I leaned back into his solidity, and his spare arm circled my waist. I said, “We might as well get comfortable” – as my head nestled into that convenient hollow between neck and shoulder – “because I don’t think we’re going anywhere for a while.”
Our transport had taken himself offline, and the first wisps of fog were already twining around our feet. Even with Thom at hand to burn it back, I didn’t fancy blundering about in the soup of it, trying to find our way off the moor. People have died that way, and giant hounds have eaten them.
Besides, where else did we have to go? Getting here had felt urgent, all-consuming; one of the things it had apparently consumed was any thought about what came next. I wasn’t quite sure even what I’d intended with the hellride, whether I was warning Thom or rescuing him. Either way, apparently I’d betrayed him where I might perfectly well have let him be.
Dawnlight is milky anyway; dawnlight through thickening fog was like sitting in creamy porridge. Cold creamy porridge, or it should have been, cold and wet both: only that I had a heat-source to engulf me, to wrap his arms and legs about me and keep the bad at bay. My Aspect was probably around somewhere, in reach, it should’ve caught up with us by now – but honestly I preferred Thom, for the real honest contact, skin to skin.
Which was a puzzle, now that I came to think about it, as I settled back into that all-around embrace.
It was maybe good to have something to puzzle over, given that I was at the back end of a long and exciting night, and now I had an entirely naked male as physically close to me as he could get, and we were both of us hot and a little frightened and very ready for distraction, and very accustomed to each other’s bodies, and it had been a long time for him and he was always very ready, and I’d had my Aspect on and off all night and all the day before, and –
And no. Just, no. I had gone already from Jordan’s bed to Jacey’s; I wasn’t going from Jacey’s to Thom’s, not overnight. I’m not that fast.
Puzzle, then. Think it through. Show your working.
“Thom?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What? This?”
“Yes, that. Stop it. No, I mean it. That’s not cool.”
“It’s not meant to be cool.”
“Seriously. Don’t. If you have to breathe” – and I wasn’t at all convinced that he did, despite fire’s traditional fondness for oxygen – “then don’t do it down the back of my neck. Breathe back at the fog, blow it away.”
“Spoilsport.” He’s a nice boy, though; he did what he was told, half-heartedly huffing at the vapour that enclosed us. That caused some serious eddies, but they didn’t last. So then he rested his chin on the top of my head and tightened his grip on the rest of me, none of which I was going to complain about. Instead I cooperated, treating him like a kind of living chair while I worked my way through my puzzle, and got nowhere, and at last tried again.
“Thom?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How do you
work?
”
“Huh? I don’t need to work, I’m –”
He didn’t have the words for what he was, so he just shrugged. Which, given how warmly intimate was our entanglement – well.
Concentrate.
“Not that. Fool. I mean physically, scientifically, how does your body work? I had this theory about shapeshifters” – the rule of the conservation of mass, but there was really no point in throwing that at him, he’d only get confused and try to duck – “but you don’t seem to fit.” Like this, here and now: he was running hot but otherwise entirely human to the touch. One male body, standardly tall, standardly responsive. Standardly heavy, more to the point. But at any moment I could be toppling helplessly backwards because he was just gone, a flicker of playful light that could settle into a Zippo and add nothing to the weight of the thing but still be him entirely.
“Oh,” he said. “That’s because I’m not a shapeshifter.”
“You’re not?” A girl could get tired –
extremely
tired – of having young men tell her how wrong she was about the world, but I supposed he should know what he was talking about. Even if he knew nothing about the conservation of mass.
“Shapeshifters are mortal. I’m divine.”
He felt divine, right here right now – but that wasn’t relevant, and it wasn’t appropriate, and I wasn’t going to say it. No.
“Arrogant sod,” I said instead, comfortably. And then, “You’re mortal too. Why else would Oz have hired me to kill you?”
“Even gods can die,” he said. “That’s different.”
“Is it? How?”
