Breath (22 page)

“Correcting the course,” he said. “You were at the tennis club that day to kill me, because I was supposed to be dead. Right? That
is
what you meant,” Xander said, his voice rising, “isn’t it?”

“So dramatic.” Death clucked his tongue. “Not like you hadn’t already died. Well. For a little bit. Yes, that’s exactly what I meant, well done. Gold star for you.”

“But you didn’t kill me.”

“No.”

“Because . . . I gave you a chocolate bar?”

Death’s mouth quirked into a lopsided smile. “I was moved.”

“My life was saved by a chocolate bar.”

“Of course not,” Death said. “You were kind to me. That’s what led me here today: your act of kindness. The chocolate was just a bonus.”

If Suzie were with him, she would have said that chocolate was
always
a bonus.

Xander looked up at the Pale Rider, who was looking back at him pointedly, as if he were waiting for something. Behind those blue, blue eyes, Xander saw emotions sparkling like crystals catching the light—a wink of compassion, a glittering of gratitude. But more than anything, he saw exhaustion staring back at him and, beneath that, a hint of fear.

Death was afraid. Xander would have bet his life on it. Which, Xander supposed, was appropriate when one trafficked with Death.

The Pale Rider was afraid to die.

And that meant Xander could save him. He just had to figure out how.

He cleared his throat. “Thanks,” he said, and then immediately felt sheepish, because the word was nowhere near enough. “For, you know. Not correcting the course.”

A shrug.
“De nada.”

“It’s not nothing,” Xander said. “It matters. Life matters. You matter.”

Death rolled his eyes. “Here we go again . . .”

“If life didn’t matter,” Xander said, louder, “then death wouldn’t be a big deal. But it is. You are. Don’t you see that?”

Another shrug.

Okay, Xander told himself as he climbed to his feet. Time to backtrack. “What happened?” he asked. “You were lonely, so you created companions, first your steed and then the Horsemen. And they helped, you said. For a time, at least. They helped. But something must have happened. When did they stop helping?”

Death smiled thinly. “It might have been around the time when they were talking about how to stop me.”

“Is that where you went before, when you popped out of here? To talk to them?”

“No. I went to kill them.”

Xander spluttered,
“What?”

“I went to kill them.”

“You
killed
the Horsemen of the Apocalypse?”

“The steeds too. Really, it’s not such a big deal. I am Death, after all. Besides, it’s not like I murdered them. I just took back what was mine. More whole again, for the first time in thousands of years.” He spread his arms wide and glanced down at his billowing sweater. “Does it look like I’ve put on weight?”

Xander had only thought his head had been spinning before. Nauseated, he said, “You really killed them all?”

“Technically.” Death lowered his arms. “I reabsorbed the parts of them that made them Riders. So yes, I killed the Horsemen. The human parts were theirs, so those remained.”

“The people who had been Riders—they’re still alive?”

“For now.” He glanced at his watch. “Ticktock, Xander.”

“You didn’t kill them,” Xander said, his heart racing. “You could have, but you didn’t.”

Death shrugged. “Not a big deal.”

“It is. You care about them,” Xander said. “You love them.”

“Love,”
Death repeated, turning the word into something profane. “You humans are so quick to use that word, as if saying it makes it so.”

“Saying it, no. Feeling it, believing in it, yes. Love makes us do amazing things.”

“Love makes you do stupid things.”

“That, too, sometimes.” Xander thought of the Amazingly Perfect Riley Jones, the one for whom he’d changed his future, and for a second he thought he heard Suzie yelling at him to wake up already. “Love can mean everything.”

“Love can cause more pain than you ever imagined.”

A sound like a door slamming shut, or maybe a screech of tires.

Quietly, Xander said, “And love can make that pain bearable.”

Death laughed softly. “How romantic. Now who’s the hero of the story, Xander? Does true love solve everything? Does love really mean a happily ever after?”

“It can,” Xander insisted.

