by Chuck Wendig
Which of these three contains the real stone?
Which two are just dupes?
In school, she enjoyed acting, and maybe that’s part of it, too. She’s looking to Candlefly, looking to these three choices, and asking, Who is acting? How much of this is scripted? Candlefly is a controller. He has orchestrated this to serve him more than her. All three of these choices have value to him in some way—but she knows that one of them above all others will help him more than it does her. She needs to figure that out.
And fast.
Three choices remain available.
She thinks of these three as, respectively:
Mister Hollywood.
The Bodybuilder.
The Delicate Flower.
Hollywood is easy on the eyes. A Bernardo from West Side Story vibe. Strong nose overlooking a pouty mouth. Bit of a dimple on the chin. Tall. Reedy in the hips, broad in the shoulders. Standing there like, Yeah, so what?
The Bodybuilder. Bulging behind a black V-neck T-shirt. Board shorts rippling in the wind. Neck like a telephone pole. Little dark eyes that hide what she suspects is a glimmer of actual intelligence—a mote of smarts in a big dumb body.
Finally? The Delicate Flower. A wan wisp, like a dandelion—no, worse, like a seed off a dandelion, blowing in a wind. Art student-type. Soft features. Unlike the others, he’s blond. Blond as beach sand. Hands clasped in front—a sign of comfort and confidence, or a defensive position? She can’t be sure.
Which one is the right one?
At the base level, this should be easy. She picks one—the one she likes, whether that means the one who is easiest on the eyes or the easiest on the ears or the one who shuts up and lets her talk—and that’s her husband. It’s not like it’ll matter in the long run. Her husband is really just “husband” with the dramatic air quotes demonstrated.
But the game is much deeper than that.
Candlefly wants her to pick one of these above the others. But which? And why?
Hollywood is the quickest choice. She gets to be married to some hunky actor-model type (she would normally think waiter but the Candlefly clan may have some actual pull in the La-La-Land fame machine) and he’s comfortable to look at—her gaze is drawn right to him. A very real kind of magnetism. But he’s also too good, too handsome, and Candlefly would know that—and expect her to see that, too.
Then the Bodybuilder. It hits her suddenly: he reminds her of her father. Buzz his hair to the scalp and give him another twenty to thirty years for all that muscle to start braiding with fat and he’d be at least within spitting distance of her father, visually. Then there’s that intelligence behind the eye. Does Candlefly hope she doesn’t see it? Or does he hope the opposite? Does Candlefly think she’ll cling to him because of her father, or be repelled for just the same reason?
The Delicate Flower—clearly the weakest choice here. She’s not strong like her dad, but even she could probably snap him in half like a Kit-Kat. But that might be the trick, too. Candlefly might count on her seeing that and then choosing that—either because she wants someone she can control or because she thinks it’s the last option he’d want her to pick. Then again, maybe he’s sussed out her distaste for weakness. Would he have? Could he have?
“You can talk to them,” Candlefly says, pacing behind them. He looks better today than he did the day before. Not as weathered and wizened. Still, he’s a third of the man he was when she met him last year. Less a snake. More a worm.
But worms are still parasites. Worms still bite, and squirm, and bury themselves in deep as they can—into dirt, or skin, or brains.
“I’m fine,” she says. Standing there. Shaking. Because she’s worried. Worried she can’t find the thread. The invisible one wound around Candlefly’s finger.
She almost thinks to ask Candlefly who he would pick. Just to see his reaction. But she’s afraid he’d take that as a gift of power. Lending him that confidence—even a half-a-teaspoon of self-satisfaction—makes her queasy.
Then she thinks, I’ll choose you, Ernesto. Gods, could he be anticipating that? That by giving her three choices he’d push her to go for the fourth and least obvious choice—which would by proxy be the most obvious choice?
Shit, shit, shit!
She can’t see her way clear on this.
“I have to go,” she blurts, and she regrets the words even as they leave her mouth.
