by Helena Maeve
“I’m sorry, back up a step… What rift?”
Neil arched a brow. “You haven’t seen them before?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Eve said, something inside her sparking hot with shame as his disbelief registered. That chip on her shoulder was alive and well. Ten years wasn’t enough to shift it.
“I just meant….” Neil heaved a ponderous sigh. “I just meant that there have been a few. They pop up a lot now that it looks like the world might be ending.”
Might be? Well, aren’t you the optimist?
“Do they all look like they fell out of a slasher movie?”
He cracked a smile, but he didn’t seem to be mocking her.
That’s something, Eve thought and couldn’t say why it mattered. She was having one of those days.
“They’re a manifestation of fear—whatever mind they can tap into first, that’s usually the one they mine for some idea of how to adapt their image.”
“So which one of us is afraid of flayed men with wings?” Eve asked, grinning up at Neil. “Because I’m pretty sure it’s not me.”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It’s gone now.”
“Right. I guess your work here is done, Super-hunter.”
“Not really… Still have to close that rift in the Paleolithic.”
“Oh.” Eve forced her features into a mask of insouciance. “Well, you know the way. You don’t need to me play tour guide, do you?”
Her contempt had the desired effect. Neil scoffed. “I can take care of myself.” He’d been fond of saying as much whenever Eve had caught him reading a grimoire way beyond his meager abilities. Bolshiness was hard to shake—impossible, in his case.
Eve watched him go until he turned a corner and faded from view. There was no reassuring sound of receding footsteps as he moved through the exhibit, nothing to calm her nerves. The scent of his body lingered, familiar to her after all these years, but wasn’t enough to shake the mounting unease. Eventually, she battled her way to her feet and ventured from the lobby back the way she’d come.
The control room was dusted with a fine gray mist. The equipment had enough plastic in it that once the flames caught, the console melted all over the desk, dripping over the magazines and Neil’s personal effects. A few corners of HR paperwork had survived, albeit blackened with soot. She thought of heading in to retrieve them as a kind of memento, but soon enough the whole world would be full of souvenirs and disaster sites ripe for scavenging.
In the end, she didn’t touch the doorknob. She left the ghoul’s final resting place undisturbed.
Neil found her there, peeking in through the ash-streaked windows at her last place of employment. “Brought you something,” he said, and held up her boots.
“Thanks.” They fit awkwardly without socks, but it was still better than nothing.
“You know, I have to say you’re the last person I would’ve expected to find at her post at a time like this…”
“Why’s that?” Eve asked and cinched her laces tight.
Neil fumbled, huffed out a breath. “Well, for one thing, I would’ve imagined you’d be with your pack.”
Was that his way of asking where the others were? Eve didn’t shy away from the grim reality, so why did he? “They went the way of your family,” she answered. “A long time ago.” Just like you wanted.
It was Neil’s turn to balk. “What happened?”
“Events.” Draped in white and big on taking measurements. “An accident,” Eve amended, slowly drawing to her feet. “Does it matter?” She didn’t want to talk about it now. What purpose could it serve? They were gone and she only half knew why.
“No, of course not,” Neil said, backing down. That, too, was a new development. Before, he would have fought her tooth and nail for an answer. He wouldn’t have let it go. “I mean, it does matter, just not—”
“I know what you mean,” Eve interjected before he could dig himself in any deeper.
“I’m glad you’re still around.”
“Not for long.” The latest prediction was two weeks.
Neil shrugged. “Maybe your luck will hold.” He was stalling, dragging out their farewell like he’d never done before. Eve could sense it, which meant that Neil knew that she knew. He had often told her that her face was an open book, which explained the curveball. “Would you like to get a drink?”
It caught Eve by surprise. “Now?”
“It’s only the end of the world,” Neil said, struggling and failing to conceal a smirk, “but if you’ve got somewhere else to be…”
“I don’t.” It surprised Eve to admit as much. It didn’t matter that it was the truth or that she didn’t even think to offer a lie in exchange.
“I know a place,” Neil said.
“You always know a place.”
“This one’s the good kind,” he insisted. “I promise. No backroom dealings.”
“No oracle?” Eve quipped. He had taken her to a bar once, when they were still too young to order anything more intoxicating than a soda, and had wound up being catered to by a blind soothsayer who claimed to be descended from both Nostradamus and Cassandra. The price of a reading, which they didn’t find out until later wasn’t free, had been twice what little cash they had on them. Neil’s uncle had had to come in and settle the debt.
Everyone agreed that it had been Eve’s fault for dragging golden boy Neil to a place of ill repute—palm readings for a pittance were low on the totem pole of respectable dark arts—and he was promptly banned from ever setting foot in that place again.
Eve went back by herself, many years later, but the oracle was gone. She didn’t believe a word the woman had had to say about fire and brimstone, anyway. The joke was on her.
“Oh, shit. Wait. I can’t go,” Eve said, smacking her brow. “I forgot. I have to finish my shift.”
