Chasing the Moon (29 page)

Sharon drove on autopilot. She paid just enough attention to traffic to avoid getting into an accident, although there were several close calls. She slammed on the brakes, barely avoiding a collision with the taxi in front of her.

“C’mon, you ass.” She honked the horn twice.

“Is something wrong?” asked Calvin.

“Yes.” She let the horn blare for a good three seconds. “People need to learn to drive in this city. That’s the problem.”

“Mmm-hmm. You do realize the light is red, right?”

Sharon swore. She wrung the steering wheel in her whiteknuckled grip. She continued to glare alternately at the taxi and at the light for standing in her way, though if she’d reflected on it, she was in no rush.

“Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?” he asked.

“Everything’s fine,” she said. “Why would anything be wrong?”

“Okay.”

“Everything is perfect.” Her voice was flat. “Everything’s wonderful. Everything is just the way it’s supposed to be.”

“Okay.”

The car behind her honked its horn. She stuck her arm out the window and flipped him off.

“Light’s red, genius.”

“Actually…”

Calvin didn’t need to finish the sentence. The light had changed several seconds ago. The welcoming intersection beckoned. She pressed the gas pedal too roughly and their car lurched through with a screech.

“So nothing’s wrong?” asked Calvin.

“No. Nothing’s wrong. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because you almost ran over that guy in the last intersection.”

“I had the light.”

“He was blind.”

Her jaw tightened. “So, he had a dog, didn’t he? If he got hit, don’t blame me. Blame the dog.”

“Uh-huh. You should probably pull over before you kill somebody.”

“Why bother?”

She took a turn too sharply and bounced off the curb, nearly clipping a small gathering of pedestrians.

“Pull over.” He spoke with quiet authority. He didn’t give
orders often, and it got her attention. She pulled into a parking lot. He reached over, turned off the car, and took the keys.

“Maybe I should drive.”

“You don’t know how.”

“You could teach me.”

He smiled. She didn’t.

“Maybe I have better things to do than take care of you,” she said.

“Whoa. Where did that come from?”

Sharon drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She kept her eyes straight ahead. If she looked at him, she couldn’t stay mad. She cared for him too much. Hell, she might’ve even loved him, and the ridiculousness of the idea made her smile humorlessly.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“You. No. You never do anything wrong.”

And he didn’t. He couldn’t do anything wrong because he wasn’t human. He was so far beyond human that you might as well call a hurricane wrong. Or label an asteroid malicious just for wiping out the dinosaurs. If he was to destroy the world, wasn’t that within his rights?

Except he didn’t do that. He never hurt anyone. He was the gentlest soul she’d ever come across, and while some might think it easy to be kind when you had no needs or wants, when you were immortal, invulnerable, and so above the petty squabbles of this world, Sharon suspected the opposite was true. She’d imagined herself in his position before, and it always ended with her going mad at all the insignificant specks buzzing around her, crushing them and their cities in her rage.

She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

He made the ill-defined noise he reserved for those moments when human behavior escaped him.

“It’s my problem,” she said. “I just didn’t expect for it to come so soon. I thought we’d have more time.”

If she’d admitted it, she hadn’t expected this moment to come at all. She’d known that Calvin would leave one day. But considering the miserably short life span of humans, she’d always assumed that the day would be long after she’d died. Greg had always said it would be soon, but she’d just attributed that to the necessity of running a cult. You couldn’t tell people the end of time was a thousand years away. It wasn’t what they wanted to hear. People wanted front-row seats to the big show.

She apologized again. “I’m just being stupid. I know you need to go, and I should just be glad to have known you. It’s more than I deserved.”

“Hey, I won’t hear any of that,” he said. “This means something to me too. You’re more than just the lady who takes care of my laundry.”

“You’re just saying that.”

Calvin put a hand to her cheek and turned her face toward his.

“You’re special.”

“There are a million people out there just like me,” she said.

“Maybe. But when the time comes, I won’t remember any of them.”

“I bet you say that to all your laundry ladies.”

She didn’t know if she believed him, but just that he’d said it made her feel better.

* * *

When they got home Sharon shut herself in the bathroom and called Greg. He answered the phone. He always answered, day or night, always him and not some underling. Greg, for all his faults, took the business of the Chosen as sacred and not to be shirked. He answered with his usual aplomb.

“Yello.”

Sharon sat on the toilet and explained the Diana situation.

“I see. And how did she find out?”

“I don’t know. She just did. She had this eyeball entity with her, and it couldn’t stop staring at Calvin. I think it can see things and gives her the power to see things.”

“Interesting.”

