Page 9

CHAPTER 9

The Man Who Fell to Earth

I did like Oslo.

Begrudgingly so, like admitting your cousin was a lot more beautiful than you. James and I had arrived a week later to a sparse but cozy bed and breakfast by the port. In our twin guest room, we unpacked the few days’ worth of clothes we’d brought. James took up the entire bathroom with his moisturizers, hair products, brushes, and whatever else had the man looking at least ten years younger than he should.

When I’d told Tye about our plan to speak to Bryn, he was even more disappointed than when I’d wanted to leave. Why was this worse? Because Bryn was a “ fucking lunatic ” about Ruhaven, according to Tye.

I believed him. Anyone who’d spent years visiting that Gate would have to be a bit crazy. Living as someone else. Being someone else.

So why didn’t the idea scare me as much as it should have?

I glanced over at James as we navigated the streets of Oslo. His eyes were still a bit sleepy from our early start, but he looked otherwise content in a city that was too… clean . Suspiciously clean—no cans in the ditches, no cigarette butts fallen between the sidewalk cracks, no litter blocking the sewage grates. I could practically eat off these streets.

I’d spent a good thirty minutes walking around with an empty coffee cup before I realized the bins were actually the twisted iron rectangles I’d mistaken as sculptures. They sat in the manicured parks between bubbling fountains and twisted trees—imported, according to the proudly displayed sign.

“When did you first see the Gate?” I asked James as we passed a café whose wafting buttery scent had lured me for a block.

“Ruhaven? When I was five, sure.”

“ Five? ”

He chuckled lightly. “Maggie, me mam, knew when I was coming because of the Ledger . When she saw that I was up for adoption, she had an opportunity to bring the first child to Naruka. I went to school during the day and into Ruhaven in the evenings. Not such a bad life.”

Considering it, I sipped my second coffee of the day. Wouldn’t it be weird to have a life here, then be living another in the Gate? “Were you a child in the memory as well? Did you have friends? Or…demons?”

“Ruhavens. I was, and I did. When I was only but eight, I met a young female named Essie, another Ruhaven. She was me mate.”

I lifted my coffee cup. “And what’s that?”

“Kind of like a wife, I suppose.”

Splshhhh . Dark liquid spat out my mouth, smearing the perfect marble sidewalk, much to the disgust of the suit walking past, whose briefcase barely escaped becoming a victim too.

I hastily wiped my mouth. “You have a wife ?” I repeated as James laughed. Wait—was that what Kazie had meant? “In Ruhaven ?”

“Yera, ye’ll find a mate’s something a bit more intense.”

I certainly hoped I didn’t. But I darted a glance at the band on his right hand, then up to the shimmering laughter in his eyes. “And you got married when you were… eight ,” I repeated slowly.

He crossed the road. “Jayzus, ye think me mam would let me get married in Ruhaven when I was but only a wee lad? No, sure, that was all later. Too many years ago now.”

James had a wife in Ruhaven. I hadn’t even considered the relationships that might form in another world, the ones you could only witness.

“Do you…?”

He lifted a brow. “Do I what?”

I cleared my throat. “I mean, can they?”

“Yera, I’ve not a clue what yer to be meaning, Roe.”

Heat crept into my cheeks. “Never mind,” I mumbled—none of this mattered now.

“Why Roe, are ye a wee bit embarrassed about asking if I’ve had an ol’ Ruhaven snog?” he teased, reading me perfectly. “Yera, we have sex and the like, if that’s what ye want to know.”

I tossed my cup of coffee—which was just causing my nerves to jitter—into the now identifiable trash. “I was just curious.” Morbidly, ashamedly curious, and I had no right to be.

“Sure, ye can ask me anything ye like. Essie has always been a lot more to me than just what yer blushing at. Ye might say I got bullied a wee bit in school, and Essie was like a…a salvation. I couldn’t talk to her, as ’twas only a memory, but it was enough to be near her. And in some ways, a relief not to need to control anything, be anything, make any decisions, ye know?”

Maybe I did. Maybe Willow had been a bit like that for me.

It wasn’t until she was gone that I’d realized I didn’t really have anything that wasn’t hers. Our shared friends weren’t mine at all, and when she died, they stopped calling, stopped inviting me to New Year’s parties. We’d been dating two brothers, and even that had withered, as if without Willow, I had started to disappear as well. As if there wasn’t enough of me left to hold on to when she was gone.

