Screw it, he told himself. You only live once.
He slipped inside and headed for the stairwell. Halfway up the first set of stairs, he heard a scuffling sound come from behind him. He turned quickly, shotgun swinging around, finger tightening on the trigger. But it was only the kid. A moment later Rolanda followed her inside.
He started to say something, then shook his head. Short of shooting them or handcuffing the pair to a lamppost outside, he didn’t see how he was going to be able to stop them from following him.
“Just keep the hell out of my way,” he told them, and started back up the stairs.
He reached the landing without incident and headed up the next set of stairs. On the second floor, he paused at the doorway of the first room he came to and looked inside. There were a few busted-up paintings lying on the floor along with a scatter of ratty-looking blankets, but otherwise it was empty.
Then he heard the sound of voices coming from a room farther down the hall.
Giving his unwanted companions a warning look, Davis moved on along the hall, cursing the way the floors creaked underfoot and the noise Rolanda and the kid were making behind him. When he stepped around the corner of the doorway, shotgun leveled, he almost fired. Standing in the middle of a seriously trashed room was a tall figure covered in blood, some kind of club raised up in his hands. Behind him was a blond woman, also covered with blood, who was crouching protectively over another woman.
But before Davis’s finger could exert more pressure on the trigger, other details registered.
No way the guy was going to get much damage in, wielding that puny stick. More to the point, he looked scared as shit. And Davis knew him. Knew the blond woman, too, from when he’d had the pair of them down at the precinct earlier in the day. Alan Grant and his girlfriend, Marisa Something-or-other. He saw recognition dawn on their features as well. Maybe he’d been a little too quick in scratching Grant from the top of his suspects list.
“Drop it!” Davis told Alan.
“But –”
“Drop it and assume the position, pal. On the floor, hands behind your head. Do it!”
As Alan started to comply, Davis felt a sense of relief that things were going to work out smoothly. He’d gotten lucky. No crazed bikers. No crackhead with an AK-47 protecting his turf. Just a screwed-up guy who wasn’t going to be much of a problem at all. But then Rolanda and the kid pushed into the room behind him and he lost control of the situation.
“Oh my God!” Rolanda cried. “What happened?”
Cosette pushed past her and Davis, getting in the line of fire. Davis was about to yell at her, but then Alan threw aside the stick he was holding.
“We need an ambulance,” Alan said. “Fast.”
“What we need,” Davis told him, “is for you to –”
But now Rolanda had gotten past him as well and there were just too many people moving around in the room. Davis lowered the shotgun, pointing the muzzle at the floor. On the other side of the room, Rolanda knelt down beside Marisa.
“If we can get her on this cot,” Marisa was saying, “we should be able to get her downstairs at least.”
“Who did this to her?” Rolanda asked.
Marisa shot Alan a glance. He was the one who answered.
“Rushkin. He cut her throat and then just took off.”
Davis moved a little deeper into the room and turned so that his back wasn’t to the door anymore.
He glanced uneasily down what he could see of the hall. “So where’s he now?” he asked.
Alan glared at him. “We don’t know. Now, are you going to help us, or do you want Isabelle to just die here waiting for you to make up your mind?”
Davis looked at Alan, then at the wounded woman, and made a quick decision he hoped he wasn’t going to regret later. The blood on Alan’s clothes could have come from his trying to help Isabelle. Fact was, the guy hadn’t struck him as capable of killing the Mully woman in the first place, much less cutting his own friend’s throat. None of them had a record and they were all so scared and screwed up about what was going down that he couldn’t help but try to take them on faith. For now.
“Okay,” he said. He turned his attention to Rolanda. “Think you can handle this?” he asked, holding up the shotgun.
When she nodded, he passed the weapon to her and knelt down beside the wounded woman.
Marisa had been stemming the blood with rags that were now soaked crimson. Davis quickly stripped off his jacket and shirt. He handed the shirt to Marisa and put his jacket back on over his undershirt.
“Cosette,” he said. “You and I’ll support her head and shoulders. Alan can handle her legs. On the count of three we’ll lift her onto the cot.”
Cosette looked at Alan as he moved into position. “Why didn’t you kill Rushkin?” she asked.
Alan gave her an anguished look. “I never got the chance.”
Davis filed that information away for the time being. There was a hell of a lot more going on here than met the eye, but he’d have to sort it all out later. Right now they had a life to save. Normally he would have left Isabelle lying as she was until the medics could get here, but Christ knew how long it’d take an ambulance to get through the Tombs to reach this place. As it was, the woman looked so weak he wasn’t sure she’d make it through the next few minutes, never mind a ride to the nearest hospital.
“One, two, three,” Davis said.
He’d been expecting a dead weight, but the woman didn’t seem to weigh more than a few ounces, tops. She was in seriously bad shape. Marisa had replaced the soaked rags with his shirt and had held it in position while they moved the woman. It was already turning crimson. Not a good sign.
“She got cut on the side of the throat,” Marisa explained. “I don’t think any of the major veins were cut.”
“When did she pass out?”
