Michelle Zink - Kiss Me Deadly - Tales of a Paranormal Romance

I hope that wherever Sullivan is, he can somehow hear us, and he knows that music can sound like this without her. Without Them. He only needs me.

At Cú Chulainn’s worst, when he was in his warp spasms, his blood would start to boil. They used to put him into barrels of cold water to cool him down after he’d gone all battle-rage, and he would explode the barrels with heat until finally he achieved room temperature.

By the time I get to Sullivan’s house after the session, my blood is just about hot enough to cook a chicken. Fifteen years I’d known him and never stood him up.

I sit myself on his front step and I wait. I am still humming with the music from before. When he finally appears, emerging from the night, hands in his pockets, he doen’t seem surprised to see me.

I stand up to face him, not letting him past me on the stairs. “You want to tell me where you were?”

I can smell it on him, though—clover and spring and flowers, all of them out of season for a D.C. fall. He’s been with her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, but not in that way that means he actually is sorry. The way that means he’s sorry he has to say sorry.

“You told me to tell you when you were doing something stupid,” I say. “You’re doing something stupid.”

He stares at my hair. “I want something more,” he says.

“Then we’ll go find it.”

“Something more than that,” he says. “Something more than here. ”

“And I’m telling you that what’s she’s offering is a cheat,” I say. “Short cut. Is that what you want? Or do you want to earn it yourself?”

Sullivan eyes are still fixed on my hair, or rather, the lack of it. “I’ll never get to that place without her. Without Them. I’m sorry.” And this time, I can tell that he really is sorry, because he’s made up his mind.

I feel my blood reach boiling point. Everything inside me has shifted to something else and I’m no longer the same person I was five minutes before.

I smash my fist into his face.

I hear the bones in my hand hit his cheek, like knuckles being popped. Sullivan stumbles back, holding his face. I am ready to hit him again, fueled by the memory of him kissing her. What I can see of his expression around his hand is shocked as he realizes I’m about to hit him again.

“Anne,” he says. “Anne, please.”

I haven’t heard my real name in almost a decade.

My fist slowly drops to my side. I’m aware that it’s throbbing and painful. I think I’ve broken my hand on his face.

“Anne,” he says again. “I’m sorry.” And this is a third kind of sorry.

My mind is still churning with the sound of my real name in his mouth. With the memory of one night eight years ago, a girl holding a baseball bat and a boy cradling his broken arm.

“I’ve broken my hand,” I tell him. “On your face.”

He lowers his fingers from his cheek; it’s turning purple already. “Then we’re even.”

“We’re not,” I say. “Don’t go with her, Sullivan.”

“Anne—”

“Don’t call me that,” I say. “I haven’t been Anne in a long time. Should I start calling you Patrick again?”

He looks away. He’s already changing, I see now. He needs a new name entirely. Maybe she’s already given him one.

We were punk gods of Irish music, and we were going to change the world. It was supposed to be the two of us against the world.

(I miss him, still.)

I think I love him, Daddy, is what she’d said. This was what Cal was thinking about when he heard that the van had gone off the road.

There were five young people in the van, but that number had not been easy for the initial officers at the site to determine. Not at first. Some of the bodies had been thrown from the vehicle, probably when it caromed off the red oak, but possibly after, when it slid careening down the culvert and tipped over onto the passenger side. But even before there was an accurate count, many members of the Sanders volunteer fire department were crying. Cal Wilson was the Sanders town constable, and he was trying his best to keep from coming unglued, but it was difficult. He knew at least two of the teens who had been traveling in the van. He knew they’d been in there because he’d waved good-bye to them as the van had pulled out of his driveway.

It would be Christmas in two weeks.

They had to cut the van open. They peeled the roof back like the lid of a can of pudding. There were two teens still in the vehicle. Two more by the tree, one in the culvert. Everyone on scene was thinking alcohol was involved, but no one wanted to say it. The emergency personnel were gentle, as though they were lifting babies from cribs rather than bodies from a wreck.

The living wouldn’t look at each other, and as soon as vitals were checked, and found to be defunct, they would not look at the dead, either.

“Donny,” Mike Smolenski, the newest volunteer, was not much older than the kids who died in the wreck. “I think I saw this one move.”

Donny glanced over at “this one,” a girl he knew. Not well, but enough to feel and predict all the resonance her death would have. He knew many of these kids, by sight if not by name, and he knew that no matter what happened in the next couple days, this would be the accident that they would be talking about fifty years from now, the crash that would be etched into the town consciousness permanently, as though with a rusty nail. This would be like the day, twenty-seven years back, when the O’Briens’ horse barn caught fire and five horses burned to death. The only thing people talked about when they talked about that fire was the sound of the horses screaming.

There wasn’t any screaming now, on this night. Not yet.

“She’s moving, Donny. I really saw her move.” Mike sounded terrified.

“Too early,” Donny said. He had heard of some coming back that fast, but more typically, it would be anywhere from six hours to a day. There was the one time that a kid, a drowning victim, had sat up in the back of the ambulance, unable to talk because water had filled his lungs. But all the others, that Donny knew of personally, took their time about it.

He’d just never heard of one coming back that fast. They weren’t sure how long the bodies had been there, but the trucker who called it in said that the snow hadn’t filled in the tire tracks yet, the treads like a long black snake uncoiling off the road. Donny’d arrived seven minutes later, and Cal rolled up three minutes after that.

“She’s moving. Her eyelids are moving.”

Donny went to her. He felt for a pulse, and it wasn’t there and then it was. Faint. An echo of life.

Donny swore. “We’ve got one still alive!” he said. “Alive!”

He yelled orders, people moved. Cal Wilson was running. Mike moved. Other than she-of-the-fluttering-eyelids, none of the other bodies on the ground had moved.

Cal Wilson ran over too. The girl on the ground was bruised and bleeding, but she wasn’t his. Hope, like love, can be a dagger in the heart.

Not his. Not Mandy.

She was still in the front seat of the van.

They made Sanders High School the center for grief counseling. There were those in the area who thought that was an idiotic idea, seeing the school as a large brick-and-chalk-dust reminder of those very kids they’d just lost, but there were others who understood. Sanders High School, for many, was the last remaining edifice that held some sense of the community that Sanders once was. It was where Mayor Marshland had town meetings. It was where the rotary club met. It was where the spaghetti suppers and the fundraisers and the socials were held. It was where Alma Gustavson held adult ed classes in macramé and needlepoint.