Bitter Angels (49 page)

They must have laid down a whole new network for me.
Was it easier or harder that way?

Easier. It had to be easier. There would be no interference, no second voice of sanity to be counteracted. Just my permanently mourning mind, all primed and ready to believe in the miraculous return of the lost.

“You don’t believe that, Terese,” he said softly. “You can’t believe that.”

I slumped and I sagged. I fell back into the white chair. They hadn’t even bothered to keep me restrained. This was Dylan, and he was with me again and he was real—and I couldn’t fight him.

Dylan crouched down in front of me. “It’s okay, Terese. We’re needed here. We’ve got a whole new world of people who depend on us. Just stall Misao for a few hours while we sort out what to do.”

I lifted my head weakly. Dylan smiled at me, and I took his hand. They had me. They had me in a way the Redeemers never had. They had not taken anything from me.

They had given me what I’d wanted most in the world.

They.
Who are they?
I tried to make myself think.
I should know. I should be able to understand
. I knew the names. I knew who had planned this and brought me here. I knew who held Amerand hostage now and forever.

For a single heartbeat, it wasn’t Dylan. It was the white-haired man in his bright collar. And Dylan’s hand vanished from mine.

Then it was gone, and it was me and Dylan, and I was holding his callused hand again.

I didn’t answer at once, and he frowned, just a little, and sorrow flooded me. It was cold, it was loneliness, deep in my head and my heart.

It was too much. It was going to drag me under, it was so strong.

Too strong to be real. Too strong to be mine.

I grabbed his hand again and I squeezed, too hard.

“It matters,” I said through gritted teeth. “It does matter, Torian Erasmus.”

And I pictured the white-haired man in his collar of rank. I pictured the Clerks and their guns. I formed the thoughts and I held them hard.

I had been trained for this. I had worked with a Companion for years, and I knew how to picture him. I could picture a world to put him in when I needed to. I had been in a cell for months with only Dylan and that world for relief, and I had gotten very, very good at this kind of focus.

My eyes cleared and I could see. At least, it seemed as if I could see. Dylan was gone. My hands were empty. Torian Erasmus sat at his desk, his mouth fixed in his death’s-head smile.

“I can give him back to you, Terese.” It was still Dylan’s voice in my head. I’d never heard Torian’s voice. I didn’t have any memory to work from. “Anytime. Just say his name and he is here.”

Torian frowned. I’d hurt him. I’d hurt him and the sorrow rushed through me. Despair, bleak and uncomprehending. How could I hurt this man? I was making him keep Dylan away from me.

Patience, deep and profound, radiated from him. “I’m Felice Erasmus’s father.”

Shock blanked my mind, and the patient warmth flowed into me unhindered. “I took immortality, I think about the same time your Bianca Fayette did. I was able to watch my daughter’s plans come to fruition, then fail.” His anger shook me, a parent’s righteous, disappointed anger. His grandchildren, the unworthy heirs of his beloved daughter, they’d been given everything, and they’d lost it all.

But he was not going to permit his family—his daughter’s family—to perish. He’d planned this across the decades, with the vision of centuries.

“I truly owe Bianca a debt. I thought I was going to have to let them take me apart. I started the Clerks’ network to protect and stabilize my family in case I had to give what I had, what I was, over to them. But then Bianca came, and that was no longer an issue.” His smile was beatific. “That she was conspiring with Bern to destroy my family only made it easier for her to vanish. Liang didn’t care what happened to her, and Bern couldn’t let the truth be found out.”

“Yes. The debt we owe her is truly incalculable.”

I was on my knees. I didn’t remember falling. My focus wavered enough that I saw Torian stand up slowly and walk around his desk. He held out one long, well-kept hand.

“Accept this, Terese. Let me help you.”

I stared at that hand. Hand. Hands.

I saw Siri’s hand holding the knife to Vijay’s throat.

I knew this. I
knew
this.

I looked up again and I clenched my teeth. One fiber at a time, I pulled myself to my feet. And there was Torian Erasmus sitting immobile at his desk.

Despair again, a flooding black wave. I stood and let it wash through me. I did not resist. There was nothing to fight. It was pure feeling. It would come. It would go. I would still be here.

This was illusion. This was drugs and nanos and Dazzle. I reached inside myself and I found my voice, my real, physical voice.

“Amerand!” I shouted.

“Terese!”

“Amerand, I’m blind! What’s Torian doing?”

“He’s just sitting there, Terese, he’s not moving.”

And Amerand screamed and there was the sound of metal against flesh, and I whirled around, but I saw nothing.

“There’s only you and me here, Terese,” said Torian. “I see no one else. This is our place, and it will be from now on.”

Warmth flooded me now, the pure primal security that comes with being with your best friend, your lover. This was the safest place. There could be no pain here, no worry, and no end.

I stood. I don’t know how, but I stood. I let it rise in me, sweet and false and a thousand times more terrible than the despair had been.

