by Raine, Meli
Like something out of an old Greek mythology movie. Like I’m about to be tied to a stand and devoured by a sea monster.
“I did, Allie. God help me, I fell in love with him.” Her eyes soften as they catch mine in the mirror. I can’t stop looking at her. Her hands are on my shoulders and she gives me a squeeze.
“Did you ever love Jeff?” I ask.
Her face hardens. “That sonofabitch.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”
Her bitter laugh makes me feel so confused. “I thought I loved him. I thought he loved me. And then he started dealing.”
“You knew about that?” Mom gently moves me so I face her. She starts putting powder on my skin. I wince as she hits a long gash on my cheekbone. She winces, too.
“I did.” Her long, weary sigh makes me wonder how much I don’t know.
“And?”
“And he swore he’d stop. The bar was losing money and he needed to make some extra. Jeff wasn’t doing meth, just dealing it, blah blah blah,” Mom explains. She gives me a sharp look. “Was he ever mean to you?”
“Well...”
“Allie! Did he ever...was he....”
“No.” I pull my arm out of her grasp. “Of course not, Mom.” My voice comes out nastier than I want it to. “Remember? He was saving me for El Brujo.”
She goes white as a sheet.
“That rat bastard. He traded you, too.”
I catch her eyes. She’s inches from me, applying blusher now. “Is that what happened to you?” I ask.
She’s suddenly as nervous as a jackrabbit. Her hand shakes. She avoids my eyes. It’s hard to do that when you’re four inches from someone’s face.
“Yes. Jeff traded me to El Brujo to pay off a bad drug deal.”
My hands start to shake, too.
“Jesus, Mom. And he faked your death?”
She swallows, then takes a determined breath in. “Yes.”
“Why? Why didn’t you run away, or tell the police or—”
“Because he said El Brujo would come get me anyway, and kill my daughters. Or do worse things to you and Marissa than kill you.” She settles her hands on my shoulders so gently her fingers feel like feathers.
All my questions die in my throat.
“But,” she says, as if we’re just talking about a church service, or a PTA ice cream social, “El Brujo didn’t want me. Said I was too old. He gave me over to the Mephists. I don’t know what they got in return.” She frowns. “Funny. I never asked. They needed someone with nursing experience, and there I was.”
Mom’s work as a nurse’s aide. Geez. I’d forgotten.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Anything connected to drugs and men with power never does, Allie.” Mom sighs as she plugs in a curling iron and presses the on button. The light blinks red, over and over. I know it will turn green. Then it will be hot enough to curl my hair.
To make me pretty.
To make me ready.
My long-dead mother is primping me like we’re having a princess party and I’m a little girl.
Except this princess party doesn’t end with a pretend tea and a Disney movie.
It ends with my being ravaged by a guy who is so powerful and delusional, he thinks I can cure his AIDS.
I start to tremor and grab the edge of the vanity for support. My chest stops moving. I can’t take air in. I can’t let it out. Any idea that I’m going to make it out of here disappears. Chase is going to fail. Nothing he does will get me out of here.
“Honey?” Mom says, grabbing my shoulders. She twists me around. I go limp.
Her hands cradle my face. My eyes can’t focus.
El Brujo. I’m being sacrificed to pay a debt. Jeff’s debt. He groomed me for this.
I start to retch. Mom rushes to find a trash can and sticks it under my head. Nothing comes up, but I keep gagging. She rubs my back, between the shoulder blades, and makes sweet, soothing comments.
It’s like that one time in third grade when I got the stomach flu.
Except it’s nothing like that.
The curling iron sends out a sickly scent of burned hair as the light turns green. I look at my reflection in the mirror. I’m wearing the bra and panties. My skin is so damaged I look like I’ve been tie-dyed in blue and black and purple.
Mom grabs the curling iron and starts working on my hair, making giant ringlets. “We need to stall,” she whispers. “I don’t know what Chase is doing, but we need to make it look like were getting you ready.” She holds the curling iron up, my long strand of hair wrapped around it like a garrote. Like she’s choking the curling iron.
