Page 3 of Unholy Bond
Nothing. Not a whisper, not the faintest tremor of resonance.
It’d been like this for hours. With each passing minute, the pressure behind my eyes built until I thought my skull would split along its old tectonic seams, the lines that still ached when I remembered being Hyperion. Most days I kept that part of me locked down, but it came out when I felt threatened or when I got drunk enough to forget why it was safer not to. It was out now, stomping around the perimeter of my thoughts, wanting to murder the world for taking her from me.
A low growl started in my chest and bled into the upholstery. The sofa groaned, the seams pulling, the metal frame beneath beginning to warp.
Ian entered first. His shirt was pressed with the collar open. He saw me on the couch and stopped, one hand still on the doorknob. “You’re at it again?”
“Come to mock, or join in?” My own voice surprised me. It sounded foreign, a little guttural, like I’d swallowed jagged gravel instead of vodka all evening.
Ian shrugged and crossed the room, unbuttoning the cuff of his shirt as he went. “I thought you’d be done by now. You’re not exactly subtle with this shit.” He gestured at the dented table and the way the walls vibrated in time with my pulse.
“I can’t feel her,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “She’s angry, that’s all. She’ll come back when she wants something.”
“No,” I hissed. “You don’t get it.” I stood, towering over the coffee table and Ian both. “It’s not anger. It’s absence.”
Absence meant math, not mood. If she’d slipped off the index of the world, fallen between the stitches into the seams, we could howl all night and never touch her. Only the Void ran in the marrow.
He weighed that for a moment, then nodded slowly, as if I’d confirmed a theory he’d rather not be right about. An idea he’d thought of but had refused to accept until I’d spoken it out loud.
Levi arrived with the subtlety of a missile strike. The elevator chimed, and he stepped out laughing at something only he found funny. His hair was still dripping from the rain outside. He swept it back, sending a spray of water behind him, and was already halfway to the bar when he noticed us.
“What’s with the funeral?” he asked, pouring a glass of tequila from a bottle that probably cost more than my gold watch.
I didn’t answer. Ian didn’t either. It took a lot to silence Levi, and for a second, I savored it.
He put the bottle down. “Okay, who died?”
I stared at him, and the glass nearly cracked in his grip. He noticed, set it down, then looked me over with something like genuine concern.
“She’s not answering you,” he said, more a statement than a question.
“She’s gone.” I made the words as blunt as possible. “I can’t sense her at all.”
He smiled, but it was nervous, the kind of smile that telegraphs you know you’re about to get hit. “She’s a big girl. You think this is the first time she’s ghosted us?”
I ignored him. “Ian, show him.”
Ian looked irritated but did as asked. He closed his eyes, breathed deep, and extended his senses. If anyone could, it was him. He was always best at tracking, the only one who could ever keep up with me in the old world. He twitched, a faint ripple passing over his face, then opened his eyes and looked at Levi.
“She’s not here,” he said, “Not in this plane.”
Levi rolled his eyes. “Spare me the drama. I’ll show you how it’s done.” He didn’t walk so much as blur, one moment standing at the bar and the next sliding out of phase, gone. The air snapped in his wake, static popping along the countertop. I’d seen him do this a thousand times, and I still hated it.
The silence in his absence was worse than before. Ian poured himself a drink, and I stared at my hands, the knuckles pale, veins standing out like map lines.
“He’ll be back,” Ian said. “Or he’ll get stuck somewhere and we can finally have some peace.”
I snorted. “You’d miss him. We always do.”
He gave me a sidelong look. “Do you remember when you tried to kill him? On that beach in Tyre. Three days, nonstop.”
I remembered, of course. I remembered every time I’d tried to kill either of them. In some ways violence was our purest form of communication. I shrugged. “He deserved it.”
“He always does.”
We lapsed into silence again. The rain picked up, slashing harder at the windows, as if the city wanted to get in and devour us along with its own. There’d been so much rain lately. As if the world itself was trying to wash its own sins away. If so, it was failing miserably. I sat, but didn’t relax, my spine burning with a need to do something, anything. I remembered the wars, not the tidy human ones with treaties and ceremonies, but the old, slow wars that were measured in mountains razed, continents shattered. This situation would have resolved itself by now, back then. I would have leveled the world until I found her.
