“Cis men,” Brynn said, shaking her head. She dropped her bike on the street and flicked open her baton, walking toward the pair.
“Hey!” I shouted.
If the two exchanged fire, it wouldn’t work out well for either of them. Vasilis didn’t know what he was doing, but he had a semiautomatic pistol and likely a full magazine. Sebastian had probably brought down an animal or two in his day, but a bolt-action rifle ain’t the tool for the job of close combat.
They both turned to look at me.
“Who in God’s name are you people?” Sebastian asked.
“I’m Danielle,” I said. I knew what he meant, but I didn’t feel like answering his implicit question.
“I caught this man trying to break into my place of business. I have every legal right to shoot him if he doesn’t leave the property.”
“You don’t care about law,” I said. “I don’t care about law.”
“I care about what I can get away with. And that includes shooting your face-tattooed freak of a librarian friend.”
“You don’t want that.”
“I don’t even know what I want anymore.”
All the fuss had attracted some onlookers. We were at the very end of town, but a few people had already filtered over. None of them looked particularly friendly toward us. In their shoes, I wouldn’t be either.
“He’s stalling,” Brynn whispered into my ear. “Waiting for a crowd. We should bring him down now.”
“No, come on,” I said back. “I don’t want Vasilis to die. I’m sick of seeing people die. We’ll talk our way through this.”
Sebastian had a small backpack thrown over one shoulder. Vasilis kept eyeing it, and Sebastian kept moving his body, unconsciously, to keep it as far from his assailant as possible.
The book was in there.
It was a hunch. Nothing to gamble a life on.
I approached, raising my hands over my head.
“Stay back,” Sebastian said. His voice was cracked with worry and exhaustion. For all the world, he could have just been someone’s dad. If things had played out the slightest bit differently, he’d just have lived his life reading thrillers and watching TV and hunting and none of this would have happened.
“Just want to talk this through,” I said. “We’re at an impasse. Let’s find a way past it.”
“I don’t see the impasse. I’ve got the upper hand.”
“You attack us, we’ll kill you. We attack you, you kill one of us and likely at least some of us end up in jail, you included.”
“You’ll end up in jail in either scenario,” he said.
“You think people with face tattoos are the kind of people who are afraid of ending up in prison?” I asked. I stepped closer. I approached from his right side, which was convenient because it’s the harder direction for a right-handed shooter to swing a rifle. I wasn’t near enough to reach his gun, even if I lunged, but I was getting close. “You think you can scare women who’ve spent their lives hitchhiking alone?”
“You think a man who raises the dead would be afraid of a bunch of fucking punk kids?”
“No,” Brynn said, standing shoulder to shoulder with me. “You’re right. You’re not afraid of us. You’re a different kind of coward. You’re afraid of being alone. You didn’t resurrect your wife for her. You did it for you.”
“Take one step closer and I’ll shoot at least two of you.”
“See,” I said, “what was I telling you? Impasse.”
I looked over my shoulder. Thursday and Vulture were with the bikes. Thursday had his hand in his hoodie pocket. Vulture had his phone.
A serious crowd was gathering, maybe ten people already with another dozen on their way. They stayed clear of the line of fire between the two armed men, but were getting awfully close to the rest of us. A few of them were open-carrying pistols at their waists.
Interpersonal crime is so much more annoying to commit in open-carry states.
At the back of the crowd, leaning against the glass front of a lawyer’s office, a man with black sunglasses and a black suit sipped coffee, his blond hair in a tight bun. Next to him, a freckled woman with her hair in a sixties bob, dressed identically to the man, ate a donut. They weren’t part of the crowd. They were just watching.
Fucking magic feds. Hipster magic feds.
“You need any help, Mr. Miller?” a young voice shouted.
“These punks broke into my shop!” he answered. “I scared them off, because they’re chickenshit, but they got me outnumbered out here.”
Fuck this.
I took another step forward. Sebastian started to swing the gun around to face me. Long barrel, terrible for close range. I pushed in closer, knocking the barrel aside. Used my bad arm to do it, which I shouldn’t have—the stitched-up wound in my shoulder complained. Got my knife out of my pocket and open in one motion, brought it up. He flinched, hard, closing his eyes, dropping the rifle to point slack at the ground while he covered his throat.
I cut the strap of his backpack, down at the bottom where the strap is thinnest and farthest away from meat, and snatched it. I stomped the barrel of his rifle and disarmed him.
Too many armed strangers around to kill him then and there.
“Fucking run!” Brynn shouted.
We ran.
Vasilis came with us. Thursday, at the front, put his not-insubstantial mass to bear and plowed through our audience before they had time to react.
We got off the main street, first thing, and Vasilis took us through an alley. Brynn overturned a Dumpster in our path to slow down our pursuers.
“Ahead of us!” Thursday shouted.
Four men at the mouth of the alley barred our path.
We grabbed a second Dumpster and pushed it ahead of us on its caster wheels. I pushed with my one arm; the other hurt like hell. I might have ripped the stitches.
A shot rang out, the ping against the steel side of the Dumpster almost as loud as the report itself. Couldn’t have been a long gun, or it would have gone through—and probably into someone I cared about.