“But James, Essie’s not real, just a memory.”

He pulled a smoke from his pack. “Roe, I don’t know that Essie is any less real than you and I right now. She’s real to me. Aye, she is, and that’s enough.”

Could it be, though? Just seeing a woman, talking to her, in a memory you couldn’t control?

“Now, about Bryn,” James said as we rounded a corner. “I want ye to mind yerself when yer around him. Keep yer questions about the disease, about Willow. Don’t mention Ruhaven.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s gone to some trouble to move on, it seems, and it’ll likely upset him. No one likes to have their dreams taken away.”

“Is that what you think you did to him?”

“Yera, it is what I did to him.” James sighed, long and deep. “There’s another reason, as well, for ye to be careful of what ye say around him. I haven’t told ye about Marks, yet. It wasn’t necessary, as ye were leaving, but I don’t want ye to be surprised should ye see it.”

I scratched at my cheek. “Marks?” Was Bryn scarred in some way?

“In Ruhaven, our Marks are our species, each one signifying the race ye belong to. Like how a cat has claws, except I can bond with a spirit. But ye need to know, as sometimes our Marks can drift over here if we’re particularly close to the Gate.”

Great. “And what’s Bryn’s?”

James took a second to answer. “Light,” he said at last.

“Light,” I repeated. “So if he starts glowing, I should run?”

James hiccupped into his tea. “Not exactly, but ye might see him look a wee bit strange. ’Tis nothing to worry too much of. He won’t hurt ye, but ye might get a fright. So it’s best not to mention Ruhaven because of it.”

My questions would be about Willow, anyway. “Did you know Bryn, in the Gate?”

James tossed his tea in a bin. “Bryn? No.”

Had my past life and James’s met? What would it be like to find someone else to share all that with? “What do you look like? In the—the memories, I mean? What’s your Mark?”

He lifted the map, angled us along the port boardwalk. “I’ve all the basics—arms and legs and such. If ye’d stayed in the Gate longer, we’d find out what ye look like too.”

I grumbled a response.

“As for me Mark, I’m a Kalista , which means I can share the powers of the spirit I choose to bond with—and it so happens that Essie’s me spirit and me mate.”

“Share the powers…?”

“Aye, Essie’s a female carved from a type of clay in Ruhaven, and so I’ve a bit of a green thumb.”

Before I could unpack that, James veered toward a set of stone steps leading away from the port. They spiraled up through picturesque townhouses, each with a window box stuffed with flowers I couldn’t identify, but James bent to sniff. Two fishing rods leaned against the buttermilk house on my left, their orange bobbers bright spots in the sun. Beside them, water beaded on the lid of a Styrofoam tub of worms.

“Which is his?” I asked as my thighs begged me to stop.

James panted a breath, in even worse shape than me despite his slim body. “One more now, the little white one.”

I limped up another ten steps—no wonder Europeans are so fit—until I could read the house’s hand-painted address. Unlike its neighbors, the flower box boasted only dry, baked dirt, and moss grew in the spaces between the wainscoting. Above the door’s porthole hung a silver coin that would have been stolen within minutes back home.

When James’s labored breathing finally echoed in my ear, he moved to straighten my cardigan, redoing buttons that hadn’t been wrong in the first place. I frowned down at myself, at the fingers that shook on the pearly buttons, at the glinting gold band he wore on the ring finger of his right hand.

“It’ll be okay, James,” I said softly, earning a brisk nod.

But where to begin when that door opened? How did I explain to the man inside that I needed answers about what I’d willingly given up—the very thing he’d been exiled from?

Tension bracketed James’s mouth. He tugged my braid over my cardigan, letting the black weave hang down my chest. “Ye look well.”

I probably smelled like that bucket of worms. At least I felt like it, with the sun heating a sticky trail along my spine.

“Think that’ll help?”

He faced the door, lifted a fist. “Couldn’t hurt, like.”

Knock-knock-knock .

This was it. Pure desperation would probably be written all over my face when he opened that door.

I curled my hands in my pockets. Desperate, pathetic—it didn’t matter. I wasn’t doing this for me; I was doing this for my twin, and I could be a lot of things for her.

Feet click-clicked across the floor. Stopped. A chain rattled. Locks slid.

Thunk .

When the door inched open at last, James’s eyes widened.

A woman stepped out. And all I could think was that her features were in such stark contrast to mine, James could have stuck us on opposite sides of a coin and flipped it.

