Flytrap

by Stephanie Ahn

  “Oh, no reason. We could make it like old times, you know?”

  Old times? The three of us didn’t really hang out together in the old times. Or am I just remembering wrong?

  She says goodbye airily and hangs up. I put down my phone. Scratch my head. How did Miriam know exactly what city Luce is in? Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at all, the Merestis have eyes everywhere. Oh well, that’s not important.

  In a few minutes, she texts me: Where are you?

  I duck out of the bathroom and peer out the window for an easy landmark. McDonald’s, 102 1st Ave.

  Stay where you are. They’re coming to you.

  I squint at the screen. “…What?”

  Confused, I wait outside the McDonald’s, hugging my arms to my chest and shivering inside my coat and too-thin turtleneck. I don’t know how exactly the Group will show up. They might already be here, scoping me out, and I might just not be noticing—

  I hear the squeal of tires before I see the source. A boxy, beat-up, once-stately black Cadillac careens around the corner, straight toward me—I hop back onto the curb, then keep stumbling back, and even then the tires screech to a stop an inch from my toes.

  The car itself is dented to Hell and back, but the windows are tinted and spotless. The window on the passenger’s side starts to roll down; I bend and peer in.

  “Hi,” I say, “is this—?”

  I stop. Looking back at me is the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen. He has dark, gleaming eyes, black hair pulled up into spikes, fascinating hollows under his cheekbones, and a short, neat mustache over lips that haven’t missed a day of chapstick. I see the way his eyes flicker from feature to feature on my face and clothes: cataloging.

  “Didn’t think I’d see you here,” he drawls, his square jaw shifting.

  I blink. “Do you know me?”

  “I could.” He winks and jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “Get in the back.”

  I’m all kinds of flustered. I don’t often consider fucking guys, but my sex brain is interested in this dude the way physiologists are interested in rare lemurs.

  I look past him, at the driver’s seat. A small, chubby Asian kid is holding the wheel, teeth chattering with fear, long black hair pointing back like porcupine quills. He looks fourteen, fifteen at most.

  “Is that kid old enough to be driving?” I ask.

  Gorgeous—that’s what I’ve named the hot guy in my head—shrugs. “He’s as old as I was when I started.” The statement gives me absolutely no comfort.

  “If he’s old enough to fight, he’s old enough to drive,” says a crackling voice from the backseat. “Get in the back.”

  I do as I’m told, sliding onto pockmarked and peeling leather seats. I find myself next to a middle-aged woman, brown-skinned and brown-haired with a strong nose and wide mouth. Definitely older than me, not as old as Bautista, but with the wide, tough shoulders and proud posture of a wrestler. She has a pair of Ray Bans propped up on her head.

  “Hi,” I say, trying to settle down and look professional. “I’m here for—”

  The car jumps forward. “Ai ya!” Gorgeous shouts, bracing himself on an armrest. My head whips backward, pinching the back of my neck.

  “Sorry, sorry!” I hear the kid yell as the car spins, seemingly out of control, around a corner.

  I find myself grabbing the seat in front of me, trying not to crash into the woman. She snaps something in a language I can only half-identify as Mandarin. Or is that Cantonese? “I didn’t get that!” I shout. “Sorry, wrong kind of Asian!”

  She dismisses me with a snap of her wrist. “Not talking to you. Bao bao!”

  “Shi, mama,” Gorgeous answers, before grabbing the wheel and jerking it to avoid hitting a fire hydrant.

  I realize that if I wait for a calm moment, I’m never going to speak at all. As the car accelerates and Gorgeous starts yelling at the kid to switch lanes, I shout to be heard above the noise. “I’m here for a weapon!”

  The woman is wiping her sunglasses on her sleeve. “What kind?”

  “Something that’ll kill a demon!”

  Gorgeous twists around in his seat. “What kind of demon? That matters, you know. Some demons you can cap with a 9mm, but you have to be sure—I knew a dude who tried to drown a demon. Didn’t bother to check if she had gills. Honestly, he deserved what he got.”

  His head snaps sideways as the car makes another turn—this time, both him and the lady in the backseat shout, and the kid squeaks back.

