by Tam MacNeil
Rob jumps up into the driver’s seat, and Yuko follows in the passenger’s side. She throws her helmet in the well at her feet and then reaches up to unlatch and slide open the little square window. She cranes around. “How’s he holding up?”
James shakes his head. “Dunno. Look, I don’t know where you were thinking about taking him, but I, look, will you take us where I say?”
She looks at him for a moment, maybe trying to decide if he’s too upset to be rational, maybe trying to tell if he’s drunk. “Where?” she asks.
“Get out onto the highway, going south,” James says.
Rob turns, pulling himself around by hooking an arm over the back of the diamond-patterned seat. “There’s nothing out there,” he says. “We don’t know how much time he’s got.”
“There’s somebody out there,” James says. “The old church, down from the old Sweno place, where we picked up the witches, remember?”
Rob’s eyes narrow. Then he turns back, the truck engine roars to life, and they lurch forward, James cradling Gabe’s head against his shoulder.
“What’s going on?” Gabe whispers.
James smooths the grease-and-blood-caked hair back from Gabe’s bruised face, for all the good it does with the blowing wind. He covers Gabe’s exposed ear and holds him close.
“You wanna explain?” Yuko hollers.
James scoots a little closer to the window. The damp, warm wind blowing at him pulls the words away. He has to almost shout. “Skinny Mary’s there.”
Yuko looks back at him. Her expression doesn’t change; her eyes stay exactly as they were. Perfect poker face. There’s a reason James never plays with her.
“You want us to go to Skinny Mary, the three of us Firm employees, plus one wounded.”
It’s not a question, it’s a statement, and it’s delivered in a perfectly neutral tone.
He nods. “If there’s anybody who knows what to do, about a turning I mean, it’d be her. Or the Baron.”
“The Baron,” Yuko says. “Baron Samedi, you mean.”
He nods. She closes her eyes for an instant and opens them again.
“You have some explaining to do.”
He nods. “Later,” he says, promises. “I’ll tell you everything. Later.”
“Where’s the turnoff?” Rob shouts. Seems odd, since he drove out here last time. “Everything looks different in the day,” he says in response to James’s expression.
James ducks down so he can see through the rear window and the windshield glass.
“About five hundred feet. Left-hand side.”
They slow, and the force of it squashes James against the rear window and squashes Gabe into him. The road gets rough, knocks his spine against the truck bed so he has to lean forward, and Gabe groans.
“What happened?” he asks again.
James smooths back his hair. “Hey, sit up for a sec. Can you do that?”
Gabe nods, pushes himself upright like a sleepy child. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “Yeah, I got it. Something happened to me, didn’t it?”
“You got hurt, Gabe,” James whispers. “Just hold on. I’m gonna get you help.”
Gabe nods, moving slow, like the air’s thick, like his head is too heavy to lift. “I don’t feel right,” he whispers.
“I know,” James says. “I know. Hold on.”
The truck bumps to a stop, and James jumps out, over the side, lands in the tangle of rampant resurrection vine and hurries up, toward the church.
Maybe it didn’t look so dilapidated when he was there before because it was so dark. Maybe it didn’t seem so broken down because of the golden candlelight, because he was drunk and the edges of the world were fuzzy and he wasn’t really paying attention to the place, anyway. He’d been paying attention to Brett, to the other sidhe, to not ending up dead. He hadn’t been looking at the way the roof was sagging between the beams and the way the building itself sits cockeyed on the swampy land.
He goes to the door. It’s closed up tight, and there’s an iron lock hung like a rusted garland across it. He could use Brett now. A Dullahan would come in real handy. Maybe knocking will be the right thing to do. He’s never gone looking for the court of the sidhe queen before. So he knocks. The door sags inward a little, hinges groaning. He pushes and it falls open and the church lies there before him, daylight pouring through the broken roof, arrowing onto a verdant floor, illuminating the peeling black letters that read:
The harvest is past
the summer is ended
and we are not saved.
He hears the crunch of the broken step behind him and turns. Yuko stands a few steps back, looking on.
