They didn’t anymore. No wonder he hated it every time I disappeared.
Caoimhe told me his diagnosis but had refused to discuss it further. She’d said I needed to ask him about it. When she walked away, she glanced back with a look of pity and said softly, I really did think you knew. I’d not have disliked you so much otherwise.
Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
I knew what it was—the disease that killed young athletes on the basketball court or football field, without warning, cutting them down in their prime.
The symptoms: fatigue, shortness of breath, inability to exercise, fainting, a sensation of pounding heartbeats, heart murmur. At times it might be manageable, other times it could be severe. I was pretty sure all those times he’d disappeared for a few days he’d been having a bad spell and gone off alone, so I wouldn’t know.
The cause: usually gene mutation. An abnormal arrangement of heart muscle cells called “myofiber disarray.” I’d watched a TV show about it, years ago when all I’d had to do with my time was watch TV. The severity of the disease varied widely. Most people had a form where the septum between the two bottom chambers of the organ became enlarged and impeded blood flow out of the heart. It was usually inherited. The thickened heart muscle could eventually become too stiff to effectively fill with blood, resulting in heart failure. Sudden cardiac death was rare, but when it happened—it was to young people under the age of thirty. Young athletic people just like Dancer.
The treatment was palliative, relieving symptoms, and preventative: avoiding sudden cardiac death.
Dancer had never breathed a word of it to me.
We’d raced through the streets at dizzying, dangerous speeds, set off bombs and outrun them. He’d let me whiz him around in freeze-frame, crashing him into all kinds of stuff, bruising him, hurting him. Laughing his ass off the entire time.
Now I understood why he’d liked to laze on uncommon days of sunshine as boneless as a cat, soaking up the sun: stillness was his friend. Being able to relax so completely might just be what had kept him alive this long.
Now I understood why Caoimhe had stared daggers at me whenever she’d seen me.
I might have killed him.
You’re going to get the boy killed one day, Ryodan had said to me five and a half years ago, Silverside time.
Rot in purgatory, dude, I’d fired back. Batman never dies. Dancer won’t either.
But Batman didn’t have a bad heart.
Dancer did.
When the door whisked silently open, I stalked into Ryodan’s office and dropped into the chair on the opposite side of the desk from him. In the month we’d been gone, the floor and walls had been replaced and the office, like the man, was good as new.
For a moment I just looked at him, appreciating that he was no longer charred to a human crisp and his skin was golden and smooth, except for the skein of scars at his throat and the long, wicked one that stretched from what I could see of his collarbone up to his left ear. Dressed as he usually was in dark pants and an impeccable crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled up, silver cuff glinting, he looked more like a business tycoon than something that I knew wasn’t human, sometimes had fangs, could move faster and knew far more powerful magic than me. I realized then, as I never had when I was young, that he’d chosen such civilized attire for precisely that reason—to make people think he was something other than the ruthless, immortal being he was.
I opened my mouth to give him the carefully scripted speech I’d worked on for the past hour, the one that was logical and persuasive and built gently to the point and came off as neither pushy nor needy—the deft, tactful speech that was going to win him over and guarantee his aid—but my mouth had other plans and growled, “How the bloody hell did you keep Dageus alive?”
Up until that moment he’d been regarding me with more benign interest than I’d ever seen from him before. Weird fuck. I just killed him recently, and now he was all laid back.
Benign vanished. A scowl stomped the living shit out of it and did a dance all over his face. He lunged from the chair, was around the desk and had me on my feet, gripping me by my shoulders before I’d even processed that he’d moved.
I would give not just my eyeteeth but every last one of my teeth and wear dentures for the rest of my life, if he’d teach me how to do that.
“How do you know about Dageus?” he said with careful precision. Like Barrons, he spoke differently when he was deeply pissed off or offended. Barrons got softer. Ryodan went all upper-crust British formal and precise, enunciating each word crisply.
I shrugged his hands off my shoulders. “Saw it on the monitor last night.”