Salt and Iron

by Tam MacNeil

  “Hey,” James says, starting forward. “Hey, I left them with my dad.”

  “Yeah, didn’t put them in the evidence locker like you’re supposed to.”

  “My dad is the head of the Firm, Gabe. He tells me to jump, I say, ‘How high?’”

  “Maybe that’s your fucking problem,” Gabe shouts. “Maybe that’s why you’ve been such a fucking mess lately. Maybe that’s why you’ve been drunk for the last, what, week? Maybe more? We went for a burger and beer last night, and two hours later I left, and this morning you look like you slept in your clothes. How late did you stay? Closing time?”

  “I stayed… I stayed as long as I fucking wanted to stay, okay, Gabe? And then I left with Brett, okay?” He says it because he wants Gabe to think he’s fucking her. He wants Gabe hurt and angry, even though there’s no reason for him to be hurt, and he’s already angry enough. “And then after that, I went and I had more drinks—”

  “Just what you fucking needed!”

  “—with Skinny Mary and Baron fucking Samedi!”

  And that, finally, shuts Gabe up.

  Six

  “YOU DID what?” Gabe says quietly.

  “You heard me.”

  “No,” Gabe says. He shakes his head a little as he does. “No, I heard you say you were drinking with Skinny Mary and Baron Samedi last night, and I know you do dumb things sometimes, James, but I know you’re not a fucking idiot.”

  James glares at him.

  “What”—Gabe’s voice is soft—“were you thinking?”

  “Not your fucking business.”

  “Not my fucking business?” Gabe yells, surging forward, grabbing James by the shirt and shaking him. “Not my fucking business? You could have been kidnapped. You could have been poisoned. You could have been turned. Your uncle was murdered last night, maybe murdered by sidhe, and you were drinking with his killers? What the fuck is the matter with you? What the fuck is the fucking matter with you, Jamie?”

  “I can’t take it anymore,” James screams back and knows the moment the words are out that he’s said too much. He gives Gabe a hard shove, and Gabe goes back a few steps. “I can’t fucking take it anymore.”

  He sounds, even to himself, defeated.

  “You gonna let me in? Or are you just gonna keep drinking ’til you do something so stupid it kills you?” Gabe asks quietly.

  James smiles at the ground. It’s not a nice smile. “Maybe… I’d rather take option B,” he says.

  “Too damn bad,” Gabe answers. “Either you tell me or I’m going to go to Abe, and I’m going to tell him everything you told me.”

  James doesn’t mean to react like he does. His head comes up; he hears his breathing stutter and break. “No,” he says. “No, please. Look. I didn’t mean to go there. I… I was drunk, right? Really drunk. And tornado warning last night. So I couldn’t get home. I was going to sober up, but Brett said she’d drive me. But she’s….” He shrugs. “She’s a Dullahan.”

  “Brett?” Gabe asks. “The bartender from the Gory Locks? She’s sidhe?” He shakes his head like he’s trying to get water out of his ears. “How… did you know?”

  James shrugs and spreads his hands and shakes his head and sighs. “I-I knew before I got into the car with her, but I didn’t care. I just…. So anyway, she drove out to the old church near the Sweno place, and that’s where Skinny Mary and the Baron were. I don’t remember getting home, but that’s where I spent the night.”

  Gabe’s still shaking his head, staring at James. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why would you go to them? Why did you stay? Why didn’t they kill you or turn you or something?”

  James licks his lips. “Yeah. So. About that.” He looks at Gabe again. “I guess the sidhe don’t really care to spill family blood if they can avoid it.”

  He shuts his mouth hard and looks at Gabe. And Gabe’s head comes up. He rocks back a little on his heels.

  “Jamie,” he says softly, “what are you talking about?”

  And now it’s out. He sighs. He rubs at his forehead. “Know how I get migraines?”

  Gabe nods, eyes still wide.

