Splintered

by Jamie Schultz

  Van Horn knew, though. Where and why.

  “Go to Van Horn’s bed. Bring me hairs, anything like that.”

  Rain ran off, leaving Sheila to contemplate. Rain would return with something, and Sheila would perform a basic seeking. She was already nearly convinced it would fail. Whoever his captors were, they weren’t uninformed. She’d try anyway, because it was the easy way.

  It wasn’t the only way, though. She raised the pen to the wall and began sketching the outlines of the necessary diagram, in case the easy way failed. It took a few tries to get these things right, to get them fixed in her mind, but once she did she didn’t make mistakes.

  Rain returned a short while later and, to her credit, waited silently in the doorway until Sheila was ready for her. She had a few short gray hairs, and a few white ones. Enough, unless Van Horn was hidden somehow.

  The simple seeking took no time at all. A quick drawing, a few drops of blood, the hairs, and a short chant. Sheila held her pen suspended from a piece of string and waited for it to turn, pointing to Van Horn. It sat, inert. Sheila had expected that, but rage welled up in her anyway, and she threw the charm to the floor and kicked it into the corner, snarling.

  “It didn’t work,” Rain said.

  Sheila balled up one fist, then forced herself to relax. Rain was an insipid thing, but this had been her idea, and Sheila was now convinced it had been a good one. “No.”

  She went back out to the hall. Aside from her and Rain, there were seven of the Chosen left now, lying, sitting, or standing in the big open room. Raul and Deanna were fucking again, almost out of sight behind a crosshatched mess of metal framework. That was all well and good for them, but the moaning made it hard to concentrate. It was time to get to work.

  Sheila sat cross-legged with her back against a shorn-off metal column. “Gather around,” she said. Six of the Chosen obeyed, but Raul and Deanna couldn’t seem to bring themselves to give their genitals a rest. She did her best to ignore that, though what she really wanted was to gather up the other six Chosen and show Raul and Deanna that, if they weren’t part of the group, they were food.

  Seven would be enough for what she needed now, though. Leave them to their rutting. Any reckoning could come later.

  She stood and moved to the center of the circle of Chosen, then bent and used a piece of chalk to draw the appropriate diagram on the pavement. It was too dark to see what she was doing, but that didn’t matter. This working was in her blood, and her hands moved with swift sureness. When the diagram was complete, she began a short chant, motioning for the others to join her. They listened, then took up the chant.

  She pulled a butcher knife from her satchel. It was long and sharp, shining even in the faint light here, the only thing for miles that seemed pure, uncorrupted by grime and filth. She’d taken it from an apartment nearly a week ago, reasoning that it might be useful, and by then the owner had no more use for it.

  She placed her left hand in the center of the circle, palm against the concrete, her index finger making an L shape with the thumb. As the chanting rose to a crescendo, she leaned in, bearing down with all her weight, and cut off her little finger. There was a crunch as she forced the knife through the ligaments holding the knuckle together. Pain, immense and blazing, tore through her skull, balanced by a pleasure almost as intense, until she thought the two might pull her body apart.

  The night coalesced around her, and she felt a strange thickening of the air. She scrambled back from the center.

  The finger vanished. A mad, exhilarating rush coursed through Sheila’s body, and the next moment, a thing, gray and glistening, appeared in the middle of the group. Sheila gasped, and she thought everyone gasped with her. The creature in the center of the circle looked like nothing so much as a freakish, giant slug. It was about the length of a man lying down, but she thought it was much, much heavier. It was round and fat, and its sides quivered. It had no features to speak of—no mouth, eyes, antennae, or anything she could see. Just a coffin-shaped glob of gray nasty.

  “Find Belial,” she said.

  It lifted one end of its mammoth body, and though it had no eyes, she swore it was looking at her. A wet, choked hissing sound escaped from it. It didn’t move.

  “Edgar Van Horn, then. Find Edgar Van Horn. Please,” she added softly.

  It turned, its undulating body making a squishing noise on a glistening trail of thick slime. Maurice got out of the way as the thing slid toward the door.

