by Sarah Porter
“Let Ruby go! My God, after everything she’s been through tonight, and because of you. And you put Everett in the hospital? I don’t understand how anyone could be so—”
“Elena!” I need to stop her before she says anything terrible. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t have gone to Dash if it wasn’t okay with me. I know what that means, here. If I didn’t want him to possess me again, I could have just stayed away.”
Dashiell kisses me on the forehead, so gently. And I can’t help it: a tremor goes through me at the contrast between the round warmth of his lips and the round cold of the barrel on my bare skin. I tell myself that the pain won’t last long; there will be only one quick jolt, and I won’t even feel the fall. Dash won’t hurt me any more than he has to.
He doesn’t know that I thought of holding back, that I almost changed my mind and didn’t go to him. Because even now that Everett is saved, I can’t forget what Dash was ready to do if he thought he had to. As utterly as I love him, I’m not sure if that’s something I can forgive.
“But, Ruby! You just—just a few minutes ago, you went through the whole—grabbing your own corpse, pulling it back in? You did that for nothing? Or—”
And then she gets it, and her voice stops on a sharp exhalation.
“I knew Aloysius would be gravely tempted by a chance at our Miss Slippers,” Dash explains, and strokes my hair with his free hand. “He wouldn’t care to lose face, either, by letting everyone see that a girl he’d marked as his own select prey had escaped his grasp. But I thought he’d be too leery to risk coming near her, knowing what he knew about the object in my possession. Unless he was entirely persuaded that my Ru-Ru had betrayed me. So we planned it this way, Ru and I, though she wasn’t sure she was capable of such advanced deceit. Oh, but you did a fine job in the event, didn’t you, Miss Slippers?”
“You mean she was fooling me?” Mabel yelps somewhere behind me. “Ruby, you were tricking me, too?”
I don’t answer. Mabel set up Everett. We nearly lost him forever because of her. Even if she is a little girl, there’s no way I can let that go. She whimpers and tugs on my clothes, and I bury my face in Dashiell’s chest. Aloysius’s scream is still there, but getting higher and thinner: a broken, babbling stream of sound.
Then it goes out, twisting off into silence.
“Mabel,” Dashiell snaps. “Leave us alone, please. Elena, you too, if you don’t mind. You’ve proved you’re the one girl brave enough for my brother, and he’s the only man you’re likely to meet anytime soon who’s remotely worthy of you. You’ve rescued him, and you’ve saved the dead here from a sadistic tyrant into the bargain. But everything that remains now is between me and my Ru. Let us be, and you’ll wake up very soon.”
“Ruby?” Elena must have dragged herself to her feet, because she curls a hand on my shoulder. “You’re seriously planning to spend the rest of your life being half someone else? A walking life-support system for a ghost? Because that’s what this comes down to.”
“Remember what you said to me?” I say. I don’t look at her, because I don’t want her to see that I’m crying. I’ll be giving up a lot of myself, and a lot of my freedom, to keep Dashiell with us, I know that. And I can’t completely forgive him, but I can’t abandon him here, either. “I’m not asking your permission.”
I don’t know where she goes—maybe she wakes up on Liv’s floor with her sleeping bag billowing around her? There’s some more whining and scuffling from Mabel, but we ignore her until she leaves us, too, screaming names at me as she runs.
Then Dash and I are alone in this gray space, among vague shacks and wiry trees limned in sporadic gold and green. His tangled golden hair covers my eyes and we sway almost imperceptibly together with each breath.
“I’m sorry to be holding the gun to your head, Ru,” Dash murmurs after a while. “But it keeps the other ghosts at bay. Aloysius’s old lieutenants are watching us from every side. None of them will hassle us, though, not when they can see I have an exit instantly at hand.”
“You can go ahead, though, Dash. I’m ready. We can go home.”
I try to brace myself for the blast, the sensation of my skull shattering inward. My fists are clenched tight against his naked back and my breath is thick, but the shot just doesn’t come.
“Ah, but that’s what I have to tell you, Ru. That’s why we need our privacy. I won’t be coming back with you. I can feel a change in the resistance of this place, if that makes sense. I’m free to go on.”
