Brightly (Flicker #2) (60 page)

In the light of day, the dreams were like blurry photographs. He could never make out the details. They followed him all the time, though, rising up in the darkness behind his eyelids.

Rodney ground his cigarette out in an ash tray, lit another and joined Filo on the couch. “You know,” he said, “in the two weeks you’ve been back, I’ve seen all of you but Nasser.”

“Have you?”

“I asked Jason about it when he stopped by Snapdragons the other day. He said that Nasser was still out of town on separate business. He’s a much better liar than his brother, but something was eating at him.” Rodney looked at Filo sidelong. “It’s eating at you, too. I can see it. What happened on that island?”

Filo hesitated for a moment. Then he told. Once he got going, the story spilled out in a rush, everything from the curse to Amelia, though he left out her offer to Nasser. He even found himself talking about Henry.

“It never should’ve happened,” Filo muttered, rubbing his eyes with one hand. “I know better. The one thing I had control over, and that’s what I did. Salt and sage, I don’t ever want to be that stupid again.”

“Oh, you will be,” Rodney assured him. “Someday. I’ve no doubts about that. Everybody gets scraped along the pavement by that metaphoric truck, usually more than once.”

Filo flashed him a skeptical look. “Including you?”

“Of course,” Rodney said, without hesitation. “I have done many extravagantly stupid things because I was in love.”

“I wasn’t in love with him.”

“Then be glad it ended when it did. Much longer, and you might’ve been, and that just makes the whole thing much messier.”

“That wouldn’t have been a problem. I don’t do that.”

“What, fall in love?”

Filo nodded. That was something other people did, not him. He wasn’t convinced that he knew how, and even if he did, he wouldn’t let himself. He couldn’t afford to get sloppy again. If he’d learned anything on Siren Island, that was it.

Rodney snorted. “You probably also thought your brain wouldn’t fizzle and give up the moment a nice-looking boy kissed you, and look how that turned out.”

At first, Filo opened his mouth to protest. Then he slumped lower. “Fair point.”

“You know,” Rodney said, “sometimes, when the truck hits you, it doesn’t smash every bone in your body. Sometimes, it’s actually pleasant. I’ve heard of people who don’t even compare the experience to being run over. It’s the strangest thing.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Filo said firmly. “It’s finished.”

“You are young yet,” Rodney said, blowing a thin stream of smoke. “You don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“Nothing’s ever finished. Not until everything is.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Rodney just smiled.

Rolling his eyes, Filo sighed and tried to put Henry from his mind without pinching himself. He was being stupid again. Sentimental. If he was going to make himself sick by dwelling on something, it should be one of his real problems—but, then again, being sick over them wouldn’t do any good, either. There was no changing any of it, no solution he could see.

Filo paused and sat up a little straighter. “Hey, Rod…”

“Mmm-hmm?”

“What do you know about the Guild?”

Chapter Thirty-Two:

Lee glanced up from her sketchbook to where Nasser sat on the other end of the couch, reading a dog-eared paperback she’d loaned him. It was late afternoon, they’d finished their work ahead of schedule, and the apartment was half-filled with golden sunlight that poured through the small windows.

“I was thinking,” she ventured. “Maybe we could go out for dinner.”

Nasser went very still. He didn’t look up. “I don’t know.”

“We don’t have to go tonight,” she said quickly. “I just think it’d be good for you to get out of the apartment for a little while.”

Glancing at her sidelong, he said, “It’s a lot of stairs.”

“Oh.” She paused, feeling foolish. The apartment was on the fourth floor, and the building had no elevator. She should’ve remembered that. Getting downstairs would be the first obstacle. Jason had mentioned that they would almost certainly need to move. “Is that the problem? The stairs? Because we can—”

“Lee,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

“That’s fine.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “I’m only asking because we’ve been in town for two weeks and nobody’s seen you. It’s striking people as odd. Gabriel Hennessey asked me about you the other day, and I didn’t know what to tell him.”

“You don’t have to tell anybody anything.”

“I know. I just—”

“I can’t see anyone we know,” Nasser said, quiet but firm. “I can’t. And the less you talk about me, the better. Jason’s been telling people I’m out of town. If you have to say something, go with that.”

“Why? I don’t understand.”

Nasser looked away from her. “I had a reputation, you know, before all of this. People knew I did quality work. They respected me for that.”

“They still do.”

“For now. Wait until people find out I’m crippled and see how fast that changes.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. I can’t work like I used to, and as soon as word of that gets around, a lot of the people we do business with won’t be interested anymore. They’ll go elsewhere. They won’t refer clients to us. We’re not a two-person team anymore, not like we were.”

“They wouldn’t do that. You’re the same as you always were.”

He smiled sadly. “Except for how I’m not.”

“You’re just as skilled as you were before,” she insisted. “That hasn’t changed.”

“Nobody else will see it that way. Humans are already at the bottom of the food chain. Sighted humans are a little better, but how do you think they’ll look at me?”

Lee frowned. “So it’s a secret? How long are we supposed to keep that up?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t hide in the apartment forever,” she argued. “You can’t live like this.”

“What else am I supposed to do? It’s bad enough with just Jason working in the field. We can’t afford to lose more business.”

She opened her mouth, but found that she was at a loss. Briefly, she wondered how much of his reluctance to go out was based solely on a desire to save face and how much was rooted in his self-consciousness over his leg. Leaving the apartment meant interacting with others, both strangers and, potentially, people they knew. It meant being looked at. He clearly wasn’t ready for that yet.