“What if Chase can’t get me out of here, Mom?” I whisper, the question so quiet I can barely hear it in my own head.
“Then I’ll die trying,” she says with a vicious sound of determination. “You know that, Allie. I was dead once,” she says with a funny snorting sound. “I’ll die for real before I’ll let that butcher lay one finger on you.”
Chapter Nine
Ten minutes later and I’m ready. Mom makes me stand up and looks me over. She spins me and I stare at what I guess is me. All of this is starting to feel like I’m separate from my body. The whole situation has gone from being surreal to something else. Something I can’t describe. The mirror isn’t lying, right?
I look like something out of a bad teen horror movie. Mom has done her best with makeup, but I have big bruises poking out from under the foundation and blush. Huge circles under my eyes, one of which is swollen half shut. A long scratch winds down from right above my temple, under my jaw, and along my neck. I still have all the now-healing scrapes from falling off my bike.
My eyes look dead. Haunted.
How long ago did I fall off my bike? The time Chase took me back to his little shack feels like a different life. I start to ask Mom, but she bends down and whispers in my ear.
“If we can’t get you out of here, you go down fighting. Bite his dick off. Rip his balls with your finger nails. Knee him. Scratch him, do whatever you have to. Make El Brujo suffer for being evil.” She hands me a tiny black plastic thing that looks like fingernail clippers.
“What’s this?” I see our reflection in the mirror as she puts it in my palm, then nervously looks back at the door. No one’s coming. It’s closed.
“A switchblade.”
“A what?” I roll it over in my hands. So tiny. So lightweight.
She takes it back and pushes a button.
Snick! A one-inch serrated blade comes flying out of a slit.
“Holy shit!” I exclaim.
“Allie,” she says in a chiding mom voice. “Language.”
I start to raise one eyebrow but it hurts too much. “Mom. You think having a bad mouth is my biggest problem right now? If there’s ever a good time to say fuck shit goddammit cocksucker, it’s now.”
She makes a snorting sound and shakes her head. Sliding the blade back into its little spot, she points to the trigger to make sure I know how to make it work. “I guess you’re right.”
I take the blade and push the button.
Snick!
Whether I can remember what to do when a grown man is on top of me trying to rip me open is a completely different issue.
“I don’t want to be right,” I say, my throat slick with unshed tears. I can’t cry right now. I just can’t.
“Allison Cassidy Boden. You listen to me.” Serious eyes meet mine as she turns to me, hands on my shoulders, her body transmitting energy to me. It’s like I’m a battery being recharged. Her warm, smooth palms slide against my upper arms.
“When this all goes down, it’ll happen fast. You hear me? I’ve been at raids before on compounds—”
“Raids?”
“Where Loogie and his guys go to get what someone stole from them. Chase has the same burning look in his eyes that Loogie gets when someone fucks him over. When someone takes what’s his. You got yourself a boyfriend—”
“
Ex-boyfriend,” I insist.
She smiles, but the grin doesn’t meet her eyes. “You keep thinking that, honey. That man loves you with a deep intensity. They all do.”
“They?”
“Bikers. Chase is Galt Halloway’s son, and if there’s anyone in the world who’s determined to get what he wants, it’s a Halloway.” She smirks. “Trust me, I’ve seen what they’re capable of. Heard Loogie rant and rave and go off about ‘the fucking Halloways’. Chase is coming back here, and he’s getting you out.” Reaching for my bra, she slips the knife under one breast. I roll my shoulder and it nestles in place.
I don’t feel safer.
My stomach still feels like it’s stuck permanently on the spin cycle of a washing machine. I know she’s right. Deep inside, I do. I have to believe that Chase is going to get me to safety. I have to believe that he still loves me.
I have to.
There is no other choice.
“But when this happens,” she says, making me look at her. “When the wheels go into motion to get you out of here, you’re going to need to make split-second decisions that will define whether you live or die.”
