Chapter 19
He’d told Gwen that they shouldn’t give up on Arthur because Arthur would never give up on them. But it was tricky to define
“giving up.” Colin stayed three more days, then offered to fly Gwen back to the States on the Gulfstream. She said she was
going to stay awhile longer. He had pushed his stay in the United Kingdom as long as he safely felt he could. Dragonware was
pitching a suite of services to the Department of Homeland Security in another week, and he had several venture capital offers
to give his consideration. A driver in a black Mercedes—the same model as the one they had at Heathrow for VIPs—picked him
up in Tintagel and rushed him back to London and the Savoy hotel.
Pilot Ronnie had been there the whole time, on hold, and she met him in the lobby, wearing a bubblegum-pink miniskirt and
enormous pink heels. Colin loved it! It was so sleazy and desperate. She gave him an unasked-for hug.
“I can’t imagine what you’ve been through,” she said. “Let me look after you tonight? No arguments.”
He nodded obediently. He had read her latest text messages to her friends on the ride to London. No man in grief turns down a comfort fuck, Ronnie had texted her best friend, and he really had to agree.
He told her he’d meet her in the bar and went up to his suite to shower and change. It was while he was naked, in the big,
brightly lit bathroom, that he picked his sweats off the floor and found the Surrealist’s Glass. Curious, he placed it to
his eye and looked into the mirror.
And there was no Colin at all. There was, where his face belonged, a whirling black hole of nothing. He was a void—a darkness punched into the world. The Long Dark! he thought, with a giddy thrill. It wasn’t a place that existed somewhere outside their universe after all, but a zone that
existed within them. Within him, anyway. It went on forever and ever, a place no light had ever touched.
He put the Glass down and padded naked into the cool dark of his room. He found the little phial, peeled away the wax, popped
the cork, braced himself with a deep breath, and had a sip of a saint’s blood. It was a mouthful of salts, a taste of brine—a
swallow from some vast ocean Colin had never seen and never intended to visit, that sea that encompassed all grief. He popped
the cork back in, and by the time he returned to the bathroom, the ache had gone from his back, the black bruise there had
almost faded away, there was no twinge of pain in his knee, and he was as fit and trim as he remembered being at twenty-five.
A pulse of heat and weight throbbed in his crotch and he remembered what Finger had said, that it would give him the stiff
dick of his randiest youth. He didn’t know if that was true, but he thought Ronnie was about to find out.