The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy (80 page)

“I understand. I’m not happy, but I understand. Oh, the enemies you make—they’re of the highest caliber.”

“Yeah, people keep telling me that. There’s something else,” I say, I clear my throat. My eyes sting, I know I’m barely holding back tears. “Rillman, I killed him.”

Lissa doesn’t look surprised at all. “I know.”

“But—”

“It’s obvious. What were you going to do? Life isn’t a Batman comic,
there’s no Arkham Asylum in our world—though that place was hardly very effective anyway, all they ever did was escape. You didn’t have any choice. Rillman was insane. He’d have kept coming after you until you were dead, probably killing Tim and me in the process.”

“I strangled the bastard. I crushed his life out with my hands, and I enjoyed it.”

“You enjoyed it, or was it HD doing the enjoying?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Hmm, you enjoyed killing the man who had tortured you, had threatened to repeat everything that Morrigan had done to you over again. Steven, you are a monster.”

“But I am a—”

“Bullshit. Have you killed anyone else lately? Are you sneaking out and slicing off heads with that scythe of yours?”

“No.” Even if sometimes—more often than sometimes, if I’m honest—I feel it, roiling away inside me, desperate for blood, death, destruction. “No.”

“And you never will. Steven, you contain the Hungry Death inside you. And I won’t lie to you, there are moments that I can see the homicidal prick staring out, but it’s never there for long, and it’s never alone. I know that you’re always standing behind it, or driving it back. You’re stronger than it is. You’ve proven yourself stronger than it. Don’t you see that? If after everything that had happened you had lost control, gone on a killing rampage, wiped out a continent or two, yes, then I would have a little trouble forgiving you—but you didn’t. You stopped at Rillman.” She touches my face. “You were given this thing, without wanting it at all. But I’m proud how you have stepped up. And keep stepping up.”

“Thank you. But it still hurts. It still shocks me that I could do it. Mr. D’s disappointment…”

“Mr. D was the one who hurled Rillman’s wife back to Hell, and
remember he once pulled off a successful Schism himself. He started all of this. He’s hardly in a position of moral superiority. You did what you had to do, and you always will.”

She pecks me on the cheek and walks back to the food. I follow her to get out the plates. How wonderful is my girl? So forgiving, so wise, and with an appreciation of classic comics. I know how lucky I am. Maybe it’s time. I clear my throat, hands shaking as I put down the plates.

“Killed Rillman,” she says with a wry chuckle, eyes burning into my soul. “Phew, for a minute there I thought you were going to ask me to marry you.”

We eat dinner, barely, before Lissa drags me to the bedroom, and proves she doesn’t find me monstrous—twice.

Afterward she lies on my chest. I can still taste her. The room smells of us. The warmth of her and her presence is so reassuring and so vital. Right now, with her holding me, I can almost imagine that I’m alive. Even HD is merely a shadow, ill-defined at the back of my cells.

“What do you think the end of the world will be like?” Lissa asks.

“I don’t know, something between radio static and Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road
?”

Lissa sighs. “But that wasn’t really the end of the world though was it, just the road toward it, the road we’re all on. It’s so like you to imagine noise.”

“What do you think it will be like?” I can feel HD uncoiling, interest growing. It’s an odd tingling sensation, not that far from arousal.

“Beautiful and terrible at once. Nothing we can ever see, except maybe you. And it will be silent, so silent, not a breath of wind, nothing stirring, nothing moving, and nothing growing: silence given form forever.”

“Sounds kind of nice,” I say.

“You wouldn’t like it,” Lissa says.

“But you would?” She’s right. I do like my noise. I think of the frozen Styx and how its silence had discomforted me.

She doesn’t answer me. And soon she’s asleep.

I listen to her breathing, that’s a sound I adore, her heartbeat slowing with it, but remaining indisputedly hers. Sleep really isn’t for me anymore, but sometimes, when I let them and the stars or the moon or whatever are in alignment those twin sounds can guide me there.

