Chapter Twenty-Five: Secrets Never Prosper
Lisa and James left the town hall with the other mobs, but drifted away as soon as they could. Some were continuing the search. Most were heading for the safety of their homes. Lisa walked quickly. Presumably James followed her; she didn’t turn to find out.
How could he do that? Leave his friend like that? Not even offer an explanation? And how, how could he leave Dom’s corpse there? Did he have no soul at all?
They arrived at the new hideout, let themselves in, and made their way to the rumpus room at the back. The others were dotted around the room: Will and Curt in the far corner covered in blankets, Mitchell covering the main hallway with his rifle, and Truman trying his best to read all of McGregor’s scattered notes. Lisa couldn’t see Skylar; was she securing the back of the house or another casualty of the night?
“Found him?” Mitchell asked.
“Yeah,” Lisa said. “I found him.” She wished she hadn’t. She wished Mitchell had never told her where to find James.
“Where’s Dom?” Will asked, rising.
“They killed him,” James said.
Lisa resisted the urge to add that he’d let them. Hadn’t so much as lifted a finger.
“Then we’re all here,” Truman said.
James had unbuttoned his coat and now winced as he slid out of it, revealing…
Oh fuck.
…revealing a blood-soaked suit and shirt. Wet blood covered his torso and left leg. It had pooled in his left hand, which hung limply at his side, and dripped from his fingers and from the sword’s scabbard onto the threadbare carpet.
Truman rushed to his side and eased him into a chair. “Doctor!”
McGregor abandoned his translations to crouch beside Paddington. They took off his jacket and shirt and Lisa saw a deep cut on the upper left of his chest. A still-bleeding hole where her husband’s hairless chest should be. She could probably fit three fingers in there…
McGregor glanced at the clothes. “He’s lost a lot of blood. How long ago did this happen?”
“Near the start of the fight, I think,” Will said.
“And he kept fighting?” McGregor said.
“Can you do a blood transfusion?” Truman asked.
“Cross species? I wouldn’t want to risk it. Do either of you werewolves know your blood types?”
“What’s that?” Curt asked. Lisa hoped his ignorance was from youth until she saw that Will had the same untrusting look. The idea that blood came in different types was apparently too progressive for Archian medicine.
“I don’t know his,” Lisa said.
“And you?”
“AB-positive.”
“Universal receiver,” McGregor said.
“What’s that mean?” Will asked. He looked ridiculous, demanding answers wearing nothing but a blue blanket.
“That there’s about a four percent chance Lisa’s blood would help him.”
“I’ll survive,” James said. “I have to, for the prophecy.” Trust James to think like that at a time like this. “Speaking of, what did you find out?”
McGregor glanced at Truman, who nodded then keyed his radio. “Skylar, Clarkson, inside.”
By the time Skylar had walked in from the side of the house and Clarkson had emerged from the front, McGregor had disinfected the wound and sewed James up using the Team’s medical kit.
“I’ll do the bandages,” Truman said. “Tell us what you found out about the prophecy.”
McGregor retreated to the head of the billiard table. The two remaining werewolves – of the seven that had left Archi with Lisa less than twenty-four hours ago – stood to McGregor’s left. Joel next, leaning against the wall and staring fixedly at James. Next was Truman, wrapping James’s chest in neat white bandages. Then James himself, his eyes barely open and focussed. Next was Lisa, crouched by his chair and holding his hand. Finally Clarkson, Skylar, and Mitchell. The whole army, together again, and half as big as it had been.
McGregor cleared his throat. “Right. Ah. First, of the two prophecies I think we should fulfil the one relating to champion eating the Fruit of Life, not the one about the demon killing his brother.”
“You’re sure?” Truman asked.
“It’s our best bet,” McGregor said.
Bet? Good thing the fate of the world wasn’t hanging in the balance… oh wait, that was right: if they chose wrong her husband would spread death across the globe. A thought that had been laughable earlier tonight, before James had let his friend die with little more than a whimper.
