Who: Lyra and Graham What: A stand-off When: Recently Where: Botanical Gardens Warnings: There be a heck of a lot of creepy.
The nature of Graham (and Shane’s) work came with a certain amount of discretion. A balance had to be found between grimy back alleys and public places like restaurants, but with time came familiarity, an established pattern, and so long as it wasn’t predictable business went smoothly. More often than not it was Shane who went out and actually dealt with buyers, while he stayed back behind the scenes, working the finances and logistics. Most people didn’t think he was smart. It was a good act. It also meant that he didn’t go out much, not really. He had Shane, and Clem was in town, but friends weren’t a big part of his life and that was okay with him. He was a simple man. He didn’t need much. Even this, striking out on his own and partnering up with Shane, was more about freedom than money. He liked not having to answer to anyone, or follow orders like a dog. It was nice.
Today was one of those rare instances where he met a customer, and afterward, since he was already out, he went for a walk. He liked taking pictures and sending them to his son, who was grown enough to be an adult but not so much that he didn’t like seeing what Vegas was like. Visits were often talked about but never decided upon. His son knew some things, not everything, but enough to not push. And so he walked the strip, and he stopped at the Bellagio because he liked the gardens there; it was something Lorelei had liked, too, and they’d gone a couple of times before she’d died. Maybe he’d take some more pictures, he thought. It was quiet, which was nice, and most tourists didn’t pay too much attention to him, which he liked too. Sometimes he liked to talk but sometimes his own thoughts were enough.
Lyra did not stay in one place. She was rootless, the jetsam of another life, clay formed by heavy hands and crafted with thin puppet-strings to tie her to one city, one life, one place. She had been seventeen the last time she had stayed in Vegas this long, and the knowledge of it had threadlets in her blood, pulsed alongside her heart in the cavity-cradle of her ribs. There was nothing to it, it could be a decision as any other decision she made, dictated by whim but there was something under-the-bed nightmare about it, time spilling like sand through glass, clock-face smiling with the cobbled teeth of her father. She had stayed too long and it ticked over in the back of her head as she went to the one place in the city that felt like it could carve space between seconds, give her longer to think.
The Bellagio gardens had been her favorite for years. They were not taking in the view from the Pont Neuf and they weren’t the beaches of Java. They weren’t listening to the mournful wails of the street cats walking on the Roman streets in the dark but the smell was crisp and light and green and the flowers were thought through, regimented in their careful artlessness. She had begun as a small girl, with her hand threaded through that of a larger, older, silent presence who had shadowed her heels like a ghost as she grew older, and now she was herself, and she walked alone. She left behind the Vega which felt too full, cloying with another’s breath added to the haze, and she walked until the muscles behind her knees and in her calves burned.
She was a sharp-cut figure in all of it, black that dripped from the knife-blade of shoulders, the creamy pallor of indoor skin. She walked without predetermining a path which was best, and she let her thoughts unspool until the fear of it, the livid taste of too long mocking from the back of her tongue faded beneath the white-nothing of muscles and her own breathing and the soft scent of the gardens.
Graham had learned a long time ago to be aware of his surroundings, to sense the presence of others without needing to look. Now it was instinct, unthinking, and he didn’t pay it all that much attention. Of course there were other people here. But he could shut them all out, he was good at that. Make them fade away and conjure up a ghost from the past, like he’d done so many times in the past. But this time he glanced up, glanced over, and the woman in black with dark hair and pale skin stood out because of more than just her appearance. Fear was something he no longer felt, and few things surprised him these days, but the sight of her elicited a sharp, stabbing pain in his chest that came from old things, anger and hatred and ache, and if he closed his eyes he was certain he’d see a man standing there instead of a woman. A man he’d once worked for, a man whose death had brought only relief, no sorrow.
She’d been a girl, before. When he was around and saw her in the capacity of business, one of her father’s dogs, and she was a girl no more. He knew he was not a good man but any child raised by Constantos could only be something much, much worse. Graham knew his and Shane’s severing of ties was seen as a betrayal, he knew he had likely evaded death on her orders more than once. But he didn’t turn his back, and he didn’t leave.