Torian shrugged. “It hardly matters. You cannot maintain your resistance for long. This takes a great deal more strength for you than it does for me.”

Oh, it felt so good to be here with him. Better than it had ever been with Dylan. Only with David had I ever been this safe.

David. Memory bright as daylight flashed over me. David in the rooftop garden looking out over the winter city. David sad and struggling with what I had done. David fighting with my old ghosts and losing. Ghosts, after all, couldn’t fail to comprehend. Ghosts couldn’t disappoint you.

Except wasn’t that what Bianca had done?

“Very pretty,” murmured Torian. “I always did like Chicago.”

And David and Chicago were gone, and we were in the white room again, and all the worry was gone. I was tired and I was safe. I could sleep now, and it would be all right.

“I see everything, Terese. It’s those little technological improvements—and the fact that I am a living being. We are connected now, you and I.”

Lassitude, warmth, and safety. Connected through a wireless transmission, a buzzing in the background, right behind my ear where my Companion used to be. The place Siri had tried to cut Vijay.

“You’re very close to accepting it. Rest now. You’ve earned it.”

“When you wake, Dylan will be here with you, and nothing else will matter.”

I wanted to lie down at his feet and sleep. It would feel so good just to stretch out on the floor.

“Go to sleep now, and Dylan will wake you when it’s time. Nothing else matters.”

I swayed on my feet. The edges of my vision blurred and dimmed, moving slowly inward, blotting out light with warm darkness.

Darkness.

Darkness from my cell. Darkness from the space under the stairs. Darkness can see you. Darkness creeps under your skin and into your head. Daylight thinks it sees, but darkness knows. Darkness is what you carry in a hole in your head.

I could hold on to darkness. I could grab hold of it as I never could the daylight. I could shape the darkness because I remembered it so well.

I knew what the stone would feel like under my hands, I knew the exact temperature of the air, the way the dust would grate against my throat. And I knew to the depths of my soul there was no way out.

And there in the darkness of my mind, I closed the door. I knew the sound, I knew the feeling. I felt the breeze of it against my skin. The hollow thud reverberated down into my bones.

“What are you doing? Where is this?”

Torian Erasmus groped through the blackness I’d brought down. I could feel him blundering through my nightmare, searching for the door with blind fingers.

She’d been their test case. They had manipulated her Companion, trying to see how far they could make her go, but they couldn’t keep her alive and she’d called for me at the very end. This was why. She knew they’d pull me in here, into this space of illusion and manipulation. She was betting on what I’d bring with me.

She’d broken the rules and cost me my Companion, and she had found a way to save us all.

I could be in this place forever. Waking or sleeping, this was where my mind went. I wore this darkness like I wore my skin. I had never been able to escape it. I wouldn’t lose it now.

“What have you done?”

“I’ve closed the door, Torian, and I’ve locked you in here with me.”

And he believed me. He had to believe me. This memory was stronger and more clear than anything he knew how to bring up. I was trained. He was only practiced. This was my final reality and I had pushed it into his mind.

I was his Companion. I was the voice in his head and the vision in his mind’s eye.

I smiled into the darkness and listened to the sound of Torian Erasmus banging on the locked cell door.

Terese knelt in the middle of the floor. She was smiling up at Torian, a satisfied, almost beatific smile. My guts flipped over and if I’d had anything left in my stomach, it would have spilled. Torian sat where he was, his fingers steepled, smiling down at her.

The Clerks stood still and staring. Not moving. I pushed myself up onto my knees. They still didn’t move.

“Terese!” I shouted. “Terese!”

She did not move. The Clerks did not move. Torian did not move.

I climbed to my feet. I walked to the front of one of the Clerks. I didn’t waste time with tests or pranks. I lifted the gun out of his hands. I turned it on him. I discarded the oath I’d sworn her.

I worked the action, and I shot him. Simple as that. Bone splintered, blood spattered, and he fell.

I took aim again, and I shot the second Clerk. And there was more blood and the smell of burning, and he toppled next to the first. The gun bounced out of his hands and clattered onto the white floor.

I picked it up out of the rivulets of blood and slung it across my back.

“Let her go,” I said.

He did not move. He did not blink.

“Let her go, Sentinel.”

He did not move. He did not blink.

I shot him as well, and he fell across his desk, spilling blood across the black stone.

Then I crossed the floor. I sat down beside Terese, cradling the gun across my thighs. I took her limp hand, and held it tightly.

“You can wake up now, Terese. It’s over.”

She didn’t look at me. She stared at Torian Erasmus, dead at his desk, the top of his head blown clean off by my shot. She smiled like it was a good thing.

Outside the door I heard screaming. I heard shouts and wails of despair. Then I heard the unmistakable keening of alarms.

The woman beside me did not move.

“Terese? Terese, please.”

She didn’t move. I took her gloved hand. There were words shining on the back of it.

It was real to me, David. It was always real.

I covered up those words with my palm. I held her hand and waited for her breath to stop.