Suck It Up and Die (18 page)

Small talk about their respective schools carried them to the river. When they turned south on the sliver of park running along the Hudson, Morning got to his plan. “So, Zoë told me about the winter solstice thing coming up at LaGuardia Arts on December twenty-first.”

“Yeah, they’re calling it the End Is Upon Us Ball,” Portia said with a half smile.

“What’s an End Is Upon Us Ball?” Even though he had picked Zoë’s brain for all the details, he didn’t want to sound like he had done too much homework.

“A bunch of doomers are saying the world’s gonna end on December twenty-first because it’s the end of the Mayans’ five-thousand, one-hundred-and-twenty-five-year calendar, so, naturally, the kids at LA are gonna turn it into an event.”

He kept feigning ignorance. “Is it like a dance?”

“Yeah, but with an end-of-the-world theme, I’m sure it’ll be more than a dance.”

“Are you gonna do something for it?”

“Nah, too busy with the film. Besides, you know I’m not into dances.”

He wasn’t discouraged. He knew Portia wasn’t a fan of events that promoted gender stereotypes. “But what if the world is really ending,” he mused playfully, “and this is the last dance of all time? Wouldn’t you wanna go?”

She gave him an
I’m on to you
look. Surprisingly, she didn’t call him on it. “The solstice is a long ways off,” she said with a shrug. “Besides, the way the crap’s hitting the fan with DeThanatos and Becky-Dell Wallace getting everyone riled up, the world might end before then.”

He had figured she would or wouldn’t want to go to the dance. He hadn’t anticipated indifference or evasion.

She took his arm and led him to a bench overlooking the river. “C’mon, let’s sit down.”

They did as Morning tried to think of what to say now that his plan to find out if they were still eternal beloveds had been derailed.

“I’ve been thinking about us,” she said. “A lot.”

The ominous words churned Morning’s stomach. “Me too,” he said, knowing what was coming.

“You wanna hear what I think?”

He didn’t want to have this conversation; he wanted to
cut to the chase. “Why don’t I say it first,” he blurted. “It’s time for us to break up.”

She gave him a tight smile. “That’s not what I was gonna say.”

He kicked himself for his rush to judgment. “What were you gonna say?”

“I think we just need to take a breather. You know, be friends for a while.”

The dreaded F-word twisted his stomach tighter. “Isn’t that the same as breaking up?”

“There’s so much going on right now,” she said, dodging the question. “I’m confused. I’m scared, but I’m also trying to earn my death.”

“Earn your death?”

“Yeah, earn my death. It’s something Cody told me about.”

Morning scowled. “Cody, great.”

She ignored his sour expression. “He said that if you’re lucky to die old and still be mentally competent enough to look back on your life and not have any major regrets, then you’ve earned your death.”

“Are you saying you already have some major regrets?”

“No, but I know I would if I didn’t put my heart and soul into every movie I make.”

“You can’t do that and be with me at the same time?”

She took his hand. “It’s not that, Morn. I’m saying if DeThanatos
thinks
we’ve broken up, a couple of things might happen. He might stop trying to get to me through you, and you might stop trying to protect me by turning me.”

He felt his jaw clench. “I’ll never stop trying to protect you.”

“Even if I broke your heart?”

“Is that what you’re planning? To break my heart?”

Her eyes welled up. “I don’t wanna break up. I really don’t. But we need to take a break.”

“And just be friends.”

“It’s a cliché, I know, but yeah. And it might just be for a while.”

“Till your film is done,” he said abruptly.

She wiped her eyes. “No, till all this crap flying around us settles. I can’t live with the double fear of some vampire wanting to off me and this wild piece of you that wants to protect me the only way you can. Can’t do it anymore. No girl should have to handle that much.”

He took a slow breath. He knew she was right; he knew being together had to end sometime. But knowing it didn’t prepare him for feeling it. And it felt a hundred times worse than he had ever imagined. He swallowed the thickening lump in his throat. “So, we’re just friends.”

She nodded.

“On one condition.”

“What?”

“We still meet Thursdays for breakfast.… That’s what friends do, right?”

She managed a kind smile. “Deal.”

Becky-Dell lived across the Potomac River in a posh Virginia neighborhood of stately homes and cast iron streetlights.

A peregrine falcon flashed through a pool of light, pierced the lower half of a big oak in a front yard, and landed on a low branch. A second later, the bird dropped down and
whopped
into human form; DeThanatos landed in the grass without a sound, or a stitch on.

Inside the house, Becky-Dell was in her home office, adding an amendment to her bill giving the BVA sweeping new powers and criminalizing such things as “medical vampires” or any form of consensual bloodlust.

The sound of a creaking floorboard turned her head; she gasped at the sight of the man standing in the doorway. It was shocking enough that he was dressed in a hazmat suit—the kind a killer might wear to make sure he kept his DNA to himself while he murdered his victim—but the biggest
shock was his face. It was the one she had been seeing all day: the pitchman for Vampower.com.

She started to scream, but DeThanatos flicked his fingers and closed her throat as tight as a vacu-packed sock. “I’m gonna talk fast,” he said, “so you can breathe sooner than later. Not going to hurt you, here to help. As you’re a worst-case-scenario type I figured you’d have a hazmat suit in the trunk of your car. You did, and I borrowed it so you didn’t get the wrong impression. If you promise not to scream, which you can signify by nodding, we can have a little chat.”

