Her hand, seemingly of its own accord, went to the pouch at her belt. She could feel the little square plaque through the soft leather. What if there were other relics left over from her world amidst the detritus? Could she find it? Would she want to?
“It’s still bothering you, isn’t it?”
Emily started, looking around to see Corbbmacc watching her. Behind him, the window was open, and she could just feel the first few breaths of cool air on her face.
“What?”
He tilted his head toward her waist, where her hand still clutched the pouch. “That thing you found downstairs. I don’t really understand why it’s bothering you, but it obviously is.”
“No, it’s not. It’s just…”
“Why do you keep doing that?” he asked, his expression falling back into its customary scowl. He didn’t raise his voice, but there was frustration and bitterness in his tone, tempered by a weary kind of disappointment.
“Doing what? I’m not…”
“You’re lying. Whether it’s to me or to yourself, I’m not sure. But you keep doing it.”
Emily opened her mouth to protest, but found there were no words coming to her lips.
“I know you talk to Celine,” Corbbmacc went on, looking away and lowering his voice. “And I’m pretty sure you and Michael came to some sort of understanding back at the cave. But you still won’t talk to me. Not really, anyway.”
He was speaking slowly, feeling his way through the words as if he was only just realizing their truth. He didn’t sound angry or bitter anymore; he just seemed sad.
The image of the world revolving around her head as she’d nearly fallen through the doorway outside filled Emily’s mind, and with it came the memory of the feel of Corbbmacc’s hands on her hips, hauling her back across the threshold to safety. Heat rose in her face, feeling for all the world like that faint, warm echo that had followed the knowing.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she, too, looked away.
Her eyes lit upon another one of those watercolor paintings, like the ones hanging on the walls in the corridor outside. It was leaning against a rotting bookcase and seemed to be of some kind of cityscape. The glass had shattered in the frame, creating a spiderweb of cracks that crisscrossed the canvas, and a thick layer of dust made everything in the picture appear insubstantial and ghostly.
“Don’t be,” Corbbmacc said. “I guess I haven’t given you much of a reason to trust me, have I? I didn’t have much use for you when we first met, and I tend to leap into things before looking. It keeps getting me into trouble.”
“I’m the one who half strangled you down in the mines,” Emily said, bemused.
“That was different. It wasn’t even really you doing those things. The crystal did something to you. It wasn’t your fault.”
There was a long silence. Emily went on staring at the painting. There was a lot of blue in it, she thought. A lighter blue above and a darker blue below. Was there an ocean behind the buildings?
“I don’t think that’s true,” she said at last, her words coming slowly. “The thing I can do… I call it the knowing. It is part of me, Corbb. Such a deep part of me that it’s stayed with me across lifetimes. The crystal intensified it, maybe even twisted it, but it was always mine.”
“It saved my life,” Corbbmacc said. “It saved all our lives, I think.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean, ‘maybe’? If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be lying in a bloody heap at the bottom of a mine shaft.”
“Celine’s power saves lives,” Emily said, her voice falling to nearly a whisper. She could feel fresh heat in her face, but this time it had nothing to do with Corbbmacc. “Celine saved Mona, and Michael, and me. Probably Garrett too. Celine’s the one who saves lives.”
“So?”
Emily said nothing. It was hard—still so damn hard—even after all the ways she’d changed in the last few weeks, to let down her guard.
“I saved you,” she said at last, “but I had to—” Her voice caught on the word, her lips stubbornly refused to form the word. She took a long, shuddering breath. “I had to kill, Corbbmacc. I killed someone, because it was the only way to get us out of that fucking mess.”
She hadn’t heard him step toward her, and she stiffened as he placed a hand on her shoulder.
“We’ve all killed, Em,” he said quietly. “This is war, or it will be war before long. No one likes it, but it is the way it is.”
She pulled away from him, shaking her head.
“I didn’t ask to be part of your war,” she said. “I didn’t want any of this.”
“Maybe not,” Corbbmacc said, his voice rising a little. “But I’m not sorry that Dalivan’s dead. Not considering the alternative. He was a son of a bitch who wouldn’t have thought twice—hell, would’ve enjoyed—slitting our throats, if he’d had half a chance. I saw the way he policed the streets when Marcom wasn’t with him.”
“But did he deserve to die?”
“I don’t know, Em. It doesn’t really matter what anyone deserves. All we can do is live the lives we’ve been given.”
“It isn’t just that,” she said, turning from the painting at last and looking at him.
“What is it, then? Tell me.”
She opened her mouth to answer, but something inside her rebelled. She tried to force the words past the lump in her throat, but it was too hard.
Something of her struggle must’ve shown on her face, because Corbbmacc’s posture relaxed, and he took another step toward her.
“Please, Em,” he said very softly. “Talk to me.”
She took one long slow breath.
“What I can do is all about death and destruction,” she said. “I killed Dalivan; I tried to kill you. I can strike out. I can fight and wound. I know how to do it and I know how to win. Celine’s power heals. Do you know what she feels when she uses it? Do you know what she sees?”
“No,” Corbbmacc said.
