Land of the Beautiful Dead (71 page)

He nodded, puffing out a breath that could have been a laugh with a little more effort. “Done. I think I can safely swear that you have been, remain, and forevermore shall be the sweetest thorn that ever stabbed me. What else shall you have of me?”

“You know what I want.”

“And you have known from the first you will never have it, but this melancholy is new. Come, Lan.” He brushed his fingertips across her cheek. “I see the shine of tears hiding behind your eyes even now. What wound is this? Tell me. Let me mend it.”

“I…” Her voice failed. She hugged on him, hiding from him in his arms, but he only waited and at last, she whispered, “I don’t want to die.”

He stroked her hair, combing out damp tangles with his claws in several long, slow passes before he finally said, “Then you won’t.”

“Don’t. That’s not what I…” She tried to move away, but he would not release her and she was forced to press herself even closer to avoid his searching gaze. “I’m tired. It’s making me stupid.”

“You’re tired,” he agreed, still stroking her hair. “It’s making you honest. Lan, I do not say I will raise you up tonight. I would not, even if you asked me. I will have you and cherish you all the years of your life, but you have my word on it. I will never let you die.”

“But you can’t make me live.”

“Lan,” he said, more a growl than a sigh.

“It’s not the same and you know it! That’s why you wouldn’t trade for it, even when I said I was willing. That’s why you won’t do it tonight, even if I ask! Because you know better than anyone, you can make me love you, but you’d always know it wasn’t—”

He dug his fingers into her hair and pulled her hard against his mouth, silencing her with his kiss. Her pliancy, her silence, only seemed to provoke him to greater ferocity. He took what she willingly gave, dominated what she freely surrendered. One hand dropped to squeeze with bruising force at her thigh, yanking her leg around his waist. In answer, she lifted the other and laced them behind him, rolling her hips lightly against the chill hardness of his erection.

He refused to be placated. Snarling into her mouth, he lifted her, jostled her into position, and drove himself home in one powerful motion. She lost her grip on him immediately, but didn’t fall; in the water, she was nearly weightless. One hand at her hip was enough to support her even through the fury of his thrusts. The other stayed knotted in her hair, forcing her to meet his hungry mouth. Waves broke over the tiles as he made her ride him harder and faster, washing out as far as the stuttering fire, splashing up between them with every wet slap of their bodies.

He had always been passionate, but never violent. It should have frightened her, but she could feel nothing but a heartsick throb of sorrow and the purely physical rush of her body’s responses. Nothing was going the way she’d planned, but events were set in motion and she couldn’t stop them now.

He broke his brutal kiss to watch her cum, his eyes blindingly bright, hot with triumph. His own climax seemed almost an afterthought, a careless shrug at the end of a particularly effective argument. He set her on her feet, sharp teeth bared in a savage smile, and said, “It wasn’t real.”

She blinked, disoriented, trapped between her body’s heightened sensation and the dark storm of her thoughts. “What?”

“That is what you were about to tell me, is it not? I can make you love me, but I would always know it wasn’t real. And why? Because you arrogantly assume that life and love are one and indivisible. The soul must die, you think, and flesh cools and whatever happens after that must be of my own devising.” He advanced on her, pushing her back along the side of the bath with the intensity of his stare alone until she bumped the corner. His hand darted out, seizing her sex; his thumb teased at her clit; his fingers parted her, pierced her. He smiled, feeling the immediate, hungry grip of her body.

“This is the nature of flesh,” he told her, almost purring. “It does not rationalize its desires. It asks no permission, considers no consequence. It only feels, be it warm or cool.” He lifted her up on his hand, fingers pumping harder, bringing her still-humming nerves to a second explosive peak almost instantly. He set her down again, not as gently as before, causing mini-waves to ripple outward and come sloshing back even bigger than before. “This is flesh,” he said again. “And if flesh can teach you nothing else, child, it will teach you that life is not love.”

“Neither is sex.”

His smug smile faded.

“I may not be as old as you, but even I know that much. And I know that sex, when it’s just about bodies and not people, isn’t that great. And you know it too.”

“Do I.”

“I can prove it.”

He uttered a humorless challenge of a laugh and rolled one hand through the air before folding his arms over his naked chest.

“If you could pick my next words, what would they be? Fuck me? Or I love you?”

His lips thinned in a smile. “Fuck me,” he said. “And I would choose them again and again, were not the limits of your mortal flesh a factor.”

