by Helena Maeve
“It’ll pass,” Neil sighed, slumping against the wall. Blood marred his cheek like warpaint when he swiped a hand over his face to wipe away the sweat. “You want to tell me what the hell you were thinking? Cut like that so close to an artery—”
“I know,” Felix shot back, righting himself. “I know, all right? It was a totally routine sealing… Or it was supposed to be.”
“A sealing?” Eve murmured, frowning.
“That’s what we call closing a rift,” Neil explained. “Technically.”
“And you always cut yourselves open to do it?”
Their eyes met and Neil shrugged. “Power has a price.” It was a sufficiently ambiguous answer not to incentivize Eve to want to know more. “You were supposed to be healing—”
“Don’t you think I tried?” Felix shot back, gaze flinty with aggravation at being taken to task and something that Eve almost thought might be shame.
A Riccard capable of feeling embarrassed? Stop the presses!
“You must’ve pulled something out of the underworld,” Neil reasoned.
“I didn’t,” his brother scoffed. “I know how to close a rift. I’m not a moron.”
“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Eve interjected. She grinned when Felix turned his narrowed gaze to her. He had his brother’s blue eyes, but the arch of his brow was wider, more pronounced. It put Eve in mind of the Homo Heidelbergensis skulls back at the museum. Same flat face, same wide nose. But the resemblance stopped there.
She couldn’t imagine Felix running through the European plains dressed in furs and wielding a pointy spear. He was too well groomed for that, too put-together in his tweed three-piece.
Neil broke their staring contest with a ponderous sigh. “So did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Close the rift.” A salient point, Eve thought, if only because bad things seemed to roam on the other side—things that she wouldn’t want released into the world if it wasn’t on a collision course with another great big rock.
“I think so,” Felix said, glaring at the glossy, congealing blood marring the floors.
“Think so or know so?”
Felix gave up scratching at the inside of his arm. “I don’t know! I— Maybe… When I couldn’t get control of myself, I just— I ran.”
“Some lawman you are,” Eve snorted. “Speaking of which, how do you reconcile thievery with that neat little badge of yours, hmm?”
“Just about as well as you reconcile terrorizing innocent people, I should think.”
Eve was on him in a flash, one hand fisted into his lapel, the other folded into a fist. “I want my money, you little shit.”
“What money?”
“You know what money. Don’t pretend you didn’t go through my rucksack.” She gave him a shake, relishing the thumping noise of his skull as it met the wall behind him. “Where is it?”
“Ow! Fuck, all right! All right! It’s upstairs.”
“In this house?” Eve couldn’t stop herself glowering at Neil.
“He didn’t know,” Felix gritted out.
“Sure he didn’t. This is how it’s gonna be—you head upstairs and bring me that bag and if there’s a single dollar missing, I swear to all the gods that you’re gonna wish we let you bleed to death. Go!”
She didn’t have to tell him twice, although once he was safely out of her reach, Felix stopped to dust himself off, a sneer pulling at the corners of his lips.
“Out of curiosity,” she heard Neil sigh, “have you ever heard the phrase ‘get more bees with honey’?”
Eve leaned her head to one shoulder, nothing comical in the way she smirked. “Really? You’re going to tell me I’m not polite enough for your sticky-fingered little brother?”
“No… No, I’m not.” He looked tired. His blue T-shirt and slacks were spattered with blood. For a moment, Eve had forgotten that Neil had almost witnessed his brother die right there in the foyer. “Thank you answering the door. I didn’t hear it, I… If you hadn’t helped him when you did—”
“You would’ve heard it eventually,” Eve scoffed, uncomfortable with the praise. She hadn’t done it for Felix. She hadn’t even done it for Neil. Gratitude had no place in this equation.
“All the same,” he insisted, “thanks.”
Felix’s footsteps receded into silence, drowned out by the howl of fierce gales as they seeped in through the rafters and the ancient sash windows before finally stealing out through the open front door. The pitter-patter of rain drenching the overgrown front yard and shaking the leaves from scraggly tree branches was their only soundtrack for a few, long moments. Then Eve found her voice again.
