The only light that comes for me is dawn.
I stand up, and my men stand up and we stare uneasily at one another.
Then my son stands up and I don’t care. I spare no thought for the strange night that shouldn’t have been. The universe is a mystery. The gods are fickle. I am and he is and that is enough. I toss him on my horse and leave my men behind.
“My son was killed two days later.”
I open my eyes, blinking. I can still taste sand, feel the grit in my eyes. Scorpions crawl at my feet.
“It was an accident. His body disappeared before we could bury it.”
“I don’t understand. Did you die in the desert or not? Did he?”
“We died. It was only later that I pieced it together. Things rarely make sense while they’re unfolding. After my son died the second time, he died many more times, simply trying to get back to me and come home. He was deep in the desert without conveyance or water.”
I stare. “What are you saying? That every time he died, he came back in the same place he’d died that first time with you?”
“At dawn the next day.”
“Over and over? He would try to make it out, die of heatstroke or something, then have to start all over again?”
“Far from home. We didn’t know. None of us died for a long time. We knew we were different, but we didn’t know about the dying. That came later.”
I watch him and wait for him to speak again. This is the crux of Barrons. I want to know. I won’t push.
“That wasn’t the end of his hell. I had rivals who rode the desert, too. Death for hire. Many were the times we’d thinned each other’s pack. One day, they found him walking the sands. They played with him.” He looks away. “They tortured and killed him.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because when I finally put things together, I tortured and killed a few of them and they talked while they died.” His lips smile; his eyes are cold, merciless. “They set up camp not too far from where he was reborn every dawn and found him the next day. Once they realized what was happening, they believed he was demon spawn. They tortured and killed him over and over. The more he came back, the more determined they were to destroy him. I don’t know how many times they killed him. Too many. They never let him live long enough to change. They didn’t know what he was, nor did he. Just that he kept coming back. One day another band attacked, and they didn’t have time to kill him. He was left alone, tied up in a tent for days. He got hungry enough that he turned. He never turned back. It was a year before we were hired to hunt the beast that was scouring the country, ripping out the throats and hearts of men.”
I was horrified. “They killed him every day for a year? And you were hired to kill him?”
“We knew it was one of us. We’d all changed. We knew what we’d become. It had to be him. I hoped.” His mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “I actually hoped it was my son.” There was naked hunger in his eyes. “How long was he a child tonight? How long did you see him before he attacked you?”
“A few minutes.”
“I haven’t seen him like that in centuries.” I could see him remembering the last time. “They broke him. He can’t control his change. I’ve seen him as my son only five times, as if for a few moments he knew peace.”
“You can’t reach him? Teach him?” Barrons could teach anyone.
“Part of his mind is gone. He was too young. Too frightened. They destroyed him. A man might have withstood it. A child had no chance. I used to sit by his cage and talk to him. When technology afforded, I recorded every moment, to catch a glimpse of him as my son. The cameras are off now. I couldn’t watch the recordings, looking for him. I have to keep him caged. If the world ever found him, they would kill him, too. Over and over. He’s feral. He kills. That’s all he does.”
“You feed him.”
“He suffers if I don’t. Fed, sometimes he rests. I’ve killed him. I’ve tried drugs. I learned sorcery. Druidry. I thought Voice might make him sleep, even die. It seemed to hypnotize him for a time. He’s highly adaptable. The ultimate killing machine. I studied. I collected relics of power. I drove your spear through his heart two thousand years ago, when I first heard of it. I forced a Fae princess to do her best. Nothing works. He’s not in there. Or if he is somewhere, he is in constant, eternal agony. It never ends for him. His faith in me was misplaced. I can never—”
Save him, he doesn’t say, and I don’t, either, because if I’m not careful I’m going to start crying, and I know it would only make things worse for him. He’s thousands of years past tears. He just wants release. Wants to lay his son to rest. Tuck him in and say good night forever, one last time.
“You want to unmake him.”
“Yes.”
“How long has this been going on?”
He says nothing.
He will never tell me. And I realize a number doesn’t really matter. The grief he felt in the desert has never abated. I understand now why they would kill me. It’s not just his secret. It’s theirs, too. “All of you return to the place you first died every time you die.”
He is instantly violent. I understand.
They kill to keep anyone from doing to them what was done to his son. It is their only vulnerability: wherever they come back at dawn the next day. An enemy could sit there, waiting for them, and kill them over and over again.
“I don’t want to know where that is. Ever,” I assure him, and mean it. “Jericho, we’ll get the Book. We’ll find a spell of unmaking. I promise. We’ll put your son to rest.” I feel suddenly vicious. Who had done this to them? Why? “I swear it,” I vow. “One way or another, we’ll make it happen.”
