House of Slide: Hunter

by Juliann Whicker

  “What, Helen, don’t you want to go to the Woods? The new master of the Woods is supposed to be much less likely to fry out your brains if you trespass.”

  “New master of the Woods?” I asked feeling slightly sick. My dad was gone. I knew that, but hearing that he’d already been replaced so easily filled me with the helpless grief that pushed me towards the edge.

  Satan turned to me and I saw the sympathy in his eyes mixed with the usual crazy. “The Woods passed on when your father died, along with the paintings we salvaged from the gallery mess.”

  I nodded and felt my stomach clench. “I’ll go back to Sanders with mother,” I said.

  “Oh, good. You can explain things to Snowy. She’s been pestering me ever since you sent back a girl who was supposed to be dead,” my mother said with a smile that didn’t touch her eyes.

  I swallowed hard. “On second thought, the Woods would be better. We don’t both need to get my painting.”

  My mother nodded slowly. I felt played. Ah well. That’s what I got for being my mother’s daughter.

  “So, how’s the marriage going?” I asked brightly.

  Satan snorted, my mother’s smile melted away, and Matthew gave me a stone hard glare before he looked into the distance. I felt a twinge of pleasure at making him uncomfortable. He’d paralyzed me after all.

  “They haven’t killed each other yet,” Satan boomed, grinning as he clapped Matthew on the shoulder. “What more can you hope for in a marriage?”

  Chapter 23

  I knew Aiden was waiting for me, but I couldn’t slip away, not when Slide was organizing at Grim’s small house. At least I had clothes brought for me from Slide by Shelley.

  “This won’t work.” Stanley’s voice was a snarl.

  “Even if it does work, I still don’t see how it’s going to solve our problems.” Shelley’s voice was smoother and considering, soulful.

  “We haven’t got an awful lot of alternatives,” Satan growled. “We’re operating in the dark, but the former Head trusted Devlin’s visions, and that’s why we are where we are right now.”

  “The former Head died putting his faith in the boy’s visions,” Stanley reminded him.

  “Enough,” my mother said in a dangerously gentle voice. “If you wish to debate my will, do so somewhere I can’t hear you. Slide requires you to perform your parts.”

  I stepped into the doorway and saw my mother seated behind the kitchen table littered with papers, maps, drawings, and books. The white slab had nearly disappeared while my mother seemed small with her head and shoulders barely visible above the mess. I turned, and stared at the swirling colors of my old Axel painting on the floor beside the fridge, the colors seeming more bright and vibrant than before, if that was possible.

  “How did it get here so quickly?” I demanded, my voice suddenly shrill.

  “I sent for it,” my mother said without looking up from a sheet of paper she was scribbling on. “I don’t have time to fetch things myself. I forgot for a moment what I was.”

  “Are the other paintings on their way?” I asked trying to sound less irrationally furious than I felt.

  “No.” She put the pencil down and looked at me levelly. “I want you to go.”

  “You’re Head of the House. Why would you want me to do something painful that you don’t want to do?”

  She smiled slightly. “If you go to collect your inheritance, no one can object. We could go and forcefully remove the paintings from the new Woods, if you think that it would be better to act with violence.”

  I stared at her long and hard. “If I don’t go innocent blood will be shed. And it will be all my fault. I hate to break it to you, Mother, but I’m not taking responsibility for your actions.”

  Satan snorted and put a large paw on my shoulder, weighing me down. “Let’s go get the bazookas, boys,” he said pulling away.

  I put my hand on his, holding him in place. I sighed. “It will be faster if I go.”

  “Yes, it will,” my mother said, cocking her head while she studied me. An almost tender smile flickered around her mouth before she turned away.

  “Awesome,” I muttered as I packed into the monster car beside Satan’s hulking frame with a sleek black leather jacket over my black shirt and black jeans. My mother’s clothing almost fit me. Night still held onto the city, darkness crouching behind the streetlights like a monster waiting to swallow us all.

