Later that night, I cried all over her, and she rocked me until I fell asleep. The next day, she brought me coffee. Not that she made it or anything—that would have been going a step too far, even for someone who prided herself on going to extremes. No, making the coffee was for the help. But she brought it to me, and knelt by the bed in the pool house, and woke me up gently.
She’s always been there for me. It’s just easiest for her to be there when money and alcohol are involved. She even gave my dad the money he needed to go find himself on a commune in Arizona. He’s still there, for all I know. I got a few postcards the first month, and then nothing.
Amanda and Stan are the only people who have never abandoned me, not even at my worst.
Except for now. Why hadn’t Amanda answered her phone when I called her? It wasn’t like I’d just called once—I’d called a bunch of times, and each time I’d left a message. Each message was more urgent-sounding than the last. I mean, the Door disappeared! We went hunting Doors! I touched one! We decided to go through a Door! Stan got bit by a werewolf! Everything had been escalating, and I couldn’t get Amanda on the phone, or find her anywhere.
I shouldn’t have left her in our dimension. What if something had actually happened to her? But Ryan and I had both figured that she was just on an epic bender. Which she probably was, right? Maybe still is.
I miss Christian’s clicking. I wonder where he’s gone. Maybe what I said about arachnids hit him hard or something. Maybe he went full demon at last. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe everything is my fault. Maybe he’s gone on to Hades’s underworld, where he can be with a bunch of other arachnids. Maybe he’s gone back to Jackson. Maybe . . .
One at a time, I say all these things to Stan. He doesn’t say anything at all.
Stan. Stan. Stan. Please, wherever you are, remember.
The worst thing about this Hell dimension is that it is fucking boring. The worst thing about this Hell dimension is that it is quiet, except for the crunching of our feet on dead pine needles and sticks.
The worst thing about this Hell dimension is when Stan rips his kerchief off and bares his teeth at me and snarls, and I slam Betsy into his chest without even thinking. I’ve had her palmed for the last hour. Just waiting. And now he stares down at the nail sticking out of his heart with a totally surprised look on his face. His eyes are black, and faceted.
“Allie—” he says, Stan says, before he falls, and Ryan and Roxie just stand there.
I drop to my knees. “I love you,” I tell him, and I try to put everything into those words. I think about pulling Betsy out of his chest, but I couldn’t if I tried; it’d be covered with his blood, and then the werewolf might get me. I don’t care about the werewolf dying. I’ve killed those. I’ve killed lots of those.
Stan’s gasping for air.
Iron will slow a werewolf down, but for the kill, you need silver. Silver heals. It heals the body that used to be human, and kills the werewolf in the process. I don’t have a gun here, and I don’t have a cauter. I pull out the silver ankh I’d strung around his chest before we left our dimension and slam the end of it right on top of Betsy and deep into his chest.
The werewolf screams. And then it dies.
I pull off my Seal of Solomon, the pretty pendant one, and wrap it around Stan’s wrist. I tuck the pendant into his hand. He’ll need protection, in Hell. I hope he finds his way back to the Egyptian underworld. Or Ashmedai’s—I told him where it was, what it looked like. Maybe he’ll find it, and be happy there.
It’s all I can give him. It’s all I can give him and I hate it.
Ryan touches my arm, very lightly; I can barely feel it through the disgusting lamia leather of my duster.
“Allie . . .” he starts.
“Don’t,” I say. I pull away, and stand up. I start walking toward the Door again.
I can kill vampires without getting hurt. They’re not hard at all. They just crumple. I can kill werewolves. I can kill one of my best friends.
I wasn’t going to, but I do; I look back. And I see werewolves climbing down from the trees, gathering up Stan’s body, and carrying him back to the canopy above us. Ryan was right about the bandanna after all; the werewolf in Stan saw Hell, and Hell’s werewolves found him.
The Door in this dimension is green, of course, and it glows brighter when I touch it. I go to cut my hand again, my mind tiredly reaching out to it; the knife’s barely hit skin before the Door is suddenly warm against me, happy to see me, pleased to give me anything I want. But it can’t give me Stan back, or my parents. It can’t actually give me anything I want.
