Prepare to Die! (21 page)

I didn’t have to picture her in bed because there she was. The night was warm enough that she didn’t have much in the way of covers. Just one loyal sheet and one straying blanket. She was dressed in a silken negligee that was doing its usual lackadaisical job of covering up a woman. Wiggles had moved into the middle of the room. Bored.

Adele was sleeping. Breathing. I really hadn’t expected it any other way. Macabre would have bragged about it, taunted me, if he’d hurt her.

Finding that Adele was okay… that was all I needed, so I turned to go, but she turned over in bed. Her eyes were open. Not wide open. Just
drowsy
open.

She said, “Steve?” She almost fell back asleep during this monumental speech.

“Yes. I was just…” I felt like I’d had some excuses in case I ran into this situation, but I couldn’t remember a single one of the damn things.

“Are you seducing me?”

It was another question where it felt like I should have a definite answer at the ready, but I was caught empty again. I was wishing I’d had a chance to read a whole book about her, the way she’d apparently been reading about me.

“I was just… leaving.” This was the best I could come up with. Not romantic. Not witty. Not particularly anything. Legions of my baser fans would have been disappointed. I was the man that had slept with Mistress Mary. With the possibly alien Stellar. With two Oscar winners. With a woman married to a head of state (not claiming that was a good idea, here) and so many famous models that it had taken the Vogue article three consecutive issues to bring the matter to a close, and even then they’d published an online addendum.

I was… in fact… the man that had once made Siren, in public, remark that she hadn’t been bored. And now I felt like a rookie again. It felt… amazing in a way. Mistress Mary had once told me that there’s nothing more soothing than being humbled. Mistress Mary, of course, is goddamn crazy… but sane people say crazy things at times, so there’s no reason the water can’t flow both ways.

“Leaving?” Adele mumbled. “You mean leaving the house?”

“Just going downstairs.”

“If you’re not getting into my bed, why did you come up here?”

“Can I tell you in the morning?” There are few things more awkward than coming into an old lover’s bedroom to check if a man that you yourself have just beaten to death has killed her.

“Sleep in the corner,” Adele ordered. She tossed a pillow on the floor and mumbled about blankets in the closet. She said a bulletproof man shouldn’t have any trouble with being comfortable on a hardwood floor. She said to be quiet and not make any noise. She then thought better of that and told me that noises were fine. I’m not sure she even realized she was awake… that she wasn’t dreaming.

In less than a minute, she began a soft, repetitive, wonderful snore.

I sat in the corner for an hour or so. Just watching her sleep. Her phone (on her nightstand, next to a copy of
Bulfinch’s Mythology
) beeped once, and a text message from Laura (
The
Apple is tasty! She wants to meet Steve. Did he roughly sex you?
) appeared. It glowed softly for fifteen seconds, then the phone went dark.

In time, I snuck back downstairs to my couch. I slept a little bit. I waited for morning. I thought about Macabre being dead. About what the public and the media would say. I thought about how Octagon would take it. How would this affect my
two-week
grace period? Had I cheated by fighting back? Had I negated the bargain? I thought about such things.

And I thought about that message on Adele’s phone.

CHAPTER TEN

O
ctagon cut into a tiny little television broadcast in Italy, and it was soon (as I’m sure he planned and knew) all over the Mediterranean, and from there it spread out until it had made all of the world’s major news channels, and all of the minor ones, a million different websites, mentions on a billion different blogs. Whenever Octagon so much as takes a piss, it goes viral.

No camera can capture him very well. The strange qualities of his black costume are too indefinable for any electronic eyes… too elusive for any eyes at all, really. On screen, he takes a curious flat quality… as if he is a shadow.

“Last night there was a mistake,” he said. “Some of you might already know that Macabre, a member of my team, Eleventh Hour, sought out and battled Reaver. The battle did not go well for the magician. He is now dead.”

In the broadcast, Octagon pauses here. He seems to be lost in thought. Perhaps he is. Perhaps he’s lost in drama. Villains are like that. Although, truth be told, villains are only like that because villains are people, and everyone gets caught up in drama.