“Pretty.” It was a general statement, said to no one. She didn’t have to acknowledge it. He wondered if she would.
They’d all been puppets once. Loose strings, hung up on pegs in the closet, taken down and made to dance. Even she, in the soft, black-as-black he’d chosen for her, even she with the tight, black braids along her cheeks, she with the games and the high, sharp little laugh as her father taught her fearlessness along with the fear. Lyra straightened, her middle finger closed against her thumb and pulled at the shiny, green leaf her fingers had idled over until it plucked from the thin stem-strand. She recognized the voice; didn’t all dogs bay the same way, life-long? She had never been a child with choices.
Lyra lifted her head and the sharp planes of her face were like twisting a knife to catch the light, blade-clear. “Graham.” He looked older, haggard. Running forever would do that, nightmares on his heels. He had never called her anything but her own name, the shadow and duality of a man who’d made her twist, the pain of betrayal. Both men, now washed ashore in Vegas beyond the reach of killers bought and paid for, who’d come home with empty palms. She had been sixteen when they’d fled. Sixteen when they’d shouldered through the ravages, the weak spots papered over with the sick taste of fear at the back of her mouth. It had been a decade; she’d imagined him taller. Older. Something more than merely a man.
She began to laugh. “Do I imagine you?”
There was no surprise in her recognition; in fact, Graham would have been surprised had she looked at him as one looked upon a stranger. He had been loyal to her father, oh, yes. Loyal before years had been repaid by tearing the one thing he loved most from him. Afterward, the loyalty had been false. Some things, when shattered, could not be repaired, and when Constantos had died his one regret was that he hadn’t been the one to watch his life fade from his eyes, the same eyes which had been capable of striking fear into so many. Lyra, he thought, had the same eyes. But he felt no fear, not now. His son was far, far away, and the boy knew enough to understand why he could not come here, why his father could only visit and could only visit occasionally. There was nothing she could do to hurt him now. When his wife had died, he had not been dragged kicking and screaming into the dark waters of loss; no, he had gone willingly, and he had sank back without struggle and allowed himself to drown. Lyra had been young, young for such betrayal, but staying had never been an option. Death would have been preferable.
“No.” He smiled, a faded thing, like a copy of a copy. “Do I imagine you?”
She had a memory like the pages of a book, dead things trapped between the leaves, discarded wings from long-caught butterflies, the traceries of veins from fripperies long torn apart. Lyra remembered the Shadow, constant companion to the man who’d been barking laughter and breadth of self. She remembered his laughter; it being brief, quiet. Like a clock unexpected to tick, wound down in a corner. She had been sixteen and they had left her with the remnants, torn-silk tatters of what her father had stretched out like a map. Betrayal ran beneath her collarbone and beat there like a pulse, filled with quiet promise. He looked no different. He felt no different.
“Would you imagine me?” She was arch, feline. Her mouth curved like a glass of Scotch set before an addict. Lyra had grown. She had been made and unmade half a dozen times since he and his friend had run, loyalty scattered like coins. “Do you think of me so very often?” The smile sharded through, light closed off by cloud. Her fingers raked through the leaves, she twisted off a bloom as if she was entitled to it. “Do you dream?” She put her back to the few people scattered amongst the gardens, the supple pliancy of vertebrae beneath the black silk, inclined her head.
Would he imagine her? Graham considered. He imagined his wife. She was his constant, dreams spilled over into reality and he never tried to fix the leak. He let it be. Sometimes, he imagined Constantos; in the corner of his eye, in the shadows. He imagined the dead. He did not imagine the living. “No,” he said, calm honesty. But did he think of her, yes, he did. Not often, but he did. In the early days he wondered how little Lyra was managing on her own. Later, he wondered how much she hated them, how badly she wanted both himself and Shane dead at her feet. A very, very small part of him felt a spark of sympathy for the girl who’d never had a chance to be anything other than what her father had wanted her to be, but it was not and had not been enough to keep him at her side.
“Wouldn’t imagine you,” he added a moment later, clarification. “Do you think of me often? Or just sometimes?” But oh, yes, he dreamed. He dreamed without knowing if he ever woke, sometimes, or if he slept still. Other times he did know. He nodded. Yes, he dreamed. In his dreams time reversed itself and froze, and he wished it could last forever.
