“Exactly,” Liyana says, now wishing she hadn’t mentioned anything in the first place. Although, happily, the unexpectedly dramatic news has taken the attention off the matter of arranged marriages. But Liyana can’t think about that now. She simply wants to find her sister. And Liyana has no idea who she is, only what she looks like: white, blond hair, blue eyes. She was polishing a mirror and wearing a uniform with a logo. F.H. Not much to go on. Still, it’s a start.
9:14 p.m.—Scarlet
Why Scarlet goes to see Eli that night, she can’t explain. Rationally, she thought it best to deal with the confrontation quickly. It’s only when she’s knocking on the door of his hotel room that she realizes this might have been a mistake. She should have arranged to meet on neutral ground. At a café, a library, a church. Anywhere but in a bedroom.
“Why, Miss Thorne,” Eli says, as he opens the door. “What a great surprise and an even greater pleasure. Do come in.”
Scarlet doesn’t. “Are you alone?” she asks, trying to maintain a modicum of formality. “I’d like—I need to discuss the contract.”
“Please, come in.” Somehow he manages to look innocent and guilty, surprised and smug, all at once. “Don’t be shy.” He opens the door, stepping aside.
The room is smaller than Scarlet imagined, having imagined it more often than perhaps she should have. It’s tiny. She’s almost forced to sit on the bed, to avoid standing too close to him, but thinks better of it.
“May I get you a drink?” Eli gestures towards the minibar. “Water? Wine? Whisky?”
Scarlet shakes her head. No alcohol. Absolutely not.
“Water is fine, thank you,” she says, then remembers she’s here to renege on their deal. “Actually, I’m not thirsty.”
Eli shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He opens the minibar and removes a half-empty bottle of red wine. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
“Well, all right then.” Eli pours himself a deep glass, then sits at the edge of the bed, lounging back. He catches Scarlet’s eye and grins a wicked grin. She studies the mediocre painting on the wall above his head—two horses frolicking in a meadow—fixing it with far more attention than it deserves.
“So,” Eli says. “What brings you to my bedroom at this time of night?”
Scarlet assumes an affronted scowl. “I didn’t come to your bedroom. I came to your hotel room, because I didn’t know where else to find you.”
“Suit yourself.” Eli Wolfe gives a nonchalant shrug. “So, how may I service you?” He coughs. “Sorry, that’s to say: How may I be of service?”
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“You know what.” Scarlet focuses on the painting. “Anyway, you’re not going to like what I have to say.”
Eli sits up, sporting a mock-serious expression. “Oh?”
“Well . . .”
“Out with it. Don’t be a tease.”
Scarlet shifts from foot to foot. “Okay, so I know this is bad practice and all that, but . . .”
Eli rubs the wineglass between his palms. “Oh, get on with it, would you? I’ll be asleep before you’ve finished. Not my preferred choice of activity on a Friday night.”
“All right.” Scarlet steadies herself. “I’m afraid I . . . I’m going to have to withdraw my, um, agreement to our . . . agreement.”
“Ah.” He sips his wine. “So you’ve come to tell me you want to welch on our deal?”
“I, um, yes, I am. And I know—”
“Well, I am sorry to hear that.”
Scarlet frowns. “You don’t look sorry.”
He shrugs. “What can I say? I enjoy our negotiations.”
“Oh, no,” Scarlet says. “This isn’t part of that, this isn’t me trying to get more money or anything—”
“Good. Because you won’t get it.”
“Well, that’s fine, because I don’t want it.”
Eli looks sceptical. “In my experience everyone wants more money if they can possibly get it.”
“Well, I don’t.”
He shrugs again. “Suit yourself. So, what do you want?”
“Nothing,” Scarlet says. “I just came to tell you about . . . the deal. I decided last night and I didn’t want to wait. It didn’t seem fair.”
“It’s not fair.” He pats the duvet. “So why don’t you come and make it up to me . . .”
“I most certainly will not,” Scarlet says, trying to sound like she means it. “I don’t know what kind of girl you think I am, but—”
Eli smiles. “Oh, I know exactly what kind of girl you are.”
