When Libby left the room, Callum raised a hand daintily to his face, which he was aware had swelled well beyond its usual constraints by then. From somewhere behind the engorgement of his left eye he surveyed the landscape of bodies in the room, the red light in the corner. A messy tangle of emotions, all hopelessness and despair. Granted, some of that had been Libby’s, and part of Callum was disappointed she had chosen the high road yet again. It might have been fun to try and stop a bullet. But whatever, there were other errands here to run.
Callum leaned over the young man’s body, the one who looked placidly asleep. Did not seem threatening. No knowing for sure, of course, but the vibes were very much cinnamon rolls and puppy dog tails alongside rarity and abstract power. Something priceless and unknown all at once. (This, Callum recalled hazily. This had been the precise impression he’d sensed once before, felt from the center of another doomed siren’s heart as if it had been born inside his chest. Interesting.) Then he shifted to Parisa, who was clearly worse for wear. Suffering—he’d tasted it from her once, exquisite, and it was honeyed again now. The drip-drip-drip of a tropical sunset, golden dregs of a buttery Chardonnay.
Dalton. What a fucking mess. Callum tucked his sunglasses into his shirt pocket and crouched down beside Dalton’s body to watch it twitch with interior warfare; tension that Callum could see but not read. Desperation, definitely. He put a hand on Dalton’s tremorous shoulder and thought calm thoughts, serenity, dull academician things that Callum had associated with the person he’d always believed Dalton to be. The singular delight of reading for pleasure, with no thoughts as to world domination. A warm bath. A scented candle. A nice cup of herbal tea.
Nope. No such luck. Whatever emotions were battling in Dalton, they were unrecognizable and incomplete. It would be like trying to piece together a mosaic from individual grains of sand. Maybe not impossible, but by the look of Parisa’s increasingly waxy pallor, Callum didn’t have all day.
Callum straightened with a sigh, or rather, an intended sigh that was more of a gasp of pain, because Libby Rhodes had really clocked him. Good for her, or something. She had other problems and so did he. Could he join the astral circus, pay a little visit to Parisa’s telepathic realms? He could, but he doubted that was worth doing. The wards seemed to be resolving themselves, the garishness of the red light in the corner growing fainter. Pulsing gently, like watching something disappear into the rearview.
The sleeper, the other man, whimpered a little. Callum leaned over him, then straightened when he spotted something from afar. The pistol, glinting at him from where Libby had dropped it. He bent over to pick it up, then returned to the sleeper’s body, peering at him. Listening to the sound of resolution, like a newly tuned violin. The strum of a minor chord—a perfect answer to an unanswerable question. Darkness hidden behind beauty, discord that lived inside a sigh.
From his periphery, Callum caught sight of Dalton jerking himself awake. Then Dalton abruptly sat up, eyes wild when they met Callum’s. Instantly, a rush met Callum’s tongue. (Smoke on the horizon, a river of blood, top notes of apocalypse. If annihilatory rage could have a flavor.)
Callum raised the pistol in his hand and pulled the trigger quickly once.
The sound was deafening, but only briefly.
Then the sleeper opened his eyes and Callum, with a healthy sense of caution, shifted the barrel of the pistol back to him. The sleeper locked eyes with him, wordless.
“Callum, you smarmy idiot. Don’t.”
He turned over his shoulder toward the sound of Parisa’s voice. She had lifted her head, still dazed, to take in the scene, which Callum realized was likely problematic. After all, a smarmy idiot—Callum—stood over a total stranger with his finger on the trigger amid the wreckage Dalton had left of the reading room. Beside Parisa, Dalton himself lay faceup on the ground, eyes open. Perfectly still.
With a gaping wound where his heart should have been.
“Callum,” Parisa began, her eyes finding and then leaving Dalton’s blood-soaked chest. “You look like shit. And what the fuck did you do?”
Callum glanced at the sleeper, who still said nothing. Not a threat, as Callum had already known. So he tossed the pistol away, turning back to Parisa.
“I,” Callum began, wondering how to phrase it. Nothing very impressive came to mind. “Sorry” was what he offered insincerely. “But you don’t get to die today.”
Parisa stared at him for a long time.
And then, abruptly, she laughed.
Laughed, hysterically, until she choked. And then it was clear it wasn’t laughter anymore.
Gingerly, Callum sank to his knees beside her. He didn’t move to hold her. She didn’t push him away. Behind him, he heard motion but didn’t turn, noticing only that Parisa had locked eyes with the sleeper over Callum’s shoulder and said nothing. Then the slight limp of fading footsteps and the man, the sleeper, was gone.
Parisa raised her chin to look at Callum. “He won’t be back,” she said, mostly to herself, but Callum didn’t know who he was and didn’t care, so he said nothing. Parisa’s eyes flicked over Callum’s face, a little wave of repulsion warping over it. “Rhodes did that?”
