Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Noble Rot BY HOLLY BLACK

Holly Black is the bestselling author of several contemporary fantasy novels. Her books include Tithe, Valiant, Ironside, The Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), and the graphic novel series The Good Neighbors (with Ted Naifeh). She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret library.

Agatha picks up the paper bag off of the counter. Grease has already soaked through the bottom. She hates this job, but not as much as the one before this one, when she worked as a janitor and the night watchman kept asking her for neck massages. Or the one before that where she washed endless stacks of dishes. She’s tired of moving so much, tired of crappy jobs, but that doesn’t mean that she will stop.

Stopping means going home, which means she can’t stop.

“It’s the rock star,” John, the boss’s son, says, holding out a receipt with an address on it. “Your boyfriend.”

John’s younger than she is—maybe too young to work as much as he does—but he’s the only one who can translate stuff into Korean for his parents. She’s pretty sure he lies to them.

It makes her like him more.

“That’s the end of my shift,” she says, peeling bills out of her pocket. “I’m going to take off after I drop this off, so let me pay for his food.”

“I delivered to him once,” says John. “I don’t care how much you loved his music, it’s not worth it. That guy is creepy.”

“His music was pretty good,” she says, but he just shrugs because he’s already answering the phone and scratching out the next order.

She passes the corner 7-Eleven, flashing with neon, its parking lot crowded with cars. Kids from Long Branch and Deal and Elberon looking to buy drugs, partiers spilling from clubs or just pausing to flirt in person after a slow cruise down Main Street. Tattoos wrap around their arms and fabric sticks to their skin.

Her stomach growls.

Over the sticky sweet reek of spilled Slurpees, she can smell the salty air blowing off the sea. It gets on everything, tangling her hair and dusting her skin. As she unlocks her bike, a discarded newspaper warns of a fresh grave dug up in the Mount Calvary Cemetery and a body chewed on by dogs.

Once, Asbury Park was a resort city to tempt presidents with its glittering hotels and merry-go-rounds housed in fantastical buildings with sculpted Medusa faces making the spines of the windows. After those days faded, the city was at least a place that turned out rock stars—Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Colin Lainhart—all of them playing The Stone Pony before going on to take over the world. Now, Colin Lainhart is dying in a cavernous loft, and speculation about a marauding pack of corpse-eating dogs is the only thing worth putting on the front page.

She bikes to one of the row houses near the boardwalk. Despite the influx of renovators and bright rainbow flags hanging from freshly painted houses, the block is still kind of shady. Guys sitting on their stoops call to her when she passes. She reminds herself that the guys are probably harmless—their faces are leathery with drugs and age—and she’s stronger than she looks. Faster too.

After she locks the bike to a telephone pole, she takes the bag out of the basket. It’s so soaked that the brown paper tears when her fingers touch it, but she can still carry it if she’s careful. She hits the doorbell and waits for Colin Lainhart to buzz her in.

John’s wrong about him being creepy. Colin Lainhart has cancer or something and he’s lonely, but that’s all. Sometimes she can smell the illness on him, devouring him from the inside. And he doesn’t ask her to do anything bad; most of the time she’s not even sure he notices she’s there.

Agatha takes the stairs. “Hey,” she calls. The inside of the loft has no walls. Once, Colin told her that he and his wife tore them out, planning to restore it, but they only got as far as putting in the electric before he got sick. The wires are exposed, running back and forth along joists like veins.

Agatha read that he’d met his wife when they were both addicts. Supposedly he was the reason she finally went to rehab. There’s a famous picture of her from back then that Agatha saw in a magazine somewhere—stringy bright-red hair with heavy black roots, knees skinned, vomiting her guts onto a street in Tokyo. She wants to ask Colin about that, about the pictures of him with loads of curling, dark hair and a hungry smile, but he doesn’t seem like he knows the man in those photos.

She didn’t like his music when she was younger. It bothered her the way that it seemed like Colin’s songs were carefree, but if you listened to the words, they were about despair and death and misery. It made her feel like she was being tricked, like he was laughing at the audience when he sang. Agatha’s best friend when she was eleven, Selena, was obsessed with his songs. Selena played them over and over again until Agatha finally admitted they were good.

They were good; she just didn’t like how they made her feel.