  “You know, my grandmother had the sight. She is the reason that the former Slide married mother. Your brother inherited her gifts, enhanced by your father’s Nether blood. It’s kind of fun to see it all come together so nice, almost makes the sacrifices worthwhile. So, Lewis is the Hollow.” He shook his head, his face shadowed from his hat pulled low over his forehead.

  “He isn’t now.”

  “Hollows don’t like the Hotbloods. They don’t like the physicality, the lack of restraint. Hollows don’t want to understand sex drive. It’s an interesting choice, raising him with Hotbloods, making that his prime suit.”

  “He burned out. That part of him is long gone.”

  Satan shrugged, took a drag on his cigar, exhaling a ring of smoke that drifted obligingly out his window. “He’ll still be wantin’ the pieces of his soul he left in these paintings,” Satan said with a grin. “That’s why he left them. That’s why he painted them and spread them across the world, or tried to. They kept coming back together, almost like they have a will of their own.”

  “You think the paintings are animate?” Sometimes my painting seemed like that, the way the colors seemed to move and shift across the canvas, drawing my eye however many times I tried to look away.

  He shrugged.

  “Tell me about the circle of seven.”

  “It’s almost like runes, only completely different,” Satan said helpfully.

  “I can’t believe we’re actually going to try and do stonework in that cursed Hollow Hall.”

  “Best think of it as Hallow,” Satan said, grinning at me.

  “So, we’ll go to the House, hang out there with the paintings until the Hollow one shows up?”

  “More or less,” Satan agreed.

  “I don’t want to go there.” I don’t know why I said that. It didn’t matter what I wanted, not at that point.

  “It’s going to be great,” Satan said as he slammed a hand down on my shoulder in what may have been an encouraging pat. “Lost Souls, Paintings of Madness, Hollow bait, it’s a perfect plan.”

  “If your plan involves everyone getting their souls sucked out of them and their bodies replaced with insane Lost Souls, yeah, that’s perfect,” I muttered.

  I took a deep breath, forcing my heart rate to calm. I felt delicate, on the precipice of my own sanity, like if I thought too much, or heard his name mentioned one more time, I would fall off the brink and become lost in my own abyss.

  “And then you get to stab him with your knife,” Satan said, grinning at me.

  I gasped.

  “Oh come on, Darlin’. After all the lying, deceiving and general lack of faith he had in you, never telling you what he really was, always leading you on, not letting you die, you can’t tell me that it won’t feel good to slap some metal through his heart.”

  I started laughing. Not the happy kind. The, I’m really not sane, and no one here is either, kind of laughter. I sank low in my seat, trying to breathe. I felt like I still had glass in my chest, cutting deeper with every breath.

  “Do you remember the first time you came out here?” Satan growled.

  “I wanted to rip you limb from limb.”

  He chuckled as he rolled a cigar between thick fingers with one hand, steering with the other. “He has a good soul.” He sounded suddenly serious.

  I blinked back tears that I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t lose it, not now. “You just liked it because I broke your arm. Satan, you’re a little bit of a masochist.”

  His barking laughter made me wince. “When life is full of so much p
ain, you either fear it or embrace it. I let go of the fear a long time ago. We die when we die. Life hurts.”

  “That sounds like a shoe slogan.”

  “Maybe someday I’ll start a shoe company. There’s a shortage of perfect shoes in the world.”

  “Making the world a better place, one sole at a time.”

  “Saving the world from Lost Souls, one shoe at a time.”

  I laughed, a broken hideous laugh that hurt my chest so much.

  He patted my knee with his meaty paw. “Dari, I don’t blame you for liking him. He wasn’t nearly as bad as most Wilds I know.”

  I inhaled and held that breath, holding in the wave of pain that made me more lightheaded than jumping out of the window. “If he painted his soul into his paintings years before I met him, there’s probably no chance I really knew him.”

  “That’s the part that makes me nervous,” he said under his breath. “That he’ll come back as someone even more excited to wipe out Wilds than our Peregrine.”

