“Edie?” Ti said from behind me. Asher’s hand dropped like a stone.
I tried to think. Could I work for shapeshifters? Going from place to place, on the lam? I didn’t ever want to be a psych nurse—hell no—but I could do it if I had to. But there was Jake. And now Ti—
“Edie?” Ti asked again, nearer now. He crowded the doorway behind me, and reached a hand through for Asher to shake. “I’m Ti.”
“No, thank you,” Asher said, regarding Ti’s hand with disgust. And then anger lit. “Are you the one that hit her?” he asked, taking a step forward. Ti came another step forward from behind me at this affront.
“No!” I answered for him. “Both of you—no—just let me think, okay?”
I twisted away, unwilling to go far on bare feet, but I needed some space. I looked down the shared wall of the apartment complex, past the parking lot, to the cars driving by in the street. If only I could hitch a thumb out there and leave everything behind. But—leaving was only an option that I’d have considered taking a few days ago. Now, with Jake on the cusp of being normal, and Ti helping me—I stared out, ignoring how the cold made my feet burn, trying to imagine a future where everything might be okay. I’d almost managed it when I saw them there, outside my window. Footprints in the snow. Not mine, not Anna’s, but huge talon-tipped birdlike prints, edges frozen, sharp. The Hound’s. It’d found me. How old were those tracks? One night, two? I swallowed.
Who was I kidding, thinking I could escape? No running or hiding would save me. There would be no safe place. Ever.
“I can’t.” I turned back toward Asher. “There’s no way I can leave. I have too many obligations.”
Asher leaned in to look me directly in the eyes. “Edie, they’re going to kill you. Vampire trials are always a sham.”
“We have a plan—” Ti began.
“What, zombie, did they promise you her corpse?” Asher sniped. Ti took another step forward.
“Asher!” I raised my hands up. “I’ve made up my mind.”
“But I can promise you safety!” Asher protested. I bit my lip, and my tongue found the cut that a shapeshifter had caused.
“No.” Ti pulled back, and I stepped into my apartment again.
Asher shook his head. “Edie, the next time you see me, it will be as if we do not know one another.”
“I’m sorry, Asher. Thank you, but no.”
He stared at me one last time, as if trying to think of something else to say, then walked off.
Ti waited for me in my apartment’s short hallway. I reached for him and his arms encircled me, holding me tight. He was warmer than I was, and that was saying something. We were silent for a long while together, my face nestled against his chest.
“You put your shirt back on,” I complained.
“Not everyone is as understanding as you about scars.”
I nodded into him. Had I done the right thing? It felt right, but—Ti squeezed me. “A life running away is no life at all.”
“You’re not telepathic, are you?” I pulled back to look up at him.
“No.” He reached up and caught my chin, and I fully expected another kiss.
“You’re bleeding,” he said instead.
I ran my tongue against the inside of my lip. “Yeah. Again.”
Ti ran his thumb along my lower lip, and then tasted his thumb, before picking me up and carrying me to my bed.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Round two was more like making love.
I don’t think I’d ever really made love before. It was awkward and sweet, with an awful lot of eye contact, and everything felt much more meaningful than it ought to have. I wondered if this was the clarity that some people get in the hospital when they know they’re about to die, when the spirit world and the real world overlap. They got visitors from the past and information about their upcoming strange new future. For those people, sunrises were symbols, sunsets were symbols, the leaves falling outside, the mist rising up at dawn. It could get cloying being in their rooms, listening to them and their relatives make the meaningless into magic.
But maybe now I understood—because every single stroke of Ti into or out of me felt like a drum strike or a heartbeat, resonating far further than it had any right to do: pushing in—we still live; pulling out—we soon die … until things went faster and faster and life and death were mixed up in the friction of our passion and he cried out, ramming hard into me, life life life, and made me spasm around him, drawing him deeper in, farther in, taking all he had to give inside. He lay atop me, panting, and I bit his shoulder lightly just because I could.
When he’d moved off me, I walked out of the bedroom, turned the thermostat on full blast, and returned with an extra comforter to snuggle up against his side. “Tell me everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“About you. Everything everything.”
He propped himself up. “Why?”
