Chapter 18
He looked like Cyrus again now he was showered and wearing his old clothes. Only his hair looked different, lying wet and tousled. The old Cyrus had precision styled his hair with enough product to turn him into a walking fire hazard.
When Evie watched him saunter across the wooden floorboards of the warehouse towards them she thought she caught a glimmer of his old arrogance in the way his body moved and the confidence in his stride. But when her eyes tracked up his body to his face she felt her uncertainty return. The mocking smile Cyrus used to wear all the time was gone and the spark in his eyes had been replaced with a wariness and a seriousness she didn’t recognise. The only thing that was really familiar about this new Cyrus was the slice of dark amber cutting through the iris of his left pupil, marring the greeny-blue colour of his eyes. No, she corrected herself, not marring, more like defining.
Her gaze fell to his lips and she inhaled softly, remembering all of a sudden how he’d kissed her just before he walked through the gateway. She’d been surprised by how soft and gentle that kiss had been. If she’d stopped to think about it before – which she never had – she would have assumed Cyrus’s kisses would be rough and demanding, just like he was. But that kiss had felt like it had contained his entire soul. It had been the kiss of a dying man, filled with passion and remorse and pain and enough desire to burn up hell.
Evie felt herself flushing at the memory. She looked away, flustered, as Cyrus came to stand by her side. He kept glancing at her with this curious expression on his face, and it made her fidget with the bandage on her wrist that she’d put over the Mixen burn. She crossed to the sofa, as far away from him as possible and sat down, bringing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them.
Ash sat opposite, his elbows resting on his knees, while Vero perched on the arm of the sofa beside him. They were both staring at Cyrus as if they couldn’t work out whether he was really Cyrus or in fact a cyborg.
‘This is my place?’ Cyrus asked, looking around, his eyes scanning the rafters. He seemed to be finding that part the hardest to get his head around.
‘Yeah,’ Ash answered, not taking his eyes off Cyrus.
‘And I was a Hunter. I – I mean we – fought these monsters?’
‘Unhumans,’ Vero cut in. ‘And we’re still fighting them.’
Cyrus frowned at her. ‘Unhumans,’ he said, testing the word out. ‘And they’re from other realms, you say?’
Vero and Ash nodded at him.
Cyrus chewed his lip for a bit. ‘There are ones with tails, aren’t there?’ he asked finally.
‘Yes,’ Ash nodded.
Cyrus snorted through his nose. ‘I told them. I kept telling them.’
‘Telling who?’ Evie asked.
‘The doctors. All the people who kept trying to keep me in that place.’
‘Yeah, that was probably not the best thing to tell the people doing your psych evaluation.’
‘What do you remember?’ Ash interrupted, leaning across the coffee table, a sense of urgency in his voice.
Cyrus shook his head. ‘Not much.’ He turned slowly to face Evie. ‘I remember you and I remember seeing this blinding white light and the next thing I can recall is walking naked down a street holding a knife or a sword or something – I barely remember. A cop car pulled me over. Then they took me to the hospital and locked me up – pumped me full of drugs. They kept asking me the same questions again and again until I thought they were actually trying to drive me crazy.’ He looked over at Ash. ‘How long have I been away?’ he asked.
‘The last time we saw you was almost nine weeks ago.’
Cyrus frowned, his gaze falling to his lap. He started pulling at a loose thread on his T-shirt.
‘Where did they pick you up? The police. Where were you?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was all a haze. There were big houses, though, huge lawns. I remember lying down on one – I thought it was a carpet. And gates – lots of gates. But that’s all.’
Evie exchanged a brief look with Vero and Ash. It sounded somewhere expensive – somewhere like Bel Air or Beverly Hills. Nowhere near downtown.
‘So let me get this straight,’ Cyrus said. ‘We were all Hunters and we were trying to close this way through gateway thing – to stop any more of these unhumans from getting here?’
Evie nodded.
‘And the way through was in that building – the one we were just outside?’
‘Yes. There was a big fight. We fought our way inside. I think that’s what you remember when you say you saw a blond guy and Evie stepping between you. It was an Original. They’re like Thirsters, only worse. Evie killed it.’