“Congratulations to Reaver on this victory,” Octagon said. There is another pause. In this instance, I knew what the pause meant. I was one of the few who would. The others were Stellar, Laser Beast, and Siren. The surviving members of Eleventh Hour. They would know that Octagon’s congratulations meant that Macabre had been condemned and ostracized, even as a corpse, for going against the bargain between myself and Octagon.

“This, of course, leaves a hole in Eleventh Hour. But, please, no applicants need file. No resumes need be sent. The void in Eleventh Hour has, I believe, been most adequately filled.” Here, he gestured to someone off screen. You’ve all seen this, of course, and it’s old news now, but none of us could claim that we were, then, ready for what happened next.

Mistress Mary walked into view.

Her hair was somewhat longer than the last time I’d seen her.

Octagon’s hand was on her shoulder.

And she was smiling.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

F
elix and Greta Barrows were both fifty-eight years old. They had been childhood sweethearts… meeting in the seventh grade (Felix was from Greenway and Greta from Lausanne, Switzerland, by way of Bolton) and (years later) forming a book-reading club together. Greg had told me that the book club had boasted, at one time, of twelve members, but eventually it dwindled to nine, to five, to four, and finally just to two… and after one book club meeting (Oscar Wilde’s
Happy Prince & Other Tales
) Greta had asked Felix if she really needed to go home that night, or if he would like her to stay, and on the following day Felix had proposed. Greg was born eleven months after. Felix was an architect who had received offers from big concerns in big cities, but had stayed in Greenway because (according to his son, Greg) he was afraid of any other life but his simple one with Greta. Greta was a children’s book artist, drawing fuzzy bears, and old witches and monsters, and (whenever she had the chance) pictures of Greg into the backgrounds. I called ahead and told them that I wanted to talk with them. They were happy to hear from me. We hadn’t spoken hardly at all since the night they believed their son had died in a car accident, and I was going into their house to tell them Greg hadn’t been dead for twelve years… but instead only three years. That he had, in fact, been Paladin. The greatest hero of them all. I didn’t think it would make them happy.

Adele opened my car door for me, not because she was acting the gentleman, but because I’d been sitting in the driver’s seat for too long, frozen in place outside the Barrows residence, wondering what to say. Mostly I had come to a resolution that there’s never any reason to practice a speech in front of a mirror, because the words stay in the mirror, not in your mouth.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” Adele asked.

“No.”

“Good. I don’t want to go.”

“I love an honest woman,” I said, walking up the sidewalk to the house, trying to pretend that I hadn’t, in the broadest sense of the conversation, just told Adele Layton that I loved her. To her credit (and a little to my disappointment, I admit) she had nothing to say in answer beyond a statement that she would wait in the car.

The house was split level with an attached garage, a huge yard and a lurking tree of the type that always appears it is only waiting for one strong wind in order to betray the house and family. There was a forty-foot span from sidewalk to front door, but the walk had been artistically complicated by winding paving stones and gardening plots, so much so that there should have been a minotaur to act as a guide. The bottom of the house was red brick. The top was wooden, and white. Greta Barrows was peering at me from a ground floor picture window that was partially obscured by a mesh of willow branches. She waved. There was a child standing next to her. A girl. Maybe seven or eight years old. Curly red hair and great big eyes. Nobody had warned me there would be a kid around. I wasn’t sure if it would make it easier or harder. I wasn’t sure of anything.

I knocked. Three sharp raps.

If you think I can knock on a door without thinking how my punches steal the years away, if you think that I can ever forget that I’m Reaver, you’re wrong. Hell… I felt like the years were running away from me, right then, standing on the porch, perched on the square of an astro-turf mat that read, “
If you’re knocking, you’re welcome
!”

The door opened. Felix Barrows put out his hand for me to shake.

He hesitated, a bit, on that. But no more than I’m used to.

“Stevie,” he said. His head bobbed, like a bird’s, then he amended, “Steve.”

“Mr. Barrows.”

“
Felix
works fine. Come in. Come in.” He gestured inside. The young girl I’d seen in the window ran up next to him, but stayed slightly behind his protection. She whispered my name (
Reaver
, the new name, not the old name,
Steve Clarke
) in a voice she didn’t think I could hear, but I’ve got damn fine hearing (just
damn fine
hearing, not
super
damn fine hearing) and besides I can read lips. SRD had taught me. They’d taught Greg, too. Maybe the subject would come up.