“We don’t have a, a, a lifespan. There’s no reason for it, dying, it doesn’t come naturally to us.”
The way he said that, it sounded like we mere mortals didn’t quite make sense to him, he couldn’t quite work out why we’d bother. I let my hair hide my smile, and didn’t say anything until I was sure my voice wouldn’t show it.
“You mean it has to be made to happen, like Oz hiring me to do it?”
“Yes. There can be accidents too, there can be self-sacrifice. Mostly we just carry on until we’re stopped, one way or another.”
I thought about Asher, young prince of Hell, torn apart by the Green Man far too soon; and shivered, and gave up wondering about the science of it all, if that conversation could lead us so quickly somewhere that I really didn’t want to be.
Only then I couldn’t think of anything else I’d rather talk about, any safe ground. In my head suddenly it all led back to this, to the two of us sitting on the cold hill’s side because Oz Trumby wanted to kill us both. And I knew about me, I understood that, he was never going to be generous in the face of betrayal; but, “Tell me about Oz and you, then. Why’s he so determined to snuff you out?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Oz doesn’t give reasons, he gives instructions.” And money, and houses, and boats. And Aspects, and safety, of a sort. New identity, whole new me. I didn’t stop to interrogate his motives, I just said
yes
and grabbed what I could. Looking back, I wasn’t any too proud of that. Never mind that I hadn’t followed through; I didn’t mean to cheat him when I signed up. Put plainly, I agreed to be his whore first, and then his assassin. And then I funked it. Or flunked it, whichever.
Dancing a Zippo in your fingers may be cool, but being an assassin is probably cooler. The Woman in Black: I could’ve earned my colours...
Never mind. I thought I was probably happier to be here, nestled in his arms in the fog, waiting for something to happen but feeling oddly safe right now, as though some greater goddess had huffed her misty breath down to cover us, to gift me this morning.
Waiting for Thom’s confession, that too. I really did want to know.
He said, “It’s the same thing, really. Oz wants me dead because I said I was immortal.”
“Wait, what?”
“He did what you did, he thought I was a shapeshifter. He likes shapeshifters. I did... what I do, I told him what I am. He’s been wanting to kill me ever since.”
“That makes no sense. I mean, it’s really annoying to be corrected all the time, but...”
“But it’s not a killing thing, right? But you’re not Oz.”
“Right. Punctured vanity, I can see that.” Everyone knew you had to tread careful around the guy, and Thom just wouldn’t, of course. He wouldn’t know how. “But...” It still didn’t seem enough. Empires can’t thrive on vanity alone. Oz wouldn’t have survived this long if he’d been that petty, there had to be a bigger picture. “What am I missing?”
“I worked for him,” Thom said, which was my biggest surprise of the morning so far.
“You? Come on, you don’t work. We’ve established that. You’re, um, independently situated...” Sitting in a gas plume, burning waste. It was work of a sort, I supposed, though he wasn’t paid for it.
“I don’t have to work, no. There’s always something I can burn. But I was interested, and he was interested in me, so...”
So Thom had gone for it, whatever it was. In a gadfly kind of way, I was guessing: turning up when he felt like it and doing what he fancied, which wouldn’t always – or ever – be exactly what Oz asked for.
Oz would put up with that, for a while. For whatever value Thom brought, for the interest, for the kudos of having a fire-spirit in his service – and for the shapeshifting. That would be the driver. Oz’s constant obsession.
It would be like rubbing his own face in his own failure: that thing he strived for that he could never achieve, the birthright he was denied. After a while, that would have grated like a microplane, sliced like a mandoline, it would have grated blood. And he would’ve kept Thom around regardless, just that little bit too long, as a goad to himself and his people,
this is what I want
; and at last Thom would casually, innocently have snapped the final straw.
Oh, no, I’m not a shapeshifter, I’m divine. I’m immortal.
