by Marjorie Liu
Grant struggled to sit up. This time I helped him. I didn’t think about it until it was too late, and his arm was looped over my shoulder. His rough cheek rubbed against mine. I closed my eyes.
“You always say things like that,” he whispered. “But I’m still here, Maxine. So don’t remember me. Don’t remember. Just remember me from now on.”
“I will,” I said.
CHAPTER 7
KILLY didn’t want our help cleaning up her bar. I didn’t blame her. I seemed to have a bad habit of bringing violence into her establishments.
Grant and I drove back to the Coop. The rain beat down hard against the windshield, drowning out the radio until all I heard were drums and snatches of melody. Grant stared out the window, humming to himself. I could not place the song, but I could hear him more clearly than the rain and radio, and his voice rolled through me, over me. The boys stretched and shivered.
“Stop,” I said.
Grant looked at me but didn’t play dumb. “There are things I need to tell you.”
Father Lawrence had warned me about this. I hadn’t believed him.
Why did you forget this man? I asked myself. Why him?
“Your voice,” I said, frowning uneasily. “What you did to Blood Mama, the things she said to you. She called you something.”
“Lightbringer.” Grant fiddled with his cane. “It’s a name I’m uncomfortable with. But it is a name that’s mine. In the same way that the demons call you Hunter.”
Lightbringer. I had heard that name before, from Jack. The context was fuzzy, but I felt it resonate inside my heart.
I pulled into a gas station and parked. Listened to the rain on the roof, the windshield wipers, the radio busting a move with “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I listened to the lyrics and could imagine the boys singing along, inside my head.
No escape from reality. Open your eyes.
Open your eyes.
I left the engine running and got out of the car. Grant, this time, did not follow. Inside the station, the aisles were clean and the air bright with artificial light. A girl in a dirty brown sweatshirt watched me from behind the counter. I ignored her and went straight to the hot food. I hardly looked at what was there. Just grabbed hamburgers wrapped in foil, juggling them in one arm while I walked quickly to the freezers for ice-cream bars. I picked up sodas, too. Some of the hamburgers fell on my way to the counter, but I didn’t try to pick them up. I kicked them across the floor like soft hockey pucks. The girl watched me like she wanted to hit her security alarm. I wondered if there was blood on my face from the fight. Or maybe I smelled like burned flesh. My clothes were a little charred.
I paid for the food, and she threw it in a plastic bag. When I slid back into the car, “Bohemian Rhapsody” was still playing. Grant watched me, silent.
I grabbed a hamburger and shoved the rest of the sack toward him. He peered inside and, after a moment, removed an ice-cream bar. It was hard for him to unwrap it with one hand bandaged, but he managed.
“You know,” he said, “the first night we met, we went to a McDonald’s for ice cream and hamburgers.”
I choked a little.
Grant watched me finish off the hamburger in three bites and reach for another. “I thought you were never going to eat again.”
“I thought you were going to become a drunk.”
“Mmm,” he said; and then: “Ask.”
“I don’t know how.” I finished the second burger. Cheap, but good. I hadn’t eaten one of these in a long time. I had gotten used to real food, not road fare. I unwrapped the foil from a third hamburger. “What you did, what you seemed to be doing, shouldn’t have been possible.”
“What did you think I was going to do?”
I stopped eating and put down the hamburger. “Possess her. Kill her.”
“Possession,” he echoed thoughtfully. “We’ve never called it that. But yes, more or less that’s true. I would have . . . changed her.”
“She brought all that extra muscle for you. Not me. In case you tried.”
Grant touched his bandaged hand against the lump swelling just at his hairline. “If there hadn’t been . . . interference . . . I might have managed something permanent. Maybe. I’ve never tried before, with her.”
He said it so easily. Possessing a demon, no big deal. Controlling the queen of them, an interesting experiment. Managing something permanent, as though he’d have her trading red high heels for bunny slippers, or eating chili peppers instead of souls. I couldn’t imagine it.
