Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
The fifth fire came at dusk. The call reached him while the light over the Quarter went from gold to the deep blue that meant the heat might finally break for the night, and he took it standing at the window with Delphine behind him, and he knew before Maya finished talking that he would not be able to leave the woman he loved behind.
He tried anyway, out of an old habit he could not kill. She let him get all the way to the end of it before she answered, and the answer had changed shape over the last two weeks into one he could no longer argue with.
“Every memory brings me closer to you,” she said. “I am not going to run from that. Not the memories, and not the smoke that brings them. If this is how I get you back, Bastien, I will stand in every fire in this city until it is finished.”
So he took her hand, and made her promise once more to stay where he could reach her, and they went out into the blue evening together.
He drove them north and west out of the Quarter with the windows down, because she liked the air and because the column of smoke was already smudging the sky over the rooftops and there was no point pretending they could not see where they were going.
The city was changing its shift around them.
Esplanade ran its long tunnel of live oaks toward the lake, the Spanish moss gone gray in the failing light, the big shuttered houses giving back the day's heat from their bricks.
A brass band was working out a dirge somewhere off Rampart, the tuba walking under it, practicing for a funeral that had not happened yet or mourning one that had.
He saw the other city as he drove, the one that rode underneath this one and that only he and a handful of others ever saw.
On a gallery on Esplanade an old woman rocked with the perfect stillness of a thing that had been rocking there since before the house was last painted, and she tipped her head to him as he passed, one of Marcelline's people taking the evening a careful century at a time.
Under the concrete spine of the Claiborne overpass, where the great oaks of the avenue had stood before the interstate came through and took them, a feu follet drifted low over a storm grate, a pale cold knot of swamp light that the people hurrying home read as a trick of a streetlamp and walked straight through.
A young man waited at a bus stop no bus would reach at this hour, his outline running a half-beat behind the rest of the world, a revenant that did not yet understand it had died.
Bastien marked each of them and drove on.
None of them were his tonight. There were only so many hours in a night, even for him, and the smoke ahead had already taken all of them.
The fire was a union hall on Claiborne, a low brick building that had hosted weddings and repasts and meetings for three generations before the redevelopment money that was meant to save it evaporated and left it standing empty in the overpass's permanent shade.
It was well gone by the time he reached it.
The roof had opened and the tall windows had blown, and the crowd behind the tape was the largest and the angriest yet.
Five fires now, and the city had stopped being frightened in the quiet way and started being frightened in the loud one.
People did not come to watch anymore. They came to demand.
A councilman stood in a clean shirt in front of a camera promising action in a voice meant to carry.
A knot of residents held a bedsheet with HOW MANY MORE painted across it in red.
The air smelled of wet char and the sweetish chemical bite he knew too well now, and under it the ordinary city smells of the Seventh Ward at night, fried shrimp from a corner stand, cut grass, the green breath of the bayou somewhere off in the dark.
Maya found him at the edge of it with soot on her jaw and no sleep left in her face.
Before she could speak a woman broke from the crowd and got a hand on her sleeve, and an officer moved to peel her off and Maya waved him back.
The woman was not angry. She was frightened down to the bone, which was worse, and she wanted to know whether her block was on the list, whether she should send her babies to her sister's across the river, whether it was safe to close her eyes in her own bed tonight.
Maya looked her in the face and told her the truth, which was that she did not know, and the woman nodded as though she had expected exactly that and went back to the others with it.
“The mayor's office has called me twice today,” Maya said, low, when the woman had gone.
“They want me to stand up tomorrow and tell this city it is under control. It is not under control. I have a car nobody can describe and a list of people somebody is choosing his targets from, and that is more than I had a week ago and it is nowhere near enough. He is not slowing down, Bastien. He is speeding up.”
Bastien stood at the tape and watched the councilman work the cameras, and a piece of it turned over in his mind that had nothing to do with magic.
Whoever was doing this did not want money, and he did not want to hide.
He wanted exactly this. The cameras, the councilman, the frightened woman, the question no one in power could answer.
He wanted the city hauled to its feet in front of itself and made to look at the thing it had buried.
A man did not burn condemned buildings on a Sunday in front of an audience unless he needed the audience to watch.
He walked the scene while she worked the crowd, and he did the thing that had stopped even disappointing him.
He opened the part of himself that read the unseen and he pressed it into the ruin, down through the char and the poured accelerant and the wet brick, listening for the smallest wrong note, and the union hall gave him nothing.
A fifth time, nothing. He had crossed over, somewhere in the last days, from a man who expected to find magic and failed, into a man who no longer expected it at all, and standing in the smoke with five clean scenes behind him he finally admitted the whole of it.
Whatever had its hand on Delphine was not waiting in these fires.
He had stopped believing it ever had been.
He simply had nothing to set in its place, and a thing with no name was a thing he could not fight.
The smoke found her at the edge of the lot, and he was already turning when it took her.
He caught her against his chest before her knees finished going and lowered them both to the curb, and he did not panic, and he was not proud of that.