I can’t understand this. I can’t take it in. I rear back to stare at him and my eyes must be jagged with accusation, because he actually flinches. It’s so unlike Dash to flinch at anything that seeing it hurts me even more.
“I’m dead, Ruby-Ru, and hauling me around in your body won’t undo that. Let me be dead and gone, then. Let the dead bury the dead.”
“Dead and gone where?” The world is warping in my eyes, rippling like light in ice, and I can barely breathe. I know that nothing I can say will help. Who’s ever gotten Dash to change his mind—even if I completely want him to? I can’t stand to lose him, but at the same time I can’t quite open myself to him, can’t swell my heart with him, not in the same way that I have all my life. “Dashiell? If you’re going on, then where?”
“Where? Hell, presumably, if there’s any justice in the universe. But since we all know there isn’t, I wouldn’t worry too much, sweet Ru.” He smiles at me, dabbles with my hair. “Ru, our father was perfectly right. It’s better that I died young, truly, much as you’d rather not understand that. If I had lived, I would have always been a danger to you. To other people as well, probably—Paige comes to mind—but to you in particular. That’s what you haven’t been willing to see, so I thought I’d take this last chance to tell you.”
“You were never a danger to me! Dash, I loved you more than anything, and I was never really afraid. No matter what you did, I couldn’t be afraid of you.” I was only worried for Everett, not for myself, but I don’t say that to him. And anyway, he knows. Dash has always known everything I feel, I recognize that now. He even knows the impulse that passed through me as Aloysius crumpled: to withhold myself from him. To keep myself closed.
“Ah, but there’s the difficulty, dearest Ru. You should have been afraid. Because I needed you, much more than you realized. I needed to see myself through your eyes. There were plenty of times when that was the only bearable view. And what I might have done to hold on to your tenderness, as you grew older, as you started to drift away from me…” Dashiell shrugs. “I’d have given way to the urge to drag you into whatever mire I happened to be in myself. Do you really suppose I wasn’t tempted, Ru-Ru? And you wouldn’t have stopped me. I always knew that.”
Grief shakes through me, and I can feel that brick wall where Dashiell pinned me again, the wet snow weeping into my face. I know he’s thinking of it, too.
“You nearly did, once,” I say. “That afternoon in Williamsburg. When I came looking for you.”
“I nearly did,” Dash confirms. His voice is soft in my hair. “I badly wanted to. And you had just turned fifteen, then. Suppose you’d been a year or two older? But there was still just enough decency left in me that I tried to frighten you instead.”
“So is that what you’re going to do now, Dash?” I ask, and I can’t keep the bitterness from my voice. Even long before I was possessed, Dash and I lived as secrets inside each other, expanded each other like shadows stretched from sinking lights; I know that now. I always felt like his creation, like a miracle he made by seeing something fierce and glorious in me—but he was my creation, too. And he can go off someplace where that won’t matter anymore, but I’ll have to live on without him to sustain me. “Order me to walk away, and not look back at you?”
“Ah, but I’m the one who’ll be walking away, this time.” He presses soft kisses on my face. Drinks down my tears. “I have a distinct sense that I’ll be disappearing from view in just a few paces. And you’ll be going h
ome, to find out who you are without me, and who you can love instead. I think you’ll know both those things soon.”
He lets me go and steps backward.
He lets the gun fall from his hand.
His face is still there, his gray eyes gazing into me, ironic and sweet and insolent all at once. And it’s the face of all the heart I’ve ever had.
But I don’t scream his name.
I don’t beg him not to go.
DASHIELL
What is given to the dead? No kind of future, that much is sure. Memory rattles its telescopes sometimes, offers its narrow views, all the more precious here in the borderlands where there’s nothing else to see. But in those visions, nothing changes. Ruby sits beside me in the shoe store and tries on her crimson boots again and again, tugging the laces with clockwork delicacy, always precisely the same. Paige turns to meet my eyes for the first time and her rain-blue lips curl into an identical smile; her hair flicks in the same breeze. We have what we have, and no more. Even the shuffling and elaboration of dreams is lost to us.
