Authors: R. Lee Smith
That didn’t
help, for some reason. Now Connie sat and stared and thought of Papa Frankie in
the ground, full of bugs.
“It’s not a bad
thing,” Mara insisted, annoyed with herself. “The bad stuff is all the stuff
that happens before, like when it hurts or when you’re scared or feel sick, or
whatever made you die. That part ends.”
“But what comes
after?”
“I don’t know. I
don’t think anyone knows for sure, no matter what they say. But we’ll find out
someday and I’ll probably be as surprised as everyone else.” She smiled at
that. “Nobody lives forever, Connie.”
“But aren’t you
scared?”
“Of dying?”
“Yeah.”
Mara thought
about it, very aware of Connie hanging on her answer because she knew Mara
would tell the truth. Hell of a lot of pressure to put a girl six days shy of
twelve, she thought, but not bitterly. It was just Connie, that was all. “I just
want to do it right,” she said at last. “Being dead doesn’t scare me, it’s just
what happens. But dying can be pretty bad. I think it’s okay to be scared of
that part, especially if it’s a bad way to go, like getting sick, where you end
up puking all the time and have to pee in front of people and everyone who sees
you just feels sorry for you, like, for years and years. That’s harsh. I’d be
scared of facing that.”
“He lost all his
hair,” Connie whispered. “And he smelled bad. I hated having to see him. I
hated having to hug him.” And she hated worse having to kiss his dead cheek,
when all of it was over, because he was passawayed now and didn’t even know it
was her anymore. All he had was the last time, when she hadn’t even wanted to
be there.
“Nobody knows
what to do all the time,” said Mara. “But the world just keeps going on. We
might as well go with it, and maybe just try to be better.”
“Like how?”
“Like…” Mara
looked at the grave again. “Like be nicer to cats. But don’t, you know, let it
take over all the time. It doesn’t help you or the cat to get all crazy when
you think about it. It’s dead. The bad stuff is all over, right?”
Slowly, Connie
nodded. Then, almost unexpectedly (the thought did precede the words, but only
by a second or two), she said, “You don’t think you’re very nice, do you?”
Mara looked at
her, lopsidedly smiling. “No, I’m not.”
“You are,
though.”
“No, but that’s
okay. Being nice is like being pretty. There’s a scale, you know?”
“I think you’re
nice.”
“Yeah and I bet
Anna Slovak’s mom thinks she’s pretty, but she’s…she’s kinda hideous.”
Connie gasped,
then giggled, then scowled. “She’s nice!”
“Mostly,” said
Mara, who knew that no one was really very nice, and who would not be a bit
surprised when, five years later, the girl everyone described as ‘sweet but
shy’ to police and ‘mule-butt ugly’ to each other took a tryout baton and used
it to put Holly Hoendekkar in the hospital after a particularly nasty comment
at the cheerleading trials. Holly had to breathe through a hole in her neck for
a few days. Anna even went to jail for a little bit. But yeah, mostly nice.
“Do you want to
go home now?” Mara asked, knowing Connie did, and so she went too, and six days
later, at Kimara Warner’s upscale and elegant birthday party, a very nervous
Connie in a very secondhand dress gave Mara an eight-dollar locket on a
gold-painted chain, wrapped in slightly used paper that had pastel balloons on
it. Best Friends, it said on the front, but that wasn’t why Connie gave it to
her, not really.
“It’s so you
always remember,” Connie said with that shy Connie-smile, “that you have a heart
too, and it’s a good one.”
In that moment,
through Connie’s eyes, Mara saw herself, the better self, the Mara that Connie
thought she knew. She would have given anything, anything, to be that person at
that moment. It was the best birthday, the best of any days.
She put on the
locket, ignoring the ugly flare of disapproval radiating out from her mother at
the grown-ups’ table (where Mrs. Vitelli sat, as nervous as her daughter in her
faded cotton dress and freshly-done hair, trying to disguise her churning
nerves with loud laughter and horribly inappropriate good cheer). She put it on
and kept it on, and no, it didn’t change her, it didn’t change anything, but
she wore it just the same. Day in, day out, asleep and in the shower, for
twelve years without fail.
