I smiled ruefully. A small part of me would’ve loved to hang out with Jude and have a drink, just like old times, before all the insanity. But a larger part knew it wouldn’t be right, not with Asher in the picture, and, more importantly, while Jude was fun, the times I’d had with him didn’t compare to my times with Asher.
“Thanks, but I can’t stay long,” I said. “I wanted to get Bowie out of your hair and head back home.”
At the sound of his name, my chubby little wolpertinger came racing around the corner. He was a peach-colored bunny with two tiny antlers between his big ears and a pair of feathered wings that he was too fat to use.
“Hey, Bunny Bo!” I said, using my nickname for him, and I crouched down so he could dive into my arms. He cooed as he nuzzled up against me, giving me tiny little kisses as his antlers scraped my chin. “How are you doing?”
“He was really good,” Jude said. “I actually liked the little fella. I might have to get one myself.”
“Yeah, they do make great pets.”
Jude leaned against the doorframe beside me. “How are you doing, Malin? Did everything work out okay for you?”
I laughed, focusing on the soft feel of Bowie’s fur as he cuddled up to me so I wouldn’t cry. “I made it out alive.”
“That bad?” he asked, and I looked up to see him grimacing. “You know, if you need a hand, I’m always happy to help.”
“I know. I don’t want you to get messed up in…” I floundered, searching for an innocent way to describe the situation before lamely finishing with, “Whatever it is that I’m messed up in.”
“Well, if you ever reconsider or it gets to be too much, you know how to reach me.”
Jude began gathering up Bowie’s things, putting his food and dishes in a bag. He brought over the carrier, and I put my wolpertinger inside. He was so excited for cuddles, I had to push the door shut and lock it in a hurry.
“Oh, I got the little guy something!” Jude snapped his fingers, then walked across to his small living room to pick up a black canvas contraption sitting on an end table.
“What?” I straightened up. “You didn’t have to get him anything.”
“No, it was no problem.” He smiled. “I could hear him hopping around if I went down to the garage to work, and he sounded so anxious when I left. I thought I could take him down to work with me, but I didn’t want him to get run over or anything. So I went out and I picked him up this Babybjörn.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” I held up my hands, stopping him as I barely contained my giggling. “You got a baby carrier for my wolpertinger? And you wore him around? Like on your back?”
“Yeah.” Jude laughed. “I did! And he liked it. It worked out well.”
“Oh, I wish I could’ve seen that.” I put a hand over my mouth in an attempt to keep the laughter back. “How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He shook his head. “We can settle up the next time you bring your luft in, and let’s face it, we both know you’re going to bring your luft in again.”
“Thank you again.” I smiled at him. “With everything going on, it was a really big help that I didn’t have to worry about Bowie, because I knew he was in good hands with you.”
“Well, you do know how good my hands are,” Jude teased.
I gathered up Bowie and his things, thanking Jude again as he walked me to the door. When I left, he leaned against the doorframe and watched me go down the stairs.
“If you need anything, call me,” Jude called after me. “And don’t be a stranger.”
It wasn’t until after I’d left and began the long walk back to my apartment building that I realized I shouldn’t have let my cab go when I arrived. Jude’s place was right at the end of New Edgewater, where the roads changed from pavement to canals, and it was only a few blocks down to my place out on the lake. But they were big city blocks, and Bowie and his food weighed a lot.
I had to make my way along the crowded sidewalks, dodging between everyone with my arms full, while also struggling to avoid both getting splashed with the murky water as hovercars sped by and falling in myself. Both of those scenarios would be disastrous because the water smelled of gasoline and dead fish and the scent would linger for hours, even after a shower.
Finally I reached the Tannhauser Towers in all their faded glory and rode the elevator up to the sixty-seventh floor. As I walked down the long hallway to our apartment, I heard our neighbors—TVs blaring too loud, couples fighting, a baby crying, and some strange dubstep polka that I hoped didn’t catch on.
