Afterlight

by Lim, Rebecca

  But O’Loughlin knew it, too. ‘No you don’t,’ he grunted behind me. Pain exploded again in my back as he stabbed down.

  I screamed, my hold on the antenna loosening.

  O’Loughlin stabbed me again, twisting the blade. And I knew that the two men in the distant valley caught my scream of agony. Knew that it echoed over the waving green-gold field and hung beneath that violet sky.

  Two figures, running, the last thing I might ever see: the one in the lead fluid as water, long-limbed, broad-shouldered, his long, blond hair streaming out behind him as he leapt through the hip-high grass; Jordan’s rangy, familiar, beloved shape so close behind.

  I sobbed, sinking lower beneath the current as O’Loughlin stuck me one last time for certainty, for luck, cursing as his blade became entangled in the fabric of my hood. He had to push my body off the blade, shoving me aside so carelessly that the antenna I was gripping onto snapped off in my hand.

  Then he moved past me, towards the widening breach, knife out before him, as I sank beneath the surface.

  I could taste my iron blood in the water, seeping out. Regretted that I would never get to walk beneath that sky, with Joss, with Angel, with Jordan.

  So easy, just to surrender.

  But then something lit in me, like flame, like the north wind.

  O’Loughlin, I heard myself roar through the tumbling water, the wind my voice.

  O’Lough-liiiiiiin.

  I was on my feet when I shouldn’t have been able to stand; blood and water streaming off my body, monstrous. And she was in me, gripping tight like claws hooked around my soul, the effort to stay, to speak, so terrible.

  She cried out through my lips, through my throat, in a voice that was not my voice, deep, husky, laughing, ‘Sheol, O’Loughlin. I’ve been waiting to take you there, my love. We each get the ever after we deserve, you’ll see.’

  O’Loughlin stilled in shock, turning. Framed between me and the fracture in reality that every part of my soul, and hers, longed for.

  Giving a high, animal scream of rage, he charged at me through the water with his hunting knife raised high.

  Through me, I felt Eve stretch. And it felt to me, for a moment, as if I possessed the hard muscles and strength of a dancer. But then I bent double, retching, curving my arms around my body, almost dropping the broken antenna still clutched in my right hand, as Eve relived some unimaginable pain. Her unimaginable hold on me wavering.

  ‘Die, you bitch,’ O’Loughlin breathed over me, the rain pouring down like it would never stop. ‘Just die.’

  Then the knife came at me again, and Eve and I curled ourselves one into the other, drawing strength, pulling tight, so that before the blade could touch me, I twisted and swung upwards with the thin, broken piece of antenna in my hand and buried it in the soft flesh of his throat.

  Blood pouring. Rivers of it, from him, from me.

  We fell away from each other, O’Loughlin and me.

  Then I felt Eve lift through me and out, before the water claimed me.

  18

  I fell into the water and imagined I saw the sky.

  It was violet. Clouds passed overhead, moving fast. There was no rain, no sound.

  Then, without warning, I was pulled out of the water, and the sound of the driving rain resumed. I could feel the whole world tilting as Jordan carried me beneath a canopy of dark green.

  He sank to his knees on the bike path I’d been so desperate to reach before, laying me down in the shadow of a massive willow whose branches swept overhead before trailing into the water. I lay against the wall of his chest in a cathedral of green, breathing shallowly. It hurt to do more.

  ‘Daughtry, goddamn you,’ Jordan screamed. ‘Where are you? Daughtry! Help me. Please.’

  I couldn’t seem to hold my head up and it slipped to one side so that I saw it, the gap, just for a moment. The one that Jordan and Daughtry must have run through to reach me because Daughtry half turned then in the water. One foot already inside the fracture between two worlds. As he stepped back, the fracture closed and I could have imagined everything. There was only the drowned TV, the current, O’Loughlin floating facedown, in the water.

  Daughtry was tall, with thick blond hair worn unfashionably long and wind-tangled, I realised, from running. As I watched, he plaited the golden mass of it swiftly and bound the end of it. And then I knew who he was. I had last seen him, standing over my bed, when I was a very small child. I had no energy left to question, only wonder.

  He hadn’t changed, in all the intervening years. I could see he was wearing the same plaid shirt pulled tight across hard shoulders, dark, narrow jeans plastered to his legs by the current. As he came out of the water towards us, I saw that he was wearing old-fashioned, lace-up leather ankle boots that looked like they’d been hacked out of the cured hide of some furry animal. Like Jordan, he appeared to have a couple of kilograms of silver and onyx fastened around his wrists and neck.

  His dark green eyes regarded me with an almost tender amusement as he climbed up the embankment. I couldn’t look away as Daughtry threaded the dark, spindle-shaped stick of wood he was holding—a sharp, doubled-ended thing, the length of one hand from wrist to fingertips—through the base of his plait.