  I shrugged. “I guess there’s one way to find out, unless you know Devlin’s future.”

  He shook his head. “That boy knew how to keep his cards close to his chest. You’re still angry at him.” It wasn’t a question.

  I shrugged. “I try not to be. I try to have faith in him, in both of them, but it seems like such a waste of time. I’m tired of feeling played by everybody.”

  “If you live long enough, you’ll get used to it,” Satan said, flicking open his lighter and drawing on the end of his cigar. “Not even Heads of Houses are immune to manipulation. We’re all put into place by the Nether, or the demons, or the generation that came before, or some miserable Cools who duck around the edges of the game, too cowardly to come out and play fair.”

  “So there is no free will? My dad would disagree with you.”

  “Free will?” He frowned thoughtfully. “Unless you’re controlled by a Cool or a Demon Mistress, you can control what you think, sometimes what you do, sometimes what others do, but you can’t control your life. Things happen. Some good, most bad, but some people think it’s all for a reason. Sometimes I think that’s a good idea, other times, I’d rather no one was in charge, that we don’t have to rely on a true power of the universe and hope it has good intentions.” He shook his head. “I’m not a philosopher. I’ve never been interested in that. All of the explanations tend to make me want to blow something up. There’s never been a good enough reason for life to be the way it is.”

  “Aren’t we important, though?”

  He glanced at me with one hairless eyebrow cocked. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “We are the warriors. We stand between humanity and the darkness, the demons. Sometimes they kill those we love, sometimes they nibble on our own souls, but they’re always there, we always have to fight them. There is no rest for us. Everything we do is important.”

  “Does that help you?”

  I shrugged then nodded. “Someone has to destroy demons or we’d all get eaten away. There’s a certain nobility in that.”

  “If you say so.”

  “We could stop. Give up, go on vacation, could try to forget about duty.”

  “Why don’t we?” he asked sounding genuinely curious.

  “Because it’s not what we are, not who we are. We are the warriors. We fight even when it seems hopeless. We withstand the pain, the torment, the demons eating away at our own souls. Because there is no one else.”

  “You make me sound noble, Dari. I highly resent that,” he said as he slapped me on the shoulder, very narrowly singing my ear with the cigar he still clutched in his fist.

  “Well, I resent the whole thing,” I admitted pushing his hand away. “Let’s get the world saved so that we can die.”

  “Or go on vacation,” he said, glancing at me.

  I shrugged. I was done talking, done thinking, done verbalizing what had kept me going this entire time.

  We got to the woods surrounding my father’s house, the acres and acres of dark trees that blocked out the sun and sky high above us. Satan and the other cars and trucks following us took the drive slow and steady. He seemed much slower this ride than that first one I’d taken with him. At the barrier where the trees nearly touched either sides of the mirrors, nothing stopped us and I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

  “Getting out is the trick,” Satan said, not comfortingly.

  I nodded and watched the field to the left, dotted with wildflowers while the sun danced, so bright after the shadows of the woods. It felt peaceful there, like my father was laid to rest, not out searching for vengeance. We pulled up to the house, the bushes that camouflaged the front porch, and sat with a fine layer of dust rising around the car and then settling on the black hood before I opened the door, ignoring the drawn out creak of the squeaky hinges before I slammed it closed.

  I walked through the bushes like I owned the place, ignoring the feeling between my shoulder blades of being watched. As far as the new Woods was concerned, I did belong there and had only come to claim what was rightfully mine. Axel’s paintings, could they belong to me? It seemed laughable, but I wasn’t about to let anyone else get their hands on them.

  “Welcome to the Woods,” a melodious voice settled over me, filling me with calm and peace I’d probably never felt in real life.

  I looked up at the porch, at the tall figure standing on the edge, leaning casually against the pillar with his hand hooked in his pocket.

  “Ash?” I asked, jerking to a halt. “Ash, what are you doing here?”

  He smiled at me, his eyes the color of leaves in the wind, shifting colors of green. “It’s Ash of the Woods. Your father left me his title when he passed. No one told you?”

