Grave Whispers

Dean had spent most of his life being told no. Not cruelly, not always — sometimes it was a gentle let-down, a kind smile followed by the word sorry and a reason that was really not a reason. Sometimes it was worse than that, a laugh shared with someone else across the room, a pair of eyes that went through him as if he were furniture. He had liked many girls over the years, from the first nervous attempt in school to the last one at his office, and they had all, in their different ways, looked past him to someone else — someone louder, richer, more careless with himself in the way that seemed to attract people the way carelessness so often does.

He was not angry about it, for a long time. He just quietly collected the rejections the way some people collect small, useless objects, storing them somewhere interior where they took up more and more space without ever being sorted through. He went home alone and ate alone and sat in his flat listening to the city outside and feeling, in a specific and unhelpful way, that the city was happening to other people.

Sleep stopped coming easily. When the flat became too quiet he started going out at night, walking to the seafront and sitting on the low wall at the edge of the promenade, watching the dark water move. It was not a happy habit but it was his, and the sea at night asked nothing of him, which was more than he could say for most things.

He had been doing this for months when, one night, he heard someone scream.

The sound came from the far end of the promenade, near the old steps that led down to the lower beach. Dean followed it without thinking — not bravely, just reflexively, the way you move toward a sound before your mind has caught up with your feet.

What he found stopped him cold.

A man in a long black coat stood over a woman who had gone still against the wall, his head bent to her neck. The man straightened when he sensed Dean — straightened with a speed that the human eye could barely track — and turned. The face was pale and sharp and the eyes held a red light that had nothing to do with the lamppost twenty feet away.

Dean stood very still.

The figure crossed the distance between them in less than a second and was there, in front of him, close enough that Dean could feel the cold that came off him like a second skin. A hand went to Dean’s throat. The red eyes studied him.

Dean did not scream. He did not run. He looked back at the thing in front of him and felt something give way inside his chest — some last tension he had been holding for years — and simply waited.

The grip loosened slightly.

“You are not afraid,” the figure said. His voice was low and old, the kind of voice that had been speaking for centuries and had stopped finding most things surprising. He sounded surprised now.

“No,” Dean said.

“Why?”

Dean looked at him. “Would it change anything if I were?”

The figure studied him for a moment longer. Then the hand dropped entirely and he stepped back, and what came into his face was something close to curiosity.

“Tell me,” he said.

Dean told him. He was not sure why — the hour, the exhaustion, the particular freedom of talking to something that was probably going to kill him anyway. He told it plainly and without dressing it up: the years, the rejections, the slow accumulation of being looked past, the nights at the sea wall, the sleep that would not come. He said he had been ready, standing there at the end of the promenade. He had not gone looking for it, but when it arrived he had not been sorry to see it.

The figure listened to all of this without moving. When Dean finished there was a silence that the sea filled from below.

“My name is Sebastian,” the figure said at last. “I have been alive for four hundred years. I have watched a great many men like you.” He paused. “Men the world does not notice tend to go one of two ways. They disappear quietly. Or they are given a reason not to.”

“And you are offering me a reason,” Dean said.

“I am offering you everything,” Sebastian said simply. “Power. Time. The ability to take what this world withheld from you.” His eyes held that cold red light. “The question is whether you want it badly enough.”

Dean thought about the flat and the silence and the sea wall and every slow, empty night that had led him here.

“Yes,” he said.

The change was painful in the way that all real changes are painful — not briefly, not cleanly, but thoroughly. Sebastian guided him through the first nights with the detached efficiency of someone who had done this before and had opinions about how it ought to be done. Dean learned what he was and what he could do with a speed that surprised even Sebastian, who said so once in a tone that was as close to a compliment as he appeared capable of giving.

The hunger was the first thing. It was vast and specific and demanded to be answered, and answering it was the first moment Dean understood what it meant to have power — not the theoretical power of money or status or good looks, but something older and more direct. He moved through the city at night and the city no longer ignored him. Things felt him coming. People stepped aside without knowing why.

Sebastian watched from a careful distance and said nothing, which was his way of approving.

The rage came after the hunger, once the hunger had been satisfied enough to allow other things through. Dean had not known how much rage there was until it had room to move. He had kept it very small and very quiet for so long that it had compressed into something dense, and now it expanded.

Sebastian asked him, one night, what he wanted.

Dean told him.

He was methodical about it. That was perhaps the most surprising thing — not the fact of what he did, which Sebastian had expected, but the patience and order with which he did it. He went back through his memory carefully, name by name, face by face, every boy who had been chosen over him from school through to his working years. He found them one by one. He was thorough.

When that chapter was closed he moved on to the women themselves — not with violence but with the particular power he had discovered he now possessed: the ability to reach inside a mind and rearrange it, to make himself the most important thing in the room, to be, finally, seen. He made them see him. He made them understand, in their own minds, what they had passed over. And then, when he had had his fill of being seen, he let them go and moved on, because that was the point — not to keep them, but to finally have the choice.

He lived this way for a decade. It was exactly what he had been promised and he found he had no complaints about it. Sebastian moved in and out of his life the way old teachers do — appearing occasionally, observing, offering a word and then disappearing again.

And then Dean went into a bar on a Thursday evening and saw her.

