Muninn looks like he’s about to turn me into a pillar of salt.
“Stark, I know you’re upset, but if you came here for a favor, remember who you’re talking to.”
“Uriel was my father, which makes you my grandfather. I know exactly who I’m talking to.”
He shakes his head and turns to Candy.
“He was never any good at respecting his elders.”
She says, “I love Stark. Please listen to him.”
“I can tell you care deeply. You’re a Jade, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Please don’t kill me.”
Muninn laughs.
“I don’t kill my children. And you are my child as much as that troublesome one next to you. Now, tell me about this favor.”
“It’s not really a favor. It’s more like a deal.”
“Go on.”
“I want you to take the Key from me and give it to Candy.”
Candy looks at me in shock.
I squeeze her hand and say, “Hear me out.”
Muninn sips his tea and says, “If you don’t want it anymore why not just leave it with me?”
“No. Candy needs it more than you do. If you’re worried she’ll use it to rob banks or something, forget it. She’s not built that way.”
Mr. Muninn leans back and crosses his legs.
“I’m curious why she needs it.”
“I don’t want it,” Candy says. “I don’t want the Room of Thirteen Doors. I don’t want any of it.”
“There, you see?” says Muninn.
I get close to Candy.
“Listen to me. You might not want the Key, but you need it. But only once. After that, you can give it to Mr. Muninn.” I look at him. “Does that sound fair?”
He looks at Candy.
“Will you give it up willingly?”
“If Stark says so.”
He picks up his tea again.
“Then we have a bargain.”
I turn my cup on the coaster, not looking at him.
“That’s not the whole deal. You get the Key back, but I need you to trust me on something big. And I need you to do something that you said can’t be done.”
Mr. Muninn looks from Candy to me.
“Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?”
She shakes her head.
“I want you to give me the first fire. The Mithras.”
He looks at me and chuckles.
“You’re serious. I can’t do that. If it gets loose, you’ll burn down all of existence.”
I point at him.
“Not if you do your part. Look. This is a deal based on trust. You trusted me with the Mithras once. I’m asking you to do it one more time. And when all this is over with, you get the Key and the Room of Thirteen Doors. I know you’ve always wanted it.”
“Don’t misunderstand,” Mr. Muninn says. “I do trust your good intentions. It’s just your methods I worry about. I’ll need to know more before I can hand you the Mithras.”
“First do the Key exchange. Then I’ll tell you everything.”
“All right.”
Candy tries to set down her teacup and almost drops it.
“I’m afraid,” she says.
I put an arm around her.
“It’s okay. Mr. Muninn won’t let anything happen to you. Right?”
He leans forward, looking as beneficent as any kid’s Bible drawing.
He says, “You’ll be all right, my child. But the Key goes into your heart. It might hurt a bit at first.”
She looks from me to Mr. Muninn and back to me again.
“Do it.”
“Excellent,” he says. “Both of you lie down where you are. There’s plenty of room. Open your shirts and try to relax.”
We lie down head to head on the long sofa. Our arms dangle off the side and we hold hands.
Mr. Muninn stands over us and says, “Here we go.”
I close my eyes as I feel his hand slip into my chest. It’s warm and when his fingers enter my heart, it still hurts. I can feel it as his fingers wrap around the Key. When he tries to pull it out it resists. Becomes heavier. Digs into me. It burns and I can’t help groaning. Candy squeezes my hand.
Mr. Muninn never lets go of the Key, but pulls it slowly, insistently, out of my heart, up through my breastbone, and out of my chest. It glows a bright gold. Like the rising sun.
Then he moves to Candy and very gently slips the Key into her chest. She cries out at one point. When it goes into her heart. I remember the feeling. I sit up and hold her hand with both of mine. Her teeth are bared as Mr. Muninn gently removes his hand from her chest.
“It’s done,” he says.
Candy’s face and body relax. Her breath becomes regular.
“She’ll sleep for a while,” says Mr. Muninn. “She’s strong, but she doesn’t have your constitution.”
He goes back to his side of the coffee table and wipes his hand on a napkin.
“Now we have a chance to talk one-on-one. Tell me what you want with the Mithras.”
I need something to drink, but tea is all that’s on the table. I run my hand along my forehead. The new scars ache.
“Do you have anything stronger than Earl Grey?”
Mr. Muninn leaves and returns with a bottle of bourbon and two glasses.
I say, “You don’t happen to have any Aqua Regia, do you?”
He gives me a look.
“Sorry. Bourbon is fine.”
He pours us both good portions from the bottle. We clink glasses.
“There,” he says. “You have your drink. Now tell me, finally, what do you intend to do with the Mithras?”
I smile at him.
“It’s not what I’m going to do with it. It’s what you’re going to do.”
We get to Enoch Valley well before noon, so we rest in the shadow of one of the mountains that ring the place. Even in the shade it’s still pushing 110 degrees. Mr. Muninn gave us a couple of bottles of water to take with us. Me and Candy sit back on the smooth rock wall, shoulders touching, and pass one of the bottles back and forth.
