She couldn’t ever remember feeling so at peace.
Between the heat of the water, and the heat of his body, she drifted. He was hard – she could feel that he was against the small of her back – because the night’s activities had excited him, but he didn’t grind against her, didn’t try to draw her attention to the fact. It was a simple state of being: he was hard. Just like they were naked, and in the bath together, the water slowly swirling with pink film across the top as the blood washed from their skin.
He’d told her to ask anything, and that he would answer. She said, “The portraits out there in your room.”
He took a breath and let it out slowly; it whispered through her hair.
“You aren’t Simon.” Technically, this wasn’t a question, but she was sure, now. She didn’t have to ask. “You’re Arthur.”
Another breath. “You’re right. I’m Arthur.”
In the pause that followed, she wondered if she’d have to ask; she knew it was rude, and none of her business besides, but they were naked, skin-to-skin, and she wanted them to be naked in another way. Intimacy. She’d never known it, and never thought to crave it until now.
But he said, “I was the black sheep of the family. Simon was the good one – the responsible one. He went to school, and took care of our parents in their waning years. He managed the finances, and invested widely; he kept the family afloat despite the havoc the Atmospheric Rift wreaked on society. The golden child. He was supposed to carry on the Becket name.
“And I was the fuckup. A junkie, and then a gangster. A hired killer.
“When Simon got sick–” His voice faded. A tremor stole through him, one that shivered into her. “He turned to vice. Quietly, elegantly, like he did all things – he wanted the pain to go away.
“The cancer would have killed him…but Castor got to him first.”
“Oh, Beck. I’m so sorry.”
His hold on her tightened; he drew her back against his chest, and he wasn’t hard now, not anymore. Wracked with tremors, his breath quick and sharp. “I assumed his identity so I could keep the house. So I could keep his good name alive, the way I couldn’t keep…” He let out a shaking breath. “I will kill every last one of Castor’s people. Clean him out root and branch, conduit or no.”
He panted against her neck for long moments, caught in the grip of old grief that felt fresh, and a fury that had his blunt nails digging into her shoulders. Rose kept still, letting it wash over him, and then slowly bleed out into the warm water, joining the real blood that scummed the surface.
Finally, he gave a deep sigh and pressed his face into her throat. She felt the hot wetness of tears on his lashes. “Oh, Rosie. I should apologize to you. I really should. I’m an awful man who’s done terrible things – but I saw you tonight.” His voice shifted to that velvet register that always left her breaking out in pleasurable goosebumps. His lips shifted up her throat to her ear, warm and damp. “You liked it, didn’t you? You understand it.”
She thought of how easily the knife had slipped into the man. The salt of blood on her lips. “Yes.”
His hand shifted, splayed up across her throat so he could take her jaw in his long fingers and turn her head towards him. They were close, so close his face wanted to blur – but she could see his eyes, gleaming like coins in the soft overhead light of the bathroom. Could feel the heat of his breath against her lips.
How easy it would be to close the distance. Want spiked in her belly. How would he kiss her? Soft and chaste? Or would it be a hungry clash? Would he taste the ghost of blood on her lips if his tongue flicked between them? His fingertips were five burning points against her skin, hotter than the bathwater, not enough, not nearly.
“Beck,” she whispered.
But he drew back. Dropped his hand. Turned his face away, jaw clenched tight, muscle leaping in his jaw. Nostrils flaring as he took a deep breath. His hair shivered against his forehead.
“Beck.”
“It’s alright, sweetheart.” He picked a bottle up off the shelf. “Wet your hair.”
She slipped down below the surface, let the water close over her head, eyes open so the burn rivaled the sting of forming tears. She would not feel rejected, she told herself, firmly. Beck had already given her everything – food, and shelter, and clothing. A home, and knowledge, and a life – and the strange, thrilling gift of tonight. He’d given her a lesson, given her permission to feel this way. And this moment here, pressed together in the tub, was more intimate that kissing and pawing at one another. This was his truth; he’d pulled back the veil of Simon – polished, and polite, a society gentleman – and let her see Arthur beneath: cunning, violent, skilled, bloodthirsty.
