“Sorry about that,” I mumbled as I checked it for a crack or chip, sucked on my smoke, and watched my best friend do his best to avoid me. “Kash, Ave. I’m talking about Kash.”
He dried his cup and remained quiet.
“Do you want me to go back there and find out for myself?” I asked, pointing in the direction of their bedroom, making no effort to hide my irritation with his vague responses to my simple question. “Or do you just want to save all of us—you, me, and Kash—the drama?”
Avery put away his teacup and turned back to me with a sad smile on his face. He leaned into the counter behind him, bowed his head, and became so still for a moment, I wondered whether he’d stopped breathing. When he looked back up, he had aged years, the stress of whatever secret he held evident in the fine lines around his eyes and mouth, the pale of his usually sun-kissed skin, the sag in his soul.
“Kash is dying, Dutch.”
Blunt. To the point. Brutal.
The bones.
The motherfucking bones.
They always knew.
I stilled as Avery’s statement settled around us, taking up space and demanding attention, wanting me to hear it and breathe it and live it—Kash is dying—no matter how cruel and full of fuckery it was.
My friend was dying.
That gentle soul who always took care of me and watched over me and loved me in his quiet way, even when I was being horrible and abusive and my shitty fucked-up self. Even when Avery had enough of my antics, Kash would find me and take care of me and remind me that they loved me, no matter what.
Kash, who shed tears for Kajal and me and everything she and I lost in those nine murders. Kash, who respected a dive bar as much as I and had no problem spending an afternoon getting fucked up with me as I soothed my soul after a kill. Kash, who followed Juma all those months and watched her and learned her and then just like me, fell in love with her.
Sweet, beautiful Kash.
“No,” I said into the space between us, my voice a mere whisper. “No fucking way.”
“He hid it from me, or I should say kept it from me, because I saw it,” Avery said, ignoring my shock.
“Kash is fine.” I spoke over whatever nonsense was coming out of Avery’s mouth, my mind in a state of disbelief.
“When he escaped Atlanta with Juma’s parents,” Avery continued speaking despite the fact I wanted him to shut the fuck up, “he did so with a nice gash under his armpit, small enough to hide from me until he couldn’t.”
Avery laughed, and the sound tore my gut in half.
“The Black Copse. Those bastards you said not to worry about,” Avery said as he pointed at me and shook his head. “Their blades are magic. Did you know that? Probably not, because you are a skilled fighter and I would like to see one of those fucks touch you. But Kash. Ha, he’s a whole other story.”
“Slow down, back up. This makes no sense.” I pressed my fingertips into my eyeballs and tried to digest a world spinning too fast on its axis: Rani’s relationship with Shema, Juma’s ten - hours - and - counting - late arrival, and now Kash’s slow death. “He got out of there way before we arrived, that’s not possible.”
“Oh yeah, you heard that story, too?” Avery asked, and shook his head. “So did I. But the other night I got the real one. The one that involved escaping that house with Mimi and Rufus and seconds to spare, throwing them into the car, and screaming at them to lock the doors while he fought four of those things.”
I stilled and stared at Avery, my mouth slack, my eyes wide, all of me discombobulated. None of Avery’s words making much sense.
“Right?” Avery observed my expression and laughed, and it sounded genuine because just like me, he probably couldn’t picture Kash fighting and killing anything, especially those muted Black Copse monsters. “According to Juma’s mother, he killed three of them and maybe injured the fourth, but not before it got him, too.”
I ran my hands through my hair and lit a smoke and waited for the rest of Avery’s words that I knew were going to break me in ways I least expected but I needed to hear them anyway. I needed to know what was happening because then I needed to turn around and fix it.
“Fucking Kash,” I muttered. “You could have worked on him if he’d told you. You could’ve fixed him.”
Avery crossed his arms and watched me, his eyes large and glassy and all of him suddenly so small. Which was crazy because despite the fact his five feet nine inches were diminutive next to my six feet four, Avery Lu was larger than life. A rage began to build inside me as I watched my friend, my brother. He and Kash had done nothing to deserve this—their only crime was loving me—but with one swipe from Veda’s new toys, they became collateral damage in this fucked-up game of lives.
