CHAPTER 16

 

 

Andrei followed tentatively, but without protest, as Ariadne led him through the dimly lit hallways of the First National Bank of Boston, where even the soft press of their footsteps on the carpet sounded incriminating. He had patiently waited outside while she worked her will upon the guards, made them deactivate the cameras and then forget she had ever been there. When she finally called him in and led him to the elevator, he had the good sense to not ask any questions until they were in private.

Only when she reached the nondescript black door in a nondescript suite of offices bearing the nameplate Anodyne Financial Services did he speak.

“Is this where you work?”

“No,” said Ariadne. She grasped the door and, shielding it with her body, did her best to disguise her ripping it open as some kind of lockpicking.

Andrei coughed uneasily. “Ari . . .”

“You said you wanted to help.” She stared back accusingly, and it was enough to silence him.

He followed her lead into the dark space, and the thunk of his impact into a desk a moment later reminded her that he didn’t share her night vision.

She flicked on the smallest, dimmest-looking lamp she could find. The pale light revealed an apparently ordinary office with cubicles, computers, and water coolers.

Andrei noticed the wrongness immediately.

“This place is awfully bare,” he whispered. “No comics pinned above desks, no knickknacks. This is exactly the kind of Spartan bullshit we tried to avoid at VisionTech. Every time I consulted for one of the big uglies for some money on the side, it always made me grateful to come back home.”

Ariadne pulled out her cellphone, checked the text message from Liliane, showed the screen to Andrei. “You see these? They’re Mister Rose’s login IDs and passwords.”

“Hrm.”

Liliane had had her way with the Councilor, worked him as only she could to obtain this information. Thoughts of those ministrations made Ariadne suddenly look guiltily at Andrei, as if he could read her thoughts and see what she had seen.

“You’re still in?” she asked.

Andrei chuckled with a bitterness that seemed to come from some deep, terrible place. “Why not? The one advantage of my current circumstances is that I’m practically judgment-proof. No address to serve a court order to, right? And, hey, in jail at least you get three square meals a day.”

Ariadne scanned his eyes in the dim light, trying to locate the line between bravado and stupidity. Maybe her night vision wasn’t as good as she thought. Either way, though, it looked like she was going to get what she wanted.

Ariadne turned on the computer and waited the small eternity until it booted. Andrei, who had been glancing over his shoulder every few moments, apparently found his curiosity overwhelming his anxiety. He bent in close, logged in, and looked at the screen carefully.

“Who on earth is this?”

“No questions, remember?” Ariadne kept trying to position herself between Andrei and anyone who might see him, changing her angle every time she thought she saw the light from under the door interrupted by a shadow. Not that they had seen anyone in the halls at this hour, but some lights had indeed been on here and there, jagged teeth across the face of the skyscraper as they had first approached.

“Wow. Whoever this company is, they’ve got holdings in all the major banks, private and public.”

“Can you just do what I asked?” Ariadne snapped, prickled and alert.

“Of course.”

Andrei sat down in the chair as if he owned it, the computer’s wireless mouse becoming an extension of his hand. He explained at length all of the artistry involved in what he was doing, the accounts he was shifting around, the backdated trails he was designing. Paeans to the myriad different ways he could frame Rose for all kinds of embezzlement and malfeasance.

She turned to him, keeping one eye always on the door. “Well?”

“I can do this.” He pushed back from the desk, put his hands behind his head, tapped his fingers rapidly against the back of his skull in a habit Ariadne knew well.

“So? What are you waiting for?”

“I wanted to make sure I could. I was pretty sure, but now I know it. Which means that this would really be serious stuff. Maybe if you told me a little more about who this Mister Rose is, and why we’re doing this to him.”

“He hurts people,” she said at length. “He’s powerful and uses his power to hurt others. To hurt me. Do you really need to know more than that?”

“If he’s that bad, then surely he’s left a trail. We don’t have to make anything up; we can use what he’s done to hoist him on—”

“Andrei, we don’t have time! Isn’t what I told you enough?”

Ariadne ran her hand back over her forehead, through her hair. This was just like Andrei. Just the fact that she wanted or needed something was never enough. There had to be some greater good, some reason he deemed rational.

