The Crooked Letter (62 page)

‘Seth — for Christ’s sake!’ Hadrian’s chase took him across a busy road, down a lane, through an empty market and into a narrow park where trees reached for the sky with skeletal hands. The ground crunched beneath his feet.

Seth’s pace finally slowed. Exhaustion was taking a toll on both of them.

‘Fuck off, Hade,’ Seth snarled as the gap between them narrowed. His face was pale apart from bright circles of red on his cheeks. Hadrian had never seen such a look in his brother’s eyes — of hatred, desperate and cruel.

‘We need to talk.’

‘I said,
fuck off!’
Seth pushed away the hand Hadrian tentatively proffered in a gesture of peace. ‘Just leave me alone.’

Hadrian’s lungs burned, but the pain in his heart was worse. He’d just wanted space — to be with Ellis, to be himself. Words came haltingly between gasps for air. ‘Seth, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to be like this.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Seth lunged forward and grabbed Hadrian by the front of his T-shirt. Hadrian hung from his brother’s left hand as Seth’s right hand pulled back and punched once, twice into his face. Pain exploded between his eyes, flashed through his entire head. ‘Was
this
part of your plan?’

He couldn’t reply. Seth let him go. He fell to the ground, clutching a torrent of blood pouring from his nose. Stars wheeled around him and he thought for an instant that he might black out. Under his moan of shock and surprise, he heard his brother running away again, across the frozen ground.)

Seth brought Hadrian back to himself, arriving in a cloud of distaste. ‘Want to rub my face in it again? Is that it?’

Fatigue filled him. He was tired of reliving the anger of that scene. He felt as though he had been doing it all his life, before it had ever happened.

‘No.’

‘It wasn’t enough that you got what you wanted. You had to take it from me, right under my nose.’

‘She’s not an
it.’
He reminded himself that it wasn’t just Ellis Seth was talking about. Caught up in both their feelings for her were other equally complex issues — of identity, independence, self-worth. The spasm of rebellion in Sweden had been the culmination of years of resentment and frustration. It had come out badly, but that didn’t mean the impetus behind it wasn’t justified.

‘Yes, we were lovers. Yes, we hid it from you. But was that any worse than what you did to me? You were lovers first, and
you
rubbed my face in it. How do you think that made me feel? Did you stop to think even once about how that must have hurt?’

Seth looked down at the faded grey carpet. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It didn’t stop me, though.’

‘Me either. And don’t forget that it wasn’t just our decision. Ellie was part of it. She knew what she was doing as well as we did.’

Hadrian remembered their mother once saying that you could argue for the existence of love for a lifetime, and disprove it in a moment. The reverse was true, too.

He took his brother by the shoulder and physically turned him away. ‘Look by the bed. What do you see?’

‘El’s backpack.’

‘What was it doing there?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Ellie was packing, Seth. She was leaving us both and continuing on her own. I caught her in the middle of doing it.’

‘So she was saying goodbye?’ Seth’s expression was sour. ‘That’s a funny way to do it.’

‘I’m sure the decision wasn’t an easy one. I’m sure there was a whole raft of complex, conflicting desires. I’m not even sure she’d decided for certain to go for good — not until later, anyway, when we were arguing in the train. Maybe —’ He stopped to take a deep breath. ‘Maybe she was trying to find a reason to stay.’

Seth shook his head. ‘I thought —’ His brother looked confused and helpless. ‘I knew she didn’t love me. She loved you, if anything, but that didn’t mean it was hopeless. I thought we were going to work it out.’

‘Because she wanted both of us? Because both of us wanted her? I don’t think that makes for a stable relationship. Not in our case, anyway. Even without all the supernatural shit, it still wasn’t going very well. It was screwing us all up, coming between us. It’s not as if we were being terribly mature about it. We were probably going to explode one way or another, no matter what happened.’ Hadrian wanted to touch Seth — grip his shoulder or put an arm around him — but he didn’t know how to any more. ‘We drove her away. It was going to happen whether we wanted it to or not.’

‘I suppose so.’ Seth’s tone was wooden, and Hadrian heard in it that his brother had accepted the truth — had, perhaps, known it all along, just like Hadrian. Accepting the truth and letting go of the lie, however, were two very different things.