  ‘When you expect him he doesn’t show,’ I murmured, ‘and when you don’t, he just materialises out of nowhere.’

  It made sense now. Daughtry could take shortcuts others could only dream of. I could see confirmation of this in Jordan’s dazed expression. I began to cough, my mouth filling up with blood as Daughtry knelt and took my hand.

  Jordan dialled, speaking in clipped frantic tones as I whispered, rain and blood mingling in my mouth, ‘Am I going to die?’

  I closed my eyes and could still see: Two skies, one inside the other.

  And a valley filled with wildflowers of every colour, dotted across green-gold grass. The lavender farm of my dream. If I could get there, keep walking, maybe I would find him, Dad, and he would take me to Mum, and my heart squeezed tight at the thought. It was so close, I could almost touch it. It was just beyond that gap.

  ‘Make it come back,’ I gargled, stirring fitfully as Jordan tried to hold me still while he pleaded with someone on the line. ‘Take me with you.’

  Daughtry said in his smoky voice, ‘Not yet. Not for you. Though I told you you were intriguing, Sophie, and you are.’

  He took my hand and I could feel the scars and calluses there. The hand of a man who wielded heavy things, who knew how to fight. In a formal voice, I heard him say something like: Jorn der Ort Reeve.

  Frowning with my eyes closed, I blurted before I could think, ‘That’s not a name. I can’t even spell that.’

  ‘Then I shall spell it for you,’ he laughed, saying with exaggerated courtesy, ‘J-e-a-n d-e H-a-u-t R-i-v-e. It is both a name, and a place name. It is where I am from: Haut Rive. It means, the high bank, or something of that kind.’

  I opened my eyes with difficulty, unable to reply for the coughing.

  Daughtry gestured at the landscape around us, the creek below, and his voice and gaze were suddenly urgent.

  ‘I want you to stay her
e. Don’t go to that place, Sophie, do you understand? Don’t go looking for anyone you know. Just wait. Here, with Jordan. You’re one of us now, whether you like it or not. You are mastin; a gate keeper. But wholly unprepared, untrained. Can you do that? Wait here?’

  He had to lean close to hear me murmur, ‘Where did she go? Eve?’

  Daughtry took both my hands in his and his green eyes seemed to glow for a moment.

  ‘Sheol, Sophie, where freed souls reside. There are things I must do there—the newly dead are very powerful. They have not yet forgotten what it means to be alive. Do not leave Jordan until I come for you both. You’re safe here. I will try to be as quick as I can. But you must hold on.’

  He rose, looking down at me as Jordan repeated his directions with wild eyes. ‘Just wait, Sophie. It won’t be long.’

  Daughtry inclined his head and stepped back, sliding the spindle-shaped piece of wood back out of his knotted hair. He turned with a rapid motion and re-entered the water, slashing a quick vertical line, then a horizontal one, in the air behind him, before spinning back to face me.

  The air behind him began to separate.

  An indistinct piece of nothing seemed to grow and unfurl behind Daughtry’s back until I caught a shift in shape and colour and light that jarred with the rain lashed landscape I lay in.

  Daughtry held my gaze steadily for a moment more, calling, ‘Stay with Jordan, Sophie. Or risk being lost inside Sheol forever.’

  Then he was gone, and the breach with him, and my entire world was Jordan’s rain-drenched face over mine.

  He threw his phone aside and wrapped me tightly in his arms, pleading, ‘You don’t go anywhere without me, you hear?’

  But my eyes were already closing, and the smell of wildflowers, the feel of sunshine, were growing stronger.

  Acknowledgments

  With thanks to my loving husband, Michael, and our beautiful children, Oscar, Leni and Yve; who put up with much, and light my way in this world.

  With thanks also to Yean Kai and Susan Lim, Ruth and Eugenia Lim, Barry and Judy Liu, Ben and Michelle Lee and Sally and Marcus Price, for all that they do for me throughout the writing year.

  With enormous thanks also to my publisher, Michael Heyward, and my editor, Rebecca Starford, and all at The Text Publishing Company in Melbourne (best city in the world!) including, but not limited to, the wonderful Alice Cottrell, Hannah Forrest, Anne Beilby, Kirsty Wilson, Emily Booth, Alice Lewinsky, Imogen Stubbs, Stephanie Speight and Shalini Kunahlan. And to Alison Arnold—who welcomed me into the charmed circle in the first place—with thanks and best wishes always.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, descriptions and events in this book are entirely fictional, and all opinions expressed by the characters are expressed by the characters; whose preferences and attitudes are also entirely their own. Any errors are entirely mine.

  Certain authorial liberties may have been taken with those buildings and places that do actually exist in the real world and, for those, the author apologises and begs your leave.