Winterlong (29 page)

“Justice, don’t—” I rolled away from him.

I shut my eyes and tried desperately to retain that image of a face so like my own. A hundred tree-strung candles cast golden light upon his hair as he turned from me, from the child Fancy, the smell of him like jasmine and opium, burning wax and balsam, his pale gray skin, his eyes—

“Yes, Wendy!” Justice murmured in my ear, mistaking my silence for compliance. I pushed him away, his lips leaving mine with a sigh.

Too late. Already the metallic taste flooded my mouth and my heart pounded, as it had each time he had approached me thus backstage. Then it had always been furtive, a stolen embrace with blood bartered in exchange; his swollen mouth in no need of rouge because I bled it each ‘evening, but slowly so that I could taste his own desire and climax as he moved against me.

But it infuriated me now, when I had for a moment glimpsed my brother’s heart and past. I punched him in the ribs.

“Leave me,” I yelled. “Go
away!”

Justice gasped. Clutching at his stomach he sat up, tears glittering in his eyes. “Why?” His voice tripped into a fit of coughing. “Why, Wendy? Why won’t you let me? I understand—”

“You don’t understand, or else you’d leave me.” I kicked aside a pillow so that I could slide beneath the blankets. “Emma and Morgan and that other woman are
dead,
Justice. It killed them,
I
killed them—”

“But you slept with other empties at
HEL
,” he protested, yanking back the coverlets.
“They
didn’t die. And you just took that girl—”

“She knew something,” I said. “About me; about my brother. I care nothing for her, nothing at all. And you understand nothing, Justice, or you’d be afraid even to touch me.”

He knotted the blankets, avoiding my eyes. I felt a sudden pang, pity mingling with my anger. “Don’t you see, Justice? It kills them sometimes—what I see, what I am—and I … I don’t want to hurt you.”

Still he refused to look at me. I waited, then said,
“Why
am I so important to you? You could have anyone in this House, in this whole forsaken City. Why do you want me?”

He pushed the blanket from him and looked up, his hair falling into his eyes. “Because you are beautiful. Because they hurt you at
HEL
. Because I love you.”

I thought of how he had saved me; of him standing over me in the Home Room, watching silently through the night while I tossed in the bed with the Ascendants’ machines hooked into my brain. And I thought of tapping Fancy, her joy as she greeted Raphael; her delight when she first saw me and thought I was he. Raphael Miramar, beloved of the House Miramar.

And who loved Wendy Wanders? Who even knew who I was, except for Justice and Miss Scarlet?

But I couldn’t risk returning their love; could only imagine it, really, for I had nothing of my own to give. Only nightmares and despair and suicide.

I laughed harshly. “Love? Your people are whores. You want to use me, just as Dr. Harrow did—you’re no better than any of them!” But I knew my words were not true.

Pain and yearning so distorted Justice’s face that I looked away.

“Oh, Wendy …” He took a deep breath, shook his head before going on. “It’s not just that you are beautiful—”

“But you are beautiful, Justice. All of your people are beautiful! Any of them would welcome you as a lover.”

In the soft light his eyes burned a vivid sapphire blue. Angular face rounded just enough to keep its lines from gauntness, smooth brow raked with that golden hair above slanted deep-set eyes. I had seen how other Paphians gazed upon him with presumptive pride, as if in his even features each recognized his own. But to me they all seemed too much alike; only something in Justice’s face marked him, lines left by his time at
HEL
, the relative hardship of our life with the Players.

“Beauty is too common among your people for it to move me,” I said at last.

He sighed and wrapped a blanket around his knees. “There is a saying we have: ‘Empty vessels are the loveliest.’ That is why we love children, innocents, anything that is young and new, before the world changes it and it begins to die. Maybe that is why I love you.”

“But I am no innocent, Justice. And I think I am Death itself sometimes.”

He reached to stroke my hair where it had grown back to cover the nodes and scars upon my temples. “You are not Death, Wendy.” He drew me closer to him. “But even if you were …”

I shut my eyes and let him touch me, felt an odd dizziness that frightened me. I opened my eyes and took his chin in my hand, brought his face close to mine, kissed him until I drew blood once more from his broken lip. He cried out and drew back, but not soon enough.

Giggling, I fell upon the bed, exhilarated by the taste of his dismay, those few drops burning like some hot liquor upon my tongue.