His hair is growing back, a thin dusting on his head, but his cheeks look hollowed out. He’s as thin as if he were made of twigs. His black T-shirt hangs in folds off his shoulders. In the dim light from the bare bulbs on the ceiling, she has never been able to tell what color his eyes are. In the old pictures of him, they were beach-glass green.

“Cash’s on the table,” he says. His throat sounds scraped raw. All around him are cardboard boxes of vinyl records. Some of them are opened, and discs surround him on the sofa in haphazard piles.

The sofa is a beautiful thing, part sleek black tufted leather, but with silver coffin trimmings. It had come with the records and a few boxes of other things his wife no longer wanted after the divorce.

She got the apartment in the city and a lot of his money. But he still has enough that he can just stare out the massive wall of windows overlooking the sea or at his tiny black-and-white television, order Chinese, and wait to die.

“I know,” she says, setting down the bag carefully on a box near where he’s sitting. “I took an extra twenty. You’re an excellent tipper.”

“Do you want some lo mein?” he asks.

She hasn’t taken any money yet, but she knows where he keeps it—a lacquered box on the makeshift table. She doubts he counts it. She could probably take eighty bucks, a hundred, all of it, without him noticing. “You shouldn’t let people take advantage of you.”

He shrugs.

She goes into the kitchen, gets out two bowls, and brings them to the bag of food. He forks out noodles and hands her the bigger bowl.

“How come you always eat at night?” she asks him.

“I got used to it on the road,” he says, and smiles a little. He’s easy to be around. He has kind eyes. “Once a day. Like a snake.”

She picks up the controller and turns on the television, flicking through the channels. They watch a reality television show where a guy from a glam-rock hair band has to pick a girlfriend. Colin laughs every time the guy talks to the camera, because Colin knows him and can’t believe how normal the show has made him seem.

“There was this one time that we were opening for him, and after we get offstage, there’s this delay. His whole band is onstage, but not him,” Mr. Lainhart says during the commercial break. “The tour manager had already gotten into plenty of fights and doesn’t want another one, so he sends me back to his dressing room. And you know what he’s doing?”

Agatha shakes her head.

“He’s got one of those tiny cocktail stirrers and he’s down in the corner of his dressing room with two naked groupies, snorting up lines of live ants. Ants!”

“As in bugs?” Agatha asks him. “Ant ants?”

He laughs a little, which makes him cough. “Yeah, the really tiny ones. Sugar ants. I’m glad that he didn’t try for a big black carpenter ant. That thing would have chewed off his nose.”

She leans back against the leather. “So what’s the sickest thing you’ve ever done? Anything sicker than the ants?”

“Piss-and-vodka shots.” He says it so matter-of-factly that she bursts out laughing.

“Whose?” she asks him, scandalized.

Now he’s laughing so hard that he sounds like he’s choking. “Mine,” he finally chokes out. “What kind of guy do you take me for? I wouldn’t drink someone else’s piss.”

He eventually manages to tell her the story about a town in Indiana where there was a little bar and he and his bandmates and his wife, Nancy, were all drinking there after a show and some grizzled old badass goaded him—and the rest of the band, with the exception of the drummer—into a drinking contest that turned both nasty and brutally competitive. “I didn’t even win,” he says. “Nancy did. She could drink more than any guy.”

“I’ve been there,” Agatha says when she’s stopped laughing. “The town, anyway, not the bar.”

He looks at her “You always say that. You’ve been everywhere. How come you move around so much?”

“I’m an adventurer,” she says.

“No, really,” he says. “You sound like me when I was your age.”

“I left home when I was thirteen,” she says with a shrug. “And I wear out my welcome elsewhere pretty fast, too.”

“Now you really sound like me,” he says. “It’s funny that we never ran into each other in any of those places.”

They eat their lo mein in the flickering light of the television, even though Colin complains that he can’t taste anything anymore. By the time Agatha leaves, she’s hungry again.

When Colin moves, he can feel his chalky bones grinding together. His sinews feel limp, and he worries that his veins are liquefying inside him. His head is swollen, his brain throbbing, as though there is a cyst growing ready to crack open his skull and birth some foul goddess.

For months he hasn’t been hungry, but today he feels ravenous. Too tired to call for food, he eats leftovers and crackers that scrape his throat and the last spoonfuls of a pint of diet ice cream that Nancy left, even though it’s rimed with frost.

