1.45. Unlight Me
“You…” Lisa’s voice, always so warm and full, was tight and quavering with uncertainty. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” he murmured into her chest. “Yes. I’m sure. I’m ready. I can’t keep waiting. Take my soul. Please, I want you to—I’ll be yours. I don’t give a fuck. I’ll… I’ll be your pet, your thief, whatever you need me to be. You can put a fucking leash on me, I don’t care.”
Another suspended moment, hanging like a wirewalker between two cliffs.
“Okay,” she said.
His heart backflipped. “Really?”
“No, it’s okay. Yes. Let’s do it.” She laughed with uncorked relief and sat up. “Fuck it. Let’s do it. Get this dress off me.”
The enervation of the night fell from him. Jittery bravado brought him up to his knees. His hands were shaking so hard he fumbled with the zipper and drew a giddy, girly laugh from the woman under his fingers.
“And I can tear my Annalise hair out all I want,” she said. “It’ll be done. And I’ll take responsibility for you.”
He paused, halfway down. The air left the room. “Actually, uh.”
She looked over her shoulder. Her eager smile froze over.
“Actually,” he said. “I think we should switch to Annalise. For the first time, I mean.”
“Oh, Seth. I don’t—that’s darling of you, but I think it’s better this way. Better for me.” She summoned another giggle, but it was from further away; it almost had an echo.
“No. Hold on. I can’t—” Seth swallowed the tremor in his reply. “I think we can’t yet. I think I need to talk to Annalise.”
“Why?”
“She’s—I mean, she’s all of you at once, right?”
“All of me includes my inhibitions,” she said. “All my self-sabotaging bullshit. All my… my everything that gets in the way, Seth.”
“I can’t win you on a technicality.” His resolve crystallized further with every word. “I have to earn you.”
“You have. Seth, you have earned me a thousand times over. I’m no great prize.”
“I mean all of you. I’m greedy. I’m covetous. I’m a thief. I know you said it could only be Lisa, but I—I don’t think I can do that.”
“No, Seth, listen.” She infused some of her matronly firmness into her voice. “I’ll be a bit—there might be some fireworks at first, yes. But Annalise wants this so badly. She needs it. Desperately. She just can’t—I just can’t do it right. Unless it’s this. And once you’re unlit, it’ll be fine. I just—I need the first time to be like this. Just the first time and then…” She blinked rapidly as she struggled to rescue her smile. “Then you’ll have so much time. You’ll have all the time you need, and we’ll have done it already, and I’ll—”
“Your rule,” he said.
“Fuck my rule,” she snapped. “It’s my rule and I get to break it. And anyway, we don’t have to kiss. I have so many uses for your mouth. Kissing can come later.”
“Lisa. No. That can’t be—that’s a snakebitten start. We need her permission.”
“Her permission? Seth, how many times do I have to tell you that I am her?” She stood, her arm drawn across her chest to keep her half-zipped dress up. “Am I not good enough for you? Does it not count, somehow, if it’s this mouth? Is that it? You were happy enough to cum in it.”
“Please,” he said.
“Fine.” Anger darkened her face. “Fine!” She stomped to a corner of the room and knelt by her steamer trunk, the exquisite muscles around her shoulder blades hunching beneath the open red silk. “Fine, I’ll be broken old big-nosed cowardly Annalise. And I’ll fucking mope and moralize and ruin everything.”
She yanked clothes and supplies from the trunk as she spoke. A wrapped summer sausage rolled across the floor.
“I wanted one thing. Just one thing in my life where I could be fun and selfish and—and happy, where I didn’t have to be so—so fucking exhaustingly responsible. But no.” She laughed angrily. “No, I’m a grown-up. I’m old enough to be your mother, aren’t I? An old matron. Sensible and responsible and fucking old.” She stood with a skull gripped tight in her hands, and turned to look at him.
All the fury departed her, and left a horrible, hopeless sorrow its wake.
“It could have been so wonderful, Seth,” she said.
She yanked her head off, and those sad eyes boiled away into sightless sockets.
Her headless body shuddered, and then, as the flesh filtered onto her Annalise skull, shifted. Tightened in on itself. Turned its knees in. Held the dress closer, suddenly ruefully aware of how little it was covering.
Annalise stuck her head back onto her neck and turned away from him, fumbling with her dress’s zipper to cover herself further. “This is over, Seth,” she said to the wall. “The Lisa experiment is over.”
“Oh,” he said, dumbly, and tried to catch up: “If Lisa was lying, if the rest of you didn’t want it—”
“It’s not that. It’s not any of that. It was…” Her shoulders hunched further. “I loved it. How long it’s been, and how warm, and… it was fucking beautiful. You’re beautiful.”
Hope rekindled in Seth’s heart. “So are you. That’s why—”
“That’s why it has to stop now.” She turned back around, still spilling from her dress but with an arm clamped in place to hold herself in. “Thank you for getting me back in charge of this fucking wreck before it went overboard. I know that can’t have been easy. You’re a good man.” She blinked, hard enough to flare her aquiline nose. “Saints, you’re fucking wonderful. And it’s the hardest thing in the world to say we’re done. But we have to be done.”
“I told you,” he said. “I’m ready to go unlit. I’m ready. Swear to the saints, I am. And I want it to be you. I have to tell you something. I—”
“Seth, that’s the rest of your bleeding life. Spent trapped at the Necropolis, or as a pariah otherwise, or, or doing this horrible shit I do.” She sat on the unused bed across the room. “Have you lost sight of what I am? This is horrible. I’ve killed so many people, Seth. I’ve gotta keep doing it. Every year for the rest of my life until a seraph bites me in half or some angry, crying kid takes well-earned revenge on me. Everyone looks at me like I’m a fucking beast, because I am. My dreams—”
“Annalise. I know you want me. I want you.”
