CHAPTER EIGHT
RHYS
“This is harder than it looks,” Rhys grumbled, squinting at the tiny brush in his hand. The butter-yellow varnish came off in a splotch on Moira’s thumbnail, and he tsked while he tried to fix it. “I’m telling you, I’m a lost cause. You’re going to have to take me back to the dealership and trade me in for a new husband.”
“But I like that little line you get between your eyes when you’re concentrating,” Moira said with a chuckle.
They were sitting at the kitchen table, splitting a carafe of steaming pour-over coffee while spring showers pattered against the window. Moira had wiggled out of her hours at the shop and tempted Rhys away from his research on medieval Welsh economics for a Saturday of lazy domesticity. He had cooked feta chive omelets for breakfast and surprised her with a crocus bouquet from her favorite corner store. He knew it wasn’t enough to make up for his habit of losing himself to research for weeks at a time, but it was a start.
“What do you want to do after this?” he asked, dipping the tiny brush in the pot of nail polish before moving on to her next nail.
“Oh, I don’t know. If it was a nicer day, I’d say we should fix sandwiches and go picnic by the Charles. We could watch a movie, I guess.”
“We could,” Rhys said, a wicked smile tugging at his lips.
“Or?”
“Or,” he said, finishing his work on her nails and pulling her in slowly by the wrist so his breath moved across her lips, “we could go upstairs.”
Moira smiled into his mouth as she kissed him.
“I have to convince you to take the day off more often,” she said.
Rhys didn’t have a chance to reply, because his phone began vibrating insistently on the table. He snatched for it, ready to hit silent and flip it over, but then he registered the name on the screen.
David.
He glanced at Moira, who had simply raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know y’all still called.”
“We don’t. He texts me when he needs something.”
The phone buzzed on, demanding attention, and Rhys moved to cancel the call. Or take it. He wasn’t sure what was right in this situation, or what would look right to Moira.
“I’ll just–”
Rhys moved to switch the ringer off, but Moira shook her head. “No, you should take it.”
“Moira–”
“Something about this doesn’t feel right. You should take it.”
Rhys pressed one more kiss to Moira’s lips before answering his phone.
“David?”
It was meant to sound less like an accusation than it did. For a moment, there was silence, and then a distant, “Rhys?”
“Obviously. What’s going on?”
He heard the rustle of what sounded like papers, a crash, and then a hissed “Shit!” as David moved around on the other end.
Rhys pressed a knuckle to his mouth and locked eyes with his wife, shaking his head. So far, so inscrutable.
“You alright?” Rhys ventured.
“I just… I’m at Evgeni’s.”
The first stirrings of nausea swirled in Rhys’s stomach. Training told him to reach for the orange bottle of as-needed anxiety meds in his work satchel, but he couldn’t move.
“What’s wrong?”
“Everything was fine and then… something happened. I don’t… I don’t remember. Fuck.”
“Are you alright?”
“I’m sorry, Rhys, but there’s no one. I don’t have… I didn’t know what to do.”
Rhys didn’t have an ounce of sixth sense, but he didn’t need it to know that something was seriously haywire. David didn’t just ask for help.
Rhys shot a glance at Moira to confirm his suspicion, but she was already ashen. Wrong. Something was wrong.
“What happened?” Rhys asked.
“That’s what I’m telling you, I don’t know! I was just here and then everything went dark. Fuck. God. I can’t stand up. I think I’m sick. Jesus Christ.”
Rhys pulled himself to his feet without meaning to. “What do you need, David?”
“Please come over. You know I wouldn’t ask unless… Please.”
“I’m with Moira, I can’t–”
Moira shook her head and waved him on. Go, her flicked wrist said.
On the other end, David had moved the phone away from his mouth, probably pressed it to his chest, and heaved for breath. It sounded like he was on the verge of hyperventilation.
“I’m in Jamaica Plain,” Rhys said, trying to remain calm. “Nathan is just down the street from you, do you want me to–”
“No, don’t call anyone. I’ll be okay. I just need–”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Rhys knew how it ended, he had heard it a thousand times, on pay phone lines and shouted over thumping club music and sobbed out in parking lots while Rhys tried to drive away.
You. You, you, you, settling around Rhys’s neck like an albatross.