She merely nodded, unsurprised and a little impatient. “And if you couldn’t pick them, what would you
want
them to be?”

His smile faded, then grew back cold. “Is this your latest offer, diplomat? You offer to say these things if only I would take back my hungering dead?”

“You’re not getting it. This has nothing to do with what I’d actually say or even what I want to say. It’s about what you want to hear and why.”

“And you think I want to hear these hollow oaths so desperately that I would give over all my victory? You think I find your honeyed lies so much more precious than your honest flesh?” He thrust his face at her, his eyes blazing and fangs exposed. “I don’t need your words and I’ve had your body. I will not lay down my hungering dead for a promise of either.”

Lan sighed and waded past him, out of the bath. Each shallow step took more and more effort to climb, as if her failure were waiting for her at the top with a weight all its own.

“You’ve no right to be angry,” he said at her back.

“I’m not. Just disappointed.”

“That I would not be trapped?”

“That you think that’s what I was doing.”

She heard a soft slap and rasp behind her—the unmistakable sound of Azrael rubbing at his scars. For a moment, she thought he might call her back, but in the end, he simply got out of the water.

“We’ll speak later,” he said curtly, picking his wet clothes off the floor and dressing in them. “After you’ve slept.”

She tried one last time. “There won’t always be a later.”

“Yes!” he snapped. “Always! There will not always be
mercy
, there will not always be
compromise
, but there will always be
time
and I can give it to whomever I please, whether they desire to receive it or not! So go to bed, Lan, and we will talk
later
!”

He left, slamming the door behind him hard enough to make the bed curtains flutter.

Lan took the coverlet off the foot of the bed and wrapped herself in it. She sat down, watching the firelight shine over the many little lakes left on the floor.

After a while, she reached under the mattress and brought out her hidden treasures. She smoothed the paper out over her thigh and read the words that stranger in the library had written like she’d never seen them before:
You will never understand until you lose someone you love
. She put it on the bed beside her and picked up the knife.

She held it.

Eventually, she looked at it. The handle was decorated with a pattern of roses and vines. The blade was fat and rounded, too short for the length of the hilt. Pretty, but not very functional.

Hesitantly, she drew the blade along the inside of her arm. It dimpled the skin, nothing more.

She sat.

After an endless, unmeasureable span of time, she gripped the handle tightly, took a deep breath and pulled the blade across her arm in a quick jerk. Strangely, she saw the blood before she felt the pain. It poured out of her so much faster than she expected. Alarmed, she dropped the knife and clapped a corner of the coverlet over the wound, only now feeling the pain. When she lifted the coverlet a minute later, she could see the pale lips of the wet wound gape for an instant before fresh blood spilled out. Her stomach flipped over queasily and clenched into a cold knot.

Pushing the coverlet back (but not taking it off; she could do this, but only if she didn’t have to see), she picked up the knife and made another little cut. She decided it didn’t really hurt that much. Like a bee-sting, it was more the throbbing heat that followed than the actual injury. She made a neat ladder of cuts, trying to make each a little deeper than the one before, then covered the whole thing over with the blanket and watched the grey fabric turn black.

It was too late to pretend she could just stop now. She couldn’t hide what she had done and besides, her note was already written. Time to stop mucking around and just do it.

She wished Azrael kept a bottle or two in the bedroom. Maybe this would be easier if she was tight.

“Live and learn,” she muttered, then realized what she’d said. She laughed a little. Cried a lot. Then picked up the knife and placed the blade against the side of her throat.

‘You might save the world with one good blow,’ she thought. His words. His voice in her mind. And maybe it was even true. In that moment, it was almost as if she leaned back out of her body and watched, as of a film projected into the room. She could see herself, an Eater (she looked a lot like her mother), raised up and shambling in hungry discontent back and forth across the floor (so much like her mother), with old blood staining her body and her hair still damp from the bath. She could see Azrael open the door, see his eyes go wide and bright, see his mouth behind the mask gape in a silent howl of grief…or maybe he wouldn’t. The film skipped and ran itself back and now he was opening the door again. He waved his hand, just as he had done for his Children that night in the dining hall, and the Eater she had become dropped like meat to the ground to be cleared away by his attentive chamberlain. He might mourn her and certainly he would remember her, but there would always be another dolly come along to comfort him.

And she would never know. That was the hell of the thing. One way or another, she’d be just as dead and whatever happened after that was just going to have to happen without her.

Lan closed her eyes.

She held her breath.

‘For the world,’ she thought, but did not cut. Could not.

