He was brutal and fierce and not gentle in the slightest. He pulled her hair back at the nape, he ground his lips against hers, his fingers curved cruelly into her hip as if he would bruise and punish and hate her for all the darkness in the world, in the Never. As if it were all her fault.
Wendy, after a brief moment of shocked stillness, growled in the back of her throat and then, unexpectedly, gave as good as she got. He felt her nails rake his back red and raw beneath his shirt. There was a billow of steam where her nails cut and her heat and his chill mingled. Her knee jammed between his legs, pressing painfully into his thigh, her thumbnail gouging the hollow beneath his ear as her teeth tore at his lips, her tongue forcing between them. He could taste her hate, so like his own, and knew that as he punished her, she punished him—for not being alive, for not saving her mother, for walking away without a glance back. She loved him and hated him and loathed herself just as much, if not more, and Piotr helplessly felt his skin begin to blister under her palms.
Piotr couldn't breathe beneath her onslaught. Gasping, he pulled back and was both relieved and disappointed when she let him go.
They were both left damp and shaking from the steam. Wendy took his jaw in one hand and twisted gently until she could see the extent of the damage along his neck. She brushed the pad of her thumb along a stinging ridge. “I was mean to you.”
“We were mean to each other.”
“I should've been a little nicer, huh?”
“I started it.” Back stinging with each tiny movement, Piotr relaxed against the mattress, closed his eyes, and luxuriated in the counterpoint warmth of her, the oranges and smoke perfume that clung to her hair and cinnamon-mint that scented her breath.
“Did you?” Wendy curled into his side again and rested her hand on his chest. “I lied. I can feel your heartbeat.”
Smiling, eyes closed, Piotr pressed his palm against her chest, waiting for the comforting thump. “Da? Well, I can…can…” Piotr drew his hand away and sat up.
Wendy was gone.
Frantically, Piotr's head whipped left and right, desperately searching the room. Had she hidden in a corner? Had he fallen asleep again and she'd gone to find a private spot to take care of living nature's business?
His bed was still rimed with frost. Piotr ran a hand under his jaw; there were no scratches. The flesh on his back, on his face, didn't protest even slightly when he shifted. His blisters were no longer there.
A dream, Piotr realized. Wendy's visit had been nothing but a wonderful, terrible, agonizing dream.
“Such a fool,” he whispered, contrite and aggravated with himself. “I am such a stupid fool.”
“Piotr?” Lily peered around the doorjamb, black hair dappled grey and silver in the remains of the dim light. “We heard you call out. How do you fare?”
“Tired,” he said. “I had a dream.” He glanced around the room. “Spasibo, for watching over me, and for bringing me here. It was a wise choice. We shall be…should be…safe here. Momentarily, at least.”
Lily tilted her head in silent acknowledgement. “Do you wish to continue resting?”
Though he knew now that the kiss was all in his mind, Piotr wanted to see Wendy again, even if it were nothing more than his own fevered imagination. “For a while,” he said and curled on his side as Lily retreated.
Freed to dream, Piotr slumbered, drifting easily into sweet dreams and sour, tasting Wendy on his lips, feeling her fingers curl through the nape of his hair, the tips of her nails experimentally brushing against the twisting scar from temple to jaw. Piotr shivered under the onslaught, willing himself to hold perfectly still. If he roused she would be gone again. He would be alone.
Time passed, possibly minutes, probably more, before Piotr woke again from his dreams.
He'd dreamed of ice floes, of snow banks, of pressing on through drifts as high as his hips, leaving his heat in a red trail behind. He'd dreamed of the Reaper again and he hurried. He hurried. He hurried and when he woke Piotr knew that…
…knew that…
Knew that this place had once been his. The bare soles of his feet recognized every board, every creak, each thin space in the Never so that he could pass unseen through walls and find those others huddled below.
He felt alert now, rested, but as he stood, Piotr left ice in his wake, not just in the Never, but on the mill floor in the living lands, small pools of ice in spreading circles each place his bare feet touched.
He hunted in complete, effortless silence.
