Page 21 of Where the Light No Longer Follows

“Not particularly.”

“What if I meant harm?”

“What worse can you do to me that you haven’t already done?” she asked.

Still, he didn’t move from there, their faces merely inches apart. “Tommy says he misses you, and that you should visit again.”

Despite the few cold rain drops clinging to her body and the chilly tunnelling breeze in the corridors, Silene felt impeccably warm. “Tommy is such a gentleman. You ought to learn some stuff from him.”

“Take that back or it will not be a very good life for Tommy starting now. I will buy him the cheapest kibble and throw out all his toys.”

Her tongue pressed against her cheek as she tried really hard not to laugh. “I think you would not do that to the one thing that finds you bearable.”

Sarcasm dripped off his tongue when he gave her a smirk and said, “You think too highly of me.”

“I assure you, I do not think highly of you at all.”

“So, you do think about me?” he asked, flashing her a full row of teeth.

“Often,” she admitted, lifting her umbrella and resting the silver tip of it under his chin. “All usually involving some mild form of violence.” She winked at him. “Pew.”

“What did I tell you about flirting with me?”

She rolled her eyes and ducked under his arm, eyeing the wide space of the theatre with so much relish. She’d never been in one, and they were just as magnificent as the pictures on the human magazines. Silene had rules. Many which she had broken in the very short time of three days of hanging around him. She never stepped in human spaces unless she was there to collect a death.

He pointed to an empty red, velvet seat among the many and then went to sit a seat further from her when she put her umbrella and raincoat between them, a barrier she felt like it needed to be there to remind her of what he was and what she was, something that was starting to blur in her thoughts—in her actions, too. What in the stars was she even doing with him? In a theatre out of all?

“Are we early?” she asked, going on her toes to take a peek at the rows under them. “There is only me and you here.”

“That’s because it is mine.”

She blinked at him. “Like…the entire theatre?”

“Indeed.”

“Why do you own a theatre?”

“There was this girl I’ve always wanted to bring to a theatre.”

Her voice dripped with sarcasm, “As there always is, I’m sure. Owning an entire theatre is a bit excessive though.”

He raked a hand through his wet hair, pushing it back from his face, and chuckled, but the amusement never quite reached his eyes, and Silene was struck with the realisation that nothing quite reached his eyes—she’d come to realise they were a sole entity, one full of sorrows. “She doesn’t like being surrounded by people.”

A faint, strange empty sensation settled in her stomach as she studied his strangely dour profile that just reminded her of the terrifying power he beheld—of the powerful God she’d seen from afar. “Did she like this grand gesture of yours?”

“I never really brought her.”

“How come?” she asked, not resisting the urge to know.

“There was this one bargain I once made. In exchange for what I wanted, I had to give her up. The only way I could have her at all was if she wanted me to have her. I kept waiting for her to call for me, to ask for me, to want me. It was something unrequited in the end.”

Silene did not miss the opportunity to laugh a little at his pain as she always did, but for the first time she felt a sense of unease for doing so. “Who could possibly dare break your heart, Gabriel?”

“She did. Many times. The fault might be mine. I keep offering it to her, but she does not want my heart. Nor to break it, nor to bury it, nor to tear it up to tiny little pieces. She does not want it at all.” The muscles in his jaw tightened, and he swallowed. “What am I to do with a heart I cannot use to love her, Silene?”

Her insides squeezed as if they had been pulled into a tight fist, the air turning a little thick, suffocating her lungs that had just started breathing again after hundreds of years.

Silene’s attention was dragged away as actors poured on the stage, dancing their way in with spectacular movements, pouring flower petals and glitter in the air as they jumped and waltzed and sang their hearts out. She clapped along, smiling widely and with fascination, utterly enchanted by the spellbinding grandeur of all the costumes and the bejewelled props—she clapped until her arms felt like falling off. But the longer it went on, the more she looked, the louder the music got, the more she noticed the twisted smiles on the actor’s faces, what was staining their hands a crimson red, speckled across their colourful clothes, their skin. Silene’s hands pressed together one last time in a meek clap, her smile slowly fading as she noticed the strange, drunken craze spinning around one lone table that she’d not noticed at all being there all this time, where one lone soul stood and sat beside. No costume, no mask or paint or drawings, no glitter or colour, dressed in a tattered nightgown, her face vacant. Through the whole first hour of the play she did not move nor blink, just sat there unnoticed—almost unnoticed to Silene’s eye as well. It was such an anomaly amongst the stage. It stood out so sorely, so strangely, like a tumour on a healthy heart. It spoiled the entire vibrant play.