Dane is the boy, the joy and the sorrow, the highs and the spirals, the always friend who terrifies me—soothes me—with the sometimes something more. Dane is the dream and the wish and the longing, he is the known and familiar.
Hamlet is not the seething, poisonous pain that attacks the fine chairs with feet and an animal cry, but neither is he Dane. This is someone new, someone frightening and alluring. He isn’t just lost in the darkness, he drowns in it. He isn’t Dane; he isn’t Hamlet.
What name do we give the pain? The fury? The grief? What name do we give the part that drowns and the part that dies? What do we call the fragments that remain?
Mine.
The star burns and blazes inside my chest, brighter and larger until the flames licks my stomach and arms. It sears my sight, deafens me to everything but the spinning whisper of danedanedanedanedane.
Father enters the room, stops short at the sight of Dane kicking apart the chairs, then makes the visible effort not to comment upon it. “Your mother would like to speak with you. Now.”
Dane calms abruptly, though his chest still heaves from the exertion. He paces slowly to the door, until he’s staring down into my father’s face. “Do you see that cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?”
We’re inside and night has long since fallen, but I can see the thought in Father’s face: play along. Keep him calm. He forces a smile and a small nod. “I do indeed, and it is very like a camel.”
“I think it looks like a weasel.”
Father’s smile falters, but he still makes the attempt. “I … yes, its back is like a weasel.”
“Or a whale?”
“Very like a whale.”
I close my eyes so Father can’t see the shame. Did he do this to me when I was younger, before he realized that I was never going to grow out of being my mother’s daughter and he put me in the cold place, put me on the pills? Did he play along, just nod and smile as I talked of sorrow and rage that rode forever through the woods?
Did he sound so much like a fool?
“Then I’ll see my mother in a bit. Now go, and take these idiots with you.”
Father hesitates, but he says nothing further. Not to Dane, anyway, and not to me; he simply ushers the actors and the dumbfounded Toms out the door and closes it behind him.
“Dane—”
“Go, Horatio, please. If you love me, go.”
I open my eyes in time to see the pain flash across Horatio’s face. Does Dane know? Or does he use that word as friends do, with no idea of how much more it means to this boy who wounds himself to keep Dane safe from this ill-begotten promise? Horatio squeezes my shoulder, careful with his strength because he can’t stand to add to my bruises. “Stay with him until he goes to his mother. Please.”
I glance over at Dane, who inclines his head in barely perceptible agreement. “I will.”
When the door clicks quietly shut, Dane just stares at me and the recorder still in my hand.
Wetting my lips, I bring the recorder back to my mouth and start to play.
And he laughs.
CHAPTER 30
Dane crouches next to me and watches my fingers move over the holes, watches the way my lips part for breath before pressing again against the mouthpiece of the recorder. “You’re the only one with any right to play me and the only one who never tries,” he murmurs.
I set the recorder to the side and use his shoulder to steady myself so I can stand. Pins and needles race up my legs after so long sitting, but he doesn’t move until he’s sure I have my balance. “And Horatio.”
“That he has the right to play me? Or that he never tries?”
“You already know what I mean, Dane. There’s no one else here to play with.”
“Are you scared of me, Ophelia?”
“Sometimes,” I whisper. “But most of the time, I’m scared for you.”
“Horatio said that.”
“He’s better than either of us.”
“I know.” His fingers travel over my face, smear the shimmering powders around my eyes down onto my cheeks. “Play me, Ophelia. As only you can.”
“I don’t know how.”
He gives me a crooked, mischievous smile, and for a moment he’s just Dane, the Dane I knew, the Dane I miss. “You managed fairly well on your birthday.” He laughs at the blush that blazes beneath his fingertips, kisses me softly. But the softness doesn’t—can’t—last, and then the need and the hunger and the desperation clutch me against his chest until the darkness dazzles my sight. “Come,” he gasps, wrenching away. “Come with me.”