She did not want to die.

Without warning, the door banged open.

Lan’s hand jerked, laying a line across her throat like a red-hot wire. Heat poured out. Not heat, but blood. So much blood. It soaked into the coverlet, saturated it, splattered her thighs, poured onto the floor. She jumped up without thinking and the letter she had worked so hard to write flipped over, drifted down, and landed right in the spreading pool of it. Red roses bloomed through white paper.

Lan raised her eyes from that with effort to watch Azrael stride across the room—Azrael, who was not supposed to be here yet. Was he here? Did any of that just happen? The world had taken on a dreamlike quality in which colors ran and sounds faded. She could see Azrael’s mouth moving, but she couldn’t make it out beyond his angry tone and a few disjointed words: “…am not…only…no argument…for this…”

Lan reached up to grip her throat and felt blood,
felt
it, like a living thing crawling out of her. “Azrael,” she said. Even her voice sounded as if it came from somewhere else, someone else.

He did not look at her, but went straight to his golden mask, forgotten on its shelf. He was still talking to her, but all his words hummed together, indistinguishable. He was angry. She’d made him angry. Their last night together and this was what she’d done with it. She was so sorry. She tried to say so, but wasn’t sure what came out. Whatever it was, Azrael did not answer. He just picked his mask up, turned around, and dropped it.

The sound of the mask hitting the tiles was not what she expected. Resonant. Like a gong. Gold was supposed to be heavy. Shouldn’t it have cracked the floor? ‘It isn’t real gold, is it?’ Lan tried to say, oddly offended. What she said, slurring so that even she could barely understand the words, was, “It isn’t real.”

Then she collapsed, slowly, in stages, like a scaffold folding up. First, her butt hit the edge of the bed. Then her knees hit the floor. Then she was sliding back along the fall of the blankets and Azrael was running at her, bellowing her name from a thousand miles away, but even as he pulled her up, she seemed to drop through his hands, through the floor, through everything. The world receded, leaving her, taking him. The lights of his eyes were the last to go out and then Lan was alone in the dark.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

D
eath was not what she thought it would be. It hurt. She’d expected that to some extent, but she thought she’d be unconscious for most of it, that she would do her actual dying in her sleep.

There was no sleep in the choking black in which she had trapped herself. She could not move or speak, only lie without any sense of up or down or where her limbs were. She felt oddly weightless, as if she’d be floating if only the pain weren’t weighing her down…or perhaps it was the pain that buoyed her up.

She could not open her eyes, but sometimes her eyes were opened. On these occasions, there were faces, mostly strangers with huge hands that alternately held her down or moved her around, but she didn’t know how much she could trust what she saw because the one time she did see someone she knew, it was one of the tailors and that made no sense at all. Beyond these hands and faces, she knew nothing other than she was in Azrael’s bed and that bothered her, because she’d left it simply swimming in blood. She guessed she’d be beyond caring once she actually died, but it was taking a lot longer than she’d thought and in the meantime, it bothered her.

Aside from the pain and the faces, there were also voices, jolting her out of the black-that-was-not-sleep without sense or reason. Everything she heard seemed distorted and difficult to grasp and even those few times that they did twist into recognizable words, she couldn’t seem to hold onto them long enough to squeeze any real meaning from them. There seemed to be two of them, but just when one stopped and the other started was impossible to know. They faded in and out for a long time as Lan floated in death, and it was almost comforting until something brittle loudly smashed apart and that was how she knew Azrael was there, even before he shouted: “This is a simple procedure! I have seen it done in the damned streets, in open combat, with no more than bombs for light! How can you be so incompetent?”

“It
was
simple,” a voice said. “And with the right equipment and training, it would be now, but the reality of our situation has changed.”

Something else smashed, the sound exploding right in Lan’s head. She could not open her eyes, but she moaned and at that, all the voices silenced.

“She’s waking,” Azrael said.

“Forgive me, my lord, but she’s not sleeping. She’s suffering. And…it might be best to let that suffering end.”

‘I’m okay,’ Lan tried to say, but the words sounded only in her mind. Her lips made only another moan, weaker than the first. And she wasn’t okay, was she? Maybe she would be, once she was dead and the hard part was over, but right now, she was about as far from okay as a girl could be. She was heavy and brittle, a clay shell full of pain, and she was cold…so cold.

A hand. His hand. It came out of the dark to stroke her cheek just once, then went away like it had never been.

