Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  “What? No,” Hallie said. She didn’t make deals.

  “Oh, yes,” Hollowell said. “Three days. Otherwise, you’ll never see him again.”

  “What?” Boyd was awake again, though he looked groggy and confused. “Hallie,” he said, “Don’t—” But he had no time to finish his sentence before he and Hollowell disappeared straight into the ground.

  25

  Hallie threw herself across the buried railings and clawed at the ground like she could find them both and haul them back, like it didn’t matter that Hollowell could come back for her, like nothing else mattered except getting Boyd back. She knew it was stupid and futile both, but she dug anyway, wrenching up clumps of dried grass and soil.

  Boyd was gone and Hollowell had him.

  She heard laughter and looked up. The white reaper.

  “Wow,” she said. “That was something. I bet you weren’t expecting that.”

  Hallie scrambled to her feet. She shoved the reaper hard in the chest. “Where did he go?” she demanded.

  The reaper stumbled several steps backwards. Her eyes were wide and her lips curved back into something that resembled a snarl.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, her voice brittle and hard.

  “Tell me where they went,” Hallie said.

  A cold and bitter wind rose out of the east. The light at the edge of Pabby’s yard flickered out, then came on with a buzzing snap, casting Hallie and the reaper in blue white light like winter.

  The reaper took a breath and Hallie could see her shoulders relax. “You should be more careful,” she said in a calmer tone. “I know you think we can’t kill you. But the rules are different every day. Anything can happen.”

  “Like stalking Pabby?”

  “You know it’s her time,” the reaper said coolly.

  “No.” Not like she hadn’t had this conversation already. Not like she had time for this. “It isn’t.”

  “You don’t know as much as you think you know,” the reaper said. She stepped closer. “And I have no interest in your problems.” Her lips creased into a cold smile.

  “Tell me where they went.” Hallie grabbed the front of the reaper’s shirt. It was made of some sort of gauzy material that felt as if it would slip right through her hands.

  The reaper’s brows snapped together. She brought her hands up and clapped her palms to Hallie’s temples. Hallie felt a short sharp shock, like she’d been pierced with needles. Everything went white. Her knees buckled.

  Then … nothing.

  “You are really annoying, do you know that?” the reaper said, stepping back and gathering the shredded front of her shirt around her.

  “I’m going to get a lot more annoying if you don’t tell me where they went,” Hallie said.

  “There are stronger beasts than I in the under worlds,” the reaper said. “You have no idea.”

  “Where. Did. They. Go,” Hallie said. Minutes were passing. Important minutes that could mean the difference between finding Boyd and not finding him. Between getting there in time or failure. And right now, for the next three days, failure was not an option.

  The reaper raised an eyebrow. “Let’s make a deal,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You know what I want,” the reaper said. “You could get it for me.”

  “No.”

  “All you’d have to do is confuse her about where the line is. Such a small thing.”

  “Did you not hear me? No. I’ll figure it out myself.”

  “You’ll be too late.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Hallie turned to see the black dog, returned from wherever she had sent it with her prybar earlier. An entire phalanx of black dogs sat behind it, their eyes reflecting the stark cold glow of frost-fresh dawn. One of them was growling, or maybe more, like the rumble of distant thunder.

  “You cur,” the reaper said with a sneer. “If he catches you, he’ll send you all the way down. All the way. And he will catch you.”

  “What’s he going to do when he catches you?” the dog asked. Behind it, the other dogs howled, like a Greek chorus. Hallie wasn’t sure whether they were howling at her, the reaper, or the black dog who was talking to her.

  The reaper laughed, but it was a brittle sound, like breaking glass. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she told Hallie. To the dog, she said, “Don’t cross my path again.” Then she disappeared into the earth like Hollowell and Boyd.

  Hallie turned, prepared to face a pack of angry black dogs, but they’d already dispersed, back to lurking at the edges of the hex ring, like Hallie wasn’t important enough to interest them.

  “Seriously,” she said. “You can take me?”

  “I can show you the way in,” the dog said. It seemed more agitated than usual, its tail whipping back and forth like a metronome, one front paw scratching aimlessly at the ground.

  “Why?”

  The dog tilted its head. “Because.”

  “What does that mean? That’s not helpful. I want to know if I can trust you.”

  The dog stretched into a long play bow, then sat, lifted a paw and inspected it, then set it back down. It had a scratch along its muzzle, white against the black fur. “Trust is overrated,” it said. “If I say I’ll do it, it’s done.”

  Hallie looked at it for a minute. Minutes, seconds, the microscopic bits of time consumed by her heart beating and her lungs expanding and contracting pounded against her like a vast ocean tide. This moment and this moment and this, and Boyd was farther away and in more trouble and she had to go. Right now.

  No.

  Not yet.

  No matter how much she wanted to go, to keep going, to stop for nothing until Boyd was back, there were other people in the world. Things were bigger.

  “Can you meet me in—” She did a quick calculation in her head. “—three hours?” she asked the dog.

  “Three hours?” The dog tilted its head, considering. “I thought it was important.”

  “I have three days, right?” When the dog didn’t answer immediately, “Right?”