Sometimes, she
needed the reminder.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
R
eturning to Kazuul had been a mistake. Even
Mara made them now and then. And just as she had done on those other rare
occasions, Mara did her best to learn from this one and move on. She ate. She
slept. She searched the students’ wing of the Scholomance with the locket held
out before her and even ventured down into the Great Library’s miasma to lift
every aspirant’s hood and make sure Connie was not among them. She tried the
labyrinth beneath the Nave without Horuseps, and managed to open most, if not
all, of the doors again. The one place she did not go was the lyceum. Looking
at the spiraling stair only reminded her of whose theater lay at the top and
then she was angry all over again. She didn’t handle anger well and she
couldn’t afford to lose her temper with him twice. She’d get over herself in
time, but for now, she stayed out of the lyceum.
On the fourth
day following her encounter with Kazuul, as Mara’s body slept and her mind
hovered in the Panic Room watching dreams, her monitors suddenly registered a
hand upon her shoulder. Not a subtle touch, but one that shook her boldly. She woke
fast, ready for Kazuul and ready for a fight, and instead saw moonlight in the
shape of Horuseps, sitting cross-legged at her side in the tiny cell, not
smiling.
“I have just
spent every hour since sunrise convincing him not to come down here himself,”
he said without preamble. He did not identify the ‘him’.
She didn’t need
it identified.
“Let him,” she
snapped, sitting up.
Horuseps looked
pained. “Precious, you don’t mean that.”
“The hell I
don’t! Do you know what he is to me? He’s a nuisance, that’s all! I tried to
deal with it by giving in to him even when I knew that was a mistake, and it
blew up on me, so fine. I can live with that, but I don’t need the peace and
quiet so bad that I’m going to put up with his—”
His what? What
had it all boiled down to but a little name-calling? She’d done all the
slapping and the storming out. If anyone ought to getting pissy here—
Horuseps waited
patiently, his hands folded in his lap. He looked tired.
“I don’t need to
put up with him,” she finished, and threw herself back down as violently as she
could without hurting herself, rolling away from him. “You can tell him I hope
he enjoyed himself, because it is the last fucking he ever gets out of me. I’m
through.”
“Yes, and ten
minutes after I delivered your message, he would be right here, fucking you
until he broke either your bones or the wall. I allow him nine minutes to
charge bellowing through the Scholomance,” he added lightly, “and one minute to
kill the messenger. Really, darling, I thought we were friends.”
She stayed on
her side, facing the dark, fuming.
“Once more,”
Horuseps said after a moment. “Meet with him once more. Give him the chance
to—”
“No.”
“Think what your
refusal means to your search, to your Connie.”
“He doesn’t know
her. He doesn’t know anything. He’s useless.”
“His power—”
“I don’t need
it. I can find her without him.”
Another short
silence.
“You’re just as
stone-stubborn as he is. I hope you appreciate that. I’ll be here all day,” he
muttered, and sighed. “Precious, I don’t know what you’re expecting, but this
mountain will stand up on swan’s feet and fly before he ever apologizes.”
“I’m not
interested in his apology.”
“You can’t avoid
him forever.”
“Sure, I can. He’s
put himself in the most avoidable spot in the whole damn mountain.”
“You have no
idea how angry you are making him with every day that passes.”
Mara bolted up,
shouting, “He should have thought of that before he called Connie a miserable
worm!”
“And so should
you,” Horuseps snapped back, seizing her locket and shaking it in his fist. “Before
going to him wearing the token of someone else’s love!”
Mara drew back,
still flushed and breathing hard, but beginning to be confused as well.
“He has always
been first in the eyes of his supplicants. You put your Connie above him even
in his bed…How did you
think
he was going to handle that?” He released
the locket with a snap of his wrist. It bounced off her throat and spun, lying
tangled over her breast in its cheap chain.
