The Gray Man opened his eyes to the feeling of a knife sliding along his ribs.
It was a cold and slippery knife, hard in a way that suggested daintiness and precision, and neatly serrated along its blade, and it was a feeling he was sadly familiar with and thus almost did not notice as it curved in and out of his chest. A long time ago, the specific feeling of a knife or gun flush against him, eager to kill or at least maim, had shocked and enthralled him; shortly after, he’d realised there were more sensual and enjoyable sensations, and had promptly forgotten its allure.
It seemed it was always a good time for his old haunts to come back and bite him.
He flexed his wrist, a small and frail movement, and realised he could not move beyond similarly small and frail motions. He was not sure why he was immobile, or what he was lying on that writhed so incessantly beneath his shoulders, but above him, a single lamp swayed, its light cold and piercing in an otherwise pitch black room.
He realised he was naked. The Gray Man mused that he had never been simultaneously so naked and so uncomfortable for a long time, then wondered, briefly, if that was his captor’s intent.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” came the low viscous drawl of Laumonier, “Well. You would not, if only you could see yourself."
"If only,” agreed the Gray Man, and canted his head upward, pressing his chin to his chest to look in a way that severely inhibited his ability to speak. Laumonier stood facing him, toying with a velvety black coil of whatever it was that he lay upon; Laumonier crouched by his side, watching him intently and curiously; Laumonier loomed over him, something dark and slick and shiny gleaming from the pocket of his blazer. He looked amused and bored and coldly furious all at once, an unearthly and inherently malicious concoction that the Gray Man had been familiar with in his previous line of work, but not deeply fond of.
It was possible that he was going to die here.
He tested his bonds. They stirred gently but firmly against his wrists, cold as damp moss and autumn rain and the knife against his side. He could probably break, or at least wriggle, out of them if given a few uninterrupted minutes, but he chose not to, partly because when he moved his thumb just so, there came the worrying prick of teeth against his inner forearm, and partly because Laumonier held a set of pliers and Laumonier held a knife and Laumonier held a chrome gun with the words dream killer engraved into its muzzle in a messy, jagged, hand.
Very few men survived an altercation with Laumonier— profession and professionalism very rarely factored into it. The Gray Man knew this, like he knew he would be here for a while regardless of Laumonier’s intentions, and knew this was not how he wanted to die. Doing his best to look at Laumonier (and Laumonier, and Laumonier), he said, tersely and softly: “I had no involvement in Piper’s death.”
Laumonier sighed out a melancholy half-hymn that had probably been played at his daughter’s funeral, if he had even had the thought to hold one, and turned the gun over in his hands. He looked tired; he looked haunted; he looked ravened. “And I,” he said, “none in yours.”
From where he lay, the Gray Man could see the knife in his hands— it was a girlish switchblade, smooth as opposed to toothful and serrated, which meant it could not be Laumonier that held the knife to his ribs. The blade’s white lustre winked coquettishly at him, and he frowned as Laumonier leaned forward until he could no longer see the lamp, only the shine of whatever Laumonier had been hiding in his pocket as it was placed atop his bare and damply cold chest.
All the air was sucked out of the room. Slowly and tremulously, the Gray Man's heart began to beat.
Laumonier stepped back, and smiled thinly, and grimaced, and yawned with all the lazy loathsome leisure of a predator in wait. “Goodbye, Dean,” he said, in three voices, and turned to leave just as the Gray Man closed his eyes and thought: this is wrong.
The Gray Man opened his eyes to a trickle of blood down his side.
His brother stood above him, broad friendly face wolfish in the hiemal light, and the Gray Man felt his heart go still in his chest.
“Took you long enough, little brother,” he said, and his grin was genial and savage. “It’d be a pity if you slept through this.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” said the Gray Man, numbly, and somewhere between his dissent and the shudder of his heart in his throat, there was something that evoked from his brother’s harmless face a flash of something more heinous and endlessly hungrier than Laumonier; from his jaws, a mouthful of uproarious laughter.
“Well.” said the Gray Man’s brother, “I think so. It’s been, what– five years? Ten? More?” When the Gray Man did not respond, he hummed jovially and slipped the knife into the haggard space between his fourth and fifth ribs, chucking good-naturedly as the Gray Man sucked in a breath and melted into childhood terror, a long line of sleepless nights spent shivering with his knees folded into his chest and blood in his mouth coiling wetly ‘round his neck.
The Gray Man said: “Don’t.” and his voice was syrup in his throat, breath pressing hard on his frayed larynx. He wondered how Greenmantle had found his brother. He wondered if it was fate. He wondered if he deserved this. Maybe Niall Lynch had survived and was watching him now from the rafters, chortling vengefully through his scoundrel’s smile.
The Gray Man’s brother tutted. “If I’m honest,” he said, “I’ve missed you, Dean,”, and he plunged the knife into the Gray Man’s heart.
The Gray Man
thrashed and it was
teeth
that shredded his wrists as he struggled
fruitlessly
against his slippery
slimy
supple
bonds.
