by Tosca Lee
“I’m aware.”
“But unless your intelligence got erased with your memory, I believe you have a reason. And I believe Ivan when he says there was something very big that caused you to do what you did. And so I trust you. If I’m wrong, I won’t be disappointed or hate you. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll be dead. And so will Piotrek. And you’re the one who will have to answer for doing what our hunters could not.”
She might as well have struck me.
She turns toward the doorjamb, and it takes me a minute to realize she’s traced the marking with a tapered finger. “This is Glagolitic,” she says. “A very old Croatian alphabet used in the liturgy.”
“I thought Latin was used in the liturgy,” I say. But I’m still stuck on what she said before. Am I prepared to have even more lives on my conscience?
“The Pope made an exception in the thirteenth century. This symbol is the letter V. It is also the number three.”
“Why three?”
She holds her hand out like a claw. “The Bathory coat of arms has three claws on it. Our ancestor Vitus is said to have killed a dragon—like Saint George did—with three thrusts of his sword. The coat of arms shows three teeth of the dragon biting its own tail. Vitus was given the name Bator—‘brave’ in Hungarian—which became Bathory. We brave, who slay the dragon. This is our legacy. It is who we are,” she says, looking intently at me. “Our ancestors are also affiliated with the famous Order of the Dragon. As was Vlad Dracul the third,” she adds, with a slight, rare smile.
“Vlad . . . as in Dracula, the vampire?”
She slaps my hand. “Don’t be stupid. Vampires don’t exist. Come.”
For its drab exterior, Claudia’s apartment is the poshest kind of bohemian chic I’ve ever seen. A red velvet settee sits beneath the chandelier ship in the middle of the living room, a leopard throw across a curved arm. The walls are hung with several pieces of what look like very old and potentially very valuable art—as well as several framed pieces of what I can only call graffiti. A kilim rug sprawls across the wooden floor beneath a tufted ottoman. There are little lamps everywhere with red and orange silk shades. Claudia systematically stops to turn several of them on.
The galley is small but modern, tiny pieces of art hanging beneath the cabinets.
“You can have the second bedroom,” Claudia says, leading me down a short hallway. She flips a switch and the beaded chandelier throws a kaleidoscope of light across the ceiling. No fewer than nine brightly colored pillows sprawl on top of the red-brown comforter, which glints with pieces of mirror like an antique sari. Mismatched art lines the walls—including a piece featuring a giant red sneaker on a skinny, hairy leg. It’s too vibrant to look away from and really kind of ugly, a line in another language scrawled across the bottom.
“What does that say?” I ask.
“ ‘And I knew that the foot of God was about to crush me.’ ”
“That’s kind of horrible,” I say.
“Piotrek painted it,” she says.
“Oh. I mean it’s just very . . . bold.”
“I find it comforting, myself,” she says, leaning in the doorway. “How many times have I felt that God was a god of crushing feet? That all bad that happened was punishment for some mistake—of even being born?”
“You don’t still feel that way?”
“No,” she says. “Not since the day Piotrek painted this and I cried the minute I saw it. ‘I think one day you will realize that God likes you,’ he said. Which made me cry more. Because it’s much harder to think that God likes us than that He loves us.”
I have shortchanged her, I realize, and the often-silent Piotrek. It must be impossible to have no beliefs, living as they do. As I have, too, lately. I wonder if I was ever religious, if I ever had a single thought nearly as deep during my life before. I recall what Luka said about our argument over whether it was better to take what life we could get or fight for more, and wonder if I’m a far shallower person today than I was two months ago.
“There are things in the closet, the other bedroom, the bathroom. Take what you want, but I suggest you sleep,” she says. She turns on the bedside lamp. It is outfitted with a purple bulb. “We don’t go out during the day unless we have to, as I must now if we’re going to get you passports.”
I catch her by the arm.
“Thank you, Claudia,” I say, and mean it. She gives me a perfunctory nod.
She leaves shortly after downing a small cup of espresso with what she calls “sinful speed.” “You see?” she says, as she picks up her purse. “I’m practically American.”
Luka locks the door behind her as I force down half a cooling cup of coffee. There’s no milk, and I’m pretty sure asking Claudia to get some would have gotten me a laugh in the face.
“How is it?” he asks.
“Horrible,” I say, setting it on the table.
“Maybe she’s got some sugar.” He goes to search the cabinets, and I follow him into the kitchen. He’s got nice shoulders. Broad, like a swimmer’s.
Or a murderer’s.
I remember the weight of that arm curled around me and hope to God my unconscious self—the same part of me that swam to shore for Clare’s cross and crawled into his bed before dawn—is wiser than my waking mind. Because Claudia’s right: I can’t take one more life on my conscience.
“Hey,” I say. “About last night . . .”
“You were scared. Don’t worry about it,” he says, his back toward me.
“I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression.”
“You didn’t. How about this?” he says, holding up a canister of tea. I shrug and nod, and then watch the elegant hands capable of strangling someone with their T-shirt carefully fill the infuser.
“Do you play the piano?” I say on impulse. He looks up, surprise clearly written on his face.
“You remember that?”
“No.”