Kneeling in Pandora's room at the end of her pallet, Lily struggled to keep her eyes on Eddie as he spoke. He ought to have her full attention, she knew, but resting here brought back uncomfortable memories of not just Piotr's young charges, but her own Lost as well. Her heart ached at the emptiness of the room, the walls papered with Dora's sketches and the warped door resting on cinderblocks as a makeshift desk, bare save for a few curls of colored pencil and faded paint splatters.
“I still think Piotr needs a doctor,” Eddie urged. He gripped the back of the folding chair Dora had left tucked beneath the desk until his knuckles turned white. “You can't tell me that every dead doctor goes right into the Light.” Behind him Dora's pictures flapped on the walls, caught in a suddenly chill breeze. Shivering, Lily rubbed her arms and considered shaping the essence she'd draped into a simple shift into a longer-sleeved garment, one that would protect her from the clammy air of the Treehouse.
“Of course not,” Lily replied, rubbing her forehead. Eddie clearly meant well, but he was missing the point entirely. Piotr's issue wasn't just his sickness. Lily took a deep breath and began trying to explain. “But there is more to it than just his physical—”
“Trying to get rid of me?” Piotr demanded, appearing suddenly through the wall.
Despite herself, Lily flinched back; Piotr's tone was icy, sharp, and high. She'd known Piotr hundreds of years at this point, and he'd never spoken like that before…unless you counted the crazed minutes after he'd found Eddie and Wendy kissing.
Casually, Lily moved to place herself between Piotr and Eddie.
“I knew you would one day,” Piotr snarled, striding closer. Like Eddie had once been, Piotr's edges were now flickering like a dim light, only he seemed to be growing thinner and less substantial before their very eyes. “It was just a matter of time. YA nikogda ne doveryal tebe.”
“What?” Eddie glanced at Lily, confused.
He was flush, Lily realized, either with anger or dismay; despite their kiss she still didn't know him well enough to tell. This was terrible—the last thing she needed was all her good work with Eddie undone by Piotr's temper as her gift of energy and will was sapped away by whatever was draining Eddie slowly dry.
“What are you talking about, man?” Eddie asked nervously. “We're trying to help you.”
“Piotr,” Lily said, calmingly, disregarding Eddie's paleness in favor of calming Piotr. Once Piotr was relaxed Eddie would calm as well. She hoped. “You are fading in and out. Please, Piotr, please sit. Rest.”
Piotr, apparently, was having none of it. He pounded the doorway with the side of his fist and glared at Lily. “You won't trick me this time,” he snapped. “Where is she? What have you done with her?”
“Who, Piotr?” Lily asked, patience personified, though she felt that the situation was rapidly spiraling out of her control. “Who are you seeking?” “
“I…I…” Piotr hesitated, an expression of momentary confusion darting across his face before he clenched his fists and glared at the ground.
“Are you looking for Wendy?” Eddie asked cautiously.
“No. Yes. YA ne znayu! I do not know!” Moving in a jagged jerk, Piotr ripped one of Dora's sketches off the wall—a picture of the tree outside in full, glorious summer bloom—and crumpled it, throwing it at Eddie's head.
“Man, chill out!” Eddie shouted. “Just…relax, okay?”
“I've waited for her for so long,” Piotr said coldly to Eddie. Lily
frowned; the cadence of Piotr's speech was changing, his body language was shifting. He had come in raging and now he was moving, rocking, from side to side, as if singing a slow song with his words. “So long. Centuries and centuries and centuries again. You can't take her from me, hooyesos, with your sweet words and kind eyes, your friendship of years masking your intentions. I have waited for her decades beyond your years! I have the greater need! I won't allow it!”
“Why do I get the impression that what he just said was extremely mean?” Eddie whispered to Lily as she eased further in front of him, pushing him back into the shadows behind her with a nudge of her hip and shoulder. Piotr was radiating a kind of sinuous seriousness that worried her.
“Piotr, do you remember something from before?” Lily held out one hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled and gestured to the room slowly. “Do you remember your life now?”
“Of course I remember,” Piotr said, snapping out of his back and forth daze and glaring at Lily. “A fool, you think I am. No more! I always remember!”
