Выбрать главу

“You are really sweet, you know that?” She leaned forward to kiss him again, with no more regard for his words than if they had been empty sweet-talk. She didn’t know me difference. he realized. Had other men tried to reach her mind, only to have her shelve their words as verbal foreplay? He felt pity for her and wondered who had taught her dial men and women never really spoke to one another. She was rattling on. “You don’t have to say thank you to me. It’s okay. Let’s get you to my place now and run you through a hot shower and head for beddy-bye, I’ve got to work tomorrow, baby. Hey, it’s already tomorrow, isn’t it? I was going to say we could talk about all (his tomorrow, but I guess it’ll have to wait for the next tomorrow. Hey, that sounds funny, doesn’t it?”

“This is the last tomorrow I have,” he told her desperately.

He was selfishly relieved to find that he felt only pity for her.

Loving a woman like her would have been hell. She believed all the old myths: Men have no feelings such as women harbor;

(hey can share your home, your bed, and your money, but not your life. She knew all about ‘how men are,’ but she had never really spoken to one. She wasn’t going to let him get through.

He made a final effort. “Lynda. I have things I have to say to you. For my sake, if not for yours, let me. You are a giver, and it brings you joy- Don’t let your sister shame you out of it, for the world would be a barren place without those who give as you do. But it can also be a form of giving when you take- Let them give to you, the men that come into your life.

The giving must flow both ways for the bond to be real. All your life, you’ve believed in only one kind of relationship; that in each pair, there is one who is loved, and one who does the loving. It doesn’t have to be that way. Give yourself by taking.

Then you’ll find—“

“Can’t we at least walk while we’re talking? I’m freezing, baby, and I’ve got to get home and get some sleep before work.

I’m going to be dead on my feet as it is.“

He fell silent, allowing her to take his arm and tow him along. Perhaps the time for him to speak to her had passed, irretrievably. Perhaps the magic granted only that one moment of exchange, when me strange man with the pigeons could have spoken to her and she would have felt his words. Now he was too close. He was just another man to her, to feed and support and screw and, on occasion, when bored, to pester and irritate to the very edge of a violent confrontation. She would never hear him again, and he would never know any more of her than he did at this moment. Why was he going with her?

He stopped abruptly- She rounded on him. “Now what?

Baby, I have to—“

“I’m not going home with you, Lynda. We have nothing for one another. There is a thing I have to do tonight, and I have to do it alone. Go along, hurry home to where you’ll be safe. And if you can remember what I said to you, think about my words. I meant them.”

“I don’t believe this! What’s me matter with you, are you crazy or what? You can’t just walk off like that, running off in a Hallowe’en suit with no shoes on! You can’t just walk out on me- You can’t treat me this way! You’ve got no right to treat me like this.”

“I’ve got no right to treat you any other way, either.” She wouldn’t hear him. How can you say good-bye to someone who never even heard you say hello?

For a moment she stared at him, her face an ivory mask in the darkness. Then she burst into tears, stamping her fed on me sidewalk. When he impulsively reached to comfort her, she hammered him with quick, forceless blows of her fists. “Go away, men. Go away! Leave roe alone! I knew you would anyway, sooner or later Everyone always leaves me, or makes me throw them out! All men use roe! And you’re no different.”

She continued to hammer at him wordlessly. He caught one of her flying wrists and restrained it. With her free hand, she dealt him a slap on me side of me head that clapped his ear painfully and stung his cheek. “Lynda‘” he protested, but she swung again, a backhanded slap that smashed his lips against his teeth. Damn, she was strong. He tasted blood. Anger coursed through him and he squeezed the captured wrist and began to turn it. The night pressed close all around diem. Electrically gray-

He let go and sprang back from her so suddenly that she fell. “No!” he told her frenziedly.“No!” He turned and ran from her. She shrieked obscenities after him and the sodden hem of his robe flapped against his ankles as he ran. He fled through the night, a hunted thing. Mir had stalked him well, from a perfect blind. Its raking claws had touched his soul and marked him. It would have him this night.

The city marked his cowardice and turned on him. He collided with dumpsters in alleys. At an intersection a yellow light winked suddenly green, and a car roaring from nowhere blasted its nom at him. He raced up streets that were all uphill. A passing squad car suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree and squealed a u-turn to pursue him. He darted up a crowded alley, knocking over garbage cans as he fled, then turned left and ran half a block before dropping to roll into hiding beneath a parked truck. He lay flat and still, the front of his robe absorbing an oily puddle of rainwater. He held his breath until he could force himself to breathe silently. He thought of Lynda’s eyes gone huge and gray and hungry in the night. He shuddered.

Cassie bad been wrong. It was hiding, not only in the city, but within him. Like was calling to like, and when they united, it would have him. Lynda had come perilously close to letting it out. It had been stalking him all this time.

The cold water met his skin and chilled it painfully. He endured it, lying still until he was sure that the patrol car was far away. Then he rolled from under the truck and stood again in the bitter November wind. There was a heaviness inside him, a sense of carrying as if he bore the seed of a deadly disease. It hid in his chest and in the muscles of his back, questing tentatively into his biceps, probing into his wrists and hands. Waiting. It could materialize in his fingers, or use his feet as its tool. His body was rotten with it. The knowledge disgusted him. It was worse than the idea of internal parasites.

He would have preferred intestines full of tapeworms or the cellular anarchy of cancer, leprosy, or plague. But he had not been given a choice.

“ ‘And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off,’” he muttered.

He laughed bitterly. It was past the stage of a hand or an eye.

He would have to cast his whole body aside to be free of it.

Now, how did one go about that? The word was like a snake sliding through dry summer grasses. Suicide. The cold certainty of it settled on him even as he denied it. Cassie would never have sent him out to face it if that were the only way he could win. But, men, Cassie had not known as much as she thought she did. She would not believe that it lurked inside him: not as a figment of his imagination, but as a fragment of himself.

Maybe Estrella had known more than she had been able to tell.

The Hanged Man. A helpful suggestion from your friendly neighborhood fortune-teller. But it wouldn’t be his foot in the loop. The plan did not please him, but there was a bitter satisfaction in knowing that by losing, he would win.

One detail disturbed him, and it took him a moment to find it. There it was- He did not want anyone weeping over his body. Not Lynda, dramatic in black, not Cassie, shaking her head. A vision came to him, clear and cold as ice. He saw himself standing on one of Seattle’s bridges, the rope looped several times around his throat, simply looped, not a noose at all. He would jump, and the weight of his body at the end of the rope would be enough to break his neck. Then the slow turning of the body at the end of the rope from the natural torque of the woven strands; the rope unwinds itself from me throat, and me body drops neatly down, to be carried away by the moving water. In the morning, an empty rope dangling from a bridge. He was almost positive it would work. If it didn’t, he’d never know. Tidy, he congratulated himself, and tried to ignore the gray chuckling in me back of his mind. As for me rope—had not me dumpsters of the city always provided him with all his needs before? So would they this night. His stride was purposeful.