The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  When I had first met Ginny, I had tried to read her with my ability. That time, she had stopped me with her own powers. She might not have been a warrior, as she claimed—although the gun said differently—but she certainly had a good deal of psychic juice. I had grown stronger since then. I hoped strong enough to make a difference.

  I reached for her mind, crossing that infinite distance of blackness between us, and crashed into the golden barrier that I remembered from the time before. It was like hitting a bridge abutment at sixty; the psychic shock left me dizzy, disoriented.

  Too late, I realized Sara was rising, trying to get to her feet, fumbling with her purse. Maybe she wanted to call for help. Maybe she wanted tissues to press against the bloody wound. Maybe she was so deep in shock that she was just going to freshen up her lipstick. Whatever she was doing, she was going to get herself shot.

  I flashed back into my body. Pain broke over me like a wave: my busted nose, the thousand aches and bruises I’d accumulated, and exhaustion. The exhaustion was the worst, the most dangerous, and after I had used my power, it threatened to drag me into unconsciousness.

  “Sara, stay down.”

  But she was on her feet—wavering, and her arm buried up to the elbow in that mammoth bag she called a purse, but on her feet. She was going to get shot. She was going to die because of me.

  My unconscious body had slid down the stairs while I was on the other side, and now I was too far away from Sara to tackle her. By the time I reached her, Ginny would have gotten off a shot. Maybe two. I needed something, some way of distracting Ginny long enough for me to get Sara behind cover again. And then I saw it.

  I slid on my butt down the stairs and caught my heels on the thin black strip of the telephone cable. The phone. That massive plastic beast of a phone. The one with an ivory-colored casing as big as my head. It lay right there on the stairs next to a gouge in the boards where Sara had dropped it. Call the police. Call Austin. Call Jim.

  Those thoughts weren’t even really thoughts. They were like the ghosts of thoughts. They never had time to materialize because I didn’t have time to think. I only had time to see the phone, for my mind to whirr once, and for me to crouch and grab its bulk. It jangled. Maybe the chime had broken when it fell. Maybe someone was calling. I had the sudden urge to laugh.

  Instead, I launched up out of my crouch, the heavy phone held in both hands against my chest. Ginny was looking toward Sara. The pistol in her hand was swinging up at my foster mother. But Ginny must have caught a glimpse of me popping up like some kind of insane jack-in-the-box because the smooth glide of the pistol turned into a kind of stuck-zipper jerk, up and down, a wobble toward me and then a wobble back.

  I shoved out with both hands. I wasn’t a shot-putter by any measure, but I hadn’t been neglecting pecs and triceps and delts on weight days, and that telephone flew like a cannonball. It hit like a cannonball too. My aim was a little off, and the behemoth case of the phone made it arc like a falling star, and the little broken chime chirped madly as it flew through the air, but I still managed to wing Ginny. The phone clipped her arm, knocking her to the side and throwing off her shot. A clump of plaster exploded from the ceiling as her gunshot blasted through the room.

  Then there was another shot, and my brain went into overdrive trying to figure out where the bullet had gone. Only I couldn’t find it—wall, ceiling, stairs, Sara. Sara. Sara had a gun.

  With her blond hair fuzzing out like she’d stuck her tongue to a plasma lamp, Sara straddled two stairs, her body set wide and low in a classic shooter’s stance. The gun must have taken up most of the purse because it looked big enough to blast a mule deer in half. My eyes flashed across the room.

  Ginny sat on the coffee table, blood welling from her side, her dark eyes swimming somewhere even darker, like the bottom of the ocean. She brought up the gun so fast that I didn’t have time to blink. I was staring right at her, right at the gun, right into that dark eye. The darkest. Darker even than hers at the bottom of their black ocean. I was staring into the pistol’s negative eye when she squeezed the trigger, and the muzzle flared like she had thrown fire or lightning at me.

  I dropped, but even as my brain caught up with me, I realized I’d been too late. I’d seen the gun go off, and no matter how fast I moved, I wasn’t faster than a bullet. My hands flew across my chest, my torso, groping, seeking.

