“Well, hello to you, too,” Ilia says.
“Give me a break,” I say, “I just woke up.”
“Good morning, then.”
“Ilia,” I growl.
“Your car is out front,” he says, unruffled. “I had Theo drive it over.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling guilty for snapping. “Right. Thanks.”
“No problem. You off today?”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Why, you need me to come in?”
“No, just making sure. You doing okay?”
“I’m fine.” I pause, suddenly suspicious. “Did you call to check up on me?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Ilia says dryly. “But maybe get some rest today.”
“I’m hanging up now.”
I throw the phone on the bed and glare at it for a moment. Is he trying to be nice? If he is, it’s a mistake; nice doesn’t get you anything, and I’m not about to reciprocate.
My stomach growls and reminds me I’m starving and dripping water on the floor. I wrap the towel more firmly around me and rummage around a pile of dirty laundry until I find a decent-smelling shirt. I’m late to see Deda, and I can get lunch at the home. It’s not exactly flavorful, but right now the only things I have in my small fridge are mustard and milk that’s definitely spoiled. I need to get groceries, I need to do laundry, both of which cost money I don’t have—I sigh and sink down onto the edge of my bed, a headache building behind my eyes. I don’t know if it’s from the bad dreams or from the impossible weight of living. I guess it doesn’t really matter; the solution is the same. I find a dusty bottle of painkillers, take two pills, and I keep going.
They don’t put enough salt in the mac and cheese here. I shovel it in my mouth anyway, Deda watching like a hawk to make sure I’m eating.
“You want some?” I ask.
“I already ate,” he says. “Only young people eat lunch this late.”
“It’s not even two.”
“Exactly,” he says. “Where were you?”
“Sleeping,” I say. “I was up late.”
“Did you go back to that . . . place?” Deda asks, frowning. He doesn’t like to say hospital, like if he doesn’t say it, maybe I’ll forget about it.
“No,” I tell him, giving up on the mac and cheese and switching to the pork chops. “I had to work.”
Deda makes a sound in his throat. “Tell me.”
I poke at the meat with my fork, avoiding the answer.
“Alexandra.”
“Someone leaked information. Urie sent me to make sure it was contained.”
The deep lines around his mouth deepen. “Any trouble?”
I shake my head. “He wasn’t strong. And he has a daughter.”
“Foolish man,” Deda says. “You did well.”
“I did my job.”
I try not to let the bitterness color my voice. It’s not like I was going to be a teacher or a doctor or a lawyer. I was never going to college; I dropped out of high school my junior year. Deda fought me on it, but there was no point in going anymore. It was awful, trying to sit in class and pretend everything was normal when the teenage suicide that haunted homeroom would start to cry. Awful to walk down the halls and have so many people shove against me, the darkness pressing so roughly my nose would start to bleed. I had no friends, couldn’t have friends, and the counselors didn’t know what to do with me and eventually stopped trying. Then Deda got sick, the brakes on the car went out, and rent was due. It was time. I got my GED, picked up where Deda left off with Urie, and there was no going back.
A gnarled hand covers my arm and I look up at Deda, his eyes seeing too much. It’s different, between the two of us. Whatever the magic is, it shields us from each other, like two magnets being repelled. I can’t see Deda’s death and he can’t see mine. Maybe the magic knows it would be too hard, to have no one.
“I am sorry,” he says, and his voice is thick with regrets.
Deda never wanted this for me. It’s not the kind of gift you’re grateful for. He was so happy when Mom didn’t have it, even though it cut her off from him. And then I came along. And I was like him, and it broke his heart. It still breaks his heart, every damn day.
“It’s not your fault, Deda,” I tell him. “I’m fine. Let’s just eat.”
I put a piece of rubbery pork in my mouth and chew.
We play gin in the rec room, the TV blaring in the background. I sort my cards, putting a group of fours together, my mind only half on the game. I never win anyway; no one can beat an old man when it comes to card games.
I’m still tired, and the weak coffee from the machine here isn’t helping much. I add more sugar so it will taste like something besides water.
“Are you working tonight?” Deda asks, his eyes staying on his cards.
“No,” I tell him. “I’m off till . . .” I pause. I don’t remember what day it is. Saturday, maybe? It all starts to bleed together, the sleepless nights, the too-bright days. I have no markers, no anchors, no way to track the hours. “For the next couple days,” I finish lamely. “I’ll come by, take you out. We can see a movie.”
Deda huffs and rearranges his cards. “You spend enough time with me. I can play cards with my friends here; you go out with yours.”
“You don’t have any friends, Deda,” I tell him bluntly. “And neither do I.”
“You could make some. You could go back to school. You are so smart and you are wasting—”
“I’m not having this conversation again.”
Deda once asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. A molecular biologist, I said. I wanted to study cells, see them magnified until they looked like stained-glass mosaics, until I could see what makes people people on the most fundamental level. Why, Deda asked, and I was young then, and I didn’t understand yet that sometimes lying is kinder than the truth. Because I want to fix us, I said.
“You need to be around people, Alexandra,” Deda insists. “The living, not the dead. And not the almost dead.”
