Only Ashes Remain

by Rebecca Schaeffer

  Ten

  KOVIT CALLED THE KELPIE and set things up. After he hung up, he placed his phone on the table.

  Her eyes snagged on Kovit’s phone. A smartphone. Last she’d seen, he’d had a dinosaur-age flip phone, and it had been shattered across the floor of their prison in the market.

  “Nice phone,” she said casually. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Detroit.” He flashed her a grin. “I needed a phone so I mugged someone before I left.”

  Nita found herself unsurprised. She didn’t ask if his victim had survived the mugging. She didn’t want to know.

  “Can’t they track it?” she asked.

  “Nah. I factory reset it and tossed the SIM card.” Kovit clicked his phone off. “You can also thank that Detroit man for your dinner.”

  Nita snorted. “Speaking of Detroit . . .”

  The smile fell from his face, and his shoulders slumped. He opened his mouth, then hesitated and looked around at the crowded shop. “I don’t really want to talk about it here.”

  Nita raised her eyebrows. He was willing to talk about mugging someone in the café, but not whatever happened there. She wondered if he’d killed someone. If so, she hoped he’d dealt with the body before he left. She didn’t want the police on his tail.

  She shivered at the thought. Even without them knowing he was a zannie, Kovit would be in danger from the police. They were in North America now, and law enforcement wasn’t kind to brown boys. Or brown girls, for that matter. They would have to be on their guard.

  She reconsidered. She wasn’t actually sure what Canada was like. She knew about the States; it seemed like every day there was a splashy tale of police brutality on the news. But Canada was a mystery. Better safe than sorry, though. They needed to stay as far away from the authorities as possible.

  “Well,” Nita said, “you can tell me on the way to this kelpie.”

  Kovit hesitated a moment, then nodded. “All right.”

  They rose and left the restaurant. The sky had darkened while they had dinner, and now the street was lit by glowing restaurant windows and bright condos, squares of light stacked on top of each other like a ladder to the moon.

  The temperature had dropped, and the wind had a bit of a bite. Nita almost wished she had a jacket. This morning she’d been sweating in Bogotá, and now she was shivering in Toronto. It wasn’t even that cold, but it had been years since she’d been anywhere that could be considered cold, and she wasn’t used to it. She wondered if it would be weird if she stepped a little closer to absorb Kovit’s body heat.

  You’re being ridiculous. You have complete control of your body. Use it.

  Nita blinked. She immediately enacted measures to reduce heat loss, closing her pores, increasing circulation, and upping her internal body heat the slightest bit.

  There. Much better.

  They walked away, Kovit leading them with Google Maps. He hesitated every few steps, until Nita took the phone from him, glanced at it, and pointed them in the opposite direction.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “No worries.” Nita had lived in five different countries in her life, and traveled to more on her parents’ hunts, and she’d gotten lost enough that she’d learned over the years how to orient herself quickly and get herself found again.

  The crowded streets dropped away into the darkness of less populated side streets, and suddenly it felt less like a crowded city of flashing lights and too many people and more like wandering the market at night. Dark and full of monsters she couldn’t quite see.

  She shivered softly. She was out of the market. She needed to stop seeing it in every shadow that looked a little strange.

  Nita forced her mind away from the memories that tried to boil up, and gave Kovit a sideways glance as they walked. “So, are you going to tell me what happened in Detroit?”

  Kovit’s face fell, eyebrows scrunching in and mouth turning down. The flickering shadows from the streetlights along the road made his face shift and change with each step they took. “I haven’t really talked about my time with the Family, have I?”

  Nita shook her head, mute.

  “They took care of me when no one else would. When I was alone in the world.” He looked down at his curled hands. “They were good to me. My handler, Henry, treated me like a son. He made me feel accepted. It was good. Mostly. But—” He tilted his head to the side. “I was isolated. I wasn’t allowed to speak Thai. I wasn’t allowed to go out.”