“Just because you love someone,” said Death, “that doesn’t mean you’re loved in return. And even if you are, that doesn’t mean the one you love will always be with you. Your love can leave you, abandon you, and then all you have left are pieces so jagged they slice you when you try to grasp them.”

For the first time in years, Xander suddenly, vividly, remembered his first love, and he shuddered because Death was right: Being in love was no guarantee of happiness.

Ashley Davidson had taught him that lesson long ago.

Some people say that love and death are connected. Xander got to experience both when he was twelve.

He fell madly, completely in love with Ashley Davidson the first time he saw Ashley smile. He would spend hours thinking about Ashley’s eyes, the way they were so black that they looked almost blue. In his seat in the back of the classroom, he would quietly dance to the music of Ashley’s voice. He’d cast surreptitious glances toward Ashley during PE
,
trying not to look at Ashley’s legs but not being able to help himself. He wrote Ashley’s name again and again, whispered it to himself at night. Thinking of Ashley made Xander’s heart do amazing gymnastic feats in his chest. It didn’t matter that he lacked the courage to tell Ashley how he felt: His love for Ashley transcended words. He was content.

And then Ashley died.

Everyone had known that Ashley had been sick, the sort of sick that adults talk about in hushed tones even when they think the children are out of earshot. Everyone had known that Ashley didn’t choose to be bald but instead had to be because of the chemo. Instead of complaining about it, Ashley turned it into a fashion statement and wore brightly colored bandanas, a different one every day. That had been fourth grade. In fifth grade, Ashley traded bandanas for hats: large-brimmed ones, bowlers, baseball caps, cowboy hats, floppy hats, even an Abraham Lincoln stovepipe hat. But in sixth grade, Ashley had made it to school only one day, the first day of class. Xander remembered someone teasing Ashley for daring to bring in a classroom snack the way that the elementary school kids did. Ashley had blushed, and had looked so tired, and Xander wanted to say something funny to make Ashley smile that radiant smile again, but he couldn’t think of the words. So he said nothing to Ashley that first day of middle school.

And he never saw Ashley again.

It wasn’t quick. Everyone knew that the cancer had come back, and many people even knew the name of the specific disease, but Xander refused to learn it. If he didn’t acknowledge the illness, it didn’t really exist. Ashley would return one day, healthy and happy, and Xander would once again be content to steal a glance and hold a song in his heart. But then September became October, and October led to November, and still Ashley didn’t return.

The day before winter break, he got a phone call from his friend Teddy. And that’s when he found out that Christmas had been canceled for Ashley. Permanently.

Xander stopped eating because his chest felt too hollow.

He got a new iPod for Christmas, as well as a prescription for Lexapro.

Soon he was eating regularly again, and his psychiatrist got him to start drawing as a way to get his feelings out. He made it through winter break in a haze of video games, medication, and sketchbooks.

At the end of the school year, a tree-planting ceremony was held in Ashley’s honor. Xander stared at the sapling and tried to picture Ashley’s face, but all he saw was a baby tree.

The lesson of Ashley Davidson would stay with him forever: Just because you love someone, that doesn’t mean they won’t leave you stranded.

Loving someone exposed your heart and left you ripe for disease.

Loving someone ate away at you until you were a husk, starving for even a sip of affection.

Loving someone cut you to pieces.

In the end, loving someone completely could be the death of you.

Xander knew this implicitly. And yet, years later, he still fell madly in love with Riley Jones.

And that was the beginning of the end.

He couldn’t love, not really. That’s a human emotion, and though he was many things, he wasn’t human. That’s what he told himself the first time he gazed upon War seated atop her steed, and he felt something deep inside of him shift, subtle yet tangible—a connection that he couldn’t deny.

He wouldn’t love, he told himself as the girl who had been Creusa stained the world in red. Love was a feeling he hadn’t experienced since the door had slammed shut behind him. Love wasn’t for one such as he.

He couldn’t love her, he said gently after War moved to kiss him for the first time. Her lips parted in a wicked smile and she said she didn’t need love, not when she had passion, and then her lips were on his and her heat thawed him. Not love, no, but something hotter.

