41. Backup #2
“I do. So you can fly back there in a second. Just, when you get home, could you please send Edgar this way? Tell him I need him at East London Cemetery, in about…” I check my watch. “Three hours. Should be dark enough by then.”
The two of them fall silent. I’d say they go ghostly pale, but, well…
“What are you going to do?” Helena asks.
“He’s going to dig that body up,” Simon answers for me, his tone perfectly accusatory. “He’s going to dig Jem up and try to revive him.”
“I’m…” I am, but this really doesn’t need dissecting in the street right now. “I’m… just going to see.”
It’s not a good enough excuse for Simon. He drops his verdict bluntly. “It’s going to kill you.”
Helena’s eyes sharpen on me in agreement. “He’s right. Archer, this is not a good idea.”
I gaze down the street, wind whipping leaves over the bonnet of the car, the softest outline of Liam in the front. “This is what I do. I help people with dead loved ones.”
“Not if I tell Liam, it’s not.” Simon’s voice is a kind of icy that I’m not accustomed to from him, even in his worst moods. “Do you think he wants you to do that?”
“Don’t tell him.” I say it softly, pleadingly. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I-I just want to see how bad it is. See if there’s anything I can do.”
“He’s been dead for five years,” Simon shouts at me, and it’s a wonder the living wandering by can’t hear it. “What do you mean, how bad? Pretty fucking bad, actually.”
As if I don’t know that. As if I’m not aware I’ve nothing but dust to work with, at best. And we both know I’m already wrecked from the last few days.
“I have to try,” I say aloud, forcefully quiet.
“He’s… I can’t stand to see him hurt like this.
I know that sounds… I don’t know. Strange, or desperate, maybe.
But what happened is wrong. And I have this gift, I have a chance to use it, to do some real good in this world, so why wouldn’t I do that?
What is my purpose in having this if I can’t help? ”
“And where does it stop?” Simon asks. “Are you going to revive every person in London? In all the world? That’s just not possible, and you know it.”
“I’m not sure even this is possible,” I concede. For one, how on earth is Edgar supposed to find me enough city rats and squirrels and god knows what else to work with? “Which is why I’m not telling him a thing about it. I can’t disappoint him. I won’t let him down like that.”
Simon’s nose wrinkles in about as disdainful a manner as I’ve ever experienced, which is disdainful in the extreme. “I should think finding your dead body laid out on his brother’s recently disinterred remains would be quite the disappointment, wouldn’t you?”
I glare at him because what can I say? He’s right.
He’s absolutely correct. All I can attempt is a fresh deflection.
“Liam’s known me less than a week. Meanwhile, he’s mourned his brother so hard it’s a core piece of who he is.
I can take that away. I can give him back the piece of himself he should have had all along.
If I’m the cost of that… In the grand scheme of things—life and death and reincarnation and the afterlife—what can that really matter compared to what I could give him and his family? ”
Simon shakes his head, drops a disgusted eye roll. Helena shimmers by his side, flickering in and out of my reality. She must be growing exhausted by now. “I think you’re very kind, Archer,” she says. “And very noble. And I think you’ll do what’s right.”
“Thank you, Helena,” I reply with a pointed look at Simon.
“And if you die, the afterlife is pretty great to be honest,” she adds.
“Thank you.” A little more clipped this time.
“It’s really not that big a deal if you’re dead,” she carries on.
“Okay. I appreciate that. Glad we had this talk.”
“That’s the spirit!” she replies. Then laughs. “Spirit.”
I force a half laugh. “I get it.”
“Not yet, but you soon will…”
This time I can’t summon more than a groan in response to her warped humour. Thankfully, she disappears. Or maybe not so thankfully, as that just leaves me with Simon, glowering at me.
“I’m sorry,” I try, as an end to the discussion. “I’m going to do this.”
But he doesn’t leave. He stays pissed off at me, clearly, but with his voice taking on that rare earnestness he’s started showing recently. “You know, when I lost Ferdinand, it was the single most horrifying moment of my entire existence.”
Guilt churns in my gut. Of course this is making him think of that. Not that it should. It’s not at all the same thing.
“I tried to do something noble,” he continues. “Something I thought was right. It cost me the love of every life. It tore me away from the living for two hundred years. There isn’t one day in all that time I didn’t wish…”
The sadness is overwhelming. A sadness that’s lived on so long after he died. A hurt that never stops, that comes out in blood and violence, sarcasm, that cold and aloof manner he’s perfected. But there it is, right there, plain heartbreak, so close to the surface.
“I’ve been given a second chance. By you, or Tezcatlipoca, or who knows what.
But I have suffered for centuries to get here—to find Ferdinand again when I never once thought that was even possible.
” He blinks a long, slow blink, then talks to me seriously, quietly, no morsel of regret hidden for the first time.
“When you get the chance at love, don’t walk away from it.
Don’t turn your back on it, and don’t, for god’s sake, get yourself killed before you’ve even told him how you feel.
Especially not right there in front of him.
That will do things to Liam that you cannot even fathom.
A man does not move on from watching his lover die. Please, Archer.”
There is no way I can explain this without hurting him, without dredging up more of his dark history that he’s somehow conflated with whatever’s going on between me and Liam.
Not until he says, “I know you’ve been very unhappy.”
That stings. That’s a knife between the ribs. “It’s not that.”
“Isn’t it?” His eyes are hard, but not in a cruel way. In a way that says he knows difficult, he knows sad, and any suggestion that he’s wrong about me is tantamount to betrayal.
“It’s not the same thing,” are the best words I can find.
“I’m not doing this deliberately. I seem to have been put on this earth to help ghosts.
And…” The misery of it swells around me, the loneliness that was every day of my life until Liam.
“I’m tired of sadness. I’m tired of death.
I’m tired of all the horrible things I see, and not being able to fix them.
So I can’t this time. I just cannot stand here, with this power, with this ability, and do nothing.
Not when I see this horrible injustice. Not when I can fix this.
” I shake my head, trying to get my thoughts in order, to explain any of it, for me or for him.
But it’s close to impossible, so I finish with, “Liam will move on. If I can give him this one thing, he’ll be okay. ”
Simon studies me, long and hard. “I never, for one moment, thought you of all people could be so stupid.”
“Simon…”
He disappears. Pops out of reality as if he can’t even stand to look at me for one more second.
And that’s fine. He can berate me in the afterlife for as long as he likes, so long as he lets me do this tonight.
So that’s it. Job done. Plan made.
Now, to lie to Liam’s face one last time, take him safely home, and kiss him goodbye.
Maybe for the last time.