All five of us were packed tight behind our moving shield, and I found that strange clarity I’d only ever really known in riots. The world had always, it seemed, been against me and my friends. These, though, were moments of me and my friends against the world. I know that’s bullshit on a bunch of different levels—hell, the people shooting at us right now weren’t even our enemies. I wouldn’t shoot back even if I could.
But our collective power felt like its own magic just then, in the early morning in some small town in Montana. We picked up speed and shouted our wordless power.
We hit the street. As I’d guessed, the men trying to stop us moved out of way of the couple hundred pounds of steel barreling toward them. They were still armed, though, and we were in the open in the street, the library twenty feet away.
Another shot rang out, but it wasn’t from our assailants. Thursday had his gun out. He’d fired at the ground by their feet. They bolted, taking cover behind cars. They’d be returning fire any second.
We sprinted for the library, Thursday covering us, firing shots to keep our attackers behind cover. Doomsday met us with the door open, and I dove through. Bangs everywhere. Loud ones and tinny ones and ones that went poof more than bang and just way too much gunfire everywhere.
Thursday was pinned down behind the Dumpster. Vasilis drew his pistol aloft, but Doomsday snatched it out of his hand and stepped outside, firing calmly. I don’t think she was aiming to keep those guys pinned down. I think she was aiming for the guys themselves.
They ducked. Thursday ran, zigzag. A shot shattered the glass of a window not a meter in front of him, but he got in through the door and Doomsday slammed it shut. The firing stopped.
I fucking hate gunfights.
SEVEN
Nothing says well-established squat like barricades and other defenses ready to deploy. I went through the building with Isola and dropped thick wooden panels over
every window. Upstairs, an argument raged.
“How’re you feeling?” I asked Isola.
“I’d rather be watching TV,” Isola said, as she helped me get a steel bar in place over the front door.
“Yeah.”
“I used to think I wanted a life of adventure. Now I just want to be left alone.”
Yeah.
I felt that to my core sometimes. I’d gambled everything on a life less ordinary. I had no savings. No long-term partner. No home. No roots in any given community. All I had were stories and scars and vivid memories of moments too beautiful or horrid to comprehend.
Sometimes I wish I just had a little bit of peace, instead.
I didn’t say any of that to Isola, though. Because . . . me even pretending to understand where she was coming from? That was bullshit. I didn’t know shit about shit. I’d never been kidnapped and murdered. Everything bad in my life—truly bad—I’d stabbed and fought and kicked my way out of, to varying degrees of success.
“Maybe we’ll get through this,” I said. I didn’t sound optimistic though.
“Maybe,” she said. “I hope so. It’d be cool to find out what happens in Voyager. Find out if they ever get home.”
I looked out through the peephole. Half the town must have been gathered outside. No pitchforks or torches, just handguns and cars. The modern pitchforks and torches, I guess. Which made us . . . what? Frankenstein’s monster? Dracula?
If we were the monster, Frankenstein himself was out there, somewhere, in that crowd. He was out there and he was lying, to everyone, and everyone was going to believe him.
“You can hide in there!” Sebastian shouted, his voice muffled through the thick door. “But we’re patient, we can wait!”
I didn’t want to watch TV and live a simple life. I wanted to kick open that door and walk out into that crowd and stab Sebastian Miller to death. That’s what I’d do in a dream world, a world in which I could do anything. Bucket list be damned.
There wasn’t shit I could do.
“You want to go upstairs and join the argument?” I asked.
“No,” Isola said. “I’ll stay down here, keep an eye on the door. If I’m going to die again, I’d rather be first, and I’d rather be surrounded by books.”
I nodded, then plodded up the stairs into the angry chaos.
* * *
The argument was split into two camps. Thursday and Vasilis wanted to get out onto the roof and try to shoot Sebastian. Brynn, Gertrude, and Vulture wouldn’t let them. Doomsday was sitting cross-legged on the floor, poring through The Book of Barrow. She refused to acknowledge the conversation.
“I don’t see any other option!” Thursday yelled.
“Dying in a standoff with innocent people isn’t an option either,” Vulture said. “Come on. You know that.”
“This is bullshit,” I said, once I got the gist of what was going on. “Quit arguing. It’s just making everything worse.”
“Well, what the hell else am I going to do when these idiots won’t let me at least try something?” Thursday asked.
“Thursday,” I said. I approached him. Adrenaline kicked into my system, almost the same as when I’d approached Sebastian. Angry, armed men. And this was one I usually trusted. “Listen to me. We’re a team, right?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“We’ve made it this far, right? You saved my life in Freedom, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Save it again. By calming down. By not doing something stupid.”
“Fuck,” he grumbled. “The longer we wait, the worse the situation is going to get.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But if there’s one thing I learned while traveling . . . if you’ve got a losing hand, it’s better to shuffle the cards and draw all new ones, even if the new ones might be worse.”
“That’s not how poker works,” he said.
“Yeah, I know but it’s kind of how life works. Everything is shit right now. But in here, for the moment, we’re comparatively safe. We don’t have to act this second. We can just get ready for when things change.”
