The Devil's Favourite Obsession

The phone went dead in her hand. Off, the screen went black and final, even though she had seen the battery sitting at fifty percent not a second ago. Cixi stared at the dark glass and felt her stomach drop.

She looked in front of her. She looked to her right. She looked to her left. She did not dare look behind, because behind was exactly where the cold was coming from, and she knew, with the certainty of a girl who had watched far too many horror films alone, that the thing you turn around to face is always worse than the thing you imagine. She stood there weighing it, whether to be brave, whether to whip around and scream and faint clean away at the sight of whatever was standing at her back.

Why was she thinking of a ghost?

Because the Reaper had warned her. The longer she spent bound to the dead land, she had said, the sooner she would begin to see the ones who lingered there. The wandering spirits. The ones who had not finished leaving. But surely it was too soon for that. She had been certain she had a year before any of that started, and a year was not nearly used up.

And yet a living person did not switch off a phone with half its life left in it. A living person did not pull the warmth out of a room. Only the movies and the dead did that, and she was fairly sure she was not in a movie.

She glanced down at the heavy, swollen weight of her six-month belly, which had an alien baby, and thought of Cassian.

Suddenly, a chill walked up the back of her neck, lifting every fine hair as it went, and she felt the presence move. Coming closer. Nearer than before.

She wished fiercely and uselessly that she could remember a single holy line from the Bible, anything to say out loud into the cold. She had none. She had never read it. The people who had stolen her and raised her as their own had never once taken her to a church, and so now, when she would have given anything for a scrap of scripture, her mouth was empty of it.

She did not move a muscle. She stood rooted where she was and called his name the only way she dared, first in the silence of her own head.

Cassian.

Then, in a voice pinched thin with fear, barely a whisper. ”Cassian.”

Then a third time, her fist clenched at her side, a little louder, as though the volume itself might make him real.

”Cassian.”

”Yes.”

She spun instantly.

He was standing right behind her, close enough to touch, that calm dark face looking down at her as though he had been there the whole time and saw nothing strange about it at all.

Cixi glared.

”Were you pranking me?” And then she was hitting him, both fists against his chest, all the fright pouring out as fury. ”Do you have any idea how scared I was?” Another blow. ”How could you frighten me like this? How did you even get into the room? I didn’t see you come in. Why would you do that? Why would you scare me on purpose?”

Cassian let her hit him. He did not catch her wrists at once, did not stop her, only stood and took each small angry blow against his chest until the worst of it had spent itself, and her fists slowed, and her breath began to steady.

Only then did he close one hand gently over both of hers and hold them still against him.

”I wasn’t pranking you,” he breathed. ”You called. I came.” His thumb moved once across her knuckles. ”That is all. Now stop wearing yourself out. You need to rest.”

Cixi did not rest. She pulled her hands free of his and stepped back, far enough to look up at his face properly, and the fright that had been pouring out of her as anger settled now into something narrower and harder to put off.

”Don’t tell me to rest as though that explains anything,” she said. ”You vanished from a study. Rafael vanished from this room one breath after I heard someone call his name. My phone is dead in my hand with half its life in it, the air in here went cold enough to see, and you appear behind me without a sound like a... ” She stopped herself before the word.

”Like what?” Cassian said. There was the faintest pull at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, the look of a man who already knew the word and wanted to hear her say it.

”Like a draught,” she finished, which was a lie, and they both knew it was a lie, and she lifted her chin and dared him to argue.

He did not argue. He moved past her instead, and his dark eyes went over the room the way a man checks a house he no longer entirely trusts. The terrace doors. The corners. The cold patch of air near the couch had not quite warmed, even with him in the room. She watched the inspection and did not like it, because Cassian did not check the rooms. Cassian walked into rooms as though he owned the ground they stood on, which, as far as she could tell, he usually did.

”Where did you go?” she asked.

”To deal with a rat.”

”Rat?.. As in Rafael?”

”If he comes to our room next time, stab him in his eyes...” He said it flatly, in the voice he used for closing subjects, and turned back from the window. And then from his pocket he took out a small knife. ”Here, keep it with you all the time.”

”No. I need an answer....” Cixi folded her arms over the top of her belly. The old her would have let it go. The old her had let a great many things go, year after year, until being walked over had felt like the natural shape of her life. That girl was gone. The curse had burned her out and left someone with far less patience in her place. ”That is not all I need to carry, Cassian, because I am the one who was sitting here alone while the two of you disappeared. I am the one whose phone just died. So you can tell me what you did, or you can keep your secrets and leave and never come back...”

For a moment, he simply looked at her, and something moved behind his eyes that she could not read, something that might have been irritation and might, just as easily, have been a kind of pleased surprise that she had teeth now where she used to have none.

”I told you I will tell you everything tonight... Did I not? You need to stop worrying and relax. I will answer all your questions, Love... And about Rafael... I need you to stab him in his left eye if he ever comes near you... in my absence... Promise me, love, you will do it?”