  “Time is different underneath,” the dog said. “You should hurry.”

  Well, shit.

  There were still things she needed to do, though. “Two hours,” she said.

  The dog nodded agreement. And disappeared.

  “You’re leaving me here?” Beth’s voice rose. “I want to talk to Boyd. Where is he?”

  “He had to go,” Hallie said, and each word hurt, like grinding her insides out.

  “He wouldn’t leave without saying anything,” Beth said, her face pinched in the single light of an old floor lamp. “He said he’d help me!”

  “He’s going to help you,” Hallie said impatiently. “I’m going to help you. But right now I’m going to help you by leaving.”

  Pabby was at the kitchen table, her rifle beside her, looking through a stack of photo albums. “Where are you going?” she asked Hallie.

  And seemed surprisingly unsurprised when Hallie said, “Well, hell, I think.”

  Pabby nodded like it was just what she’d expected. “That other reaper,” she said. “Is she out there?”

  Hallie frowned. “She was, not now. Why?”

  Pabby shrugged. “Thought I might talk to her,” she said. “Maybe talking would help.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. “I don’t think so.” She looked at Pabby closely. Pabby flipped through a few more photos. “Be careful,” Hallie said, though it didn’t seem as if any of them knew what “careful” meant anymore.

  She spent forty-five minutes loading the rest of the iron from the pipe Boyd had smashed the night before into shells. She debated whether to add blood and sacrament. This was actual iron, so theoretically it should work anyway. In the end, she decided better safe than sorry, carefully swiped blood on each shotgun shell and repeated the parts of the Lord’s Prayer she could remember over the whole stack. Then she headed out. To the ranch first, because in her family they weren’t goo
d at saying good-bye. The assumption was always, We’ll see you again. That hadn’t been working so well—her mother gone and Dell.

  So this time she was saying good-bye. Or at least, See you later.

  Of course, her father was nowhere to be seen and his truck was gone when she got to the ranch.

  Damn him. As if he could have known that she was going to be leaving, that she might not be coming back. And then she wondered if he had already left—disappeared. But she was going to fix this, right? She and Boyd, they were fixing this.

  She had no idea what she’d be able to take with her, but she went upstairs and changed, adding several layers because it might be cold or it might be hot—who knew?—and it was easier to wear than carry.

  She dug an old backpack out of the very back of her closet and filled it with the shells, three bottles of water, a couple of pairs of socks, a box of crackers, though she was a bit uncertain how long they’d been in the cupboard, and a hat and gloves.

  She relaid salt along the back door and several of the windowsills, her father having apparently swept the kitchen.

  She tried to call her father on his cell, but since he rarely charged it and almost never answered it, she wasn’t surprised when he didn’t pick up. Except for the part where he might be among the disappeared. Except for that part.

  She went into the office, took paper out of the printer, and wasted ten valuable minutes writing him a note. She didn’t generally spend a lot of time thinking about what she was doing next or about things as simple as writing a note. Hi, I’m not here, I’ll be back, was her usual. She tried to figure out how to say, I’m going to hell to get the Boy Deputy back, without sounding crazy. But realized pretty quickly that wasn’t actually possible.

  In the end, all she wrote was,

  Gone to get Boyd. Out of state. Be back in a couple of days.

  Hallie

  P.S. Leave the salt alone.

  She grabbed a flashlight and stuffed it in the backpack. Then she turned out the lights, closed the door behind her, and went out to her truck.

  She checked the time—an hour left. An hour was a long time. And Boyd was in hell or purgatory or wherever dead people went. And he was alone. When he said, “Don’t—” just before Hollowell had taken him, he probably meant, Don’t come. But he must have known she would.

  He must have.

  The sun was peeking over the horizon, muted by a gray sky that seemed to turn darker the nearer it came to dawn, when Hallie turned into the long drive to Brett Fowker’s house. There was a hard turn to the right at the halfway point, which Hallie’d never been able to figure out. The approach was pretty much flat, no creeks or low spots.

  “Maybe your dad wanted to stop a sneak attack,” Hallie had said to Brett when they were eleven.

  “Maybe he did,” Brett had replied.

  Once she’d made the turn, Hallie could see the Fowker front yard and slant shadows against the house, cast by the big yard light near the edge of the drive. Beyond the light was a series of smaller lights around a corral and bracketing the doors on the end of the horse barn. As Hallie pulled into the yard, she could see that even though it was not quite seven, the lights were on in the house. She parked next to Brett’s old gray Honda. Another car sat on the other side, something new and cream colored.

  Brett was waiting for her when she reached the side door. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she said before Hallie could even say hello. She was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and she had a dish towel slung over her shoulder. Hallie could smell coffee and bacon.

  “What are you talking about?” she said as she walked blinking inside. The big modern kitchen had a center butcher block island, rough tile floors, and light oak cabinets. A small table near the archway into the great room was set for two people. Brett moved across the kitchen and turned the heat down on the stove.

  “Is your dad here?” Hallie asked, because she thought she’d heard that he’d gone to Arizona to pick out horses.

