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SEVEN
I had that night off of work, so Frost elected to utilize it to its full advantage. By the early winter nightfall, we were sitting side-by-side in a bar or all places, me with a glass of water I was staring off into and Frost with a beer he was barely drinking. It was a cop-bar called Tony’s, one Frost said he and his partner, Justin Abercom, came to regularly. I thought it was kind of stupid and ironic to hang out in a bar when the extent of your drinking habits involved nursing one beer all night, but Frost claimed he came for the pool table and cop-talk.
We weren’t talking and that was fine by me. I didn’t want to talk to him. Not after the trainwreck he’d seen of me that afternoon. I had completely lost my mind and would have done some serious damage to that hell-hole of an apartment if Frost had not been there to calm me down. I still didn’t know how he had managed it. After he got control of me, he just held me for what seemed like forever. All the anger dissipated at his touch and I was able to finish falling to pieces in his arms, and then, when I was all cried out, to pick them all back up. Now I was whole again, but infinitely self-conscious. I barely knew this man beside me and he had seen almost all my worst sides in the course of a few days. I was dragging him through each circle of Hell, one by one.
Not to mention that I didn’t drink, didn’t talk to people, and was now sitting in a bar waiting to meet people I knew even more vaguely than Frost.
The bell over the door announced the entrance of a tall guy who looked just over twenty-five. Frost waved to him and he made his way through the thin crowd to the bar, where he took the seat on Frost’s other side. Frost gestured to him first, then to me. “Poe, this is my partner, Justin. Justin, this is Poe.” I swallowed hard and gingerly reached around Frost to shake Justin’s hand. He smiled broadly, good-humoredly, and said something along the lines of ‘nice to meet you’. I was too busy studying him and feeling uncomfortable to catch it. He was easily two inches taller than Frost, which was a bit amazing in and of itself, and had a shock of jet-black hair that he wore spiked. His eyes were a generic brown, but there was something eerie in them that made them seem darker, deeper. I remembered Frost mentioning that Justin had been a marine and wondered what nightmares haunted him. “So, to what do I owe this pleasure?” Justin asked sarcastically.
Frost grimaced slightly. “It’s complicated, so I’d rather explain it once. Poe’s friend should be here any minute now.”
I raised an eyebrow at the term ‘friend’, but otherwise didn’t react. I didn’t exactly count her among my friends and still didn’t understand why in the world Frost thought this meeting was a good idea. The way I saw it, we were simply compiling a hit-list. Frost, Mrs. Aaron, Justin…
The bell chimed once more and Liz Nite slipped into Tony’s, raven-black hair swirling about her in the wind. She looked about the bar skeptically and I waved to her. She caught my eye and made her way to my side. The sound of her high heels echoing on the hardwood floor and her commanding presence prompted the predominantly male patrons to clear a path for her. I knew no one would ever step aside like that for me. In a moment she sat beside me, smiling anxiously and glancing at Frost and Justin out of the corner of her eye. I cleared my throat nervously and nodded to them. “Um, Liz, this is Frost and his partner Justin Abercom. Frost, Justin, this is Liz Nite. She’s an intern at a psychiatric clinic.” Liz smiled tensely and reached past me to shake their hands. As they met, I noticed Justin’s gaze lingering on her a little more intensely than would be considered normal and narrowly avoided rolling my eyes.
Liz shrugged out of her heavy wool coat and smoothed her violet sweater. It looked far more comfortable than the dress she’d been wearing at the office earlier today, but no less flattering. “So? What’s going on?” she asked hesitantly, as if she was afraid to hear the answer. An image of the gates of Hell rose up in my mind and I thought to myself that that was where I would end up for getting them messed up in this.
“You’re going to want a drink,” Frost answered, taking a liberal sip of beer. He slapped a twenty on the bar and grimaced. “Actually, more like several before the night is out.” While Frost gazed into the rows of glass bottles on the back wall of the bar, imagining a better place or gathering his thoughts, I couldn’t say which, Justin ordered something with brandy and Liz surprised me by ordering something with whiskey with a basket of onion rings tagged on. When I gave her a curious look, she rolled her eyes. “What? Whiskey and cholesterol can fix anything. Starting with your eating disorder.”
My mouth fell open slightly in shock. “Jeez, what’s your problem?”
Liz smirked slightly. “Your eating disorder. You didn’t deny it. When you stop being so emaciated, I will stop commenting on it.”
Frost smiled half-heartedly. “I was hoping someone else would tell her that. I was afraid of the consequences.”
I glared at him half-heartedly and flicked droplets of water from my sweating glass at him. Justin smiled comfortably and took his own glass from the bartender, taking a quick drink before putting it down and looking to Frost and me. “So what’s going on?”