“What are you going to do about the rift?” Felix might have said he’d closed it the first time, but his story had changed so much that it seemed like a tenuous proposition. And if it wasn’t closed, then St. Louis could easily become a warzone well before its appointed expiration date. Eve reminded herself that she didn’t care, that her way out was already written into the script, but it didn’t stick. She had grown up in St. Louis. This was home.
Neil let his head thump back against the wall. “What do you think?”
“That you can’t be stupid enough to go chasing trouble in this weather… But that you’re definitely stubborn enough to try. Basically, I think foolish risk-taking runs in your blood like diabetes.”
“Oh, but tell me how you really feel,” Neil entreated, smiling with eyes closed.
Eve felt something akin to tenderness pull at her insides. “You’re a moron.”
To his credit, Neil didn’t bother trying to deny it.
It took more than the handful of minutes she had anticipated for Felix to troop leisurely back down the stairs, her backpack clutched in one loose hand. He had cleaned himself up, skin smelling faintly of citrus and aloe vera, his fresh, clean shirt starched and crisply ironed. “Here,” he said and tossed her the rucksack. “Don’t let the door hit you on your way out—”
“And where do you think you’re going?” Eve drawled as he made to head back up the stairs. “You’re staying right here until I’m sure nothing’s missing.”
“Rain’s abating,” Neil said, more quietly. “I’ll get dressed.”
Felix balked. “Wait. You’re going with her?”
“No, he’s going to clean up your mess,” Eve shot back without looking up and didn’t know why the thought of Neil tagging along filled her with so much regret. He would only ever get in her way. He was, for all intents and purposes, human. He needed the comforts of home and hearth to survive. He didn’t belong in the wild.
Neil said nothing, neither to challenge nor to contradict Eve. She didn’t expect him to.
A perfunctory inventory of her personal effects revealed that Felix hadn’t put his hands anywhere inside her backpack, but she still made him stand there, huffing and puffing with boredom, while she counted the five grand she’d only just withdrawn from the bank. “Looks like it’s all here.”
“I told you as much.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t put much faith in the asshole who tossed me into jail on a whim.”
“I’m the law—”
“You’re not my lawman,” Eve said sweetly. “And if you ever touch me again, I will make you regret it. And yes, sugar, that’s a threat.”
Felix squared his jaw and marched up the stairs without another word. Eve knew full well that it would be a mistake to think him cowed or defeated, but the sense of victory was too enticing to deny. She pushed herself up from the floor, hoisted her backpack onto one shoulder and cast around the silent house for a reason to linger.
The rain had indeed calmed a little, dialing back from a torrential downpour to a fine, misting drizzle. She could walk to the metro, wait for her clothes and hair to dry on the train, then start the northbound trek until she was out of the town’s perimeter. Come dawn, she could be in the clear.
Neil’s heavy tread on the stairs brought her up short.
<
br /> “There’s blood on your hands,” he said airily.
“I know.”
“Oh.” Neither of them seemed to know what to say after that, much less how to take their leave.
Eve dug her nails into the well-worn strap of the backpack. “So where exactly is this rift you’re headed to?” She could have kicked herself for asking, but it was worth it to see Neil smiling at her again, possibly for the last time.
* * * *
The bread factory had been a weapons manufacturer’s, back in the day, and before that, a mental asylum. These days, it didn’t look like much. The windows were boarded up, No Trespassing signs nailed to almost every vertical surface. If not for the chains that should have been holding the front gate shut, Eve might have said that the place was well and truly deserted. It wasn’t.
The fetters had been wrenched open, every link stretched like a rubber band. The brass lock itself had been cast aside like so much offal.
Felix had clearly been here. The venue had just his kind of dramatic flair.
“Stay behind me and keep quiet,” Neil said, pausing in the doorway.