Our little apartment had been billed as a “luxurious two bedroom, one bath” despite the fact that it was essentially a living room/kitchen combo with two closet-sized bedrooms and an even smaller bathroom, and I would definitely not describe the concrete floor or metal walls as luxurious.
The only nice thing was the window that took up the entire exterior wall. It gave us a view of the canal below, but the other buildings and their noxious billboards blocked us from seeing much beyond that.
When I came in, Oona was on the couch with her feet propped up on the coffee table. The little TV affixed to the wall outside our bathroom was on, playing a trashy old slasher flick. On the table in front of her was one of the bottles of soursop wine she’d bought before we left Belize and two large plastic tumblers, and a super-sized bag of delicious fried kibbeh was on her lap. We usually bought them from a vendor down the street from us, because they were the best in the city.
“Hey,” Oona said through a mouthful of food, and the second I let Bowie out of his cage he hopped up on the couch to see her. “Bowie!”
I finished unloading all of my and Bowie’s stuff while he and Oona greeted each other with lots of cooing and kisses.
“Mal, come join us,” Oona suggested. “Putting your stuff away can wait until tomorrow.”
She wasn’t wrong, and I was exhausted, so I sat down beside her. She nudged the empty tumbler toward me with her foot, and I poured myself a drink before settling back onto the couch.
“What are we watching?” I asked as I pilfered a couple kibbeh croquettes from her bag.
“I don’t know, but that girl there is about to get stabbed a bunch,” she said.
And that’s how we spent the next couple hours. Drinking wine and eating lukewarm kibbeh with Bowie sprawled out between us, snoring softly. I was more than content to spend the rest of the night that way, but a knock came at the door after midnight and interrupted our plans.
FORTY-SIX
“Maybe you shouldn’t answer that,” Oona warned me as she sat up and put her glass on the table. “It could be a murderer.”
I was already halfway to the door, so I scoffed. “You’ve been watching too many scary movies.”
“Or maybe you haven’t been watching enough,” she countered.
I rolled my eyes and opened the door to find Asher. He had a shadow of stubble growing on his face, and there were dark circles under his eyes. But otherwise, he looked better. Much better, actually, than when I had seen him last. His color had returned, and he stood a bit taller, as if a weight had been lifted on his return to the city.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“My grandma is smothering me, and I couldn’t sleep.” His eyes landed hopefully on mine. “I thought I’d see if you were still up.”
“Yeah, I’m up, come on in.” I stepped back, allowing him in, then locked the door securely behind him.
“Hi, Ash,” Oona said as she stood up and clicked off the TV. “Don’t mind me. I’m heading to bed.”
“Oona, you don’t have to do that,” I said, but she waved me off.
“No, no, I’ve already drunk too much wine anyway,” she insisted as she walked into her room. “I’ll see you guys in the morning.” She winked at me before closing her bedroom door.
Through the thin cold metal walls I could hear the neighbors arguing about who had done all their drugs (spoiler alert: it was both of them), so
I turned on the stereo to drown them out. Since Oona was in bed, I didn’t turn it up too loud, just enough to let the mellow instrumental music blanket the room.
I picked up the wine bottle, swirling the pale yellow liquid around before asking Asher, “Do you want anything to drink? We still have a little bit of wine left.”
“That’d be nice. Thanks.”
“So, your grandma is being a bit much?” I asked as I grabbed a beer mug from the kitchen.
He lingered in the living room, walking slowly around the small space and admiring our décor. We didn’t have a great deal, both because we were broke and because we didn’t have the space for it.
Our shoes were piled up by the door, under an overflowing coatrack. The end tables were homemade from cinder blocks and metal Jude had given us. On top of them were books piled up, a few candles, and a nice incense burner that had been a gift form Oona’s cousin Minerva.
