“I think so. We’ll know sometime next year. Long line.”
“Okay, cool. Thanks.” Naree crumpled up the bag and handed it to Tanis through the window.
Tanis eyed it, then her girlfriend. “...thanks?”
“You’re standing right next to a trash barrel.”
“Lazy.”
“Look, I’m like twenty pounds fatter than I was yesterday and I just found out I’m going to have a baby sometime in the next twelve minutes. You can throw my trash away for me.” Naree slurped on her shake, grinning around her straw as she peered out the open window at Tanis, brushing bugs away from her face. “Checkmate, bitch.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Tanis smiled, but she had to force it. How was Naree so calm? Was she putting on a brave face because she thought she had to for Tanis’s sake? Was she actually excited about it, despite the threats? It was hard to say because they hadn’t had time to talk since the shit hit the wall. It’d been doctor to nap to flying out the door because Gorgons were coming and then straight to a witch’s house. Tanis pulled the nozzle from the Caddy and capped the gas tank, walking around to the other side of the car but still near the trunk to keep her smoke away from her best girl. She lit up, filling her lungs with smoke and relishing the familiar burn.
“How are you doing with this?” Tanis asked. “I’m worried about you.”
And me, honestly. What kind of parent am I going to be? Will I even be around to help you with our daughter? Is the kid going to be weird thanks to her lamia blood and you’ll have to figure it out on your own? Who’ll watch out for you? Her? What happens if Lamia comes for you both and I’m gone? Hell, what’ll happen if Lamia comes for you both and I’m alive? There’s only one of me. Bernie’s here, but...
“I might still be in shock, if I’m being perfectly honest,” Naree said. “Like, my brain knows it’s happening, but I’m not sure it’s registered in the feelings factory. I’m numb. I know we’re running from a bunch of angry snake women, but it’s not yet... maybe it’s because I can’t feel the baby yet. Or maybe it’s because I kinda like kids, so the idea of having one isn’t such an awful thing, even if the circumstances are messed up. I’m not unhappy about it, if that helps at all. I’m just not sure I’m happy about it yet, either.”
“That’s fair.” Tanis puffed on her cigarette once more before stubbing it out on the heel of her sneaker. “Are you scared?”
Naree nodded. “Sometimes. Astrid was something else. She... yeah. That was creepy. They can be wrong, right? About stuff? Like what she said about you and death?” She slurped the last of the shake from her cup, eyed it, and then stretched out to offer it through the window. Tanis ignored it just to be contrary, so Naree chucked it at her head. Tanis caught it before it struck her nose and put it in the trash barrel along with her dead cigarette butt.
“They can be. Divination isn’t exact, and she said I was walking a thin line, so there’s hope there. We’ll be smart, or as smart as we can be. I’ll help you as much as I can either way,” Tanis said.
“I know. We’ll figure it out, babe. We will.” Naree sat up straighter in her seat. “Okay, seriously, where’s Bernie with my crackers? Because if I don’t get them soon, I’m going to cut a bitch.”
Tanis looked back. Bernie still had one old timer in front of her and she didn’t look too happy about it. When she noticed she had Tanis’s attention, she pantomimed gagging with her free hand, the red Ritz box tucked into the crook of her elbow.
“She’s got them,” Tanis said. “One guy left.”
She circled around the car and was about to climb in when a gray Nissan with a cardboard-and-plastic-bag-covered rear window pulled up in front of the store. It didn’t park in one space, but stretched across two. Two men climbed from the front seats, a tall black man with long arms and large hands and a short white man with orange hair and a face full of freckles. Both dressed casually in T-shirts and jeans, the black man wearing a cowboy hat, the white man sporting an earful of silver piercings from lobe to upper cartilage. Tanis watched them circle the back of the car and open the trunk. Someone barked at them from the back seat, behind the cardboard window covering. Whoever she was, she wore far too much floral perfume. Imitation rose scent was not kind on a lamia nose.