If you asked her now whether she thought her husband capable of murder, of genocide… Gods, she had no idea how she’d answer. But she was very conscious of her hand in his, of moisture and pressure, and she really didn’t want to be touching him. She wanted to be across the other side of the room. Or back on Archi.
And that just made her hate herself more.
“But it’s still risky,” McGregor continued. “Eating the Fruit of Life or Understanding will kill anyone who isn’t one of the brothers. I think – think – it’s safe for either brother to eat from either Tree, but it’s possible the demon would die if he ate the Fruit of Life, or vice versa. That is, because the demon is Enanti’s emissary, eating of Idryo’s Fruit would be lethal.”
“Okay,” Truman said. “If that’s your recommendation, I say we—”
“There’s more,” McGregor said. “I think I know why the vampires attacked now. There’s references that after fulfilling his divine purpose – uh, that being killing his brother – the demon would have a ‘blessed union’ with the Mother of Creation.”
Truman frowned at McGregor’s hesitation around the last few phrases. “‘Blessed’ is good, right?” Truman asked.
“Not when a force of pure destruction says it.” McGregor took a deep breath. “I think it’s something horrible; something horrible the demon does after killing his brother.”
“What?”
McGregor stalled: scratched his beard, reread his notes, avoided all eye contact. “Well, in the Book of Enanti, ‘union’ has a very specific meaning. It’s, um, it’s what the Man and Woman have… together. In their, uh, alone time. Because they’re, ah—”
“We get it,” Truman said.
McGregor let out a relieved sigh that he didn’t have to keep thinking up euphemisms. “Given the context, something that Enanti considers a ‘blessed union’ would be, in layman’s terms, the demon defiling the act of creation with the Mother of Creation.”
Lisa wanted to ask if he could be any more specific but feared he could and doubted that she actually wanted to know. Better not to learn what the devil liked in bed.
Especially when apparently her husband would be doing it with whoever the Mother of Creation was.
“What happens afterward?” Truman was sweating, even jittery.
“Idryo calls it off.”
“Calls what off?”
“Creation.”
Just like that? She could do that? The whole of existence?
“Takes Her bat and ball and goes home?” Mitchell asked. “How very mature.”
McGregor grabbed a sheet of paper from the pile nearest the Book: one of his prized few, the most important. “If I’m reading between the lines right, Idryo becomes so overwrought with pain that one of Her creations could do that to another – that anyone would defile a being so pure – that She loses faith in the created order and unravels the Braid of Time. Existence won’t end; in a sense, it… never will have been. It will become like, like a dream that She had.”
“How certain are you that this will happen?” James asked.
McGregor averted his bulbous head, following patterns on the floor. It highlighted his receding hairline. Or maybe Lisa was also looking for some distraction. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not a prophecy, but I don’t know if that means it can be avoided or that it can’t. What I can say is that killing your brother makes you perfect in the eyes of Enanti which is
, in our terms, the final corruption. It robs you of humanity, turns you from a man into a… into something horrible.”
“Any leads on the Mother of Creation?” James asked. “Just so I can keep a wide berth.”
“Uh… yeah,” McGregor said. “I think you’re holding her hand.”
Lisa felt heat all through her, surging both to and from her hand still clasped in James’s. He was going to do something to her that robbed the humanity from him? Something that made the God of Creation give up on creation? What could he possibly do that was that awful? Did she even want to know?
It explained the Andraste’s timing, though: she had to be a mother for her post-prophecy, hollowed-out evil husk of a husband to do… whatever horrible thing she didn’t want to know about.
“Good news for me,” Joel said. Everyone looked at him. Lisa had forgotten he was even there in his geography-teacher jacket and floppy haircut and youthful, sad eyes. “On the whole, I prefer the fruit-eating prophecy to the brother-murdering, mother-defiling one.”
