Breath

by Jackie Morse Kessler

  And he never saw Ashley again.

  It wasn’t quick. Everyone knew that the cancer had come back, and many people even knew the name of the specific disease, but Xander refused to learn it. If he didn’t acknowledge the illness, it didn’t really exist. Ashley would return one day, healthy and happy, and Xander would once again be content to steal a glance and hold a song in his heart. But then September became October, and October led to November, and still Ashley didn’t return.

  The day before winter break, he got a phone call from his friend Teddy. And that’s when he found out that Christmas had been canceled for Ashley. Permanently.

  Xander stopped eating because his chest felt too hollow.

  He got a new iPod for Christmas, as well as a prescription for Lexapro.

  Soon he was eating regularly again, and his psychiatrist got him to start drawing as a way to get his feelings out. He made it through winter break in a haze of video games, medication, and sketchbooks.

  At the end of the school year, a tree-planting ceremony was held in Ashley’s honor. Xander stared at the sapling and tried to picture Ashley’s face, but all he saw was a baby tree.

  The lesson of Ashley Davidson would stay with him forever: Just because you love someone, that doesn’t mean they won’t leave you stranded.

  Loving someone exposed your heart and left you ripe for disease.

  Loving someone ate away at you until you were a husk, starving for even a sip of affection.

  Loving someone cut you to pieces.

  In the end, loving someone completely could be the death of you.

  Xander knew this implicitly. And yet, years later, he still fell madly in love with Riley Jones.

  And that was the beginning of the end.

  Death

  He couldn’t love, not really. That’s a human emotion, and though he was many things, he wasn’t human. That’s what he told himself the first time he gazed upon War seated atop her steed, and he felt something deep inside of him shift, subtle yet tangible—a connection that he couldn’t deny.

  He wouldn’t love, he told himself as the girl who had been Creusa stained the world in red. Love was a feeling he hadn’t experienced since the door had slammed shut behind him. Love wasn’t for one such as he.

  He couldn’t love her, he said gently after War moved to kiss him for the first time. Her lips parted in a wicked smile and she said she didn’t need love, not when she had passion, and then her lips were on his and her heat thawed him. Not love, no, but something hotter.

  It wasn’t love, he realized as he watched War and Famine snipe at each other in the way that sisters do. Each Horseman had been formed around a piece of himself, and War had sprung from the piece that contained a memory, a feeling, of another—a still, small voice that could move stars. Not love, but the memory of love. An echo, false and, ultimately, doomed to fade.

  It was an impression of love, he decided as he witnessed the first murder among the Horsemen. The Black Rider had taunted the Red, had told her that while Famine and Pestilence were forces that happened to people, War was dependent on people for her existence. “You need them,” Famine had said sweetly. “For all that you rage, you need them. You despise that about them, and about yourself. You’re starved for attention.” She smiled, then, and let out a ripe laugh. And that’s when War split her apart like rotten fruit—the first act of destruction between Red and Black, which would play itself out in various ways over the millennia. Yes, an impression of love, Death thought as he walked over to the fallen Black Rider, and that was right, because mortals were so very impressionable.

  It wasn’t love, he told himself when the girl who had been Creusa eventually died. He bound the essence of War into the idea of a sword, and he wrapped it in red cloth and sealed it in the Slate. It was a slice of affection and, at times, a cut of passion.

  And yet, when he offered the Sword to another, he again felt that connection, that hint of memory, that whisper of a feeling that once had meant so much to him.

  He returned to the Slate, where he searched through the tomorrows until he found the one that sated him, made him whole, and there in the midst of everything and nothing, he made his peace.

  There would be a time when the one he waited for would find him. Until then, he had echoes and memories—and a Horseman who claimed to love him until the skies blackened and the seas boiled.

  It wasn’t love. But it would do.

  For now.

  Xander

  Xander remembered Ashley Davidson, and he bit his lip as he felt that loss so completely, so overwhelmingly. It was like he was twelve all over again and he’d just gotten the news. He’d lived for Ashley’s smile, and that had been stolen from him by a cancer whose name he’d never learned.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Death.

  Xander blinked and looked at the Pale Rider, who was still perched whimsically atop the balcony railing, his long blond hair flying crazily in the wind. “What doesn’t matter?”

  “Even if you do find love,” said Death, “so what? In the end, it doesn’t matter. Everyone leaves you.”

  “No,” Xander said, denying Death’s words but thinking of Ashley Davidson, remembering how hollow he’d felt when Ashley died, as if part of him had been scooped out and would never be filled again.

  “They do, every single one. No exceptions to the rule, Xander. They say they’ll be with you forever, but they’re lying, either to you or to themselves.”

  Now Xander wasn’t thinking of Ashley Davidson but of Riley Jones—that laugh, that smile, those kissable lips.

  He suddenly, desperately, needed to know if Riley had texted him back.

  “At best,” Death said, “people die and leave you behind. At worst, people leave you long before they die or even take a step out the door. Either way, the result is the same.”

