by Gregory Ashe
Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
“Let Tyler go,” I said. “Hannah too. Help them be normal again. As normal as they can be, after everything you’ve done to them. And then I’ll help Urho cross over. I’ll bring him to this side.”
Lady Buckhart’s pursed lips tightened. She wasn’t wearing makeup, but red stained the thousands of fine lines webbing her mouth. Not lipstick, my brain said. That’s not lipstick. She stepped around my dad, her bony fingers feathering Tyler’s hair. The boy’s huge, hateful eyes didn’t register the touch. When she spoke, her voice was thoughtful.
“There are many paths, and the young must learn which one to follow. When a hound hunts, he must scent the quarry’s trail. Drag a smoked cod across the fox’s path, and the hound will go astray. Tie a silk scarf around a boy’s eyes, and he will lose his way.”
“You can make him better. Ginny helped you before. If you need her help again, she’ll do it. She’ll make sure you can fix him.”
“Fix him?” The Lady’s chin came up; those brick-orange eyes hardened. “Why should I fix him? He is perfect. His sister, on the other hand, has been difficult. She has been willful. She has been obstinate, ungrateful, proud. A lying, deceitful, mischievous child. She will do what she must—she can’t help herself—but afterward, she must be punished.”
If I hadn’t been watching Tyler’s face so closely, if I hadn’t been studying the hard, dark mirrors of his eyes for anything resembling the boy I had known, I would have missed it: a ripple like a minnow about to break still waters. And then gone.
Hope sparked inside me, and I meticulously ground out the glimmer. I kept my breathing even. Careful, I thought. Careful. Not yet, not quite yet, but soon.
“You,” the Lady said, her skirt whispering against the ground as she crossed the room toward me. Her fingers stung my cheek with cold; I waited for skin to blister and crack with frostbite. “You will be delicious. I will begin the dust feast with you.” Then, whirling, she pointed at Tyler. “Let us begin.”
Somewhere out in the valley, under the thick snowfall and the clouds and the hidden stars, somewhere out in that whirlwind of fire and ice and darkness, someone screamed, and the scream went on and on.
The Lady smiled.
I took a step forward. She was frail and old. I was young and strong. I didn’t need to be psychic to break her. I just needed to get a good grip.
As I grabbed at her hair, she spun and clutched my throat, shook me, shook me again. My head rattled so hard on my neck that, for a moment, I thought my spine had snapped. My arms and legs waved like a rag doll’s. My feet slapped the floor in a horrible dance. She was so strong. Just like mom. Too strong, and I hadn’t even considered it.
The Lady tossed me.
When I hit the ground, I hit so hard that I skipped, and I flew another two feet before I crashed into a roll. The roll brought me up hard against the hearth, where my head cracked against river stones and my blood mixed something like iron into the scent of burning pine and smoke and lavender.
I tried to roll onto my knees. My body, however, didn’t respond. I was too tired. I hurt too much. I had tried and I had failed, and every horrible thought drifted over me, burying me in black snow, each icy granule sucking the heat and life from me. I had never been strong enough. I had never been smart enough. I couldn’t save the people I loved. I couldn’t save the people who deserved to be saved. I couldn’t even save myself, and I was shit, and I was worse than shit, and I deserved everything that had happened to me. All of it. I had deserved it because if you laid the iron and the vacuum cleaner cord and the cigarettes and all the rest of it, if you laid all of that on one side of the cosmic scale, I still came up short. For a lot of reasons. But mostly because of this night. Another scream, a longer scream, came from the valley and blew through the cabin like a frozen wind. This epic failure.
Get up, I told myself.
Get up.
You can either die like the broken fuck you are, or you can get up.
Tyler had called me Thor.
Hannah had held my hand.
Austin had loved me against every good reason.
Emmett had dragged a razor up the inside of his arm.
Somehow, I flopped onto my stomach.
Somehow, I got my knees under me.
