I laughed louder this time. Everything has happened to me, I thought.
“But I know the feeling,” he continued. “I sometimes regret the small stuff, like snapping at my mom or forgetting someone’s birthday, so I guess it’s not so different. Wanting to relive the past to try and make certain parts of the world go away. It makes more sense for you though,” he added. “Your stuff is much more significant.”
“That’s one word for it.” I paused. “I think I’m gonna put in for a transfer.”
“Where to?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Los Angeles. Chicago. Wichita. Oklahoma City.” I put my hands over my face and inhaled deeply. “Pretty much anywhere that isn’t Splendor.” I had plenty of bad memories to leave behind, all up and down the coast. I’d already caused enough trouble for California as it was, and the scale of my latest fuckups seemed to be swelling like an overfilled water balloon. Besides, Henry would make a good cop, and he deserved a partner that wouldn’t totally stunt or sabotage his career.
“Cool. I’ll go with you.”
I peeked through my fingers. “What?”
“I said I’ll go with you. Just let me know where we’re going.”
“Even if I end up somewhere like, Kentucky?”
“Well, sure. I want you to have a friend wherever you go.”
I wanted to hug him. But I didn’t dare jostle him, lest I appear awkward. I was never really comfortable with imposing on people’s personal space. So I just nodded and smiled. “Where would you go, if you got to choose?”
“Hawaii would be nice.”
Classic answer. “Beaches and babes?”
“Fresh pineapple,” he corrected. “And a criminally underappreciated and capitalistically exploited culture.”
“Oh.” I blinked at him.
“And snorkeling.”
“You can snorkel here.”
“Hawaii has better reefs,” he said. “And pineapples. And Spam.” He feigned a shudder. “So much Spam.”
“Have you been there before?”
“Yeah. My dad programmed computers for the Army. We lived at the base on Honolulu for a while.”
“Oh, cool.”
“Pineapple and Spam are actually really good combined,” he added.
“Really? Cause they sound gross.”
“Yeah, I promise.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Ever been to a luau?”
He looked up suddenly and smiled as broadly as his bandages would allow. “Hawaii’s nice, but I’ll go wherever.”
“Wherever?”
“Yeah. Kentucky or anywhere else.”
“I’m not going to Kentucky so don’t worry.”
I picked a dandelion from the corner of Trey’s grave and spun it between my thumb and forefinger. The little, white tufts caught the sunlight and seemed to glow. I grinned at Henry. “Want to make a wish with me?”
“Sure.” He scooted forward in the grass and leaned in, adjusting his glasses as he looked at the little weedflower. “What are we wishing for?”
I held it between us and smiled. “Pineapples and spam.”
Henry laughed.
We made our wishes, and blew on it and the microscopic seeds whirled up and up and away.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sam
We were on my couch, watching a very bad movie. Snuggled up in our pajamas in the dark, we were watching underpaid actors with cheap props fight poorly constructed aliens that poured out of sloppy attempts to conceal their true identities: trash cans posing as space ships. The movie came out this year, but the whole thing reeked of the eighties, gratuitous gore and all.
My head was nestled on Casey’s chest, and I wasn’t really watching TV. Neither of us were. We just wanted the incessant white noise. I was close to falling asleep, listening to him breathe. I kept expecting to hear his lungs rattle, before he coughed up something gunky and black. A sign or clue that the Darkness wasn’t really gone after all—but he didn’t.
We were fine. Having been released from the hospital, we were out of the dark. The only light we had on was the lamp on the side table at the end of the couch. It cast a soft, yellow light across the living room and kitchen, with bright little tails streaming down the hall.
Cookies were in the oven, and the whole house smelled of dough and chocolate. We were baking a second batch after the only evidence of the first batch was a large plate of tiny crumbs on the coffee table.