But as I slip from my boundaries, it’s not my own life that blinks in my eyes. A future that isn’t mine grants me the mercy of a few home movies, rapid-fire and blazing, and I see:
Everett coming home from the hospital, still weak, but with a new clarity and determination in his look that does wonders for him. Elena’s arm steadies him as he climbs our front steps.
My father lowering his face to hide his tears as he rocks my infant son on his lap, there in the nursery they’ve made from my old room. He’s trying to sing a lullaby but grief breaks up his voice. Really, I hope this is a particularly rough day for him, or that those are at least partially tears of happiness.
Paige confusingly dressed in a business suit, looking so much older that I hardly recognize her. She’s waiting to board a plane. Ah, I’d have liked to see her face as she read my letter, my final effort to explain and possibly even to console, but evidently that’s too much to ask. So many things are, it seems.
And then my Ruby Slippers, perhaps in her mid-twenties, holding a framed photo of me in both hands. Truly a lady of slipping and sliding now, elegant in gray angora. She lifts the photo and softly kisses my image on the forehead, just the way I always kissed her.
Then she opens a drawer and lowers the photo inside, and bites her lower lip.
The drawer slides closed, and all I was spills open.
Read on for a glimpse of Sarah Porter’s next Tor Teen novel
NEVER-CONTENTED THINGS
Available September 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Porter
It was Friday night, it was lush buzzing June, and only a week into summer break. I’d just graduated, along with the rest of the senior class. The gorge’s rim should have been thick with kids we knew. I’d been expecting that our friends Lexi and Xand would be there, at least, though maybe Xand was out of town and I’d forgotten, and Lexi wouldn’t come out without him.
But there was no candlelight staggered by the tree trunks, no visible slices of sequins or denim. It was silent apart from the rattle of the bugs, and it was blue and banded violet where the gorge opened into midnight, and our faces went a blending-in blue again as we walked along chewing our pizza. Josh stopped and nuzzled his cheek, kittenish, into my shoulder, which is a thing he does and the way he is, especially with me.
“Doesn’t anybody want to see us, Kezzer? Doesn’t anybody care?” His voice was teasing, but also not. And of course I thought it, too: that there must be something else going on, something better than the usual beers and mason jars radiant with sweating candles, and we’d been left out. Which might be understandable if it was just me, but who doesn’t want Josh at a party, to sass and dance and smile, never showing off or getting in the center of things but just softly glimmering in the corners? Who doesn’t want the chance to maybe make out with him, right before dawn, behind their parents’ hydrangeas? He’s a shade chubby, in a sinuous way—it’s part of what makes people take him for a girl—and he makes chubby look prettier and sultrier than anyone else can.
That was when we heard sounds coming from a clearing farther along than the one we typically used. Laughing voices and a song that was new to me, dark but piercing, with languid harmonies and scattered bells. That was when our eyes opened wide to take in their lights, still mostly blocked by trees, but with a crystalline sharpness that wasn’t like candle flames. Maybe they were rich college kids with some kind of new LED setup. It didn’t make a lot of sense that we were only noticing them now, and so out of the blue, but there they were, and we crept closer. I wouldn’t have bothered with people I didn’t know, but Josh was already smiling. I knew he could follow that smile straight into their circle; even if he was young, he was so unmistakably deft, so ready to be one of them.
And I felt guilty, for no reason at all. I might have been edging toward weariness, I might have preferred to go home and watch a video together, but I knew Josh was eager to play. I felt like I had something to make up to him, though there was nothing I’d actually done. So it seemed like he should go have his fun, and I’d look after him, and get him safely home no matter how late it got or who tried out the softness of his skin.
That was what I thought, but that wasn’t what happened.
“Ooh, Kezzer,” Josh crooned. “Just look at them!”