  Sheila popped the stump of her finger in her mouth, relishing the hot blood as it ran from the wound.

  I can do this nine more times, she thought. She was making some kind of noise, she realized, but she had no idea whether she was laughing or crying.

  Chapter 7

  Anna flicked her lighter. The flame added practically nothing to the light from the lantern, but it was something to do. Better than watching Genevieve’s chest move in slow tides, better than holding her own breath while she waited for the pause after each of Genevieve’s exhalations to become the next breath. Better by far than studying Gen’s face. Anna had teased Genevieve at one point about how she slept with her eyes open a slit, enough to watch the iris dart around when she was dreaming. They weren’t moving now, or hadn’t been last time she checked, but that white crescent still glistened between her eyelids. It was goddamn creepy, and Anna didn’t like being creeped out by Genevieve.

  She blew out the flame. Past her lighter, a bluish blur near the lantern, Genevieve’s chest rose, then fell.

  Anna pursed her lips and breathed deep, shaky breaths, trying to force down a suffocating sense of impending panic. Genevieve would be okay. Would have to be okay. Probably it was selfish, but Anna thought she would melt right the fuck down if Gen didn’t wake up. Gen’s sarcastic commentary and exaggerated bravado were a little over-the-top sometimes, but a little bravado seemed called for these days, not to mention some outright mockery of the stupid shit they’d gotten themselves into. It was good for morale, Nail might have said, but Anna thought it was more like an anchor. Fucking everything had come unglued—what else did they have to hold each other in place?

  Anna missed the conversation. It was easy with Genevieve, in a way she hadn’t experienced before. Had been since very their first “date,” back during the jawbone job. Anna could throw up a curtain of small talk effortlessly, and often did as part of her job, but with Gen the conversation had gotten real, fast, and it had veered with dizzying speed from topics trivial to those so personal Anna couldn’t believe she was talking about them. She’d thought it was a talent of Gen’s until one evening at Gen’s apartment, when she surprised Anna by saying much the same about her. The shock on Anna’s face had been so evident that Genevieve burst into laughter. The physical attraction had been immediate, but that only went so far—as Karyn had once told her, there were almost no points for that. An attitude that was just bad enough, a little “fuck you” in her smile, and a certain swagger in a woman’s bearing would get Anna’s attention nearly every time. Good for fun or blowing off some steam, but who’d have thought it would turn into anything?

  An indistinct voice from the next room sounded, inflection rising in a question. Karyn, talking to her phantoms again. It was the middle of the night, and Karyn was in there talking to the walls. Her body clock was a mess, rhythms adrift with no normal light or darkness to anchor them, despite Anna’s attempts to at least feed her on a regular schedule. She might go to sleep anytime now, or maybe not until noon. Maybe she’d sleep sixteen hours after that. Anna just wished she’d stop talking, and then hated herself for wishing it.

  Anna wasn’t much for looking back, at least not past a postmortem on the most recent job to think about what got screwed up or what they could do better, but she was looking back now. What kinds of decisions had she made to end up here? Twenty-eight years old, three people in the world she truly cared about—and vice versa—and two of them lost to some bizarre occult malaise. She couldn’t find the spot wh
ere it had gone wrong. There had to have been some critical choice that had led inexorably her to squatting in a condemned school with her lover comatose in front of her and her best friend in the next room talking to imaginary future people and occasionally screaming at the walls in frustration.

  And, in the dark room beyond that, the guy she was going to escort to his death just as soon as she possibly could.

  Sobell. That first damn job. Even that, though, wasn’t so clear-cut. Would Adelaide have abandoned Karyn without the job? Anna probably never would have met Genevieve at all if they hadn’t taken it. So, really, would she even make that choice differently?

  That was the sort of thing Karyn was supposed to know about. Choices, and their consequences.

  Anna flicked the lighter again, intentionally missing the button so that it just threw sparks.

