The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  I eyed the back of Austin’s head. The back of his head could be pretty damn angry sometimes. I eyed the door, where air still bled through the imperfect seal in a high, shrill noise like a train that couldn’t stop. Yep. Throwing myself out would be a lot better.

  “I’m ok.” Kaden squirmed away from me, his back against the opposite door. That print on his cheek, it was a joke. It was colossal. It was clownish, so exaggerated there was no way it could be real. My hand wasn’t that big. And I’d never hit him that hard. Never.

  But I thought of Dad coming at me with the belt. I thought of Mom looping the vacuum cord around her hand. I thought never was a lot fucking closer than everyone told themselves.

  Kaden’s hand waved up and down, almost to his cheek, away, back, away, back, away, never quite touching, and his eyes did this amazing circumnavigation of the whole damn Camaro without ever meeting mine. He looked at the back of Austin’s head. I wondered if it looked as pissed off to Kaden as it did to me.

  “Hey,” Kaden said, reaching around the seat to ruffle Austin’s short, preppy hair. Then his hand dropped, skating along Austin’s chest. Brotherly affection. Just a couple of straight-guy bros who were comfortable with each other. Or just Kaden being a goddamn tease. In a few more months, would he run his hand lower? Would he blink, his eyes huge and innocent, and tell Austin he was flexible, he didn’t need labels, this was just something all guys messed around with? “I’m ok, Aus. I am. He didn’t hit me that hard.” His hand settled right on Austin’s shoulder, and he squeezed once. He laughed shakily. “Thanks, Vie. I needed that.”

  Then his eyes cut to me.

  Fucker, I mouthed to him.

  He didn’t smile. He didn’t smirk. His eyes didn’t light up like he’d scored a point. He just stared at me, his hand on Austin’s shoulder, and I realized Kaden didn’t have to do any of that. He didn’t have to pull a face or grin or mime a tally in the air. Because both of us knew I’d fucked up. And both of us knew he was winning. I didn’t even know the game or the rules or the end of it all, but I knew he was winning.

  When we reached Sara’s, the house was dark; she was still at Bighorn Burger, still making sure her crew of teenage delinquents—which normally included me—didn’t burn the place down. But there was a car in the driveway: a boxy blue Volvo with reddish-orange crusts around the wheel wells. There wasn’t any moonlight or starlight, not with the clouds so thick. The rain still came down in brief, furious fusillades. But even with all that darkness, I could see shapes inside the Volvo. Waiting.

  The War Chief, I thought. And the Lady. They were here now, waiting for me. The explosion at the Greasy Spoon had been them beating the bushes, trying to scare me out into the open, and I’d come running back here, right into their arms, where they were waiting for me. In a Volvo, a dry voice asked at the back of my head. I ignored it. The terror that they were here, appearing after all these months, was too strong.

  Austin hit the brakes, and Kaden and I bounced off the seats. Kaden’s eyes had gone cartoon-size. Metal squealed somewhere inside the Camaro, and then from outside the car, there was a snap. A length of Sara’s wire fence whipped free from the post, lashing the black sky. A piece of wire that gauge, moving that fast, could take off a limb. Could open an artery. Could break bone. I punched Kaden in the shoulder, hard.

  “Get it together.”

  Shuddering, he licked his lips. “Sorry.”

  The squeal of metal died. The fencing wire dropped, limp, to the ground.

  Ahead of us, the Volvo’s passenger door opened. A figure stepped out, and Kaden sucked in a breath, and beneath me, the Camaro gave another squeal.

  “Fuck, it’s her, it’s her—”

  I slugged him again.

  “Keep him from doing anything stupid,” I said.

  Austin reached back and grabbed my arm. “I’ve got my hands full with you. Literally.”

  “That’s Shay. Tyler and Hannah’s mom. She lived next door to me.”

  Nodding slowly, Austin peeled his fingers away. “Why’s Kaden so freaked then?”

  “Because he’s a baby. Dark and stormy night. All that.”

  Austin grunted.

  Unlatching the door, I stepped out into the Wyoming night. The wind roared across the prairie. It was a dark wind. It clapped me between the shoulder blades, propelling me toward Shay. She was barely more than a blur in the next volley of rain, blond and frail, and the wind pinned her against the door like a butterfly wing.