Because they were beautiful. Maybe nineteen or twenty kids who looked like high school juniors or seniors, college freshmen at most. Josh and I should have known them at least by sight, but we’d never seen them before. For half a moment I thought they must be models, dancers, on break between takes of a music video, because they had the glitz and seduction of pure images. Most of them were spinning, undulating their arms, but a few perched in intimate pairs on boulders around the edge of the clearing.
There was a girl with blue-black skin and pink dreads past her hips and patterns like neon butterfly wings painted up to her eyebrows, a pale boy in shiny black leather tights and a white billowy jacket like a ship under sail, a milky blonde dressed in surreal Victoriana with a mink head sewn, open-mouthed and snarling, right over her heart. Dripping red poetry was written on her skirt, and I thought she might have used blood. I looked, and looked again, and then gave up trying to take in all the details. It was too much, it scattered and refracted when I looked too hard. All that I could truly see of them was their glamour.
Josh stepped out of the tree-shadows before I could catch his arm, and they pivoted to him.
They smiled knowing, comfortable smiles. I wasn’t sure I liked them but I couldn’t leave Josh there alone, so I followed, into the ice-blue twinkling of their lights.
“How can I not know you?” Josh asked, with a full-on blast of wonder. His tone was beguiling, disarming; I could feel the strangers warming to him. “Unless you’re just visiting here?”
“We’ve met before,” the pale boy said. His white jacket caught too much of the light. There was a burning cast to its pallor that made me look off, but I could feel how his stare lanced at us. “I can’t believe you’ve forgotten that … Josh.”
There was a lilt to the way he said Josh’s name, and I was nearly certain of what I’d heard: it was the ping of a lucky guess. A long shot, maybe, but I knew that no one who’d met them would forget them. It wasn’t possible.
But Josh’s eyes widened, then spun searching through the leaves. “That’s right! It was here. Was that sometime last spring?”
“Something like that,” the pale boy agreed. “We had a thoroughly wonderful time.” The pink-dreaded girl shimmied up to Josh and wrapped her arms around him, giggling confidentially, and the pale boy’s attention beamed toward me. “You and your brother here stayed up till dawn with us.” When I looked at the boy, his smile leaped all over me. Prodded like a dog’s claws.
He was waiting for me to introduce myself, but I didn’t. We’d never seen them before, I was sure—and Josh is common enough that him saying it didn’t prove anything. But if he
could hit on the name Ksenia, I might start to question my own memory.
That, or question if they’d spied on us somehow. Either way, it set me on edge. If part of me thought I should be more open to new people—especially to gorgeous, wild new people—the offness of how they were acting completely killed the impulse.
“I’m sorry, I can’t recall your name,” the boy said. Too formally, I thought, for a teenager. “It begins with a K, I think? Kelvin?”
“Close,” I said. Josh was absorbed in the dark girl’s banter but now he glanced at me, and I shot him a look to say keep your mouth shut. “It’s Keyshaun, actually.”
“Keyshaun,” the stranger repeated. I felt the tiny slap of his doubt. “I remembered the K, and that it was something a bit unusual.”
Josh had been gawking, on the edge of outing me, though it wasn’t anything new for us to invent names to match what people thought we were. He didn’t like me lying to these brand-new, very old friends of his, but at that he subsided.
“Keyshaun,” Josh said, and smiled blissfully. “You remember now, don’t you? How much fun we had? You were dancing for hours with…” and he scanned the crowd like he was trying to find his own memory out in the night, pick it up and slot it into his brain. “With that guy in the blue.”
A boy in blue holographic leather came up to me then. Amber-skinned, deep-eyed. The look of him, the look of all of them, was too perfect, too cutting, but for Josh’s sake I didn’t shy away when he slipped an arm around me and pulled me into the center of the glade.
The gorge yawned ten yards distant. We were dancing and the music chimed and chattered in a way that made my tongue prickle. Bells seemed to be ringing in my head. The night took on an unctuous gloss that sent me gliding too fast through time.
I watched Josh from the corner of my eye. Pink dreads and white jacket had him in a triangular hug, three faces leaning in together, cheeks touching, and that was how they were dancing. No one had told us their names, I realized, but my thoughts felt slippery and it seemed too late to ask.
