Betwixt

by Tara Bray Smith

  He reached a hand in front of him. His stomach seized when he didn’t see it rise. He dropped it and once more lifted it. Nothing. All he saw was the light, seemingly brighter now, but a strange shade of cold blue. Everything else, the walls, the ceiling, he saw as if through a screen.

  He turned once more and again there was the door, which he walked toward, reaching his hand out —

  He was walking backward. He wasn’t used to paying attention to his eyes, but as he rolled them around in their sockets he realized: something had happened to them. He swiveled his head. Right was left. Left, right. Even before he reached a trembling hand up to touch his face he sensed his eyeballs had moved, or grown. They seemed to be on the side of his head now, and larger—much larger. He reached his hand up, straining his peripheral vision. Finally he caught sight of his hand moving.

  He had eyes on the back of his head.

  No, that wasn’t right. But he could see behind him. He touched his forehead, patting the now-puckered skin. Two eyeballs domed there, the lids pulled back in tight rings, almost half the size of his hands. Even the shapes had changed, growing ridges and bumps. He could not touch them without burning.

  He felt farther up. Two warm stalks, soft and furry as feathers, sprouted out of his temples. Perhaps an inch high, they arced into the damp tunnel air, and when he released the one he had touched, Moth realized that he could control them. They responded to something in the air — not sound, but something else, something more chemical, like a taste.

  Smell. He could smell it. Dying human corpa.

  “Moth,” he whispered.

  He’d morphed. This was it. What Viv had promised. He reached behind his shoulder blades for wings and felt nothing, just the smooth stickiness of his leather jacket.

  Was this what she had meant about not using the full extent of his powers until he was ready? Until he’d committed to the exidis? But he didn’t remember deciding. Had he missed something, some clue he’d given himself? All he remembered was being under the bridge, the moment before stepping into the darkness. Ondine’s face had appeared to him and he had felt something — an odd pulling, a disturbance. He had felt for a door and found it, heavy and iron, unlocked it, and slipped in. It had been as easy as that.

  Moth felt one of his antennae move minutely and involuntarily. His eyes shifted and again focused on the burning light in the distance. Something was there. He could smell it. He walked toward it, noting how the tunnels and the mold and lichen offered up new, strange patterns. Wings and bull’s-eyes and seeping spots. This was so different, this feeling of certainty, even if it was limited to the realm of the senses. Something on the floor leaned against a brick wall: a human, Moth knew, not by its shape or color — his spectrum had been reduced, he realized, to whites and violets and blues and pinks — but by its chemical composition. Decaying flesh, nitrates. This one was no longer alive.

  Tripping across a soft leg, he felt liquefying flesh squish, drying bone crunch. His heart squeezed but he continued.

  Faster Moth crept, practicing his shifting gaze.

  He didn’t hear the voice until he was almost to the light. He wanted to move into it — no, not quite into it, but to the very edge of it, where the shadows were blackest. He paused at the edge of a low, dug-out door.

  “If you think I’m going to help you get out of here, you little slut, you’re dead wrong. Don’t mean to be so blunt, but you’re the one who got us into this.”

  The figure stopped near him and Moth heard an uncomprehending whimper, then another nervous laugh.

  “You and your lizard-faced lover. Bleek. He doesn’t even know what he has coming. What did you think, that he was in love with you? Or were you just high?”

  Moth recognized the fierce whisper. He leaned past the edge of the door.

  Neve was clamped to the edge of a low table with what looked like a woman’s leather belt. Her head hung between her knees and she was swaying. With his altered vision he could make out a white dress, smeared with something darker, all across the front down to the hem. Whatever Bleek had intended to do, Moth realized, he’d already at least tried.

  “You are never going to get out of here, darling Neve.” A hand picked up the lantern on the table. “But I am.”

  Morgan was already turning when he spoke. She jerked and turned her eyes into the darkness, where he was still hidden.

  “So it was you I smelled.”

  “Who is that?” Her voice raised to a tinny squeak.

  “You know who it is.”