Andrei’s fingers tapped his chair’s arms with increasing force. He was caught in some internal loop, trying to sort out which ends justified which means. Ariadne glanced yet again at the door and was not reassured by the fact that she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Their luck wouldn’t hold forever.

Ariadne leaned in, dangling over Andrei , her hair ensconcing them both in a private curtain. “Andrei,” she said, “I need this. You said you wanted to help. If you do this, you are quite literally saving my life.” She stared into his eyes with yearning that was by no means false.

Andrei spoke into the darkness she had created. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Ariadne couldn’t help but sound surprised.

“Okay,” he said, and she pulled away, let him draw his chair up close to the computer again. “You know—” Andrei began typing again “—this guy I work with at Ronnie Cab, he once stole twenty bucks from the till. He’s an illegal, and he’s got four children at home. But Ronnie fired him, then called the cops and told them about his status. Four children! No mercy.

“Now here’s this Rose. He’s actually hurt people, but he’s got a ten-million-dollar portfolio. Is any cop coming after him? Is he getting any pink slips from his bosses? Is Homeland Security knocking on hisdoor?”

“No,” Ariadne said, shaking her head, knowing her role. “It’s not right.”

“Hell, no.”

Ariadne watched as icons flew across the screen, hourglasses twirled, flitting and dancing beneath the all-seeing eyes of Andrei reflected in the glass, some manic God laying down righteous retribution.

“There we go.” He clapped his hands together, undaunted by the noise it made.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Andrei beamed. “This Rose guy, he’d better run. Thanks to what I did, right now he makes those guys from Enron look like Mother Teresa.”

“What did you do?”

“Made it look like he swiped two million from his company and then cashed out.”

Two million? Would that be enough to distract the Invictus Council?

“Order him plane tickets,” Ariadne said.

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Someplace far.”

“Sure, I can do that, but don’t you want his bosses to come looking for him here?”

“No!”

Andrei stared at her, a realization dawning.

“You . . . you don’t want them to come looking for him.”

She shook her head.

“Ah. You, um . . . you didn’t—”

“You promised no questions.” Ariadne lowered her voice. “You saw what he did to me two nights ago.”

“My God,” Andrei whispered. “That was him? Personally?”

The lie came easily enough. “Yes.”

He reached out, gripped her hand. “Ari, whatever you did, I’m sure you had no other choice.”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry I hesitated. I didn’t realize what this was about. It sounds as if whatever we do, it’s not going to matter to him. That he’s, ah, beyond caring.”

“Please. Let’s stop talking about it.”

Andrei executed the final commands.

“Is it done?”

“It’s done.”

Ariadne stared at him, saw the concern in his eyes. “Thank you.”

“How can you even think I’d have done otherwise? I mean, once I knew the whole thing.”

“Of course.” She took his hand. “Let’s go. Now.”

As they left the building, Ariadne allowed relief to seep slowly through her. The political battle had been won. Just like that. With keystrokes. Without Bourne.

She pumped a fist in the air.

Then she stared at it as it hung there, as if the limb belonged to someone else. In all her battles, in all her victories, she hadn’t ever made a joyful gesture like that.

Andrei looked at her, smiled broadly. “I’d forgotten that we used to make a pretty good team.”

Ariadne bit her lip and nodded.

“So, ah—” Andrei shifted, hands in his pockets “—is that it? Mission accomplished, so long? Or do we get to see each other again? Because I’d like that,” he said before she could even fully open her mouth to answer. “I mean, if it’s okay for you. If it’s safe. If you need to leave town or something, I’ll understand.”

Ariadne stared at him. He was giving her an out, right here. Her business consultation was over, and now she had the perfect excuse never to see him again. She didn’t even have to say a word. She could just turn and walk away.

It was more than just an out. It was a chance to avenge herself for his killing blow a decade ago. Back in the motel, the night of the golem fight, she had been weak and confused. She’d been unable to find the strength to repay him, with sword or claws, for what he had done to her. This time, the Silent Knife needed no other weapon than a word. One syllable; two letters: No.

She could say it, savor the expression on his face. But would it be one of heartbreak, like hers had been ten years past, or merely mild disappointment? What kind of prize would that be?

And then, to walk away. To lose this pounding feeling inside her, as if blood were still rushing around inside. Tonight she had felt nervous. She had felt triumphant. God, there had even been tears rolling down her cheeks at one point.

