Somehow, it was dawn again. Or was it the same dawn? Was that twilight only a dream, and everything that happened after it?
Just what the hell had happened after it?
I sat up in bed, slowly, my eyeballs throbbing in my skull the way they used to after a night of bourbon, back before I’d learned to hold my booze. I rubbed at my face, trying to get the aches out of it and massage some clarity into my brain. I groped for some recollection of what had happened, or what had seemed to have happened, but kept coming up empty, with nothing but crumbs of memory and sensation. I didn’t care too much for the flavor of those crumbs, I can tell you—not at all. They left a thick, ugly taste in my mouth.
The bed beside me was unoccupied again. And this time, I knew I really was alone. My place had that cool, echoey quality of emptiness to it, like a spent shell casing.
Evelyn was gone.
I climbed to my feet and staggered to the sink, ran some water and rinsed my mouth, trying to chase away that god-awful taste. It went, mostly. I saw water in the tub again. It looked a bit pink, even in the yellow light.
I turned my back to the bathroom and looked around the rest of the place, all four-hundred square feet of it. Everything was the same as always, every inch of wall space taken up with shelves and cupboards to keep my meager belongings, kitchen stuff and a few books, the couple of framed pictures I’d held onto from my legitimate policework days. The unmade Murphy bed took up most of the floor space and my desk, an organized mess like always, claimed much of what was left. But even so, something had changed, something too big for me to see right away. Something huge and vital. I studied my familiar digs and searched for it and didn’t find it.
But I did find something else.
It was folded neatly in two and tucked under the lamp on what had been her side of the bed, and I knew even before I picked it up pretty much what it would say. At least, I thought I knew …
On the outside was written, Frank in neat, efficiently elegant script.
What it said inside set my heart pounding extra hard.
Dear Frank—
I’m sorry I left you as I did, alone in the night. But it has all gone too far—for me, perhaps for both of us. I tried, Frank. I tried to warn you that I could not refuse Him any longer. His voice was too much inside my head and I had to answer. I thought to do it without destroying you, but I fear I have done just that. I am surely lost now, as He always wanted me to be. Lost in the dark. I suppose that last glimmer of humanity still in me, the tiny light by which I write this to you, will soon flicker out forever. It will be better that way.
Forgive me, Frank. Forgive us both.
E ~
The name trailed away as if she’d forgotten it even as she wrote it.
I stared at the letter, read it again. It didn’t make any sense, and it made perfect sense. Some part of me understood every word, but the alert portion of my brain couldn’t unlock what the rest had already figured out. Didn’t want to, most likely. I stood there, planted beside the bed, rooted in place with that letter in my hand, the words circling around and around in my brain. I needed to react, to do something, but I had no idea what. Hunt down Evelyn Night? Where? Search a thousand alleys and strange doorways and dark passages on the west side? Roust all my informants, bribe or bully them into coughing up information none of them could possibly have? I picked up my .38 but it only made me feel that much more powerless—what the hell could a gun do for me now?
All at once I remembered darkness, and too much silence, and pale white shapes glimpsed in the flicker of a lighter’s flame, soft voices and cold fingers. And I remembered emptying my gun into the black.
I remembered trying to blast Evelyn Night into oblivion.
When had that been? Last night? Two nights ago? The memories all seemed woven together into one senseless tapestry of visions. Whenever it was, I knew all my bullets had been wasted, and I was glad. The fact that I hadn’t shot Evelyn down in a panic was about the only comforting thought I could find just then.
At last I folded the note and put it down on top of my gun, then I got dressed and slipped the gun in my belt. If I stood around in my place even five minutes longer I would lose whatever I had left of my marbles, so I figured I’d do the only thing I could think of, the same thing I did most every morning. I’d go to the office. Maybe there, in the mundane sanity Cass so expertly maintained, there where I did my best thinking, the world would start to make some sense again.
I got to Suite 513 of the Cain Building well after the usual time we opened, but there was only gloom behind the frosted glass door with my name on it. For a moment I wondered what was going on, and I felt my muscles tense for some new brawl. Then I remembered that I’d given Cass the week off. Just as well. I could’ve used some extra work, but right then I didn’t feel much like taking on any new cases. Probably a little spouse-chasing or insurance fraud would do me good, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. All I wanted was that sensible, familiar space where I was Frank Orpheus, PI, not the lonely fella who occupied a dingy place in a cheap building wedged in among much nicer ones. Frank Orpheus, PI, could handle things that other fella never could.
I opened the door and stepped inside and all that sanity shattered into a thousand jagged, cutting pieces.
Cass was there, after all.
Most of her.
Her body lay sprawled across her desk, her arms flung to her sides like a portrait of the crucifixion. Her legs spread much too far apart. Her shirt and camisole had been torn wide open and her small white breasts lay flat against her ribs like lumps of unbaked dough. Her skirt was hiked up around her waist and all she wore under it was a girdle of thick red blood. Jagged gashes X-ed across both wrists, and more blood pooled in her palms and dripped through her fingers to the floor. Her head flopped to the side, her eyes wide, like she was looking right at me. Wide and glassy and dead.
Beneath the line of her pretty jaw, her throat was gone.
With all that crimson, it took me a minute to spot the single bullet hole in her chest. It didn’t seem to fit with everything else that had been done to her—too neat, too quick—but all I could really think about right then was how much of it Cass had been alive for. Enough to keep her blood flowing for a good long time.
I’m not sure how long I stood there, staring at her and feeling nothing. I kept waiting for something to come over me—horror, grief, shock, anger—but nothing did. Cassandra O’Clare—who’d been typing my reports and answering my phone and keeping my sorry excuse for a life in order since she was barely more than a kid—was dead, and that was all there was to it.
I turned around and closed the door and locked it behind me and walked back to the elevator and got on and rode it to the Cain Building’s lobby. Then I walked out onto the street, and never went back in again.