He nods, folds his arms behind his head, stretches back on a pillow, and closes his eyes.
As the moments pass, I watch the tension leave his face. I know he’s in that place where he meditates, where he controls things. What extraordinary discipline.
How many thousands of years has he been taking care of his son, feeding him, trying to kill him and ease his agony, if only for a few moments?
I’m back in the desert again, not because he takes me there but because I can’t get the look on his son’s face out of my head.
His eyes say, I know you will make the pain stop.
Barrons has never been able to. It never ended. For either of them.
The child, whose death destroyed him, has destroyed him every single day since. By living.
Dying, Barrons said, is easy. The man who dies escapes, plain and simple.
I’m suddenly glad Alina is dead. If the light comes for anyone, it came for her. She rests somewhere.
But not his son. And not this man.
I press my cheek to his chest, to listen to his heart beating.
And for the first time since I met him, I realize it isn’t. Have I never heard his blood rush before? His heart pound? How could I not have noticed?
I look up at him to find him staring down his chest at me, an unfathomable expression in his eyes. “I haven’t eaten lately.”
“And your heart stops beating?”
“It becomes painful. Eventually I would change.”
“What do you eat?” I say carefully.
“None of your fucking business,” he says gently.
I nod. I can live with that.
*
He moves differently down here. He doesn’t try to conceal anything. Here, he is himself and moves in that way that seems one with the universe, smooth as silk, flowing noiselessly from room to room. If I forget to pay attention to where he is, I misplace him. I discover he’s leaning against a column—when I’d thought he was the column—arms folded, watching me.
I explore his underground lair. I don’t how long he’s lived, but it’s clear he has always lived well. He was a mercenary once, in another time, another place, who knows how long ago. He liked fine things then, and his taste hasn’t changed.
I find his kitchen. It’s a gourmet chef’s dream—stainless-steel top-of-the-line everything. Lots of marble and beautiful cabinets. Sub-Zero fridge and freezer well stocked. Wine cellar to die for. As I devour a plate of bread and cheese, I imagine him here all those nights when I trudged up to my fourth-or fifth-floor bedroom and slept alone. Did he pace these floors, cook himself dinner, or maybe eat it raw, practice dark arts, tattoo himself, go for a drive in one of his many cars? He was so close all that time. Down here, naked on silk sheets. It would have driven me crazy if I’d known then what I know now.
He peels a mango while I wonder how he managed to get his hands on fruit in post-wall Dublin. It’s so ripe it drips down his fingers, his arms. I lick the juice from his hands. I push him back and eat the pulp off his stomach, lower, then end up with my bare ass on the cool marble of the island and him inside me again, my legs locked around his hips. He stares down at me, as if he’s memorizing my face, watches me like he can’t quite believe I’m here.
I sit on the island while he makes me an omelet. I’m ravenous, body and soul. Burning off more calories than I can eat.
He cooks naked. I admire his back and shoulders, his legs. “I found the second prophecy,” I tell him.
He laughs. “Why does it always take you so long to tell me the important things?”
“You should talk,” I say drily.
He slides the plate in front of me and hands me a fork. “Eat.”
When I finish, I say, “You have the amulet, don’t you?”
He catches his tongue in his teeth briefly and gives me a full-on smile. It says: I’m the biggest baddest fuck and I have all the toys.
We go back to his bedroom and I get the page from Mad Morry’s notebook and the tarot card from my pocket.
He looks at the card. “Where did you say you got this?”
“Chester’s. The dreamy-eyed guy gave it to me.”
“Who?”
“The good-looking college-age guy that bartends.”
His head moves funny, like a snake drawing back to strike. “How good-looking?”
I look at him. His gaze is cool. If you want that kind of life, get the fuck out of my house now, his eyes say.
“Nothing like you, Barrons.”
He relaxes. “So, who is he? Have I ever seen him?”
I tell him when and where and describe him, and he looks puzzled. “I’ve never seen the kid. I saw an elderly man with a heavy Irish accent pouring drinks a few times when I came to get you, but no one like you’re describing.”
I shrug. “Point is, it’s too late for the first prophecy to work.” I hand him the page. “Darroc was convinced he was the one who could use the amulet. But I read his translation and it sounds like it could be you or Dageus. Or any number of men.”
Barrons takes the parchment from me and scans it. “Why would he think it was him?”
“Because it says he who is not what he was. And he used to be Fae.”
He turns it over, looks at Darroc’s translation, then flips back to Mad Morry’s prophecy.
“Darroc didn’t speak Old Irish when I trained him and, if he picked it up since then, he didn’t learn it very well. His translation is wrong. It’s a rare dialect and gender neutral. It says the one that is possessed … or inhabited.”