by Gregory Ashe
Those goddamn eyebrows shot up again. “Not about the teddy-bear boxers?”
“No. For fuck’s sake—oh. You’re joking.”
“You’re not exactly impossible to read, blondie. Not like you think you are.” Something like a blacklight shone across his face. “Not even when I ask what’s wrong.”
“I’m sorry I’m a total fuckup. I’m sorry I was a total fuckup today in particular.”
“You’re not a total fuckup.” He let out a breath and tilted his gaze toward the windows. “Emmett, on the other hand—”
“Why are the lights on?”
“Vie, when it gets dark, some people still need to do things, and they need to see, so—”
“I’m going to make you sit in the car with Kaden.”
He nuzzled against me again, hard, peppering my face with kisses until I laughed again and pushed him away. The grass whispered against me, flexing, teasing wet lengths along denim. For a wonder, the ever-present Wyoming wind seemed to have died, and suddenly something felt wrong, and the skin down my spine itched, and every noise was too loud. My laugh faded quickly as I studied the house. “Seriously. Why the lights? It’s past midnight. Even if Emmett is up, even if he’s having some friends over, why is every light on in the whole house?”
Austin gave the house a moment’s consideration. “Maybe his parents have friends over.”
“Who?”
Shrugging, Austin said, “Maybe it’s like this on the weekends. Or maybe it’s like this every night. Maybe they leave the lights on. Or maybe his mom is a night owl. I mean, it could be a million things.” He paused, and tension tightened his body against mine. “What are you looking for?”
“What?”
“I mean, what do you think you’re going to see? And if you see it, what good is it going to do you?”
“I want to see who Urho and the Lady brought into town.”
Words tumbled out of him now. “If you see them up there, pressed against the glass like they were in the picture, if that’s what you came to see, what are you going to do? Go inside and shoot him? Or shoot her? Beat him up? Yell at him? Drag her out by the hair? Try to get answers out of her?”
“I just want to see her. That’s the smart thing to do. Get an eye on the enemy. Protect myself.”
Austin shook his head as though what I’d said was too stupid for words. Then he ran his hand up the nape of my neck, through the thick blond hair, and I thought of the day before, when he’d marked me with his nails, scratching five long lines down my chest. “Baby, you’ve never, ever known how to protect yourself. Coming here like this is about as far from protecting yourself as you can get.”
The wind whistled across the plains, clawing through the buffalo grass and leaving gouges that disappeared into the darkness. I pushed aside Austin’s words and focused on the house, the lights, the empty glare of the windows. It wasn’t a party. My heart thumped a little faster. It wasn’t a late night. The lights were on, and his mom wasn’t a night owl, and his dad wasn’t having scotch with a friend, and the lights were on, past midnight, every light, the whole house blazing like a lamp at the end of the world, and it wasn’t any of the things Austin had said. Every light. Every goddamn light. And the wind shrieked in my ears, carrying pellets of rain that exploded against my nose and my cheek and my jaw. Every single goddamn light.
I started back, and Austin ran easily at my side. I felt bad for him then, for the way the tension slackened in his shoulders, for the relief that softened his face. I felt bad because he thought we were leaving and I wanted to give him what he wanted, I wanted it so bad, but I couldn’t. Not with the wind in my ears. Not with those lights swimming in the windows. I felt bad because I couldn’t even tell him, because my throat was so tight and my heart was hammering on it, trying to get out.
As we passed the door that led into the kitchen, I stopped and checked the handle. It turned.
“Jesus Christ. You’re kidding.”
I couldn’t look at him; I couldn’t stand to see how much this was hurting him, so I shouldered through the door and kept going. The kitchen was huge, with stainless steel and granite and hanging racks of pots. It wasn’t big enough to feed an army, but it could have fed a couple of battalions pretty easily. The lights were on. They ovaled along stainless steel like the edge of a galactic disc. They puddled deep in the granite.
Beyond the kitchen, a hallway ran the length of the house. Every light was burning. I knew they were electric. I goddamn knew it. But in my blurred vision, they burned and bent like flames. Every light. Every light in the whole house. And even inside, the wind was shrieking in my ears, and I realized it wasn’t the wind, it was something inside me, a noise that couldn’t quite get out. Every light. And the house was silent. How could it be so bright and so quiet?