“Because. I don’t want to die alone.” I separated myself and looked at him. If I blinked right, and fast, I could see him there, looking like a soft yellow haze beside me. “My whole life I haven’t been good at making connections. There was me and my brother, yeah, but other than that? No one else really. And most days he doesn’t even count. I do all right at work, but no one really gets me. School was lonely, except for the times that I was taking care of patients, because they were happy to see me, you know? I either talk too much, or tell too much, and it scares people off, and I’m not sure what to do about that.” I looked up at him, and saw his expression momentarily cloud. “Like now.”
Ti nodded. I decided to lay everything on the line. “And I don’t want to die alone. I want to die with someone that I know, that knows me. It’s not too much to ask. At least I hope it’s not.”
“You’re not going to die, Edie—”
I shook my head back and forth. “Answers. Everything. Now.”
“You might not like hearing some of it, you know. If I start talking, I’m not going to sugarcoat things, or lie.”
“I can take it.”
One of his eyebrows rose. “For starters, I’m married.”
My stomach lurched, but I kept my game face on. “Go on.”
“She was perfect. Completely perfect.” He sat up, perhaps so as not to make eye contact with me, and stared up at my ceiling.
“Was?” I asked. “You didn’t—” I imagined him rising up from the grave, hungry for the brains of his loved ones.
“No. She’s been dead for almost two hundred years. So have I. I was killed after what’s now called the Battle of Saltville, in October of 1864.”
I did some math. “In the Civil War?”
“Union Cavalry.”
This was more like it. I placed my hand on his back and scooted closer. “Tell me.”
“I was injured in the battle. Some Confederate asshole came through the hospital tent and knifed all of us.” His voice was distant. I waited without saying a word. “Then, for a long while, I don’t remember. I had a master. I don’t remember much else. I did what I was told.” He shrugged. “Around 1950, I woke up. I assume my master truly died, and some portion of my soul he kept in thrall was finally returned to me.”
“Woke up—straight from 1864?”
He nodded. “I could barely understand the language. There were states I hadn’t heard of. Cars. Planes.”
I waited patiently for him to continue.
“I only barely knew what I was. And when I figured it out, I spent a long time working at cemeteries, digging graves. One time to put bodies in, and another time to pull them out.” He turned to look at me over his shoulder as he said this, and I steeled myself not to cringe. “Eventually I became a funeral home manager so that no one would ask questions.” He sat cross-legged, and I moved to be behind him, holding him, my breasts and silly badge pressed against his back. “There was nothing like Y4 back then. Or maybe there was—I don’t know, the vampires are good at looking out for themselves, but maybe zombies weren’t included. But for me, there was nothing.”
“How did you survive?” I didn’t mean the day-to-day business of survival, he’d made do, that was clear. I meant the endlessness of marching time, the loneliness of utter solitude. How could anyone face that and stay sane with even half a soul?
“I had a wife and a boy. They died while … while I was otherwise occupied. I looked them up, as best I could. The Internet’s made it easier now, even though a lot of old records were lost. But I am sure they are in heaven. And if I do enough good here on earth, I’ll get to someday join them. Whenever it is that I manage to cleanly die.”
I blinked. “You believe in heaven? For real?”
“It exists. It has to. And I’m going to get into it.” He put a hand to his own chest. “When I do the right thing, I think sometimes I can feel my soul start to grow.”
Stating things you desired to be true did not make them be so. An old quote about wishes, fishes, and nets that I’d read once burbled up from my subconscious. Ti took my silence for the negation that it was, and turned to look over his shoulder at me again. “Your own soul’s on the line, and you don’t believe?”
I pushed away from his back. “If I believe that I have a soul—which even at this late stage in the game, maybe I don’t—that might make sense. There’s a spirit that people have when they’re alive that they don’t when they’re dead. I’ve watched people die before. I know.” Ti nodded. I knew Ti had watched people die before. Maybe even killed them himself, when he was someone else’s servant. Who was I to judge—I’d killed someone too. “But if you believe in a heaven,” I went on, pushing myself even farther away from him, “then you have to believe that someone’s keeping score. And if someone’s keeping score, if what we do really matters, then life ought to be fair. And I’m sorry, it isn’t. Shitty things happen to good people all the time, and bad people never get what’s coming to them. Don’t tell me that there’s a heaven as some sort of perverse reward for being good. That is bullshit of the highest caliber, bullshit through and though.”
