Page 137 of Red Rooster

31

The Ingraham Institute

The baroness had brought him a mirror. A compact, folding one of the kind ladies carried in their purses. “I know you think you’re so slick,” she’d said, laughing fondly, “but I see you trying to fix your hair. I just thought.” She’d grown serious. “You might like to have this. And this.” A simple plastic comb that nearly brought tears to his eyes.

“I don’t need these,” he’d said, gruff to cover the emotional clog in his throat. “I can make myself look however I want when I go dream-walking.”

“Sure. But that’s not the point, is it?”

“No…no, I suppose it’s not.”

He pulled the mirror now from its hiding place under his sleeve, in the crook of his elbow, where he tucked it when one of his guards brought his meals so they wouldn’t see it and take it from him. A man with a small token was somehow more pathetic than one with nothing, and he didn’t trust their indifference; in his experience, no one ever missed the opportunity to inflict little tortures when it was convenient.

He opened it and tilted it to catch the meager light of his cell. His reflection – his true one, and not the glamour he conjured when he went wandering – was a horror. Sunken cheeks, sunken eyes, chapped lips. His hair hung in greasy snarls; it had bypassed dirty, and then filthy, and become the lion’s mane of a wild man. Humans would have said he looked like someone raised by wolves, and the irony of that thought sent him into a fit of laughter, his voice echoing off the bare walls around him, sounding more than a little insane.

“My,” he murmured, quieting, dashing the tears from his eyes with the back of one trembling hand. “Radu the Handsome. Look at you now.” He snapped the mirror closed and slipped it back up his sleeve. Later, he would open it back up and prop it as best he could on his cot; get out his comb and, perhaps with the aid of a little of the olive oil-based salad dressing stolen from his next lunch tray, he’d begin the laborious task of working the knots free. Now, though, he wanted to be somewhere else.Withsomeone else. Not with any of the immortals and their allies whom he visited, no. They were diversions, possibly assets, but they weren’t…they weren’t people whosawhim. They saw Valerian the Brother-Killer. Radu the Handsome. They saw someone who wasn’t to be trusted.

Sometimes he was summoned.

Sometimes he slipped onto the astral plane and found other immortals shining across the vast distances like beacons, like drawing like.

But sometimes, like that one time, and all the times that had come after it, when he was able to return to that place, he thought his mother’s gods must have been smiling on him after all to allow him such a gift. Something precious and secret that was his and his alone.

He wanted to go there now. Toher.

Valerian moved into the corner of his cell, pressed his back against the stone walls, let his head fall back and closed his eyes. Calm, he had to be calm for this. He’d just fed, and though it was weak, the pig’s blood gave him enough strength to send himself down into that dark, thoughtless place where his magic lived. He had to go down, first, then the magic would draw him up, pull his consciousness from his body in a dazzling helix, send him to the dark, uninhabited plane where time and distance meant nothing.

He saw something, a bright orange flicker, but he tucked his head and kept going, going, all the way to the place that he’d earmarked with a little white dot.

His projection coalesced in the wood-paneled office of a barn in Colorado. Sunlight fell through curtained windows, glinting off the glass of all the framed photos and award shadow boxes that were hung on every inch of wall space. Ribbons in all the colors of the rainbow fluttered in the breeze of a window AC unit. An orange cat sat on a tack trunk and licked itself.

And at the desk, the person he’d come to see wore pale green breeches, and a white shirt, her black schooling boots with the spurs strapped to the ankles. Her dark-gold hair, pulled back in an efficient bun, looked a little stuck to her head: helmet hair, she called it. She sat with her elbows braced on her knees, her head in her hands, her breath catching and hiccupping. Crying.

Fear flashed through him, so fierce and sudden he felt sick, even though it wasn’t possible for his projection to do anything with that sensation. He reached out, and then stopped, because he couldn’t touch her. Could offer no physical comfort of any kind. So he let his arm fall and said, with false cheer, “Well, it looks like I stopped in at a bad moment.”

She jerked, head snapping back, hands slapping down on her legs. Her eyes were red, but dry, as was her face. She’d been fighting the tears, then, working hard to hold them in. Her expression went from shocked to smooth to embarrassed to glad, all in a single heartbeat.

She sniffed and wiped hastily at her dry cheeks. “Val. Hi.”

“Hello, Mia.” He smiled, and she smiled back, albeit shakily. “Don’t look so happy to see me,” he teased, but inwardly was screaming,Who hurt you? Who made you cry? Tell me and I’ll put their heads on pikes outside your city walls.

A tiny voice in the back of his head pointed out how verymartialthat was:so much like your brother after all.

“Oh, I am happy. I just.” She shook her head, then winced, and brought her hands up to cradle her skull. “I, um – this is embarrassing. I had…had a bit of a fall. One of my headaches. And Donna sent me in to get some Tylenol and rest, but…” She blinked hard a few times. “I’m sorry. I’m just sofrustrated.”

“You fell?” He closed the distance between them in two long strides, hands coming up to hover fruitlessly above her shoulders. “Where? How badly? Do you need a doctor?”

Her smile opened across her face like a wound, red-edged and raw. “No, it’s…no.” She turned her head away from him. “Don’t look at me like that.”

His heart pounded in his throat, quick enough to choke him. He swallowed and said, “Like what?”

“Like you care.” Then, quieter, “Like you’re real.”

But I am real. He swallowed again. “Idocare.”

She breathed a shaky laugh. “I guess you wouldn’t be a very good imaginary friend if you didn’t, huh?”

“Mia–” he started.