The Barrow Will Send What it May

by Margaret Killjoy

  “We are going to talk about this,” Doomsday said, kneeling on the floor in front of his chair.

  “Let me be.”

  “If I leave you alone right now, you may never emotionally recover from what’s happened.”

  “I don’t care.” Methodically, he pulled on his mangled hands and worked them back into place. I’d never seen anyone injured like that, and I’d never seen anyone heal themselves like that.

  “When a person is dying, you don’t stop to wait for their permission to intervene medically. You know that. You acted on that. The same is true now, for you.”

  I’d never even imagined this side of Doomsday. I assumed she didn’t have a nurturing bone in her body. Tough love is still love, though.

  “You were right,” Vasilis said. “She was too far gone to heal. We should have soothed her wounds instead of trying to directly reverse the damage. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “That’s true,” Doomsday said, “but it’s immaterial. I could have been wrong. You did what you felt you had to, which is always ethically better than doing nothing.”

  “Then what are we going to talk about?”

  “We’re going to talk about Barrow. Because I don’t know the first thing about emotional support, but I want to get you problem solving instead. I want you to worry about this later. Soon, even. Think of problem solving right now as your emotional tourniquet to stop the bleeding before you can get real support.”

  “What does this mean?” Brynn asked, and showed Vasilis a photo of the Greek carving over the door. Vulture and Thursday, who hadn’t yet seen it, stood behind him to look as well.

  “None that are living may pass.”

  Doomsday nodded. “That’s about what I figured.” She steepled her fingers. “How long have you known that Sebastian Miller was responsible for the resurrection of Isola and Gertrude?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You’re not an idiot.”

  “It was only a guess.”

  “You’re lucky I’m not in a blaming-people mood,” Doomsday said. “Blaming-people moods are the opposite of getting-shit-done moods, and I’m in a getting-shit-done mood.”

  Vasilis nodded weakly. “I had no idea when Isola came back. She wouldn’t talk to us. But when Gertrude came back too, yeah, I suspected.”

  “Was he ever in here, ever checking out books on magic?”

  “All the good stuff is closed to the public. It’s all up here.”

  Thursday nodded.

  “He did check out a book on modern Greek, last winter. Returned it not a week later. I was disappointed, because it would be nice to have people locally I could talk to.”

  “That’s how he knew the right words for the barrier,” Doomsday said.

  “My hand went through the barrier without burning,” I said.

  “Let me see it,” Vasilis said. I showed him. He whispered arcane words, throwing them forcefully from his lungs as though afraid of them, then held his hands above my hands. My left hand, my undamaged hand, glowed red. My right hand was unchanged.

  “This hand . . .” he said. “It doesn’t have a soul.”

  “Cool,” I said. Brynn laughed a little, then got self-conscious. “What does that mean?”

  “Practically? Almost nothing. Enough wounds like that one, and you’ll die, but I don’t think it’ll have any effect on you other than that.”

  “Okay,” Thursday said. “This is easy enough. The barrier won’t let anyone through who’s living. An undead hand doesn’t count as living. I bet Isola and Gertrude don’t either. Get one of them to head on through, find out what happened.”

  “They won’t do it,” I said. “Think about it. They’ve got to know more than they’re telling us already. If they wanted to help more, they’d have offered.”

  “Gertrude’s probably in on it,” Thursday said. “They’re married, after all.”

  “I get resurrecting your dead wife,” I said. “But I wonder, why Isola?”

  “We resurrect Heather,” Vasilis said. “To get through the barrier.”

  I looked at Doomsday, expecting her to shoot him down.

  “Yeah,” Doomsday said, instead. She put her hand to her cheek, scratching in thought. “Yeah, that would work. She’d be able to go through the boundary.”

  “Are you fucking kidding?” Thursday asked.