“When is that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe everyone will get bored. Maybe Sebastian will say something damning and they’ll figure him out. Maybe they’ll all go home tonight. Maybe Doomsday will figure out something good in that book, or maybe one of us will think of something.”
“Or maybe those rednecks will set this place on fire,” Thursday said. “Or maybe the magic feds will show up and kill all of us.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Thursday sighed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you all. I don’t know what to do.”
Doomsday, without standing up from where she was, reached out a comforting hand and held onto his calf.
“If we’re going to hunker down,” she said, “anyone want to make us some tea?”
* * *
I hate being barricaded inside a building with enemies outside. I also, for what it’s worth, hate that this is something I know about myself, because it’s happened more times than I could count. Thanks, property laws, for making my way of life illegal.
There’s never enough air or something once you barricade the doors. There’re always too many people, both inside and outside, when you barricade the doors.
We’d waited half the day already. The sun was high overhead.
When I’m fighting off a panic attack, I go into scientist mode and observe my body. I think to myself: how am I feeling? As specific as possible. How and where exactly is the worry manifesting in my body? How long does each “wave” last and how intense is it on a quantifiable scale, like from one to ten?
This serves two purposes. First, it gives me something to do. Just the act of trying to track my feelings distracts me enough to break out of the worst feedback loops of anxiety. Second, it gives a database of sorts that I can refer back to. Okay, I could say to myself, you’re having one of your existential loneliness panic attacks: expect three major waves with a high water mark of seven on the panic scale, one every three to five minutes, each one lasting roughly a minute before ebbing back down to a level four. Or if it’s a false alarm medical panic attack, that’s good for a single eight followed by a descending succession of waves until it’s over.
Knowing what I’m in for keeps the panic from controlling me utterly. It knocks each panic attack down one to four increments on that scale.
This was the old “barricaded inside a building with cops outside” panic attack. Well, in this particular case, it wasn’t cops, it was armed strangers and an evil magician. Which was better in some ways—they didn’t have the institutional authority to lock me into a cage for the rest of my life—but overall kind of worse because Sebastian was not what could be called a rational actor and it was impossible to tell what he might do with what power he had.
So that was the kind of panic attack I had. The worst kind.
A couple of the waves, they hit up toward nine, maybe ten. A wave of panic that hits nine, it takes me right out of scientist mode and right into that prison called my own head. I sat on the couch closest to door, my head between my knees, and tried to count my breaths. I couldn’t.
I tried to drink my tea. I couldn’t.
It was just all too much. For way too long, it was all too much.
“Can I join you?”
I looked up. Vasilis.
The past few days had wrecked him, and he looked it. The darkness under his eyes had reached the skeletal stage. His hair was a frightened, uncombed mess. His lip quivered under his mustache, a nervous tick.
“Yeah,” I said.
He sat next to me, but not rudely close.
“I can only imagine what you think of me,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mind him opening up to me, though. Any distraction at all was welcome.
“Every excuse I could tell you, it would sound like something Sebastian would say. That’s pa
rt of what’s eating me alive, seeing all the parallels between me and him. I want to say ‘I’ve lost everything!’ because in a lot of ways I have. Heather was my world. I wasn’t hers, but she was mine. I just . . . accepted that dynamic, while we were together. I knew she was going to leave me one day.”
That wasn’t what I thought he’d tell me. I lifted my head to listen better.
“When you all came to town, I thought: ‘This is it. She’ll leave with these people.’ I accepted that. But of course, the reality is so much worse.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I thought, for a moment, about what I was apologizing for. “There’s this thing, when people die, where people always blame themselves. I’m maybe hyperaware of that being what people usually do, because I do the opposite. People die, and I absolve myself of guilt. Clay died, and yeah it was partly because of a demon but I’m sure it was partly because of loneliness. And I know he loved me, non-romantically, and I loved him, non-romantically, but I didn’t keep up with him as well as I could have. I chose solitude. I chose the road over him.”
“We can’t save one another,” Vasilis said.
“I know we can’t. But if I could go back knowing what I know now, I would have stuck with him, and I bet you anything he’d still be alive and I bet you anything I’d be happier than I am right now. So that’s what I’ve avoided thinking about. And with Heather . . . she made her own choices. You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“I wasn’t blaming myself for Heather’s death. I was blaming you and Brynn.”
If I’d been in any other mood, I might have taken that badly or pointed out his botched attempt to save her. Instead, I just nodded.
“Which is bullshit, of course,” Vasilis said.
“Mostly bullshit. But it’s true, if we hadn’t been here, she’d be alive right now. It’s not our fault, but it’s still causation and not correlation. What do you call that?”
“Life,” he said. “Chaos.”
“Yeah.”
“I understand Sebastian. I understand what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling. I know magic. I don’t have a natural aptitude, but I’ve been studying it for years and I can perform most rituals if I’ve got the right book in front of me. Now I’ve got a book, here in my apartment, that could bring Heather back from the dead. I could sacrifice myself to bring her back, but I won’t. And I know why Sebastian grabbed other people instead of doing it himself.”
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