“It’s a sacrifice, each and every time she helps someone. You’ve seen what it’s done to her physically. What it does to her emotionally is worse, maybe. And there’s pain. Pain for the person she’s helping, and pain for her.”
Corbbmacc nodded, saying nothing.
“When I deal out death, or disarm an opponent, or defend myself, it isn’t a sacrifice at all, Corbb. I love it. It’s overwhelming”—she groped for the right word—“…bliss. It’s the way I used to feel—” She broke off. It was the way she’d felt on the ice, but he wouldn’t understand that.
“It feels good to strike out, to deal death,” she said instead, dropping her eyes. “It’s wrong.”
She turned away, angry with herself for revealing her feelings aloud and confused that she’d hardly known she’d been feeling this way before the words had come tumbling out—tumbling out in a childish torrent to someone who couldn’t possibly understand them.
She pushed her way through the clutter, knocking over a small, scarred table as she passed. She heard the thud as a few trinkets that had been on top of it hit the floor and rolled away, but she didn’t look to see what they were.
She stopped before the painting she’d been looking at. Up close, there was something about it that seemed vaguely familiar, but it was hard to care at the moment.
Just to have something to do with her hands, she began slowly pulling shards of broken glass out of the frame and letting them drop to the floor at her feet, revealing more of the picture in bits and pieces as the dusty fragments fell away.
“It sounds to me,” Corbbmacc said, as if she hadn’t just walked away, “that it’s two sides of the same thing. Celine’s power saves at a cost to herself. Your power saves at a cost to others and, apparently, to your own peace of mind.”
She didn’t answer. She just went on, carefully pulling out pieces of glass. There was something definitely familiar about the buildings in the picture, and there was something else—something she couldn’t quite see—behind them
in the background.
She pried another piece of glass free, and a shower of them came loose and pattered down to the floor around her.
Emily stared, not entirely surprised, but still filled with wonder that something could be so familiar and alien at the same time.
The painting wasn’t quite what it should be. The proportions were all wrong, as if the artist had been attempting to recreate the image of something he’d only heard described by someone else. And yet, despite the warped details, there could be very little doubt about what she was looking at.
Impossibly tall buildings made of glass and steel, forming the shape of a familiar skyline, filled the painting’s foreground, and looming over them all, ridiculously huge and rising up out of the ocean behind them, was Lady Liberty.
She felt something then. It wasn’t the all consuming tidal wave that had threatened to drown her as she’d fallen from the stairs outside; it wasn’t even the old familiar sense of invincibility that had been her companion on the ice. It was still the knowing, though. It nudged her, pulling at her emotions with fingers that were as light and deft as those of any harpist.
“Close,” she whispered, not understanding what it meant, but knowing—knowing—it was true. “So close.”
The knowing tugged again, and her mind began to fill with images. It wasn’t like the visions. This was gentler—sweeter. It showed her the glare of a goal light coming to life as the puck crossed the line and slid into the net; it showed her Michael staring out at her from a chipped and dirty locker room mirror; it showed Celine helping her to her feet in the gloomy cabin on a boat at sea; it showed her Marcom grinning down at her, a slingshot between his hands; it showed her Derek.
She reached out and touched the painting, remembering the way she’d reached out to Michael through a funhouse mirror in an abandoned warehouse in another world.
“Yes,” she whispered.
Yes, there was more to the knowing than passion and bloodshed. There was hope, and friendship, and memory.
Remember your friends.
She turned toward Corbbmacc. He stood behind her, a bemused expression resting uneasily upon his features.
“What’s close?” he asked.
Emily didn’t answer. She just slipped her arms around him and hugged him to her.
For a moment, Corbbmacc only stood there, surprised. Then he smiled and hugged her back.
“I will,” she murmured into his chest.
“You will what?” he asked.
“Remember.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Nine o’ clovers!” Celine cried, slapping the card down on the mattress atop Emily’s seven of hearts.
“Clubs,” Emily corrected again, smiling slightly.
“Yeah, yeah,” Celine said, sweeping the cards away into her growing pile with a flourish. “But they don’t look like clubs none. If yeh tried usin’ one yeh’d knock yer own self out, yeh would. C’mon. Go again.”
Corbbmacc sniggered from where he sat beside the window, hunched over a tangle of rags and shredded upholstery knotted together in his lap. Emily couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was doing with it, and trying to trace the complex network of strips and loops made her head ache. When he’d told her he was making something to help them get down from the second floor, she’d expected a rope of bedsheets tied together, like in old movies. Apparently Corbb had something more complicated in mind. She hoped they wouldn’t inadvertently hang themselves with it.
“C’mon, Em! Play a’ready!”
Emily’s gaze returned to Celine, who was almost bouncing where she sat on the edge of the bed, her white hair floating around her face. She hadn’t seen the girl so vital—so happy—since before Hellsgate, and it warmed her heart. She’d only taken the dusty pack of cards she’d found amidst the piles of trinkets and trash she and Corbbmacc had sifted through on a whim, but as the hours toward nightfall stretched on, she’d decided to try to fill them by teaching Celine to play the few card games she knew.
Celine had tired of Go Fish after an hour or so, but was enjoying War, the only other game Emily could remember all the rules to, such as they were.
