The Space Between (18 page)

“No.” His expression is amused and he leans back in his chair, smiling mysteriously. “No, it’s not like the Arlington.”

“If I were to set out for Las Vegas, are there any special words or commands I ought to know? I mean, I had some trouble with the door here. Truman had to open it for me.”

Moloch regards me with eyebrows raised. “Did he, now?”

“Yes, he went to Catholic school.”

“Be as that may,” Moloch says dryly, “I think his ability to open hidden doors has less to do with latent Catholicism, and more to do with being the bastard son of someone with a halo. Blood like that, he can walk through just like anybody else. Now, if you want to get to the Passiflore, all you’ll need is this.”

He takes a black felt-tipped marker from his pocket and rolls it across the table to me.

For a moment, I say nothing, staring down at the marker. Then I look up at him, trying to determine if he’s mocking me. “What do I do with it?”

“You make yourself a door. It just takes an east-facing wall and something to draw with. Render the entryway of your choice, knock politely, and ask for the Passiflore Hotel. If your walking tragedy got you both in here, he should manage the jump all right. The trip probably isn’t going to feel good, but it won’t kill him.”

“He didn’t seem to have any problem coming in here. Do you mean the jump-door will be worse?”

Moloch gives me a complacent smile. “I’m not a betting man, but I’d venture the half of him that’s human is going to find it quite a bit worse.”

2 DAYS 7 HOURS 13 MINUTES

T
hey sat side by side on the train, swaying against each other as it rocked.

Truman clasped his hands behind the back of his neck and stared straight ahead. “No offense, but your cousin’s kind of a dick. Your sister though, she’s—” He shook his head, trying to find the words for what Myra was. “Holy shit.”

Daphne stared out at the moving skyline. “I know.”

Her voice was distant and Truman lapsed into silence. What he didn’t say was that Myra had scared him a little. Really, he was just glad to be out of there.

At the bar she’d slipped onto a stool next to him, pretending not to notice that her leg was pressing against his. When she’d offered to buy him a drink, his first impulse was to say no. The night before was still fresh in his mind and he didn’t want Daphne to see him drunk again. But his skin felt too tight for comfort and it was just one drink. Myra’s smile was wide and inviting, and Truman found it hard to look away. After a second, he nodded.

“Road to Redemption,” she told the bartender, holding up a hand. Her nails were painted a sticky, iridescent purple, so dark it looked nearly black in the light from the bar. “And doesn’t he look like he needs it?”

“What is it?” he asked Myra when the bartender slid the drink across to him.

The look she gave him was sly. “Don’t you worry about the particulars. Let’s just say, I could have ordered you a Road to Hell—they’re basically the same. The only difference is, Redemption comes with a splash of grenadine.”

The drink was a deep mahogany color, topped with a layer of bright, sickly red.

Myra ran one finger along the back of Truman’s neck. Her touch was electric and he sipped the drink to keep himself from breathing too fast. It tasted like sweet, salty water and something flammable. He’d never been in a bar before, not even to ask for directions or use a pay phone. The Prophet Club was ancient, and decades of liquor had soaked into the counter and the floors, making everything smell boozy and kind of sickening.

Myra sighed and moved closer. Her own drink was almost black, with a thin column of smoke rising off it. There was a hunger in her face that he recognized. It reminded him of girls at school. The ones who would make out at parties and not expect him to call afterward. It was an unsettling look—sad, but a little too predatory.

She turned to face him and held up her glass. The cloud of smoke had already drifted away. “To Deirdre. I’ll remember her for as long as I remember anything.”

She said it with a smile, but her eyes were flat as she downed her drink, then sat toying restlessly with the string of beads knotted around her wrist. A short length hung down separate from the main strand and Truman moved to get a better look. The thing Moloch had given her was a rosary.

“So,” she whispered, letting go of the beads and leaning so her chest brushed his shoulder. “How did you meet my sister?”

Her body was warm through his T-shirt and he stayed very still. “We met at a party.”

“A party? Daphne? How adorable.”

Truman didn’t answer.
Adorable
was not a word he generally used to describe anything. But it sort of fit Daphne.

“And what about you?” she said, leaning closer and fondling the rosary. “You look lonely, like you could use a kiss.”

He shook his head and inched away. He wanted to argue with her, remind her that her sister had just died and this was hardly the time to be scamming on guys in bars, but even Daphne’s reaction to Moloch’s news had been minimal. And the truth was, Truman wasn’t entirely sure he’d understood the conversation. He knew they’d been talking about someone being killed—murdered, maybe—but all three of them had seemed disturbingly unconcerned.

“Let me tell you a secret.” Myra’s lips moved slowly, almost brushing his neck. “Girls like me, we are very, very good at making people feel better. We find pain, and we take it away.”

“Why are you even talking to me? I mean, what’s in it for you?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s all about you.” Her lips against his ear were unbearably warm. “I know you want to get rid of something—all the feelings, the memories.”

“Like you know anything about it.”

Myra smiled slyly. Then she closed her eyes and moved her mouth along his neck, inhaling deeply like she was smelling him. “Linoleum. Liquor, mildew, soap. And water. I smell water and something black and sick underneath.” She opened her eyes again. “Guilt?”

Truman stared at the wall of bottles behind the bar and didn’t answer. It was unsettling to think that she could see guilt just by looking at him.

“And you smell a little like death. Not a lot, just a little.” She held her fingers an inch apart. “Just this much.” Then she licked her lips, and her eyes widened in something like delight. “Oh, alcoholism—that’s nice.”

