Chapter 7
SEVEN
He had not been sleeping when it rang. He had not truly slept since the smoke first took her, and his nights had thinned into a kind of vigil, his back against the headboard and her breath warm beside him while he listened to the city for the next thing to break.
He had the phone in his hand before the dark finished swallowing the first ring.
It was Maya, calling in the gray hour before the Quarter woke, her voice already roughened by a scene.
“Another one,” she said, before he could speak.
“Other side of the city this time, a vacant single near the old fairgrounds. Same three origins. Same pour. I have not even gotten the lab to confirm the accelerant and I already know what it will say.” A pause, and the sound of her moving through a scene, boots on wet ground.
“I am done calling these coincidences, Durand. Somebody is doing this to my city on purpose, and they are getting comfortable.”
“I am coming.”
“I figured. Come around the back. The press already has the front, and they are awake and bored and looking for a face.”
He dressed in the dark and meant to leave her sleeping. He had his coat half on when he turned and found her in the bedroom doorway, already dressed, her hair pulled back, watching him with the calm of a decision long since made.
“You are not going without me.”
“Delphine.”
“I heard the phone. I heard your half of it.” She crossed to the chair and picked up her bag. “There is another fire, and you are about to ask me to wait here where it is safe, and I am about to tell you what I told you yesterday and the day before.”
“It found you at the last two,” he said. “Both times. Smoke comes off the building and it takes you. If I leave you here, it cannot reach you.”
“And I will sit in this apartment every time the city burns, for however long this lasts, hiding from smoke and waiting to hear whether you came home?” She shook her head.
“I cannot live that way, and I will not. If this thing is part of me now, I would rather face it standing next to you than alone behind a locked door. You taught me that. Not in words. By never once locking your own.”
He stood with one arm in his coat and lost the argument for the third morning running. She was braver than was good for either of them, and she was right, and both of those facts pressed on him at once.
“Stay at my side,” he said. “Not behind a line this time. At my side, where I can put my hand on you. The second I say we leave, we leave, no argument.”
“At your side.” She took his arm. “I can do that one.”
He helped her into her jacket and hated every sensible word she had said.
Bringing her toward the smoke cut against two hundred years of instinct that had only ever told him to stand between her and the thing that could hurt her.
But she had named the truth he kept trying to outrun.
He could not wall her off from her own life and call it love.
He had done a version of that once, kept a woman inside the safe borders of what he would let her know, and it had saved Delia from nothing at all.
He straightened the collar of her jacket and opened the door.
He drove them out toward the old fairgrounds while the sky over the lake still held the last of the night, the streetcar wires hanging empty overhead.
On one corner a few of Tib's kind in human shape watched the street with too much patience for the hour.
A shuttered church kept its saints behind boarded glass, and he felt them watching back as he passed.
The third fire had drawn a crowd the first two had not.
Three burned houses in a handful of days had done their work on the city's nerves.
The street near the fairgrounds had filled before sunrise, neighbors in robes and a thickening wall of cameras, and over all of it the bright false daylight of the news lamps.
He heard the word before he was out of the car.
Serial. A reporter said it into a lens with the relish of a man who had been waiting weeks for a story this size, and the people behind the barricade passed it hand to hand until it owned the whole street.
The fires had changed the city in a handful of days, and he could read the change in the crowd.
People stood closer together than the hour called for.
A man across the street had dragged his garden hose to the curb and stood holding it against a fire that was not his and was already down to smoke.
Three burned houses and the word serial had drawn a low current of fear through every block, and it would not ebb until someone handed the city a name and a face to fix the dread on.
Maya carried the knowledge of that on her before she reached them.
Maya found them at the back of the lot, and she did not waste breath objecting to Delphine. She had stopped expecting to win that one too.
“Same hand,” she said low. “I will spare you the walk this time, the cameras are too close. Three origins, the pour, the climb. I am opening it as a pattern this morning, which means a task force, which means I lose half my days to meetings and the other half to the press.” She rubbed her eyes.
“Tell me you have got more than I do. Tell me your side of it finally turned something up.”
“My side of it is the same as yours,” he said. “Empty.”
He had walked the edge of the scene while she talked, and he had reached into it out of habit more than hope, and the habit had returned what it had returned twice already.
No curse. No spirit. No cinder of the unnatural anywhere in the ruin.
Three fires now, three clean nothings, and the nothing had stopped being a puzzle and started being an answer he did not want.
Whatever was burning his city carried no trace of his world because it had never belonged to it.
