Never (13 page)

The red of Eir's cheeks deepened. “Hush,” she said. “Save your strength, stay as comfortable as you can. Your time is soon.”

“You hear these words from the lips of all dying men, I'm sure, but if I can hold your hand,” Piotr's father replied seriously, reaching up one bloodied hand to stroke her pale cheek, “I would willingly travel to the black places and back. For the touch of your lips, I would do even more.”

Eir flushed. “Hush,” she said again, but her color was deep, and Wendy could see Eir's pulse throbbing at the base of her throat. Eir shifted in place and it dawned on Wendy that Eir wasn't playing hard to get…she was actually overwhelmed by his compliments.

“He's raving,” the youngest brother said. “We should help him to meet our great-grandfathers in the quiet fields. This…what we are doing has no honor—carrying him back on his enemy's broken shield. Grandfather would be most displea—”

“Quiet, Kirill,” the oldest commanded, flicking a contemptuous glance at his younger brother. “If it weren't for your foolish bravado in battle, Borys would not be so wounded. And Grandfather was not a man to worship so. Shut your mouth or I will shut it for you.”

Kirill rolled his eyes and, despite the gravity of the situation, Wendy smothered a smile. Their bickering was just so much like the way she and Jon and Chel…Wendy felt her smile fade. Jon. Chel. It was starting to really bother her now, that she was trapped in this memory with no easy seashell door to escape through. The concern slammed into her again, leaving her breathless. She turned to ask Piotr if they could leave, if he could share this memory some other time, but beside her, Piotr's expression was startlingly grim.

Wendy decided to bide her time for at least a few minutes more.

“And now it comes,” Piotr said as the begrudging silence between the brothers was broken by a whinny.

The men who topped the rise were just as bedraggled and bloodied as the brothers. Their clothing was just as mended and worn, their weapons just as dinged, yet Wendy got a sense from them that these newcomers were not farmers. These were desperate men.

The one in the lead, holding the corded strip of leather that was serving as a bridle, greeted them first.

“Ho, travelers! We are weary and wish to rest. May you spare a bit of room around your fire?”

“You may have it,” the eldest brother said curtly. “I am sorry, we have snuffed the embers, but the clearing is still dry, the ground still warm from our fire. It should not be hard to light again, and there is a cache of deadwood just over there, in the shade of that fallen ash.”

“May I give you a kiss?” Borys whispered to Eir as she, standing beside his travois, reached down to grip his hand, comforting him. “Such a little thing, from a kind lady as lovely as yourself.”

He winked and Eir, flushing, rolled her eyes and chuckled. “You are a flirt, sir,” she said, fingers plucking at the necklace at her neck. “The Winged Ones do not kiss flirts.”

“Oh, would you prefer me to be proper?” Borys asked, smiling wider, sensing that he'd caught her attention. “To woo you as a lady like yourself deserves? To fly to your palace in the sky and beg on bended knee for just a touch of your hand, a single press of your lips? No, no, you are wilder than that—I can see it in your eyes. You know the truth of things. You know the way a true heart beats, with passion, seeking to sink into the earth and, raining salt-tears, become one with the sky.”

She blushed brighter red, nearly scarlet from temple to collar now. “Hush! You have a flapping mouth.”

“Then my lips have had much exercise,” he joked. “Perhaps you'd like to test their strength?”

Wendy, so caught up in their flirting, missed whatever was said between the brothers and the newcomers. Suddenly weapons were drawn and the two groups were hacking at one another violently.
Kirill, stabbed through the shoulder, stumbled into the brush as his attacker turned and spotted Borys, still holding on to Eir's hand.

“One kiss,” Borys whispered quickly. “Please, lady, before he has my head split apart.”

“All these Westerners are madmen,” the soldier snarled and, flinging his sword to his feet, drew the dagger at his hip. “They even haul their dead home!”