It felt so strange. The silence, the movie, and the downright normalcy of the entire night. It almost seemed like a lie, a carefully crafted illusion spun to keep me from actually going insane. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop but it was still hanging ominously in the sky behind a cloud somewhere, waiting for the right, dramatic moment to emerge and turn everything upside-down again like a rampaging giant. The calm was infuriatingly fragile. I expected to see someone crashing through a window at any moment, or the house to catch fire, or an abomination, or a good old-fashioned zombie to start crawling through the TV, hell-bent on eating the parts of our brains that hadn’t been melted by the absurdity of it all.
But nothing happened. That’s because it was over, well and truly and honestly over. Another crisis would replace it eventually—our whole job was a never-ending Conga line of crises—but it wouldn’t be Meg. Or the Darkness. Or Melchior O’Neil. With any luck, it might be something really boring, like potion smuggling or tax evasion.
I’d love to arrest somebody for something as innocuous as tax evasion.
But it’s like taking a really long test before a million scantrons and small letters flash before your eyes every time you close them. I couldn’t quite convince myself it was all over.
I will admit it was getting easier, though. Every quiet, normal second I spent with Casey became a little more natural, and a little less like a crime against reality. I even felt safer.
I nestled down and closed my eyes. Half the movie was no more than a crappy action-shot blur.
“How would you feel about me living closer to you?” Casey asked suddenly.
I looked up and blinked slowly, a little too sleepy to reply right away. Nothing can lull you to sleep like eating thirteen cookies and breathing in the smell of your boyfriend.
“Huh?” I asked. I didn’t smack my lips, but I might as well have.
He cleared his throat, blushing furiously. “After everything that’s happened, I’m worried about you, and even though it’s still too soon for us to start living together, I want to be near enough that if something happens, I’m not over half an hour away, you know?”
“I do want you to live closer,” I said quickly. “That’s fine. That’s great! Fantastic even.”
His smiled relaxed, and he bent down to kiss me. It was just a peck at first, but when I leaned into it, a full minute passed before we stopped and remembered our conversation. When I came up for air, the cookies were already burning, and Casey was missing his shirt.
“Oh, hello,” I said, my eyes roving up and down his chest.
My pajama top had three buttons on the collar that didn’t even clear my collarbone. He reached up and undid one. “Hello, yourself.”
I undid the rest, baring the hollow of my throat as I traced a finger over my collarbone and batted my eyelashes at him. “Like what you see?”
It was kinda funny until he leaned down and kissed me there, and then on the side of my neck, beneath my ear.
“Of course,” he answered.
“I think we should take a vacation,” I said unexpectedly. “After all of this, we definitely deserve one.”
He nipped my ear, one hand rising to cup my face on the other side. The hand on my face dropped away, and I failed to see what he was doing with it until it was already inside my panties.
“Hmm, sounds like a good idea to me,” he answered. “Where do you want to go?”
“Um…” Hades, distracting me didn’t even begin to describe what he was doing. “Glacier National Park. Fort Lauderd
ale. Ontario. Albuquerque. Anywhere but here.”
He thrust his hand up suddenly and I gasped as he pulled me closer to him. With a big smile, he kissed my forehead, my nose, my lips, and the oh-so-exposed hollow of my throat.
My hands roamed all over his shoulders, feeling his muscles ripple as he moved and breathed. Lamplight and cheap explosions reflected off his glasses.
He pushed me gently onto the couch until I was lying flat on my back; then he hovered over me like a thundercloud. A trickster’s smile appeared on his face when he put his hands on my hips and slowly, carefully, started pulling my pants down and off me. I reached up and did the same for him.
Then he slid deep inside me. A single sharp thrust that made my breath catch in my throat.
“I’m game,” he answered.
TWENTY-FIVE
Bram
You know, I have always been a sentimental fool for nostalgia.
Every home I have ever owned features the old, English Gothic aesthetic: pillars, towers, spires, and black wrought-iron gates. Aesthetics of a time long since past but one that feels comfortable to me since it was the time period from which I came.
