Title: The Tank, Chapter Three, Part One
***
Chapter Three, Part
One
Oh God, what had he done?
It was a despicable quirk of nature than Anton was able to
recriminate himself even as he ran for his life. It would have been a kindness for
him to fill with panic as he fled, unable to think on the situation he’d left
behind and what he might have just done to the man who had so recently menaced him.
It didn’t help much that the man had been menacing
him either, as it might have if Anton were a little less inclined to overthink things.
He’d been threatened with rape, but he’d retaliated with forcing the man to
relive a hideously brutal death. Anton swore at himself as his feet began to
slow—he shouldn’t go back, he absolutely shouldn’t go back, there was nothing
he could do now but let it play out.
On the other hand, the only other person he’d ever worked
this spell on was himself. One data point was hardly enough for Anton to draw
any sort of conclusions from. Perhaps he could watch from a distance to
ascertain the man’s condition, see if he’d come through all right, and if not…well,
then, perhaps Anton could—
A hand suddenly gripped his dangling left wrist and jerked
him sideways, pulling him into the shadow of a deep doorway. Anton squawked and
lashed out with his elbow, riding the surge of adrenaline to help him fight back.
He’d been followed, someone had caught him, they were going to try to—
“Anton!” Another hand caught his elbow and pressed it down
and out of the way, but nothing about it hurt. Even the grip around his wrist
was only tight enough to restrain, not to injure or bruise. “It’s all right,”
his gentle captor said. “It’s just me.”
“Camille!” Anton felt like he should have seen this coming,
after the day he’d had—unexpected visitors seemed to be in fashion. On the
other hand, he’d learned better than to expect what he wanted to happen to
actually occur, and he had wanted Camille for months now.
Yet it was Camille. He looked haggard, even more so
than the last time he’d visited, and there were a few worrying strands of gray
that hadn’t been there before in his moustache, but it was him. There was
nothing but warmth and concern on his face.
“I’m sorry I had to—” That was as far as Camille got before
Anton pressed in against him, his arms still trapped but not even caring about
that, turning his face into the side of Camille’s neck and just breathing. “Anton,”
Camille said again, softly this time. He let go of Anton’s arms and wrapped him
in an embrace, which Anton was pleased to be able to return. “It’s all right,”
he murmured. “You escaped.”
“You saw?” Anton mumbled. “You saw what I did?”
“And what he almost did to you, don’t forget. Not that I
would have let him. I’d caught up to you a block earlier, but I didn’t want to approach
you in that part of town if I could help it—it would give people the wrong
impression.”
“I wouldn’t have cared.” The whole world could have thought
Anton a catamite and he would have endured it, if it meant meeting up with
Camille a moment sooner.
“I know, so I had to care for you.” Camille paused, then
said, “I’ve never seen a death miasma resurrect like that before.”
“It’s not a—well, it’s a…” Anton sighed. “I would love
nothing more than to tell you all about it, but I can’t right now, I just can’t—the
words are right there on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t speak them. I just—I
might have killed that man. I could have killed myself the first time
around, and I was only experiencing a suicide, not a—” His voice cut off as
Camille’s grip became brutally tight for a moment. “Can’t…breathe…” he squeaked
out.
“Damn, I’m sorry.” Camille pulled him arms away all at once,
leaving Anton with nothing to hold him up but his own shaking legs. “But what
do you mean, you experienced a suicide?” He looked slightly manic around the
eyes. “You were suicidal?”
“No—no, I wasn’t at all!” Anton insisted. He could see now how
what he’d said might have been misinterpreted, and lord, wasn’t he just going a
wonderful job at cocking everything up today? “The first time I cast the spell,
it was actually an accident—I was trying out ingredients that would result in a
rising, yes, but nothing so powerfully formed. I meant it to be a spell that
could be used to help investigate older cases, but I dropped the wrong thing at
the right time and got a bit of mercury mixed in that shouldn’t have been in
there, not to mention the—well, regardless, it ended up producing much what you
saw back there.”
He exhaled slowly. “Only in my case, the dead man had been
in the act of committing suicide, hanging himself from the rafter of my
laboratory. He didn’t die easily. He suffocated, and the whole time I felt what
he felt, and he was so filled with regret, and he wanted to reach the
chair he’d just kicked away, wanted to stop what he’d put into motion, but
there was no way out. It took him nearly three minutes to die, and I lived the
entire thing with him. I…lost most of that afternoon to disassociation,
honestly.”
“That sounds hideous,” Camille said, his skin taking on a
bit of a ghostly pallor.
“Oh, it was utterly incapacitating,” Anton agreed. “But so
interesting too, don’t you think? I knew I was onto something, so I kept
working at the spell in my spare time. I filled the wooden ball up with all the
right ingredients some time ago, but I confess I was too afraid to drop it for
the longest time. I’ve been carrying it around for over a month now, trying to
find an area to set it off where I was least likely to be debilitated.”
Camille held up a hand between them, the other one squeezing
the bridge of his nose. “Stop. Just…don’t speak, for a moment.”
Anton stopped. He felt a bit sick to his stomach, all the impulse
to fight or flee fully drained from his body, leaving him tired and a bit
desperate feeling. “I’m sorry,” he offered after what he hoped was an
acceptable interpretation of a “moment.” “I’m not sure what I said that upset
you, but I wish I hadn’t.”
“It’s not you,” Camille assured him, lowering his hands. “It’s
simply that…I’ve been hoping, for quite some time now, that you were safe here.
I have not been particularly safe myself, and one of the few things that gave
me any sense of comfort was the idea that you were perfectly well and taking
care of yourself. And now I find out that you’ve invented a spell that can
force a person to relive whatever violent deaths may have occurred in the
vicinity it is cast, and in doing so leave them as helpless as babes. It’s a mental
contradiction, and it’s taking me a moment to come to terms with it.”
“Oh.” Anton felt very small, but also oddly warm as well. “I
really am very careful,” he said. “Please tell me you know that. I wouldn’t
deliberately put myself in danger.”
“I know,” Camille agreed. “And I respect your expertise. I
just…” He blew out a breath. “Will you stay with me tonight? I have a room not
far from here, and I know that you’ve just graduated and you probably have
parties to attend and people to see, but—"
“Absolutely,” Anton said before Camille could finish talking
about silly things like Anton possibly preferring someone else’s company. “Let’s
go there now.”
No comments:
Post a Comment