“You do not.”
Eli stands and steps forward. “Oh, but I do.”
Scarlet steps back. He comes closer and Scarlet stops. When they are only inches apart Eli reaches out, as if he were trying to pet a wild deer, and gently takes hold of her hand. Scarlet doesn’t have to look to know that sparks are firing between their fingertips. When they kiss this time, every fuse in the hotel blows.
9:33 p.m.—Goldie
“What the hell was that?”
Leo sits up in the darkness. “I haven’t a clue.” He slides off the bed we’re currently occupying in room 49. “But I need to investigate. The new night porter is bloody useless.”
It must be a power shortage, I think, as Leo leaves, banging the door behind him. But just before it happened I felt a shift in the air—like the way the light changes before a thunderstorm.
It’s slightly unnerving. I feel again that surge of power in my veins, as if I’m pulsing with electricity instead of blood. I think of Leo to steady myself. Never in my life did I imagine it possible to feel this way with another human being: so reckless and so safe all at once. I thought, after my stepfather, I’d never feel safe with a man again. Not that, never that. And yet, here we are. I smile to myself. A small miracle.
11:59 p.m.—Leo
Leo watches Goldie sleep, watches the rise and fall of her chest, listens to her breath. Now and then, he strokes the tips of his fingers along her cheek.
Of all the despicable things Leo has ever done, this must be the worst. It’s not the killing that bothers him as much as the method. The way he killed before had a sense of symmetry, a certain cleanness, a guiltless inevitability. He’s followed the dictates of nature or the rules of war. This is how he’s killed every Grimm girl to date.
But with Goldie it’s no longer simply the kill, it’s deceit and betrayal too. And not only of her but them both. Every day he’s increasingly torn. When Leo’s with her he’s sure he won’t be able to do it. But when they’re apart he feels the soldier in him strengthening—his nervous system, his predatory instincts, overriding his heart.
The human heart, Leo thinks, is a strange thing. It should fight for its own survival, but it doesn’t, not always anyway. He’s seen enough examples of selfless heroics on Earth, even strangers sacrificing their lives to save others. Of animals, Leo isn’t sure. But in stars, in soldiers, the survival instinct is so strong it overrides everything else, even love.
18th October
Fourteen days . . .
9:06 a.m.—Goldie
“I never thought I’d have this,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
I burrow my face in his bare chest. “This.”
He cups my head in his hand, wrapping blond curls around his fingers. “I’m glad.”
I try to shape my feelings into words. “I suppose I always felt like . . . like I’d never be loved, not simply for myself . . .”
Leo nods.
“Just for me, without doing things I don’t . . . Thank you.”
“For what?”
I shrug. “Everything.”
We lie together for one long perfect hour, silence settling between us like dawn light. Eventually, I sit up to touch the tiny scar of a crescent moon on his shoulder blade.
“What are these?”
I’ve been waiting to ask this question since the first time I caugh
t sight of the scars. I told myself to wait until Leo told me himself. But I find myself too impatient, too curious. I draw my fingertip along his spine and across his back, tracing the spaces between the scars, a map of roads and rivers always encircling, never touching.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I say.
“I will.” He takes a deep breath. “I just don’t know how.”
“Whatever it is, I won’t mind.”
He falls silent. I want to stroke his scars, to show I’m not scared even though I am, a little. I want to reassure him it won’t repulse me, whatever his confession.
“I promise,” I say. “It doesn’t matter.”
I feel a sudden rush of heat under my fingertips and snatch my hand away.
“Don’t say stupid things.” Leo shrinks back, pulling into himself, though he doesn’t pull away from me.
It’s the first time I’ve felt his fire, and for the first time I wonder if perhaps he burned the scars into his skin. He might have been a member of a sadistic cult. I realize, again, how little I know about Leo. Which suddenly seems dangerous, given how deeply I feel for him. When he doesn’t speak, I place a tentative hand on his back.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I repeat. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” Leo says. “More than you know.”
