“Oh, and if you fill me in on this other realm you’re from. I’d sure like to know more. I like knowing things.
“I’ll take one guess that you’re immortal. I wouldn’t mind trying that out, living forever. Maybe the stars will align, and it’ll happen one day.
“Or maybe you can help me out with that.
“But anyhow, yeah. I’ll be your friend.
“Just please write back,
Your Wayward Star.”
Wonder balls a hand and presses it to her mouth, quelling the shock as Malice recalls placing that one and only missive in his saddlebag, hoping she would find it.
Instead, troublemaking children got their hands on it while fixing to loot the bag for money or whiskey. One of the youths had been the mayor’s son. That, and the spectacle Malice had already been making of himself in town ever since Wonder entered his world, had motivated the townsfolk into action.
His became the only surviving letter. It had been handed over as proof of his insanity, while everything else had burned in that pile.
Wonder focuses on her weapons, then the wash of hydrangea light in the room, the curl of nature outside the window, the scent of pomegranates and old books. Her fist abandons her mouth, her heart crashing into her breastbone. “Even if my letters didn’t send you there, even if I didn’t send you to the asylum—I still kept you there. Because I tried to save you.”
Malice pauses, his golden hair blazing around his face.
Wonder explains. After her indiscretion and subsequent torture, the Court had her under close surveillance. However, she did find a sliver of time to steal away, intent on freeing Malice. The nearest asylum was in a city, some twenty miles outside of town. She’d concluded that Malice must have been taken there.
But her heroics only made things worse. Locating his cell, she had spied him through the bars. Wonder hadn’t known what they’d done to Malice up until that point, but upon her arrival, she saw the pallor of his complexion, the bruises on his exposed skin, and the vacancy in his eyes as he stared at the ceiling from his cot.
The sight of a dozen buckles and straps had nearly eradicated her.
Malice had been locked up for three years by then.
Wonder had wrenched open the door and tore his bindings as easily as paper. Malice hadn’t flinched despite her invisibility, nor the fact that his restraints had yielded presumably out of nowhere.
She knelt, whispering entreaties and endearments. His pupils had flickered, seeming to sense her very presence, and his hand had lifted as though to touch what he couldn’t see.
An alarm had sounded. Wonder got back to work liberating him. But within seconds, the wardens appeared in time for them to witness the bindings come off at lightning speed and ostensibly by magic—or satanism.
Wonder acted impulsively, not giving herself the advantage of planning. She hadn’t devised a means to actually harness Malice, her fingers slipping through him like water.
Rashness had made her sloppy, causing her downfall. Inanimate objects are fair game to deities; humans themselves are not. Therefore, the room had lacked tangible gadgets that she could have used as a weapon, and she hadn’t been able to throttle the wardens or medics with her bare hands. She just kept passing through them.
Her archery had been temporarily confiscated by the Court, so she couldn’t shoot the mortals with a dose of awe to distract them. Before she could race into the hall and seize a makeshift alternative—a pipe, a shard of glass—the orderlies had swarmed Malice.
That’s when he’d snapped out of his trance and begun to struggle. It should have taken Wonder milliseconds to locate a suitable method of defense in the corridor. However, desperation had impaired her faculties, deterring her from acting swiftly enough.
So when that prairie librarian who’d stolen her heart attempted to do his captors bodily harm, they retaliated. The pocketknife would have inconvenienced a goddess. To a frail mortal, it did much worse.
Malice’s blood coated the handle, the blade lodged in his stomach as he slumped in the casket of the guards’ arms. If Wonder had been in possession of her archery, she’d have dropped it. Instead, she’d plummeted to her knees and watched him die.
The guards had left him, dashing from the room to avoid getting caught by their superiors. Shrieking, Wonder had pawed at his face to no avail. She’d tried, but she hadn’t been able to cradle Malice, hadn’t been able to comfort him in death.
Well…he hadn’t been called Malice. Not back then.
Emptying herself of the story, Wonder sinks into the bed while Malice studies her. “I remember a warm breeze and sparkling light when it happened,” he reflects. “Like a guardian had knelt in front of me. It was the same feeling I’d gotten every time I reread your letters.”
He recalls the slice through his belly, the slick coat of crimson, and a metallic scent. “Despite all that crap, I felt you there with me,” he says, stroking Wonder’s tears. “I felt you there, not wanting to let go.”
Indeed, she had burdened him instead of letting him rest in peace. As she’d suspected before, the tether had been strung too tightly. He’d died inexplicably linked with a deity and without closure.
Yet he doesn’t look furious that she had interfered, nor accusatory that she’d sealed his fate. Matter of fact, the forks and trenches of Malice’s face scarcely attribute his demise to her. “Tell me who I was,” he prompts.
Wonder’s so tired that it comes out effortlessly. “You were a tenant of the prairies in the nineteenth century, living on the brink of war. You ran a library surrounded by pomegranate trees, with a telescope aiming out of the window. You were kind to patrons, and you lived below level, in a room with a rocking chair. You liked reading about birth and death and legends, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, how his eyes glow for myths.’ You had three hounds and one horse, whom you adored. You carried a saddlebag over the right shoulder, but you wrote with the left hand. You had a gravelly singing voice.”
She kisses the inside of his wrist. “And your name was Quill.”
“Quill,” he repeats. “Yeah, that’s it. Except you never told me your own name.”
“I tried to save you.”
“I tried to answer you.”
“But we’re here now. We’re right here.”
“Are we?” he draws out. “And who am I? Right here?”
Wonder considers him. “You’re…”
She may know the details of who he used to be, but she’d never gotten to know that boy. Not like she knows him today.
So this request should be simple to fulfill. Nonetheless, Wonder stammers, and Malice’s gaze darkens. “Tongue-tied, eh? How about a simpler question: Who do you want? Me or him?”
Again, her mouth goes numb.
And with a slit of his eyes, Malice shears her silence down to the cartilage. “That’s what I thought.”
Just like that, his weight is gone, and his scent is gone, and his voice is gone. But it’s only when the door slams shut that Wonder realizes he’d gotten dressed and evicted himself from the room, his absence producing a mishmash of emotions that hardly correspond. Her womb cramps, and her fingers bend at the knuckles, forming steep inclines. Lastly, a suffocating density fumes in her cheeks.