He has stopped the treatments, but only because the doctors told him there was no more they could do. When Nancy left him, she said it wasn’t because he was sick but because he’d given up. She needed him to be a fighter. She needed death not to get him down.

He’d said he wanted to fight, but maybe he didn’t fight hard enough.

A door slams downstairs, and a man’s voice screams, “Slut! Slutty slut slut!”

His neighbors are both out in the street. “You are so self-righteous,” shouts the other man. “Like you never—”

There’s a crash, like hollow metal hitting concrete. Trash can.

Colin Lainhart believes his neighbors are in love. They’re always yelling down staircases, always throwing one another’s things out the window and onto the sidewalk, always storming out. Colin thinks they fight a lot harder to be in love than he ever fought the cancer.

He wonders how long it will be until Agatha comes and brings him dinner. He feels like a dog that scratches at the door. Waiting to be walked. Waiting to be fed. He can tell that she has no idea he’s only ten years older than she is. Sickness has made him ancient.

Sometimes he wants to beg her to stay a little longer, but he doesn’t want to disturb the illusion that she likes him. He doesn’t want her to have to spell it out: I am just taking pity on you. My mother used to listen to your music.

The phone rings, and by the time he answers it, he is already tired.

“Colin?” The voice is familiar, but he can’t place it.

“Yes,” he says.

“It’s Mark.”

“I know,” Colin says, ashamed that for a moment, he didn’t. Mark is his lawyer, his college roommate, and, famously, the guy who let Colin sleep on his couch while Colin recorded most of his first album.

“You’ve got to get out of that town,” Mark says. Mark is full of dire pronouncements, like: “If you don’t freeze her bank account, you’ll lose everything” or “If you don’t come back to the city now, you’ll become a crazy hermit.” Mark was also disappointed when Colin stopped fighting.

Colin laughs.

“Seriously,” Mark says. “It’s all over the papers. Some kind of necrophilia-necrophagia cult going on down there.”

Something crashes outside, and Colin smiles against the phone, hoping that Mark can’t hear. Colin’s pretty sure that his squabbling neighbors sound enough like a pack of hungry cultists to make Mark worry. He reaches over for his laptop and types into the window of his browser. “Uh, all the local paper has is something about some kids partying in the graveyard and a dog getting into a tomb.”

“They’re covering it up,” says Mark. When Colin just laughs, Mark interrupts him. “When are you going to be in town next?”

“Not gonna be.”

“That’s ridiculous. What do they want you to do—just lay down and die?”

“They call it making me comfortable,” Colin says.

There is a long pause on the other end of the line, and when Mark speaks again, his voice is choked. “I’m an asshole—”

“Don’t,” Colin says. “Actually, I feel good today. Better than in a while. I might even go out and eat something.” Just saying the word eat has made his mouth water. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

“Your manager says he can’t get ahold of you,” Mark says, but he doesn’t have the surety in his voice that he had before. “Car company wants to license a song for a commercial.”

“I’ll call him,” Colin says, even though he knows he won’t. He feels guilty that the conversation has become awkward. More than anything, dying is an embarrassment. “Listen, I got to go. There’s a bunch of people outside with torches chanting something about Beelzebub.…”

“Fuck off,” says Mark, but at least he sounds like himself. “Remember to charge your phone. And to answer it.”

The bones of Colin’s spine pop as he stands to put his phone back in the charging dock, but after he’s up, he doesn’t feel so bad. His stomach growls and he pulls on a hat and sunglasses, despite the heat, and decides that he’s going to go outside after all.

When Agatha knocks on his door next, it isn’t because he’s ordered anything. She’s carrying a carton anyway. She feels a little stupid when she hits the bell, but she’s afraid that he’s not going to answer and then she’s going to have to decide if she should break in to see if he died.

He buzzes her up like usual, without even talking into the speakers. There’s music playing, and when she gets upstairs, he’s sitting by the window and playing a guitar. She recognizes the song he’s playing: It’s one of his, but he’s playing it so slowly that the music sounds as mournful as the words. She wonders if this was how he wrote the songs, how they were supposed to be played. She hopes so. This music isn’t laughing at anyone.

His hair looks almost grown in, military short rather than sickness short, like a rock star who’s no longer dying might have, and it makes her aware that no matter how friendly he seems, she has no reason to be standing in his loft. He doesn’t seem surprised to see her, though.

