He looked up to me, and his face, it was cut stone. Harsh, angular, pale. And those eyes. I'd been right, last time: The pupils or irises or whatever, they were blown out. There was hardly any white.
Of course he didn't need a headlight.
Creatures of the night, they get along just fine in the darkness.
There were no eyebrows, either.
"What happened to you?" I almost said.
And his thighs—if I hadn't seen him ride, I'd never have clocked him for a serious cyclist. A rider who can rabbit up the canyon even just a mile or two without breaking a sweat, his quads should be jodhpured out past what any denim could ever contain, with thick, veined calves to match. Like gorilla forearms.
His legs though, they were slender, smooth. Probably pale as his face, pale as those wristlets of white between his gloves and sleeve, between the cuff of his tights and the crescent of his shoe-tops.
He must be corded like steel, and wound tight.
At which point, finally, I cased the front door.
It was shut, the deadbolt still twisted tight.
Meaning—yep. Right on cue, the drapes over the sliding glass door billowed in, then sighed back out onto the balcony.
The third-floor balcony.
"I know what you did to those kids in the creek," I said. "Before they were in the creek, I mean."
It was supposed to be what kept him from coming for me. Knowledge. Except, idiot that I am, I'd made sure he knew that the only place that knowledge lived, it was in my head. Dig that out, and he'd have nothing to worry about.
"You didn't have to," I added. "They were never going to get that log moved."
He just stared at me. Evaluating me, it felt like. How long had it been since anyone attempted conversation with him, I wonder now? If he had spoken, if he could, what would he have even said, after so long? Would he have asked why a die-hard cyclist was defending those who would do violence to cyclists?
Looking back, my guess is that he couldn't speak at all. Not without showing me his teeth.
"I didn't invite you in here," I said to him, my bulk—with the comforter—filling the doorway.
To show how little threat I was, he turned away from me, studying his glasses again. Then raising them, to inhale their scent.
"I didn't wear them," I said. "Not really."
What he was smelling, it was my sweat on the band, from when they'd been around my neck. From when I'd been chasing him.
In a moment's association, then, I knew that that was how he'd found me here on the third floor of an apartment building miles away from the last place I'd seen him.
He'd picked my scent out of all the smells of the city. Out of all the thousands of other bodies out after dark. He'd known me through the rain.
I swallowed, the sound of it crashing in my ears.
He'd come here because I'd seen him. He'd come here because he couldn't be seen.
"You don't ride in the sun, do you," I said. It wasn't really a question. I nodded down to the glasses he was still considering. "And the stores are only open in the daytime. So you can't—you can't update your gear."
I could tell by the new stillness about him that he heard me, but he didn't look up.
"Take them," I said.
Slowly, by labored degrees, he looked over to me.
"Mine," I said. "Take them. You need them."
Because it wasn't in him to leave evidence behind, he hooked his down over his neck like I'd worn them, then settled mine around his head, the continuous lens cocked up on his forehead. When he lowered them, the dents left from the elastic's pull didn't fill with red color.
But I'd known that wasn't going to happen.
"You're fast," I said to him. "I used to be fast."
He looked up to me for what I knew was the last time. I knew it was the last because there was a grin spreading across his face. No, not a grin. A sneer.
What he was saying was that he was fast. The fastest.
And he didn't need lungs.
And he slept—where he slept, it was probably burrowed into a hole somewhere up the canyon. Under a rock ledge, in a cave only him and the marmots and the chipmunks knew about, and whatever beetles and grubs can live in gaspy thin air, without the sun.
The moment his grin flashed into a smile, I saw the dirty yellow sharpness past his lips and I took an involuntary step back.
That was all it took to spook him.
He moved like quicksilver over the couch, past the rattan stools, and onto the balcony. I rushed over after him, to see him silently touching down, or swimming through the night air, but he was already gone.
I should have expected nothing less.