There was something about the set-up that bothered Tanis. It looked too much like they were gearing up for something—a robbery, a confrontation, a drug deal. Whatever the circumstance, it wasn’t normal, and she reached into the car for her pistol, her back to Naree as she surveyed the newcomers. Bernie was finally at the head of the line, was paying for their things, when the short ginger man broke away from the car to go into the store. He perused an aisle, selected something, and stood behind Bernie.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I misjudged.
Except the man in the cowboy hat walked her way, his long arms swinging. If he’d been in his car and pulling up close for gas, she wouldn’t have been so on edge, but he walked straight at her, no gas can, no nothing.
“Get down, Naree.” Tanis kept her attention fixed on the stranger, but didn’t pull the gun on him yet, in case this was one of those have-you-heard-about-our-Lord-and-Savior-Jesus-Christ speeches, but...
CRASH!
Tanis looked up as the window of the convenience store exploded. Glass rained down, glimmering beneath the sun, and the red-headed man flew out, nearly striking the parked Nissan in his trajectory. He landed in a heap midway between the store and the gas pumps, grunting with the impact. Tanis wanted to check on Bernie, to see what had happened, but the black man took the opportunity to run at her, something silver glinting against his palm. She lifted the gun, aimed it at him, but he crouched and kept coming. She fired the shot. It took him in the side of the leg and sent him sprawling. She kept the pistol aimed at him and he lashed out at her again, his cowboy hat rolling off of his head to land on the pavement. He slashed wildly as he crawled toward her, desperate to make contact with her leg. It made no damned sense—the thing in his hand was tiny, looking like a dinner fork or a miniature back scratcher...
Something’s wrong with it. It smells off. The danger isn’t the weapon, it’s what’s on it.
The same odor had been in the basement of the Gorgon house, though she’d only caught a hint in passing; Cassandra’s rot had overpowered pretty much everything else. But as Tanis had made her escape, on her way through the basement to meet Bernie at the bulkhead door, she’d caught a whiff of a strange, chemical funk. It came from upstairs, specifically the room with Ariadne’s body: a wicked combination of bleach and lemon and cat urine. Bitter, unpleasant. She’d associated it with the Gorgon—not her priests, but the monster herself—and she’d dismissed it at the time as a pheromone scent marker similar to her mother’s.
It’s the green shit on the end of Euryale’s fingers. It’s how she slow-petrified Ariadne. It’s a venom.
Realizing it, seeing how close the man came to her—and, worse, Naree—she shot him through the cheek. There was no dramatic death scene, no twitching or rolling or thrashing. The bullet went clean through, into his brain, and he slumped forward, a small trickle of blood slithering out from beneath his body and traveling, slowly, down, to settle into a crack.
“MOTHERFUCKER!”
Bernie. Tanis cast a wide berth around the body, putting an insurance bullet into the back of the man’s brain before eyeballing the gray car, the crumpled redheaded man on the pavement, and the shattered storefront. A woman in a white robe now sat in the driver’s seat of the Nissan. Perfume girl. She had a shaved head, the home-tattooed circle symbol behind her ear. Tanis lifted the gun right as the woman threw the car into drive, circling it wide and, in the process of veering off for the main drag, running over her own compatriot. He screamed, but Tanis ignored him, shooting at the back of the car in an attempt to take out the back wheels. She was a good shot, excellent really, but a moving car was not as easy to strike as the movies made it appear. The Nissan got away in a screech of burnt rubb
er and dust clouds.
“Son of a bitch cocksucking thundercunt. What’d you do? Eh? What’d you do?”
Oh, shit.
Tanis turned around to see Bernie stalking from the blasted open storefront and through the sea of shattered glass to dive on top of the redhead. He breathed wet and hard, his midsection having taken the brunt of the car’s weight when it passed over him. Bernie didn’t care. She grabbed him by the face with her left hand and bashed his head back against the pavement. It hit hard. He bellowed in agony, so she did it again, up, down, again and again, crunching wetly, until his screams dwindled and a messy puddle formed beneath him.
It was only when she sat up, straddling his limp body, that Tanis noticed her gray right hand.
