by Jim Butcher
“What aunt?” she asked him cautiously. She and her mom had kept to themselves until her death three years ago. She didn’t know any of her relatives.
“Aunt Meg.” He waited for her reaction. The name meant nothing to her.
“She’s white,” he added.
Her stomach did a flip. Maybe this Aunt Meg was from her father’s side. Dana didn’t even know his name. Dana’s mom had never told her white ex-boyfriend that she had gotten pregnant.
“What things?” she asked, catching her sneaker toe on a crack in the sidewalk. Their neighborhood looked like a bomb had gone off. Things fell apart all the time. She caught her toe again. Despite the heaviness of the box against his chest, he reached out a hand to steady her. His fingers were very warm and pale against her dark skin.
“Where is she?” she asked. “Aunt Meg?”
“She used to work for my family. In a way.” He took his hand away. “My distant relatives.”
She stopped walking. “It was nice of you to taser that dog and all, but just, you know, get to the point.”
He stopped, too, and faced her. “It’s a sad world when someone who knows a family member of yours is greeted with such hostility.”
“This world is more than sad. I don’t know that you know her,” she countered. “You’re just a name-dropper in a coat.” When he kept looking at her as if that didn’t compute, she said, “I need more proof.”
He nodded. “Fair enough.”
She looked to the right, at a boarded-up building, and had a funny feeling. His face came into her mind and then there was something black and rectangular. She squinted as she walked, trying to make sense of it.
“Hey,” said a voice, and she jerked her head up. She and the guy were standing in front of her house, which she shared with Jordan, Lucy, Mike, and Anny. The strays that had become family. Wrapped in his bathrobe and plaid pajama bottoms, Jordan was standing on the porch, shotgun pointed in their direction. “What’s up?”
“We have a rule,” she told the guy. “No strangers in the house. Ever.”
He looked from her to Jordan and back again. “My name is Alex Ritter. There. I’m not a stranger. It’s okay to let me in.”
Jordan hesitated. “What?” he said fuzzily.
“It’s okay,” the guy—Alex said again.
“Cool.” Jordan nodded calmly and lowered the shotgun.
Dana was stunned. “Jordan?”
“It’s really all right, Delaney,” the man—Alex said. “I swear it to you.”
“It’s not,” she insisted. Too late, she remembered that he still had her gun. She bounded onto the porch beside Jordan and reached for the shotgun. “We don’t know this guy. And he is weird.”
Jordan kept hold of the rifle and opened the front door. “Come on in.”
“Lucy!” Dana shouted. “Anny! Mike!”
Then they were in the house, and her four roommates were oohing and aahing over the carton of batteries, which Alex was doling out to them like Santa Claus with his bag of presents. Dana looked around wildly. She had lost more time. And this creepy man in black was inside her house.
“These things are over fifteen years old,” Jordan marveled as he popped a couple of batteries in her flashlight, twisted the head back on, and gave it a flick. Light poured forth. She didn’t remember giving it to him. “Awesome.”
“They’re warm,” Lucy said, holding one between her hands. She leaned over and kissed Dana on the cheek. “You’re made of fabulous.”
“She chased away some dogs, too,” Alex offered. Dana glared at him. Everyone else was taking his sudden appearance in stride. Or maybe she had simply fast-forwarded through the introductions.
She held out a shaking hand. “Give me back my gun.”
He did so, willingly, and she stuffed it into her pocket again. Then she turned her back and walked into the kitchen. Out of his line of sight, she slipped through the back door and flew down all the wooden stairs to the cool sand of the beach.
He followed, as she had expected him to, and she pulled out the gun. He looked from it to her face and sighed.
“If you shoot, you shoot,” he said.
Then he walked to the water’s edge and lifted his chin. “No seaweed,” he said. “No seagulls.”
But there was something on the beach, next to his boot. She spotted it at the same time that he looked down. He picked it up—tats all over that hand—and his palm blossomed with a pale bluish glow. Her eyes widened as he put the object in his pocket.
“Sea glass,” he said, as if that should satisfy her.
He turned his face back to the black water. “I was out here earlier. One good thing about the end of the world. The sunsets are fantastic.”
“This is Southern California. Our sunsets are always fantastic.” She kept a good grip on the gun. “You’d better tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m Alex Ritter. From Germany. Berlin.”
Despite herself, she was impressed. Eight years ago, people traveled all over the place. But fuel was getting scarce. Her house didn’t even have a car.
“I flew here,” he added, as if reading her mind. “I have a plane.”
“Holy shit,” she blurted. There were still planes in the world. And they cost… she didn’t even know what they cost. Too much to even think about.
He smiled faintly. His profile was sharply etched against the night. It didn’t make any sense that Jordan had let him in, just like that, and everyone had behaved as if it was no big deal. It was a huge deal. He was scary.
“Dana, please, I’m sorry,” he said abruptly, turning his face toward her. “There is no good way to have the talk I need to have with you. Let me show you.”
