The Book of Blood and Shadow (14 page)

I saw the footprints first, red and shimmering under the track lighting, a trail of them heading straight toward me, past me, out the door. Then the drawing, finger-painted in blood, a dot between two curved lines, like an eye, with a lightning bolt speared through its center. There were other prints, not prints at all really, but blurry smears that could have been left by a foot, a hand, a knee, body parts scraped and dragged across the expensive tile.

Mrs. Moore would die when she saw this, I thought, feeling the strange urge to giggle. She was obsessed with keeping her tile clean.

I swallowed the laughter. It tasted like bile.

Chris’s house had a long entryway, the Great Hall, Mrs. Moore liked to call it. Opposite the door, a winding mahogany staircase led to the second floor, with its four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and former servants’ quarters. A step down on the left led to the kitchen and dining area, which had recently been featured in the
Boston Globe
’s style section under the caption “Country Splendors.” On the right lay a living room no one ever used, with its pristine white tiles, white couches, white walls. Chris liked to say it looked like a padded room in a mental institution, “therefore,
perfect for my mother,” he would add, especially when she was in the room, because she loved his teasing as much as anyone.

He was lying facedown.

His left arm was flung out at an unnatural angle, elbow bent backward and splintered bone poking through the flesh. His right arm was crushed beneath him. He was so still.

And the blood.

Graceful as ever, Adriane perched in the center of it, a child in a puddle. Legs tucked into her chest, arms wrapped around them, face drained of color except for the red slash slicing across her cheek, she rocked back and forth.

Someone was screaming, and I needed it to stop.

I couldn’t think.

I didn’t want to think.

I closed my eyes. I closed my mouth and held my breath.

The screaming stopped.

But when I opened my eyes, nothing had changed. It doesn’t look like he’s sleeping, I thought. If he looked like he was sleeping, I could pretend.

“Adriane,” I said. The voice sounded far away. Calm. “Adriane, what happened?” Thinking,
This is what you do, you pretend you can handle it, you pretend you’re in control, you pretend
.

Thinking,
Don’t you dare leave me alone
.

She looked past me, eyes sightless, mouth open, small, weak noises punctuating the panicked breathing. No words, just noise. Like a baby; like an animal.

This is what you do
, I thought, and called 911, and told them something had happened, someone was bleeding, someone was dead.

“Get out of the house,” the distant voice said. “Stay on the line.” And I meant to, but the man kept talking and talking and it was too hard to focus on his words, so I hung up.

I hung up and knelt beside Chris, knelt beside the body. Knelt in the blood, put a hand on his back, then pulled it away, sticky.

I grabbed Adriane, shook her, slapped her, my hand leaving a bloody print on her cheek, screamed again, begged her to wake up, to come back, to
tell me what happened, please, God, just tell me what happened
.

She had something crumpled in her fist. I forced her fingers open, and there it was, like a joke, like a bad penny, like a curse,
E. I. Westonia, Ioanni Francisco Westonio, fratri suo germano
, a stolen letter.

No big deal.

Then the bloody letter was in my pocket and the phone was in my hand again, Max’s face grinning from the display, because he’d promised to protect me whether I wanted him to or not, but the phone rang and went to voice mail and I hung up.

He’s dead, too, I thought—I knew. Everywhere I looked, Chris’s blood. Adriane’s empty eyes. “Please, don’t leave me here alone. Please.” I wasn’t sure which one I was talking to, not that it mattered. No one answered, because no one was listening.

Gone is gone.

PART II

The Ceremony of Innocence

Evocat iratos Cæli inclementia ventos;
Imbreque continuo nubila mista madent
.
Molda tumet multùm vehemens pluvialibus undis
Prorumpens ripis impetuosa suis
.

The sky’s inclemency stirs up the angry winds;
the watery clouds are soaking with ceaseless rain
.
The turbulent Vltava, swollen with rainy waves,
Bursting, impetuous, breaks through its river-banks
.

“De inundatione Pragæ ex continuis pluviis exorta”
Elizabeth Jane Weston

1

I have been here before
.

2

I have been here before
.

I have done this before
.

3

Before
.

There were flashing lights, before. Sirens screaming. Someone screaming.

There was blood, before, blood on the road, blood I imagined and blood I saw, blood that shimmered under streetlights as we sped by, tires crunching over broken glass, my father grim and pale behind the wheel, my mother with one hand cupped to her ear, like she was still hearing, or trying not to hear, the call that had summoned us from
before
to now, to
after
. There was blood on the road and there was blood on the torn clothes stuffed into the Ziploc bag, blood on his wallet and his sneakers and the button-down shirt he’d chosen at the last minute because this was supposed to be the kind of party where you were allowed to look, just a little, like you were trying.

There were cops, before, because of the blood. Because of
his
blood, tainted, proving it was his mistake, his fault, his crime.
Or, as he would have said—because he had watched a James Dean movie in English class and then another with Catherine to dupe her into believing he had depth; because he had imbibed, embraced, finally inhabited the legend, living fast and dying young—his beautiful corpse.

The funeral was closed-casket. The blood on the road, the blood on the shoes, that was the last of him I saw.

It was not beautiful.

