Page 81 of Antihero

Even reclining on Anca’s couch, Candy looked coiled. That’s how she was, an embodiment of latent energy. Until she went kinetic.

At the moment, her eyes were ice blue. Evan couldn’t remember if that was their real color. They changed depending on what she was wearing and she also had a variety of contact lenses that aided her chameleonlike propensity. It wasn’t merely about disguise, this ability, it was an alteration of her carriage and bearing, energy and posture. She could ignite your attention and then recede right before your eyes.

At the moment she seemed fully in the version he recognized as most like herself. But he could never be sure.

Flicking aside the magazine she’d been reading, she drew herself upright on the couch, a tigress-like undulation of her spine. “How’d it go with Joey?”

Evan looked at her.

Candy said, “That well?”

Evan said, “Anca?”

“Sleeping like a baby. I checked on her a few times. She’s out cold. Hasn’t moved an inch.”

“She needs to sleep for a month,” Evan said.

Candy gave a nod, her eyes distant.

Despite Anca’s best efforts, the apartment smelled of dust. Motes spun in the yellowed glow filtered through the lampshade. A touch of moisture in the air, a harbinger of mold, the smell of wet brick. Cold Bronx night leaked through a draft in the window with a moan. The paint along the sill had flaked elegantly into a mosaic of cracked mud.

Candy said, “You fly back tomorrow to deal with RedLite?”

“Yes.”

“I booked a room at your hotel,” Candy said. “She wants to sleep here alone tonight.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“It’s not up to us,” Candy said. “Is it?”

Before Evan could reply, screaming ripped through the living room. A high-pitched undulated wail.

He knew the sound. Night terrors morphing into a panic attack.

Candy was halfway to the closed bedroom door already, having levitated directly onto her feet. “Got it, I got it—”

She blew inside, the door sweeping shut behind her. The screaming kept on. And on. Deep screeching breaths, wails guttering into sobs.

The sound—unadulterated anguish—was nearly unbearable. Evan paced around the living room, fingers shoved through his hair.

The keening kept on undiminished. Unintelligible words pushed through a constricted throat and a grief-spasmed diaphragm. One lamentation came audible—“Why, why, why—”

Between wails, he could make out Candy’s murmuring, low and cooing, the softest he’d ever heard her voice.

Just when the sobbing seemed to quiet down, the screams resumed, throttling back up, strident peaks interspersed with breathless weeping.

Evan paced some more.

Sweat matted his shirt, made his cargo pants cling to his legs. A dozen times he debated entering the bedroom and a dozen times he resisted the urge.

Fifteen excruciating minutes passed. And then another fifteen.

Anca’s moans grew hoarse and finally gave out.

The silence was even more awful.

Evan checked his Vertex fob watch. Forty-seven minutes had passed. He’d never known anyone to cry for that long. He didn’t know anyone could.