Slowly and steadily I follow her breath and her beating heart.

I dream.

Blood, a whole sea of it, a wave crashing down on me and mine. Lissa’s motionless beside me. Her wrists are open. Her face is the blue of the dead, the recently bled. There’s no life to give her any other color. I can’t hear her heart beating. I can’t hear anyone’s. Even the waves are silent.

Then soundlessly and slowly bicycles fall. The first one smashes down beside me, sinks into the sanguine sea. The second knocks Lissa from my hands, and I’m scrambling through blood to find her. I catch a glimpse of her face. Reach out, but she is gone.

I wake with a jolt. Lissa wakes with me, her heartbeat thudding in my skull.

Thank Christ.

“It’s all right,” I say, quietly. “Go back to sleep.”

“Another dream?”

“Yeah, another one.” The clock by her bed, a ruby luminescence—5:30. The sky is lightening outside, though dawn’s at least an hour away. I kiss her gently on the forehead. “I have to go,” I say.

Lissa grabs my hand. “What you told me,” Lissa says, not sounding nearly as sleepy as I would expect, “is that your last secret?”

“Yeah, it’s my last.”

Lissa grins. “Haven’t had time to find some new ones yet? Steve,
we’re all secrets and lies and truth and love. And I know that you love me, that much isn’t a lie.”

“And what about you?”

“What do you think?”

I kiss her one last time. Lissa doesn’t tell me to be careful. We both know where I’m going and there’s nothing careful about that.

F
ive forty-five a.m. and I’m standing on top of the Story Bridge, sipping Bundy Rum out of a flask, looking down at the sporadic early-morning traffic and the river beneath. To the left of me is Kangaroo Point, to the right Fortitude Valley—too many drunk nights spent in the pubs and clubs of the latter. Here, I am above it all, at the point where North and South Brisbane meet. There’s power here, all of it balanced on this steel bridge. And here, as night begins its transition to day, it expresses itself as an ache in my bones. HD thrashes back and forth inside me like a great white shark trapped in a goldfish bowl.

The bridge thrums, the steel shifts, almost imperceptibly as the day begins to warm. The sun is a while off, but the bridge is getting ready for it.

I picked the bridge because it gives me height and sight, and it’s water-bound and water-crossing without being of the sea. Seems like a neutral enough sort of location for a one-on-one with the Death of the Water.

A wind blows down the river, somehow sharpened by the skyline behind me. The chill slices through my suit. A couple more mouthfuls of my rum and it’s not such a problem. Maybe I shouldn’t be drinking before setting up this meeting, but I can’t remember a meeting that I’ve attended in the last five months where I haven’t had at least a little to drink.

It’s not like I don’t have it under control or anything.

The wind drives the early morning mist before it in billowing ripples of gray. It’ll be another hour or two until the sun burns it all away. Buildings jut out of the gray like the apocalypse has already happened. Lights wink. Above me planes circle, waiting out the mist, or being redirected to the Gold Coast.

More rum, and I unlock my phone, clear my throat, and tap in the number. It doesn’t ring, there’s nothing but the sound of the wind blowing through my mouthpiece. Wouldn’t it be nice, for once, to get a warm greeting on a phone call with a supernatural entity? I’m the one that’s supposed to be grim.

“Right then,” I say. “I’m ready to talk. Here, or somewhere neutral, a place of your choosing.”

I hang up, and I know that it’s heard me at once. There’s noise before sight, the whole bridge thrums in time with it. A dim hissing that grows with each beat of the World Pulse.

Right. This is enough.

How dare the Death of the Water think it can waltz (well, twist) in here and start doing things like this? The sea, the ocean, that is its territory. This thread of river is mine, no matter how it feeds into the sea. It’s mine, and my opposite should know better.

Yeah, like I should have known better when I snatched those 150 souls from the sea.

As much as Tim would like to think not, I am aware of the statistics. There have been 149 deaths by drowning around the coast in the last few months. None of them were meant to happen—all of them were unscheduled.

