My feet found their rung. I wasn’t going to fall.
It took me a moment to believe it.
“I’m fine,” I called faintly. “I’m climbing.” I started down again, just as the window swung open above us and a head popped out, shouting something in loud Czech that needed no translation.
“Then go!” Eli shouted, and, though I was still trembling, I scrambled down, willing myself to play monkey for just a little longer, dangled from the bottom rung, dropped with knee-crunching pain to the ground, and stupidly waited for Eli to make it safely down before I began to run.
They chased us through Josefov, up Maiselova, around the corner and down široká, past the Jewish Town Hall and the Spanish Synagogue and the dark windows of Prada and Louis Vuitton, and into the twisting alleys of Staré Město. We led them in circles, our steps echoing through the empty passageways, our lungs bursting, thick fog and moonless night conspiring to turn our pursuers into nothing but clomping bootsteps and angry voices, the occasional drunks and beggars watching dispassionately as we blew past—and then, somehow, the shouts behind us faded away and we were alone.
Even then, we kept running. Sometimes it was Eli leading the way, sometimes it was me—whenever he fell back, I surged forward, and vice versa, until it almost seemed we were no longer racing the cops but each other, in a silent challenge to see who would give up first.
I did, and nearly collapsed. Eli stopped beside me, not even breathing fast. We both waited, braced for lights and sirens to emerge from the darkness. But they never did—and the pouch of sacred dirt was nestled safely in my pocket. Maybe it was a small victory. But it was the first I’d had in a very long time.
29
“It was my fault,” I said.
Eli snorted. “You got that right.”
We’d walked in circles for nearly an hour before getting our bearings, thanks to a street-side tourist map whose You Are Here was at least a mile from where we wanted to be. All the streets looked alike, faceless stone walls wherever we turned. Prague was silent. Even the drunken frat boys had relinquished the fight and passed out in their puddles of vomit.
“It’s not like I meant to scream,” I said. “I thought I was falling.”
“It wasn’t your fault because they heard you scream,” Eli said. His voice echoed off the stone, and I wanted to shush him, but didn’t, because that would have seemed paranoid. Or maybe not—it wasn’t paranoia if someone was actually out to get you—but it would have seemed like I was afraid.
And there was a strange comfort in his voice.
“It was your fault because you’re the one who dragged us out here in the middle of the night to play Spider-Man,” he added.
I reached into my pocket and tightened my fingers around our prize. “You didn’t have to come.”
“And miss all the fun?” He laughed.
“So this is fun for you?”
“This? Right now? Strolling through a moonlit foreign paradise with a beautiful girl by my side? No. Of course not. Horrific.”
“There’s no moon.” I ignored beautiful.
We walked.
We finally navigated our way back to Karlova, and followed it to the bridge. It was surreal to see the broad boulevard empty of its shoulder-to-shoulder tourist hordes. The entrance to the Karlův most was equally bare, watched over only by a bleary-eyed beggar curled up in a tattered black quilt, and by the Old Town Bridge Tower, which, I remembered, had once been festooned with twelve severed heads, their dead heretic eyes scanning the city. The choppy water reflected nothing.
“Why are you here, Eli?” Wind raked across the bridge, and I tried not to shiver, worried about evoking chivalrous gestures. I didn’t need his jacket, or his arms.
“Because you gave no indication that you were going to let me go back to sleep?”
“No. I mean here, in Prague. You didn’t know Chris. You aren’t a suspect. No one’s after you—not the cops, not the Hledači. You don’t have to be a part of this. So why are you?”
“It’s my job to protect you, remember? From—what did Janika call it? The darkness at the heart of the city. Maybe that’s why I’m here.”
“You don’t even know me,” I said. “So that seems unlikely.”
“Maybe you make a strong first impression.”
I could feel my cheeks getting warm and was grateful for the darkness. “That just proves you really don’t know me. Try again.”
“Another reason?”
“Maybe this time one you don’t make up on the spot,” I said. “A real reason.”
“As you point out, I don’t know you. So what makes you think I owe you anything real?”
I couldn’t argue. At least under that theory, I owed him nothing in return.
Stone saints lined the bridge, silhouettes of black nothingness against the night. Out of the corner of my eye, a movement, a flutter of black on black. I sucked in my breath.
But it was just a pigeon, startled from its roost.
“Fine,” Eli said. “Truth?”
“You tell me.”
“You’re right.” He ran a hand along the stone parapet that kept us from the water, pausing to rest his palm against one of the saints. “Chris was nobody to me. I’d probably be back in my dorm doing a problem set right now if my parents hadn’t forced me to come to Chapman. But once I got there …”
“What?”
“I know what it’s like to get sucked into something you shouldn’t be a part of,” he said quietly. “When all you want is for them to leave you alone, let you live a normal life, and they Just. Won’t. Stop. That’s all Chris was trying to do. Be normal. And look what happened to him. Now it’s happening to you. It’s not fair.”
I wasn’t sure whether to envy him or hate him for being so naive. As if fair meant anything. Life did whatever it wanted to, and usually it wanted to crap all over you. But if he didn’t already know, let him enjoy the fantasy.
