she still couldn’t remember the sun being terrifically present during their travels. “I just thought the bathwater was too hot.”

  “A hot bath, you say? And did you have anything to drink?”

  “Uh…”

  “Sunburns can be enormously dehydrating,” the doctor informed Azrael. “And it’s clear from her overall condition she’s been malnourished for some time to begin with. Her handmaiden should have washed her down with cool water, treated her with moisturizing lotions, and seen to it that she had plenty to drink if she was going to leave her unattended for the night.”

  Serafina, pacing at the foot of the bed where other servants indifferently scrubbed at the bare mattress, belatedly realized she had come under attack and turned around.

  The doctor bent Lan over her knees and felt up her back with hands that seemed to have been made of nettles. “Was the bed turned before she was put in it, by any chance?”

  Serafina’s mouth dropped open and snapped shut. “It was…covered! It was all perfectly…perfectly suitable!”

  “I see. Sunburn,” he declared, “exacerbated by allergens present in unkempt conditions.”

  Serafina made a strangled huffing sound and punched her fists onto her hips.

  “It isn’t serious, my lord,” the doctor went on, having a last peep down Lan’s gob. “She should be moved to cleaner surroundings and perhaps assigned a more attentive caretaker—”

  “Quit taking shots at my handmaiden,” said Lan as Serafina sputtered. “She’s not going anywhere.”

  “—but she’ll soon recover. See that she drinks often, clear fluids only, and if you must feed her, she’s to have soft foods in small portions. And, ah…rest. Rest, most of all. So if my lord were to find another, ah, outlet for his…that is to say, perhaps one of his other companions—”

  “Balls to that!” Lan interrupted.

  Azrael silenced her with a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I understand.”

  “Good. Don’t hesitate to call on me if her condition changes to any degree, but do be aware that there’s likely to be some small cosmetic changes over the next few days. Peeling and so forth. Nothing to be alarmed over. Sunburns are rather unsightly,” he called as he headed off, “but entirely treatable and, I dare say, entirely preventable.”

  Serafina followed him as far as the door, impotently outraged, then turned on Azrael. “My lord, I didn’t…! I would never…! She needed a bath!”

  Lan roused herself to a reluctant sense of loyalty. “I did.”

  Azrael stroked her hair, which hurt, then must have gestured because the servants
stopped bustling around the bed and removed themselves. Serafina trailed them out, sniffing and muttering, and then they were alone.

  “And I’m not sorry,” said Lan, reaching for his hand. “So don’t you dare apologize again.”

  He allowed her to pull him down to sit beside her and brought her in under his arm. The chill of his body immediately soothed the stinging ache of her skin, a better balm than anything the doctor could have given her. She began to drowse again almost at once, despite her still-churning stomach.

  “This is not the homecoming I would have wished,” he murmured.

  “Maybe it’s for the best. I’m sure you’ve got lots of people waiting to see you.”

  “I’m sure,” he agreed sourly. “One would think I’ve been away half the year with the amount of petty reports demanding my attention.”

  “And if I weren’t so sick, I’d probably be jealous of you needing to spend all your time taking care of it instead of rolling around with me. See how it all works out?”

  “Truly evidence of a greater design.” He stroked her hair some more. “Shall I have you moved to my chambers?”

  She shook her head and the world swam. She grabbed at her temples, squeezing her eyes shut until she stabilized, and finally managed, “No. Not until I’m sure I won’t sick up in it. And not the Red Room. All those stairs.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Here is fine,” she mumbled without opening her eyes. “Here is just…just fine.”

  He shifted her, pulling her into his arms and rising from the settee, but she was asleep before he could lay her down again in bed. She had only the faintest impression of the smell of clean sheets—such a uniquely Haveny smell—and then she was falling through it and into a dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  It was a bad day, alternately choking tea down and choking tea up, but those episodes became fewer as the hours dragged on and the sleep that interrupted them gradually became rest rather than simply unconsciousness. When night fell at last, she slept all the way through and woke feeling whole worlds better the next morning, as different from the Lan of yesterday as she was from the Lan of last year. At her request, Serafina brought porridge with her breakfast tea and when Lan was able to keep it down, more foods cautiously followed throughout the day.