by Ginn Hale
“I don’t think I’ve met you before. I’m Laurie.” She smiled, and Kahlil noticed the plastic barrettes shaped like ducks hanging limply in her hair.
“Kyle.” He shook her hand.
Her pale eyebrows shot up. “Not Kyle the roommate?”
She glanced back to John for confirmation. Kahlil didn’t miss the flicker of horror that passed over John’s face as he nodded in acknowledgment.
“Yes, I believe that would be me.” Kahlil smiled.
“So we meet at last.” She peered up at him. “You really do have tattoos on your eyelids! I totally thought Toffee was lying about that.”
“He wasn’t lying.” Kahlil bowed his head and closed his eyes, allowing her to see the Prayerscars clearly.
“Cool. They’re eyes.” Laurie moved closer to him, and he caught the very faint scent of beer and pine trees.
“Didn’t that hurt?” Laurie asked.
“A little.”
“Yeah, right. I would totally be screaming if they even came close to one of my eyes with a tattoo needle. I swear to God. I almost fainted when I got my ears pierced.” She casually glanced at Kahlil’s bare ears. “So do your scary tattoos have any special meaning?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“You don’t believe so. That’s kind of evasive.” She grinned but didn’t pursue the question. Kahlil warmed to her further for that.
“So do you mind if I’m really nosy and ask if you’re single or not?” She seemed to be joking, but he wasn’t sure.
“We really need to sit down and order, Laurie,” John broke in. “And somebody should take Bill home.” He pointed back to the booth where the pale man had collapsed onto the tabletop.
Laurie waved her hand as though she were brushing Bill’s inert, sprawling form aside. “He just needs some coffee. Come on, you guys can help me bring him back to the land of the living.”
Laurie grasped Kahlil’s arm, tugging him back towards her booth. He allowed her to pull him along, and John followed behind.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for ages, but John obviously doesn’t want to share you.”
“Maybe he just doesn’t want to share you,” Kahlil replied.
“Not in this lifetime.” Laurie cocked her head slightly. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“I might.” Kahlil started to shrug, then stopped himself, remembering his shoulder. The yellowpetal water had numbed the pain, but he didn’t want to start bleeding through his bandages and clothes in the restaurant. John would never take him anywhere else again.
“So, what do you think of it?” Laurie asked with a teasing smile.
“Does it matter what I think of it?” He still marveled that desires of this kind could be discussed aloud here in Nayeshi, even in this sideways manner. The freedom to speak aloud made him almost giddy. He stole a quick glance at John and noted the flush coloring his tanned cheeks. Briefly he held John’s gaze, and it seemed that something like interest lingered there, despite his obvious embarrassment.
But Kahlil warned himself against becoming caught up in this illusion of freedom. Someday, word would come from the Black Tower, and all of this would end in blood or ruins.
“Of course it matters what you think. That matters the very most.” Laurie’s voice dropped into a stage whisper.
“I believe my actions will speak for my thoughts on the subject.” Kahlil smiled, knowing that neither John nor this woman could comprehend the truth of his words.
“Really?” Laurie returned his smile like a conspirator. “I thought that something like that might be going on. John never tells anyone anything, but I know when there are birds and bees in the air.”
The conversation reminded Kahlil of talking to the bones. Everything alluded to something else. One word might mean another thing completely. “Sword” could be “a key.” “A key” could be “death.” They were like riddles. But where the bones spoke in riddles because their lives depended on deception, here it was a matter of harmless amusement. Kahlil could enjoy it, though John plainly did not.
He said, “No. We are not going to start talking like spies in a bad French film. We’re just going to eat and talk, like normal people.”
“You really can be a whole lot of no fun sometimes, Toffee.” Laurie stopped at her booth and said to Kyle, “I have no idea how you put up with him.”
“I didn’t do anything...” Bill cracked an eye. He looked at John and then to Kyle.
“Oh hey, Toffee.” Bill’s voice was rough. “We missed you at the mountain party last night, man.” Slowly, he pulled himself fully upright and scooted over to make room for one of them beside him. Laurie took the space with a little bounce as she sat.
