He frowned. No, not to kill. To move or react or fight, but not to kill. Not for a long time. He wasn’t that person, that monster anymore. He never would be, not again. He’d die before he became that again.
As he stepped outside to begin his perimeter walk, a biological orchestra of nighttime sounds filled his ears. He gave a small shrug, repositioning his coat on his shoulders, and headed off around the east side of the house. He stopped by the shop, making sure it was still securely locked and nobody was lurking about. It reminded him that he needed to get that old rattletrap truck in better working order by next spring as a birthday present for Alex. It was about time for him to learn how to drive, but Rain wanted the truck in more reliable shape than it was now, good only for occasional sputtering missions to Maple City for supply restocking.
Passing by the chicken coop with its automated feeder that Alex had devised, Rain wondered if his brother might be better off servicing the truck himself. He always seemed to know how everything worked simply by touching it. It had taken Rain six months of scrounging up parts and books, as well as a great deal of hard studying to piece together the large generator that powered the house, fueled only by vegetable oil. When it had nearly exploded the previous winter, Alex had assessed and fixed the problem in less than two hours, using random items from around the house. It had been running strong ever since. So perhaps they would work on it together, as they had his own car. Rain continued to mull this over as he reached the tree line and left the house’s clear-cut property behind.
He walked casually along the sinuous path that snaked its way through the dense forest of maple trees. The nearly full moon loomed sleepily close to the horizon, casting an orange glow between the tree trunks. All around him, crickets were beginning to quiet their love cries for the night. He pulled his lighter from his pocket and fiddled with it as he walked, debating having a cigarette. Flicking the lighter open, he sparked the flint once. The act did not create a flame, but he stopped for just a second and glanced up towards the treetops. For reasons unknown to him, he thought, for a brief moment, about butterflies.
He shook his head and continued on, dropping the lighter back into his pocket. Presently, he stepped out of the tree line once again, this time into a small clearing that extended out twenty feet before dropping off over a seventy-foot cliff. It would be a dangerous place to stumble blindly out of the woods, but it offered a beautiful view of eastern Ayenee, which lay before him like a painting on an artist’s easel. The glowing outskirts of Chicane to the left, the Vitale River and all its unnamed tributaries snaking off to the right, like a system of veins feeding lifeblood to the massive entity known as Maplewood Forest. Somewhere in the distance, mixing with the blue-black of the horizon, the Atlantic Ocean lapped against the young continent’s coast.
III
Lita stretched her arms out and arched her back, groaning as she heard it crack for what seemed like miles. A sharp tilt of her head to either side elicited a few more pops, and then she went to work on her knuckles. Loosened up and a bit more relaxed, she went to the bed where she drew her handgun and set it on the nightstand, then opened up her knapsack, starting to rifle through it in search of a hairbrush. Sometimes it was a real bitch to find something in this thing with everything she had crammed in there. But she needed all of those things. Needed them just in case. So she’d be ready at the drop of a hat for a job.
Her jaw clenched. Fuck that. She wasn’t that gal anymore. She hadn’t been for a long goddamn time. Tonight was just some oversight, some moment of weakness born out of a promised paycheck that was too good to be true. She would never go back to that again. Not for any amount of money.
Hairbrush finally in hand, Lita plopped onto the bed with a sigh and began forcefully brushing through her hair’s tangled waves. As she tamed it, she saw it occasionally fall into small ringlets. Seizing these, she attacked them viciously, raking at them until they straightened out to her liking. The last thing she needed was to look like some dollish little girl. She had considered lopping it all off a handful of times, but something always seemed to make her change her mind.