“Give her something,” said Azrael. “For her pain.”

“My lord—”

“I command it.”

“My lord, I don’t dare. Not unless and until she has blood.”

“Then give it to her.”

“It’s not that simple,” the voice said, in the over-polite way of a man repeating himself. “Blood has specific groups and they are not all compatible.”

“Cross-matching would be impossible under these conditions,” a second voice interrupted. “The tools for testing are antiquated and no care has been taken to preserve them.”

“Excuses! Transfusions have been done for hundreds of years before the tools you speak of even existed!”

“And patients died from them,” the first voice said quietly.

“With respect, my lord, do you even understand what you are asking me to do? First, I either re-invent a cross-matching test or I ‘have a guess’ at a donor, and then I either re-invent a centrifuge to create the necessary products or use whole blood, which all but guarantees complications I would then be forced to treat using decades-old equipment and expired pharmaceuticals! I can’t be made responsible for the outcome of that…that mess! You raised me to look after the medical needs of your warmbloods and I have done my service faithfully, but this is not a touch of summer flu or a sprained ankle. I can’t treat this from a book. This woman needs a real doctor!”

“Find one.”

“There are none.”

“I say,
find one
!”

“My lord, it’s been thirty years. You must at least acknowledge the possibility that they are all dead. Even if there were a surviving surgeon somewhere close at hand, how eager would one be to treat your…” An awkward pause. “And even if we had one, the scarring alone is more than can be mended and we haven’t even seen the infection that is sure to follow. Even if she has the best possible care, she’ll be horribly disfigured! With the utmost respect, lord, the only sensible course of action is to let her die. You can always bring her b—”

The last word became the eggshell crack of bone breaking and the rustling thump of a body falling to the floor. After a short silence, the first voice said, “We’ve stopped the bleeding…for now…but she will not survive without a transfusion. Which I will attempt if you insist, lord, but you must understand that if she receives the wrong type of blood, it will kill her even faster than the lack.”

“So you’ve said.”

“So it
is
, lord. Her body may already be failing and I would not know it. Reading about hemolysis does not qualify me to treat it. Listen. Hear me. I will do as you command, but a transfusion carries with it enormous risks. I have no way to test for type, much less blood-borne diseases or parasites. And then there is the issue of contaminated equipment. At the very least, I will need needles and tubing, and after all this time, there may not be any left to salvage. Whatever I do find cannot possibly be considered sterile and—”

“Enough, I say!” Azrael’s fist struck some immoveable object—the wall, perhaps—and he began to pace. The sound of his footsteps circling made the room itself seem to tip and the blackness swim around her. “I will hear no more of this. I command you to do whatever is necessary to save her.”

“As I said, I will try,” said the voice in a neutral tone that left no doubt as to his belief Lan was well beyond saving. “To begin with, I need your Revenants to take me to the nearest human settlement that might have a clinic, because he was right…she needs a real doctor and the living will not willingly give one up. He or she may have the equipment I need, but if not, we’ll have to search for it and that will take time. While we’re gone, I need every living human in Haven brought here so a match can be made as soon as possible on our return.”

“And for her? What can be done for her?”

Another pause. “Nothing,” said the voice, with just a hint of a question in his tone, as if he were also asking why he had to say it. “Her condition is extremely critical and there is no way to stabilize it. Plasma…oxygen…medication…all of the things that would improve her chances even a little are gone. Her heart could stop at any moment. I am frankly astonished it hasn’t already.”

The silence that followed was so long that Lan thought she’d died again, and when he did speak, the words were so strained, she couldn’t be sure it was really Azrael who spoke them: “Can I do nothing?”

“Someone should watch her. To prevent her coming back in an…unfortunate manner.”

“Yes. That would indeed be unfortunate.” His fingers combed through her hair. “But no more so than to deny her final wish, surely.”

“My lord?”

“You have your orders. Go. My full authority is at your disposal. And you,” he murmured. “Oh, my Lan…damn you.” And suddenly, he was close, his lips against her ear and his hand heavy on her bare chest, pinning her to life and the world like Mayor Fairchild used to pin butterflies to a board. “
Damn
you! Hear me now and hear me well. If you die, I will raze your Norwood. I will raze all of them—every village, every waystation, every wall. I will make the whole of this world your grave! Do you hear me? How could you do this to me? How could you
dare
?
Answer me
!”

