Chapter 21

. . .

Callum tiptoed into the hotel bathroom, contemplating turning on the lights before deciding no, that wasn’t necessary. He perched on the lid of the toilet, then paused to open the small shower window, shivering gladly at the late-autumn draft. Winter lurked; his time would be up soon, and whatever remained would be greedily earned. Or merrily won. The mystery thrilled him, a cheap, fleeting high.

“Where are you?” he said, stepping over the edge of the bathtub when his screen lit up.

“That’s how you answer the phone? I take back what I said about you not being a psychopath.”

Callum rolled his eyes. “Would you answer the question?”

“I’m upstairs. In bed.”

“Alone?”

“Yes. Rhodes and Varona are downstairs and Gideon’s passed out in the archives. Are you trying to make this dirty? That’s not at all what I meant when I said I wanted to talk.”

Another eye roll. “Gideon meaning Varona’s little dreamer friend?”

“He’s not actually that little, and yes. He got roped into being an archivist or something, which is not a real job as far as I’m aware. But apparently it’s the Society’s version of a witness protection program.”

“How is he?”

“Extremely unnerving. Very quiet. He’s given me at least seven jump-scares because he walks so quietly. It’s like having a cat that startles you while you’re reading.”

“You said you wanted to be startled.”

“Not like that, which you know. Are you only going to be difficult?” Callum heard the rustle of sheets, the motion of Tristan turning over in bed. “I could simply hang up and go to sleep if that’s the case.”

A pulse or two of silence. “Oh?”

“They’re confused, a bit, but it’s not . . . it’s nothing you need to feel badly about. They know your father wants them to hate you but they can’t reconcile it with their memories of you.”

“They told you that much?”

“Alys likes me a bit more than Bella, or at least doesn’t actively hate me, but either way they don’t have to tell me. Alys knows I’m going to murder you and yet she still asked me questions about you. Because she knows I’m the only one who can give her answers, even if they’re bad.”

Tristan said nothing for a moment. “And what did you decide to tell them?”

Callum, likewise, was silent for a while. “I told them you’re still fairly grumpy.”

“That’s it?”

“And that you don’t like soup and you’ve got too many turtlenecks.”

“Just the basics then.”

“I did tell them that you can stop time.” A pause. “That the main reason everyone wants you dead is because you’re so powerful. Because you can make a whole new world and it’s dangerous.”

Another pause.

“Did they believe you?”

“Yes.”

“Though surely my father told them something very different.”

“Yes, almost certainly. But they believed me anyway.”

“Because you’re very convincing?”

“Because the idea of you being special is actually very easy to believe.”

He could practically hear the sound of Tristan thinking.

“Is this part of your plan?” Tristan said eventually. “Influence me over the phone? Get my guard down? Convince me to meet you somewhere and then hand me over to my dad?”

“Of course that’s my plan. But it’ll never work, will it? Since you’re going to be the one to kill me first.”

“It’s only fair.”

“Is it? You already had your try. Technically I think it’s my turn.”

“You had a whole year to murder me and instead you spent it getting pissed and doing maths.”

“No it isn’t.”

“No, it isn’t.” Callum felt the laughter stick in his throat. “Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that, obviously because it’s part of my plan to soften you up for my eventual assassination.”

“Worst supervillain in the world,” Tristan muttered.

“But you clearly need your rest, so I’ll just—”

“I can’t decide if it would be better or worse,” Tristan interjected, “if I could have felt my father’s feelings.”

Callum said nothing.

“On the one hand, perhaps there might have been some complexity I’m missing? Or some kind of . . . reasoning? Maybe I could have understood the triggers, the things that got him so angry, maybe I could have stopped them before they happened. Or maybe that would have just been exhausting. Watching where I stepped, making myself responsible for him. Maybe I would have felt like I needed to stay behind, just to make sure nothing bad happened in my absence.”

Callum scratched idly at the thinning paint beside the bathroom vanity. “Is that meant to be a metaphor?”

“It’s an attempt at empathy, actually. So I can understand why you’d find it so difficult.”

“Hilarious,” Callum said dryly, “and for the record, my situation is quite different.”

“Is it?”

“Of course. It wasn’t like I stayed where I was purely because I had to.”

“Oh, Callum.” Tristan gave a long-suffering sigh. “You do see how that’s worse, don’t you? Wanting to stay with someone you already know doesn’t love you.”

“Ouch,” said Callum. He felt it somewhere small and sharp, like resting his heart or his entire sense of worth on the prick of a needle.

“That’s not what you’re doing now,” Tristan said.