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
“Stay in the car, stay low. Keep this. If anyone comes near you and it’s not me or Bernie, I don’t give a fuck who they are, blow their heads off,” Tanis instructed Naree, who crouched best as her round body would allow in the footwell of the car. She raised miserable eyes to Tanis, bottom lip quivering. Tanis’s heart constricted in her chest seeing her so scared, but she knew she had to check on Bernie, and so she opened the driver’s side door to lean across the seat, offering Naree the gun grip first. “It’ll be okay. I’m okay. Bernie needs help, alright?”
Naree nodded, holding the gun to her cleavage, and Tanis closed her in before jogging Bernie’s way. Bernie was red-faced and furious, her good hand rubbing over her limp arm. It was dead weight from her shoulder socket, wobbling around whenever Bernie moved. Her knees were to either side of the redhead’s lean hips, and the blood from his pummeling was creeping toward her leggings, threatening to ruin the floral print.
“Bernie. Probably want to move or you’ll get blood on you. More blood on you.”
“Fuck you,” Bernie snapped. She immediately winced and shook her head, her gray hair flying wild around her shoulders. Her face screwed up into a thousand wrinkles as she tilted her head back, dark eyes pointed at the sky, the edges rimmed red and glossy with unshed tears. “Didn’t mean that, doll. My arm hurts. That asshole poked me with something and I lost all control from the shoulder down. Within seconds. It burns like I got fire ants eating at my skin from the inside.”
Tanis winced. “Shit. I’m sorry. Other one tried to do it to me. I think it’s the shit they used on Ariadne to do the slow poison thing.” Tanis eased Bernie’s way, afraid to get too close in case Bernie lashed out, though beating her attacker to death seemed to have taken some of the edge off. Ish. She was still tomato-colored, blotched with hives, but she was breathing slower and she wasn’t cursing up a storm anymore. “It’s probably temporary?”
“Don’t bullshit me, doll. Gorgons don’t do anything temporary.” Bernie looked down at her useless arm, pinching it, poking it. She tried lifting it up and letting it go, and it swung down hard like it was lead. Sometimes, the fingers appeared to spasm, which accompanied a murky, navy blue tinge settling into the very tips around the nails. “Why would they bother with this poison shit? Eh? Why not just shoot us?”
“Don’t know. To neutralize us, maybe. Take us back to the Gorgons. We’ve got the heart. Maybe they thought we’d tell them where the Den was if they poked at us enough. I can’t be sure, but... there’s...”
“Get me out of here,” Bernie said, cutting her off. “Just get me out of here. If I’m going to die, it won’t be in a Quik Mart parking lot because a redneck cop decides he feels sorry for the bad guys that poisoned me. I got some dignity, you know.”
Tanis managed a flat smile. “You’re not going to die. You’ll be fine,” she said, looping her arm around Bernie’s waist and helping her to the car.
“There’s death all around you. Eihwaz. He’s waiting for you.”
Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Tanis.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THEY DIDN’T HAVE two double-bed rooms at the motel, so they got two rooms side by side instead. It was a mom-and-pop-owned and -operated place called the Honeybee, with a yellow brick exterior, floral wallpaper in every room, and a solid market share of dried flowers and Yankee Candles. The furniture was covered with plastic, which Naree on a brighter day would have called “couch condoms,” but after what happened at the gas station, she wasn’t in much of a jokey mood. Neither was Tanis, for that matter; Bernie’s injury was serious, like ‘need a mystical healer’ serious, and even then, magic didn’t fix everything. Gorgon toxin wasn’t something people had handy antidotes for.
Maybe she’ll just lose the arm. Maybe it’ll stop there.
“Just” an arm. “Just.”
Hell.
“Are you hungry?” Tanis whispered in Naree’s ear after check-in.
“Yeah. Yes. Please,” she replied, voice small, her face swollen from crying in the car. Tanis handed her the room key, eyeballing Bernie. A chicken-foot worry mark indented the middle of her forehead, and every few seconds she shuddered, a full body thing that made her back hunch and her eyelids flutter. It was obvious the arm was hurting her, the gray stain up to her wrist now and running into her forearm. Her veins bulged beneath the skin, black instead of blue. Her fingertips had blackened too.
“You two head to the room. I’ll get some food. Bernie, you hungry?”