The scene playing out in front of me froze me for a moment. Tyler stood on one side of the room. On the opposite, Hannah’s spirit perched above her body. A psychic gale ripped through the other side: the hypersaturated colors bled and swirled and streamed toward Tyler. I could feel the tremendous energy he was exerting, dragging the other side toward himself. From her place on the other side, Hannah was pushing. Between them, the glass-edged outline of the War Chief slipped and bled toward Tyler.
In a matter of moments, he would pass through the boy and to this side of reality, and then he would need a host, and—
The pistol touched the gash that the river stone hearth had opened in my head, and I hissed with pain and tried to jerk away. The gun followed.
“Stay nice and still,” my dad said. His voice was flat. Flat like river stones. Flat like the small gray disc that once he had cupped my hand around. Flat like that perfect oval when he had gripped my wrist and guided me into the throw, and it had snicked through the air and then splish-splish-splish dimpled the water. “It’ll be over soon, and they told me you won’t feel anything.”
That day skipping stones had been one day. One summer day, just a blip, nothing special, really, except I had felt loved. And I had loved him. That was what hurt so much, just as it had with Mom, just as it had with Gage. Love dug its roots deep, and you couldn’t rip it out or burn it out or cut it out. All you could do was stop feeding it and hope it died, and it almost never did. That was the worst part: that I had loved Dad, that I had loved Mom, that I had loved Gage long after they had hurt me. That I still loved them, in fact. That I might always love them in some weird, twisted, aching way that made me feel foolish and weak and desperate and so very, very stupid.
“I love you.”
Dad ripped down with the pistol, the muzzle gouging my scalp and forcing my head down. My jaw clicked shut. Blood slicked my teeth.
“Shut up.”
“I do.” Twisting, trying to find a way around the unrelenting pressure of the gun, I said it again, “I love you.”
“Shut up.”
This time, I managed to slide until the muzzle skipped past my ear, and I turned, the iron sight biting into my neck deep enough that warmth trickled down my collarbone, formed a hot bead in the hollow of my throat.
“It’s fucked up,” I said. “I wish I didn’t. But it doesn’t work that way.” I swallowed, closed my eyes. I thought of River. I thought of the monster letting himself out of the closet. In my mind—in my heart—I reached out for that closet door and threw it open. Nothing. No monster. And then I breathed out and looked up. “You’re my dad.”
Something unfurled inside my mind: the curling edges of a scroll, the wings of a great bird, the roots of an aspen running under loam.
The gun cracked against my face low, the sight slicing along my cheekbone, and then struck again. The blows exploded in white, powdery bursts. Like snow, I thought, clutching at the hearth to keep from falling. Like somebody kicking the best powder after a fresh fall. And then the pain avalanched, and I bent and tightened my throat to keep from puking.
“You can say whatever you want, kid.” His eyes crystallized above me, the hard blue crust of a mountaintop in summer. “This is the way it’s got to be.”
“I know.” Those roots shimmied under loose soil, spreading, reaching out into the darkness.
“You try anything funny, and I’ll shoot you. You know me. You know I wouldn’t fuck around about something like that, even if you are mine.”
“I know.” The roots spread and tangled and spread again. They glowed like aspen leaves in October sunlight. They were part of me shooting off into the b
lack spaces of my mind. Maybe they were my brain, I thought, feeling my whole face snap into a grin. Maybe they were my brain leaking out my ears.
“Jesus. Jesus Christ, will you turn the fuck around? I’m just doing what I’ve got to do. That’s all. It’s not personal.”
And it wasn’t personal. Not at all. I felt a crazy smile skid across my lips and then burn rubber out into space. “I know. But I do love you.”
The roots in my mind twisted and spread again, and this time, they touched water. Water rich with minerals, cold and clear and deep. Water like moonlight and silver and glass. Only it wasn’t water. It was power. It was love. It was my friends. The people who cared about me, even if this man didn’t. The people who made me more than I would have been otherwise. Austin, a blast furnace of red-hot steel. Emmett, the ultraviolet stitching between the stars. They balanced inside my head. They turned me into fire.