“No, I know that. I’m either talking to my future murder victim or my future murderer, depending on who gets there first.”

“It’s hard,” Tristan said. “There is nothing harder than loving someone who can’t love you back. It is very fucked up, Callum, and nobody blames you for that part.” A pause. “They blame you for everything else, which as you know is intensely earned.”

“No, it’s the whiskey. Being with Rhodes is actually incredibly suffocating.”

Callum blinked. “Well, that’s—”

“Don’t be too delighted. It’s not that I don’t have feelings for her, because I do, and that’s exactly the problem. It’s just—” Tristan paused. “There’s more to it now, more shit she doesn’t want to share with me but has to. Which is why,” he added, “I can finally put into words how annoying it was that you tried to take every burden off my shoulders but couldn’t fucking ask me what I actually wanted from you.”

“I’m gathering that there were some flaws in my management style,” Callum said after a moment. “Which should make it all the easier to kill me, I imagine.”

“Actually, yes,” said Tristan. “This sort of thing makes it very easy to want you dead.”

“You’re welcome.” Callum shifted from where he was sitting on the toilet lid, facing away from the vanity and toward the shower, reclining a bit in the space. “For what it’s worth, I hope you do see God. Or whoever’s out there.”

“Assuming Rhodes finally admits she wants to do it, yeah, and assuming Parisa lets Dalton off his leash for long enough to try. Though, for the record, I’m hoping it’s more of a construct than a deity.”

“It’s all the same,” Callum said. “It’ll always be something bigger than we can understand.”

“Maybe bigger than you can understand,” said Tristan.

Callum chuckled. “You’ve taken well to the prospect of omnipotence. How many god complexes does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Six. Five to agree on one to die,” said Tristan.

“Speaking of Parisa, I saw her recently.” Tristan was silent. “She wants to kill Rhodes.”

“Does she? Quite a change of heart.”

“Parisa doesn’t do changes of heart.” Actually, her heart was as consistent as it had always been. Callum had already seen her pain and recognized it for what it was: constant. (He’d mentioned that already several times, not that anyone ever believed him.) “Though I suppose a change of mind isn’t entirely off-brand.”

Tristan hummed in equivocation. “I take it you’re in agreement?”

“I don’t think Rhodes is in a position to be killed,” Tristan commented. “In fact, I really don’t advise it. Also, I need her.”

“Is that your affection talking? Because the Rhodes we knew was very killable. Probably her main feature.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Yes,” Callum exhaled deeply, “fine, I know that’s not true—”

“Did Parisa say why?” Tristan’s voice had changed. Callum couldn’t identify the texture, but it was different, more alert.

“She seems to think something’s wrong with Rhodes. Possibly that something’s interfering with that moral compass you admire so much.” Callum waited for a response, then decided to test the waters with “But you already know that.”

From the other line Callum heard nothing but silence. He tried to imagine the room Tristan was lying in, the way the house used to sound at night. The crickets and the stillness, like being lost to time and space.

“Did you know this house has a hired staff?” asked Tristan suddenly, and Callum choked on a laugh.

“Who did you think made the salads you enjoyed so much?”

“Have you ever spoken to the chef?”

“Of course not, Tristan, but still the house is sentient, not alive. It doesn’t know how to julienne a carrot.”

“Are there groundskeepers? Why did we never see them?”

“Maybe there are tiny little elves that push up the grass at night.”

“Do you think everyone chooses this? The power and prestige, all that jazz.”

“I think they do, yes. The murder clause is fairly specific.”

“It’s different now, though.” Tristan was quiet. “I don’t want to kill you for the books. Maybe I never did, but in the moment . . .” Another pause. “Now I want to kill you because you’ve pissed me off royally, and apparently someone’s got to.”

“I warned you,” Callum said. “I told you that the moment Rhodes came back we’d all be sitting ducks.”

“I’m still contributing to the archives,” Tristan said. “So it’s you who’s got to watch out, or Reina. Or Parisa. You’ll be the ones to die first.” Any minute, perhaps.

“Beat the library to it, then,” Callum suggested invitingly. “It’d be such a shame to die of something dull, like typhoid.”

“Drowning in the bath.”

“Cardiac arrest.”

“High cholesterol.”

“You’re right, a steak knife to the carotid sounds much better,” Tristan said.

“Carotid? Jesus. Femoral would have worked just as well.”

“Noted,” Tristan said. “For next time.”

Callum felt himself nod, but said nothing.

“Well.” Tristan cleared his throat. “I don’t remember why the fuck I called you but I think I got whatever I was supposed to get out of it.”

“Homicidal fantasies,” Callum supplied.