He was nearly sure of that now. He had only one reason left to keep looking on his own side of the veil, and she was standing with her hand in the crook of his arm.
The smoke brought it again.
A gust pushed a low gray cloud off the wreck and across the lot, and it reached them before he could turn her out of it.
He felt her hand tighten on his arm. He felt it go slack.
By the time he had her name in his mouth she was already gone, her eyes open on nothing, her body sagging toward him in the middle of a street full of cameras.
He got both arms around her and turned his back to the lenses in one motion, shielding her face against his chest, and he carried her at a steady walk that would not draw a shout.
To anyone watching he was a man carrying a woman overcome by smoke away from a fire, and he let them believe it.
He laid her in the car and got behind the wheel and pulled out before a single reporter thought to follow.
She did not come back at the first light, or the second. The stillness held her longer than it ever had. He counted the blocks home, then counted her breaths in the car below the apartment, and the count ran on past where both other episodes had ended.
He had kept this vigil before. He had knelt on a burning street with her gone still across his arms and bargained with everything that would not answer, and he had learned that night exactly how long a man can wait before the waiting turns to grief.
He felt the edge of that old arithmetic rise in him now, and he shoved it back with both hands.
This was not that night. She was breathing.
He said it to himself until the words wore smooth and stopped meaning anything, and then he said it again.
He carried her up the stairs and laid her on the bed. He sat with her hand folded in both of his and waited, and the waiting stretched thin and thinner, until at last she drew the deep, tearing breath he had learned to listen for, and surfaced.
“It was longer this time,” she said, when she could speak. She was not frightened. That was the strangest part. Her face was wet and wondering, lit from the inside. “I was gone longer because there was more of it. Bastien, it did not stop at one moment this time. It kept going.”
“Tell me.”
“It was a whole stretch of our life. Not a picture. A season.” Her fingers moved in his.
“I came home from work to a boarding house with a green door, and I climbed the stairs, and I stood at the window watching the street for you because I knew your step before I could see you. And when you came up I had supper half-ruined and you did not care. We read in the evenings under one lamp because we were saving the oil, your shoulder against mine, and we passed the book back and forth when our eyes got tired. We talked about a future, and the future we wanted was so small. A little more room. A garden, maybe. Nothing anyone would write down.” Her voice thickened.
“And I was happy. Bastien, I was so completely happy with an ordinary life. I could feel it running through all of it, this quiet, enormous contentment, the kind you only notice you had after it is gone.”
“There was a song,” she said, quieter. “The one from the kitchen. You hummed it over the washing-up, and I never asked what it was because I liked not knowing what it was. I only knew that hearing it meant you were home.” She opened her eyes and found his.
“Tell me I have that right. Tell me there was a song.”
“There was a song,” he said, and kept his voice steadier than he had any right to.
He held her hand and let her give it all back to him, every evening of it, the green door and the saved oil and the book passed back and forth in the lamplight.
He had lived that season. He had climbed those stairs to that window a thousand times to find her watching for him.
She was not handing him fragments anymore.
She was handing him a continuous thing, an unbroken length of a life, and as she spoke he understood that the pieces inside her had begun to find each other and link, one memory reaching back to take the hand of the one before it.
“There is so much of it,” she said, marveling, exhausted. “I did not know there was so much.” Her eyes drifted closed. “I want all of it. I want to remember every ordinary day.”
She was asleep before he could answer, which was a mercy, because he did not trust what his answer would have been.
He sat at the desk a long while before he opened the notebook, and longer still before he wrote.
He recorded the season she had given him, the green door, the window, the single lamp, the small future.
He wrote it down so it could not be taken twice.
When he finished he did not cap the pen right away.
He looked at the pages behind this one, the growing record of a life returning to her in order, and he made himself follow the line of it forward to where it pointed.
She had begun with the dying. She had moved back into the living, the flowers and the dance and the green door.
The memories were reaching backward through that life, link by link, toward its beginning, and they were not slowing.
He had spent three days terrified that the episodes would take her from him.
Tonight, for the first time, a different fear opened underneath that one, colder and quieter, and far worse.
If they did not stop, if they kept reaching back through everything she had ever been, then sooner or later she would arrive at the rooms he had sealed and never meant her to enter.
She would remember more than Delia. She would remember all of it.
She would remember him as he truly was, and why.
He closed the notebook and sat in the dark with his hand flat on its cover, and for the first time since the smoke first took her, he found himself wishing the remembering would stop.