She flipped over the next card in her hand; it was the queen of spades. Celine’s lower lip jutted out in a good-natured pout, and she flipped over her own card—the jack of diamonds.
“Damn!” Celine groaned. “And that’s a pretty good one, too.”
Emily reached for the cards but paused as Rascal leapt up onto the bed beside them, mewing discontentedly at Celine. He raised one paw and batted at his mistress’s knee, staring up at her unblinkingly with his great silver eyes.
“S’matter, dearheart,” Celine cooed. “Aren’t I payin’ enough attention to yeh, poor thing?”
Rascal mewed again and sat back on his haunches. The white bone of his sting quivered, arched over his back and gleaming in the fading sunlight.
“What is it, boy,” Emily asked, getting up and moving to stand beside Celine so she could face Rascal. The kitsper blinked slowly, eyeing each of them in turn, then, content that he had their attention, got up and sprang from the bed, landing neatly in Corbbmacc’s lap. Corbb grunted a surprised oath as his handiwork fell to the floor, but Rascal paid him no mind. He crawled up onto the window sill and looked back at them over his shoulder, then pointedly down into the deserted street below.
Uneasily, Emily set the cards she was still holding down on the mattress beside Celine and crossed the room, stepping over the tangled mess of Corbbmacc’s project. She stood at the window behind Rascal, letting her gaze follow his.
Though the sun had not yet sunk entirely below the horizon, there were deep shadows between the silent and abandoned buildings. Broken shutters swung lazily in a gentle breeze, the screech of their decaying hinges making a discordant harmony with the rusty caws of crows. Now and then, one would thump against the wooden walls—the beat of a drummer three sheets to the wind. The packed dirt paths between the buildings looked as dry as those in any western ghost town, showing no trace of the rain that had pounded them the night before. It was as though the ground had opened and swallowed up all the moisture, leaving everything as parched as the desert that stretched out to the south and east.
Again, Rascal mewed, a low, piteous cry, and Emily felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. Someone was out there, she thought. Was it the knowing warning her? Just paranoia? She squinted down into the darkness, trying to pierce the shadows.
“What is it?” Corbbmacc asked, his voice low in her ear.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing maybe. I just felt like…like someone was out there. I’m probably just on edge.”
Celine was on her feet now, coming toward them in the darkening gloom and nervously shuffling the deck of cards between her fingers. “Nay, Em,” she said, all joviality gone. “He wouldn’t be actin’ so if there weren’t somethin’. I think yeh’re right.”
Emily put her arm around Celine’s shoulders and the three of them stood at the window, looking out over the town and watching as the light slowly drained away.
“I don’t like it,” Corbbmacc said. He knelt and picked up the thing he’d been working on, straightening the tangled strips of fabric absently.
“It’s almost dark,” Emily said. “We’ll be able to get out of—”
She broke off, her eyes fixing on the deep shadows of a doorway across the road and one building down from the inn. Had something moved there? A darker shape amidst the shadows? A glint of dying sunlight on metal?
Rascal leapt down from the sill and padded over to the door. Emily tore her eyes from the street outside to watch him go. The kitsper was clearly agitated. What did he sense? Was it the same thing she was feeling?
Again that sense of being watched crawled over her, but she didn’t think it was the knowing. There was no liquid burning through her muscles—no adrenaline pumping through her veins.
Rascal let out an almost human cry and began scratching at the closed door.
<
br /> “Jesus,” Corbbmacc muttered, and he started across the room, running a hand nervously through his hair and wiping away a bead of sweat from his brow. Emily followed, and Celine sank wearily into Corbbmacc’s vacated chair.
Corbbmacc opened the door, and the long dark hall yawned before them. Emily looked back at Celine, pressed a finger to her lips, and followed Corbb into the darkness. Behind them, Rascal stopped his mewing, suddenly quiet, but didn’t venture out of the room.
They made their way along the dark corridor, their footsteps muffled by the thick carpet of dust. The tattered cobwebs they hadn’t already destroyed stroked their faces. Sweat ran out of Emily’s hair and down the back of her neck, making her shiver. Something nagged at the back of her mind; something felt wrong.
As they reached the far end of the hall, she slowly became aware of tiny details that were off. A sound—a hum?—felt more in her joints than heard with her ears began to encroach on her consciousness. The hall itself was too warm for the autumn evening, and the golden light shining from beneath the door at the end of the hall was too bright for the dark alley behind the inn.
Sudden fear rose up inside her, and she reached out and grabbed Corbbmacc’s shoulder when they were still a few steps from the door that led to the ruined stairs outside.
“What?” he hissed, glancing back at her.
“Listen.”
They fell silent. Behind them, Celine was murmuring softly to Rascal, soothing the frightened kitsper. Outside, wind groaned beneath the eves and through the gaps in the railing on the roof above.
And then, there it was; a dull pop, a thud, and the vibration she’d been feeling grew into a crackling roar.
Emily took two quick steps forward and pulled the door to the outside open. Heat hit her face, and the acrid scent of smoke burned her nose.
Haven Divided (The Dragon's Brood Cycle Book 2) Page 22
