The Weeping Lore (Witte & Co. Investigations Book 1) (45 page)

“Stop, Cian. I’m not embarrassed by this. I certainly don’t care what you think. Men like you have always hated—what do you call men like me? Inverts? Fags? Is that right?”

Cian wasn’t sure if he nodded or not. So much blood had rushed to his face that he thought his head might fall off.

“It’s nothing new to me,” Harry said. Then he paused. “You don’t have to stay here, Cian. Go get some sleep.”

“Harry—”

“Save us both the embarrassment, Cian. Your dislike of me has been patent. At least now we’ve cleared the air.” He looked away and added, “Good night.”

“It’s not—it’s not what you said.”

They were the hardest words Cian had ever spoken. They were barbed and slippery all at once, and Cian had to yank them out one at a time, ripping out his own guts as he did.

“Not that I’m a fag?” Harry asked. He turned back to Cian, pulled his knees up to his chest, and wrapped his arms around them. “You can say it.”

Cian shifted in the chair. The wood squeaked.

He didn’t know what to say.

But Devil take him if he was going to leave.

Several long minutes passed. Harry relaxed by inches, like a man coming off the rack. He looked over at Cian. The air might as well have been gunpowder that they were both breathing, waiting for the next word to be a spark.

“I’d kill for a smoke,” Harry said to the room.

The gunpowder smoldered.

Cian grabbed a pack from the dresser. He passed one to Harry and lit it. Then he lit a second for himself and dropped back into the chair. The two men smoked in silence. The scent of the tobacco leeched some of the bitterness from the air. Cian’s shoulders dropped as he took another drag. He rubbed his eyes.

He knew what to say.

And Devil take him if he was going to be a coward now.

But it still took him the length of the cigarette to drag up his courage kicking and screaming. He ground out the butt in an ashtray. Then he looked at Harry, who was staring at the corner of the room as though he were going to ask it to dance.

“His name was Ollie, wasn’t it?” Cian asked.

Harry didn’t answer. He took another long draw on the cigarette. In the darkness, that speck of orange was like a light in port, signaling someone home. Cian didn’t know who. Someone lost, he thought. Someone who had been lost for a very long time.

Then Harry nodded.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Cian asked.

“Please don’t do this. Don’t pretend.”

Cian waited again. The minutes measured themselves out to the flare of Harry’s shrinking cigarette.

“When you were hurt, you said his name,” Cian said. “A few times, actually. You said you weren’t going to let someone take him. Did he die?”

Harry nodded. He dropped the cigarette butt in the ashtray. It glinted like a dying star.

“I’m sorry,” Cian said.

“His name was Oliver Dupont,” Harry said. It had the sound of an iceberg meeting a ship. A sudden, fatal break in the silence. “He was two years younger than me. Our families were great friends.” Harry leaned back against the headboard, stretching his legs out.

“Was he . . .”

Harry rolled his eyes, and Cian tried to swallow his tongue. “Yes,” Harry said with a small smile. “He was . . .” He exaggerated the pause and then smiled again to take the sting from the mockery. “I loved him. I don’t know how he felt about me. I thought he felt the same. Now,” Harry shrugged. “We were young. Who knows?” He stopped. His eyes were drinking up the shadows in the room. Cian remembered a bit of mythology. He remembered a river that made you forget. He thought, right then, that Harry was trying to drink deep from that river, like putting his mouth to the Mississippi. Cian was fairly certain that there wasn’t enough forgetting in the world. Not for someone like Harry Witte.

“What did you mean when you said you wouldn’t let them take him?” Cian asked.

“That’s a long story. The short version is that the Children took him. By the time I found them.” Harry paused and shrugged again.

“That’s why you hunt them. That’s why you do all of this.”

“It’s part of why. The story is too long. I won’t bore you. But what happened to Ollie was my fault, at least in part. I won’t let it happen to anyone else.”

The room swallowed up the last words. The words disappeared into the silence like snowflakes into a drift. Harry turned his head away, brushing at his eyes.

