One of the towels from the hotel was still in her hands. For a long time she didn’t respond, twisting it into tortured knots in her lap as she thought about the question.
“You don’t belong here,” she said at last. “Your home is . . . somewhere else.”
Neither of them said another word until they pulled into the Riverview’s parking lot. Just as he had feared, there were cars already there that he recognized, had driven and ridden in before. Dark shadows loitered on the staircase leading to the second-floor balcony.
“Where’s Luce?” he said. His eyes never left the figures on the catwalk.
“At Sarah’s.”
Sarah’s. Downstairs. Thank storm and spring and dew on the grass. “Okay. Here’s how we’re gonna play this. I’m getting out of the car. I’m walking upstairs. You get out after me, and you go get Luce. Then you get into your car, and you drive away to your sister’s. You are not to look back, no matter what you hear. Please.”
“Joe, I—”
“Please. Just walk over to Sarah’s, get Luce, and walk back to your car. It’ll be okay.”
“Will I see you again?” She blurted it out so that all the words ran together: WillIseeyouagain? Rita was not a blurter. There was nothing left of Joe’s heart now but the kind of slivers you had to use a wet paper towel to sponge up.
“Never know,” he said. He didn’t look back at her as he said it. He opened the car door. “Count to fifteen and then get out.”
He cleared the space between the parking lot and the staircase at a sprint. He was a big target for the guys up above to miss, but even a big target was hard to hit at a dead run in bad lighting. The flimsy metal-and-plywood shivered and boomed beneath his feet as he began his ascent. Two steps at a time and then two more and he was plowing into the dark mass of bodies with all the blundering force his lumbering steamroller of a human body contained. He saw faces he knew and smashed them with his fists. A gun went off beside his ear and he barely noticed. The world was reduced to churning, boiling action, things swept up and tossed aside by his rage. It felt amazing. It also felt awfully damn familiar.
Far away a car door slammed. From inside the maelstrom Joe registered it and thought, Good. All he had to do was keep them distracted until Rita and Luce got clear, and then he could go confront Raymond himself: boss, benefactor, and betrayer. Someone’s skull bounced against the metal railings with a clong. A guy who had baked the best peanut butter cookies Joe ever tasted for Raymond’s birthday pressed the muzzle of a pistol against his shoulder and pulled the trigger, and Joe felt the bullet sear a path through muscle and bone and more muscle. He roared. There was no better way to describe it: he opened his mouth and an animal noise ripped out, and then he tore the gun away and broke the man’s jaw with it.
He came up for air, clawing at shoulders and heads and necks. Down below, Rita was making her away across the courtyard back toward the parking lot, Lucian in her arms. The light was getting worse by the second, the world long since melted into shades of blue and gray and black, but he saw her just the same. And she saw him. Don’t look back, he had told her, begged her, but she was her own person—her own wonderful person—and she looked up and saw him and their eyes met across the divide. She paused. He shook his head, frantically. She gave him one last anguished glance and kept going.
“Good-bye,” he whispered. The churn of bodies sucked him back under.
“Hey,” Luce said to the river, and Rita’s breath snagged, ragged in her throat. “Why did you go? You still hadn’t taught me to do the butterfly kick.”
Their new place wasn’t anywhere near the river. It was high in the hills, in a nice neighborhood Rita had driven through a thousand times before in her bombed-out Chevy, never able to glance at the pretty bungalows with their pretty front lawns for long before a police cruiser edged into frame to hurry her along. Half of her reasoning when she had bought the house had been purely petty: Screw those people, let’s see how they like having me as a neighbor. It was also a really cute house, in a really good school district, and only a couple of miles from the community college to boot. The pettiness had just been the thing that finally pushed her over the edge, a gentle nudge that said, Girl, you deserve this.
But the river wasn’t nearby, at least not near enough to walk to. Her neighbors said that was a blessing; the way it had suddenly begun to rise, like a dam had gone bust somewhere upstream, there was no telling what would happen the next time a hard rain fell. A lot of new construction along its banks had been put on indefinite hiatus. Some said it was due to snowfall in the mountains; others said the weather patterns were all outta whack. Rita had her own ideas, but she kept them to herself. She dropped Luce off at kindergarten and bought groceries and went to class three times a week, and on the weekends they drove to the river, glittering and fanning beneath the desert sun like dirty silk.
It was still filthy. Tan scum still gathered on its concrete shores, full of takeout cups and plastic bags and all the other garbage the people of the city felt like tipping in. Something about it had changed, though. Something besides the water levels. There was a watchfulness that had been missing for a long, long time. It rippled its oily coat when they got out of the car, like a cat stretching and yawning and rising to greet them. It gentled when Luce got too close, ready to catch him if he tripped and fell in. Or maybe that was Rita’s wishful thinking. She didn’t know what she expected, really. Despite the windfall Joe had left them, there was a want so big in her she couldn’t sleep some nights. It only really went away when she could hear the water. Her heart was only satisfied when she could keep a weather eye out, for—
For what, exactly? Eyes like weird jewels? Feathers and fur and fangs? A Super Bee rising up out of the nasty water like a damn dolphin?
“Where did you go?” Luce asked again.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
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Habitat
K. J. Parker
K. J. Parker (aka Tom Holt) (www.tom-holt.com) was born in London in 1961, and has been, at various times, not very good at coin dealing, lawyering, farm laboring, lumberjackery, and auction-house portering. He is an indifferent metalworker, inept carpenter, two-left-footed fencer, timid horse rider, lackluster archer, so-so armorer and swordsmith, barely adequate stockman and forester, run-of-the-mill mid-list novelist, skilled textile worker and crack shot, who won the World Fantasy Award for novellas twice hand running some years ago and has since produced relatively little of note.
The desert grows: woe to him who harbors deserts!
—Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra
He looked at me.
I looked back at him, trying to think of something to say. Go to hell isn’t something you say to a prince, not when you’ve been obliged by protocol to leave your sword at the porter’s lodge, and the royal grooms have control of your horse. I might just get away with No, but then again, I might not. Yes was out of the question.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m a bit deaf in one ear. Could you just say that again?”