“If it’s so easy, then you go make new friends,” I tell him. I nod at the shuffling ghost of an elderly man watching our game with interest.
“He won’t talk to me.” The ghost pouts, his mouth disappearing into wrinkles.
“I do not talk to you because you have nothing of interest to say, Edgar,” Deda says, not looking at him.
“Sorry, Ed,” I tell him.
“It is too late for me,” Deda says, “but it is not too late for you.”
I shake my head, knock on the table, and lay out my cards.
Deda looks at them and sniffs.
“Oh, come on,” I say as he starts to ruin my sets. “How is that even—”
And my breath catches in my throat.
“What is it?” Deda asks, frowning, but my attention is locked behind him, on the TV. On her.
The picture they’re showing is wearing less makeup, more clothes than the girl I ran into, but it’s still unmistakably her.
“. . . disappearance of eighteen-year-old Culver City High School senior Jane Morris. If anyone has any information on her whereabouts, please contact . . .”
The newscaster drones on. Jane, I think, her name is Jane. It doesn’t sound right; it doesn’t fit. It’s a name for the nameless, for the lost girls and the unclaimed dead. She’s too vivid for a name like that. Was. Was too vivid.
There are five liters of blood in the human body. The heart pumps out about seventy milliliters of blood with each beat, and it beats around seventy times a minute. If the carotid artery is severed, death from massive blood loss can result in less than three minutes.
I wonder how long those three minutes felt. Did she pray, did she call out for help? I wonder if anyone heard her. I bet the three minutes felt much longer.
“Alexandra?”
I tear my gaze away from the TV, dizzy and sick and guilty.
“Are you all right?” Deda asks, leaning toward me.
“No,” I tell him. “I think it’s too late fo
r both of us, Deda.”
One day at a time. That’s what the therapists at the clinic always say, even if they don’t remember who they’re saying it to. Take it one day at time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time. The respiratory rate for an adult at rest is twelve to twenty breaths per minute. Sometimes all it takes is knowing you made it from one breath to another. I’m not sick, not like the other patients in there. But I am damaged.
I take two sleeping pills, spread out on my bed, and wait for the drugs to work their way through my system. They’re not strong, not like the ones the doctors give me, but I just need enough to keep the bloody dreams away.
“You don’t have Harry Potter or anything?” Trevor asks, squatting in front of my small stack of books. “Not even one of them?”
“You can’t turn the pages anyway,” I remind him.
“I could pretend. A Thousand Interesting Science Facts? Modern Biology?” He reads the names of the secondhand textbooks and thrift store encyclopedias. “Who actually reads this shit?”
“I do,” I say, closing my eyes.
I always liked science. I’m not looking for an answer anymore, a buried defect in a cell that would explain why I am the way that I am, but I still like learning. Not just biology, but astronomy, geology, ecology. Maybe I can’t make sense of myself, but there’s reason in the world around me. My head is full of random bits of information picked from old textbooks I find at thrift shops. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, acceleration is the change in velocity divided by time, black materials appear black because they absorb all wavelengths of visible light instead of reflecting them—my knowledge is incomplete, a shape without the details filled in, a skeleton without flesh. I still have so many whys to answer.
“You’re boring,” Trevor says, bouncing onto the bed.
“Then find someone else to haunt.”
“Very funny,” he scoffs. “You ever seen any famous ghosts? Like James Dean? Or the Black Dahlia?”
“No such luck,” I tell him.
“What about Walt Disney? Or wait, can you even become a ghost if you’re cryogenically frozen?”
“Urban legend,” I mutter.
“What?”
“It’s an urban legend,” I repeat. “Disney’s buried in Glendale.”
I roll over onto my side, away from the heat and the hot-tar smell of him.
“Hey,” Trevor says, poking me in the back. “I’m trying to have a conversation here. Why are you in such a bad mood?”
I’m too tired to be anything but honest. “Because I’m unhappy. And I don’t know how not to be.”
“Oh.” He goes quiet for a moment, and then I feel a thin, warm hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry you’re unhappy, Lexi.”
My limbs feel heavy, immobile and thick, but I turn back toward him and we lie face-to-face. His eyes are light brown, fixed in a glassy stare, and I ask, even though I have no right to ask.
“Did it hurt?”
His mouth tightens, and bruises roll across his face like storm clouds.
“The dying part?” His voice is so soft I don’t breathe in case I miss it. “No. But the before part. I would have done anything to make it stop hurting. Dying . . . it was a relief.”
I want to say I’m sorry. I want to say I wish I could have saved you. Instead I close my eyes, try to shut out the truth written on his face.
“Lexi?”
“Mmm?”
“Tell me an interesting fact.”
I sigh, but I answer. “Babies are born with around three hundred bones, but an adult skeleton has two hundred and six.”
“Really? What happens to them?”
“A lot of them start out as cartilage that ossifies and fuses as we grow.”
“Weird.”
The drugs rush through my veins and waves rock my body, tugging at my bones. Fully grown, we’re so brittle with our fused skull plates and spinal columns. We start losing as soon as we’re born. We are always less than what we were.
