by Marcus Sakey
“Besides,” Brody said. “There’s something we should do first.”
“What?” She’d cocked her head, looking at his face. Her smile had bloomed slow and sweet. “Oh.”
By unspoken agreement, they’d walked back to the hotel slowly. Not talking much, just looking around. The afternoon was cool, and a fog had risen, cloaking the world in mystery. Every step revealed something they couldn’t see a moment before. The smooth curve of a Jaguar’s bumper. A nameless skyscraper cutting a perfect line into the clouds, marble façade slick with condensation. The gentle sway of a dead traffic light, function stripped away, hanging like a necklace over Michigan Avenue. The fractal pattern of gum ground into the pavement and trod black. The wind-whipped ripples on the dark river, flowing endlessly into one another.
So beautiful, Brody thought. How come I never saw how very beautiful it all is?
After so much abandoned silence, crossing the bridge to the hotel felt like entering a party. People talked and laughed. Kids sat on car hoods and tossed a tennis ball idly back and forth. Finn fired arrow after arrow into a leather chair, his speed and power dizzying. DeAndre was talking to a pretty blonde girl who kept fixing her hair and touching his arm. Patricia, Brody assumed, and smiled.
Kyle opened the case of beer at his feet and tossed one to each of them.
The simplest thing in the world, and the most precious. People coming together to help one another. Strangers forming a family. Brody and Claire each took one end of a lobby couch and hauled it outside to join the party.
Later, in the suite on the 12th floor, they pulled the curtains to let the city darkness flood in. The room was magnificent, white marble and soft fabrics, silver vases with autumn leaves arranged in them. Brody thought about the living people who had moved through the room today. The maids fluffing pillows and refilling decanters of scotch and bourbon and brandy. The wealthy guests, investment bankers or rock stars, who had plunked down thousands of dollars for a night in the sky. He could imagine them tapping at the grand piano, or naked and eating strawberries, soaking in the steaming tub. Were they happy? Or were they, like so many people, bothered by tiny gripes and silly frustrations?
To learn the true value of something, all you had to do was lose it.
Brody poured drinks in crystal tumblers. They’d stopped by the pool first, the closest thing to a bath, and he could smell the chlorine on his hands when he sipped his drink. He found Claire at the window, brushing damp hair and staring out at the night. The city spilled out around them in a hypnotic geometry of darkness.
“They can’t be right,” she said as she took the glass. “Isabella and Edmund and the others. It can’t just be about energy. I understand that’s part of it, I felt that. But when I killed that Eater, Lawrence, I didn’t just get his strength. I got his story too.”
“So?”
“Well, if it was just energy transference, just a flow of power from vessel to vessel, then why would their lives come too?”
“Maybe that’s just how it works. A side effect.”
Claire shook her head. “We’re not just energy. We’re people. Everyone, good and bad. There’s something ineffable and perfect and indestructible that makes us who we are. That survives even when we die. Lawrence is dead but I remember his life. He lives inside me. Like Raquel inside of you.”
“You talking about a soul?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Maybe that’s just the best word we have to describe something we don’t understand.”
“Maybe.” He sipped his bourbon. Caramel-colored warmth filled him, warmed him from the inside out. Down below, he could just make out figures lounging on couches, leaning against walls. Shadows not quite swallowed by the darkness. “I’ve been thinking about something you said. When you first got here. You said that entropy always increases, but that it didn’t happen like flipping a switch.”
Claire nodded.
“Thing is,” he said, “it doesn’t always increase. Okay, fine, eventually everyone dies, and the stars burn out, and everything just drifts forever.”
“That’s what entropy means, babe.”
“Yeah, but my point is that it may win in the long run, but it doesn’t always increase. Sometimes it’s losing. Sometimes we, people, are winning. When we’re building cities and making love and writing poems. Sometimes life is winning. And that’s worth something. Even if it won’t change the ending.” He finished his bourbon with a swallow. “So screw entropy.”
Claire turned, set her tumbler down on a nearby table. In the dark of the room, she was a silhouette in a white bathrobe, her features barely visible. Slowly, she untied the sash of her robe. With a shrug, she let it drop from her shoulders. Beneath it, she wore nothing at all, her body a symphony in curves and shadows. She said, “I’ve got a better idea.”
There was no wall-rattling passion, no pictures knocked loose or broken glass. This was the other kind of love. They took their time. Lounged beneath covers thick as a cloud. Shivering a little in the cold. Tasting of bourbon and chlorine. Eyes locked in the darkness. She pulled his lip into her mouth and sucked on it gently. He ran a hand down her arm, savoring the softness of her skin, tracing the muscles beneath.
They made a feast of each other. Building up heat in the bed, their communion pushing away the cold. Touches and nips and growing pinches. Her breath hot in his ear. Her body firm and soft atop him, the weight of her, the feeling of her breathing, the beat of her heart. Savoring and teasing and soaking.
