by Kay Camden
Control—I have it somewhere. It’ll be easier to find in the air-conditioned car and out of this heat, so I get behind the wheel and slam the door.
“It’s fucking hot out there.” I don’t know if her Deaf person app picked that up but it doesn’t matter. I’m not really talking to her anyway.
I take the phone and see the text. Last chance? Right. Let them try to find me.
Piss off, I type back. Sloane looks quickly away like it’s a thing she didn’t want to see. Princess is shocked by the disrespect I show my own father? Maybe I should tell her he’s the one I learned it from. No—that would require looking at her, and I just can’t do that right now. The memory of last night has me wound so tight I can’t trust myself not to do it all over again. Being confined inside this car with her is not helping.
“Get out of my car.” She probably can’t read my lips if I’m facing the steering wheel. I open the Deaf person app, repeat it, and hand the phone to her.
Do you feel that? she asks through the phone.
She’s going to have to be more specific. I feel a lot of things right now.
I think someone’s coming.
I hear it then—a car with a loud exhaust. She’s twisted in her seat to look out the back window down the driveway, and I’m watching my side mirror. At the same time we look at each other—we need to go. Convenient we happen to already be in the car. I release the brake and find the gear, but she lays a steady hand on my forearm and leaves it there long enough to refresh that memory of last night and the feel of her mouth on mine. It was for sure real, right? Had to be—I saw the way she looked at me when I woke up. Her face hides nothing. And it couldn’t have been one of my nightmares because it was too damn good.
Get a grip, Rex. Just handle it already. Stop being such a little boy.
That’s not a car exhaust, that’s a motorcycle. I kill the R5’s engine and reach into my bag in the back, wrestling free the .45. No one in my family rides a motorcycle, but there is one Bevan who does. And if he’s here to claim his daughter, I’m going to blow his head off.
Unfortunately the rider is definitely not male. She doesn’t look like any Moore I know. Sloane has joined my side behind the R5. I chamber a round and aim as the motorcycle approaches. The rider stops several yards away, turns off the engine, takes off her helmet.
“Take that away from him,” she says to Sloane, who jumps as if poked.
Sloane reaches for the .45, and I’m handing it to her without wanting to, my hands having gone weak and grown their own brain and free will. Weird magic hangs heavy around us, powerful, overtaking, unfamiliar—shit. Black magic. A black witch. Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Dúile daoibh,” she says, taking off her gloves. The greeting is obviously aimed at us, but I’m not greeting her back. She’ll have to make me say it just like she made me release the .45. Just as I think it I wish I hadn’t. She looks as old as my father and has had a whole lifetime to collect power. She can probably read minds.
Sloane takes a step forward, and I have to check myself. Don’t reach for her, Rex. Lighten the hell up. And even as the black witch steps forward, my arm wants to shoot out and grab Sloane. Yeah, she can probably fight her off better than I can. Brain, please get that message to my idiotic arms.
The black witch presses her index finger against Sloane’s forehead. “Daughter of Liv, son of Dillon,” she says, glancing at me.
Sloane covers her ears, which is pretty weird for a deaf girl.
“What an unlikely couple you make. Do your families know?”
I choke and laugh. There’s nothing happy about it though, unless you count the joy I get from the image of kicking her in the throat. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, old lady.”
“Rubbish choice of word? Okay, how about ‘team?’”
Sloane nods like she’s following along completely. I hand her my phone. Total dumbass for not doing it sooner. If we really are a team, then I need her to follow the conversation so she knows when to attack. But she doesn’t even look at the screen.
The woman reaches into her jacket and removes a pouch. From it she pulls a bright green leaf she tucks in her mouth and chews. I shift my weight so I’m closer to the .45 in Sloane’s hand. She’s too observant though, because she switches the gun to the opposite hand. I’ll have to reach around her body to get it now. It’ll add time to my offense but that’s no prob. I’m much faster than an old lady even if the old lady’s a black witch.