  Nothing. Just skin and cloth. My breath whistled in my throat, and my nose blared between my eyes. I could taste bile in my mouth; had I puked again?

  Two more shots rang out. My ears rang from the concussive blasts.

  “All right.”

  That was Emmett’s voice.

  “All right, you’re ok. You can come out.”

  Sara yelped and squeezed off another shot. Something shattered, and I rolled onto my knees and looked over the stair railing. Sara had blown her pink-and-blue china potpourri dish into a million pieces. Dried rose petals and bark shavings and whatever else that crazy woman put in her potpourri confettied the air.

  Emmett stood in the kitchen doorway, blood seeping from a long, narrow slash to his neck, staining his shirt with a rust-colored fringe. He was focusing on an invisible point at the center of the living room, but his eyes flicked once to me, questing, desperate, and I managed to nod. His breath of relief was barely visible. But it was visible. To me, anyway.

  In the air between Ginny and me, three bullets hung suspended in a loose triangle. Ginny slumped on the coffee table, the gun on the floor, its slide locked back; she had emptied the magazine trying to kill us. Now, with one hand pressed over her bloody side, Ginny looked shrunken and old and tired. I’d never seen her that way before. Before, she had always been tall and strong and solid. I didn’t know if I was just seeing the effects of the gunshot or if this was the real Ginny: afraid, desperate, beaten.

  “I shot her.” Sara’s voice broke, and the big woman leaned forward. The avenging angel of static electricity slumped against the stair rail, her hair haloed out around her head, whole body quivering, and then she slid to her knees. The movement sent a draft of air my way, and the mixture of frying oil and smokeless propellant made my stomach lurch. “Oh my God. Vie—I’ve got to call the police. We’ve got to call the police. My phone. My phone is in my purse. It’s in my purse, Vie. I’ll just get it out. I’ll just get it out now and call—and call the police.”

  But she wasn’t reaching for the purse. And her breathing was strained. Labored. The color had leached out of her face except for two hectic strips that ran under her eyes, and then, in a move that was so classic that it hit me like something off a bad sitcom, she clutched at her chest.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, oh, oh.”

  “Vie,” Emmett said.

  “I know.”

  “Oh,” Sara moaned again. “My God. Vie, I think—”

  I reached her, wrested the gun from her stiff fingers, and helped her lie back. “I know. Just try to breathe. Just hold on.”

  Dumping her purse out on the steps, I scanned the spillage of gum wrappers and those small, bewildering cosmetic cases that women always seem to have and a hand-mirror the size of a dinner plate and three packages of tissues and an Alpine Springs water bottle and the knotted mess of her earbuds and, yes, there, her phone. Just an old flip model, thank God, no passcode or security. I dialed 911.

  “I need an ambulance,” somebody shouted. That couldn’t have been my voice. My voice sounded cool, collected, like the ice-water of my thoughts.

  “What is the nature of your—”

  “She’s having a heart attack you dumb fuck. Get an ambulance out here right now.”

  “Sir, I need you to—”

  I rattled off Sara’s address and dropped the phone to my chest. My eyes found Emmett’s. Fallaway eyes. The electric sheen silverfished across those eyes.

  “I’ll take care of her.”

  “I just need to make sure she’s ok.”

  �
��I said I’d take care of her, tweaker.”

  “Your neck—”

  He ran the tips of his fingers at the edge of the wound like he was smoothing out a chord. “That little Crow boy was back. He kept me busy in the yard. When I heard the gunshots, I tried to get back as fast as I could. He’s got some tricks I didn’t expect.”

  “You should see a doctor.”

  “Take care of Sara. I’ll take care of everything else.”

  I nodded. He turned his attention to Ginny, who barely seemed to recognize where she was; her head nodded, and she dipped as though she might topple off the coffee table at any moment.

  “Em?”

  A long sigh. A frustrated sigh. “What, tweaker?”

  “Thank you.”

  The silence lasted a full heartbeat. Against my chest, the 911 operator’s voice buzzed, but that seemed like somebody rattling greenhouse glass—the only sound in a perfect moment.

  He smirked at me over his shoulder. “I’ll find a way for you to pay me back. Now let me get this bitch out of here.”