Lyra imagined no one. She dreamed soundlessly, the creep of black and white, shadows dancing in the corners of her room. She dreamed occasionally, distantly, of Anais, of white fingers and lioness eyes, of the blush of her throat. She slept in half a dozen places across the world and when she slept there was no time for dreams of dogs gone rabid, running wild. She looked at him and the ink-spill of her pupil was wide in sea-glass green. “I never think of you.” She pulled the blossom apart, the scatter of petals like blood.
She had no sympathy. It had been excised with a scalpel-blade, cut apart as her seams had been unpicked and reknit. Little Lyra had grown from the skinny teenager into an adult and she stood now amidst the scattered petals and she looked at him with soft curiosity, as if she were a creature without teeth, without blades and nightmares. “What do you dream of, Graham?” She took a step forward, and the petals rolled off her skirts like an undulation, surf on the tide.
There was no reaction save for a very small smile. Graham hadn’t expected her to answer in the affirmative. Just as, he was certain, her father had never thought of him. His fingers brushed over petals and then dropped, and though his body turned he didn’t move. No steps forward, no steps back. He would never cower in her presence. Once, he’d been a dog on a leash, but no more.
He knew better than to think her harmless. “Not going to tell you about my dreams,” he said. He tipped his head to the side and regarded her when she moved forward, but he remained where he was. “Should I ask how you’ve been? Keep up polite conversation?”
Constantos, Lyra knew, thought of no one. He was an island, a wine-dark sea and a starless night, untouched by anyone and anything. She wondered now and again, between the stories of her mother as a thankless whore and those that made her a virtuous Madonna who had died with her knees still damp with childbirth-blood, if her mother had touched him at all. He could, quite easily, have killed her mother himself, a bullet in the back of her head, cleanly efficient, unemotional. He had done it to many, she had peeped behind doors and cried the first time she’d seen it, and he had bade her come and stand at his side, to hold his free hand so that she was part of it. It had been her first death. She had been four.
She smiled like oil poured over glass, like doors shut tight and sealed with fresh paint. There were many skeletons locked up in the Vega and some buried beneath the boards. “No, you do not think you owe me anything,” she agreed with the careful candor of thought, all the artisanal grace of a fan snapping into play. “You would not give me dreams, and you do not give me blood.” Lyra laughed, delicately dissonant. “I am as I’ve always been, Graham. How is your son?” She knew exactly how he was. And where he was.
Graham’s gaze was steady, and this time he did not smile. “You aren’t owed my dreams, and your father took his blood.” Taken, because it hadn’t been given. His wife was not a sacrificial lamb he’d offered up to the man he worked for and had he thought, for one second, that her life would be in danger he’d have sent her far, far away, as he had with his son. There was no blood left to give. The part of him that mattered was already dead and he would take her blood before he would ever let her to do his son what her father had done to his wife.
The mention of the boy might have been meant to elicit a reaction, or maybe Lyra just wanted to see if it would. He made sure it didn’t. “Fine,” he said coolly. He rarely spoke of his son with anyone aside from Shane; Clem was more recent.
He had run when she was too young to pull the strings to make him dance, to haul him back. Her father had ruled with the blade of the knife kissed up to the veins that marked the throat, his greed had kept it pressed there but a dead man’s hand could hold no knife. Lyra thought perhaps the blade had swung too quickly, separated the man from his reason for loyalty as cleanly as an animal from his skin, but Constantos was not spoken of. His house was silent from his name. “You can see her in him,” she said now, calm as in her own place, calm as the blossom undisturbed. “Your boy.” She had only the vaguest of memories of a photograph, damp from palms. But she could see it. She didn’t know if he had any salt left in his veins, or nothing but fresh water.
“What are you doing back here, Graham?”
Graham didn’t need to look at his son to see his wife. He saw her when he was asleep and he saw her when he was awake. He saw her around corners, in diners, in his bed. He felt her, too, and that was how he knew there was something broken in his mind; he just didn’t care all that much. “What I see or don’t see is no concern of yours.” He’d learned cold, the opposite of Southern warmth, and he used it then. “Not back here, Lyra. Just here.” As for what he was doing, he ignored that part of the question.