From under his head, something
uncoiled,
lax and raptorial,
stretching itself out 'round his throat–
it was a snake
(it was many snakes)
(he was lying on a bed of snakes)
(Laumonier had not done this to him) (Neither had Seondeok, or Greenmantle)
(the jury was still out on Lynch)
and it hissed
sweetly
against his Adam’s apple,
purring the mellowed notes of his brother’s words
into his bones.
“You’ve been slipping,” said the Gray Man’s brother, and he sounded almost disappointed. “The woman was a mistake, little brother– you were never cut out to be a lady’s man.” He paused, deliberately, half all the flamboyance of a Saturday cartoon villain, and half a childhood previously left repressed and dusty in the less-frequented recesses of the Gray Man’s mind. “Say, Dean– I think I’ll pay her a visit. I think I’d enjoy that.”
The Gray Man thought of
Maura, her
fishy kiss and
pearl-toothed smile. He thought of
Blue,
who appreciated his approximate sense of humour
and his sensible gifts, but
who could not fend off a grown, malevolent, man if her life depended on it
and certainly not his brother.
He had wanted to stay.
He had stayed too long.
His brother twisted the knife, cleaving his heart in two with a sick ripping sound that did not even try to present itself as sensuous. The Gray Man screamed soundlessly. A snake coiled around his bicep, its teeth pricking his skin as every sinew in his body pulled itself taut, the rush of blood in his ears barely quieter than his brother’s voice and the long, thin, knife folded into its timbre.
His brother was still talking. “Really, Dean,” he was saying as he burrowed uneven figure-eights into the Gray Man’s heaving chest and leaned into the pump of ruddy blood, “you were messy. After everything, too. Rentals are too easy to track down, out here. You know that. You didn’t even take the blood out. I saw you coming from a mile way. Maybe two.”
The Gray Man stopped screaming. That was wrong. He did not drive a rental car with an incriminating stain half-scrubbed out of its upholstery. He drove a white Mitsubishi Evo that read THIEF in proud letters across its vanity plate. He did not drive a rental car. He drove a dream and a beast and a shuddering, sentient, thing, because that part of him was dead and buried and gone. It came to him slowly: the pain was wrong, too— it was not the harming that hurt. It was the healing.
“No.” said the Gray Man. “No, you didn’t.” His restraints were there and then they weren’t; he skimmed his hand over his breast and found that the object Laumonier had placed there was a small, metal, bee, dimly amber through the cracks in his fingers, its thorax polished black and shiny.
His brother stopped, and looked at him. He grinned, and his mouth was wide and unforgiving and toothless. “What’s that, little brother?”
The Gray Man said: “You’re dead.”
His brother tutted again, no longer in dismay but in something verging on impatience. Vexed, he swept his palm across his shiny forehead. His fingers hooked into the holes where the Gray Man had shot him, and the Gray Man began to breathe again. Air sat, strangely prickly, in his lungs— the sensation was perhaps similar to the regrowth of skin, but infinitely more gratifying. “Not really, Dean,” said his brother. “No one really dies.”
The Gray Man sat up. The bee pulsed in his palm, its languid ebb and flow comforting and familiar and warm. He said, perfunctorily: “Niall Lynch is dead. So are the Greenmantles. And so are you.”
The Gray Man’s brother looked unsure for the first time since their parents’ death. Vividly, the Gray Man remembered his brother’s solid hand on his shoulder, the blood on his nails redder than anything either of them had seen before— technicolour-lurid. Vividly, he heard his voice in his ear: c'mon, Dean. This’ll be fun. He shivered, and leaned forward, and the bee became the chrome gun that went off twice as his brother erupted into a hive and the lamp overhead shook violently.
The Gray Man opened his eyes to a buzzing in his fingers and the unpleasant but harmless sensation of being totally swathed in blankets. Poking out of the tangle was Maura Sargent, blinking blearily and imploringly. Three sleepless nights tugged at and purpled the bags under her eyes. The slow soothing curl of her fingers over his chest was heavy and harmless. Her hair was furiously mussed and spiky in between his fingers as he raked his hand through her scalp, wondering, warily and foolishly, if she would become Seondeok or Aurora Lynch or, god forbid, Laumonier’s dead third.
She did not, only quirked her brows in a way that was probably much more effective at communicating discontent later in the day, after a full night's sleep. She smelled like pumpkin spice and thyme and sugar, and then sweat. The Gray Man realised that she had probably been lying on his chest prior to Laumonier and the dream, and that his thrashing had probably woken her.
Still stroking her hair, he blinked sedately, and when her face (and the wonderful, crooked, bridge of her nose, and the smattering of freckles across her cheeks, and the concern bruised into her knowing eyes) stayed in focus, he sighed, a hollow and tired sound. “Are you going ask me if I’m troubled?”
“You should know,” she said, “that I’m not that kind of psychic.”
They held each other like that until the sun rose.