Mine is a world I promised myself in equal measure that I would forget and remember. It symbolizes a pathetic illusion I once believed, a version of the life I may have even enjoyed, every bit as affluent and upright and elite as I could ever dream.
Time freezes wherever I live. Just as I am frozen in time. Photographs of other photographs, printed on silver, and Victorian mirrors hanging on every wall allow me to safely remain utterly invisible; and the only creature privy to my existence is me.
This is the place where I seek sanctuary whenever I remember too much. When I see food and lack an appetite, or when I swallow water but lack the sensation of thirst, or when time and gravity collide and the crushing epiphanies of the world begin moving much too quickly or too slowly.
It is the place where I can pretend that nothing changed. I can lie in my bed and imagine I need to sleep, or walk down a hall of long windows, arranged to allow me to stand in the shadows and still feel the warmth of the sun. A place where I am free to remember, as well as forget.
The year is perpetually 1634 inside these walls. Cold and airless, it is without feeling, filled with old art and relics of the past, dust pans and gravy boats, inconsequential trinkets that came from a world that no longer exists. Only the mirrors are modern, absent the silver backing that erases the reflection of a vampire. In these mirrors, I can still admire my reflection. Young, brooding and arrogant, with my pockets full of coins, and my heart full of something slightly less honorable than high adventure.
In one room, something hangs on the far wall well above the floor: a crucifix. The last thing I forbade myself to remember. It represents the version of myself I once was, a version that was stolen from me.
My thoughts, as they often do, turn to Dulcie.
As all the people around her will continue to grow and change and breathe, they will also age and shrivel and fade, and yet she will remain the same. Standing in the middle of an old room filled with the things she refuses to forget: pictures, notebooks, gloves and old chargers; she will change only as the mountains change, by millennia, worn down by the onslaught of freezing winds, until only her bones and skin and the eternal sigh of Dulce O’Neil are all that remains.
I fear sounding melodramatic. There is no precedent for a creature like her, a fairy with the blood and spirit of every beast under the stars. Perhaps some of her blood could render her mortal. Perhaps she is not so different, nor as dangerous as we feared, and all will be well. Maybe her life will only be a touch longer than it would have been otherwise, and if she outlives her friends, it will happen naturally.
But when was the life of Dulcie O’Neil ever natural?
###
We sat, Quillan and I, like a couple of delinquent children being detained in private school. Slumped in our plastic chairs outside the principal’s office, we were waiting to answer for our heinous pedestrian crime. Vander was inside, explaining the long, sordid adventure he had with Hades.
The hall was empty. Vending machines made fresh coffee and a sterile white light reflected all the chips and fruit snacks behind the black windows.
“Did it never occur to you that the Darkness might actually be Meg?” asked Quillan.
The question was unprompted. I turned to him slowly, and gave him a quizzical expression, lifting my brows as high as I could. He was not looking at me but at the floor, or perhaps he just noticed the scuffed toe on his shoe.
“No,” I said coldly. “I thought she was dead.”
“You’ve been in the game a lot longer than I have,” he said, and his words sounded too familiar. That sentence made me stop and wonder how many times it had been said before; not many, I supposed, but enough to make me feel like we were talking in circles. “You never heard anything? Or saw anything that would made you have thought otherwise?”
I shook my head and turned away but my reflection glared back at me from the windows. My face was none the worse for wear, but my hair was all tangled, and the emptiness in my eyes conveyed an air of utter weariness.
“The Darkness was a name for a monster. It was nothing more to me than the Bogey Man is to human children,” I said. “It was a name you threatened your minions with when they disobeyed you. It was one way to convince them you were their best option. Stories abounded of the Darkness ripping the souls of monsters out of their skins, decapitating people and swallowing their headless bodies whole. That is what you deliberately led them to believe.” I looked at him with narrowing eyes. “And you? You spent the better half of your illustrious career working with Dulcie’s father. Never once did he mention dealing with the Darkness? Or his plans for his lovely daughter?”