  If Genevieve doesn’t wake up, I might kill Van Horn myself. There was surprisingly little feeling in the thought. More proof, as though she needed it, that she was wrung out. She slouched farther, sliding down the wall until she was nearly lying flat, her neck at an uncomfortable angle.

  Minutes passed. Mercifully, Karyn fell quiet—asleep, Anna hoped. Genevieve’s slow breathing wasn’t audible from where Anna sat, so the night was truly quiet now. Not even the traffic bothered her here.

  Like a tomb.

  “Oh God,” Genevieve said. “Tastes like I ate a cat box.”

  Anna sat up so fast it made her dizzy. She put out a hand to steady herself. “Babe, you okay?”

  Genevieve rolled onto her side and groaned. “Somebody shit in my skull.”

  Gross, but Anna smiled anyway. “Seriously, are you all right?”

  “Just scooped out my brains and . . . plop.”

  Anna handed her a plastic bottle, half-full of water. Gen took it, propped herself up, and downed everything that was left. Some spilled out onto her chin and cheek. She didn’t even wipe it away, just tossed the bottle in the corner when she was done drinking and lay back down. A moment later she raised her left leg, put it down, then did the same with her right.

  “Everything still works. We get him?”

  “Yeah,” Anna said. She slid down next to Genevieve and pulled her close. “We got him.”

  “Hey, not so tight, huh?”

  Anna laughed, and something in her chest loosened fractionally, enough to let in a good, solid breath. She inhaled as deeply as she could.

  The next hour passed in a slow sweet blur, the time spent alternating between Anna filling Genevieve in on the general state of things and the two of them just hanging on to each other. For once, the room was cool and comfortable, and Anna didn’t think about the rats in the corner more than a couple of times.

  “I’m exhausted,” Genevieve said when she’d finally gotten caught up. She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling by lantern light, her fingers, warmer than usual, entwined in Anna’s own. “Asleep for an entire day, and I feel like I could do go another ten hours.”

  “That might not be a bad idea,” Anna said.

  “I had the most fucked-up dreams. We were supposed to kill some guy, only when we got to him, it turned out he was a cheese omelet. Not even anthropomorphic—just a straight-up cheese omelet, sitting in a cast-iron pan. We were just supposed to, I dunno, finish cooking it or something. Even Freud couldn’t figure that shit out.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, but it was actually really disturbing. Kind of hard to explain.”

  “I bet.”

  Genevieve shifted, pulling back from Anna to get a better look. “You look thoughtful. I don’t like it when you look thoughtful. You only do that when you’re brooding about something.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And one-syllable answers, too. Definitely a bad sign.”

  Anna tried on a reassuring smile. It felt humorless and awkward. “You ever think about giving it up?”

  “Giving what up?”

  Anna waved her hand vaguely. “All this . . . occult shit.”

  Genevieve laughed, then stuck out her chin and lowered her voice an octave. “Man, I’m not, like, givin’ up my bike and my rock and roll and my homeboys, just cuz you want me to settle down. I’m, like, a free spirit, man. Can’t put chains on me.”

  “It’ll kill you eventually,” Anna said.

  “So will cheese omelets. And don’t think I haven’t noticed the cigarette stink coming off you. You really want to go there?”

  “This isn’t a contest.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  The shadows from the lantern were heavy, but Anna recognized the set of Genevieve’s mouth and the slight lowering of her eyebrows. She was pissed.

  “Never mind,” Anna said. She sat up and shrugged on her jacket.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Got a deal to square up. Get some rest.” She stood.

  “Oh, come on,” Genevieve said, sitting all the way up. “It’s not like this has been my dirty little secret all along—you knew the score. This is bullshit.”

  Anna paused in the door, mind casting about for a comeback. There was nothing. She walked out.

  Nail was on watch, but she didn’t much feel like talking to him tonight. She gave him a quick nod and let herself in to Van Horn’s room. Cell. It’s a cell.

  Van Horn wasn’t asleep. Instead, he sat in the far corner, knees pulled up, head resting against the two walls. In the white light of her small flashlight, she saw his hat upside down on the floor next to him, as if he was hoping she’d throw a few bills in it.