  “Yikes, alright.” I mutter. “Um, mine is big. Like, big-wolf, small-horse-big. And it eats people.”

  “Oh, cool. We got something for that.”

  I wasn’t expecting this to be so easy, but I guess it’s a relief. “Okay, how do I pay? Do you take cash? I’ll have to go to an ATM, but—”

  The woman shakes her head. “We barter here. And we already know what you have.”

  “Uhhh… you’re going to have to enlighten me.”

  “Three years ago, Johanna Khatri, Lucille Martin, and you retrieved an urn from a tomb before our agent could. It was a fair play, so we did not contest it. But we’ll take the urn now in exchange for the weapon.”

  I wrack my brain, trying to remember. “…Oh! I remember that thing, I had to fight a girlfriend for that. Ex-girlfriend.”

  “We are well aware. She was our agent.”

  Right, that’s the part I forgot. “Woops. Sorry. Just as a curiosity question, has Johanna taken anything else from you?”

  “Many, many things. You had a hand in it too.”

  “Uh…”

  “If it had offended us, you would be dead already.”

  “Cool. Fun. I like that thing you’re doing, the royal we. When should I get you this urn? I can have it within the day.”

  “Good. Where do you need to go?”

  “White Plains, I can take the train there.”

  “We’ll take you.”

  “Seriously? How do y’all get through New York traffic?”

  “We don’t.” She nods at the driver through the rearview mirror. His face pales, and his teeth chatter back with heightened terror.

  “Um, okay. White Plains, Jackson Avenue, right on the—ow!” My forehead stings as Gorgeous leans back and SLAPs something sticky onto it. It flutters, noisily—is that a piece of paper? I reach for it—

  “Don’t take that off until we’re through the tunnel.”

  “Through the wha—”

  I can only half-see, but the world around the Cadillac goes dark. All sound is eclipsed by the roar of rushing air. Then, as the sun hits my eyes again, my ears pop painfully.

  “Alright, we’re good.”

  I rip the paper off my face. It’s rice paper, with black ink on it. Brush calligraphy, in what looks like a mix of ancient Chinese, Greek, and… what is that, Norse? When I try to look closer, the car screeches to a halt and my face smashes into the seat in front of me. As I bounce back, dazed, I hear the kid’s voice saying, “Th-that’s why you wear a seatbelt, duh.”

  I blink out the window. The streets are wider, more open than they were before. The buildings aren’t quite so tall, and I even see some trees across the intersection. I twist to look behind me; we’re facing outward from the exit of a large, multi-level parking structure, with the bright yellow arm of a parking gate closed behind us. It all looks vaguely familiar—wait. I press my face up against the window and squint to check the green street sign. Ferris Ave. Ferris Avenue, White Plains, just behind the train station. Twenty-five miles from Manhattan. “Wha—how the fu—”

  “You’re magic, bonehead,” Gorgeous says, lazily tilting his head back from the passenger seat. “This can’t possibly be the strangest thing you’ve seen. How long do you need?”

  “I don’t know, uh—two hours?”

  “Then we’ll be back. We have other errands to run.”

&nbs
p; I stumble out of the Cadillac and onto the driveway. As the car peels away, I think I hear the sound of the kid screaming, and more conflicting instructions yelled in Chinese.

  ***

  I walk up the street to get to the right house, counting blocks and street signs—not that I know anything about the neighborhood. Luce, Johanna, and I lived here for only about four months before Johanna’s… passing. And Luce and I were generally taking the train into Manhattan every chance we got, for comic book shops, desserts, clubs, and dates with pretty girls who’d never call us back. Best I remember about the city is that it had great pizza.

  But I’m Korean-raised. I wouldn’t know good pizza if it slapped me in the mouth.

  There it is, the right house. It’s a simple two-story affair, painted a pale cream on the outside, with a slanting, asymmetrical roof. Really, Johanna liked it for the basement—that’s where the vault is. She didn’t trust her bank anymore so we set up the vault ourselves, but the work of moving all the artifacts wasn’t complete when Johanna died. I thought it was important to finish what she started—so important that I bought the damn house from the friend we were borrowing it from.