“I’m coming,” Rhys said, quieter. “I’m coming, alright? Just… hang on. It’s going to be alright.”
David didn’t apologize or say thank you, just let the line go dead. Rhys stood in stunned silence for a moment, heart pounding. Old instincts were warring inside him, battering against the walls he had built to preserve his own sanity. The warmth of their little kitchen seemed all of a sudden oppressively hot, and his nausea worsened.
David could have gotten into absolutely anything when Rhys’s back was turned, and he could already be too far gone for Rhys to be of any help. Scenes of potential desolation flipped through his mind like tarot cards: empty liquor bottles, a ritual that called for too much blood, an ambulance screaming through Beacon Hill.
Moira drifted closer to him, nail polish and coffee abandoned. She tipped a tiny white pill out of his prescription bottle and into her palm. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. He sounded… I think he had some kind of breakdown. I don’t know.”
Moira put the pill in his mouth and handed him his cup of coffee. The anxiety was building up under his skin, numbing him like a novocain shot. He would dissociate if he wasn’t careful, and he reached out to grip his wife’s hand to remind himself that he was real and alive, here with her.
“I’m sorry, I have to go.”
“I’m coming with you,” she said, snatching up her purse. She was already pulling a knit cardigan over her dress and yanking her phone off the kitchen charger.
“What? Moira, I have no idea what I’m going to be walking into over there. I can’t let you–”
“Don’t shut me out of this, Rhys.” Her voice was heather-soft but her eyes were set harder than steel. “I know the Society usually handles its own problems, and I know what you two have going on is complicated, but I don’t want to see you get in over your head.”
Rhys’s shoulders sagged, and he took his wife’s face in his hands.
“Love, please. I shouldn’t even be going over there… He’s not someone you want to take responsibility for.”
“I think you’re forgetting that David and I share a referral network. I know how he is.”
“If you would rather I not go, say it and it’s done. I’ll send somebody else. I mean it; if this makes you uncomfortable–”
Moira shook her head, and the blush dusted across her cheeks left shimmery sunset-colored kisses on Rhys’s fingertips.
“No, he called you for a reason. And I don’t like the idea of you walking into whatever trouble he’s in by yourself.”
“I love you.”
“Damn straight.”
Rhys took her face in his hands and kissed her, hard and deep. Her fingers sank into his shoulders, pulling him in tighter, and then she was slipping away, trailing pecks across his mouth and jaw as she headed for the door.
“I’m driving. I want to be able to make a quick exit in case he gives you an anxiety attack,” Moira said.
“Pray he’s being histrionic and doesn’t actually need me.”
“That still doesn’t seem like a great outcome,” Moira said as she held open the front door for him.
Rhys shot a passing glance at himself in the foyer mirror before slipping outside. He looked like he had aged a year overnight. “With David? That’s the best of all possible worlds.”
The house on Beacon Hill had been purchased by David’s father shortly before their move to the states, and had stood abandoned in the years after his death. The brownstone was four stories from street to rooftop garden, tall and narrow with a splashy stone staircase leading to the oak door. It must have cost a fortune, even at the time of purchase. And the fact that David could afford to let the house sit unrented while he burned through his money just a few miles away in his modern condo was a testament to the Aristarkhov’s obscene wealth. Rhys couldn’t wrap his mind around money like this, no matter how many times he had seen David pull out his black card without looking at the number on the register. Out of principle, Rhys had returned or given away many of the outlandishly expensive watches and blazers David had bought for him, but he still had a few items in his closet that could pay his rent if he ever needed to consign them.
“He grew up here?” Moira asked, glancing up at the forbidding structure from beneath the umbrella Rhys held. Her dress was forties vintage, with a bodice that cinched her waist like a wasp, and she would be distraught if the rain ruined it. He would have brought the Lincoln around closer, but parking prices were murder in this area, if you could find parking to begin with.
“For a while, at least,” Rhys said. He had tried to explain the house on their drive over, at least, as well as he could. He wanted Moira to understand what she was getting into. He wasn’t sure he had succeeded. “His father immigrated with him from Russia when he was fourteen.”
“Mom’s out of the picture?”
“She was dead by then.” Rhys rapped on the door with a knuckle. Then, when there was no answer, he knocked again.
“It’s open,” David called from inside. His voice sounded strangely thin.