“Vie, this is a bad idea.” Austin hooked my sleeve. “A really bad idea, even for you.”
I kept going, towing Austin behind me.
The house hung on the axis of a central staircase, a massive wooden affair overlooking an enormous foyer on one side and, on the other, a tastefully appointed living space. I took the steps. My soles squeaked once, at the bottom; I looked back, but I couldn’t stand what I saw in Austin’s face, so my eyes skimmed over the wet prints of my shoes and then I kept going. He let go of my sleeve, then. That was better. And, at the same time, so much worse.
Emmett’s bedroom was on the third floor, but I stopped on the second because the door to his dad’s study was open. Someone moved inside the room—I couldn’t see them, but steps rasped across the rug, and then there was the soft clang of metal: a filing cabinet, I thought. Or a desk drawer.
When I met Austin’s eyes, he shook his head once. His eyes were an absolutely hopeless shade of blue, like the bottom dropping out from the ocean.
He was right. We should leave, right then. I should turn around. I should get the hell out. But he didn’t understand; every internal alarm I had was ringing out, and they all had to do with Emmett, and I could just as easily leave as I could cut off my own arm. And then, looking at those blue eyes darkening at the rim of the iris, thinking of a shelf of ocean floor crumbling, of the waters seizing up with blackness, I thought maybe he did understand. He was here. He had followed me.
I crept to the edge of the study door and peered around the frame. A man sat behind the desk, but he wasn’t Emmett’s dad. This man wore a flannel shirt open at the top, exposing a thatch of dark hair and muscled chest. He was a big guy—muscled, with the extra weight of an athlete just starting to go to seed. He had a nice face; he looked like your neighbor, like the kind of guy you’d trust to help you move a piece of furniture or jump your car. He was Lawayne Karkkanew, and he controlled the drug trade—and pimping and prostitution and every other vice I could imagine—throughout Mather County and beyond. He was a killer. And he had conspired with a dirty deputy to kidnap me and offer me up to the War Chief and the Lady.
If I’d had the Glock, I would have put a bullet between his eyes. I’d stolen the gun from his office the year before; it was valuable insurance, but it hadn’t kept Lawayne from turning on me. Since his betrayal, I’d waited and tried to decide what to do about my ace in the hole. Pulling the trigger—figuratively—would remove Lawayne from my life, but for the moment, I thought it was better to know who my enemies were. If I got rid of Lawayne, someone would replace him, and I might not be able to identify his successor.
Right then, though, seeing him in that chair, rifling the desk, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I just wanted to blow out the back of his head.
It was the change in Austin’s breathing that made me tense, and I glanced back and froze. Above us, on the next flight of stairs, Emmett shirtless and barefoot, leaned coolly against the wall. He pointed a compact, black pistol at me. Something flickered on Emmett’s face. A footstep sounded farther up the staircase, and Emmett glanced up, over at me, and then toward the open study door. “Lawayne. We’ve got
company.”
“Put that down,” I said. “You’re not going to hurt me.”
A smile tore at one side of Emmett’s mouth, pulling on his split lip. In a mocking echo of the words he’d spoken in my bedroom, he said, “You still don’t understand, tweaker. I get to do whatever I want. Whenever I want.”
“You wouldn’t shoot me.”
He just shook his head. That smile opened the side of his mouth like a gash, and the gun twitched toward Austin before settling on me again. “Maybe I would. Maybe I’d shoot your boyfriend instead.”
“What the fuck is wrong with—”
The shot came so abruptly that I never had a chance to prepare myself. The clap of the gunshot rocked me. On the step below me, splinters jagged up.
“No more talking,” Emmett shouted over the ringing in my ears. “Or I’ll shoot Austin. And you know I won’t lose any sleep over that.”
His eyes were that funhouse darkness I remembered. I was in shock: the sense of vertigo, of weightlessness, of falling while I was standing still. He had shot at me. He had actually taken a shot. The little fucker had actually . . .
