Behind him, his mother calls once more. He starts and half turns.
“You’d give her up?” I ask, softly, nodding toward his mother. “Did she offend thee, wouldst thou cast her into the flames, and save thyself?”
Alvin’s eyes widen and his shoulders twitch, as though to break free of my empty grip.
He goes to his mother and hugs her, hard.
The rain turns icy sometime after two that morning. It hits the windows with tiny sighs. Like the voices of the wronged dead. It isn’t just Victor with me now. It’s Trent, and Maryann. It’s everyone she killed because I had kept my silence.
I wake sweating. My breath mists in the still air of the room. On colder nights than this, Mother and I would camp beside the living room fire in a nest of blankets. We could never afford to install heating. My mother’s shame, but I secretly relished the closeness it imposed. The smell of pressed roses and woodsmoke. Her soft hand brushing back the hair on my forehead when she thought I slept.
Tonight a fire already burns in the living room hearth. It paints the woman beside it in planes of light and shadow.
“The sleet’s killed the new shoots by now,” she says, “but at least we won’t have to worry about the aphids. Silly of me to keep growing so late in September.”
Her knees are pulled tight against her chest. Her face is flushed with heat. A slight shiver shakes her shoulders, sharp beneath her cream silk robe. She winces and traces one of the scars on her left hand.
I kneel beside her. She looks at me sidelong and then away.
“The cards,” I say.
She gives a small shrug. “You know how Tammy is when she really gets going with those things. Give the girl some black candles and goopher dust and she could make serious money as a conjure woman. Suicide kings and laughing jacks and spades and spades, I don’t know. She says it means violence, coming soon. Something brutal. She says it means the past coming back to haunt us.” She laughs. “’Cause that could never happen.”
“Did she say anything about the hands?”
Pea levels a look at me. “Did she need to? What am I without them? Dead, or might as well be.”
“They can’t just desert you, Pea. They don’t have a mind, or a spirit apart from yours. If you think they’re judging you—”
“Oh, they already have.”
“Then it is simply you judging yourself. The soul feels its own weight.”
She takes a breath. Considers. “Some card tricks did not bring Walter up three hours from the city.”
My pulse jumps. I reach out to touch her hand. She grabs me before I can pull away.
“You cannot honestly think,” she says, “that I don’t know how much you lie to me.”
The air leaves my lungs. I knew this day would come. I knew. “You didn’t before.”
She squeezes my wrist hard enough to leave marks. “You must have thought I was very stupid. All those years, and I never even wondered about your story. Why the hell were you in that alley, Dev?” She laughs. “You were waiting for me, you son of a bitch. Waiting for a killer to give to your cops. You were lying from hello.”
Her stare goes into me like two hot drills. Three shaky breaths. “I never said hello.”
“No,” she agrees. “No.” She shakes her head slowly. Lowers her eyes to our entwined fingers. Smiles, suddenly, brilliantly. “Ain’t that like life, to give you your big break, a stone-cold killer naked in your bed, and you go and fall in love with her!”
I can’t meet that bleeding gaiety. I can’t match it.
“Poor Dev. I ruined your life, didn’t I? But turnabout is fair play, I’m sure you ruined mine.”
Sleet beats the windows and French doors. A log cracks in the fire, sends up a shower of sparks. I am crying. Nothing will stop it. Victor’s curse was just the beginning. It’s Pea’s that will get me in the end. Her love, despite everything, her love.
“You knew it all. You knew about the hands—”
“Stop—”
“—about what Victor was really doing to those poor people.”
“Pea, please…”
“Christ, how many were there, Dev? Fifteen? Twenty?”
She pauses, waits out my sobs like they’re the slushing rain. How many? I don’t want to know, but the answer bobs to the surface anyway. I can be as brutal to myself as to Pea.
“At the end … nearly thirty. His mouth was—he hardly had any of his real teeth left—Pea—”
She slaps me. “We are getting to the end of this!”
She is Kali filled with fury, with the power of death. Her skin, her hair glows orange with firelight. This is only what I deserve.
“When Walter came here that day and showed me the photos of those dead bodies. He told me they were Trent’s kills. Did you know then?”
“Yes.”
“But I—” She closes her eyes. “I left before you came back. I couldn’t face what I imagined you would say to me. I had promised not to kill again.”
“You didn’t—”
“I had promised. Maybe I wouldn’t have if I had known what you were.”
“You did know. Even when I lied, you felt around it.”
“And when you found me, after. When you found me and washed that blood away and brought me back, just so you could leave me, oh fuck you, Dev, did you ever think for a minute that I couldn’t have known? Not then. Didn’t you think to tell me? Didn’t you know me at all?”
And I am run through. No comfort, nothing but this ringing guilt, and a blade to fall on. But she deserves it cleanly.
“I—decided that you knew, because—you were a killer, I had heard you kill him—and you are brutal and hard as diamond, Pea—it—you terrified me—I told myself I had misjudged you. To protect myself. You had lied, that’s what I said—you broke your promise. So I had been wrong. So you must have known. I am”—I hold up my hand with a smile that twists