“I’m not an alcoholic.”

She moved closer, running the tip of her tongue along her bottom lip like she was tasting the air beside his cheek. “Well, not yet. Not quite. But it’s on its way. Six months—a year, maybe. How Deirdre would have loved you. She always had a taste for addiction.”

Myra rested her hand on his knee, pressing her mouth against his ear. “Let me take it,” she whispered. “You don’t want it. It’s just going to hurt you and keep hurting you. Let me take it away and you’ll never have to feel it again.” Her breath on his neck was electric.

And for one excruciating moment, Truman wanted to say yes. The word was there. He could feel it shaping itself in his mouth.

Then he looked past her. Daphne still sat at the corner table with Moloch, partially in shadow. Her face was turned toward him and she looked very out of place in the dim, seedy club. She looked clean.

Myra’s hand on the back of Truman’s neck suddenly turned into the way Daphne had touched him the other night. Holding him in Dio’s bathroom. On the train platform. In the street. Her hand on his forehead, the insides of his arms. Holding him again, always, no matter how ruined and messy and pathetic. Myra was caressing his shoulder when he stood up abruptly.

He crossed the dance floor to the corner, not looking back.

Outside the train, the city flashed by, dark and light and dark. The ghosts of high-rises showed in outline against the sky, but Truman ignored their insubstantial shapes and focused on his own reflection.

“Which one is your stop?” Daphne said, still gazing out the window.

He shrugged, feeling awkward. “It’s not for awhile. I mean, I actually have to go back the other way.”

Daphne glanced up at him with wide, startled eyes. “You came with me?”

He nodded. “I thought it might be better if you didn’t have to go back to your hotel alone. I thought it might be safer.”

The decision hadn’t been that conscious, though. They’d left the club and walked through the rundown neighborhood to the station and instead of saying goodbye, he’d simply gotten on the train with Daphne, fully aware that he was going the wrong direction.

Maybe he’d done it to make up for how close he’d come to bailing on her earlier. Everything he’d ever learned in church said that angels were the very definition of good. You shouldn’t even want to go against them. But Obie was good too, and that was something he knew for a fact.

Beside him, Daphne was quiet, staring down at her hands.

“What happened to Deirdre?” he asked, glancing at Daphne’s face. It was hard to tell if the question was a bad one—if it even bothered her.

She took a second before she answered, folding her hands in her lap. “She died. Moloch told me this morning that some of the bone men found a body, but he didn’t know whose. I guess they couldn’t identify her right away. She was . . . badly mutilated.”

“Oh.” He wasn’t exactly the world’s biggest coping expert himself—he understood the temptation to pretend so doggedly, so defiantly, to be above it all because the prospect of being in it hurt too much, but Daphne’s calm was bordering on catatonic. “Are you okay?”

She drew a deep breath and said with frightening composure, “I keep telling myself things are going to be fine. That this was just a freak occurrence, and if Obie were dead, I’d know. Someone would have found a body by now.” She looked at him as though daring him to disagree with her. “There’d be a body.”

Truman didn’t argue. He leaned forward, clasping his hands and trying to think of something to say. Myra’s version of grief had been dramatic and mostly fake while, under her frightening calm, Daphne’s was stark and disoriented and absolutely real.

He wanted to reach for her and hold on. She looked lost, like she needed someone to tell her everything would be okay. Truman wasn’t stupid though. He knew how useless words could be. How even when you wanted more than anything just to hear someone say they understood, it didn’t make you feel better. Not really.

“When my mom died—” His voice sounded hoarse and he cleared his throat and started over. “When she died, the only thing that really helped was knowing that all my best times and my memories of her—that I still had those. No one could take them away.”

Daphne looked up at him and her face was almost unbearably vulnerable. “Will you tell me what she was like?”

“What’s to tell? I mean, she was my mom.”

“She was a person, though. People are different. She must have been unique, had her own preferences and mannerisms.” Daphne’s eyes were fixed on the long window across from them, staring into the glass like she was seeing something besides their own wavering reflections.

Truman nodded, trying to assemble the details that would conjure the image of his mother, accurate and whole, but even before he spoke, he knew it would just come out sounding trivial and flat.

“She was a bank teller. Even sort of liked her job, I think. She could be really funny sometimes. She liked books about China and Japan, and the Civil War. She made good pancakes.” His voice cracked and he leaned his head back, covering his face with his hands. “Jesus, it sounds so
stupid.
”

“Did she love you?”

He nodded against the window glass. “Yeah, she did.” His voice was husky and muffled against his palms. He sounded like someone else.

“How do you know?”

“She told me.”

“A lot?”

“Enough.”

“You’re lucky.”

He dropped his hands and looked at Daphne. “Doesn’t your mother love you?”

“No,” she said, and it was nearly a whisper. “But Obie loves me. That’s why I have to find him.”

There was a wounded look in her eyes, an ache so deep that Truman felt it in the center of his chest. After a second, he draped his arm across the back of the seat, but wasn’t quite brave enough to touch her.

She glanced up at him and didn’t say anything. If she’d been a normal girl, he might have put his arm around her, pulled her close or smiled sympathetically or even just told her that the pain of loss would get better eventually. But she wasn’t a normal girl, and he could lie to a lot of people, but he couldn’t to lie to her. It didn’t get better, it just got different.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

T
he windows in my room at the Arlington are so dirty that I have to make a circle on the glass with my hand in order to see out. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Monsters, maybe. The ruthless slaughterer of sisters. Below, the street is full of taxis.