With her eyes bugged wide with fear or anger or a mixture of both, she nodded. DeThanatos flicked a finger; she sucked air and spit back words. “What do you want?”

“First, may I introduce myself. Ikor DeThanatos.” The hazmat suit crinkled as he made a little bow. “Second, I’d like to tell you what we have in common.”

She glared at him through her big glasses. “The only thing we have in common is a flair for publicity.”

He responded with a gentle smile. “We also want to see Leaguers wiped off the face of the earth.”

This took her aback. “How does a dating service that hooks up mortals and vampires for bloodlust bring
that
about? By training the mortals to date-stake?”

He gave her a charity chuckle. “Like so many of your ideas, it’s rather tame. It doesn’t go for the jugular.”

As much as she didn’t like being criticized, he had her attention. “What do you mean?”

He pointed at her computer. “It’s like the paragraph you just added to your anti-Leaguer legislation. You know, the amendment that strips businesses that hire Leaguers for
their special skills from the yellow pages and puts them in a new phone book called the red pages.”

Her eyes shifted to her computer, then back to DeThanatos. “You can read that?”

“When you’ve been watching the world for a thousand years, your eyes get very sharp. My point is, so many of your strategies are all so”—his lips curled like he had tasted bad blood—“democratic. You’re tossing splinters at the problem, when you should be plunging a big fat stake in every Leaguer’s heart.” He raised his hands apologetically. “However, today, you did have one brilliant idea.”

As much as she didn’t like being lectured, he had her attention. “And that was?”

“Declaring war.”

Her brow furrowed with curiosity. “Go on.”

He gave her a conspiratorial smile. “What if we were to join forces? Not in public, of course. We need to
appear
to be sworn enemies. But in private, if we could shed our mutual distrust and hatred and the instinct we harbor to slay one another, we could become strange bedfellows. And together, we could achieve what we both desire: the Leaguer apocalypse.”

Whatever revulsion “bedfellows” caused in her was swept away by “apocalypse.” She took him in with new eyes. “You’re not a Leaguer, are you?”

He was pleased she had noticed. “No, but I play one on television.”

At dawn, Morning woke feeling awful. His chest felt hollow and heavy, like aliens had kidnapped him, taken him to their spaceship, and filled his lungs with the air of a planet with ten times the gravity of Earth. He didn’t want to get up. He didn’t want to go to school. Now that Portia had broken his heart, he just wanted to lie there like a pile of abandoned bricks.

But somehow he dragged himself out of bed. He skipped breakfast so he would have time to swing by the one place that might lighten the load of bricks crushing his heart.

By the time he arrived at the firehouse on Great Jones Street, Will Prowler had finished washing his truck. Morning pulled off his cap and sunglasses and they sat in the back corner of the bay. He told the fireman his tale of woe, including the moment of
dentis eruptus
that he’d felt on the park bench. Prowler listened carefully as he ate an egg-and-cheese roll.

When Morning was done, Prowler wiped the crumbs from his mustache. “I’m sorry to hear you broke up.”

“We knew it was coming someday,” Morning said with a heaving shrug. “I just never thought it would be so soon. What am I gonna do?”

Prowler clasped his hands behind his head. “I’ve been married twice, divorced twice. I’m not much for advice on the ways of the heart. But along the rocky road of love, I did learn a thing or two about women.”

“Since they’re totally new to me,” Morning said, “whatever you know might help.”

The fireman scratched his gray head. “As far as I can tell, women are a force of nature we don’t get, and never will. That’s the way it is, so don’t feel bad that you can’t look into Portia’s heart like it’s a glass-bottom boat. In my experience, women aren’t like water, which always takes the easiest path. Women are more like fire.”

“Yeah.” Morning nodded. “I’m feeling burned.”

Prowler ignored his literal thinking and continued. “I’m not talking about
any
fire.” His face set in that look he got before he was about to impart one of the secrets of the fire knights. “There’s a kind of fire they don’t teach you about at the academy. It’s a kind of fire you’ll never see in a city. I only know about it because I fought a few of ’em when I was a smoke jumper out west. It’s called a climax fire.”

Morning didn’t know what a climax fire had to do with women, but he knew Prowler well enough to know that if he threw out a verbal boomerang, it would eventually circle back and hit you in the head with some revelation about the original topic. “A climax fire?” he echoed.

“Most fires are destructive,” Prowler explained. “A climax fire is destructive
and
creative. It’s the fire that sweeps
through longleaf pine forests. It not only destroys, but the fire’s extreme heat opens the pinecones, and the cones release the seeds that go on to resurrect the forest. If there’s anything in nature like the mythological phoenix that rises from the flames, it’s the longleaf pine.”

Morning didn’t have a clue as to what pine trees and phoenixes had in common with Portia except they all started with
p
. But he held his tongue and waited for the boomerang to come winging back.

“When smoke jumpers face a climax fire,” Prowler went on, “sometimes they fight it and sometimes they don’t. They know the fire is Mother Nature doing what she has to do to re-create. And that’s how climax fires are like women.”

Morning shrugged, still not getting it. “How so?”

Prowler gestured to the two of them. “We’re the smoke jumpers, they’re the fire. There’s a time to douse and a time to burn. Portia put a match to your relationship. She’s letting it burn. Maybe your job right now is to
not
fight it. Maybe there’s some old trees that need to die before new ones can be born.”