Andrei was different now. And he could still prove useful. The war wasn’t over yet.

Ariadne smirked. “I wouldn’t be so sure you won’t see me again.”

Andrei’s face began to blossom with anticipation, and Ariadne turned her back on him, to stop herself from leaping into his arms. She shouted commands to her limbs to keep walking, all the way back to Eagle Hill, the half-remembered tune in her mind now transformed into a rollicking symphony.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 17

 

 

“So get this: The guy eats the freakin’ eyeballs. In tartar sauce! Freakin’ tartar sauce.”

Ariadne tried to tune Po-Mo out, his jeers and the hip hop blaring on the old boombox he had stolen from somewhere. She glanced at her watch for the fifth time.

“He’s got his mouth full of, like, this white foam. Hey, you think they put some kinda extra stuff in to make it look, you know, grosser for the cameras?”

Ariadne shrugged impassively as they walked down Broadway in East Cambridge. Like most streets in the winter, in this city devoid of late-night dining, it was deserted at 2:00 A.M.

“I bet they do. So all this loser has to do is get it down his throat without barfing, and he wins like, I don’t know, like a million freakin’ dollars. And his eyes are bulging and his mouth’s puffin’ out.”

Ariadne ignored Po-Mo’s pantomimed reenactment.

“And then, like, as the clock’s just about to hit zero, he spews. All over the studio audience. It was the freakin’ bomb!”

There was no sign of any trouble. From Roarke. From the Council. There had been no sign for days. The tide of the war seemed to have turned at last.

As Ariadne had hoped, the Invictus Council had been silent on the matter of Rose’s disappearance. Ariadne knew she and Andrei were not the only ones deserving of congratulations for political skill. Liliane was meeting with the local wizards every night, it seemed. They came in threes and fours, dressed to the nines.

One time, Marie was among them. The blue streak in the hair, the too-chic glasses, the mischievous twinkle in the eye . . . it was definitely the girl who had saved her from Silas’s hound by the riverside. Ariadne dimly remembered her words, her curiosity, her comments about Ariadne—what was it: hiding her aura? If Marie recognized her, though, she made no show of it. Maybe all Kindred looked alike to her.

Ariadne caught snatches of the wizards’ conversations. They talked an awful lot about arrows and veils, it seemed. And fixing the roof with a silver ladder, or something like that. They always arrived looking angry and concerned. They always left looking satisfied, even Marie, carrying armfuls of books or statuettes.

Scrying spells, Archibald’s Ravens, Ariadne’s gambit with Andrei. New Jerusalem had many brave defenders, keeping the eyes of the mortals away from the war as it wound down. Leaving Ariadne free to do what she did best.

“One second, man. One more second, and he woulda been gold, but, naw, he loses it. Doughboy, he always says those shows are scripted, but me, I say you can’t write that shit. Some people, man, they’re just determined to self-destruct, y’know?”

It took Ariadne a moment to realize Po-Mo had paused in his logorrhea.

“We need to push our patrols beyond the city proper,” she said. “Roarke’s home base is gone. He obviously learned he can’t stab into East Boston anymore, or we’ll cut him down. He’s not stupid enough to disobey the wizards’ warnings about downtown and those troops of his we found in Roxbury were staked to fenceposts by the time we got there, so some wizard or other obviously won’t let him operate out of there. The only consistent places we’ve engaged with him have been in the Kendall area, so he’s got to either have another base there somewhere, or he’s building one.”

“Hey, you’re the boss,” said Po-Mo. They began their trek across the Longfellow Bridge.

What little remained of Roarke’s forces were ghouled humans and a handful of neonates, freshly embraced Kindred so confident in their own newfound strength as vampires that they did not stop to think tactically. Their fighting styles were slow, ponderous, sloppy, and Ariadne never gave them a chance to learn better. The war was swiftly becoming a series of search-and-destroy missions that did not require her constant hand.

So she had begun meeting with Andrei at the Fresh Pond Motel, at restaurants, at any location Ariadne could think of that seemed far from the war zone that Andrei didn’t even know existed. As long as she was conscious to always “happen” to drape something over the mirrors in Andrei’s room, the whole thing was easy. Whenever they were out in public, Ariadne half-expected the pedestrians of Boston’s busy streets to stop in their tracks and point, stare, run away, or call for help. But their eyes, when they truly saw her at all, told them only what they wanted to see: She was just a college-age girl out with her boyfriend. If anything, Andrei drew more attention, the critical or jealous stares of his agemates assessing how this disheveled-looking guy was robbing the cradle.

