The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 9: What Hale Did With It

Hale didn’t forgive me. I want that on the record, because I’d half expected him to.

He sat there with the watch shut in his fist and his knees pulled up, and the longer he sat, the less like a bully he looked. Without the jacket squared on his shoulders he was just a tall, worn-out kid with a split knuckle and mud on his jeans.

“I don’t forgive you,” he said finally.

“Okay.”

“I’m not saying it to be a jerk. I just don’t. I don’t think I can.” He turned the watch over. “I keep waiting to feel better, and I don’t. I feel the same. It’s just that now it’s true instead of something I made up.”

“That’s fair.”

“Don’t say that’s fair.” His mouth twisted. “Everybody says stuff like that.”

I shut up. We watched the creek.

After a while he said, without looking at me, “I came out here to jump.”

The words just sat there. I’d seen it, in a way. I’d seen him standing on that tie with his shoes on the edge. But there’s a difference between suspecting a thing and having it said in a quiet voice by the person it happened to.

“Today?”

“Every October. Since the first year.” He shrugged one shoulder. “I never do. I just stand there. I figure if I’m going to do it, I should know what it’s like to stand there. And every year I walk back to the road feeling like a coward.” He pressed the heel of his hand into his eye. “This year I was going to. I think. I had it picked out. And then you came down the path, and I thought, good, he’ll see.”

“See what?”

“Me.” He laughed, a thin dry sound with nothing in it. “I wanted you to watch.”

I felt the temperature drop in my own chest. Friday. Not Rian’s break, then. Or not only Rian’s. The fate had two threads, and they’d been tied to the same rotten board.

“I’m glad I did,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad it was me who got there.”

He looked at me for the first time in a long minute. Something unclenched across his face, then locked up again, like a man testing a bad tooth.

“I still might hate you,” he said.

“You can.”

“I’m going to tell my parents.”

“Tell them what?”

“All of it. Kyle and Jonah. The lie.” He stood and held a hand out. I took it, and he hauled me up, and I swayed on Rian’s weak legs. “The detective’s name was Pearce. He’s still on the force. My dad has his number.” He didn’t let go of my hand right away. “You’ll come with me. Tomorrow. You’ll say what you said.”

It wasn’t a request.

“I’ll come,” I said.

We walked out through the park together without talking, two boys in a failing light with a good twenty inches of air between us. At the lot he stopped where the gravel met the sidewalk, and he stood there with his hands jammed in his pockets, working his jaw.

“The thing about you,” he said, “is that you were such a nobody.”

I waited.

“Two years I’ve been hitting you. And you never hit back. You never told anybody. You’d just stand there.” He shook his head. “I thought you were the worst person alive. Like some kind of ghost who liked it. And all that time you were just...” He didn’t finish.

“A coward,” I said.

“Yeah. Kind of.” He almost smiled. It looked painful. “But you came back today.”

He crossed the street without saying goodbye, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, and I stood and watched him go. Under the streetlight on the corner he stopped, held something up to the light, and pushed his sleeve back. The watch hung loose on his wrist. He pulled the strap tight.

I let out a breath I felt in my teeth.

I got home after seven. The apartment was dark except for the light over the stove. Carmen had left a plate under foil with a note on it, in handwriting I’d already learned to read. Worked a double. Eat. Love you. M.

I sat at the table and ate cold rice and beans with my fingers, because I was too tired to find a fork, and the only sound in the apartment was the refrigerator. After a while I noticed that I wasn’t carrying anything. It was an odd sensation. Two days I’d been dragging a dead weight through this kid’s life, and now my chest felt as light as the hollow in a drum.

I wondered what Rian felt like, wherever he was.

“He’s close.” The Intercessor was in the doorway, leaning on the frame like he’d been invited. In the dim light he was almost a person. I almost caught his face. “He’s been listening. You said the words, and the groove closed. The thread’s already moved.”

“Moved where?”

“Away from the trestle.” He came in and looked at the plate, the note, the clock, with a faint interest, like a man reading old photographs. “Friday had two knots in it. You untied them both. I don’t think he’ll be needing you much longer.”

“What about Hale?”

“That one’s not mine to count.” He seemed to think about it. “I’ll tell you something, though. It’s rare for the pair to come loose together. Most of the time you get one.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s quiet.” He was looking at the plate. “That’s usually the sign.”

My throat did something strange. I looked down at my hands. The scar I’d carried across the base of the left thumb hadn’t come with me into this body. Rian’s hands were smooth. But I could feel the shape of it anyway, like the ghost of a limb.

“Tomorrow,” the Intercessor said. “You’ll go with Hale. You’ll say it again to the adults, which is harder. They’ll make you say it slowly.” He turned toward the dark of the hall. “Rian will want to be the one who does that part. You should let him.”

“How?”

“You’ll know.”

I woke up on Saturday morning with my cheek on the kitchen table and my mother’s hand on my back. She’d come home early. She was looking at me with a face I couldn’t read, her eyes wet and very bright.

“Mijo,” she said. “Marcus Hale’s mother just called. She wants to talk.”

And behind her, in the window, the morning light had a new quality to it, thin and clear and a little hard, the way it gets before something ends.