Master of Blood and Bone

by Craig Saunders

  “Good,” said Holland, thinking maybe French wasn’t such a twat after all.

  14

  Holland ate breakfast while he told his tale. He was good at eating. Barely missed a beat.

  Ank listened to everything while he spoke and ate. She listened just like he taught her—to what he said, what he didn’t say. His tone, his language, but listening and communication was about seeing, too. So she watched, as well as listened.

  Finally, she took her eyes from Holland and glanced at the book on the table. She touched it, lightly, with her fingernail. Her other hand toyed with her nose ring.

  She pushed the book toward Holland.

  I fucked up. I shouldn’t have read it.

  What the hell did he leave it on the fucking table for?

  Holland took the last bite of his breakfast, then with a handkerchief from his right jacket pocket, wiped his thick lips. Put the handkerchief back in there, along with the book.

  “How much did you read?” he asked.

  “Not all,” she said. “Enough.”

  “Enough?”

  “Enough to…feel it.” She didn’t trust herself to say more.

  Holland nodded, and Ank saw that he understood.

  “It’s a dark work, Holland,” she said. He nodded.

  “It is. Dangerous, too.”

  “I get that. The subject matter…but it’s not old…it’s not…I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “You’d think something like this should be ancient. Lost. Not new.”

  “Not old?”

  “It’s just a notebook.”

  Holland looked at Ank, peered into his pocket, looked at the book. His face was unreadable. He felt bad, for some reason, stuffing the book in along with his grubby handkerchief.

  He took it out and put it in his breast pocket instead.

  Worried about hurting the book’s feelings?

  Shut up, he told himself. He pulled out his lighter to cover his indecision.

  “He found this somewhere,” said Holland after a beat. “It’s not the dead guy’s book. I’m sure of it.”

  “Whose is it, then? The killer?”

  “I think so,” said Holland, taking out a cigarette. “Maybe…Jane knows.”

  Ank rose and took an ashtray from under the sink, which she emptied and washed each night. She replaced Holland’s empty plate with the ashtray and sat down again, just as the detective flicked his ash.

  Great, she thought, keeping her face still, too. Jane.

  “You think the dead guy stole it, hid it?”

  “Yep. The killer came for it, couldn’t find it, or didn’t have time, for some reason.”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  Holland nodded, baleful.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “Yep,” said Holland. He didn’t correct her language, because she was seventeen, and between the two of them, a little swearing was the least of their worries.

  “Does he know you’ve got it?”

  “The killer?”

  “Yeah, the killer,” said Ank.

  “I think…I wouldn’t be surprised if he knows…”

  “Holland…”

  “Yep. I know.”

  Ank knew, too. Of course the killer knew Holland had the book. Of course he did. Because the man who wrote the book wasn’t like a man. He was a conjurer, a magician, a bona fide fucking wizard.

  And the book?

  The book was his lore, his catalogue, his thoughts and his story, all in one. But like the man was more than a man, the book, too, was something more.

  Not just a story, not just a book.

  The book was his prison.

  Was, she thought, was. Past tense, because Holland had read the damn thing and let him out. Let him out somewhere. Maybe at the edge of a car park, last night, when he’d finished the thing. Not all the way. Holland hadn’t opened the door. He’d just left the key in the lock.

  Ank had opened the fucking door.

  “The book was complete when you read it, wasn’t it?” she asked Holland.

  Holland nodded, lips tight. “And unfinished when you read it, right?” he asked in return.

  She nodded, colder than she’d ever been in her life.

  “You…unlocked it? You did, didn’t you?”

  Holland pushed himself upright with the aid of the table and his stick.

  “I think I did. Yes. I think I did.”

  15

  Holland kissed his daughter on the cheek. He might be a killer, but he loved her. Together, they were something better than themselves.

  She felt better when he was around. Like a real person, like a part of a family.

  But it was a lie. All a lie.

  And still, as he readied to leave yet again, they lied. We’re a normal family, the kiss said.

  But they weren’t. He was a killer of men and monsters.

  She was…Ank.

  And she was worried…more than worried. She was freezing, despite the day’s early warmth. The sun was doing a pretty decent job of cresting that hill in the sky, on toward the other side, down to night.

  I’m not going to see it go down, she thought.

  She shuddered. She desperately wanted to tell Holland, but she couldn’t. Her words froze in her mouth.

  “I’ll be back tonight. You’ve got something you should be doing, I believe?”

  It wasn’t magic or intuition that froze her words. It was her will, hers alone.

  I’m not a child anymore, she thought. About time she started figuring out shit for herself.

  “Holland—” she began, but he interrupted.

  “I know…it’s boring. Just do it.”

  She sighed, he kissed her cheek again, and then went about the business of getting into his car.

  Ank watched him go, closed the door, and leaned her head against the cool wood.

  “I’ve got this,” she said, staring down at her bare, freezing feet, and the black worms that were eating their way up her flesh and had been since she’d read the book…

  16

  When she’d gone back inside, Holland took out his mobile and used voice recognition to make a call.

  A woman answered. “Jane wants to know if you’re on it?” said the woman with no preamble.