“Kash didn’t know the blades were poisoned,” Avery said in defense of his partner. “He admitted he got cut, but insisted it was small and would easily heal and I believed him because I saw it with my own eyes. And then instead of watching that cut, I got caught up in the fact he sent Juma to the palace after you. Alone. Without one of us to join her, to which he laughed and called me a fool and I snapped back and called him an idiot. We bitched and moaned and acted like two old married people, disagreeing over where to eat dinner instead of paying attention to the fact that days later his cut hadn’t healed at all, the skin around it had turned black and hard, and was full of poison.
“Even if I did work on him, Dutch, it wouldn’t have mattered. This magic mimics the blood and the tissue and is slow-moving and goddamned impossible to detect until it’s too late.”
“No,” I said, and shook my head as I pushed away from the counter and out of the kitchen, as if doing so, moving out of the space Avery and I shared, would lessen the veracity of his words. “It’s not too late. I saw him—he’s fine. He was just at the safe house drinking tea and picking flowers and being so very Kash, I didn’t think twice about him.”
“Goddammit, Dutch,” Avery growled low and fierce, the veins bulging in his neck and his eyes flashing rage. “Listen to what I’m saying—Kash is dying—and stop making this about your devastation with that fact.” He then stepped around me, headed down the hall to the room he shared with Kash, and slammed the door. The boom echoed throughout the large white space, bounced off the walls, crashed into all the warm bodies scattered around—me, Frist, Rufus, Mimi—before it landed with an empty, very final-seeming thud.
I let that sound fill me up, become a part of my soul, then I disappeared down the hall after Avery. Standing outside their closed door, I listened to their hushed voices on the other side, impossible to decipher exact words, but able to pick up on their shared sadness. I turned the knob until the familiar click of the disengaged lock reverberated through my fingers, then I slipped inside the dark room, pressed myself against the near wall, and allowed my eyes a few seconds to adjust.
Another photograph of Frida Kahlo greeted me with her curious stare, this one of the artist in her youth, all sexy and daring in a barely there, gauzelike shirt, and a seductive tilt to her hips. I saw that photo every time I came into this apartment and into this bedroom, but at that particular moment, it wrecked me. It was so Kash, always appreciating the sexier side of everything life offered, but doing so in his quiet way.
I squeezed my eyes shut and swallowed a sob. This was not the time to fall apart.
“Dutch,” Kash whispered into the darkness, and I went to his bedside, twined our fingers, and gulped down my shock. The deep brown of his skin was splotched black and felt hard and scaled, as though the poison encased him in a shell of dark magic. I squeezed his hand and he grimaced.
“Careful,” Avery said low as he sat on the other side of the bed, rubbing thick cream into Kash’s skin, “it hurts.”
“It’s fine, Ave.” Kash turned his head to the side and watched his partner before returning to me. “I won’t break, Dutch.” And as if to prove himself right, he squeezed me back, but it was light and quick and barely there, and all of it seem
ed to take the life out of him.
“Obviously,” I lied, and took a seat on the bed next to him. “Like I’d believe any of the shit coming out of Avery’s mouth.”
Kash laughed and grimaced and squeezed me again. “Thank you.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For three seconds, not acting like I’m dead already,” Kash said, then closed his eyes and gasped, and his words cut Avery in all those places hidden from the casual observer, but I knew where he held his pain: the slight sag in his shoulders and the less-than-perfect beard, the lackluster of his eyes and the quiet of his voice.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I said, “you’re dying all right.” Then I leaned close and listened to his breath. “But yeah, you’re not dead yet.”
I laughed and Kash laughed and even Avery, in all his anguish and devastation, had to crack a smile.
“You’re such a twisted motherfucker, I swear.” Avery shook his head and continued his ministrations to Kash’s black splotches.
