Betrayed

by Lynn Carthage

  “We shouldn’t,” I say. “It’s the only bottle.”

  She brings the vial to her lips with a slow and salacious smile. I am powerless to stop her, because I want to drink, too. She lightly tips the glass and a single drop lands on her generous lower lip. She lets it rest there, perfectly round, a half sphere of crimson, while we both adore at its shape, scent, power.

  And then her tongue darts out and takes it.

  A groan of pleasure comes from her throat like she was never meant to make any other noise, ever. The humming joins her. She is changing as I watch. A spark comes into her eyes: something different, something knowing. Her lips lift to show her teeth, to give air and worship to the single drop she has imbibed.

  She drinks again, fully, and her extended cry of pleasure makes me reach out to take it from her, but of course my hands go through the glass.

  Yet I’m able to touch the blood on the inside.

  It’s like touching a heated tear from a lover. It’s warm and chills me at the same time. The humming shoots up through my arm and darts into my mind. I’m part of that blood now, and I haven’t even drunk yet.

  Phoebe, the only one who can touch the glass, tilts the vial so it touches where my mouth would be if I were still living.

  We both need to drink. We understand that.

  The two of us.

  The wash of the blood touches my lips and then subsides.

  Oh.

  My.

  God.

  I feel like I’m swooning but instead of losing consciousness, I’m gaining it. More awake, more alive. The humming is in my bloodstream now. I regard my arm: there’s music flooding through that blue network of veins just under the skin. The veins may not be pumping blood anymore, but they’re pumping a gorgeously insane chorus to every inch of my body.

  I’m flooded with it.

  I’m in it. It’s in me.

  She pulls the vial away and drinks again, then she tips it for me and gives me the rest of the vial.

  In my gluttony, I manage to curb myself. “Save some for Eleanor,” I gasp. There’s just a bit left there in the bottom for her. Phoebe gives me a look of anguish yet drops to her knees to get the dropped cork and thrust it into the bottle top—just as feeling completely overtakes me.

  I hurtle through my mind. I see green, such a painfully saturated color. I rise and see the green is grass, a beautiful meadow from which fog drifts up. It’s morning and I’m whole. In the distance I know there is home and a woman who loves me but she is many days’ journey away. I walk with a heavy heart and every tree drips with mist, every leaf wearing a stole of dew. I turn back and see the wavering progress I’ve made through the wet grass. A snake’s deceptive trail.

  Next it’s silver I see, glinting and catching the sun in such a dangerous way—it distracts a man, lets a sword cut your cheek, and I see the eyes behind the helm, full of hatred. The sounds are terrible, the scream of metal on metal, the rough and crude sound of denting and the soft skin beneath denting, too, and the bones and the organs the bones were supposed to protect.

  Armor. I’m seeing men in armor. I swivel my gaze down. I’m in armor, too. My feet are in thick metal shoes coming to a sharp point.

  Red. Blood on silver. A sword blade with someone else’s blood coating it. It’s slick and dripping and it hits the grass and the poor beautiful green is soiled by it.

  A clanging crash that is so mind-crackingly loud. Someone falls. Someone in a full suit of armor hits the ground and every grass blade cries beneath the silver.

  I’m back on the crypt floor again, breathing as hard as if I’ve run for miles, my skin tingling, my whole self tingling. I’ve been changed and transformed.

  I’m Sangreçu.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  French is the language of heraldry, and maille, meaning mesh, is the foundation of chain mail. Worn as armor, mail consists of tiny interlocking rings, a beautiful time-consuming art for the smith.

  —Art of Armor

  Phoebe is glowing with it. I stare at her, her skin changed, more vibrant, her eyes fathomless.

  “Where were you?” I ask. “Were there colors?”

  “Colors . . .” She can’t seem to collect herself enough to talk.

  “I saw the most incredible green,” I said. “It filled my mind.”

  “I saw stone,” she said.

  I can see that her experience disturbed her more than mine did.