There were no faces that haunted her. She had seen dozens, she had held a blade and a gun and killed enough of those faces that perhaps one or two should sift to the surface of the murk of memory like stones turned over by a tide, but there was nothing. No one. Lyra wondered sometimes if the nothingness was usual or if it had been made, what should-have-been pried apart with Constantos’ thumbs until nothingness grew. If perhaps, had there been no Constantos, she would have been like the shell of the man in front of her, a husk with everything he had loved, wanted, needed pried from him like a pearl pulled from an oyster until it had nothing left, nor the will to make it. But there had been Constantos. There were no questions.
She smiled, as if the South had rippled warm through his voice; she remembered old gravel and quiet observation, he had undone a part of himself, remade himself. She liked that. “My concern? You have never been my concern.” Lyra said it sweetly, cool as early morning in the desert, starved of warmth. “You return. You were here once and you are here now. Alive.”
He didn’t like her smile. It made him think of Constantos, of his smile; in the early days, that smile had brought fear when he still remembered what fear was. It was the realization that he’d gotten in too deep, that he’d made a mistake. And then, when Graham had forgotten fear in the haze of loss, that smile made acid burn in his belly, hatred and bitterness that grew and grew until it ate away at loyalty entirely.
“Good,” was his response to her sweet assurance that he’d never been his concern, even if he didn’t quite believe it. “I was around. Been here for a while. Alive. Plan to stay that way.” He regarded her almost skeptically. “Do you care?”
There were names floating around in lists in the Vega, written down in ink instead of blood. Graham’s name was written up, linked with Shane Alexander’s, until the two were one, a thorn to be cut out. Lyra crumbled her fingers free of the sticky pollen of the dead blossom and looked at Graham directly, the pale green of her eyes empty as sea-glass. “This is my city,” she said with her fingers knotted together like the little girl had stood once in the same ink black. “If I cared enough to end you here, you would be dead already.”
"Your city?" It was something her father would have said. Entitled, like kings and queens from days near forgotten, but Graham served no monarch and he no longer owed her his loyalty. Those ties had been cut long ago. “You own it?” He didn’t sound all that impressed. Tired, maybe, because he’d heard it all before. And death, death didn’t frighten him. Not even Lyra could kill one who was already dead. It was simply a matter of waiting until that final tie was severed so he could join his wife. His son was elsewhere, his son was living his own life and he was living it well; that was all he wanted, and so there was nothing left for him there or anywhere. He lived, and he waited. “Death doesn’t scare me,” he told her. “You don’t either.” He shrugged.
Lyra’s head cocked, the avian angularity sharp and the eyes bright. Death was a bogeyman beneath the bed to so many. Knife-blades and poison, strangulation and suffocation, everyone feared. It was as human as the ability to breathe, to love - dying was an obsession. The man she had remembered Graham to be had feared. He had not been unusual, he had to have feared - or he would have been a curiosity, to be cultivated by her father, and she did not think he had been that. His skin might be in flitters, had he been a curiosity or his wife kept, her bones strung together with silk until she danced at command. But this gray man was not as tall as she had imagined, he was quieter than the shadow-man she remembered.
“I do not,” she agreed, because he did not look scared. He did not look worried, he did not look as if caring came easily to him, anymore. He was like a mirror that had hung on the wall, long after the glass had broken in its frame and could reflect nothing but its own brokenness in its pieces. She stepped closer, until she could see the lines on his face, the dull color in his eyes, until he was a man who was old rather than a child’s memory. “Do you look to be scared, or do you welcome it?”
Once, before he had been broken and glued clumsily back together, Graham had known fear. It had gone hand-in-hand with loyalty, one kept him tied to the other and one had come first. But things were different now. He wouldn’t run, he wouldn’t flee. Neither would Shane but for different reasons, he knew that. They were similar but not the same. He didn’t try to straighten when she approached, nor did he slouch and attempt to put distance between them. He simply stood, as he had been standing all the while, and watched. The little girl had indeed grown into a woman, and once he might have been proud, had his loyalty to her father remained, had he remained.