For a moment, both John and Kahlil remained standing, obviously waiting for the other one to sit first. It simply went too much against his instincts to allow himself to be blocked into a seat between a wall and John. If he had to get to his feet quickly, he didn’t want to negotiate any obstacles. He stepped back slightly.
“After you,” Kahlil offered.
John frowned at him but then acquiesced. Kahlil seated himself next to John.
“Bill,” Laurie flipped a strand of his hair back from his face in an easy manner, “this is Kyle.”
“The roommate Kyle?” Bill asked.
“Yep.” Laurie was beaming like she’d discovered a treasure.
Bill squinted across the table. “You do have tattoos on your eyelids. I really thought Toffee was lying.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said.” Laurie leaned past Bill and picked up the two laminated menus. It was a small act, but it struck Kahlil as conveying a great intimacy. Bill made no attempt to shift back and Laurie didn’t seem to care if her body brushed against Bill’s chest. Laurie straightened and handed out the menus.
“The special is this super-nasty chili thing,” Laurie said.
“It’s puke.” Bill yawned. “Don’t order it.”
“I’ve been trying to steer clear of puke lately, so I suppose I’ll pass on the special.” John opened his menu, careful to keep to his half of the bench, physically restrained as he always was in the public company of other men. In private, he could be very different, though even then Kahlil had noted that John maintained a level of self-restraint, as if he unconsciously knew that something dark and powerful lay dormant within him.
“I’m going for the Denver omelet with sausage and some fake-ass maple syrup for my grotesque, meat-dipping pleasure.” Bill pushed a string of his hair out of his face and smiled in a slightly suggestive way.
Kahlil looked over the bright photos of impossibly shiny fried eggs and fluffy stacks of golden pancakes. He flipped the menu over. The oatmeal, listed under the à la carte items, was not pictured. So far he had never found a single menu that did picture its oatmeal. He had no desire to eat oatmeal; he just wanted to see what it looked like.
The smell of strong, sweet perfume preceded the arrival of their waitress. She was an older woman with unnaturally red hair and big, doughy breasts packed into a frothy white blouse. She put two additional glasses of water down on the table.
“So is this gonna be everybody this morning?” she asked.
“Yep.” Laurie offered her a charmingly pretty smile. The waitress smiled back.
“Coffee all around.” The waitress didn’t actually ask; she made a statement, to be refuted or accepted in silence. Encountering no objection, she turned over the brown coffee mugs and filled them.
“Sweet nectar.” Bill picked up his cup and slurped the coffee.
Laurie ordered an item titled “Toast à la Français Superbe,” which, from the picture, seemed to be a stack of French toast with a poached egg on top. She hesitated when the waitress asked if she wanted real maple syrup, which cost extra, or the regular stuff.
“Get the maple syrup. I’m paying.” John didn’t wait to see Laurie’s delighted smile, but simply addressed the waitress. “I was thinking of h
aving the special...”
“No,” Bill hissed. “You’ll die.”
“I’ll have the eggs Benedict.” John handed his menu to the waitress.
The waitress turned to Bill with a slightly sour look. Bill ignored her condemning expression and ordered an omelet, sausages, and syrup.
Then it was Kahlil’s turn.
“I’ll have the steak and egg breakfast.” Kahlil relinquished his menu to the waitress.
“E. coli,” Bill whispered.
“The steaks here are all cooked well done.” The waitress ignored Bill and Kahlil went on with his order.
“That’s fine. I’d like my eggs over hard.”
“Toast?” the waitress asked.
“Wheat,” Kahlil answered quickly.
The waitress nodded. He felt a certain satisfaction in having finally mastered the ritual interrogation of ordering a breakfast in this world.
Ten years ago, the baffling barrage of choices had been far more than he could contemplate or prioritize. White, wheat, rye, sourdough, over hard, over easy, scrambled, boiled or poached—he knew all the options now. And he was experienced enough to know that he liked his eggs cooked hard, even though he loved the way the words “sunny-side-up” sounded.