“I don’t have horns,” he said, and I blinked, coming back to myself, staring at him. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t frowning, either. His eyes were just . . . warm.
“Not yet,” he added.
“I didn’t say anything,” I replied.
“We’ve had this conversation before. History isn’t exactly repeating itself, but close. You’re not as grim as you used to be.”
“Grim.”
“You had good reasons.”
I looked away, out the window. Watched a man pump gas into his truck. Ordinary, everyday. He wasn’t a zombie. A woman walked past him into the station, head down against the rain, tugging fretfully at her tight pink sweater. He never looked at her. Both of them in their own little worlds, alone.
“When did we meet?” I asked.
“When do you remember coming to Seattle? Where did you stay? Where did you go?”
His questions irritated me. “Almost two years ago. I stayed at the Hyatt. I was going to leave that night, but I went to Pike Place Market for a walk . . . even though I knew it was trouble. The prison veil is weak there.” I looked at him, frowning. “My next memory is . . . later. Moving into the Coop.”
“But you don’t know why.”
“Stop,” I said wearily. He did, and ate his ice cream. I watched the girl in the pink sweater come out of the station, still tugging on her sweater and carrying a gallon of milk. She looked miserable, lonely, like someone had stomped on her dreams this morning and told her to go sit in a ditch and die.
I glanced at Grant and found him watching the girl, too. He looked sad.
“She’s thinking about killing herself,” he said, twisting in his seat, watching as she climbed into a beat- up rusted sedan. “She won’t, but the germ is in her.”
I believed him. I couldn’t help it. I almost wanted to run after the girl, shake her up, and didn’t know why. Not my problem. I had enough on my plate. “Are you like Killy?”
“No,” he said. “I’m something else.”
The girl drove away. I felt cold when she did, a little empty, like I had done someone wrong.
I dumped the rest of the hamburgers from the plastic bag but left the ice cream inside. I wrapped it up until it resembled a brick, then pressed it, lightly, against Grant’s swelling head. He held still. I did not meet his gaze. “Let’s say you’re telling the truth.”
“Generous of you.”
“Yes,” I said. “Blood Mama should have killed you by now. Or tried to take over your body.”
“She made that attempt, a little over a year ago.” Grant placed his bandaged hand over mine. “That’s how we met. You saved my life. At Pike Place Market.”
I withdrew my hand, letting him hold the softening cold pack against his head. “And I never left.”
“I think you decided you liked me. Just a little.”
More than a little, if we were sharing a bed. I was beginning to feel too curious for my own good about how all that had come about. “What are you?”
“Human,” he said, and his tone was serious, dark, that one word hanging heavy in the air, like it meant more than what I knew. Or maybe I did know, in a different way than I could remember. I was human, and not. Human and demon, and other parts thrown together, in ways I could not comprehend.
Human. I was human. And a little bit not.
“When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with synesthesia,” Grant said. “You know what that is, right? A neurological
condition where the different senses—auditory, visual—get mixed up. For some people it’s letters or numbers that evoke smells, even personalities. For me, when I hear sounds . . . I see color.”
I knew about the condition. I liked music. Years ago I’d read about Duke Ellington, Jean Sibelius, seeing colors in notes, melodies. “So when I crumple this foil—”
“I see flashes of bright orange. The sound of the rain looks like dark silver pearls. When the car engine runs, I see a deep gravel gray that resembles teeth, and when I hear ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ I’m surrounded by a rainbow of purples and reds that . . . spike . . . then melt together like hot wax.”
“And when I talk?”
“I see light,” he said, and it surprised me to see his eyes grow a little too bright, red-rimmed, hot. “I see light, Maxine.”
I forced myself to breathe. “And?”
“I don’t just see sound. I see energy. Auras. Around people.” Grant looked away from me, and stared at the half-eaten ice-cream bar in his other hand. “I can change those auras. I can . . . manipulate them.”
The hamburgers felt heavy in my stomach. “What does that mean?”