Their best conversations came when she would ask him, in veiled terms, for political advice. How to get people to part with information by means other than physical intimidation.

“You’ve got to make your bosses feel as if your ideas came from them,” he told her one night, pushing aside his pile of papers to make room for her to sit atop his desk. “Remind them of the times they did things for you, however small. They’ll want to keep doing things for you. It’s about their sense of self.”

As much as it had galled her to begin expressing gratitude to Silas at war council sessions, the confusion in the elder’s eyes was almost worth it. Soon enough, he was agreeing to “his” war plans that Ariadne had drafted. Maybe her pride suffered a bit, but it certainly was nice to not hear Silas’s biting critiques at every briefing.

“Build coalitions,” Andrei told her, and she actually took notes on a small steno pad, as if she were back in college. “Find like-minded individuals and get them on your side until you achieve critical mass.”

Of course, the Prince’s Hand needed no more than to ask and the Kindred in her court should obey. But many were the elders, still jealous and bitter over Ariadne’s role, who would find ways to lose track of a request Ariadne made, or delegate it and blame its failure on incompetent minions. But Ariadne found that winning over just one or two elders to her agenda—by means, of course, of making them think the idea was theirs—was often all she needed to make her ideas start to seem like inevitabilities.

These tactics were new toys that thrilled her as she tried them out . . . or, at least, that thrilled her by the time she got to Andrei’s room to talk about it. That the reaction was delayed didn’t diminish its value. Did it?

Po-Mo’s voice cut through her thoughts again. “So, what d’you think?”

“About what?”

“About what I said. About some people.”

“I’ve never watched Fear Challenge.”

“It’s Fear Brigade,” he said. Then he absent-mindedly brought his hand up to his chest, as if remembering the wound she had made him self-inflict at their first meeting. “Ah, sorry, boss. I forget sometimes that you old Licks, you don’t know the new shows and all that.”

Ariadne snorted. Old.

Po-Mo relaxed visibly. The Silent Knife had been in an increasingly good mood these nights, which opened up so many delicious possibilities.

They walked down streets with only letters for names, past signs for the Galleria Mall and the Kendall Square Cinema, approaching the warehouse district.

“You gotta wonder ’bout the people who go on those shows,” Po-Mo said again. “They get, like, blinded, you know? They try an’ keep their eyes on the prize, but they lose sight of what really matters.”

“Stop philosophizing. We’re out here to fight.”

Mercifully, their route led them into an ambush.

The next few minutes passed in a flurry of blades and bludgeons. This squad of Roarke’s minions was composed of mere ghouls, strong enough to bandy blows with Kindred but inescapably mortal. One of them carried a heavy silver canister on his back, from which a tube snaked all the way out to a nozzle in his hand. He raised it with a gleam in his eye, fingers twitching in anticipation.

To Ariadne’s senses, he moved like a figure underwater. She paused just long enough to let hope build a home in his eyes, to let him think he had the drop on her. She allowed time for the germination of whatever dreams might have taken root in his mind, whatever ambitions he might have imagined himself fulfilling by killing her.

Then she swung her sword, cut the vital tie between nozzle and backpack. He pressed the trigger, only to see it spark uselessly, deprived of fuel. She allowed another moment for his surprise and frustration to turn to panic. Only then did she gut him.

Ariadne did not smile. The battle, the slaughter, was old poetry to her.

Po-Mo, beside her, reveled in the newness of each stanza. He danced in and out of the mortals’ slow-moving limbs, wasted precious time with taunts and jeers. He twisted arms, jabbed out eyes, and broke teeth, cackling all the while. There was art in what he did, Ariadne had to admit, but it was the art of a child splattering paint.

For a moment she envisioned what Andrei would think if he saw this scene. For the first time in years, she shuddered on the battlefield.

Gunfire beckoned from several blocks away.

Ariadne cursed. “That’ll bring the police. Time to end this, now.”

She finished off the rest of their opponents in a flurry of sword strokes, much to Po-Mo’s annoyance, and beckoned him to follow her. They clambered over fences and around alleyways to find a battle already joined.

