Lament - Мэгги Стифватер

And faster still, a slide show on high speed. A wickedly beautiful knife. A young man, falling onto his face in a wet street, a knife jutting from his side.

Another man, in strange clothing, his neck warm and pulsing life between Luke's hands, gasping and falling. A searing pain in Luke's chest.

A woman, her shrill cry cut off as a blade sliced her white skin. Hands gripping three iron nails until they left red in his palm.

Another young man, his neck stabbed as neatly as the big cat's. A girl my age, life gasping out with each breath, crimson around her.

The savage knife ripping shred after shred in Luke's arm, cutting at the golden band. Lying in a pool of blood and self-destruction. A white bird flapping in blood. Rising out of the blood. Another body.

Another. Hands covered with red.

All I could see before my eyes was red, rising with increasing vertigo. I collapsed onto the cold marble, my breaths too slow and far apart. The wounds on my arm stung.

"Enough. "Luke's voice, barely audible, came from across the floor. He was slumped against the wall, paler than white. His face, colorless and miserable, turned away, and I saw a single tear made of blood drip down his cheek, leaving a red stain behind it.

I knew then that I had done more than read his mind.

TWELVE

I lay on the marble forever while the gravestones outside marked time, the moon's shadow moving around them, lighting the other side of their worn surfaces and illuminating Christian names that hadn't been used in decades. Cold crept through me, passing from the marble into my veins. Every moment that I lay on the cold stone, hoping and dreading that Luke would pull me from the ground, images of death flew through my head. No. Not just death. Murder.

I didn't know what to think, so my brain just stopped. Then I could sit up. I looked across the dark tomb to where Luke made a light shape on the marble, a strange pale character in an alphabet I didn't know. His cheek lay against the wall as he stared out into the night, eyes dull. There was still a dried blood trail where the single strange tear had traced its way along his cheekbone and found a path along the edge of his jaw. I followed his gaze out to the headstones and watched the mist, ever thickening, creep around their bases. Graves. How appropriate.

I thought about asking him if he'd really killed all those people. But then I remembered him saying, Do I scare you?

He'd really killed them.

So he wasn't a faerie. He was a murderer.

I looked back at him, huddled there so miserable and regretful. Anger boiled in my throat, sudden and hard to swallow. I wondered what twisted logic let him look so torn up over the deaths, now--and then would let him do it again.

"So, that's your secret?" I snapped. Luke's head didn't turn. "You're not a faerie--you're just a serial killer?" I should have said "one of Them" instead, but I didn't care at that point.

Supernatural beings seemed the least of my problems.

Luke was perfectly still, just another marble statue in the monument.

Somehow his silence just made me angrier. I found I could get to my feet, and I did, staring down at him from across the ever-widening space between us. "Were you going to kill me, is that what it was? Save me from Them so you could stab me in peace and quiet?"

He still didn't move. But he asked, his voice dead, "Aren't you afraid?" "No! I'm pissed."

Finally, he looked at me, and his eyes silently begged for understanding. But how could there be understanding for this? It wasn't wild sex or drugs or a mammoth collection of Britney Spears posters that I'd uncovered in his mind. It was a trail of bodies. Real people, the life cut out of them as quickly as that wild cat's. It was maybe the one thing I couldn't forgive. I'd opened up my tightly sealed armor and let him in--and now it hurt.

"So, all those times you asked me if I thought you were sketchy or whatever--it's because you're a killer? A murderer?

His voice was flat. "It's not like that."

I hugged my arms around myself. "Oh, how is it, then? They just accidentally got stuck on your knife? Let me guess. It was self-defense. That girl I saw, she was going to kick your ass."

He shook his head.

He wasn't even denying it. "How many? How many have you killed?" As if that mattered. As if it were like a math test, where the number of wrong answers affected your score. He was a killer, no matter how many bodies he'd left behind.

"Don't make me remember."

"Why? Does it hurt? Don't you think it hurt them more?" Luke looked like my words cut him, but he had no right to mercy. "How many?" I snapped.

"Don't make me remember."

My anger shook my voice, which was wild and out of control. "You asshole. You let me believe you were the good guy. You made me trust you!"

"I'm sorry."

"Sorry doesn't friggin' cut it! You killed people. Not soldiers. Innocent people. I saw them. They weren't hurting you! You're just--you're just--a monster." The images were still flashing through my head, the violence perfectly preserved at the moment of death. I wanted to throw up, to somehow get the poison out of my system, but for once, I couldn't. He hadn't just killed them-he'd burdened me with the memories of their deaths. As if I'd done it.

I swiped a tear--a real tear, not a weird, bloody one-- from my cheek and sank back down onto the floor. My anger was gone as quickly as it had come. I didn't want to feel anything at all.

"Can you forgive me?" Luke whispered.

I wiped another tear before it had a chance to fall. I wanted him to hurt as badly as I did. I looked at him, shaking my head, wondering how he could even ask.