  “It sounds lonely.” Nita thought of her own childhood, locked in her parents’ house with only books and dead bodies for company.

  “I suppose. I didn’t really think so at the time, but I did feel trapped. I know why they did it, they didn’t want me to develop empathy. Mostly, I was just bored.” His eyes were distant. “They eventually let me play games on the internet. I became obsessed with Pet Crossing.”

  Nita gave him a blank look.

  “It was a computer game.” Kovit clarified. “You took care of magical pets. You could customize their looks. There were games to win clothing and accessories for your pets.”

  “Oh.” Nita had never played video games. Seeing the dreamy smile on Kovit’s face, she wondered if she’d missed out.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I started looking up online forums to try and find cheats for the game. I made some forum friends. We eventually grew out of Pet Crossing, but we’d been in this forum together so long. There were six of us, all around the same age, and we created our own group chat.” They stopped at a red light, but he didn’t seem to want to stop moving, and he shifted from foot to foot. “Obviously I couldn’t talk about my family. So I made up one based off what I thought American families were like.”

  Nita smiled softly. “I imagine it looked terribly realistic.”

  He laughed. “In hindsight, it looks so fake. I’m sure everyone knew I was lying.”

  The light turned green, and they crossed in silence. Kovit stared off into the distance, and Nita gently prompted, “So, Detroit?”

  “Detroit.” He swallowed. “I thought, after I left you, I could meet some of them. In real life. I’d never been free to before. And I just . . .”

  “You wanted to see them.” Nita tried to imagine having a friend she’d never met, someone she only knew over the keyboard and the glowing screen, but even the thought seemed absurd. How would she know they were real, that the person on the screen was the same as the one in real life?

  But then again, it was just as easy to lie in real life.

  The more she thought about it, though, the more she understood. The computer was one more line of defense. She could edit and clarify her sentences before she sent them. She could be silent or lie and say someone had called her away. She could log off when she tired of people, and if she decided she didn’t want to be social, she could ignore the messages.

  She could see the appeal.

  “Yeah. We agreed to do a meet up. Four of us found a time we could all be in the same city. Only May and Vince couldn’t make it.”

  “It didn’t go well?”

  He hesitated. “It did, at first, I guess. I don’t know. May was the one I talked to most. She always got it without me having to explain, you know?” A small, sad smile flitted across his face. “But she wasn’t there. And Vince was usually the person who smoothed things over when stuff got awkward. If he’d been there, it might have been better. But those of us who were there were still—I mean, we were still friends. But over time, I could just see . . .”

  “See what?”

  “I disturb people.” A thin, creepy smile crossed his face. “And I don’t mind that. It’s worked well in the past.”

  “But you didn’t want to scare them.”

  He nodded. “And it got worse. It turned out that Anna had severe fibromyalgia.”

  Oh. Oh no.

  “That comes with considerable pain, doesn’t it?” Nita had a bad feeling about where this was going.

  “Yes.” He dr
agged the s sound out into a hiss. “Oh, it can be quite considerable.”

  She closed her eyes, not wanting to hear the rest, but unable to quell her curiosity. “What happened?”

  “I was me. You’ve seen me with pain. It’s not like I can shut off if I absorb it or not. And I was”—he swallowed—“deeply affected. I couldn’t even function normally. It was so obvious.”

  “They found out you’re a zannie?” Fear laced her voice.

  “I told them it was seizures,” he admitted. “I don’t know if they believed me. I wouldn’t have believed me.”

  Nita wouldn’t either. Seizures usually weren’t enjoyable, and Kovit getting high on pain made him look like he was lost in ecstasy. Though both involved spasming muscles, that was where the similarities ended.

  “I didn’t want to have to kill them if they learned what I was. I was already disturbed by the fact that I was eating the pain of a friend. It felt so wrong.”

  “So you left.” Nita finished.

  He nodded, and his hands curled into claws by his side. He stopped and Nita looked up. They’d reached the subway station.