“You should see the trauma I left on her,” Callum said dryly.
“Callum. We’ve all seen that.” Parisa lurched to her feet, avoiding Callum’s hand when he offered it to her. From his pocket, his phone buzzed. She glanced at it, mouth pursing. “How long were we out?”
“A few minutes?”
“Felt like hours.” She seemed to force herself to look at Dalton again before looking away. “I really didn’t want it to come to this.”
“I know.” He did.
She sighed aloud, then grudgingly looked up at Callum. “For what it’s worth, I would have done the same.”
“What, kill my boyfriend?” Callum asked doubtfully.
“Oh, so we’re calling him what he is now? No. I meant I would have saved you.” She dusted herself off, reaching a hand up to her sodden hairline and making a face. “Gross.”
“You’d have chosen me over Dalton, really? You hate me,” Callum mused as she sought out the nearest reflective surface, opting to tie her hair in a knot atop her head in the gleam of a gutted pneumatic tube.
“First of all, we’re dealing in hypotheticals, so all of this is meaningless.” Parisa cleared the vestiges of struggle from her throat. “But you really should have just let me die. It’s what I brought you here to do.” She didn’t sound as if she’d ever really believed it. Callum chose, quite admirably in his opinion, to let that go unmentioned.
“Please. I’m not winning on a forfeit.” His phone buzzed again. Parisa’s gaze dropped to it before rising back up to his.
“Jesus.” She shook her head. “You look monstrous.”
It wasn’t pity, so there was that. It was more of an observation. No disgust, which was how she’d often looked at him previously. Just a simple, unaltered fact. “I’m choosing to accept the compliment,” Callum replied.
“What compliment?”
He arched a brow, and she rolled her eyes.
“Fine,” she said. “So I might actually like you after all.”
“Don’t worry,” Callum assured her. “It’ll pass.”
His phone buzzed a third time and Parisa made a sound of incoherent agitation. “Just get that, would you?” she said. “Get out of here. I need to—”
“Wash your hair,” Callum advised, reaching for a loose tendril. She slapped his hand away.
“Take a nap. Do away with some bodies.” A brief shudder, which he felt but did not comment on.
“Do you think someone’s coming after us for any of this?” he wondered aloud, meaning any of it. The dead researcher. The dead Caretaker. The telepathic threat he could tell Parisa had successfully negated, either with brain damage or its functional equivalent. The fugitive sleeper who, come to think of it, might have been the fugitive archivist.
Varona.
Callum suddenly wondered whether they’d see Libby Rhodes imprisoned any time soon for her part in whatever this was. He found the thought amusing, but not nearly as funny as he’d have liked.
“You think anyone’s coming after us in a house where someone dies every ten years? I imagine not,” Parisa scoffed.
Callum shrugged and tried to slip the phone surreptitiously from his pocket. Parisa, with obvious annoyance, yanked it out for him, slapping it into his hand.
“Go,” she said, and walked out the door of the reading room. Or tried to, until Callum called after her, pausing her in the threshold.
“What was it?” he asked. “My first thought after you told me Atlas died.”
She stood perfectly still for a moment, and he understood that her answer would be a lie intended to spare him.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It wasn’t true.”
Then she walked away, leaving him behind.
With a dead body, Callum realized with a shudder, taking off like a shot the moment he recalled. Parisa had gone into the garden, staring blankly at a small circle of potted plants. His dismissal was probably for both their sakes, so Callum obliged her solitude, looking at his phone, which had a missed call from Reina, no voicemail. Two messages from an unknown number.
We’ve got Caine.
The pulse in Callum’s chest beat double-time, a wave of nausea coming over him.
PS—fuck off and die.
Well, fair enough. He’d only influenced Wyn to warn him, not to like him. It was helpful, really, if a bit worrying. Not that Callum knew what Adrian would do; not exactly. Whether Adrian Caine genuinely wanted his son dead was an emotional matter, not a logical one, and therefore mostly fluid. Whatever Wyn thought would happen, whatever the other witches had been told about Adrian’s intentions, Callum knew better. Adrian’s mercy or condemnation would almost certainly amount to a split-second decision, one based more on what Tristan said or did than anything preconceived.
Regardless, this was not ideal. Not ideal in the slightest. Callum fumbled for his contacts, dialing as he sprinted to the transport lifts on the house’s west side.
“You really shouldn’t be calling.”
“Alys.” Teenagers. Why any man would want anything from a girl her age was beyond all comprehension. “I know Adrian’s thugs have Tristan. Just tell me if they’ve brought him back to your dad’s pub.”
“Why, so you can kill him yourself?”