“Oh,” says Agatha. “I thought maybe something happened.”

He looks at her quizzically. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s been three days since you ordered any food,” she says. “I didn’t know if you were just ordering from some other place or if you were sick or what. I’m sorry. I should—”

“Three days,” he repeats, like he doesn’t believe it. He looks out the window again, like he’s going to check the position of the Earth, but it’s dark. All there is to see are glittering lights and the immense blackness of the ocean. “I went out.”

“Today?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I got strawberries.”

She puts down the bag of fried rice and goes into the kitchen. Standing there, near the refrigerator and the board supported by sawhorses, she realizes just how inappropriate she’s been, rummaging through his things. But the strawberries in their plastic green basket are right there on the mock-counter. She comes back out with them covered in a fine gray mold and pocked with brownish patches. “Not today, I think.”

“Maybe it has been three days.” He picks one off the top and brushes off the gauzy threads. “Noble rot,” he says, and pops it in his mouth. It is so soft that some of it squirts onto his lip.

“What?”

“Decay concentrates the sweetness,” he says.

She’s staring at him in disbelief. He grins, and it’s the smile she remembers from the photos. Rapacious. Unappeasable. It makes her smile, too.

“It’s gross, I know,” he says. “I’m just so hungry. And it’s not like I’m drinking my own piss.”

She holds up the box of fried rice. “It’s yours if you want it. My treat.”

He takes the box from her, unfolding the paper and cupping rice in his palm. He shovels it into his mouth as she watches him.

Then, abruptly, he spits something out. It hits the floor hard, like a rock, and she can see that it’s a small gold earring, wrapped with a wisp of hair. “Ugh,” he says wiping his mouth.

Agatha bends down and picks up the earring. She rolls it in her fingers, hardly able to believe what’s happening. There’s a tiny piece of what looks like skin attached; she hopes he doesn’t notice.

She has made a terrible mistake.

“I don’t know how that got in there,” she says quickly. “It must belong to one of the cooks.”

Colin is watching her with a strange expression.

“I better take it back to the restaurant,” she says.

“We should call the police.” He sits down on his couch, not looking at her. He reaches for his cell phone, but he doesn’t dial.

“It’s just an earring.” Agatha holds it up to her own ear and lets it dangle. She feels guilty, but keeps talking. She has to convince him not to make any calls. “Let me at least go back and see if someone lost it. Then we can call the police.”

He nods. “Leave the earring here, okay?”

She sets it down carefully on the coffee table, brushing off what’s attached to it. She looks over at him, not sure what she’s hoping to see, but his face is blank.

Out the window, he watches her go, watches her head in the wrong direction for the restaurant.

He goes to the kitchen and pokes through the box of food with a single chopstick. Then he leans down to smell it. There’s a lot of thick, brown sauce and underneath that, a strange rich smell. Almost sweet. Rot.

All the next day, Agatha doesn’t go over to Colin’s apartment, not even when he calls the restaurant and asks for her specifically, although that does get her a lot of teasing.

Even worse, John catches Agatha eating a piece of maggoty pork from the trash in the alley behind the restaurant.

He drops the plastic bags he was dragging. “Are you crazy? You can’t put that in your mouth!”

Unprepared, she just gapes at him. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she says finally. He fires her anyway and—she’s pretty sure—lies to his parents about the reason.

By the time Agatha enters the graveyard, she is hungry and tired and sad. She wants to curl up in inside one of the crypts, but she knows she has to be careful. Nesting near graves is stupid.

But as her sharp little teeth rend gray flesh, she thinks of the great ghoul city her mother told stories about when Agatha was little—its walls wet with silt, its spires sparkling with the reflected light of lichen deep beneath the earth. In that mythical place, all the ghouls of the world could cool themselves in the city’s shadow and no one had to be careful.

Sometimes Agatha imagines that ghoul city aboveground—here—where meat would spoil fast in the hot sun. In that dream, she doesn’t have to keep moving. There is no series of jobs or haphazard nests. And she doesn’t have to make a choice between Colin dying or hating her.

An abrupt movement near the gate is enough to snap her out of her reverie and make her move, locking the crypt and sticking to shadows. She hears footsteps, but they are receding.

