Heartland

hard the walls shook against us. Marielle strained and pulled at me, her fingers raking through the fabric of my jacket. At some point, she bit me and blood smeared across her lower lip. Her teeth were shining blades of ivory, eagerly poised to bite me again.

The knot of our bodies tightened, cinching into an impossible tangle of desire and restraint. I thought my body was going to rupture, an explosion of bone and blood, before I could climax. She pulled harder, the tendons in her neck and shoulders standing out. When she cried out in frustration, I couldn't hear her voice, so loud was the feedback of my pulse jackhammering in time with the staccato climax of the drum and bass track.

I must have blacked out for a few seconds because, when I became aware that the knot was gone, I had no recollection of when or how it vanished. The song had changed too, and the walls only shivered quietly now, a distant buzz that was like a vibrating cell phone in a coat pocket. My face lay against the cold wall, and Marielle lay nestled against me, her face buried next to my throat.

Reluctant to let go, to let this moment of stolen intimacy end, I stroked her hair gently as I tried to burn all the tiny details into memory.

The trembling pulse beneath her skin. The tender brush of her fingers against my lips. The hint of her breath against my neck. A tear, sliding down my throat and melting into the braid of the Chorus. Ephemeral relics of her presence. All so fragile that, were I to move, they would vanish. All tiny fragments that would be lost in a moment.

I would keep them; when everything else became confused and tangled in my head, when my memories became twisted with the dreams and recollections of others, I would still have these tiny treasures. They would last, unlike the dreams.

They would be enough.

XV

The wind had died during the last hour, and as we sat on a narrow bench near the terrace bar, we weren't cold. Winter had died, and the land was thawing once again toward the season of rebirth.

Marielle was thawing too. The sweat-soaked atmosphere of the boat's interior had melted the icy crust of her opinion of me. The kiss had unlocked both of us, and in the crowd, we had shed some of our old skins. In the sweat thrown from our brows and arms were the liquefied remnants of old habits and old hesitations. All of us gathered in that tiny space gave up something we had been carrying for far too long, and we came out of the metal cocoon wearing new skins, moist with the perspiration of our rebirths.

She stared out at the river, watching the lights of a boat drift by, and while I should have been looking and thinking about other things, I examined her face. My memories were a mess now with Philippe's constantly folding into my own, and my recollection of her went back much further than it should. I could remember her face when she was a tiny baby, and looking at her now, a procession of images strung themselves in my head. A time-lapse vision of Marielle growing from baby to girl to woman.

I reached for her hand and raised it to my lips. I kissed the back of her hand, and her lips quirked into a tiny smile. I kissed her ring finger, and the white marks of my teeth became visible on her skin. The hidden tattoo of our stolen morning together. She turned her hand over so that I might kiss her lifeline, and I did, inhaling her scent.

Philippe's memories were very visual-he didn't store olfactory and auditory triggers-and the memory of Marielle's scent was mine. It had been the same way with Kat; what had survived during the years of trauma was the smell of burning lilacs. Marielle, on the other hand, had an ephemeral scent that was like nightfall in early April, as the ground starts to cool after the sun has gone down, and all the nocturnal flowers are opening. It was a scent that remained indescribable, and I could never quite recall it with confidence, but I always knew it the moment I was in its presence again.

It's a funny way to remember someone: as a sensory phantom haunting you when they are gone. They become a collection of elusive details; you cannot remember them completely, and the more you struggle to put the puzzle together, the more you obsess about the gaps between the pieces. But, when you find these people again, when you crush them to you and inhale their smell, when you hear their voice, when you feel their touch, the pieces arrange themselves and you can't fathom how you didn't see the whole picture before.

Being with her made my heart ache as much as it healed the rifts, for it reminded me of what I had lost in the wood, of what I had let into my soul, and even though I had burned out that disease, there was always going to be a stain. A permanent mark where my humanity had been scarred by the Qliphoth. No matter how much my memory felt whole and complete when I was with Marielle, I was never going to be that way myself. I would always be a patchwork man, no matter how much her presence made me feel otherwise. Because when she was gone, all I would have would be memory, and my memory was far from perfect.

'I dreamt about you a lot after the duel,' she said, as if she knew what I was thinking. 'Antoine claimed victory and his second Witnessed the event, and that was the official Record. But I kept dreaming about you, as if part of me didn't believe you were truly gone.

'Water dreams. You were drowning, and I would try to save you. At first, I was in a boat and you'd be floating out of reach, and no matter how much I rowed or bailed or tried to raise a sail, I could never reach you in time. You always sank before I could touch you. Later-eight or nine months after the duel-I would find myself on a bridge and you would float by underneath. Like Ophelia, after she drowned herself. It was always a different bridge, as if I was searching for the right one, the one that was low enough that I could lean over the railing and grab you as you went past.' She looked at me, and her eyes were bright. 'The Record said you fought beneath a bridge, but it didn't say which one, and Antoine would never tell me.'

'Pont Alexandre,' I said.

She nodded, and seemed to notice I was still holding her hand. She moved her fingers so she could grip mine. 'When I was in the boat, your eyes would be open and you would watch me try to reach you, but when the dreams shifted to the bridge, your eyes were always closed. And you started to sink. Each time, you were a little further underwater, until one night, I dreamed of the river and I wasn't on the bridge anymore. I stood on the bank, watching the boats move on the water, and I never saw you again. You were gone, finally, and all that was left was memory.'

What is done is done, what is gone is gone.

She opened my hand and examined the lines on my palm. The jagged arc of my love line, the broken strand of my lifeline with its tiny hook near the top and the deep groove it cut into the heel of my thumb. The tiny scars that bit and chewed at the line, never breaking it but transforming it into a spiky branch.

On the night before the duel, the night we had taken for ourselves, she had read my palm. We lay in the large four-poster bed, a king-sized king, surrounded by bolsters and comforters and pillows. We could have been disembodied spirits, lost in a sea of smoke. Like the pair in Toulouse-Lautrec's painting that hangs in the Musee d'Orsay. Marielle had put her hand next to mine, and we had compared lifelines. Hers was smooth and it wrapped all the way around the base of her thumb, seeming to go on forever. I traced it over and over again, like I was following the course of a great river on a map. All the way to its source. Yes, this is where we will go. All the way to where it begins.

The Chorus tickled my spine, and something Philippe had whispered to me floated up again. Nunc. Latin for 'now.' Both Bernard and Philippe had referenced it, both had said the word as if it was a marker, denoting a separation between the past and the present. This is how it begins.

This is where we will go.

What is done is done.

But that which is gone didn't stay gone. The world rotated, and the cycle bent back on itself. The world ended and began again. Nunc. The word spoken at the beginning, when the cycle starts anew. And where we stood was where it began.

The airport. Marielle had been surprised to see me there. But not in the way you'd expect when someone you thought dead showed up.

'You knew,' I said. 'You knew I hadn't died under the bridge.'