Eileen Wilks - Mortal Ties

She needed to go. Still she paused, looking at the ghost of a man who’d been her enemy and was now determined to be her partner. Or whatever. “Tell me something.”

He looked wary. “If I can.”

“You killed that woman, or arranged her death somehow. The one with the Fire Gift. The one who killed your wife.”

His face didn’t change, but for a long moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally he spoke, his voice entirely level. “I did.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

The pause was even longer this time, and his voice was different. Husky. “Oh, yeah. I fucking loved it.”

BEINGdead sucked.

He hated it when she went in a car. You’d think the plane trip back here from D.C. would’ve been worse, but somehow a plane—at least a big one like the 757 she’d flown in—established its own space, a locus he could hang onto. He’d been able to hold together okay in the plane.

But cars were a bitch. Al Drummond sailed along behind the white Ford like he’d been tied to the bumper. He didn’t have to work at it. That wasn’t the problem. All he had to do was relax, and she pulled him with her.

He didn’t feel the wind, the pressure of air zooming past, shoving at his hair and face and skin, making his eyes stream. That would’ve been fine. That would’ve been great, but he never felt the air anymore. It was the sheer speed that tattered him, made him into something that didn’t feel, didn’t have eyes to stream, didn’t have ears to hear or any goddamn way to experience the world. Most of the time he felt like he had a body, even if it wasn’t the same kind he’d had before he died. But not when Yu went zooming around in a damn car.

You were gone for over a month…

He’d lied to her. That didn’t bother him. He was a good liar. It wasn’t enough to just smooth your face out to official blankness. Any moron could learn to do that, but a good cop learned to lie, too. But it had been luck, not skill, that made this particular lie work. He’d been shook up enough for it to show, so she’d put his hesitation down to that.

And if she hadn’t, so what? He wasn’t going to tell her where he’d been.

Yu was right, damn her. He’d thrown in on the wrong side.

Twenty-seven years of law enforcement. Twenty-seven years of stakeouts, bad food, and the slow, painstaking build of cases some asshole of a defense lawyer couldn’t shred. Plenty of failures along the way, but some triumphs, too. He’d been a good cop.

And he’d thrown it away. Wiped it out. It didn’t take a genius to spot the when and why. The job had reached out in the person of Martha Billings and killed Sarah. He’d reached back to return the favor. Most people would say that’s where he stepped wrong, where he made the decision that destroyed him. He didn’t agree. It hadn’t felt like a choice, like being faced with a decision he could choose or reject. Martha Billings had killed Sarah. Martha Billings would die.

She had, too. Burned to a crisp. Just like Sarah.

And Yu wanted to know if he’d enjoyed it. That memory was one bright, hot spot of pleasure in the endless gray his life had become the moment he learned Sarah was gone.

No, killing Billings wasn’t where he’d taken a horribly wrong turn. Maybe that had been wrong, but only in the unstoppable way that cancer is wrong. Staying on the job after he killed her, though, hiding what he’d done—that’s what twisted him. He should’ve done what he had to do and turned himself in. At the time, he’d thought that getting himself thrown in prison would’ve handed Billings a postmortem victory. At the time, he’d felt that stopping Billings wasn’t enough. He had to stop everyone like her, too.

At the time, he’d been bumfuck crazy. Which was why he hadn’t noticed the other reason he stayed on the job. So he could piss on it.

The job had killed Sarah, and he’d wanted revenge on it, too. Only he hadn’t known that’s what he was doing, not until a month or so after he died, when he’d done what he’d told Yu was impossible. He left.

Getting himself fully, properly dead turned out to be harder than he’d thought.

Not that he’d seen extinction as the only possibility, but he’d been pretty sure that’s what would happen. His world—the only world left to him—was about two hundred yards in diameter. Get three hundred feet away from Yu in any direction and everything turned fuzzy. Keep going and it got…not dark. Darkness was a lack of light, and out there in the gray it was like vision itself didn’t exist. Out there was nothing .

Nothing had sounded like a damn good place to end up. He’d expected to become nothing, too, when he left Yu, though he’d conceded it was possible he’d get that white light people yammered about, the one that hadn’t shown up when Big Thumbs pulled the trigger. Or maybe…

He hadn’t really let himself think about that “maybe.” He didn’t deserve it. But it was like a rope—there were two ends to it, and if the end he held was grimy and black with guilt, the other end was as shiny and right as any of the angels he didn’t believe in.

Mostly, though, he’d expected to die for good. Drummond hadn’t believed in God for years, much less an afterlife…though Sarah used to tell him he wasn’t a true unbeliever, just too mad at the deity to give Him the time of day. She’d been at least somewhat right. He figured that any God who let the sort of shit happen that he’d seen over and over wasn’t worth much. Sure, you could blame it on free will and people being assholes, but if so, God had done a pisspoor job of creating when it came to man, hadn’t He?

So he’d left, walking off into the gray. Pushed ahead even when he didn’t have any sense of a body, when there was nothing left of darkness or light, no whisper of sensation, barely the memory of it. Slogged on until he couldn’t tell if he was moving anymore, until even the blasted whatever-it-was that tied him to Yu grew so faint he couldn’t find it.

Maybe he’d stopped then. Maybe he’d kept going. He had no way of knowing. But still moving or just plain still, he’d waited. And waited.

At some point—it had seemed like hours, but might have been weeks or minutes, given how little time meant in the gray—he’d known he’d been wrong about that “maybe.” Wrong that it might be even a little bit possible. Wrong, too, about how desperately he’d wanted it to happen anyway.

If Sarah had had any way of coming to him, she would have come then.

He’d broken down then, broken apart. Sobbed like a baby, and if he hadn’t had eyes and a body to sob with, that made it worse. There was no Sarah. There would never be a Sarah for him again.

There was no anything…but him.

People think they know what alone means. Shit, he’d thought he did, thought he was more loner than not. He hadn’t had the least damn clue. Broken, bereft of bones, breath, sight, hearing, touch, he’d known that the gray was hell, and he’d waited for hell to eat him.

It hadn’t.

Not that he knew what had happened. Maybe, like he told Yu, he’d slept. At some point he’d drifted back to himself, wisping around like a bit of fluff so insubstantial that gravity was a lesser force than the eddies of air he floated on. He’d come back soft and slow and gentle, and found himself lying on a bed in one of the guest rooms in Yu’s D.C. house. He’d come back knowing two things.

While he was away or asleep or whatever, someone had talked to him. Not Sarah, and he didn’t think it was God, but someone. And he had to help Lily Yu.

However little either of them liked it.

What I want to hear, she’d said, is that you’ve changed your mind about magic and the people who use it.