  While I tried to make Sara more comfortable and handled the operator’s battery of questions, Emmett did something with his ability. I watched the invisible barrier sweep across the carpet, pushing a slight ripple of fabric ahead of it, and then it caught up Ginny so that she floated in the air like a doll pressed into plastic packaging. Her blood fanned out against the barrier, like you might see in those displays of plasticized bodies, and then she drifted out of the house ahead of Emmett. He smirked at me one last time, the fringe of blood on his neck and chest only making it hotter, and blew me a kiss. Then he was gone.

  In the distance, sirens.

  I’D NEVER RIDDEN IN an ambulance with someone before. I mean, not this way. I bounced a lot, and every time my ass came down hard, I wondered at the state of Vehpese’s roads. I tried not to breathe the clinical, disinfectant-laced air, especially because I kept gulping down the French fry oil whiffs that came off Sara’s Bighorn Burger shirt. I recognized the paramedic who rode with me in the back, a hot guy with a faux hawk who patted me on the back a few times but mostly paid attention to Sara.

  I tried holding Sara’s hand, and I was shit at it. Every time we went over a bump, her hand would slip, and I’d clutch at it harder. Then I’d realize how hard I was holding on, and I’d try to relax, and then we’d hit another pothole or speed bump or whatever the hell was happening to these roads—huge, shelling craters was what I imagined, like a World War II battlefield—and my teeth would click together and her hand would slip and I’d be clutching at her like she was drifting off to where I couldn’t catch her again.

  Faux hawk patted me on the back again. “Just try not to break her fingers.”

  He smiled. I didn’t bother smiling back.

  If I held on to her, she wouldn’t die. That was it. Simple as that. And if Sara didn’t die, then—what? I could stay? That sounded plausible, like something I might pencil—very lightly pencil—at the end of a really shitty math problem. But it wasn’t definite. I wouldn’t use ink. Just a real light tracing of the words. I could stay? With Sara? Now that Ginny was exposed, now that I knew Austin—

  Now that I knew what?

  The ambulance hit another of those World War II-size potholes, and my teeth sheared the inside of my cheek, and I tasted blood. What did I know? I knew Ginny was a traitor. I knew that she’d been working with Urho. First, to get me back in my dad’s life, where they’d be able to get to me more easily. Probably with dad’s help, if I were honest about it. I knew that she’d tried to kill Sara and me tonight. I knew that she’d almost succeeded.

  But the rest of it? I thought of the letter. Of those words stamped in my mind. Interviews including foster parent(s), friends, and other significant individuals.

  In the snowy tinge of the ambulance lights, with a dozen of my own shadows falling around me, I had to face the problem: I knew she was a traitor, but I didn’t know that she was a liar. Maybe Sara really had wanted me gone. Maybe my friends had thought it’d be best if I were back with Dad. And that microcassette. My foot pumped, raising the weight of my backpack. I had collected it from the basement before leaving with the paramedics, and now it rested on my sneakers as we drove. That microcassette was just inches away, clicked into the player, ready to go. I wanted it in my hand. I wanted to unspool the silky magnetic tape and weave a noose with it. It would be cool against my throat. That recording wasn’t faked. It might have been clipped. It might have been pilfered. But it wasn’t faked. Austin had said those words.

  It’s just, sometimes I think it’d be so much easier if he weren’t here.

  Sara’s hand was slipping again, and I clutched at her, but I wasn’t even sure what I was holding on to anymore.

  “She’ll be all right,” faux hawk said with another of those smiles. He must have gotten a twelve-pack of them cheap. He patted me on the back, and I visualized what his wrist would look like with the hand torn off. And then I smiled back.

  “There you go,” he said.

  He goddamn near tousled my hair.

  Later parts of that night were a blur: jogging alongside the gurney as the paramedics wheeled Sara into the hospital, and finding myself diverted by a barricade of nurses and orderlies, who shunted me off into a waiting room full of artificial succulents and an abandoned cosmetics mirror, the kind with an oval light ringing the glass, the kind that magnified your face so that the pores were the size of Vehpese potholes.