  I shook my head and felt weird: numb and cold and hot at the same time.

  “I take it you didn’t come to see me,” he said gently.

  “No. I’m here to collect things. You’re the Woods? Why would my dad leave everything to you? He did, didn’t he? This whole place,” I said, gesturing behind him. “It feels like yours, like home, but not my home.”

  Ash scratched his head. “We’re distant cousins, you and I. I mean, it’s in the family still, which is you. If you want to be here, you are welcome. I think he gave me the responsibility because he knew that you had enough to deal with.”

  “Enough to deal with? He didn’t ask me. He was always going on about free will and choice, but he didn’t give me a choice. I’m sorry,” I said shaking my head, trying to clear it, to remember why I was there.

  “It’s okay,” Ash said, coming down the steps slowly. He’d gotten so tall. He was almost as tall as my father had been. “I mean it’s not okay. Change has already happened and you come back and you haven’t changed with the rest of the world. At the rites of passing we felt his will, his spirit, his peace, and then he moved on. You should have been there.”

  “I should have. Unfortunately, I was doing other things.”

  “Hunting demons,” he said, frowning at me. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Of course it’s not a good idea!” I exploded before I tried to calm down, to just be fine that Ash had taken over my dad’s world, my father who was dead because my true love had killed him while his soul was stuck in paintings. “Nothing in my life is a good idea.”

  He raised his eyebrows and studied me while I tried not to punch him in the face.

  “Why don’t you come inside? I’ll give you some springtime or hot chocolate.”

  I looked up at the porch roof, the white slats that could use a fresh coat of paint trying to keep the burning in my eyes from turning into tears. I nodded and followed him through the screen door, into the cool kitchen, the wood smelling like my father and like Ash. At the old stove, Ash fumbled a little while he lit a fire, trying to put on hot water for that hot chocolate that was supposed to make me all better.

  “Not all better, but it’s something to do with your hands other
than punch my face,” he said, apparently reading my mind.

  I slumped on the bench, the edge of the table digging into my spine in a comforting way. “I’m sorry. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “I thought your mother sent you because she knew that we’re friends,” he said without looking up.

  I stared at his bent head feeling a wave of anger at my mother, at Ash, but mostly myself. “So that’s why she wanted me to come, because we’re friends?”

  He looked up at me, brows lowered over his eyes. “You’re here for the paintings, aren’t you? They’re dangerous. It’s one of my duties to make certain that they don’t hurt anyone.”

  I rubbed my forehead and felt truly tired. “Okay. You can keep them. It’s not a big deal. Just trying to save the stupid world. If you want the gig, you can have it.”

  “What happened to you?” he asked, sitting down on the bench beside me, not close enough that I could feel his temperature, but enough that I could smell him. Woodsy.

  “My brother took my soul.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. “I spent months with the Hollow One, Peregrine as voice. He dressed me up in these gowns with things hanging on them, feeding me birds. Birds. He called me dove. He touched my cheek so gently as he ripped my soul.” I put a hand on my chest and tried hard to breathe. “I don’t have my own clothes. These are my mother’s. Don’t I look like a nice doll? Who wants to dress me up next? My dad has old clothes in the attic I could wear. I loved them when I had Lewis’s soul.”

  Ash leaned over and touched his forehead against mine, leaning me away from the encroaching madness. I turned and sagged against him, willing him to lean me so much that I’d forget everything I had left to come back to.

  “Dariana,” Ethel said, her sharp tone cutting through me like an internal water dousing.

  I didn’t move, only pressed my face against Ash’s shirt, breathing in his scent, like that would keep away everything else.

  “What do you want?” Ash asked, sounding stern. His tone brought me upright, feeling stung, but he wasn’t looking at me, but at Ethel. Ethel was thin, sharp, anxious, her eyes full of restless energy like those possessed Wilds I’d seen so recently. Hollow. How much Hollow she had in her blood, I didn’t know, but suddenly I understood why she stayed with my father, in the woods.