Then, “You do what you’ve got to do. So will I.”
And then I slipped out of my body. Completely. Totally. The way I had left my body at Emmett’s and reached the other side. With the sudden rush of power, it was easy, and it came over me the same way as before: the sudden numbness, an anesthetized relief at the absence of everything: pain and hate and tears and hope and love. My physical body crumpled, my head sliding down my dad’s leg until I sprawled on the floor. I turned my back on him and on my body. I heard the gunshot behind me, and I steadied myself with a breath. Well, there it was. He had shot me. I couldn’t feel it, thank God, not this deep into the other side. But I knew what he’d done. I’d known he would do it before I made my decision. If I survived the nightmare in front of me, I would get back into my body just in time to bleed out.
It didn’t matter now. I focused on the scene ahead of me. This deep into the other side, I could see Urho—not just the shadow, not just the glass-edged monster that had ripped open my neck. The man. He was short, his paunch spilling over rawhide chaps, and his hair fell in long braids down his back. He looked old. His eyes, when he saw me, were like two chips of asphalt that a dump truck had kicked up—a dirty, greasy black that had looked cheap from the first minute.
“You’re too late.”
He was sliding across the floor, the hypersaturated colors of the other side streaming past him as Hannah used her ability to push him out of the other side and Tyler dragged him onto the physical plane. Urho wasn’t a visitor here; he wasn’t like me, his psychic self projected from a physical body. This was all that was left of Urho, and he was rooted here even more deeply than Hannah. Hannah’s spirit they had pinned here by damaging her chakras; Urho was here because he was dead. And what they needed to bring him back, to carry him through the veil between worlds, was a psychic. A true psychic. I could have helped him across because I could touch both sides. Lacking my ability, they had improvised two psychic engines to pump him across: two kids. Two innocents who had never hurt anyone.
“You’re going to hell,” I said to Urho.
He laughed, and his paunch jiggled, and his braids danced a tarantula dance across his back.
“And I’m going to send you there.”
“You had your chance. And now that time is gone. We will keep you. You will be the first in the dust feast. These children will follow you in the feast. And the feast will never end.”
He slid another few inches. Around him, reality shredded and tore, the tatters snapping like pennants in a strong wind as the combined force from Tyler and Hannah drilled between planes of existence.
She is hungry. River’s words echoed in my mind. A true psychic. She is hungry.
“The dust feast,” I said.
“You will know pain like you’ve never imagined.” Urho laughed again. His belly bounced, creasing the rawhide chaps. “Each scrap of your mind, each quivering slice of flesh, each drop of blood will become flesh of her flesh.”
She is hungry.
A true psychic.
I took another step toward the punctured veil between worlds. Urho’s eyes followed me with open amusement; he bared his teeth in what might have been a smile. He was missing an eye tooth. He looked like he’d never owned a toothbrush.
She is hungry.
A true psychic.
I looked past the ragged edges of existence. I saw the Lady, her hands still primly at her waist, the shrunken creature inside her howling and scratching and clawing. Urho slid another inch. From between that torn partition, a howling noise rose—the shriek of the walls between worlds going under the psychic equivalent of an augur.
She is hungry.
A true psychic.
Like me.
I grabbed Urho’s braids before he knew what was happening and lunged. He shouted, stumbling, as I swaddled him in my power. He slipped free of the psychic magnetism that Hannah and Tyler were driving, lurching after me, his hands going to his head, his eyes wide with shock. I dragged him with me. I was here, fully here, in a way that I had only been once before, and I was in the fullness of my strength, channeling a river of molten power.
Ginny was right. I couldn’t attack with this power. I couldn’t tear Urho to shreds the way I had pulled Luke into ribbons or sent Krystal drifting away in motes of cinder and ash.
Love was about navigating the black spaces of the universe. Love was a lighthouse at the edge of the world. Love—a smile crossed my face as I remembered months before, how simple it had been, how hard, trying to understand my power.
Love was a bridge.