“Where? The control room isn’t exactly usable anymore—”
“It doesn’t matter. I leave the perimeter and it comes out my paycheck. I need the money.” The system was fully automated and no human operatives were left to appeal to, which meant that she could hardly cite extraordinary circumstances.
“What for?”
“How else am I going to leave St. Louis before we all blow up like one of your homemade grenades?” Eve chewed her lip. She could have done without his sneer. “I have to stay.” There was no way around it, but genuine grief bit at her all the same. She didn’t need this—cravings were dangerous whether they were for food or liquor or companionship. She had to start learning how to live alone.
“You could meet me at the bar,” Neil suggested tentatively. “It’s not far.” He gave her directions, promised to wait. He scoffed when she asked if he wasn’t too tired. “Are you kidding? I can never sleep after a banishment. It’s—”
“Exhilarating?” Eve ventured, remembering the old days when she had a pack to hunt with on the rocky outcrops of Hughes Mountain.
“I was going to say unsettling.”
Eve smiled. Some things really did remain the same. “You’ll never be a proper ghostbuster with that attitude. Go on, get yourself a beer. You’ve earned it.”
“I’ll see you in a bit?” Was it wishful thinking or did he actually feel hopeful at the thought of catching up?
She promised that he would. His directions seemed easy to follow and the fact of the matter was that most bars had been looted already. This one must’ve had serious muscle to have stayed open so long. Part of Eve was curious enough to check it out, while another, equally powerful fraction of her brain had her wondering why she was even contemplating this rabbit hole. She already knew where it led—it was somewhere she’d already been, someplace she didn’t want to visit again.
Self-preservation was the name of the game.
The Paleolithic was completely ruined to her now, so Eve ventured into the Bronze Age instead and found herself a place to sit on the leather benches between a display of Persian urns from the
third millennium BC and a highly romanticized Shang Dynasty diorama featuring a court scene with some sixteen identical concubines.
At least the leather seat was comfortable. It bothered her that the shadows made it hard to see much of anything outside of her immediate peripheral vision. She considered shifting to make the most of the low light and her visual acuity while in changed form, but quickly put the thought aside. Shifting in and out of her fur took some effort—not as much as it used to, certainly, but still. She was going to need every ounce of energy once she left the city. That plan hadn’t changed.
There would be hunters out for game, hoping both to compete with her and turn her into their supper. There would be other shifters to fight for territory. Eve didn’t relish the thought. She brought a hand over her eyes, scrubbing dully at the bridge of her nose. Tonight had been supposed to pass quickly and quietly, without any excitement. Instead, whenever she closed her eyes, she saw that awful ghoul hovering above her, its flesh glossy red, its eyes and teeth missing.
She had told Neil that it wasn’t her nightmare. She’d lied.
“Eve?” The sound of her name shattered the silence.
She jerked awake, body jack-knifing on the low settee. Neil had left. She had seen him leave—and yet here he was, standing in the doorway with a bottle in each hand.
“If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed…”
“I think you have that backwards,” Eve muttered, for want of anything more sensible to say.
Neil’s toothy grin caught a flash of moonlight, giving his face a touch of danger. Eve shivered as she watched him approach. “I’m pretty sure I don’t.”
“You didn’t have to go out of your way to accommodate me.”
“I destroyed the Paleolithic,” Neil pointed out with a shrug. “It’s the least I could do.”
“Ah, so this is penance?”
Neil arched a brow as he dropped to the couch beside her. “What else could it be?”
A date, Eve thought and knew that made no sense, that the notion had only ever come into being because she was lonely and confused—and sad and pathetic, and scores of other adjectives that fell short of flattering.
They opened the wine with the corkscrew on Neil’s Swiss army knife.
“Looks like you’re all set for the apocalypse,” Eve drawled, clinking her ’96 Merlot against his ’97 Cabernet Sauvignon. She had always been more of a red wine kind of girl, on those few occasions when she didn’t just go for a beer. “When are you leaving?”
“I’m not,” Neil said.
Had Eve been a betting woman, she would’ve lost a lot of money playing the odds of his being suicidal. “Are you serious?” She gaped. “Why not?” He couldn’t have missed the emergency radio and TV broadcasts. They were on every network, twice a day, just in case someone was comatose and hadn’t heard that the world was ending.
“Equally poor chances everywhere you go. Here, at least, I have my parents’ house.” The bleak outlook might have made better sense if his parents’ house hadn’t looked like something out of the Addams Family, but it did.
“Look at you,” Eve chuckled, “all filial piety and shit… You’re a new man, aren’t you?”
Neil hitched up his shoulders, something slightly defensive slithering into his posture. “Ten years is a long time. People change.”
You don’t have to tell me that, Eve mused. She took another swig of wine to medicate away the sudden onslaught of guilt. The Merlot was good. Sharp and tangy, it had just enough alcohol to make thoughts of the ghoul seep from her mind.
“I had no idea you were back,” she said instead, tiptoeing around the topic like an acrobat on stilts. “What happened with Europe?”
“Nothing,” Neil answered, deliberately obtuse. “I’m sure it’s still there.” According to the latest predictions from NASA, the whole continent would be spared—which was good news, except that most of the EU had already relocated south of the Mediterranean. Socialism had its uses.