The green Door is covered in leaves and branches that we have to push out of the way as we walk through.
I look around, and despite myself: “Are we seriously back in the caves?” I am totally appalled.
“I don’t know.” Roxie looks around and squints into the darkness. Again with the sconces attached somehow—magically?—to the smooth cave walls. Again with the sort-of-damp air, the wind that isn’t really blowing.
“I am sick of this shit.” I slump against the wall, and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor of the cave. The Door here is just a mouth of another cave. It hardly glows at all.
Hello? I push at it.
Hello, it says, but it sounds reluctant.
Don’t you want to give me anything? Or whine at me about how hard it is to be a Door in this age of people not appreciating how great Hell dimensions are? I pick at some mud crusted on my shoes. They are not pristine and white anymore. Not that they were exactly pristine when we started, since they’re my kitchen shoes. They get grease on them, and barbeque sauce, and all kinds of crap. Now they’ve also got, like, demon guts, and other terrible things. Maybe even some of Stan’s blood.
No, it replies. I just want to be left alone.
Yeah, I know how that feels. I stop talking to it, and leave it alone.
When I look up, Roxie and Ryan are whispering furiously. Roxie is gesturing at me. Ryan’s got his hat pulled down pretty far over his eyes. sat and Ištar and the lioness look bored. The snakes look bored. Even in the middle of all of this, I’m starting to be totally bored too. This whole thing is boring the crap out of me. I bet—I bet all the avatars, and whatever’s protecting me, know there’s nothing going on here, so they don’t have to protect us. Nothing going on, nothing dangerous . . . which, in Hell? Unusual.
“There’s no way this is the same dimension,” I announce. “For one thing, this Door doesn’t want to talk to me. For another, if we were in another lamia dimension, the snakes would be freaking out, wouldn’t they?”
“Yeah, we already figured that out while you were communing with evil,” says Roxie.
“No need to be nasty.” I slide back up the wall until I am standing up. “I was just saying.”
“So where are we?” Ryan asks tiredly.
“This is—” I shut my eyes and look for a Door. The whole world is dark. I can see even darker shapes where the avatars are, shadows, greenish-blue. The Doors are bright, colors swirling around, beckoning me to come to them.
But I’m being pulled somewhere else—to the shape the Doors make. They are small in comparison to the shadow inside them. They surround it.
It’s a hand.
Gotcha. “This is where the Hand of Franklin is.”
When I open my eyes, Roxie looks confused. I roll my eyes. “It’s just what Ryan and I have been calling the hand that we’re looking for. The waters of life. This is where we’ll find it,” I say. “I can see it. It’s here.”
“Where?” Roxie looks at me from under the brim of her hat, totally skeptical.
Where? I ask. And a voice, made of many voices, says, Here.
Um. Weird. But let’s run with it. I point toward the other end of the cave, where the tunnel curves out of sight.
Ryan is looking at me strangely. “How do you know?” he asks, and it’s almost cute how bewildered he sounds.
“Well . . . I have
n’t really wanted to say anything,” I tell him, “but I’m kind of getting more and more psychic. Like, the psychic dreams, you know? And the Doors.”
“I thought you only had one psychic dream.”
“Yeah, but that’s one more than I’ve ever had before,” I point out. I turn to Roxie. “And the Doors—they talk a lot. It’s not even feelings anymore. They want to have actual conversations with me. They want to do what I tell them. That’s not exactly normal.”
Roxie snorts. “Chère, we’ve been traipsing through the underworld. What part of normal is that?”
I almost smile. “Good point.”
“What the hell are we standing around for?” demands Ryan. “If the hand is here, the waters of life, whatever Ištar wants us to find—if that’s here, let’s just go get it.”
We walk quickly to the tunnel, and make the first turn. Nothing jumps out at us, nothing tries to kill us. The silence is eerie; not even Ryan’s boots make noise.
The tunnel turns one more time, and then abruptly opens into an enormous cavern, like the size of three diners laid end to end, lit with fires set in giant braziers. Except can you call a room made totally of gold a cavern? I think there must a different word. Like, holy shit.
