All Our Pretty Songs (21 page)

Jack stumbles onto the stage, and the crowd goes mad. I cling to the stage and hold on for dear life. If I lose my place it seems entirely possible I’ll be torn to pieces. Behind me an awful howl rises and bodies surge forward. I stare up at Jack, willing him to look down at me, but he gazes out unseeing over the seething mass of people. He looks terrible, his face gaunt, his back bent under the weight of the guitar slung around his neck like an anvil. “
Jack,
” shouts the crowd behind me, “
Jack, Jack, Jack,
” one name rising from hundreds of throats, pounding into the hot dark like the beat of a drum. He opens his mouth but makes no sound, and all the
Jack
s run together into a blur of noise. I cover my ears with my hands and cower. He strikes a chord, and the frenzy behind me grows even wilder.

This time when he plays it’s the song of someone who’s dying. I weep as I watch him, his body jerking as though his limbs are being pulled by invisible strings, his mouth open and working, his eyes with that empty, terrible stare. The air around him fills with hundreds of huge-winged dark moths that flutter out into the darkness. I throw my hands up to protect my face from heavy, soft wings that leave thick traces of something powdery and terrible smelling across my arms. There is no joy in what he plays, only an immense, terrible pain. I can see a dry wasteland stretching out under a starless sky. Behind me someone screams above the rest of the noise, and the air fills with the metallic scent of blood. I kick back behind me again, fighting to keep from being crushed against the stage. When I punch into the knot of bodies my hand comes back slick with gore. Still Jack plays, a single chord that grates and wails into the hot dark. Something knocks me into the stage and I hit my leg hard, Cass’s quartz grinding into the soft part of my thigh; but instead of pain, a soft coolness spreads from where the stone struck me. I shove one hand into my pocket and close my fingers around the crystal. The noise around me dims and I can breathe more easily. I close my eyes and imagine Cass, standing over the stove, stirring tofu with a wooden spoon. The ordinariness of the image eases my terror.

At last the song ends. I open my eyes. Jack’s sunk to his knees. I am almost close enough to him to touch him. “Jack!
Jack!
” He doesn’t hear me. He bows his head, but not before I catch a glimpse of his expression. Desperate, hunted. He looks terrified. The roar behind me is so immense it has mass, like a vast flock of some nightmarish bird rising into the dark. With a visible effort, Jack stands, listing as if he’s drunk, staring at nothing. There’s a movement in the darkness, and then Minos is striding onto the stage, moving toward Jack, catching him even as he slumps back toward the ground. Holding him up with bony fingers, the bony face triumphant, the hollow eyes full of fire. Behind me the crowd gets even louder, the massive shriek battering at me hard as a fist.

Minos tugs Jack closer, bends his head down in an awful kiss. I can’t bear to watch. I turn my head away, bury my face in my own sweat-soaked shoulder. The crowd turns on itself, frenzied and gleeful. Some of the screams seem more particular, more gruesome. Hands grab at me, tear at my hair. When I look up again Jack and Minos are gone. All the rage I have ever felt in my short angry life flares up in me now, a white pulse that strips all the fear from me. I am going to find them and then I am going to get out of here. There’s a door to the left of the stage, and maybe this is hell but I bet it still works the way a club works. I fight my way through, kicking and biting, pulling hair, punching, until I’m standing in front of the doorway. “Minos!” I shout into the dark. “Goddammit!” I scream his name over and over again, but I’m still surprised when the darkness yields him up and he’s standing in front of me.

“I want to see him,” I say. “You have to let me see him.” I push past him. I’m in a hallway, like I thought. Not so much worse than some of the clubs I’ve been in. I stumble down the hall, past closed doors, a reeking horror that is maybe a bathroom, and then I see it: a door that’s open a crack. I walk through it without knocking. Jack is there, his back to me. His shoulders are slumped, but he’s standing.

“Jack.” He whirls around. His face when he sees me is equal parts horror and, I am delighted to see, joy.

“What are you
doing
here?” he asks, but I’m already running at him, flinging myself into his arms. He grunts, startled, but holds me tight. “You crazy thing,” he says. “You crazy, crazy thing. You should never have come here.”

“I missed you,” I say, “so much. I missed you so much.”

