The Last Stop

The call came at 2:13 a.m., which was already rude.

The phone in my apartment was an old fashioned rotary one that was big and clunky and still had a cord. A lot of electrical equipment, especially the newer ones didn’t last long around me, especially when I used my magic. Magic tends to drain the energy from everything around it which I suspected it did just to make sorcerer’s lives harder.

I picked up.

“Darkeson,” I said in what I think was English.

A girl’s voice whispered, “There’s a man on the train who isn’t breathing. Thirty-Third street.”

The line clicked dead.

I held the receiver against my ear for a few seconds, listening to the absence of a dial tone. Then I set it down and looked at Joshua’s mirror.

His face appeared in the glass, pale and sleepy-looking despite his insistence that ghosts didn’t sleep.

“Is that one of your friends?” I asked.

“No,” Joshua said. “But I heard it too.”

“From the phone?”

“From the phone.”

“Great. Haunted phone. Just what this apartment needed.”

I took my coat from the back of the chair. My ribs still ached from the day before, where a spirit had decided my body was an excellent place to test its throwing arm. The ache had settled into a steady throb, like my skeleton was tapping out a complaint.

Fenrir lifted his head from his bed.

“No,” I told him. “You’re staying here.”

He gave me the wounded expression of an abandoned orphan.

“You’re a demigod, not a taxi service.”

He stood.

“Don’t make me explain this twice.”

His tail wagged happily.

“Fine. But if you eat another subway rat, I’m telling people you’re someone else’s regular dog.”

He licked my hand, which was not a binding legal agreement, no matter what he thought.

The train station was closed when I arrived. A yellow barricade blocked the entrance, and a tired-looking transit cop stood beside it, sipping from a paper cup.

I flashed my consultant’s badge.

He looked at the badge, then at me with a look that could only nicely be called skeptical. “You’re the guy from the weird cases.”

“I prefer ‘specialist.’”

“Sure you do.” He lifted the barricade. “We got a report of someone acting suspicious on the last train. Operator saw him through the window. No movement. The train’s stopped on the lower platform.”

“Anyone go down?”

“Operator called it in, then decided he wasn’t paid enough to investigate. Can’t say I blame him.”

“Did he see a girl?”

The cop frowned. “No. Why?”

“No reason.”

I ducked under the barricade. The cop looked like he was about to say something but the coldness of the look I gave him made him stop. He had already understood there was some weirdness in this and wise enough to not want anything to deal with it.

I headed down the stairs. The station smelled of wet concrete, old electricity, and the ghost of a thousand hurried mornings. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Most of them were working, which meant I’d have to be careful with my magic. It was annoying that a little power could drain a light, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. The universe had apparently decided I was an energy sponge with lousy timing.

The platform lay empty. The train waited with its doors open, each carriage lit in a pale, humming glow. I took the steps down slowly, listening.

A train shouldn’t be quiet. Even standing still, it had a hundred small noises: ticking metal, cooling brakes, the rattle of something loose beneath the floor.

This one made none.

At the far end of the platform, a little girl stood with her back to me. She wore a yellow raincoat and had dark hair hanging in a wet curtain to her shoulders.

“Hey,” I called gently. “You shouldn’t be down here.”

She turned.

Her face was colorless. Water dripped from her hair, though the station was dry. Her eyes were the hollow empty of a dead person, edge to edge.

I stopped.

I knew that face.

Not the girl herself. The expression. The awful, patient expectation of a child who had learned that adults might not come back.

For half a breath, I was seven years old again. My foster parents were drunk, again and screaming about who knows what. I was hiding under my bed with Joshua next to me.

My fingers closed around the katana hilt at my side.

The girl looked down at my hand.

“I,” she said.

I let go.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He’s on the train.”

“Who is?”

“The man who took my brother.”

The train lights flickered once.

I looked into the nearest carriage. A man sat alone near the middle, head bowed, hands resting neatly on his knees. His clothes were old-fashioned: a dark coat, a white shirt, a narrow tie. His skin had the waxy stillness of a corpse left too long in a cold room.

A black stain spread beneath his shoes, moving against the slope of the carriage floor.

“How long has he been here?” I asked.

“Since the train came.”

“What train?”

She pointed at the track where a single small subway car was sitting all by its lonesome. “The one that takes people away.”

I looked back at her. “What’s your name?”

“Anna.”

“I’m John.”

“I know.”

“Of course you do.”

She took a step toward the train. I shifted to block her.

“Wait here.”

“He has my brother.”

“Then I’ll get him.”

The girl watched me with those endless eyes. “Adults always say that.”

The words landed harder than they should have. A flash of memory opened behind my eyes: my foster family’s bodies, broken across the living room; Joshua’s small hand, motionless on the floor. I felt anger rise, quick and hot, demanding someone pay for all the things I couldn’t undo.

I inhaled through my nose.

The train was waiting. The girl was watching. Getting angry wouldn’t bring anyone back.

I stepped into the carriage.