“What the fuck is going on?” Lawayne barked from the doorway.
“These two were sneaking around. Krystal caught them when they got on the grass; she told me.”
And then I remembered the grass that was too long, that was wet, that whispered and rasped and flicked against my legs even when the wind had stopped, and I knew what some intuitive part of my brain had already figured out: the grass shouldn’t have been moving when the wind stopped. That had been Krystal.
Lawayne grunted; then, still speaking loudly over the aftereffects of the gunshot, he said, “You always go breaking into people’s houses?”
“I didn’t break in. The door was unlocked.”
“That’s a nice technicality. I wonder how well it would hold up in court.”
“The next time you’re in court, it’ll be when they’re putting you away.”
Lawayne’s face eased into a smile, and he clapped me on the shoulder. “Jesus, I always forget what a tough little prick you are. Come on in. Let’s talk. Emmett, get Krystal and come down here. If they try to run, have Krystal stop them.” Lawayne cocked his head. “And then shoot them.”
Without another word, he disappeared into the study.
Emmett, with a kind of bro-ish swagger that made me want to clip the grin off his face, shoved the pistol in the front of his gym shorts. “Better go in there. You heard the man.”
“Vie,” Austin said.
I shook my head and stretched out a hand behind me. After a moment, Austin took it, and I tugged him toward the study. As I passed through the door, I shot a look back at Emmett and gave him the finger; for an instant, that sharp grin disappeared, and I saw calculation in his eyes.
Lawayne sat behind the desk again, yanked out the bottom-most drawer, and gestured to the chairs. Austin and I stayed in the doorway. As Lawayne pulled out file folders and strewed them across the floor, he said, “I bet you want to do something really nasty to me. Am I right?”
“What are you doing with Emmett?”
“He works for me.” Lawayne paused, fingered open a folder, and then scowled and threw it down. Meeting my eyes, he said, “I offered you a job. A couple of times, if I recall correctly. You weren’t smart enough to take me up on it. Your buddy was.”
“What are you doing with Emmett?”
Lawayne smiled. He dropped the folders back into the drawer, slung his heels up onto the desk, and leaned back. Hands laced behind his head, he studied me. “Jesus, kid. You beat them once. They came after you hard, with everything they had, and you handed them their asses. But you know what your mistake was?”
“Not handing over that Glock to the sheriff.”
“Your mistake was not working with me. If you’d told me everything, if you’d started at the beginning, everything that happened with Tony and with that kid Luke, if you’d told me what was going on—” He broke off with a laugh that sounded genuine. “Jesus fuck, kid, the kind of stuff that’s been going on: mind control and ghosts and psychics. If you’d even told me some of it, I would have made you the richest kid this side of the Mississippi, and I would have had your back against those crazies. But you didn’t want anything to do with me, and a guy’s got to make a living.”
Austin grabbed my arm. “We’re leaving. And if you try—”
Emmett appeared in the door, the pistol dragging down the waistband of his gym shorts, and his arm curling around a skank-skinny girl with dark roots. I recognized Krystal Giblin from the photographs; I recognized the bad dye job, the way the cocaine made her ribs show through her shirt, the way she fit under Emmett’s fucking arm. Now, from a closer distance, I could see a mountain range of hickeys running along Emmett’s collarbone and up his neck. There were a lot of things pissing me off right then, but the biggest one was that Emmett was just such a fucking slut.
“You want to know what Emmett’s helping me with?” Lawayne stood, and the office chair skittered back on casters, the noise shrill and jolting me in my seat. “Well, you know what? This kid is pretty smart. And he’s been looking into a few things for me.” Another of those buddy-next-door laughs spilled out. “He’s been my little research assistant. And it’s time to see if his research has paid off.”
I shook my head. I turned to leave, only now Emmett had the gun trained on me again.
Lawayne pulled a folding knife from his pocket. Opening the blade, he circled behind the chairs. I wanted to move, but Emmett had the pistol nuzzled under my ribs before I could take a step. I froze and watched as Lawayne moved to stand behind Austin. His fingers threaded through Austin’s preppy cut, jerked his head back, and laid the blade against his throat.