  Xander whispered, “No,” but the sound was lost as an image bloomed in his mind: Riley standing on the back deck at Marcie’s house, black braided hair streaming in the wind like some pirate’s banner, dark eyes fixed on him, and what Xander saw in those eyes made his skin crawl and his stomach knot and suddenly he was afraid—no, more than afraid, he was terrified because it all had come to this . . .

  A beep shattered the image, the sound disembodied, overwhelming. Xander, so grateful that the false vision was gone, didn’t wonder where the beep had come from; if he felt a ghost squeeze his hand, he discounted it as a trick of the wind.

  He breathed in; he breathed out.

  “Everyone leaves you,” Death said, “and you die alone.”

  “No,” Xander said again, louder, as he remembered that this wasn’t about him and Riley, wasn’t about him at all. “The people you love don’t just stop caring.”

  “Of course they do. Something else always comes along. You’re like magpies, always looking for the next bright and shiny thing.”

  “That’s not true,” Xander said.

  “Really?” Death smiled coldly. “You think you know? You don’t. I’ve been around, Xander, and I’ve literally seen it all. People make promises and give assurances, but those are just words. And the thing about words is they’re easy to ignore, and far easier to break. You people have littered the world with broken promises.”

  Xander is at Marcie’s party, and for a moment he thinks he sees something, something horrible, but no, it’s just Ted and Riley—

  “Not everyone is like that,” Xander insisted. “There are good people out there, friends who always have your back. When they promise something, you can believe them. You can trust them.”

  “Trust?” Death’s shoulders bobbed with silent laughter. “Trust is even easier to break than a promise. Trust always gets broken. It’s a rite of passage. That was the first lesson I learned here, when the life I’d come to save leeched itself onto me and drained me dry. Pay attention, class. Life means betrayal.”

  Xander tried to speak, but there was a lump in his throat and all he could think of was how he wasn’t
thinking about what he absolutely hadn’t seen at Marcie’s party.

  It didn’t happen. Seeing was believing, and he hadn’t seen it.

  It didn’t happen.

  “It’s not anyone’s fault,” said Death. “It’s part of who you are. At a cellular level, you’re all programmed to do what you need to do to survive. And that means when the time comes, you’ll lie, you’ll cheat, you’ll steal, you’ll do anything you need to do in order to survive. But don’t take it personally. It’s only human.”

  “That’s not true,” Xander insisted. “It’s not just about survival. It’s how we live. And we don’t live alone,” he said, his voice rising. “We find people we care about, people we trust,” he said, shouting now, “ones who’re there for us and help us and make it all worthwhile!”

  His words echoed until they were lost to the wind.

  “You throw trust at me like a weapon,” said Death, “thinking you’re striking me with some profound truth. But in the end, trust exists only until it’s not needed. And then it breaks as quickly as a person’s spirit.”

  They stared at each other, Xander breathing heavily and Death not breathing at all.

  “What happened to you?” Xander asked softly. “What hurt you so badly that it shattered your trust?”

  Silence, thick and suffocating.

  “What brought you to my balcony?” Xander asked, more urgent now, feeling in his gut that this was the heart of the matter and it was now or never, baby, now or never. “Something must have happened, something big enough that it made you want to kill yourself. Something changed.”

  A muscle worked along Death’s jaw, but he didn’t answer.

  “Finish the boon,” Xander demanded. “What changed?”

  When Death finally replied, his voice was empty and bleak, and he didn’t meet Xander’s gaze.

  “I told you of the Slate,” he said, “how it had become my sanctuary, the one place to which I could retreat and rest.”

  Xander nodded, but Death wasn’t looking at him. In a monotone, the Pale Rider continued.

  “I told you how there, in the heart of the Slate, I could see all yesterdays and tomorrows, how I could entertain myself forever by remembering the past and observing possible futures, then step back into my role here, refreshed, ready to continue my work.” Quieter now, as if confiding a secret. “I told you of the one thing for which I was waiting, the one tomorrow out of all possible tomorrows that meant everything to me. I told you of that glimpse of my other, there in the distance, beckoning to me.”

  Silently, Xander waited.

  “I told you how that and that alone had been enough to keep me chained here, cycle after cycle, giving everything that I am to something that had been taking advantage of me for so long that my presence had simply become a given. I told you all of this.”

  “Yes,” Xander said quietly.

  “What changed, you asked.” Death turned to face him, to stare at him with those haunted, empty eyes. “My tomorrow changed, Xander Atwood. My future, the only future that mattered, was erased.”

  Death’s voice was so very flat, but its absence of emotion made it all the more difficult for Xander to hear.

  “My hope,” said Death, “my very reason for being, was suddenly gone. The one you called my soulmate will never come through this side of the door. My waiting has all been in vain. That maybe will never be.”

  Xander’s mouth went dry. The thought of him being without Riley during four years of college had been enough to make him gamble his entire future; he couldn’t begin to imagine waiting for thousands and thousands of years just for a possibility. He rasped, “How do you know?”