This has to stop. If I can save just one soul from going to the Death of the Water, I will. I’m stubborn, yes, but de Selbys always are.

I quickly text Lissa, tell her I’ll be back as soon as I can. Then jump to the top of the handrail and watch the waterspout draw near. The traffic beneath me is at a standstill. The waterspout sways. It dances.

“So you want to chat here?” I say.

The waterspout is silent. It sways cobralike a few meters before the bridge, an angry storm narrowed to one slender point. A cold spray of water drenches me.

“What the hell is this passive aggressive shit anyway? We’re both adults here. Surely we can…Ah, fuck it!” I don’t know I’m going to do it, until I do.

I leap off the bridge and into the swirling water, turning my head at the last moment to catch a glimpse of my city. The buildings shine in the early-morning light, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m saying goodbye for the last time.

There’s a flash, a sensation of burning and stretching similar to a shift, but I’m not doing it. Then I am somewhere else. Water, colder, deeper. I know it towers above me, that it stretches away from me, from shore to shore. A weight that would crush the life from anything of the earth. But I am not alive. Not really, I am the opposite of that. Doesn’t stop the pressure. I creak in ways alarming.

My hands are wrenched back, hard enough that my arms are nearly pulled from their sockets. A hood slides over my head and what feel like plastic ties are tightened around my wrists. Hands grip my biceps firmly and easily.

My lungs are painfully, but uselessly, full, and, for a moment, I panic. Then I give in to it. Stop fighting, and, while I don’t exactly breathe, something’s going on within me with enough vitality that I don’t black out. HD swells to replace my air. He’s keeping me alive, pushing against the pressure of the sea. Sometimes the homicidal bastard comes in handy

Water all around me. Somewhere nearby whales are singing. Songs of predation, love, lust and war. In the water, at these depths, I can’t see, but I can feel vast presences slide past me. Shifts in pressure, moments of deeper cold. The small hairs rise along the back of my neck, and I remember how insignificant I am.

I’m glad I sent Lissa a text. There’s no way this is going to go well.

I blink sightlessly into the dark. I can’t speak. I can’t breathe, but my feet are touching the bottom of the ocean. Something nudges my back. I stumble forward.

“Walk or stay here forever,” a voice whispers in my ear.

Handcuffed and hooded at the bottom of the sea isn’t good. But this voice, that’s a whole new level of not-goodness.

There’s more pushing, jabbing really, rough and cruel.

I walk, lungs, nose, lips filled with the briny muck of the sea. The ground sucks at my boots, sometimes I sink so deep that I have to be pulled out. Things brush against me, and I stumble frequently, but I keep walking.

I’ve a meeting with the Death of the Water.

In that deep and heavy cold I move. Every step is a slow one. The water pushes down with a steely pressure, though sometimes I can feel a wind brushing against my face, a sense of strolling through open airless spaces.

I don’t know how long we travel. But there are interludes, brief moments where the hood is snatched away and I’m led to examine machines the size of mountains that throb with energies that I recognize, but can’t even begin to understand.

Figures move over these terrible engines, glowing softly blue, working ceaselessly upon them. And I feel like I’m in some sort of poem by William Blake mashed up with the
Matrix
and, God help me,
Sea Quest
. I may be Orcus, but I am a child of television.

I try and shift, but can’t, the water itself is holding me here, resisting my will with an implacable strength. HD rumbles inside me. Mumbling. I feel it strain with the pressures of keeping me whole. I creak, my teeth ache and my feet rot. I trudge, sometimes knee-deep, through the silt and seepage. I’ve visions too, of blood, of ships sliding and sinking into the depths. Of boulders as big as cities, trailing forests of kelp fronds that extend for hundreds of meters, circling each other like the mechanism of some monstrous organic engine.

And souls, so many souls, shackled to these great machines, keeping them moving, working with and against the currents. Stone and fire. There’s a beat to them much like the creaking of the One Tree, and now I recognize it, it’s hard to miss.