The Devil's Favourite Obsession

If she ever found out that the mirror in her quarters worked the way it did, he calculated, she would, in rapid succession, accuse him of several things, and most of them would be accurate.

He decided to keep a secret after he saw her standing in front of the mirror after a bath, not knowing he was watching her. It wasn’t entirely his fault that she took her baths at different times, and it turned out that whenever he decided to see her, she would be either changing clothes or finishing her bath. And also, it wasn’t his fault that she still changed her clothes in front of a mirror and sometimes watched herself. If she chose to bathe and dress at the same time, he would know and would not try to seek her, but then would he?

He had considered telling her on at least four separate occasions. And decided against it each time.

He drew on the cigarette, exhaled into the dark sky, and continued to watch.

*

Inside the room, Cixi rose abruptly from the bed.

She could not sit there any longer. She could not sit there with her own thigh rubbing against silk and her own teeth in her own lip and the slow, looping heat behind her navel that refused, even now, to be reasoned with, and so she did what she always did when her body refused to obey her mind, which was to remove her body from the situation and trust that the situation would resolve itself in the cool, neutral environment of somewhere else.

The double doors of the terrace, set into the far wall of the living area, had been unlatched earlier in the evening. She crossed the room with her arms wrapped loosely around her ribcage and pushed them open. The night air rolled in with the suddenness of a breath being released, cool and faintly sweet with the smell of late-season jasmine from the gardens below, and Cixi stepped out onto the dark stone of the terrace and pulled the doors half closed behind her.

Why, she thought, had she not dreamed of a murder tonight?

The question arrived without warning, the way most of her questions about the curse arrived, sideways and unwelcome and trailing several other questions behind it. She should have dreamed of a murder. She had, for the past four months, dreamed of one almost every other night, the Reaper’s grey, weightless visitations that came for her between midnight and dawn and pulled her out of her body and dropped her into whichever city alleyway, hospital corridor, or quiet kitchen the Empress Dowager had decided she was required to attend that night. The dreams were never pleasant. They were not meant to be. But they were predictable, and predictability, Cixi had learned, was the only thing in her life since the bridge that she had been permitted to count on.

Tonight, instead of a murder, she had dreamed of Cassian’s mouth at her throat.

Tonight, instead of the Reaper, she had been left in her own body, awake at eleven o’clock in the evening, with her own thighs warm and her own pulse misbehaving and a phone call to the Devil that had ended in a sentence she had not meant to make.

The Reaper, she had concluded a day ago, always missed telling her the full terms of the curse.

She was, frankly, tired of it.

She leaned forward against the stone balustrade of the terrace and let her forehead rest on the cool ridge of it. The forest beyond the Crown estate lay quiet and dark, the canopy moving in slow, considered breaths under a wind that carried the first faint suggestion of rain. The wind found her hair and lifted it across her cheek, and she did not push it back.

The more still she stood, the more the wind played with her, and the more her body began to remember it had not been touched in a long time by anything other than itself. Her mind, given the vacuum, did what her mind always did with a vacuum, which was to fill it with the only thing it had been allowed to think about for the past half an hour.

Did Cassian think of her, she wondered, in the way she had been thinking of him?

Did Cassian dream of her, she wondered, in the way she had been dreaming of him?

The flutter in her stomach arrived on cue, low and warm and entirely unhelpful, and her hand drifted to the small of her abdomen of its own accord, pressing flat against the silk in an unconscious attempt to settle whatever it was that had begun to misbehave inside her. The pressure did nothing. The flutter sharpened into something else, something with edges, something she did not yet have a name for and was not certain she wished to give a name to, and she closed her eyes against the wind and tried, with the dignified, half-hearted effort of a woman who had already lost the argument with herself, to think about something else.

She did not hear the footsteps.

The shove between her shoulder blades was flat and two-handed. A full body’s weight behind it. The balustrade caught her at the ribs, too low to stop her, and she went over.

*

The lift opened.

Olga stepped into a corridor she had never walked. The runner was a deeper red. The wall sconces were spaced wider. Marble busts of nameless women stood in the alcoves between them.

She did not know which door was Cixi’s.

She walked around and somehow ended up at the right door. She walked toward it. She did not knock. She pushed.

The door opened.

The room was empty.

The terrace doors at the far end stood half open. A curtain moved in and out with the wind. From somewhere below the curtain came a scream.

A woman’s scream.

And Olga ran.

She crossed the living area and ran towards the terrace. She crossed the terrace, reached the balustrade, and looked down.

The drop was three storeys to the garden path.

A man stood on the path. His back was half toward her. His arms were full holding a woman. Dark hair. Her head against his chest.

He finally looked up.

It was Cassian.

His shirt was open at the collar. His hair was out of order. The woman in his arms was Cixi.

Olga’s hand went to the stone. Her breath stopped.

She stepped back. She closed her eyes. She opened them. She looked again.

The path was empty.

No man. No woman. Nobody. The lavender beds along the path moved in the wind. The garden lamps lit nothing but stone.

Olga stepped back from the railing.

A delusion. Grief had given her a thing to see.

She turned and ran back inside.

”Cixi.” Olga crossed the living area and pushed open the bedroom door. The bed had been slept in. The covers on one side were back. The pillow held the print of a head. The lamp on the nightstand was low.

The bed was empty.

”Cixi.”

The bathroom door stood ajar. She pushed it. The marble was cold. The towels were folded. Jasmine in the air, and something darker under it.

No one.

She came back into the living area. The borrowed jacket had slipped from her shoulder. She pulled it back. Her hand shook. Her hand had been still an hour ago at her husband’s feet.

The scream had been a woman’s. She was certain. The terrace had been empty. The path under the terrace had been empty. The bed had been slept in. The woman who had slept in it was not here.

She turned back toward the terrace.

She did not even reach it when she heard the footsteps.

The main door of the suite opened.

Olga turned only to watch. Cassian stood in the doorway.

His shirt was open at the collar. His hair was out of order. The woman in his arms was Cixi.

Cixi’s head was resting against his shoulder. Her eyes were closed. One hand hung at her side. The other lay against his chest, fingers half curled.

Cassian looked at Olga.