  “They’re not. Not migraines. I’m a, I mean, I can. I mean.” He sighs. “I’m a fucking fixer. I see where time is loose, and if I interact with it when it is loose, I fix it to some destiny. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I just do. Can’t help it. And it’s been getting worse since I saw those cards, since I touched them. There’s something fucked up about them. I did something, and I don’t know what, and I couldn’t have stopped it and….” He gestures emptily, vaguely. “And we keep arresting witches and hunting down sidhe, and every one of them could be me, you know? ‘There but for the grace of God,’ right?”

  “Jesus,” Gabe whispers. He sounds breathless, as if James had punched him in the chest. “Jesus, Jamie. How long?”

  “Since I was a kid.”

  Gabe exhales. He passes a hand over his face. “Christ,” he whispers, and James has a moment of wondering if Gabe is going to break for the door or start shouting or something, if this is it, and the grace he’s been treading on will be finally yanked out from under him. “No wonder you drink,” he whispers.

  James laughs softly; it surprises him. “Not enough anymore. Nothing’s enough anymore. Not since the cards.”

  Gabe nods. “Hey, uh,” he starts, then stops. “Hey, um, it’s Gabriel Marcus Antonio Marquez. Full, true name. All of it.”

  It’s like a blow. James lurches back. “What the hell, Gabe?” he shouts.

  Gabe’s mouth twists up into a half smile. “I don’t want you to be scared of me,” he says. “Now you’ve got something you can hold over me, if I ever try to hold that over you.”

  James stares at him. “No, I didn’t want to know,” he whispers. He shakes his head. “Gabe, I didn’t want to know. You should never have told me. You don’t know what I am. You don’t know anything about me. What if I used that? What if I made you do things?”

  Gabe’s smile is easing, settling, more himself, less fear. “Listen to yourself,” he says. “I’m not the one who’s scared of you.”

  James takes a deep breath and lets it out in a kind of laugh. He shakes his head. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he admits. He sighs, rubs his face with his hands. “I don’t want to be a fuck-up anymore, you know, Gabe? I just want it to go away. I want it to go away and it won’t, and I can’t fucking stand it anymore.” He looks down at his hands again. They’re shaking. “Never told anybody before. Please don’t tell anybody.”

  “I won’t, but you should. You can’t keep this a secret. Seriously. Your folks should know.”

  “No,” James says, straightening up and rubbing his face with his sleeve. “No, they can’t know. They’d be so disappointed. They’d be so angry.”

  “They’re your family.”

  He nods, frowning. “Yeah. That’s why.”

  Gabe laughs a little. “It’s them too, you know. I mean, these things are supposed to run in families. You ever think that maybe one of your parents had to go through this too?”

  He exhales. The fact is, no, he hadn’t thought of it.

  “Or maybe even Abe?”

  Abe, the perfect son. Maybe not so perfect. Maybe trying hard to keep a secret. “Jesus,” he whispers. He rubs a hand through his hair and then over his face, wiping away the tear marks and the salt. “No. I never did.”

  “Maybe you’re not the only one. I know you think you’re a screwup, James, but maybe you’re not.”

  He draws in a big breath, and something unsticks in his chest. “Thanks,” he whispers.

  Gabe nods.

  “You should go talk to them now, before you talk yourself out of it,” Gabe says. He grins. “I’ll keep my phone on. Call me afterward, okay? Tell me how it goes.”

  He nods again, head ringing still, from the hangover and the stress and now the crying. He swallows noisily.

  “Afterward you’re going to
wonder why you waited so long. You know that, right?”

  “Okay,” he whispers. He sighs up at the ceiling. “First Uncle Abraham and now this,” he says and shakes his head. “God. It’s going to be a hell of a day to be a van Helsing.”

  HE GOES up to see his dad. Abraham is in his private office, the office James played in as a child. Heavy desk in the middle, the portraits on the wall, the wood paneling that hides a multitude of doors and safes and passages. He and Abe spent a lot of their childhood here, underfoot during the day, running around, watching the small TV at night, sleeping on the couch while the business of the Firm went on around them. It’s been a long time since he was here and he noticed those things. And a long time since he was here and he wasn’t totally drunk.