“Now,” Lawayne said. “Emmett told me you’re getting better with your magic powers. I bet you could get inside my head and scramble me pretty good. But here’s the thing: I bet you’ll have a hard time messing with my head if Emmett puts a bullet in you. He’s still a kid; he’s tough, but I’m not sure if he’s hard. Not yet. So maybe he wouldn’t put you down. But he’ll put a bullet in your leg. And something like that, something that hurts like a real bitch, I bet that pulls you right out of my head. And then I’ll cut your boyfriend’s throat. So you should think really carefully about what you do next.”
The electric lights blurred and bent as I blinked, trying to control my breathing. Emmett would shoot me. He would; I could see it in his face, I could see it in that nightmare, funhouse drop in his eyes, that darkness, the void where for the last year I had found my footing. Emmett might not kill me, but he would shoot me. That was the truth. And that would definitely be enough of a distraction for Lawayne to slice open an artery, and Austin would bleed to death. My heart wasn’t even beating anymore; it thumped, hard and heavy, like a stone rolling downhill.
“Be smart,” Lawayne said. “Walk over there and take off your jacket and shirt. Tell your boyfriend to sit like a good boy.”
My hands froze at my sides. My fingers burned like I was holding ice. Like frostbite had taken them to the first knuckle.
“Leave him alone.” That was Austin, his voice so thick the words barely came out.
“Walk over there, face the wall, and lean up against it, or I’m going to take off your boyfriend’s ear. Whichever one I like.”
“Fuck him, Vie, fuck—” Austin cried out, and I jerked in response; my vision went to him long enough to see the cut at the top of his ear where Lawayne had set the blade.
“I’m going. Don’t hurt him, all right?” My first step, I bumped into the chair, and it scraped along the floor and fell over. The wood clattering was the only sound in the whole universe. Another staggering step, and then another, and I worked my way to the spot against the wall that Lawayne had indicated. As I went, I wormed out of the jacket, and then I stripped off my shirt and let it fall. I leaned against the wall, my forehead and the inside of my a
rms the only thing touching the paneling. It was real wood. It had a slight waxiness to it, and lemon rubbed off from the polish.
Face to the wall, I could only trust my hearing to tell me what was going on. Austin’s erratic breathing meant he was still just as freaked out as I was, and I could hear steps as Lawayne marched him to one of the chairs. Krystal hummed the jingle from an orange soft drink ad. Emmett—not a sound. He might as well have been dead. He was dead, as far as I was concerned. Dead to me. And he’d be literally, physically fucking dead as soon as I got a chance with him alone.
“Krystal,” Lawayne said. “Take over for me.”
Lawayne’s first step toward me scuffed on the rug. His second step caught a warped board that creaked. I tried to slow my breathing. I forced air in and out. From inside the command center of my brain, I struggled to relax my muscles. When he hit me, I wanted to be limp; I wanted to flow with the punch, to absorb as much of the force with my own movement and try to minimize the damage. I concentrated all my focus on those things: the tension in my core, in my legs, in my fingertips. Flow with the punch. But what if it wasn’t a punch? What if it was a vacuum cleaner cord? What if it was the winking red eye of a cigarette? What if it was a knife?
His touch was hot and cold at the same time, and I jerked away from him and made the most goddamn embarrassing noise of my entire life. It was a whimper. Worse than a whimper. Because he had touched one of the scars. The first one. The very first. And all I could hear was the tune to “Happy Birthday.”
“Get your fucking hand off—ah.”
“It’s fine, Aus. It’s fine. Just—” The next shudder broke up my words, and I had to clench my jaw to keep from biting my tongue. “Just be quiet, all right?”
Lawayne’s hand moved. There was a pause. No, that wasn’t right. Not a pause. At the level of an animal, at the level of instinct, I recognized what it was: hesitation. He wasn’t certain. And then he exhaled and settled his finger on the second scar, the watery triangle left by the tip of a hot iron, and my heart became a white hiss in my ears beating so fast I couldn’t tell the pulses apart.