Doughboy and another of Liliane’s soldiers were chasing what appeared to be a twelve-year-old girl. Their quarry ran right into Ariadne’s path, and Ariadne paused for a moment, hand on her sword. She blinked. The girl’s face had taken on the visage of Cassie, Andrei’s daughter. By the time she recognized the Beast on her, Ariadne was staring right into the barrel of the gun gripped in the small Kindred’s hand.

Po-Mo threw himself in front of her, taking a bullet in the process. He and the child-vampire went down in a tangle. After a brief flailing of limbs, Po-Mo emerged on top, his hands clasped around her neck.

Police sirens shouted in the night and grew closer. As one, Ariadne’s forces scattered into the darkness. All but Po-Mo. He was still grappling with the girl.

Ariadne shook the cobwebs out of her brain and, with a swift sword swipe, decapitated Po-Mo’s foe. The child-vampire’s nails scraped uselessly across Po-Mo’s neck. Her hands spasmed before falling down to the ground.

“Damn, boss—” Po-Mo dusted off his hands “—you don’t let me have no fun at all.”

“We need to go.”

Blue lights flashed into the alleyway. Ariadne leapt over a fence.

Po-Mo remained, scooping up large handfuls of clotted earth and gore as his victim began decomposing. He was pocketing them.

Ariadne stopped in her flight, called back over her shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Just makin’ sure.”

“Making sure of what?”

The police cruiser rolled into the alleyway. Warnings were shouted. Po-Mo turned and leapt over the fence, gunshots ringing out behind him. It took him and Ariadne twenty minutes of madcap flight before they were confident they had lost their pursuers.

“What the hell were you up to back there?” Ariadne demanded as the team reassembled at the rendezvous point. “You want to give the Council a reason to send someone else after us?”

Doughboy, also bearing a small pile of remains in his hands, spoke up. “We gotta scatter these. Roarke can use magic to bring his soldiers back to unlife, even if they’ve been dusted. The only way around it is to steal a hunk of them and scatter it.”

Ariadne shook her head. “That’s ridiculous.”

“No, it ain’t. I swear, that little kid we fought tonight was the same one I iced three nights ago. Unless Roarke’s embracing twins—”

“We found more of that black ash, too,” someone else said. “Do you know what it is?”

“Stop being stupid,” said Ariadne. “Whatever the ash is, whatever Roarke’s so-called magic is, it hasn’t done him much good so far, has it?”

A nervous silence followed. Ariadne watched a cluster of ants crawling over the carcass of a dead squirrel.

Po-Mo finally spoke. “Only one problem with this war: All the good shows are on at night, so I gotta miss ’em.”

Doughboy and the others laughed, a macho poise to cover the fear that all of them could recognize so easily. Only Ariadne radiated none of it, and they deferred to her, respected her for it, mistook it for iron courage.

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

“Why won’t you ever meet me in the daytime? Do you turn into a pumpkin or something?”

Ariadne, sitting on the edge of Andrei’s motel room bed, dug her fingernails into her palms.

“You’re married. Is that it?”

Ariadne refused to meet his gaze. In the past, this would be the point where he exploded into a frustrated rage. But this new Andrei just let loose a long sigh and softened.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t want to push you too fast. It’s just you’ve told me so little. I don’t know if you’re only here because you need my business advice or—”

“I want to see you,” Ariadne said without hesitation. “Really, honestly, it’s all I have to look forward to these days. You have to believe me when I say this is all I care about in my life.”

“I’d like to hear more about that life.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” she told the floor.

“Try me.”

Ariadne turned to him. “Dre, you had all these big ideas in college. You were going to save the world. Well, the job I have . . . it’s supposed to be like that, too. I think it is, for some people. For my boss, anyway. It used to be for me. I was really, really good. I still am. Knowing that used to be enough. But now, I just . . . I just don’t feel it anymore. Not that I haven’t tried.”

“As it turned out, my job wasn’t all it was cracked up to be either,” said Andrei. “No, that’s not true. We helped a lot of people who really needed it. There was some rot in the middle of it all, but that didn’t change the fact. . . .”

He seemed to run out of steam midsentence. Almost by accident he had taken Ariadne’s hand, but his grip on her fingers began to loosen. She tightened her grip to make up for it.