“Let’s go pick some Fruit of Life!” Clarkson said, thumping the billiard table for good measure.
“Wait!” Truman rubbed his hands through his hair. “We need a plan. We can’t go out blind like last time.”
He didn’t look at the werewolves as he said it. He very pointedly didn’t look at the werewolves. But who else could he mean? The Team hadn’t lost a single member, but one more bad plan would wipe out every werewolf in existence.
“Take twenty everybody,” Truman said.
People disappeared to the different corners of the house. James stood, removed his hand from hers, picked his bloody shirt off the floor, and put it back on. “What are you scared of?” he asked Truman.
Truman’s impressive jaw was set. “If Adonis wants you to become this evil thing, why is the Tree from the other prophecy here? We need to be sure it’s not another trap.”
“James?” Lisa nodded him toward the corridor and he followed her into the laundry, which was the only room that wasn’t already occupied.
“What’s up?” he asked. “Do you have an idea?”
Was he serious? “No, Jim. I’m still hung up on why you let one of your friends get shot in the head right in front of you.”
His mouth half-opened as he searched for the right words, but she could see he was struggling. His usually-long face looked almost sickly thin, his eyes were ringed with black and barely open, and his skin was pastier than Lisa’s had been after fifteen years in Scotland.
“I tried,” he said. “I really did.”
“You tried logic. When does that ever work?” she asked. “I mean, for feck’s sake, Dom was your friend. Wasn’t he worth starting a fight? Throw a punch, divert their attention, do that… that ridiculous thing you do where you connect two random ideas and make a solution!”
“You think I didn’t try?” he asked.
“I think… that I’m not sure I recognise you. The Jim I know would have made them shoot through him, or fought them until they dragged him away and to hell with the consequences.”
“Sorry I’m not some paragon of virtue who’s willing to die for no reason.”
“But you’ll kill for one?” she snapped. She’d meant that he’d come here for revenge and shouldn’t dress it up as justice or duty, but immediately regretted it because James didn’t get angry. He didn’t hit her or shout or storm away. He went quiet. His eyes took on that dispassionate stare through which he could view any situation without emotion clouding the way.
“Interesting point of view, coming from you,” he said.
Lisa didn’t want to ask. Nothing good would come of asking. But she asked anyway. “What do you mean?”
“Tell me about Charlie’s boat.”
“What? The Andrastes—”
“Need me alive for their prophecy. Created a whole town to lure me here. They had no motive. But you wanted me to stay on Archi, and I fell straight to sleep after the cup of tea you made me.”
Her chin quivered first, then her lips; her nose ran, and finally the tears came out of her eyes. “He was meant to check,” she said. “I just wanted to stop all of this from happening. He always checks the boat before he sets out. By the time he fixed it… I don’t know. I’d have had a couple of days to make you see that you didn’t have to come here. That we could stay on Archi and let the others deal with the vampires. I just wanted you to stay with me.”
That wasn’t even all of it. She wanted to be more important to him than a prophecy.
“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “If the Three-God said I’d be here—”
“Fuck the Three-God!” She only resisted the urge to shove him by staring at the corner of the washing machine and breathing deeply until she could bear to look at him. “I don’t care, James! I don’t care what some god says we’re supposed to do. I don’t even care if Adonis wins, you know that? So what if he’s taken over another town, or he’s trying to end the world for the umpteenth time? Someone else can deal with it!”
He stood apart from her, just staring at her – not as a specimen, but with pity. Like she was a child who didn’t understand and he didn’t have the patience to explain it again because she’d never understand. “I wish that were so,” he said, then turned, opened the door, and went back into the house.
The door shut with a gentle k-tng.
Lisa sank to the floor. What had she married? Had he always been like this or was this some new perversion? Was this the darkness he’d always talked about, waiting inside him? An inhumanity that revealed itself when pushed too hard? Had she married a demon not a man?
Was she in danger if she stayed with him?