And then, yes: then Oz would want to kill him. Because that was Oz’s opposite and his other obsession, everything he truly wanted; and because nobody else gets to rub Oz’s face in things, ever; and – well, just because he could. To know that he’d done it. To sneer at Thom’s ashes:
Immortal, huh? How’s that working out for you, eh?
Oz would enjoy that. He’d keep the ashes handy. In fact he’d probably want to work them into his ongoing eternity project, to have them on hand for, well, eternity.
He’d want to do it there and then, only that hadn’t worked out for him. It’s not that easy to kill a fire, all unprepared. Thom got away, or maybe left without even noticing – and Oz mulled it over, thought it through, figured it out. Found me, hired me, sent me to do his work for him.
With instructions to sweep up the ashes and deliver them back to Oz in his lair. I wasn’t making that up.
So I did as I was told, what I was hired for. I swept ashes into a bucket and handed them over at Oz’s, where no doubt they were now all mixed and set and immovable. I collected my payoff in keys and cash, and went my way like a successful assassin, cool and easy with herself – and Oz knew now that they weren’t Thom’s ashes after all, and yes. His first killing impulse might just have been vanity. Now it would be necessary repercussion, and it would fall on both of us, and he would be very serious about it.
I didn’t much want to think about that, so instead I said, “What were you doing for him?” Work? Thom? I was still a little boggled about that.
No. A lot boggled.
He said, “Torchlight. He wanted an eternal flame. Well, he said he did. He wanted someone to tap into a source deep down and give him light everlasting. And who better than me, to find the source and draw it up and set it burning? That’s what he said. Of course I was flattered, and it was fun, chasing down into the dark where no one’s ever been, slithering through cracks between the strata, going deep. There are things down there, caves, stones... No, never mind. You can’t ever see them, I can’t bring them up, I can’t describe them. But they are wonderful.
“And I did what he wanted, I found pockets of gas and oil, and I could have figured out ways to channel them to the surface. I was talking it through with him when he said, and I said, and like that.”
“He called you a shapeshifter, and you said no, I’m divine?”
“Right, that. Something like that. And then – well, then he didn’t want piped gas any more. Then he wanted me, to be his eternal flame. His
living
eternal flame. He wanted to put me in a bottle. And he tried, and I wouldn’t let him. I did some damage, I guess. He didn’t know, he had no idea what I can be like.”
Fiery, hot-tempered, yes. It was always a surprise.
“And then I got out of there, and nothing happened, time passed, I forgot about it.” That was all Thom too, shrug and move on. The opposite of grudge-bearing, the opposite of wary. “And then you came.”
“Yes.” I came to seduce him, which was easy; and then to inveigle my way into his house and his heart, still easy; and then to betray him and murder him, which turned out to be not easy at all. Impossible.
Instead I did the next-hardest thing, persuading him to hide up until I came to fetch him.
Until you’re safe,
I said.
Which he wasn’t, but I’d come anyway and here we were, on a hillside in the fog. With the world rubbed out that way, it was good for confessional, good for looking back. Good, apparently, for sinking into my own fog of nostalgia.
Thom’s home was a lighthouse, and what could be more appropriate, then or now? To him, or to the rest of us?
It stood just offshore, on a lump of rock that was only an island by courtesy, at high tide, and even then you could splash across the causeway if you didn’t mind getting your socks wet. No quicksand, no tidal suck, no danger. The light itself had been declared redundant long since, replaced by an automated beacon further out where the danger lay. The high blunt tower had a little house at its feet, for the keepers it used to need; Thom was in and out of there like a regular human being, dressed and everything. Shopping and everything. And if some nights there was a fierce bright beam from the lantern, well. If you owned a lighthouse and kept it in perfect working order, of course you’d want to light it up, wouldn’t you? It did no harm, on land or at sea; more light is always better.
Sometimes we’d spend all night up there together, him dancing on the wick and playing games with the mirrors and lenses, me snuggled down in a nest of cushions and quilts with a good book, reading by the light of Thom.