“Dre, please. Let’s stop asking questions for a while. Go with the flow.”

God bless the flow. It swept her along, through meals she couldn’t eat, songs on the radio she didn’t recognize, arms that held her whose warmth she was almost, almost sure she felt.

Andrei’s motel room centered her, the way seeing Silas’s paintings in the safehouse foyer used to before he had taken them away to replace the ones Roarke’s men had burned. She always knew there would be toilet paper on the roll, a stack of tissues in the box, a filled pitcher of filtered icewater. Even though her body required none of it, her mind, it seemed, required knowledge that it was there. The bareness of her cell in Liliane’s sanctum now seemed unbearable.

If only he didn’t have those damned pictures of Cassie. The ringlets of hair, the playful smile, the dopey panda eyes that seemed to mock Ariadne from all corners of the room. From within those photo frames came glimpses of Andrei’s world, complete with people who loved him—a world in which Ariadne could never take part.

Ariadne began pacing around the room, opening up the plastic storage bins that contained Andrei’s papers and rifling through them with impunity. Her chest seized when she came upon a rolled-up canvas.

“You . . . you saved it.”

Andrei craned over her to look, and she could suddenly smell the salt and sand of a remembered ocean:

It has been an age since she’s painted anything, what with exams to study for and final projects requiring hollow essays that miss the point of what college is supposed to be about. So Ariadne jumped at the chance to paint his portrait as a birthday present, with their favorite beach as the backdrop.

She tries to capture the jutting chin, the pride in his bearing, the pent-up energy struggling to burst free around every line and tendon and muscle in his neck. He fidgets something fierce the whole time, muttering about all the studying he has to do, all of the hours they’re wasting out there on the sand.

“Christ.” Ariadne finally hurls her paintbrush across the towel, where it leaves a stain the color of dried blood. “Can’t you just sit and enjoy anything? Look around you—it’s beautiful out!”

“Ari, not another one of those ‘stop and sniff the flowers’ speeches, please. I’ll just be quiet, okay?”

“No. Then you’ll just be thinking the same negative things. I want you to have fun.”

“I had fun. An hour ago. Now you’re just milking it.”

“Milking what?”

“You’ll do anything to delay me going to this conference, won’t you?” He says it with a smile that she has learned not to believe.

“Can’t you forget about work for two lousy hours?”

“We’ve been out here for three.”

“I’m not watching the clock! Look, do you want this painting or not?”

“I never asked for a portrait.”

“Then what?” Ariadne spreads her arms. Overhead, a seagull screeches. “What makes you happy? Just tell me, Andrei, and I’ll do it. But don’t make me guess, just so you can yell at me because I’m not psychic.”

“This isn’t just any conference. It’s my chance to meet Matt Legatt. Matt Legatt! He’s a legend in social technology entrepreneurship. He’s the guy who outfitted half of Nigeria’s schools with computers—”

“Can’t saving the world wait until one portrait’s finished?”

“Some of us aren’t born with connections. We have to make our own.”

“Thank you for the fiftieth reminder.”

She turns from him, pounds the sand with her fist. What will it take to get him to see that she’s on his side?

At that moment a small child running by drops her ice cream cone and the cloud of seagulls hovering overhead descends in a storm, screaming and biting and clawing for the meal. Their frenzy kicks up sand and sticks, sends the child running and crying, and makes Ariadne and Andrei dive to protect the paint supplies and their spare clothing.

Ariadne feels like something of a refugee as they scurry to the car, fleeing the scene with the bags slung over her shoulder. As they near the parking lot, they exchange no words, but Andrei seems to have calmed down. She can tell by the glassy look in his eyes that means he has already converted the energy into something useful, some plan for tomorrow. He doesn’t even allow himself the luxury of wallowing in his anger. Ariadne doesn’t know whether to feel jealousy or pity.

An elderly couple passes by, arm in arm, and Andrei raises the fence post at the edge of the beach and beckons for them to pass through first.

Ariadne can’t tell if the old man is crying or if his eyes simply have that watery look. He reaches up a bony arm, removes his checkered hat, and tips it to Andrei. The old woman smiles through thick brown sunglasses at Ariadne.

“My, it’s nice to be young,” she says sweetly. “It only comes around once, so you two enjoy it, you hear?”