Before she could reply, he wiped his face with both his hands and rubbed them together. He moved his head from side to side, as if working out the kinks; then he turned to the sea and opened his arms like an orchestra conductor.
Something hummed against the soles of her feet. A couple of her braids bobbed in a freshet of wind.
Shimmering blue crackles of energy crackled from his fingertips. Then the crackles traveled to the water, and hit it with a sizzle. The waves rippled and flared blue, pink, gold like the Aurora Borealis.
Dana jumped backwards so hard she landed on her butt, and she spastically lifted her sneakers as the water swirled toward her. It took her a moment to realize that he’d clasped her wrist and was pulling her to her feet.
“Don’t touch me,” she said as she tried to yank her hand away. He was bending over her; there were rings under his eyes and the pupils were dilated. He was jittery and shaky, like he was on something.
She looked from his eyes to the water. The colors were gone. Her mind started spinning rationalizations and denials. She was spooked by the way he cocked his head and gazed at her with an odd, confused expression, like he was trying to remember what to say.
“I don’t know how else to tell you this,” he said. “But I think it was your Aunt Meg who made all this happen.” He waved his hand. “All the chaos. The… ending.”
“What?” she blurted. “How?” She backed away from him, holding the gun in both her hands; behind him, the black, colorless surf rolled into the night.
“I don’t know how,” he said, so softly she barely heard him. “But please, for the love of God, help me fix it.”
Then he advanced on her and pushed down her arms. She tried to raise them again but she couldn’t. He cupped her face in his hands. Dizziness swept through her and she dropped the gun. He held her still and she could feel him falling right into her, inside her mind. There was nothing but his blue eyes.
Then warmth raced through her, zinging through her bloodstream, and she began to sweat again. The soles on her sneakers made hissing sounds against the damp sand. Sparks skittered through her veins and arteries.
Then she shot like a comet into the air, into space, among the stars, away from the messed-up world. Suspending above the night, she gazed down and saw Lo
s Angeles in ruins, the way it was, and a huge bloom of red surging toward the shore.
Toward her beach, just below her house.
And then saw, in that house, two tiny dots of light. She looked at the dot in the kitchen. It was behind the refrigerator, and as it magnified in her mind, she saw Anny’s missing house key. She moved on, and found Jordan’s reading glasses between the couch cushions.
She jerked to consciousness, to find that she was she was sprawled in the sand. He was on his hands and knees, his face close to hers, and when he saw that her eyes were opening, he leaned back on his heels with a deep sigh of relief.
“What did you do to me?” she shouted, trying to get up. But her muscles were strangely flaccid.
“I think I activated your gift,” he replied. She could hear how freaked out he was.
“You think you what?” She felt in the sand for the gun.
“What happened?” he asked.
“You know what happened.” He just looked at her, and she huffed. “I saw things. First the world, and the mess.” She thought of the mass headed for the beach. “Garbage, or something. And lost things.”
She told him about the keys and the glasses. He nodded, looking thoughtful. Then she saw a faint glow around him.
She said, “Did you make those things glow so I could find them?”
“No. I can use energy, in some ways,” he said. “Like on the dog.”
“And on me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“And you can make people like you.”
“Only when they should,” he replied.
“I don’t like you,” she said.
And suddenly she was overcome with weariness. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. As they drifted shut, she said, “I think you left your wallet in a building on my street.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Thank you,” he said finally, into the muzziness of her sleep.
~
When she woke up just before dawn, she liked him a little more, which was terrifying, because she didn’t want to like him at all. He had explained that he’d just found out some unbelievable things—that some kind of supernatural power ran in his family and apparently in hers, too. All his people were missing or dead, but some of them had lived in a castle in the Black Forest. And as soon as he’d gotten inside the castle, he’d turned into Mr. Electric.
Then they were in the house, and he was helping Jordan pull out the refrigerator—a useless appliance except for keeping rats out of boxed food—so Anny could find her house key. Jordan was overjoyed to find his glasses again. There was no one around to make him new ones.
She put all her own valuables in boxes and Jordan promised to keep an eye on them. Then, with shaking hands, she packed a suitcase. He was making her be okay with all this. She could tell. She wanted to make him stop, but she was doing it.
And then she was saying goodbye.
They got his wallet and then he walked her into an alley where a vehicle sat beneath a protective covering. He pulled it off, revealing a beautiful candy-apple red Corvette. She hadn’t ridden in a car in years. Something loosened in her chest as she slid in on the passenger’s side. The car smelled of old leather and dust. When they climbed in, he pressed his finger against the ignition, and the engine purred.
“I couldn’t find the keys,” he said. “Do you see them?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Is this some kind of test?”
He shook his head, watching her.
Settling back, she let her lids fall shut. A blur of light passed through her mind’s eye; then she felt a stab of sorrow, deep and penetrating. It hurt almost like a physical wound. She opened her eyes and looked at Alex.
“There’s something about the keys that’s sad,” she said.
“The keys are sad?” he repeatedly slowly. As they glided out of the alley, he knit his brows. “In the sense of…?”
