Chapter Eleven #2
“Oh?” he asked politely. In his opinion, there was quite a lot wrong with the Midnight Wood already, but he understood that to be the normal state of affairs.
“I fear something has been killing off the Midnight Mice,” Mrs. Jupiter confided. “I found another of the poor creatures dead today.” She turned and caught David’s eye. “Has either of you been in the Wood again lately?”
“I haven’t, no.” David slowed to a stop at a red light. “Not since the weekend. I’m not sure about Meredith.” It was impossible to guess what he got up to when he was out of sight, and David didn’t care to speculate, especially knowing as he did now the probability of it involving sycamore dryads.
“Speaking of the Midnight Wood—” David began as he turned onto a downtown side street, then reconsidered. He himself still doubted what he’d seen. “Never mind.”
Though he was indeed headed to the Night Market, he took a deliberate path that passed by both the Rat Cellar and the Lost another, an elbow to the ribs that knocked him off balance.
As Meredith tried to dart past the third, a burly man with a shaved head, the stranger seized him and slammed him against the brick wall.
At that moment, the clouds passing over the moon thinned to mere shreds, providing a clear view of the scene, of the man flipping open a switchblade knife, of his tattooed knuckles shifting as he gripped its handle.
David braked hard, slammed the gearshift into park, and leapt out of the van, leaving it running. Dimly, he registered Mrs. Jupiter’s footsteps behind him as he sprinted the last few yards toward the group, heart thudding in his chest.
The other two men had quickly recovered and taken up their positions on either side of their leader, blocking in Meredith against the wall.
He shrank back against the bricks, head tipped back as he tried to avoid the point of the knife pressing in under his chin.
A trickle of blood ran down the blade, nearly black in the moonlight.
“No!” David shouted, but he’d never get there in time.
The man’s arm drew back, the raised blade glinting for an instant before it plunged.
Lungs burning, David surged forward, but he was too far away, too late—
Behind him, Mrs. Jupiter shouted an incantation, and the three men vanished, switchblade clattering to the concrete.
Rather, they appeared to vanish. In their place, three cockroaches skittered across the sidewalk to disappear into the dark alley.
Meredith staggered forward, both hands to his throat, wide blue eyes gone impossibly wider. “David,” he choked out, “am I—”
“You’re all right,” said David firmly. Meredith had to be all right; that was simply the way the universe worked.
He’d said so himself, in fact. At the time, David had been annoyed by it, but right now, it was the last thing he wanted to complain about.
With as much reassurance as he could manage, he went on, “I’m right here. It’s okay now.”
Meredith took his hands away from his throat; no more than a few streaks of blood stained his palms. The only sound that escaped him was a wordless, panicked whimper.
“Christ,” David breathed. “Meredith.”
Then, without warning, Meredith slumped against him, head falling onto his shoulder, leaving David to support his full weight as he reflexively caught hold of him.
“You’re all right,” David repeated, at a loss for any other words.
“Yeah, course I am,” murmured Meredith. “Just—just gone a bit lightheaded, that’s all.”
David tried to work himself up to righteous fury at Meredith for putting himself in such a situation to begin with, even though he himself was still not entirely clear on what said situation actually was.
When that failed, he tried for annoyance at the spots of blood now staining his shirtfront where Meredith clutched at him, and again came up short.
He tried desperately to catch at any detail to take his mind off the spike of fear that hadn’t faded from his heart—Meredith trembling in his arms, the tangles of brass-blond hair that David couldn’t seem to get out of his face, the combined scent of patchouli and sweat and the antibacterial soap that Meredith always smelled of after work.
“Let’s have a look.” Though Mrs. Jupiter’s eyes flashed with rage, her voice was gentler and more soothing than what David had managed. From her tapestry bag, she took a handkerchief and a small jar of healing ointment. “Look up for me, that’s right, dear.”