“I shouldn’t have asked. Forget it.”
We’re silent. I wait, deciding not to speak again until he does. Perhaps a minute passes, perhaps an hour.
“I’ll tell you one day,” he says. “I will, it’s just . . .”
I wait.
“When I do, when I tell you . . . all this . . .” Still, he won’t look at me. “I want at least a little time with you when . . . I want you to remember me with . . . I don’t want you to hate me.”
“Remember you? Hate you?” I reach for him. “Why are you saying that, when I love—”
“When I tell you”—he drops his eyes and his voice—“You won’t want to see me again.”
I laugh. “That’s not possible—nothing you say could . . .” I try to lift his chin, try to catch his eye. “Hey, if I told you some of the things I’d done, then I doubt you’d like me very much either.”
Leo looks up at me. “I know everything about you.”
“No, you don’t. You know hardly anything about me.” I laugh again, hoping to lift his mood, to make him smile. “It’s not as if we’ve spent much time talking.”
Leo falls silent again and so do I.
What can I say to make it better? What can I say to take it back? I wish I’d waited, I wish I’d shut up, I wish I’d not said anything at all.
9:06 a.m.—Leo
He’s a selfish coward. He should warn Goldie what’s coming. When he’s with her he imagines he might. But he knows that if he did he’d lose her. And how can he tell Goldie that in fourteen nights, at the next first-quarter moon, one of them will die? Already his fingers twitch with anticipation. Every time they’re together, Leo suppresses the urge. When he strokes her neck, his fingers throb with the desire to take the life, the light, from her.
The temptation is so great that his whole body is pained by the restraint. When Goldie lies beneath him, when Leo kisses her skin, he sees the light that pulses with the beat of her heart. Sometimes the light is golden: sunset on a lake. Sometimes it’s silver: moonlight on fresh snow. And it calls to him, as if it’s his for the taking, as if she’s an animal he has the right to slaughter. It takes everything Leo has to hold back, all his willpower not to extinguish her light, not to steal her life.
He can’t help it. It’s his nature; it’s what he’s been doing for centuries. At least, that’s how it feels. Almost as soon as their mouths touch, his hand rests over her heart. Even as they kiss, even as he’s filled with the joy of it, he’s imagining drawing the life from her, pulling the spirit from her body, the last breath from her lips. He’s still kissing Goldie, still holding her, as the fog thickens and the mists envelop them, entwining with her essence so she dissolves into the air, until Leo’s left with only the echo of her barely glimmering in the moonlight. Then she’s gone and he’s torn between sorrow and joy.
Leo can’t help the joy since, when the last breath of a Grimm girl etches the scar on his skin, when her light enters him, Leo is filled with a vital surge of life, as if being suddenly powered by the sun. It’s what he needs to live. But the sorrow is there, as it’s never been before. And Leo wonders whether, when the time comes, it will be what stops him, what allows her to win.
7:17 p.m.—Scarlet
“Scarlet!”
Scarlet runs into the kitchen from the café to find her grandmother poking a fork into the toaster. Scarlet skids across the linoleum floor to snatch it from Esme’s shaking hands.
“Grandma, what the hell are you doing? You could electrocute yourself,” Scarlet snaps. A sudden memory rises, of her grandmother saying exactly that on catching a ten-year-old Scarlet extracting a teacake with a knife from the very same toaster. “What do you want? I’ll make it. Were you making toast?”
Scarlet depresses the metal handle but it springs back.
“Fuck, it must’ve blown a fuse. Everything in this bloody place is falling—”
“Language, Scarlet.”
Scarlet stops, turning to grin at her grandmother, thrilled by the unexpected reprimand. Today might be a good day. Or, at the very least, in this moment she has her grandmother back. “Sorry, Grandma. But anyway it’s dinnertime, why don’t I make you something proper to eat?”
Esme shakes her head, like a stubborn child.
“All right then.” Scarlet fishes into the toaster to retrieve the two slices of still untoasted bread. “We can use the grill.”
But, as she steps over to the oven, Scarlet has a better idea.