“Sloane. You’re a gatherer of darkness. Collect it, harness it, use it, and let it use you. The stronger you are, the more it will bend to your rules.” Now the woman holds that pouch out to Sloane, and Sloane is taking it. “This will relieve your eyes from the daylight.”
Sloane types into my phone and it says, My dad said—
She pauses to look up at me. Unsure how to finish? Or unsure if she should finish in front of me?
“Forget what you dad said,” the woman says. “He’ll never understand dubhealaín. He doesn’t have our blood.”
Our blood?
“Our and your mother’s blood.”
The longest pieces of Sloane’s bangs have blown in her eyes, but she’s making no move to fix them. All she can do is stare at the woman, and all I can do is stare at her. I need to teach the girl how to keep a neutral face because the layers of expression are unreal. Shock, panic, grief, with a healthy side of suspicion and disbelief. But laying it all out in plain view like that? I don’t know how she survives around people.
She’s gone back to the phone. My mother?
“Carries black magic blood and passed it to you. She’s lost it, but you’re still young enough to learn. I can teach you how to manage it.”
Sloane shakes her head like she’s just been offered candy by a stranger.
“It’d be wise to shed your father’s hatred of our kind and rethink this. My number is in your head once you do.” Then the woman looks at me. “Rex Moore, you have something of mine.”
Here’s where I take my own advice and keep my face blank. Release just a little grin to keep this friendly until I’m ready to not be friendly. “Okay, hmm. Youth? Nope. Superior magic? Help me out because neither of those are yours.” Pressure coils around my throat. I subdue a cough but it gets away from me, not easing the pressure but increasing it. Even though I’m taking in air, it feels like it’s through a tiny tube that doesn’t cut it. The woman has crossed her arms to watch me struggle. And Sloane has a hand against her own throat, her eyes showing the fear mine should be. I decide to shut up.
“Finished?” the woman asks.
My throat finally opens to its full capacity, allowing me to fill my lungs.
“Because we only have a few minutes. Your father stole something of mine I’d like to have back.”
“I don’t have it.” Which is true. It’s in my other pants. Along with a blade I’d love to have on me right now.
“You’ll need to find it then.”
Moths pour out of the trees into a whirlwind above our heads. It’s enough of a diversion for me to reach around Sloane for the .45, which slides right into my hand since Sloane is dropping to the ground. I get a violent tug in my stomach that stops me still. Does she think I’m going to shoot her?
I feel a hundred feet tall standing there while she’s on her belly smacking at my ankle. The woman and her motorcycle have disappeared without a sound. Sloane smacks again, the moths circle, and everything else has gone completely silent.
Gunshots explode from all around, bullets popping earth and pavement around us. Sloane is army-crawling to the R5, and I’m covering her, shooting down guys emerging from the woods and behind the house. A sting peels across my shoulder, and I’m out of ammo. I dive toward the R5 where Sloane sits against the wheel, both hands pressed on her leg over a gush of escaping blood.
Everything blurs around me. All soun
d mutes. What I see instead is my thumb on that crease in her palm. How perfectly it nested there. And how she let me do it.
A man’s voice is shouting at me to get down. Someone else has knocked me to my knees. My wrists are being wrenched behind my back. And Sloane is setting fire to the ground around her for a barrier to the three guys stalking up to her. Her leg runs with red. All she can do is sit and hold that wound. If she gets up, she’ll bleed out. Now it’s not just the crease in her palm I see. It’s the way she tilted her face to me when I backed her into that wall. The trust in her eyes. No one’s ever looked at me like that.
I slam my head back, making contact with something that feels like a nose. My wrists return to me. I knock away grabbing hands, kick an aimed pistol, and roll to catch it. It’s firing in my hand with no work from me because everything’s on autopilot and I can’t find the controls. Heads blow out, chests go bloody. No more bullets and they’re on me again, three at a time. I dodge and counter until I get a good hit on one and then I’m on offense. Elbow to throat, foot to knee, stomp a neck. The snap of a bone, the splatter of blood. A body falls and there are no more.
