The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  “They disappeared. Captured by the Lady. She woke them from the mortal sleep—that’s what Luke called it. I don’t get it; what are you freaking out about?”

  “Use your fucking head, Vie. For once, use it. Everybody we know?”

  I stared at him. At the ruined half of his face. Emmett had come back with power, I had been wondering at the back of my head where he had gone. But my self-pity, my fear for Hannah and Tyler, the way everything had spiraled out of control, and then I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but come here—the way I couldn’t do anything sometimes but find my own place and shake the blades out of their box like a deck of cards. All those distractions had allowed me to push the question to the back of my mind. How had Emmett gotten his abilities? Who had done these horrible things to him? Not the Lady; she wouldn’t have released him, and none of her victims wore visible wounds like Emmett. How had he returned, after nothing more than a day, looking like months had passed, his wounds healing into lines of fresh pink scar tissue?

  “Why does it matter?”

  He just shook his head. The electric slick on his eyes had gone out; they were total fallaways now, and I felt myself dropping, my gut rising, nausea spilling into my throat.

  “You—”

  “I’m not talking about me. Everybody we know, tweaker? Everybody that’s got a power in Vehpese? Every single one of them was kidnapped at some point by the Lady?”

  My heart stuttered to a stop. I shook my head. “No.” It sounded so dumb. It sounded like a kid. Like a baby. But I couldn’t make anything else come out. “No.”

  “Why did I go see your mom, Vie?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why? Why did I go see her?”

  “You’re crazy. There’s no way.” But maybe it wasn’t crazy, maybe it all made some kind of awful sense, because I could see that old newspaper in my mind, could practically feel the brittle page under my fingers.

  “I went to see her, Vie, because she’s the one who awakened you.”

  I SAT THERE, FRAMING my next question. I thought I should have been in shock, but the roller coaster of emotions over the last two days had finally carried me past the point where I could react. Instead of provoking a response, this last surprise wiped my nerves clean.

  “Are you going to bolt on me again? Are you going to freak out or fall down or something?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you going to hit me?”

  I smiled. “Are you scared of me?”

  “Fuck you, tweaker. You don’t look good.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Emmett’s hand ran the length of his bandaged arm; the dark pools of his eyes swallowed me and gave nothing back. “Are you going to make me show you what it feels like again?”

  My grin stayed plastered on my face, and I gave a little shake with my head.

  “Well?”

  “What?”

  “You look like you’re going to pass out. Come on, just take a swing so you’ll feel better.”

  “I feel fine.” That grin still drew on the corners of my mouth. I was biting my lip, trying to force the expression off my face, but it was super-glued there. “So. You saw her.”

  Emmett nodded. His eyes had become hooded. He watched me the way a beaten dog watches: alert to every movement, alert in a way that turned my stomach. But my smile. I couldn’t shake that smile.

  “Did you see the apartment?”

  “I—”

  “The one I lived in with her.”

  “I don’t know if it’s the same one.”

  Patiently—I felt like I could be patient with him forever, patient, patient, patient—I said, “1117 Oakland Terrace.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you saw where the iron fell and burned the carpet.”

  “Vie—”

  “And you saw the holes I punched under the stairs—she didn’t get those fixed, I bet, did she? No, of course she didn’t. And you saw—” My lips were dry, and my tongue flicked out, and it was dry too so it didn’t make any difference.

  “Vie—”

  “You saw the ashtrays, I guess. You can’t really miss them; they’re in every room. And you saw my room, didn’t you? You saw the bed. No sheets, right? And you saw the closet doors that fell off when I threw a chair at them. And you saw that greasy spot on the carpet where she rubbed the cake in.” My tongue laved my lips again. Dry. Bone dry. “It’s still greasy, isn’t it? And brown, right? You can’t get chocolate out of anything, and she told me not to take it upstairs, and she was right. I dropped it. And if you want to know why I don’t like birthday cake, it’s because I can still taste those fucking carpet fibers when she made me lick it—”

  When Emmett’s hand cupped my chin, I stopped. I was blinking rapidly. I was trying to find that knot in the floorboards again, trying to find anything I could fixate on, but Emmett was slowly turning my head, and I knew I’d have to see him eventually. I knew what Austin would say if he were here. That he loved me. That he was sorry. That I was brave or amazing or strong or whatever stupid adjective he’d settled on for today. And I knew that when Emmett said one of those things, it’d be over between us. Those words would burn him out of my system like penicillin chasing a bad infection. I just kept blinking and let him turn my head.

  Dark eyes. Fallaway eyes. No electric shimmer. Just the drop.

  “Are you doing this to hurt me? Or are you doing it to hurt you?” He waggled my head. “Or do you even know why you’re doing it?”

  Heroin. Crank. Crystal. Glass. They were nothing, nothing, compared to this. I turned into his touch, and his skin was hectic and hot against mine.

  After a moment, he let go. “It’s the same shithole, Vie.”

  I nodded. I scrubbed my cheeks. It didn’t make any difference; I could feel the flush and the hot, hectic patches.

