Distant Star (7 page)

Declan
Dances

I let myself back into the shop
after kissing Emily on the cheek and promising to meet her at Paddy’s around
seven.

I kept my wits about me as I
moved through the stacks, mindful that I had left the shop unguarded for the
best part of an hour. Anyone or any
thing
could be waiting to tear out my throat through my ass—

“And just what in hell were you
thinking?” Marcus said, sitting in the window alcove with his arms resting on
his knees. He looked furious.

“Pardon me?”

“You are
not
pardoned, Hale.” The immense ex-Knight hauled himself up,
knocked over his favorite champagne flute, and advanced toward me with clenched
fists.

I held my ground. There were
perhaps five people in the world that I would never raise a hand against.
Marcus was two of them, despite what my dead self had alleged those few short
nights ago.

“She was here, I know she was. I
can
taste
her on the air, Declan.
Like a battery on my tongue. She has a Will that is hard to forget, no?”

I often forgot that Marc and
Clare had been more than Knights before my exile. “Oh, yes. Faraday sent her to
investigate the Renegade attack. She—”

“You went diving. What in the
seven hells were you thinking?”

It also paid well to remember
that Marc was most sensitive to ripples of Will and cords of power use. When he
said
taste
, he meant it. He could
taste an invocation—smell the spell.
Helluva
talent. “I was thinking that I tire of this exile, Marc. That I hadn’t seen
Clare in five years, and she was like a breath of fresh air. Broken quill, she
was
lovely
.”

“You are out, Declan. The both of
us are forgotten Forgetfuls—”

“We’re gone but nowhere near
forgotten.”

He exhaled and relaxed his mighty
fists. “You handed in your badge and your gun and walked away. To get mixed up
in that again…”

“You wouldn’t go back, if you
could?”

He sat down with the slowness of
an old man. “The Knights would never take me. I’m too stained by your shadow.”

“Heh. What shadow?” I reached
behind the counter and retrieved a bottle of Glenfiddich 15. “Come on now,
let’s have a sip and talk about what we’re going to do. The Renegades will try
again, and the Knights’ renewed interest will mean trouble—for Sophie,
and I suppose Ethan, as well—for which we’re not quite ready.”

Marcus took a long swig from the
bottle. A drop of the amber liquid ran down his chin and blotted his collar.
“Faraday will
never
rescind your
exile. If you are even considering returning to Forget, to Ascension City, then
you must overthrow him. But you do that at the cost of his peace with the
Renegades. The one certainty in all this mess, the one unbreakable surety
amidst the chaos and the maelstrom, is this: The Renegades would sooner see the
world in ashes than you on the Dragon Throne.”

He spoke the truth, but I’d be
damned if the bastards thought they could get away with attacking me here.

“Let me say it again,” said
Marcus “You. Are. Out.”

“I thought that for awhile, yeah.
But now, Marc, now. It feels like… well… like the situation is how it was five
years ago. War or something like it. I don’t think I was ever out, not
really—just benched. If anything, I’m deeper than I’ve ever been. Sing it
true, pal.”

Marcus threw up his hands.
“Unbelievable. Just stay away. Don’t go back. What’s the worst that can happen?
You have to fend off an attack once every five years?”

“Or, you know, I could end up
dead on the floor of this shop inside a week.” I shook my head. “But it’s not
just about going back, Marc… I walk down the street and see kids on their
smartphones, sipping mocha-frappe-vodka energy drinks, or whatever the hell
those things are, and I’m… I’m angry at all of them, at all the stupid ignorant
people. They don’t know what I’ve done for them—what Tal did for them.
The only reason they’re alive and not enslaved or worse is because of her
sacrifice. They don’t know. They can’t know. I hate them.”

“You are going to get someone
killed. You know that.”

“What’s one more when my tally
runs into the millions already?”

Marc had no answer.

*~*~*~*

Emily and I had dinner that night
at Paddy’s Pub, which was hustling, bustling, busy, and dizzy. Under the hot
lights and cool air-conditioning vents, we sat at a table for two amidst the
storms of laughter, song, and an altogether good time.

I had the steak, medium rare with
pepper sauce. Emily chose the gnocchi, which I thought a rather brave offering
for an Irish pub. The scotch was fine. Emily only allowed herself lemonade,
given her condition, but that did not stop her from dancing.

After dinner, I watched her from
a seat at the bar. She was the heart of the dance floor, and the live band, a
group of old men singing ditties of the old country, kept in time with her. She
moved with such grace, such subtle, timeless fervor, that every eye in the pub
was drawn to her: a passionate queen in a little black dress, adorned with a
silver crown of admiration.

After several songs, she
remembered me, and sought me out at the bar. Emily giggled, her hair wild and
eyes alight with the fire and the music—the noise. She sat down in my lap
and kissed my stubbly cheek. “Dance with me, Declan Hale.”

“No, ma’am.”

She swatted my chest. “Are you
going to sit there all night sipping that disgusting stuff while I get swept
off my feet by all these handsome gentlemen?”

“Whoa. Hold on. Scotch is lovely.”
I took a healthy swig of liquid gold. “I don’t dance. Never learned how, I’m
afraid.”

Emily laughed, the sound like
water over pebbles, and kicked her heels into the air. If I didn’t know better,
I would have thought she was one glass shy of the bottle. “You can dance, but
you don’t want to.”

“I’m telling you. Two left feet.
I could shuffle and shrug my shoulders and that’s about it.”

“That’s not the truth.”

“On my life.”

She stuck her tongue out at me
and wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “No, never on your life. Declan, are
you happy?”

I finished two fingers’ worth of
scotch between heartbeats. “I think so.”

