by Kali Wallace
I was slumped into the corner of Ingrid’s sofa. My neck was stiff, my side throbbing where Lyle had cut me, my fingers cold. The candles had burned down and softened. The light in the room was golden, the breeze cooler.
It had been just after noon when I first stepped into Ingrid’s house. Now it was early evening. I had lost hours in the space between her words.
“What,” I said. My mouth was dry, my lips chapped. My heart raced and I tried to pull my hand free, but Ingrid held tight. “What did you do to me?”
“Your ability to lie to yourself won’t last,” she said. “Blood? Pain? Revenge? Is that what you want?”
“No. No. I don’t want anything.” Panic was rising like a thunderstorm. I couldn’t think clearly. She wouldn’t let me go. Rain was gone. Ingrid and I were alone and I didn’t know what she had done. “I don’t— What are you doing? Let me go.”
“Revenge,” she said, as though I had answered. “You crave it more than anything. You won’t be able to stop yourself.”
“Stop. What did you do to me?” I saw myself insensible and openmouthed, as empty as Brian Kerr on the floor of a blood-painted room, and just as vulnerable. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t have to do anything. It is your nature now,” she said. “It is instinct. You will start with those you choose to believe are guilty, or dangerous, but you won’t stop there. It will become easier and easier to convince yourself that others deserve it too, and soon you won’t concern yourself with reasons at all.”
“No. Let me go.”
“There is only one way to prevent it. There is only one person whose death can have any real meaning to you. It can set you free. The person who did this to you, the one who ended your life—”
“Stop. Let me go!”
I didn’t realize I was shouting until I felt the tear of it in my throat. The entire forest fell silent and held its breath.
I wrenched my hand away and stood so quickly I knocked my shin into the edge of the trunk, felt my recently healed knee twinge in protest. Outside birds chattered again and a breeze stirred through the aspen trees. The shadows were long. It would be dark soon.
I had refused to give Ingrid what she asked for, but she had taken something anyway.
I relaxed my hands from fists at my sides. “I don’t want to hear any more. I’m leaving.”
“You should stay here. There is more for us to discuss. You don’t want to know what will happen to you?”
“No.”
“You don’t want to know what you will do?”
“No. I don’t want to know.”
“Are you sure?” Ingrid crossed her legs and sat back, folded her hands over her knee. Even though she was sitting and I was standing, I felt small and quaking before her. “This is the best part. You are a fascinating creature.”
“No,” I said. “I want to leave.”
“Whether you hear it or not has no effect on how true it is,” she said. “You have no choice anymore. Your death has made you into this thing, and there is nothing you can do about it. If you give me but a drop I can tell you—”
“I don’t care. I’m leaving.”
“Sit down.”
“No. I said no. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t need to know.”
“You can keep your ignorance, if you want, but you still owe me your information in trade.”
She was right. I had agreed. As much as I wanted to run from that house and never look back, I wanted even more to go without Ingrid believing I had reneged on our deal. It may not have been magically binding, but I didn’t trust her.
I sat again, but not on the sofa. I didn’t want to be close enough for her to touch. I settled into the armchair by the window.
“What do you want to know?”
“What do you want to tell me?” she replied.
I thought it over before answering. I didn’t know what she was going to do with the information I offered. Before meeting her, before she had stolen an entire afternoon, I would have thought that anybody, with any intentions at all, would be better than Mr. Willow. But Ingrid unsettled me nearly as much as he did.
“Lies are not as valuable as the truth,” Ingrid said drily.
“I’m not going to lie,” I told her, and I meant it. Picking and choosing bits of the truth was not quite the same thing as lying. “I’m just trying to figure out where to start. It’s been a weird few days.”
“Tell me,” she said.
I told her some of it, but not everything. I didn’t tell her about the men I had killed, but I told her about hitchhiking across the country and meeting a kid at a truck stop who picked me out as somebody, something, unusual. I didn’t tell her his name. I told her how I had found my way to Mr. Willow’s church, but I also told her I wasn’t sure exactly where it was. Mr. Willow was there with Violet and Lyle, and I had no interest in protecting them, but helpless Esme was also at the house, and the children and the woman with the knitting needles. I didn’t trust Ingrid to distinguish between prisoner and captor.
I did tell her that it was more of a cover than a real church, and she snorted, unsurprised.
“Yes,” she said. “He did that here as well. It was his father’s idea. A man can get away with all manner of irrational nonsense if everybody believes he’s doing it for God.”
I also told her what I had done to Brian Kerr. Rain would tell her anyway, and I wasn’t opposed to Ingrid knowing I could be dangerous too.
I didn’t tell her about the stolen memories.
“We had thought, when we drove Willow and his congregation away, that they would stay gone,” Ingrid said, when I was finished. “He won’t like that you and Rain have escaped his grasp. He’ll send somebody after you.”
“Can he really do what he thinks he’s doing?” I asked. “Those people I saw, they looked—some of them looked like they were brain damaged, to be honest, but is it possible they used to be monsters and aren’t anymore? One of the girls said she was—said it had worked for her. Is that even possible?”
