Land of the Beautiful Dead (70 page)

“I,” Wickham said cheerily, “am going to the tea house in the garden. You’re welcome to come with me, of course, but I won’t insist. My intermedi-mate needs a rest and she shall have it.”

Lan watched him tap papers and stack books, feeling she ought to protest, if only because she knew he didn’t really want a half-day. He was only offering because she was being so bloody useless. “Are you in a beastly mood?” she asked finally.

“Not at all.”

“Are you sure?”

He stopped mucking with his teachery things at once and smiled at her. “Bunk off, Lan,” he told her gently. “Have a sleep or a walk or whatever you need to put yourself right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Her heart sank. “Goodbye, Master Wickham.”

He closed his briefcase and left, pausing once at the shelves to select a book to read while he was drinking his tea down in the garden.

When he was gone, Lan took a sheet of paper from the desk and uncapped her fountain pen. She was not connected to the hand that wrote. It was like she was at the cinema again, watching some woman she didn’t know blow on the ink to dry it and fold the paper into her sleeve with the knife. She sat there for some time longer, fighting the urge to write a second note, this one to Master Wickham, but she was afraid he’d find it before Azrael found his. In the end, she couldn’t leave it alone and so she found another sheet of paper and wrote
I’m sorry I upset your routine
. If he found it today, he’d think it was today she was apologizing for. If he found it tomorrow…hopefully, he’d still believe it.

Serafina was waiting for her in Azrael’s chamber, sitting on the edge of his bath and dipping her toes in the water with a bored expression that became alarm when Lan opened the door on her. She leapt up with a splash, her bare feet slipping on the tiles and her tongue slipping over apologies, but she quickly recovered herself when she saw who it was that had walked in on her. She tossed her braids, not quite with her usual haughtiness. “You’re early.”

“So are you.” Lan shut the door, careful to keep the sleeve with her knife and the note in it behind her back, hidden from her handmaiden’s sharp eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting on you, of course. Our lord wished to be informed as soon as you were made available.”

“Well, here I am. Trot yourself off and tell him.”

“I should make you presentable first.” Serafina ran a despairing eye over Lan’s attire and shook her head. “You don’t appreciate how much work that involves.”

“I’m not the only one. Azrael seems to think I’m at my most presentable when I’m bare-ass naked and honestly, he likes ‘preparing me’ himself. Look,” said Lan, edging toward the bed with her arm behind her back, “I’m not going to tell you not to bother, but I will say whatever you put on me is about to come off in shreds. How about we compromise? I’ll take a bath. Then you won’t need to dress me.”

“And your hair would be dry by dinnertime…” Serafina scowled thoughtfully. “All right. I’m trusting you to do a proper job of it and not just get wet and get out again.”

Lan waggled her fingers goodbye and watched her go, trying not to think of what condition she’d be in then, but imagining it all the same. Briefly, she wondered if the sight of her—crusted with blood, dull-eyed and slack-jawed, dead—would shock her otherwise taciturn handmaiden. Probably not. If she recoiled for any reason, it would be because she was afraid someone would hold her responsible.

And someone might. Someone who might flay her, impale her, and never let her die.

The urge came over her to call Serafina back, but what would she say? Any warning, no matter how oblique, would go straight to Azrael’s ear. No warning at all and she might as well be slitting Serafina’s throat along with her own.

Her own.

Lan waited for the tears in her heart to come spilling out her eyes, but they never did. And she didn’t have time to cry anyway.

She undressed, draping her old clothes over the bath screen where they would get wet but not bloody. Hopefully. She’d seen goats and pigs slaughtered; they tended to spray when the slaughterer didn’t know what he was doing. After some thought and without a lot of options, she slipped the knife and the note under the mattress. Then she stepped down into the bath, waded over to the other side, and turned on the fountain.

Water crashed down, just on this side of uncomfortably hot, uncomfortably loud. She closed her eyes and bent her head, telling herself it felt good drumming on her bare back even though it sort of hurt. She’d thought a bath might relax her. Nothing was going the way she’d planned. Hard not to see an omen in that.

She only meant to wash off yesterday’s sweat and wake up a little. Instead, she fell asleep, right there in the water with her head pillowed on her arms and ten thousand too-hot needles stinging unrestfully on her skin. She knew she was asleep, oddly. Even with her eyes closed, she could see, and even odder, she could see herself.

If it was a dream, it wasn’t very interesting…just a naked lady in a bath. But as she watched, things began to change. The fire dimmed so that the darkness slowly folded in around her, swallowing the bed, the screen, the wardrobe, everything but Lan herself and the last of Azrael’s masks—the gold demon with horns. The sockets were aimed at her, as if it was watching as the black enveloped her, and when the shadows closed all the way around her bath, the water turned to blood.

‘That’s interesting,’ thought Lan, disturbed, watching herself sleep peacefully on as blood clotted in her hair and poured thickly down her back. The darkness and the deep red color made her skin look even whiter…or maybe she was getting paler. She was. And all at once, Lan understood that it was her blood in the water, her life falling out. She could see death washing over her, decay creeping in. Her skin shrank on her bones, losing its luster, sagging as the flesh beneath withered. Her blood-damp hair dulled and began to fall out. Behind her in the bath, the red water bulged and grew upward, taking on Azrael’s form, crowned with the same gold mask that had somehow vanished from the shelf without her noticing. He reached for her, his claws carving gashes in her slack flesh as he caressed her, but there was no pain. He said her name. Her eyes, shriveled in their sockets, opened at the sound, tearing her out from this eerie dreaming distance and anchoring her at once in her dead flesh.

Lan jerked awake with a scream and a splash, smacking her hand on the lip of the bath as she reached for a knife she hadn’t worn in a year, then swung around and screamed again, throwing herself backwards with enough force to knock her own feet out from under her.

