passion. Not just to witness and observe, but to know.
He obliterated a slice of pizza and some French fries. “Do you think Sharon knows what he is?”
Diana didn’t have the answer, but there was an obvious way to find out. She caught Sharon at the buffet line. Diana didn’t want to ask the question, but she needed to know. Vom gave her an appetite. Zap gave her an insatiable curiosity, an endless hunger to observe everything and to understand it all.
“Do you know?”
Sharon perked up.
“Do you know what Calvin is?” pressed Diana. “Do you know what he really is?”
Sharon’s lips tightened, and she used a pair of tongs to rearrange a bed of lettuce. It was all the answer Diana needed.
“He’s a monster, Sharon.”
“No, he’s a victim. He’s trapped, lost. You don’t know what it’s like for him.”
“I don’t need to know what it’s like. All I know is that he’s the most dangerous thing in this universe.”
A woman stuck behind Diana, waiting for a shot at the meatballs, caught enough of the conversation to wrinkle her brow.
Sharon took Diana by the arm and pulled her aside. “You’re making a scene.”
“I’m just trying to understand this. Why would you do it?”
Sharon heaped some banana pudding on her plate, just to keep her hands busy. “I told you already, Diana. I wanted to touch something important.”
“You’re damn right he is,” Diana said, “but he’s also going to destroy our world. You have to know that.”
“Of course I do. But it’s not like it’s something he wants to do. It’s just something he has to do. It’s that thing in the sky, it’s that goddamn Fenris aspect.”
“But that’s him, isn’t it?”
“No,” said Sharon. “It’s a part of him, but it doesn’t reason. It doesn’t think. It functions. It just exists. He’s only a very small part of it.”
They parted ways. Diana grabbed some pizza. Sharon added a few pieces of shrimp to her own plate.
“He’s an anomaly,” said Sharon. “And one day, he’ll return to Fenris and… well, I don’t know what’ll happen to him then.”
“Him? What about us? What about all these people?”
“They’ll be taken care of. Greg has a plan to save as many as possible, but it’s complicated. I can’t explain it right now. Just promise me you won’t bother Calvin about this.”
Diana glanced to Calvin, then to Sharon.
“Promise me, please. There’s no point in talking about it now. I’m the wrong person to talk to anyway. You need to talk to Greg to understand what we’re doing. He’s a smarmy ass, but he has a gift. He sees the world in ways that, like it or not, are true. If you can get past his smarm, you’ll see that.”
Diana didn’t relish the idea.
Sharon said, “I’ll talk to Greg, and set something up for tomorrow evening. Give me that much time.”
Diana sighed.
“Just one more day can’t hurt, can it?” asked Sharon.
“I guess not.”
“Fantastic. You won’t regret it, Diana.”
“Yeah, we’ll see.”
They returned to the table. While Sharon forced chitchat, Diana devoured her food. She was too distracted by her thoughts to exercise the self-control to eat at a regular pace. She did her best not to stare at Calvin, and when she caught Zap staring she kicked his chair.
Calvin didn’t look like something that would rip the universe to pieces one day. Knowing what he was, Diana hated to admit it, but she understood what Sharon had meant about touching something more incomprehensible than yourself.
Something beautiful.
Something horrible.
The last few weeks had altered her perception, and Diana nd nothing contradictory about the notion.
She pushed aside such thoughts. She was getting used to that, so even something like the end of the world was easy to ignore for an hour or two. She didn’t mention it, and it didn’t come up in conversation.
She decided to enjoy her dinner and her friends. A storm might sweep through time and erase this moment forever. And when you couldn’t count on even yesterday to be there tomorrow, it only made every moment seem all the more precious and worth having.
Vom carried a plate piled with every scrap of food he could manage to fit onto it. The mound teetered on the edge of collapse. He sat, shoveled the serving down in two bites, and got up for seconds. She decided against warning him to pace himself. She could only expect so much.
She even let Vom have an eleventh plate.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Sharon drove on autopilot. She paid just enough attention to traffic to avoid getting into an accident, although there were several close calls. She slammed on the brakes, barely avoiding a collision with the taxi in front of her.
“C’mon, you ass.” She honked the horn twice.
“Is something wrong?” asked Calvin.
“Yes.” She let the horn blare for a good three seconds. “People need to learn to drive in this city. That’s the problem.”
“Mmm-hmm. You do realize the light is red, right?”
Sharon swore. She wrung the steering wheel in her whiteknuckled grip. She continued to glare alternately at the taxi and at the light for standing in her way, though if she’d reflected on it, she was in no rush.
“Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?” he asked.
“Everything’s fine,” she said. “Why would anything be wrong?”
“Okay.”
“Everything is perfect.” Her voice was flat. “Everything’s wonderful. Everything is just the way it’s supposed to be.”
“Okay.”
The car behind her honked its horn. She stuck her arm out the window and flipped him off.
“Light’s red, genius.”
“Actually…”
Calvin didn’t need to finish the sentence. The light had changed several seconds ago. The welcoming intersection beckoned. She pressed the gas pedal too roughly and their car lurched through with a screech.
“So nothing’s wrong?” asked Calvin.
“No. Nothing’s wrong. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because you almost ran over that guy in the last intersection.”
“I had the light.”
“He was blind.”
Her jaw tightened. “So, he had a dog, didn’t he? If he got hit, don’t blame me. Blame the dog.”
“Uh-huh. You should probably pull over before you kill somebody.”
“Why bother?”
She took a turn too sharply and bounced off the curb, nearly clipping a small gathering of pedestrians.
“Pull over.” He spoke with quiet authority. He didn’t give orders often, and it got her attention. She pulled into a parking lot. He reached over, turned off the car, and took the keys.
“Maybe I should drive.”
“You don’t know how.”