It wasn’t love, he realized as he watched War and Famine snipe at each other in the way that sisters do. Each Horseman had been formed around a piece of himself, and War had sprung from the piece that contained a memory, a feeling, of another—a still, small voice that could move stars. Not love, but the memory of love. An echo, false and, ultimately, doomed to fade.

It was an impression of love, he decided as he witnessed the first murder among the Horsemen. The Black Rider had taunted the Red, had told her that while Famine and Pestilence were forces that happened to people, War was dependent on people for her existence. “You need them,” Famine had said sweetly. “For all that you rage, you need them. You despise that about them, and about yourself. You’re starved for attention.” She smiled, then, and let out a ripe laugh. And that’s when War split her apart like rotten fruit—the first act of destruction between Red and Black, which would play itself out in various ways over the millennia. Yes, an impression of love, Death thought as he walked over to the fallen Black Rider, and that was right, because mortals were so very impressionable.

It wasn’t love, he told himself when the girl who had been Creusa eventually died. He bound the essence of War into the idea of a sword, and he wrapped it in red cloth and sealed it in the Slate. It was a slice of affection and, at times, a cut of passion.

And yet, when he offered the Sword to another, he again felt that connection, that hint of memory, that whisper of a feeling that once had meant so much to him.

He returned to the Slate, where he searched through the tomorrows until he found the one that sated him, made him whole, and there in the midst of everything and nothing, he made his peace.

There would be a time when the one he waited for would find him. Until then, he had echoes and memories—and a Horseman who claimed to love him until the skies blackened and the seas boiled.

It wasn’t love. But it would do.

For now.

Xander remembered Ashley Davidson, and he bit his lip as he felt that loss so completely, so overwhelmingly. It was like he was twelve all over again and he’d just gotten the news. He’d lived for Ashley’s smile, and that had been stolen from him by a cancer whose name he’d never learned.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Death.

Xander blinked and looked at the Pale Rider, who was still perched whimsically atop the balcony railing, his long blond hair flying crazily in the wind. “What doesn’t matter?”

“Even if you do find love,” said Death, “so what? In the end, it doesn’t matter. Everyone leaves you.”

“No,” Xander said, denying Death’s words but thinking of Ashley Davidson, remembering how hollow he’d felt when Ashley died, as if part of him had been scooped out and would never be filled again.

“They do, every single one. No exceptions to the rule, Xander. They say they’ll be with you forever, but they’re lying, either to you or to themselves.”

Now Xander wasn’t thinking of Ashley Davidson but of Riley Jones—that laugh, that smile, those kissable lips.

He suddenly, desperately, needed to know if Riley had texted him back.

“At best,” Death said, “people die and leave you behind. At worst, people leave you long before they die or even take a step out the door. Either way, the result is the same.”

Xander whispered, “No,” but the sound was lost as an image bloomed in his mind: Riley standing on the back deck at Marcie’s house, black braided hair streaming in the wind like some pirate’s banner, dark eyes fixed on him, and what Xander saw in those eyes made his skin crawl and his stomach knot and suddenly he was afraid—no, more than afraid, he was terrified because it all had come to this . . .

A beep shattered the image, the sound disembodied, overwhelming. Xander, so grateful that the false vision was gone, didn’t wonder where the beep had come from; if he felt a ghost squeeze his hand, he discounted it as a trick of the wind.

He breathed in; he breathed out.

“Everyone leaves you,” Death said, “and you die alone.”

“No,” Xander said again, louder, as he remembered that this wasn’t about him and Riley, wasn’t about him at all. “The people you love don’t just stop caring.”

“Of course they do. Something else always comes along. You’re like magpies, always looking for the next bright and shiny thing.”

“That’s not true,” Xander said.

“Really?” Death smiled coldly. “You think you know? You don’t. I’ve been around, Xander, and I’ve literally seen it all. People make promises and give assurances, but those are just words. And the thing about words is they’re easy to ignore, and far easier to break. You people have littered the world with broken promises.”