“It was here,” he says, feeling small and stupid. “It was here.”
“Well, it’s not here anymore,” she answers. “Come on.”
He turns to her, exhausted. Defeated. “Where?”
She smiles at him and claps him on the shoulder. “When things go to shit, what do you do?” she asks. “You lie low somewhere safe ’til the dust settles. You know the Summer Court?”
A shabby motel just outside of town, near a gas station and a liquor store and a stand of rural postboxes. He nods.
“We’ll set you up there ’til the dust settles. We’ll play it by ear ’til then.”
He nods, hands clenching and unclenching in the air. “Okay,” he whispers.
SUMMER COURT is paint-peeling, reddish, one level, standing there in a puddle of tarmac that’s crumbling at the edges and lit by orange sodium lights. Yuko goes to the office and gets the room, and he and Gabe and Rob wait for her to come back. Gabe’s eyes are closed now. His breathing’s settled out, like he’s sleeping, but his back is still jumping and twitching like there’s a living thing in there. James passes his hand up and down over the muscles, as if contact could soothe and still them. The spasms don’t seem to be hurting him. Nothing seems to be bothering Gabe near as much as it bothers James.
“How’s he holding up?” Rob asks, turning in his seat. James shakes his head.
“No idea. Maybe okay? He doesn’t seem to be hurt, but….” He frowns. “There’s something not right.”
“There’s a lot not right,” Rob mutters.
James nods. “Do people get unturned?” he asks softly. “Is it like magic? I can read people out. Can somebody read him out of the turning?”
Rob glances in the direction Yuko went. He shakes his head. “I never heard of that before,” he says. “Yuko’s good with that stuff. Not me. You should ask her.”
James nods and swallows and doesn’t think about it.
Rob licks his lips. He twists a little more where he’s sitting, pulling himself around with his arm over the back of the seat. “Look, James, the Thing. The Thing that did this. It told Gabe that he was a gift.”
“What?”
“He told me they said no one would come for him, because he was a gift.”
“A gift?” James whispers. He can almost hear his father’s voice say don’t parrot, but he feels like he has to say the word to make some kind of sense of it. He looks down at Gabe’s battered face, the rotten-fruit color of a bruise forming around one eye, lurid in the orange light. “Somebody gave him to them?”
“Maybe he was raving, but he seemed pretty lucid to me,” Rob says. “And… and it told me it didn’t know what to do with me. That if it was good it might be allowed to have me.”
“What?”
Rob sighs. “That mission was a total facefuck, start to finish. We heard it was a little nest because some kids had been making animal sacrifices. But the Thing that was there was….” He swallows hard and shakes his head. “Never, in all the years I’ve been doing this, did I ever see anything like what I saw today. That Thing in there, it was powerful. And it killed Benecio, turned Gabe, and held on to me. That’s not a crazed animal, and that’s not a psychopathic magic user or something. I think someone’s controlling it.”
“You think that job was a trap, you mean?”
&nbs
p; “Maybe. Or….” He bobs his head. “She said gift. She said it twice. Maybe it wasn’t a trap so much as a delivery.”
James doesn’t think he can feel worse. He doesn’t think he could feel any sicker than he already does, but his stomach twists again, and it feels like the place under his breastbone where worry lives has been scraped completely raw.
“Who would have done this?” he asks.
Rob shakes his head.
“Uncle Abraham and now Benecio and Gabe. It’s like somebody’s playing with us. Taking the Firm apart. Only the sidhe could do this kind of thing.”
He shakes his head again. “The seelie hate the unseelie precisely because nobody can control them,” Rob says quietly. “You know that.”
James sighs and looks down at his hands.
“Yeah,” Rob says. “I don’t know who, either.”
Yuko comes back across the parking lot. She points. “Room thirteen,” she says. It’s on the other side of the lot. Rob nods and starts the truck and backs into the parking spot closest while Yuko opens the door. She comes over to the truck when Rob turns the engine off. She leans against the side, arms folded.