And then Candlefly says, without a beat, “Of course, I understand. This is a difficult decision. I respect your need for time.”
That’s it.
That’s the hook.
His dismissal of her rises off his words like steam off a rain-slick summer road. He didn’t miss a step: she said not right now, he answered as if he anticipated her inability to move forward. He still thinks he’s smarter than she is. Even after their first meeting in the cenote. Even after she bested him in New York and rescued him now.
That is all she needs to know.
“I choose the Delicate Flower,” she says. And since that’s her nickname, not his, she points to the art student, whose brows raise in quizzical arches.
Now Candlefly looks shaken. He hesitates for a moment. A vital, precious moment where he has no words, only a mouth failing to form them. “Of course.”
Nora almost laughs, but doesn’t.
She keeps it straight.
“Do you have a name?” she asks the Flower.
“Owen.” His voice is soft as she expected, but deeper.
“My name’s Alonzo,” the Bodybuilder says. He steps forward and gives a little curl of a smile like he’s some kind of Don Juan. He offers a hand.
“And nobody cares,” Nora responds.
Candlefly flinches.
That was his choice, wasn’t it? Alonzo the Bodybuilder. And Alonzo knew it and now he’s trying to save the day but maybe, just maybe, he isn’t as smart as those little dark eyes suggest.
“I thought she’d pick me,” Hollywood says to Candlefly—giving a flip shrug. His accent is thick. Cuban, maybe, she’s not sure. “Fuckin’ bitch.”
Candlefly kicks him in the back of the leg. Right at the crook of the knee. Hollywood loses his balance and falls into a tide pool, yelping. When he scrambles to stand, Nora sees that the underside of his arm is abraded like someone came at him with a cheese grater. Dark blood wets his arm, drips to the water below.
“The lady has made her choice,” Candlefly says. Then, to her, “We can go?”
“Yeah. You—” she says to Owen. “Tomorrow. Sunrise again. Just you. Not him.” She gestures to Ernesto. “It’s not a date. It’s a strategy session.”
Owen nods.
And Nora turns around, no longer able to hide her smirk.
Because she won.
*
He lost. Candlefly knows that now. He’s not sure exactly when the rope slipped through his hands and it all fell away—but it did.
It was when she almost left the scene. And he said something—what did he say to spook her? Was he too eager to let her go? Too expectant she’d fail?
He got cocky.
He thought she’d pick Alonzo. That was his bet. Emil was too handsome, too pretty-boy, and he knew she’d see right through the Hollywood haze sure as you can see through the LA smog. But he also thought she’d never pick the weakest of the three choices. If only because it smelled like a trap. Alonzo looked like someone who could protect her, who would echo her father, who would be someone she could still manipulate—a sense of familiarity there.
Then Alonzo had to open his mouth and speak.
Atop the bluff, above the cave, Aurora waits in the parking lot.
Alonzo says, “Ernesto, I’m really sorry—”
He shushes the muscle-skulled idiot. “Shh. You failed me. But you can save your own fortune yet. I have other work you can do. Are you willing?”
The meathead nods.
“What about me?” Emil says. That handsome smirk. That tilt of his chin.
“You wer
e never of value, but you played your part. I have nothing else. Go back to your life of auditions and models and poolside cocaine, pretty-boy. Both of you, in the car. I have... things to discuss with Miss Aurora.”
Ernesto ushers the three younger Candlefly men into the car.
“So?” she asks.
“The girl picked Owen.”
Aurora sneers. “Really? She’s an idiot. Or a genius.”
“I’d lean toward genius now.”
“You failed to manage this scenario.”
“I managed it perfectly. I am not a puppetmaster.” I am a rudder. “I gave her three options, each good for us. She chose one. If not the maximal choice, so be it.” He hesitates, then adds, “We are still in control.”
“We’d better be. If this all falls apart for us, it’s your ass.”
“You’re my minder,” he says. “I’m your charge. If things get away from me, they get away from you, too. Remember that.”
