She had taken his arm and turned him and was walking him away before he realized that she was taking command. Her tongue was rattling like a pocketful of loose brass, and she plowed down the center of the sidewalk as if nothing in the world could wish her harm. Wariness was impossible with her around. When he tuned in to her words, she was still going on about hot showers and clean sheets. He dug his heels into the sidewalk and brought her around to face him. The look on his face stopped her chatter.,
“What is it?” she demanded. “There’s nothing back there to go back for, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He took a deep breath. “Lynda. There is nothing wrong with liking men, any number of men, as long as you still like yourself.”
Annoyance creased her brow. “What’s that crack supposed to mean? Hey, I’ve been walking around down here all day, crying my eyes out over you, and when I finally find you, you say something like that. What do you think I am? Do you think I’d take in just anyone?”
“That’s not what I meant!” he protested.
“Then just what the hell did you mean?” Color was staining her cheeks, and with amazement he realized he had hurt her.
He was surprised at the strength of the remorse he felt. He touched her face quickly, stroking the hair back from her cheek as he might smooth a pigeon’s rumpled feathers. She quieted under he touch. He took a deep breath.
There’s no way I can explain dial you will understand. But I’ll tell you anyway. I’ve got to put me magic back in balance.
That means I have to give more man I get, always. There were questions you asked me when we first met. You asked me why you should keep on going, you asked me if you had to live like a nun because your sister thought you should.“
“I don’t remember any of that,” Lynda began, but he put a soft finger over her lips.
“Maybe not in those exact words, but you asked me. And I had things to tell you, but I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to talk to anyone who might endanger me later. I unbalanced things, and I owed you. The more you gave me, me further unbalanced it became. After tonight, mere may never be another chance for me to put things back in balance. So I have to do it now.”
“You are really sweet, you know that?” She leaned forward to kiss him again, with no more regard for his words than if they had been empty sweet-talk. She didn’t know me difference. he realized. Had other men tried to reach her mind, only to have her shelve their words as verbal foreplay? He felt pity for her and wondered who had taught her dial men and women never really spoke to one another. She was rattling on. “You don’t have to say thank you to me. It’s okay. Let’s get you to my place now and run you through a hot shower and head for beddy-bye, I’ve got to work tomorrow, baby. Hey, it’s already tomorrow, isn’t it? I was going to say we could talk about all (his tomorrow, but I guess it’ll have to wait for the next tomorrow. Hey, that sounds funny, doesn’t it?”
“This is the last tomorrow I have,” he told her desperately.
He was selfishly relieved to find that he felt only pity for her.
Loving a woman like her would have been hell. She believed all the old myths: Men have no feelings such as women harbor;
(hey can share your home, your bed, and your money, but not your life. She knew all about ‘how men are,’ but she had never really spoken to one. She wasn’t going to let him get through.
He made a final effort. “Lynda. I have things I have to say to you. For my sake, if not for yours, let me. You are a giver, and it brings you joy- Don’t let your sister shame you out of it, for the world would be a barren place without those who give as you do. But it can also be a form of giving when you take- Let them give to you, the men that come into your life.
The giving must flow both ways for the bond to be real. All your life, you’ve believed in only one kind of relationship; that in each pair, there is one who is loved, and one who does the loving. It doesn’t have to be that way. Give yourself by taking.
Then you’ll find—“
“Can’t we at least walk while we’re talking? I’m freezing, baby, and I’ve got to get home and get some sleep before work.
I’m going to be dead on my feet as it is.“
He fell silent, allowing her to take his arm and tow him along. Perhaps the time for him to speak to her had passed, irretrievably. Perhaps the magic granted only that one moment of exchange, when me strange man with the pigeons could have spoken to her and she would have felt his words. Now he was too close. He was just another man to her, to feed and support and screw and, on occasion, when bored, to pester and irritate to the very edge of a violent confrontation. She would never hear him again, and he would never know any more of her than he did at this moment. Why was he going with her?
He stopped abruptly- She rounded on him. “Now what?
Baby, I have to—“
“I’m not going home with you, Lynda. We have nothing for one another. There is a thing I have to do tonight, and I have to do it alone. Go along, hurry home to where you’ll be safe. And if you can remember what I said to you, think about my words. I meant them.”
“I don’t believe this! What’s me matter with you, are you crazy or what? You can’t just walk off like that, running off in a Hallowe’en suit with no shoes on! You can’t just walk out on me- You can’t treat me this way! You’ve got no right to treat me like this.”
“I’ve got no right to treat you any other way, either.” She wouldn’t hear him. How can you say good-bye to someone who never even heard you say hello?
For a moment she stared at him, her face an ivory mask in the darkness. Then she burst into tears, stamping her fed on me sidewalk. When he impulsively reached to comfort her, she hammered him with quick, forceless blows of her fists. “Go away, men. Go away! Leave roe alone! I knew you would anyway, sooner or later Everyone always leaves me, or makes me throw them out! All men use roe! And you’re no different.”
