Chapter 1 #2
I don’t get far with that thought, because the entire world seems to jar violently, like the axis of the planet has been punched off its correct angle.
My body wrenches, and without a seatbelt on I’m sure I would go flying if not for all of Alessandro’s considerable weight slamming into me, pinning me to the car door.
The car is sliding unnaturally, fishtailing on the icy street. We’ve hit something.
Or something has hit us.
The cabbie is swearing. Alessandro is bleeding from his nose and his eyebrow. His hand rises unsteadily to his face, his gaze unfocused. Beyond him, I see that the car’s side door airbags have been deployed on Alessandro’s side, mushrooming into the cabin.
This is my one and only shot.
I don’t even try to shove Alessandro off of me.
It will waste my energy and my precious time.
I have to get back to Curse. I twist my arm behind my back, feeling for the handle, then latch onto it like it’s some kind of lifeline.
Pulling hard, it unlatches, and I half-fall out of the vehicle.
Stumbling to my feet, I run, nearly getting hit by a vehicle in the oncoming traffic lane.
The driver shouts something to me – maybe scolding me, maybe trying to stop me to make sure I’m OK – but I don’t answer them.
My boots slide as I loop around the back of the taxi, which I now see has been T-boned by a large black SUV in the middle of an intersection.
How far have we gotten from the station?
I have no idea. I don’t even know what the hell Union Station looks like from the outside.
My battered brain barely registered the details on the way out.
I run back in the opposite direction that the taxi had been going.
A part of me feels terrible for leaving the cabbie behind with his smashed vehicle and Alessandro, vengeful and bleeding, in the back.
But I can’t stay there. Alessandro will come for me, and Curse might still be alone on that train car.
I need to tell Elio and the others where he is and what Alessandro’s poisoned him with.
Opioids.
He could die. Actually fucking die before I get there. Before I can claw my way back to him.
Don’t do it, I beg inside my pounding head. Don’t go. Don’t leave me.
It’s stupid even to think it. Curse and I have both acknowledged that he isn’t the person I used to know. He’s not little Accursio anymore. He may be my fiancé, but we both know he isn’t my friend.
And yet…
It’s still there. Still fucking there; always there.
This connection to him, whoever he is. Whatever he’s done.
However he’s changed. Like my heart doesn’t know how to beat without the dark rhythm of his breathing in the background.
Like I can’t go on existing without knowing that, somewhere out there, he is existing, too.
If souls are real, then mine has been held fast in Curse Titone’s hands for more than twenty years.
He’s owned it ever since he pulled me from that water.
He’ll take it with him wherever he goes.
Even if it’s out of this world and into the next.
Ahead, there stands a huge block of a building made up of pale material, like limestone, alight and golden.
There are pillars with doors behind them, and I see a dark iron post with a large cube at the top, a clock displayed on each square face.
It’s like a little clock tower combined with a lamppost. Beyond it, close to the building, looms a large statue or sculpture made of metal.
It shows a naked man, straining to pull the metal sides of a split sphere together, like he’s connecting the framework of an unformed globe in his hands.
Metal birds surge around him, wings spread but ultimately flightless, supported by curving rods.
A concrete barrier has large metal letters on it, similar in colour and material to the sculpture. While the sculpture’s shapes and lines are knife-sharp and so clear to me that I can make out the carved lines of every metallic feather, the letters swim and smear before I can drag them into focus.
Union Station.
But then the letters are gone again, a man shoving himself between them and me.
Alessandro lurches my way, blood streaming down his face, like some grotesque villain from a nightmare.
Other men are running towards us, but I don’t see Elio among them.
I don’t know if these men are his, or Alessandro’s.
I want to barrel right through him but know that I can’t. My body reacts before my mind can come up with a plan, some bone-deep instinct to save myself propelling me backwards a few shaking steps before I spin and run again.
A sleek black sedan slips crisply into a space in traffic and nips up to the curb. The back passenger door opens as I pass it.
Or try to pass it. I don’t succeed. A hand appears with such speed and grace it seems like something disembodied. The ghost of a limb that can move with eerie quickness no human should be capable of. But when it clamps on my wrist, I feel the living heat of it. Skin and blood.
“Let me assist you.”
Apparently, assisting me means yanking me into the vehicle. The car peels away from the curb with me in it.