Page 2 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)

BEADS OF BLOOD shivered on Lethe’s forearm. His body quivered with convulsions of adrenaline.

Disassembled bodies paved the road, all neatly placed like offerings and coated gray in soot like cobblestones.

Seventeen human torches lined gutters gorged with the fruit of violence.

Lethe had helped bind, tar, and light them.

Their fires had illuminated the base of the war’s most ominous and prolific symbol.

The elegant stone fortress, leaning back like the columns of a throat, rested at the heart of the Strike’s empire.

A deep split formed a smile across the columns, like a slit throat, earning it the name the Bleeding Grin.

Tonight, the Grin had seen its last offerings. The death of the Strike, The Eating Ocean’s prophets, had marked the end of their war.

Corpses haunted the shadows of the surrounding buildings, their pale faces lighting the darkness like white seashells along the ocean floor. The only sound was the cackling of the flames. The silence seemed hungry for any man bold enough to violate it.

It was in these moments that Lethe thought of god.

It was never about asking why. God had made the world as it was. Lethe wouldn’t petition to change it.

He thought about god because he felt like one—like a force, trapped outside of time, watching events transpire with no will to touch them, with no sentiment, bias, or humanness. There he saw the power of the being he imagined to be god.

He stretched his fingers against the husk of ash and blood that had closed him in like a casket.

Lights exploded across his vision, his consciousness lifted like a balloon, and for a moment he was at a carnival in the city park, watching a red balloon float up toward the sky until it was nothing but a dot.

His head spun like the bright, fall carnival rides. He blinked and he was on them, girlfriend by his side, spare tickets clasped in one hand, the other clasped around hers. She was laughing.

Then he was back on that road, buried among the bodies, a secret in the dark.

He relaxed into his dizziness and watched the horizon tilt beyond his hand. Lightning broke a sky that boiled with shades of rotten wine.

Thunder boomed like a moan of anguish or perhaps a burst of laughter. He couldn’t tell.

This victory, won at all expenses, against all odds, didn’t quite feel like a victory.

They’d charged in with ideals, but the fighting had been crude. There was no cause, only corpses, and for whose purpose?

It rained. The fires hissed.

He was back at the carnival again, standing in the lights and splendor, watching two vendors roast an assortment of meats from across the crowd. He remembered seeing the flames lick up the pale flesh, browning it. He remembered the smell.

The memory gave the night’s human torches some purpose.

But then, what was eating them?

His next thought sent a jolt into his chest, shocking him back from his vision again. His lungs flinched with a laugh, and he bit down hard as the motion jostled his ribs.

Maybe it was god.

The timer rang.

Lethe jolted from the memory, finding himself back in the bakery. The caramelized dressing of two bread loaves cracked and peeled in the raw heat of the oven in front of him. He saw the sugar, bubbled and browned, starting to burn.

He shook the image of skin from his head.

With a swift flinch of the muscles in his arm, Lethe drew the bread pallet from the oven and snapped it back over the adjacent table. The loaves rolled off, and Lethe exchanged the pallet for a bowl hanging on the wall. Something about the rush of movement soothed him.

He tore the cap off a carton with his teeth, pouring the pale syrup into the bowl with one hand as he grabbed a spatula from the table.

He dropped the cap and carton into a bin beside the table before pushing it under with his foot. He picked from a line of glass jars full of sugar and spices, adding ingredients to the bowl as he mixed the syrup with his other hand.

His fingers played across a set of glass vials on a shelf like piano keys, snatching up the last one. He unscrewed the cap with two fingers, tilting it.

One drop landed in the syrup.

Lethe stopped.

A second landed on the edge of the bowl, a blood-red tear that wandered down to the syrup where the first simmered with the brilliance of the firelight.

He stirred again, stopping the first time the spatula cut through it, creating a fine, red ring in the center of the bowl. The simmering red sank in, and the memory he’d only just surfaced from flashed like the glint of a knife in his head, delivering stark, vibrant images.

He brushed a knuckle across the edge of the bowl, lifting it to his lips as he tasted the insufferable sweetness of the syrup.

He grounded himself in the differences between flour and blood, bread and skin, the indulgences of sugar and suffering.