Beyond that, there wasn’t much to the place. We had a couple posters—one of lagomorphs with pictures and boxes explaining the differences between jackalopes, wolpertingers, rabbits, pikas, and colugos and a fantasy-inspired one for Oona’s favorite band, a dream-pop duo called Eden’s Eternity—and a brightly colored tapestry that Oona had hung above our old couch. A couple throw pillows that Oona’s mother had made and a threadbare rug on the floor completed the picture.
“That’s an understatement,” Asher said with a sigh. “I didn’t even tell her everything that happened. I toned it down as much as I could, but she was still this awful combination of livid, panic-stricken, and affectionate. She kept yelling at me while she was hugging me.”
“I’m sorry.” I poured wine into the glass and handed it to him. “That sounds uncomfortable, but she’s freaked out because she loves you.”
An unfortunate apology flashed in his eyes—the one that said he’d just remembered how cold and terrible my mother was, so he shouldn’t complain about being loved too much.
“I know,” he said, softening his complaints. “And I love her, too. I just needed some space.”
“Yeah, I get that, too.”
We stood in the middle of the living room, both of us slowly sipping our wine. The lights from the billboards across the way shone through the large window, so shades of red and blue played across the room, giving us a soft, ever-changing mood lighting.
I wondered if I should suggest we sit down, but the truth was I didn’t feel like sitting. There was enough alcohol in me to numb the ache in my arms and legs, and while I had been content relaxing with Oona, I’d begun to feel restless when Asher came in through the door.
“I’m not intruding, am I?” he asked, then took a half step back, toward the door. “I can go. I wanted to get out and move and clear my head.”
“No, you’re not intruding.” I put a hand on his arm to stop him. “I’m glad you came over.”
He moved closer to me. “Yeah?”
“Believe it or not, I like having you around.” I smirked.
“Yeah, I figured that when you braved the underworld to rescue me.”
“I didn’t go there for you,” I corrected him, but I felt heat flushing my cheeks.
The sunstone had inadvertently shown everyone exactly how I felt about Asher, and I hated having my feelings out in the open like that. It left me exposed and vulnerable. Even now, standing with him, I wanted to downplay it, pretend I didn’t care as much as I did, but I held my tongue and forced myself not to run away.
“Right.” He set his glass down on the table and moved even closer to me. “The sólarsteinn brought you to me.”
The light that splashed across his face shifted again, changing to pale blue. It did this wonderful thing to his eyes, making them almost glow in the dark room as he looked down at me.
“To be fair, my heart brought me,” I admitted.
His voice was low, almost a whisper, when he said, “Finding me was your heart’s greatest desire.”
“I wanted you safe and I wanted you back,” I said as the truth came tumbling out.
I hadn’t meant for it to, but something about Asher made it so I didn’t want to lie. I didn’t want to hide from him, the way I did most everyone else. I stood before him, defenseless and honest and totally unafraid, because the way he looked at me—with such unabashed yearning and warmth—I knew I had nothing to be afraid of. Not from him.
“Do you know what my greatest desire is right now?” he asked.
“What?”
He didn’t answer, not right away, and instead he moved even closer, so his lips were mere inches from mine. His eyes were wide open, looking in my eyes—looking through me, it felt like.
And then his mouth was on mine, hungry but gentle in a way that only he could be. His hand was on the small of my back, strong and firm as he held me to him, and I wrapped my arms around his neck.
This time, he was restrained, and I was ravenous. I wanted him, almost desperately. It was an ache deep within me—a pounding demand from my heart, and an insistent heat in the base of my stomach.
I was pulling him with me, backward to the bedroom, both of us refusing to stop kissing as we stumbled across the room. I nearly fell over my bag, but he caught me and lifted me up, carrying me to my room.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever carried me before, not since I was a kid.”
“I’m glad I could be your first,” he said with a laugh.