“Not always,” she reminded him softly, not wishing to shame her friend in front of his rival for the Lightbringer's affections. “Sometimes you forget.”
“I am not confused!” Piotr shouted, pounding the wall again, this time with both fists. “I am not a child to be coddled!”
“No,” Lily quickly soothed, wishing briefly that he were a child. That she could just reach out and pull Piotr into her arms as she might one of her Lost, that she could rock him in her lap until the memories surfaced or whatever terrible fears he harbored subsided. Piotr, however, had the right of it: he was not a child, not a Lost. He was her equal and Lily knew that he needed her guidance, not to hide in her embrace. “No one thinks you are. Please. Please, Piotr, please. You are angry once more. There is no reason to be. We are your friends. We are your allies. Talk to me, Piotr. Tell me what you know.”
“The hearthstone,” Piotr said, his sneer sending chills up Lily's spine and raising the fine hairs on the nape of her neck. “Where she kept her cloak of fur and feathers. The feasting hall, the great fire in the center, stone rough-scorched and charred black at the edges. We huddled close, together, waiting for the others, and she told me stories of battle and blood, of how she rode and rode for days on end until her hunt was done, until the soul was gathered. All these things, these important things, I remember. I remember her.”
“Has he gone nuts?” Eddie whispered in a sotto voice, rolling his index finger in a ‘cuckoo’ gesture around his ear. “I thought he had some kind of Wendy's-Mom-induced-amnesia? That not the case anymore?”
“Hush your mouth,” Lily hissed quietly, wishing that it were Elle at her side for this and not this jester dressed in silver and grey. “Tripping over these words does us only ill.” She stepped toward Piotr and gingerly reached for his hand. “Please, Piotr, go on.”
Piotr, seeing her intent, yanked away.
“Why do you care? You are a warrior, one of the fierce women! See? Even now, even in death, you walk in the halls of the dead.” He spat at her feet but Lily paid it no mind. There was such fury pouring off him that she was obliquely grateful she wasn't actually the real target of his rage.
“I wish to know because I am your friend,” she said softly. “You have to know that. In the light of day perhaps you will not know your words, perhaps they will be lost again to the halls of memory but I, Piotr, I will recall them.” Lily pressed her palm to her heart. “Allow me to remember for you.”
“In my dreams I walked,” Piotr said shortly, turning away and resting his forearm against the shattered window. Where his flesh touched a thin film of ice spread and crackled along the slivers and jagged triangles of remaining glass. The wood of the frame constricted as he grew close, pulling nails out of the tough, old window casing with a low screech. Beneath his palm the glass, brought to its breaking point by the incredible cold, shattered, both in the Never and in the living lands.
Eddie and Lily exchanged a glance as the tinkling shards fell. Lily was glad to note that Piotr did not seem to notice their shared concern. It might set him off once more. “I walked until I could walk no more and then, at the narrow V of the river where I tickled for summer fish when I was a boy, there I huddled in that damned cloak, that cloak of blood and feathers and fur, and I slept the cold sleep. The long sleep.”
“Is he trying to say what I think he's saying?” Eddie whispered. “Because I wasn't the best with poetry, but it sounds like he's talking about when he died.”
“Shhh,” Lily hushed him, though he had a point. “Listen. Remember.”
“There, slipping into my dreams, in the snow and wet, I knew her. I saw. Over a thousand years and a thousand years again, I've waited and dreamed, because…because I knew. I knew then. I know now.” His voice echoed hollowly and Lily shivered again. She could almost see the years, sense them, stretching out around Piotr in a nimbus of confusion, hidden from his view but nearly tangible, lost in the annals of his mind.
“He's not making any sense,” Eddie hissed through clenched teeth. “It's kinda hard to remember dithering nonsense.”
Glaring at Eddie, Piotr snorted, and Lily fought the urge to grab him by the shoulders, to shake sense into his stubborn, combative head. No lover, even the Lightbringer, was worth this sort of ridiculous drama!
“I make no sense?” Piotr drawled at Eddie, gesturing rudely. “Fine. Make sense of this, boy. I dreamed of her hair against the snow, red like my blood dripping between my thumb and forefinger, like the hair of my mother and her shield-sisters. I dreamed of her markings, her badges of rank pricked into her very skin and soul.”
