9
The Man Behind the Bar
The door was already open.
I didn't remember pushing it. I didn't remember walking through it. I didn't remember the bell that had chimed somewhere above my head, announcing my arrival to no one, because no one was here. The bar was dark. The stools were upside down on the tables. The air smelled like stale beer and lemon polish and something else—something warm, something that reminded me of bread baking, though I couldn't remember the last time I'd been somewhere that smelled like bread.
The Lost Hours.
The name was on the window. I'd read it as I passed—or thought I'd read it, or dreamed I'd read it, or maybe I'd just known it somehow, the way you know things in dreams, without evidence or explanation.
The Lost Hours.
I'd never been here before.
Or maybe I had.
Or maybe I'd been here a thousand times, in a thousand dreams, and my body knew the way even when my mind didn't.
I walked toward the back of the bar. My legs were heavy. My arms were heavy. Everything was heavy, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd slept, or eaten, or drunk anything that wasn't cold coffee from a diner at three in the morning.
The cooler.
It was against the wall, humming, vibrating, pushing cold air into the room.
I needed to be cold.
Cold was grounding.
Cold was real.
Cold was something I could feel without thinking.
I lowered myself to the floor. My back pressed against the cooler, and the cold seeped through my shirt, through my skin, into my bones. The blood on my hands was dry now—cracked, flaking, red-brown and ugly. I looked at my palms and didn't recognize them.
Rue.
Her face.
Her eyes, closed.
Had I closed them?
I didn't remember.
I didn't remember anything.
The last thing I remembered was Rue leading me into the building. Her voice, soft and sure. Her hand, reaching for mine.
And then—
Nothing.
A gap.
A wound.
And now I was here, in a bar I'd never seen, with blood on my hands and no memory of how I'd gotten here.