  The door to the rooftop is open again. The air is breezy and cool with onrushing autumn. This too shall pass away, he thinks, and then he thinks, at least I have Gabe, and between those two things he’s okay, and he crosses the rooftop toward the rail and leans on it, arms crossed, pretending to take in the view.

  “Yuko said you wanted to see me,” his dad says. “She said it was something personal.”

  He nods. “Yeah. It is.”

  His dad sighs and shakes his head. “Is she willing to take money and go away?”

  He looks at his dad, blinks. “What?”

  “The girl. The girl, James.”

  “What girl?” he echoes.

  “Don’t parrot, James. The girl.”

  He feels the heat rush to his face, as much anger as embarrassment. “There’s no girl.”

  “Well, if you haven’t knocked a girl up, why make an appointment as if it was all cloak-and-dagger business?”

  “It’s about me.”

  His dad laughs, head up, loud, almost barking. “Of course it is.”

  James’s face is getting hotter, his hands starting to shake. He should have had a drink before this. Just one. Just enough to calm him down. Because his heart rate is climbing and he’s starting to feel light-headed and his hands are starting to feel like they’re stranger’s hands, palsied, shaking.

  “Well?” his dad says.

  He scrabbles for what they talked about, him and Gabe. “I want to be honest with you.”

  “James, I have a meeting with Judge Robertson in fifteen minutes.”

  “About… those tarot cards.”

  His dad makes a small noise, and all the terror and tension in his back and his chest unknots just a little.

  “James, listen. Your mother and I have been talking about this, and, well, we’d like to not talk about it for a while. I know the cards upset you. You’ve always been oversensitive. Just let yourself forget about it.”

  “No, Dad, it’s not about that. Well, it’s kind of about that. It’s….” His dad is looking at him, cold and narrow eyed. Olive branch extended and rejected, James realizes. “I mean, I appreciate what you’re saying. I seriously do. But it’s not about that. It’s… they scared me because I could see they were affecting time.”

  “You what?”

  “I could see it. It’s a thing I can do. Since I was fourteen. I—”

  Abraham flushes a violent, bloody red. “Since you were four— James, you get headaches. You are oversensitive. Your mother and I have been making ourselves sick over the brittle state of your mental health—”

  “Dad, Dad, listen—”

  “—and letting your brother carry you—”

  “Dad, please. Please.” Don’t yell, he tells himself, trying to muster the certainty he’d felt with Gabe. Don’t yell. Try not to get mad. They’re going to be as scared as I was. Maybe more. “Please, Dad, listen to me. I know this is going to be hard, but I… I’m not like Abe. I….” Here. Now. This is it. He sees the way time breaks before him, and whatever he does now is going to fix something. There’s nothing he can do about it. “I fix the future. Since I was a kid. I did it with the cards. I think when I touched them I made something happen. But I don’t know what. I don’t know how to control it. That’s what scared me.”

  Stillness and silence and the wind cooling the already-cold sweat on the back of his neck, on the palms of his upraised hands.

  “I don’t understand,” his father says.

  Of all the myriad things he expected, all the situations he and Gabe had rehearsed, this was not one they prepared for. “I-I’m a fixer,” he says, because he’s not sure how else he can say it. He thought he was being pretty clear. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to be. I can’t help it.” It seems like the kind of thing worth apologizing for.

  “This is a stunt,” Abraham says.

  “Dad—”

  “You want to go away for a while? You want a vacation? You want me and your mother to send you off somewhere nice where you can pretend to be in some kind of therapy while your brother and your mother and I do our duty to the family? To the country? Is that what you want?”

  “No, Dad—”

  “Well, then what brought this on?”

  He stares, shakes his head. “What brought it on?”

  “Don’t parrot, James,” he shouts, and James steps back, steps away, mouth dry, words all gone. “You want everything. You want to be young forever. You want to avoid your duty. You want me and your mother and your brother to carry you, while you keep the family name and the privileges and the fame, but you’re not going to, not with me as your father. You’re lazy. I understand that. You always were. You were lazy and you had problems and your mother and I, God forgive us, we indulged you. But I never believed you were a bad seed. I never imagined you’d stoop to lying to me. Lying to me. About something like this.”