Her name, she told him, was Clara. She had dark hair and a way of looking at him that was different from the way people usually looked at him now — not the dazed, rearranged look of someone his power had touched, but something clear and present and equal. He was careful with her. More careful than he had been with anyone in a decade. He did not reach into her mind. He wanted whatever this was to be real, and using his power on it would make it not real, and he found, to his own irritation, that this mattered to him.

They spent time together. Weeks, then months. He felt things he had not felt since before Sebastian — the particular vulnerability of caring about a person’s opinion of you, the specific hope of a morning message, the loss of control that comes with wanting someone to stay. He had spent ten years taking exactly what he wanted and this was the opposite of that, and he could not decide if it was weakness or something else.

He chose not to read her mind. He told himself it was because he did not want to spoil it.

One night, when the room was quiet and his guard was lower than it should have been, she reached beneath the bed where she had placed it earlier, when he was not watching, and drove a wooden stake into his chest.

The pain was extraordinary. He went down and lay on the floor and the world went grey at the edges and she stood over him, and her face had changed — not physically, not yet, but the expression on it was entirely different from anything he had seen there before. All the warmth was gone. What was underneath it was old and cold and had been waiting.

“My name is not Clara,” she said. “My name is Lydia.”

He looked up at her from the floor. The name moved through the grey edges of his consciousness and found something.

“I changed my face with a witch’s help,” she said. “So you would not know me. So you would feel exactly what I felt — something real, something true — and then have it taken away.” She crouched down so she could see his face. “I spent years finding a way to you. Years learning what you had done, finding the witch, learning what would stop something like you. And you felt something for me, didn’t you? That is the part I needed you to feel.” She stood again. “Now we are even.”

She walked to the door. She did not look back.

Behind her, on the floor, Dean’s hand moved.

He had known since the third week.

He had told himself he would not read her mind, and he had kept that promise for two weeks, and then on the third week something small had slipped through the gap between them when they were close — an image, a feeling, the ghost of a name she was not using. He had seen enough to know the shape of it. He had not seen all the details, but he had seen enough.

He had made his decision then, and he had played his part carefully. The stake beneath the bed he had found and examined and replaced with something that would cause pain and shock and the convincing appearance of death but nothing more. He had not told her. He wanted to hear what she would say when she thought it was finished. He wanted to know if what she had felt was entirely a performance or if something real had been in it, buried under the revenge, the way real things sometimes are.

He heard her answer when she spoke over him on the floor. He noted every word.

Now he stood in the doorway of her home, which she had gone to directly, as he knew she would, because people who have just done something significant go somewhere they feel safe. She was sitting in the kitchen with her hands flat on the table, coming down from the long tension of the plan finally completed.

She heard the door and turned.

The colour left her face completely.

“Hello, Lydia,” Dean said.

She rose from the chair and her eyes went to the door and the window and the space between them. He watched her calculate and watched her understand that the calculation did not come out in her favour.

“How,” she said.

“You were careful,” he said. “The disguise, the witch, the stake. You were very thorough. But you let me close, and when you let something like me close, you give it access whether you mean to or not.” He stepped into the kitchen. “I saw your name. I saw enough. I wanted to see the rest, so I let you finish.”

She said nothing. Her hands, behind her on the kitchen counter, were very still.

“You were not entirely acting,” he said. “That is the part that cost you. Whatever you felt — some of it was real. I could tell the difference. I know what performance feels like from the inside of a mind and I know what is not performance.” He tilted his head. “It made me angry, actually. That even that could be a trap.”

Lydia looked at him across the kitchen. Her chin was up and her eyes were clear and whatever she was feeling she was not showing it, and he could have respected that in another situation.

“Then do what you are going to do,” she said.

He crossed the kitchen.

The house was quiet for a long moment, and then it was quiet in a different way, the way houses go quiet after something final has happened in them, and the night outside continued as nights do, indifferent and dark and very long.

Sebastian was leaning against the wall of the alley outside when Dean emerged. He had his arms folded and the expression of someone who has been watching a performance and has views about the quality of it.

“You knew,” Dean said. It was not a question.

“I suspected,” Sebastian said. “I did not interfere. I wanted to see how you handled it.”

Dean stood in the alley and looked up at the sky above the rooftops. The night was clear and the stars were very far away and the city around them hummed with all its ordinary living.

“She was not entirely lying,” he said. “Some of it was real.”

“It usually is,” Sebastian said. “The best traps always have something real in them. That is what makes them traps.” He unfolded his arms. “You are not upset.”

“I am,” Dean said. “It will pass.”

Sebastian regarded him for a moment with those old, flat eyes. “You have learned quickly,” he said. “More quickly than most.”

Dean looked at him. In four hundred years of existence Sebastian had turned very few people, and the ones he had turned had not all lasted, and the compliment — if that was what it was — landed with the particular weight of something said by a person who does not say things lightly.

“I had a good teacher,” Dean said.

Sebastian said nothing. He stepped back into the shadow of the alley and was gone the way he always went — without a sound, without a trace, simply not there where he had been.

Dean stood alone in the alley for a moment longer. The city went on around him, loud and lit and full of people moving through their short, warm lives. He had once been one of them. He had sat on a sea wall and watched the dark water and been ready for it to end.

He was very far from that now.

He put his hands in his pockets and walked into the night, and the night, as always, made room for him.