She continued to hammer at him wordlessly. He caught one of her flying wrists and restrained it. With her free hand, she dealt him a slap on me side of me head that clapped his ear painfully and stung his cheek. “Lynda‘” he protested, but she swung again, a backhanded slap that smashed his lips against his teeth. Damn, she was strong. He tasted blood. Anger coursed through him and he squeezed the captured wrist and began to turn it. The night pressed close all around diem. Electrically gray-
He let go and sprang back from her so suddenly that she fell. “No!” he told her frenziedly.“No!” He turned and ran from her. She shrieked obscenities after him and the sodden hem of his robe flapped against his ankles as he ran. He fled through the night, a hunted thing. Mir had stalked him well, from a perfect blind. Its raking claws had touched his soul and marked him. It would have him this night.
The city marked his cowardice and turned on him. He collided with dumpsters in alleys. At an intersection a yellow light winked suddenly green, and a car roaring from nowhere blasted its nom at him. He raced up streets that were all uphill. A passing squad car suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree and squealed a u-turn to pursue him. He darted up a crowded alley, knocking over garbage cans as he fled, then turned left and ran half a block before dropping to roll into hiding beneath a parked truck. He lay flat and still, the front of his robe absorbing an oily puddle of rainwater. He held his breath until he could force himself to breathe silently. He thought of Lynda’s eyes gone huge and gray and hungry in the night. He shuddered.
Cassie bad been wrong. It was hiding, not only in the city, but within him. Like was calling to like, and when they united, it would have him. Lynda had come perilously close to letting it out. It had been stalking him all this time.
The cold water met his skin and chilled it painfully. He endured it, lying still until he was sure that the patrol car was far away. Then he rolled from under the truck and stood again in the bitter November wind. There was a heaviness inside him, a sense of carrying as if he bore the seed of a deadly disease. It hid in his chest and in the muscles of his back, questing tentatively into his biceps, probing into his wrists and hands. Waiting. It could materialize in his fingers, or use his feet as its tool. His body was rotten with it. The knowledge disgusted him. It was worse than the idea of internal parasites.
He would have preferred intestines full of tapeworms or the cellular anarchy of cancer, leprosy, or plague. But he had not been given a choice.
“ ‘And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off,’” he muttered.
He laughed bitterly. It was past the stage of a hand or an eye.
He would have to cast his whole body aside to be free of it.
Now, how did one go about that? The word was like a snake sliding through dry summer grasses. Suicide. The cold certainty of it settled on him even as he denied it. Cassie would never have sent him out to face it if that were the only way he could win. But, men, Cassie had not known as much as she thought she did. She would not believe that it lurked inside him: not as a figment of his imagination, but as a fragment of himself.
Maybe Estrella had known more than she had been able to tell.
The Hanged Man. A helpful suggestion from your friendly neighborhood fortune-teller. But it wouldn’t be his foot in the loop. The plan did not please him, but there was a bitter satisfaction in knowing that by losing, he would win.
One detail disturbed him, and it took him a moment to find it. There it was- He did not want anyone weeping over his body. Not Lynda, dramatic in black, not Cassie, shaking her head. A vision came to him, clear and cold as ice. He saw himself standing on one of Seattle’s bridges, the rope looped several times around his throat, simply looped, not a noose at all. He would jump, and the weight of his body at the end of the rope would be enough to break his neck. Then the slow turning of the body at the end of the rope from the natural torque of the woven strands; the rope unwinds itself from me throat, and me body drops neatly down, to be carried away by the moving water. In the morning, an empty rope dangling from a bridge. He was almost positive it would work. If it didn’t, he’d never know. Tidy, he congratulated himself, and tried to ignore the gray chuckling in me back of his mind. As for me rope—had not me dumpsters of the city always provided him with all his needs before? So would they this night. His stride was purposeful.
The scream ripped his decision. It was a strange cry, thin and short, terror with no breath to vent it. He could not decide if it came from deep inside himself or only echoed mere. It was a sharp sound, pained and despairing and gray. He crossed his arms on his chest, holding it in and muffling it- He heard three quick scuffs, soles against pavement, and me gong of a heavy body colliding with a dumpster. Then silence. Fear rolled through Wizard. He wanted to stopper his ears and keep walking. He had reached a decision for his gray Mir, and he wanted it to be a final one. He doubted he had the strength to face anything else this night. But his traitorous ears brought him the harsh breathing of a predator on a blood trail. It came from an alley mourn, less than a half a block away.
Wizard kept walking, his steps reflexively silent. He would reach the alley mourn and pass it, search for his rope elsewhere.
His own burden was all he could carry, and his mission was clear in his mind. If other evil walked in Seattle, that was no affair of his. Someone else would have to handle it. He was already doing as much as he could-
The alley loomed on his right, blacker than me night itself.
It was a deadend alley, walled up so that it offered no light or escape at the far end. Entering it was a one-way journey to me pit. Coldness emanated from it. He kept his eyes down and straight, watching me sidewalk in front of him. He walked soundlessly past the mourn of me alley and continued walking.
The grayness wriggled inside him, chuckling. He clenched his arms tighter around it.
“Oh. please!”
The cry, whimpered with no hope of clemency, halted him.