Moira and Rhys exchanged a glance, and then Rhys turned the golden knob and pushed their way inside.
The interior was dim, lit only by the weak sunlight filtering through the thin decorative curtains veiling the windows. Their steps echoed loudly across the hardwood floor.
“David?” Rhys called.
“Library,” the psychic responded, impossibly distant.
Rhys thought about asking which floor that was on, but he was getting tired of playing Marco Polo, so he picked a direction and tried to act like he had been to the house more than once before.
The last time Rhys had been here, it had been half-past two in the morning, and David, emboldened by four highballs and the muggy June twilight, had let them in through the back door while insisting he’d just wanted to see the place again.
Rhys had been baffled by the justification, since David avoided all discussion of his father or the house as a general rule. But David had wandered the lower level for almost twenty minutes, running fingertips over the dusty furniture and singing to himself. There had still been cigarettes in the ashtrays, as though the house had been vacated on a whim. David had stood quietly in the parlor, shivering despite the hot night, and said a few sentences in Russian before swiftly turning on his heel and tugging Rhys out of the house. They had never gone back.
In the here and now, Rhys ducked in and out of the parlor, finding little except moldering pieces of furniture, half-heartedly preserved by sheets. The mess of a house once lived in had mostly been cleared away, although there were still a few books lying open on the floor and cupboards left hanging ajar, giving the eerie impression that the brownstone was not entirely abandoned.
“God,” Moira breathed, stepping delicately over a shattered beer bottle. “You said he was rich, but I didn’t realize…”
“I don’t think I paid for a thing the entire two years we were together,” Rhys said. “He tried to get me an Audi for my twentieth birthday and didn’t see why I thought that was excessive.”
In the end, it was the scent of David’s Parliaments that led Rhys up the curving stairs to the second floor, and towards a swinging door that led to the library.
To call the room huge would be an understatement. Floor-to-ceiling black oak bookshelves lined the wall behind an imposing desk, and heavy furniture lounged on high-pile rugs. Rhys knew very little about David’s father except that he had been an occultist, but the painstakingly catalogued specialty titles and esoteric memorabilia littering the shelves supported Rhys’s initial impression of a man obsessed with his work. Rhys batted down the knee-jerk response to take a closer look at the books, to catalog their contents. He wasn’t here for them. He was here for David.
Windows double Rhys’s height lorded down over the rain-slicked streets below, and a genuine bearskin was draped in front of a hearth large enough to curl up and sleep inside.
David was seated on the windowsill, a cigarette burning down to nothing in his hand as he gazed out over the city. His slacks were uncharacteristically smudged with something that looked like soot, or paint, but he otherwise seemed to be in one functional piece.
“I was starting to think you weren’t going to show,” David said. He turned to face them both. Rhys caught an apology in his eyes before they landed on Moira and flickered with uncertainty.
“Ms Delacroix,” David said, bringing the cigarette to his mouth and performing a deep French inhale. “I didn’t know I was expecting you.”
Moira patted the large silk iris pinned into her hair. “Hope you don’t mind having another pair of hands around to help. Rhys said you found yourself feeling a bit distraught.”
David shot a look at Rhys, trying to draw the other man into their old dance of conversations held entirely in glances. Rhys didn’t take the bait, no matter the electric thrill that went through him at the thought of being that intimate with David again.
“Are you alright?”
“Of course I am. Don’t I look alright?”
He looked… passable. There was something so off about the sight of David lounging around in the vacant embrace of his despised childhood home that it set Rhys’s teeth on edge. More than that, David’s usually golden complexion had a sick pallor to it, and he was tapping his knee with his free hand like it was the next best thing to letting his fingers shake outright.
“You sounded like you were staring down the reaper on the phone. What happened?”
“I…” David opened his mouth and then closed it again. He stood suddenly, moving like he was afraid of something spying on him from outside, and drifted closer to Moira and Rhys. “I blacked out.”
Terror and rage flooded Rhys’s system in one stomach-lurching rush. The scent of rancid, sticky bourbon invaded his memory, along with the sound of shouts and shattering glass, the ache in his arms as he did his damndest to drag David into a waiting cab. He tasted metal and gin, and he felt like he might be sick.