  It took me a few minutes. The walls were lemon curd, with a raspberry border that was probably meant to be cheery. Instead, it looked a little too much like blood; bad taste, I thought, for a hospital to decorate with blood. And then other thoughts started filtering in. Hospital. What hospital? The county hospital had collapsed. Kyle Stark-Taylor had knocked it down like a kid kicking over a sandcastle.

  So where the hell was I?

  From the waiting room’s door, I scanned the hallway. After the big bustle when Sara and I had arrived, everything had calmed down, and now the hall was empty aside from a middle-aged blond tech with dander on his scrubs pushing an old Native American man in a wheelchair.

  The reservation? I thought of those potholes, and the blackness of the Wyoming wind and the high prairie rushing past the ambulance. No. Not the reservation. That was on the other side of the mountains, and it would have been faster and easier to go west, forty minutes to Lovell. A minute later, my eyes found it stamped on a list of waiting room rules, below gems like CMT and MTV stations must be played QUIETLY!!! And Snakes and Camels Spit—-LADIES and GENTLEMEN Do NOT!, there it was, the name: Western Bighorn Hospital.

  I went back to one of the vinyl seats and turned on the mirror’s halo light. My nose looked like shit. Blue-black and crusted with blood, it filled the mirror. When I shifted, seeing my face in magnified patches, I realized the nose was the worst, but everything else looked pretty bad too. I’d fucked Emmett Bradley like this, looking about as bad as I’d ever looked in my life. All that build-up. All the fantasies I’d squashed about what that first time should have been like: I’d show up in a tux, with flowers—or chocolates, maybe he would have liked chocolates—and I’d be driving a Lambo, something that would have knocked his socks off, or no, maybe I’d hire a limo to take us around. And we’d go somewhere fancy. Maybe I’d rent out a whole restaurant like Clarity, the new place on the riverwalk. Kaden had bragged about dropping two hundred dollars on dinner at Clarity. I’d clear out the whole place, just the two of us, sitting across from each other in a copper shell of candlelight.

  I winced as I probed my broken nose, and then I snorted, and that hurt like doubled-up hell. Tux, limo, Clarity. Bullshit. That was a nice kind of fantasy, the kind I had to grind under my heel and squeegee away when I was dating Austin. But Austin and I were done; he had said so. And when it had finally happened with Emmett—my whole face was screwing up tight, my nose screaming, my eyes stinging—it hadn’t been a tux and a limo and Clar
ity. It hadn’t been a soap-bubble glow of candlelight holding us together when Em would finally look up and see me, the real me, and realize I was somebody worth dating.

  Instead it had been blood. And blades. And scars. And hot, desperate fucking. At least, I told the magnified, watery eye in the mirror, it had been hot.

  “They said you looked like shit.”

  In the doorway, a dark-haired woman with Crow features studied me. She wore a white doctor’s coat over a pearl snap shirt and blue jeans. Her boots looked like they’d seen a lot of hard places, but her eyes made me relax. Those eyes looked like she laughed a lot—at all the right things, and at all the right times.

  “I feel like shit.”

  “Come with me, and we’ll see what we can do about that.”

  I snapped off the mirror’s light, and my nose looked even worse.

  “Are you feral? You don’t come when you’re called?”

  “I’m not a dog.”

  “You look like something the dog dragged in. Come on. Your mom is going to be fine, and I think she’d be happier seeing you cleaned up than looking like you fell down a mineshaft ass-first.”

  “She’s not—”

  She’s not my mom. That’s what I’d been about to say.

  “What?”

  “She’s not going to die?”

  “Not tonight. Why don’t you come with me? You look like shit, and you smell like shit. What have you been doing?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she took my arm and led me to an exam room, where the paper crinkled under my butt as I squirmed on the table, and I caught a whiff of myself—blood and sex and sweat and exhaustion—in contrast to the chrome-polish air of the hospital. She was right. I did smell like shit.

  She set my nose. She wiped my face. She cleaned, with a strong but surprisingly gentle touch, the worst of the scrapes and the cuts.

  “I think you’re all done. You want to see your mom?”