Kahlil realized his thoughts were drifting. He was exhausted and hurt, and he should have slept the entire day away, but he had wanted to see John. He had needed to see John smile and laugh and be kind.
In his own world, Kahlil saw such ugly things. He had done such hateful things. But here, it was different. This world was immersed in perfumes and abundance. Here, it was easy to be generous. There was so very much that giving could be painless. Goodness could seem inherent to all life. Here, even a being like John, a Rifter, a destroyer of worlds, could be a thoughtful, quiet graduate student.
“You know,” Laurie announced, “normally I can just look at somebody and get a reading right away, but you’re different.”
“A reading?’ Kahlil asked.
“Laurie’s psychic,” John explained, though his tone conveyed absolutely no conviction.
“Madame Laurenza Luciana mystifies even the most skeptical of men,” Bill put in.
“Yes, I read that on the latest flyer.” John looked amused.
Laurie smiled. “We added it especially for you.”
“Well, I am often mystified by your clientele,” John said.
“You’re a witch?” Kahlil asked. It would be natural for witches to be drawn to the company of a Rifter. Alarm prickled at the edge of his awareness.
“I’m a psychic.” Laurie corrected him. “It’s not a religious thing. It’s just my job. I tell fortunes and do palm readings. Mostly at the mall.”
“I see.” Kahlil relaxed again. Petty fortune telling was the field of the wishful. Witches dealt in blood and bones.
“So, can I try reading you?” Laurie leaned across the table and smiled sweetly at Kahlil. “I think I may be seeing true love in the future.” She winked.
“Do as you like,” Kahlil told her, suppressing a laugh at the absurdity of seeing anything in his future.
Laurie closed her eyes. She drew in several quick breaths and exhaled quickly, like a diver preparing to suppress his sense of oxygen deprivation. Kahlil held himself very still. The trick of breathing made him wary. He watched intently as Laurie opened her pale eyes. Her pupils were wide and black as bullet holes. She sat perfectly still, staring into the empty space between them.
“Well?” Bill asked after a few more moments. He started to say something more, but John silenced him with a motion. Bill took a quiet sip of his coffee. He squinted again at Kahlil. All three of them waited.
Laurie’s small mouth compressed slightly and her eyes remained wide. Her skin was going blue. She was beginning to suffocate.
Beyond death lay the bones.
Somehow, without training, she must have learned that. Kahlil wondered how far she would dare to go. She was still a creature of flesh, so not too far, he guessed.
Suddenly, he felt something brush against him, very softly, almost like a breath of air. An old, musty scent washed over him. Kahlil recognized the smell, even as weak as this was. He couldn’t allow her to go any further. He flipped the tattooed backs of his hands up, pretending to simply wrap his fingers around his coffee cup.
Laurie jolted back with a little cry that was half-hiccup, half-yelp. Her mouth opened wide, but she couldn’t seem to inhale. Bill slapped her back. Laurie coughed violently and gasped.
“Laurie?” Bill leaned over, rubbing her back. He looked wide-awake now.
“Is she choking?” John sat forward.
“No.” Laurie coughed again and then grabbed her napkin. She held it to her mouth and spat into it. She wiped her lips and crumpled the napkin.
“I’m okay,” Laurie whispered. A little flush of pink came into her cheeks.
“I just... I don’t know, I guess I sucked in a bug or something. I feel like such a geek.”
“You scared the crap out of me,” Bill said.
“Oh no, you’re not crappy anymore?” Laurie smiled. She looked up at Kahlil. “Sorry. I guess you think I’m a total flake now.”
“No, I don’t think anything like that,” Kahlil said. John gave him a pointed look, but Kahlil didn’t know why.
Then the waitress arrived with their food. Every other concern dissipated in the face of the warm dishes and bright little packets of jelly.
Kahlil enjoyed comparing the way people ate.