The visit went barreling along. Greta Barrows gave me a hug that was as enthusiastic as possible considering there was very little body contact. Most people are afraid of touching me. There are an infinite amount of hugs to give in this world, but a finite amount of years in which to dole them out, so it’s best to be careful. Again, I understand.

After the hug and the obligatory statements of how I’d grown, and how they still looked great, I was introduced to the third member of the household. The young girl’s name was Chase, short for Chastity. I thought of a joke about that, something to do with the preacher’s daughter and how you should never name a kid something they might feel obliged to live
down
to, but I was in the wrong company to tell it.

Chase was adopted. An orphan from a trailer park fire. I was told this last bit with hurried phrasings, before Chase could return with the lemonade and biscuits she’d been sent to retrieve.

There were pictures of Greg on the walls, and more of them on a desktop and also a couple of bookcases. There were no pictures of Paladin in sight. I wondered if that would change, after I was gone.

“What brings you here, today, son?” Felix asked me. He was seated on a couch with a floral pattern. I’d noticed, before he sat, that the pattern was worn dull in two places. One of the places was where he sat, and the other was where Greta settled. People get into their patterns.

“Can’t I just visit?” I asked.

Chase said, “In school, people talk about you.” She made it sound important.

Greta said, “People talk about him everywhere.” Somehow, that made it sound less important.

“Is it true? The papers?” Felix asked. He nodded towards a newspaper on the coffee table, a copy of the
Greater Greenway News
, a paper funded by SRD, which did many charitable acts around town. As far as I knew, there was no
Lesser Greenway News
. It would have been fun to put one out and keep it lowbrow. Full of gossip.

The newspaper had an image of Macabre on the front page, and also a photo of the old station wagon where he’d met his end.

“That’s true,” I told Felix. “We fought last night.”

“You seem okay,” Greta said, in concern, staring into me like a looking glass.

I said, “I heal quickly.” She blushed, as if it was something she should have remembered, as if she’d been rude not to recall, instantly, that she was watching a superhuman man nibble on a biscuit.

“Anything else to tell about it?” Felix asked. He phrased the question so that it could have been heard (for instance, by an eight-year-old girl) as, “
Can you give us any details
?” In truth, though, I knew that he meant, “
Are there going to be any more problems? Any reason that having you in the house could put us in jeopardy
?”

I said, “Not much to tell. An isolated incident.” Felix nodded.

“Horrible thing. Car accidents,” Greta said, looking at the paper and the image of the station wagon, as if it had been an accident, and not all of it, from one side or the other, definitely on purpose.

So… a car accident. It was a logical lead-in to what I had to tell them, and before I could stop myself, I was zooming right along, heading for a huge bump in the conversation. An accident waiting to happen.

I said, “I have to tell you some things about Greg.” Felix and Greta both went silent and somewhat bloodless, and they leaned back. Chase leaned in closer. She had a blush. Ripe and full and childlike. Her eyes were peering at me over a glass of lemonade. The glass was at her lips, but she was not drinking.

“Maybe…” I said. I let my eyes drift from Felix and towards Chase.

“She’s family,” Felix said. I evaluated that in my mind, wondering if the two of them (Felix and Greta) could imagine how much I was about to tell them. It’s okay to bring your child into the shallow water, but there I was sitting with an ocean on my lips, and I wasn’t sure if any girl named Chastity should be around when I began spitting it out.

“Maybe…” I said, again. And I let my eyes drift towards Chase, again.

Greta looked at me, and she heaved a huge breath, the kind that lets the lungs know that some serious shit is about to go down. She looked to Chase’s hopeful expression (it was, “
Please don’t tell me to go. Please let me hang out with Reaver. Please! Please! Please-don’t-tell-me-to-go
!”) and then evaluated the look on my face. I tried to look serious. It wasn’t hard. I’ve faced down Firehook when my lung was hanging from the tip of his flaming hook, but I’d never been more serious than when looking at the fifty-eight-year-old housewife… her being the mother of both Greg Barrows, and the adopted orphan from the trailer park fire.