I am instantly aware that I have not forgotten the approximate value of gold on the open market. Maybe this is the Hell of temptation. Gorgeous golden temptation.
Ryan says, without even looking at me, “You don’t need it.”
So says him. He doesn’t have to count out every night, or think about the quality of food to buy, or where to get the money for some new signage, or how long I’ll have to save up to buy out Sally. Gold would be a great idea.
It takes me a second to realize that instead of thinking about expensive clothes and big houses and getting my old life back, the first thing I thought of to do with the money is put it back into the diner. That the life I have now is more worth keeping than the one taken from me, and not just because Ryan’s in it.
I do not even know what to do with this realization.
Roxie touches my shoulder, and points toward the end of the cavern. In the middle of all this shiny gold, almost in shadow, is a tall-backed chair—no, wait, a throne?—made of some dull rock. And there’s something sitting in it.
We walk closer, since there’s not a lot of other options, and the thing in the throne becomes clearer. It’s—look, you’ve seen Psycho, right? Everyone’s seen Psycho. The thing on the throne? It’s Norman Bates’s mother, minus the dress and wig. A dead thing with mouth open wide, tilted sideways against the throne with its hands palm-up in its lap. Its feet don’t quite touch the floor—like they shriveled up as the mummy dried.
I sniff the air. I smell metal and stale air. And I smell, somehow, time.
Because I may possibly be dumb, I send my thoughts out with a careful Hello?
Something speaks. It’s the same thing I heard before, a voice made of many voices. I am the Kalaturru, it says, while, simultaneously, it also says, I am the Kurgarru.
I swallow. “Everybody hear that?”
I look over at Roxie, standing next to me. Her snakes are absolutely still, and her eyes are wide. “Yeah,” she says. “I hear that.”
On my other side, Ryan’s women are arrayed behind him, a train of ghosts pretending to be goddesses. Ryan’s looking at me. He just nods and steps in front of me.
“We seek the waters of life to close the Doors.” He sounds weirdly formal. Like when he was thanking Owen way back in the hospital, saying something because that’s what you have to do, not because you mean it.
Why do you bother doing something like that? Why make up a formality that no one cares about? Unless maybe it used to mean something. Maybe it used to be important, and we’ve just all forgotten why—which, you know, just leads to little accidents like the dragon back in Kur trying to eat us because we didn’t perform some stupid rites we didn’t even know about. “There are rites to be performed in the netherworld”—why didn’t Narnia mention that before we left our dimension?
The mummy says, with its layered voices, I look for companionship. Do you wish to partake of my hospitality?
Avatars, I have noticed, are useful things to keep an eye on in times of trial. For instance: Roxie’s snakes are hissing, all of them, in one long sound that is getting more and more quiet, like air from a tire. Ryan’s women are wavering in place, looking less real and more like projections on smoke.
And then there’s my avatar, whatever it is. Blue, that’s what. Blue, and glowing, and there are tiny pinpoints of blue around me, and wings, I can suddenly feel them, a weight that isn’t a weight. I let out a breath, and a sudden breeze swirls around me, lifting my ponytail, coming under my wings, lifting me.
All the avatars are getting weaker by being around this mummy. Except mine. The mummy wants companionship, it wants, god, what, an equal? Someone worthy of the hospitality? Whatever my avatar is, it thinks it’s up for the challenge, and nobody else’s does.
What happens if you ask for hospitality and are unworthy of it?
Shit.
I dive my mind into Ryan’s, I see the thought that will become the word, I see We wish to partake of your hospitality, and I’m already running when I hear him say “We—”
I bum rush Ryan and plow square into his back. It startles him enough that he stumbles to the side and glares at me. “Allie, what the hell?”
“Shut up,” I say, and before he can stop me I step forward and say, “I wish to partake of your hospitality.”
I don’t know what the mummy shoots at me, but it feels like a sudden punch to the gut; I’m flying backwards through the air, high up, with a long fall. I’m going to puke, if I don’t die from a thousand broken bones when I land.