“You didn’t like it enough to stick around?” Eve pressed. Perhaps Neil had mellowed out in the past ten years, but she hadn’t. She wasn’t about to pretend otherwise.
He caught on quickly. “What’s with the interrogation? Don’t tell me you’re already wishing I hadn’t come back…”
“I’m not wishing anything.” One way or the other, the subject was going to come up. She chose to bite the bullet. “When I left, you seemed pretty dead-set on heading back to the old country to get your training on. I’m just wondering what changed for you, that’s all.”
Neil was quiet for a long moment. In the low light, his blue eyes shined like beacons, like beads. Unlike the plastic but lifelike concubines in the Shang Dynasty display, his gaze was never still, though. He also didn’t give Eve the creeps, although she wondered if that years-old sense of comfort and ease she felt around him wasn’t due for a revision. A decade ago, Neil had been a boy with a killer smile and soft hands—now he could blow up entire rooms and battle creatures from the underworld.
Okay, but he’s still Neil.
“It’s different over there,” he said at last, voice soft. “Everything is regimented. You have to fill out forms for every summoning…”
“Really? I thought there was more freedom.”
Neil hitched up his shoulders. “You’re allowed freedom… You still have to prove you’re following the rules when you perform your trade.” By his tone, it was easy enough to judge how little he had enjoyed such restrictions.
Eve tried to think back to their adolescence. Had he always been so secretive? So keen to avoid scrutiny? She couldn’t say. The boy she remembered had been the one to hide her from his family, not the other way around.
“So you came back to the land of the free and the home of the bigots?” Eve asked, wondering when that had happened, if she had factored into his decision-making at all.
There was no reason why she should have—other than her own stupid pride—seeing as they had ended things before she left. It had been her decision to break it off. Their relationship had soured by then anyway. It was impossible to sneak around forever. Neil had begun chafing under his family’s disapproval a couple of months before the opportunity had presented itself. It wasn’t a choice as much as it was a request from her packmaster—to refuse would have meant banishment. She hadn’t.
The rest was history.
“You came back, too,” Neil remarked blithely. “Why?”
A simple question, but the answer that he wanted wasn’t an easy one to give. Eve mulled it over. “This is my hometown.” Or close enough that she couldn’t think of any other place she might call home.
“And you’re leaving it now.”
“I don’t like it enough to want to die here,” Eve pointed out, swirling the wine bottle by its long, cylindrical neck. “Romantic as that sounds, I’m not even thirty. I’d like to get another crack at the whole pack thing, someday. Maybe get a house someplace. Can’t do that if I’m dead, can I?”
“You think you’ll find that out there?”
“I’ll take my chances.” She could do nothing else. There was no family legacy to keep her in St. Louis. And pretty as the Gateway Arch was, looming above the city like a friendly, angelic hand, she didn’t want it tumbling down to shatter her bones or break her spine. At least out in the open road, there were no guarantees.
Neil let his head drop to the backrest. “Sun’s coming up.”
Eve followed his gaze to the overhead skylight, where the stars were slowly dimming under the bright glare of morning. Dawn was well on its way. Half an hour longer and it would be bright enough to see into the farthest recesses of the exhibit, from Stone to Iron Age.
“Looks like you made it through the night,” Neil said and when Eve turned to meet his gaze, she found him grinning. “Congratulations.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m not happy for you.” They clinked their bottles together, chuckling like people who had pushed t
hrough something agonizing and emerged on the other side, changed and exhausted. “I’ve always been happy for you,” Neil went on dizzily, slurring his words. “Even when you left. I hated you for leaving me all alone, but…”
“But what?” Eve pressed, curious, always too curious for her own good.
“I should’ve known that what the oracle said was all bullshit.”
Something cold skittered down Eve’s spine, like icicles in the dark. She shivered with discomfort. “Is that so.” She couldn’t make it into a question, couldn’t pretend she wanted to hear it confirmed. At least this way, she could excuse the testimony as another drunken confession. Neil didn’t know what he was saying. He had always been a bit of a lightweight.
It meant nothing that he remembered.
She rallied. “I should head home.” She didn’t want to be on the premises when looters finally broke in to the museum hoping to steal weapons or food—or both, though there was little enough of either.
“Me too,” Neil agreed and levered slowly to his feet. He didn’t waver for all that he must have been plastered. Eve tried not to think of his whole body tensing against hers as he fought to resist the ghoul’s attack. He was made of sterner stuff than most men. Then again, he was a Riccard. His family had never believed in coddling the weak.
A sallow dawn was slowly rising as they made their way outside, over the debris on the front steps and the retinal scanner where Eve clocked out for the very last time. She suppressed a pang of nostalgia as she closed the once-electric gate behind her and clipped it with a lock. She couldn’t protect the museum forever and she had no desire to try, but she could buy the stuffed ancient animals and hideous skulls some time. Plunder was inevitable once the world went all to hell.
“So where do you live?” Neil asked.
