Well.
I reached between us, sliding my hand up his thigh. “How’s your leg?”
He gave me a wry look. “Don’t distract me. We still have a bullet to discuss.”
“Bullet done gone and rebounded into a building,” I replied, with more ease than I felt. “And it was an honest question, about your leg.”
“Then it’s honestly sore. Crushed bone never does heal right.” He leaned in, brushing his lips over my cheek. “I need a heating pad, baby. A lawn chair on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.”
“It’s probably snowing there, you know.”
“With you in nothing but your tattoos.”
“Because looking at demons on my breasts is such a turn-on.”
“And no one,” he breathed, kissing my ear, “no one for miles around.”
I turned my head and kissed his mouth. Warmth slid through my heart, down to my toes. I felt catalyzed by his heat: turned over, mixed, becoming something new. His strong hands—already beneath my sweater—moved a fraction higher, his thumbs caressing me, just so; and my breath caught. I tilted back my head, arching into his touch. Aware, keenly, that feeling anything at all was due to the good graces of Zee and the others.
Bothered me, sometimes. I had never had privacy in my life. But a person could get used to anything. Almost.
I wanted him to forget. I wanted to forget. I wanted something better to remember than bullets and zombies and dead girls. I wanted to be free and warm, and human.
I brushed my lips over his cheek, and reached for the zipper of his jeans.
CHAPTER 4
I could not fly in an airplane; that much was clear. Not a commercial aircraft, and probably not even a private one. Airplanes were dangerous territory. Short flights, I suspected, would be all right—but long international travel, the kind that crossed date lines where the sun rose and set while you were in the air, might prove disastrous. The boys woke when the sun went down. Peeled straight off my body, hungry and ready for trouble. Simple as that. No matter where, or how inconvenient it might be.
Nor did I have time to arrange the proper documentation for a visit to China. A quick search on Google made that perfectly clear. I had a passport, but no visa. Grant’s luck was better, if more dubious. Due to whatever influence Father Cribari had brought to bear on his contact in the local Chinese embassy, Grant would have his visa within hours as opposed to days. He was scheduled to fly to Shanghai late that morning. Which meant I had less than the wink of an eye to come up with a solution.
Luckily, I had one. If I could find him.
But first, that bullet. I needed some answers. Confirmation, if nothing else. Which led me on a circuitous path through the homeless shelter, searching for a zombie.
I found Rex in the basement. Years ago the warehouses that made up the Coop had been used in the manufacture of furniture. Most of the old equipment had been cleared away, but the lower levels—off-limits to everyone but a handful—still housed an array of mysterious and elaborate iron machines whose purpose, I was sure, could not be nearly as remarkable as what I preferred to imagine (which was that some genius inventor had made his home in this concrete tomb and assembled, in wild fits of mental operatic fury, his own collection of devices meant to change the world into an odder place than it already seemed to be).
The basement smelled like damp concrete and motor oil. My cowboy boots were loud on the floor, and Dick Van Dyke’s voice echoed merrily through the shadows; the Mary Poppins sound track, Chim-Chim-Chereeing against steel pipes and iron gears. I followed the music to a room that was a good distance from the stairs, watching shadows move through the light that spread from the crack around the half-closed metal door.
I peered inside. First thing I saw was row after row of racks holding wooden flatbed containers filled with soil and careful rows of small green plants. Sunlamps hung haphazardly from chains and ropes strung from the ceiling. In the aisles, on the floor, were some very pretty rag rugs—homemade, I knew—and several cardboard crates piled high with brightly colored yarn and bolts of cloth.
I heard muttering beneath Dick Van Dyke’s voice. Choice expletives. I pushed open the door a little more and saw a dark aura thundering above a bowed brown head covered in a red knit cap. Grizzled hands flexed, and a tool belt hung low around narrow hips.
The zombie was watching Mary, who seemed completely oblivious to his presence. She was singing along with the music, barefoot, standing on her toes as she carefully, and with a great deal of affection, watered her marijuana. She had pulled back her wild white hair, stuffing it into a bun, and her arms were bare. No trace of fat, just sinew and bone. Old track marks covered her pale skin. Grant had found Mary in an alley, years ago, almost dead from an overdose. Nursed her back to health. The old woman had never left. I wasn’t certain she could.
“Jesus Christ,” Rex muttered. “Holy fucking shit.”
“Yes,” I said, surveying the illegal growth. “Remarkable how this happens.”
Rex turned, giving me a dirty look—though his aura betrayed his fear, flaring in all directions like rockets powered the shadows in his soul. He was the oldest of the zombies who had come to be converted by Grant—oldest, in that his parasite was old—and while I distrusted the idea that any demon could willingly desire a change in its nature, I was convinced of this zombie’s devotion to Grant. For now, that was enough to let him live.
“I just found this new stash,” Rex said, like he thought I would try to blame him. Make good, finally, on my longstanding threat to exorcise the shit out of him and feed his writhing body to the boys.
“Last week it was the south side of the basement,” I replied mildly, watching Mary, who was now singing along with the always-melancholy melody of “Feed the Birds.” “Any clues yet to where she’s getting all the equipment?”
