Dead Reign (27 page)

“I was never much of a reader.” Joshua swiveled back and forth in the office chair—
her
office chair, right down to the squeak. “Is this your new assistant? The replacement for Ted? I never liked Ted. He liked me, though. Everyone did.”

Marla instinctively maneuvered herself between Pelham and Joshua. “He’s my friend. And he’s none of your business.”

Joshua shook his head. The broken bones in his neck ground together audibly. “You don’t have friends, Marla. Not really. There’s no room inside you for anything but yourself and your duty. Your
city.
Nothing but ashes in the hearth of your heart.”

She gritted her teeth. “Fuck this. Pelham, look for a door out of here.”

“You don’t leave until we’re done,” Joshua said, gently, gently. He rose from the desk, and he had a kitchen knife in his hand, the same knife, still wet with Ted’s blood. “Which means you don’t leave at all, because we never had closure, you and I. I was your lover. You took me into your arms, your bed, your confidence. Into your heart—I thought. I was closer to you than anyone. And what did you do?” He looked down at the knife in his hands, then back up at her. “You killed me. I know you loved me until the end. I saw it in your face, in the tears just starting to well up in your eyes when you snapped my neck and sent me here. What kind of woman are you, Marla? What kind of person kills what they love?”

Marla licked her lips. “I don’t…you didn’t…you were going to kill me. You killed Ted. I had no choice.”

He shrugged. “I never loved you. I was a liar. I acted true to my nature. But you…you did love me, and you snapped my neck anyway. What’s your nature? Ashes. A heart full of ashes.” Joshua put the knife down and came around the side of the desk, head lolling, eyes fixed on her.

“I had no choice,” she whispered.

“Please. You could have incapacitated me. Twisted the knife out of my hand, dropped me to the ground, knocked me out. I was no match for you. I was a lover, not a fighter. But you don’t hold back, do you, Marla? Erased me like a mistake on a blackboard. Because I was inconvenient, and complicated. Because I embarrassed you, tricked you. Isn’t that right?” He stepped toward her, put his hand on her cheek, and gazed into her eyes. She could smell him, the scent of honey, vanilla, just a hint of male sweat. Even without his supernatural glamour, he was still beautiful, her beautiful boy, and he was a monster, yes, of course; but wasn’t she a monster, too?

“We’re both monsters,” he whispered, and she wondered with a jolt if he could read her mind, or if their thoughts simply ran on parallel tracks. “Two monsters. We may as well be monsters for each other, and leave everyone else out of it. You and I, together forever, here in this room. Just one thing to do first. To make us match. I’ll give you what you gave me. One little twist.” He put his hand on her chin, and Marla just waited for what she knew must come next: the hard twist, the break of her neck. She deserved it. She’d killed Joshua, and she’d never allowed herself to feel a moment’s regret or remorse for that act. But he was right. It had been easier to kill him than to cope with him alive, knowing he’d played her for a fool. She hadn’t faced that fact. Righteousness had been her armor. Until now. Now it was all rising up, and a broken neck was only the beginning of the penance she owed.

But Joshua staggered away, reaching behind him, flailing, and suddenly Pelham was there, taking Marla’s arm, tugging her away, saving her. Marla’s eyes slowly came back into focus, and her fuzzy head cleared. “What—Pelly? What?”

“I stabbed him with his own knife,” Pelham said grimly. “Just like he stabbed your friend Ted. It seemed only fitting. I apologize if I overstepped my bounds, Ms. Mason, but he was going to hurt you.”

Joshua sat down on the edge of the desk, still trying to reach the knife Pelham had jammed into him. He began weeping, blinking tears from his beautiful eyes. “I was alive,” he said, voice harsh, no longer a lover’s whisper. “Damn it, I was alive, you loved me, you should have let me kill you, I’m supposed to be the one who’s alive.”

“The door is this way, Ms. Mason.” Pelham led her by the arm to the far end of the room, to a door that didn’t exist in her real office.

Marla let herself be led. “I had to do it,” she said, not sure if she was talking to Pelham or Joshua. “It was him or me. He tried to kill me, I had no choice. Isn’t that right? I had to do it.”

“Of course,” Pelham said, and opened the door.

A heart full of ashes,
Marla thought.

They entered a gray stairway, and after Pelham closed the door, Marla sank down to sit on a step and put her head in her hands. “This place is getting to me, Pelham. If you weren’t here, I’d have been lost two or three times by now.”