“How’s your chest feeling?” I say.
She squirms a little.
“It tickles.”
“It’ll do that for a while. You’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t want this thing in me long enough to get used to it.”
“Not even to take it out for a test drive? Go some places you’ve never been? Did you ever want to go to Paris or Rome or see the Northern Lights? You can do that through the Room. No twelve-hour flights or Customs assholes to hassle you at the airport.”
“Did you want to see those places?”
“Maybe. Someday. With the right person.”
Candy wiggles in closer to me.
She says, “I always thought you’d shrivel up like a prune if you ever left L.A.”
“I should have gone to those places years ago. Time just sometimes disappears, you know?”
“When you spend all your time fighting monsters.”
I sip some water.
“Still. We had some good times at the Chateau Marmont. Didn’t we?”
“Oh man. The room service in that place.”
“And the beds.”
“And then Kasabian managed to weasel his way in there.”
Candy laughs.
“It was a nice thing you did for Kas, giving him his body back.”
“He’s been through enough. We’d both been through enough.”
“I’m going to say something now.”
“What?”
“You’re a romantic dork. A sweet, secret romantic.”
I hold up the water bottle to the desolate valley.
“And I take you to all the nicest places.”
Candy sits up, takes the bottle, and drinks. Wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, she says, “You haven’t told me why we’re here. Why this particular spot?”
“Do you know anything about Enoch Valley?”
/> She thinks for a minute.
“I’ve heard people joking about it. It was supposed to be some kind of huge land development thing a long time ago. But everything went wrong.”
Spread out in the near distance is a dead landscape of ruins to rival Pompeii. A hundred or more abandoned mansions bleach and crumble to dust in the dry air. In the center of the site is a salt-choked lake surrounded by the desiccated bodies of millions of dead fish.
There are two low points in the valley wall. One east and one west. I point to the west.
“In the seventies, the railroad was supposed to come through here from L.A. Enoch Valley was going to be the Palm Springs of the north. An exclusive enclave for the super super rich to live, go boating, fish, and generally do rich people stuff away from the prying eyes of the little people. There was even a shopping center with Versace, a Lamborghini dealership, Prada. All kinds of luxury shit.”
“What happened to it?”
“State funding ran out and they never built the railroad. The real estate company went bankrupt and the site sat here for years. In the eighties, some of the investors tried to make their money back by letting companies dump toxic waste in the lake, but the state shut that down and now the valley is one big biohazard site.”
“And not another person in a million miles.”
“That’s the idea.”
Candy picks up a rock and throws it at a weathered no trespassing sign.
She says, “Who needs the Northern Lights when you have toxic sludge to spoon to?”
The shadow we’re sitting in is getting smaller by the minute. I check the time on my phone. It’s eleven twenty.
Candy says, “How does it feel to have the Key out of your heart?”
“Weird. Lighter. It’s strange to know that if I tried to jump into one of these shadows I’d just crack my head.”
“It was freaky for me to bring us here.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“No, I won’t.”
Candy checks the time too. Now we both know that things are going to wrap up one way or another very soon.
I look at Candy, so beautiful sitting on her rock, and say, “I’m sorry.”
She looks at me.
“For what?”
“Everything. Losing you. Letting Audsley Ishii murder me. Being dead for a year so that you had to move on with your life. I’m sorry I did that to you.”
“You didn’t know that Audsley was going to kill you.”
“Yeah, I did. In a way. I always knew he was unstable. But my ego wouldn’t allow me to let up on the guy. I cost him his job and that pushed him over the edge. Like so many things I did back then, I hurt everyone around me.”
Candy looks out over the dead city.
“It was hard seeing you die. It was hard trying to get over you.”
“I’m glad Alessa was there.”
“Me too.”
“You think she’ll forgive you for coming with me?”
Candy shakes her head.
“You mean for kissing you. For never getting over you. I don’t know. Maybe not. I don’t want to talk about that now.”
I say, “I wish I had a cigarette.” But before I can say anything else Candy is on top of me, tearing at my clothes. She rolls off long enough for us both to get undressed, then climbs back on top and slowly lowers herself onto my cock. We move together slowly. This isn’t crazy breaking-furniture sex. It’s something else. Two people—two monsters—trying as hard as possible to absorb the other into their skin and bones so that whatever happens next, they’ll carry this moment and the essence of the other person with them forever.
We’re still lying in the last of the shade, just holding each other, when a plume of dust appears at the valley’s eastern entrance. Me and Candy scramble into our clothes and walk hand in hand down to the fetid lake at the center of Enoch Valley.
The plume of smoke grows as a gleaming black Chevy pickup speeds across the empty house lots in our direction.
Candy pulls me around to look her in the eye.
“I love you, James Stark.”
“I love you, Candy.”
“I don’t want to leave you here with him.”
“You have to. That’s the whole plan.”
“You’re sure? There’s no other way?”
“There isn’t. I’ve been over this a million times.”
“Okay then.”
“Okay.”