Grant stopped holding the plastic bag to his head and tossed the remains of his ice cream inside. “I can change people. Alter who they are, down to the soul. Not just people.”
“Demons.”
“Anything that lives.”
“Me?”
“You’re immune. God knows, I think you might be the only one who is. And even if you weren’t . . .” Grant stopped, and the silence was long and deep, and I was grateful for the boys, then, on my skin, with their heartbeats pulsing in time to mine.
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” he whispered, “but there are lines, Maxine, that I could cross. And sometimes I think I have.”
I picked up the trash around me. Grant handed over the plastic bag. I got out, threw everything away. Breathed long and deep, though the air tasted like exhaust. I heard sirens in the distance. Zee tugged, once—
—and the armor twisted on my skin. A very physical jerk, as though it were trying to pull away from me. I clutched my hand to my stomach, breathing through clenched teeth.
It happened again. I ripped off my glove. The armor’s surface was moving, shimmering, those engraved knots and roses oozing across the organic metal like petals and threads cast on water. I stopped breathing. And didn’t start again until, abruptly, the armor stilled.
I slid back into the car. Grant’s frown deepened. “What’s wrong?”
“Mind reader, too?”
“I know you.”
“Guess you do,” I said quietly, and gripped the wheel with trembling hands. “Buckle up. We’ve got trouble.”
GRANT and I drove back to the Coop. We heard the sirens before we saw them. I told myself it had nothing to do with the corpse in the apartment, but I was already thinking about new aliases for Grant and Byron. Mary, too. We’d go to Texas, I thought. Back to the old farm where my mother was buried. Or maybe drive to Chicago or New York. I had inherited homes there, filled with cash, weapons, papers. Everything a girl needed to start over.
I didn’t question why I included Grant. I told myself it was because I wasn’t done yet with his mystery, our mystery—the who and what and why of him. I guess that was true.
It was raining hard, skies dark, which was why we didn’t see the smoke sooner.
Not that we needed to. An ambulance sped through the intersection ahead of us, followed by two fire trucks. Grant leaned forward until his nose bumped the dashboard, staring intently through the windshield. Zee wrestled even more violently against my skin, and the armor felt hot, then ice-cold; and then it pulsed like a heartbeat, making my right hand twitch uncontrollably. It felt like an electrical current was jamming up my muscles. I peeled my fingers off the wheel and stuck my hand beneath me, holding it still as best I could. Grant watched but said nothing.
I turned the corner and saw the Coop. Fire trucks and ambulances surrounded the homeless shelter, which took up an entire city block in the warehouse district. The place was immense.
And it was on fire. Just the second wing. The floor with the apartments. Where Byron was.
I slammed on the brakes. Grant jerked against his seat belt, bracing himself against the dashboard. Maybe I put the car in park. Didn’t know, didn’t care. I was out on the road, running.
A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk and in the garden, volunteers and homeless trying to calm each other. Firemen were cordoning off the area. I slammed through them all, ignoring shouts, screams. I glanced up just before I entered the building, and looked at the smoke billowing black through the windows—one of which had already exploded outward. Looked like someone had set off a bomb.
Then I was inside. The downstairs hall was smoky, but mostly clear. I passed firemen wearing masks. Several tried to grab me, but I wrenched free and punched one man who was too persistent. I cracked his mask, and he slammed hard against the wall. I didn’t stop. I flew up the stairs, and it was like entering another world, hot and thick with smoke and ash. My eyes and lungs burned.
Not for long. The boys slipped over my face and mouth, and then my nostrils. Strange sensation. Felt like I was drowning. I tripped on the stairs, panicked, and touched my mouth. I found only smooth skin. Touched my nostrils and found them gone. When I blinked, my eyes felt thicker, heavier; and the world darkened, veiled in silver and pearl.
When I breathed, air filled my lungs. It tasted warm, like sulfur. The boys, breathing for me. They had saved me from drowning before, just like this. They had probably saved my grandmother like this, as well. She had been in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. Lost, in the inferno, watching bodies blast into ash.