“It is not a pleasant journey for me, but it is…less personally tailored to my experience. I think I am better able to cope. These women and men and monsters are all strangers to me. I have never, myself, killed anyone.”

“I don’t recommend it. It’s bad for your soul. Even if you had the best reasons in the world, it eats at you. Maybe not right away, but eventually. The best you can hope for is to die yourself before all the shit you’ve pushed down comes welling up again.”

“But…we’re almost done, aren’t we? Not much farther now?” Pelham’s voice was hope layered on top of desperation. He’d done some fighting down here, hadn’t he? That was new for him. Like B said, you couldn’t go to Hell without the experience changing you.

Marla stood up. “Yeah. The only way out is through. Let’s go upstairs.” She had to focus on the task at hand. To repress everything else. It was the only way to continue.

They emerged onto another rooftop—it was the roof of the club, Marla realized, on a warm summer evening—and faced a twisting tornado of gray feathers, white shit, and harsh cries. The buildings in the distance were all liberally spattered with bird shit. “Pigeons. Somerset’s turn, I guess.” She opened her shoulder bag and took out a good hunting slingshot with a molded grip, and a couple sacks of ball bearings. “Get Bethany’s crossbow ready. If Somerset appears—he’ll be the thing that
isn’t
a pigeon—hit him. I’m going to get his attention.”

“You seem eager to confront him.”

Her relationship with Somerset had been unambiguous: he was her first great enemy. There were none of the treacherous depths she’d run into with Joshua. This would be simple and direct. Just what she needed. “Fighting Somerset, putting him down, made my name in this city. It’s how I became chief sorcerer. It was also the hardest, best fight I’ve ever had.” She loaded the slingshot with a steel ball, drew back, and let it fly. A tiny portion of the tornado of pigeons fell, and Marla started whistling as she loaded up another shot, and another, plinking away at the birds. “Better than fish in a barrel.” After she’d fired two dozen times, the tornado finally began to shift, twist, and open up, birds parting like curtains, revealing a figure hanging in the air in the center of the vortex.

“There he is,” Marla said. “Hit him!”

Pelham raised the crossbow, took aim, and fired. Marla half expected the birds to fly in and intercept the bolts, but both struck Somerset true, in the chest. He didn’t plummet from the sky like a stone, though. He flew forward, and Marla saw now that some of those dirty gray feathers were attached to his back. Like Bethany, Somerset had grown wings in the afterlife, though his were enormous bird’s wings. He seemed to dangle from the wings like a spider from a thread, and as he slowly flapped his way closer, he looked just as gangly as always. He wore only a ragged loincloth, and his skin was the same gray shade it had been in his undeath, when Marla killed him.

Somerset glided down and landed on the rooftop, unconcerned with the bolts sticking out of his chest, and folded his dirty wings behind him. “Marla Mason.” His voice like something that scuttles in the night. “Why have you dragged me here?” His eyes seemed to spin like dirty pinwheels, almost hypnotic.

Marla blinked. “What?”

“I was having a perfectly pleasant afterlife when I heard you calling. Ruining the solitude I’ve made.” He gestured at the guano-stained cityscape before them. “I can’t create any
people,
but to be honest, people only got in the way. I’m happier here than I was alive. I always liked the inside of my own head better than the outside world anyway. The outside was so resistant to being shaped.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be psychotically attacking me?”

Somerset shrugged. “The dead often go mad in the presence of the living, I’m told, but after you’ve been brought back to life and sent back here again, something changes. You realize that life, real life, is no longer an option—just a false life, as an undead thing, skin numb, like your whole body is wrapped in leather. No taste, no smell, no real pleasures. It takes the edge off the blinding jealousy a bit. It helps you accept your fate. Normally, the dead can’t change, but being brought back to life provides another little window for learning experiences to slip through.”

“But I killed you,” Marla said.

Somerset frowned. “Hardly. You couldn’t have killed me. You were an upstart. Sauvage killed me, and took over the city. And I killed him for that when I came back to life, which is how you took control, I suppose. Don’t look surprised. I still hear things down here, sometimes. I have many connections. But no, you didn’t kill me, Marla. You just…put me down. Helped me rest again. I know I resisted you, but being raised from the dead made me crazy, ambitious, violent, desperate for things I could no longer have. I’m happier here, in my own little empire of the dead and the gray. And if this meeting has fulfilled whatever strange subconscious longing you had to see me again, I’d just as soon you moved along. You’re spoiling the whole milieu.”