“She hit her head on the wall as she was falling down.”
Great, Davis thought. So they had a concussion to worry about, as well. “Okay, let’s get her out of here,” he said. “Rolanda, you and the kid take point.”
Rolanda gave him a confused look.
“Take the lead,” Davis explained. “Scout ahead. You hear anything, you come tell us. Don’t play hero.”
This time she didn’t argue. She gave a quick nod and went to the door, waiting there for Cosette.
Cosette stared down at Isabelle’s ashen features, her own face having gone almost as pale. She reached out a hand and lightly brushed a wan cheek with the tops of her fingers.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean those things I said about you.”
“Cosette,” Rolanda called.
Cosette nodded, but didn’t look away from Isabelle. “I know you loved us,” she said, “but it just didn’t seem to be enough.”
Then she turned away and hurried out of the room after Rolanda.
There was something seriously weird about that kid, Davis thought as he watched her go. He found a grip for each hand on the sides of his end of the cot.
“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” he told Alan as they lifted the cot between them.
“I’ll tell you whatever you want,” Alan said. “But not until we get Isabelle to a hospital.”
“Understood.”
Davis took the lead, walking carefully backward through the rubble. Marisa walked alongside the cot, keeping the makeshift bandage in place. None of them spoke again as they navigated their way down the stairs and out of the building, where the night was suddenly filled with sirens and flashing lights.
XXI
Isabelle didn’t feel any pain. She knew Rushkin had hit her with his second shot – how could he have missed at such close range? But then she’d closed the distance between them and there was no more time to think. She barreled straight into him, hands scrabbling for his gun, knocking him backward, off balance. Because of the force of her momentum, she lost her own footing and fell down on top of him.
&n
bsp; They hit the floor with a thump that had to have knocked the breath out of him, but she didn’t let up.
This time she was determined to see things through. If she had to die, she’d be damned if she’d let him survive to torment someone else the way he’d tormented her.
He didn’t fight back as she struggled to get a grip on the gun in his hand. His fingers had gone oddly limp and she had no trouble pulling the weapon free from his loose clasp. Clutching the revolver, she scuttled sideways, trying to put some distance between them before she aimed the revolver back in his direction. But there was no need to fire. No need to see if she could actually go through with it and pull the trigger.
Rushkin lay sprawled on the floor where she’d knocked him, except she hadn’t been responsible for the blood that was splattered all over the floor and on the wall behind him. She stared at his corpse and it was only then that she understood why he hadn’t fought back. The second shot hadn’t been from his gun, but from John’s.
Her hands began to shake and she slowly laid Rushkin’s weapon on the floor. She wrapped her arms around her upper torso, but the trembling grew worse. She watched John enter her field of vision. He walked slowly up to Rushkin, his gun pointed at the monster’s chest as he toed the body. Once. Twice.
There was no response. When he was finally satisfied that Rushkin was dead, John put down his own weapon and walked back to where Isabelle knelt, shivering.
“It’s okay,” he said. He crouched beside her. Putting an arm around her shoulders, he drew her close. “It’s over now.”
Isabelle nodded. But it didn’t feel as though it was over. It felt more like it was just beginning. She felt stretched so thin that she knew something had to give. Still leaning against John, she looked back at the body.
“There’s … blood,” she said. She regarded John in confusion. “But numena can’t bleed.”
“That we know,” he replied. “Remember what he said: all we know is what he’s told us. He might have taken over more than Rushkin’s life. He might have taken over his body, as well.”
“Unless he was lying.”
John nodded. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the truth about some things, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever he was, he’s dead now and we don’t ever have to worry about him anymore.”
Dead, Isabelle thought, and then she understood why she was feeling stretched so thin. Back there in that tenement studio of Rushkin’s, the last of her life was finally bleeding out of her body.
“I think I’m dying, too,” she said. “I can feel the pull of my body fading away on me.”
“Hold on,” John told her, his voice suddenly urgent. “Don’t let go.”
“I don’t think I have much say in it at this point.”
And at least she wasn’t dying all alone, she thought. Not like Kathy had died. Had Kathy regretted what she’d done when it was too late? Had she wanted someone to be with her as desperately as Isabelle knew she would if John weren’t here?
“I wish I could have been there for Kathy,” she said. “I wish I hadn’t let her die alone.”
“You didn’t know.”
“But I should have figured it out. If I’d been a better friend …”
“No,” John said. “That’s not the way it was at all.”
“But it is. You always told me to be more responsible.”
“I told you to be responsible for what you do – for your own actions. There’s a difference.”
“I still wish I’d come in time to stop her,” Isabelle said.
“Of course you do. That’s natural. But you can’t take responsibility for what she did. It’s not like she came to you and asked you for help and you turned her down.”
“But in a way I did. I wasn’t there for her anymore. Not enough. Not like I should have been. She loved me – unconditionally and right from the first. How could I have gone away and left her alone in the city?”
John could only shake his head. “You can’t live other people’s lives for them.”
