Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

My voice was a whisper. “Can we get clean, though, Ange? Or is it already too late?”

She shrugged. “It’s worth a try. Don’t you think?”

“Sure.” I reached across and took her hand. “If you think so, it’s worth it.”

She smiled. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“Back at you,” I said.

“I sat up in Angie’s bed with a start.

“What?” I said, but no one was talking to me.

The apartment was still. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. I turned and looked at the far window. As I stared at the frozen panes, dark leaf silhouettes pressed flat against the glass, then snapped back into the darkness as the poplar tree outside bowed in the wind.

I noticed that the red digital numbers of her alarm clock were black.

I found my watch on the dresser, leaned down to catch the icy light from the window: 1:45.

I turned on the bed and lifted the window shade behind me, looked at houses around me. Every light was out, even porch lights. The neighborhood looked like a mountain hamlet, glazed in ice, deprived of electricity.

When the phone rang, it was a shattering sound.

I grabbed it. “Hello.”

“Mr. Kenzie?”

“Yes.”

“Tim Dunn.”

“The lights are out.”

“Yes,” he said. “In pockets all over the city. The ice is turning heavy and yanking down lines, blowing transformers across the state. I’ve apprised Boston Edison of our situation, but it’s still going to take a while.”

“Okay. Thanks, Officer Dunn.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Officer Dunn?”

“Yes?”

“Which of Devin’s sisters is your mother?”

“How’d you know?”

“I’m a detective, remember?”

He chuckled. “Theresa.”

“Ah,” I said. “One of the older sisters. Devin’s afraid of the older ones.”

He laughed softly. “I know. It’s kind of funny.”

“Thanks for looking out for us, Officer Dunn.”

“Any time,” he said. “’Night, Mr. Kenzie.”

I hung up, stared out at the hushed mixture of deep black and bright silver and pearl.

“Patrick?”

Her head rose up off the pillow and her left hand pulled a mass of tangled hair off her face. She pushed herself up on an elbow and I was very aware of her breasts moving under her Monsignor Ryan Memorial High School T-shirt.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Bad dream?” She sat up, one leg under her, the other slipping out, smooth and bare, from under the sheet.

“I thought I heard something.” I nodded in the direction of the window. “Turned out to be a tree branch.”

She yawned. “I keep meaning to trim that.”

“Lights are out, too. All over town.”

She peeked under the shade. “Wow.”

“Dunn said transformers are blowing all over the state.”

“No, no,” she said abruptly and threw back the sheet, got out of bed. “No way. Too dark.”

She rummaged through her closet until she found a shoebox. She placed it on the floor and pulled out a handful of white candles.

“You want a hand?” I said.

She shook her head and walked around the room, placing the candles in holders and stands I couldn’t see in the dark. She had them tucked everywhere—on the two nightstands, the dresser, the vanity chest. It was almost unsettling to watch her light the wicks, her thumb never once releasing the ignitor on her lighter as she pivoted from one candle to the next until the shadows of flame flickered and expanded against the walls in the light they’d created.

In under two minutes she turned the room into one that resembled a chapel far more than a bedroom.

“There,” she said as she slid back under the covers.

For at least a minute, neither of us said anything. I watched the flames flicker and grow, the warm yellow light play off our flesh, begin to glow in the strands of her hair.

She turned on the bed so that she was facing me, her legs crossed at the knees, tucked against her, the sheet bunched at her waist. She kneaded it between her hands, and tilted her head and shook it so that her hair untangled some more and fell down her back.

“I keep seeing corpses in my dreams,” she said.

“I just see Evandro,” I admitted.

“What’s he doing?” She leaned forward a bit.

“Coming for us,” I said. “Steadily.”

“In my dreams, he’s already arrived.”

“So those corpses…”

“They’re ours.” Her hands clenched together in her lap and she looked at them as if she expected them to tear apart from each other on their own.

“I’m not ready to die, Patrick.”

I sat up against the headboard. “Neither am I.”

She leaned forward. With her hands clenched on her lap and her upper body leaning in toward me, her thick hair framing her face so that I could barely see it, she seemed conspiratorial, vested in secrets she might never share.

“If anyone can get to us—”

“That’s not going to happen.”

She leaned her forehead against mine. “Yes, it is.”

The house creaked, settling another hundredth of an inch closer to the earth.

“We’re ready if he comes for us.”

She laughed and it was a wet, strangled sound.

“We’re basket cases, Patrick. You know it, I know it, and he probably knows it. We haven’t eaten or slept decently in days. He’s screwed us emotionally and psychologically and just about every other way you can think of.” Her damp hands pressed against my cheeks. “If he chooses, he can bury us.”

I could feel tremors, like sudden jolts of electricity, explode under her palms. The heat and blood and tidal tuggings of her body pulsed through her T-shirt and I knew she was probably right.

If he wanted to, he’d bury us.

And that knowledge was so goddamned ugly, so polluted with the basest sort of self-awareness—that we were nothing, any of us, but a pile of organs and veins and muscle and valves hanging suspended in currents of blood within frail, uselessly vain exteriors. And that with a flick of a switch, Evandro could come along and shut us down, turn us off as easily as turning off a light, and our particular pile of organs and valves would cease to function, and the lights would go out and the darkness would be total.