Azrael caught her, laughing, and held her until she steadied. “Forgive me. I thought it odd you didn’t answer, but I didn’t realize you were asleep.”

“I was dead.” She looked down, clutching at her chest where her heart still pounded, only slightly reassured by the sight of her undecayed flesh, shining with water, just water. “I was dead.”

“Hush, now. Are you sleeping still? What is this dreaming talk?”

“I was…I…I’m bleeding,” she said numbly.

He took her wrist and held it up so he could see her scraped knuckles for himself. Spray from the fountain thinned the blood welling up from the very shallow abrasions, creating scarlet ribbons twining down her arm.

“It isn’t serious,” he told her. Like she needed to be told at all, much less by a man with open wounds and exposed bones.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, staring fixedly as blood beaded up and washed itself away.

“Mm.” He held her arm beneath the fountain’s fall, nuzzling as he did so at her neck, brushing his rough lips across the thin skin beneath her ear. “I forgive you.”

She pulled her hand out of the fountain long enough to see it was still bleeding and shoved it back under the fall.

He straightened and in his considering silence, she could almost hear his frown. “Shall I send for a doctor?” he asked at last, his tone one of neutral concern.

“No, I…I’m fine,” she said and turned toward him to put her arms around his neck where she didn’t have to see the blood. It shouldn’t bother her—it never had before—but nothing felt normal now. She smiled at him; even her smile felt like crying.

He was not drawn in. “What is wrong?”

“Nothing.”

His jaw clenched. He made an effort to gentle his expression, but his true feelings were clear; he hated it when she lied to him.

His mood was turning aside after all and this was not what his last memory of her should be. In some desperation, Lan surged up on her tiptoes and kissed him. He let her…but he did not kiss her back.

“Did you come here to talk?” she asked, stroking the back of his neck just above the jut of bone. His newest flesh was sensitive to touch, she’d learned; his body felt pleasure best where it had suffered the most pain. “I didn’t.”

One corner of his mouth twisted in a smile. “You place me in a difficult position.”

“Yeah?” She pushed him back and he let himself be pushed, until he reached the stairs and sat at her direction on the middle one. There she pressed close, licking drops of bathwater away from whatever skin presented itself as she made her way down his body. “What position is that?”

“I can either allow you to have your way…where I freely admit my preference leans. Flesh, as I once told you, has its own priorities.”

“Mm-hmm.” Her tongue traced the firm hills and valleys of his abdomen.

“Or I can pursue the truth, where I suspect my best interests lie.”

“Better than this?” She trapped his stiffening cock between her breasts and rubbed herself along its length.

“An unfair comparison. What are you trying to do, Lan?” he asked softly, seriously.

“Get your end away without drowning,” she replied, stubbornly smiling. “It’s harder than it looks. Hang on.” She took a deep breath and submerged herself fully, sucking in a mouthful of water and directing it in little jets all along the underside of his shaft before coming up for air. She stroked him in her fist as she looked up through damp tangles of her hair to see his unsmiling face gazing down at her. “I’ve never done it in the water before. Have you?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” She dunked under to hide from him again, taking him into her mouth, but could only manage two or three shallow passes before she had to come up again. “That’s too bad. I kind of liked the idea of you doing something with me for the first time.”

His hand, which had been idly combing through her hair, suddenly stopped, then gripped her chin and forced her to meet his narrowed eyes. “What?”

Startled, Lan repeated herself.

“That isn’t what you said. You said, ‘for the last time.’”

Heat flamed in her cheeks. Had she? She must have. His memory was infallible. “I haven’t been sleeping well,” she told him. “Sorry.”

He did not look convinced. When Lan reached for him again, he caught her wrist.

He was going to be like that.

Stifling a sigh, Lan used his grip to help her climb his body, doing her best to be sexy and slippery instead of guilty and exhausted. She must have had some success at it too, because she could see his eyes flickering with every awkward, slithery movement. When she finally came even with him, face to face, his doubts, although not wholly displaced, were comfortably swallowed by desire.

“You trouble me,” he said gravely.

“Sorry to hear that.” She went to work nibbling on his jaw, flicking her tongue lightly at the extremely unpleasant edge of his open scars as she followed it down to his collarbone.

“No, you’re not.”

“Okay, I’m not.” She kissed the hollow of his throat, lapping at the water that had collected there and tasting mainly soap.

“I’ve never seen you like this before. I don’t like it.”

“You’ve seen me like this plenty,” she said and boldly took hold of his firm cock. “And you love it.”

He searched her eyes, frowning. “Please talk to me.”

She kissed him, forcing their mouths together although he did not resist, bruising her lips with the violence of her conquest.

He put his hand on her chest and gently, insistently, pushed her away.

They stared at each other. The fire hummed. The water laughed. He waited.

“Don’t you want me?” she asked finally. Her voice cracked, damn it. She was not going to cry!

“You know I do.”

She moved to straddle him. He pushed her back.

“What do you want, Lan? Will you not simply tell me? Would I not give you anything you desired?”

“Almost.”

He shook his head, his jaw tightening, but he didn’t push her away. He brought her closer, wiping droplets of water from her cheek, her lips, her chin. “Can you not be a little happy with your heart’s penultimate desire? Must it be the world? Come, I will give you whatsoever else you wish if you will only name it.”

She put her arms around him and pressed her brow to his, pressed hard. “I want you to miss me when I’m gone. Not for a thousand years or a million, but all of them, until there’s no more way to count them. I want to give you the best night of your life and I want you to remember it forever.”

“Do you mean that as a blessing or a curse?”

She was too tired to think before she answered. She told the truth: “A bit of both, I reckon.”