He turned to face Lily and she was struck by how solid he was compared to a few moments before; denser than she'd ever seen a ghost become, dense as the Lightbringer in the midst of reaping; Piotr could have been alive.
“I dreamed of Wendy two thousand years ago,” Piotr said shortly, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “I have been waiting for her since the day I died. And neither of you will take her from me. Not you, boy, not you, Lily, friend or foe.”
“Piotr—”
“You say friend, but I say that you are playing me false. You, Elle, warrior-women, are shield-sisters. You are one of them.” Piotr turned away from her and Lily felt her gut clench. He didn't mean it, she reminded herself. It was the poison, the sickness talking, nothing more.
“You are like all the rest,” Piotr declared. “You wish to watch me fail.”
“One of the fierce women,” Lily said, finally putting two and two together. She felt a fool for not scenting the connections, tasting the venom dripping from each word, sooner. “Did these women kill you, Piotr?”
Piotr smiled grimly at Lily as snowflakes began fluttering down from the ceiling. Lily felt them nestle in her hair, their cold kiss upon her cheeks, and she suppressed a shiver.
“Net,” Piotr said. “My dyadya did that. My uncle was the death of me.”
Groggy, Wendy opened her eyes. The sky was bright and blue above her, skimmed only lightly with clouds, and the air was dense and still. She was lying oddly, Wendy realized, with her legs stretched upward at an uncomfortable angle, ankles crossed and hands folded neatly over her ribcage. It took a moment for Wendy to realize that she was resting across the slick red backseat of an old Chevy Bel Air, head pillowed by a leather jacket.
Wendy shifted and the world around her shimmered and shivered in the strange grey light of the Never.
Wait, the Never? Wendy squinted and the Never receded, but only with some real effort. Wherever she was, the world of the dead was strong here. Even the massive trees at the edge of her vision flickered back and forth between the living lands and the Never, green and lush one moment, silvery-grey and twisted the next.
Turning toward the trunk, Wendy poked her head over the backseat and squinted at the world past the edges of the convertible. The convertible was parked diagonally in the middle of a vast drive-in parking lot, one Wendy recognized.
“The West Winds?” Wendy murmured uneasily, tasting the ghost of Red Vines and cream soda on her tongue. “How the hell did I get here?”
When she was young her mother rarely took nights off, but on the few memorable occasions that she did, the whole family would empty the Safeway candy bins, pile in the Charger, and drive down to San Jose to catch a movie. Wendy clearly remembered being small and young and crawling in the front seat to bury her head against Mary's shoulder while Dumbo's mother wreaked havoc in the circus. Her mother had wiped away her tears and offered to cut the Disney special double feature short, to take sobbing Wendy home. Her dad had protested that it was an honor to see the classic flicks on the big screen, the way they'd been intended, but Mary had held firm—whatever Wendy wanted.
Knowing that Jon and Chel would be sad to leave, that her father was right about it being a once-in-a-lifetime event, Wendy had chosen to stay…and wept again when Bambi's mother died an hour later.
To this day she still hated Disney movies.
“We brought you.” A greaser roughly her own age, perhaps a few years older, vaulted into the front seat from beside the car. Wendy jumped in surprise.
In the Never the screen looming behind the boy suddenly flickered. The radio of the convertible hissed loudly and static thrummed for a brief instant before a countdown began on the screen behind his head. The radio beeped with each number.
“Hang on a sec, radio's up too loud,” he said, reaching back and twisting the knob so the beeps were barely heard. Just in time: the vast screen filled with dancing concession foods as “Let's go out to the lobby!” started playing. A long hot dog cha-cha danced with a melting Hershey's bar. A slack-eyed Coke cup tipped its lid, and as the frothing liquid filled it to the brim, it drummed its feet and grinned hugely.
There was something about the way it writhed and twisted on the ground that filled Wendy with unease. Discomforted watching the short clip, Wendy grimaced and turned her attention back to the boy.
Reaper (Lightbringer) Page 28