“No,” he said. “Don’t look to be scared. Don’t welcome fear.” But maybe she was talking about death, and his gaze flickered, shifted to something over her shoulder. There was nothing but space and plants, but he saw something else, someone else, and he smiled at the ghost of what had made him whole. He knew what was waiting for him when he died, and he was just fine with it. “When death comes for me, Lyra, I’ll welcome him. When he comes.”
She watched the way his eyes fell, the glitter in them like a shimmer in broken glass, at the warmth caught momentarily in them like something long dead held fast in amber. Lyra saw warmth in the way she held a blade, in the twist of Anais’s smile like a child with something awful in cupped hands. She did not know what it was he was looking at but it was plain it was something. He had been perfectly broken, and Lyra admired that the way she admired ruin in things that were not hers.
“He,” she said and into Lyra’s voice crept a note of something alike to curiosity. Close to there was nothing of the little-girl’s roundness in the sharpened planes of her face, or the milky green of her eyes but that one piece of curiosity and she looked at him now as she had the silent man who had done as he was told for so many years. And then she smiled. “You think Death is a man?”
It was an instinctive thing, that which rolled off the tongue without need for thought. He. Back home, when Graham was small, Death had always been ‘he’. God, too, was ‘he’, and in his mind the two were linked. Perhaps it just seemed more polite, as absurd a thought as it might be, than referring to such a force as ‘it’. “Death is more than a man,” he said, and there was a hint of wry humor, as though the woman standing before him wouldn’t have liked to see him dead at her feet. “Not human. Prefer I call death something else?”
Death had always been male in Constantos’ house. He was as full of pride as if he were Death himself or he had him at his heels and there was no chance of Death being a woman or anything female. Women were whores or mothers or irrelevant and Lyra’s face took on a faint glassiness. Anais taught death a lesson about killing with a smile, about violence held in pink and white hands.
“Death comes no matter what you call it,” she said, “Welcomed or not,” and there was an echo of the same dry humor refracted back. She thought death was a woman, capricious, who would not be commanded. Lyra liked the thought of it.
Oh, he knew. Graham could not imagine that his Lorelei had welcomed death, he never knew if the bullet had been fired before she’d had time to register what was happening but if she had, if she’d had clarity, then he imagined she would have resisted in whatever way she could. She had wanted to live, but Death didn’t care. He took her regardless. “Yes,” he said. “I know. Some fight. Some say no. I won’t.”
It was curious, a man who had resisted being found, cut down (and he would be, Lyra was certain of it, eventually. No one won out forever; her bones would be sand one day and he wouldn’t matter but until then, he mattered a great deal) who did not care if Death took him or not, simply the hand on the blade. But his wife, his woman, she had been a nothing, a hiccup to her father and now she was everything, the separation. Would it be different had Constantos stayed his hand? Lyra’s face remained impassive, the green eyes ink-dark and trained on his face. There were men at the mouth of the gardens but they were not here. They wouldn’t take the shot anyway, not with him so close. It was a risk. Lyra liked them, she liked all risks, but risks were enjoyed by so few. They were careful, instead.
“Do you promise?” She laid a hand against his cheek, cool as water. He was old, he was not the man who’d been a companion however unwilling to a girl who had looked for anyone who was still themselves, not a cypher to march at a man’s call. She had liked looking for it, but he had only pieces now. It was a pity. The gesture looked, perhaps, like that of a lover -- or even a benediction. It was something less tokenistic, just the fringe of her fingers over his jaw. “Not to fight?” Her smile curled, mocking.
Graham kept his reactions tightly restrained, wound up and tied beneath his skin. When she touched him he did not cringe, did not draw back, nor did his expression change. But the dead woman whom he saw over Lyra’s shoulder was displeased, a maelstrom in her eyes and a scowl on her lips. His gaze flickered there again, briefly, and then back. He smiled. “I promise you nothing.” He stepped back and away, and turned. Never would he have shown his back to Constantos but she was not him and things were different now. “Goodbye, Lyra. Enjoy the gardens.”
She let him go, she stood with the blooms at her feet and the sun at her back and she watched the shadow-man go and she laughed for his promises would mean nothing had he made them. But he did not care for dying, and that she knew now. There would be other things worse than death for him to find.