He knew the shape of it now. The empty eyes.
The slack weight. The long count he would have to wait through with his back to the cameras and his arms around her.
He waited her through it and lifted her and carried her to the car, and he did not let the paramedics near her, because there was nothing in their kits for this and he had stopped pretending otherwise weeks ago.
He drove her home through the emptying streets with her head against the window, and he hated, on that drive, how good he had become at all of it.
A competence had grown up where the terror used to live, a set of motions his body performed without asking him first. Catch her.
Lower her. Shield her face. Wait. The smoothness of it frightened him worse than the first clumsy panic ever had, because a man should not get good at watching the woman he loved disappear in his arms, and he had gotten good at it, and the city slid past the windows dark and ordinary while he drove and did not let himself feel how good.
She came back to him in their own bed, in the lamp's low light, and this time the joy and the grief arrived together and could not be pried apart.
“We were going to have everything,” she whispered.
Her eyes were wet and shining and somewhere else.
“I remember planning it. Lying awake planning it, the two of us, like children who did not know any better. A small wedding, nothing grand. We could not have afforded grand and we did not want it anyway, just the people we loved and a good meal after. And children. We talked about children in the dark, Bastien. We named them. We argued about the names.” The laugh that came out of her broke in the middle of itself.
“You wanted so many. I told you we could never feed so many and you swore you would learn to cook properly by the time they came, and we laughed until the people on the other side of the wall knocked for quiet.”
He held her and let it tear through him without a sound.
He had lain awake beside Delia and planned exactly that, the small wedding and the impossible houseful of children and the names they fought over in the dark with the lamp out.
He had meant to give her every piece of it.
He had carried a ring toward a burning theater to begin it.
He had begun nothing at all, in the end, except a hundred years of carrying the plans alone.
“We were going to grow old,” she said, softer now, almost to herself.
“That was the part I wanted most. Not the wedding, not even the children. The years. Sitting on some porch being boring and gray and completely unremarkable, with you, for a very long time.” She turned her face up to his.
“I wanted to be old with you. I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything in my life, and I am only finding out now that I already lost it once.”
She was quiet a while against his chest. When she spoke again her voice had gone small and careful, a child asking a question she already half feared the shape of the answer to.
“Did we ever get married?”
He could not answer. The word would not come up out of him.
He lay there with her hand spread over his heart and the whole weight of a century pressing down on a single syllable, and he made himself give it to her, because she had asked, and because he had finally run out of ways to spare her that did not require a flat lie.
“No,” he said.
The silence that came after it was the loudest thing in the apartment.
She did not cry out. She only pressed her face harder into his chest and mourned, and he understood that what she mourned this time was not the death but the life, the whole bright ordinary life they had drawn up together in the dark and never once been allowed to live.
The wedding that never came. The children they had named and never had.
The long gray unremarkable years, stolen out from under two people who had done nothing in all the world but want them.
He could have told her then. He could have given her the rest of it, that the wedding never came because the theater burned, that the named children were never named again because she had died in his arms with the smell of smoke in her hair, that he was not grieving a stranger's lost future but their own.
He held it back one more time. She was already carrying a life she could not place, and he would not lay the death at the end of it on top of her tonight.
“I'm sorry,” she whispered into his shirt, though she could not have said for what. “I'm so sorry. I can feel how much we wanted it.”
“So can I,” he said, and it was the truest thing he had given her in weeks.
Long after her breathing had gone slow and even, he got up and crossed to the loose board he had pried up in a different lifetime, in a different set of rooms, and carried with him from address to address ever since.
He took out the small box, worn soft at its corners from a century of handling, and he carried it back to the bed and opened it in the dark.
He had opened it a hundred times to look at the little stone and a hundred times locked it away again, kept it safe, kept it secret, a hard bright relic of a future that had burned down to nothing on a November night in 1906.
He did not lock it away tonight. He took the ring out of the worn velvet and set it on the bedside table, in the open, where the first gray light would find it in the morning and where she might see it herself if she woke before he could decide what to do.
He did not put it on her hand. He was not ready, and she was not finished, and there was far too much she still did not know for him to ask her anything at all.
But he could not make himself close it back down into the dark under the floor.
Not after she had lain in his arms and grieved a wedding they never got to have.
He lay down beside her and watched the moonlight come through the shutters and find the diamond on the table, and throw one small point of its light up onto the ceiling.
For a hundred years the ring had been a relic, the last hard proof of everything that had been taken from him.
Lying there in the dark beside the woman who had begun, impossibly, to remember wanting it, he watched that one point of light tremble on the ceiling, and for the first time in all those years the ring was not a thing he had lost. It had become a promise still waiting to be kept.
He took it back before the sun was fully up, before she stirred, and slid it into the dark beneath the loose board where it had ridden out a hundred years of his exile.
Not to hide it from her any longer. Only to keep it safe until the hour it was meant for, an hour he could finally, for the first time in a century, let himself believe was coming.