“Your life’s not normal?” I said, suddenly realizing how little I knew about him—how little I’d bothered to ask. He was a freshman at some small school in Maryland, he knew three languages and counting, he had whimsical taste in boxer shorts, and … and that was about it.
“Parents obsessed with a lost golden age,” he reminded me, “doing everything they can to mold me into the embodiment of dead traditions, insisting on speaking Czech, cooking Czech, papering every damn surface of the house with pictures of ‘the beloved homeland,’ drilling me every night on what to do when—” He stopped abruptly, then laughed. “Well, there’s some other stuff. It doesn’t matter. Let’s just say it’s not a recipe for normalcy. Not when I was a kid. And definitely not now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not lobbying for a pity vote. You wanted to know, so now you know. Maybe there is no good reason. Maybe I’m just in this because I’m in it. Leave it at that.”
I shrugged. The dots didn’t quite connect, but he was right: He didn’t owe me that.
“I could tell you about him,” I said.
“Who?”
“Chris. If you want, I mean.”
“Oh.” He stopped walking, suddenly, like he couldn’t ponder the question and operate his legs at the same time.
“Or not.” Stupid to even offer, I realized. He’d said it himself: Chris was nobody to him. I leaned over the ledge, peering down at the water, up at the clouds, out at the city and its hulking towers, anywhere but at him.
“That would be good,” he said, leaning beside me. Our shoulders touched. “If you want.”
I told him about Chris’s first basketball championship, and how he’d shown up beneath my window at two a.m., face flushed from hours of liquid celebrating, too drunk to remember that he wasn’t supposed to come to my house, that no one was, and challenged me to a game of one-on-one in my driveway, where a rusting hoop had stood unused for the last five years. I told him about Chris and Adriane’s first official date, the disastrous movie where she, exhausted from that af
ternoon’s class-council kayak trip, had nearly fallen asleep and he, fighting off the stomach flu that would keep him out of school for the next week, had finally raised the white flag and thrown up on her favorite pair of strappy heels. I relayed, with only a few false starts, Chris’s favorite dirty joke, the one about the bartender, the monkeys, and their golf balls. I confessed how, despite Adriane’s pestering, it had been Chris who made me and Max possible. After our official first date—less disastrous than it was awkward and off-key, full of fumbling and stilted questions and a botched, nose-bruising sequel to our first kiss—it was Chris who promised I had not humiliated myself and I had not made a mistake, Chris who said I deserved better than being alone, and Max was almost good enough to deserve me.
Eli was a stranger, but I told him everything. I couldn’t stop talking, not until I made him understand the way that Chris’s eyebrows crinkled, asymmetrically, when he waited for the punch line to a joke, and the difference between his smiles, happy, surprised, excited, sorry, in love, because they were each distinct, and each as easily readable as any of the expressions to pass across Chris’s open face. Usually, I had to brace myself before even saying his name, but not this time. This was easy. I told Eli how Chris hated fresh broccoli but liked it cooked, and how he thought he could wiggle his ears despite all evidence to the contrary, and we let him believe it. He liked romantic comedies, I told Eli, but only the ones where the gawky girl gets her guy or the jock discovers his inner geek, and only when he was alone with no chance of being caught in the viewing act. He liked the Knicks, the Eagles, the Red Sox, and, on principle, not a single hockey team because he felt that wasn’t an acceptable sport.
As long as I kept talking, Chris would be real.
So I described, in vivid detail, the expression on our calculus substitute’s face when Chris and Adriane started making out—after they had convinced the poor woman (with the help of the entire class) that they were half brother and half sister. But eventually I ran out of words, and he was gone again.
Only when I stopped talking did I realize Eli’s hand rested on top of mine.
I pulled mine away.
We started walking again. “So. Incest in calculus,” he said. There was a new awkwardness between us. “Impressive.”
“I didn’t think it would work. Adriane’s got only child written all over her.”
“It’s a funny coincidence, don’t you think? How you’re all only children? You think there’s some deep subconscious psychological magnetism going on there, like a post-Jungian quest for familial connection?”
I didn’t answer.
“Aren’t you going to at least pretend to be impressed by my Psych I psychobabble?” he said.
I don’t know why this time, of all times, I said it. “I’m not an only child. I mean. I wasn’t.” I walked faster, staying a step ahead of him, eyes straight ahead. “Didn’t used to be.”
A pause. “Brother or sister?”
“Brother. Older.” I swallowed. “Andy.”
I waited.
Eli didn’t say anything.
Finally, impatient, I forced myself to face him. His fists were clenched as tight as his jaw.
“Now is when you traditionally say something like ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
“Your older brother died?” He sounded weird. Freaked out, maybe, but I’d logged my time getting gawked at and whispered about and stared at helplessly by people who couldn’t wrap their minds around the capriciousness of the mortal coil. I was an expert in freaked out, and this was something different. Something almost like … fear.
“Yeah. Died. A while ago. Forget I said anything.”
“No, I mean, I’m sorry—I am sorry—you just surprised me. That’s all. Do you want to … talk about it?”
