Excerpt
The power died at 9:12, and the rain, which had been background all evening, took over.
It hammered the roof and the courtyard and the stone, insistent, deafening. Victoria was standing at the corner where the two corridors met, her hand on the low parapet of the first floor. Below her the courtyard was black. Her roommate had told her to wait here. "Just meet him, he's harmless, he's my cousin." Nobody she had been told was harmless had ever turned out to be.
Somewhere under the rain, footsteps. She turned toward the sound.
Two shadows at the far end of the corridor, a man and her roommate, coming slowly through the dark. She stayed where she was, one hand on the wet stone, in no hurry at all.
Lightning tore across the sky and lit the arcade white.
She saw his face.
The sound went out of the world. The rain didn't stop so much as vanish, as if someone had closed a door on it, and the silence that came in its place was total.
She had never seen it awake. She had only seen it in the dream, in firelight, turned toward her with an expression she had spent two years trying to forget. Same jaw. Same stillness, as if he had already decided something and the rest of the world was catching up. His step faltered when he saw her.
"I''m hallucinating. Grief does this. I've read the papers."
Thunder broke over the building, huge and slow.
She turned away from him, toward the other corridor, and the thunder didn't stop. It became feet. Iron. One roar from forty throats. The corridor was full of torches, forty faces with one open mouth, poured down the arcade toward her, and the fire made the rain glitter orange. The smell reached her a half second after the sound: pitch, sweat, smoke.
She screamed and ran, and couldn't hear herself.
The silence came back, thick and total.
She didn't get three strides. Behind her, his footsteps had already broken into a run, and later she would remember that it had happened 'before' she screamed. A hand closed on her arm, and she swung on instinct. He took her elbow across the jaw without a noise and caught her around the waist. The stone was slick, and her heel went out from under her. The momentum had nowhere to go but forward, and the parapet met the back of her thighs and simply wasn't high enough.
They went over together.
He pulled her in as they fell, one arm around her back, the other cradling her head against his chest. There was no sound at all, only her own breath, ragged and shallow, and under her ear, through the wet wool of his coat, his heartbeat. Hard. Fast. Certain.
She braced for the ground.
The ground was him. He had turned in the air so that his back took the fall, and the world came back all at once: the rain roaring in her ears, and under it, the wet crack of something that wasn't meant to make that sound. The breath left him against her ear.
"Not again," he said, low and furious, to nobody. "Not again."
His arms, which had held her the whole way down, fell away from her.
---
She was on her knees in the mud and gravel before she'd decided to move.
Above them, at the parapet, a phone light shook. Her roommate was shouting something, but thunder rolled over the words and swallowed them. "...was that...why did you scream...why did he...there was nothing there, there was..."
She looked up. The arcade was empty. Rain, dark stone, and one small useless light.
Blood was coming from under his skull, dark and fast. She found a pulse at his throat, and it was already going, thinner under her fingers each second. His skin was cold, and it was getting colder. She pressed the heel of her hand against the wound and leaned into it until he would have flinched, if he could.
"No," she whispered. "Please, God, no."
Lightning. In the flash she made the mistake of looking at his face.
It was paler than it should have been, wet, the color leaving it as she watched. The same face. Everything in her stopped. Her hands stayed where they were, but she was gone from them. Under her fingers the pulse fluttered and faded, and she felt it fade.
Thunder rolled across the courtyard again, and her roommate's voice went under it, and she didn't even notice it go.
Then the thunder passed, and in the gap after it a voice came through, cracked and small and very close. "Please, tell me what to do."
It pulled her back like a hand on the collar.
Airway.
Her hands were shaking so hard the tremor ran up her arms and into her teeth, and she was shivering, and none of it mattered. Her hands knew where to go even when she didn't. Pressure on the wound. Keep it there.
"Come down," she said, and her voice was flat and clinical, the one she used at three in the morning in the ward, the one that made other people obey. "Bring the light. Closer."
The light came. In its unsteady circle she saw the injury for the first time, the depth of it, the angle, and the terror that had been screaming in her a moment ago went quiet and became a list. She let it. She was grateful to it.
She didn't look at his face again. She looked at the wound, the pulse, her own hands.
She was still pressing when the first black cars came up the drive, and she didn't let go until someone pulled her hands off him.