  Hesitating, Nita took a step closer to him, so she was standing beside him, their arms brushing. “Do you regret going to see them?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I never knew that Anna had fibromyalgia. She never mentioned it. She even tried to hide it when we met up, but, well.” His smile was twisted and self-deprecating. “There’s no hiding pain from me.”

  “No, I imagine not.”

  “We were all keeping so many secrets.” His voice was quiet. “Was it ever a real friendship, without any of us seeing the real faces of each other? How many secrets does it take before it’s all a lie?”

  Nita tilted her head to the side. “I don’t know. Do you really need to know every detail about someone to be their friend?”

  He looked at her, gaze frank and open. “I don’t know.”

  “You started with shared interests. But you don’t really have those anymore.”

  “No.”

  “So, what connected you?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head, fingers running through his hair and mussing it up. “Things. It never really mattered to me what we talked about. They were just . . . an escape. A way for me to not lose touch with the real world.”

  He looked down. “When I was feeling awful, I could go online, and they were there. They had no idea what was wrong, but they’d say nice things. They said things I needed to hear. They made me feel like I was more than my life. They gave me perspective.”

  Nita shrugged. “Maybe that’s what friends are, then. People who say the things you need to hear.”

  He laughed, his smile crooked. “And what do I need to hear?”

  She looked at his hand, curled into a fist, and put her own over it.

  His skin was warm, and her hand tingled, like mild electricity.

  “I’m here, Kovit. I’ve already seen your monster.” She met his eyes. “And I’m not leaving.”

  He stared at her, eyes dark and brows drawn together. Then he raised his arms and enfolded her in a hug. His arms were gentle as he pulled her close, and their cheeks brushed. Nita’s heart raced, and her palms were sweaty where they wrapped around his back.

  “I did need to hear that,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

  Her arms tightened around him. “Always.”

  But she wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth.

  Eleven

  THEY WALKED DOWN the stairs to the subway platform in silence. It was crowded near the stairs, so they strolled to the very end of the platform where it was emptier. Thick, towering pillars were scattered along the pathway, holding up the ceiling. Nita wondered if the weight of Toronto above would crush them without the pillars.

  A couple of students were sitting on the only set of metal chairs, bulky backpacks in their laps. Kovit met their eyes and smiled at them. It was not a nice smile.

  Both of the students stared at Kovit for a moment, then the petite redhead pulled her heavily muscled Asian friend to his feet and tugged him away, heading for the other side of the platform. Their eyes never left Kovit.

  It was always fascinating to see bulky, tough-looking people cower in front of Kovit, who was lean and wiry and on the short side.

  “You really need to tone down the serial killer look in public,” Nita sighed, watching until the two students had completely vanished from view.

  He snorted. “It’s not that far from the truth.”

  Nita just raised an eyebrow. “Are you trying to scare me or something?”

  He grinned at her, smile wide and crooked. “Are you scared?”

  He was smiling, but there was something in his eyes that made Nita pause before she answered.

  “No,” she lied, even though the screams of the girl he’d tortured still haunted her nightmares. Then she told the truth. “I know you won’t hurt me.”

  But just because she wasn’t afraid for herself didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid at all.

  Kovit walked a few steps away to check the timetable, and Nita shuffled her feet before taking a seat on a metal mesh chair. Kovit had scared away its previous occupant for her, it would be rude of her not to use it.

  She leaned back and looked up at the cement ceiling and the bright fluorescents jammed into it. There was a noise behind her, but she ignored it, pretending the other passenger wasn’t there.

  Until a garrote pulled tight across her throat, cutting into her flesh.

  Nita tried to gasp, to scream, to make any kind of sound, but the garrote dug into her throat and choked off her voice so only gurgles of blood escaped.

  Her fingers shot up, clawing at the garrote, but it was embedded too deep already, she couldn’t pull it out. She reached around, grabbing for her attacker. But her hand scrabbled against a smooth jacket, and the garrote sliced into her fingers when she slid them under the wire to block it from her throat.