Even when they finally slid together, they did it slow, a fraction of an inch at a time. Trying to feel every moment. To record it like fire against the darkness. The searing heat of her. The catch of her breath. Her fingers in his mouth. His hands cupping her, filled with her. His tongue capturing the sweat between her breasts. Her hair draping them both like a curtain to screen out the universe. The way they had always both preferred it, the two of them alone together and everything else forgotten.
It was sex, and it was making love, and it was a choir, and a prayer. It was the only church he would ever need.
When they were finally done, when she’d pointed her toes and clenched her legs so hard the muscles trembled and shut her eyes and moaned and told him not to stop, never to stop; when he had spread his hands around the hinges of her thighs and pushed himself into her heat again and again, until he couldn’t tell where he ended and she began; when the song built between them, resonating back and forth, a glissando of slippery intensity; when she had screeched through closed teeth and he had groaned with his head thrown back; when they had collapsed, slick with sweat, hands trembling and breath coming hard, and held each other; when they were finally done, only then did Brody let himself admit what he’d held at bay throughout, the idea that both of them thought this might be the last time.
They lay spooning, pulses gradually slowing. Bodies connected, his nose in her hair. Soon her breath grew steady, a gentle rhythm like the tide, and he knew she was asleep.
Softly, not wanting to wake her, he put his lips to her ear, and spoke.
He told her she was right. That for all they knew, they still knew nothing. That for all they knew, there were still worlds after this one, eternities that followed the abyss.
And he told her that if they died tomorrow, he would follow her across them.
He would chase her through existence if that’s what it took.
FORTY-SEVEN
The hatchet smashed into her skull. There was a lightning strike of agony and the urge to scream and then she was jerked away. The world retreating from all directions at once like she’d been strapped to a rocket. Then the perspective shifted and she wasn’t flying, she was falling, plummeting into darkness, and as she fell pieces of herself kept shearing away, and each time they did she felt calmer, simpler, more at peace—
Claire’s head jerked off her pillow. Still in darkness, but not the same. She could see a little, the shape of a table and windows and a faint light. Her heart thumped
so hard it made her dizzy.
A dream. It had just been—well, not a dream. A memory. Her second death.
She took a breath, then another, then remembered to do it yoga style, in through the nose, out through the mouth. The rhythm of it calmed her, brought things under control.
The hotel. They were in the hotel. In bed. She turned, saw Brody on his back, eyes shut and mouth open. A faint guttural snore rose from his throat. He did that sometimes, nights they’d been up too late or had too much to drink. There had been a time when she imagined how it might be decades hence, whether she might one day lie awake imagining smothering him with a pillow.
Through the windows, the sky was only barely touched by what passed for dawn here. Something like five in the morning. Claire glanced at her wrist, remembered that the Rolex was gone, vanished into . . . wherever things went. Gone like she had been.
She considered lying back down, knew it was pointless. Sighed and rolled her legs out of bed. Stumbled to the bathroom, peed in the dark, then took a long swallow from a bottle of water.
pieces shearing away, all the things that make you you
The shiver shook her whole body, a quick involuntary tremble. The kind people used to say meant someone had walked over your grave. A funny, nonsensical expression, she’d always thought, until she got to the echo and realized that the dead were all around the living. That every moment of her life—dancing at her sister’s wedding, reading a book, taking a bath—had been shared with the dead. She thought of Brody trying to bring them all the way back to life. That poor woman at the bus stop. One minute everything was normal, a phone call on a sunny fall day, and the next, two people were materializing in front of her. How confused and frightened she must have been. Would it change the course of her whole life? Or would she bury it, write it off as a vivid daydream? Strange to imagine the ways moments like that must have shaped the world, instants when the line between life and death smeared enough to glimpse what lay beyond.
The living room was broad and opulent, pale silver light falling across luxurious fabrics. Claire ran through sun salutations, then a plank sequence, side, down, side, back again, holding each pose until her arms shook. Her muscles warmed and her body limbered, but the visions of falling kept looping in her head.
You may as well admit it. You’re frightened.
No. You’re terrified.
It wasn’t an easy thing to acknowledge, even to herself. Normally she could compartmentalize her fear. But this was primal, too raw and huge to cram into a box.
It wasn’t the dying itself. That had been strangely easy. With each piece of her that went away, she’d grown increasingly calm, placid, until she was just a nameless selfless shadow approaching the abyss.
That was the scary part. Alzheimer’s was far more terrifying than death.
Out the windows, the brightening sky revealed the world, the city sprawling out in all directions. Mist rose from the river. The sentry on the bridge jogged in place. Claire wanted coffee so badly she thought she could smell it brewing.
In the bedroom, Brody had rolled to one side, his arm flung across her pillow. She stood and watched him sleep. There was something childlike in it, his tousled hair and splayed limbs.
The necklace lay on the nightstand.
Claire padded softly across the room. There was a sensation that she was watching herself walk there. She bent at the waist to examine it. Three yellowed bones, wired together with bits of patinated copper. She wasn’t a forensic specialist, but she’d spent enough time looking at bones to guess it was an index finger, most likely of the right hand. The base of the largest was chipped, suggesting the cut had not been clean.