She pauses at the stone wall at the edge of the graveyard, where dirt and lime and ink and blood marks tell the story of all the ghouls who have passed through. No police, reads one. Good eating, says another. Agatha makes a thick chalk mark on the wall. Territory, it means. Mine.

She is pushing her bike home, lethargic with satiation, when she sees a woman who looks familiar getting out of a Mercedes. For a moment, Agatha freezes, unable to figure how someone she knows is here, when she realizes that she doesn’t know the woman at all.

She’s Nancy, Colin’s wife. She’s famous.

Another woman has gotten out of the driver’s side. She is in a tailored navy suit and slinging the strap of a soft leather briefcase over her shoulder.

Agatha follows them down the long dark street, matching her stride to theirs, staying close to the shadows. The carrion in her belly makes her feel strong, and her fingers flex restlessly.

The women stop in front of the apartment and press the buzzer. Then they wait, more impatient by the moment. Nancy flips open her cell phone and presses a few buttons with her thumb. Then her friend says something and she laughs, harshly.

Agatha watches them and her heart starts to speed faster, like her body has already decided on something.

“What were you doing?” Colin comes out of the shadows behind Agatha, forcing her into the light. He smells of vomit and his gaze locks on her. Accusing.

“I didn’t…” Agatha starts, but doesn’t know how to finish. She doesn’t know how to deny doing what she was thinking without admitting she was thinking it.

“There you are,” Nancy says to Colin. “Are you using again? You look awful.”

“This is Agatha,” Colin says stiffly. “And this is Nancy and Whitney.”

Agatha lifts her hand in a half wave.

“I’m the lawyer,” Whitney says. Agatha wonders what Nancy needs a lawyer for now, here. They are already divorced.

“Is she a fan?” Nancy says.

“I never asked. I don’t even know if she likes music,” says Colin, which sounds sordid and isn’t even true, but Agatha doesn’t correct him. “Let’s go up.”

“I should probably let you guys have your meeting or whatever,” Agatha says.

Colin shakes his head, his fingers closing around her arm. “We need to talk.”

She lets him lead her toward the elevator; one look at his face and it is clear that he knows something. But what he knows or what he thinks or what he can guess is so unclear that all she can do is stare at the floor of the elevator and panic.

“Were you sick?” Whitney asks Colin as the smell of vomit is unmistakable in that small space.

“I am sick,” he says, and no one speaks into the uncomfortable silence.

Nancy walks around the room, stopping to stand by the windows. “You should hire someone to come here and finish the renovation. A healthy environment puts you in a healthy frame of mind.”

“What’s the point?” he says.

Nancy throws up her hands and looks at Whitney.

“You know how stubborn he can be,” Whitney says, and the way she and Colin exchange smiles seems weirdly intimate. Agatha is suddenly sure that Colin has slept with both of the other women in the room.

“I’m sorry,” Colin says suddenly. “Agatha and I are going to go and see what we can rustle up in the kitchen. Right, Agatha?”

Because there is nothing else for her to do, Agatha answers, “Right.”

The room reels around him, and he holds on to the wooden joist in the door frame. The sickness has mostly passed, and what he feels, most of all, is hunger deep in his belly. A kind of hunger that reminds him uncomfortably of the beginnings of withdrawal.

“Let me smell your breath,” he says, leaning toward her.

She frowns, ducking her head, but smiling. “What? Why? Do you think I’m drunk?”

I watched you eat someone, he wants to say. I followed you to a graveyard and saw you break the lock on a tomb with your bare hands. I gagged on the smell, threw up leaning against the rusty iron gate, and, after, my mouth watered. I want to know if your breath smells like dead flesh so that I can prove to myself that I’m not crazy.

“I saw you,” he says instead. He wonders if she imagines sinking her teeth into his flesh, if she’s been patiently waiting for him to ripen in death, like the strawberries on his counter. He should be disgusted, but he’s fascinated.

Agatha has opened the cabinet above the sink in the makeshift kitchen. There are dusty packets of tea in there and some honey. When he speaks, she turns toward him, her hand still reaching. She looks startled, her tumble of dark hair pushed back behind one ear. A normal, pretty girl with sharp teeth.

“In the graveyard,” he says.

Her fingers close on the honey but don’t seem to grip it. He watches as it slips. The bottle cracks on the wooden floor, thick amber fluid spreading slowly from between the shards of glass.

