Nicola Griffith - Always

Kick came back with a few bits of wire. I selected the two longest, un-rusted pieces. “Turn on your stomach.”

“I can’t, my ribs.” His lips were dark.

“Turn on your stomach.”

The ribs crackled as he turned, and he groaned, but I doubted he could feel much. I sat on the back of his knees, facing his feet, and wired his ankles together. Then I sat on his thighs and wired his wrists. His breathing began to sound labored. “I wouldn’t struggle too much when we’re gone,” I said. “Something’s pierced your lung. Wait quietly for the police.”

“You fucked me up.”

“Yes.” I thought of not being able to move, not being able to see, of doubting my own senses. He’d done that to me. “I’d do it again.”

I threw the crowbar into the bushes and turned to Kick. She was real. “Shall we?”

We walked back to the set. I put my arm around her waist.

“So that’s how you hit people,” she said.

“Pretty much.” For no reason, we both laughed, and then there was traffic again on Highway 99, and the world seemed almost ordinary.

“So, what were you going to say, before? When we’d just crossed the road?”

It seemed like a lifetime ago on a planet far, far away, a place where I wasn’t sure and didn’t know. Her waist under my arm was intensely alive. The body knows; I knew. “When you nearly walked up to the light, even though the road was deserted, I was thinking, in some ways you’re more Scandinavian than I am.” I had no idea whether she knew what I was talking about, but neither of us wanted to talk. She leaned into me as we walked and I adjusted my stride so we moved hip to hip. My left thigh hurt.

I still had my arm around her waist when we got to the warehouse. “Get Turtledove,” I said to Janski. “And Rusen or Finkel.”

“I’m not supposed to—”

“Get them now.”

Kick and I stood forehead to forehead, breathing each other’s scent. Someone cleared their throat. Deverell.

“I found Mackie, or rather he found me. Us.” Rusen stepped out of the warehouse, blinking in the dark. “We hurt them. Two of them. Call the police,” I said to Rusen. “Tell them they’ll need an ambulance.”

“You should tell them.”

“Just tell them. Tell them we’ll be…” I looked at Kick, who nodded.

“We’ll be at Kick’s house if they need us. Persuade them not to need us for a while.”

“What—”

“Just do it, Rusen.”

He got out his phone. He looked at my leg. “You’re hurt.”

I looked at the rust mark on my trousers where the crowbar had thumped into my quadriceps. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about anything. It’ll be fine.” It was all going to be fine.

SHE DIDN’Tshake me awake, she simply held me tighter. "I’m here,” she said. “It’s a dream.”

“It came up behind me in the alley,” I said. “In the dark.”

“It’s a dream,” she said.

“No,” I said. “It’s still there.”

I STEPPED OUT OF BOREALIS, DORNAN’S COFFEE SHOP A LITTLE AFTER SUNSET. The seventy-degree dusk smelled of blackened fish from the Bridgetown Grill and water, caught in magnolia blossom cups, evaporating after a long day in sunshine.

I had just told Dornan my news: my mother was getting married and wanted to see me. I didn’t want her in Atlanta, in my life, but she was visiting Seattle. If Dornan wanted a working holiday in the land of coffee, I would cover flight and hotel.

I was fairly sure that the offer to pay would clinch the deal.

My phone rang. I recognized the number but couldn’t place it. I answered.

“Hello.”

“Aud?”

“Who is this?”

“Aud, this is Therese. Aud, it’s… Oh, God. She’s…” Shuddering breath. “Look”—suddenly brisker, almost impersonal, as though she had stepped out of the messy, hyperventilating body and become all frontal cortex—“I’m at Sandra’s house. It’s a terrible thing. I didn’t know who to call. You have to come. There’s blood everywhere. It’s… There’s blood.”

IMAGINE A FULLcup of coffee. Imagine tripping over the rug and flinging it across your white wall and new pale green sofa. That’s a lot of liquid—and a coffee mug is usually less than twelve ounces, less than a third of a liter. The average human body contains 5.6 liters of blood, fifteen or twenty times as much as that cup of coffee. And blood is brilliant red.

Sandra’s house was a neat four-bedroom mock Tudor in one of the developments that had gone up fifteen years ago on the edge of Druid Hills, the kind of place where the kitchen should have been white and blond oak, with mediocre can lights in the ceiling, a tidy little breakfast nook, and children’s pictures tacked brightly to the fridge with animal magnets.

Two of the ceiling lights at the far end of the kitchen, over the counter near the stove, had been hit with arterial blood spray. The end of the room dripped and glowed an eerie vampire-cavern red. Blood dripped onto the body below, thickly, silently, the drops absorbed by its clothes. A pool was spreading from its upper arm. Brachial artery. The boning knife was lying next to the gleaming, slow-moving pool. Henckel. Dishwasher safe.

The purple-green glisten of intestines protruded beneath it. Belly, too. Like a pig.

“Thank God, thank God,” Therese said from the column by the dining room entrance. She clamped a hand on my left arm and tried to pull me into the dining room.

“Stop,” I said, “stop. Don’t move, not even an inch.” I was reading the pool of blood on the floor, the smears and spatters, the little lake on the counter, already dripping off the edge, the streak along the kitchen wall to the dining room, sorting story lines, angles of arc, possibilities. “You mustn’t move anymore,” I said absently.

“But Sandra—”

“Can wait thirty seconds. If we’re to save her, I need to think.”

After a moment, I nodded. “Sandra,” I said, “come here.”

“She can’t—”

“Therese, be quiet now. Get Sandra from the dining room, bring her here. Right now, Therese.”

Sandra’s skin was pale, paler than I’d ever seen it, but apart from the blood there were no marks on her face and hands that had not been there at the last class.

“His blood’s still coming out!” Therese said. “He’s alive. He’s—”

“Not really,” I said. No medical facility on earth could save this man: this was simple hydrostatic draining, not the vivid spurt of a pumping heart. His blood levels had already fallen below the crucial forty-percent level. Even without the gaping belly wound, he was dead. “Have you called the police?”

“No,” Therese said. “No, I suppose I should. I just didn’t…” She trailed off and looked at me.

She just didn’t want it to be real.

“Where are the children?”

“I don’t—”

“Sandra, where are the children?”

“Sunday school.” She sounded quite composed.

“When will they be back?”

“At seven-twenty.” It was a little after six now. One less thing to worry about.

“Your husband—”

“That’s not my husband.”

I breathed out slowly, deliberately. “This man on the floor is not your husband?”

“My husband is dead.”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s dead, and we have to do something about that.”

“That’s not my husband,” she said again. “That’s George.”

In. Out. “This man on the floor, with all the blood, is not your husband. He’s someone called George.”

“That’s right.”

“But you killed him.”

“He’s dead?”

“He is.”