They watch him in the side mirror of the car, sipping Thai iced teas. He’s brooding, flipping pizza in a sullen chain restaurant kitchen, not looking up.
“I believed my own hype,” mutters Liz. “Stupid. I thought if I loved him, that if I tried, I could fuck the crazy out of his brain.”
Delarivier shakes her head. “Your failure lies in where you placed his crazy.”
“You don’t have to put our whole relationship in terms of my failure,” says Liz.
“I didn’t. You did.”
“Then where was it really, smartass?”
“Men,” says Delarivier, “are crazy down to the bones.”
“It was at this point,” says Sherrinford, “that he shook my hand–”
“Aha!” says Sacker. “From which gesture you surely gathered a panoply of interesting details.”
“It was neither limp and cold, like a dead fisherman’s, nor crushingly tight like that of some great Russian sadist,” says Sherrinford. “His fingers were slightly moist from the exertion of climbing the stairs. The shake was appropriately firm, and ended after a clasp and a slight vertical movement.”
“And what did you deduce?” asks Sacker, mustaches twitching.
“Almost completely nothing,” says Sherrinford, “the only people who don’t shake hands like that are in books.”
The secrets of the Witches of Athay include a method for storing all the blood in your body in a jar in the cooling cellar. Isabella does so, with a knife and a pipette, then gives Patrick the umbrella and leads him out into the storm of glass. The music of the shards is beautiful; the cuts don’t hurt. She seals them up with superglue.
In the cooling cellar again, she pours her blood back in through her ear.
“I think you should have waited,” says Patrick.
“What?” says Isabella, as, in a pattern of tiny fountains, she begins to leak.
The forest pulses with light, points of it teasing her behind trunks and fronds: uncountable, and always receding. Shea scrambles over logs ripe with moss and stony creek beds. Her jar is slick with the sweat of her palm.
A reach, a scoop, and the fluting thump of her hand on the neck. There! Shea holds the jar up to peer through the lens on the bottom.
But the only thing inside is an impostor, an insect, its thorax glowing with false promise.
No matter. Shea discards it and scrambles off again. She’ll catch one of the real ones soon enough.
“It was a grift to begin with, on you and your ma,” says Buchanan, spitting seeds off the stern.
“I know,” says Proserpina.
“But you turned it right about on me.”
Proserpina waits.
“I don’t think you respect me; I know you don’t trust me. That’s good. Don’t start. But you’re what I need, gel. I think you and I can do things that my son’s too gentle to learn.”
Proserpina keeps her eyes on the wake, leading back to the world she knew.
“Let me teach you,” says Ganymede Buchanan, “to be dangerous,” and holds out a strange red fruit.