“You healed yourself,” Cian said. “Using magic.”

When Harry answered, his voice was thick. “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “It was the only way. The venom is not natural.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

Harry turned back. “Yes. Very. But I didn’t have any other choice. I’m not ready to die, Cian. The Children have too much to pay for. I took a risk. This time, it paid off. I live to fight another day, for whatever that’s worth.”

“I’m glad,” Cian said. “We were worried.”

“We?”

“God, yes, Harry. I was terrified. I mean, I don’t know shit about any of this.” Cian surged to his feet, shoved his hands in his pockets, and stalked across the room. He pulled back the curtains and stared out at a wall of darkness broken by pale lumps of snow. It reminded him of France, of the bodies in the fields, of moonlight on dead flesh. He let the curtain fall back into place. “You die, and I’m left without a clue in the world. The Children? Cultic magic? Ancient gods awakening? I might as well go piss in the wind for all the good I’m going to do.”

“Poetic,” Harry said with another small smile. “I’m touched.”

Cian took a deep breath and left the window. Harry was watching him. Cian would have rather faced a loaded gun.

“You think I don’t like you because, well, you know.”

Another smile played at the edge of Harry’s mouth. He nodded. “You’ve made it fairly obvious.”

“That’s not why, although I’d be lying if I said I were . . . hell, I don’t know.”

“My point.”

“No, damn it. Give me half a second. I don’t care about that. The truth of it is, Harry, you remind me too much of someone I knew.” Cian marched across the room. His bandaged hand was hurting, and he pulled it out of his pocket, forcing himself to relax. Fresh, dark spots marked the cloth. “You weren’t in the military. That’s what you said.”

Harry shook his head. “Morally unfit,” he said. Then a grin. “Father almost died. He would have rather had me declared mentally unfit, but it was too late.”

“Mentally unfit wouldn’t have been too far off.”

Harry’s face went cold for a half a second, and then Cian grinned. Harry wrinkled his nose and laughed. “I asked for that, didn’t I? All right, go ahead. Military.”

“You know I was in the army. In France, I had this lieutenant. A lot like you, Harry. Nice guy, smart, funny. Everybody liked him. Good looking too, and all the local girls were practically crawling out of their dresses to get at him. The men, they loved him. Hell, we loved him. He was on our side, he looked out for us. When we went into battle, he was right there too. Nobody thought anything would go wrong with Harley Dunn by your side.

“I remember watching this boy, his name was Felix something, I think he was a Jew. Anyway, he’d caught a stray bullet. It was bad, clipped an artery, he was bleeding out in the trench. He screamed murder. I was sitting right there, calling for a medic, trying to do anything I could. It didn’t make any difference. And then Lieutenant Dunn got there. He took Felix’s hand, told him things were going to be all right, and the boy quieted down right away.” Cian paused. The ache in his hand had doubled, and his eyes stung. “He died a few minutes later. Quiet as a lamb. I think he thought Harley really was going to make things alright. Hell, I half thought it myself.”

Cian stopped. He looked at Harry. The other man sat and watched him. The silence crawled up Cian’s skin on spider legs.

“Anyway, that was Lieutenant Dunn, and you remind me of him. The way Pearl and Freddy and, hell, Irene—especially Irene—the way they look at you reminds me of the way those men looked at Lieutenant Dunn. Of the way I looked at Lieutenant Dunn.”

“What did he do to you?”

Cian grinned, and he wondered why his face felt like it was breaking. It was a funny story. Damned funny. He couldn’t quite catch his breath, though, and the room was hot.

“There was a girl,” he said, and he tried to laugh.

Harry didn’t move.

“Her name was Corinne,” Cian said. “She had these eyes. Dark eyes, and skin like you never saw at home, and she was French. Of course. They were all French. But Corinne, she was the kind of girl every man wanted.”

He paused and looked at Harry.

Harry waved his hand. “No offense meant, present company excepted, all of that. I get it. Go on.”

