Page 35 of Spelunking Through Hell

Not that he looked his age. He could have been here less than a week, to look at him. Only the women I’d met so far, and the painting of me on the wall, which was weathered and aged and had clearly been exposed to direct sunlight before it was moved to the back of a closet, told me that he’d been here any longer. Time can run differently between dimensions. It still didn’t explain why he looked so much like I expected him to.

“Who sent you?” he demanded, and surged toward me, aiming a blow at my solar plexus. I blocked, but barely, and was rewarded by my arm going numb.

He was still wearing his wedding ring. That was enough of a surprise that my guard dropped for a moment, and his next punch caught me on the edge of the jaw, rocking me back and filling my mouth with the bright, sharp taste of blood. I spat it onto the floor.

It’s bad to get distracted during a fight. That’s how you lose. I spat more blood and glared at him.

“I came because I knew I’d find you one day,” I snapped, and swung for his head. My right arm was still numb, so I used my left. Less effective, but still good enough.

Sometimes good enough is all you have.

He blocked the blow with too much ease, eyes going wide, and took a step back, conveniently leaving himself wide open on the left. If it wouldn’t have been tactically stupid, I would have assumed he did it on purpose. Under the circumstances, I didn’t particularly care. I swung again.

This time, he ducked easily out of range of my fist, and just stared at me. Voice spiking slightly, like he couldn’t actually believe what he was saying, he asked, “Alice?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “This isn’t where you get me to drop my guard by pretending to finally know who I am. That isn’t how this goes.”

I rocked back to reposition myself, and launched another roundhouse kick, this time aiming for his midsection. To my confusion and surprise, he took the blow, not even flinching away from it, and went down hard, hitting the floor on his back.

I dropped down to straddle him, landing with one knee on either side of his hips, and pulled back my right fist, arm cocked to hit him hard enough to knock him out if my aim was right. He didn’t even try to defend himself, just kept staring at me like I was an illusion, like this couldn’t possibly be happening. Like none of this was happening. I didn’t move.

He was staring at me, and so I just stared at him, and the two of us formed a frozen tableau marred by blood on the floor and trickling from the corner of my mouth, running from a split on the skin of his left cheek, and blotching both our knuckles. A bruise was forming around that cut on his cheek, burst capillaries darkening with damage. Still I stared, and still he stared, and it felt like neither of us was breathing.

Since my fist was still raised for a blow that felt like it was never going to land, I wasn’t holding down his arms. Hands shaking, he raised them toward my face, like he was going to cup my cheeks. “Alice,” he repeated, less disbelieving, more amazed.

I pulled back, stopping him from grabbing me the way he had been intending to. “As soon as you’re losing, you believe me?”

“Alice,” he said, for a third time, like repeating it was what made it true. Then, starting to laugh as he spoke, he said, “No assassin would know how you telegraph your swings to the left. I told you to work on that. You should have listened.”

“Yeah, well, you should have learned toaim,” I countered.

This time, when he reached for the sides of my face, I didn’t pull away. And while his hands were warm—a sorcerer’s hands are always warm—they didn’t burn me. This wasn’t some sort of a trick to get me to drop my guard. I did lower my fist, finally, and just stared down at the laughing man beneath me. He looked almost exactly the way that I remembered him, except for the tattoo I’d already noticed, the one that must have been almost impossible to complete without making a mistake, and he was watching me so closely that his gaze was almost a physical weight. There were tears in his eyes.

He made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob as he let go of my face in order to grab hold of my shoulders, sitting halfway up and wrapping himself around me as he pulled me into a hug so tight it bent my ribs and made everything about me ache.

After a moment of stunned surprise, I wrapped my arms around him in turn. This wasn’t the reunion I’d imagined. It was apparently the one I had, and that was what honestly mattered. That I had it. That I’d been right all this time, and here he was for me to find, waiting for me, holding me like I was some kind of a terrible miracle, something he’d never even hoped to have.

Then he pulled back, returning one hand to the side of my face. I leaned into it, taking a deep, shaking breath that felt like the first real one I’d had in more than fifty years.

Eleven

“Nothing is lost forever. Sometimes we just pretend not to understand what it would cost to find it.”

—Juniper Campbell

In a throne room the size of a cathedral, kneeling atop the man I’ve been hunting for the last fifty years, who just stopped trying to attack me

Eyes still bright withtears, Thomas looked up at me. My eyes weren’t exactly dry, either, although I’d been working toward his reunion, while he’d just been invited. It was understandable that he was looking a little poleaxed, considering the circumstances.

He began to pull his hand away. I grabbed his wrist before he could complete the motion, holding it in place, and he smiled, a little unsteadily.

“Always did know what you wanted,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

“Hi, Thomas,” I said, still holding his hand against my face. “Miss me?”

“Oh, well, it’s not like I’m any stranger to being locked up while you go gallivanting, so I suppose I shouldn’t have, but I missed you when you went off to college, and I missed you when I went off to hell,” he said, shoulders dropping slightly as he started to relax. He didn’t try to pull his hand away from my face again. Instead, he reached up with his remaining hand and slid it around behind my neck, pulling me down toward him.

Adrenaline is fun. It tries its best to keep us alive during a fight, and then when the fight is over, it does all sorts of clever things. Sometimes it exhausts us, or makes us hungry, or makes absolutely everything seem funny, no matter how inappropriate laughter is. It canbring relief, or it can bring crushing depression. Or it can bring the urge to be close to another person, to ground yourself in the act of touching and being touched.

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