He’d work up to it, she told herself. She had to be patient with him.

At last, she said, “We’ll figure something out, though. We have time.”

But she didn’t know how much time they really had before even this charade came apart at the seams. Jason’s story about Nasser being away on business wouldn’t convince anyone for long. Nasser never left town without his brother.

Lee walked into the kitchen and started wiping down the counter with a dishcloth. The counter was already clean, just like every other surface in the apartment, but the task gave her something to do with her hands. She never knew quite what to do with herself anymore.

“Will you stop that for a second?” Nasser said, exasperated. She heard the tapping of his crutches against the floor as he approached her. “I’m not
completely
helpless, you know.”

Lee winced, but she didn’t look at him. “I don’t think you’re helpless.”

“Then stop acting like it. You don’t have to do every little thing.”

But she did. At least, it felt that way. Their lives were a mess, but this was something she knew how to do: take care of the little things, keep them in good order. If she stopped, she would have to look up. She would have to look around and see how it was all falling apart.

Cautiously, Nasser took the dishcloth from her. She heard him sigh as he realized that she’d been wiping a clean counter.

“I’m grateful for everything you’ve been doing for us lately,” he said. “I am. But you’re taking it a little far. You don’t have to do all of this. You’re driving yourself crazy.”

“And you, right?” She knew he hated for anyone to go to any trouble for his sake, no matter how small.

“Maybe a little,” he allowed. “But you always make me crazy.”

Lee smiled feebly, remembering the first time he’d said those words to her. That night felt like it had happened years ago.

Turning to face him, Lee pushed herself up onto her toes and kissed him. As she slid her hands over his shoulders, she realized that she hadn’t kissed him—really kissed him—in weeks, and for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why. After the surgery, she’d somehow fallen into the habit of pecks on the cheek and nothing more. It had been a while since she’d even touched him for more than a moment at a time. When had that shift occurred?

Nasser didn’t move at first, as if he were surprised that she’d touched him. Then she felt his fingertips graze her jaw—lightly, hesitantly, just for a heartbeat, before his hand fell away and he disengaged himself.

“You don’t have to do that, either,” he said softly.

“What are you talking about?”

He adjusted his grip on the crutches and turned slightly, angling his body so he wasn’t facing her directly. Without quite meeting her gaze, he said, “I know I’m not like I was. It’s all right if you don’t want to—” He shrugged, looking embarrassed.

Lee stared up at him in silence for a moment before what he’d said clicked into place. She hadn’t noticed the change in her own behavior until now, but he had. Now he seemed to think she didn’t want him that way, that kissing him was another chore.

“It doesn’t bother me,” she told him. “You know that, right?”

“Sure.” He offered her a faint, unconvincing smile that faded quickly. “Just… don’t feel like you have to do anything around here. Okay?”

“Okay,” Lee said, because that seemed to be what he wanted to hear. She started to reach for him again, but held back. He was only a few inches away, but all at once, the distance felt much greater.

In the dream, the little girl was running through a garden, chasing something Filo couldn’t see. The high, distant singing of crickets filled the thick summer air. When Filo breathed in, catching the faint musk of pine needles, he thought he’d been here before.

The girl snatched something out of the air and whirled around. “Look,” she urged, holding out her hands. “Look!”

At first, he thought it was an insect that buzzed between her carefully-cupped palms. Then he saw it was a pixie, tiny and bright as a ruby. When the girl opened her hands, the pixie darted away. Sunlight flashed against its iridescent outer shell. She laughed. He liked the sound of her laughter.

The wind rose at Filo’s back, and something fluttered past his face. Feathers, he realized. Black feathers. He reached up and caught one as it whipped past. The feather was long and glossy, shining like an oil slick.

When he looked up, the little girl wasn’t laughing anymore. Her eyes were very wide and very blue, fixed on something behind him, but for some reason, he couldn’t turn around.

Filo felt his breath starting to come faster. The world shimmered, as if in a heat haze. Behind him, a crow screamed—so loudly that the dream splintered and Filo jolted awake.

He was sitting bolt upright in his own bed, his heart pounding. He could still see the little girl when he blinked, like a flash of light burning a hole in his vision. For a long time, Filo sat perfectly still, listening hard. The apartment was silent. Nothing moved in the dark.

Filo put his head in his hands. He never knew which dreams were memories, stirred up when the dwarf woman rifled through his mind, and which were imaginary, conjured up by his brain. They all felt the same.

He was so tired. Every time he drifted off, he woke feeling worse. He was bleary all day, unable to concentrate. It was dangerous to be off his game like this. So far, he’d gotten through work all right—but yesterday, when crossing the street, he’d stepped off the curb at the wrong moment and was almost clipped by a car. The driver wasn’t being careless; Filo was.

When he wasn’t sharp, he got hurt. It was only a matter of time. He couldn’t go on like this, staring at the ceiling all night, trying to make sense of dreams. It was pointless. Everything he came up with was pure speculation, anyway, and gave him no peace. But maybe it didn’t have to be that way.

Filled with an unfamiliar resolve, Filo pulled on a shirt, climbed out of bed and lifted his mattress. Underneath was the file folder labeled with his name—at least, with the name Neman and Morgan had given him. Having the file so close made him anxious, but having it any farther away would’ve made him more anxious.

With the folder in hand, Filo padded into the kitchen. He funneled just enough energy into the light bulb above the kitchen table to read by. Then he sat down and opened the folder.