Death
David waits until his strange housemate has removed herself to her room and shut the door.
Even after he hears it click firmly home, he stays where he is for a count of twenty, giving her the opportunity to come out again if she feels the need.
She doesn’t reappear. He exhales as he swallows the last bite of his convenience-store pie, creating a momentary paradox where his body can’t decide whether or not it’s choking, then wipes his hands on his sweatpants and starts toward the couch with great strides of his long legs.
She’s an alchemist. He’s more certain of that with every time he sees her.
And if she’s an alchemist, he needs to tell Judy, because she’ll want to know.
(She’ll also want to know how he wound up living with an alchemist, to which he’ll say he wasn’t home when Raven interviewed their new housemates, and he had only been on the lease for about two weeks when she signed: he hadn’t had any sort of seniority-based veto power at that point.
He still doesn’t. Going to his strictly natural house organizer and saying “Hey, Raven, don’t mean to stress you out or anything, but I’m pretty sure the lady down the hall would slit both our throats in the night if she thought she could trade our cooling hearts for power” isn’t going to get her evicted, but it might make him homeless.
And besides, if there’s an unaffiliated alchemist in town, isn’t it better for them to keep her where they can see her, where they can know what she’s doing?
He’s making excuses and he knows it, but this is above his pay grade.
Judy will know what to do next. Judy always knows what to do.)
(Well, that isn’t entirely true. Judy didn’t know what to do when it turned out that their area senior, the Lunar who was supposed to keep them all safe and shining, had secretly sold them out to the American Alchemical Congress.
Judy had been caught as flat-footed by that one as all the rest of them, and had barely been able to keep herself alive long enough to help everyone else.
But Diana is dead and gone, impaled by a peach tree in the everything, and her body has never been found.
When all is said and done, David is happy to put his faith in Judy.
People who don’t have a tendency to wind up dead.)
He walks to the couch and digs through the pillows until he finds the shirt he was wearing earlier, white ribbed cotton with no sleeves, and pulls it on over his head.
He prefers to let his tattoos show when he can.
His divine aspect is Máni, Norse god of the moon, and his tattoos are his way of honoring that side of himself.
The skinhead punks who sometimes lurk around the bars on Shattuck don’t like having a Black man who could clearly break them walking around with symbols they’ve decided belong to them tattooed on his arms. Is it petty?
Sure. Is it fun? Absolutely. David is a literal god.
He refuses to be intimidated by a bunch of jumped-up little men who think the speed with which they sunburn makes them better than him.
Snake is still at school, and Raven is asleep in her room, where she’ll stay until shortly before sunset, emerging only when she absolutely has to.
She likes it when she knows where her people are, and since they’re all technically subletting from her, it’s easier to let her have her way.
David pauses to grab a Post-it from the stack on the coffee table, scrawling a quick note that says he’ll be out late with some friends from the team and sticking it to the fridge.
Then he makes his exit, the lie still tingling in his fingertips.
David doesn’t really have many friends from the team.
Oh, the guys like him well enough—he’s a good player, and he almost never misses a practice, heals fast enough that he almost never misses a game, either—but he hasn’t gone out of his way to cultivate them.
The friends he left back home when he came to school would be baffled.
He’d always been the first to the party and the last to leave, the one laughing loudest with a lager in his hand and his arm curved around the waist of some sweet young cheerleader whose name he might not remember the next day.
He hadn’t had friends, he’d had legions, scores of high school heroes ready to go to war on his command.
And he still likes to party now that he’s in college.
Judy used to get on him about it, the way he seemed to think beer was a human right and women were a renewable resource.
She wasn’t wrong to ride him about it back then: he’d had less respect for the work than he should have, and had fairly regularly neglected his duties to the other Lunars and to the Impossible City.
That changed when Aske died. She’d been the Sámi goddess of the moon, and she’d been a freshman girl from Minnesota named Eliza, and she’d been his friend.
He hadn’t been entirely in love with her, but he’d been on his way, and he’d been able to see clearly just how infatuated he was going to become.
He hadn’t minded one bit. She was the sort of girl who deserved to have someone fall in love with her over and over again.
Sometimes he thinks he’s still falling in love with her over and over again, even though her part in the pantheon is over and done. Even though she’s gone.
Anyway, after Eliza, he hadn’t been able to see his endless collegiate party in the same light, and he still can’t. It all seems shallow and a little pointless, if it can’t save the most innocent of goddesses.
He thunders down the stairs to the food court, waving to a few familiar faces among the gathered patrons as he locks the door, then heads for the street.
He won’t be seeing his nonexistent team friends today; he’ll be seeing his fellow Lunars, and hopefully not getting mobbed when he tells them about a suspected alchemist in their midst.
He’d like to be wrong about Lilianne. She’s a nice girl, as gawky, awkward girls from the middle of nowhere go.
She pays her share of the rent on time, and doesn’t judge him much for being more interested in the gridiron than the grind.
She doesn’t seem to know enough about football to have realized that his chances of a professional career are dwindling with every semester he spends on the collegiate field; he’s very close to becoming one of those men who peaked early and now haunt the site of their old glories, frustrating the newer players and antagonizing their former coaches.
That’s not going to be him. Being a Lunar means he heals faster, recovers from little complications with more grace: he’ll never tear an ACL or have to deal with a head injury that puts him on the bench for the back half of a season.
He’s not invincible, but he’s hard to harm, and he ages more slowly than someone without his ties to the divine.
He has the time to spare, and when he’s ready to move on from his college days, the recruiters will be shocked by how much stamina he has left in him. All he has to do is wait it out.
But Lilianne … she’s from Alabama, and they take their football seriously there.
She should know enough to see that he’s spinning his wheels, and her casual acceptance of the situation tells him she has no idea.
It’s strange. One more oddity to put in a column that’s increasingly tilted toward “alchemist” without containing anything conclusive.
Oh, he wishes she’d do something blatantly alchemical, melt a frog or turn milk into beer or something else that violates the laws of nature but will tell him clearly that he’s doing the right thing by telling Judy about her.
And then she doesn’t do anything obvious, but all the little bits and pieces of her reality add up a little more, and all he can do is admit the truth.
It’s late afternoon, the golden hours of sunlight and warmth and leisure, all the college kids freed from their classes and most of the nine-to-five workers finally released from their offices and desks.
The sidewalks are crowded, not so tightly that he can’t talk, but sufficiently to slow him down as he heads down Telegraph away from the campus.
He’s heading for the secret suburban Berkeley, the residential neighborhoods tucked away where most people will never look or see.
He didn’t know about them himself when he first came to study here, not really.
Oh, he’d known that the people who worked in the city would have to live at least semi-locally if they wanted to be able to afford their own professions, but he’d never really stopped to think about where exactly that would put them.
The college tours had had less reason to focus on the spreading blanket of apartment buildings and private homes than they did to wander the aisles of the local supermarket, pointing out brands of jam.
He passes the Whole Foods Market, parking lot packed with people who don’t know about the much-superior nearby Berkeley Bowl.
Sure, it can be hard to park at the Bowl, but their produce is fresher, and they keep their own flock of chickens.
Knowing that much makes David feel a little smug, like he belongs here while those uninformed tourists don’t.
He’s a resident of Berkeley now. No one gets to make him leave.
Especially not some Alabama alchemist, no matter how nice she is when she’s not conspiring to chop poor, innocent Lunars up and add them to her alchemical nightmares.
With a snort, he turns down the next street on his journey and keeps on walking.