Betrayals within betrayals,
Hadrian thought to himself. What would it have felt like to return to the hostel room an hour later and find her packed and gone? How could he have possibly explained it to Seth? Or vice versa?

‘Some holiday,’ said Seth with a hint of his old self. ‘We were supposed to be finding ourselves — and look at us.’ He indicated the scene before them with a contemptuous flick of one hand. ‘It’s like a French farce.’

‘I think we did find ourselves,’ Hadrian said. ‘Only it wasn’t what we wanted to see.’

‘You and me thrice,’ said Ellis.

Hadrian turned, startled, to face the bed, but it wasn’t
that
Ellis who had spoken.

She was standing behind them, a muted expression on her face.

Her face ...

‘Your veil!’ exclaimed Seth, beating Hadrian to it by a split second.

‘Yes, it’s all very symbolic. The truth is revealed; the clouds are parted. Everything is supposed to make sense now.’ She rolled her hazel eyes, and looked around her, at the room, at herself on the bed. ‘I thought you might come back here, my little perverts.’

‘That’s “inverts”,’ Hadrian said without smiling.

‘Are you one of them now, El Paso?’ asked Seth.

She turned back to him. Her expression was one of anger kept tightly in check.

‘Apparently,’ she said.
‘Apparently
I’ve always been one of them: the third Sister, the one who’s missing. I may have lived an ordinary life in the First Realm, they tell me, but before that I wasn’t human. And when that life was over, I didn’t come to the Second Realm the way humans normally do. Oh, no, that wouldn’t do at all. I tried to come back to Sheol, where I
apparently
belong — only I wasn’t very good at it, having been a human for so long, so I got stuck halfway. That’s where Shathra found me, and that’s why the Ogdoad wouldn’t let me pass. The Fundamental Forces know who I am, even if I don’t.
Apparently
my name isn’t Ellis now, but Nona. What sort of name is Nona, for Christ’s sake?’

Her self-control flickered for an instant, and Hadrian caught a glimpse of the great well of upset just waiting to spill over. ‘I feel the need to reassure you that I have no memory of any of this. I don’t think I am or have ever been anyone else but me. Just me: Ellis. I grew up in Melbourne and went to school in Brisbane. I had a cat called Perestroika and a set of Saddle Club books in a box under my bed. I went to church on weekends until I was fifteen, and never once dreamed that it might all be true. I go on a holiday to celebrate finishing my Masters, and look what happens: I meet you two, and my life gets pulled out from under me. And here I am trying to convince you that it’s not my fault — as though I haven’t been totally screwed over by myself as well. I’m an idiot.’

‘We’re all idiots,’ said Seth, reaching out to comfort her.

She brushed him away. Hadrian truly saw her then, noticing for the first time how, with the veil removed, the cut of her black robes matched that of the Sisters’. She looked, from some angles, like Ana had: many faces, many eyes — but still her. A multitude of her.

‘We’re
not
idiots,’ he told both of them, reiterating what he had told himself after finding out that Kybele had betrayed him. ‘There were just things we didn’t know.’

‘Is there
anything else
we don’t know?’ she asked him, eyes flashing. ‘Can you answer that?’

He shook his head. ‘I have no idea.’

‘Then excuse me for not feeling terribly reassured.’ She deflated then. ‘Jesus, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you two. Of all people.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Seth. ‘I guess we’re more likely to understand than anyone else here.’

‘Exactly. And it’s not as if I can do anything about it. I mean, I can’t deny what my life-tree tells me. It’s all there. I can watch it as many times as I like, and it’s not going to change.’

‘So — why?’ asked Seth, faltering. ‘Why did you — did Nona ...?’ His gaze darted to the bed and back.

‘To be part of the moment,’ she said. ‘To be close if the end came. I don’t know exactly why because I have no memory of it, but that’s what they tell me I said. The merging of the realms means the end of Sheol. The Sisters feel they should have a role to play in the destruction of the Flame. Maybe they’re right.’ She shrugged. ‘But that doesn’t make it any easier.’

‘That’s what Ana was trying to tell me,’ Hadrian said, remembering: We
do reserve the right to choose which particular path to follow to our ends.

‘There was some disagreement about me going,’ she said. ‘The Sisters argued. It hadn’t gone very well the last time, apparently.’

