The Lazarus Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

She started crying and Benny held her until the world bled slowly into focus again.
    Now she's staring at the photograph above Benny's dressing table, the steel frame shining dully in the candlelight. Benny stretched out on a rough and crumbling concrete floor, his head turned so sharply to the side his neck might be broken, a satin blindfold hiding his eyes, his blackened lips parted ever so slightly. Sometimes Lucrece wishes for the strength to tear the photographs from the walls of the room, to burn them and this whole goddamned building with her inside. Set a cleansing, erasing fire, as she and Benny had done so long ago. In the life before, two lives before, when she was still a frightened teenage boy called Lucas on the run, with the future stretching out endlessly in front of them. Now the future is a cinder-block wall that she could touch if she had the nerve, a cold dead end to the ever-narrowing avenue of her life.
    But Lucrece knows she doesn't have the nerve, the strength to make that final gesture, to close the distance dividing her from her brother and put an end to the loneliness. She has the strength to bear this pain forever if necessary, and the strength to hold these memories, and she will ask nothing more of herself.
    The clock on the chiffonier ticks off the last minute before midnight. Lucrece sits up straight and continues to pretend that she's only waiting for Benny to come home.

    The setting sun was a hazy fireball sinking into the vast expanse of Lake Pontchartrain as the bus carrying Benjamin and Lucas crossed the causeway they thought would never end. It was like something from a fairy tale, something from one of the books gone to ash in Isolde's library, a bridge spanning the gap between their childhood and the dangerous, wonderful city that lay ahead.
    At that moment Lucas leaned dose to whisper into his brother's ear the only thing he'd ever kept from his twin, the one secret so heavy he'd never imagined it would ever become words and cross his lips. But he understood that there was a wild magic in this crossing, and if he didn't speak it then, it might stay locked inside him forever. And after it was out, Benjamin only smiled his easy smile and kissed his brother on the cheek.
    "Did you think we didn't know?' he said, and Lucas was too shocked to answer, too overwhelmed by his confession and Benjamin's casual response, by the world slipping past so fast outside the window of the bus. "Well, we knew. We thought you knew we knew."
    Lucas managed to shake his head.
    "Jesus," his brother sighed, an exasperated sound, but he was still smiling. "You can be a dense little thing, can't you?"
    "Then you don't hate me for it?" Something slipped across Benjamin's face so fast Lucas almost missed it, anger put back in its black box before it could do him harm. Benjamin shook his head. "We're both freaks, Lucas. We're nothing like these others..." he whispered, motioning at the people in the seats around them. "And that's our power."
    Lucas closed his eyes. As the bus rolled off the causeway and into New Orleans, Benjamin whispered an old story, one they had invented together years ago, about two identical fairy brothers, changelings left for human children and taken to be raised by a kindly old woman in a house full of riddles and dust and fat scuttling spiders.
    Lucrece is almost dozing in her chair when the tapping at the window begins, the French windows behind the bed and all its black linen drap-ings. At first she thinks that the sound must be coming from the door in the other room, someone knocking at the door to the apartment, someone wanting in, and she whispers his name before she can stop herself.
    "Benny?"
    Then the sound begins again, sharp, like small stones hurled against the glass, almost hard enough to shatter it. Lucrece stands up. Her legs are weak and the small hairs on the back of her neck are prickling, a cold sweat blooming wetly beneath her dress, across her forehead and upper