Short, soft hair the color of white wine brushed her shoulders, and pearl earrings dotted each lobe, matching the strand resting on a slim collarbone. Her skin was Norwegian white, her eyes an enviable blue, and her polite, restrained smile and salmon-orange suit might have hinted that she was about to leave for work—but the tapping black heel said it a hell of a lot louder.

I smiled hesitantly, waiting for James to apologize that he’d gotten the wrong house, but he said, “Ah, sorry, is there any chance Bryn is here?”

“Brynjar?” she repeated in a heavy accent, and his name went from sounding like the ping of a guitar strum to an exotic Viking caress. Bryn-yar , with the first “r” rolled in a way I’d never manage.

“Sorry, this is the last address I’ve had for him,” James said, stepping a leg up in case she closed the door. Bolder than I gave him credit for. “We’re old friends. Do ye know him?”

By the way she smoothed her tongue over her teeth, I’d say she knew him very well. “Brynjar moved out six months ago. He’s at work now, I think. He accepted a job in the university.” She folded her arms as if it were cold with the door open.

I stepped a little more into view. “Which university?”

The woman tilted her head, voice taking on a frigid tone. “You—your accent. Where are you from?”

“L’Ardoise.”

Her waif-thin body bristled, fuchsia fingernails puncturing the leather purse at her hip. “I am not a map.”

James laid a hand on my tensed shoulder. “We’ve enough to find him, I think—”

“Nova Scotia, Cape Breton—Canada,” I said quickly, because some perverse part of me had to know what put that look on her face.

“ Canada ,” she repeated, emotions flying high. Fury? Embarrassment? Jealousy? Eyes like chipped glass scanned all five feet nine inches of me, and measured each one. Her glossy mouth soured. “I suppose you thought to come here, to my home, to rub my nose in what you have stolen?”

I blinked. “Me? Stolen ?” Bewildered, I looked around. One worm had escaped the fisherman’s container and now lay shriveled in the sun next to a cigarette butt. “We’ve never met.” I didn’t even know her name.

But when I glanced at James, his face was carefully blank. “Yera, we’re sorry to have bothered ye. We won’t—”

She cut him off with a look that must have been the reason the flowers had died. “Be sure you do not. If Brynjar has sent you here to find my forgiveness, you can tell him there is none to give. Neither I, nor my family, shall ever offer that.”

Her hair swayed as she spun around, and James barely dodged the slamming door. Back and forth went the wooden sign as locks slid shut.

We both stood there for a moment, stunned, pigeons feeding beside us on breadcrumbs thrown out by the neighbor who’d needed an excuse to listen in. Now, she made a show of rolling out laundry on the second floor. A pair of cotton undies waved between townhouses.

What had Bryn done to this woman? How had he managed to piss off seemingly everyone he came into contact with? Kazie had spoken well of him, but I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

Grabbing my elbow, James led us down the stairs and back to the port, his face so acutely distressed that I waited until the smell of dead fish greeted us again to say anything.

“How does Bryn’s roommate know me?”

James let go of me to lift his wrist, studying the twirling gears beneath the ticking minute hand of his watch. “I don’t know.” It was said flatly, no lilt, no playful up-and-down roll.

“Is she a Ruhaven?”

He chewed on his thumbnail. “No.”

Turning, he stuffed his hands in his pockets, huddling against the wind as he strode briskly along the boardwalk and wound between pedestrians.

“Wait, James!” I hurried to keep up, cardigan flapping around my hips, the rusty air stinging my nostrils. “Where are you going?”

“University of Oslo,” he said, all business. “It closes in an hour.”

So Bryn worked in the city. “What about that woman who—”

“Maybe it’s not yerself,” James said shortly. “Maybe ’tis another Canadian she knew, and nothing to do with ye.”

I drew alongside him, considering it. That could be right—she hadn’t said my name, hadn’t known me. Just some woman from Canada. Or someone with my accent. I was no one.

The knot in my gut lessened. “Right. You’re right.”

I peppered James with questions as he crossed the road. Twice, he stopped for directions before finding a woman in a green blazer who spoke English.

“And if Bryn has some vendetta against Canadians like his roommate?” I asked again after she pointed us down a tiny side street. “Maybe we should make an appointment.”

James lifted a hand to the changing sky. “An appointment! Sure, I recruited him meself, and now I’m to make an appointment?” he muttered under his breath. “No, we’ll go on up to his department and ask for a blond-headed eejit who won’t return me calls.”