  Cold. He goes quite cold. It’s not just the wind and the sweat, it’s like something’s sucked the blood right out of him. “It’s not a lie, Dad.”

  Abraham fixes him with his eyes, jaw forward, frowning, mouth moving like he’s got something in his teeth he can’t get out. “Fixer,” he says.

  James hears himself swallow. “Yeah.”

  “Then you know how this”—he gestures between the two of them—“ends.”

  “It’s not like that. I don’t know how things end. I just, I see the places where time comes apart, and no matter what I do, it fixes a destiny. I don’t know how—”

  The blow stings. It knocks his senses around, and then another and then another, so the world is a blur of gray and white, and when his brain catches up he’s looking far to his left and the rooftop is freckled with red. He gasps, then feels the pain come rushing through his face.

  Abraham grabs him by the shoulders, pushes him so that he has to scramble backward until the sharp bar of the rail makes a line in the small of his back and he’s back as far as he can go. For a moment his father keeps pushing, and he has an instant of scrabbling, animal terror, grabbing at his father’s arm, the suit coat, fine material all slippery-smooth, his broad wrist, gnarled hands. He’s going to go up and he’s going to go over and he’s going to go down onto the concrete below and splatter on someone. No, no, no. “No, Dad, please, Dad, please, Dad—”

  “You have problems, James. I know you have problems, but don’t you dare make up stories like this.”

  “I’m not. I’m not lying, Dad. Please.” He’s bleating. He can hear himself making terrified little noises. The rail hurts, his face hurts, hot blood running from his nose into his mouth, and all he can taste is thick saliva and blood, and all he can say is please, Dad, please.

  “Don’t you ever tell your mother. You hear me? It’ll kill her. Don’t you ever tell your mother. Don’t you ever tell anybody.”

  “I won’t. I won’t.”

  All at once he lets go. He stops speaking. He turns and walks away from James, and James has to grab the rail for a moment to keep himself upright. He rubs his hand over his face, feels the blood smear, wipes at it with his sleeve to clean it away. They’re practically in public, after all. Abraham turns and comes back. He raises his hand, but this time he points at James, doesn’t hit him.

 
; “You can’t even imagine what this is doing to me. You can’t even imagine what it will do to your mother. I’m disgusted with you.” He stops, shaking his head. “The Marquez family put you up to this, didn’t they? Gabriel? I hope he’s happy.”

  He fists the front of James’s shirt, and James lets himself be pulled forward, keeps his head back, already cringing even though he knows it’s useless.

  “You don’t speak a word of this. You don’t breathe a word of this. You’re a van Helsing. For better or worse,” he adds. “Since I can’t get rid of you now.”

  He’s so terrified it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s so terrified he’s calm. “I’m a van Helsing,” he says, mouth twisting, voice struggling, “monsters are in my blood.”

  Abraham jerks back as if he’s been burned and lets James go. He stares at him for a moment, and James stares back, head still ringing with the blows. Then Abraham takes the pocket square from his suit and begins to clean the blood from his hands.

  “I want nothing to do with you, James. Get out of my sight.”

  He has to walk past his father to get to the door, and then he has to have his back to him until he gets through the office and out into the hallway and there are walls between the two of them and he can breathe again. He steps into a washroom and washes the dried smear of blood from under his nose, then pulls out his phone and dials Gabe’s number. It goes right to voice mail, and he hangs up. He checks the time. He checks his wallet.

  When he steps out of the washroom, he sees Yuko coming up the hall toward him. “If anybody needs me I’m downtown,” he says. He makes it convincingly cheerful.

  “Don’t get into trouble,” Yuko tells him.

  She’s not smiling, and she’s not joking, and she can just go fuck herself.

  James forces himself to smile at her. “Who, me?” he asks. He’s going to get fucked. Trouble won’t even begin to describe it.

  HE STARTS at Bonnie’s. Then he makes the rounds and ends at the Gory Locks. He banters with Brett as if Brett doesn’t know he’s already drunk, as if he doesn’t know she’s a Dullahan. He drinks ’til closing time.