Release(48)

“Will a hundred and fifty cover it?” Enzo asked, holding out cash.

Adam just stared at it for a minute, and his heart broke in a different way. A way that felt suddenly, terrifyingly free.

“That’s okay,” he heard himself saying. “A going-away present.”

Enzo grinned, surprised. “Thanks, Adam.”

“Yeah,” was all Adam could say back.

“Can I get you a beer?” Nat said.

“Nah, I’m fine,” Adam said. “I can get my own.”

He turned back to the even larger group of people now, the group gathered to say farewell to Enzo, and now that Adam had done that himself, he was suddenly desperate to find Linus, hoping in an increasing panic that he hadn’t ruined everything.





“I was always this much of an idiot,” Tony says, still weeping. “One stupid thing after another.”

“And I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?”

“No!” he practically wails. “I’m just saying that I deserve it!”

“Deserve what?”

He looks at her, fear and – the faun is surprised to see – a kind of relief in his eyes. He can tell by the Queen’s face that she sees it, too.

Sees it and is displeased.





“Is that what you think this is?” she says to him. “Your release?”

“Isn’t it?” he asks.

“I came here to tell you what I know. If you are released by it, then I have failed.”

She touches his skin again, the sizzle of the burn lasting only an instant but he collapses. He is a bug, she realizes. Nothing more than a bug to be stepped on–

No.

No, she also thinks. No, more than that. I will tell him.

“I will tell you,” she says. “Are you listening?”

He looks up at her, wounded now, chastened. “I am.”

She tells him.





“I was alive when you took your hands off me,” the faun hears her say. “I was alive when your fingers left their bruises on my neck.”

There is a different kind of fear on the man’s face now. The fear of waking up from a dream into something much worse.

“No,” Tony says.

“I was alive when you wept over me. I was alive when you lifted my body from the floor. I was alive when you found bricks to put in my pockets–”

“No. Nonononono–”

“I was alive when you put me in the lake, Tony.” She kneels to him. “I was still alive.”

“You can’t be… I checked–”

“You didn’t check closely enough. You were too high, too far gone–”

There is a surprising surge of terrified defiance on his face, and he shouts at her, “So were you!”



Before she can even think, she removes his head from his body.





The faun can’t fix this, not while the Queen still holds the man’s head. But perhaps this is what the spirit bound to her needed. It seems the most obvious, this straight revenge, this violent act to match the one that robbed the spirit of her body–

Except–

Except that isn’t what he feels in the spirit. Her spirit is questing, searching, lost. This isn’t the action of the spirit.

This is the action of a Queen.

And then she or the Queen or the hybrid that the two have become, that changing, shifting personality that the faun must somehow unravel, that voice says:

“No.”





“Where’d Linus go?” he asked Angela.

“Bathroom,” she answered, surprisingly curt.

“That bad?”

“You ignored him the second Enzo spoke a syllable. Not your best move, Wild Thornberry.”

“Shit,” he said. “And I just… Angela, I think I just got it with Enzo.”

“Now? A little late, isn’t it?”

“That was his girlfriend.”

Angela spat out half a mouthful of beer right onto the dusty ground. “His what?”

“I know.”

“No, seriously, his what?”

“Maybe he’s bi. Or fluid. Like you.”

She gave him a look that said comparing her and Enzo was an endeavour embarked upon by fools. She looked around until she found Nat in the ever-growing crowd of partygoers. “Oh, my God,” Angela said. “She looks like you.”

“What? No, she…” But he stopped. “Oh, wow.”

“That’s probably the weirdest compliment you’re ever going to get.”

“But, no, Angela, this isn’t the important thing. The important thing is he offered to pay me for the pizzas. Not even close to enough either.”

Her eyebrows rose in confusion. “What?”

“I’ll explain but I need to find Linus first.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Don’t go anywhere?”

She took the flesh of his upper arm between two fingers and gently pinched. “Not even when I’m across a continent and an ocean,” she said.

“Not even then,” he agreed.

“Not even until the end of the world.”