“Hey, Grandma, want to see something special?”
Her grandmother frowns.
“Remember the sparks from my fingertips?” Scarlet holds her breath. “When we were dancing to Bessie Smith? I burned your hands a bit—still sorry about that, by the way—and you said—”
Esme’s eyes light with recognition and she smiles. “Like Ruby.”
“Exactly. But that’s not all I can do. Check this out.”
She sets the two pieces of bread on the counter, then holds her hands an inch above them. “This is how I’ve started heating your cinnamon buns. I thought you’d prefer it to the microwave.”
Her grandmother is transfixed by the slices of bread, like a child waiting for a magic trick. At first, nothing happens, and then the air between the bread and Scarlet’s hands starts to shimmer, like heat waves coming off tarmac on a hot day. Then the edges of the bread begin to singe and, slowly, to toast. Esme claps.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Scarlet grins, flipping the bread over.
The thrill of seeing her grandmother so delighted, of being the cause of that delight, sends fresh sparks down Scarlet’s fingers that, all at once, burn the toast. A bitter charred scent singes the air. For a second, Esme looks shocked. Then she laughs as if she’s never seen anything so funny in all her life.
Scarlet watches her grandmother, smiling. There are moments, brief transient moments, of unexpected joy in this frightful disease. Moments when her grandmother is returned to herself as a child, when she’s serene, when she’s full of wonder and awe. Moments to be cherished. Moments too quickly gone.
Still laughing, her grandmother looks up to the ceiling and falls silent.
“What’s that?” She frowns. “It’s a m-m . . .” The word slips away, then she catches hold of its tail. “. . . mistake.”
“Where?” Scarlet follows her grandmother’s gaze. “Oh.”
Snaking diagonally across the ceiling is a long, large crack.
“Shit.” Scarlet exhales.
This time, Esme says nothing.
8:25 p.m.—Liyana
“What are you thinking about?”
Liyana looks at Mazmo across the table. “Oh, sorry, I was
just . . . It’s nothing.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” A hundred thorough internet searches have still not brought Liyana any closer to identifying her sister, and her frustration and impatience builds by the minute. She tries to focus on the date. Aunt Nya is so hopeful that this one might prove fruitful, if they’re able to finagle the finer details of sexual freedoms and financial obligations, that Liyana feels she should at least give it her best shot. And, though she’s still reluctant to admit it, the promise of three years’ full funding for the Slade is a not insignificant bonus. “Sorry, I . . .” Besides, the fact that he’ll be picking up the bill for this ridiculously overpriced dinner means she should give Mazmo a modicum of attention. “I’m fine.”
“What do you think of the soufflé?” Mazmo says, sticking his fork into the fluff of gooey chocolate on his plate. “Is it not the best bloody soufflé you’ve ever eaten?”
He flashes her that smile again, the one that tugs the silver threads of a memory, of a moon breaking through clouds, casting its light on dark water. She returns his smile. “It bloody well should be, at this price.”
Mazmo laughs. “Well, this is Le Gavroche, darling. What do you expect?”
“A bit more for twenty quid. After all, it’s only chocolate and air with—what?—a bit of burnt milk foam and salted caramel crumb on the side.”
“Just chocolate and air? What sacrilege!” Mazmo cups his hands protectively over his plate. “Don’t let the soufflé hear you say that.”
Liyana smiles. She hasn’t told Kumiko about meeting Mazmo tonight and is feeling guilty about it. And, though she won’t admit she feels any attraction, she can’t deny that he is a particularly spectacular specimen of manhood.
“You’re funny,” she says. “And sweet.”
“Oh, please.” Mazmo rolls his eyes. “Not that word. It’s the death knell of dating. And I’ll have you know, I’m extremely sour and incredibly masculine”—he winks—“Despite my pansexual tendencies. Otherwise, I’m an entirely blokeish bloke. I’ve a nasty habit of queue-jumping, swearing at slow drivers, never talking about my feelings. On occasion, I’ve even been known to snatch lollipops off toddlers.”
The Sisters Grimm Page 22