“Right, that. And stay away from my sisters.”

“No.”

There was a low growl from Tristan’s end. “Motherfucker.”

“Same to you.” A pause. “Good luck, then.”

“I know you don’t mean that, but thanks—”

“If you see a white light, stop walking.”

“Jesus. Are you done?”

“If there’s something wrong with Rhodes, Tristan, then for god’s sake ignore your impulses for theater. It doesn’t have to be a faff. The femoral is incredibly easy to reach.”

“Wow, again, thank you—”

“Just a small incision, really. She won’t even notice. It’ll be like a love bite, only with a letter opener, maybe—”

“I know this is difficult for you to understand, Callum, but I do love her. I’m really not interested in killing her.”

“Are those things mutually exclusive, though? You love me,” Callum observed, “and yet murder’s almost incessantly on the mind.”

There was a click as the line went dead. Callum pulled the phone from his ear, looking at the smear of sweat across the screen from where it had been pressed against his cheek.

“Are you done?”

Callum jumped, looking up to find Reina waiting sourly in the doorway. Another terrible instance of his usual senses being overpowered by something else. Something gruesomely private and internal, like agony or constipation.

“Sorry.” He shot to his feet, waving her obligingly toward the toilet. “All yours.”

“You might as well tell Adrian Caine and his cock-faced goons that you’re not going to be following through on your offer,” she said. She sounded grumpy, as she nearly always did, though there were gradations to her tonalities that Callum had learned to listen for. He did not care for the implications of this one.

“If I sound,” he began, opting to finish with, “attached—”

“If?” she echoed, repulsed.

“If I sound attached,” he repeated, “that’s not necessarily a bad thing.” Callum fell into his unmade bed and shrugged. “The sacrifice has to mean something, does it not?”

“So you admit Tristan means something to you.”

He opened his phone, refreshing the page of recent headlines. “Nova Corporation under investigation for antitrust violations.” “What exactly is going on with everyone’s favorite illusions company?” “Nova shares dipped 3 percent in extended trading.” “Everything you need to know about the allegations against Dimitris Nova.”

“Would you stop acting like you’ve tricked me into something? Of course he means something, that was never a secret. You’ve been mocking me for it for over a year.”

“No,” Reina said emphatically enough for Callum to look up. “I haven’t been mocking you for having feelings. I’ve been mocking you for having possibly the dumbest revenge plot I’ve ever personally witnessed.”

Callum heaved an irritable sigh, tossing his phone away. “If we want this to actually work and save the rest of our skins, it can’t be nothing. I can’t kill Rhodes because I dislike her, and neither can you, because you have no opinions about her. Parisa’s right, the arrow’s most deadly only when it’s most righteous, and that means—”

“I’m done listening to Parisa.” Reina shut the bathroom door, dousing what remained of the light.

Callum was aware that Reina had yet to put words to the feeling she’d walked away with when they left Parisa behind in Nothazai’s office. The taste in her mouth, the mix of acridness and bile, and the worst of it, the sweetness. Like sugar to hide the medicine, only in reverse.

Easy to name it hatred. Much, much harder to call it what it was.

“You’re sure you don’t want to help Varona?” he said, mostly to annoy her, but also because he was feeling vulnerable and it was gross.

“I’m sure.” Reina fell into her bed, reaching for her earplugs.

“What if their experiment fails?” Assuming that such failure would not be instantaneously catastrophic, of course. Easily done, as Callum rarely assumed apocalypses could befall him. He couldn’t imagine where people found the time for such impractical neuroses.

It seemed that Reina agreed, or had elected to disagree privately, like a lady. “Then he can grovel again when it’s over. Life goes on.”

There was something potentially ominous to the flippancy of her tone (inauthentic such as it was, and unfittingly heavy, like claggy bread), but as hubris was one of Callum’s particular strengths, he did not investigate it further. “Stone cold, Mori.”

“I wish.” Grudgingly she flashed Callum a view of her phone screen, which consisted of a daily bubble of conversation (and then some) from Varona, followed by a single line in reply.

“Oh my god,” said Callum. “You don’t have to sign your messages, Mori, they’re not emails. Are you actually eighty years old—?”

“Can’t hear you,” said Reina, pointedly putting her earplugs back in, and Callum rolled his eyes, flopping onto his back and thinking again of the headlines he’d just scrolled through.

“Who exactly is Callum Nova and what does he have to do with the Forum investigation for medeian corporate fraud?”

Regrettably, he might have to do something about that soon.

“Growth,” Callum remarked into the darkness.

“Shut up,” said Reina sleepily.

With a laugh, Callum closed his eyes.