Space stretches around me instead of the crush of moving bodies. I take in air, assess the scene. Four left. All staying back. They’re the final round, and they don’t want to fail. I circle two of them to position myself between them and Sloane, who’s somehow managed to drag my bag out of the R5 and is wrapping her wound with a T-shirt. If she could hear, I’d tell her to get in the car. Might be hard to understand me though, with these swollen lips and a mouthful of blood. I spit it out and wipe my mouth.
“What are you guys waiting for?”
They exchange eye contact. A silent decision of strategy. Who knows what my family promised them if they bring me back. Is it something that can be split four ways? They may have been trained as a team, but on the battlefield things like that change.
I point to the guy closest to Sloane. “You first.”
The guy to my left charges. I take it head-on, let him knock me to the ground and pull him down with me. Then I slide around him and snap his neck. Something must’ve happened to my shoulder because there’s a hot stream running down my back and my arm tingles. Is that where I caught a bullet? I can’t even remember. I stay down and point to another guy. “Next.”
He’s not so eager. I glance at Sloane—it seems like she called my name, but I know that’s impossible. She’s shoved my bag back in the car and extinguished her fire, but she’s standing so still with both eyes closed—that’s when I see the guy near the woods with a rifle aimed right at me.
I roll, the bullet catching me somewhere in the arm. The pain is so bad it’s good. The rush of fresh adrenaline and endorphins, the raw sensation of open flesh and blood running free, and the knowledge I’ll overcome this. I’ll get up and fucking win. That’s what I need. That’s the high no one understands but me.
I’m up and moving. Sloane has met me halfway, but she shouldn’t be on that leg. She’s loco.
“Get in!” I push her toward the R5.
Instead she hobble-sprints toward the house, and I’m ducking against the car to avoid another shot from the rifle. At least it’s keeping those last few guys away. I have no idea if she’s staying in there or coming back out. My other guns are inside, though, so it wouldn’t be suicide to go back in—more guns, more cover. Is that guy reloading? Hopefully, because I’m already running toward the house.
Sloane and I collide in the doorway, my bloody arm taking most of the blow. It’s great, how that feels. If I could bottle the sensation, I could kill people with it. She’s dragging a bag—is that what she came in here for? And would it be a bad idea to smack her right now?
She points in the direction of the car and hands me the key. Good thought to grab it so they wouldn’t. Okay, genius, but now we have a rifle to dodge for yards instead of inches. I gather my guns while she dumps the box of food into her bag. We meet at the front door. I hold up one finger, then two, then three. And we run.
Because she’s slow on that bad leg, I empty my magazine to cover us. Rifle Guy isn’t firing, probably because he’s waiting for us to stop. If he takes out my new tires I’m going to kill him. But that’s not saying much because I’ll kill him anyway. At the car I aim into the woods where he last was, hoping to take him out before he ruins my tires and our smooth getaway. I don’t see Rifle Guy, though. All I see is a cluster of coyotes.
Then I’m tearing through the gears and wondering how the hell we survived that. Or if there’s another team waiting at the main road. Or a helicopter tracking us. My brain is firing faster than that last mag unloading and my heart is choking me it’s beating so hard.
Sloane’s hip slams into me when I take the turn onto the road. Her upper half is buried in the back, searching through the bags. Another hard turn would conveniently put her hip against me again but there’s no turn to make. Plus that would be weird. She’s back in the seat then, strapping into the harness with a first aid kit on her lap.
“Where’d you get that?” Not that it even matters. She needs to doctor up that leg and then see to me. My multiple bleeding wounds are trashing the R5’s interior.
*
An hour later we stop because I’ve bled through my bandages. She wants me out of the car so she can do a better job patching me up. And I’d like to take a look at her leg since there’s no way it’s fine like she says it is. It was too serious of a bleed back there.
I pull off the road into the empty lot of an old church. Unfolding out of the car is no easy effort, which leads me to believe I’m more wounded than I thought. At the back bumper of the R5, Sloane waits, clothes thoroughly mottled with brown-red dried blood, face and arms smeared, leg covered in it. It’s like her warrior paint, only instead of mud, it’s blood. The clean white bandage on her thigh blinds me in the hot sun. She holds up three fingers and taps them on her lips. I don’t know why she keeps signing to me when she’s well aware I don’t understand it.
