by Levi Black
“I hope she didn’t ditch us.”
His frown is a dim shape on his face in the low light. “Didn’t you find her this last time?”
I nod. I don’t know if he can see it between the dark wood of the truck wall, my dark hair, and the upturned collar on the coat, so I speak out loud. “Well, I didn’t zap us to that diner for the food.”
“My burger was pretty tasty. They grill it up good in Kentucky.” He says Kentucky like he says coyote, low and run together with an emphasis on the middle syllable: “ken-tooooo-kee.” “You didn’t like yours?”
“My food was fine.” I remember that ham. “Better than fine, it was really good.”
“But we went there for … what was her name again?”
“Ashtoreth.”
He mutters it a few times before nodding his head. I guess he has it now.
I don’t know how long this ride will be, where we could be going, why we are in a mattress truck, but it looks like Javier is with me.
Might as well get into this while it’s just the two of us.
“What’s up with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Back at the club.”
He is slowly turning away from me. “What about it?”
“Jesus, Javier!” I snap. “You had a fucking gun and were going to open fire in that place. What did those people do to you?”
“Those people? Wait, do you think I was going to light up the whole place?”
“What else could you have been doing?”
His head drops, chin to chest, his silhouette becoming strange. It takes a long minute of just listening to the road rumbling under the truck for him to speak. “I wasn’t going to shoot everybody.”
Something in his voice tips me off. “Who were you going to shoot?”
He mutters something. It doesn’t sound like English, not alien/weird/supernatural, just not English. Maybe Spanish. The pain radiates off him. The coat trills in my head and the edges of the hem flutter across the mattress between us, softly caressing Javier’s leg.
I let him go silent for another few minutes.
“Javier.”
“Yeah.”
“You can tell me.”
“I was going to bust a cap in Fonso.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“My mom’s esposa.”
“What did he do?”
The energy off Javier jolts, running up through the coat and into me. It’s jagged and hard and brittle like a fist made of splintered glass. “What didn’t he do?”
I hear the tears even though I can’t see them.
“It’s okay, Javier. Let it out.”
He groan/screams, a low, guttural noise that tears from deep inside him. I know that sound. I’ve made that sound. That sound hurts coming out.
“He came home with my mom when I was little, maybe five, six, something like that. He never left; he was just there one morning when I got up.”
“When did he first hit you?”
“What?”
“When was the first time?”
“How did … never mind.” He shudders. “It’s hard to remember. Might’ve been that first day. I was young.”
“Did he do that to your ear?”
The black shape of his arm in the dim light shoots up to the side of his head. “He’s left-handed.”
So he hits on the right side.
“Does he hit your mom?”
“Yeah.”
Fuck, this kid is fucked up. I’ve had a lot of therapy in my time, since that night. I know fucked up when I see it. He needs help, a therapist or counselor.
(Or a gun?)
Shut up.
Too bad therapists are in short supply in the back of a mattress truck going down the road.
Fuck.
“That make you run or stick around and try to keep him from hurting her?”
“I can’t stop him. You saw him; he’s huge, all built, and tough. I tried stopping him and when I did he knocked me unconscious and put my mom in the hospital for two days.”
I study him as much as I can, pulling the picture of Fonso in my mind, accessing it. I picture the man in the bar Javier was wolf-tracking. Taller than Javier and heavier, but I wouldn’t call him huge. Then again, none of Tyler Woods’s crew were all that big, but in my mind for years they were all-powerful monsters. I can see where Javier has a skewed perception. “He’s been doing this shit for what? Ten, twelve years?” I don’t need Javier’s nod to know I’m right. “Does he do anything else?”
“What do you think?” he growls.
“Oh, Javi…”
“Don’t you dare be sorry for me, chica! Don’t fucking dare!”
Something wet hits my cheek. It’s not big, probably spit, he’s upset and crying, and I’m sure it’s not intentional.
“I don’t know what it’s like, but I know something of what it is like.”
“You don’t know shit.”
I put the heat into my voice as I echo the words of my favorite therapist. “Don’t let your pain make you an asshole.”
It makes him visibly start.
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry; just don’t think you have a lock on pain. There’s too much of it going around for that.”