“Oh.” He laughs softly. “I told you a really embarrassing story about that once. I’m glad you forgot.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“It’s completely fair,” he says, setting up the electric kettle.
“You know things about me. Personal things. I don’t know anything about you other than that you were supposed to kill me.”
He turns to face me, leans back against the counter.
“Okay. Ask. I’ll tell you anything.”
I consider him across the kitchen’s small galley.
“Were you with me the day before my procedure?”
“I was,” he says with a quiet nod.
“How did we spend that day?”
“We’d found this place called the Heron House outside Indianapolis two nights before. You convinced the owner that she really wanted to put us up in their only suite. It had a huge bathtub . . .” He starts to continue, stops and shifts where he stands. “We slept late. The owner brought up breakfast, and later lunch. We stayed in bed all day. We didn’t talk about the future, or anything from the past. You kept staring at me, said there was no way you could forget me, though of course we both knew you would.”
I’m quiet for a moment. “What about the next morning?” I say finally.
“We had talked about it for so long . . . But when your cab showed up outside I didn’t want to let you go. I freaked out. I broke down. You were determined. And then you kissed me good-bye and told me to find you in Maine,” he says, as the kettle begins to hiss.
“I looked for you every day for a month,” he says, pouring hot water into a cup. “Drove by your place a few times. It was all I could do not to get a boat and go out there. I could see your caretaker once, looking out the window. I worried she had seen me. And I waited. Till the day you showed up at the grocery.”
He’s just set down the kettle by the time I cross the few feet between us. The cup tips and spills as he pulls me against him, a soft sound escaping his throat.
He
kisses me hard, arms hungry around me. His fingers slide into my hair. And the desperation is back without even the guise of control as he pulls me against his chest and off my toes.
He can’t get enough of my mouth, my neck, my skin. “I miss the way you smell. I miss this smell,” he whispers, hand cradling my head as we fall back against the opposite counter. And then he’s lifting me up, my arms and knees locked around him, and carrying me down the narrow hallway to the wrong room.
“That one,” I say, grabbing the doorframe, steering us across the hall.
He kicks the door shut behind us, and the kaleidoscope of stars dances on the ceiling.
* * *
“Don’t sleep,” Luka murmurs. He’s curled behind me, nose against my ear, his fingers caught in mine.
“Why not?” I say, drowsing.
“I still owe you.”
“Owe me what?”
“I made the mistake of falling asleep at your friend’s flat once, where you were staying. I woke up late for work and ran out the door . . . with no idea you had drawn a purple Hitler mustache on me. With a Sharpie.”
I laugh.
“I mean, you kissed me good-bye with a completely straight face.”
“Wow. I’m good.”
“You’re evil.”
I close my eyes. I haven’t felt this at ease in days.
“What’re you thinking?” he whispers, brushing the hair from my cheek.
“It must be tiring telling stories more than once.”
“No. I love it.”
After a minute, I ask, “You said I changed your mind. How?”
I feel him shrug. “You weren’t a thing anymore. You weren’t a belief. You had a soul. A laugh. A smell I was addicted to. A twisted sense of humor. It wasn’t just that I loved you. It was that even though you were Progeny, you were more like me than unlike me. And then, somehow, you were more me than I was.”
“So you just gave it up?”
“I went into a tailspin.”
“Because you couldn’t kill me.”
“No. Because the Scions were the only church I knew. Their God, who wanted revenge and justice, was the only God I knew. For the first time, I didn’t know what to believe.”
“I’m pretty sure God doesn’t condone killing.”
“God has condoned killing throughout history, depending who you ask.”
“That is literally so Old Testament.”
He rolls onto his back. “I used to think about the story of Abraham, being told to kill his son. I spent so many nights wondering how he was willing to do it. And I didn’t know what God would hate more: me not fulfilling what I had always been taught to be some sacred obligation, or me killing myself. Because that’s what it was coming to. Either God would destroy me for failing, or I’d destroy myself.”
I don’t need to turn to study the painting behind us. The red-sneakered foot, laces tied, laughably neat, in a bow. Maybe I even see a little bit why Claudia called it comforting.
“I was in hell,” he says. “I quit eating. I couldn’t sleep. Worse, you knew something was wrong. You thought I was cheating on you at first, until you realized it was something wrong with me. I couldn’t keep it secret. You knew me too well.”
“Not as well as I thought, apparently.”
And even now I allow for the possibility that I have just made love to a man who will kill me. I can’t see it, but I have been wrong about him before.
“So what’d you do?” I ask.
“I laid my whole, messed-up heart on the table. And I knew you would leave. But honestly, I think I was more afraid of God abandoning me. For as much as I loved you . . . that thought was worse.”
I’m trying to reconcile the tortured person of his story with the urgently happy-go-lucky guy from the Food Mart. I never would have pegged him as spiritual. ’Course I never thought of him as very deep until recently, either.
“You don’t seem tortured anymore, though.”
He turns toward me, nuzzles my shoulder. “No. I finally decided God’s mercy is enough, or it isn’t. It’s the foundation of religion, isn’t it—forgiveness? But you never really think about what that means until you have no choice but to throw yourself on that altar and pray it’s enough. Forgiveness is enough, or it isn’t. That is the only thing I believe anymore.”