  I feel like such a clown now. After Johanna died, I spent every cent of my inheritance to buy this place. Why couldn’t we have been staying in a house not in New York? At the time it seemed like such a given, the logical next step—now I just see a crumbling building and a wasted fortune. Just thinking about the number of zeroes I blasted out of my checking account makes me want to sit down and tuck my head between my knees.

  I step onto the porch. The wood must be rotting, because the stair almost gives way under my feet. I take my keys out of my pocket; there’s my apartment key, my mailbox key, my building key—and then four separate keys, just for this door. I undo all four locks, and tug the door open. It sticks in its frame a little, like something’s gotten warped.

  I step across the threshold. I almost expect some kind of… event, to mark it. But nothing. It’s just a house.

  I enter the foyer. Everything is covered in dust, so much so that my movements kick it up and make it fly up into my nose. I sneeze, blindly making my way to the living room to open the windows—when I turn around, I see Johanna’s favorite armchair, the ugliest thing in the room with a brown and turquoise floral pattern that mismatches at the seams. She never said it was her favorite, but she’d walk through three rooms just to get to it.

  Across the way is the kitchen where I found her body. I stare at the floor, as if taking my eyes off of it will make that shadowy mass appear again—tangled, matted black hair, silk soaked red with blood. The white surface of skull, and the red of tattered muscle. No eyes, no nose, no mouth; not just a murder, but a mutilation. It’s still a wonder to me that, out of all the people I’ve unintentionally or intentionally killed, the twin assassins who murdered Johanna aren’t among them.

  I hurry up the stairs to the study.

  The door is cracked, and I push it open all the way with a light touch. I place my foot on the floor. Right foot, left foot. Just don’t think about it. This is the study where I performed the ritual. That’s the corner where I tossed my latex gloves after injecting myself with a demon’s—with Beelzebub’s blood. The floorboards still smell sweetly rotten to me and they always will, no matter how many times Luce tells me, We tore up the floorboards, every single one of them—there’s no more of her left, Harry. I can’t smell anything.

  But I can.

  I make it to the desk where Johanna taught me pain energy, the desk where she’d fall asleep with her hair fanned out over an obscure text, her reading glasses nudged up to her forehead. During my apprenticeship, I started staying out later just to make sure that Johanna was asleep by the time I came back—that way, I could put away her glasses, put a bookmark in her book and close it so she wouldn’t stain it with drool, and put a blanket over her shoulders. It was why I drove for her too; she got nauseous reading in the car, so she was forced to nap and get the REM sleep she desperately needed. I was her apprentice, and she took care of me, sure. But some of the moments I miss the worst are the chances I stole to take care of her.

  I open the top drawer of the desk, get out the heavy steel key, and head down to the basement.

  This is the basement where I did my dirty work: the hiding of the body, the prep for the necromancy. You wouldn’t know it now from how bare this entire room is; the Council took everything to present as evidence in my trial. Maybe it’s a good thing they did. It makes the memory feel less real, like I just fantasized a whole two months of stitching waxy, cold flesh, marking limbs with Sharpie and sawing through bone, putting together my own Bride of Frankenstein. Honestly, if I tried to replicate the process now, I wouldn’t be able to. I can’t imagine these clumsy hands stitching those fine stitches, spending those hours, days, weeks in unblinking focus, lying with a stone face, moving with a terrifying, relentless, crushing forward motion, because to stop was to drown. Twenty-two-year-old me was a completely different person, capable of much more dangerous things.

  I think of her as the angry me. I remember the grief and the rage, how they fueled me, how I’d scream alone and split my nails against the walls, hitting myself just to feel in control of something—then get up, rinse my face with cold water, and meet some information broker in an alleyway. I remember how tired I was, always so tired, but when I put my head down and worked, just one stitch more, two stitches more—I’d raise my head and find it was four hours into the next day. No sleep or food needed, no love, no sunlight. Just purpose. I don’t know how Luce could even stand to talk to me; I was more a machine than a person and I barely cared what anyone else thought, let alone what might happen to them.