“But –”
“And you can’t second-guess what they want,” John went on. “All you can do is accept the parts of themselves that they show you. We don’t live inside each other’s heads or have a script where everything we’re supposed to do is all worked out for us. If Kathy had wanted more from you, she would have told you.”
But she did, Isabelle thought. The only trouble was, she’d either hidden her message away in her stories or written it in a journal that she’d only been willing to share after she’d died.
Isabelle wasn’t even leaving behind that much. She was beginning to feel thinner than ever. Almost transparent. She slid out of John’s arms and laid her head on his lap, looking up at him, too weak to do anything else.
“Hang on,” John said. “Think of yourself as having been healed, of going on from here. Don’t let go.”
Isabelle nodded, but it was so hard. “If I had another chance – not to change the past, but to go on, I’d do things differently. I wouldn’t just hide away on the island anymore. I think I’d take up Kathy’s work. I’d keep the island for any of the numena who wanted to live there, and I’d still live there part of the year, but I wouldn’t hide away from the world anymore. And I’d try to be there for my friends.”
She paused as a deep sorrow rose up inside her. It grew not for herself, but for all the time she’d wasted.
“Because if I die now,” she said, “not many people will miss me. I’m just not a part of their lives anymore. When Tom Downs died a couple of years ago, I remember going to his funeral and seeing all those people there and thinking, if it was me they were burying, I could count the mourners on one hand.”
She looked up into John’s eyes. “I’m not just feeling sorry for myself. It’s more like pity. That I could have let my life come to this.”
“I’d miss you.”
Isabelle gave him a sad smile. “Even with all those lost years between us?”
John nodded.
“Did you … were you and Barbara lovers?” she asked.
“No. We were only friends. Good friends.”
“I wish we could have stayed friends,” Isabelle said.
She closed her eyes. She heard John say something, but she couldn’t make out what it had been, because she was stretched so thin now that she was invisible.
I hope you waited for me, Kathy, she had time to think.
And then she went away.
XXII
Left behind in Rushkin’s studio, John bowed his head. The hand that had been stroking Isabelle’s hair lay on his knees. The weight of Isabelle’s head was gone from his lap. He was alone now in the studio, except for the two bodies. Isabelle had been drawn back into the world, out of dreamtime. He could feel the pull of the world on himself, as well, but he held on to her dreamtime for a few moments longer. Nothing waited for him there in the world.
He regarded the corpse nailed to the wall, then let his gaze travel to the other Rushkin, the one he’d killed. Which had he been – numena or maker? In the end, John realized he’d told Isabelle the truth: It didn’t matter. All that was important was that the monster was dead.
There were so many dead. Rushkin murdering Isabelle’s numena. He, Rushkin’s. How had it come to be that he’d embarked upon such a course for his life? He sighed. Why did he even ask?
It began with Isabelle’s friend, Rochelle. He’d tracked down and confronted her attackers, wanting to know why they had done such a thing. They’d only laughed at him. And then one of them had said, “You should’ve stayed on the reservation and minded your own business, Geronimo, because now we’re going to have to shut your mouth for you.”
They hadn’t known what he was. They’d been no match for him. He hadn’t meant to kill them, but once they were dead, he’d rationalized that their deaths had served to even the scales of justice.
That was where it had begun. He’d vowed to take no more human lives, to devote himself instead to protecting Isab
elle’s numena. But on the night of his greatest failure, as the farmhouse burned and all those innocent spirits died, he took the battle to Rushkin, tracking down his creatures and dispatching them until the monster fled the country. That should have been it. That should have ended it. Except Rushkin had returned with the last of his creatures and the killing began again.
“Has it ended now?” he asked Rushkin’s corpse.
The monster was dead. Whatever had animated it, numena or maker, was gone. But the fixed stare of that dead gaze seemed to be focused directly upon him, mocking him. You win, it said to him, by which it meant he’d lost everything all over again.
John closed his eyes, calling up Isabelle’s features, needing them to wash away the choking swell of his memories, of too many murders, of the dead monster that shared the studio with him. In his mind, he repeated what he’d said to Isabelle, what she hadn’t heard.
We were always friends, Izzy. Nobody could take that from me – not even you.
But the lies he’d told her still lay between them, for when truth was the only coin one had, even one lie rendered all one’s coins suspect. He was guilty of far more than one. Whenever Isabelle had pressed him too hard, when changing the subject no longer worked, the lies had come. No, he hadn’t killed Rochelle’s attackers. He lived with an aunt in Newford. She didn’t care for white girls. Her apartment looked like this. One led so easily into the next.
If he’d been asked what he regretted the most, it would be the lies. The lies, and the pride that had kept him away from her when he knew she needed him, when he could have been with her and prevented the deaths of so many. For if he’d been there with her on the night of the fire …
He remembered what the monster had said just before he died: Everything has its price.
He’d finally fulfilled the promise he’d made all those years ago when the farmhouse on Wren Island burned down and the inferno claimed so many of his brothers and sisters. He’d finally put an end to the threat Rushkin presented. But in the process, he’d lost Isabelle once again.
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