“Oh, it’s lovely, lovely!”

A blurred glimpse of his face, Justice shaking his head, his mouth moving though I cannot hear the words. And then it comes …

Strands of blood and saliva entwine within my mouth. Fire flares back to my temples so that the blood dances beneath my skin. I shut my eyes tightly, the better to see what sings there so bright and clear—

Eyes, eyes, eyes dancing, green as the highest branch upon the tree, eyes so clear that they show no pupil, nothing but the reflection of what He sees before me, Justice’s white face dancing now too as he tries to hold me and suddenly I am clawing at him, grunting deep in my throat as my nails tear his face and
—

With a cry Justice rolled across the bed, and I wailed to lose my dream. I scratched at my own face, dragged my fingers across my cheeks until I felt something warm, jammed my fingers into my mouth and gagged: because it was my own blood I tasted, the shining strands snarling into clotted chemicals. On the other side of the bed Justice wept.

My stomach stopped heaving. The shrieking in ‘my mind stilled. I raised my head to see Justice crouched on the corner of the bed.

“Why won’t you let me?” he cried. “I could make you happy!”

I held my head in my hands, pressing my thumbs beside my eyes to stop the pain raging there. As he reached for me I spat at him, pointing to a thread of blood trailing from my lip.

“That
makes me happy,” I snarled.

But as I spoke I reeled back as though I had been struck. My sight dimmed as something black and huge and cold loomed in front of me. I began to shake uncontrollably and choking reached for Justice.

“No—stop Him—”

But it is too late.

“Baal is dead,” a Small Voice wails. “I have killed my brother: puissant Baal is dead.”

My hands fall back helplessly; Justice’s face ripples as though reflected in dark and quickly moving water. A cloud across the surface. From the depths rises another face, leaden-hued, soft and pallid as a salamander. As He turns to smile at me the skin droops from his cheeks. From His neck floats a rope
—
no, a vine
—
but then it too falls away, its flaccid curve tracing the outline of His mouth. His smile widens to show white broken teeth, swollen tongue, the waxen tendril of a feeding maggot.

Another Voice whispers, “No. Baal is risen; his sister Anat we take now
—

“With sword we cleave her,

With fire we burn her,

In the field we doth sow her.

Birds eat her remains,

Consuming her remains,

Devouring her remains.

Puissant Baal died;

And behold, he is alive.

And lo, Anat we take now.”

His grin is hideous. I scream, try to escape those livid eyes but He is there reaching for me. His hand beckons me and all He has to do is touch me and I will lose all this, this room and earth and the warmth of air and blood, He will take me as He took them, all of them, and I feel Him, He is inside me the blink of His eyes His mouth opening to rend me my beautiful brother in the dark—

His eyes close, his mouth snaps shut, his lips furl into new green leaves spilling from a tree where stranger fruit grows. Another boy, yellow hair plaited about a leather belt, smiling, smiling as he always does seeing me in the mirror: Emma, Aidan, Raphael, my brother, we three there …

The face that rears to gaze upon me with hollow eyes rimmed with bone is not his: not Aidan’s or the laughing Boy’s. I scream because as the belt slips from the neck it leaves no scar, no burning flesh, but instead skin soft and
s
mooth as Justice’s had been beneath my nails. The swollen eyes that stare from the corpse are my own.

“Wendy. Wake.”

Dr. Harrow’s voice rings clear and strong enough to pull me from a profound stupor. Beside me Justice stirs, then moaning turns to hug a pillow. I sit up, keeping my eyes shut so that the vision is not disturbed.

I know she is not really here, not in the Paphians’ chamber where I have finally collapsed. She is a Small Voice now, but it is Emma Harrow I hear and not my own thoughts.

“Dr. Harrow,” I whisper. My hands tremble as I pull the coverlets to my breast. I can still taste the bitter residue of my brain’s own bile. “Dr. Harrow—please help me. I have entered a fugue state. Please—”

She laughs. A starburst of pale yellow light as the threads of her consciousness leap neural chasms.

“You live in a fugue state now, Wendy.”
Her voice fires along my locus ceruleus so that I begin to sweat in fear. The neural threads twist and spiral into a brilliant trail. Her sour laughter plunges into the utter darkness of regret.

