Land of the Beautiful Dead (98 page)

“Doesn’t always feel good, does it?”

He might have laughed, but if so, he chose that exact moment to run a hand over his scarred throat and the rasp of his dry skin rubbing together obscured all other sound. “I have built all the worst mistakes of my life on that foundation. Lan, I want this, but…I’m frightened.”

“It’s all right,” she told him and shrugged. “It’s just the world.”

He stared at her as Deimos waited by the open car and the rain blew in and puddled on the marble floors where no one would mop it up. Then he smiled. “Is that all it is?”

“That’s it. And it’s not waiting for us. Our little house is out there right now, in Maya,” she added, testing the name for flavor and finding it bittersweet. “It’s there on the highest rock with every window looking at the sea and we’re here, not seeing it. Our greenhouses are all empty beds and bags of seeds and we’re here, not planting. Our life is there,” she told him, smiling as she extended an empty hand back at the empty hall in which they stood. “This one’s over.”

“And when that one ends?”

“We go on.” She reached up and unfastened his mask so she could smile into his true face. “And on. And on.”

He took his mask from her and held it a long time as he gazed at the hall—the dark lamps and curtained windows, fine carpets neatly rolled and marble floors polished one last time, the paintings and statues covered with canvas—and when his eyes came at last to the empty sockets of the golden mask, he let it fall. It hit the tiles and rocked onto its side, seeming to stare back up at him accusingly as Azrael turned away. He took a step, paused, and offered her his arm.

She took his hand instead and they walked to the door together. There, he suddenly swept Lan up off her feet and into his arms. He carried her over the threshold and out into the rain. The sky was full of fog, with the sun behind it turning it all to a single color—not quite white, but pale and promising, like a blank page where anything could be written. Anything at all.

THE END

April 2014 – October 2015