“I’m through
with him,” Mara said again, but not as heatedly as she had before.
“No you are
not,” Horuseps shot back, biting off each word. “Not for so long as you live by
his
grace in
his
mountain! Must I remind you of that? And you,
darling Mara, light of my lonely heart, you are a hair’s breadth from finding
yourself chained to the foot of his bed until you learn to appreciate him
better, which knowing the two of you, is going to take at least a thousand
years, and in the meantime, you will lose every hope of ever finding your lost Connie!”
“I don’t respond
well to threats.”
“Neither does
Kazuul!”
She looked away,
pushing her anger down and trying to think. She couldn’t fight him, she knew
that. Even if it was just him and not every demon under his command, she could
never fight Kazuul. His physical strength aside, he could easily crush her with
no more than the power of his mind.
But he hadn’t. Even
when she slapped him.
No. She didn’t
need him. She could find Connie without—
It occurred to
her only then that every resource he had at his disposal to help her find
Connie was also a resource he could use to shut her away. The revelation
overwhelmed her with frustration and a feeling of helplessness so new to her
that she almost couldn’t recognize it, and both together combined to make a
churning pit of purest anger.
“I can’t,” she
said finally, calmly. “I can’t see him right now or I’ll just make things
worse. I’m furious with him.”
“I understand. You’ve
no idea how well. And I think I can convince him to wait…if he knew that you
were coming.” Horuseps watched her glare across the dark cell. “Are you?”
“Looks like I
have to, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“What does he
expect me to do?” Mara demanded scathingly. “
Love
him?”
“Probably.”
“After he tells
me how incapable I am of loving anyone? After he calls me a…a terrible,
wretched—”
“He doesn’t
think things through,” Horuseps agreed with a sigh. “He only knows that he
wants you…and you want someone else. If you knew him as I do, you’d realize
he’s actually trying very hard.” He waited as she seethed, and quietly said,
“Shall I tell him you’ll be back?”
Stiffly, she
nodded.
“Soon?”
“Sooner than I
want,” she said with a tight laugh. “And if he expects me to be happy about it,
he’s got a hell of a disappointment in store.”
“Very well.” Horuseps
started to rise, then abruptly leaned over and brushed his lips against her
cheek. It was a distinctly unpleasant feeling, and she had to fight not to
reach up and crush the lingering sensation like a spider. “I know this is
difficult for you, precious. I doubt you’ve ever had to capitulate so entirely
to another’s will before, and I sincerely sympathize. It wasn’t easy for me
either.”
“How often do
you have to chase down his women for him anyway?”
“As they say—” He
smiled thinly and stood up. “There’s a first time for everything. Sleep well,
Bitter Waters.”
He let himself
out, and after a while, Mara lay back down and rolled over.
She had to go
back. Not today, she knew that already, and not tomorrow either. But soon.
Of course,
‘soon’ ought to be relative to a demon who had lived more than four thousand
years by his own admission. With any luck, she’d find Connie and the two of
them would be long gone before he lost his patience and sent Horuseps after her
again.
Kazuul.
Mara shut her
eyes, gritted her teeth, and eventually slept.
*
*
*
The second time
she woke, it was to first-bell ringing through the rock. She sat up aching, as
she did every evening, and felt a wall at each of her bracing hands, the door
right at her toes.
Yet Horuseps had
been here, she was sure of it. Her cheek still crawled from his kiss. She
didn’t know how he’d gotten in or out, but she knew he’d been here, pimping her
out to Kazuul.
All right,
perhaps that wasn’t entirely fair. But then again, perhaps it was.
So his feelings
were hurt, were they? Her twelve year-old birthday present was too much for his
demonic heart to bear when he had to look up and watch her ride him. And three
days without her had proved so painful that he had to threaten to chain her to
his bed if she didn’t come back on her own. All to win her pale, wretched love.
There was no
point in sitting here, making herself angry. She got up, tucked her cup into
her sleeve, and felt her way out into the hall to light a lamp. She did not
think about Kazuul. He wasn’t worth thinking about.