“This is bad,” Rob says. She nods. “I’ll submit a report directly to Abraham and Maria as soon as we get back. I’ll keep this part out of it.”
“Do. And maybe don’t be as honest as you usually are,” Yuko says quietly.
Rob frowns at her, and James sees her shoulders rise and fall. Rob’s frown gets deeper, and shrugs back, but it’s not mocking. There’s something being communicated in silence there.
“What?” James asks.
Yuko sighs. “There’ve been rumors about a Thing attacking sidhe for a while now.”
“Yeah,” he says softly. “I heard about it. From Skinny Mary.” He expected her to be surprised, but if she is, she’s hiding it really well.
“Well,” she says, “I don’t think the van Helsings are the only thing sidhe parents scare their children with.”
He’s never really thought about that before, sidhe children. Never really thought of the sidhe as anything but monsters. “Sounds like it’s just called the Thing. Seems to turn sidhe from seelie to unseelie.” He shrugs. “Don’t all sidhe hate the Firm? I mean, we’re trying to push them back into Shadow and make them stay there.”
“Well, there’s hate and then there’s hate,” Yuko says, shrugging back at him. “Some of them will fight you if you go after them, and some of them will rip you to pieces and eat your still-beating heart hot in your chest.”
She says it with a hard edge, like maybe she knows this. Like maybe she’s seen it. James keeps his mouth shut about that, but something percolates through. “You think maybe this Thing is what killed Uncle Abraham?”
Rob nods. “Gabe’s a mess,” he says softly. “The savagery would match.”
Yuko nods back at him. “Yeah, it would.”
James sighs. He rubs at the back of his neck and feels dust rolling under his fingers. “Do you want me to tell Mom and Dad?” he asks. “About Benecio and Gabe, I mean? It might be easier to take, coming from me.”
Yuko nods. “You or Abe would probably be best.”
“Yeah,” Rob agrees. “If you’re going to stay here with Gabe for a bit, and I think you probably should, it’s probably better if I go to Abe before I send in my report. If he wants to talk in private with your parents, it won’t be remarkable. Good thinking. Now come on. Let’s get Gabe inside.”
James lets Rob gather Gabe up like a child and carry him down from the truck bed and into the dark and chemical-smelling room beyond. James follows, and Yuko comes last, closing the door behind her.
Rob lays Gabe out on the hard box of a bed that dominates the room. Gabe shivers, as if he’s fevered, and contracts, knees coming up to his chest. James hauls up the end of the garish quilted comforter and folds it over Gabe. He settles on the edge of the bed, hand on Gabe’s face.
“Hey,” he whispers, “hey, Gabe? You okay?”
Gabe makes a little noise, eyes closed, and burrows deeper under the blanket.
He hears Yuko’s soft sigh. “I’m worried,” she says in a low voice.
“He’s gone,” Rob whispers back.
“It’s not him I’m worried about,” she answers.
James sighs and scrubs his face with his hands. “Don’t worry about me.” He laughs and tries to look at Rob, but finds he can’t. “If I hadn’t been shit-faced, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Worrying about me is a waste of time. I don’t want you guys to worry about the shit I might do anymore,” he adds. “I’ll do the right thing. Keep my head down.”
“Hey,” Rob says.
James looks up, meets Rob’s eyes.
“You think you’re dead weight, but you’re not.”
James looks back down at Gabe, curled up, shivering. “Look, Rob, you don’t have to—”
“Have I ever blown smoke up your ass?”
He thinks about it. “No.”
The fact is, Rob and Yuko might be the only two who’ve never let him get away with anything. They might be the only two who’ve told him what he needed to hear rather than what he wanted.
“Someone killed one of the Marquezes and turned the other, and the senior van Helsing’s been murdered. You should consider yourself a target,” Yuko says. “Keep your head down ’til either Rob or I gives you the all clear, and keep Gabe out of sight. We’ll check in with you by phone every twelve hours. You don’t hear from us, we’ve got bigger trouble than we thought. You got it?”
“Yeah.”
Rob chews his top lip for a minute. “How much do you drink?” he asks.
James shrugs. “Some. Too much, maybe?”