I don’t even bother to ask him where. It doesn’t matter. I promised Horatio I’d stay with Dane until he went to his mother, and would have gone even without the promise simply because Dane asked it of me. Because I bear his pain, and where the heart goes, the pain must follow. Always.
The cold attacks us as soon as we step outside, and I shiver in the wrap that offers barely enough protection against an air-conditioned room. It does nothing against a night just shy of All Hallows’ Eve, a night with a wind that swirls and stabs.
And sings.
The bean sidhe have begun to sing again, but it’s a different song, a different sound. The death they announce hasn’t happened yet, but in the way of faeries, they already know that it will happen.
But Dane can’t hear them, so he doesn’t pause in his mad race across the grounds to the garage down near the gatehouse. Cold air burns my lungs, and my heels skid across the gravel walks until we reach the paved drive. His hand is laced through mine, tugging me after him.
In the garage, he hangs my wrap on a hook on the wall but slides onto his bike without a helmet. When I reach for one, he makes a growl of impatience that has me backing away from the thing that could save my life. It’s uncomfortable on the bike, my skirts bunched beneath me, but I hunch against his back and wrap my arms around his chest.
I can feel the hard metal of a gun against my stomach, the gun he’s once again tucked into the back of his waistband.
The motorcycle roars to life, and we race from the garage, down what’s left of the drive and past the sleepy guards in the gatehouse. They cry after us, but we’re gone before they can even identify us, and Dane isn’t the only boy in school with a bike and a girl.
There’s a sort of thrill to terror, a frisson of feeling that races through you when any moment your life might end. In that moment, that split second, you’ve never felt more alive. We skid on the narrow curves and take them too tight, too fast, always on the verge of spilling off the bike onto the road with nothing but a bit of cloth between the asphalt and our skin. Wind whips my hair around us, a cloud of ink that blinds us, and he doesn’t even slow.
He races in front of cars, cutting them off so abruptly the drivers have to yank aside to avoid hitting us. Curses muffled by thick windows follow our progress, accompanied by a cacophony of blaring horns. We zip through a red light and leave the loud crunch of metal behind us.
How many nights, in the hours between his frantic antics and his visit to me, has he ridden out like this, courting death just to feel alive in a world of ghosts and pain? How many nights has the gym not been enough distraction?
Red and blue lights flash behind us with an ululating siren that makes my heart stutter and stop. A squawky voice, deep and masculine, crackles over the police cruiser’s speakers. “Pull over.”
Dane ignores him.
The cruiser follows us through town, the orders growing stricter and stronger, and then a second cruiser swings off a side street to join the chase. Dane laughs and slows down just enough to ride between them, then zips forward through a red light and a line of cars that couldn’t pull out of the way in time.
Ahead of us, the lights flash at the railroad track, warning us of the freight train about to pull through, but Dane gives them the same consideration he gives the police, and he crashes through the barricade. Wood splinters rake my arms. The conductor yanks on the whistle when he sees
us.
We cross the tracks with inches to spare, the air alive behind us with the force of the train’s passage. Even police can’t go through a train.
There’s no one to follow us now, no one to keep the thrill alive, but Dane doesn’t slow. He races through sleepy neighborhoods, mostly full of older couples whose children have long since moved away and had children of their own, who went out to an early-bird dinner and now, barely pushing nine, are readying for bed.
We stop so abruptly my stomach lurches. I swallow hard against this new kind of nausea, my face buried between Dane’s shaking shoulder blades. I can’t tell if he’s laughing or trying not to cry.
Silence presses in all around us, not just the absence of noise but the sort of silence that waits in the cathedrals at the bottom of the lake. When I’m sure my shaking is only from cold and no longer from fear, I slowly sit up and look around. We’re actually in a building, a large gap behind us where double doors used to be, but not even fragments of the wood remain. Thick black soot streaks up the grey stone walls around gaps where fractions of stained glass windows still cling to the leaded frames. Holes gape in the colored panels of glass. Most of the roof is missing, letting in rippling pools of moonlight like quicksilver, and dead leaves litter the floor in a thick carpet. Here and there I can see signs of life, a bird’s nest in the open cradle of a beam, the skeletons of small rodents tucked into the corners half buried under leaves. Behind the charred remains of what used to be an altar, a statue of the Christ weeps tears of soot, hands and feet blackened.