“Are you threatening me?”
He smiles with artificial warmth, like a flickering fireplace on the television. “No, no, of course not. I’m just reminding us all that our fortunes are tethered together.”
Of course I’m threatening you, you fool.
“Get in the car,” she says.
26
Courtship rituals of the daemon families are a curious thing. The Bellbooks offer one another gifts of forbidden lore, secret ciphers solved, clandestine prophecies prophesied. The Hogstooth kill for one another: they might hunt boar or fish for shark or hunt a shared foe, and then culminate this ritual in what could only be described as a bloody, frenzied coupling—an act that is as much a battle as it is a sexual rite. The Candlefly family has no known courtship rituals—because to them, marriage is a commodity. An act of alliance and convenience where love is a void and where a demonstration of one’s value has already been made by others.
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
“I brought you flowers,” Owen says, and thrusts them at her.
Nora looks down at them. A mix of wildflowers. Surprisingly springy. Not limp. The wind gets underneath them, and they shake and shudder as if begging to be taken.
“You should’ve brought me In-N-Out,” she says. “Or at least a cereal bar or something. I’m starving.”
Owen remains with a small, passive smile. “My friend, Caleb Woodwine, said that a local wildflower collection might be best. California poppies, black-eyed Susans, something called a fried-egg flower?”
“If it’s not an actual fried egg, then I’m not interested.”
“You’re hungry. I can get you food.”
Nora looks him up and down. He’s less fey than she remembered. Maybe he suffered in comparison to the other two. He still has a poet’s frame. A body as insubstantial as beams of light tangling in the heart of a prism.
“It’s fine,” she says. “My friend is on the hunt.”
She stayed here all day yesterday and all night. The high tide came in and she retreated to the tunnels—feeling the stone, sensing the channels of the Great Below stretching on and knotting together, feeling the dull throb of the cenote. Then when tide went out around midnight, she crept out into the cool night air. She marveled at the stars. The panoply of pinpricks poked through the endless blanket of black.
Before sun-up, Burnsy found her. She told him what happened, and now he’s off on a breakfast run.
Owen nods then, finally, retracts the flowers.
“You don’t seem like a Candlefly,” she says.
He smirks, a little bit. “What does a Candlefly seem like?”
“That question was very Candlefly.”
“I don’t follow.” But still, that smirk.
She lets it go. “How much did Candlefly—eh, Ernesto—tell you?”
“All of it.”
I doubt that. “So you know that you’ll be able to descend into Hell?”
“The katabasis. Yes.”
“You and your... family must be thrilled.” She says that word, family, with some disdain, like she’s smelling a cloud of cigarette smoke. Because they seem less a family, perhaps, than they are a fraternity of serpents fucking and biting each other.
Here, the smirk drops. “They are.”
“But you’re not.”
“Not so much.”
“Here I would’ve thought this was a big deal. Like being an astronaut or a deep-sea-diver. The first to enter a forbidden space.” She faux-gasps, covers her mouth. “The ladies will love you.”
“You’ll be my wife. And I don’t want to enter a forbidden space. I’ve never understood my family’s fascination with what lies beneath. I’d rather look up, not down.”
“An optimist.”
“A dreamer.”
She makes a barfy face. Tongue out, nose wrinkled. “Well, you’re right to not be thrilled. They’re going to use you. You’re a pawn in all this.”
“You’re really into the hard sell.”
“They’re going to manipulate you. I figured for once I would go the other way.”
Ah, there, the smirk returns. “Isn’t that just another form of manipulation?”
“Everything we do is manipulation.”
“Don’t you want me to fall in love with you?”
“I don’t. Because I’m going to be a ghost to you. When this is all said and done, I’m going to pass you on the stairway—me going up, you walking down, and we’ll shake hands and that will be the last we ever see of each other.”
Gulls laugh and wheel in the sky.
“I still need to want this,” he says.