Eir, sensing his movement, paled and, in one fluid motion Wendy could hardly follow, struck out with a spear of Light so bright that Wendy's eyes gushed water; she was temporarily blinded.

When her sight returned, Wendy was stunned to find that Eir had killed all the attackers—smoking holes pierced their centers through. The older brothers likewise lay strewn on the ground; all the soldiers were dead save for Kirill. Kirill crawled from the bush with his shoulder still streaming blood and another rivulet dripping from his dark, bruising temple.

“Wow,” Wendy said, mentally stumbling for the right phrase to describe what had just transpired. “That was…amazing. She's got moves like Emma. Or Jane. That was just…dude. Wow.”

“This just…I'm such a silly fool,” Eir sighed, resting her hands on her hips as she surveyed her handiwork. “I've made a mess of things, haven't I? And for what? A man? My sisters are going to mock me for months.”

“You saved me,” Borys whispered to Eir, holding up his hand, reaching for her. “I may be only a man, but thank you. Thank you so much.”

“No, I really didn't,” Kirill groaned, staggering to the eldest brother and resting his head on his brother's chest. “He's dead. They're all dead.” Kirill coughed. “Borys, what happened?”

“Kirill, it was fantastic! It was—” Eir pressed a finger to her lips,
shhh
ing Borys, and shook her head. Borys, understanding, shook his own head.

“Well, Borys?” Kirill asked impatiently. “What happened?”

“Mykola was overwhelmed with an insane, protective fury,” Borys improvised, gesturing to the oldest brother. “He ran them all through, spinning wildly and screaming like you've never heard, and then collapsed himself.”

“He's dead,” Kirill said again and flopped back into the snow. “Oh, Borys. What are we to do?”

“Well, hell, that's a good question,” Wendy said. “What do you do when your invisible girlfriend straight up assassinates a bunch of dudes just to keep you breathing? I mean…was she supposed to kill them?”

“Save for Kirill, they were all due to die in that battle,” Piotr said, examining his mother's face. “My mother did nothing untoward but cut their lives a few minutes shorter. Unusual—Reapers generally collect souls, not end lives—but in this case it is allowed. Their time was up either way.”

“We go home,” Borys answered Kirill as Eir knelt beside him and whispered in his ear. Her left hand hovered over his stomach, her hair dangled against his cheek, copper-bright against the bluing-pale flesh. “Or as close as we can manage. And then we rest, Kirill, in the bier where our ancestors sleep in the quiet fields.”

Using the cleanest cloak he could find, Kirill tore strips off to bind his shoulder. He spat in the snow. “For a madman, you make good sense.”

Rolling over so the cloak spread over him fell free, Borys struggled to smile, though Wendy couldn't believe that the man could move at all. He'd been split from gut to ribs; she could see shiny loops of intestine peeking through the flayed flesh. She fought to keep her gorge down.

Borys coughed. “They say the mad and the dead speak with the gods. I think I have good council.”

The fog crept in and Piotr was at Wendy's side once more; expression flat, eyes tired. Wordlessly, he pulled her to him, crushing the bloom between them, and kissed Wendy's eyelids.

She closed her eyes.

Ten minutes later, still shaken, Wendy was guided upstairs to meet Frank. He was playing poker for a pile of dead guns and shining silver knives, surrounded by his Council cronies. A battered cardboard box, once the packaging for tiny Japanese stuffed pigs, held a smaller motley of items—single bullets of all shapes and sizes—and Frank had a huge haul in front of him. He, unlike most of the elegantly clad spirits around him, wore a simple blue chambray work shirt and a pair of khaki pants over heavy boots. His dark hair was smoothed back and, unlike the others, Frank was not drinking.

“Hello Frank,” Piotr said, as Frank set down his cards and led them to an employee break room off the kitchen, away from the throbbing music and crush of ghosts dancing in the dining room. The side wall had an impromptu bar set up in the Never. A long stretch of the outside wall was glassed in; the San Francisco lights glittered in the darkness, brilliant and shining against the black expanse of the bay. Only the barely-visible edge of the spirit web broke the beautiful expanse. “As requested, I have brought Wendy to meet you.”

