Draw One In The Dark(136)

And then she was tumbling down, and hitting the ground hard.



As she struggled to sit up again, she could see the Great Sky Dragon already high in the sky, flapping his wings—vanishing.



Around them, the other men—or mostly dragons—were disappearing. Some flying and some just . . . scurrying away.



Aching, Kyrie looked over at Tom's corpse. He was still staring blankly at the sky. What did she expect? That he would get up and say it was all a joke? Corpses rarely moved.



She swallowed hard. Grief felt like a huge, insoluble lump in her throat.



But the madness was gone. She knew she couldn't avenge herself on the dragons. Or on any of them. She knew as she knew she was alive and that Tom was dead that there was no remedy for this.



She scooted forward and took hold of Tom's hand. "I'm sorry," she said. She knew he couldn't hear her, and she'd never devoted any thought to the possibility of life after this one. But if there was anything, and if he could hear her . . . "I'm sorry. This is not how I meant for this to go. I didn't even realize . . . I didn't know myself until just now." She squeezed the cold hand, knowing it was beyond comfort.



"Kyrie, you have to get up," Rafiel said. "I'm going to call the police. You have to get up from there."



She shook her head. "No. I'll stay with him. I'll go with him. We can't leave him alone here." She saw a fly try to alight on Tom's wide-open eyes, and she waved it away with her free hand. Oh, she knew he was dead and he couldn't feel it, but it seemed . . . indecent.



"Kyrie, he's going to the morgue. You can't go with him. You don't want to. Let me help you up," Rafiel said.



She felt him tear her fingers away from Tom's hand. As if from somewhere, far away, she heard her own thoughts tell her that she was in shock. And she believed them. It just didn't change anything, did it?



There were sounds of someone throwing up behind her. She thought it was Keith, but she didn't turn to look. It had to be Keith, anyway, since there were only the five of them . . . the four of them here. And it couldn't be Edward because he was crying, somewhere to her right side. He was crying, loudly and immoderately. And she thought that was weird because she didn't know lawyers could cry.



Rafiel threw something warm—a jacket?—over her shoulders. "You're trembling, Kyrie. You need something warm," he said.



"Tom's jacket," she said.



"What about it?"



"It will be ruined," she said. "All the blood. He's going to be very upset." And then she realized what she'd said was nonsense, but she couldn't seem to think her way out of that puzzle.



She felt Rafiel lead her very gently. And then there were lights, and noise, and a siren, and someone was asking her something, and she heard Rafiel's voice say, "She really can't talk now. She's in shock. I'm sorry. Perhaps later. We were walking across the parking lot to see when the restaurant opened, and this giant Komodo dragon came running out of nowhere, and it attacked Tom. I'm not really am not sure of the details. It all happened so fast."



Kyrie felt Keith shove her into a car. She didn't care whose car, nor where she was going.





* * *




And then life went on, somehow. It all seemed very odd to Kyrie that life could go on after something like that. She'd seen someone die—no. She'd seen Tom die. She'd seen Tom die so that the rest of them would be allowed to go free.



It all seemed very strange, and she thought about it very deeply. She thought about it so deeply that the rest of life seemed inconsequential.



It all seemed a great mystery. One minute Tom had been alive and well and afraid, and making wisecracks and being himself. And the next minute—no, the next second, he was so much flesh, on the ground. No life, no spirit, no breath.



It was very odd that such a great change could be effected so quickly and that it could never be reversed.



There should be, she thought, and realized she was in her kitchen, sitting at the table and staring down at the pattern of the table—whirls of fake marble engraved on the Formica—there should be a rewind button on life. So that you could press the button and life would be again as it was before. And the horrible things wouldn't have happened.



Someone was knocking at the door. At the kitchen door. Tom. But no. Tom would come no more.



But someone was knocking on her kitchen door. And she was sitting at her table in her robe and—she looked—yup, a long T-shirt. She was decent. And someone was knocking, so she guessed she'd better let whomever it was in.



She stood up, opened the door. Keith was there, on the doorstep, wearing his ridiculous backward hat. Only it had to be a new one, because the other one had burned with the castle, had it not? She seemed to remember . . .