Chapter 45
“WHERE’S THE RIVER?” DEZ DEMANDS, storming up to the bar as Eri’s putting the closed sign in the window. When Rafe left her tonight, he had other things to do. Her best guess is that he’s at the river where they keep the frags.
At the river so deep you can dive into it.
Wiping down the counter, Eri gives Dez a nod, as if she’s glad Dez finally asked. “Head west.”
“Is he out there?”
“Where he belongs,” Eri says. “If you do this, Dez—and you need to do this—beware that the rules might change.”
“What does that mean?” Dez asks impatiently.
“Better go find out.”
Dez pushes out of the bar’s back door into still, white snow.
Her rage is blinding, vibrating in her skull, and the night is cold and grim.
She charges west into a stand of towering pines, her eyes adjusting to the darkness as the forest swallows her.
There are no footprints in the snow to follow, but of course, Rafe would have flown.
Moving quickly through the woods, she listens for running water. Hears nothing.
And then she smells it. Petrichor. He’s been here, and he’s close. She tramps through powdered drifts until she sees a dim reflective glow over the permanent night’s horizon. She follows the glow until she finds herself at the river’s edge.
She kneels down and gazes through the river’s frozen surface at …
A dozen disembodied hands of every shade and shape, tied together with an almost formless cord. Looking upriver, she sees more underwater islands made of feet, torsos, and heads.
“Dez.” Rafe’s voice startles her. She spins to find him behind her, clutching a severed forearm with a cheap gold watch fastened around the wrist. He looks at her like he knows exactly what she’s doing here. “This must look bad.”
“Rafe—”
“We’re keeping the frags here until they’re ready—”
“You lied to me.”
He tips his face up to the sky. “Do you know how much easier my life would be if I could lie to you?”
“What happened that night at the Dairy Barn?”
“Oh, we’re doing this? Okay.” Rafe bends to set the arm down on the ice.
Dez watches, stunned, as it sinks through the ice as if it were water, then stills a few inches below the surface.
He walks toward Dez on the frozen river, his boots clacking on the ice, his expression dangerously gorgeous.
Dez hates herself for what they did earlier, for how his eyes still send a rush of hunger through her.
“Did you have something to do with it?” she makes herself ask.
“Yes.”
“Start talking,” she says through her teeth.
“I know you loved your brother, Dez. And we also both know he was a fuckup.”
“What did you do, Rafe?” Dez chokes out.
“I simply took advantage of an opportunity that already existed by sending in a friend to help.”
“To the Dairy Barn?” Dez squints, confused. “The guy in the skull mask?”
“You don’t know this—you couldn’t possibly know this—but another, far more violent man was supposed to rob the Dairy Barn with Mo that night.”
“Who?”
“A drifter your brother met one night at the Badwater Saloon. Mo was going to steal your family’s money for a cheap high. But he was bringing a man who would have hurt you, like he’s hurt other women. So I sent Jet in his place.”
“Jet?”
“Of course, your brother couldn’t see Jet.
Only a handful of mortals have ever been able to see us outside a barbelo.
You saw Jet, but Mo thought his partner was wasted on the street somewhere, that he was left to do the job alone.
Jet never interacted with your brother—not until you burned him and brought him to the precipice of death.
Only then could he sense the angel holding him aloft. ”
“But I took that guy’s eye out,” Dez says, staring at her hand as if the jellied eyeball is still there in it.
“Yes. You did. Jet had a hell of a time looking for it. Never found it though.”
He had an accident over break, Yael had told Dez. Before that, he was a Visionary.
Dez makes a gagging noise, piecing the horrible evening together. That feeling of wrenching out the eyeball. The sound it made. The warm wet of it in her hand.
The strange, old-fashioned gun he’d been holding. Was it a gun at all? And his eyes. One pale blue. One inky black.
One of them is a replacement.
Dez has the original in a pill bottle under her mattress. Jet looked for it but never found it, because it’s been with her all along.
At a school where eyes are used for security clearance, for access to the Vault and more.
And that’s why he was switched this year from Visionary to Scribe.
“Zeke got him a replacement from a frag,” Rafe explains, “but he’s never been quite the same.”
“Why did you do it?” she says to Rafe.
Rafe sighs. “You were already going to be so angry at Mo after he tried to rob the Dairy Barn. Which was very useful for me, having you estranged from your closest tie to home. But it wouldn’t be so useful if you got yourself killed that night, trying to fend off some deranged stoner. I kept you alive. Safe.”
“The gun Jet used—”
“A chronophotographic gun. Doesn’t fire bullets. Captures video. A fascinating invention, and we’ve got the whole night on film—”
“Then you just drove up on that motorcycle …” Dez whispers in a daze.
“And introduced myself,” he says, unashamed. “It was an opportune moment. You were gonna say yes to Acheron, no matter how absurd the offer was.”
“But Mo,” Dez whispers faintly, gripping a pine tree bough for support.
“Jet’s intervention was meant to be the Inciting Incident in this still-unfolding saga, the plot point that spun both our stories in a new direction. But there was a twist I hadn’t anticipated. Your will to protect your brother.”
Dez is apoplectic. She doesn’t even know where to start.
“There was never a committee who selected me,” she says. She cannot catch her breath. “No one saw Glimpse. If they had, they wouldn’t have cared.”
“I was the committee,” Rafe says. “I saw Glimpse. I cared.”
She looks up to stare at him. She sees a stranger. “Not as much as you care about yourself.”
“That’s true,” he acknowledges. “But who really cares about anything more than they care about themselves?”
Dez swallows, choking back tears. “I cared about Mo. I loved him. And if you hadn’t ruined everything, he’d still be alive.”
“Yes. But you’d be dead. I saved you from a brief, meaningless life. And I made you a filmmaker, a storyteller, instead of merely a receiver of one tragic little story in a premature Life Review.”
“Shut up. Just stop talking for a minute.”
“We’re artists, Dez. Everyone else is wasting their time. I saved your life, so what?”
“You shouldn’t have. I wish I was dead.”
“Come on, you get off on this place. You want to be an angel.”
“You feel no guilt for what you did,” Dez says, astonished.
“Why should I? Your brother’s in a better place. He wasn’t destined for greatness. But you and me? You know we’re the dream team.”
“You’re an actual monster,” she says, backing away from him, sickened by him. “You killed my brother.”
“You killed your brother,” he says. “I was only trying to save your life.”
“You choose your words so carefully,” she whispers. “But you only say a fraction of the truth. And everything you don’t say is so much worse than I could ever guess. The lies by omission are so much crueler.”
“You’re mad, I get it. But to continue to grieve your brother with this level of fixation is to misunderstand the whole system. The difference between us, Dez, is that I’m not afraid of death.”
“I think the difference between us is that I’m not afraid of love.”
He smiles. Nods. “Ouch.”
“I don’t ever want to see you again,” Dez says, turning away from Rafe, running back toward the bar.
“But I have a feeling you will,” Rafe calls after her, into the night.