  Morgan lowered the lantern and stared. Moth smelled shampoo, sweat, and crumbling, terrified corpus. He felt his antennae strain, his eyes turn.

  “Moth?”

  “That is what I am. But what are you?”

  It had just come to him. What he had been learning, studying for years, was now all available to him in an instant, without thinking. Her response was instantaneous, jumbled. One after another. She hadn’t yet gotten control of her gift, but it was showing itself at Moth’s command. First a long, forked black tongue licked toward the darkness, then the talons of a bird of prey scratched. The wings of a bat stretched out and were just as quickly replaced by a rat’s hungry, nibbling snout. All predators of his kind, and all interspersed, bits of Morgan, screaming in frustration. Viv had been right. Morgan was an adept morpha — already. Far beyond what Moth had been capable of at her age. Adept, but untrained.

  “I know what you are.” He spoke calmly through his fear, noting that his voice seemed to have lowered, become stronger. He liked its new timbre. “And I knew what Bleek was, early on. I just didn’t want to admit it. Viv will be very happy with me when she knows what I’ve accomplished.”

  So this was what he had been meant to do. He’d failed early on with Bleek. He could redeem himself with Morgan.

  She crouched in the shadows, her head shaking. “No — It’s not what you think. I’m just here for K.A. I got lost. I’m just angry —”

  Now he seemed to be upside down. His eyes rolled in their sockets so as to be still fixed on Morgan, who had crouched near the door and was now looking up at him with a stricken, terrified stare. He was quivering, yes, shaking inch by inch. But getting closer. He could smell her so clearly now. She was sweating, releasing herself. Still sweet, Moth thought. I never did get that kiss. And though he knew that this wasn’t right — Morgan had the potential to be a cutter; he knew what cutters did — he also felt the deeper, almost sensual need to get closer to her. Taste the nectar she was now emitting freely, in clouds as soft as honeyed mist. He wanted … he wanted to suck at her…. He felt himself dropping … past the light….

  It was not Morgan’s mouth that Moth found himself heading toward as he landed with a tongue that had suddenly grown to almost a foot, and turned rough and grayish black, but something hairless and foul-tasting, rotted from the earthen tunnels. Moth leaped off the body he had landed on almost as soon as he touched it.

  “We were always close, brother, but not that close.”

  Bleek laughed and dusted his jacket with long, pale, and pointed fingers.

  K.A. HAD WAITED FOR A HALF HOUR OUTSIDE OF DANNY’S before he picked up his cell phone, not sure whom to call. He had spoken to Jacob before he’d gone to bed, promising him he’d spend the day looking for Neve, but it was too early to phone him now. He wanted to let the man rest. Though he knew the situation with Neve was serious — enough to merit Jacob’s calling the cops — something also kept K.A. from panicking. Neve was with Tim Bleeker; that much seemed clear. He didn’t allow himself to think the word “dust,” let alone “sex,” but he knew his sister had been right, and he’d not wanted to see it. Now he needed to find Neve, get her home, and get her help.

  What confused him, what caused him to be sitting in his car outside of Danny’s like a cheap detective, cell in his hand, hat pulled low, was what the hell his sister was doing with Nix Saint-Michael at a seedy bar in downtown Portland at sunrise. Nix Saint-Michael, whom he’d thought was hi
s best friend.

  “Morgue.”

  He spoke the word and the cell dialed her number. While he waited for the line to connect, he felt heat rise to his face, even sitting here alone in the car. K.A. had never messed with his sister’s business; Morgan wouldn’t have tolerated it. Even being there, spying on her, made him feel ashamed.

  The call clicked into voice mail. “Hi, this is Morgan. Leave a message —”

  K.A. hung up and tried again. “Hi, this is …”

  “It’s K.A. Call me as soon as you get this. I’m … I just want to talk to you. So call me.”

  Now what? Nix didn’t have a phone. What would he say, anyway, besides asking the boy what he knew about Neve? He’d have to go inside. There’d be a scene. He hadn’t seen Nix since he’d left for soccer camp, and now that he’d heard about him being with Neve, he’d have to confront him. K.A. didn’t like scenes. They reminded him too much of his father, the last man he wanted to be.

