Page 102 of The Business of Blood
With a cry, I caught Aidan as his knees buckled, and supported his fall to the cold floor. His blood pooled instantly beneath us as I held his head on my lap. My sobs had turned to whimpers. They became softer than the almost indistinctwhooshingof the candle flames.
“Pray for me, Fiona.” Aidan’s voice was even darker than before. Wetter. “And remember me.”
I made a terrible sound. How could I forget such horror? This would paint my nightmares red for eternity, if not beyond.
“Not like this.” He read my tormented expression correctly. “Like we were. By the river. With Finn and Flynn and… And Mary. When we were still…innocent.”
I nodded. My last gift to him was an utter lie. I’d remember his confession. I’d recall that he tried to both save me and kill me. That he’d not felt worthy of my forgiveness, and in the end, he’d not deemed me worthy of his.
“Pray for me,” he begged again. “Finish it.”
I don’t know how I managed, but I warbled and sobbed along with him as he gurgled and drowned in his own blood. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”
I was dimly aware of noises. Maybe I should have been afraid, but anguish smothered any fear, and I whispered the words I knew by heart.
Aidan’s mouth filled before we were done, the blood overflowing until it streamed from the seam of his lips. He didn’t fight it anymore. He no longer struggled for breath.
I finished the last stanza of the prayer with a stronger voice.
My tears died when he did.
I stared down into his vacant eyes, swathed in a cloak of grief and pain. Agony he’d inflicted on me, yet again. For the final time. His golden, cherubic aspect a mask for such deep wells of madness and violence.
I gazed at him for what felt like ages but was only enough time for Aramis to free Jorah from the cross on the altar.
“I tried to be quiet.” The dazed gangster said almost apologetically as he sat up. “I was when he started on my shoulder. But…once he reached my ribs, I could no longer swallow the screams.”
I knew that would happen to me, eventually. I could remain quiet now, but the day would come when I could no longer swallow the screams.
“Only you white men find shame in screaming. When we kill, when we die, we make enough noise to alert the dead that more are coming to join them.” Aramis looked over at me. “Unless silence means survival.”
I wondered if it meant survival for me now.All to the good, I thought. I had nothing to say.
Did they blame me for this? For Aidan? Had I become someone on the other side of a chasm they couldn’t cross? A liability. An enemy?
I waited for either of them to strike, my fingers clutching my knife.
They didn’t.
“You are not bleeding much,” Aramis noted as he examined Jorah’s heinous wounds.
“No,” Jorah groaned. “I’ll live. He cauterized as he cut with that infernal blade. I think he hoped to flay as much of me as he could before I gave up the ghost. Tell me the carriage is here. I’m embarrassed to admit that I cannot make it home on my own power.”
“It’s here. Though I did not wait to bring anyone else to aid us. We’ll have to send for the doctor.”
Jorah patted Aramis’s amber shoulder, then clutched it, his gratitude unspoken.
I used my sleeve to wipe my tears and blot at my nose as I sniffed. I had no handkerchief, and one was not offered.
The shadow of numbness crept through me. Much as I imagined the biblical Angel of Death had crept through Egypt so many thousands of years ago. It snuffed out everything it found. First, the terror, utter and unutterable. Then, the anger, cooling it like the marble had cooled Aidan’s tempered blade. And, finally, loss and despair. They folded into a void infinitely emptier than the well of grief threatening to drown me.
I’d found power here. I couldn’t explain how. But for a pure, empty moment, I was untouchable. I stared up at the Hammer and the Blade and, while I couldn’t feel what my features were doing, I silently dared them to move on me.
It wouldn’t matter. I had nothing left to lose.
A fraught silence became a death knell as they stared back.
The Hammer leaned heavily on the altar, his chest struggling against his uneven breaths. His teeth bared slightly in a now ever-present grimace of pain.