He hacked off his own finger to make a weapon to equip a serial killer to burn innocent people alive.
That’s the kind of will and evil you’re facing.
Gingerly, she poked it. The bones felt normal enough, smooth and without temperature. Claire picked the necklace up by the leather strap, and held it in front of her face. The totem spun gently. Somehow it was light and heavy at the same time.
For her, Brody had put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Then he’d put on this evil thing and used its power to dive into the abyss after her. To snatch her hand as she fell and pull her back to herself.
It was such a crude and ugly trinket. The primitive jewelry of a shaman in some forgotten time, blood magic out of a myth. Brody had been able to feel Edmund when he wore it. We weren’t chatting or anything, he’d said. But it felt like my head was more crowded. It’s not a bank account he deposited power in. It’s him. A piece, but still him.
That belief—that the totem wasn’t jewelry, it was Edmund himself—was central to their plan.
If one could call what they had a plan.
Claire had a sudden urge to leave the suite, run down the stairs, and throw the necklace in the river. Without it, they wouldn’t have the option of going after Edmund. There would be no choice but to stay. To spend the rest of their days together, instead of risking everything on a desperate maneuver.
How would he react if she did? He might be happy about it. Maybe not initially, but with time, and in his heart.
Or he might look at her with disgust. It could be a wound that grew infected, festering and poisoning the only thing that mattered to her.
“Hey.”
Claire jumped, almost dropped the necklace. Will hadn’t moved, but his eyes were open and looking at her. She had the guilty rush of a kid caught tucking a candy bar down her pants. He could sense what she’d been considering. He was judging her for it.
Then he smiled.
In that moment, Claire realized that the thought of her acting that way would never occur to him. To Will Brody, she was better than that.
To his surprise, Brody had slept like diving into a dark lake. No dreams, no sense of himself at all, just a deep and consuming absence. Once, he’d imagined that was what death must be like.
When he opened his eyes, he saw Claire standing nearby, examining the totem. “Hey,” he said.
She jumped, and an expression flickered across her face that he couldn’t parse. Then it was gone, and she smiled. “Hey yourself.”
Brody rose and stretched. Brushed his teeth and ate a granola bar and got dressed. They’d made a few stops on the walk home yesterday, and he poured out the contents of his pack. Good knives, a hammer, a throwing hatchet like a tomahawk. An aluminum baseball bat strapped to the outside. He remembered the moving mountain, razor teethed and mad. The notion of fighting Edmund with these seemed ridiculous.
Claire hefted the hatchet, spinning it so the edge caught the light. “Are we crazy?”
“Probably,” he said, and grinned. He strapped the longest knife to his belt, tucked another in his boot. “Edmund won’t be expecting it. The element of surprise has turned worse odds.”
“What do we tell the others?”
He paused. “Let’s not.”
“Nothing at all?”
“They can’t help. No point in worrying them.”
“They’ll worry if we just vanish.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“You’d rather no one tried to talk you out of it, because they might be able to.”
“Yes,” he said, and met her eyes. It was a naked look, no attempt to hide the fear he felt, the dread.
“Okay,” she said. “Well, it doesn’t matter. We’ll be back soon enough, we can tell them then.”
She said it matter-of-factly, like they were running an errand instead of risking a desperate plan against an enemy they barely understood. Like she wasn’t even afraid. Like she believed in the version of him that wasn’t either.
Maybe that’s what love is. Believing in the best version of your partner, so they have the courage to believe it themselves.
“It’s a good plan,” he said.
“I know. I made it.”
He snorted a laugh. The tension and fear blew away. They had a job to do, and they would do it toget
her. “Ready?”
She looked around the room like she was taking stock. The lush space they could never have afforded, the bed they’d made love in, the windows and the cloudy morning. Nodded.
“Hand me the totem, then.”
“No.”
He’d been reaching for it, and her response froze his hand awkwardly in mid-gesture. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll wear it,” she said.
“Like hell you will. It’s too dangerous, there’s no way I’m going to let you—”
“Let me?” Her eyes flashed. “Are you kidding?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Shut up.” Claire stepped forward, squaring off with him. “When I was gone and you’d been reborn, you didn’t hesitate. Even though you’re likelier to attend a square dance than commit suicide, you put a gun in your mouth. You came for me when I had forgotten what it even meant to be me. So if you think that I’m going to stand behind you like the cheerleader in a horror flick, you’re out of your mind. We’re doing this together. And it’s my turn to take the risk. Do you get me, Agent Brody?”
“Claire . . .”
“Do you get me?”
“Yes, ma’am.” They stared at each other from inches apart. Then he smiled. “I should probably tell you. Before I came to help I took a really long shower and had a beer.”
“Is that right?” She pursed her lips. “Some hero you are.”
He stretched his arms up and out, shook out his muscles. Picked up the baseball bat. “Probably better anyway.”
“Why?”
“The way it works, the way you sort worlds and everything, you’re a natural for it.” He paused and smiled. “You know why?”
“Because I’m anal?”
“Because you’re anal.”
FORTY-EIGHT
“The trick is not to think of it as moving.”