“Fuck,” muttered the zombie. “Take your pick. Just one of her harvests could pay for an army of little helpers.”
“No one else has been down here. I’m certain of it.”
“Whatever.” Rex rubbed his jaw, aura settling; assured, maybe, that he was not going to immediately meet his end. “If the police ever find out, Grant’s ass will burn. All of us will.”
“No one would blame Grant,” I said, but I knew that was not the point. Grant loved Mary. He had saved her life. If she went to prison for selling drugs, it would hurt him in ways I did not want to contemplate. Problem was, Mary and marijuana were like conjoined twins: where one was, so was the other, no matter how impossible. The woman loved her weed.
Mary still ignored me. I thought about all the effort it had taken to get rid of her last harvest, and sighed. “Someone tried to shoot me this morning.”
Rex laughed. “Lovely. Did it make you feel closer to your mother?”
I punched him. He staggered to one knee, clutching his face. I bent close and, in a loud, sickly-sweet voice, said, “Wow. Those migraines are really bothering you, huh?”
“Bitch,” Rex murmured.
“Don’t fuck with me,” I whispered. “I want to know if a demon was responsible.”
“I don’t know,” he snapped, staggering to his feet—one hand pressed to his face. “Doubtful. The smart ones all left town, and no one else would dream of trying that stunt. None of us could get away with—” Rex stopped, staring. “They got away with it?”
“They just think they did,” I snapped, still peeved about his remark concerning my mother. “So if it wasn’t one of you, then who?”
There was a gleam in his eye I did not like. “Nothing large has escaped the prison. Not recently. And anything powerful enough to break through those walls wouldn’t use a bullet to kill you.”
I’d already had a sense of that. I would have felt a crack in the prison veil if a demon larger than a parasite had come through. “And before my time? Something already here?”
“There were some breaks from the outer rings of the veil. But that was centuries ago. Again, a bullet would not be their sty
le. Too human.”
Demons did not lie. Even if the zombie had told an untruth, I would see it in the shadows of his aura, which remained steady, unflinching.
I thought of Cribari, though the idea of humans hunting me was more disturbing than a demon. “You ever heard about anyone in my bloodline being called Dark Mother?”
“No. But all you bitches do is breed and kill. That’s plenty dark.”
“Mouthy little parasite,” I replied. “I bet you wouldn’t like that body so much if it was missing its tongue.”
His aura flared, though his expression remained flinty. “Try another one. You don’t harm hosts. Not like that. And you won’t kill me because that would mean breaking your word to Grant. You won’t even exorcise me, because I would just find another body to inhabit. No-win situation, Hunter.”
“We’ll see,” I said, looking past him at Mary, who had finally stopped watering her plants and now studied me with that piercing, farseeing gaze that was all kinds of crazy and sane and otherworldly; a mixed bag for a mixed-up mind. She took a step toward me and held out her hand.
On her palm, in ink, was an exact drawing of the pendant Grant had shown me only an hour before: his mother’s necklace, etched in neat coils and knots, tumbling into eternity upon her pale skin. My vision blurred. I swallowed hard, gut churning like I was riding a roller coaster on a full stomach.
“Iron hearts make murder,” I heard her say, though her voice sounded very far away. “Those who eat sin will be cast away and burned.”
The boys rippled. A chill raced through my bones. I said, “Mary,” and she shook her head, folding her hand into a fist that she pressed above her heart.
“We are lost in the Labyrinth,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “We are lost.”
DEMONS were not of earth, any more than a comet might be. Demons had journeyed to this world, as had the Avatars. As had humans, though I still questioned that particular revelation.
Either way, the method for reaching this planet had not involved space travel—though it had involved travel through space. A particular space.
The Labyrinth.
I still did not understand, not fully. I could not bring myself to imagine the possibilities. Other worlds, doorways into alternate realities. A maze of interdimensional highways bound together by a neutral zone—a crossroad between here and there—a place of possibilities that was a world unto itself. Or so I had been told. I had traveled through only a fragment: a prison, a place where souls were thrown to be forgotten. I had fallen into the Wasteland. Walked the dark side of the Labyrinth.
I had forgotten myself there. Forgotten everything. Buried alive. Nothing but a heartbeat in the endless dark.
According to Jack, I was the only person ever to escape the Wasteland. And though I knew, intellectually, that the Labyrinth was much more than that dark, endless hole, I could not help but associate one with the other. Because even if you fell into the good side of the Labyrinth, you might find yourself lost, forever. Wandering from your world to another, and another: a stranger, eternally in a strange land. Abandoned in the maze.
As Mary had been abandoned. Elsewhere, far from this world. Only she knew how or why it had happened, or where she was from, but it was enough that she was here. Grant called her an Alice who had fallen through the rabbit hole. Like fairy tales told, of men and women who discovered hidden hills, or magic stones; or fell asleep, only to find a hundred years had slipped by. Time passed differently in the Labyrinth. Everything did. And not everyone who stumbled through its doorways was human.