“Um, sure. That’s…sure.”

“I imagine you’re a terrible chief sorcerer.” Somerset turned away. “But I do still respect the office, you know. Good luck regaining your place.” He jumped off the roof and flew away, disappearing into his cloud of pigeons again.

“That was not what I expected,” Marla said. “This place is fucked up.”

“There’s a ladder here, Marla,” Pelham said from the edge of the building. “Leading down.”

“Good. Down is good.”

“We’re nearly there, aren’t we?”

“Nearly somewhere, Pelham. Though I’m worried this place has saved the worst for last.”

“What do you think we’ll find down there, Ms. Mason? You said something about when you were younger….”

Marla glanced back. Somerset had taken his flying horde off into the distance, so maybe they could linger unmolested for a few minutes. She was not eager to head down this ladder if she was going to find a facsimile of rural Indiana at the bottom, and the remains of the man—the
boy
—she’d killed there. “I grew up in the country, in Indiana. We had a trailer on a big dusty lot, backed by some trees, and there wasn’t much around but farms and a garbage dump.”

“I’m surprised, Ms. Mason. You seem so firmly a creature of the city.”

“By choice, Pelly. Because I didn’t much like being a creature of the country. Back then, in junior high, I only had a few friends, mainly two girls, Amy and Carol. We all three liked climbing trees and playing kickball more than wearing makeup and hanging out in the mall, which made us sort of outcasts, but we were outcasts together, so it wasn’t so bad. We hung around together, caught a lot of hell, people talked about us, called us dykes, whatever.” Was that a little Hoosier accent creeping into her voice, overpowering the carefully neutral accent she’d cultivated after she ran away? “I think Carol might have actually been a lesbian, though back then, around there, she’d never have said so, not even to her best friends.” Marla looked over the ledge, wondering if she’d see stubbly cornfields below, but it was only a guano-spattered street. For now. “Carol got attacked,” she said flatly. “And then Amy got attacked. They were both too ashamed to say anything about it—Amy actually went out on a date with the guy, though it wasn’t really a date, just a walk after a school dance, but anyway, she blamed herself, said she had it coming. Bullshit, but young girls, in situations like that, don’t necessarily understand where blame belongs. Dwayne. His name was Dwayne Sullivan. Older kid, by a couple of years, so maybe sixteen? In our grade still, more because he was lazy than stupid, I think. Always had a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and had a little fuzz of a mustache, and sometimes his voice cracked. He hung around with the kind of guys who think the height of comedy is snapping a girl’s bra strap, but there was always something different about Dwayne, more intense, more patient, more serious. But kind of alluring, too, in that way dangerous older guys can be alluring when you’re young and inexperienced.”

She glanced at Pelham, who seemed rapt, and she supposed a story like this, all sordid and messy, was as alien to his experience as walking on the moon, or windsurfing off the Great Barrier Reef, or choking to death on poisonous gas in a coal mine. “Carol didn’t even go out with Dwayne, didn’t go near him. But her walk home from school was along kind of a back way. Mostly we walked with her, since we lived farther down in the same direction, but after Amy got hurt she was out of school for a week, and me…I just wasn’t there one day. Something stupid. My mom wanted me to pick up a loaf of bread before I came home or some crap. Next day Carol wasn’t in school, and the story was someone hit her on the back of her head and tore off her clothes and left her in a ditch. Carol went to the hospital. They thought she was going to die. Everybody—
everybody
—in school knew Dwayne had done it. He didn’t brag, exactly, he was too serious for that, too careful in his own way, but he must have told one of his cronies, because word got around. Suddenly I was alone. I didn’t have my friends with me. I didn’t have anybody. I was just another poor white-trash kid, nobody and nothing. My brother was only two years older than me, but he’d dropped out of school by then, so he wasn’t there to protect me. One day Dwayne came along and pressed up close to me when I was standing by my locker. He whispered in my ear. He said, ‘Two out of three.’ And then he just walked off. I stood there, Pelly, shivering, and terrified. Amy, he raped. Carol, he raped and beat. Me, I was no great shakes in math class, but I figured there was an exponential progression there: come my turn, he would kill me.