“I told her you’d talk to her. Tomorrow.”

“Well, I don’t know if you recall, but I’ll be rather busy tomorrow.”

“I know, but I did promise her.”

“Promises won’t mean much in the future.”

“Yes, but they mean something now.”

“I have a lot on my plate.”

Sharon said, “But what if she interferes? She is a warden. She has entities of her own.”

“Now you’re just ing absurd. Fenris has nothing to fear from whatever influence she’s amassed. Nothing can stop the future.”

“I know, but you can at least consider it. One last convert, one last soul to save.”

“If she has her own link to the greater universe, she’s already saved.”

Sharon swore. She despised that he was right.

“I’d like her to understand better, once it’s all over.”

“Her understanding won’t matter to you, once it’s all over.”

“But it matters to me now.”

“Sharon, I just don’t see the point.”

“I’m asking, Greg. That’s the point. I’ve been contributing to this venture for years now, and I’ve never asked for any favors. This is my favor. You don’t want to go into the future with a debt hanging over you, do you?”

“Debts won’t matter in the—”

“Goddamn it, Greg.”

He was silent for a few moments.

“Okay. We’ll arrange a meeting.”

“Thank you.”

She hung up and stared at the bronze cast of a crescent moon with a human face and a great big smile hanging beside the bathroom mirror. For the first time in a long time, she saw the smile as the grim grin of a dangerous universe.

Diana found West on a ladder, changing smoke detector batteries in the hall.

“Hi,” she said.

He grunted.

“You’re not busy, are you?” she asked.

“Just taking care of a few things, Number Five.”

He descended, and she helpfully held the ladder.

“I’m not distracting you? Because if this is important…”

He grabbed the ladder, moved it a few feet down the hall, and climbed it again. There were a surprising number of detectors. So many that West had a paper bag full of batteries in his right hand to replace them all.

“These aren’t like cosmic smoke detectors or anything?” she asked. “It’s not like if the batteries die in them the universe blows up, right?”

“Nope. Just being safe. Can never be too safe.”

“Oh, good.” She laughed to herself. It was silly to think everything West did had grand importance. It was ridiculous to assume that everything in the apartment building was connected by invisible strings to something vital to the universe outside.

He climbed down and repeated the short journey down the hall to another detector. She tried to be helpful and pointed out he’d missed one.

West stopped and wheeled upon her with unexpected energy. “We leave that one alone, Number Five. We don’t ever change the batteries in that one. No matter how often it chirps for them.”

The detector beeped.

He glared at it. “Shut up.”

It chirped louder.

“Just ignore it,” said West.

Diana pondered the small white disk affixed over her head. What great and terrible effect would it have if she slipped in while West wasn’t looking and popped in fresh batteries?

She wanted to know. She blamed Zap’s transferred curiosity, but it was deeper than that. The mind detested mysteries. It liked things to make sense or at least be predictable. It was human nature. It was why some people became scientists, theologians, philosophers, dedicating themselves to exploring those mysteries, and why most others took the easy way out and resolutely pretended those mysteries didn’t exist. But her species hadn’t crawled its way to civilization by
not
thinking about things, analyzing them, tearing them apart, putting
them back together in fanciful, experimental combinations just to see what happened. Zap’s influence had only amplified her natural inquisitiveness.

It wasn’t all her and Zap, though. The smoke detector itself whispered temptations to her. She’d gotten used to those types of whispers and pushed them aside, along with her questions.

She made herself useful by holding West’s ladder as he crept down the hall.

“I need your help. I don’t know who else to talk to this about, and I thought you might have a useful perspective.”

He grunted.

“You help people, right? You keep the universe running and all that, right?”

“Not exactly.”

“But I’ve seen you do it. I’ve helped you.”

He nodded. “I keep a few things in check. Nothing terribly important, though.”

“Not important? If not for you the world would be crawling with giant bugs from the future or we’d all be floating around in space.”

“Those things would take care of themselves regardless. Or not. It’s not as if it matters much in the long run.”

The conversation paused as they moved to the next detector.

“Doesn’t matter? How can you say that? People would be dead without you. Heck, they might not have ever existed if not for you.”

He leaned against the ladder. “And if they never had, who would notice?”

“You can’t be that indifferent. Otherwise why would you do this job?”

“That’s a strange question. Why does anyone do anything? Why does anyone take a bath when they know they’re just going to get dirty again? Why does anyone eat when they know they’re just going to be hungry again? Over and over again until eventually they die. And they will die. So why go to the doctor when you’re sick? It’s only postponing the inevitable. But at least it’s something to do while waiting for the inevitable to happen.”