“Too soon, too soon,”
she sighs.
“And now swallowed into the void Poor Wendy wanders alone now
…”

“No!” I try to follow the faint spark of her consciousness as it soars and plummets through endless canyons. “Don’t leave me! Help me, Dr. Harrow—”

“Help you?”
In my mouth a faint sweetness as of old apples.
“You killed me, Wendy
—”

“Not me!” The sweetness roils into norepinephrine’s cloying honey. She leaps into flame, white and blinding. I start to cry out, to press my face into a pillow so that I will not see the room and wake to lose her again. “The Boy, Dr. Harrow—who is that Boy?”

“Ahhh

Two Voices now, two bright flecks in my spinning firmament.

“My brother—
”

“My sister—
”

Faint as first light the Boy’s bleak consciousness touches the rim of my temporal lobe. I groan in disappointment and terror. Already I can feel Dr. Harrow’s retreat into my corpus callosum, those gray mountains.

But Dr. Harrow lingers a moment longer. Axons whip and slash against the Boy’s first firings. I derive a numb solace from her presence, unclench my fingers from the pillow and draw a deep breath. Something had stirred her to wake me; something she would warn me of. A moment longer and she will be gone and only the Boy will remain to torment me.

“Dr. Harrow—”

A sigh echoes through the gray chasm.
“Wendy,”
it breathes.
“Oh Wendy it is cold, He is so cold
…”

I shiver at her anguish, but another urgency forces me on. “A brother, Dr. Harrow. Do I have a brother?”

Her consciousness wavers. A pulse of noradrenaline. Emerald novas burst to send her spinning into the shadows. A last cry soars through my mind’s abyss and I shout in pain as a blocked pathway erupts into crimson flame.

“There is a Boy,
“she cries at last.
“Our brother
—
Baal
—”

My head pounds from the effort of trying to hold her another moment.
Who is Baal?
my mind shrieks. Aidan? Raphael?

Her consciousness a crimson streak as she spirals into the void—

“He is our brother, the dying god
—
we woke Him and now there is no peace until He is slain
—

“
‘But oh, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;

It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t

A brother’s murder!’

“Find him, Wendy—
”

She is gone. I am alone with Him, the One she woke, the One who slumbers within my tangle of dendrites and neurons and axons: the One who uses me as a flail to reap His harvest, His tribute of souls. The God in the Tree, Dionysus

Dendrites. The Gaping Lord. My hands pummel the bedcovers as He strives with me. My fingers curl helplessly, then flex and open as the blood pumps into them.

I feel Him, the cold and iron pressure of His limbs within mine, my blood streaked with the raw fluids He has released within my brain. A roaring as of some vast beast freed from its prison. A cry that I know is Justice’s as he wakes, as I claw and scream and tear at the sheets.

“No, Wendy!”

I do not see Justice as I fight Him, try to keep Him from seizing Justice like an animal, until finally I fall back onto the bed, grunting as I rip the comforter into shreds.

“Find him, Wendy!”

Her last words echoing as above me Justice hovers, in his hands some heavy object that smashes against my forehead. I hear a howl of frustrated rage, and plunge into unconsciousness.

Somehow Justice and Miss Scarlet engaged palanquins to bear us back to the theater. Justice pleaded I was ill. I recall only Gower Miramar leaning over me in our small chamber, and a fleeting impression of sunrise striking the minarets of the House Miramar as the elders carried us off.

I slept fitfully through that entire day and night, waking often from terrible nightmares. Like shades flickering in a cinematoscope the faces of Justice and Miss Scarlet would reveal themselves to me, first one and then the other as momentarily I awakened, struggling to lift my head before collapsing back upon my pillow.

When finally I did wake it was late morning. Sunlight bloomed upon the peeling wallpaper of my tiny room. I turned to see Miss Scarlet sitting primly upon a child’s rocking chair she had dragged from the prop room, her lips moving as she read silently from Mrs. Fiske’s
Memoirs.

“Miss Scarlet,” I whispered. When I touched my forehead I felt a bump there as big as Miss Scarlet’s fist, and recalled Justice’s face as he struck me in the Miramars’ chamber. I tried to raise myself, and knocked against a half-full pitcher of water on the nightstand. Miss Scarlet caught this before it could fall. She put it back upright, carefully reserved the place in her book with a tattered strand of velvet ribbing. With a sigh she set the volume upon the nightstand.