“What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Me,” I said. “I’m wrong. I’m sorry, Rosaleen, I shouldn’t be doing this.” She rolled over next to me in the bed and kissed my cheek. We were both breathless. Our eyes met again.
“I…” I tried to find the right words. “I’m in love with someone, still in love with someone, and I shouldn’t be with you or anyone else, until I get my head straight. It’s unfair to you, it’s unfair to me, and in my head, it’s unfair to her.”
“This the girl you were with before you came out here six months ago?” she asked me. I nodded.
“Yeah. Her name’s Torri, Torri Lyn, and the last time I saw her, I said terrible things to her. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be with her, but … I’m still with her.” I turned onto my side, still facing her. “I’ve wanted you since the first time I saw you,” I said.
“I wanted you too,” she said. “I hope you know it wasn’t my intention for all this. I just couldn’t sleep and I was so sad, and I needed to talk. I wanted to talk to you. You’ve always seemed to understand, to empathize with the plight of the victim. They’re not just ‘DBs’—dead bodies—to you. I think your compassion, your passion, those things are your strength. That’s where all that power in you comes from.”
“I did bad when I was young,” I said. “I ruined the life, the soul, of someone who was the world to me, who believed in me when no one else did.” I told her what happened with Granny, how I damned her, how I destroyed her soul and every wonderful, shining, brilliant part of her, forever. Rosaleen held me tight and listened. She brushed the hair out of my eyes.
“So the legend is true,” she said. “Laytham, you were a child. You didn’t know what you were doing, the implications. You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“I did it,” I said. “Exactly what this bastard did to Jane. I’m the same as him, at my core. I’m selfish and careless, weak … evil, and guilty.”
“No,” Rosaleen said, “far from it, darling boy.”
“I’ve been reading a lot about the samurai,” I said, “their code, their self-discipline. For them, it was better to be dead than to live without honor. Joining the Nightwise is my chance to master myself, master all that hateful tar deep down in me, to change before it’s too late. To prove I can be good, can do good; I can make it right.”
She kissed me very lightly on the cheek. Rosaleen pulled the covers around herself and around me. Alphaville’s “Forever Young” was whispering through the fog of static on the radio. “You thought it wouldn’t be honorable to be with me with another woman in your heart and your head,” she said. “You had the integrity to stop even though things had gotten as far as they had. You are a good man, Laytham Ballard, an honorable man. You could have used me to ease your own loneliness, and later I would have been hurt and confused by why you were acting cold and guilty. You didn’t. Thank you, and thank you for telling me why.”
“You deserved that,” I said.
“Do you mind if I stay here, with you?” she asked. “Just to sleep, to not be alone?”
“Please,” I said, “please stay.”
I turned off the lights, and we held each other tightly, listening to the tinny music on the radio until we slept. My last thoughts before sleep swallowed me were of Jane Doe, lost in all but memory, and only a dim shade there, and the promise I made to her.
THIRTEEN
Thrashing through an opiate fever dream, infection, pain, through hot, black, claustrophobic oblivion, the darkness like a coffin too close all around me, my breath bumping against it. The cold, silver bite of needles pinching at my elbow joint, in my forearm, on the back of my hand. Brief flutters of awareness. I was in a bed, in a room, not a hospital, not a prison infirmary.
Painful daylight stabbing my eyes, making me want to retch. Shadowed night, too cramped, out of sync with the humming cadence of the living world. The dead visit me. Dusan Slorzack crouched beside me, his breath smelled of shit and cum; his body was covered in safety-pinned wounds. He tells me he’s waiting for me in the ceramic room with no doors, the sound of cockroach legs scratching on filthy tile engulfs me. I think I manage to flip him off. August Hyde was there too, pale and bloated from the water, his skin splitting, gasses leaking from him, telling me he forgave me for what I did to him. I was a kid and I didn’t understand. I’m positive I flipped him off, too.
“Well, there’s a sign of improvement,” a man’s voice said. I knew it; it resided in one of the uncoupled rail cars of my mind, hidden behind pain and drugs.
“He’s fighting.” A woman’s voice, also familiar, also lost to me in the wash of dying.
“He’s losing,” a third woman’s voice added. It was Dragon’s voice, and I knew she was telling the truth.
It ends in fire, sweet, acrid, sizzling fire, numbing my lips and razor-scraping my throat. I am a speck hanging before the great crimson jewel, the thudding sun full of ancient blood. It burns the petty mortal pain away with transcendent agony; it makes me whole by annihilating every tattered, ragged edge in me, filling up all my festering wounds, inside and out. The red is too old, too endless, and too merciless to leave anything alone. Tight, semi-aware darkness again. The taste of metal in my mouth. Time passes, but I’ve lost all reference to it.
My eyes opened; I was awake. It felt wrong, uneven, to be so aware.
I sat up in the bed. It was night, and Vigil
