Page 38 of Spelunking Through Hell

“I’m just getting Mama’s gun,” I said, and stooped to retrieve the revolver from the floor, quickly popping the cylinder and verifying for myself that there were no more bullets inside. Sure, it had failed when Thomas tried to shoot me, but the first rule of gun safety is that no gun is unloaded unless you verify it for yourself. The second rule of gun safety is that it still isn’t unloaded, because invisible bullets can happen to the best of us.

Maybe invisible bullets aren’t really a thing, but acting like they are prevents a lot of accidents.

I snapped the cylinder shut and turned back to Thomas, smiling. “All good,” I said, then paused, slightly taken aback by the expression on his face. He was watching me with a look of such all-encompassing fondness that it was almost confusing. Nothing I’d done justified that face, at least not that I could see.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have realized you’d be worried about the gun.”

“It was my mother’s.”

“I know. I have the other one, if you want to put them back together.” He offered me his hand, almost hesitantly. “Will you come with me?”

“I crossed a universe to find you,” I said, and slid my hand back into his. “I’ll go anywhere you want me to.”

The narrow wooden door Thomas led me through had clearly been designed to blend in with the panels around it, virtually disappearing until you got close enough to see the seams. There weren’t even any hinges on this side of the door. I raised an eyebrow.

“The people who originally constructed this place were gone long before my arrival, and they had a tropism toward circles,” he said. “Any door with sharp edges was built by people who came later and took over what they’d left behind.”

“Is that your polite way of telling me that you finally learned how to hang a door?”

“I’m handy!” he protested. “I patch drywall like a champion.”

“You put holes in drywall like a champion,” I corrected. “I had to hang all the doors for the mice, and those were so small that you should have been able to manage them one-handed in the dark.”

He smiled and pressed a kiss to my temple before undoing a latch on the front of the door. It swung open easily. “I missed you so much,” he said, and stepped through, pulling me with him into a dim, narrow tunnel that smelled of wood resin and time. No dust, though, and no spiders; just a faint underlying scent of strawberries and apples, making me suspect he’d been treating the wood in some way with bromeliad oil.

Interesting. Maybe he’d finally found a decent use for the stuff. The door swung closed behind us, throwing the hall into darkness. Thomas kept walking, pulling me along. He didn’t create a light to guide us to our destination, and that was a little strange—once he’d fully relaxed into the idea that it was safe for him to be a sorcerer around me, he’d become casual about showing his magic, casting near-constant little spells to make things easier on the both of us. After a lifetime of hiding, he’d finally been able to relax and be himself. It seemed odd that he wouldn’t do it here.

The hall was only about ten feet long. At the end, Thomas opened another door, revealing a small, square room with the same whitewashed walls I’d seen throughout the rest of the building.

There was a small, round window high on one wall, allowing sunlight to trickle into the room. The window was open, but largely choked off by a tangle of bromeliad vines. One opportunistic bromeliad flower had actually poked halfway into the room, and I could see small insects like moths with too many wings stuck to the petals, already in the process of dissolving. The scent of its pollen hung ripe and heavy in the air.

“I’ll get that,” said Thomas, and pulled away from me, picking up a heavy wooden paddle and using it to nudge the flower gently back outside before closing the window behind it. The pollen that was already in the room lingered, but it already seemed lighter without the flower emitting more. I took the moment to look around.

The room was simply furnished, which made it all the more jarring, because the furnishings were the sort of thing that wouldn’t have seemed out of place at home in Buckley. A low bed was shoved into one corner of the room, too small for more than two people to sleep comfortably, and for two only if they were content to be piled practically on top of one another. There was a dresser, four drawers and a cluttered top, one drawer partially open to reveal a tangled welter of clothing. A single bookshelf dominated the wall opposite the bed, mostly filled with rocks and oddly shaped pieces of wood, rather than actual books. The top shelf was entirely devoted to a tattoo kit that looked half as sophisticated as the one I had at home, which was already an antique.

Something small was stuck to the wall above the bed, too distant from the door for me to see it clearly, even at this short remove. The bed itself was unmade, covers tangled and tossed and entirely unprepared for company. My pack leaned against the foot of the bed, top open, and my other revolver was on the bed itself, gleaming in the light from the window.

I crossed to the bed and knelt to check that my bag was still closed and retrieve my second gun, feeling better once both of them were in my hands where they belonged. “Do I get my clothes and the rest of my gear back eventually?” I asked.

“All your weapons are with Sally, except for the revolvers,” said Thomas. “I kept those, because I thought...” He trailed off, looking momentarily like he wasn’t sure whether he should continue. Then he nodded, apparently coming to an agreement with himself, and continued, “I thought, based on the description she’d given of our newest arrival, that you were the latest in a long line of assassins. One clever enough to have disguised yourself as my wife, but not clever enough to have started from an accurate description of her. And since you weren’t the real Alice, you must have been responsible for her death as I couldn’t see any other way she would have allowed those guns to leave her hands. Forgive me for thinking you’d be so easily overcome. After this much time... it grows easy to confuse what I know for the truth with what I hoped to be true. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten many of your failings in the intervening years, and remembered only howmuch I missed you, and your absolute conviction that there was no possible threat too big for you to handle. I had a shamefully easy time picturing a younger, faster assassin getting the drop on you in order to complete their disguise.”

“So you kept my guns because you thought they were the only real thing about me?”

“Not to put too fine a point on it... yes.” He looked at me hopelessly. “It’s still somewhat difficult to believe you are who you claim to be.”

I glanced back at the wall, at the small item stuck there. It was the original photograph that the painting Sally showed me had been based on. Of course it was. It was faded and worn, with tattered edges, but still recognizable, and looking at it, I could so easily understand his concern. I looked nothing like that girl.

The anger washed out of me, replaced by an exhaustion I had been fighting back for decades, never quite allowing myself to feel it, for fear that it would slow me down. I sat heavily on the edge of the bed, setting my revolvers on the mattress to either side of me, and just looked at him.

Thomas. My Thomas, the man I had loved since the first day I saw him, long before it was appropriate for me to go falling in love with an adult man. The man I had spent what sometimes felt like my entire life trying to find. He was still looking at me like I was a miracle. He was just looking at me like I was a stranger at the same time, and the dissonance of that expression in his eyes was painful. The silence stretched out between us.

“So this is where you live,” I said finally, choosing to smash the silence rather than allow it to fester.

“Yes,” he said, walking toward me. “And this is where I sleep. Alone.”

There were no signs that anyone else shared this room with him, but hearing him confirm it reminded my body what it had been doing before we were so rudely interrupted. My breath caught, and I met his eyes, not letting myself look away.

“I know you still have questions,” I said. “So do I.”

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