4.
lies
The plane was somehow exactly what she’d expected and nothing like what she’d thought it would be.
Audrey’s instructions had filed neatly into Claire’s email within ten minutes of them hanging up the phone, bulleted and clear.
They gave her a number to call, a car service that would pick her up and ferry her to a private airfield, where a plane waited.
Plane, not jet, which made Claire wonder if it was going to be one of those shaky commuter flights instead of the modern extravagance promised in movies.
The Ashburys were rich, but maybe not that rich.
But when the car—a town car, not a limo, which seemed classier—pulled up to the airfield, she saw that the word choice in the email meant nothing.
It was definitely a jet, and definitely just as fancy as what she’d imagined.
There was no writing on the hull, only a twisting line of deep-sea blue.
She’d seen the same symbol in the Ashbury Marinography logo. This jet was owned, not chartered.
“Shit,” Claire muttered, pulling her battered roller bag behind her as she climbed out the car door.
The driver pretended not to hear.
An attendant greeted her at the bottom of the boarding stairs with a gentle closed-mouthed smile and nothing to say.
Claire clomped up the steps to the main cabin, small and sleek and gleaming white.
There was a tiny bottle of champagne on the table in front of a plush leather seat, already popped, and a glass of water next to the empty champagne flute.
There were bottles of Perrier lined up in the fridge, spots of deep green shining through the clear glass door, and a small plastic tub of what looked like caviar.
An open door at the back of the cabin revealed a bathroom that was arguably nicer than the apartment she’d lived in before Elias bought the house.
“Shiiiiiit,” she said again, this time with more emphasis.
“Welcome, Miss Sutherland.” The voice came cool and even over a hidden loudspeaker in the ceiling.
She started like a frightened deer, half crouching before straightening up again, embarrassed.
“Our flight to Portland should be a little over two hours long. The weather is favorable, and we don’t expect any turbulence.
If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to push the button on the table, and Sophie will be with you shortly. ”
Sophie, she assumed, was the pretty attendant who had waved her silently up the stairs.
“I’m your pilot, Arthur,” the voice continued. “If you’ll sit down and fasten your seat belt, we’ll be off. Once we reach maximum altitude, the light at the front of the cabin will come on, and you’re free to move around as you please.”
The voice on the speaker sounded recorded, almost, the cadence too practiced and even to be coming straight from a human mouth, and there was none of the fuzzy static that normally accompanied pilot greetings. A better class of sound system, to go with the better class of everything else.
Claire sat in the plush seat. She fastened the seat belt, which was smooth and comfortable, nothing like the frayed nylon she was used to. She took a long gulp of champagne straight from the bottle.
The liftoff felt seamless. Claire wouldn’t have known it was happening if she hadn’t looked out the window, seen the airfield growing rapidly smaller. Pools were sapphires in concrete bracelets. Yards were squares of emerald patchwork.
Her fingers closed around the glass of water, her eyes still watching the world fall away.
She brought it to her lips, took a sip. It took her a moment to realize what was so wrong, and she didn’t immediately spit it out, even when the reason for her visceral reaction swam itself up from the back of her mind.
It was salt water.
Claire frowned at the glass. She swallowed almost without thinking, the salt making the water feel warm in her mouth, turning the taste metallic and bloody.
Must be something wrong with the taps, or maybe her nerves were screwed up, sending the wrong electrical signals from tongue to brain.
It’d happened sometimes, when her meds went slightly wonky. It was probably nothing at all.
But she didn’t take another sip to confirm.
Instead, Claire took another long pull of champagne, swishing it around her teeth.
Her vision seemed foggy at the edges, colors blurred.
She hadn’t managed to sleep well since Elias died (since she’d dreamed of him yellow-eyed and floating), constantly waking up to pee, to stare at the ceiling, to drink more.
Weird, since she remembered sleeping almost constantly after Mom and Dad and Haddie were gone, so deeply it was like she was dead, too.
Maybe the body never processed grief the same way twice.
Or maybe she was just broken now, incapable of processing it at all.
Her vision bloomed and brightened, edges of shapes spilling into each other. Claire leaned her head back.
Hopefully, the champagne would make her sleep.
“I’m sorry,” Elias said.