She couldn’t speak, could barely breathe. Her heart stumbled on, shuddering in the chill of his touch while all the rest of her flesh lay numb. She knew she should feel panic now, she should be afraid, but exhaustion numbed out all emotion. She was slipping even as he held her, sinking deeper into the cold because it was the only place that promised relief from the pain. She knew it was death and she didn’t want to die, but even that was a vague shadow in a far greater blackness.

“Answer me,” he said again, but the words were broken now, broken and bleeding. “How could you? How could you speak to me of love, knowing all the while what you meant to do? Was this your plan all along? This…this hateful, cowardly,
monstrous
act?”

The naked pain in his voice cut at her from every side. She twisted away, but there was nowhere to go but deeper inside herself, into the cold place.

The hand over her heart went away. Another cupped her cheek.

“I’ll end the Eaters,” he whispered. “I’ll end them for you, Lan, if only you ask me one more time.”

That should mean something, she knew, but it didn’t. The cold had a voice, too. It told her nothing else mattered. It told her she was safe inside it. It told her nothing had to hurt.

“Say something,” said Azrael, but his voice was strange, warped like a reflection in one of the mirrors you could sometimes still find in the old houses.

On her walk to Ashcroft, she’d slept one night in a house like that, and even though it had been stripped to the walls in most rooms, she’d found a bit of mirror glass in one of them. Remembering that, it seemed suddenly that she was there. She could smell moldering plaster and feel the chill of the glass as she pinched the shard carefully between her fingers and tried to squint past the age and neglect to see her face. Then Elvie Peters was there beside her, only not the Elvie Lan had left, but Elvie at eight or nine—all whispers and giggles and ribbons in her hair, back when they were friends and too young to know yet how impossible that was—telling her she could see her truelove’s face in it if she looked in it right, so Lan turned the glass, hoping to see Eithon Fairchild, but instead she saw a black wolf, jaws gaping and eyes like fire. “Say something,” it snarled.

A pinpoint of cold struck her cheek, so much colder than the enclosing death, so cold it was indistinguishable from heat, shattering this odd living dream and plunging her back into her body and the pain that housed it. She gasped—her breath was a stone in her lungs, a knife in her throat—and maybe she opened her eyes because a wash of white overtook the black for just a moment, but it didn’t last. Somewhere, Azrael was still talking, his words fading out to a meaningless, yet soothing, hum. Lan listened as the cold crept in, wrapping her in its numbing embrace until it had covered her over entirely and she slept.

* * *

She woke moaning, pulled from the increasingly comfortable cold by someone shoving a thin board between her and Azrael’s bed. Once she had been slabbed, her ankles were caught and lashed together with a belt, binding her to the board. Then her knees. Then a belt was cinched tight across her hips. All this, and yet Lan somehow still didn’t know it was coming or what it meant when her wrist was seized and forced into a restraint. It put tremendous pressure in her arm, one even greater than the pain-pulse already beating in her neck, head and heart. She tried to pull free, but couldn’t, tried to at least turn her head to see who had her and couldn’t do that either. With all her strength, she managed to raise her other arm, groping blindly into space, but felt that wrist seized as well.

“Lie still,” a new voice said. A woman’s voice, rough as a cat’s tongue, loveless. “The harder you make this for me, the harder I make it for you.”

Although she still knew she was in Haven and why she had come, hearing that voice, Lan somehow forgot her mother was dead, because who else could that be? She relaxed unhappily, allowing her mother to finish setting the restraints on her, although she could not help crying out again when those calloused hands moved to her trapped arm and made the hellish squeeze there even tighter.

“You’re hurting her.” And that was Azrael, although he wasn’t close. At the mantel, perhaps, keeping his back to the room as he gazed into the fire. “Be gentle.”

“You brought me here to save her life,” the woman said, unbothered. “That doesn’t come gentle. She has to be snug for the move, doesn’t she?”

“I’m not convinced of the necessity.”

“Pity, that, because I am. Look, I’m not going to tell you there’s no harm in it, but the fact is, the equipment we need is a damn sight more delicate than she is, even in her current condition. You’ve had your lads scrub down a space there, so it’s nice and sterile, which is more than can be said about this place, sparkly-clean as it is. Those bed curtains are naught but breeding pens for bacteria and you’ve done such a good job making the air here all toasty warm and wet that it can’t help but grow. One infection, your lordship, just one, and she’s off. Convinced yet?”

No answer, but he must have done something—a nod or a wave, because the hands returned to make a final hellish adjustment, and then she was swooped off the bed and onto a high, narrow table with wheels.