  “I guess I am,” said Holland, just as shortly. He might not be a cop anymore, but he still answered to someone. He might not like it, but the work was all he knew, all he could do. Jane’s pet ex-cop. It wasn’t perfect, but without Jane what would he be?

  A drifter…some kind of supernatural serial killer? Dormant, redundant? A man with remarkable talents who did nothing all day but sit on his ass, watching his daughter grow into herself?

  Couldn’t do it. Jane was better than none, and everyone, he figured, answers to someone. Eventually.

  “Call when you’ve got something,” said the woman on the phone.

  Holland clicked off but didn’t reply. The woman on the end of the phone wasn’t interested in being his buddy. She didn’t care if he had guts ache, how his breakfast was, what the weather was like in his part of the world.

  He was fairly sure the woman on the end of the phone wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire.

  He sighed, a big cathartic sound, and started the engine so he could go check on something he knew anyway, because Holland was thorough.

  He was thorough, and he was still alive because of it.

  17

  Holland took a quick look up and down the street that had been so aptly named, then let himself into the murder scene with the key he’d taken from PC French the night before.

  He went straight up the stairs, not taking much notice of the dried-up mess on the walls and floor in the living room. In the bedroom, where the PC had been, he stopped and thought for a second.

  Nothing felt different.

  But it is, his mind told him. Someone’s been here.

  He didn’t bother looking at the floor, because that would have been no good. What he was searching fo
r needed a bit of height. It didn’t take him long, because he knew already what he was looking for.

  There, on the ceiling, was a patch of broken coving.

  It had been torn away. Not with finesse, but with a kind of careless abandon…because the person who had installed the tiny camera up there, in the coving, had known that the time for discovery was done…or because they had no fear of discovery in the first place?

  When?

  Might be relevant, thought Holland. Might be. But not right now. It was enough.

  The coving was the heavy kind—plaster. Maybe it’d been hit with something, maybe torn by strong hands.

  Holland shifted on his feet and took his cigarettes from his pocket. He pulled one loose from the pack, took his matches and flicked it on the rough side of the pack. Lit his cigarette and took a long pull while he looked up at that torn coving.

  Someone had come back to the scene, after. Which was impressive, because the police and their entourage would have been all over it, and since the murder, the neighbors’ curtains would have been twitching like mad.

  Maybe he’d come back today?

  Maybe he’s still watching? In a car, a van…up the street?

  “Maybe,” said Holland to himself, and shrugged. Either way, he figured the person who’d planted the tiny camera, watching the murder victim hide the book, knew for sure that Holland had it. Which meant that the person who’d taken the surveillance camera that had caught Holland as he’d pocketed the book was either supernatural, or just a sneaky fucker.

  Holland had better than a suspicion that the killer wasn’t just sneaky.

  Jane had called him, put him on this gig. If Jane was involved, then it wasn’t one thing, but the other.

  And even more so, it begged yet another question…

  Where was the murdered man’s soul?

  18

  Ank was in school, way up on the coast, away from Holland.

  She didn’t do schooling, not like normal children. He was her teacher. Holland. The only teacher she’d ever had. He showed her plenty. Geography, calligraphy, the dead languages. Anatomy and astronomy, tarot. Fishing. He liked fishing. Guns, too. People thought guns were complicated. They weren’t. The science was simple and elegant, and the theory, by and large, boiled down to pointing the business end away from yourself and at the thing you wanted to shoot.

  Fishing was more complicated than guns.

  Wards, sigils, runes. These were the kinds of things he showed her. How to draw a doorway in the sand. But he wasn’t just business. He was life.

  Holland was, in a strange way, good at life. He wasn’t just death. Wasn’t just killing.

  He taught her how to cook Japanese food and Mexican food. Yes, he taught her how to poison a person with food alone, but they weren’t just killers of people.

  No.

  Mythology, demonology, cryptozoology.

  Needlework, mathematics, how not to throw like a girl. She could ride a motorbike and drive a car, a bus, a forklift.

  There was plenty she couldn’t do. She knew that. She couldn’t, still, do what he could. She couldn’t see the dead easy like he could, couldn’t talk to them.

  She had to use tricks. Wards, Ouija, runes.

  Like a bloody witch.

  “I am a bloody witch,” she said to the empty house.

  But even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true.

  She wasn’t even close.

  She knew well enough what she was. She hated it since she’d known, fought it. Maybe that’s why she hated her name and consistently failed in this one little task he set her.

  She failed because she didn’t want to succeed.

  “Deep, Ank,” she said to herself, looming over the morbid tableau before her.

  She stared at the work he set out across the table in the garage. The garage was dim, the work dull and repetitive.

  The cat on the table was dead. Now, in the height of summer, the dead cat hummed. Hummed with an awful odor that was part decomposition and part earth, the earth it had been dug from. It looked as though the cat had been killed by a car, or a bus, maybe. The rear end was misshapen. She couldn’t tell if some of its innards had come out one way or another. She didn’t really want to know.

  “Fuck, this is morbid,” she said to no one in particular. Certainly not the stinky cat, with its cadre of buzzing flies. The cat didn’t reply.