  “She looked fine. I mean, she’s not sick or anything.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She asked about you. Do you want me to tell you all of it? Or just the parts your boyfriend thinks you can handle?”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Say it like you mean it, tweaker.” His breath punched out. “I just wanted to talk to her. I wanted to know if I was right. It seemed unreal: an awakener, a monster like the Lady, only living some shitty suburban life. I wanted to know why she had—” He stopped. “That was stupid, in hindsight. I should have realized she would be . . .”

  “Dangerous?”

  His fine, long-fingered hands spread across the quilt, chasing wrinkles. “I asked her about you. As soon as she opened the door. And she let me in. She was smoking. She’s . . . younger than I expected.”

  And I knew, without looking at his face, that he meant she was attractive, that he hadn’t expected to feel attracted to her.

  “And she wasn’t nice, not exactly, but she let me sit down, and she got me a glass of water. She asked how you were doing. I lied. I just gave her a little bullshit and then went back to asking questions. She wasn’t even surprised when I started talking about powers. She didn’t even blink. She just dragged on her cigarette and blew the smoke to the side and waited like I had something more interesting to talk about. She asked if you had talked to Gage.” His hands kneaded the quilt; from the corner of my eye, I caught the question in the way he turned his head, and I ignored it.

  “All of the sudden, she started talking. Just shooting out facts like she was reading off a grocery list. Yes, she made you exactly what you are. Yes, she did it on purpose. Yes, she could have done it a dozen other ways, but she chose the one she enjoyed. Yes, she knew about the Lady in the Montana Territory, and she laughed about that like it was some kind of joke. And then she said—this part I can remember exactly—something like, ‘That old bitch lost her touch, though, didn’t she?’ and then she laughed again.”

  She could have done it a dozen other ways. God, the grin on my face was start
ing to hurt.

  “I asked her why. Why she made you the way you are. Why she let you go. Why she lived in a shithole apartment when she had abilities most people couldn’t dream of.”

  “And?”

  “I think there are all kinds of monsters, Vie. I think we see the big ones easily. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. Serial killers like Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy. But there are so many we don’t see. So many monsters that hide in plain sight. They don’t care about armies. They don’t care about world domination. They’re . . . domestic. All they want to do is rule their little kingdoms. They’re the nightmares that live next door.”

  For the first time since Emmett had started his story, I shook my head. “I don’t care what you think. I want to know what she said.”

  His voice warbled; it was such a childish sound, so incredibly innocent, that I wanted to grab his hand, touch his cheek, run my fingers through the short hair above his ears. But I didn’t move, and he kept speaking. “She came over and sat next to me on the sofa, and she took the cigarette from between her lips.”

  A moan was building behind my lips. I hated it; I couldn’t get rid of it.

  “And she grabbed a handful of my hair. And I freaked out. I grabbed her wrist. I tried to squirm off the sofa. She didn’t really fight me or hold me. She just said, ‘How bad do you want to know?’ And I thought about it. Honestly. I mean, my brain was scrambled, but I tried to think. And I said, ‘Just not my eyes.’ And she laughed and said of course not.” His hands spread on the quilt, the fingers stretched to their utmost as though responding to that remembered pain, and then they gathered waves of quilting and clumped it in his fists. “I didn’t scream. I wasn’t even thinking at that point, I just felt the pain and this weird pride that I hadn’t screamed.” He was trying to extend his fingers again, but his fists remained tight around the cloth. “And she said, ‘How bad do you want to know?’ And it took me longer this time, but I told her, ‘Just not my eyes.’” A shudder ran through him. “It went on like that for a while. And finally I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was crying. I’d been crying for a while. And screaming. I mean, I had been so fucking proud of myself that I could do this, that I could do it for you, but I’d started screaming pretty fast. She sat there for a while, a fresh cigarette between her teeth, just smoking while I cried.” A smile twisted his lips. “She even offered me one. When I finally looked at her, she just asked me again, ‘How bad do you want to know?’ and I told her to fuck off. And she laughed.” He suddenly seemed aware of his tightly clenched fists, so he shook them out and stared at them. “You know what makes me the most angry? It took me that long. It took me all that time, and I still didn’t figure it out before she broke me.”

  “I’ll kill her.” I got off the bed and took a helpless step toward the door. “I need your credit card for a plane ticket, and then I’ll kill her.”

  “She talked more after that. I don’t remember all of it; I was hurting pretty bad, and my mind was in pieces. She said I could leave if I wanted to, but I’d be back. She said people always came back. She said they came back no matter what she did to them because they wanted what only she could give to them. She said once she broke a woman’s spine, and the woman still came back. In her wheelchair. And she made that woman get out of her chair and drag herself across the threshold. And the woman did it. Dragged herself back to the woman who had crippled her.” Emmett’s voice took on a strange note. “She said the woman didn’t complain when she got to fly.”

  And I remembered, then, the article in the old newspaper that I had found in Dad’s apartment: the woman named Lillian Bellis in New York City who had looked so much like Mom; and Arturo Fabiniani and his dungeons; and the woman who had levitated over the Empire State Building.