“I'm not blind,” Frank chuckled. “So you're the Lightbringer.”

Frank scratched his chin, eyeing Wendy, and gestured to the woman barely wearing a collection of sparkly red scraps who followed closely behind him, acting as a bodyguard. “Here, honey, neither of these two mean me any harm. Do me a favor and go finish up for me.”

Turning fluidly, the scarlet-clad lady returned to the table, picked up his cards, chuckled, and flashed the rest of the table a smirk. Then she confidently reached for the line of knives Frank had assembled before him.

“I'm out,” said a tall black man in Navy whites, folding his
cards on the table. “Damn.” The others scrambled to follow suit. The slinky woman grinned as she collected Frank's haul and wiggled her fingers in Wendy's direction, waving coquettishly.

“Frank! You want me to deal again, or is it break time?” The dealer was a weedy-looking man in an ill-fitting tux. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the din.

Leaning in the doorway of the breakroom, Frank ignored him and addressed Wendy. “You're lookin’ a little dead to me, kid. Are you feeling well?”

“Coma,” Wendy replied coolly. “It won't last. I'll wake up in no time.”

Chuckling, Frank straightened and flapped a hand at the nearby waiting spirits. “Council's adjourned for the night, folks. Close up shop and we'll meet up again tomorrow, sort out the territory issue down out in San Jose. Danny! Don't forget bullet inventory.”

Surreptitiously, Wendy's fingers snaked to her side where one of Elle's knives sat snugly hidden. To her quiet relief, the Council spirits didn't approach. They—and all the other spirits hovering nearby with drinks at the ready—filed out the walls and doors, vanishing rapidly from the room as the dealer and the sparkly-dressed woman guided them quickly away.

“Neat trick,” Wendy said, forcing a smile and dropping her hand from her hip. She was still shaky and on edge—Ada's face, Piotr's memories—all of it tangled together in her head and made concentrating on Frank difficult.

“Hmm,” Frank said, threading his fingers over his chest and tilting his head back, not even bothering to hide his slow, intense perusal of Wendy from head to toe. After long moments he settled in a nearby chair, flopping down and crossing one leg over the other. “You're a looker, but even a blind man could see that you aren't your mother. Not by a long shot.”

Eyes narrowing, Wendy pulled out the chair across the table from Frank. “Piotr tells me that you knew her.”

Frank rubbed his chin and smirked. “You could say that. We were business associates.”

He shifted in his seat, expression soft and hazy, his gaze somewhere past Wendy's left shoulder. Frank's lips twitched and Wendy was struck with the sudden and unwelcome realization that he had
had feelings for her mother
. It was all over him, the way he said her name, the pleasant crinkling of the fine mesh of lines in the corner of his eyes. Square-jawed, broken-nosed Frank wasn't a strictly handsome guy, but when he spoke of her mother it was like a light lit up within him; reminiscing about Mary made Frank almost glow.

Chewing over this new information, Wendy almost missed Frank clear his throat and snap back to the conversation. “Mary was…a nice lady. A real class act.”

“Whose idea was it to team up?” Wendy asked archly.

Frank's smirk faded. “It was hers,” he said. “No spirit's crazy enough to seek out a Reaper, kid, even one rumored to be pissed at her
familia
. Not even the sickest Walker gets close to a Reaper unless they have to.”

“So, if no ghost gets close to Reapers unless they're loco,” Wendy glanced at Piotr who smirked and waved back at her with two fingers, “how did my mom get you all to partner up?”

“With guile.” He snorted. “You know about your ex-aunt, correct?”

“Tracey, yeah,” Wendy said. “I know she existed. Mom never talked about her much. I also know the Reapers had her killed.”

“Not the Reapers, Lightbringer.
Elise
. Elise had Tracey killed.”

