The Last Coffee Shop

Chapter 31: Not Even Eternity Can Hold Houdini

They had to halt a few minutes later, when Luc made an urgent gesture at Mads. She released her hold on him just before he doubled over to spit a mixture of blood and saliva on the passageway floor. His skin, always pale, but normally pale brown, was purple-gray in the faint tunnel lighting. His dirty hands looked skeletal, clutching the wall to keep him from falling.

Mads shivered and looked away, and felt tears prick her eyes. She was gripped by a sudden memory of her mother's hands. Equally skeletal, equally elegant, still beautiful even when the woman was fading from the blighted, wasting sickness that would take her away forever. It took your mind first. Then your body. It had seemed to take her mother's soul as well.

*****

Come here, child! Let me look at you. The voice was right. The hands were right.

Mads had crept closer, terrified by this ghoulish creature with her mother's eyes.

The woman – her mother – had smacked her across the face and screeched like an animal, You're not my child! Demon! He sent you to taunt me! He lied! They always lie!

Grandmere had dragged her away, the doctor had injected her mother with something viscous and whitish. And Mads had been sent to her room, never knowing just what she had done wrong.

They remembered her, eventually, and Grandmere had brought her some milk and a piece of toast, and told her to go to sleep. Mads had nodded meekly, refused the food, and sat in her room for hours, her eyes dry and her thoughts scattered.

In the middle of the night, she'd crept back into her mother's room, holding her breath and pretending she was a ghost. Her mother, the thing on the bed, had been awake, but she didn't see Mads. 

Mads hid in the shadows, and then the tears came. Silently, through the teary blur, she watched her mother get up, sit down, get back up again to pace the room, muttering, always muttering, about him, Mads' mysterious father, the man who had destroyed their lives. The man who made mother hate her . . . 

Mads had hated him with all the passion a child could summon, as she watched her mother fade away, choke on her food, lose her bloom and her bodily functions . . . He was a liar. He was a murderer. He'd taken all her mother's love, and her life, and left Mads with nothing at all. Well – he'd left her his hair, and his smile, and a thousand little things that made her mother hate her too.

This is what bad choices do to us . . . Grandmere had said, as she closed Mads in her room, ignoring the girl's stinging cheek, teary eyes. Grandmere had never known how to handle tears. Keep your chin up, Madeleine. Keep your chin up, be a good girl. Be a good girl. Good girl--

*****

"Water?" Luc's croak snapped Mads back to the present, to the conundrum she'd gotten herself into.

Mads steeled herself. I am a good girl, Grandmere. I've always been a good girl. She undid the flask and knelt next to Luc. Mads knew what soft hearts, and soft heads, had done to her mother, to her grandmother. If she wanted to survive, she could only trust herself. She couldn't survive unless she was as ruthless as Luc and as slippery as Jupiter Jive.

Mads helped Luc tilt the waterskin up, watching his throat contract, watching to ensure he swallowed every drop of the solution. Jupiter Jive had robbed hundreds and killed plenty. There was no shortage of blood on his hands, as she had witnessed. Jupiter Jive might be human; he might be the pitiful man leaning on her shoulder, gasping for breath. But he deserved to be punished, to answer for his crimes. He didn't deserve her pity, or her mercy. She would not be weak. She could not be her mother.