What was sex compared to that?
She sat up, water streaming off her face. She wiped her eyes, blinked off crystal droplets, and Beck gathered her wet hair up in lathered hands. Worked the shampoo suds through the ends, and upwards. Massaged her scalp until her neck went weak, drifting again, listing to the quiet pop of bubbles, lulled by the steady motions of his fingers, and of his ribs as he breathed. He was calm again.
Not the manufactured calm of Simon, but something deep and animal. The peace of knowing that he’d protected his den and his people, and that all of them had come out safe on the other side of chaos.
She rinsed her hair, and he took up the soap next. Washed her all over – though his hands never strayed to her breasts, nor between her legs. There was nothing sexual in his touch, nothing untoward or designed to elicit a thrill of pleasure. It felt possessive all the same, though. She was his, and he was cleaning the blood from her, spending long moments on her fingers, working it from every crease, and from beneath her nails. He had introduced her to violence – the kind she could wreak, rather than receive – and he would care for her in its wake.
That was its own kind of pleasure.
When she was pink and clean, she twisted around so she faced him, up on her knees. She could feel the water streaming down her breasts, the coolness of the air pebbling her nipples. But Beck tipped his head back and looked up at her face, gaze never straying.
Maybe he really doesn’t want me, she thought, with a pang. It was alright if he didn’t. Probably for the best.
“Your turn,” she said, and picked up the shampoo.
He studied her a moment, before the corners of his eyes crinkled in a tiny smile. “Alright.” He ducked his head, came up wet and blinking, and turned around, knees jacked up to his chest, so she could wash his hair.
It was longer when wet, an inch past his shoulders, and darker: threshed wheat, and poured honey, and melted chocolate through her fingers, heavy and soft as an animal pelt.
The water finally grew too cold for comfort, and Beck pulled the drain with a sincere look of regret. They dried off with thick towels, and the moment was quiet, subdued. She didn’t sneak any looks at him because she didn’t feel the need to, now, her eyelids heavy, and her heart full, and her disappointment an understandable sort: she had a crush, a girl’s crush, and even if it never faded, even if it grew, and began to hurt, it would be an endurable pain. She wouldn’t lose Beck, especially not to her own emotions.
He found clothes of his own for her to wear, a shirt that swallowed her up, and a soft pair of cotton shorts. He pulled on a pair of black pajama bottoms, and stood before her with his hair wild and drying, his gaze somewhere between sleepy-soft and acutely earnest.
He caught her face in both hands. “Rose, you were wonderful.” He kissed the top of her head, lingering there, inhaling the shampoo scent from her scalp. Then kissed her forehead and drew back. “We’ll talk about things tomorrow. I’ll explain.”
She nodded, and started to withdraw.
His eyes widened, a moment of something like panic, and he held her fast. “Will you stay?”
Her eyes stung again, and she blinked hard. “Of course.”
They lay down in his big bed, the cool sheets delicious against overheated skin. Faced one anoth
er, hands resting inches apart on the mattress.
“Goodnight, Rosie.”
“Goodnight, Beck.”
She drifted off looking at his face, and dreamed of blood, and the sharpness of his cheekbones, and the new-coin brightness of his eyes.
THIRTEEN
Rose woke the next morning in her own bed, all tucked in. She’d slept so soundly that she hadn’t felt Beck carry her there.
She dressed in a hurry, and went down to breakfast. A tray of berries and a dish of yogurt were already at the table, and Beck turned sausage links in a pan at the stove.
Kay sat on her usual stool, chain-smoking, and Rose met Beck’s gaze, briefly, as she approached the woman from behind. He offered a quick, upward tick with one corner of his mouth, wry but patient. Rose was ready, then, for Kay’s closed-off expression when she drew up alongside her.