Ingrid’s lips parted, the beginning of an answer, but she paused, and she thought about it for a long while. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “He wouldn’t be the first to try, but Edward Willow was never a very skilled magician. I find it hard to believe he could do it without help, and any creature that could help would be doing so for its own purposes.”
Stone and iron and laughter in the darkness. She will be so happy to see you. I suppressed a shudder.
Ingrid went on. “But if your estimate of how many people they’ve taken is accurate, he has a lot of power at his disposal. Anything is possible. He must be stopped.”
On that, at least, we were in agreement. “What are you going to do?”
“It’s not my decision to make.” She stood up. “I will share what you have told me with the community. We drove him away before, and we will do it again if necessary. I won’t keep you any longer.”
Just like that, our conversation was over.
Ingrid waited until we were outside to say, “You should have listened to how this will end for you.”
A familiar house on the dark street, a single light burning, a shadow in the window. I pressed my fingers against the scarf around my neck, digging into the hidden bruises, the ones that never healed, and for a moment I felt the hands that had put them there. I had listened. Whatever she had done to me, however she had put that vision of the future in my head, I knew exactly what she was telling me.
I stepped down from the porch. The sun was setting, draping the valley and forest in shadow, but the tops of the hills were still bright. Zeke’s truck was parked outside the fence; I had expected him to be gone. By the barn Rain was talking with a man who laughed loudly at whatever she was saying.
“You are not what you used to be,” Ingrid said. “You can’t go on pretending nothing has changed.”
“Oh, I know that,” I told her. I kept my voice light, my tone flippant. “Do you really think that’s what I�
�m doing? Give me a little bit of credit. I’m just not convinced you or anybody else knows anything either. It was nice talking to you. Have a good night.”
TWENTY-FIVE
AS I LEFT the house, Rain wandered over from the barn to meet me. She introduced me to Stuart, Ingrid’s son, who smiled too widely and held on to my hand a shade too long.
I pulled my hand away, rubbed it surreptitiously on my jeans. Ingrid had never killed anyone, but her son had, and unlike most of the killers I had met since I woke up, Stuart looked exactly sketchy enough to be a murderer.
“Guess that must’ve gotten boring for you,” I said to Rain, “just sitting there.”
“It wasn’t so bad. I can entertain myself. You get what you came for?”
I didn’t want to ask, not with Ingrid’s creepy son standing right there, but I had to know. “Did you know she was going to do that?”
“Do what? She wasn’t doing anything to you. You were just talking.”
I didn’t like the way Rain was smiling. “Right. Okay. Can we go?”
“You can do whatever you want. I’m going to stick around for a while.” She waved at Zeke, still waiting by the truck. “I’m sure I’m heartbroken to miss that fun sleepover.”
“You could stay too,” Stuart said. He had the oiliest smile I had ever seen. “Ma won’t mind. We’ve got room.”
“No, thanks,” I said, and I walked away. Walked, even though I wanted to run.
Zeke pushed away from the truck as I approached. “You’re not staying?”
“No,” I said. Rain and Stuart were heading into the house, and warm yellow light shone through the windows. “I don’t want to be around anybody as old as my dad who smiles at me like that.”
“Yeah, Stuart is a creep,” he said. “He has a thing for monsters.”
“A thing? You mean like a fetish?” I scrubbed my hand on my jeans again. “Gross. You could have warned me.”
“I said we shouldn’t come here,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, yeah. You were right. Can you drive me back to Boulder?” I wasn’t quite sure yet where I would go from there, but I did know I didn’t want to spend the night in the mountains.
“Sure. Get in.”
I waited until we had left Ingrid’s property before I said, “He’s a murderer too. That Stuart guy. He’s not just a pervert.”
“How do you know?” There was hesitation in Zeke’s voice, as though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
“I can tell,” I said. “It’s one of my superpowers. It’s that and healing like Wolverine.”
“For everyone?”
“Yes.”
He was quiet after that. I drew my legs up on the seat and leaned against the door. We left the dirt road and turned onto the paved highway again, wound down through the trees, through Nederland, past the reservoir, into the high steep gash of Boulder Canyon.
The silence was starting to bother me. “You’re not going to ask me what Ingrid said?”
“No.”
“You’re not curious?”
“Not really.”
“She thinks I’m going become a vengeful murderer who kills everybody I meet while laughing maniacally and bathing in their blood.”
I rested my head against the cool glass. The mountains were dark now that the sun had set, and the headlights of passing cars flashed through the windshield. Now that I was thinking about it clearly, I could see the problems in what she had said. I wasn’t going to start hunting down innocent people. I hadn’t been able to hurt Lyle, not even in self-defense, because he wasn’t a murderer. But Ingrid wanted me to think I could. Ingrid thought I was fascinating.
An entire afternoon gone. It made me feel cold all over, naked and exposed, not knowing what she had done. Had she sat there the whole time, holding my hand, waiting and watching while my mind whirled and spun? Or had she taken a break, got herself some tea, read a few articles in The Economist, gone outside to chat with Rain and Stuart, leaving me there slumped on the couch?
