Read Online The Interminables by Paige Orwin - Free Book Online Page A

Death was responsible for his supernatural speed and near-invincibility.
    Not true, but not too far from it.
    Edmund checked his pocket watch. It was a quarter to eleven.
    Tomorrow, at noon...
    Istvan peered over his shoulder. “Are you quite all right?”
    Edmund put the watch away. “Fine.” He stepped off onto the beast’s neck, its “flesh” not giving way in the slightest. “I’m just fine.”
    Istvan looked at him oddly, but didn’t say anything more.
    Edmund adjusted his hat again and pressed on. He had his lily, everyone was still casting surreptitious glances at him, and it was better to get this over with. He’d made a promise.
    The ruin of the beast’s skull could have cupped a Little League game. The eerie whistling it made was just a trick of acoustics, the wind again. He swung down over exposed vertebrae, stone and iron, a mockery of anything living, and traced the ridge of its shattered eye socket.
    There. Chiseled.
    Grace Wu.
    Come on , she’d said, live a little. Indulge a girl before she dies a heroic death battling the forces of evil. Preferably punching a dragon. If there’s magic now, are there dragons, Eddie?
    I can’t say that I’ve ever met one , he’d said.
    She’d flashed that cocksure smile. Punched his shoulder, twice, gently, because if she wanted she could crack concrete. Bend steel. Well , she’d said, if you ever do, you have my number.
    He hadn’t meant to fall in love with her. He’d known it wouldn’t work out. He’d told her so. She was a Conduit, channeling power no wizard could hope to control through her very bones: neither one of them even knew how long she would live.
    But Grace… Grace had been sharp in all the right ways and curved in all the right places, beautiful, brilliant, and brave. More than he was. More than anyone. Unforgettable.
    That was the problem. That was what always happened if he didn’t take the coward’s way out.
    He knelt, and set the lily down. Its petals drooped against yet more names: a sad, small, pathetic sort of offering, all told. Hollow.
    She probably would have asked him what the hell he was doing. Why he’d vanished for so long. Why he would agree to come here, but go nowhere else except at night. Patrol and Charlie’s. Guilt and oblivion.
    Eddie, if you’re going to do what you do, if there’s really no way out of it – which I think is bullshit – you had better put that time to good use.
    They’d gotten into more than one fight, near the end. He was trapped, and he had no interest in becoming a widower who-knew-how-many-times-over, and he’d told himself that this dalliance would be brief, and then...
    So much he hadn’t been able to say.
    He still loved her.
    â€œI’m trying,” he said. “I promise I’m trying.”
    He patted his pocket, where the note was. Meeting at noon. If this Lucy woman was real, and sincere, and did know what she claimed to know, he could be back on the trail that day. A start. A fine new start.
    A good use of time.
    Istvan knelt beside him. “Are you certain you’re all right?”
    Edmund stared down at the lily a moment longer, then straightened. “I have someone to meet,” he said.
    Istvan started. “What?”
    â€œAt Charlie’s. Noon. Her name’s Lucy.”
    â€œWhat?”
    Edmund held up his hands. “I don’t know her and I’ve never seen her, but she makes a mean pie and left a note claiming to know something about the Bernault devices we lost.”
    The ghost looked aghast. “What?”
    â€œI’m sorry. It said noon. Maybe we can come back later and–”
    â€œEdmund, some woman you’ve never seen gave you a pie last night and you ate it?”
    â€œIstvan, a pie isn’t going to kill me.”
    The ghost stared at him. Then he advanced, loops of barbed wire following in rusted