“Good morning.”
Kay didn’t respond. Didn’t even glance toward her.
“Would you get the plates, Rose?” Beck asked, and she was glad of an excuse to turn away from Kay’s cold indifference.
“She’ll come around,” Beck said an hour later, when they were closeted in the library together. “She’s very tolerant of my – lifestyle – ordinarily. It was once her lifestyle, too. That’s how we first met. But then she’ll have a spell where she wants me to give it up. It’s too dangerous, she says, and not worth it.” He crossed from the shelves to the table and set down a stack of books. Lifted a single brow with faint amusement. “I think she’d hoped you would be a good influence on me, rather than the other way around.”
“I’m not being influenced,” Rose said, reaching for the topmost book. It was a thick, joyless tome about the Atmospheric Rift, the kind with tiny print and grainy black-and-white photos.
He chuckled. “Perhaps not.” He took his usual seat across from her. Folded his hands together. Cocked his head to the side. “Now. You were eavesdropping last week outside my bedroom.”
She stilled.
“When Kay was questioning what I’d seen the night I was hurt.” His head tipped a fraction more, hair sliding over his shoulder. “You heard all or part of that exchange, yes?”
She bit her lip – but he didn’t sound accusing. And he’d told her his real name; had killed with her, buried bodies with her. She squared up her shoulders and said, “Yes.”
He nodded, and looked pleased. “What do you know of conduits?”
“Only what they told us in school. Most of my teachers thought they were urban legends. Something made up to scare people into going along with the governmental takeovers.”
He nodded again, and flicked a tiny smile. “They’ve become more mythic the farther we get away from the Rift. Start there.” He motioned toward the book, and she opened to the early chapters; to the grainy photos of a shape like a fixed jagged lightning bolt in the sky, and security camera footage of men and women glowing.
“The first reports of the Atmospheric Rift – before it was called that – came from a pair of British airline pilots flying over the Atlantic,” he said, voice taking on a melodic, professorial tone. He was a good teacher; he would have been a wonder at a college, she thought. “The co-pilot radioed it in, and three hours later a scientific vessel had moved into position and began taking photos.”
One of them was the first one in the book, above the chapter heading; credit had been given to a British scientist aboard the Darwin, which had been tracking the migration patterns of right whales.
“Over the next twenty-four hours, the rift grew,” Beck continued. “Reports started cascading in from American and European coasts: it could be seen by the naked eye – it could be seen growing.
“And then came the pulse.”
They’d watched a video on it at school, a documentary cut with shaky cellphone footage – screams and shouts of alarm in the backgrounds of each – of people across the globe reporting one massive power outage. The cell towers hadn’t worked; the videos had all been forwarded to news stations a few hours after the event, when the power had flickered back on in sporadic bursts.
“When the lights came back up,” Beck said, “We weren’t alone anymore.”
Photos of humans glowing: a glowing woman with an arm raised, staring at a burning house. A glowing man hovering ten feet off the ground, his shadow bracketed by the shadow of wings that weren’t there. Fire in the streets. A house full of bodies all bleeding from the eyes.
“I was four,” Beck said, gaze going distant. “My mother dragged us down into the basement, and we crouched beneath the stairs. She kept calling for our father, wanting him to come down. He’d been standing in the foyer holding a shotgun. There was fire outside in the street. I remember – I remember Simon took my hand, and squeezed so tight his nails drew blood. Mother was crying.”
Rose shivered. “Everyone thought the world was ending.”
“Oh, yes. This was fire and brimstone. The apocalypse wrought by the heavens. All we needed were the horsemen.
“We didn’t know what was really going on until the good senator made his broadcast.”
“Senator Fallon,” she said, nodding. She knew if she turned a few pages, she’d find a photo of him, all shiny JFK good looks and earnestness, gaze glowing with fervor.