Kash sank into his pillow and laughed again and even though all of it sounded like pain, it was flecked with spots of joy and it was those brief seconds of light that mattered.
“I love that twisted motherfucker, Ave,” Kash sighed happily, his eyes closed and a smile curving his lips. I pushed his hair off his forehead and touched the skin, then reached for some of Avery’s cream and began rubbing it into a splotch forming along his temple.
“Tell me if it hurts,” I whispered, and Kash nodded while Avery quietly wept. We remained that way for long, slow, quiet minutes, our threesome shrouded in darkness and despair the likes of which I knew none of us could have seen coming. Without ever saying it aloud, all of us had expected I would be the one lying on my deathbed somewhere, carved and flayed beyond repair. Never did we consider something horrible would befall Kash.
“He won’t admit it, because it’s not sophisticated,” Kash said, turning his head and catching my eye, “but he likes peanut butter on white bread with sliced-up, fried bananas, so promise me, every so often, you’ll make him one. He prefers raw sugar over the white stuff, and he likes his jeans ironed, but no crease.”
Lists.
Kash was making a death list for Avery, a collection of Avery’s secrets to pass along to me so I could step in from time to time and make sure the man he’d spent so much of his life loving spent the remainder of his days with tiny remnants of that deep rich tender affection.
I knew a thing or two about lists, and the need to make them, so even though I realized every word spilling from Kash’s near-black lips was slow death to Avery, and cut me in ways I hardly knew possible, I didn’t stop him. I didn’t make him stop or tell him he was being foolish, because who the fuck was I to pass judgment on a dying man seeking some peace?
“Peanut butter is disgusting,” I said with a snort. “I hope you don’t really expect me to make that shit.”
“I most definitely expect you to make that shit, Dutch,” Kash said, and continued. “He needs a fresh collection of Tommy John undershirts”—and I shot Avery a look because he was forever maligning my expensive sartorial choices, and here he was, indulging in forty-dollar undershirts—“and he loves chicory in his morning coffee.”
“I’m not making his goddamned morning coffee, Kash,” I replied.
“Not every morning, of course not. I don’t think Juma would take kindly to being usurped by my Chinaman.” Kash joked and coughed and grimaced while Avery and I watched him, unable to ease his pain. “But here and there, I don’t think she’d mind.”
“She might not,” I agreed, “but I will.”
Kash squeezed my hand again and smiled. “You’ll do it, I know you will.”
“How about you—” Avery replaced the lid on his tube of cream, leaned over Kash, and kissed him. “—get some rest and I’ll fill Dutch in on the rest of my quirks?”
Kash rolled out from under Avery and pushed himself upright, leaning into the headboard and catching his breath. His eyes looked a little wild and beads of sweat dotted his upper lip, and I thought to myself how stress and death made for horrible bedmates.
“I’m not dead yet, love,” Kash said as he cupped Avery’s cheek and held his gaze, “but I will be soon. I can feel her, she’s here, in the quiet spaces of this room. The Dark Mistress is ready for me, so no sleeping. I’m not a child, I don’t need a nap. What I need is to talk to Dutch and make sure, when I’m gone, you keep living because I can bear to leave this life, but I cannot abide taking you with me.”
A wretched sob escaped Avery’s lips and filled the room with mourning and loss, the sound so real, so feral, I felt it everywhere, crushing in its unfairness and finality.
And then.
“Where exactly are you headed, sweet man?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: DUTCH
Honey.
Grass.
Lemons.
Light.
She entered the room and her scent teased my everything as that voice full of sex and mischief, murder, and a dash of mayhem curved around all my sharp edges, kissed my calamities.
Juma.
I glanced at my watch: twelve hours and thirteen minutes late.
She wore black pants that hugged her hips and sat low on her waist, a black T-shirt with the neck cut out, chic combat boots, and a battered leather belt for her blade. I could hear her in my head—dressed in all black like The Omen—as I looked for something, anything amiss and came up empty-handed. She was her usual, magical self, that perfect being who took my breath away every time she walked into a room. Whatever delayed her sure as fuck didn’t mess with her ability to bring me to my knees in seconds flat.