“I’m sorry,” she says, voice shaking, apologizing for more than the honey. He realizes that he was waiting for her denial. He was ready to believe that despite the fact he’d seen her hunched over a corpse, it was some kind of joke—some new phase of his sickness involving hallucinations.

She’s talking, saying something about not knowing how to tell him, saying that she didn’t think he’d believe her, but he can’t seem to focus on the words.

He interrupts her. “What are you?”

“A ghoul,” Agatha says.

Nancy steps into the room, looking at Agatha like she overheard at least the end of that exchange. “Colin? Are you alright? I thought I heard glass…”

They both turn toward Nancy, and there’s something about their expressions that makes her step back.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

Nancy looks over at Agatha. “I was hoping we could talk. Just us.”

“And Whitney?” he asks.

Nancy hesitates.

“Go ahead,” says Agatha, with a quick smile. “I’ll make the tea.”

He sighs, trying to give Agatha a look that says: Okay, but if you try and sneak out, I will forget about politeness and I will run after you, and there is no way this conversation is over—and realizing that she’s probably not getting anything like that from his expression. She could interpret his look as I have a headache or I think I misheard you, because I heard “ghoul” and you clearly meant “girl.” He follows Nancy back to the living room and sits down next to her on the sofa. She’s lost some weight since he saw her last, and her fingernails, despite being freshly polished, are bitten to the quick.

He watches her reach over and take his hand. He glances in Whitney’s direction, but she’s looking carefully at his guitar.

“I talked to Mark,” Nancy says. His expression must have been so completely surprised that she corrects herself. “Okay, Whitney talked to Mark. I can’t believe you’re living like this. Are you trying to punish yourself?”

“Punish myself for what?”

She shrugs her shoulders. “All the drugs. You know—you would always say that if it hadn’t been for your job, that maybe we would have never gotten as bad as we did. That it was your fault.”

He remembered saying that, now that she mentioned it, back when they both were trying to stay clean. All their awful flaws and insecurities and desires ballooned along with his career. There was just so much money, and with the money, temptation. “That was a long time ago.”

“Your mother called me. She says you won’t talk to her. She wants you to come home.”

“Why are you here, Nancy? I know what my mother wants. I’m not dying in the same house I spent a lot of years trying to get out of, so if you came all the way down here to suggest it, don’t.”

Nancy flinches. “Someone’s got to take care of you. You were never good at doing it for yourself. If you’re not going to your mother, then I’m going to have to do it.”

Agatha enters the room, carrying a collection of mugs that clink together as she walks. She sets them down on the box near the couch. “I couldn’t find any sugar, but there was milk. I put it in one of the mugs.”

“Does she have to be here?” Nancy asks Colin.

“She’s not going anywhere,” he says.

Whitney starts to speak, but Colin cuts her off. “You’re not going anywhere, either. Everyone just sit down.”

Agatha pours milk from one mug into her tea and takes a sip. Nancy does the same, and then spits out the liquid.

“How can you drink that? The milk’s bad. There’s chunks floating in it.”

“Let me try,” Colin says. He looks right at Agatha when he takes a sip. He knows that it’s going to be sour, but the taste isn’t as bad as he anticipated. It reminds him of yogurt. “Tastes fine,” he says and laughs.

Agatha smiles and gulps from her cup. He wishes that he and Agatha were alone, that they could talk. He wants answers. He keeps thinking about her sharp teeth and what they would feel like against his skin. What her mouth would feel like.

“What’s going on?” Nancy says. “Are you two on something?”

“A dying man gets painkillers, right?”

“He’s not on anything,” Whitney says with a sigh. “He’s messing with your head.”

“Did Mark tell you that?” Nancy demands. “Colin could be scoring anywhere—from his doctors even.”

Whitney crosses her legs and gives Colin a sly look. She speaks slowly, like she’s bored. “I know because I know how he looks when he’s messing with you.”

“She’s right,” Colin said, holding up his hands in surrender. “I apologize.”

Whitney opens her briefcase and takes out some papers. “Maybe I should explain what we’re here about. I brought some papers that would give Nancy general power of attorney. Do you know what that is?”

Colin shakes his head. “Sounds legal. Does Mark know you’re here?”