Her nerves were too fried to permit sleep, but she felt too out of place here to wander the house, so after putting away her brush she decided to acquaint herself with this room. Adjacent to the foot of the bed was a closet door, so Lita went to explore further. Looking inside, she found the structure of the closet interesting. It wasn’t very deep, and it was filled with shelves, more like a linen closet than one meant for a bedroom. She supposed it made sense for practical storage, and could easily be converted were someone to take up the room permanently. For a moment, she caught herself thinking how nice it would be to live in a house like this permanently, but she quickly forced the notion from her head. People like her didn’t deserve a place like this. They deserved little cracker-box apartments with no electricity, peeling paint, and the rhythmic creak-moan of prostitutes hard at work next door. The assassin’s retirement home, where the water smells funny and the old ghosts never seem to knock first.
The shelves of the closet were filled with various things: folded blankets, two wooden boxes labeled light bulbs, a whole shelf of identical leather-bound books—all blank, she checked a few—and an unlabeled, lidded apple crate. This last item piqued her curiosity, so she pulled it down and found a seat on the floor, placing the box in front of her. After removing the lid and a few of the items inside, however, she grew disappointed at the realization that the box was little more than a catchall. There were candles, a stack of folded handkerchiefs tied together with twine, and a small metal box with the word fuses written on it. She was about to put the whole thing away when her fingers touched something coiled and slender, soft and leathery. She jerked her hand away, her first thought being that it was a snake. She immediately scolded herself for the snap reaction and leaned in for a closer inspection.
Retrieving the item from the crate, she turned it over twice in her hand, wondering why someone would keep something like this. It was a piece of brown leather, about eighteen inches long. One end was ragged, torn, but the other tapered down to a sharp point. Lita examined the sharp end closely, because there was something on it. A brown substance, dry and flaky. All at once, she became entirely certain it was blood. Her stomach bottomed out and an icy shot ran up her spine. She suddenly wished it really had been a snake as she shoved it back in the box and brushed her hands off on her pants. Closing the box and standing, she pushed it back into the closet, then shut the door and leaned her back against it with a sigh.
IV
Standing on the perch of the world, Rain was not looking at the view, although he had many times in the past. Instead, he was staring at a spot on the ground just a few feet from the cliff’s edge. There, in an oval shape six feet long and four feet wide, the earth was scorched black. He knelt down in front of it and ran his hand over the anomaly in the otherwise immaculate flora. The blades of grass at the outer edge tickled his palm as his fingertips wandered over the bumpy texture of the burned ground.
Three years had passed, and he still didn’t know what to make of that night. He had been over it countless times, the thoughts sometimes keeping him up for days on end. Alex was no help; he remembered almost nothing of the event. Rain equated that to being unable to recall one’s own birth. Even if Alex could recall what had happened, Rain didn’t suppose he’d have any explanation for it. All Rain knew was that one moment he was sitting on the edge of this very cliff as dawn approached, seriously considering his own demise as he had many times before, when suddenly there was a flash of white light and a burst of heat so intense that he thought the sun had crested the horizon and sent him to some circle of hell specifically designed for monsters of his sort. But as soon as it had come, the light and heat vanished, leaving him momentarily blinded and stunned. Once that faded, the real confusion set in. Alex was just…there. Gone so long and then suddenly back: naked, trembling, and looking just as he had on the day he’d died.
Now, crumbling a bit of dirt between his fingers, Rain looked out to the horizon once more as he pondered the old adage: never question a good thing. But he knew from experience that many terrible things arrived under the guise of something wondrous, and he knew even better that nothing wondrous came free. Though Alex’s return had made his life bearable—he hadn’t again considered suicide since that night—he couldn’t help wondering what price he would someday pay for the universe’s generous gift, if it even was a gift. It made him feel both uneasy and guilty to think of his brother as some sort of harbinger, and he hated it. He already had more guilt than he knew what to do with, and unease was not a color that suited him at all.
But it couldn’t have been a gift. He hadn’t earned a damned thing aside from damnation itself. The only thing he could imagine was that it was meant to be a new form of torture. He’d be allowed to watch his brother grow old and frail and then die in his arms once again. Or perhaps Alex would simply grow to hate him for his introversion and temper and leave him alone all over again. Rain shook his head and lit that cigarette after all, deciding it was time to head back home.