“It’s not the kind of thing you just stop doing.” He leans back and looks out the window at the truck stop on the other side of the road. “Booze, first aid kit, salt. What else?”
“Food,” Yuko says, smiling faintly.
Rob laughs. “Yeah. Food too, I guess.” He nods at James. “I’ll be right back.”
James nods. “Thanks,” he says softly. He means for everything.
Ten
IT’S THE smell that Gabe notices first. It seeps in, unfamiliar enough to rouse him from the dream. A nightmare of a mission gone wrong, of captivity, of hands on him, of his body exposed, made meat, made thing, molded into something else, of blood and terror and finally, of James. James holding him. He must have slept again after that, after the nightmare. But the smell is a thick sort of chemical smell. The sort that clings to hair and skin, the sort that covers up the smell of bad drains or old cigarettes or carpets desperately in need of a clean. The smell of a cheap room at a motel. The smell of his childhood.
“Abe,” he hears James say in a low voice. “Hey. It’s me.”
James is speaking softly, not to him. The conversation is one-sided, soft, almost a whisper. He hears the clink of glass on glass and the slosh of liquid pouring.
A pause. James sipping whatever today’s medicine is.
“Look, I need to talk to you. It’s important. Yeah, I’m not… no, I’m not…. Listen to me, for Christ’s sake. Let me talk.”
A pause. A sigh.
“Please, Abe. Please, just….”
A pause.
“No, I’m not okay. I-I’m out of town. And I’m not coming back into town for a while. Out on Old Field Highway. Yeah, the motel just before the junction? Hah. No, it’s gross, but it’s okay. Look, though, look, there’s a gas station across the street, with a diner. Can you come tomorrow? There’s something I need to talk to you about, and you have to keep it quiet, okay? Where I am, I mean. And that you’re going to meet with me, okay? No. Please, Abe.” He sounds so tired. “Please, I’ll explain everything. Keep it to yourself, though, okay? Not even Mom. Yeah. I am scared. Okay. Okay. No, we, uh, I’ve got everything I need. Just show up, okay? Okay.”
He hears the phone thump softly on the table, hears James sipping his drink. Gabe opens his eyes.
White s
treetlamp light comes arrowing in under the blackout curtain. It breaks on the little table right under the window. There’s a sharp-shouldered bottle two-thirds full of liquid on the table and beside it a crumpled bag. And a shape in the darkness near the door. He hears the click of a lock turning, sees the shape move, and he jerks back, or tries to. He’s stuck. It takes him a minute before he understands that his hands are cuffed to the bed frame.
“What the fuck?” He hears the panic in his own voice.
“Hey, it’s okay.” A whisper. James’s voice in the dark. Slurring a little. “It’s okay, Gabe. It’s me. You’re safe.”
“Safe?” he echoes. Moving his mouth makes the skin of his face pull and sting, as if his face is covered in scabs. “Why am I cuffed?”
“Sorry. Just… I had to go outside for a couple minutes. Wasn’t feeling very good.”
“James, what the hell? What’s going on?”
“It’s okay,” James says again. His voice is soft and soothing, and there’s something familiar about the repetition of those words. “What do you remember?”
He sags back down. There must be a reason for this. He’s a got a yawning hole in his memory. Something must have happened. He trusts James. He has to trust James.
“Nightmares,” Gabe whispers. “I only remember nightmares.” Had to be nightmares. “My dad….”
“Yeah,” James whispers. “Rob says. Rob says he’s gone. He’s gone.”
It crashes over him, as if somebody pulled something out of him, as if there’s someone in his chest trying to break apart his sternum. He gasps, convulses around it, can’t breathe around it, and then he’s sobbing like a child, hiding his face in a mattress that smells like old cigarettes and stain remover and industrial laundry. The bed dips under James’s weight, and a cool, heavy hand settles on his shoulder.
“I know, man. I’m sorry.”
So now he’s an orphan. It hits him hard like a storm and then passes, and in its wake he understands that if the horror of what happened to his dad is true, then so is the rest of it.