Agatha picks up the mugs and walks toward the kitchen. He turns toward her, wanting to tell her to stop acting like a maid, but her back is to him. He wonders if years of restaurant work have made bringing and removing food into a ritual.

“This is just a proposal,” says Whitney. “If you sign this, Nancy would be your agent in taking care of things. She can deal with your health care, finalize the details of certain deals your manager is trying to work out with the rest of the band—basically do everything to make sure that you’re comfortable. Nancy feels terrible about the divorce.”

“I do,” Nancy said, touching his arm.

Whitney clears her throat. “She feels like she left you to fend for yourself at a time when doing so was very difficult, and she wants to make that up to you.”

“She thinks I didn’t fight hard enough,” Colin says numbly.

“I said I lot of things I shouldn’t have said.” Nancy’s hand is still warm on his arm, and it makes him realize how cold his own skin is by comparison. “We were together for a long time, and I shouldn’t have just thrown that away.”

“No,” says Colin.

“I’m glad you agree. Look, the first thing I’m going to do is get someone to come in here and put up some drywall. Then we’ll get you some furniture and hire a nurse.”

“No,” he says again.

“No what?” Nancy asks. “You live like a squatter. It’s understandable that you’re depressed, that these things are hard to come to terms with, but no one is looking out for your best interests. Imagine the scandal if your body wasn’t found for days and then found here. Is that how you want to be remembered?”

Whitney flinched visibly. “Nancy—”

He stands up. “I’m already dead in your mind, aren’t I? You’re already planning my funeral, getting your veil all ready, selling the rights to the tribute album—and what? You’re pissed that I won’t be a good little corpse and lie down so you can start embalming me?”

“That’s not what I’m saying at all! I don’t know that you’re in a rational frame of mind.”

Whitney holds up her hand. “Just think about it, Colin. I know you’ve still got a lot of anger toward Nancy, but right now she’s someone you can trust who really wants a second chance to be there for you. I’m going to leave the papers here, and you can look them over while Nancy and I go and grab a bite to eat. We’ll bring you back something, and then we can talk some more.” She takes out a gleaming pen and places it atop the papers.

He follows them to the door, and as he looks out at her, weariness overcomes him. When he speaks, his voice is quiet. “You can’t go back, you know. We can’t. People can’t. I can’t go back to being the person I was before I was sick, and you can’t go back to being that person’s wife, because he doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Of course he does,” Nancy says. “He’s just sad.”

Colin closes and bolts the door behind them, then picks up the legal pages. Walking to the window, he cranks one wide open and drops confetti of ripped white paper onto the street below. It looks like a parade passed through, he thinks.

“Agatha?” he calls, but there’s no response from the kitchen.

Colin walks in, expecting to find her perched on the countertop or drinking the rest of the bad milk from the carton. But she’s not there, and the window to the fire escape is wide open.

On her way down the metal stairs, she runs into one of Colin’s neighbors—a pale looking man with floppy bleached hair. He is smoking a cigarette, and the corner of his mouth looks bruised. He scoots over so she can sidle past him.

“Don’t like front doors?” he asks her.

“Don’t like good-byes,” she says. He nods like that makes sense.

She feels bad leaving like this, without explaining to Colin what she’s done. She tries to tell herself that he’ll figure things out, but she knows that her cowardice will cost him.

As she walks down the road, she thinks about the real first time she met Colin, outside of a club in New Mexico. She’d been washing dishes and was on a break, just leaning against the cool stucco of the building next door and listening to the music.

He’d staggered out a moment later, his shirt wet with sweat, and leaned against the wall, too. Neither of them spoke, but in that moment she could tell that their skin itched the same way. Itched to keep moving, to escape. To keep looking for the mythical city where they would be sheltered in its shadows.

When her break was over and she headed toward the kitchen door, he gave her a look of sympathy that, for a while, made her feel less alone. She hasn’t told him that they have run into each other before. She won’t ever tell him.

Another memory rises up, unbidden—Colin leaning toward her in the kitchen tonight. His eyes were dark with something that might have been revulsion but that she could pretend was desire. And she hates that she’s leaving, but it’s better than being around when he realizes how much there is to despise her for.

He watches crows, black wings gleaming like oil, peck garbage strewn across a sandy lawn. The sun hurts his eyes, but he’s determined to sit on this bench, near the one place he knows she can’t avoid.