  “Thing is,” Doomsday said, still thinking it over, “I don’t think we could do it without The Book of Barrow. I only know a few of his minor rituals, not resurrection. Also . . . don’t you have to end a life to bring one back?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Well, you can bring them back temporarily, as long as the ritual is still being cast. But if you don’t give Barrow his due at the end of the ritual . . . right back to death the person goes.”

  “This is really obviously a shit idea,” Thursday said.

  “Why?” Doomsday asked. “Are you telling me that if you could bring Heather back, right now, that you wouldn’t do it?”

  “It’s unnatural,” Thursday said.

  “It’s fucking magic,” Doomsday said. “None of it’s any more or less natural than anything else. I’m not here to just learn about this stuff in the abstract. I’m here to gain and wield power.”

  “Over others?” Thursday asked.

  “No goddammit, not over others. Everything is power. A fucking gun is power. I used one once to end three lives, but it wasn’t because I wanted to wield power over them, it’s that I needed them to stop wielding power over me. There’s a pretty fucking massive power imbalance in this world, and I don’t see why we should be afraid to correct it.”

  Doomsday stood up, bringing her teacup with her, taking a long sip.

  “Are humans supposed to fly? I don’t know. We built airplanes, though. Are we supposed to bring back the dead? I don’t know, but EMTs do it all the time. It’s not a question of whether or not it’s ethical to bring Heather back from the dead. It’s whether or not we can, and whether or not it will further our aims.” She turned to face Vasilis. “If it’s a life for a life, will you do it? Will you die for her?”

  “Yes,” Vasilis answered, but then doubt clouded his features. “I don’t know.”

  “Moot point,” Vulture said. “We don’t have the book. Maybe he’s got it on him, but I bet it’s on the other side of that barrier. I say we send a drone.”

  Doomsday laughed.

  “I wasn’t joking,” Vulture said. “We get a drone to fly down there with a camera.”

  “Where the hell would we get a drone?” Doomsday asked.

  “Oh, like I’m the one with the unrealistic plan? I’m not the one planning human sacrifice and reanimating corpses.”

  “Oh, shit, wait,” Doomsday said.

  “What?” Thursday asked.

  Doomsday went to the pile of books still scattered across the floor next to the table and picked one out, flipping through the pages.

  “Yeah, okay. No resurrection for us,” she said. “‘Barrow: an endless spirit who stands at the gate between the living and the dead, waiting to tear it from its hinges. While capable of granting power over many things, he is most known for his ability to reverse death by imbuing the body of the dead with a piece of his soul. It is believed that if enough of his soul passes from the land of the dead into the land of the living, the gates will open. The distinction between living and dead will be forever destroyed. The living will storm heaven, the dead will storm earth.’”

  “So . . .” Vulture said. “If enough people are resurrected all at once, we get some Bible-style apocalypse?”

  “Basically,” Doomsday said.

  “Cool,” Vulture said.

  “How many resurrections, do you think?” I asked.

  “No idea.”

  I looked to Vasilis. “You knew about this apocalypse thing?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking down at his hands.

  “And you didn’t say anything about it because . . .”

  “I wan
t to bring back Heather.”

  “Holy shit,” Brynn said, “if I really could trade your sorry ass for Heather I’d do it in a second.”

  “Hey, don’t be mean to him!” Vulture protested. “He’s just . . . well . . . he’s had a rough day.”

  “The odds of one more piece of Barrow being the tipping point are so incredibly low,” Vasilis said. “These rituals have been performed for thousands of years and it hasn’t happened yet. We could bring Heather back, and just her, and it would almost certainly be fine.”

  “Almost certainly,” Thursday mumbled.

  I would bring Clay back. I realized that, all of a sudden. I would go to Denver and I would dig up the body of my old best friend and I would bring him back to life. Because the world needed someone like Clay. Because I needed Clay. I don’t know that I would kill to do it. I don’t know if I’d sacrifice myself to do it. But I might risk the apocalypse for him.