  His sister was in there — on dust, too? — and he knew he’d have to get her. He pulled his cap lower on his head, feeling self-conscious about his baggy jeans and new Stanford sweatshirt, a boy in a boy’s costume. Nix and Morgan walking into a downtown Portland bar at dawn, while suspicious, didn’t feel outlandish. Was he just too innocent, after all? Was that why Neve always kept her distance?

  K.A. walked across the street, head down, hands in pockets. He might not be sophisticated like his older sister, but he knew one thing: Danny’s at dawn was no place she should be.

  Inside was dim and dank and sickly sour: his father on a Sunday afternoon. He tried to ignore the swelling nausea, surveying the room for Morgan and Nix. It was far past closing time, and the stragglers were asleep. The bartender had started to put chairs on tables. K.A. approached.

  “I’m looking for a girl — seventeen, black hair, blue eyes. She came in here about a half hour ago with a friend of hers, a guy.”

  The bartender shrugged and shook his head.

  “People come in here all the time.”

  “Hey, officer,” the one drunk not asleep called from the other side of the room, “the doughnuts are down the block.”

  K.A. leaned over the bar, taking off his baseball cap. The bartender folded his arms in front of his chest.

  “I’m no cop. I’m in high school. I just want to find my sister. She came in here with a …” He almost said friend, then amended himself. “With a guy, around my age, Indian. Native American. They never came out again. I’m sure you saw her. I’m just worried about her, man. She’s my sister.”

  The bartender scratched the back of a hand with his stubbled beard. He narrowed his eyes but didn’t say anything.

  “Listen, man. I just want to find my sister.”

  “Feathers not dots,” the heckler yelled. But K.A., fighting the desire to kick his teeth in, ignored him. The bartender picked up his rag and resumed wiping.

  “The junkies like the women’s room.”

  “My sister is not a junkie.”

  “The dustheads like the men’s room.”

  “Dust and junk. Never touch the shit myself.”

  “Shut up, Ed,” the bartender said to the drunk in the corner, though by then K.A. was halfway out of the room. Right before he opened the door to the men’s bathroom, he remembered something. Maybe it was the laughter of the man in the corner, maybe it was the fleeting image of Nix’s solemn face. But he real-ized there was one person who might know what the hell was happening with Nix, and he still had her number on his phone from before his trip to California. He just didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before.

  CHAPTER 25

  RAPHAEL INMAN HAD SAID TO HER, the time Ondine had attempted to draw a storm:

  “The big things, they’re not so literal, are they? Not so representable. Storms, eruptions, the tsunami, the earthquake. They are vast. They are unpaintable. Natural power masses and fractures into the elusive abstract. The gestalt, Ondine. How do you evoke the gestalt?”

  She had run to Google and looked up the word that night.

  “A unified symbolic configuration having properties that cannot be derived from its parts…. A German word that does not translate easily…. A complete pattern or configuration … elements so unified that it cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts.”

  Now here she was in Chicago, by a gigantic lake — itself a gestalt, Ondine thought, a giant hole, negative space filled — having just met with a horribly familiar stranger, her biological mother (the thought was enough to make her pass out), who had told her that her ring was in mortal danger.

  Take them. Then fight.

  Walking quickly across the park, Ondine looked down with jittery, unseeing eyes at the letter the woman had given her. She would not open it. Things were as they seemed.

  She called her mother from a pay phone, asking hoarsely if there had been any calls. Trish sighed. “Your phone was ringing off the hook, honey. So I finally answered it. I thought it was you. It was K.A. D’Amici. He said he needed to talk to you, but that he was going to be out of cell reach for a while. I told him to leave a voice mail. Is everything okay? Where are you?”

  She was at the lake, she said, with Lissa Griffiths. She would be home in an hour. There was nothing to worry about.