The shaking gets worse.
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do, Allie,” Mom says, stroking my cheek now. “You’re broken. Exhausted. Beaten and sore and fuck those fuckers who did this to you.”
“Mom,” I chide. “Language.”
She laughs, but her face twists suddenly with fear and tears. I grab her in a hard hug just so I don’t have to see that look on my own mother’s face. I can’t stand it.
“Sorry,” she mutters into my neck.
“No. It’s fine,” I say. We’ve swapped roles. I’m comforting her and she’s the one falling apart. Except she isn’t about to be handed off to a guy with AIDS to pay back the drug debt of a dead man.
Jeff’s lucky he’s dead already, because if he wasn’t, I’d make it my sole mission in life to hunt him down and murder him. Slowly.
But I think Mom would beat me to it.
With Chase right on our heels.
“No, it’s not fine, sweetie.” She wipes her eyes with the pads of her fingers, her eyes glittering with intensity. “Chase told you to watch for a man who looks like him. Older. He’s got a plan, and the guys to help him perform it. You need to do whatever people tell you to do, at the same time you keep your head and decide what’s right in the moment. I can’t stress this hard enough. If you let the fear paralyze you, you will die.”
You will die.
Those last three words ring out in my head as Mom stares at me, willing something into me by the force of her look and her words.
“You can do this,” she says softly. “You got this. And I’ll be there doing whatever I can to get you out.”
“If I get out—”
“When you get out.”
I nod. “Right. When I get out, I’ll see you again, right?”
“Oh, hell yes you will, honey. You and Marissa. Nothing will hold me back.”
The snap of boot heels on tile makes my stomach start agitating again. Frenchie walks in.
“Better. She looks a lot better, Jackie. Good work.” He’s holding something pink and fluffy in his arms. A glittery thing is dangling from his fingers.
“Thanks,” Mom says, acting like she’s friendly to him. Frenchie needs to think she’s one of them. Until now, she has been. “Jackie” is one of the weapons in the fight to save me.
Chase is the other.
He tosses the giant puffball of fabric in his arms onto the bed. It looks like a big cone of pink cotton candy. Then he throws something silver from his hands on top.
“Change of plans,” he says. “El Brujo wants you to wear these.”
Mom walks over and shakes out the fabric. It’s a dress. Like a prom dress. The prom I never went to. David was at a robotics competition the weekend of the dance, and no one else would have asked me. I didn’t go.
“A prom dress?” Mom asks, incredulous. “He wants her to wear that?”
“And them silver heels. Yep,” Frenchie says. “That’s what El Brujo wants.” He gives Mom a conspirator’s look, as if to say, Don’t judge me if the evil drug lord has bad taste.
“I thought you were transporting her to his mansion,” Mom says, her hands stroking the chiffon fabric. The dress looks like something a virginal girl would wear. It’s not fashionable. If I’d gone to my prom I would have worn something sleeveless and sleek, a rich hunter green or a deep blue. Something form fitting.
The dress El Brujo sent looks like a fifteen-year-old girl’s celebration gown. Or a junior prom dress.
“We’re taking her there,” Frenchie confirms. “Right after she puts this shit on.”
“You want her to wear this and ride on the back of a bike?” Mom says the words like Frenchie is the stupidest cockroach on the planet.
He frowns. Clearly, no one here has thought about that. Loogie’s SUV is broken and it sounds like no one else has a car.
“Huh,” he grunts. Then he shrugs, those hard, black eyes on me. “No accounting for taste. Get her in the dress and she can just carry the shoes. Wear something else for the ride.”
“How far is El Brujo’s house?” Mom asks.
“About two hours.”
“Where?” Mom’s question is casual. She’s rearranging makeup on the vanity. I know she’s calculating, though.
Frenchie snorts. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Whatever,” Mom replies, and lets it drop.
“Get her in that pile of pink and some boots and we’ll get the hell out of here.”