“Daniel Fallon,” Beck stressed, his gaze wide. “And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings. Daniel Fallon had become a mouthpiece for a higher authority, he informed us all, on a national broadcast. A conduit. That was his word. A conduit for an angel of the Lord to enact God’s will upon the earth. Gabriel had come to him, had filled him with light, and shown him the way forward. And I heard a man's voice between the banks of the Ulai, which called, and said, Gabriel, make this man to understand the vision.”
His gaze darkened. “Three million people were killed. And then it just…stopped. Those who’d claimed to be conduits immolated; they left nothing behind but blackened husks. The rift closed. A new age had begun; a new world order crawled out of the wreckage.
“Eventually, as time passed, it got easier and easier to attribute it all to basic, human evil. An uprising, a geo-political movement. The word conduit became synonymous with terrorist or zealot. Nothing divine or otherworldly had happened. It was a simple case of a natural phenomenon in the sky being used as justification for slaughter. Angels had never played a part in it.”
She paged through the book, and as the chapter headings progressed, she could see that he was right. That was how she’d learned it in school: it was far from the first time that miracles and the voice of God had been held up as excuses for war and destruction. “But these people,” she said, pointing to a photo of a burning woman, “they had powers.”
“Parlor tricks,” he said with a shrug. “People can explain away any sort of miracle if you give them enough time. The burnings were attributed to bombs and Molotov cocktails. The torture and killing blamed on mortal weapons.
“By the time I was a teenager, times had settled into the current pattern. Life was difficult, but hadn’t it always been. Only it rained all the time, everywhere, and the land withered. There are reasonable scientific explanations for this on the nightly news,” he said with a dismissive wave. “Don’t think it was the wrath of the heavens. Never think that the Atmospheric Rift was a ripping in the fabric of the world, and that forces we aren’t ready to face had come down to join us.” His tone was mocking, bitter.
She shut the book. “But conduits are real, and there’s a new one. At least one. You saw it.”
That earned her a small, deeply pleased smile. “Exactly.”
~*~
“You must understand: anytime there’s a catastrophe of any kind, holes open up in the power structure of a place, and there are always actors ready and able to step in and fill those holes. When the government was at its weakest, during and right after the Rift, the gangs and crime families of every major metro
polis took over,” he said the next afternoon, today’s text A History of Organized Crime in the United States. “Those organizations took control, and they never gave it back, despite what the politicians would have you believe. And those organizations are very, very good at using terror and tragedy to line their pockets.”
“How did you get involved with Tony Castor?”
“Oh, well.” He rubbed the back of his neck, and then flopped down in his chair, legs stretched out to the side, miles long in old, tan corduroy. “That’s a long story.” When she only stared at him, he took a breath and said, “Fine.”
He laced his fingers together over his knee, rested his temple against the high back of the chair, and told her a story.
A story of a spoiled, wealthy boy at what remained of an all-boys school upstate post-Rift, rain lashing high, Gothic windows, professors tense, rumors always swirling and changing. Post-Rift was a time of hushed conversations in dark corners, furtive looks, and worry, always worry. A darkness lay over the world that had nothing to do with the charcoal cloud cover, and which infected all of them. Happiness – what was that?
At Beck’s school, when he was fifteen and stupid, happiness had come in pill form, small, and white, and oblong. They called it heavensent, and half a pill could leave you lying dreamily in the back stacks of the library for a few hours, fascinated by the slow movements of your own hands. A whole pill sent you flying through fields of color and sunlight, and you inevitably returned to yourself in a completely different room from which you’d started, sprawled sometimes across a stranger’s couch, being slapped and hissed out and called a junkie and told to get the fuck out.
“My parents found out I was using,” he said, “so they cut me off financially. They paid for tuition, and meals, and that was it. But I was addicted, so I found ways to get more of it. That was how I became indebted to the Dellucci family.”
Not as big or as powerful as the Castors, but big and powerful enough. Enough to ruin the life of a teenage boy hooked on their pills.
King Among the Dead (Hell Theory Book 1) Page 12
