Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
The sun was sliding away and the dark was rushing in after they finished their last Reap du jour. Gray broke the silence with, “I’m confused.”
“Warned you.”
“No, you freaked out about it fucking me up. You didn’t say anything about upending the laws of space/time. And possibly physics. And how confusing that would be. To me. Or anyone, I bet.”
They were back at the compound. Gray had coaxed the small garbage can out of Amara’s grasp and they had an early supper of lefse and brown sugar, which they gobbled while standing over the sink.
“Hurry, if my mother catches us, her wrath will be terrible, she’ll have questions I don’t want to answer, and the lefse supply might get cut off.”
“I get that you want to avoid your mom while you process living your literal worst nightmare, but there are about a hundred better spots to eat than over the sink. Especially in this place! And it’s not that I don’t like a dessert for supper, but there are three pies in the fridge: chicken, apple, and chocolate cream.
We could be gobbling down pies over the sink like kings of old. ”
“Faster, dammit!”
Death was still comatose, and Amara had her suspicions. So she washed the butter and brown sugar off her hands, grabbed Gray, and led him down the kitchen stairs into the main basement.
“This wasn’t on the tour.”
“There are a lot of things that aren’t on the tour.”
“Awww. Thanks for making me feel special.”
Amara hit the lights, then led him to the wooden doors beneath the stairs, unlocked them, and slid them wide like a barn door.
Gray peeked over her shoulder. “It’s a small fake cave! For some reason.”
“It’s not fake. It’s an actual cave. The house was built around it.”
“A death god thing?”
“A death god thing. Crawl in.” Amara turned, closed and latched the double doors, and turned back to find Gray hadn’t moved. “Well?”
“The last time you told me to crawl somewhere, my shorts got soaked and I wound up kneeling in dog shit.”
“That was three years ago! What, I should have crawled into the culvert? It was your errant basketball.”
“You had jeans on! I was in shorts.”
“You’re always in shorts!”
“My point!” In response to her glare, Gray sighed and got down on all fours. “They’ve set it up so you have to crawl in, but your folks couldn’t put down some carpet?”
“Jesus, you sound like an old woman.”
“Always have, always—ow! Even Berber carpet would be—hey, there’s a tiny waterfall in here!”
“We supplement the underground spring with well water.”
The waterfall was bracketed with flowstones that resembled icicles, making it look like winter had been trapped inside the cave with them.
She crawled past the cave popcorn, the clusters of calcite crystals that looked like bouquets of diamonds in the low light, and the dogtooth spar, which always looked like a pile of sea sponges to her.
Above them, boxwork had covered the low ceiling with honeycombed weathering, and cave bacon draped the opposite wall.
Amara assumed the scientists who had named such things were perpetually hungry.
“Cool, you have your own indoor grotto.”
“I loved coming in here, especially when I hit my teens. It’s very peaceful.”
She settled in next to Gray who (shocker!) had questions.
“Not that your chilly, misty secret indoor lair isn’t lovely, but is there a reason we aren’t having this meeting in a room with heat?
And/or blankets? Or in your Mustang? We could drive to Dairy Queen and then watch our ice cream melt before the power of your car’s heater. ”
“Do you remember when I suggested my mother reach out to Paeon?”
Gray blinked and focused. “The thing that happened a couple of hours ago? Vaguely. He’s the god of godly medicine, right?”
“Yes.”
“Am I gonna get to meet him? Because I have this thing with my elbow he could maybe take a look at . . .”
“Apparently you won’t meet him, since I assume Mother still hasn’t contacted him. Which makes no sense. She doesn’t need me to remind her to take action, and she’d be the first to tell you that. So is she doing this—or not doing this—on my dad’s orders? That’s the best-case scenario, and it sucks.”
Gray frowned. “So what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking this is a woman who was fully prepared to gut my sixth-grade teacher for not letting me check out books from the adult library.
And she’s as protective a spouse as she is a parent.
My middle school got pissy when my dad took me out for two weeks, and when Mom saw the letter they sent him, she went right down there and tore a few strips off their hides.
So believe me when I say Freyja Brunhilde Gondul ignoring a viable option is unbelievably out of character.
Why wouldn’t she pull out all the stops? ”
“Is that why we’re meeting in your chilly grotto? You think there’s mischief afoot?”
“Nothing works in here. Not cell phones, not walkie-talkies, not radios or fax machines or electric can openers.”