Laurie was shy at first, still seeming to feel self-conscious after her coughing fit. But, slowly, she relaxed. After a few minutes, she stabbed her fork into one of the pale curls of chilled butter, sweeping it playfully over the mounds of her French toast as if it were a skier. Bill was more animated about playing with his food. He dunked his sausages in his syrup while making little drowning noises. The two of them seemed well suited to each other.
John, on the other hand, seemed to approach his meal like a dissection. He expertly manipulated his butter knife and fork to excise the ham from beneath his eggs. He cut and shifted his English muffins, also separating them from his eggs. It struck Kahlil as particularly telling that John would choose a complex dish and then break it down into its components instead of simply ordering the separate items.
“Do you always chew your food so thoroughly?” Laurie asked Kahlil.
“Always,” John answered for him.
Kahlil frowned. He didn’t remember eating in front of John before.
“That time you ate the green apple,” John said, as if it were a famous moment in their history together.
“During the electrical storm last fall?” Kahlil wasn’t sure why John would remember anything about that night, though he himself recalled it vividly. Violent bolts of thunder and lightning had cracked the black sky. One burst blew out the electricity. He had barely been conscious. His entire body had ached with bruises and cuts. He remembered feeling ravenous and nauseous at the same time.
He had staggered through the darkness down the staircase, and John had off-handedly said, “Welcome home” and offered him an apple. Even now he remembered the sharp, sweet taste bursting his mouth as his teeth cracked through the crisp flesh. He had eaten it, forgetting for a moment about the blood collecting in the bandages beneath his clothes.
“He ate the entire thing,” John went on, “stem, seeds, core and all.”
“I was starving.” Kahlil sliced thin strips from his steak. The foods here were so pungent that normally he could only manage them in the thinnest pieces. The apple had left his mouth tender for days, but he hadn’t regretted it.
“Yes,” John shifted in the booth so that they almost faced each other, “but you didn’t rush. You must have chewed every bite thirty or forty times. It took forever.”
“Twenty times,” Kahlil said.
The conversation lapsed into perfect silence. That little pulse of quiet always told him that he had said or done something so out of step with this w
orld that no one knew how to react.
“I’m just kidding,” Kahlil said. “I don’t actually keep count or anything. I just had this crazed old uncle who always made me chew everything a million times. It turned into a habit, I guess. I don’t even know when I’m doing it.”
The stillness at the table evaporated instantly. Laurie laughed and Bill nodded. John finished the bite of egg that he had scooped onto his fork.
“My grandma used to brush her hair one hundred strokes every morning before she’d get up.” Bill squeezed more catsup over his omelet.
“Your grandma Ruby. She was kind of nutty, wasn’t she?” Laurie asked.
“Yeah.” Bill nodded proudly.
“One time John went to Bill’s house, and Bill’s grandma made John stand in the bathtub with a rubber hose tied around his waist,” Laurie told Kahlil.
“She was really worried that he’d be struck by lightning.” Bill drank a little more of his coffee.
“To be fair to her, John was actually struck by lightning once.” Laurie paused thoughtfully. “That was up at Rawley Lake, wasn’t it?”
For an instant, Kahlil thought he saw pain flicker through John’s expression. He wondered what John remembered from that moment, when two worlds had touched, and the Oracles had lanced an invisible bond into John’s flesh and bones. Had he seen their hollow eyes and carved bones? Had he glimpsed beyond them to see Kahlil, whose blood had forged the bond?
Then John simply shrugged.
“No.” Laurie frowned. “No, it must have been Emerald Lake, because you were up on the rocks...”
“To be perfectly honest,” John said, “I don’t actually remember, what with the thousands of volts coursing through my brain at the time.”
“It was Emerald Lake,” Laurie decided. “That lightning bolt just came smack down out of the blue.”
John frowned, and for a moment Kahlil was sure that some recollection of the Oracles’ writhing bones and bare skulls must still haunt him.
“According to the prevalent scientific theory,” John said, “lightning doesn’t actually originate out of the blue. It’s a convergence of positive charges in the clouds with negative charges in the earth. The two meet around 150 feet in the air and what people actually see as lightning is the return stroke shooting back down.”