The Chevy comes to a long, sliding stop about fifty feet from us. It disappears for a moment as the plume of smoke becomes a dust cloud around the truck. A few seconds later, King Bullet and Janet emerge from the cloud. Janet looks like hell. There are marks around their throat from when he held the knife to it. Their face is streaked with the tracks of dried tears. The King, on the other hand, couldn’t look jollier. As soon as he sees me he lets go of Janet and heads in my direction, laughing. He has what looks like a goddamn Viking battle ax in his hand. But he doesn’t come at me with it. He wants to savor the moment. He swings the ax in an arc and buries the head a few inches in the packed valley floor.
King Bullet walks all around me, taking in the view.
He says, “You know, for a few minutes yesterday I thought you were fucking with me. That the photo you sent was a Photoshop phony. But here you are. Wow. You are one beautiful hunka-hunka burning ugly.”
He turns to Janet.
“Come closer, princess. Join the party and get a good look at your main man.”
Janet is crying again and when they don’t come forward, King Bullet grabs them by the wrist and drags them to me.
“Look at him,” he shouts.
Janet is trying to be strong, I can see it, but the last twenty-four hours have been too much for them.
“Are you okay?”
Janet half-smiles.
“I’m holding up.”
I say, “You don’t have to listen to him. Close your eyes. Look away. This face, it isn’t for you. It’s for his amusement.”
They shake their head.
“No. It is for me. You did that to yourself for me. I’m—I’m sorry.”
I take a step toward them, but King Bullet gets between us.
“Look, but don’t touch,” he says.
I stay where I am.
“Don’t be sorry. This was my decision. I had to get you away from him.”
King Bullet laughs and says, “You hear that, princess? He did all that to himself for you. Really, in a way, you did it to him.”
When Janet looks away again and the King grabs their wrist, they wheel around and slap him. He looks genuinely shocked. But then laughs and slaps them back.
I’m on him in a second and plant a fist to the side of his head. He goes down hard. But before I can stomp his brains all over the valley floor he comes up with a little 9mm pistol aimed not at me, but at Janet. He goes to them and puts the pistol to the back of their head.
He says, “Let’s not do that again, shall we?” Then looks at Candy. “What’s the extra bitch for? I told you, no tricks.”
“No tricks,” I say. “Candy is just here to take Janet away so you and me can get down to business.”
King Bullet looks around.
“I don’t see a car.”
“They won’t need a car. It’s all been taken care of.”
“Huh,” he says. Still a little suspicious, he looks at the sky like he’s expecting an Apocalypse Now helicopter raid, complete with Ride of the Valkyries. Eventually, he looks back at me.
“Where’s my necklace?”
I take it out of my pocket and hold it up so it glitters in the desert sun.
He holds out a hand to me.
“Throw it here.”
I stamp the toe of my boot into the ground, raising a little dust. Then I put the necklace back in my pocket.
“No. You let Janet go first.”
“Fuck you.”
“The moment Janet is with Candy, you and me can finish things. You said you
wanted my head.”
“Sweet baby Jesus yes.”
“You let Janet and Candy go. I kneel down all penitent like you wanted. You use the ax. And that’s all there is to it. Get the necklace from my pocket and you’ve won.”
He laughs, but his eyes are hard.
“You know if you try to trick me I’m going to find your bitches again and kill them. Kill them bad.”
I shake my head.
“You keep saying shit like that when you could be killing me. Look. If you’ve changed your mind it’s fine with me. But let’s do something besides standing around. It’s hot and your threats are boring.”
“Get on your knees,” he says.
I do what he said.
“Hands behind your back.”
I do that too.
He throws a length of rawhide to Candy.
“You. Tie his hands tight.”
Candy looks at me and I nod. She gets behind me and knots the rawhide around my wrists.
King Bullet says, “How’s it feel being completely helpless?”
Now I laugh.
“Are you kidding? This isn’t the first time Candy’s tied me up.”
When she’s done, Candy stands up.
“Get away from him,” says King Bullet.
Candy takes a few steps back. King Bullet comes around behind me and checks the ties on my wrists with his boot. He moves in front of me again and says, “Good.” Then he looks at Janet and says, “You and the other bitch, get out of here. The menfolk have things to do.”
He lets Janet go and they run to me. Throw their arms around me.
“You don’t have to do this,” they say.
“Yeah. I do. This has been a long time coming. Payback for all the mess of my life.”
Janet kisses my ravaged lips. They look at Candy.
“Stark used to warn me that he attracts trouble. That this wasn’t the life for me. I know he never loved me the way he loved you. And that’s okay. Because he was right. This isn’t the life for me, as much as I tried to pretend it was. I’m glad for the time Stark and I got to spend together. But, in the end, I’m glad he has you.”
Candy doesn’t say anything, but holds out her hand to Janet. They give me one more soft kiss and go to Candy.
“Boo. Fucking. Hoo.” King Bullet still has the gun out. “Go on,” he says, gesturing with it. “Shoo.”
As Candy walks Janet back into a shadow to safety I manage to smile one last time at both of them.
King Bullet Page 24