Out of the Black - Lee Doty [160]
It's not too late. Not too late at all. His hand still burned as he reached out through the Loom. Bones knitted, organs resumed proper operation, flesh healed. Finally, he knelt before his only son's unblemished body. With only a little coaxing, blood flowed through the repaired veins. Breath went in and out.
Sleeping. This was what sleeping looked like. Sometimes you can make it right. Sometimes, against all odds, it's not too late. But he was old enough to know better.
He shouted into the purging sky: sound and fury, but no words he could remember. He drove his damaged fist into the concrete. Bones snapped, blood flowed. He struck again and again until the pain nearly knocked him out. Then he knelt there, clutching his ruined hand, screaming in the pouring rain.
***
They moved down the stairs as quickly as they could. Ping and Miranda carried Hawthorne's gurney; Rae and Elena carried Mendez's. Alex and Anne came last, guarding the rear. Alex's focus was on his Obscuring, Anne's was on restraining the urge to look over her shoulder for the hundredth time.
The going got easier the farther they got away from the fifth floor because the stairs became less warped. As they passed the fourth floor, Alex tripped on an uneven step. He didn't get a chance to fall down the stairs, bowling through the others carrying the gurneys below him. Anne caught his arm milliseconds into the fall.
"Thanks." He said.
"No prob." She said. "So, you folks live in Wonderland long?"
"About a year and a half," Alex gave a weak smile, "Didn't do much more than hang with the Mad Hatter before this week though. Maybe five months for Rae there. Ping's been here only a little longer than you."
"He's adjusting well." She said with a nod.
"So are you."
"This is adjusting?"
"Continuing to breathe is adjusting." Elena said from just ahead of them. "I've only been down the rabbit hole for half an hour and I'm already sure 'bout that."
"Good point." Anne said, "What about Mendez and Hawthorne?"
"I had lunch with Kyle and Sarah today... no Wonderland." Elena said.
"Recent arrivals, then." Alex said. "Welcome all!"
***
Despair is for the weak, Issak thought, shoving the blackness away for the thousandth time.
After the millennia he had been alive, he didn't have a lot of room left under his skin for weakness. Yet, weakness or no, he couldn't keep the rage away. Even when he couldn't feel its fire, its smoke filled his vision, its fingers searched over his skin, feeling for any gap in his defenses.
The worst memories were the oldest and newest. Beginnings and endings: memories of Dek's childhood and his... end. Teeth clenched, he pushed away another dear and unwanted memory. This one was of Ivo and Roy: their first trip to a movie house sometime in the nineteenth century. Roy had been so excited he'd kept getting out of his seat to examine the screen. They'd been thrown out of the theatre. They'd laughed all the way home. Three people who together could have laid waste to all the armies of Europe- ejected from a movie house by a self-important usher.
The rage wouldn't leave him, largely because he was its target. Some mistakes you're just not supposed to walk away from.
***
Ping pushed the door open and navigated the gurney forward. The way Alex had sounded, he hadn't expected to get this far.
Trying to balance caution with haste, he looked down the hallway to the left... nothing. He pushed the rest of the way through the doorframe with the door sliding down the right side of the gurney. Boy, if they could avoid another pack of disco zombies, hit men, and a powerful wizard for just a few more minutes, they might actually get...
As he moved beyond the edge of the door, Ping saw him. Bald with a well-groomed fringe of gray hair, he looked more like an urbane spokesman for European coffee than the engine of their final destruction. He leaned against the wall about five meters away as if waiting for a friend. Nothing about