  “All of this is one hundred percent beside the point,” Thursday cut in. “We don’t have the book. We can’t resurrect anyone. We probably can’t find a drone in town.”

  Vulture looked sad.

  “We can either try harder to recruit Isola or Gertrude or we can confront Sebastian head-on,” Thursday said. “Those are our options.”

  “Or we follow Sebastian and figure out how he gets into his basement,” I said. “He’s not resurrected, not that we know of. He’s got to get in there somehow.”

  “He can probably bring the barrier up and down at will,” Doomsday said. “And it will last until he’s unconscious or dead.”

  “Like, asleep?” I asked.

  “No, actually unconscious.”

  “How do you summon a barrier like that anyway?” Thursday asked. “Can we do that, and keep ourselves safe?”

  Doomsday looked to Vasilis, implying she didn’t know.

  “It’s not Barrow’s work specifically. A lot of spirits can grant witch’s fire. But it’s still necromancy. The only ritual I know, it involves inflicting immense pain on an unwilling victim.”

  “That’s out, then,” Vulture said.

  Thursday still looked thoughtful.

  “Hey,” Brynn said, from where she stood by the window. “Is there supposed to be a black SUV parked out front of the library? That a normal thing?”

  “No,” Vasilis said. Instead of coming to look, though, he dropped his head in sorrow.

  “I bet it’s the magic feds,” Vulture said.

  “How’d they find us?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” Vulture said. “Probably the tracking devices we all have in our pockets. I keep trying to get you all on burner phones and VPNs, but you never listen.”

  “What do we do?” Vasilis asked. It was hard to understand him with his head buried in his hands.

  “We sit tight,” I said.

  “It just drove off,” Brynn reported.

  “Problem solved forever,” Vulture said.

  “What were the plates?” I asked.

  “California.”

  “Could be tourists,” Vasilis said. He still didn’t look up.

  “Nah, I bet it’s the magic feds,” Vulture said.

  “Doesn’t change anything,” Thursday said. “Just raises the stakes, is all. It’s never good to get caught with a body.”

  “They won’t be after us,” I said. “They’ll be after the book. And fuck, if they get it . . .”

  “I sure am so glad you came to town,” Vasilis said. He tried for biting sarcasm, but halfway through his sentence, his voice broke and he started to cry.

  “There, there,” Vulture said, rubbing our host’s shoulders. “It’s okay.”

  Then Vulture thought for a minute.

  “I mean, not actually okay.”

  Silence reigned in the apartment.

  “But I guess you knew that.”

  * * *

  That night, Vasilis slept in the living room and gave Brynn and me his room. He said he wanted to keep vigil. I could think of a few reasons it was a bad idea to let him, but I wanted to sleep in a bed, so I didn’t say anything.

  Vulture took off to scope out the town. That was also a bad idea—there were magicians and feds about—but I knew my opinion on the matter wouldn’t have any bearing on his actions, so I didn’t say anything.

  Thursday, actually sensible, decided to keep watch from inside the library, rather than standing out front with a gun.

  For a long while, I lay on my back on Vasilis’s bed. Brynn was curled up with her head on my shoulder. Wracking sobs from the living room filled the air, and I focused my attention on Brynn’s breathing.

  “Today fucking sucks,” I said at last.

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “Being demon hunters is garbage.”

  Brynn laughed a little bit at that. But it wasn’t her giggle. It was too soft, too tenuous, to be her real laugh.

  “I don’t say this much,” Brynn said, “and I don’t even know where I mean by it. But . . . I want to go home.”

  “God,” I said. “Me too.”

  I held her tighter.

  The crying in the living room hit a crescendo, and it sounded like Vasilis was trying to vomit his heart out of his chest.

  “How do you think we get ourselves thrown in the same prison, if we go down for this?” I asked.

  “If we’re lucky they’ll send us to prison,” Brynn said. “I’ve got a feeling, though, that this is some X-Files shit and they’ll just quietly make it so you and I were never born.”