V
Lita chuckled to herself as she pushed off the closet door and went back to sit on the bed. Hoisting one foot up to rest across her knee, she unlaced her boot and tugged it off, setting it aside on the floor. Pausing before moving on to her other boot, she pushed down her threadbare wool sock and looked over the topographic map of burn scars that covered her foot. As she pushed her pant leg up, her fingertips followed the lines of those irregular fractals all the way to where they began to fade midway up her shin.
She found her mind wandering without permission to the Maple City Hospital, five years earlier. She remembered sitting on the edge of a white-sheeted bed, the muscles in her arms drawn taut as she gripped the linen and tried to contain her screams of pain, her teeth feeling like they’d crack from being clenched so hard, watching the seconds slowly drip off the clock. The original burn had been terrible, but she could at least dull it with painkillers and ample amount of booze. The nerve therapy was, in Lita’s opinion, far worse than the initial wounds. Sitting for what seemed like hours with her bare feet in buckets of sand, Lita thought she was being tortured for the things she’d done. Worse yet, Nurse Winters refused to do her sessions unless she showed up sober.
Winters had been firm and straightforward, two qualities Lita admired, and thus they had been friendly. Friendly, but not friends. For Lita, that was something of an accomplishment. She spent a year with the woman—one to two hours, twice a week—recovering from what she always obliquely referred to as her “accident”. Lita never went into details and Nurse Winters never asked. She didn’t seem to care, so long as Lita made a concerted effort towards recovery. On the first visit, Winters had told her flat-out that she didn’t seem the type to return for all her sessions, and it was pointless to start if she was only going to waste both their time. Lita, simultaneously enraged and fueled by the assumption, took the words as a dare.
In the wake of walking away from the life she’d known for nearly half her existence, she had promised herself she’d make healthier choices. They hadn’t all worked out—she still couldn’t part with the bottle—but she never missed a single visit with Nurse Winters, and to this day she was thankful for it. Even as it was, she had ongoing pain and numbness, especially on cold days. She could only imagine how much worse it might have been if she’d blown off the long, torturous regimen. In the end, she had been proud and had made Nurse Winters proud. It was the first thing she had ever followed through on that didn’t end in the death of another human being.
At the conclusion of her last session, Nurse Winters told Lita that she was free to go and that she would be missed. Lita had said she’d try to visit, but knew she never would. Winters, however, said it wouldn’t do any good. She would be leaving herself in another two weeks. She was pregnant, and had decided to set aside her career to raise the little one. Lita’s response, which Nurse Winters took as congratulatory, had been, “Well, hey, if you like the idea of living with something that shits and screams all day, good for you.” They had parted ways, and that night Lita drank so much that she hadn’t been able to move from her bathroom for nearly twenty-four hours.
VI
Rain ascended the stone steps of the house just as the slightest glow began to form on Ayenee’s eastern horizon. He hung his heavy old coat on the rack as he had many times before, then took the stairs slowly, thoughtfully, one by one. His body might never feel truly tired, but his mind was weary. Recent events had stirred up emotions and memories that he was usually content to leave buried. All he wanted right now was to indulge in the thing he did that resembled sleep. However, reaching the top of the stairs, he found himself looking not at his own bedroom door, but at Lita’s.
Lita sat up from the reclined position she’d taken after shedding her boots and instinctively reached for her weapon at the sound of footsteps in the hallway. She was nearly certain they were Rain’s, but not quite sure enough to let go of her gun. Her tension dissolved finally and she released her old friend as a few more footfalls confirmed his identity. She recognized his gait even after only a short time around him. She slipped off the bed and approached the door, unsure why even as she did so.
Approaching Lita’s door, Rain wasn’t sure what he was doing. Surely she had to be asleep. But even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t true. He could hear her in there. Was she just as close to her side? He could make out her breathing, even her heartbeat, and as he listened they both quickened and grew louder, filling his head like a rising chorus. His own unnecessary respiration sped up as well, and were his heart capable of beating, it would have been booming in his chest. His breath caught in his throat as he raised a fist to knock on the door.