  A few months before, I had snuck into this woman’s bedroom. I had faced the thing that had taken possession of her, Mr. Big Empty, and I had fought him, and I had won. My heart beat so fast it was like a fire. The cold, the rain, the wind—these were miles off. I was hot with blood. Hot with the desire to throw the first punch. Did she remember? Had she come here to shoot me, to stab me, to complete some final line of subliminal code that Mr. Big Empty had left inside her?

  When I reached her, she leaned into the blue Volvo. The rust climbing the panels leached into her khakis, staining them every time another gale buffeted her against the car. Blond strands hung in her eyes. She shoveled them away, and rain left trails on her face. Not just rain, I realized. Tears.

  “Shay—”

  “They’re gone. Please tell me you know where they are. Hannah and Tyler are gone.”

  IN GENERAL, I DIDN'T have much use for—or belief in—women collapsing. Women, in my experience, were generally the more resilient sex. God knew they had to put up with a lot more shit. But in this particular case, with the wind howling and another barrage of rain needling my face, with Shay slumped against the Volvo’s glass, with the rusted-out wheel well running red streams down her leg, I figured I’d better get her out of the weather and into a chair.

  When I rapped on the Volvo’s glass, though, Lucy Harwood—Shay’s mother—just gave a stiff shake of her head. I nodded toward the house, and then I beckoned for Austin to follow. The headlights flashed once; I beckoned again, and Austin trotted out to join me. Kaden scrambled out of the back and took the spot behind the wheel. The wind and rain licked Austin’s preppy-boy hair flat; he had pulled on his shirt, and it darkened with water. Then the Camaro rolled backward, and Kaden was gone.

  Inside, I let Shay take the armchair, while Austin and I sat on the sofa. In the sixty-watt light, Shay didn’t look much better. The weather—and her tears—had made ragged curtains out of her mascara, and her hair was a bleachy mess. The wounds, however, had healed—the ones I could see, anyway. The bruises were gone from her face. The cuts, with a few exceptions, had vanished. At the corner of her mouth, and low on her jaw, two thin white lines remained. Before the rain, I guessed that some sort of concealer had made even those lingering reminders vanish. Mr. Big Empty had a nasty method for taking possession of someone. A very nasty one. Body and mind and spirit. They were all connected; break one, and you could break all of them. Mr. Big Empty always started his breaking with the body.

  “What’s going on? What do you mean they’re gone?”

  A minute ticked by. At my side, Austin poised, ready to jump to his feet. Every muscle was tense, and it made him incredibly solid, like I was leaning against a rock.

  “Maybe she needs some tea.”

  “She doesn’t need tea.”

  “She’s probably freezing.”

  “Fine. Get her some tea.”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone in here.”

  “Then don’t get her the tea. Or get it. Whatever.”

  “I dream about you.” Shay’s words didn’t sound dreamy, though. They weren’t vague or breathy or wispy with some far-off recollection. She hissed the words. They sounded like steel on a whetstone. “Some nights, when things are really bad, I dream about you. In my room.” Her eyes shot toward me. “Is that real?”

  “Why don’t you tell me about Hannah and Tyler?”

  “Is it real?”

  “I was there. Once.”

&nb
sp; Someone cut her strings. Boneless, she slumped across the armchair. And then she started to cry in earnest. It was silent. She didn’t move, she didn’t shake, she didn’t cover her eyes or wipe her face. It was one of the most unnatural things I’d ever seen, and I’d never wanted to run farther or faster in my life.

  “When Lawayne broke my big toe,” she said, “they put a splint on it. When I was sixteen and Ronnie Sandovar was pulling on me, trying to keep me from getting out of his dad’s Impala, when he broke my arm, they put a cast on it.” Her hand settled on her chest. Her fingers tented as though the full weight were too much. “Nobody can do shit for what’s broken inside, though. I’d look at my babies and they weren’t mine anymore. They were someone else’s. They were something else. They were . . . little shits. They’d whisper about me.” Her whole face tightened in a spasm, and she seemed unaware of it. “They’d watch me. Their little eyes crawling all over me. Little shits. I wasn’t going to let them . . . wasn’t going to let them . . . wasn’t . . . get away with it.” Another spasm rippled across her face, as though something lay underneath and wanted to get out.