  “Castle walls,” she says falteringly.

  “And?”

  “A well made of stone. There was a man inside.”

  “Inside the well?”

  “Yes. Trapped.”

  “Trapped . . .” I am lost in that word. I struggle to return to Phoebe. The word makes me feel colors: entrenched grays and blacks so sable no one can ever recover from them.

  “Miles, I lowered the stone on top of him,” she says, and bends her head so her auburn hair floods down to cover her face. “I placed a cap on the well so he could never escape.”

  “It wasn’t you.” But I think, that was me, some version of me, on the field.

  “I’ve done such a terrible thing.”

  “He must have . . .” I falter. “. . . deserved it? He hurt you?”

  “I think he loved me.”

  “Phoebe, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry for me!” she flashes, lifting her head. “I’m a bad person.”

  “You’re not! You could never—” I break off, looking at her hand.

  She holds an empty vial. The last drops meant for Eleanor are gone. The cork lies on the ground a distance away, as if thrown.

  We both go silent. I hadn’t noticed until now: the humming is over.

  She replaces the cork and puts the empty vial back into the metal stand. A sob escapes her.

  “I really did betray her, just as she said,” she says.

  I crawl to the cabinet and peer into its depths. Did we miss a vial? But the metal rack was made to hold many vials. There wouldn’t be one just lying loose, unprotected. The fact is, someone long ago took the other vials. Just having my head in the space that held the vials is intoxicating; it’s like I’m sticking my head into an oven filled with incense and smoke. I really, really want another drink.

  “I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted every last drop.”

  “It’s all right,” I say. “I know how powerful it was.”

  “It’s not all right! I drank her only chance to become Sangreçu!”

  “She might not want to be,” I say.

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “If anyone had asked us if we wanted to be, we would’ve said no. It’s only because we saw it and smelled it. You didn’t betray her. You were caught up in something you couldn’t control.”

  “I’m a terrible person.”

  I slam the door to the cupboard closed. “We don’t understand anything!” I shout at her. “Someone else makes choices for us, and then we feel guilty for them! It’s not your fault, Phoebe!”

  She’s staring at me like she can’t believe what she just saw. “I’m sorry I yelled,” I say quietly.

  “Miles—you just slammed that door closed.”

  Whoa. That’s why she was looking at me that way.

  I reach out and open it again, slam it closed. I inhale with a catch of laughter in my throat. I leap across the room and pick up a reliquary sitting in its somber niche. I set it down carefully, but then run to a wooden bench and kick it. Its clatter across the stone floor is glorious.

  I pull Phoebe to standing and whirl her around in a circle. “You’re not the only thing I can touch anymore!” I shout.

  It’s because of the blood. It’s the Sangreçu power.

  I go on a rampage, up the stairs, through the chapel, touching things. I nudge a pew forward just enough to scare the old woman sitting there going through her rosary. She glares at me, and I exult at the sensation of being looked at. She sees me. No one but other dead people have seen me since I died.
r />   “Sorry, love,” I say. “But the pew was askew! A cockney rhyme; I’m so clever. I’m so real!”

  She gestures me away with the worldliness of age. She’s seen a million cads and I’m just the most recent one.

  I burst outside. Sunshine feels better. My skin is more real now, alive to sensation the way it was when I was alive. I’m dizzy with all the feelings.

  It feels amazing. I had forgotten what touch really feels like. I had become used to the dampened, limited sensation that I had access to as a ghost.

  A thought hits me. How good would this feel if I weren’t dead, if I drank this as a living person? I don’t know if my nerves could even survive it.

  I pace past the memorial site where Pierre dug up Giraude, and Phoebe’s laughing behind me. I run as fast as I can and take a flying leap, reveling in the painful thud when I hit the ground.

  It’s pain.

  But I love it.