"How could I?" His eyes held me, begging me to change my mind, pleading for forgiveness. I shook my head again. "No."

There was a long silence. Years passed before he spoke again.

His voice was barely there. "I didn't think so." He slowly stood up, and then he reached out a hand to me. "Come on. I'll take you home."

I stared at his hand. Did he really think I was going to take it? Those fingers, that strangled a man? That gripped a knife and carved a fine deadly line across a girl's throat? He must have seen my thoughts in my face, because he dropped his hand.

The miserable line of his mouth would have broken my heart if I'd let myself forget all the blood he'd spilled.

I stood up without his hand and lifted my chin. If I'd learned anything from my mother, it was how to look like you were all right when you weren't. When nothing would be all right again. I turned my expression on him, emotions carefully packed away under ice, and said, "Okay, let's go."

I should have been afraid; I knew from his memories that he could kill me before I even knew to run. I even knew where he still kept that wicked dagger, in a scabbard underneath the leg of his jeans. But my fear was locked away with everything else, and I didn't think I was going to open that box for a long time. Maybe not ever.

Luke sighed and retrieved his three nails from the entrance of the monument. "For what it's worth--I'm not going to hurt you. I can't."

I eyed him frostily. "The same way you 'can't' tell me anything about yourself?"

He shook his head, not looking at me. His eyes scanned the graveyard, though nothing was visible through the cloying mist. "Not that way at all. Come on. Before They come out.

A tiny chill escaped from my locked-away emotions. Just when he said "They"--then, it was gone. It was probably stupid to be afraid of Them and not him, but I believed They wanted to hurt me. I couldn't believe that of Luke. I followed him from the monument, moving between the graves. We were as silent as ghosts. The mist fooled my eyes, but I was pretty sure we weren't going back the way we came.

"Why this way?" I whispered.

Luke's eyes darted past me. "We're climbing over the fence. They'll be expecting us to come out the gate." He looked back at me, his eyes finding the key that was still hanging against my skin, and kept moving. The mist shifted and shimmered, hiding even the massive trees until we were upon them. I didn't see the iron fence until I was close enough to touch it. The waist-high iron was solid and black, in a way that nothing else in the cloud around us was.

Luke gripped it and was over in half-a-breath's time. He held out a hand to me again.

Without touching him, I stepped onto the bottom rail of the fence and clambered over it. He lowered his hand again and led the way. It only took me a few moments to realize where we were--on the end of the road where I'd found his car parked. We were only a few minutes away from my house.

Then I smelled it. A familiar, sharp, sweet smell, hovering on the edge of the cut-grass smell.

And I heard it, too: a sound almost like music, forming snatches of tune somewhere in the part of my brain I didn't think I used.

I felt Luke start to move a second before he moved, and then he grabbed me, pulling me toward the side of the road, his fingers tight on my arm. Is this when I should start being afraid of him?

He hadn't pulled me more than a few feet when a pleasant voice, halfway to a song, said, "I thought I was the only one who couldn't sleep."

For a moment I didn't recognize the voice, but then Luke stiffened and turned. I saw a tall, snowy figure step out of the mist toward us. She was all the more frightening because I knew her from far more ordinary circumstances-- and she shouldn't be here. Eleanor was walking dead-center down the road toward us, solidifying as she did. I couldn't tell if it was the effect of the mist or if she really was materializing right there on the road. Luke tightened his grip on me, shifting me subtly so that he stood between myself and Eleanor.

He looked at her, voice casual, as if he wasn't obviously shielding me from her. "What do you want?"

Eleanor smiled, so beautifully my head hurt. "Couldn't this be just a chance meeting?" She reached into the folds of her fine white dress and withdrew a long, pearly blade with a round, unadorned grip.

"It could be," Luke snarled. "What the fuck do you want?"

The words sounded wrong in his mouth; desperate.

Eleanor laughed, a delicate sound that made the trees shake on either side of us. "Temper looks so bad on you, dear." She held out the polished bone knife toward him. "I brought this for you, since you seem to have lost yours."

"I didn't lose it."

She circled us. Luke held me so tightly it ached.

"Yes," she said finally. "I see that." She reached out as if she were going to touch my hair, her elegant fingers stretching toward my face, and then jerked back. Eleanor looked down at her fingers as if surprised at what they'd done, and then looked at Luke's secret, hanging around my neck.

Luke stepped back, pulling me with him. "Don't touch her. Keep your filthy hands away from her."

Eleanor studied her fingernails. "Hmm. I don't know why you're being so rude, sweetheart.

We've been so forgiving of your schedule these past few days. Everyone's been so nice to you. I really expected to find you in a good mood. It's been quite long enough for you to be all rested up." She extended the knife toward him again. "And now you can just finish everything up and we'll all go back to our lives." She laughed, and this time the trees shuddered up and down the road. "Well, most of us."

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