Mrs. Jupiter made quick work of wiping away the blood and applying ointment to the shallow cut. “There, that’s all right now,” she said briskly. “Go on home, have a cup of tea, and get some rest. That goes for the both of you.”
Meredith straightened up and ran a hand through his hair, which did nothing to improve its appearance. In a subdued voice, he said, “Thanks, Mrs. J.”
“Think nothing of it.” She bent, retrieved the dropped switchblade, and examined it for a moment before wiping it clean and stowing it in her bag. “This one’s a nasty bit of business.”
“If you call when you’re done at the Night Market—” David began, but she cut him off with a shake of the head.
“I’ll walk.” With a dangerous smile, Mrs. Jupiter added, “If there’s any more of these types about—well, I’d just like to see them try.”
“That’s what I said,” Meredith spoke up quietly. “To those three, earlier.”
The pieces finally clicked together in David’s mind. “Those were the men you threw out of the shop today? The ones who’ve been bothering you since the weekend?”
“I told you that.” Meredith wrapped his arms around himself as though he were cold. “Or tried to, anyway. It was them who came looking for me yesterday, and the sort of things they were asking for—well, in this business, one gets to know the symbols. It was a deliberate provocation, David!”
David nodded. “What did you tell them?”
“What do you think? I told them to get the hell out, and they s-said I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of them, and I said, As far as I’m concerned, against you is the only right side, and they said—” Meredith broke off with an uneasy look at Mrs. Jupiter.
“Do you think,” she said, her voice hard, “that I have never heard the sort of things those people say? Go on.”
Meredith was shivering in earnest now, so badly that David would have given him his coat this time, had he been wearing one. He suddenly regretted refusing to do so in the Midnight Wood, and was struck by a pang of guilt as he recalled how harshly he’d spoken to him that day.
“They had the nerve to say I ought to go in with them,” Meredith went on, “and they said, Down in your heart, you know we’re right and you’re just scared to admit it, and I said, I don’t and I won’t and you’ll see me dead first. And he said, Yeah, perhaps we will, and I said, I—I’d like to see you try. ”
“And they did.” David felt ill. If he hadn’t fallen asleep—if he hadn’t silenced his phone—if he’d paid the least bit of attention to what had been going on the past few days—
“Oh, they tried,” said Mrs. Jupiter, “and they failed. Remember that.”
“Mrs. J?” Meredith glanced toward the dark mouth of the nearby alley. “Will they stay cockroaches forever?”
“That,” she said, “depends entirely on them.”
—
They made the short drive to Midnight Cottage in silence.
David gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white in an effort to stop himself shaking.
In the passenger seat, Meredith clasped and unclasped his hands in his lap, fiddled with his bracelets, appeared several times on the verge of speaking, only to remain silent.
It wasn’t until David unlocked the front door that Meredith asked, sounding as if he hadn’t a care in the world, “By the way, did the man ever come to see about the washroom?”
“The man was a lady,” David corrected him, turning on the hall light.
“Oh, was he? I mean, was she? I didn’t realize she’d changed.”
Bianca came running to greet them, but Meredith drifted past her into the living room without a second glance.
“No, no, I mean the man’s always been—the plumber,” David amended, “was a lady to begin with. Different plumber this time.”
#75: His brand of nonsensical speech seems to be catching.
In reality, David could barely string together a coherent thought, and couldn’t imagine how Meredith was any better off. “Anyway, she’s been and gone. It’s all taken care of.”
The plumber, of course, was of little importance, but in the absence of Mrs. Jupiter, neither of them seemed able to address the elephant in the room.
Meredith stood staring out the bay window without replying.
“Sorry to have ruined your plans,” David said to his back. “I know you did want to see the, er—what band was it?”
“Estranged Swedes,” said Meredith. “Yeah. ’S all right, though.” He went to the sofa, sat down, and picked up the empty coffee mug left there from the morning. “They never play ‘Anglepoise Lamp’ for me anyway.”