The ground rushes up, and I can hear Ryan yelling, and I let out a breath—
Caterpillars of blue light crawl over my skin and across my vision. A wind swirls around me; my wings catch it. I float. I fly. I land without squishing.
I can feel a bruise, but it’s not nearly as bad as it could be. Actually, I kind of feel like dancing. I walk back to Ryan and Roxie and step between the two of them. Roxie’s swearing, but in an awed way instead of a pissed-off one. Ryan’s just staring at my wings like he wishes he could touch them. Maybe later.
I throw the mummy a look. “That wasn’t very nice,” I say chidingly. The voice of the Kalaturru/Kurgarru laughs. It’s hollow and echoes through the cave.
The elemental spirits protect you. You may have my hospitality.
Slowly the mummy’s hands lift from its lap. The sound is unbelievably gross, if only because it sounds so mundane, paper shuffling or leather whispering and not at all someone’s dead and dried skin moving. The mummy breaks its left hand off, holds it out to us with its right.
I blow a little breeze around myself and float to the mummy. It looks less creepy close up. More sad. I wish there was companionship to give it. I take its hand.
“Thank you, K—Kalaturru and Kur—Kurgurru.” I have totally slaughtered that, but the thing is lonely and it broke off its own hand for us, the least I can do is make the attempt.
There are rites to be performed in the netherworld, it tells me, and I nod soberly. The hand’s dry and cracking in mine, like it’s going to fall apart at any second.
My blue glow surrounds it. The fingers curl, making disgusting cracking noises, until only the pointer finger is sticking out. It’s pointing at one of the cavern walls, still decorated in a gold-on-gold-on-gold motif, but when I look closer I can see a twist in the metal, an odd line that forms—oh yes, I see me a Door.
“I guess that’s the way home,” I call over my shoulder. I turn around, and Roxie and Ryan just stare at me. I stick my tongue out at them.
Ištar laughs, and that breaks the tension.
“I wasn’t expecting you to have wings,” says Ryan.
“I told you I wasn’t like other girls.” I grin at him, and walk toward the wall. It shimmers a little
, until it looks like gold water. I hold the mummy hand tighter, and step through.
18
I’ve stepped through into a house, I think. It’s all a little blurry and blue-gold still. I blink a couple of times and hold the hand against my chest. I’m totally alone, and I’m not back in my diner, or in the movie theater, or anywhere else it would make sense for a Door to let me out. I’m—
It’s my house. I’m in my old bedroom. It used to be one of my favorite places in the world, it really was—it’s as big as the entire diner, kitchen included, and the walls are a deep purple-blue. My bed was one of those giant four posters, with a canopy, because when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a princess, and that’s the kind of bed princesses had.
Looking back on it, I was a princess. I lived in a huge house that in any other time period would have been considered a castle. I had everything I ever wanted, and just didn’t know it.
Except now I have my diner, and I have my friends, and I have Ryan, and I know this sounds terrible, but I don’t know that I’d trade it all, not even to have my parents back.
They were shitty parents, but they were my parents.
But—would they even recognize me now?
I step further into the room. There are my bookshelves, with all the books I never read on them. I must be the only girl in the whole world who’s never read Black Beauty—but I had a first edition, in perfect condition. I remember it because it brought the highest price of all the books when it was sold at auction.
My parents had a lot of debt, it turned out. My mother took all the cash when she left, liquidated all their stocks and bonds and did whatever people do when they’re planning to not come back and deal with the fallout, the aftermath.
The house was sold at auction, too.
This can’t be my house. But there are all the stuffed animals that I gave to Goodwill, and there’s my collection of shot glasses from all over the world, and—
I jerk open the bottom drawer of the dresser. There are my sex toys, and the strawberry-flavored lube that I’d never even had a chance to try. There’s even my worn copy of Colette’s biography and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the trilogy of books about how Sleeping Beauty became a sex slave. I hadn’t needed to hide them, but that was what normal girls did, and I was nothing if not completely normal, right up until the moment I met Ryan.
Salt and Silver Page 20