“What? Elise wouldn't…” Wendy paused. “Actually, no, she totally would.” Rubbing a hand across her eyes, Wendy sighed deeply. “Why? Why did Elise have my aunt knocked off?”

“That I can't answer for sure,” Frank said, shrugging. “Who knows the reasoning behind what Elise does? All I
can
say is that she forced your mother to do the deed.”

Piotr spoke then, quietly, so that Wendy had to strain to hear.
“All my information is secondhand, but Tracey had begun to question the Reapers, the way Elise was running the family while Alonya—your Nana Moses, as Eddie calls her—was gone. She…she had great concerns that the Reapers…for whatever reason they were granted their powers…that the reason had grown perverted over the centuries.”

“Does questioning the status quo sound familiar, Lightbringer?” Frank asked lazily. “Sound like anyone you happen to be by any chance?”

“Tracey was like me?” Wendy asked, turning that news over in her head. “You're saying that she didn't want to reap ghosts just because they were dead…she wanted something more? She wanted to know
why
they had to reap ghosts?”

Frank tapped his fingertips against the tabletop. “Bingo! Award the lady a kewpie doll!”

“Elise must have been pissed,” Wendy murmured. It all sounded distressingly familiar. “Tracey messed up somehow, right? She crossed some mysterious Reaper line way past just asking annoying, inconvenient questions.”

“Keeey-rect!” Frank took a deep swallow of his drink. “So Tracey died, per orders, but before she kicked it Tracey made Mary promise to stay strong and lay low. Mary didn't want to at first, but eventually she went along with it. Revenge kept Mary ticking. She wanted to see Elise suffer.”

“That doesn't sound like my mother,” Wendy protested, though a niggling voice in the back of her mind disagreed.
It might not sound like Mom, but it sure sounds like the White Lady.

The Lady Walker had said something similar, hadn't she? That there was more to Mary than met the eye?

As if sensing Wendy's disquiet, Frank shrugged nonchalantly, rasping a hand down the stubble on his cheek. “Mothers have a way of presenting themselves, don't they? Everything has to look smooth and effortless-like. It's only when things start heading south that
people notice that Mom's too busy to bother. I don't see why Mary'd be any different from any other momma ever.”

That
, at least, did sound like her mom. Wendy frowned. “For you guys it must have come out of the blue, Mom leaving the fold like that. Did you think she was spying for Elise, at first?”

“Of course. Wouldn't you?”

“What made the Council give Mom a chance, then? I mean, if I thought someone was spying for Elise, I'd tell them to hit the road.”

“Ada convinced us to give her a shot. She was head of the Council back then, and she ran the city like one of her labs: tight and secure.” Frank moodily looked out the window. “Mary must've come here every day for a month before Ada'd even speak to her. If it were me, I would've reaped the lot of us out of frustration, but Mary was a persistent little thing—patient, determined. She kept coming back.”

Frank rose and poured himself a drink. “Can I offer you a beer? It's crap on tap, but it's the best we can salvage.”

“No, thank you.”

“Suit yourself.” Taking a long, deep draught of his beer, Frank grimaced at the taste. “More for me.”

“Why did Ada finally cave?” Wendy asked. “Persistence is one thing but…it doesn't seem like her to let sheer stubbornness win the day.”

Drinking the dregs of his beer, Frank closed his eyes and grimaced. “You. Mary convinced Ada that she was on our side by introducing Ada—and later the Council—to you.”

“I don't like the look of those clouds,” Eddie said, leaning against the trunk of the car and crossing his arms. The cold was biting, and a sharp wind scudded across the driveway, bringing with it the scent of wet decay and spoiled vegetation. He shivered. “And that…stuff…that's buzzing around the hole up there. What the heck
is
it?”

“If we had the answer to that, I doubt any of us'd be hanging out around here, now would we?” Elle replied.