“Or something like that,” I said.
“Is that all?” Zeke asked.
“You think it should have been worse?”
“Do you feel like murdering everybody you meet?”
“No,” I said. Not everybody. “She asked for some of my blood.”
Zeke looked at me sharply. “Did you—”
“I didn’t give her anything. You said not to.”
“You were in there a long time.”
“I didn’t give her anything. Why does it matter, anyway? What did she want to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” Zeke said. “Magic. Nothing good.”
I sighed and closed my eyes for a moment. I couldn’t sleep, but I was tired, worn out, and stretched too thin. I hated not being able to sleep.
“She didn’t even answer all of my questions.”
She hadn’t told me why. Why was I different, why did I come back, why was I like this, the one thing I really wanted to know, and she had brushed it aside. I wasn’t even sure if I could believe that it was question without an answer. Somebody had to know something.
I could still hear the man whispering as he dug into my grave: Oh, you’re perfect, you’re beautiful, you’re perfect. He must have known what he would find when he started digging.
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but now I had to wonder if maybe I had killed the one person who could answer my questions.
“I don’t think I like magicians very much,” I said. Zeke started to speak, but I interrupted him. “I know. You told me so. I’ll remember next time.”
“Ingrid’s not even one of the bad ones. There are worse.”
“But you still don’t like her.”
“I don’t think she always knows the difference between helping people and using people.”
“Rain doesn’t seem to mind.”
Zeke glanced at me. “Rain always knows when she’s using people.”
“Ingrid’s never killed anybody. Not like her creepy son.”
“Good for her.”
I looked across the cab of the truck at Zeke. He looked normal, as far as I could tell. Human. No obvious monster traits. He caught me staring at him and turned away.
“Who was it?” I asked. I immediately regretted it. I winced and said quickly, “No, don’t answer that. Don’t. I don’t want to know.”
The shadows around him were brittle, frail, like leafless branches in winter.
“Just the once,” I guessed.
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t deny it either.
“That’s reassuring,” I said. “Considering. But now I’m kind of wondering where you get your food from, and at the same time trying really hard not to wonder at all.”
“You don’t—”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “‘You don’t smell appetizing.’”
Zeke grinned, fleeting and not very nice, but still a smile. I had been starting to think he didn’t know how.
I had said it to tease him, but it was also true, in a way. There was no excitement, no yearning. Zeke had killed before, but he hadn’t liked it. Not like the man by my grave, and not like Duncan Palmer. Not like Ingrid’s son, whose shadows had mostly felt like slick pride. The more killers I met, the better I was getting at feeling out the differences.
Zeke relaxed after that, and so did I. It’s amazing what mutual denial of supernatural ill intent can do to ease the tension.
“Where were you going?” Zeke asked. “Before they found you.”
“Nowhere. I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”
Zeke didn’t say anything for a moment, then he said, “I have to work tonight, but you can stay at our place, if you want.”
“Your parents won’t mind?” I asked.
“It’s just me and my brother.”
“Your brother won’t mind?”
“I don’t know. He might.”
“And if he does?”
A shrug. “We get dinner for a week?”
“Oh my god,” I said, but I couldn’t help but laugh. “You can’t make jokes about eating dead people if you actually eat dead people.”
“You’re sure it’s a joke?”
I was, about as sure as I could be, but I only said, “Shut up. And thanks, I guess. For the dramatic rescue too.”
“It wasn’t that dramatic,” Zeke said.
“You used an ax. That makes it dramatic.”
We spilled out of the canyon and into the city. Streetlights and houses sprung up along the street, and the roads filled with nighttime traffic around the intersections.
“Anyway, I appreciate it,” I said. “But if I catch you sharpening your knives, I’m going to change my mind.”
“You won’t,” Zeke said. “Our knives are always sharp.”
TWENTY-SIX
HOME FOR ZEKE and his brother was a small brick house on Boulder’s west side. One level, a squat worn rectangle, with an overgrown yard badly in need of mowing. The street was quiet. Light shone from the front windows of the neighbors’ houses and silhouettes moved behind curtains, people making dinner and watching TV, but Zeke’s house was dark.
He let me in, flipped on the light, and said, “I have to go. I’m going to be late for work.”
I was curious about what kind of job a ghoul might have. “Where do you work?”
Zeke made a face. “I, uh, clean places. You know, like office buildings, after hours?”
“That is not nearly as exciting as I was expecting,” I said. “I was kind of hoping you worked in a morgue or something.”
“Yeah, I wish. I would tell you not to touch anything, but we don’t have anything worth stealing. You can sleep on the couch, I guess.”
I dropped my skateboard and backpack on the floor. “Thanks.”
Zeke had his hand on the door, but he hesitated. “Don’t go into the basement. Even if you—just don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I told you not to. Jake will be home in a couple of hours,” he said, and he left.
I watched him back out of the driveway and waited until he turned the corner at the end of the street.
Then I shamelessly began to snoop around.