They said it was arson or a prank gone horribly wrong and never did figure out who caused it, but the church caught fire and blazed like a burning bush on a dark snowy night, so cold the water in the trucks wanted to freeze. We could see the conflagration from the school. Dane, Horatio, Laertes, and I huddled under a single blanket on the roof of the gymnasium and watched the flames dance and leap against the darkness, like angels made of flame that spun and twirled to the song of shattering glass and sirens.
They built a new church instead of repairing this one, left the carcass to rot until it became a ghost of stone and broken windows. Frost edges the leaves, our breath birthing clouds in the frigid air. Most of the pews are gone, burned away, but some pieces still stand, blackened and too thin, crisp like the skeleton of the altar.
This is what I’ll be when the star stops burning, when the lake drowns the flames.
Tears sting my eyes, but I don’t know if they’re for me or for this pitiful remnant of a church.
Dane tugs awkwardly at me until he can get a grip on my waist, then twists me up and around until I can straddle his lap, our faces touching. My skirts spill around us, but my feet can’t even touch the floor. He strokes the hair back from my face until it falls in a tangled mass of knots and violets down my back.
“After we took you back to your room, I was going to visit my father’s grave,” he whispers, “but I saw Claudius going into the church, so I followed him. He knelt down at the altar and clasped his hands and bowed his head, and I thought how easy it would be to end it all right there.” His voice shakes, and there’s a terrible intensity in his face. “They teach us how to shoot and call it education and physical exercise, so I could have stood at the back of the room, pulled the gun from my back, and known how to aim it, how to shoot it. I could have stood and watched the bullet bury itself right in his black, murdering heart. I promised to avenge my father, and that’s all it would take. A single shot. A bullet. A death. I even had the gun in my hand and aimed almost perfectly. He never would have known what hit him. Dead before he even hit the floor.”
“But you didn’t,” I murmur, unsure if words are what’s needed from me right now. Words or silence, sometimes it’s hard to tell, and I’ve never been good with words, not for other people.
“He was praying,” he spits. “His entire face was screwed up like the words were poison on his tongue, and I wanted him to choke on his confession. I had my finger on the trigger and then I realized: if I kill him while he’s at prayer, while his soul is in his communion with God, I send him straight to Heaven. My father, a good man, burns in Purgatory for sins he had no chance to confess. How would it be any sensible sort of vengeance to guarantee his murderer Heaven because I couldn’t wait to take his life until he left a church?”
His hands grip my upper arms, drive the splinters deeper into my flesh, and I bite back a cry of pain. “It was a good reason not to kill him. Then. But what if I can’t do it? What if every reason I’ve had for delay, my need for proof, my need to know I’m right, what if it’s all just a way to hide my cowardice? Ophelia, what if I can’t kill him? What happens if I can’t do this?”
I have no words for him, but this time, I know it isn’t what he needs. I can’t tell him to kill Claudius. I can’t tell him not to. All I can do is take my share of this pain too great for his body to hold.
“So many chances I’ve had to kill him, but I haven’t done it, and now I’m not even sure I could. All my life I tried to make my father proud of me, did make him proud of me, but this one thing … the only thing he’s ever truly asked of me … what if I can’t do it?”
Only one of the ghosts has asked it of him. The other never would, never could. But that hardly means anything, not now.
His lips crash against mine, and his palms trail blood down my arms as he pulls me flush against him. His fingers fumble at the clothing between us, clumsy with the fear that threatens to devour him. The star burns and expands, and maybe this time it won’t stop; it will just grow and grow, consume everything in its path, until all I am is the pain that Dane can’t hold.
Laughter echoes against the ruined walls of the church, and I hear my mother’s voice, Dahut’s voice; the laughter is the song of the morgens, and they play and seduce and seek men to drown, men with emptiness where their hearts should be, men who claim to love when they only ever need and devour. We’re born in blood, and we die in blood and oh!