Cyrus turned towards her, his turquoise eyes piercing her as hard as any arrow. She felt herself squirm some more under his scrutiny.
‘And I closed the way through? How?’ he asked.
There was a heavy silence.
‘You walked through it,’ Vero eventually said.
‘Did I know what was going to happen to me? Did I know I was going to end up …’ he hesitated, ‘like this?’
‘No,’ Vero said. ‘You thought you were going to die. That’s what we all thought the prophecy meant. That’s what we were told. That the White Light would die closing the way through.’
Cyrus’s expression turned to one of stunned amazement and then a soft smile crept across his face as if he was secretly kind of impressed with himself.
‘It said something about memories fading,’ Evie suddenly said. ‘The prophecy.’ She shook her head, trying to remember the exact words. ‘And shadows falling.’ She couldn’t stop the catch in her voice.
Silence descended. She could feel the others watching her. She looked up. Cyrus was studying her intently.
‘I was supposed to be the one to walk through,’ she told him, lifting her chin, ‘but you stopped me. Right at the last moment. You pushed me out of the way.’ She avoided telling him the part about the kiss.
Confusion rode in waves over his face. The question in his eyes was one she didn’t know the answer to either. Why had he done that?
She shrugged silently and looked away.
They let Cyrus sleep. It seemed the drugs were still loaded in his system. Hopefully, when they cleared out, some of his memory might return and he might be able to remember more.
Evie was huddled on the sofa with Ash and Vero, talking softly in the half-light of dawn so that they wouldn’t wake him.
‘He seems different somehow,’ Vero said in a low voice.
‘He’s drugged to the eyeballs.’
‘No, I mean, there’s something different besides that. It’s like someone else is wearing his skin.’
‘No, it’s him,’ Evie said firmly. She’d seen the glimmer of the old Cyrus not just in the underlying swagger as he walked, but in the way he’d reacted so fast when he killed the Mixen. And in the smile that sometimes tugged at the corner of his mouth as if he was laughing at a private joke.
‘He’s just lost his memory, that’s all,’ Ash said.
‘Do you think he can still fight? Will he remember how?’
‘Did you see him kill that Mixen?’ Evie asked. ‘He’s not forgotten how to fight. And his instincts brought him right back there. To the Bradbury building.’
‘We have to take him to Margaret first thing in the morning,’ Vero said.
‘Shame she wasn’t answering her phone,’ Ash grinned. ‘That’s going to be one joyful reunion.’
Evie’s fingers dug into the spaces between her ribs. She winced at herself. First she’d been jealous of what Ash and Vero had, and now she was jealous of Margaret being reunited with Cyrus. It was wrong to resent any of that. But she couldn’t help it. When she’d seen the long scar running up Cyrus’s back the wind had been knocked out of her, and when Cyrus had turned to face her, joy had blasted through her – a joy that she hadn’t felt in months. But then the happiness had been pricked by a needling disappointment that had slowly drained away the joy.
Disappointment that it was Cyrus and not Lucas.
She hated herself for feeling it, even more for admitting it, but it was true. Why couldn’t it have been Lucas to come back from the dead? To find her against the odds, like that?
‘Evie? What do you think?’
She tuned back in. Vero was looking at her expectantly.
‘About what?’ she asked.
‘Why didn’t Cyrus die? Didn’t the prophecy say the White Light had to die?’
‘Yeah,’ she shrugged. ‘I mean, it said something about sacrificing everything, I’m not sure how else you can read that.’
‘Well, he did sacrifice himself. It didn’t actual mention the word dying,’ Ash added. ‘Maybe we just all misunderstood what it really meant.’
‘What if Cyrus isn’t the White Light after all?’ Ash suddenly asked.
Evie felt her stomach squeeze into a fist-sized ball as she remembered the Mixen on the street who’d recognised her, called her the White Light and then run off.
There was a moment’s awful silence and then Vero looked at Evie, understanding and horror dawning on her face simultaneously.
‘But wouldn’t that mean the way through is still open?’ she asked.