“Did your father?”
“No!” It’s too loud, too fast, the words moving out of my mouth like bullets. My dad has been nothing but there for me through what happened and the idea … it just makes me react like I do. “God no. But people have hurt me, Javier. I know what that is.”
“What did you do about it?”
Turned my first rapist literally inside out with magick by accident, making him a steaming pile of meat and bone and blood.
Watched the second one be shot by the third because I severed his forearm with the Aqedah and then watched that one bleed out.
Watched the last one get cut in two by the Man in Black, using the sword that is inside my coat.
“I had a shit ton of therapy.”
Javier snorts dismissively. “Therapy? Must be nice to be a white girl.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
“Means I can’t afford no therapy.”
“You can afford a gun?”
“Guns are easy where I’m from.”
“After all those years of taking it, why not just leave?”
“Couldn’t.”
“Why…” I stop talking. I know why. “Brother or sister?”
“Sister. Aricelia.”
“How old?”
“Almost ten.”
I don’t say anything. It will come.
“I caught him watching her sleeping.”
“You think he would…”
“He told me he would when he was doing it to me. As soon as she ‘got her growth.’”
Oh.
Fuck.
That sits between us, a dark, ugly thing.
He slides closer. “That’s why I need to go with you. I’ll help you. You make Fonso disappear.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Bullshit.”
Could I do that? Kill a human?
A human not tied to this elder-god-otherworldly shitstorm?
Probably.
For this? Yes.
“Javier…”
He moves close enough for me to see the tears on his cheeks. “Please, Charlie, don’t make me beg.”
Gravity shifts, pulling at me. Javier leans with it. The truck is slowing down. It rocks sharply left, then right, and drags to a stop.
Javier slides back. “I think we’ve arrived.”
I slide to the end of the mattress and drop to the wood floor of the truck.
I don’t look back at him; I just say the words. “First chance we get, we go take care of Fonso.”
He slides down beside me. “I knew you were a hero, Charlie.”
Oh, Javier, please don’t rush to judgment on that.
20
WE�
��RE BOTH STANDING when the back of the truck rolls up on a track. Light and heat run into the opening, turning the cool dark into a stifling box around us in seconds. Ashtoreth smiles up at us, standing next to the grandpa from the diner. He reaches up an arthritic, swollen-knuckled hand to help me down. I step off the back of the truck and drop. The coat flares around me and I bend my knees to absorb the impact, but it still shocks me across both shins like someone hit them with a Louisville Slugger.
Sometimes I’m stubborn.
Javier swings down using a strap bolted to the outside of the truck like that was its purpose for being there. The movement is graceful, almost catlike.
Grandpa shrugs and grabs the long chain attached to the rolling door and yanks on it. The door falls quickly, slamming into place. He throws a lever and locks it down.
I glance around.
Wide parking lot full of cars and trucks. Second parking lot with longer spaces outlined in white paint that holds semis and RVs. One short brick building with a bathroom on each end and five, no, six soda and snack machines between them. Picnic tables and trash cans in the grass to one side. A bank of pay phones. (Pay phones? Are those even a thing anymore?) I can see the highway on the other side of the building and hear the thrum and whoosh as vehicles fly by.
A rest stop.
We are standing in a rest stop on the side of a highway in Kentucky.
Maybe Kentucky. It’s daytime, feels like afternoon, and bright. We could be in another state by now.
I start to ask.
The old man turns to Ashtoreth, ignoring the two of us. I’m two feet away and I can see that his eyes are still milky, but they are focused on her. A smile pulls his wrinkles back, making his face turn cartoonish, like you could pull on his skin and stretch it into any shape you wanted to. There is a devotion in his stare that you only find from lovers.
Or believers.
Ashtoreth reaches up and pats his face. “Thank you for the transport, Chester of Mayfield.”
“Anything I can ever do for you I will, Mistress.”
“And your worship will be rewarded.”
“Your pleasure is the only reward I seek.”
“Then your quest is done; you have found it in your service.”
She leans in and kisses him.