  Cats were good, dead. Easy to see, easy to talk to.

  But she couldn’t do it, nor did she want to. The cat’s cold corpse repelled her.

  “A conduit,” he said. Nothing more. But it wasn’t. It was a dead cat.

  Outside, the sun shone and the tide slowly went out.

  “Fuck this,” she said to the dead cat and the garage.

  You’ve got more important things to be doing today, she told herself. Like dying. Dying was pretty important.

  19

  Inside the house, she felt better. Away from the dark work he’d set her, Ank felt that she could breathe and think once again. She knew the work he set her was necessary…but this…this she didn’t like.

  It felt wrong. Not sick, or evil. Just wrong.

  Death was supposed to be noble, or meaningful, or…

  You’re full of shit, Ank.

  Death was death. A thing. Nothing more. Like sunset. It just came because…

  Shut up. Fucking shut up. You’re just scared.

  And she was.

  So she shut it out. Like putting the cat out at night. Dead cat, maybe.

  Instead of trying to work on something she didn’t want to, Ank tried not to think.

  Some people are good at not thinking. They can spend all day doing it. Ank wasn’t one of them.

  She spent the daylight hours roaming the house, humming, singing, talking to herself… If this really was going to be her last day, she didn’t want to spend it staring at a dead cat.

  Out of choice, she guessed she rather spend it alone. Die alone.

  She could have told him. Could have asked him not to leave. But it wasn’t their way, she and Holland. They weren’t about comfort. They were about death. They were good at it. Born to it.

  Besides, he couldn’t stop it, and he had a job to do.

  “I’ve got this,” she said, quietly. Her words echoed in the cottage. She said it again, louder, stronger, trying to make it true.

  She knew things he did not. She could do things that he could not. Holland couldn’t teach her everything.

  Some, she had to figure for herself.

  Like how she knew she was about to die.

  She knew the why of it, of course. It was the book. The bastard book was killing her.

  So she paced and waited, though not on Holland. She was waiting on the worms. Waiting for the book to work whatever evil it would on her. Her dad didn’t need to know. He had his own work to do.

  “I’ve got this,” she told herself again. She wasn’t a kid anymore. She’d been learning, growing stronger. A long way to go until she was ready, yes, but she wasn’t helpless.

  But the worms were rising, and she didn’t know how to stop them.

  Shouldn’t have read the book, she thought, but the thought made her angry. Of course she was going to read the book. She was always going to read the book. If you leave a book on the fucking table where a curious daughter…a curious student…can read it…

  Holland, what were you thinking?

  She was angry at him. He’d killed her.

  But then…she was responsible, too. Right?

  Right?

  She could feel something coming, just as she could feel that energy boiling through to the surface.

  He’d read the book, but the world didn’t work like that. Holland was…Holland. A man good with death. But just a mortal. More mortal in many ways than most people in the world. Holland was so human he was almost the epitome of human, to the point it became his shield and his sword in one.

  Some people were portals, too, though. People l
ike Ank. Doorways to the other side.

  She thought she might be in trouble.

  No. That wasn’t true.

  You are in trouble.

  She knew this, because the worms were crawling around her feet, little black things. Not earthworms. Nothing benign. These were cancers, tumors, malignant offspring that were crawling up her feet. Reading that book…a mistake.

  A terrible mistake.

  Holland hadn’t seen it, thank God, but she’d felt the worms crawling under her skin as soon as she’d picked up the book. Holland, sleeping in the other room, hadn’t felt it.

  Soon, she thought. Soon.

  And so thinking, those black worms crawled higher.

  20

  Sushi.

  Sometimes Holland surprised himself.

  He sat at the sushi bars which looked cheap but really wasn’t, staring at the maru-maru sushi conveyor on its long journey around the chef.

  He didn’t like sushi, as such. Holland liked proper food, with gravy or beans or some kind of heavy spice. Didn’t seem like real food otherwise. Something with a little sauce. Sushi, the making thereof, was an awful lot of fucking about. He did it, from time to time, but the payoff, for him, wasn’t worth the effort of making the damn things.

  Ank liked cooking. Holland liked eating.

  Sometimes, he figured, it was good to specialize.

  But sushi wasn’t really about the fish or the weird little vegetable rolls (maki, Holland learned, on his culinary explorations of the city). Not for Holland. In this rare instance, the food itself was…

  He didn’t know what it was. Oddly, to him, the fish and the rice and the miso and the tea and the sake, even, all were little more than side dishes.

  The main event? The wasabi.

  Holland fucking loved wasabi.

  The conveyor went on its merry way. Lunchtime feeders came and took their nibbles while Holland worked on building his castle of assorted colored plates. He didn’t give a shit how much each plate cost. He didn’t really care what was on those plates, though he flat out refused to eat the octopus or squid, because they tasted like a lubricated condom smelled. The stack of plates was quite impressive, but he felt his second wind coming on. The small dish before him had a few pieces of rice in it, and a little seaweed, and a lot of wasabi swimming in soy sauce. Dip, pop in, savor. No mucking about with chopsticks. Fingers were just fine for sushi, and fingers felt right for it.