Then he was setting me down on the bed, and our clothes were off—not fast enough, it was never fast enough. I wanted to feel him—needed it, really—his bare skin against mine, as close as two people could get. I needed to know that he was real, he was really here with me, and as he kissed me I wanted to beg him not to leave me. I wanted to tell him that he could never leave me again, not like he did before, not even if it wasn’t his fault, because I couldn’t handle losing him again.
Because I loved him.
I’d fallen in love with him, and I wasn’t ever letting him go again.
But I didn’t say any of that. I couldn’t. I was too busy kissing him and touching him and letting his hands roam all over my body, and that was just as good. Maybe even better.
FORTY-SEVEN
I had been dreaming about a dark forest during a rainstorm, and I awoke in my own bed, with my sheets smelling of Asher—woodsy and dark and crisp. In the early morning light that streamed in through the slats of my blinds—still more of the pale blue before the golden hour—I could clearly see him sleeping beside me, and a rush of adoration and relief swept over me.
I wanted to snuggle up with him, but I was afraid of disturbing him, so I lay on my side, watching for a moment.
Then, abruptly, he twitched. His whole body trembled, then a quick spasm went through him, like he’d gotten a chill or a bad scare. He lay motionless for a second, then he moved again, almost thrashing, and he let out a moan.
I sat up and started shaking him. “Asher.”
He calmed a little, but he kept shivering, and his head twitched subtly.
“Asher!” I was nearly shouting by then, and he finally opened his eyes.
“Malin,” he said, his voice still thick with sleep, and his eyes closed again. “You shouldn’t have rescued me.”
“What? Are you okay?”
“You should’ve left me there,” he murmured.
“Asher!” I shook him again, because by now he had totally freaked me out. “I need you to wake up.”
“What?” He rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand and looked up at me. “Malin? Are you okay?” He must’ve seen the panic on my face, because he sat up, quickly growing more alert. “What’s wrong?”
“You tell me.” I motioned toward him. “You were shaking and—and moaning.”
“I must’ve been having a bad dream.”
“You don’t remember it?”
He shook his head. “No. I know I’ve been having nightmares a lot since She’ol, but I don’t usually remember them.”
I hesitated before telling hi
m the part that really scared me, but I decided that he should know. So I said, “You told me that I shouldn’t have rescued you.”
“I don’t know why I said that.” He reached over and rubbed my arm, comforting me, when he was the one having the nightmares. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out.”
“Don’t apologize. You went through hell—literally.” I put my hand over his. “That’s not something you can just get over. I only want to make sure you’re okay.”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” he assured me.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
He pulled me into his arms and back onto the bed. I lay with my head on his chest, listening to the steady thud of his heartbeat, and tracing my fingers along the edges of his gauze bandage that covered the marks on his chest. Before we’d finally fallen asleep last night, he’d assured me that the wounds weren’t bothering him and were healing well.
But I couldn’t tell if he was keeping anything from me. He wanted so badly to protect me from everything, I was afraid he would try to shield me from whatever he was going through.
“You can tell me anything,” I said now, looking at him. “You know that, right?”
He reached over, brushing the hair out of my face. “Yeah, of course.”
“Okay,” I said reluctantly, and cuddled up closer to him.
We lay in bed a little while longer, but sleep never returned for either of us, so we decided to get up. Despite the early hour, Oona was already awake. She was sitting on the couch, watching TV and eating thin pancakes out of a Styrofoam container.
“Morning,” she said. “We didn’t have any food—well, we had food, but most of it had expired while we were gone. So I ordered takeout for breakfast. There’s some in the kitchen if you want any.”
On the kitchen counters were several containers with Jaipur in the Morning written on the side in big, bold pink letters. When I peered inside them, I quickly deduced that those weren’t pancakes Oona was eating but pudla—a crepe-like food made from chickpeas. There were also several little containers of different types of chutney, including one that smelled heavily of cilantro, a syrupy one that I guessed was rhubarb, and a spicy bright orange marmalade.
From the Earth to the Shadows Page 19