Andrei’s voice pulled Ariadne back to the motel room. “Yeah, I saved it,” he said. “Sarah wouldn’t let me put it up in the house. She was a bit of the jealous type. So it stayed in the basement, and, well, I guess it got swept up when I moved out. I couldn’t really bring myself to hang it up—seemed a little arrogant. But I liked what it reminded me of.”

The reel of memories running through Ariadne’s brain snapped to a halt. The rising tide of her anger froze. “Me?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Andrei said. “You. Better times.”

“Better times than with Sarah?” Ariadne hadn’t wanted to sound juvenile. Who was this person who spoke in her voice whenever she was around Andrei?

Andrei spread his hands in a gesture of equanimity. “Sarah was—is—a good person. She just could never sympathize or understand when I failed. Even when it wasn’t my fault. She had these impossible standards for me, and I think going through that made me realize I’d done the same thing to you, way back when. I must have been a right bastard.”

“Yeah.” Ariadne laughed bitterly. “You kind of were.”

Then she reached out, touched his cheek. “But you could also be kind. I haven’t seen a lot of that in my life lately.”

Andrei shuddered slightly under her touch. He remained still.

“I really like helping you, Ari. It gives me something to look forward to every day. Otherwise, it’s just the grind. The two jobs, trying to get my life back on track, two long weeks at a stretch between seeing Cassie. Helping her, helping you . . . it’s the kind of work I really want to do. Driving a taxi just doesn’t compare.”

“Gee, high praise.” But Ariadne was smiling.

The digital clock on Andrei’s desk beeped the hour. Ariadne couldn’t bring herself to look at it, refused to see the sky beginning to lighten beyond the shades.

Her hand was still on his cheek. She put the other one there to match it.

“Ariadne?”

She turned and spread out her arms, grasping Andrei in a hug around the waist. Automatically, he folded his own arms around her. He breathed softly into her hair.

“Do you want me?” she whispered into his ear, lips touching his flesh. Then, before he could answer, she added, “Say yes.”

She felt his grip around her tighten, felt his fingers start to cling, as if he were slipping down a mountainside and she were the last outcropping of rock that would prevent his fall. She could feel his breath and heartbeat pick up, could feel the tremors in his muscles.

“Ari, are you sure—?”

She cut off his words with her lips.

The minute their lips touched, he kissed her back with desperate ferocity. She could taste wine on his breath, taste the pungent fish from tonight’s dinner.

He gripped her even tighter, called her name, led them staggering to the bed.

He was furious, forceful, as if all of that bottled up, controlled energy of his had found an outlet. Occasionally, it had been like this back in college, and she had taken pleasure in the helplessness, the sense of being overwhelmed. A safe thrill, for the days when she had no concept of what danger really was.

He moved above her now on the motel bed, which creaked and groaned beneath them. She responded to him in a dream, her hands caressing his back, full of the knowledge that she was the one who could now overwhelm him. She could push in, right at this moment, and crush his rib cage. But of course she couldn’t, any more than she could sprout wings and fly. Or walk out in the daylight.

The sun would be rising at any moment. Andrei lay atop her, shivering.

She slid out from underneath him, threw on her clothes. He stammered questions that she answered only with a swift kiss and then a flight out the door.

Her skin was prickling with small fires as she raced inside Liliane’s sanctum with the sunrise, but the burning felt good. It almost made her feel alive.

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

Perched atop the Alewife Station parking garage, Bourne stared down through binoculars as Ariadne ran off into the night.

“My mother, rest her soul, always used to say that the good Lord, and someone else, is always watching you,” he mumbled to himself.

Then he climbed down the ladder, cursing the ungainly bulk that almost made him lose his footing and plummet to the pavement, and ducked into Silas’s sun-proofed limousine. The ride home was smooth and uneventful.

 

 




 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 

DAVID NURENBERG, PhD, is a teacher, freelance writer, and social activist who lives in the Boston area. His credits with White Wolf include writing for the Vampire: The Requiem, Scion, and Exalted lines. His nonfiction has appeared in the Boston Globe, Newsweek, USA Today, and Multicultural Review, as well as many lesser-known papers, ’zines, and blogs. Silent Knife is his first novel published by a major press. His favorite animal is the wombat.