5
I READ THE NEWS THE NEXT DAY WITH MY COFFEE. It’s Sunday, my phone says. Jane is the fourth person to go missing downtown in the last six months. It should say the fifth, but they don’t know about Marcus. The police are still looking for leads and have a tip line set up. I skim the sites, searching for more information, but nothing comes up; they haven’t found a body.
My phone buzzes and I jump, my heart skittering in my chest. Too much coffee, too many nightmares.
“I’m still fine,” I tell Ilia crossly.
“Good,” he says. “’Cause I’m coming to get you.”
“For what? I’m off today.”
“Change of plans. Urie wants to see us.”
“Ilia—”
“Cops are at the club,” he interrupts. “Not the ones on our payroll, real cops.”
My stomach drops. “What do they want? Is it Marcus?” There’s no way Urie would have let that leak beyond his people.
“No,” Ilia says, his voice strained. “There’s a missing girl. I’m on my way.”
Shit.
Ilia screeches up to the curb and I slip into the car, my hands white-knuckled around my coffee.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I say as he peels away.
“The girl was seen at the club last night. Cops looked at the security tapes with Urie. He’s still with them. Apparently they saw us near her at some point.”
I swear under my breath, and Ilia’s head snaps toward me.
“You remember her?” he asks.
“It’s that girl I ran into outside the front door.”
“How do you know which—” Ilia stops as it dawns on him. “Oh, fuck.”
“Yeah.” I try to swallow moisture back into my mouth.
“The girl’s dead? You’re sure?”
“I don’t make mistakes, Ilia.”
“You should have told me,” he says, slamming a fist against the steering wheel. “We could’ve prepared for this, made sure our people were the ones looking into it.”
“I’m sorry, all right?” I say. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
Ilia hisses out a long breath and pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Marcus?” he asks me.
“I don’t know.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his face pained. “We need to get our stories straight,” he finally says.
“We tell the truth,” I say dully. “I ran into her; she asked if I was okay.”
“Don’t embellish,” Ilia orders. “Don’t add details. A bartender would barely remember running into someone, you got it?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“Then look alive,” he says, slamming on the brakes. “We’re here.”
The door to Urie’s office is wide open. There’s two of them, one man and one woman, both in bulky LAPD uniforms, their cumbersome belts taking up too much space. Urie’s face is the same calm mask it always is, but I can feel the waves of tension rolling off Jordan as he stands outside.
“How’s it going?” Ilia asks him quietly before we go in.
Jordan shakes his head. “I don’t like this,” he says. “They’re asking a lot of questions.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“They want a list of employees,” he says, his face pale.
“We can’t give them that,” I say. “That’s a list of practically everyone in this city with magical abilities. If that list gets out—”
“Urie won’t let that happen,” Ilia says.
“Ilia,” Urie calls from the office, and Ilia straightens.
“Come on,” he says, nodding to me. “Remember, no details.”
“Officers,” Urie says, gesturing toward us. “These are two of my senior employees.”
My heart is in my throat as the cops turn to look at us. The man is young, clean-shaven, the stench of his cologne rivaling Ilia’s. It’s the woman who worries me more; she’s
in her late thirties with a down-turned mouth and eyes that look too sharp for a beat cop.
“Hello,” the woman says, nodding at us. “I’m Officer Tisdale; this is Officer Green. Can we ask you a few questions?”
I glance at Ilia, who nods politely. “Of course,” he says in his best newscaster voice. “Whatever we can do to help.”
They split us up, Green taking Ilia into the hallway and leaving me with Tisdale. Urie’s eyes linger on me before he closes the door, the warning in them clear: Say nothing that will endanger us.
“What’s your name?” Tisdale asks, her pen poised over her notebook. She gives me a perfunctory smile that I think is supposed to put me at ease.
“Alexandra Ivanovich,” I say grudgingly. I don’t like giving my name to people I don’t know, don’t like the way she writes it down, like she’s taking something from me.
“We’re looking for a missing girl,” Tisdale says. “Jane Morris. She was last seen two nights ago, leaving this club.” She pulls up a picture on her phone and holds it out for me. “Do you recognize her?”
I look at the picture, the same one they used on the news, and my pulse jumps.
“I don’t know,” I say slowly. Keep it simple, no details. “Maybe? She looks a little familiar, but we see so many people.”
“We reviewed the security footage from that night, and it looks like you saw her. Do you remember running into someone? Outside the front of the club?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “That was her?”
“Yes. Did she say anything to you?”
“Um,” I say, screwing up my face like I’m trying to remember. “I said I’m sorry, and she asked if I was okay. It’s not—I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“It looked like you were in a hurry?”
“I’m always in a hurry.” I shrug.
“Had you ever seen her before that night?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think so. Not that I remember.”
I wait, my shoulders tense, the silence broken only by the soft scratching of her pen.
“Is that it?” I finally ask.
“For now,” Tisdale says. She puts her pen in her pocket and pulls out a card. “If you think of anything else—anything, no matter how small—please get in touch.”
I nod, taking the card without letting our fingers brush. “Sure.”
Missing, Presumed Dead Page 4