They'd been waiting for Wendy and Piotr for fifteen minutes already and Eddie could tell that Elle was restless. She'd slid through the car door and perched, kneeling, on the roof, bow drawn and arrows lined in a row by her knee.

A gull wheeled overhead. Elle notched an arrow and aimed.

“Be still, Elle,” Lily said, resting a hand on Elle's elbow and settling beside her on the roof of the car. Lily's hair, loose for once, was whipping in the powerful wind. Eddie was tempted to reach out and let the ends brush the palm of his hand but he didn't want to be a creeper and besides, he and Lily still hadn't a chance to talk about the kiss they'd shared before. Eddie loved Wendy with all his heart but he wasn't stupid and he wasn't going to be the pathetic, clingy friend-zoned dude that hung around and waited for his chance—if Wendy's choice was definitely made then he needed to reassess…well, everything. Lily might be a part of that.

“It's probably a spy for the Reapers,” Elle protested, but relaxed her draw, allowing the arrow's tip to point down.

“Perhaps,” Lily murmured, drawing one of her blades and eyeing the honed edge, testing the sharpness with the edge of her thumb. “But we have other troubles.”

“Walkers!” Jon yelled from the driver's seat, the sudden noise from below making Eddie jump. His door slammed as he rushed around the side of the car and pounded the roof with one hand. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy; Jon had taken the opportunity to doze while they were parked. “Walkers, six o'clock! Where's Chel?!”

“She went in to the ladies—probably powdering her nose,” Elle replied coolly. “This is more like it!” Elle crowed, sighting the first Walker. “Good, old-fashioned monsters. I was getting so sick of thinking Walkers!” Eddie could see the bright glee in her eyes as she fluidly straightened and drew. Her arrow whizzed past Jon's left ear and embedded itself in the closest Walker's chest. The Walker staggered back a few steps but then continued forward, dragging a mutilated leg behind. Its face was sloughing off, its right arm was
half-gone, but still the Walker shambled toward them with a mindless efficiency.

“Nice to know you prefer a zombie over a dude you can reason with,” Eddie growled, wondering if Piotr had left a knife or stick or
something
he could defend himself with.

“You can't reason with Walkers,” Elle retorted, letting the arrow fly. It drifted due to the wind but still shot the Walker through the left eye with a slick, wet pop. “All you can do is put ’em out of their misery!”

“These are not entirely mindless,” Lily noted, dropping down from the roof of the car, her knives drawn. “They are still traveling in packs.”

Moving to take her place, Eddie hauled himself on the trunk to get a better view. “There's like a dozen of them,” he moaned, squinting through the dark. “Jon! Go get Chel! Hurry!”

Jon only got three steps toward the front door of the hotel before the Walkers closed rank. There was no way to get past them without one of the Walkers grabbing him.

“I can't!” Jon yelled, weaving side to side on the balls of his feet like a forward looking for an opening. “They're too close!”

“Here,” Lily said, slapping Eddie on the shin. She held up a blade. “Take this.”

Glad that she had his back, Eddie nodded and took the weapon, holding it inexpertly. Lily's blades were heavy and sharp; he felt as if he were going to slice his own fingers off. “Thank you.”

“Be careful. Our business is not complete,” Lily said and with a flash of heat Eddie remembered the brief feeling of her lips pressing against his, the pulse of her essence pouring into him and healing him. Lily's aid had been temporary—Eddie knew he'd already begun to fade at the edges again—but it had been given freely.

“Thank you,” he said again, meaningfully.

Lily spared him a bare nod, but the closest Walker was upon them and she had no time to talk. Lily leapt forward, knife slashing,
and Eddie felt a chill bloom behind him. He spun and spotted the Walker who'd snuck up on them, using the bushes of the hotel's landscaping as cover. This one was not nearly as ugly as the others; the Walker had been young when he'd died—no more than twenty, possibly twenty-two—and through the rot Eddie could make out the ghosts of acne the Walker had died with spattering across its cheekbones and chin.