  “She was right.” Emmett’s voice cracked again, and the sound made him look five years younger—it stripped the years and the sex off him until he looked prepubescent, vulnerable, aching for comfort. “I knew she was right. I knew I could drive to the airport. Maybe I’d even get on the plane. Maybe, if I had a miracle of willpower, I’d make it the whole flight and land in Billings. But I’d turn right back around. I’d go right back to that shitty townhouse on Oakland Terrace. I’d run back. If I had to, I’d crawl back. A thousand miles. Two thousand, on bloody hands and knees. And I knew if I left, she’d make me pay even more. So I stayed. And I asked for what I wanted. And I let her take her price.”

  “What did you want?”

  He lied to me. The sudden flick away of his dark eyes told me it was a lie. “I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines anymore. I didn’t want to repeat Belshazzar’s Feast. I wanted to be able to take care of myself.”

  That made sense. It was plausible. It was even, if I hadn’t known him better, credible. “And the price?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to; it had been a stupid question. He pulled the ruined lip between his teeth again; that was a new habit. The thought pulsed, a low, lava red at the back of my brain, that maybe he had learned that habit to keep himself from screaming.

  “I think that’s how she felt about kids. I think that’s why she had—”

  “Me.”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “She likes having people come back even after she hurt them. She liked the . . . the craziness of it. That’s what I think. It’s one thing to hurt someone. It’s another thing to hurt someone, but they keep coming back. That’s power. That’s maybe the ultimate power. You turn somebody inside out. They’re divided. Split. One part of them knows what you’re going to do. The other part, though, the louder part, says maybe it’ll be different. Maybe you’ll get what you want. What you need. She did it with awakening; she did it with that lady whose spine she broke. But . . . shit, Vie. People like her, people who abuse kids, that’s a big part of it. The kids don’t know any better. They just know it’s their mom or their dad. They just know they want to be loved. And sometimes they get that love. And sometimes they get—”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Silence.

  “You’ve just got to shut the fuck up.”

  The house creaked. The wind rapped at the glass, shrieked between the panes.

  “Just stop it with that stuff, ok?”

  “Ok.”

  Another blast of wind howled and curled around the house; something downstairs, the refrigerator maybe, clicked-clicked-clicked. I forced my mouth open. Forced out words. “What about the time?”

  “Time?”

  “You were gone less than twenty-four hours. The wounds look like they’re almost healed. Or as healed as they ever will be.”

  He shrugged. “You said Ginny can do funny things with time. You said time on the other side is strange. It’s—it’s a blur, a lot of it. Most of it. I remember bits and pieces vivid like pictures, and then long stretches where I just have impressions. The knife. I remember that really clearly. The scratch of the sofa fabric on my cheek. The old potpourri smell in a sachet. Other things. Sharp things. The Lady did weird things with time, too, right? People disappearing and then being found a few days later, but they thought they’d been gone for weeks. And you. People would have noticed a lot earlier if you were always showing up with fresh injuries. She must have done it to you too, to keep her secret as long as she could.”

  I shunted that thought off to the side. “If you did this for me, we’re done. If you did this for me, for some sick reason like you thought you needed to take care of me, we’re done. Is that what this is? Is that why you did it?”

  “That’s some fucking ego.”

  “Did you? Did you do this for me, I mean?”

  “I told you why I did it.” And this time, his voice was cold, his gaze locked onto me. No flick-away tell. “I did it because I’m never going to be powerless again. Not everything is about you, tweaker.”

  “You went to my mom—”

  “I went to her for information. And I got more than I wante
d.”

  “You went to her because you—”

  “Do you want to find those kids?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then quit bitching about stuff you don’t understand and let’s start planning.”

  I threw myself onto the bed. Emmett rode the aftershocks with a small smile, and he reached out long enough to tuck my hair behind my ears. “Still mad at me?”

  I pulled away from his touch. “My plan.”

  “You’re going to need one.”

  “You interrupted my plan.” I explained the series of events of the last few days, and my growing awareness that those moments of pain and release, those moments when my psyche caught fire and burned off the self-hate and doubt and pain, made me visible to Urho. I explained how they drew him to me.

  When I finished, Emmett said, “So you took the next logical step.”

  I nodded.

  “You did what any perfectly sane, rational person would do. Because you’re you, tweaker. And you always do what’s sane and rational.”

  This time, my nod was more hesitant.

  Emmett’s eyes made Bambi eyes at me. “You decided to cut off your arm.”

  “I—” I blew out a breath. “It’s not—well, not exactly. I mean, I was going to start with a finger and . . .”

  Those Bambi eyes were waiting. “A finger.”

  “Um. Yeah. To start with.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “To start with. Oh. Ok. That makes it so much better.”

  “I have to draw him out, Emmett. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know how to find him. Kyle disappeared with Hannah and Tyler, and even if I can track down Kyle, I can’t stop him, so the next best thing is to try to get Urho to face me. At least I have a chance of hurting Urho, maybe even destroying him, if I face him on the other side. But—”