And so I built a bridge across two planes of reality, and I tossed Urho across it. For a moment, the shock on his face waxed into indignation; I don’t know if anyone had ever pitched Urho like a sack of dirty socks before. And then awareness swept over him, and victory sparked in his face. I watched as his spirit raced across the span of power I had extended through the veil between worlds. I watched the glow of triumph go stellar in Urho’s face. I watched, and I saw the moment of horror when he realized what I’d done.
Urho did need a vessel. He needed a body for his spirit. But he sure as hell didn’t want the one I gave him.
As realization burned out Urho’s expression from the inside, he turned, trying to scramble back along the span of power I had extended, trying to drag himself back into the other side. But the bridge was long and steep and it was mine, and so I shunted him along its length, letting it crumble behind him, leaving no way back.
And his spirit lanced straight into the husk of the Lady’s body. For a moment, his spirit swelled, smoked up, filling the nooks and crannies of the Lady’s physical form, seeking an escape. The shriveled, nightmare abomination that lived inside the Lady twisted. It writhed. Its sallow, hollow cheeks quivered.
And then, shrieking with rage and helplessness, it launched itself at Urho’s spirit and began to eat.
It began to feast.
The screams reverberated across the other side.
I watched as Urho first tried to resist, tried to restrain the Lady’s spirit. But River was right: she was hungry. Hungry and rabid, and Urho’s spirit might have been like old, tough jerky, but it was still food, and she ripped into him like he was a turkey dinner. I felt a certain vicious satisfaction as I listened to their shared screams because I knew that the Lady didn’t want this any more than Urho did, but she couldn’t help herself. She’d been saving up for her fucking dust feast. She should have paced herself. Maybe had a snack.
The current of power rushing through me was still strong, but I could tell that I was starting to flag. I turned my attention to Hannah. The psychic floodgates that she and Tyler had opened were now closed; Tyler sat on the floor, his face fixed in a kind of impersonal hatred that looked like it was locked into muscle memory. Hannah was crying, her head on her knees. Sobbing.
“Come on,” I said, taking her hand and squeezing it.
“I didn’t want to. I didn’t, Vie. I didn’t want to, but they did something to me, and then they did something else, and part of me isn’t working
. Part of my head, I mean. I can’t—” She started crying again.
“Come on. Let’s get you home.”
I helped her to her feet and led her to the sofa where her body lay stretched out on the cushions. The vortex of power in me was slowing. The well of moonlight where I dipped my hand was shallow; soon, my fingers would scrape gravel at the bottom. I tried to stretch another bridge between worlds, and I couldn’t.
“River.”
He was there, hands in the pockets of his denim jacket, before I’d finished saying his name. “That was pretty good work.”
“We’re blood.”
He nodded. “We’re brothers.”
Steering Hannah’s spirit by the shoulder, I set her between us. “You push. I’ll pull. And River?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Gently.”
I didn’t want to go back to my body. I didn’t want to die. But the numbness of this place worked on my heart like ketamine. It hadn’t bothered me to rip every stitch out of Krystal’s soul as I dragged her to the other side. It hadn’t bothered me to imprison Urho inside the Lady’s body and watch as the two souls savaged each other to pieces. It had amused me. Even now, I couldn’t feel any horror at it, only a detached interest and a lingering sense of satisfaction.
And that was the danger. I might be able to stay. My body would die, and I might be able to keep a version of myself alive here. I would have River for company. And Samantha, if she was still around. And I could find Emmett in his dreams. And I could watch the world spin by without me.
But a part of me knew that Urho had made the same decision. He had stayed on the other side, and he had become more of a monster in death than he had been in life. I had already faced all the monsters I needed to. I didn’t care for the idea of becoming another one. River’s words came back again: The monster walks himself out of the closet, flips the lights on his own goddamn self.
I’d wanted to die for a long time. That black hole in my head had eaten up so much of my life. It had ruined every good thing in my life. Even Austin. Especially Austin. And now, with death riding toward my front door, I finally wanted to live.