“Are you… How? When? I swear to God, David, I swear on my grandfather’s grave I won’t put myself through this again. Find somebody else, I–”
“No, no, no,” David insisted, waving his hands in front of his face. Smoke zig-zagged between him and Rhys as his gaze flittered nervously to Moira. “God no, sorry. I wasn’t drinking.”
The tension seeped out of Rhys’s body, but his nerves were shredded now. He was too old for this; he had better things to do than clean up David’s messes, sober or not. But he was here, wasn’t he? And he had brought Moira. At a certain point, this had to count as courting his own anxiety.
Rhys took a deep breath and steadied himself. “Then how did you black out?”
“I was hoping you could help me figure that out.”
Moira drifted from his side, craning her neck up to take in the room. Her eyes came to rest on a gigantic painting of men in seventeenth-century clothes out on the hunt. They shouted at each other from horseback while a dying fox writhed in the jaws of a hound.
“Were you channeling?” Rhys asked, one eye fixed on his wife.
“I… yes, but I don’t know who.”
“You don’t remember who you were channeling.”
“No, and I don’t remember deciding to start. One minute I was reading, and the next minute I was waking up on the floor.”
Rhys took a step closer to his oldest friend. The last time they had been in this house together, Rhys had pulled David back from the brink with a touch on his wrist and a plea to go home and get some sleep. In another life, Rhys would go to him, take David’s face in his hands, and look him over to make sure he wasn’t injured, or lying. In another life, Rhys would pull him into the secure embrace of his Lincoln and drive him home, then ply him with kisses until the tension melted out of David’s shoulders.
But in this world, he just stood – too far away for David to reach, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his peacoat.
“How long were you out?”
“An hour? Maybe?”
“Mary and Joseph.”
Rhys glanced at his wife, hoping for a second opinion, but found her still staring up at that picture. Distress passed over her face in waves.
“Love?” Rhys asked. “You alright?”
Her dark eyes flickered over to him, wary and wide. “I don’t like this house, Rhys.”
“Hey, I didn’t pick it out,” David said, a bit defensively. “Evgeni wasn’t exactly a man of impeccable taste.”
Moira moved towards a richly upholstered chaise lounge, and it was only then Rhys noticed that the ground at her feet was littered with papers. Someone had ripped fistfuls of pages out of an encyclopedia and scribbled on them with punishing pressure. A toppled bottle of black ink was still bleeding into the carpet, and a fountain pen was stabbed through a sheaf of paper.
Moira bent down to gingerly pick up one of the pages.
Rhys peered down at the paper in her hand. Lines of text were layered over each other so densely it was difficult to discern which language was being used, but he caught snatches of Ecclesial Latin and Ugaritic cuneiform. David didn’t speak either of those languages.
“You did this?” Rhys asked. “In a trance state?”
David didn’t have time to reply, because Moira reached out and grasped Rhys’s wrist so tight it was painful. “Look.”
He followed her gaze to the papers littering the ground, finally landing on one of the few phrases in English, repeating over and over again in that heavy, dark hand.
The Devil knows your name, David Aristarkhov.
David offered up his palms apologetically. They were smeared with ink.
“I didn’t know who else to call,” David said.
The door was still open behind them, inviting Rhys back into the world of publication deadlines and bill payments. It would be so easy to turn around, sweep down the stairs with his wife in tow, and close the door on David and his excesses, his self-interest, his constant crises. Rhys and Moira could resume their Saturday, he could lay her down in their bed and luxuriate in her until he felt like himself again, cover her in adoration in the way she deserved. He could resume his policy of not picking up the phone when David’s number flashed across the screen, and David could find someone else to talk him down from whatever precipice he had climbed up on this time.
But deeply, in the darkest and quietest part of him, Rhys knew that if he didn’t want this, he wouldn’t have come. In the still of the library, the arcane writing seemed to hum – an ambient, enticing sound just below audible range that drew him in with the promise of new knowledge. The house felt heavy and oppressive, like a hand squeezing the back of his neck, but the gilt and the antiques spoke his name from the shadows. David was looking at him like they were twenty again, like they might be able to get it right this time, orbiting each other’s spheres without burning too hot or swallowing each other alive.
Rhys put his hand out and touched David on the wrist. His fingers came back stained, blue-black smears mingling with the pink blush already on his fingertips.
“You did the right thing.”