ice. Death was falling out of the sky. Sound was everywhere, life was elsewhere. And then sound was nowhere. He was drowning in a vast ocean of want, of impossible struggle, of bottomless sorrow. Was that him who felt these things for her, getting iced in the liquid grief for all she wanted to be and would never be?
Julian, he heard dimly. Julian, what’s the matter?
The bright light receded. His senses came back. He was in the dirt, on his knees, shivering, and she was in front of him holding on to his hands. She wasn’t smiling anymore. She looked very concerned. “I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
He stared into her face. She was blue, and she was dying. And as she was dying, she said, come then, take the last warmth from my lips.
Julian groaned.
“Anyone can stop a woman’s life,” he said, “but no one her death: a thousand doors open onto it.” He clutched his throbbing right hand to his chest. It felt like blood was pouring out of his missing fingers. Oh my God. What was happening to him?
“What are you talking about, what doors?” Mirabelle said. “Everything’s okay. It’s just a trick of the light. When the sun is at zenith over the meridian, it sometimes does that, disperses in a kind of rainbow. It’s just a pretty earth science thing. There’s nothing to it.”
She tried to help him up, but he lurched from her. Grabbing onto the stones, he pulled himself up and without dusting off, still clutching his hooked right hand to his chest, said, “Let’s go.”
In utter silence he staggered downhill. He didn’t even brush the dust off his knees before climbing inside his spotless car.
“You want to go grab some lunch?” she said. “I’m starved. My treat.”
“I can’t. I got . . . things.”
“You sure? You were so good to me today. I want to return the favor.”
And for some reason he said, “Today?”
“What do you mean?” she said. “As opposed to another day?”
“I don’t know what I mean,” Julian said. He drove her to her house on Lyman.
“Are you really okay?” said Mirabelle. “You are still so pale. What happened to you up there?”
“I’m fine. Probably just oxygen deprivation. Not used to it. Well, here we are.”
“The right place this time, thank goodness,” she said. “One of these days, you’ll have to tell me how you knew about Normandie.” She saw him sitting with the car still in drive, the foot slammed against the brake, his hands on the wheel. “You’re not even going to put the car into park?”
Reluctantly he shifted gears.
“Come in for a minute. I have to give you your dress back anyway. Come on, I’ll make you a cup of coffee. You look like you need it.”
“I’ll wait here, if you don’t mind. I have some calls to make.”
She came back a few minutes later carrying the dress and laid it carefully in the back seat.
Julian didn’t look at her. She began to say something, but he cut her off. “Well, so long,” he said. “You’re welcome,” and peeled away before she could open her mouth to respond.
42
Inferno
“JULES?”
Julian opened his eyes. He was on the floor, in the corner of Ashton’s bedroom, by the sliding glass doors leading to the pool. Ashton was sitting up in bed, having just woken up, staring at Julian.
Julian’s body was stiff from sleeping coiled on the hard wood. Next time he might consider a pillow and a sleeping bag.
Next time? Next time he was going to have a nasty piece-of-shit dream and get so shook that he’d have to walk to Ashton’s house, break into his friend’s bedroom and sleep on the floor like a dog?
“Had a bad dream.” Julian struggled to his feet.
Ashton appraised him. “Bad enough for you to sneak into my bedroom in the middle of the night?”
“Worse than that.”
“Have you considered upping your dosage?”
“Go to hell.”
“What was the dream about?”
Julian waved him off, made a joke, refused to say. But the dream was so awful that before he lay in the corner, he leaned over Ashton’s bed, and pressed his hand against his friend’s sleeping head to make sure it was still warm.
He creeps on black ice, slipping and falling and crawling, trying desperately to get to something in the frozen grass. With his hands numb from the cold, he digs through the hard blades and when he looks at his hands he is missing all of his fingers and black blood is pouring out onto the