“We’re in some…trouble,” Frost began hesitantly.
I gritted my teeth and gave him a sharp look. “I really don’t see how this is going to help, Frost. You’re only making it worse.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head. After a moment of thought, he met my gaze, his ice-blue eyes studying mine for a brief span of time as though weighing his options. “No. It can only help.”
I shook my head now. “You’re wrong,” I answered quietly. I wrenched my gaze from his and took a drink of my water, trying to push away the feeling of the other patrons of the bar melting away when he looked at me like that. “I won’t have their blood on my hands. If you tell them and they get hurt…”
“They can always refuse, Poe. Neither of them are close to you, so nothing has changed yet.”
“Hey!” Liz interrupted sharply. “Mind sharing? You two are bickering like an old married couple and we still don’t know what about.”
I turned to snap back at her, but Frost cut me off. “Okay. It’ll sound crazy, but just keep an open mind.” Frost looked around him at the other cops and various other customers in the bar. All were talking loudly to one another over a rock song on the jukebox and though several occasionally glanced at Liz, none were listening. “When Poe was very young, her parents and siblings died of an unexplainable disease….” He hesitated again and looked to me. I bit the inside of my cheek hard and stared into my water glass. I did not like laying out my life story for these strangers to see for the sole purpose of dragging them into a lethal curse. It was painful and foolish in my opinion. “Poe?” Frost asked quietly. “Do you want me to tell them or would you rather?”
I sighed and ground my teeth together. They could always walk away. “You can. Just make it brief and to the point. I’d rather get it over with.” I could feel Liz trying to catch my eye, but I continued staring into the water. Maybe when this was all over with, I’d try swimming. There must be a public pool somewhere in the Baltimore area. Water always struck me as so peaceful and quiet, everything I wished my mind was.
Frost continued explaining the curse to Justin and Liz, describing our rationale for believing it and what it meant, but I could feel his eyes remaining on me the whole time. Maybe he was looking for me to react. Remembering my breakdown only hours before in his arms. Trying to deduce what else I was hiding. I wondered how long it would take before I lost him. Inevitably, he’d uncover the rest of my secrets. Then he would see that he really couldn’t fix me, that I was not worth fixing. Or, even if he tried to keep me, the curse would kill him.
But that wasn’t what was hiding behind those eyes of molten ice. He wasn’t peering through me, rifling through my emotions and memories and selecting those that were unfamiliar for his studies. No. He was…worried. About the curse? About me? About the life and livelihood I would inevitably steal from him? That much I could not tell from stolen glances in my peripheral vision. But I knew there was concern there. Concern and something more…something unknown and foreign to me.
When Frost had said all he felt he needed to, the four of us sat in silence for a long time, the noise of the bar flowing over us in waves as we all stared off into the colorful glass bottles on the wall facing us. Justin and Liz’s drinks seemed to disappear so quickly that I wondered if they’d spilled them. What response can you expect to such a deranged story? After several minutes to let the information sink in, I added, without taking my eyes from a bottle of neon blue liquor, “You don’t have to believe us and you certainly don’t have to offer us any help. There’s just no one else we would ask. You won’t offend or even surprise us by walking out of the bar right now and never looking back.”
Justin began to slowly shake his head and motioned to the bartender to get him another drink. “No. I may not know you, Poe, but Frost is my partner. I believe him and I’ll stand with him no matter the cost. He knows that. I suppose that’s why I’m here.” I looked to him and he met my gaze levelly, with that same honesty that Frost often displayed. After a moment, it melted away though, not to the pain that Frost carried, but to a dark humor. “Anyway, this seems like a good way to get free drinks out of Frost for awhile.”
Frost smirked and took another swig of beer, then looked to me briefly, just long enough for me to catch that his icy eyes had warmed and gone molten with something like relief. Then, he turned to Liz beyond me. “Liz?”
I looked to Liz as well and saw that she was staring into the bottom of her empty glass, holding the sides with both hands as if it were her anchor to reality. “Just tell me one thing,” she answered, slowly lifting her head and looking to me in a way that made the rest of the bar fall away, in a way that made me think she saw right through me to all the tragedy I tried so desperately to hide. In a way that made me unsure whether to hide or to ask her what the world did to her. “Does it ever get easier?”
I swallowed hard and even though I knew the answer, I asked anyway, “To what?”
Her eyes were as black as death and worlds lonelier when she whispered, “To live.”
For a long minute, I didn’t answer, just studied her. When she said that, just as when she had told me in Dr. Grey’s office that I wasn’t the only broken one, it wasn’t so hard to see past the attractive, put-together façade. It wasn’t so hard to see the cracks where she too had been shattered once. “Not alone,” I answered quietly. “I’m still waiting.”