There was no glow about him, no ghostly translucence. Still, the air around his body seemed swimmy, though his eyes no longer had that weird yellow cast they’d had in the bedroom, and his feet seemed to be firmly on the floor instead of hovering above it, swaying back and forth.
He stood in the middle of the cabin, a wheat-colored curl falling over his forehead, in the same jeans and white button-up she’d last seen him in, when he left to go to his office.
What had he been wearing in the other dream?
Claire couldn’t remember, but she thought it was this, the clothes he’d died in.
His hands were shoved deep in his pockets, the same nervous stance from the day they met.
The only difference between how he looked now and how he’d looked when he left the day he died, really, was that his clothes and hair were wet. Soaked, even, like he’d been caught in a torrential downpour.
That, and the fact that he was rotting.
Spots of mottled green marked his pale skin, bubbling and moist, flesh made near liquid to the point that it shouldn’t hold together.
As if the observation made it so, a gelatinous glob fell from Elias’s forearm, revealing yellowing bone.
The fatty mass hit the spotless cabin floor with a soft plop.
Elias grimaced at the greasy stain it left, pus and something that looked like algae seeping between his teeth.
“It’s not supposed to be this way.” He rolled his eyes, and one of them came out of its socket, the stringy matter that typically held it in his skull stretching over the plane of his cheekbone.
When he straightened to look at her, the eyeball bounced against his face, then burst, like a perfectly poached egg pierced by a bruncher’s fork.
The fluid ran over his chin, soaked the collar of his already-wet shirt.
Something squirmed in the empty space the eye left behind.
Claire settled back in her chair, oddly relieved. It was probably good that she was sleeping. Sleep would probably be more restful here than it was in the house. “Sorry for what?”
“What I did.” He shrugged, a movement as familiar to her as the flutter of her own fingers.
It wasn’t real, but her heart still felt like a fist in her chest as another globule of wet flesh slid off him and hit the floor.
The skin and fat had fallen from his neck this time, and the wound left behind had a strange iridescence to it. “What we’ll do.”
“Hate to break it to you,” Claire said, shifting to get comfortable, “but you’re dead, Elias. You won’t be doing anything else.”
She could say it so calmly, here in the dream. Say it and not feel like she was dying, too.
Another shrug. The dangling optic nerve swayed, almost broke. The squirming thing in the orbital cavity poked out cautiously, testing the shimmering air. Dark blue green. Tentacle-like.
“Miss Sutherland, we’re beginning our descent. Touchdown in ten minutes. Please fasten your seat belt, if you’d be so kind.”
Claire started, jerking against her seat belt.
Her neck had twisted to rest her head on the window as she slept, and now it ached like a motherfucker, a cramp she couldn’t stretch out.
Her forehead had left an oily smear of makeup on the glass; grumbling, she tried to rub it off, only succeeding in making the entire window blurry.
The champagne was gone, and her eyes felt heavy with interrupted sleep. The glass of salt water was empty, too. Frowning, Claire checked the floor, sure it must’ve spilled. But if it had, the puddle had soaked into the carpet deep enough that she couldn’t see.
Her mouth tasted funny. Briefly flouting orders, Claire unbuckled and skulked across the cabin to the minifridge, cracking open a Perrier to rinse her teeth, then spit in the gleaming sink.
Ten minutes until she met the Ashburys.
○ ○ 2. ○ ○
Audrey Ashbury looked like she’d been cut out of Vogue—blonde and polished, hair swept back in an elegantly undone chignon, trailing a cloud of expensive yet subtle perfume.
She folded Claire into a hug the moment she stepped off the boarding stairs, on a noncommercial airfield at the regional airport clogged with other private craft.
Part of her wanted to stare over Audrey’s shoulder, see if she recognized anyone.
The bigger part of her was relishing being hugged.
No one had touched her since Elias died, if you didn’t count shaking Dr. Cummins’s hand.
“Oh, Claire, we’re so glad you could make it.
” The fabric of Audrey’s dress was softer than Claire’s sheets, pressed against her cheek.
Audrey was taller than she, model proportioned, thin and thinner in all the correct places.
Claire wondered if she was where Elias got his height. “And so, so sorry for your loss.”