“I envy you,” I say, pulling his arm around me. “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
“After you came back to me, you said something about how we’ve both been slaves to a past we didn’t know how to leave behind. The day you had your procedure, a part of me was jealous. Because just like that, it was gone. You were free.”
“Maybe not as free as I thought.”
“For a time you were. And I felt envious and stupidly abandoned. I didn’t expect to feel the way I did.”
“Losing your identity is no picnic, either.”
“Your identity isn’t you, Audra.”
But what else is there, when your past, your roles, your upbringing and parents and culture—your very name—are stripped away? What’s left? So far my answer has been: not much.
Eventually I doze, if only for a half hour, afraid of what my sleepwalking self might do, unable to turn off my mind.
24
* * *
When Claudia said I could use whatever I wanted in the closet, I didn’t realize the sheer trove of weirdness I’d walk into. Alice in Wonderland skirts, pin-striped corsets, gladiator sandals, straitjacket shirts, black shorts with fringe to the ankle, velvet bodices covered with timepieces—or cocktail umbrellas or buckles—purple wigs, and masquerade masks. Miniature hats that look like shrunken-head versions of something from the Kentucky Derby. It’s as though Cirque du Soleil, a goth ball, and a gaming convention all crash-landed in the same eight-by-three-foot twilight zone that is Claudia’s spare closet.
“What is all this?” I say when she comes to check on me. And then I pull up short. She’s outfitted in a pair of leather riding breeches, an abbreviated tuxedo coat, and a tiny top hat with a veil over a fall of pink hair.
“Clothes,” she says, as though I were the village idiot. “You can’t meet Tibor dressed like that.”
“Who’s Tibor?” I say, exasperated.
“The Zagreb Prince. Who answers only to Nikola.”
“Nikola?”
“The Prince of Budapest. The oldest court.”
None of this means anything to me.
“I wasn’t aware that I had to look like Lady Gaga to meet him.”
She huffs and starts rifling through the closet, pulling things from hangers, tossing them on the bed.
“What about the passports?” I say.
“Jester’s working on it.”
“Jester?”
“You didn’t think I could just go pick one up at the pharmacy down the street?” she snaps.
A loud exclamation sounds from the other room. Luka. Piotrek talks over him in protest.
“You both need to change your attitude,” Claudia says, getting on her hands and knees to dig in the back of the closet. She tosses out a pair of boots.
“So you want me to look like a freak.”
She gets up and stares at me, indignant in pink hair, and I could almost laugh at her. She throws a pair of blood-red velvet pants with zippers down both sides at me, hard.
“It’s almost ten. You’d better hurry.”
I let out a long exhale as she laces me into a black corset, fits me in a purple wig. It’s piled high with curls and topped with a giant black rose. She brushes fuchsia lipstick on my mouth, ties a black mask behind my head, and attaches a pair of golden chandeliers to my ears.
“Well, well,” she says, looking me over as I zip up the pants, almost catching my skin in the metal teeth twice.
“They fit.” More or less. Good thing they stretched or I wouldn’t be able to sit without popping a zipper. Claudia’s at least a size smaller than I am.
“They should. They were yours,” she says,
tossing me the boots.
I give her a weird look, but she’s rummaging through a dresser drawer.
“What happens when someone realizes they can’t sense Luka?” I say, chewing my lip.
“You’re ruining your lipstick! There will be too many Progeny there for anyone to realize they can’t sense him.” She pauses. “Stay close to him if we leave with anyone. Shouldn’t be hard for you to do, I think?”
The last thing she hands me is a heavy pendant on a long chain. A bronze, three-toed talon. The Bathory coat of arms.
I turn it over in my hand. “Was this mine, too?”
She looks away. “It was your mother’s. You gave it to me before you left.” The hurt is there, I can see it.
“I’m sorry,” I say, thinking that between her and Luka, I’m surrounded by abandonment issues varied only by circumstance, all of my making.
I clasp the pendant tightly before lowering the chain carefully over my wig. As I do, I catch sight of the mirror and start. It’s not the first time in my life I’ve failed to recognize myself.
* * *
I give a nervous glance around as we step out into the night. On the street, Piotrek pauses to lean on the silver handle of an elaborate cane. A black-and-white cravat is tied at his neck, his face obscured by a mask that hangs down from the edge of a top hat brimmed with feathers. Luka, apparently, has managed to hold out for the most part. He’s dressed in a black jacquard tuxedo jacket over an equally black shirt, black pants, heavy boots. A thin jet tie hangs from a tight, smart knot at his throat. His mask is plain, and clings to the contours of his cheekbones. As we make our way up the street, he pulls the generous cowl of a shapeless black trench coat over his head. At first I think he looks like a hooded monk until he turns his head; from this angle, he might just be the grim reaper.
Claudia loops her arm through Piotrek’s and leads us toward the Lego church. There’s a couple milling ahead, a man and woman in period costume. There’s another pair farther down the street—a noblewoman in petticoats, and a knight with a shield across his back.