Nine years since the end of the war. He remembered the saying that time healed all wounds, but to him it felt like a torture rack, his feet in the present and his head in the past, each year in between just another inch of tension to suffer.

He couldn’t get out of it.

He rested his teeth against his knuckle. Some days he didn’t want to.

Against provided instruction, he capped the red dye, returning it to the set before drawing out a second vial of blue dye and pouring it into the syrup. He didn’t want blood on the bread.

All at once, he threw himself into the moment, and he was only a baker again.

He dressed the loaves with the mixture in delicate strokes, fingers handling the brush like a painter as his other hand drew a long knife from under the table.

He hooked the loaves under the teeth of the knife, sawing them through with quick, fixed cycles of his arm.

He loved to bake bread. He found that it engaged every sense he had, rooting him in the present world so deeply that he could feel its pulse. In the quiet of the morning, he would mix and mold the dough in his hands, pressing as it hugged his fingers, the smell of it filling the room as it baked.

Baking was an example of his own energy in conversation with the external world.

Art, food, and sexuality were all like this, a language of consumption and connection with life.

He loved indulging in connection. It made him feel alive, but the problem was, chains were a type of connection too.

A slave to his own compulsions, he was unable to sit still and alone inside his skin.

He had to touch and feel everything, replace the silence in his soul with the sparks of sensation.

He tossed the brush back into the bowl, the knife back under the table. He wrenched the bread cloth in his fist and around his wrist, drawing it to the end of the table, a presentation in the presence of a quiet onlooker.

“You were up early.” Manaj, a coffee-colored man with a halo of gray hair, hobbled farther into the light from the oven. He offered Lethe a damp rag and a skeptical look.

Lethe had been acting strangely the last few days, and the old man was keen. Lethe could tell that he knew some outburst was on its way, often before Lethe knew it himself.

Taking the rag in his hands, Lethe wiped the flour from the names tattooed on the rippled pages of his left forearm.

He drew the cloth across the table, clearing the flour like dust before whipping off his apron and rolling it around his arm.

He tossed the bundle into a hamper in the corner as he trailed the damp cloth across the glass jars.

Manaj grabbed a broom from the wall.

“I’ve got it,” Lethe said.

“You have flour on your face.” Manaj began sweeping the floor.

Lethe wiped his face with the back of his wrist before reaching for the broom.

“And in your hair.”

Ruffling his hair, Lethe left Manaj with the broom and walked out of the kitchen.

“It will take more than that,” the old man replied, sweeping under the table.

From the current angle, the old burns across his face were clear, hiding his left eye behind webbed scars that made paths over his temple, curling his ear.

“It won’t do to have flour in that hair of yours.

People will wonder about your hygiene. Wash your hair and shave.

You have more flour on your neck. Did you roll in it? ”

Lethe walked into his room, did a restless loop, and then returned right back to watch Manaj sweep the kitchen.

“Ares has defected from the State,” Manaj said as he swept, as if sensing Lethe in the doorway.

Manaj was always prattling on about the State like an angst-filled wife talking about her husband.

Lethe pulled his sleeve down over his tattoos and crossed his arms as he searched the kitchen. “They’ve taken plenty of pressure from the Mystics on their borders lately. Another defection can’t be a good sign. Ares was their top general, right?”

“He’s the infamous one with that mutated rifle, the one that never runs out of bullets,” Manaj said, trying to free something stuck in the room’s corner with the edge of his broom.

“They say they hate mutations, but they love that one, don’t they?”

“It’s the only gun that still works since the mutations hit.

I imagine anyone would.” Manaj swept the rest of the flour into a dustpan before tapping it off into the trash.

He placed the broom and pan near the door, taking the rag back from Lethe as they made their way through the living room and toward the porch.

Lethe drew a cigarette from his pocket, unhooking a metal lighter in the shape of a fanged skeleton from his belt.

The flint hissed from the skeleton’s teeth, the jaws opening to the flame.

It grabbed the end of the cigarette before Lethe released the trigger from the skeleton’s head.

Its jaws snapped closed. Lethe returned the lighter to his belt as Manaj hobbled around inside the kitchen.

“Did you finish the braided loaves?” Manaj asked.

Lethe fixed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, nodding back into the house.