  Time slowed down as her neurons frantically connected the dots. If the garrote severed her artery and she couldn’t remove it, it wouldn’t matter that she could heal because she would continue to be cut.

  She needed to get the garrote out first and focus on healing damage later.

  Snarling, she stopped her instinctive repairing of blood vessels that were only getting damaged again, planted her feet on the ground, and shoved backwards.

  The back of the metal chair dug into her spine, but Nita ignored the pain.

  The human body was capable of incredible feats when scared. Mothers lifted cars off children or broke through walls.

  Nita cared more about her life than about any child. And she wasn’t going to die here.

  Nita prepped her sympathetic nervous system, adrenal glands dumping cortisol and adrenaline into her bloodstream. She restricted her carotid arteries and rerouted her blood directly to her muscles.

  Nita jerked backwards, a fast, sudden move using all her strength. Bolts popped from the ground as the chair was ripped from its mooring.

  Nita and chair shot back, into her attacker. For a split second when she hit, the pressure from the garrote released, and her hands snapped up and grabbed it, ripping it out of her assailant’s hands, even as the wire sliced deep into her fingers.

  Nita and her attacker tumbled to the ground, and her slippery fingers peeled the metal from the tender flesh of her throat. She immediately began repairing the damage to her body, sealing blood vessels and patching skin back together, while her too red handprints left marks on the floor.

  A man in a long beige trench coat kicked the chair off of himself, his black army boots clanging against the metal. Nita bared her bloody teeth, pulled herself onto her knees, and grabbed the chair. She swung it at his legs as he attempted to rise. It hit with a crunch, and the man fell back to the ground with an oomph as the air left his lungs.

  Then Kovit appeared from behind her attacker, switchblade in hand. Before Nita could blink, he’d pinned the man with
a knee and pressed a knife against his throat.

  Nita knelt on the floor, gasping for breath, and realized the entire interaction had only taken seconds. She swallowed, throat dry, and heaved a shaky breath.

  Voices echoed elsewhere on the platform, and Kovit’s eyes flicked to the chair. Nita rose and quietly put it back. She scuffed at the bloody handprints on the gray floor with her sneaker, but they weren’t going anywhere. She looked up at Kovit as the voices got louder and indicated a pillar at the end of the platform with a jerk of her head.

  The man in the trench coat resisted when Kovit tried to pull him toward the isolated corner. Kovit casually slid his knife under the skin of the man’s cheek, the blade sliding in flat and thin, so she could see the shape of it bulging out from under the skin. He pressed his other hand against the man’s throat to prevent his scream.

  “Resist, and I’ll skin your face,” Kovit hissed. His body shivered slightly as the man’s pain flowed through him, ecstasy making his eyes half lidded and a twisted smile pulling the corner of his lips. But his hand stayed steady on the knife. Controlled.

  The man’s eyes bulged, tears collecting at the corners, his mouth open and gurgling as he tried to scream but couldn’t. He winced at every expression that crossed his face, the muscles of each gasp and gurgle pulling at the skin being cut by the knife.

  Kovit pressed the knife deeper, and the man tried again to make a sound against the pressure of Kovit’s hand on his throat, but nothing came out. Finally, he went limp as Kovit and Nita guided him behind the pillar and out of view.

  Kovit shoved the man against the far side of the pillar, pinning his arms between their bodies with one arm, while the other one kept the knife in the man’s face. The man was in his late twenties, white, with blue eyes, a cleft chin, and a quivering lip. She didn’t recognize him.

  Nita wiped her bloody hands on her shirt. “Who are you?”

  The man’s eyes flicked to her, then he swallowed and looked to Kovit. Kovit dug the blade in and whispered, “Answer her.”

  “Allen. Allen Burns.”

  He gasped as he spoke, the movement of his mouth tugging against Kovit’s knife, and blood trickled down the side of his face, coating it red.