Edge of Oblivion

He slowly raised his head and met her gaze in the mirror. He wore that dead expression again, the absence of all feeling that had so frightened her the first time she’d glimpsed his face. He straightened—slowly, as if it pained him—and then she noticed his chest, reflected in a clouded outline in the mirror.

If she thought his back a painful sight, his chest was a maddening riddle. On both sides of his sternum at the level of his heart there were fields of straight lines. Black hatch marks on the right side in groups of four lines with a diagonal fifth, red hatch marks on the left, over his heart. There were dozens of them, more than that, row after row of stark, unembellished marks. They were the strangest tattoos she could imagine having.

“It’s a count,” he said very low to the mirror. She started.

A terrible idea began to form in her mind, one that she felt like icy fingers invading her brain.

She pushed it back, horrified.

He turned and faced her, without hurry, without expression, his arms hanging loose at his sides.

He made no attempt to cover himself, no attempt to hide from her open-mouthed alarm, as if he were inviting her disgust. As if he wanted it.

“Red for Ikati, black for others,” he said tonelessly.

And then she knew.

“Kills,” she whispered, understanding beyond the impulse to bury it. Her gaze skipped over his muscled chest, trying not to add, trying not to imagine all the lives reduced to short, blunt hatch marks on an assassin’s chest.

She lifted her gaze to his face. “Why?” she said in a small voice.

His hands curled to fists. “Why what?”

“Why do you keep track?”

The question startled him. He blinked and it was there again, that depth of urgent pathos, welling to the surface. A flash and it was gone, vanished behind the expression of emptiness she’d come to recognize as his mask, a very good, very practiced one, one that hid his genuine feelings well.

Almost.

He answered without inflection, his eyes as empty as his voice.

“So I always remember exactly what I am and what I have to answer for. So I can never fool myself into thinking I’m anything but a monster.”

She breathed in sharply. A monster. That’s what they’d called her, too.

Her heart began to ache, but not just for the carnage she witnessed carved into his bare flesh, and not for the red line she knew was waiting for her, the final one that would finish off an uncompleted group of four just above his left nipple.

Her heart ached for him. For the terrible toll all that death must have taken on his soul.

Haven’t you ever wanted a different sort of life? she’d asked him just yesterday, thinking only of herself. She wondered now how many times he must have wished for that very thing.

“I ordered some food,” she said, clearing her throat of the frog in it. “I thought you might be hungry.”

He stared back at her as if this were the last thing on Earth he had been expecting. She knew exactly how he felt.

“I’ll just...wait for you to get dressed.”

She turned and walked slowly from the room, leaving him staring silently after her.

In a dream, he dressed.

Underwear, pants, shirt, shoes. Knives in his boots and belt, hair combed carelessly with his fingers. Teeth brushed, watch strapped to his left wrist, his heart like a splintered piece of wood inside his chest.

That was new. He wasn’t thinking about it.

I thought you might be hungry, she’d said in response to his unrepentant admission of sin, and that was all it took. The blood on his hands had soaked so deep, into every pore and atom; the things he had done were so awful they could never be atoned for. He was beyond salvation, so far beyond the pale he was almost a cliche of evil. And yet she hadn’t condemned him. She had just looked at him with those huge green eyes, looked into him, almost as if she...

Not! Thinking! About it!

He found her sitting at the table on the sweeping terrace, gazing out into the lifting pink radiance of dawn. He simply watched her for a moment through the sliding glass door. Her hair was mussed and spilled dark over her shoulders, around the cashmere throw she’d wrapped around them to ward off the chill of the morning. Her skirt was wrinkled; she must have slept in it. He wondered if she’d waited for him. How long might she have waited before she’d fallen asleep in her clothes? The metal collar around her neck took on a rosy gleam in the light, and he felt a ping of discontent at the sight of it against the fine skin of her throat, delicate as a foal’s.

Twice. She’d had the opportunity to flee now, twice, and hadn’t taken either one.

He inhaled, marshaling his fragmented emotions with effort, pushing down the thought that rose unbidden inside him like a lure that bobbed up, unwelcome, from dark water.

You can trust her.

No. Trust was for children and fools. He was neither.

Her head turned and she looked at him through the slider. She sent him a fleeting, quizzical glance then directed her attention to the many silver domed platters on the table. She lifted one, sniffing its contents.

Bacon. He smelled it through the glass, and his stomach growled.

He stepped out onto the terrace and took a seat opposite her. Neither of them spoke for several minutes while they filled their plates and ate. Birds began to chirp in the trees beyond the plant-filled patio, hesitant little sleepy peeps at first that grew into full-throated songs of welcome as the sun rose over the horizon.

“You didn’t catch him,” she said, stating the obvious.

He tore apart a croissant with his fingers. “No. I know where he went, though. I’m going out again.”

“That must be handy for an assassin.” She glanced up at him. “The walking-through-walls bit.

I’ve never seen that before. And you have Vapor, too. You’re very Gifted.”

He didn’t reply. Church bells throughout the city began to toll.

“I like that,” Morgan said quietly between bites of scrambled egg. Xander froze with his fork halfway to his mouth.

“The bells,” she said, looking down at her plate. “We don’t have church bells in Sommerley.”

“Oh.” His heart eased out of his throat. Fool.

When he was able to breathe again, he sensed something different. She was so somber. Her finely arched brows were drawn together, her generous mouth turned down.

“Are you all right?” he said, low, not quite looking at her.

She blinked up at him, startled. “Me?” She let out a small, brittle laugh. “I’m...yes! Of course I’m fine! I’m just...so very...”

Then she carefully put down her fork, dropped her face into her hands, and fell silent.

“Morgan,” he said, harsher than he intended.

She put up a hand. “Just give me a minute.” Then she put the hand back over her lowered face.

The impatience that lashed through him was almost unbearable. He held himself immobile, staring at her gleaming dark hair, the fine sweep of her collarbones exposed at the open neckline of her blouse, her long, tapered fingers that were just slightly trembling on her face.

He said her name again, softer. She inhaled, then let her breath out in a sharp exhalation that sounded like she had come to some kind of decision. She lifted her head and looked straight at him, and her gaze was steady and clear.

“I have to know how you’re going to do it.”

He frowned. Do what?

“It’s just the not knowing. I think if I know, I can...it will be easier for me.”

The food he had eaten turned to a sour lump in his stomach.

“Please tell me,” she whispered. The look she gave him then, pleading and vulnerable, shattered the dull hunk of wood in his chest to pieces.

Glowering, he shoved his chair back from the table and strode across the patio, stopping only when it ended in a balustrade of pink marble lined with baskets of flowers. He had a wild thought to jump off. Somehow that seemed much preferable to answering her question.