My stomach took a nosedive as I hurried to keep up. So James was Bryn’s recruiter. “How did you convince him to come to Naruka?”

James flashed me a shameless grin. “As our Bryn isn’t nearly as handy as yerself, I commissioned him to do all our portraits, so I did.” Please, let him never do mine. “Here we are, Roe.”

Distracted, I tripped on the stone sidewalk. “What? Where?”

Oh.

Wow.

Limestone towers, three massive wooden doors, a staircase missing only the red carpet—but with giant rings waiting should it make an appearance. Over a marble arch with the school’s gilded name, the Norwegian flag snapped in the wind.

“No chance Bryn’s the bell tower oiler?” I asked as James ambled up the university’s royal path.

He smirked over his shoulder. “Not a one, love.”

Vaguely nauseous, I plodded after him, over the tiled courtyard arranged in a sundial of the school’s crimson colors, up the steps where copper statues of war heroes glared at the tissue I pulled from my pocket. I quickly tucked it away again.

James caught the door when students ambled out. God, the smell of the place. Money. Fresh books. Coffee. Absolutely nothing like my brief stint in music college with Willow, where squealing saxophones assaulted the ears and the ripe smell of clarinet oil stung your nose. Except for the tiny practice rooms. There, other smells had lingered, but even remembering it seemed blasphemous in this regal space.

Yet as I stood in the grand entrance, eyeing the dual staircases, the polished banisters ending in carved swans, the chandeliers pinging yellow lights off the marble floor, that old longing still threatened to strangle me. Not for the practice rooms, but for the beginning of it all. Hadn’t that been why I’d followed Willow to music school? Hoping to find that calling like she had, as though by sharing the same biology I could obtain it too.

“Roe? ’Tis this way,” James said, whistling an Irish tune that drew more than a few glances. I followed a careful five feet behind.

As we climbed the next set of stairs—oiled, gleaming, with a carpet runner vacuumed to within an inch of its life—it was all painfully quiet. Too quiet for a university. People spoke in hushed whispers, paper fluttered, a photocopier let out a tentative beep-beep . A chair groaned, a man heaved a long sigh, lights flickered. But there was no laughter, no giggling, no cursing at that exam or the teacher who’d given it.

“Sorry,” I mumbled when I bumped into a swinging briefcase. But the man stopped, and I glanced up at him.

Curly midnight hair, a dusting of a beard, and a dimple in each cheek when he smiled at me. “Do you know who you’re looking for?” he asked in English, his voice a rich baritone.

“Art history,” James replied behind me.

Twisting on polished black shoes, the man strode ten feet to our left with a wave of his hand. He pushed open a door and it, too, swung on silent hinges. I had a second to admire the wood carving of an angel on it before James pushed me through.

“One flight up,” the man said, and turned and left.

James wiggled his eyebrows at me, then angled us up the carpeted stairs, only slowing when we passed a corkboard. He scanned the pinned list, brows furrowed into kissing caterpillars, then murmured, “Alright, I’ve been thinking on the way here, and ’tis best if ye talk to Bryn first.”

“What?” I balked. “I thought we were doing this together?”

“Oh, now she hesitates?”

“But James, if you would just—”

He held a finger to his lips, pointed down the hall. “Number three.”

I craned my neck to look. Two rooms lined up on the left, four on the right. Each door was closed, except one. From that open doorway, a shaft of gold light spilled into the corridor, crisscrossing the awards displayed in glass cabinets.

I tucked a stand of hair behind my ear. “Are you sure it’s—”

“ Yes ,” he said in the same hushed whisper. “Go on, so, and get this over with.”

I should have rehearsed some speech before, should have practiced in front of that rusty mirror in the bed and breakfast. Because I hadn’t, everything I was about to say, about to ask, sounded idiotic, even in my head.

Slowly, I stepped toward the office, my steel-toed boots eating into what was likely a piece of artwork. What if Bryn wasn’t there? Gone out for coffee? A walk? Moved up north? I shivered at the thought—I’d seen those snow-capped peaks on the flight in, and the fjords that looked like some god had dragged their claws through the landscape. It should have seemed surreally beautiful, but compared to Ruhaven…

My nose twitched when cold tingled my nostrils, like the memory of that Norwegian frost was more than just my imagination.

I took out a napkin, blew my nose softly in the hallway, and just as I was tucking it into my pocket—

I saw him.