A Wild Light

by Marjorie Liu

  “Don’t push me away. Not yet.”

  I looked down at my hands, then the boy. I wanted to tell him that not yet was now, and that he could go to hell. But those words lodged in my throat, and all I could force out was, “I should have asked Jack more questions about what he did to Byron.”

  “Jack doesn’t answer uncomfortable questions.” Grant sat carefully on the bed’s edge and laid his cane on the floor. He stared at Byron with that same unsettling intensity, long enough that I wondered if I should be concerned.

  “You were right to worry,” he said, suddenly. “It’s not a virus that’s causing his fever. Goes deeper than that, but I can’t quite determine—”

  Byron’s eyes opened. Just a little, revealing narrow slits of dark feverish eyes. I held my breath when he looked at me, hit with memories, lightning flashes of images: seeing him for the first time inside a wet cardboard box; later, a zombie holding a gun to his head, his dark eyes wide with fear.

  But the memories of him simply sitting with me, eating with me, reading with me, were the strongest—because Byron was like me, wary of people. Unused to having a friend.

  He trusted me, though. God help him, but he trusted me.

  “Kid,” I said, gently.

  Byron looked at me for a long moment, then his gaze ticked upward, sideways, toward Grant. “Why . . . are you both here?”

  “Looks like you came down with something since last night.” I flipped the washcloth to the cool side. “Tell me how you feel.”

  “Hot,” he mumbled, and closed his eyes again. “Had a bad dream.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Woman. Or man. Don’t know. Had a . . . collar. And her voice . . .” Byron touched his throat. “Didn’t want to hear her . . . him . . . speak.”

  I frowned. Grant leaned in. “What did she look like?”

  “Sharp,” he whispered, and swallowed hard. “I’m thirsty.”

  “I’ll get water,” I said, and went to the bathroom, thinking about women who might be men, and collars, voices. Could be nothing, but the boy was sick, Jack was dead, and I didn’t believe in coincidences.

  Grant was speaking into his cell phone when I re-emerged. One hand rested on Byron’s shoulder, but the boy was relaxed, not a trace of distrust or tension in his face. I felt as though I was observing Zee again—or Raw and Aaz, hugging the man’s knees. Had to shake myself.

  Grant hung up the phone. “Rex is going to find Mary, and have her sit with Byron.”

  I didn’t ask how he knew that I wasn’t going to stay with the boy. Or why he didn’t volunteer. Not that I would trust him to. I wasn’t certain I trusted him at all, but everyone else seemed to be falling down at his feet. I could take a hint. Not be . . . willfully blind . . . to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there was a reason the boys—and this boy—trusted him.

  The same reason my underwear was mixed with his.

  God. That made me ill.

  The boy sighed. “Mary’s crazy.”

  “Just a little,” I admitted, which was an understatement bordering on lies, lies, and more damn lies. Mary had been a soldier and bodyguard in another life, on another world, in another dimension. Now she was an old woman addicted to marijuana, knitting, and—

  Nothing. I couldn’t remember.

  I couldn’t remember him.

  “She likes you,” I told the boy, embarrassed I sounded so hoarse. “If she brings you weed—”

  “I know,” he replied, collapsing into the pillows. “I’m not . . . stupid.”

  I bit back a smile and ruffled his hair. “Don’t go running any marathons before I get back. Do you want me to bring you anything?”

  He shook his head, eyes too dark. “I don’t feel right, Maxine.” His fingers scratched at his throat, then his chest. “I don’t feel right.”

  I’m scared, I imagined him saying. I’m scared.

  I thought of Jack, dead on my floor. Waking up in his blood, seeing his throat cut. My grandfather. My grandfather murdered. I hadn’t stopped it. Couldn’t even remember how it happened.

  I knelt and pressed my lips hard against Byron’s brow, tasting his fever. The boy stopped breathing when I touched him, then his arms wrapped around my shoulders, and I stopped breathing, too.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I whispered.

  His fingers dug hard into my shoulders. “You always say that.”

  “Because you’re mine.” I almost couldn’t hear my own voice. I didn’t know why I spoke those words, except that I was afraid of losing the boy, too. First my grandfather, then Grant: a man I was supposed to love. Gone. My life, unraveling.