  “If those kids are missing,” Austin said low in my ear, “we need to call the sheriff. Right now.”

  “She’s messed up.”

  “And those kids might be dying. She’s out of her damn mind, Vie. Listen to her. She sounds like she did something to them.”

  “If she had, Lucy Harwood wouldn’t be sitting out in that Volvo so calmly.”

  “Who?”

  I pushed up from the seat and walked over to Shay. I threw open my inner eye. The thickly textured reality of the other side came into view, and I focused my attention on the woman in front of me. There was no poisonous cloud around her. No sign of the beast of smoke and hate that I had ripped out of her and shredded. But Austin was right: something was wrong.

  Since that day at Belshazzar’s Feast, my powers had worked more or less at my command. I wasn’t yanked around by them anymore. But I also wasn’t really sure—most of the time—what I was doing. What I did next, though, I had been doing as long as I could remember. It was like falling off a log. A really high log. Into a really deep pile of shit. I went into her mind.

  Inside Shay’s mind, instead of the normal silence and black emptiness, I found a storm surge. That was the closest I could come to conceptualizing it: a rush of filthy water choked with flotsam that was rising, threatening to spill over the fragile walls of Shay’s sanity. And on top of that water, slicking its surface, was something else. Crude oil. It wasn’t oil, of course, but that was what it felt like: greasy and black and stinking. It was something left over from Mr. Big Empty, something like the way smoke deposited carbon on stone and brick. A stain.

  I wasn’t sure what I could do. For that matter, I didn’t even really know what the hell I was doing. Whatever I tried might cause more harm than good—and I didn’t want to harm Shay. She’d been through enough. She’d caused her mother and her children enough pain. But I couldn’t leave her like this either.

  More and more over these last months, I’d found myself digging deep into my own memories. There was something to it that affected people; they responded to my memories like some kind of sympathetic harmonics, like the tines of a tuning fork resonating together. I’d done it with Emmett. I’d done it with Kaden. I did it now with Shay: I chose a happy memory and let it resound inside her. I started with the merry-go-round at the elementary school, the centripetal pull, the heat on my back. And then something answered in her: the merry-go-round, yes, and the sight of a blond, gap-toothed boy grinning as he tried to hold on, the smell of the hot pebbles paving the playground, the smell of dust and iron from gripping the merry-go-round. It was her memory, but it was an echo of something in mine. That was how it worked. That sun-drenched memory rose up inside her and the dark waters stilled.

  Then I was free of her, and my third eye snapped shut, and I probably would have fallen if Austin hadn’t caught me.

  Shay, her arms and legs akimbo, raised her head. Tear tracks still marked her cheeks, but her eyes were clear, and she took a low, slow breath.

  I tried to get my feet under me, but my legs were still noodley, and Austin just wrapped his arms around my waist and helped me stay upright. “You all right?” The words were so quiet they barely tickled my ear.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you do?” Shay pressed the back of her hand to her forehead; on anybody else, it might have looked affected, but on her it was just one more stroke of exhaustion. “My head hasn’t—it isn’t better, is it?” Her eyes focused on me, and she drew herself upright in the chair. “It’s just quieter.”

  “I don’t know how to fix it.”

  “But it’s quieter.” She kept her hand where it was. She might have been an oil painting: Woman in Chair about to Have the Vapors, c. 2018.

  “Ma’am,” Austin said, then grunting as he hoisted me to keep me from sliding out of his arms like hot spaghetti. “You want to tell us what’s going on?”

  “They’re gone. Hannah and Tyler are gone.”

  “That’s something for the police. Have you called the police?”

  “No,” I said. My ankles and knees were finally feeling semi-solid, so I squeezed Austin’s arm, and he reluctantly let go. “She’s here because she wants me to find them.”

  “Of course that’s why she’s here. That’s why everybody comes to you. That’s how you keep getting yourself right in the middle of the worst things that come through town. But it’s not your job.”