Not anymore.
“How about we not talk for a while,” I said.
He didn’t argue, and this time he was the one to speed up, his lanky legs eating up cobblestone so that I nearly had to jog to keep up. Within a few painfully silent minutes, we were back at the Golden Lion.
Max was pacing outside, furious. Adriane was sitting on the ground, slumped against the wall, chin on her chest, sound asleep. “Where the hell have you been? Are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay.” I put my arms around him. He was stiff and tense in the embrace, and after a moment, I let go. “I’m sorry if you were worried.”
“ ‘Worried’? ‘Worried’!”
“Don’t shout.”
“You wander off in the middle of the night—with him—no note, no explanation, no way of finding you, and you’re sorry if I was ‘worried’?”
“You left first,” I said.
At those words, Adriane, not asleep after all, raised her head. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said, in a thick voice. As soon as the light caught her face, I could tell she’d been crying. Which reminded me of why Max had left without me.
I didn’t know what it must have taken for Adriane to break. To drop the act and finally admit to whatever was roiling beneath her surface, to feel so alone and broken in the dark that she’d come to me—because I had promised her, on a train through the night, that when she did, I would be waiting.
But I wasn’t.
And when I found the note, I hadn’t thought of her—or searched for her, or waited for her to return. I’d run off with Eli, as if this whole nightmarish scavenger hunt really were a game, a contest between us. Or, more to the point, as if it were mine—my problem to fix, my puzzle to solve, my cross, as it were, to bear. Not because I was special, or in any more danger than Max and Adriane—or in any more pain. But because I could translate a coelo usque ad centrum the fastest.
This wasn’t just mine, I thought, and resolved that this time, I wouldn’t forget. Chris had belonged to all of us. And if a person couldn’t be split, if a person could only be wholly owned, then, in the end, Chris had belonged to her.
“Are you okay?” I asked Adriane.
She stood up. “I’m going to bed.”
“Adriane—”
“Thanks, Max,” she said, a softness in her voice I hadn’t heard in a long time, then turned away from me and went inside.
“You going to tell me where you went?” Max asked, looking at Eli. “And why you dragged her along?”
“You think I dragged her? Nora, you want to tell him—”
“Is she really okay?” I said. Eli shook his head, then, disgust plain on his face, left us alone.
“She’s fine,” Max said, and some of the anger leached out of his voice. “She just needed to talk. So we talked.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I thought you needed the sleep.”
“You know me better than that.”
Max hesitated. “If you want to know the truth …”
I waited.
“She didn’t want me to wake you.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, I think when she got to our room, she panicked. Half of her wanted someone to talk to, but half of her didn’t, and you being asleep left her off the hook. She’s scared, Nora. More scared than she looks.”
“Of talking?”
“Of everything.”
“But she talked to you,” I said.
“I couldn’t stop her from leaving the hostel. But she couldn’t stop me from going with her. So I followed her—and I didn’t wake you then because there wasn’t time.”
“She talked to you,” I repeated, knowing jealousy was an inappropriate response. Not sure whom I was jealous of.
“Maybe it was easier. I was there, that night.…”
It was the thing the two of them would always share, the thing that I would never be a part of—except that I had been there that night, too.
But I had been there alone.
“She’s okay now?” I said.
He nodded. “She just needed to talk about Chris, I think. To hear his name. Then she calmed down—until we got back here, and you were gone.” The anger surged
back into his voice. Apparently our temporary cease-fire was over. “She freaked out all over again. Maybe this is too much for her—for you, too. Maybe I was wrong, and you should both go back.”
“Adriane is a grown-up,” I said. “And so am I. We can choose for ourselves. We’re staying.”
“Someone was following us,” he said flatly. “Adriane didn’t see him, and I didn’t want to worry her. But it was one of them, the Hledači—I recognized him from before. And I think I saw a knife.”
Every muscle in my body clenched. I wanted to touch him, to reassure myself he was whole. I couldn’t. But he saw my face and understood.
“Nothing happened,” Max said. “I promise. And I managed to lose him—but when we got back, and you weren’t here, I thought …”
I put my arms around him. His skin was cold. I wondered how long he’d been standing outside, waiting for me to appear. Worrying that I never would.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, holding on. “I know—” How it felt, to wait. To wonder. “I’m sorry. I should have left a note.”
“You shouldn’t have left at all. You should have stayed here, where it’s safe.”
I don’t know who let go first, but we were apart again. “Well, I didn’t. And maybe it’s a good thing, because”—I drew Elizabeth’s letter and the leather pouch out of my pocket; they didn’t belong to me, either—“I have something to show you.”
30
E. J. Weston, to my foolish brother.
The Jews drink the blood of children. Or so our Mother told us when, as children, we wandered too close to the gates, spying on men who spoke in foreign tongues, draped themselves in foreign clothes, and thirsted for our lifeblood, to be heated in a pot with the foul soups and stews they prepared for their foreign holidays. Our Father promised us we had nothing to fear from these men who worshipped a God that was our God and yet not. Our cousins, he called them, and we pretended to believe it.
The Book of Blood and Shadow Page 25