  “No,” Brett said. She turned from the stove, leaning against the sink with her arms crossed. “I have a friend over.” She didn’t look impatient, or like she wished Hallie wasn’t there, but then Brett almost never did, calm and sensible—or at least, if not sensible, then always appearing as if she were. “And you know what I’m talking about,” she went on, refusing to be distracted, “—the accident out of nowhere, talking to thin air, fireplace pokers.” Which Hallie could see leaning against the refrigerator. She looked behind her. A thin trail of salt ran across the threshold of the kitchen door.

  “Look, it’s not a big deal,” Hallie said. “I have to leave for a little while. Out of state.” Way out of state. “I need someone to check up on Pabby while I’m gone. She can’t leave the ranch right now, and she’ll need food and maybe help with the horses. Also, my dad, if you could check on him when you’re by that way. I should be back in two or three days.”

  “But you might not be.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what you’re not saying. That something might happen, that you might not be coming back.”

  “That’s what I didn’t say.”

  “It’s what you should have said.” Brett pushed herself away from the sink. The center island separated her from Hallie. “Because you never come here without calling first. Because you didn’t ever ask me to look in on your dad when you were gone four years in the army. Because Pabby’s never needed help in her life.” She refolded her arms over her chest. “So, what’s really going on? It’s got something to do with yesterday, right? Of course it does. Sally says those trucks couldn’t have just dropped out of nowhere, that it must have been an optical illusion. Or a collective hallucination or something.” Brett paused. “But I remember September.”

  “Sally?”

  “Who was with me yesterday.”

  Hallie looked at the clock. Time was almost up. “Remember when I explained what happened in September? Remember how you didn’t believe me?”

  Brett’s hands loosened and Hallie could have sworn she turned a little pale. “Martin’s dead,” she said flatly.

  “Yeah, it’s not him,” Hallie said. “And I don’t really have time to explain. Except, listen, what I’m asking from you isn’t dangerous. Well,” she temporized, because people were disappearing and she didn’t know how to keep Brett from disappearing too, not yet. “I’m almost sure you won’t see anything you don’t want to see.”

  “Damnit, Hallie! It’s not about what I do or don’t see or want to see. It’s about how the world should work. Does work. It’s about how the world works. Martin was an anomaly. Yesterday was an anomaly. Right? Because otherwise everything is bullshit.”

  Hallie had no response. That Martin had existed, that he had practiced blood magic, that his magic had endangered all of them. Those were facts. Shit happened. That was Hallie’s attitude. And if that shit was something that you’d never believed in and shouldn’t exist, well, you adjusted your worldview and went on.

  “If you can’t do it, just tell me,” Hallie said. “I mean—” She mentally backed up a step or two because Brett deserved more than that. “—I trust you, Brett. We’ve known each other a long time. You’re smart and you’re loyal and you come through in a pinch. So it would help a great deal if you could do this. But if you can’t, that’s okay. Really. I’ll figure something out.”

  Brett frowned, like she thought maybe Hallie was just buttering her up, but Hallie figured she should know better. Hallie never buttered anybody up.

  “Look, you know I’ll do it,” she finally said with a quick glance back at the poker against the refrigerator.

  “But?” Hallie said. Because this whole conversation was about things neither one of them was saying.

  “When you come back,” Brett said, “you explain it to me, what this is all about. Even—” She half held up her hand. “—even if I don’t want to hear it. I get to decide that. You tell me. I decide what I hear.”

  Tha
t sounded screwier to Hallie than just seeing things and accepting them, but if it worked for Brett, it worked. “Thanks,” she said. “I owe you.”

  “Yeah,” Brett said. “You do. So, come back.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie said, because she was going to the underworld, the land of the dead, hell. And suddenly she wished she’d spent more time with her father the last month, with Brett who was her best friend from all the way back to elementary school, with Boyd. “Thank you,” she said. “Tell my dad … tell him, if he asks, that I’ll be back in two days.” Because she would. She had to be. That was the whole point.

  26

  Hallie sat in her pickup truck in Brett’s driveway and made several quick phone calls. She called the hospital to check on Ole, called the sheriff’s office to tell them Boyd wouldn’t be in for the next three days (but he would be in again, he would). She called Laddie Kennedy, and when he answered, it sounded as if she’d woken him up.

  “Are the dead talking to you?” she asked.

  “Not a word,” he said. He sounded worried, like the world had changed again without warning or asking him.

  “Did you talk to Prue?”

  Hesitation. “Here’s the thing,” Laddie said. “You can’t trust her. I know people around here like her, but what’s she ever done? Listen to them when they talk? She doesn’t solve their problems.”

  “She doesn’t have to,” Hallie pointed out.

  “No, I get that. I do,” Laddie said earnestly. “And I charge people money to tell their future or talk to their dead grandmother. So it’s not like I’m pure. Or can afford to be pure.” He laughed. “Well, really, no one can—not around here. But I’m a volunteer on the fire department. And I helped Cass Andersen bring in her late hay last month when two of her wagons broke down the same day. People call me and ask me to help,” he said, as if that were important. “I don’t just take.”