  Her legs shook and her throat burned. Three times she’d had to dial her voice mail on a pay phone to get it right.

  “Ondine, it’s K.A.,” the hurried message had said. The boy sounded like he was in a small room, and she thought she could hear the warbling strains of country music in the background. “Look, I don’t know where you are but I need to talk to you. Neve is missing. And …” He cleared his throat. “I’m trying to find her. She’s … she might be in the Shanghai Tunnels … under downtown. And Morgan, too. And Nix. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but in case something happens … in case something happens, call Jacob Clowes and tell him what I’m telling you.” The phone pulled away and she heard the boy’s voice again, this time closer. “I’m going down there. I’m in Danny’s Bar. Danny’s Bar,” he repeated. “On First and Ash. I’ll call you when I’m out.”

  He hung up. Ondine pressed five. The message was delivered at 9:28 AM, almost an hour ago. 7:28 AM Portland time. There were no other messages.

  It took her a second to cradle the receiver.

  She half jogged the few hundred yards over a busy highway to a dock at the edge of the lake. Boats creaked, but other than that it was quiet. She sat at the edge of the water and looked down, then stared dumbly at the horizon. Boulders and chunks of concrete sat submerged, the only movement the pulsing of the lake weed and the tiny wavelets that crested with regularity along the wooden and stone embankment she was perched on. She had to fight a monstrous urge to throw herself in.

  Slowly, carefully, she opened the envelope. Though the words seemed to swim in front of her, she tried to take in as much as her eyes allowed her.

  She is a cutter. She will eliminate you. She tried last night.

  Despite herself, Ondine cast around for the black woman from the airplane the night before, the one she had felt so comforted by, the one who had given her the club soda. All she saw were tourists; a few businessmen strolling; a couple of teenagers skipping stones, one in a White Sox T-shirt. No one harmful. No one out to get her.

  Farther down, on the highway median Ondine had crossed a moment before, a group of people shimmered. Distant traffic halted; a few horns bleated; everything sounded slow and wavy. Then a smaller thing, shaking, trotting toward her, out of a bright weave of moving cars. A dog. A little black dachsund, the one from the rose garden.

  She stood up and walked up the granite blocks toward the highway. A car was lodged halfway across the median.

  The old woman.

  The sky was very blue; the sun shone. People stood around. She walked faster toward the crosswalk. Cars stopped, a few horns hung in the still summer air. Red lights flashed, a siren mounted, and she remembered:

  The o
ld woman from the park, she had seen her again, after she got off the phone. Something about the woman’s voice — “Come on, Henry. Come now.” — had scared her and she had run across the highway, not waiting for the light to change. The blocks of granite at the edge of the lake must have drowned out the sound of the car veering off the highway, headed for …

  “Excuse me —” She stopped a couple coming from the median. “What just happened?”

  They shook their heads and frowned.

  “Some car skipped the median and almost hit an old lady. The driver is in bad shape. The lady lost hold of her dog — a little dachsund. Have you seen it?”

  Ondine nodded, staring. The driver was in bad shape.

  “He went over there.” She pointed.

  “Tell the old lady that. She’s frantic.”

  She arrived at the scene at the same time as the ambulance.

  “Where’s the old woman?” she asked a stranger. He shrugged. “I have to tell her her dog is okay.” The man stared and she was conscious of the fact that she held only two things: the opened letter and the brown eyedrop bottle. She curled her hands into her sides.

  “Ask the paramedics,” he said. “They probably are getting her in the ambulance. She was okay. The driver — she wasn’t so lucky. Are you related to her?”

  “No.” Ondine paused.

  The man crinkled his mouth and looked down. “Oh. Just. Just that you’re both black.” He waved his hand. “Stupid assumption. The old lady. She’s okay.”

  A stupid assumption that she was related to the driver of the car that had almost hit the old lady. A black woman. The one who was now in very bad shape.

  Ondine looked around the dissipating crowd and saw an official-looking man in a red jacket standing near a car, mumbling into a walkie-talkie. He did not look up till she was there standing in front of him.