His voice caught on the last word, and the cup tumbled from his trembling fingers to land on the floor with a heavy thunk.
To David’s surprise, it remained intact, and he gazed at it for a long moment before he spoke. “Meredith—”
“Oh, don’t. I’m all right, really.”
David had a hard time believing that, and because he couldn’t bring himself to say I’m not, all his horror transmuted into wrath, which he directed at the only possible recipient.
“But you almost weren’t!” David paced from one end of the room to the other, chasing down the necessary words to convey his outrage.
“How could you be so irresponsible and go putting yourself in danger like that? What if we hadn’t happened to find you?
What if Mrs. Jupiter hadn’t been there? What if—” He held himself back from saying: What if I’d been able to do nothing but kneel over you helplessly as you bled to death in the street?
What if I’d had to watch you die in my arms because I missed a phone call?
He’d wanted to be rid of Meredith and all the accompanying annoyances, yes, but he hadn’t actually wanted him to come to harm.
The response was infuriatingly nonchalant: “Yeah, but that’s not what happened, is it?”
David spun on his heel to face him. “Meredith, they would have killed you.”
Meredith stood, hands on his hips, and fixed him with a mutinous glare. “Yeah, well, I expect that’d be my problem, not yours.”
“You,” growled David, “are always my problem.”
Acting independently of any rational thought, he strode one last step to close the distance between them, seized Meredith by the shoulders, and kissed him hard.
Meredith kissed back frantically, hands scrabbling at David’s back, drawing him closer.
David lost himself in the warmth of it, the heavy lingering scent of herbal salve, Meredith making needy little sounds against his mouth as David kissed him deeply—
At which point he came to his senses, realized exactly what he was doing, and pushed Meredith away.
There was little force behind it, only enough to make him take a single step back—a step onto the forgotten coffee mug, which rolled away beneath his foot and made him fall back onto the sofa with a surprised squeak.
For a long moment, the two of them stared at each other.
“I—that’s not quite what I meant to do.” David ran a hand over his face. “You all right?”
“I know,” said Meredith, still frozen in place on the sofa, eyes enormous. “I’m okay.”
“Good,” snarled David, all his rage returning full force. “Then don’t you ever in your life so much as think about kissing me like that again, or I swear to God it’ll be the last time I ever speak to you.”
He stormed out of the room, down the hallway, and into the doorway of his bedroom, where he stood motionless for a good half minute, hands pressed over his face.
The kiss between them had felt alarmingly natural, but it was simply panic overriding his higher brain functions, panic and adrenaline and some residual effect of the single drink he’d had hours ago.
A moment of temporary insanity. It had to be, because the last thing in the world that he actually wanted was to kiss Meredith Schwarzwelder.
#76: It is almost impossible to stay angry with him, even when he deserves it.
David turned around and stormed back into the living room. Meredith lay curled up on the sofa, clutching Bianca in his arms and not quite crying—not yet.
These, for once, were not frivolous tears.
“Christ.” David sank onto the cushion next to him. “Come here.”
Even if he was still utterly mortified, even if he had no desire whatsoever for—anything of the nature that had happened a moment ago, in spite of that, in spite of everything, he couldn’t find it in himself to leave Meredith alone like this.
“Come here,” David repeated, softer, and scooped up Meredith and Bianca both, pulling them into his lap.
Meredith buried his face against David’s shoulder, while Bianca, having reached the end of her patience, gave a discontented grumble and squirmed out of his grasp.
Turning his attention now to David, Meredith curled his fingers into his shirt and murmured something unintelligible into his collarbone.
“Shh, you’re all right now.” David stroked his hair, mainly in an effort to keep it out of his own face, and tried not to think about how thoroughly embarrassed they were both going to be in the morning. “I’m here, I’ve got you. Everything’s going to be all right.”
For a long time, the two of them stayed like that, David whispering comforting nonsense and rubbing circles over Meredith’s back until he stopped trembling and fell asleep against him.