“I was supposed to be the one to fix you,” she said, as if he’d not spoken. “Not the other way around. I was supposed to get you back on your feet and get you a nice fat check and then off you’d go. That’s all this was supposed to be. Not this. I can’t steal you from the world. It’s all open to you. You deserve a life, you deserve your freedom, you deserve to keep those gorgeous eyes, and to pass them down to your kids. I can’t give you any of that. You think you want me, but you’ll go a year at most and realize you’ve made a horrible mistake. You’ll realize I’m—I’m old and I’m broken and—” Her voice wobbled and cracked under the reservoir of emotion it held at bay. “And it’ll be too late. And it’ll be all my fault.”
“I won’t. Annalise, please. I swear to the Saints. I think—” He stood, wrapping a sheet around his waist to cover the nakedness that had become so unsuitable. He fought another quake down and forced his eyes to hers. “There’s been something over my shoulder, something gaining on me, my whole life, and I thought it was death. I thought I’d slip up and fuck up too hard and finally my useless, criminal life would be over. But it wasn’t death. It was you. This whole time I was waiting for you to find me. So I could lose my light to you, because—”
The tension over-torqued in his chest and screwed his voice shut. Say it, something said, and he wasn’t sure anymore if it was him or the fox.
“I love you,” he said. “I think I—no, I know. I’m falling in love with you, Annalise.” And despite the fear, he laughed with the realization of what he was saying, what he was finally saying and realizing as he said it how obvious and perfect it was. “And I’m unstuck. For the first time I’m unstuck, and I’m changing in ways I always wanted to change but didn’t think I could. And now I’m ready for the big one. And I’m in love with you, Annalise, and I don’t give a fuck if I can’t go back. I’m ready.”
“Oh, Saints.” She buried her face in her hands. “This was such a mistake.”
“What?” Something curled up behind Seth’s ribs and died. “No, no, it’s—”
“Saints and Seraphs. What have I fucking done? Why now? Why couldn’t I have met you when I was young? And beautiful? And not—” Her huge scarred hands tightened across her face. “Not this.” A wet sniff. She’d begun to cry. “You’re supposed to have a life, Seth. A life after me.”
“Did you not just hear what I said? Annalise, I’m—I don’t want a life after. I want your life.”
“My life ended!” Her face snapped up from her palms. “It ended in a hole in the Winter War. I just clung on because I was too stubborn and afraid to all-the-way die, and now I’m a—a wraith. The Annalise who could have made you happy is gone. I fucking wasted her. I wasted years and lost my soul over a permapissed gee-eyed brute and threw myself away, and it’s too late. It’s all too late. This is my afterlife. It’s just this, just years of killing and killing and killing until I find a death that sticks. And my boy and my girl will go, soon enough, if I haven’t already outlived them, and the al Ydrises will be gone. Countless generations since the beginning of all fucking existence, and I’m the one who ended us. My failure. Our names ground fine beneath the Turning Wheel and our souls never to live behind another set of Al Ydris eyes because we’re extinct. That’s all I can offer you.”
“What if that’s enough? That’s enough for me, Annalise.” He stepped across the gulf between the beds. “I don’t give a shit about the countless generations, or the Turning Wheel, or a name. I care about you. You’re enough. I don’t want kids. I don’t fucking want this soul inside me if it means I can’t be with you. Your sword’s right there. And if—if somehow, if it doesn’t work out, then I can just be a Necropolitan. That’s fine. I can do that.”
“I won’t do that to you,” she said. “It’d kill me to do that to you. You told me if I said give up on me, you would. Give up on me.”
“I can’t. I know what I said but that was before this all, this—I can’t just pull the reins now. Being near you and not being with you, I can’t do that.”
“I know.” Her tears carried her dark eyeshadow down her face. “I know you can’t. I could never ask you to. Not when it’s my fault. Not when I can’t either. ”
An awful jolt got her to her feet like she’d been electrically shocked. She dug back into the trunk and came out with a stitched, sable bag. He recognized it from its place on her belt, and the coins that she counted out from it.
“This isn’t all you were gonna make, but it’s all I can spare for now. Write the Necropolis come winter, tell me where you are, and I’ll figure out a way to send you the rest.” She held the bag out to him. When he didn’t move, she shook it. “Take the money, Seth. Leave and forget me. Fall in love with someone kind and young and beautiful, with their soul still in their chest and a future still ahead of them.”
“Annalise—”
“Seth,” she sobbed. Her tears were coming fast now, in full ugly-cry flow. “Just fucking take the money!”
Numbly he took the pouch—heavy, he felt, and it should have brought him some solace, but it didn’t—and he watched her stand and shake and cry mascara onto her lovely dress, and he didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” he tried.
“No.” She forced herself back together. “No, Seth, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, and I hope you forgive me someday, but if you don’t, if you decide I don’t deserve it, I understand.”
She took a deep, tearful swallow.
“Your services are no longer required, Seth il Gutierre,” she said. “I pardon you, thank you, and discharge you.”
Tell her there are people after you. Tell her you need her protection. But he didn’t. Fuck that. He could take care of himself. He would not beg; Seth had sworn to himself long ago he’d climb the scaffwood as a thief before he ever became a beggar.
He glared and stood as straight as his burning chest would let him. “You’ll have to fire me.”
“Then you’re fired,” she said.