“No,” she answers. “You don’t. You only need to open your mouth and say yes when the time comes to put the ring on your finger. Your heart doesn’t need to consent, just your mouth. If you’re here, you’ve been offered up. You’re a lamb on the altar, and at this point, no matter how hard or how loud you bleat, someone’s going to draw a knife across that pretty pale throat of yours. I don’t know why it’s you. I don’t know what they have on you. But you’re here. And I’m here. And we’re going to be wed. We don’t have to know each other. We certainly don’t have to love each other.”
“We could at least kiss.”
“Only then. Only on the day.” To seal the deal.
“A romantic, then.” He says it without any apparent sarcasm, which makes the sarcasm all the more stinging.
“A pragmatist. Ruthless as a barracuda.”
“We are very different, you and I.” He never looks away from her, not once during this conversation. “I don’t really care about these games. I never have. I don’t know if I’d really be good at them or not, but they’re not my thing. Which is why I’m dangling from the lowest rung here in my family, and why soon a boot will break my fingers and I will be made to descend into a place of subterranean horror for no good reason that I can discern except to carry my family’s flag and stick it in in the dead ground deep down.”
Shades again of the astronaut, she thinks.
“If I had my way, I’d stay up here. In the sun. On the beach. Drinking a beer. Sketching the sunset. Maybe even sketching you, running in from the ocean—or running to it.”
The ocean. She never really liked the ocean. It always struck her as a big empty void that just so happens to fill with water. (And now she’s wondering exactly what the Great Below is like there—does the ocean stop its advance? Or does Hell simply dive deeper?) But suddenly his words make her want to go out into the ocean right now. Splash out into the water. Take a dive. Salt and tide. Shimmer and bubble. She wants it so bad she’s almost willing to do it now—hop and skip over the rocks and jump to the sea. Where, surely, a mighty headache will hit her like a fist. Her nose will bleed. Her gums will go red. Her eyes will burn and the pain will be so bad she’ll sink like a stone.
And drown down there in the void.
She shudders.
“So, you’re an artist,” she says, the
words said like she’s choking back the urge to vomit.
“I am. Do you like art?”
“Let me paint a picture for you. It’s me. Standing here. Telling you I don’t give a damn about you.” She pats her pockets. “Oooh. Nope. Not one damn on me, sorry. You’re a rope dangling down into the dark. I am grateful for the rope. I am happy it exists. But I don’t care about it beyond its structural integrity. I’m sure you’re a nice guy. But we’re not a thing, okay? Besides, last guy I hooked up with ended up a red smear in a nice hallway—that, actually, in part thanks to your patron, Ernesto.”
Owen’s countenance softens. He’s about to apologize.
She doesn’t let him.
“It’s fine,” she says. “I’m hardened to it. I don’t care anymore. Only person I care about is this one.” She takes her index fingers and mimes a frame around her face.
“Hey, I heard that!” comes a voice from up above them somewhere.
Burnsy.
Owen looks confused.
They hear the man’s grunts and heel-scuffs as he comes down around the mouth of the cenote cave, gingerly stepping through tide pools and over porous rocks wet with froth-churned water. He’s got a big bag of food. The bag is brown, with grease slicking the bottom of it. “Ding-a-ling,” he says. “Chowdown time.”
She steps past Owen—and as she does, she feels the pressure of the outside pushing hard at her skull. Like a thumb against the center of her forehead, pushing hard, harder, soon hard enough she feels like she might be trepanned by it—
She steps back. Owen looks at her, concerned. Or faking concern.
“Don’t,” she cautions him.
“What?”
But Burnsy is there. “All right. Breakfast burritos from some place called, ehhh, what was it? Tacos Jalisco or some shit—”
“Not In-n-Out?”
His knifeslash mouth forms an awkward scowl. “They don’t do breakfast.”
“Oh.”
“I had to walk like, five fucking miles for this.”
She rolls her eyes. “I’m sorry, okay? Thank you.”
Burnsy lifts his furless eyebrows toward Owen. “This him?”