Chapter 14
I can’t breathe. So I may die now, before anyone can try to kill anyone else.
We are steps from each other.
“I’ll be back in just a minute,” says the server, melting away.
“It’s you,” Joel says.
“You’re the demon hunter?” I gasp at the same time.
He stares at me. I see then that he is as shocked as I am, one hand lifted as though to push me away. As though to push great floating chunks of reality back into alignment.
“You’re— How can you . . .” he whispers. And then, like he already knows the answer and can hardly abide how vicious the truth can be, “Was it you? Are you the one Adam was with?”
“Yes,” I say. “But— ”
“Two years,” he says, before either of us can learn what my impossible explanation would have been.
“Two years searching for you.” He stops speaking, but I wait for the rest. “You lied.” He looks away, his face losing its organization for a moment.
He puts a hand over it. “You lied. You’re one of them. ”
The piano plays a tricky galloping run that carves an abrupt zigzag canyon in the air, and my voice falls into it when I say, “I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell you.” The walls of the happy din rise on both sides. “How could I tell you?”
“You didn’t even tell me you knew him.” There’s a kind of dark, retreating wonder in his words. Each one is a step further away from me.
Tectonic tremors course through my legs, shimmy up my spine.
I am unstable, I may crash down, I may crack in half and split apart along preexisting hairline fractures.
“What was I supposed to say—I’m a succubus?
I put your brother in a coma because I slept with him?
” I feel the people in the next booth glancing toward me as I get louder at the wrong moment. All the moments are now wrong.
I’m sickeningly dizzy, worlds colliding in my head, orbits upended, galaxies smashing themselves to dust.
“A succubus,” Joel repeats. “You’re the reason.
The whole reason! And there I was, telling you how sad I am.
How fucking sad I am.” He looks up, and his eyes are furious and drained shallow; his hands have tightened into fists.
It’s an expression I could not have pictured on him before now; it doesn’t seem to fit.
“The whole reason?” I fight for balance. “For killing us?” I plant my feet, claim the same square of floor that has been trying to shake me free.
He nods, a cruel, condemning nod without any breath of hesitation in it. “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Destroying every last one of you.”
“You killed Grub,” I whisper. “You killed him.” The floor wins, chucks me forward. I lunge, fall toward him. “He was a child!”
The server is coming back toward us, but with clear purpose; the air is looser, he seems to move faster through it now that people have stopped talking in order to better watch us.
Joel ducks as I smash through the space where he was. “Wait— ”
Is he afraid of me?
He should be.
He cuts around me. He’s leaving! I grab at his sleeve, miss.
I am stumbling after him, down the row, around the corner—he pushes through a group of people at the base of the stairs, some of them cry out indignantly, ruffled birds, and we’re going up and up, away from the piano and the warmth of the low lights and into the harsher dark of the city night.
No balmy beach here, not like in Miami. The cold, gray Atlantic is hidden behind miles of buildings like a fortress with a thousand winding walls. Traffic spurts on Seventh Avenue.
He glances back at me on the sidewalk. “Get out of here,” he growls, as though I’m an animal, maybe rabid. “Go!”
“Turn around!” I scream at him. I feel rabid.
Two guys in puffer jackets holding hands pause, alarmed, looking at me. They start walking again, maybe deciding I’m mentally ill.
“Turn around, you fucking coward!”
He turns around.
People flow past us, only mildly interested. Another strange sidewalk scene in a city that hasn’t been shocked in centuries.
He’s wearing his brown pants, a slightly rumpled blue shirt.
He doesn’t look like a killer, a demon hunter.
He looks like Joel, who plays cello and is better at chess than he is letting on and likes to encourage timid children to play classical music.
But his eyes are different. They are not the eyes of a person who joked about homesteading in his backyard.
“I was in your house!” I hurl at him. “With Ella!”
“You knew!” he shouts back at me. This is also a surprise— the shouting—though it shouldn’t be. If you can kill a few people you can probably also raise your voice. Even normal people, even pacifists and vegans, raise their voices. I never knew him at all. Obviously!
“You knew the whole time!” he is accusing me. “What were you planning? Why didn’t you just— You were so . . . normal! I can’t believe I fell for it. I’ve been looking for you for so long and you were right there. Right there. I’m an idiot.” He’s enraged. At himself, at me.
“I wasn’t planning anything! I’m not some evil— ”
“You’re an abomination! Everything you say is a lie!”
I come forward; he stays still. We are paces apart, the air between us full of invisible shrapnel from whatever has just exploded.
“You have no idea what he overcame.” His voice gives like a knee under sudden weight. “I know it means nothing to you. What he faced. To get through all of it, to get all the way to where he was, and then he sleeps with one woman—with
you—and it’s over.”
My mind whirls frantically. “Wait— But he didn’t die then! You said he was depressed— ”
“You killed him.” He says it with complete, flat certainty. “You killed his future. You killed any children he might have had. You killed any knowledge he might have given the world.” His voice goes lower, shaky: “There’s an expression in Judaism: Whoever destroys a life destroys the whole world.”
“No!” I gasp. “I mean, it’s true. I have killed men. Boys.” There’s no coming back from this. God. “But he was alive! Until he— ”
“Stop talking.” His tone is brutal, absolute.
“You just told me your religion says not to commit murder. Does that not apply to you? Or do you get a pass, because your brother died?”
He laughs, a quiet, terrible sound. “You’re much more convincing than I would’ve expected. She warned me about this. I guess that’s how it works. But Tempest, you’re not human. None of you are.” And then he’s hailing a cab, he’s jumping into it, the door slams shut in my face, and he’s gone.
I stand there, panting, shattered, my heart in my mouth, gagging me. I can’t think. I can’t think.
One of my hands has plunged into my bag; I capture my phone. I text him. FUCK YOU.
He writes right back, the words appearing under my fingers, almost generating heat. I am going to kill you, Tempest. Next time.