It was an understandable sentiment, but Eve still chafed under the form of his advice. She wasn’t afraid. The poker chip in the back pocket of her jeans served as reassurance. She told herself that this was just a test run for Neil’s amulet. If things went sour, she could always run, leave Neil to sort out the mess all by his lonesome, like a big boy.
She didn’t know if she could actually do it.
Neil advanced with a soft tread, night goggles in place. He had clearly done this before—the evidence was in the way he moved, cat-quiet and calm, controlling every part of his body down to the pace of his juddering heartbeats. Eve couldn’t match his self-control. She’d never been very good at rolling over and playing dead.
The bread factory rose up around them with thick, steel vats and a variety of machines whose purpose Eve couldn’t begin to understand. She had some idea that store-bought bread wasn’t exactly baked by human hands—and she was fine with that, because it meant she could buy it for cheap. Being confronted with the impersonal and frankly dubious processes that transformed eggs and flour into dough had her grimacing.
Massive ovens loomed on the east side of the facility, glass-walled and ostensibly shut down for want of power. And yet a warm draft was spilling through their cracked doors, more like the snarl of a dragon than the eastern wind.
“Is that—?”
Neil reached back and squeezed Eve’s hand before she could finish the thought. It was. She’d heard about poltergeists possessing TVs and radios and driving people insane by stubbornly inhabiting the walls of homes they’d been murdered in, but this was a whole new level of creepy.
And the scare factor only mounted as the assembly line down which square loaves should’ve been running down quaked to life. Eve jumped, her claws pressing through the thick lining of her boots. At this rate, she was going to need to raid a shoe shop before she left town. Machinery didn’t scare her nearly as much as the people operating it did, but when there were no people, her fears latched onto the only available anchor—the vaguely human outline of a body kneeling by the far wall.
“Whatever you’re doing,” Neil said, pitching his voice high over the rumble of grinding gears and humming pistons, “stop.”
The figure didn’t seem to hear them. It was semi-translucent, as far as Eve could tell, and it was flashing in and out of focus like a bad dream. She wondered if Felix saw it the same way or if, on his end, it looked even more frightening. It was hard to say. Neil didn’t even tremble as he took another step closer.
“This isn’t your realm,” he called. “You came here by mistake but I can help you—”
The creature raised a hand and waved it absently over its shoulder. And in that moment, the twenty or so feet separating Neil and Eve from their quarry shimmered alight. Eve scented ozone and metal—and, of all things, the faint odor of spilled wine. This was the rift Felix was meant to have closed. The one he had failed to seal as he was supposed to. Mystery solved. Now let’s go home and let someone else bother with saving this town for a change.
She didn’t need to suggest as much to Neil to know it was hardly possible. Their troubles were just beginning. The blinding, scorching light of the rift was still spilling outward like water gushing from a hose. Only instead of a harmless, refreshing spray, the bread factory was bathed in a sudden stream of unnatural, glistening droplets that weren’t there and never had been. Eve understood it on an instinctual level, because logic could have nothing to do with the glowing thing opening up before their very eyes.
She made to pull Neil back, to beat a strategic retreat and hopefully regroup, but it was already too late. The iridescent mesh had sunk its claws into him, taking Neil prisoner as its light spilled in a powerful beam all across his face and hands, across the whole front half of his body.
Eve felt Neil squeeze his hand around hers, but it was impossible to say if he was doing it consciously or not. His whole body seemed drawn taut.
“Let him go!” Eve shouted over the hum of machinery animated by some other force than electric current. In that vast, abandoned warehouse, her voice echoed with tinny desperation.
The gears ground to a screeching halt. The figure spun around to face her.
The last thing Eve saw before the luminous tunnel reeled her in were Neil’s blue eyes staring back at her from an ashen, skeletal face.
Chapter Six
Eve landed on dusty tarmac, with Neil’s body to cushion her fall.
“Fuck me,” she groaned, rolling over onto her side. She still had the backpack slung over one shoulder. That was some relief. But her head was aching with the dull pounding of a migraine and there were scrapes on the palms of her hands, healing far too slowly.