  I’m not about to waste the sensation. There’s one amazing thing to do when your skin literally shivers at another’s touch. Phoebe and I have kissed a few times and it felt extraordinary and made my pulse go like a train careening around a mountain pass . . . but now it’s like the train is going too fast and we’re going to derail. It feels so astounding. My mind is completely blown by what my body can experience now.

  And she feels it, too.

  “Where do you want to go?” I ask quietly. We can be seen now, and we need somewhere private to be with each other.

  We can use intention to go anywhere.

  “It would be really cool to go back to my room in California.”

  I pause. “I don’t think it will be the same.”

  After a moment, she nods. “Someone else must live there now.”

  “If only we could manipulate time as well as place,” I say. “We could go back to a day when your family was still there.”

  “A time when I was still alive,” she says and shudders.

  To distract her from that thought, I start throwing out names, anything. “Want to meet up at the Parthenon? Find a warm room at the Waldorf Astoria? Let’s see, a cruise ship?”

  “With my luck, we’d land on the deck of the sunken Titanic.”

  “All I know is that I want to touch you until my head explodes,” I say. “What’s the best place to do that?”

  She hesitates for a second. “How about a beach somewhere?”

  “A secluded beach. Wait: are we trying to reenact the name of a famous cocktail?”

  “Miles, you’re a darb but you always make me laugh.” She reaches for me, and she guides us there. It’s her beach, her decision, and I don’t even know where we are, what country, what continent.

  All I know is that the surf is a gorgeous rhythmic timekeeper for us, and the sand is powdery and soft.

  At first we just sit, watching the waves, totally in tune with the forces that make the waves gather and crest, resonating a little with the bleakness of the receding water and its plaintive pull at the sand underneath.

  Then, because it’s all I can think about, I reach over and pull her face to mine, and our lips touch. Her mouth is soft, as soft as the sound she makes in her throat when we kiss.

  Her arms twine around my neck and her fingers penetrate into the hair on my nape. I shiver.

  I press forward and deepen our contact. She surges forward to match my intensity, and I taste inside her mouth, the heat and slight savor of spearmint.

  It’s like we’ve never kissed before, because the Sangreçu blood lavishly caressing the inside of my blood vessels makes this feel like nothing ever has, ever. I can hear the blood gathering in my brain, feel the pulse of it everywhere. It makes me dizzy. It makes Phoebe’s touch almost unbearably good. I separate from her because the feelings are so forceful I can’t breathe . . . whatever counts as breathing for me now, that is . . . and we press our foreheads against each other’s, breathing raggedly as if we’ve run a race.

  I touch her shoulder and the heat of her skin burns through the fabric of her shirt. It wasn’t like this before. Our skin had been cool, converted to a haunted vestige of what it once was. Now she feels feverish. I unbutton three buttons and push the shirt aside so I can put my cheek against her scorching skin. I kiss from her shoulder to her neck to the back of her ear. Her head lolls to the side to give me more access.

  I unbutton the rest of the buttons and slide her shirt off.

  Behind us, the surf roars, and my blood roars in response.

  Her fingers, deft, remove my shirt, too, and it’s going so quickly, too quickly, but it doesn’t seem possible to pull away now. Our skin is cauterizing together, like two sides of a wound.

  Every part of her is beautiful: her long legs with swimmer’s muscles, a dusting of sand clinging to her calf as I run a hand along her thigh; her arched neck and the curve of her breasts and the curve of her waist and her hips and the curve of her shoulders cresting down to the curve of her biceps. Everything about her is rounded, beautiful, and the blood in her veins that I can see so faintly blue at her wrists, at her neck, calls out to me, and my blood is on fire to answer back.

  She pulls me down to her and hoists herself so we change positions and now I’m the one on my back in the sand. She rises above me like a figurehead on a ship with her hair whipping in the wind, and undoes my belt buckle. She takes off my belt and throws it aside.

  I come up on my elbows so she can ease off my jeans and boxers. I guide her out of what remains of her clothes. Then there’s nothing left. Just our skin desperate to fuse.

