Thin Air

“Yes.”

She turned those blue, blue eyes on me and said, “Do you know why?”

I silently shook my head. I didn’t think I wanted to know.

We got out of the car and walked to a steep set of concrete stairs leading up into the dark. Motion-sensitive lights bathed the steps dusty white, a startling contrast to the reddish rocks. I put my foot on the first one, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move.

Venna took my hand. “I know,” she said quietly. “This place remembers. It remembers everything.” She put her head down, as if there were things she didn’t want to see. I could understand that. I could feel it brushing at the edges of my consciousness, and without meaning to I drifted up into the aetheric…

And I saw chaos.

Raw fury. Horror. Anguish. An abiding, keening grief that had reduced this place, on the aetheric level, to a black hole of emotion.

“My God,” I whispered numbly. “What did this?”

Venna glanced up at me, then back down. “You did,” she said. “David did. We all did. When she died-”

She shut up, fast, but not before I put the pieces together. “Imara,” I said. “Imara died here.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “We didn’t know what to do. She was part human, and that part couldn’t be saved. He tried, after you were…after you disappeared.”

“David tried to save her.”

Venna bit her lip and nodded. She looked genuinely distressed. No wonder there was so much pain here, so much grief. David’s agony, staining this place like ink.

Maybe mine, too.

“We’d better go,” she said, and took my hand. Hers felt warm, childlike, human. “It’ll be better at the top.”

It wasn’t exactly easy ascending those stairs; I felt as if I were moving through the same quicksand I’d fought through back on the beach. The handrail felt sticky. I looked at my hand, almost sure I’d see bloodstains, but no… nothing. Up above, stars were twinkling in the dark blue sky; there was still a band of pale blue toward the horizon, shot through with threads of red and gold. Beautiful.

There seemed to be a thousand steps, and every one of them a sacrifice.

When we made it to the landing I was gasping for breath and shaking; Venna let go of my hand and moved to the door of the chapel, which was closed and had a sign on the front that gave the hours it was open-which didn’t include the hour of now.

That didn’t seem to matter to Venna, who simply pulled, and the door opened with a faint snick. The puff of air from the darkened interior smelled of incense and cedar, a timeless scent that carried none of the horror present outside.

Except for the flicker of a couple of red candles here and there, it was quite dark inside; the dim, fading sunset showed a small chamber, inked in shadow at the corners, with a few plain wood pews facing the huge expanse of glass windows. It was breathtaking, and it was, without a doubt, a holy kind of place.

Venna held the door for me, and locked it once we were inside. The place looked empty.

“I thought you said-”

“I said I’d bring him,” she said, and I felt a massive energy surge sweep over my body, staggering me, and I almost saw the golden arc of it blow past.

It seemed to outline a human body, glowing hot, and then the glow vanished and there was only a man standing there, unsteady and pale as a dead man.

He pitched forward to the floor, retching.

I knew exactly how that felt, actually. I’d felt it when I’d flown Air Venna from the Great Northwest to Las Vegas, nonstop.

“I thought you said teleporting could kill people,” I said.

“It didn’t.”

Even though I knew it was a mistake, I took a step toward them and heard that he was gasping for breath in helpless, hopeless sobs. He looked up, and the dim light gilded a pale face, pale hair.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I can’t be here-” And then he just…stopped, staring at me.

“Ashan?” I asked. He should have rung some recognition bells, I knew that, but…nothing. A frustrating lack of context. “You know who I am?”

He licked pale lips and wiped away his tears with shaking hands. “You’re gone,” he said. “I killed you. I killed both of you.”

He lunged at me, and slammed the heel of his hand into my shoulder. He seemed as surprised as I was- apparently, he’d been expecting a ghost, not flesh and blood. And I hadn’t expected him to move quite that fast. “Whoa!” I said, and skipped back out of reach. “Watch the hands!”

Ashan didn’t exactly look well. He was wearing some kind of a gray suit, but it was dirty, smudged, and torn, and he smelled. I mean, really smelled. His hair was greasy, and all in all, he looked like somebody who’d never discovered the basics of hygiene. Which I suppose would follow, if he’d been busted from near-angelic status to the merely human. Venna clearly hadn’t taken the time to clean him up, or maybe she hadn’t been able to convince him to even try.

He kept looking at me like he wasn’t sure he was sane. Well…actually, he looked like he’d blown past the borders of actual sanity some time ago. I glanced over my shoulder. Venna was still there, watching with unnervingly bright eyes.

“You have to be dead,” he said. “I watched you die. I felt you die. And I paid the price.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “Guess what? Good news. You get to make amends and help me get my life back.”

He was fast. Faster than he ought to have been, and I hadn’t moved far enough. He crossed the space, grabbed me by the throat, and slammed me down to the floor with such violence that I could barely comprehend it, much less react.

Upside down, Venna’s face was still inscrutable. Great. No help from that quarter.

My instincts reached for power…and failed.

There was no access to the powers I’d started to get accustomed to, not here. This was like a bubble, cut off from the outside. Cut off from the aetheric.

“Get off!” I squeaked, and twisted, trying to throw Ashan’s weight to one side. He wasn’t heavy, but he was wiry, and he had an unholy amount of strength. I had no leverage. I grabbed a handful of his greasy hair and yanked, and he howled and used his free hand to grab my wrist. I bucked, got him off balance, and we rolled down the aisle of the chapel, spitting curses, and this time I ended up on top, my hands on his throat. Holding him down.

“Go on,” he spat at me. “Break my neck. Kill me like I killed your child. Put me out of my misery, you pathetic bag of meat!”

I went very still. I must have looked like a crazy woman, my hair sticking to my sweaty face, my eyes wide, my lips parted on a truth I didn’t want to speak.

He’d killed my child.

That was what Venna hadn’t wanted to tell me. I was facing Imara’s murderer, with his life in my hands.

This time, Venna did react. She stepped forward and said, very quietly, “You can’t. You can’t kill him.”

Oh, I was pretty sure I could. And should.

Didn’t the daughter I couldn’t remember, whose pain had soaked into the very stones outside of this place, demand that much?

TWELVE

It wasn’t so much the moral quandary that stopped me as the fact that something changed in the room, right at that moment. Not Ashan-he was a stinky, horrifying excuse for a human being, and right at that moment I had no