Quillan tucked into himself a little more. “I worked for Melchior only because I had to.”
“Says the man who was in his innermost circle, his sanctum sanctorum.”
He failed to reply to that; at least, to me. It was a low blow, I readily admit that, but my patience for anyone who betrayed Dulcie, and there were more than a few, was wearing threadbare thin.
“He never said anything about the Darkness,” Quillan said.
“What about Meg?”
“Nothing. Not a word.”
The door to the office opened and a middle-aged woman with blond hair and round glasses popped her head out, smiling. “Quillan?” she asked kindly before gesturing for him to enter.
Quillan slapped his knees as he stood up and adjusted his tie. He entered the room without another word to me.
It would have been ironic, I suppose, if I were irritated that Quillan was deliberately hiding something from me. Our entire relationship, such as it was, relied exclusively on such quid pro quo: I will keep my secrets and you will keep yours. But I will help you catch less important bad guys if you will leave me alone. This time, however, it didn’t involve potions or permits, it was all about Dulcie, and that made it somehow more… vulgar.
I laughed quietly to myself; I was older than he could ever hope to be, yet there I was, arguing with him like two schoolboys over a soccer ball. I wondered about the other mundane things young human children might argue about.
Brrrr. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I took it out and frowned as I looked at the little screen. The number was not one I recognized. This number belonged to my more unconventional realm of work; and not a number someone might stumble across in a phone book. Computers for survey companies occasionally spat it out as a random number, but that was exceedingly rare. After the last time it happened, I performed a number of enchantments around the device itself to stave them off.
So I answered it. I flipped it open (ancient tech is much more secure than the smartphones the modern world seems so obsessed with) and said nothing.
“Bram?” The voice was female, soft and consciously sultry. “I hear you’ve had quite a day.”
“From whom did that rumor come?�
��
“People who keep their ears open.”
“Well, I should certainly hope their ears are not closed; that sounds remarkably uncomfortable.”
“Hmmm.” The sound was trite, in the shadow of a laugh. “Do you know who I am?”
I smirked. My contempt was squandered in the empty hall. It was the kind of question asked by insecure amateurs, testing the waters of their bravado, trying to sound as intimidating as they hope to be. A no might have implied my ignorance, but I certainly couldn’t say yes, even if I did recognize her. “Should I?”
After a brief, bristling pause, she replied, “Perhaps not, but you will. The whole world will know me and very soon.”
Oh, good, one of those. “Darling, I fear that if you seek my help, you are barking up the wrong tree. I have enjoyed my fill of the world, and trying to guess someone’s name is not high on my list of things I like to do. Good day.” I started to hang up.
“I’m not asking for your help,” she said. “On the contrary, I’m making you an offer.”
Interesting. “Of what kind?”
“The lucrative sort.”
“I bet you say that to all your pretty business prospects.”
“Don’t try to be cute.”
“Regrettably, that is all I know how to be.” I scowled in the general direction of the office door. “Do you know where I am right now?”
“Alone.”
“Yes, in front of the office of the Director of the FBI.” No reason she needed to know it was only a temporary office. I preferred to let her believe I was in Washington D.C.
“Getting perilously close to the short arm of the law, aren’t we?” she asked.
“If cheap leather chairs in a dark hallway count as getting perilously close, then yes, certainly. Now make your offer or hang up; there is an interesting wall I would like to continue staring at.”
If that gibed her, I couldn’t tell. After two seconds, she gathered her thoughts, such as they were, and replied, “Do you remember someone named Jax?”
“Jax?” I repeated, clicking my tongue. Ah, so we were playing a game. Of course, I knew who Jax was. “Jax, Jax, Jax…” I mumbled as I snapped my fingers. “Ah! Yes, the Loki.” Just saying his name left a foul taste in my mouth.
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