  “You’re mine,” I said again, stubbornly. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  “Okay,” whispered Byron, and patted me on the back. “I can’t breathe.”

  I let him go and stood. “I’ll be back soon.”

  I walked to the door. I didn’t mean to look back, but I did, and felt terrible, filled with dread, when I saw the boy. Byron had already closed his eyes, but for a moment I imagined him dead, cold. Grant stepped between us, and pressed his mouth to my ear.

  “You’ll scare the boy if he sees you looking at him like that.”

  I ducked my head and backed away. I didn’t stop until I was outside, in the hall. And then I kept walking. Grant caught up with me at the top of the stairs. He stayed silent. So did I.

  We left the building. No one stopped us. I walked to my car, sucking down the cold wet air, savoring the rain on my face. The rain always felt real.

  I had a little red Mustang. Classic design, like a sleek cherry jewel in the Seattle morning gloom. I got in. So did Grant. I gripped the wheel, and said, “You haven’t asked where I’m going.”

  He wiped the rain off his hair. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

  “If I don’t give you a choice?”

  A smile flitted over his mouth, but it wasn’t pleasant. “Just drive, Maxine.”

  So I did. I backed out fast, accelerated forward, and yanked hard on the wheel as we swerved from the parking lot into the road, narrowly missing a parked service van and the man getting out of it. He yelled; I slid down lower in the seat and jacked up the volume on the radio. “Eye of the Tiger” was playing. Grant gave me a sidelong look, the corner of his mouth twitching.

  “What?” I muttered.

  “Nothing,” he said, and turned up the radio until I felt the bass in my chest. The boys began pulsing on my skin in time to the music.

  Fifteen minutes later, we reached Thunderdome.

  CHAPTER 5

  THUNDERDOME was a bar, but the kind where yuppies and rich college kids could go to feel a little dangerous—without actually getting knifed on the way to the bathroom. Karaoke nights on Saturdays were popular, inviting drunken performances while standing on the surface of the bar, kicking drinks and empty glasses on other inebriated revelers. Something that happened not just on the weekends, but most nights when the owner herself took the opportunity to flash a lot of thigh and serve drinks with nothing but her cleavage. The place had been open for only a couple months, but every time I visited, it was packed.

  But now it was Thursday morning, and the sidewalk out front smelled like vomit. So did the young man in jeans and a cashmere blazer—no shirt—sprawled in the doorway, snoring. I nudged him with the toe of my cowboy boot, but all he did was snort a little and rub at the dried remains of drinks and dinner—broccoli, maybe some hamburger—coating his face.

  “After today, I’m never eating again,” I said. “Ever.”

  “I think I may become an alcoholic,” Grant replied, hitting the buzzer beside the door. “I’ll develop an affinity for vodka and go down to the docks to learn Russian ditties from the sailors.”

  “My mother did that once.” I stood back, staring at the curtained windows on the second floor. “Took me along. I was thirteen. I learned how to play poker from a one-eyed giant with no teeth and breath that smelled like a box of rotting armpits
.”

  Grant stared. “I don’t know that story.”

  “Well, good,” I replied, as footsteps echoed on the other side of the scratched bar door. “I’m glad I still have some secrets.”

  The locks turned, and the door opened. A woman peered out. She was shorter than me, but all leg—a fact clearly visible given her denim cutoffs: so short I could see the lace of her pink underwear. She wore cherry red boots and a faded pink sweatshirt, slightly oversized and falling off one shoulder. She had short black hair, freckles on her nose; she was mostly Chinese, but with a little something else mixed in her blood.

  “Who died?” she asked, eyeing me in particular.

  “That’s not funny,” I replied.

  “No, I was serious,” she said. “Who the fuck died?”

  “Killy,” Grant rumbled, stepping awkwardly over the drunk man. “It was Jack.”

  She made a face, not a particularly grieved one, and backed away from the door. “Oh, man. His throat was cut.”

  It was not a question—nor was I surprised she knew. It was why I was here. I might be covered in demons, but Killy had her own gift—an offshoot of ancient tampering with human DNA.