Blood follows us every step of the way.
Blood and pain and sorrow and rage, all woven together into hands slick against my skin, a body that desperately tries to consume mine. The devil kissed poison into Dahut’s skin, but Dane kisses pain into mine, traces love in blood until I shatter, floating lost on a storm-swollen sea of bells and laughter.
CHAPTER 31
“Ophelia!”
I open my eyes slowly to find Dane’s panicked face inches from mine, his eyes wide with terror against a face that’s far too pale even in the moonlight that spills from the missing sections of roof. When my eyes meet his, he crushes me against his chest, his entire body shaking.
“You have no … you just can’t … you can’t … Ophelia!”
Pain throbs everywhere we touch and mixed through the heavy scent I associate with my brother’s room is the unmistakable smell of blood. It streaks my arms, his hands, my thighs, and my skin burns with every breath of contact, even where the frigid air curls between us.
“Why don’t you ever stop me?” he demands, his voice as broken as the windows. There are holes in the words, just like the windows, pieces missing that finish the picture. “Damn you, Ophelia, why don’t you ever stop me? You can’t let me do this to you!”
Damp warmth seeps into my hair, and I reach up to touch his face, draw my fingers away to stare at them in wonder, at the clear pearls that glisten with salt and shame and fear on the ridges of my skin. “You’re crying.”
“You’re the one good thing, but you’d let me destroy you. Don’t let me, Ophelia, please don’t let me. Everything else I think I could survive, but not if I destroy you. You can’t … you can’t let me. You just can’t let me.”
With every breath, the sun draws back into my chest. I shiver violently in the cold it leaves behind, until he tugs off his tuxedo jacket and slides my arms through the overlong sleeves. His hands move between us again, correcting, adjusting, fastening, but he doesn’t move me to the back of the bike. He cradles me against his
chest like I’m every precious thing, like I’m Pandora’s box and all that’s left within me is hope. He starts the bike.
We drive slowly around the outside of town, obeying every law and sign and light so as to attract no attention. He leaves the road a half mile from school and turns onto a narrow path worn mostly smooth by time and contact, a path that weaves into the woods and through the trees. Flashes of white and silver and grey streak through on either side of us, and the baying of hounds lights a fire in my blood. Those who watch the Wild Hunt as it passes can be driven mad.
If you’re already mad?
There’s only wonder.
Dane kills the bike as we pull up beside the plain chapel on grounds, the ghosts’ blue-white pillars of flame within the fences, and part of his father’s fractured soul watches us walk hand in hand up the path to Headmaster’s House. Each step hurts, aches, but if I’m strong enough to bear his pain, I’m strong enough to bear my own. He walks me to my door and kisses me so softly I can barely feel it.
“Dane?”
He hesitates but finally drags his eyes up to my face like he’s afraid of what he’ll see there.
“I choose your pain. What you give me, you won’t use to attack your mother, who waits to see you.” Because hurting her hurts him as well, even when he’s the one doing it.
“A choice.”
“A choice.” I lean forward to kiss him, gentle and slow, giving him all the forgiveness and love that keeps the lake at bay. “I love you, and the choice is mine to make.”
Some of the fear—the pain—leaves his face, and he closes my door silently.
But for the spill of moonlight through the window, my room is dark. I can’t see if the dress is ruined, don’t want to see. I carefully pull it off and lay it over the hamper, study my ruined underwear before wrapping them in old homework and throwing them away. I don’t want the bloodstains raising questions in the laundry. The water in the shower is only warm, not hot—a floor below me, I can hear the groan of pipes and know that Dane is cleaning up before he goes to see his mother—but it washes away the blood and the dead violets and some of the ache. Shivering in my towel, I flick on the light to dig the splinters from my skin with tweezers. They make a bloody pile on the edge of my sink, and then I have to wash my arms again before I can bind them in lengths of white gauze.
A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult) Page 25