  We pause, looking into each other’s eyes. There’s a step I’ve been trained about to the point of nausea. You have to wear a condom. You have to wear a condom. You have to wear a condom.

  I ask quietly, “There’s no way this could result in anything, right?”

  I’m dead; I’m shooting blanks.

  She’s dead; her womb is a tomb.

  Disease doesn’t worry me; there’s no more worst-case scenario for me. All the things that would’ve stopped us in real life have no significance now.

  “How could it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. It couldn’t.”

  “Right. So just . . .”

  We both laugh a little. It’s my first time. I’ve never entered another person in this way.

  I concentrate on her face, her eyes. The radiance of her skin. I could spend a century gazing at her.

  She looks at me, and there’s a fragile moment where we nearly sink into each other. I’m there. I’m her. She’s everything.

  I’m poised at the edge.

  “I’m not scared, Miles,” she says in a voice crafted of willow. “I’m yours.”

  And that’s enough for me to surge forward until we’re joined like I’ve never been joined before. It is everything. It obliterates me. I don’t even exist anymore, it’s all just Phoebe, just her and her soft words in my ear and her body moving above me and the way the waves wash over the sand around us and erase their own passage again and again.

  Afterward we lie on the sand and drift in our thoughts. Her hair is flung over my neck. Even being Sangreçu, we are still robbed of the solace of sleep. But it’s okay. Everything’s so okay.

  I begin a solitary journey back through the images I saw when I drank from the vials. That grass. That field.

  I close my eyes and the metal dances across my vision, a sword sweeping through the air, a body moving through space with slowness and heft, enchained in heavy mail. Those eyes in the break of the helm . . . Who is the person I’m killing? Or is he killing me?

  I sigh and try to learn more, see more. Can’t I turn my head—what’s over there? But my vision is blinded. I think I’m wearing a helm, too. I’m just as held back as he is.

  Phoebe rustles and her low voice says, “Shouldn’t have trusted me, should you?” There’s a musicality to it, a playfulness that contradicts the terrible content of her words. Is this what she said as she lowered the lid onto the well, burying that man?


  “Phoebe?”

  “That’s my name,” she says, and her voice still has that playful tinge. I shudder. Whoever she once was, she was no one to mess with.

  “Should we return?”

  “No,” she says. “I’m never going back.”

  I laugh, but she doesn’t. I sit up and look down at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not going back. My sister and my family will be fine. I’m not responsible anymore.”

  I narrow my eyes. “What about the prophecy? And Eleanor?”

  “It will all work itself out.”

  “You don’t sound like yourself,” I say.

  “Your love has changed me,” she says.

  “Not for the worse.”

  “Maybe,” she says.

  “The Phoebe I know cares about her sister and her safety, and she’s a good friend to Eleanor.”

  “That Phoebe,” she says, rolling to her side to give me her back, and then sitting up. “She was a fool.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I spin her around to face me, my grip maybe a little rougher than I would like.

  Her green eyes are somber. “Miles, nothing matters. We betray our friends and the sea keeps bringing brine to the sand.”

  “It does matter!” I flash.

  “Make love to me again.”

  I stand up and grab my boxers, pull them on. “What’s wrong with you?” I ask as I get into my jeans and find my shirt, brought down the beach a bit by the wind.

  “The blood makes me see things differently . . . or see things again that I forgot.”

  “You’re not different, Phoebe. You’re a member of this team and we have to see things through.”

  “I love this shore,” she says. “The sea is so quiet here. It lets me drift in my thoughts.”

  “Your thoughts aren’t doing you any favors,” I say. “Get dressed. We’re going back.”

  “I’d like to stay, but you may go.”

  “May go?” I stand there in disbelief. “I didn’t realize I needed your permission.”

  How did this all go so wrong? Phoebe is the most important person in my life/death, and she’s behaving like a stranger. She sits completely naked in the sand, hugging her bent knees, her long hair covering her shoulders and back. She’s beautiful, but she isn’t the same person.