“I missed you, too,” he says, and then he kisses me. Out of all the kisses, ever, it is the best one. A kiss that is
sorry
and
I love you
,
get me out of here
and
forgive me
. A kiss that is the two of us driving west, getting free of here, going all the way to where the ocean meets the sky. A kiss that is all the time before any of this happened, that brief window of joy when we were just two people holding hands in a starlit park. A kiss like Jack’s music. Finally we break apart, gasping. I can hardly breathe.

“Come home with me,” I manage. “I came for you.”

“Sweet thing.” His eyes are so sad.

“I mean it.”

“I know you mean it. I can’t.”

“I was wrong. What I said to you when you left. I didn’t get it.”

“I know.”

“But I get it now. And you did what you wanted. And now you can come home.”

“Look at me,” he says gently, and I look at him. That face. So beautiful, so tired. He looks years older than he did the last time I saw him. “I can’t go home. That’s not how it works. I came here to do this. I have to see it through.”

“He’ll kill you.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

“
Jack.
”

“This is all I’ve ever wanted,” he says. “Not being famous. I don’t care about being famous. That’s where Aurora’s dad and I are different. That’s what killed him. He thought he wanted it, and then he got it, and he didn’t realize until it was too late that no one wants that, not really. But me—do you have any idea what it’s like to play for them?”

“I saw you. I saw your face on that stage.”

“I didn’t say it was easy.”

“But I came to get you.”

“You didn’t come for me,” he says. “Look me in the face and tell me you came for me.”

“I did—” I begin, and then I stop. He’s right. He’s been right, this whole time.

“This is what I want,” he says. “Let me go. Find her. She needs you.”

“I love you,” I say, and this time I say it loud, so he can hear. So he knows.
All the best artists are selfish.
He smiles, tilts my chin up. Kisses me again, a kiss that is softer, sadder. Goodbye.

“I love you, too.” He reaches into his pocket. “Take this.” He hands me his knife. “You’ll need it, where you’re going.”

“But—”

“Take it.”

“I’ll give it back. Someday.”
Someday soon
, I think, but I know better.

He looks at me. Dark eyes, dark hair, the pulse at his throat, the smell of his skin. The worn fabric of his shirt, his scuffed boots. Pebbles beneath me, the sound of waves. Wind in my hair. His hand in my hand. Ink on skin. The taste of peaches. The Fool. The Lovers. Death. I touch his wrist, his hip, underneath his shirt to feel the heat of his skin and the line of muscle there. Memorizing.
I will never love anyone like this again.
Hold the thought in my palm like a stone. Let it fall. He takes my hand from his waist, brings my knuckles to his mouth. Closes his eyes. We stand like that for a moment, and then he releases me.

“Tell me you are choosing this,” I say.
Tell me you are choosing this over me.

“I am choosing this. I chose this a long time ago.”

I can’t look at Jack anymore or I will fall apart. Minos waits behind us, watching.

“Minos,” I say. “I want to see Aurora.”

When he speaks at last his voice is in my head and not in the world, a voice as old and dry as dust.
You do not know what you are asking for, child.

“Try me,” I say. I look at Jack one last time. Drinking him in.

“I love you,” he says again. “Now go.”

I turn away from him and follow Minos into the dark.

There is no time in hell. We walk for what could be hours or days. It’s still too hot, but the noise dies down and I’m alone with Minos and my own breath, the crunch of my footsteps on what I think is stone. We are in some kind of tunnel, heading down. The angle of the floor is steep enough in places to nearly trip me up. There is no light of any kind. Minos is as silent as always, but something has changed, in the dark, between the two of us.

“Tell me who you are,” I say after we have been walking for a long time. “I know there’s someone there. Tell me who you are.”

I was a king
.
In a different time. Now I am a gatekeeper.

“You collect people.”

I collect beautiful things.

“For who?”