4

I have done this before
.

Waited in waiting rooms—not the carpeted, cheerfully antiseptic, magazine-strewn rooms for waiters who needed to forget where they were, reclining in padded chairs and watching cooking shows on the ceiling TV, but rooms that were windowless closets for people whose need for denial had ridden off into the sunset with their hope.

Tried not to look at my parents looking at me. Tried not to shake. Tried to cry. Tried to bargain with a nonexistent God, beg for a reprieve or a miracle or a time machine, anything to go back, to bring
him
back.

I had done this before, so this time, I knew better.

And of course, this time, I had seen the blood seeping out of his body. I had seen his face, too swollen, too pale. This time, instead of a Ziploc bag, I had an ancient letter, streaked with dull red brown, as if parchment could rust. Those were the differences.

Everything else was the same.

5

They took me to the hospital because I was covered in blood. They let me stay because Adriane was there, too, her empty gaze unflinching as they stitched up the gash in her cheek, plied her with liquids and gentle tones, shined lights at her pupils, and finally, her parents flanking her eerily still body, ushered her off to “a special wing, better suited to her condition.” A special wing, I gathered, for the special kind of people who stared at walls, heard voices, leapt from windows, strung up nooses, sliced deep and bled themselves dry, the people who knew God.

Smart, I thought, though I didn’t want to think it. Leave it to Adriane, I tried not to think and failed, to find herself a shortcut, take the convenient off-ramp to crazyville, to leave me alone with the cops, with our friend who had become a corpse and his house that had become a crime scene, with the automated response that now greeted me when I dialed Max’s number:
This mailbox is full
.

A scrum of cameras and talking heads pounced as soon as we passed through the sliding hospital doors. My parents shoved me into the car. They shouted at the crowd. The crowd shouted back. Cameras flashed. None of it mattered. I slumped down in the leather seat, squinting against the glint of sun in the lenses. It was only then that I realized it was dawn.

I closed my eyes.

Opened them again.

There were too many things waiting in the dark.

6

There were two of them: the determinedly kind one who’d assured me an absurdly short time ago, at another crime scene, that everything would be all right, and the blond in his early twenties who looked like he’d failed the entrance requirements for gym-teacher college and, while none too pleased to have ended up in his spiffy blue uniform by default, would have to admit that the carefully buffed nine-millimeter tucked into his shoulder holster ameliorated the pain of a dream deferred.

“Tell me what happened,” the older one said. The room was white and windowless, the chair too hard. “Go slow. Start at the beginning.”

At the beginning, we didn’t know what it was, Chris and I. We didn’t know if stale pizza and a scratched
Spartacus
DVD—which mercifully froze after the first chariot race, freeing up the rest of the night for botched conjugations and several heated rounds of Egyptian ratscrew—constituted an awkward date, or just a night of shared homework between two people who seemed unlikely to share anything but a cafeteria table, and that only under duress. But even at the beginning, after that first and last painful attempt to satisfy convention—the awkward hand brushing, the mandatory gazing, the aborted attempt at a kiss, halted with his lips somewhere in the proximity of my nose, both of us flinching away at the same moment in simultaneous, horrified laughter—there was something between us: like at first sight.

They didn’t want to hear about that.

“We were supposed to watch a movie,” I said. “I came late.”

They made me run through it from start to bloody finish, and then again, once forward and once backward, wounds stitching themselves together, bodies rising, a horror film played in reverse,
and each time I told the story, I let them think it didn’t hurt to reach the punch line, to say, again, and again, “He was dead.” They asked the same questions in different words, but I had seen
Law & Order
in all its iterations, and I knew liars were always more consistent in their stories than traumatized witnesses telling the unsteady truth. If I had been lying, they wouldn’t have caught me. These were the things I thought: How to lie, if I’d wanted to lie. Why there was no two-way mirror. Whether cops really did like donuts, and if so, whether I could get my hands on one, and whether I could eat without throwing up.

Not
why is Chris dead?

Not
what happened to Adriane?

Not
where is Max?

They had taken away my phone.

“I didn’t do this,” I said.

“Who’s saying you did?” That was Cop the Younger.

“If I’d done this, you really think I would have stuck around and called 911?”

“No. We don’t.” Cop the Elder. “There were signs of a struggle. Blood not belonging to the victim. The perp would have defensive wounds. And someone your size …” He shook his head. “But you might know something that could help us. You want to help us, don’t you?”

Even without my
Law & Order
expertise, I would have heard what he didn’t say: That maybe I knew something because I was a part of it. That maybe I didn’t want to help, because I’d stood by and watched someone else get defensive wounds, watched Chris die.

I nodded.

They asked about Chris and Adriane, about their relationship (“totally committed”), how often they fought (“never”), whether they had ever cheated (“
never
”), whether I had been secretly in
love with one, or the other, or both (“screw you”). They asked about the symbol painted in Chris’s blood, whether I’d seen it before, whether it meant anything to me, whether Chris had been involved in the kind of thing that entailed drawing strange marks in human blood. (I could already imagine the headlines: Sex Triangle Tragedy! Teen Orgy Death Pact! Bloody Pagan Small-Town Sacrifice!)