Like Rain on a Cemetery
It’ll be just like watching a dream.
Julia watched the stars go by, flying in the back of someone’s ship that wasn’t Spike’s.
The thought sank into her body like cold water and filled her slowly. Not Spike. He’d asked her to come with him. Vicious had asked her to kill him. She’d told them both no.
It was raining that night.
It was raining on the cemetery grounds as she fled Mars without her love or her lover. Roses fell in the cold water filling up the dirt beneath which dragons were buried. It seemed Spike’s words had come true as she looked out on the stars he’d loved to show her, flying his Swordfish higher and higher into the black between the worlds.
It was just like watching a dream.
“Vicious?” Her voice was soft on the harsh, ugliness of the name. So gentle, as if she might even love him.
Spike stepped out of the doorway, head cocked slightly as he watched her, cigarette between his teeth, question in his eyes.
Julia hovered near the window. She’d looked up from the table and the vials she hadn’t wanted him to see. It was safer to call the name of lover, Vicious, safer to pretend there was only one man who might tread in her apartment with that look in his eyes whenever he looked at her.
He was looking at her, not the glass by her hand.
She stepped toward him, drew him into her arms, and kissed him as though Vicious would never come back through that door. He was away for days. She told her heart beating too fast that she was safe and so was Spike.
“Come,” she whispered and drew him in after her to the bedroom.
Red Eye. Julia was no stranger to offloading hot material. She wasn’t the sweet, innocent thing so many of the Red Dragon Syndicate thought she was, and Vicious wouldn’t have been taken with her or stayed with her if she had been. She was in as deep as any of them, and neither Vicious nor Spike were the ones who had introduced her to the underbelly of Mars.
She wasn’t on Mars now, but hanging around on a seedy edge planet no one wanted to call a rest stop, let alone a home. But she knew the words as she carried a sample of the drug Red Dragons had acquired and manufactured in their own time, their own ways.
She’d always known Vicious’s strength did not come solely from the power of his body or the way he trained himself with sword and anger and the cold in his blood. She had acted unsurprised when he left the vials on her windowside table. She had never commented on it at all.
It would buy her this dream, the one she’d rather be dreaming with Spike.
Alone, he could escape—dead. He could never escape with her while Vicious knew she lived.
She sank back into the covers, holding onto Spike’s warmth, the way his kisses heated her skin, and kissed him back. He was nothing like Vicious. He filled her slowly with warmth like sunlight. He fit her in all the ways she’d never known she’d been empty.
He was the part of her she didn’t know she’d lost.
…
“Vicious?” It was safer to call the name of her lover.
But she studied him with wary concern, heart already filling up with cold at the look in Vicious’ eyes and the gun aimed easily between her eyes. Vicious hated guns, but he was skilled with them and both of them knew it.
You think you’ll flee Mars, the Syndicate… All of these were forgivable. Vicious cared for little, and definitely not the old dragons on their thrones with their lizard eyes and throats and traditions. But to flee Vicious was unthinkable, far beyond taking another lover. He could forgive her filling the emptiness between his visits with his partner. What was his could be shared, but never relinquished.
Julia was his.
“Will you kill him?”
“With your hands.”
He would forgive her Spike, but never would he forgive her leaving him.
She found herself looking up old friends, despite the danger. She didn’t give her name. She didn’t offer the signs of the Red Dragon Syndicate.
She’d always been in just as deep as the rest of them. It wasn’t the Syndicate that had introduced her to her world’s dark underbelly, the sharp prick of blood in the eye, or the feeling of a cold hard revolver in her hand. It wasn’t Vicious that taught her to be ruthless and betray Spike and Syndicate alike. It wasn’t Spike that taught her how to survive and keep heart in a world made up of blood, roses, and betrayal.
“Julia.” Their voices soft against the backdrops of harsh, backwater worlds. “Julia.” They knew her. “Julia.” They knew why they should turn her away. None of them ever did.
“Julia.” His voice soft against the backdrop of a harsh and lonely world, colored in by red and guns lying among the roses. “Julia,” as he whispered soft against her throat, a sweet kiss unlike the violent promise and danger of another against her pulse.
“Julia,” he whispered, and she gave into the warmth, the sweetness in her cold and lonely world.
It promised something other than this harsh reality, the dealers and deserters she killed without compunction. She didn’t kill Spike. She bound up his wounds and hummed soft songs beneath her breath while he stared at her and smiled.
“Julia,” he whispered and somehow he made her feel real and ordinary, like something other than a hitman who learned her job and learned it well before Mao took her in off the streets and gave her purpose.
“Julia.”
It was only a name. It was so much more than a name.
She stayed with Gren while it was safe, stared out on that cold and lonely moon, and dreamed of Spike.
It’ll be just like watching a dream. She could feel the cold filling up the spaces of her heart, like rain on the cemetery stones, on the ashy scent of Spike’s cigarettes, on the sweet scent of crushed roses, and on the smoke of guns.
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