  “You should have tied me up,” he said. “That would be the professional thing to do.”

  “Why bother? No weapons here, and you’re outnumbered.”

  “You’re not using your imagination. You know, I was in a situation like this once before, and I managed to draw a summoning circle in my own excrement.”

  “You’re still here,” she pointed out. “No monsters.”

  “Turned out the circle wasn’t worth a shit.”

  Surprised laughter bubbled up from Anna’s gut. “You proud of yourself?”

  “Immensely. I spent most of today rehearsing that one.”

  I shouldn’t be in here, she thought. He’s gonna make a few jokes, pretend to be a nice old guy who got mixed up in the wrong shit, and I’m gonna end up liking him. What happens when Sobell says time’s up?

  “Have a seat,” he said. “Stay a bit. The worst thing about this little dungeon you’ve cobbled together is that it’s really, really dull.”

  “Genevieve is awake.”

  He nodded.

  She wondered how much more to tell him. Exhaustion was a drag on her thoughts, though, and all she could think of was Tran’s smug face. Fuck her. Fuck her and Sobell both.

  She sat in the corner opposite Van Horn. She set the flashlight down next to her. It threw a fading triangle of white light across the floor, growing more diffuse until Van Horn was barely lit, a hunched bundle of shadows.

  “I really thought you’d have put a bag on my head and thrown me in a van by now,” he said.

  “He doesn’t want you yet. I guess it’s a little too hot right now.”

  “Any idea when it’s going to cool off?”

  “No.”

  “I guess I’ll count that among my blessings.”

  “I’m not sure what more time gets you.”

  His teeth glinted as he smiled. “More time. I’d’ve thought that was obvious.”

  Anna grunted agreement. “What about Genevieve? What’s gonna happen to her?” Not the question she came to ask, but it was top of mind, and she wasn’t sure she could concentrate on much else.

  “If she’s awake, she’s fine. That’s it. No lingering aftereffects. That I know of.”

  “No, I mean . . . Long-term. You’ve been at this occult shit forever, right? What happens?”

  Something gleamed in the flashlight beam—a tooth, the edge of a grin or a sneer. “You stay ahead of it
as long as you can. Like you said, I’ve been at this forever. If she’s smart, she’ll be all right for a long time.”

  His words tapered off, rather than just ending, seeming to imply a question or some uncertainty. “And?” Anna prompted. “But?”

  “But it depends how much of Sobell’s dirty work he gets her to do. He uses people up. I think you might be getting some idea of that.”

  “He’s teaching her,” Anna said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “And she probably even believes it. Hell, he probably is teaching her. Doesn’t mean he’s not getting some benefit out of it.”

  “You said you’d give me some info on him. What do you want?”

  “I want out of here, and a six-day head start.”

  Anna shook her head, belatedly realizing he couldn’t see her. “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Then, like I said, you tell me what you know, and I’ll give you what I can.”

  “I don’t know a lot.”

  “I’ll take what I can get. You might have noticed that my negotiating position isn’t so good right now.”

  “It started with a job that got weird on us,” she began. She spun out the whole miserable story of the job with the jawbone and its aftermath, glossing over a few important details like Karyn’s affliction and current situation. Van Horn listened avidly, and she thought he was actually leaning forward by the end of it. Oddly, it was kind of nice to have somebody to spill all this to, somebody who wasn’t involved in it all. It felt . . . grounding. Like maybe now it would be possible to get some perspective on it.

  You are losing your shit, girl.

  “We’ve been running odd jobs and shit detail for Sobell ever since,” she said, wrapping up.

  Van Horn said nothing at first. He folded his arms, and Anna saw the vague shape of his head tilt back. “Interesting.”

  She waited. Through the wall, she heard Karyn mutter something unintelligible. Van Horn remained a dark, silent lump in the room’s far corner. “And?” she prompted.

  “Did you ever find out what Sobell wanted?”