“You got a helmet?” Mom demands.
“What?” He looks at her like she’s cuckoo.
Mom challenges him, hands on her hips, feet planted. I know that look. She won’t back down. This is the Mom who took on Jeff on rare occasions. Once she’s like this, you have no hope of winning the argument.
“You have this girl who’s spent days naked and tied to a chair, beaten and starved, and now you want to put her on the back of a bike for a couple of hours? She’ll fall off, you dumbass. You need a helmet for her. I’m sure El Brujo likes his girls alive.”
Frenchie bristles at being called dumbass. “Watch that mouth,” he warns her.
“And you watch your attitude, Frenchie. Remember who you’re talking to,” she says pointedly. I guess being Loogie’s old lady gives her some standing. Frenchie stares at her, hard, but turns on his heel.
I look at her with wide eyes. She covers her lips with one finger and shakes her head, willing me to be quiet. He comes back within seconds and throws a helmet at me. It hits me in the gut and folds me in half, making me fall on the ground. My butt bones strike hard tile and my hip screams with pain.
“Here. Now you can be safe,” he says with a dismissive sound. “Safe for El Brujo.”
Chapter Ten
He leaves. Mom reaches down to help me up. My stomach clenches and I start to gag, bile rising in my throat as I stand. Too much pain. Too much uncertainty. My skin feels dry, and my lips stick together, even with the shiny, silky red lipstick Mom had coated them with.
“Here,” she whispers, helping me stand. I lean against her, the soft scent of Mom making me feel like a little kid again. Safe. Warm. Happy.
Just for a second.
“Why did you want that?” I ask, pointing. The word “helmet” eludes me for a minute. I can see the object, but not name it. My brain is deteriorating. Every system in my body is.
And now my mind.
“Because Chase has a plan to get you out of here, and so do I.” She walks to the door and makes sure it is shut, then rushes over to the bed, pulling off her own shirt as she crosses the room.
“What are you doing?”
“I have an idea.” She turns the curling iron back on. “Chase said a blonde guy who looks like him is coming to rescue you. How about a black-haired woman who looks like you gets delivered to El Brujo?”
My mind is scrambled eggs. I don’t understand her.
“What do you mean?”
“Look at us. We’re the same height.” Mom pats her hips. “I have more meat on my bones, but not much. Our hair’s about the same, now that I grew mine long. No one would ever mistake me for a virgin,” she whispers, “but with a helmet on my head and my body covered in that giant gown, Frenchie might think I’m you just long enough to get you the hell out of here.”
I go numb.
“You can’t go to El Brujo!”
“Better me than you, Allie. And besides, El Brujo won’t touch me when he realizes who I am. And by then, Loogie will know, and he’ll come for me with all the Mephists. It’ll be a big fucking mess at El Brujo’s door.”
“Won’t Loogie get mad at you?” She listens to me but is stripped down to bra and panties now, reaching for the dress.
“He’ll understand when I explain it to him.” She slips the dress over her head and wiggles her arms into the arm holes. It is tight, but it fits. Mom has bigger boobs than me.
“He will? Aren’t these biker guys total assholes? Especially the presidents? Galt sure is.”
She stifles a laugh. “Galt is okay when you get to know him. And Loogie loves me so much he’d do anything for me. Including starting a war with El Brujo.” A flicker of uncertainty passes over her face, though. I hope she is right.
Mom holds her shirt out to me. “Here. Take this. Put it on.”
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t? C’mon, Allie, we have to do it this way.”
“No, I mean my arms don’t work. I really can’t lift my arms up to put it on.”
Panic ripples through her face. Then she calms down. “Okay.” With a loving grace that seems to slow down time, she slides the shirt on me. It scratches. I’ve gone so long without a shirt that it feels foreign against my skin. Alien.
But warm.
Getting her pants on me is a harder task. She does it, though, all while standing there in the gown. We’re in a freaked-out rush. Frenchie could come back any minute. If he catches us like this, we’re dead.