Read Online Resurrection Man by Sean Stewart - Free Book Online Page B

were unreadable, fixed on the darkness of the far shore. "The fort was ours," he said finally. "Yours and mine. Everyone else was a stranger." Naked willow-fronds hung around them, dripping cold tears of dew.

    Dante reached up to the willow's trunk and touched a welt, chest-high, where someone had stripped off a ribbon of bark. Aunt Sophie, he realized. Aunt Sophie complaining of her rheumatism, sipping her cup of bitter willow-bark tea. Jet would have known that, of course; would have watched, hidden in the fort, as she took her slices of bark. He was still the little spy she had found in her bassinet, a baby no longer wholly her child, with a mark of Cain newly etched on his face.
    Dante sighed. He had a lot to do in seven days. He squinted up at the brightening sky and corrected himself: six and a half.
    Dante shuddered as a fragment of dream came back to him: the magic lure glimmering and winking, leading him down into strange depths of sleep. The night before last, he thought wearily. The last time he had slept, before he had crept out into another gray dawn and tried his luck fishing with a wasp-bodied lure.
    They decided to bury the body in the shallow depression under a fallen tree, now rotten and cancered with moss. They dug quickly. Made from silt and leaf mold and years of mud, the dirt here was startlingly black, moist and rich as chocolate cake.
    "How long had you known?" Dante asked. Before setting off in the boat he had returned to the house to swap his silk jacket for a leather one decorated with Braque stencils. Now he stripped it off as sweat began to bead like dew on his high forehead.
    "Known?"
    Dante glanced back at the boat, where his patient body waited.
    "Ah," Jet said. He bent back to his task. "Not long."
    "But you checked under the blanket. In my room." Reluctantly, Jet nodded. "Other people always called you sneaky," Dante said. He drove his shovel down. "I told them they were wrong. I told them you wouldn't pry where you didn't belong."
    "I don't
belong
anywhere—had you forgotten? I live at the edge of the known world, gnawing the bones you throw me from the table."
    "Spare me your self-pity."
    Jet stopped, his fingers tight around the haft of his shovel. "You were too scared to look, Dante. Somebody had to." Jet bent back to work. "I didn't think to check under the blanket for a long time," he said softly. "I may be cursed, but I ain't no angel.... I didn't feel anything growing under the blanket. It was years before I realized you were afraid of it."
    Jet squinted, as if trying to see into the past. "You had been visiting, but you were about to go back to the City for a date. Amalia Jensen, I believe it was." (Here Dante, remembering, would have blushed had his face not already been red with exertion. He grunted and flung another shovelful of dirt into the bushes.) "You were preening and ignoring me while I warned you about her and that loathsome Todd fellow. You ran the comb through your hair and without thinking reached for the blanket—so you could look at yourself in the mirror, I suppose. When you touched it, I could see the shock go through you, as if you'd stuck your finger in a socket. You turned pale as a ghost, babbled some excuse, and bolted into the bathroom."
    Dante shook his head. "I don't remember any of this."
    "I'm not surprised," Jet said dryly. "I'm sure you did your usual sterling job of forgetting any unpleasantness. You do remember what happened with Amalia, don't you?"
    "Shut up:"
    Jet snickered. "After that, I would make faces in the mirror every now and then, and check under the blanket, to see what sprouted there. For a long time nothing did, and I was worried."
    Dante snorted. "Bored, you mean."
    "Well, seriously, Dante: you are my only real entertainment, you know. So finally on one of your visits home—Christmas two years ago—I decided to tiptoe into your room while you were sleeping. Things were different with you there. Instead of feeling the usual jumble