Release(49)

He set off to find Linus, but only got to the other end of the little campground before Karen and Renee stopped him. “What happened with you and Wade?” Karen asked. “You ran out of there like he tried to kiss you.”

She meant this as a joke, but when Adam didn’t answer, Renee said, “He didn’t.”

“He did. When I said I wouldn’t sleep with him, he fired me.” Adam blinked. Was it as clear as that? Maybe it was. Maybe it really was.

“He can’t do that,” Renee said, concern all over her face.

“He really can’t,” Karen agreed.

“We’re backing you up,” Renee suddenly said, which surprised him as he always thought of Karen as the more take-charge one.

“Hell, yeah, we are,” Karen said. “How dare he?”

“Are you going to talk to Mitchell?” Renee said.

Mitchell was their regional manager, a man Adam had never even spoken to. “I’ve never even spoken to him.”

“He goes to our church,” Karen said. “He’s a good guy. You should talk to him.”

“We’ll back you up,” Renee said again.

“You didn’t see it, though.”

“Please,” Karen said, “all the stuff Wade has said while we worked there? The way he looks at you?”

“The way he always touches you?” Renee said, softly.

“You guys noticed that?” Adam said, honestly amazed.

“Impossible to miss, Adam,” Karen said. “We always wondered how bad you needed the job to put up with it.”

He felt a little knot in his stomach. “I need the job pretty bad.”

“Then you’ll get it back,” Renee said. “No way I’m working there if Wade’s there and you’re not.”

“This isn’t over, Adam,” Karen said. “No way, no how.”

“Well, that’s…” Adam said. “That’s kind of amazing. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Renee smiled, shy again.

“Now, really, have you seen Linus?”

“I think he went out on one of the paths by the lake,” Karen said. “Why?”

He looked her right in the eye and said, “I have to give him a rose.”





“No,” she says, and the rebuke is not for the faun, nor is it for the dead man whose head she still holds, whose blood spreads across the floor of the cell, a brook overflowing its bank.

“No,” she says again.

In an instant, the man is whole again, cowering back in the corner, his blood running through his veins, though the smell lingers, a smell still churning the ferocious hunger in the faun’s belly. It has been so long–

And then he realizes. These desires, this hunger, this is because his Queen really is slipping away.





“No,” she says, as the man looks back up at her, the shock in his eyes not lessening. She has allowed him to retain the memory of the beheading, to remember the pain, the feeling of separation. It would normally tip his mind beyond reach, but she disallows that. He will remember. He will always remember.

And that’s enough.

A part of her feels that the beheading was only right, but the larger part, the part that drove her here, that part knows his death would be only the most callow of revenge. It’s what she learned the moment he said yes. The moment where everything changed.

It had taken pushing beyond that to realize its folly.

“You are so small,” she says to him. “So … puny.”

He goggles back at her, mystified at what she will do next. She doesn’t know that either.

“I came here to tell you of my murder,” she says, “and then to kill you, but you…” She steps back from the man. “You are so small.”





The faun does not know who is speaking now. He doubts she does either.





“There is more here,” she says, feeling it as she says it. “You loved me.”

“I did,” the man says, simply.

“But you loved the drugs more.”

“Everyone does.”

She nods at the simple truth of this. “I loved you, once.”

“I know.”

“Even when I loved the drugs more, I would not have done what you did.”

“I’m weaker than you.”

“You are. Everyone is. Do you know the responsibility of that?”

“No,” the man says.

“And for that, this world rejoices.”





She turns to the faun, looks in his eye, and says, “I am lost.”





Adam found Linus on a little promontory looking out over the lake, across the inlet from the path he’d run what felt like a hundred years ago but was actually just this morning. Linus had a beer in his hand, watching the sun dip low in the sky.

“Hey,” he said, seemingly cheerfully as Adam came up. “Is that for me?”

Adam held the rose in his hand. He’d gone back to his car to get it.

“Will you take it?” Adam said.

Linus looked up and said, plainly, without malice, “No.”