  In the basement, half of the brick wall is actually just laminate that looks like brick. It’s nothing special; Luce, Johanna, and I literally went to Home Depot for the materials to fix it up. It peels forward to reveal a door, and that door opens up into the vault.

  We put things on shelves, mostly. But we also needed a few safes, not for security so much as insulation; certain artifacts give off certain vibes, and some… conflict. We kept a ledger for organization. Hand-written, with printed pages we were endlessly photocopying because Jo didn’t trust the Internet or the Cloud. It was some of the most tedious work I did as her apprentice—but the one and only time I slacked off, a shelf blew up. I can still see the corner where it happened, chipped and crumbled, scars in the wall left as a dire warning.

  I look through the ledger, squinting at Luce’s neat, bubbly handwriting, then my illegible scrawl, then Johanna’s italicized calligraphy. The vial of demon blood isn’t listed in here, never was; I found it in the bank during my last cargo transfer trip, and just… pocketed it. Some of the entries in here are labeled “SOLD” in what is unmistakably my handwriting. Others are crossed out, messily: the feathered snake skin that I slipped on like a banana peel, the dreaming figs that got eaten when Luce’s cat snuck in, and the pixie’s baby teeth that, instead of letting me grind them into a paste, embedded themselves in my hands like shrapnel.

  According to the ledger, the Typhon Group’s urn is on the third shelf, with just a bit of clay chipped off the rim from the aforementioned shelf explosion. No volatile properties to speak of; I pick it up and put it in a simple burlap sack, then mark its entry in the ledger as “BARTERED.”

  I hear a noise, almost dropping the urn. Rats? Fuck, I hope there’s no rats in here. Is there anything that could get chewed up? I peer at a hole in the wood shelf; was it always there, or are those teeth marks? As I pick at it, something falls on my head.

  I scramble back, heart thumping in my ears, knocking into the shelf behind me—a shower of ashes dumps itself into my collar, feeling like legs, just like bug legs. Then I’m clambering upright in a panic, tearing out of the basement and up the stairs, out onto the porch and slamming the door behind me.

  I sink to the floor, panting, the heavy burlap sack
clutched to my chest. When my heartbeat finally slows, I just feel embarrassed, painfully so. I put my burning face on my knees.

  Times like this I miss my angry self, even though she was a hateful bitch. She wouldn’t have been spooked. She wasn’t afraid of pain, or fear; every single second was painful, and she just plowed through, gritting her teeth, barking like a wolf, inch by painful inch, watching hungrily as the light at the end of the tunnel dragged closer. When I’m afraid, I miss that all-pervading, all-sinking, all-devouring, purposeful anger.

  She, that version of me, is behind me like a bad dream. But the woman that he made me into, she’s still here, and I wish to gods she wasn’t. She only ever got anything done because she was drunk, or sleep deprived, or high. She formed memories like she was drawing on a chalkboard, wiping away all progress with the swipe of a hand when she ran out of space. Horrible things were done to her, and she did horrible things, and she never bothered to care about any of it. Why would it matter? Once she was done screaming, she could take anything, because nothing could hurt as bad as the time she spent with him, not even getting slapped across the face in a Chili’s bathroom by a girlfriend wearing steel rings. The only good thing about her world was that time didn’t stop, even when she collapsed in a puddle of her own piss.

  I check my phone; enough time has passed for me to expect the Typhon Group’s arrival. The walk back to the train station is easy, and in about twenty minutes I’m standing where they dropped me off, burlap sack held low at my side. This time I stay way back on the sidewalk, and when the Cadillac races into view, it stops well over a foot in front of me.

  I’m on the driver’s side; the tinted windows roll down. “Hey, kid,” I start—then stop. There’s a different Asian kid in the driver’s seat this time. He’s scrawny and has on a black chauffeur’s cap, a square gap between his front teeth, and the stub of a cigar held in a manic grin. He looks about twelve.

  I blink at him. Gorgeous leans forward in the passenger’s seat to raise his sunglasses and wink. “Get in the back, stranger.”