As Lita reached her side of the door, she heard his booted steps come to a stop, and she thought she saw two shadows just under the crack of the door. She suddenly felt warmth form in the pit of her stomach and race out to her limbs and up to her face, followed by a small wave of dizziness. Was he out there? She wasn’t sure, but either way, she needed to stick her head out, to see if everything was okay, to see if he needed something. She reached for the doorknob, her hand trembling as it moved towards the brassy fixture.
Rain stopped as he heard a wet gurgle. Lowering his fist, he looked towards the stairs. The young boy was standing there, staring back at Rain with his vacant, black eyes. The gurgling noise had come from the blood bubbling thickly from the tearing bite in his neck, pouring out with heavy splatters on the hardwood floor between his bare feet.
Lita froze as she felt a sharp wave of painful nausea tear into her stomach. Looking over her shoulder at her knapsack, she saw the neck of a bottle protruding from its opening. She withdrew her hand, which began to shake even more as sweat broke out on her palms and neck. It took everything she had to suppress the pained groan that tried to work its way out of her insides.
Rain slipped quietly away and slinked to his room, followed by the drip, drip, drip of his haunting apparition’s ever-flowing wound. He didn’t bother with the light, nor did he even remove his shoes. He yanked back the covers on his bed, slid underneath them, and curled up tightly into a ball. Though his back was turned, Rain could feel the continued presence of the boy standing over him, staring, bleeding, unblinking.
Lita stumbled back to her bed, tugged the bottle free from her bag, and dropped its cap on the floor in her haste. On some level, she could hear it roll under the bed and spin for a while before coming to a rest, but the sound was mostly drowned out by her loud, strong gulps of the fiery nourishment. When she finally tore her lips away, she barely managed to set the bottle on the nightstand before uttering a thin cry and crawling onto the bed. Forgetting the formality of a blanket, she assumed a fetal position and pulled the pillow over her face, blocking the light she’d neglected to turn off, fearing her shaking body would bring her falling to the floor if she tried to rise.
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nbsp; Trembling, alone, they each found sleep next to their respective demons, both wishing in their final waking moments that someone was there to offer them refuge in promises of sweet oblivion.
FIFTEEN
I
Lita glanced at her watch and took in a deep, soothing breath. Ten minutes to go.
While she was enjoying the peace and quiet of spending a late-summer morning in what had turned out to be one of the most expansive and beautiful cemeteries she had ever seen, she had also been out here nearly two hours and was more than ready to get this show on the road. She had spent the first hour meticulously combing through the property, behind enormous headstones and around elaborate mausoleums, checking for anywhere that might hide an enemy waiting to ambush her. She also scouted the best spot to conduct the meet, a place where she had a decent view of the dirt road coming out from the forest, but could also see a good percentage of the cemetery around her, which had to be close to five acres. She still couldn’t believe she’d never known the little Hopewell Cemetery turnoff she’d passed countless times led to all this. Amelie said at least three past Lords of Chicane were interred here, as well as many prominent members of politics and clergy. Lita had wondered if she’d sent any of them there herself, but elected not to share that musing with the rest of the group.
That particular conversation had taken place just as breakfast had begun, but was soon replaced with the arguing that would not end until Lita was actually in the car and driving away from the brothers’ home. For as much as Amelie and Alex had held themselves together like adults through the madness of the last few days, they couldn’t have acted more like teenagers in reaction to the news that they would be staying behind for the rendezvous. It didn’t matter how much Lita tried to explain the way these sorts of things worked, they both felt like they were being sidelined on account of their age. By the time had she made it out the door, Alex seemed like he was starting to understand, but Amelie was still fuming. Now, standing in this cemetery waiting for parties unknown to arrive, Lita found herself hoping the two would do something age-appropriate with their time alone together, like get into the liquor and make out for an hour. It would calm their nerves and give them both some much-needed real-life experience.
The Crimes of Orphans Page 20