  “Who would have figured? Mulder and Scully are the bad guys after all.”

  I thought it over for a while.

  “If we can see them, they’re not after us,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Feds don’t show up looking obviously like feds unless they’re there to scare you, not arrest you.”

  “It’s the mortar shell you don’t hear coming that kills you?” Brynn asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hope there aren’t more mortar shells around.”

  The crying from the living room faded into silence.

  “I like you,” Brynn said. “We don’t get to choose how we die, only how we live, and I like you and I’m glad I got to know you.”

  “I like you too.”

  “You know what Heather and I talked about last night so late?” Brynn asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “You. Well. Me, but me as relates to you. I told her how I felt about you, how I wasn’t sure what to do. She told me . . . I’m going to get the exact words wrong, which is going to drive me fucking crazy because it was one of the last things she ever got to say. She told me that it’s okay to let yourself love someone, but that letting yourself love someone is like letting someone have the keys to your control room, so you can share the responsibility of running yourself with someone else. It’s worth doing, and people will get in there and pull the wrong levers but that’s just the risk you gotta take.”

  “I like that,” I said. “What was with the ouroboros?”

  “New start,” Brynn said. She choked up a little on her words. “She wanted a snake that eats its own tail to remind herself that things go in cycles. That it’s never too late for a new start.”

  There wasn’t anything to say to that.

  There’s always time for a new start, until one day there isn’t.

  Holding one another, trying not to think about the world outside that bedroom, we slowly let sleep come for us.

  FIVE

  “Rise and shine!”

  It was still dark out. Midsummer, that far north . . . if it was still dark out, then whoever the fuck thought it was time to get up was wrong.

  “Isola’s on the move, and Mr. Magic Death Door Man just left his house in his truck.”

  It was Thursday banging on the door, being wrong.

  “Give us a fucking minute.”

  “You’ve got thirty seconds. Meet us at the bookmobile.”

  Another beautiful day in the de
mon hunter business.

  “Is there coffee?” Brynn asked. She was already standing, pulling on her work pants and buckling her belt.

  “No,” Thursday shouted back.

  Brynn was handsome. I knew that already. I mean, I’d had a weird sort of crush on her since I first met her. But it kind of just hit me again, watching her pull the shirt over her muscled torso.

  Maybe I was delirious, thinking about that instead of what needed thinking.

  Maybe I’d rather be delirious.

  * * *

  Thursday drove, conspicuously fast in the predawn light, taking turns far too quickly for a clunky old bookmobile van.

  Doomsday had stayed at the library to keep Vasilis from doing something stupid. Brynn was sitting shotgun, and I was in the back with the books. Shelves lined the walls, with webbing straps holding in the mysteries and romances and sci-fi. Like how you batten things down on a ship. Which was good, even though we totally weren’t going to flip over. Definitely not.

  I wasn’t strapped down myself, though. I was sprawled out on a beanbag, trying and failing to find things to hold onto every time we took a corner while I also tried to keep my wounded shoulder safe. From my vantage, I couldn’t see out the window. All I saw were the brief flashes of streetlights and headlights that fought against all that darkness.

  Not half a minute later, we stopped. The side of the van slid open, and Vulture hopped in. He was panting, holding his side.

  “Graveyard,” he said. “She’s at the graveyard. Take this road another mile and turn right on the first road after you see some tombstones.”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I saw Isola leave her house,” he said. “So I followed.”

  “And that warranted waking us up?”

  “Mr. Miller left his house shortly after,” Vulture said. “Dressed all in camo with a duffel bag.”

  “Okay that warrants waking us up.”

  “Wait,” Brynn said. “They live on opposite ends of town. How’d you see them both?”

  “I set up a camera outside Mr. Miller’s house,” Vulture said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, you just take an old phone and set it up as a surveillance camera. I set it to stream video to my main phone video whenever I asked or it detected motion. Then I went to go watch Isola’s place myself.”