  “I looked,” Death said. “I checked and rechecked all the possibilities, from the most obvious all the way to the barest hint of a maybe. And it wasn’t there. It wasn’t there,” he said again, sounding lost.

  “When was this?”

  Death shrugged, one-shouldered. “Recently. Today, yesterday, last week—does it matter? It happened. I returned from the Slate and for a time, I wandered. It was my steed that made me aware I had been blighting the land in my wake. And I killed the dolphins. That was a mistake, but it didn’t matter. Nothing matters, not anymore. The Slate showed me that.”

  “It showed you a future you didn’t like,” Xander said, treading carefully. “That doesn’t mean that nothing matters.”

  “It means exactly that,” Death said. “I’ve been either banished or abandoned, and either way, I’ve been forgotten.” Quieter now, and filled with a subtle poison: “My vigil here has been for naught. My soulmate is gone forever.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “How do I know? When was this? Am I sure? Your questions grow tiresome,” Death said coldly, sitting up straight on the railing, wearing his costume of a blond man in a baggy sweater and ripped jeans, looking completely inhuman. “The Slate showed me the truth of things.”

  “But—”

  “You asked, I answered. The boon is done.”

  Panic welled up in Xander, squeezing his bowels, his chest, his throat until he thought he was going to vomit his fear all over Death’s bare feet. The Pale Rider was about to take his final ride, off the balcony and down thirty stories.

  Time had officially run out.

  (dolphins)

  “Wait, I don’t understand,” Xander said quickly. “How could an entire future just not be there anymore?”

  “Something happened, something irrevocable, something that affected this particular future.” Death’s eyes glittered darkly. “I could scour all paths of all the yesterdays and determine exactly what it was that changed everything for me, but why bother? Knowing changes nothing. A butterfly flapped its wings and my world crumbled. My other is gone. All I’ve done has been pointless.”

  “Of course it hasn’t,” Xander said, trying to stay calm. How could he get through to Death? “Your presence here has affected billions and billions of lives. That’s not pointless. You let us live.”

  “I should have let you die.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t,” Death agreed. “And that cost me everything.”

  “It cost you, yes, but look what it gave you.” Xander moved, lunging across the balcony and grabbing the acoustic guitar. He held it up by its neck, an offering to an angry god. “It gave you music.”

  Death’s nostrils flared. “It made me a thief.”

  “It gave you music,” Xander said again. “Call yourself a thief if you want, but that doesn’t change that it’s you taking the guitar and strumming the strings. It’s your voice raised in song. It’s you.”

  “It’s pointless. Everything here is pointless.”

  “But it’s not,” Xander insisted. “When you were telling me about what it was that drew you here in the first place, you kept talking about our creativity. Our heat, you called it. You said it was fascinating to watch. The wheel. Stupidly high buildings. Chocolate. Music. It’s all because of you.”

  “I didn’t make those things.”

  “You being here let us make those things, and so much more. Don’t you see?” Xander said, imploring. “Everything we do here is because you’ve kept the spark alive. We’re alive because of you. It’s the most amazing gift anyone, anything, could ever have. And we celebrate that gift every time we make something. Every time we create, that’s because of you.” He offered Death the guitar. “We make music because of you.”

  The Pale Rider didn’t move to take the instrument.

  “Look at everything we’ve done in the past hundred years,” Xander said. “No, in the past fifty years—the past five years. Look at the songs we’ve written, the music we make and listen to on the radio, in concert, on television, on the Internet, on our iPods. Don’t you want to see what happens next?”

  Death sighed. “Yes. But I’m tired, Xander. I’m tired, and I know the pain that’s to come, and the thought of it is unbearable. The only thing that’s buoyed me was the knowledge that there wo
uld be a time when, finally, I wouldn’t be alone. But that time will never come. I’m done, Xander. It’s time for me to ride.”

  (the dolphins)

  “Please,” Xander said, lowering the guitar. “Don’t do this.”

  “Your concern is touching, but it’s also self-serving. You care only because of the Möbius strip.” Death smiled tightly. “Survival, Xander. You’ll do whatever it is you need to do, even if that means wasting your time with me.”

  “It’s not a waste!”

  “You take my words and twist them, put meaning into them until they’re nice and pretty, then give them back to me wrapped in a bow. It’s so human.”

  “Listen to me,” Xander said urgently. “Talking to you, spending time with you, that isn’t a waste. You matter. Not just because of what your job is, what you’ve been roped into doing for thousands of years. You matter because life matters.”

  “I’m not alive.”

  “Of course you are. Maybe not in the same way as me, but you’re alive. You’re here. You’re part of everything. And that’s literal, in your case. I understand that you’re in pain,” Xander said, more gently now, “that you’ve been hurt worse than I could ever begin to imagine, that you believe the one thing that made everything worth it is gone. But how you’re feeling now, that’s not forever. Maybe it feels like it is, but it’s not.”

  “How do you know what’s forever and what’s not, Xander Atwood? Have you watched the centuries flow and ebb?”

  “No,” Xander admitted.

  “Then don’t presume to tell me what forever feels like.”