“You saw your parents?” I asked in a low voice, the mood of the room controlling the quiet of the conversation.
“I did,” Juma said, and smiled, touching my shoulder as she stepped around me and kneeled next to the bed to wrap her fingers around Kash’s. All of her was focused on him, and at that moment, watching her with my dying friend, it struck me that because of her and the tenderness she showered on me over and over, despite the fact I was dark and horrible and hardly worthy of her love and light, I’d been able to turn around and do the same for another. Because of Juma, I was able to hold my dear friend’s hand and touch him and comfort him without a thought. Because of her, I’d been able to grieve.
“You’re a little fucked up, mister,” Juma said as she brought Kash’s hand to her lips and kissed him. “This looks painful.”
“I’m fine, killer,” Kash teased, and smiled as Juma traced the splotches spreading along his arm.
“You would know, wouldn’t you?” she asked as she leaned forward, pressed a kiss to his cheek, and whispered in his ear. Kash closed his eyes and leaned heavily into the headboard.
“No, Juma,” he finally replied to whatever she relayed in private. “Absolutely not.”
“No Juma, what?” Avery asked as he stood, his eyes searching Kash’s and Juma’s blank expressions for some hint of what transpired between them.
“Yes, Kash,” Juma said as she fixed his collar, then turned her attention to Avery and winked. “I am going to help you.”
“You can help him?” Avery asked, his eyes wide with hope.
“No,” I said without thinking as I tallied her remaining lives—three—and felt kind of bad for wanting her to preserve all of them for as long as possible.
“It’s okay, Juma,” Kash said as he reached for her hand, “I’ve made peace with all of this.”
Juma shot Kash a stern look. “In case you forgot, sweet man, I work for Death, so trust me when I say you never ever want to make peace with her. You fight the good fight because she’s a goddamned asshole, and the last thing you want to do is offer her any piece of your soul. Okay?”
She cocked her head to the side and waited. “And, yes, Avery, I can help Kash,” she added without taking her eyes off the sick Keeper.
Kash watched her intently, and I knew she had him.
Shit.
“Okay, okay,” Kash said, and waved her away, all the while I knew he loved every second of attention she showered on him. “You win, killer.”
Juma rubbed her hands together, kissed Kash’s cheek, then squeezed his shoulder and walked to the back of the room, where she’d dropped her bag when she arrived. She kneeled down and began digging through it, looking completely pleased with herself. Which made sense because even though as of late she was a bloodthirsty, machete-wielding, kill-or-be-killed murderer, her true self, the one full of light and wonder, was a giver of life and second chances and déjà vu all over again.
She was a Poocha and this was her, getting into that groove, preparing to make some magic. That didn’t mean I had to sign off on it.
“Don’t do this,” I said, standing over her as I nudged her boot with my own. “Please.”
* * *
She looked up at me and I felt as though she were seeing me for the first time, as if all of her was homed in on all my hurts and insecurities and fucked-up nasty shit. And even though I was nothing but trouble, she loved me anyway.
“Hi, you,” she said while she wrapped her hand around my leg and smiled and holy fuck that woman could make me do damn near anything when she looked at me.
“No, Juma.” I pulled free of her touch and she rose so we were face-to-face, and all of a sudden I wanted a smoke and a drink and really anything to calm whatever bullshit was brewing inside me. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” she asked, even though she knew what. She just wanted me to say it.
“Any of it,” I said, my voice hushed because I wanted our conversation to be private but also because I felt guilty giving voice to my concerns. I was willing to do almost anything to save Kash, I would even sacrifice myself if it would help, but I could not allow her to do the same. “Please.”
Where her eyes had been sharp and all of her ready for action, Juma softened and I felt it as she hooked her fingers into my belt loops and pulled me close, wrapping me in her light and love. “Any of what, Dutch?”
Death Page 13