  “I need to know what—”

  “No. It’s not your job. Lady, you seem like you’re really upset, and I’m sure you’re a decent person, but it’s not his job. You can’t come here and ask him to do this. You can call the sheriff. You can go to Highway Patrol. You can get the FBI involved for that matter. Your kids, I’m really sorry they’re missing, but he’s a kid too. You are, Vie. Don’t do that. Don’t shake your head at me. You’re a kid, we both are, and you don’t need to get involved in this. You shouldn’t get involved in this.”

  I looked at Austin, taking in the preppy-boy part, the turquoise eyes, the rugged lines of his face.

  His cheeks colored, and he said, “It’s not your job, Vie. I know that look. I know you want me to shut up. I know you think I’m an idiot and that I’m embarrassing you and you just want me to disappear right now. But I’m right. And lady, if you’ve got any kind of conscience, you won’t ask a sixteen-year-old kid to stick his head into some kind of trouble.”

  Neither Shay nor I spoke.

  “For the love of—he doesn’t even have a driver license.”

  “No,” I said, kissing him on the cheek and squeezing his arm again. “But you do.”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t—don’t use my fucking emotions against me like that. No. Don’t. Whatever you’re going to say, you’re going to twist this all around, and I honest to God can’t stand that. Not after everything you’ve been through. Not after what I’ve—” His voice broke, and he had to swallow and look away. “Not after what I’ve had to watch you go through.”

  Shay’s face had lost its manic edge, but the desperation was still there, and the pain and heartache wisped off her like the smell of rot.

  Gently, as gently as I could, I said, “Maybe you should go, then.”

  Austin actually twisted away from the words as though they’d been a slap. A tremor ran through him, one single tremor from shoulders to toes, and then he jerked his head savagely to the side. “No. I’ll stay.”

  “All right,” I said to Shay. “Go ahead.”

  “He’s not wrong. Maybe I should . . .” She crossed her arms, and her nails bit so deep that purple crescents stamped her fair skin. “You’re just a kid. And Mother . . .”

  “You’d better tell me now before he breaks my nose.”

  “Don’t make fucking jokes like that. You don’t get to make jokes like that.” The words were so savage that I glanced a
t Austin, and I was surprised—no, shocked—to see tears. He leveled me with one furious glare and then jerked his head away again.

  “You can’t go to the sheriff,” I said. “Or you already tried. Or you think he can’t handle this. Which one is it?”

  “All of them. I . . . I did talk to him. Not at the station, but I talked to him. I’ve been picking up shifts at the Cow Poke. Just lunches mostly; breakfast and dinner are busier, and those girls have been there a long time. I just fill in. But the sheriff eats lunch there some days. Most days. And I guess I knew I couldn’t talk to him, not officially, but I was out of my mind, and he was sitting there, chewing his ribeye sandwich, watching me like he does, and I just started talking.”

  “Go back all the way. When did they disappear?”

  “Saturday.”

  “All right. Where’d you last see them?”

  “They went to the park.” Her hands found the gimp braid on the cushion; her nails scrabbled at the trim. “I think.”

  Austin dashed his arm across his eyes—Christ, how could somebody telegraph anger so goddamn vividly with just one move of his arms—and said, “You think?”

  “I had a lunch shift. It came up last minute.”

  “Your mom,” I said.

  “Mother had already left for the day. She was driving to Cheyenne to see a friend. I didn’t know I was going to have a shift; I would have asked her to stay and watch the kids. But it came up, and Saturday lunch is better than what I usually get, and if I said no, Tony would . . .”

  “You took a lunch shift so you could get Mrs. Pritzker’s fifteen-percent tip on her tuna salad? So you could make a buck twelve? And you left your kids alone, without anyone to watch them, for a buck twelve? After everything they’ve been through? After what you’ve been through? After I told you, I fucking told you the first time we met, that you weren’t ever going to do that to them again—”

  “All right,” Austin said, clutching my shoulder. Until he did, I hadn’t realized I’d taken a step forward, and Shay shrank back into the chair, her nails ripping up a two-inch section of the gimp. “Easy.”