The music grew subtle and
meandering. I imagined forest sprites flickering in the night. “Do you know
what I think?” she asked.

“I think you’re going to tell me
whether—”

“I think you’re so blinded by
some past misery that you spend all day in that stuffy bookshop, drinking
yourself stupid so you can write your novel and shut out the real world. You
always look so sad, even when you’re smiling. Especially when you’re smiling.”
Emily ran her finger down the bridge of my nose and
tut-tutted
. “Let me ask again, in reverse. Are you sad, Declan?”

“I’m not drowning in happiness.”

“What would make you happy?”

I didn’t know. Who the hell did?
Certainly not the face in the mirror. “Fish and chips a hundred years from
now.”

“What?” Emily sighed. “That’s
something else you do. You say the strangest things, and your words are always
so careful and… and
proper
. I think
you’re trying very hard not to cry.”

Visions of Tal being torn
asunder, her soul and essence scattered into a machination of such brutal
turmoil that even now the Story Thread still hadn’t recovered, danced in my
head. The Degradation. Our ultimate solution to the Renegade threat.

She was the girl I couldn’t have.

“Shut up and dance with me, Emily
Grace.”

*~*~*~*

Emily walked me home that night,
her bare feet silent against the cobblestones, her arm linked in mine and her
weight leaning against me. I held her shoes in my free hand.

“You’re a man, so you don’t know
how good it feels to take your heels off at the end of a long night of dancing.
Whether through crunchy leaves or soft sand at the beach, walking barefoot is
one of the best feelings in the world.”

“You dance well. No one in that
bar could take their eyes off you.”

Emily smiled her secret smile.
“You can’t dance at all.”

“Told you. I shuffled a bit.”

“Oh, come on, now. You
were—are—charming, Declan. And if you can be bothered to shave,
you’re even nice to look at. I think you abuse that—abuse the trust of
the women in your life. Charm, good looks and eyes that look as if the world is
about to end. What woman could resist?”

“Heh, plenty.”

Back in Riverwood Plaza, we
stopped for frozen bananas dipped in warm caramel and almond pieces. The
vendor, Mathias, even gave me one of his dead wife’s flowers for Emily, but I
don’t think he remembered why they were on his cart, and I didn’t remind him.

A lily in hand, Emily and I sat
on the rim of the fountain in the heart of the courtyard, my shop just dark
windows across the way. Not one part of me was eager to get back to the scotch
and typewriter. “Thank you for tonight, Emily. I forget sometimes, how simple
it can be. Music, dancing…”

“You’re welcome, Declan. I had
fun. Anything that gets you away from all those books.”

“I was just thinking that. But
you don’t like my books?”

“Too stuffy in the shop. I don’t
know how you breathe in there all day long.”

“Well, I may be closed for a few
days in the next week or so. Business trip.”

Emily blinked. “Oh? Are you
flying away? Off to see some exotic woman in some far-off land?”

“Something like that.”

“I am both impressed and jealous.
Here I was thinking I had you all to myself.”

“Oh, you’ve never thought that.”
I laughed, and gently wiped a drop of caramel from Emily’s lip with my thumb.

“So where are you going?”

“Some place far off and exotic.”

“Really, now.”

That night, after Emily hugged me
goodnight in the doorway of my shop and drove home—as was proper—I
lay awake in bed thinking deep thoughts. About life and love and all that was
in between. Sing it true, songbird.

CHAPTER NINE

Nightmare’s
Reach

I didn’t open the shop the next
morning. Nor did I spend any of the short hours after dawn in front of my
typewriter.

Instead, I sat with the remnants
of a fine Pinot Noir in hand, and thought through my next move in a game that I
still did not know how to play. I didn’t even know against whom I was playing.
Faraday, certainly, and perhaps the Renegade King. A copy of
Nightmare’s Reach
—the same I had
used to hide my body only four short days ago—sat unopened on the
counter, next to the antiquated cash register.

True to my word, and my exile, I
had only dived once since leaving the Knights and setting up shop in Western
Australia, of all places. My dive had occurred two days ago, with Clare.
Stashing my surprise corpse didn’t count as proper diving, as I’d stayed
tethered to this world and had just sent the body across the Void.

I needed to examine that body a
little closer. I had questions that needed answers, which I wouldn’t find if I
sat around the shop in the dark. If I was to be believed, I had a little over
four, maybe five, days before I found myself bleeding to death.

I took a long draw on the wine,
tapped the rim of the bottle against my teeth, and decided to settle the
matter.
Nightmare’s Reach
felt about
as light as a brick when I picked it up and flicked quickly through the pages.
The passage I was after was on page one-hundred-forty seven:

…
burnt orange light bled over the peaks of the snow-capped mountains to
the west and a blanket of bruised purple sky shone with early stars to the
east. Below that sky, Dremer sat in rumination of his fate. The ruins of Avalon
smoldered with the heat of the Forsworn war machines. He remembered wondering
if stone could burn. He didn’t wonder anymore. The Reach was alight…

The passage was as good a place
as any to dive into the story because it was close to where I’d hidden my body
but far enough away to approach with some caution. I still had no idea what had
killed me, or why, only that the violence happened at some point in my
near-future. The concept was hard to wrap my head around, but caution seemed
warranted, nonetheless.

Still, I hesitated just a moment
longer. Marcus would come with me, if I asked him, and for that matter, so
would Clare. No. I dismissed the idea of involving anyone else. For now.
Afterwards, we would see.

I imposed my Will on the pages,
and the words shone with Void light. The way between worlds shuddered and
swallowed me whole. My shop disappeared with nary a whisper.