I did not feel the heat. I reached the second floor in moments and saw flames climbing the walls and ceiling, sweeping across the carpet in waves of light. I ran through the fire, and my clothing burned. My hair burned. I felt it sizzle away as I passed through solid walls of flame.
I watched for breaks in the floor as I raced toward Byron’s room. The smoke was thick, blinding, but the boys were wild and tugged me forward with their own unerring instincts. Below my heart, the darkness stirred—the creature, reaching upward—but I slammed it down, ruthless. I listened for screams, cries for help from the adjoining rooms, and heard none.
I found a dead body in front of Byron’s room.
The man was one of the few things not entirely on fire; in fact, it looked as though he had simply dropped dead from smoke inhalation. I didn’t recognize his face. He was pale, well built, and the remains of his clothing looked like linen, the kind those Seattle Earth Father types liked to wear when they were pretending to be yogis. Parts of it were burning, but slowly, as though something in the material retarded the flames.
He looked peaceful, and that frightened me.
Byron’s door stood ajar. I stepped over the body, pushed it all the way open. All I saw was fire and smoke. If he was here, if he had not been spirited out—
But his bed was empty. On fire and empty. I turned a quick circle, making certain he was gone.
And found someone else entirely.
A woman. She came out of the bathroom, moving through the smoke like a pale ghost, unbothered by the fire. I thought she was naked, but her clothes were merely the same color as her skin and clung to her in wispy waves, like silk. Flames touched her, but nothing burned. She had a very long neck, and around her throat sat an iron collar. Her hair was short and red.
Trouble. I knew that. This was big damn trouble.
I stood my ground, waiting. She did the same. The building was burning down around us, and we had all the time in the world.
Until she moved. And, abruptly, she was no longer a woman, but a man. The transformation was complete, startling, and when I looked closer she—he—was still the same person. Just caught at a different angle.
“You are a Guardian,” she said, tilting her head, just so, becoming a woman again, the firel
ight hot on her sharp cheekbones. “Warden. Made woman.”
I could not speak. I had no mouth. I stepped closer, and that woman’s gaze dropped, studying my burning clothes, which were falling away to reveal my naked tattooed skin. She looked at my breasts, my stomach, lower and lower, her gaze lingering on the armor covering my right hand. Her eyes fluttered closed. She tilted back her head as though in pleasure, or pain.
“I feel him,” she whispered, swaying.
And she vanished. Gone, into thin air. Gone as though she had never existed. Like magic.
Except it wasn’t magic. I had seen it done before. By Jack, by others. Even I could slide through space using the armor on my hand. But there was a price to that travel, for me. There was always a price.
I heard shouts, distant and tinny. I tore my gaze from where the woman had been standing, thinking of Byron, Jack—I feel him, I feel him—and ran to the doorway. I looked down the hall and saw a hulking figure beyond the wall of flames.
One of the firemen. Coming to look for the stupid woman who had run into the building and punched one of their own. The fires raged around him, thick and hot, snaking up the walls and licking the ceiling above his head. I stared, torn. I wasn’t certain he had seen me. I couldn’t let him see me.
But my feet vibrated, then my legs, and a groan rolled through my ears into my muscles and bones. This floor was going down.
I ran toward the fireman. He was already backing away toward the stairs, but he was too slow, too late. He noticed me coming at the last moment, and I don’t know what he saw, but his eyes widened behind his mask and his scream was louder than the crack of the beams above our heads. I slammed into him just as the ceiling collapsed.
I had been hit by a bus once before, and this felt the same. I didn’t feel pain, but the weight dragged me down on top of the man, and for a moment I saw my face reflected in his mask.
Except I had no face. No mouth. No nose. Even my eyes were lost in black scales and mercury knots, every inch of my skin covered in demonic bodies. Scariest thing I had ever seen. And I was bald.