“Alys.” Callum felt himself growl with frustration. “I think we both know I was never going to harm a fucking hair on his goddamn head.”
The line was silent as the transport doors closed, the wards left unrepaired behind him. He assumed that would be Parisa’s to fix, or someone’s. Not his, in any case.
“He’s here,” Alys confirmed, followed by the click of the line going dead.
Callum stormed from the transport doors into the delivery point at King’s Cross, shoving his way through the crowds of travelers, throwing himself into a cab.
“I’m going—”
“Mate,” said the driver, looking troubled. “Don’t you need to go to hospital?”
Oh, right. His broken face. He fumbled for his sunglasses, shoving them on to the extent he still could. “It looks worse than it is. Just drive,” Callum said, adding, “break any traffic laws necessary,” and with a little push of persuasion the taxi was in motion, speeding through the nearest intersection and narrowly missing a pedestrian as they went.
This, Callum thought, would be very simple so long as it was well-timed. It would be hard to save face afterward, he realized, given both the state of his literal face and his obvious attempts at heroism, which would be difficult to defend as any conceivable form of vengeance. So much for the revenge plan. Not that he felt he was fooling anyone, or ever had been. Adrian Caine and his cocks were right—Callum was never going to deliver Tristan to them, and even pretending so at this point was idiotically transparent. Instead, Callum would simply have to look Tristan in the eye and say, as un-pathetically as possible, you don’t have to choose me. Just know that it won’t stop me from choosing you.
Oh, that was actually kind of brilliant, Callum thought, wondering if he should write it down as the taxi screamed down a narrow lane, forcing a man with a suitcase to drift shoutily over to the sidewalk. Which was where he belonged! Callum felt nothing but heat in his cheeks and lowered his window, letting the evening wind whip into the sting of his gaping wounds. He couldn’t wait to tell Tristan that Libby Rhodes had punched him. God, what a fucking tale that would be. And he’d shot their former researcher. Fucking hell, where would Callum even start? All of it, the whole story, life and death and everything, it was shaken up inside him like some depraved martini, all these things, these sentiments and feelings. He wanted a drink, but not the way he’d wanted one last year, like trying to drown it all and find some silence. He wanted a drink the way he used to get a drink. Taken by firelight, with Tristan sat nearby.
Callum felt his heartbeat counting the miles of proximity, ticking in his chest like a clock. He wouldn’t kill Tristan with a knife, he’d kill him with such cherishing. He’d offer to take Tristan to the movies, he’d feed him grapes, he’d brush his hair. He’d make a meal for him, the kind his mother had always insisted on when she was in a good mood, food that was meant to be eaten with leisure. He’d peel an orange for Tristan, share the slices of a clementine, drizzle him with honey. It would be embarrassing and he wouldn’t die of humiliation. He would simply live with the providence of it—the sacred proffering of shame.
Yes, Callum thought, I understand it now, Tristan, the meaning of life, it all makes sense. We are given exactly as much time as we need to be as human as we are, and that’s it. That’s the entirety of the magic. We’re not gods, or maybe you are, or Reina is, but I’m not a god, Tristan, I’m just very very sad and stupid! I have been looking for inspiration and it turns out I’m not inspired, I’m lazy! I only want to hold your hand! I don’t want to rule the world, I don’t want to control it, I don’t even want to influence it. I want to sit beside you in a little garden, I want to put your needs before mine, I want to fetch you a glass of water when you’re thirsty. I want to laugh at your jokes, even the bad ones, and bury my head in proverbial sand.
The taxi pulled up to the pub and Callum burst out of the door, tossing his entire wallet over his shoulder, his license to be a carelessly rich man. He slipped through the crowd and walked straight through the kitchen, aiming himself into the back office until he finally hit the closed door housing Adrian Caine. Callum slammed a jolt of bliss through it and walked inside, and right there, in the chair where Callum himself had once sat, was a familiar set of shoulders. An unforgivably attractive head.
Tristan turned in his seat and Callum felt his own heart leap into his throat, a mission of utter fatality. Here, he thought, yanking the sunglasses from his misshapen face—see me. See all of me for what I really am. You’re the only one who ever has.
He didn’t see Tristan’s expression become one of horror, which was good, really. For the best. Callum’s last glimpse was of the ceiling when his head snapped back, which would not make sense to him until it was too late for any sense to be made.
But before that, importantly, it had been Tristan.
It was perfect, and it was honest.
And it was also over now.
In his final moments, Callum Nova understood this one last piece of everything: that this was what inspiration felt like. If fate was an answer, if destiny had a flavor, if Tristan loved him back, if peace was attainable even if—especially if—it was wholly undeserved … these were details that no longer mattered.
He could feel it anyway, and that meant all of it was real.