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THIRTY-NINE
Idon’t know how long I would have lain there watching the last vestiges of colored light drain into the shadows on the wooden floor if Brock and Dory hadn’t come for me. I dimly heard the sound of Brock’s key in the lock, but it seemed to come from a long way away. I thought for a moment that it was an echo of the key turning in the iron bracelet on Liam’s wrist and I reached out my hand into the shadows to stay his hand.
“He might still be there,” I explained to Brock and Dory when they found me creeping along the wall. “In the shadows.”
Brock waved his hand through the shadows to show me there was nothing there. Dory turned on the overhead light. The shadows scurried into the corners. I screamed at her to turn it off. I screamed again when Brock tried to carry me to my room upstairs.
“Not there,” I begged. “I can’t sleep in that bed.”
They put me in the back bedroom on the first floor—Phoenix’s old room and Matilda’s before her. Liam had never gone in there, not even the one time I’d asked him to fetch an extra blanket from Phoenix’s bed. Now I knew why. The room was filled with the smell of iron from the iron bed frame. I felt the cold of it on my wrist where Liam’s fingerprints were seared into my skin—five ice splinters lodged in my flesh. Brock made me a salve for the wound while Dory got me undressed and into bed. “Don’t worry, dear,” she said over and over, “you’llbe all right now.” But after Brock had bandaged my arm and spooned some bitter-tasting tea down my throat I heard them whispering in the kitchen.
“I’m afraid the shadow’s got in under her skin,” Brock said.
“Will it spread?” Dory asked.
“There’s no telling,” he answered. “We’ll have to watch her.”
So that was the creeping I felt under my skin, like a drug moving through my veins. I drifted off then into the darkness beneath my eyelids. I could feel it rushing up to drown me, pull me under. When I was little my parents had taken me to a beach out in Montauk and I’d been pulled under by a wave, tossed and tumbled like a sock in a washing machine until I couldn’t tell which way was up. The darkness I went into now was like that, just deeper than the ocean. Was Liam somewhere in this darkness, waiting to drown me for sending him away? I swam deeper and deeper, passing the phosphorescent faces of drowned swimmers—half-eaten faces with crabs crawling out of eye sockets and eels wriggling where their tongues used to be—but no Liam.
Then I would surface, into Phoenix’s room, the shadows lapping around the great iron bed like a retreating tide. Dory would be there, trying to get me to drink some tea or broth. Liz Book came and told me that everyone who had been sick was getting better now—Flonia and Nicky and all the other students from Liam’s class, proof that it had been Liam making them sick. The only one who was still recuperating was Mara.
“He must have drained her when she came here to work on the LaMotte papers,” she said. “Poor girl. After all she’s been through. I feel so responsible—to be taken in by a love talker at my age!” She patted my hand and bent down to whisper in my ear, even though we were alone in the room—maybe she sensed the shadows listening—“He was a very charming one, my dear. No one could blame you for falling for him. No one blames you at all.”
But she was wrong. The shadows blamed me. I could hear them whispering, their voices growing louder as the day lengthened their tongues, their briny breath lapping at my ears, rough as cats’ tongues, flaying my skin from the bone.You brought him to life, they whispered.You are a thing of darkness. That’s where you belong. With us.
“No,” I whimpered back, but I was already sinking back under the black water beneath my eyelids, where the rotting corpses of the drowned waited to embrace me.We’re your demon lovers now, they whispered. They latched themselves to me with their suckered tentacles and hungry mouths, and I gave myself to them, glad to feel the pull and suck of their hunger.
Once, though, instead of slipping into the dark I found myself standing in a green meadow, the dew on each blade of grass new-touched by the rising sun. I was wearing a long dress, the hem of which was soaked by the dew. Ahead of me, where the sun had not yet penetrated the mist, was a young man, his slim legs rising out of the mist like reeds rising out of water, his loose white shirt a swan’s wing cleaving the fog. He turned to me, his faced blurred in the mist, but then the rising sun reached him and drew Liam’s face on the white mist. He held his arms open for me and I ran into his embrace. For a moment I felt the strength of his arms encircling me and the heat of his lips on mine, but then he was gone, vanished into the mist. I woke up, grasping the knotted bed sheets and weeping. I got up out of bed for the first time and ran out into the backyard, my bare feet sinking into the melting slush. The yard and woods beyond were filled with a white mist rising off the melting snow, as if the earth was exhaling a long-held breath into the cold. Liam was out there in the woods, I knew now, not in the darkness, but wandering somewhere in the Borderlands. I would have run into the woods, but Brock caught me and dragged me back. I wasn’t strong enough to put up much of a fight. I’d have to wait until I got my strength back.
I began drinking the tea and broth that Dory brought and nibbling on the bread and scones that Diana baked for me. I could see that the iron bed made Diana uncomfortable, so I asked to sit in the kitchen with her…and then the living room. Once I was able to sit in the living room I had more visitors. Soheila came on the first warm day of the year, which happened to be the first day of spring, with almond and rose-water cookies for the Persian New Year. I was glad she had come because I had some questions for her.
“Liam told me that if I loved him he would become human,” I told her after Dory left us alone. “Was that true?”
Soheila exhaled a long breath—a sigh that sounded a little like an owl’s song and reminded me that she had once been made of wind. “Yes, that part was true. That is how I became as I am now—not quite human, but not quite all succubus. But what he didn’t tell you is that loving him would drain the life out of you the way it drained Angus. I didn’t know that I was killing him until it was too late, but Li—the incubus knows what happened to Angus. He was there. He finished him off. So if he really loved you he wouldn’t ask you to sacrifice your life for his.”
I thought about that for a moment while Soheila sipped her tea and nibbled on a cookie. I looked out the window where the icicles were melting from the eaves with a steady drip that sounded like rain.
“But he took the key from me and turned the lock on the bracelet on his own hand. He turned itright. If he had turned it left he would have freed himself.” Or I would have been sucked into the shadows with him, I thought, but didn’t say. I was too embarrassed to admit that I’d been ready to destroy myself. “Why did he do that?”
“I don’t know,” Soheila said, brushing crumbs from her fingertips. She looked uncomfortable suddenly. “Perhaps he made a mistake. Most of my kind have a poor sense of direction.Without GPS my cousins couldn’t find their way to their hairdressers or tennis lessons.”
I frowned. “But you’re descended from wind spirits…”
“Do you think the wind knows which way it’s blowing?” she demanded, her eyes flashing. “Or cares what tree it blows down? Or what destruction it leaves in its wake? Have you forgotten that the incubus raised a storm that knocked Paul’s plane out of the sky?”
I looked away guiltily. Ihadforgotten that.
“Trust me, Callie, you’re lucky to have escaped from him whole. Look at what he did to those students. Could you love a creature who fed off children?”
“Who’s feeding off children?” The voice came from the foyer. Frank Delmarco, followed by a flustered Dory Browne, came into the room, tugged a Yankees cap off his head, and sprawled out on the couch. “I’m pretty sure that’s been outlawed since Swift’s time.”
“Frank.” Soheila smiled nervously. “I thought you’d gone to the city for the break.”
“I had, but then I heard about an outbreak of child cannibalism and came hurrying back. What’s wrong, McFay? You look like someone sucker-punched you in the gut.”
“Poor Callie,” Dory answered in a loud stage whisper for me. “Liam Doyle was deported to Ireland for tax evasion.”
“Really?” Frank asked, cocking his head at me. “I wouldn’t have pegged him for financial fraud, but then many a man has been led down the road of financial ruin by his love of foppish clothes.”