“Wait, why did you bring an electric—”
“It’s a black hole of No Service. Best of all, no one can sneak up on us; there’s only one way in or out.”
Gray studied her in the low light. “Wow. You do think there’s something afoot. Or you’re about to murder me in the perfect place to stash a body.”
“If I didn’t murder you when you gobbled up my secret stash of Little Debbie Swiss Rolls—”
“You should have put them out. I had to go hunting for them.”
“Secret stash, Gray.”
“It’s not my fault you’re a shitty hostess! And for the record, my stance on this is the same as it was two years ago: I regret nothing. So are you thinking conspiracy or attempted murder or what?”
“It’s got to be the first, because the second doesn’t make sense. No one in their right mind would want to kill Death, because no one in their right mind would want the job, or to live in a world of eight billion people who can’t die.”
“Well, no.”
“What?”
Gray spread his hands and shrugged. “You don’t want to get rid of Death. You don’t want the job. But there are 7,999,999,999 other people on the planet who might not share your opinion. And who might want a world where their loved ones can’t die.”
“Most of whom have absolutely no power over Death. Wanting a world where loved ones can’t die is just a motive.
It’s not power. I know I’m biased, but, again: no one in their right mind.
Which narrows the suspects down to people who aren’t in their right mind.
And in Minot, that’s about six thousand suspects. Nine thousand if it’s a long winter.”
“Can we circle back? Are you saying that’s how it works? If there’s no Death, there’s no . . . death?”
Amara waved away the concept. “It’s moot. Death has been with humanity since before the caves. His avatar might change, but Death is always, always a force.”
“So with your dad off his feet, are you the avatar in question?”
Well?
Are you?
Amara heard a roaring in her head and doubted it was the underground spring.
“Okay, I’m assuming by that long silence that you are, in fact, Death’s avatar-in-waiting, since your dad’s the current avatar . . . is it because you’re an only child? Which is weird, by the way. Your folks have been together for centuries but only had one kid?”
“I had siblings,” she replied shortly. “They all died before I was born.”
When he was quiet for too long, she took his hand. “Now who’s responsible for a long silence?”
“You had sibs and never told me?”
Amara shrugged, and ignored the pang Gray’s wounded expression brought.
“Are you telling me that all of Death’s avatars-in-waiting have died except for you?”
“Yes.”
“And that didn’t seem suspicious to you?” Gray asked in full-on skeptic mode. “Any of you?”
“Not really. Being an avatar-in-waiting isn’t the same as enjoying the protections of being Death. One of my brothers died of an infection three hundred years before penicillin was invented. My sister got caught in a blizzard and froze to death. Like that.”
“Jeez. I’m sorry, that sucks. But it also makes sense, I think. Death’s avatar has to be tough. I guess the thinking is, if you can die of exposure, maybe you wouldn’t have made a good Death? This isn’t my area.”
“No, it is not.”
“Give me a break, I was a computer science major.” Gray drummed his fingers on his knee in a rapid tattoo because she’d long since destroyed his fidget spinners. “I’ll bet they had coming-of-age stuff, too, back then. Your folks and their . . . tribe, I guess?”
“Tribe?”
“And not cool ones, like bat mitzvahs. Terrible ones, like having to kill a huge wolf like Gerard Butler did in 300. That’s probably why your folks liked keeping you around. They must have been worried when you moved out.”
“Yes, my other siblings stayed close. I never knew how they could stand it. One of my brothers died when he was only sixty. He never moved out.” Amara paused as the implications of Gray’s observation penetrated. “This will sound awful—”
“Noooooo.”
“—but I never thought about it like that. I saw my folks as anchors and they saw themselves as life jackets. Ugh. Not my best analogy.”
Gray reached out, took her hand. “So we both had older siblings who died. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Amara couldn’t meet his gaze. Anyone else would be irked, and maybe Gray was, a little, but he seemed more concerned than angry. “It’s like you always say. It’s not a contest, but if it was . . .”
“I’d win,” he finished.
“I both love and loathe being the person who one-ups everybody. ‘You think that’s bad, one of my brothers was mauled to death by a pregnant mountain lion six hundred years ago.’”
Gray brightened. “But that means your parents could have another baby. You’d be off the hook. Do we dare speculate about procreational activities among the very, very elderly?”
“No. Let’s stay focused instead. We have to solve this now; we can’t hope my mom suddenly gets morning sickness and refuses to make lefse while simultaneously serving pickled pigs’ feet with every meal.”
“Jesus Christ!”