“Yours?” The bass of his voice was colored with derision. “And here I thought he was mine all this time. Pray tell, dead man, how is he yours?”
He still didn’t know? He still hadn’t figured out who I was? “I’m his family,” I snarled weakly. “His family, you bastard.”
“Oh really?” The curve of his mouth was ripe with superiority and an amusement I couldn’t understand. “And how do you figure that?” He held up a hand and took a few steps back. Blood did tend to spatter a long way. “Never mind. I haven’t the time or inclination to play this little game.” Raising his voice slightly, he called out, “I see you, Michael. I’ve seen you watching all along. It’s all right, you know. Watch all you like. I rather enjoy the thought of your watching your ‘savior’ die. You can watch at my side if you wish.”
No. Damn it, no. He listened when I told him to run. He always listened, but then he always came back.
“Michael.” He drew the name out cajolingly. “You cannot deny your Maker, boy. If history has taught us nothing, it has taught us that.”
I didn’t see him. I twisted my head back and forth desperately. Maybe Jericho was wrong. Maybe he was doing this to torment me, to make my final moments as wrenching as he could. That was all it was; it had to be. When I finally brought my eyes back to those glossy black ones, I tried hard to hold on to that hope. It wasn’t easy in the face of the poisonous dark gaze fixed on me as I labored to sit upright in the sand. I wasn’t going to die lying flat in the sand, as if I were just waiting for it.
“Shy, that one,” he mused. “An odd quality in death incarnate.”
“He’s not.” I knew that as well as I’d ever known anything. “He’s not death.”
“Death enters through a thousand doors.” The gun extended toward me. “He’s only one. In time I’ll have all one thousand. And when all my doors open on the world, I alone will hold their keys.”
Then he fired.
The waiting is the hardest part. You learn that from nearly day one. You could be a child waiting for a cookie or a shiny new bike, or a cavity-ridden teenager waiting and dreading the jab of Novocaine with a needle that has no end. You could ask one of a million people waiting for outcomes both good and bad, and they would all tell you the same thing. Anticipation is a bitch; everything else is downhill. Is that true or not? I didn’t know, because what I expected, a bullet to the chest, didn’t happen. But God, I wish it had.
Time didn’t freeze. My life didn’t riffle before me like the pages of a badly drawn comic book. None of the clichés held true. My heart didn’t even have time to pound at a faster, more agonizingly painful rate. By the time you hear the gunshot, it’s too late for that. The bullet has already found its mark. If you’re the one hit, a beating heart may be a moot point. If you’re not the one cradling lead, a living heart isn’t what you want anyway—not anymore.
I looked down at the armful of deadweight, almost puzzled. So, it was God after all, not fate. It was God, and his sparrow had fallen from the sky to rest broken in my lap. Strands of bleached hair were cool against my arm, as cool as the liquid flowing against my chest was warm. The bullet had entered his back and exited his chest to rest in my shoulder. And the blood—the blood was everywhere. It flowed like a river out of him and onto me. I could even smell it on his breath—his shallow, fading breath.
“How could you do something so stupid?” I choked, the words ugly with anguish. “How could you do something so goddamn stupid?” His eyes were only colorless shadows in the moonlight, but I saw him in there still. Aware, he was with me, but beginning to drift away—far away. “Misha.” I rested my forehead on his. “Why?”
“For my brother,” he said simply.
The whisper brushed against my cheek and I watched as the life—the light—began to spill from his face. His skin went so transparent that dark lashes were a brutal contrast when they came to rest—and stayed at rest.
Jericho had known where he was. Charging him would’ve been futile. Instead, Michael had charged me. He’d thrown himself in front of me to take the bullet—my bullet. I pulled him close and blocked out the smell of blood with the scent of shampoo in his hair. Green and herbal, it took me from the beach to an endless field of grass and clover. It was a place without the stink of copper and the fly of fatal lead, a place without despair.
“Isn’t this annoying?”