“For whatever reason, she took a fancy to me. We had pulled back to the village. She and I saw each other every day, whenever I had a free minute.” Cian tried to laugh again, and this time, the sound didn’t even make it out of his throat. “I didn’t speak a lick of French. She knew about ten words in English. It didn’t matter.”

“Cian,” Harry said.

Cian shook his head. “Anyway, I’d seen Harley talking to her, but it was always innocent. I knew Corinne only had eyes for me. It was the first time I’d been in love. You know what it’s like.”

“I do.”

“One night, I was supposed to be on watch. I traded with another guy. I’d already planned to meet Corinne. I went to find her.”

He stopped.

Her face pressed against the stone. The terror and pain in her eyes. Dunn behind her.

The sound of his breathing. Ragged.

“Dunn was . . . was having his way with her, or whatever you want to call it. His trousers around his ankles, Corinne pressed up against the wall, crying. I should have been shocked or horrified. I just felt cold. Like this wind was blowing and it had pushed everything out of me. I pulled out my pistol and shot Dunn. Right in the head.”

The crack of the gun. The sudden silence.

“Corinne ran. I knew she was hurt and scared. I didn’t blame her. I ran too. I’d just killed my commanding officer. I knew what that meant. I didn’t care, though. Dunn deserved to die. The fact that he could do that to Corinne—” Cian took a breath. He felt calmer now. As though someone had cut him in half at the waist. That kind of calm. “I hid out in the forest for a few days. I remembered other places we’d been. Girls Harley had taken an interest in. Bits and pieces of stories. Corinne hadn’t been the first. At least she was the last.”

“I’m so sorry, Cian.”

Cian shook his head. “I went back, you know. This part of the story doesn’t really matter, but I’ll tell you anyway. So you know that God believes in irony. I went back, late one night, for Corinne. I climbed up to her window and knocked. She opened it, saw me, and started crying.”

Her eyes had been so dark in the moonlight. She had never been more beautiful. He had wanted to tell her that. He hadn’t known how. Not in French. Certainly not in English.

“Then she shut the window and screamed for help.” Cian picked at the bandage on his hand, pressing on the cuts that hid underneath. The pain was distant. “I ran. I haven’t stopped running.”

Harry got out of bed. His movements were stiff and slow. He wore a pair of drawers and that was it. He crossed the room and put his hand on Cian’s shoulder. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.

“I haven’t told anyone that,” Cian said. His voice sounded like it was coming down a paper cone. “Sorry.” He wiped at his face. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I am sorry, Cian,” Harry said. “Truly.”

“It doesn’t matter. It never did.”

“It does matter. I don’t know what I can do to tell you I’m not that man. But I’ll try my best to show you that I’m different.”

“Hell, Harry, that’s why I told you this. I’m not stupid. I’m just slow. I know you’re not Harley Dunn. It took me a while to realize it, and I’m sorry for the way I’ve treated you. That’s all I wanted to say.” His eyes were still hot, and he wiped his face again. “God, honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I do,” Harry said. He gripped the back of Cian’s neck, a firm, friendly, and shockingly intimate touch, and then dropped onto the bed. “Neither of us is nearly drunk enough for this.”

Cian laughed and rubbed his nose. “We can fix that.”

At the Majestic, Irene took a bath. It wasn’t a relaxing bath. It wasn’t the kind of bath with her favorite soap and the heat soaking into tired muscles. It was an angry bath. Lots of unnecessary splashing. Scrubbing at invisible patches of dirt. And, for the most part, thinking about Cian Shea, who was an ass.

When she’d finished bathing, though, and the water had begun to cool, she got out and dried herself and combed her hair. The bruises along her back and sides were purpling like a summer sunset. The worst of the pain had passed, and now she was left stiff and sore. It wasn’t a bad analogy for her life with her father. After Francis, when Father had refused to believe Irene, she had thought the pain was too much to bear. But then life had gone on, the way it always did, and now she was only the slightest bit stiff and sore.

Irene sighed, set down the comb, and stared at the woman in the mirror. The other Irene stared back, her lips pursed, and looking decidedly judgmental.