The air changed at once. It smelled of rainwater and funeral flowers. The doors slid shut behind me, and the train lurched forward without moving an inch.

The man lifted his head.

His eyes were closed.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

“People keep telling me that.”

“There is no place for the living on this line.”

“Then the doors are confusing.”

His mouth twitched. “You think this is funny?”

“No. I think it’s rude to abduct children.”

The black stain under his feet climbed the aisle in thin, branching lines. It reached for my shoes, cold enough to sting through the leather.

The man opened his eyes. They were full of moving water.

“Children come willingly,” he said. “They are tired of waiting for people who never return.”

My jaw tightened.

For one ugly second, I wanted to draw Inai and cut him in half. I wanted to make him hurt. I wanted to take every loss I’d ever swallowed and put it into the blade.

Instead, I looked past him.

A small boy sat in the last row, curled into the corner. He couldn’t have been older than seven. His arms were wrapped around his knees. His eyes were open, but he stared through the window at something that wasn’t there.

The girl’s voice sounded behind me..

“My brother,” she whispered.

The man smiled. “They are safe here.”

“Safe from what?”

“Being forgotten.”

I understood then. Or thought I did. The train wasn’t taking children because it needed them. It was taking them because it fed on grief—the kind that settled into empty rooms and unanswered questions.

I’d spent most of my life furious at the dead for leaving and furious at the living for surviving them.

The black lines crept over my boots.

I raised my left hand and summoned magic, wild and unfocused. They dimmed, one carriage after another, until the only illumination came from the moon beyond the windows. My head began to ache. I could feel the train pulling power from the station and from me.

“Names have power,” I said. “So let’s find yours.”

The man’s twisted smile vanished.

The name wasn’t on his face. It was under it. Buried in the silence between the wheels, in the wet black veins running along the floor. I reached for it with my senses, carefully, because the wrong name could turn a ghost into a storm.

The train shuddered.

“Don’t,” the man said.

I heard a voice in my memory, my master’s voice, hard as a wooden practice sword: If you hesitate, someone dies.

That lesson had kept me alive. It had also made me believe that every problem could be solved by moving first and hitting hardest.

The boy started crying.

I let the name go.

“Kid,” I said, speaking to the boy. “Your sister’s here.”

His head lifted.

Anna stepped into the carriage. “Eli.”

The boy’s face crumpled. “Anna?”

The black stain recoiled as if the name itself had burned it. I seized the moment and poured power into my hilt.

“Inai.”

Steel unfolded from the handle with a bright whisper as the katana’s blade came forth.

The man rose. Water poured from his sleeves and mouth, spilling over the floor. His shape stretched, coat and limbs lengthening into something tall and crooked.

I raised the blade but didn’t attack.

“Eli,” Anna said again. “Come with me.”

The boy stood.

The thing screamed. It rushed me, all flailing arms and black water. I stepped aside and cut through the stain connecting it to the floor. The blade passed through with a sound like tearing cloth.

The carriage lights exploded.

I felt the magic drain out of me in a cold rush. The train stopped. The doors slid open.

“Go!” I shouted.

Anna grabbed her brother’s hand. They ran past me and out onto the platform. The thing struck my shoulder and drove me against the seats. Pain flared down my arm. I could have chased it. I could have hacked until nothing remained.

Instead, I watched the children reach the platform. Then I whispered a name.

The man’s shape collapsed into a heap of black water, then thinned to smoke.

The train doors closed and opened again. This time, beyond them, there was only an empty carriage.

I stepped out. The transit cop was at the top of the stairs, staring at the children as though they’d appeared from thin air.

Anna looked back at me.

“Will you come with us?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I’ve got a dog waiting.”

That wasn’t exactly the reason. The real reason was that I didn’t trust myself around the dead. Too many old wounds, too much anger, too much hope that someone might come back if I just kept looking.

Anna nodded as if she understood.

Then she and Eli were gone.

I stood on the platform until the pain in my shoulder stopped feeling like a fresh injury and started feeling like another thing I’d have to live with. Above me, the cop called down to ask if everything was all right.

“Sure,” I said.

It was a lie, but an uncomplicated one.

Everyone thinks you’re safe just because you’re dead. But even the dead have things they fear. 

When I got to the Dark Knight, Fenrir was waiting by the driver door. He pushed his enormous head into my stomach, nearly folding me in half.

“Easy, big guy.”

He licked my face.

I laughed, then winced as my shoulder protested. We drove home in silence with him poking his head out the window happily. When we got back I collapsed onto the couch.

Joshua appeared in the mirror. “You look terrible.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you save the kids?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

I started to take off my coat. My hands were shaking—not much, but enough that I noticed.

Joshua noticed too. For once, he didn’t make a joke.

I looked at him through the mirror. “I’m fine.”

“Sure,” he said. “And I’m still alive.”

Fenrir pressed against my leg. I rested a hand on his head and breathed until my pulse slowed.

I didn’t feel fine. I wasn’t sure I knew what fine meant anymore.

But the children were safe. For tonight, that had to be enough.