The demons had used the Labyrinth to slip from one world to another, again and again, harvesting human lives that had begun elsewhere. Following trails of flesh. Until, ten thousand years ago, they had come to earth—and this planet had become the last stand between the demons, Avatars, and humans. As it would be again, when the veil failed. We were all alien in our origins, our roots and blood soaked in worlds I could not dream existed.
I tried questioning Mary about the drawing on her hand but gave up when she turned away, floating on her toes like an aged ballerina, and started singing Mary Poppins’s “A Spoonful of Sugar.” I left Rex to handle her, and the marijuana. My mother was probably turning in her grave. A Hunter, working with a zombie, trusting a zombie to be left alone with a human. I was so far removed from everything I had been taught, I hardly knew myself anymore.
I had friends now. I had a man I loved. I no longer lived in my car or in hotels scattered across North and South America. I was making roots, day by day, and never mind my concerns that I was doing the wrong thing.
Because if I was here, in this city, no one else was out there. On the road. Traveling from city to city to save the day like some ball-busting, demon-hunting crime fighter (a one-girl A-Team, I liked to imagine). No matter if running around two continents like a chicken with its head cut off had been, in retrospect, the least productive way to save this world from the impending failure of the prison veil. Never mind that there was only one of me, and all I could do was scratch an itch on the toe of a giant. At least I had been doing something. I had saved some lives. Changed a few for the better. Small consolation for knowing that I was going to spend my entire life mostly alone. And die young, murdered. In front of my own child.
I had no illusions. No way out. I would have a daughter one day. Eventually, the boys would abandon me for her—as they had abandoned my mother. When that happened, I would die. Perhaps shot in the head, just like her.
Nor was going childless an option. My blood belonged to Zee and the boys. My body, their immortality—their only connection to this world. If I died, they would die. If I never had a child, they would die with me. The boys would never let that happen. They had survived for more millennia than even I could guess, and part of that existence had been upon the bodies of my ancestors—a line of women stretching so far in the past I could not dream their existence beyond my mother and grandmother: a steely-eyed woman murdered six years before my birth.
My only consolation was that the boys would remember me—in dreams, of women dead and buried and turned to dust. But that did not make the melancholy any less. That did not make me stop missing my mother. Even now, with Grant in my life.
Nor did it make my choices any less difficult. I still hunted demons, here in Seattle. Tried my best to save people. But it felt wrong not to be on the move. Like a sin. A crime. My mother’s voice, always in my head, telling me I was doing something infinitely wicked by staying more than one night in any city. Move, move now. Or invite yet more pain.
Bad enough that I didn’t know what to do about the prison veil. How to stop it from failing, how to save this world. I had no plan. No answers.
And I needed some. Fast. But not just about that.
I found Byron in the hall when I walked out of the basement stairwell. The door was kept locked from the outside. Mary did not have a key, but changing the locks once a month did little to deter her. Smart crazy woman.
The teen leaned against the wall, his eyes cold and dark, and his mouth tense. I had a feeling he had been waiting for a while.
“There’s a pervert here to see you,” he said.
“Well,” I replied, after a moment. “Introduce me.”
He led me down the winding corridors to the lobby of the homeless shelter, what had once been the corporate entrance of the furniture company. Old-time elegance was in the details: a mosaic in the expansive tile floors, dark wood trim, and stained glass in the windows alongside the oak door. A small office was visible through two archways divided from the lobby by staffed desks screwed into the floor. One desk was to check in folks who wanted to use the shelter—and the other was part of a help center where men and women could make appointments to meet with volunteers about jobs, housing, and educational opportunities.
The check-in line did not open until after three in the afternoon, but there was a good crowd in front of the help desk. I saw one of the zombies from breakfast making an appointment
. He did not notice me, but Archie Limbaud’s face flashed before mine, as did his victim’s. Little girl lost. I swallowed hard, tearing my gaze from the zombie. Wondering if he had ever forced his host to murder.
Byron did not need to point out the pervert. I saw him as soon as I entered the lobby. He sat on a wooden bench, alone, eating a hot dog and peanuts. Dressed in a tan suit and wrinkled blue dress shirt that strained over a round stomach. A loosened striped tie hung around his neck, silk, stained with ketchup. He was bald on top, and his glasses were dirty. So was his chin. He ate violently. Each bite looked strong enough to tear a steel pipe in half. Peanuts mashed around his mouth, which I saw clearly because he continued shoving food between his teeth before everything had been swallowed.
“So,” I said to Byron, as we stood on the other side of the lobby. “I can’t imagine you struck up a conversation of your own free will.”
“I was around the office. I heard him talking. He wanted the woman in charge, so I volunteered to find her.”
“You thought of me?”
He shrugged, scrutinizing the stranger with a cold, hard stare that belonged to a war-torn veteran, not a teenage boy. “I used to know men like him.”
“Not anymore,” I murmured grimly, and pushed past the boy to walk across the lobby.
Pervert or not, the man was gross—and not just because of the remnants of a hot dog greasing his lips. An indefinable something was wrong with him, and his pale, bulging body made me imagine cockroaches, millions of them, swarming under his straining skin. He studied my feet as I approached, then the rest of me, small blue eyes wrinkling into slits behind the dirty lenses of his wire-rim glasses.
Darkness Calls Page 5