“I’ll eat,” she said flatly.
The woman behind the counter, a middle-aged Latina with graying hair at her temples, a sensible white linen suit and a nice string of pearls, pointed down the far hallway. “Our restaurant is there, and takeout or room service is available. Our fried chicken is the best in the county. Miss Belle’s an artisan with a fry pan.”
“Nice. Thanks, Miss”—Tanis glanced at her tag—“Miss St. Charles.” She turned back to Naree. “I’ll see you at the room. Lock the door, maybe take a bath while you wait for me, okay? To relax? Text me if you need anything.” Naree nodded and headed down the hall, her pony purse clutched to her chest. Bernie went with her, not looking at Tanis, not saying much of anything. She carried a single bag, too, but hers was full of guns. Big guns, heavy guns. The kind that blew off body parts.
It’d been that kind of day.
It took a half-hour for their dinner to be ready. Tanis used the time to empty the car of hearts and bags and Walmart snacks. Naree had taken her advice and climbed into the tub. When Tanis dumped off the luggage, Naree was sprawled out, submerged, her head back, her eyes closed, with earbuds in her ears. Tanis left her alone to the dulcet screeching of the Misfits to wait outside of the restaurant on a golden bench someone had hand-painted with cartoon bees. It was cute, in a kitschy way.
Well, except for the bee with the huge dick dangling from its undercarriage. That wasn’t so cute. It was, however, funny.
The dinner was well worth the wait, by the smell of it. Tanis headed back to the rooms with three styrofoam containers and a plastic bag full of soda machine Cokes, knocking first on Bernie’s door.
“Yeah, one sec.” Bernie sounded as haggard as she looked. She opened the door and stepped aside to let Tanis in. The room was as floral-ridden as Tanis and Naree’s, the print on the wallpaper the same pink and orange blossoms with big, tropical leaves and flowering vines. The bedspread was fuschia to match, the art on the walls all want-to-be-but-not-quite-Monets. Bernie’s guns were wildly at odds with the decor; she had eight of them laid out on her bed, organized by size, the top one looked like a goddamned bazooka.
“I’d ask how you’re feeling, but I don’t want you to punch me,” Tanis said.
Bernie snorted. “I won’t. Feel too shitty for that. I’m tired and I can’t tell if it’s the awful couple of days, me being older than dirt, or whatever’s in my system. Maybe all three. Who knows.” She settled down at the table. A carton of cigarettes was giving her difficulty—the little pull on the plastic wasn’t easy to tear off if you couldn’t secure the box with a second hand. Tanis opened it for her, pulled out a cigarette and lit it for her, No Smoking sign be damned.
“We sh
ould look at getting you to a healer or—”
“No,” Bernie said. She smiled around the cigarette as Tanis slid her dinner across the table before her and stuck a fork in the top like a flag. “You need to see what you can do about the Gorgons. You got a kid on the way. I’m an old lady who’s doing what old ladies do best: falling apart.”
“Bernie,” Tanis said. “Come on. We at least have to try.”
Bernie puffed on her cigarette. “Could, maybe, but it’s in my bloodstream. I can feel it, Tanis. I can feel it in me. Moving. The burning is creeping. Shit, maybe if we could do something now, it’d matter, but by the time we found someone? Where will it be? If it hits my chest, it’ll hit my heart. My head, my brain. I already feel...” She paused, lips pursing. “Heavier. All over. Like there’s sediment settling into my hand. Like it’s weighed down by concrete.”
Tanis immediately thought back to what she’d seen of Ariadne through the floorboards at the manor house, the weighted coils of her bottom half stuck to the floor. If that was happening to Bernie, she could be right. It could be half over already. Maybe it’d slow creep and turn the arm to stone and it’d fall off, like Ariadne’s breast.
I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do.
“Maybe whoever we talk to can point us in the right direction—”
“Stop, doll.” Bernie shook her head. “Focus on you and Naree now, and that sweet baby. I’ll come along for the ride, as long as I can. If we stumble across somebody to help me along the way, grand, but the priority is that kid, not my old ass. What about a death dealer to help? With the River Styx thing Astrid mentioned?”
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