Shuttered Sky

serendipitous and unfortunate combine together in the end.”

“There’s always a chance they’ll come back,” Dillon offered.

“Of course they’ll come back.” Tessic appeared so unconcerned, Dillon wondered whether or not it was a facade. Although he did sense turmoil in the man, it didn’t seem to be about this particular point.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Their presence is required, and therefore I trust it will be pro­vided.”

“Required for what?”

Tessic smiled. “For the greatest of works, Dillon. The greatest of works.”

A heavy downpour began to pelt the living room windows. Now that Michael was out in the world unprotected and unconstrained, the skies over Houston resonated his turbulent state of mind.

Tessic held up his glass. “To the return of old friends,” he said, and touched his glass to Dillon’s. Behind them, a silent flash of light­ening lit the room, chased quickly by a slow roll of thunder filled with as many haunting flavors as the Benedictine.

* * *

Maddy shaved her legs in the shower, disgusted by the effect Win­ston had had on her body, and the effect Michael had had on her mood. There was no way to tell how much emotional tension was her own, and how much was projected upon her by Michael. Even in isolation, she felt she could not be alone, irradiated—violated—by their strange incandescence.

When she stepped out of the shower, the sound of thunder caught her by surprise. Wrapped in a plush robe thick as a parka, she stepped into the bedroom suite. The room had grown warmer than it had been all day, while outside, rain sheeted down the glass wall, obscuring the lights of the Houston night.

“They’re gone.”

The sound of Dillon’s voice made her jump. She turned to see him in bed, sitting up against the pillows, halfway beneath the covers. “You must be disappointed.”

“Are you coming to bed?” he asked.

“I have to dry my hair.”

She retreated to the bathroom and set the blower on low. All day she could get by with attributing her mounting sense of discomfort to events outside of herself. First there was the shock of witnessing Mi­chael’s resurrection, and then there was the pervasiveness of Michael’s emotional presence. But now Michael was gone, outside of their shielded world. Her emotions were now her own, and she didn’t like what she felt.

When she stepped out of the bathroom again, she found the lights off. Dillon was a flow of satin contours lit only by flashes of distant lightning. She hoped he’d be a asleep, but knew he was not.

She slipped on a nightgown, and slid beneath the covers on her side of the bed. Dillon’s hands were on her instantly, stroking her shoulders and back, urgently importuning. She fought her own body’s reflex to open to his touch. His hands were colder than usual. His caresses mechanical and forced. When she didn’t respond, he became more insistent. Maddy knew that tonight this was not about love. It wasn’t even about passion.

She rolled toward him, but grabbed his wrist, moving his hand away from her.

“What is it?” he asked.

He sounded so young when he said it, it made the five-year gap of their ages seem like a canyon. Yet even as she considered it, she knew that wasn’t the reason for her discomfort. It was her “orbit,” as Drew so incisively put it, which so dismayed her. The expanse was unbridgeable. They could be together, holding one another, and still she would be in a distant orbit. Maddy would never truly be with him, and that knowledge was getting harder to bear each time she felt Dil­lon’s body against hers.

“Do you think of her when we make love?” She found the words were out of her mouth before she knew she would say them.

“Who?” Dillon asked.

“Who do you think?” There was something she had heard over the intercom earlier in the day. Drew and Winston talking about how Dillon and Deanna “completed” each other. Maddy knew she did not complete him in this way, for even in their most fulfilling, most pas­sionate of moments, she sensed a depth of longing in him that her spirit was not large enough to fill. “Well, do you?” she asked again.

He reached over again to touch her, gently stroking her hair, which had grown longer in Winston’s presence. “Only sometimes.”

She spat out a laugh at his response, hating him for the answer, yet loving him for being incapable of a lover’s lie.

“Please, Maddy,” he said. “It’s been awful today. I need you to be there. Nobody else is.”

A flash of lightning lit his eyes, pupils wide, pleading. It was con­solation he wanted. She was nothing more than his consolation prize. And she did want him, as she always wanted him—but now she knew what it was she truly wanted. Stifling her own tears, she reached up to his face, gently tracing the curves of his cheek and nose. She kissed his lips, for the first time feeling his kiss free from the scars she had given him.

“Alright,” she said in a whisper. “But you have to do something first.”

“What?”

“Tell me that I complete you,” she said. “Tell me, and make me believe it.”

She knew how Dillon could find words to heal hearts and minds. Surely he could cut through the truth, and make her believe a lie. Please Dillon, she prayed. Lie just this once, and shatter the truth. The truth that I can never be the companion you need.

But Dillon said nothing. And in time, he took his hands from her. She rolled over, facing away from him, and let her tears soak silently into the pillow. For the first time, she found herself truly wishing they were back in the Hesperia lockdown. Back then she could be exactly what he needed. A human contact. The hand that fed him; the source of his survival. In those days they could cling to the wonderful illusion that titanium and steel were the only obstacles keeping them apart. Maddy would have done anything to have that illusion back.

Some time later she felt him get out of bed, and heard him dress. She watched him move in the shadows and the strobing flashes of lightning as he opened the closet door, pulling out the designer over­coat Tessic had given him for their trip to the cold northern reaches of Poland.

“Going out?” she asked.

“Something I need to do. I won’t be long.”

He opened the door to their suite, letting in the hallway light. He lingered there for a moment before he left, silhouetted against the door frame, looking toward her.

“I love you, Maddy,” he said.

“I know you do,” she answered. But it was only a shard of what she needed to hear.

27. The Dying Void

The windshield wipers metered out the time in Dillon’s taxi like a metronome.

“I hate storms like this,” the cabby said. “They make me nervous.”

Dillon had taken the stairs down sixty-seven flights rather than alerting Tessic by using an elevator. As soon as he had descended away from the penthouse, a sudden sense of the outside world hit him. Dread and paranoia, a panicked call to action, with no hint of what action to take. Do something, his spirit cried. Do anything. He immediately real­ized that his time convalescing under Tessic’s protection had changed nothing. He was no more equipped to face things now than he had been when he first arrived. If anything, the sense of panic had inten­sified.

Already drenched by the downpour, he had called a taxi from an all-night coffee shop three blocks away.

“Got caught in a flash flood once,” the cabby said as they drove to the address scrawled on the slip of paper. “Sumbitch washed my car away. Lotta power in them there things.”

The taxi was brand new. Dillon was certain it hadn’t started that way. He wondered how long it would take for the cabby to notice the change. Hopefully not until after Dillon left the cab.