Shading his face with a hand as he looks over at the graveyard, he wonders at the garden of white stone and granite. Grander and more austere than the tacky spectacle he’s finding dying to be. When he was a kid, all the songs he loved were full of romantic ideas about eternal souls and the deaths beyond death, and finding out how mundane and embarrassing it’s turning out to be is lowering, not unlike finding out all the stately Roman buildings had once been painted garish colors.

“Here you are,” Agatha says. He jumps a little and turns toward her. She’s wearing a silvery sundress and has that horrible earring in one ear. He didn’t even notice she’d taken it from his apartment.

“I figured you’d come here eventually,” he says.

She sits down next to him on the bench, but she won’t meet his eyes. “I figured the same thing about you.”

“Why would you say that?” He tilts his head to one side.

She ignores his question. “I want to tell you about ghouls. I came back to tell you—to face you. We live on putrid flesh, we’re strong, and we never get sick.” She sucks her bottom lip in a nervous gesture. “We live a long time, too. And it’s not all bad, the roving.”

“Okay,” he says.

“See those markings?” She points toward the wall to the graveyard, which is covered in marks like the kind hobos left each other at train stations. “That’s how we communicate.”

“Are you sure you’re supposed to tell me your secrets? I guess it doesn’t matter, but—”

“I have to tell you,” she says, crouching down beside the bench so that she can trace the marks in the dirt. “Here’s how you mark your territory. And here’s the symbol for danger. This is the one for safe place—which is similar to this one, for good place.”

He stares at the marks. A secret lexicon for a secret life.

“Are you freaked out?” she asks.

“Very,” he says, then takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I’ve been thinking, too, and I want to tell you, I get it. You were waiting for me to die. You’ve been taking good care of me, bringing me food.” He laughs, nervously. His hands are sweating. “But you were getting me ready to eat, right?”

Agatha stares at him silently.

“And I wanted to tell you that I’m okay with that. I mean, I want you to. Go ahead.”

She leans very close to him and opens her mouth against the place where his shoulder meets his neck. He can feel her teeth, sharp against his skin. He shivers and he reaches out to pull her against him. She shifts until she’s half risen from the ground, leaning between his legs, her body as cool as his own. His heart is speeding, but time has slowed, time is moving like the honey oozing on his floor. “Is this what you pictured?” she says. The movement of her mouth, the scrape of her teeth is exhilarating and awful.

“I don’t know,” he says. His heart is hammering against his ribs. Every instinct is telling him to push her away, to run, but he slides his hand to her hip and holds himself still. This is better, he tells himself. Because for the first time in months, he feels the thrill of life in every ragged breath.

“You’re wrong,” she says slowly, drawing back from him.

“Wrong?” His neck throbs where her lips have been.

“I’m not going to eat you, Colin Lainhart. You’re not rotten enough for me.”

He frowns, disoriented, distracted. “But what did you want, then? I don’t understand.”

“I like you. I don’t have a lot of friends, moving around the way that I do. You’re funny and nice, even though you’ve been ill and in pain. Why wouldn’t I like you?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “People aren’t liked because they deserve to be.”

“You might wish I didn’t like you,” she says.

He reaches up and touches her dark hair. It reminds him of the crow’s feathers. “Why would I want that?”

She pushes away from him so that she’s standing. “I fed you human flesh. In your food. You were so sick that you couldn’t tell.”

His stomach twists.

“You’re going to live,” she says. “I sentence you to live.”

“Oh.” There is a great roaring in his ears, and he rubs his face. Moments ago he felt ancient, but now he feels confused, stumbling like a small child.

“You’re like me now. I turned you. You’re going to like the taste of spoiled food and things with strong flavors. You will crave human flesh, but you don’t have to eat it all the time. Be careful, Colin.” With that, she turns and starts walking in the direction of the highway. The crows, startled, go to wing.

“Wait.” He stands up and grabs her arm. “You can’t leave.”

“I’m not sorry.” She jerks her arm out of his hand. She’s right; she is very strong. “You can’t make me say that I’m sorry.”

At least she’s no longer moving away from him. She’s standing right there, breathing as if she’s been running.

There are so many things that he wants to tell her. But then he remembers the one thing that he hasn’t said, the one thing that matters. “Stay,” he says, reaching his hand out to her again, gently this time. “I want you to stay. Please stay. Stay.”