She knocks on the R5’s hatch. I open it for her. She hauls the remaining water jug to the edge so we can tilt it into our hands and wash our hands and faces. Leaning causes my heartbeat to gain a terrifying intensity that travels into my head, pounding like death, distorting my vision. I put a hand against the car—Sloane’s taken a handful of my shirt to steady me. Too much blood loss. Need to sit down before I pass out.
The impact of my ass against the ground sends a painful throb to several distinct points on my body. Must be the gunshot wounds. I’m trying to remain sitting up so Sloane can remove the bandages she applied in the car, but what I really want to do is lie down and never get up again. She tugs the hem of my T-shirt up; I shift so she can remove it. Moaning like a baby is completely appropriate right now because there’s no way to orient my arms out of the sleeves without dying a few times. If I keep my lips tight, she won’t even know I’m making a sound.
I slump against the back wheel, half aware she’s cleaning and bandaging me up. She must be doing a thorough job for how long it takes. My shorts and legs are as bloody as she is. Seconds or hours later everything from my waist up is clean thanks to her. It would’ve been a lot more interesting if I could’ve kept my eyelids open to watch.
My feet are grilling in the sun. Luckily the shade from the car covers the rest of me. I struggle against my eyes wanting to roll up into my head. But then her clothes drop into a pile in my peripheral vision, water splatters the ground as she washes, and I’m fighting a new fight—the urge to stand up and look.
You’re a dirtbag, Rex, but not that kind of dirtbag, so stay the hell down.
The pain reliever she gave me is finally kicking in, just enough to take the edge off. So when she comes back around dressed in clean clothes and starts to wipe my face with a wet cloth, I almost find the strength to get up. But it’s too nice, her gentle swipes, the coolness on my summer-seared face, her eyes squinted and inte
nt on the task of scrubbing off blood I missed the first time. No one’s ever taken care of me like this. The tenderness of it pokes in deep. It just …
Hurts.
Cuts on my face are bandaged, swelling is examined but left alone since we have no ice. I get up, my brain swirling. Bad, but not too bad. I gulp from the tilted jug, smear water over my head and hair. Sloane hands me a clean shirt and leaves me to struggle into it. Then I’m slamming the hatch and going to the driver’s side where she has buckled herself in.
“No way.”
She grips the wheel and looks up at me. For once her face is absolutely, infuriatingly neutral. There’s no way she’s driving my car, not unless I’ve made the decision first. I don’t care how near death I am. It’s my call, not hers.
“Get out.”
From the way her eyes tighten, I know I’m going to lose this, so I get in the passenger side before the stakes are upped and my loss becomes more brutal. Let her try to engage first gear in this temperamental car. I’ll be back in the driver’s seat as soon as she gives up trying. I bang on the dash to put more pressure on.
It’s as bad as I thought it would be, but she doesn’t give up. Her changes in the timing of clutch and gas with each try tell me she’s learned how to drive a stick, and with each try she gets closer. The R5 pays, though it’s a bit hypocritical of me to care. It’s not the first pricey toy of mine I’ve trashed.
I adjust the seat back and close my eyes so I don’t have to visually witness it. Minutes later we lurch forward, and I sit up to see trees rolling by and her shifting into second. Well, good. I can nap. Awareness trickles away with the natural fade into sleep, giving me hope of nice dreams instead of nightmares. This is what I miss when I take those pills. A real sleep cycle. A gentle surrender to sleep. It’s a treat I don’t deserve.
*
As soon as I recognize the unique drone of the R5 exhaust, I realize I’ve crossed from sleep to consciousness. It’s a shedding of layers, or a gaining of them. Faraway noise becomes central and distinct. The hard plastic door against my cheek was a simple annoyance but now it just won’t fly. So I sit up and rub eyes, blur gaining focus, the strap of the seat harness no longer cutting into my neck.