The nights are long, here.
We’re still walking. We’ll be walking forever, I think, down and down and down. We’ll be walking still when the world ends and the stars crash into the earth and the moon spins off through an empty sky. I think I am tired, I think I am tired beyond tired, but if I stop moving I won’t start again, so I put one foot after the other, following him down. My throat is dry, sweat a salt crust on my skin. There’s a blister puffing up on one heel. I lick cracked lips, cough, keep walking. If he thinks this is enough of a test, he has never met the likes of me before. I won’t ask him how long it takes to get there. I will not let the terror of the dark get hold of me. If this is a test, I will fucking pass it. I will pass any test this creepy skeleton in a crappy suit can give me. Let them turn me into stone or water or flowers. I came here for my lover and the girl who is my sister, and they were mine before anyone else tried to take them from me, before this bony motherfucker showed up on my stoop and let loose all the old things better left at rest. Jack I will let go; Jack is on his own, now. But I will die before I leave Aurora down here.
Take your bacchanal
,
take your bloody-limbed girls, take your witches and your three-headed dog, and leave me and my love alone.
Down, down, down, and further down. Every story I’ve ever heard about Minos’s kind coming to life in my head. Persephone trapped in the underworld, Andromeda strapped to a rock. Medusa with her snaky head. The fates, the harpies. Arachne cursed into a spider’s body, forever spinning because she loved herself too well.

Why are you here? Why here, of all places, this city, this time?
I wonder.

We are everywhere
. The voice in my head is his. I didn’t know he could hear me, could see inside.

“All I want is what’s mine.” My tongue is so dry I can hardly shape the words.

What belongs to you is not for you to decide, child.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “That’s what you think, asshole.”

Far greater heroes than you have come under the earth and not returned.

“I’m not a hero,” I say. “I’m a bitch.”

And then I can feel it: The air is changing. We’re coming out of the tunnel into the forest of bone trees. I know where we are. I’ve been here every night for months. The river is ahead. I can hear the dog howling. Bare white trees, thorny vines. Things moving between the branches. We do not walk long before the trees stop, the line of the wood’s edge as sharp as if it has been cleaved away. We walk through the white trunks until we reach the place where they end and the river is in front of us. Minos stops.

If you cross this river, you will not return.

“People have.”

Once. In all the history of time.

“I’ll chance it.” Shrug. I want to cut off his arm and feed it to him. I follow him to the edge of the water and stop. The far bank is shrouded in darkness. He motions with one bony hand and a boat glides out of the darkness toward us, cowl-draped ferryman at the helm. There’s no way out but through. Minos steps into the boat, surprisingly graceful for someone so tall, and offers me his hand. I laugh out loud, take it. Hold tight. Take the first step. The second. The boat doesn’t rock. I’m in. I know you’re supposed to pay the ferryman but I don’t have any gold coins. I find Cass’s crystal in my pocket, hand it over. The ferryman takes it, pale hand gleaming in the dark. I can’t see his face under the brown hood. He makes a fist around the crystal, and then it’s gone.

It takes a long time to cross the river. The water is thick as oil and I am careful to keep my hands inside the low edges of the boat. A dank fog rises off the water. Looking too hard at the current makes me dizzy. Instead I stare at my knees, the place where the fabric is fraying and I can see a patch of skin. I think of Jack’s hand there, of kissing him over the tarot cards, of Aurora laughing, blowing smoke out my window, drinking Dr Pepper in my bed. I think of the most ordinary things I can imagine. Puppies, why not? The godawful still life I am working on in art class. Cass blowing her brown hair out of her eyes while she measures herbs. Raoul putting Oscar Wilde on my head, Raoul laughing, Raoul bringing me hot chocolate with chilies in it. I think of Jack, not the musician but the person who is barely not a boy, smiling at me with his joker’s smile. Telling me to draw him pictures of kittens and sailboats, ridiculous things. Down here in the dark there is no light but the light I bring with me, and I will not fail. I will not fail.
Do you hear me, Aurora, I am coming for you. I am coming.
I’m not the kind of girl they’re looking for in hell. I’m not pretty; I don’t play instruments; half the time I can barely draw. But I’m the girl they’ll never forget, because I’m the girl who’ll win.

At last I can make out the other side through the heavy dark. The ferryman poles the boat toward a smooth place where the bank flattens out. Dark sand, slick with the same oil that sheens the surface of the water. I catch one foot on the gunwale as I’m getting out, almost tip into the water, catch myself at the last minute, one hand inches from the surface. Something tells me I don’t want to get wet. I can feel Minos’s eyes on my back. “I’m fine,” I say, to no one but myself. Minos is moving past me, not waiting. I have to half-run to keep up with him. But I remember how fast he moved in the warehouse. This time, for whatever reason, he is letting me follow.