“I don’t know I just felt sadness.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Did you put some kind of double whammy on me?”
“I don’t really know what I did to you,” he replied.
~
His jet was bigger than she’d pictured it. It was parked in what had once been a parking lot for the beach. Fueled up, ready to go. It could cross the Atlantic nonstop. She sat to his right in the cockpit. He took off his coat, revealing lots of muscles and a black T-shirt. His right arm was completely tattooed. Tats on the left went up to his elbow. It didn’t make sense that a guy who looked like him would have access to a Corvette and a plane, and that she was flying to Germany with him.
But it didn’t make sense that in eight short years, the world had fallen completely apart. First everyone talked about fuel reserves and no TV, no grid, no net, and very few people. It was as if things were melting. Evaporating. As if the world itself was losing time—or running out of it.
They climbed. She looked down at the coastline. The ocean and sky were the same color. Skyscrapers had collapsed. Streets were broken up. There were no birds. Her mother was buried somewhere below her, in a grave not far from their house because without transportation, they couldn’t get her to a graveyard.
Her throat tightening, she brushed tears from her eyes and focused, trying to see her mother’s grave in her mind. What she saw was her mother’s face, deep black, her lips, so brown, pulled back from white teeth in a smile.
Her throat tightened. She gripped the armrest so hard the beds of her fingernails stung.
“Why did I come with you?” she asked him through tears.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Why did I come get you?”
~
Hours later, they began their descent through a sky the color of old copper. The sun was beginning to set. Snow was falling onto skeletons of trees and vast deadfalls. Anticipation skittered through her as his castle came into view. It sat on a hill, as he had said. Half of it had been destroyed; the other half rose into the aged, metallic sky.
They landed and rolled to a stop. Alex had explained that he’d been adopted by a wealthy couple named Aaron and Maria Cohen. His parents had been on a trip to Greece when the Collapse had occurred. That was what he called it. Explosions, earthquakes, riots. Eight years of looking for them. Finally he’d found a key, and then a bank safe deposit box. There were his adoption papers, saying that he had been born in town called Ritterburg, in the heart of the Black Forest. He’d lived in the castle for three months before he’d come to get her.
“Here we are,” he said, sounding nervous.
Alex had brought a little foldable ladder. She didn’t really need it. As she climbed down, he retrieved her suitcase and his black duffel. A gritty brown wind brushed over her. Strips of faded blue cloth dangled from flagpoles at the top of the castle, and somewhere a hinge squeaked back and forth in the bitter wind.
Neither one of them spoke as he led the way to the castle. With his long coat and boots, he looked like Neo from The Matrix. There were patches of snow on the ground. They were gray and they kind of smelled, but they were the first snow she had ever seen.
Alex put his hand on the small wooden door, cut into the larger, older door, to push it open. The rectangle of wood hung in the air for a second, then disintegrated, falling to the snow in a heap of fine ash. He pulled back his hand and stared at the space where the door had been.
“Shit,” he said in English. “Things are getting worse.”
“No kidding,” she murmured.
He crossed the threshold and she reluctantly—so very reluctantly—followed him in. There wasn’t much left. No roof, piles of stone and rubble, blackened walls stretching up hundreds of feet.
“I’ve got all the stuff in my room,” he said.
Her cheeks warmed. “Do I have a room?”
“Ja.” He smiled stretched into a grin. “Just across the hall from mine.”
“You were pretty sure of yourself when you came to find me,” she muttered, crossing her arms over her chest. She did
n’t like this place. Things were tapping for her attention just beneath her consciousness. Whispering just a little too softly for her to hear.
He looked over at her. “I cast a lot of magics to find you, Dana. I didn’ t know if you would come, but I wanted to make sure you would feel welcome.”
“You could just work a spell on me,” she said. “The way you did back in LA.”
“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I wasn’t proud of it.”
His manga-man black coat billowed around his legs as he crossed the marble floor. Most of the black and white squares had been smashed. He led her down a narrow passage bordered on either side by piles of wood and stone. There was more roof there, blocking out the light. Flicking on a flashlight, he led the way. It was icy, and she wrapped one hand around the other. She became aware that a low-level sadness, no, it was despair tinged with anger, crept up the backs of her legs like a needy, starving dog. Freaked out, she glanced over her shoulder, seeing nothing.
“Something’s here,” she announced. “I feel it.”
“What? What do you feel?” he asked, sounding excited. He painted the walls with the beam from his flashlight.
She told him.
“Maybe it’s a ghost?” he said.
“Maybe?” she echoed, alarmed. “Damn it, Alex.”
He opened a door, pulling back his hand quickly as if he expected it to fall apart the way the front door had. His flashlight passed over a stone floor, swept clean. He moved to table and lit a trio of candles, except that she didn’t see a lighter or a match.
He handed a candle to her. In the soft glow, she saw him open his palm, and a small ball of light appeared.
“I’m not clear what your ‘gift’ is,” she said.
“One of them is light,” he replied. “At least, I think it is. I’m on my own figuring all this out.”