  Gods and monsters, Jack had said, once. Heroes and myth, and strange beings from legend; walking in truth, made from the minds of beings who had too much power: creatures that had left earth, for the most part, after the war with the demons.

  Jack had been one of those gods, once upon a time. I suppose he still was. Old Jack. Old Wolf.

  It wasn’t lost on me that Killy knew Grant.

  I had known her for six months. We had met first in Shanghai during a particularly chilling encounter with one of Jack’s kind—an Avatar who had been released from his prison on earth and begun genetic experiments on humans: making new monsters, with nothing but a thought.

  But the moment I recalled Shanghai, I remembered, too, that I hadn’t been in that city for her. Or that Avatar. I couldn’t remember why—and the hole in my heart stretched wide and cold. I looked at Grant. Found him also watching me. Killy stared at us both.

  “Wow,” she said. “That sucks.”

  “Stop reading my mind,” Grant told her, tearing his gaze from mine. But not before I saw something sad in his eyes, sad and small and grieving. He hid it well, with a sharp smile that he gave Killy—but it stayed with me. And it cut.

  Inside, the air was dark and cool, and smelled like ash-trays and vanilla. Booths lined the walls, made of wood and steel bars, and the other tables that crammed the narrow space were round, square, long, and short, jammed together in a maze that offered barely enough space to walk. The bar top was three feet deep and almost as long as the room, dented and nicked like it had been used as a shield in war.

  The three of us were alone. I heard water dripping. Above our heads, a thump—followed by chains clinking.

  Grant said, “Is that really necessary?”

  Killy grabbed a bottle of water off the counter. “He had a bad night.”

  “Define bad.”

  “He’s still furry. And I think he ate a cat.” She walked toward the revolving door that led to the kitchen. “Come on. He’ll be happy to see you.”

  “We didn’t come here to visit,” I said. “I’ve got problems.”

  “You always have problems,” Killy shot back. “You’re a train wreck. You ruined my life.”

  “I bought you this bar.”

  “I loved my old one. In China.” She scrubbed her face with her knuckles. “It’s taken months to retrain my mind after what was done to me. Months, so that I can sleep at night without hearing every fucking thought on this block. And here you come, wanting help—when you know, damn well, that you’re the one person whose mind I can’t read.”

  I gritted my teeth. “You’re the only psychic I know.”

  “Fuck that.” Killy reached behind the bar and brought out a small metal flask. “I have my own problems, not including the werewolf upstairs who’s having a crisis of conscience because he can’t bring himself to quit the priesthood.” She knocked back a long swallow of whatever was in the flask and choked, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I really liked that cat.”

  Grant stared at his shoes a little too carefully. “My condolences.”

  Killy flipped him the middle finger. “You’re no better than Maxine. Just another kind of nightmare. I shouldn’t even let you talk to me.” She turned, stabbing that same finger at my face. “You’re here because Jack’s dead, and you can’t remember what happened. You’re here because you can’t remember Grant. Which is bizarre because you two are so mushy it makes me sick.” She took another long drink, and between a rough bout of coughing, said, “I can’t fix what was done to you. The only reason I know something happened is because I can pick things up from him.” She pointed at Grant, giving him a hard look. “Speaking of which—”

  But she snapped shut her mouth and didn’t finish. Just turned on her heel and walked fast toward a swinging door framed with hundreds of nails that had been hammered into the wall, each one dead center in the forehead of a different cutout head, most from personal photographs—but a mix of public figures, too. Voodoo wall. Killy kept the hammer and nails behind the bar. Each one cost a dollar to use, and only if you were dead sober.

  We passed the kitchen and marched up a narrow flight of stairs to the second floor, which was locked. The vanilla scent intensified on the other side, and I heard a low, murmuring voice that broke into a growl. Chains rattled. I thought of Jack, throat cut, and stopped walking.

  “This is a waste of time,” I said. “I’m sorry about Father Lawrence, but if you can’t help me remember, then I’ll need to find another way to get the information I need.”

  Killy gave me a piercing look. “Who will you go to, Maxine? Who else have you got?”