Seth was nodding. ‘That’s why Quetzalcoatl called you “Moyo”. He and Xol knew you in that life. You were — involved.’

‘Again.’ She looked down at her hands, which had curled into fists. ‘How could I have done all this and known nothing about it? How can it still be me?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Hadrian, marvelling at the triad of triads placed around them:
third way, third realm, third sister.
‘There’s no point fighting who you are. That’s the one battle you will always lose.’

Seth stared at him, recognising the quote from his own life-tree. ‘I never asked for this,’ he said.

‘None of us did,’ Hadrian responded, ‘but we’re here now, and we have the opportunity of a lifetime. Of a million lifetimes.’

‘To make a silk purse out of a pair of pig’s ears.’ Seth snorted. ‘Yeah, right.’

‘Now, now, Mister Gloomy,’ Ellis chided him. ‘There’s already enough on my team.’

‘But it’s true! Both realms are in trouble because of us.’

‘Because of Yod,’ Hadrian reminded him. ‘We can either let Yod finish the job, or we can try to turn the tables on it. Me, I don’t see much of a choice there. Not if we’re going to be worthy of a choice.’

‘None of us can kill Yod,’ said Ellis, weighing into the argument. ‘Not at the moment. Maybe it makes sense to give the world a chance to find someone who can.’

‘Is that what you would do, then?’ Seth asked her.

‘It’s not my decision,’ she said.

‘But if it was?’

Her gaze danced away. ‘I have some issues with my new siblings I’d like to resolve. There might be a way to kill two birds with one stone. If you’ll pardon the expression.’

They stared at each other for a long moment. Hadrian felt as though they had reached a subtle agreement, but what it was he wasn’t completely certain. He still felt torn between the urge to embrace and punch his brother, and he had no doubt the impulse was equally strong and equally conflicted in Seth. Ellis was a different story, but not dissimilar: he couldn’t look at her without thinking of the way the draci had betrayed him and very nearly drained him of life. And she wasn’t Ellis any more. Not just Ellis. Like the twins, she was defined by her place in events rather than solely by who she thought she was.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said eventually, glancing at the bed then away. ‘We’ve spent long enough in this place for a lifetime.’

‘Or two,’ said Seth.

She held out her hands to take theirs. The triangle they made with their arms and bodies seemed to spin for a moment, like dice rolling.

‘I knew what you had in mind before I came to you,’ she said as they tumbled, ‘and I’m glad you’re not going to ask me to choose between you. That would be as bad as it was before — before all this.’

‘Don’t say it,’ Seth said to her, ‘until you have to.’

‘Just this, then. Do you remember when we first met, in that crappy bar in Vienna? You never knew which one of you I saw first. Well, I saw both of you at once. That’s who I chose. Not Seth or Hadrian;
both
of you. And I
had
both of you, for a while. It’s just a shame you couldn’t let it stay that way. Not in a million years.’

Hadrian could see disappointment in his brother’s eyes. He felt it too. She, like everyone else, had been unable to treat them like individuals; she had wanted them bound into one unit, inseparable and identical.

Perhaps, he thought, the time had come to stop fighting it.

They held hands until they were in Sheol with the cool, harsh light of the Flame licking over them once again.

* * * *

‘Spare us the speeches,’ said Seth. Sheol rocked around them, under sustained attack from the outside. The hands of the Holy Immortals were linked in a wide circle, facing outward, their faces raised as though soaking up sunlight. Hadrian didn’t think they were tanning themselves. ‘I know what I want to do.’

‘And that is?’ Ana asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘Fix the fucker who did this to me. To us.’ He glanced at Ellis. ‘To Agatha.’

‘To everyone,’ Hadrian added. The little he had seen of the distant, isolated future where he had found Seth haunted him, the closer he came to committing to it. He felt that he should have stayed longer, to look more closely at what awaited them there, but at least it was
different.
At least it had some promise. ‘If we have to have the Cataclysm — and I see no way around that — then this is the best way I’ve seen to avoid the worst of it.’

Meg nodded. ‘We have followed the route you took. We have seen the effects it will have. It is a grave step to take, and one that certainly should not be taken lightly.’

‘There are a number of continuity issues,’ Ana went on. ‘To ensure your new world-line remains stable, should it be granted to you, you will need to know the details.’