She would react differently, I suppose, but I’m too weary to pretend. It would take a lot to scare me these days. So I just watch him steadily as he points the thing at the wall and pulls the trigger a couple of times.
Click, click.
This must be the gun all the kids at school are talking about. It’s big, black. Looks deadly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a gun before, let alone so close. Makes him look dangerous. Kind of … what’s that word Carmen uses all the time in her diary? Hot.
‘You shot the tree? And the tree caught fire?’ I wrinkle my forehead, not seeing the causality.
Ryan gives me a strange look. ‘You think that’s how it works? It’s a flare gun. Add a bit of accelerant and boom. Enough cover for you to get away. Got everything in here.’ He gestures at his pack, expecting gratitude, but, like I said, I don’t do normal.
‘So,’ I say slowly, ‘not only was today a monumental waste of time because you picked out the wrong search target, but you wasted a, what, two-hundred-year-old tree in order for me to make a getaway? I’d say the tree got a bum deal and we’re all the poorer for it. I got myself out of there, like I always do. I can take care of myself.
You bought me nothing.’ Ryan’s face darkens. ‘Yeah?’ he sneers. ‘How?’ I’m lost for a minute. Should I tell him? It’s new for me, this feeling of wanting to confide in somebody, to reach out. Though I couldn’t have created a better person to want to reach out to.
It’s as if I conjured him up out of my lonely subconscious. Though I must prefer blonds, mustn’t I?
Or rather, the blond to beat all blonds. But Ryan’s still just about perfect for me. Every time I look at him, I wonder if he’s real. There’s the sense of the earth falling away at my feet, the dizzying precipice. I knew a man once, whose name I can no longer recall, who maybe had it pegged. He used to argue that what we perceive is wholly unreliable. How I railed against that. Because to someone like me, that’s a one-way ticket to bedlam. All I perceive is all I have.
But I digress.
For me, wariness is second nature. I wouldn’t know where to start with the whole trust thing. Best to go on as I mean to continue, right? Where would it all lead, getting close to someone like Ryan only to wake one morning to find that I’m not in Kansas any more?
Heartache and pain, begin again, chants that little voice inside my head.
‘Still trying to work that part out,’ I say finally, and he can tell from the strange expression on my face that it’s the truth. He wants to know how I got out of that house under my own steam, I can tell. But he doesn’t push it, he’s a gentleman, and for that I’m grateful.
‘I still think it’s got something to do with Lauren being a singer, a soprano,’ I say stiffly.
Ryan’s tone is dismissive. ‘You think I hadn’t considered that already? Her choir stuff was a whole bunch of dead ends. I kept tabs on the people from Paradise High she mentioned spending time with. They were squeaky clean. All of them.’ Not much I can say to that, so I don’t. But it’s important, and I don’t think he’s worked all the angles on that.
After a moment, he sighs. ‘What are we fighting about?’
‘You call this fighting?’ My tone is slightly derisive but he doesn’t rise to the bait.
‘You still want to help?’ he says tentatively.
I shrug. ‘If you think it will do any good.’ His voice is quiet. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have someone … believe you for a change.’ He looks like he wants to say something else, but changes his mind, looks down at the floor. I almost reach out and touch him, think better of it. Sit on my hands for good measure.
‘I’m tired, could I sleep now?’ I say finally.
I don’t really want him to leave. But we’re going nowhere. And I need to do something.
‘Sleep,’ he says with a fleeting smile, ‘you’ve earned it. We’ll try a different tack tomorrow, yeah?’ He shuts Lauren’s bedroom door gently behind him.
I lie down on Lauren’s bed fully clothed and turn my face to the wall. There’s someone I need to talk to.
The hanging garden couldn’t be more beautiful tonight.
I smell neroli, jasmine, white magnolia, orange blossom, a thousand different blooms that no human hand could possibly have put together. It is an apology, of a kind, for the last time. He comes to me out of a living bower of flowers, a smile in his eyes, his hands curled loosely by his sides, no threat. Like a sun god when he walks. In robes of white so luminous, I can’t make out the detail.
As if to mock me.
I want nothing but an answer to my question. Which I am certain he already knows, has already read from my mind. Still I give it utterance. It is my dream, after all.
‘Who is he?’ I demand waspishly. ‘You’re even dressed like he was; you don’t always wear white. It’s not your best colour. Don’t lie.’ In an instant, the garden vanishes and we stand in a flesh-rending hail of sand, at the heart of a devouring cyclone. Anyone else would be torn to shreds, but not we two. In sleep I am invincible, for I am under his protection. It is all for show, has ever been thus. I used to find it exhilarating, what he could do, what he was capable of. Now, I realise suddenly, it’s getting a little bit tired.
‘Look!’ he screams into the teeth of the storm, throwing his arms wide, head back, displaying himself to best advantage. ‘I have remade the world for you.’
‘Don’t change the subject,’ I snap.
The night garden rematerialises around us, new shoots breaking the soil at our feet, vines climbing, twining sinuously about our ankles. The fragrance of a thousand blossoms intensifies. Everything hyper-real, hyper- beautiful.
‘Must we talk about him?’ Luc sighs, winding his arms about me like the devouring plants. ‘I hate it when we fight. Our time together is so short.’ He rests his chin on the crown of my head and for a moment I close my eyes, the gesture so familiar I can almost feel it across a hundred human lifetimes. The bass note of my messed-up existence.
You wouldn’t catch me saying this, but it’s nice being held by someone who claims to know me better than I know myself, by someone whose entire, festering inner life does not become an open book to me at first touch.
But I’m getting sidetracked by the moment.
‘Who is he?’ I repeat.
Luc pushes me away gently, considers me at arm’s length.
‘He is a portent, an omen,’ he says finally. ‘A Dog of War. Heed my advice. Do nothing. Do nothing and we shall be reunited in good time, sooner than you think.
Act unwisely and you risk certain destruction. I cannot be clearer than that, my love.’ Understanding seizes me like a lightning strike.
‘One of the Eight then,’ I say in wonder.
Finally, They make themselves known.
‘One of the Eight.’ Luc’s face is grim. Light seems to bleed from him for an instant, then he is gone.
Chapter 11
The next morning, Mr Masson tries a different tack, too, breaking the choir up into sections and assigning each group a different practice room, a different teacher.
He calls it workshopping, but it’s really meant to put a stop to the furtive speed-dating that is threatening to derail the concert.
The elderly, black-suited music director of Little Falls makes a move in our direction, but the lean, handsome, golden-haired young teacher from Port Marie’s music program smoothly intervenes. ‘I’ll take the sopranos today, Laurence,’ he says pleasantly. The elderly man stops, frowns and introduces himself to the remaining group of female singers in the room, the altos. As they straggle out of the assembly hall behind him, they murder us with their eyes, every one.
‘I’m Paul Stenborg,’ our choirmaster smiles, teeth white and perfectly even. ‘Call me Paul. Sopranos, follow