  I said nothing. I felt heat against the small of my back. Grant’s hand, hovering. Caution or reassurance, I wasn’t sure which—but it bothered me.

  Killy whispered, “You leave, you’ll find nothing. You stay, you can make a hurting man feel better. So Jack’s dead. Won’t last. He’s probably hovering over our heads right now. So fuck him.”

  No, please, I thought. Fuck you.

  Grant cleared his throat. “Maybe I can do something for Frank.”

  “No one needs your kind of help.” Killy pointed at a door near the end of the hall. “But I suppose the effort means more than the result.”

  His jaw tightened; with anger or mere irritation, I couldn’t tell. I wondered what, exactly, she meant—what Grant could do that made Killy so protective of herself and Frank. Whatever it was, it obviously hadn’t bothered me on a personal level. Not if I was getting . . . mushy . . . with him.

  Mushy. Right.

  I tried to remember. I thought of Mary, Rex, that bedroom with the rumpled covers. I fought to recall why I lived at the Coop. Why I had stopped running and finally settled down, here in rain-drenched Seattle.

  But each time I felt like I was on the verge of knowing, I hit that hole in my head and heart, that yawning black hole. An emptiness, a scouring, like some rough hand had found the one thread that was this man, and yanked it free: haphazardly, without any regard to what was left behind. Bad enough I couldn’t remember the circumstances of my own grandfather’s murder. But that was a single event in time—as far as I knew.

  With Grant, it was as though someone had tried to erase his very existence from my mind. All of it. But without any thought at all to the inconsistencies that would arise.

  Grant limped ahead. I watched him, soaking in details: broad shoulders that strained against his fleece jacket, lean torso, nice ass. Unfamiliar, but nice.

  “Staring won’t help,” Killy muttered. “Neither will having sex with him.”

  I blinked. “Excuse me?”

  She gave me a hard look, but we were standing closer now, and I could see that her eyes were bloodshot, the corner of her mouth sagging with exhaustion. She’d had her own long night.
>
  “You’re looking for a trigger. Or if you’re not, you will be. Something that will shake up your memories. Staring won’t be enough, and neither will sex. The first is too distant, the other too intimate.”

  “Then, what?” I folded my arms over my chest, feeling Zee shift between my breasts, stirring in his dreams. The armor on my right hand tingled. “What do I do?”

  “Give it time,” she said, as Grant stopped at the end of the hall and rapped his knuckles lightly against the door. “Don’t think about it. Just . . . follow your instincts. Memories are never lost. Brain is too twisty for that. You can bury something, you can hide it, it can be knocked sideways—but it’s always there.”

  “I don’t remember him,” I said simply, as Grant glanced back at us. His expression was inscrutable, but maybe that was because I hadn’t been around him long enough to know his moods and what it meant when he looked at me, just so—a glint in his eye, his jaw set, that faint furrow in his brow.

  I didn’t look away until he did. Took a while. Not quite a contest, more like an appraisal. I felt studied by him, as though he was taking me apart with nothing but a look. I hated the sensation, but short of removing his eyes or knocking him unconscious—or just leaving—there was nothing I could do to stop him from seeing me.

  And maybe that was the problem. I had never been seen before. Truly, deeply, seen.

  Finally, he broke eye contact. Stared at nothing, thoughtful, gaze distant—and then opened the door and limped into the room, possessed of a peculiar calm strength that radiated more from his presence than anything physical.

  “You don’t remember him, but you feel something.” Killy leaned against the wall, rubbing the back of her neck. “I can see it in your eyes. Trust that, and you’ll get better results than knocking on my door at seven in the fucking morning.”

  “Right. Like you were asleep.”

  “I was thinking about it,” she said, frowning, and glanced down the hall. “Damn. They’re practically spooning each other.”

  I had not been up here in months, but I remembered a room of spare design, with little furniture and just as little light. Not much had changed, except the bed was gone and a table added—a rickety old thing with green paint peeling off, and its entire surface covered with lit white candles of varying sizes. Some were in jars, others leaked wax within small chipped bowls; and a dozen more burned inside a candelabrum that looked like it had been unearthed in the ruins of some Gothic love chamber. The light was soft and golden, and the intense vanilla scent finally made sense.