She remembered the bread factory, the tumble down the rabbit hole.
And, suddenly, she remembered the creature staring back at her with Neil’s eyes.
“Neil—” Panic gripped her by the throat, a choking clutch she couldn’t shake until she heard him groan and struggle to push himself upright beside her.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Neil ground out and spat pinkish phlegm onto the asphalt.
“I figured as much. You know how I figured as much?” Eve said, her voice rising to a pitch. “Because we’re not in St. Louis anymore.”
“What?” To his credit, Neil seemed surprised. Had he treated this as a par for the course kind of thing, Eve seriously thought she might have slapped him upside the head. “How can you tell?”
Eve shrugged. “Smells different. And I’m pretty sure that’s the Eiffel Tower looming like a goddam steel dick.” She had barely left Missouri on her own, much less gone overseas to check out the sights in Paris, but she wasn’t completely ignorant. Television in the pre-asteroid days had offered her a pretty clear picture of what the world outside St. Louis had to offer and for a while there, Eve had flirted with the thought of leaving home and backpacking through Europe in reverse Kerouac fashion.
But real life had a way of impeding certain projects—like that of leaving St. Louis and finding shelter in the Rockies—because she suddenly found herself abroad, in a silent capital with no one around but the pigeons crooning at her from the sidewalk.
“Um…” Neil ran a hand over his face. “This is a first.”
“You’re kidding.”
He scowled. If Eve had been feeling any less freaked out, she might have offered him a pat on the back. Maybe it was encouragement he needed, but all she had was snarling panic and the lingering fear that whatever she’d seen in the bread factory wasn’t just a product of her morbid imagination.
She took the hand Neil offered and pulled herself up from the ground. “What do we do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not an option.”
“Eve—”
“No, listen to me for a change, okay? We have to get back.”
“Why?�
� Neil asked, gazing at her searchingly. “France is supposed to be a safe haven. We’re far enough inland that even if there’s a wave, we’ll probably be okay.” He made it sound so easy, as if trading one safe zone for another was that simple.
“And what about the thing we saw?” What about your house and Felix? She bit back the query before it could manifest into speech. Neil had said it was all about maximizing their chances of salvaging the Riccard bloodline. This would still do, even if it took him away from all those scowling portraits in his living room.
He had the good grace to sigh and hesitate before he answered, “We don’t know that it didn’t get caught inside the vortex with us.”
“Shouldn’t it be here if it did?”
“Not necessarily,” Neil said. “The rifts aren’t like a doorway where you can see both sides. They’re more like…”
“Elevators?” Eve ventured.
“Pretty much. Except you don’t know which floor you’ll come out on when the doors open, or how much time will have passed. We were lucky. You held onto me, so we both wound up in Paris.”
The city of love, Eve thought, feeling far from amorous. “When you say ‘how much time has passed…’” Eve trailed off. There was another stench in the air, thick like charred meat, but not nearly so smoky. It was getting more and more pungent by the second. It was choking her.
She gasped for breath, turning her head this way and that as she scented the air. That was when she heard it—the hiss and crackle of a heavy object launched through the atmosphere.
Eve looked up. Above them, the picturesque blue skies were pockmarked with white streaks.
“Airplanes?” Neil suggested.
They weren’t. Eve didn’t know how she knew, she just did. Not for the first time, she reached for Neil’s hand and grasped it tightly. “Run,” she said. “Run!” Her pulse was a loud tattoo in her ears, but not loud enough to obscure the distant clamor of falling projectiles.
In St. Louis, familiar streets would’ve made an easier task of zigzagging out of the path of falling debris. It wasn’t the case in Paris. Eve couldn’t think, couldn’t stop to get her bearings. She had the vague sense that they were running away from the Seine, leaving the Eiffel Tower behind them, but that was it. The street names meant nothing to her. The landmarks were confusing and distracting.