It starts chaste, two sets of lips pressed gently together, and stays that way for a long moment. Then Ashtoreth’s part, opening around Chester’s, and he grunts as her tongue slithers out over his and fills his mouth. His milky eyes roll back into his skull under parchment-thin eyelids that flutter like spastic moths. His knees fold and he slides down, down, down, slowly, so, so slowly, to the ground, guided by Ashtoreth’s hands on each side of his head. Their mouths don’t lose contact, her jaw working and working and working as if she is drinking his insides. The air around them goes coppery and I taste the ozone crackle of her magick on the back of my teeth.
Watching them pulls a shiver out of my body, a betrayal of how I want to feel, dispassionate and aloof, separated from them completely, and a tell for how this display is actually affecting me. Sweat forms in the hollows of my elbows and the backs of my knees to halfway up my hamstrings.
I can’t see him from focusing on Ashtoreth and Chester, but I hear Javier breathing like he just ran ten miles, the air drawing deep into his lungs and jerking out immediately in a whuff.
I want to say something, order her to stop, but I can’t. I’m caught, tangled, trapped and wrapped and enveloped in a web of fascination.
Finally, she breaks the kiss, pulling back and pulling away. Tendrils of wet string between her lips and his as if their skin has melted, two sticks of taffy in the warm sun going liquid and melding, blending, swirling into each other to become one skin, one flesh, one meat.
Chester stares up at the Whore Goddess with wide, unfocused eyes that have gone clear like those of a much younger man.
She giggles and the hold on me snaps as if I’ve been doused with ice water and my sweaty knees go weak and threaten to throw me to the cement under my feet. I feel funny, a clenching strangeness in my pelvis. I’m hot, flushed, and hyper-aware of the sun streaming down on the black coat across my shoulders.
Ashtoreth’s smile is crooked. “Thank you for the compliment, Charlie.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You don’t have to.” She tilts her head toward Javier. “He didn’t either.” Javier has turned away, glancing back at us over his shoulder. His skin is flushed darker and his shoulders drawn tight around his chest.
Oh.
.
.
.
Oh.
21
CHESTER’S GONE.
After the kiss he stood up, dusted himself off, got in his truck, and drove off.
Ashtoreth and I are sitting at a picnic table under a covering. She lounges on the bench seat, sprawling back over the tabletop where I sit. I’ve dropped the coat off my shoulders and just have it under me and across my lap. It shifted and shuffled until it settled into place like some kind of pet, cooing the entire time in my head until it got comfortable and then going quiet.
Good.
Javier is off to the restrooms.
I am not thinking about that.
The heat is less under the covering but still feels solid against my skin. Yellow jackets buzz around us, landing on the table near a sticky spot that is probably dried soda. They crawl around one another, picking up sugar on their legs. I don’t know if they are eating it, gathering it, or rubbing it on their little yellow and black segmented bodies, but I watch them move, focusing on them to keep from focusing on the heat.
The South, man, sticky hot like you’ve been baked inside a cinnamon roll.
The bees.
A lot of insects crawl over one another and knock one another around in a situation like this, as if they were little drunk psychopaths in a mosh pit of sugar frenzy, but the wasps are careful, barely brushing against one another, acting as if this were a cotillion or a high-society ball with complicated courting dances that require no physical contact save for the touching of fingertips.
“They feel less than that,” Ashtoreth says.
Her words make no sense.
“Come again?” I say, and the second I do I wish I could choose other words. She’s a love goddess gone to seed and I brace myself for the dirty innuendo.
Ashtoreth doesn’t take the opportunity.
Instead her face takes on a mild intensity. “Humans are foolish and shortsighted and myopic and egotistical and ignorant.”
“I agree with that, but hey!”
“Your kind continue seeking out the Old Ones, the elder gods, the Great Ones, and others, beseeching them, trying to draw them forth. They think that if they free them then the gods will come here and bless them, give them power as faithful servants after remaking your world.”
“I don’t do that.”
She acts as if I didn’t speak. “They don’t realize that every time they perform some ritual, some summoning, some work, they actually draw power from the gods, weakening them and keeping them imprisoned. If they simply left them be, forgot about them, then they would grow in power until they could free themselves from the prison your ancestors’ ancestors sent them to so long ago.”
“Sounds like an ingenious way to keep them locked up.”
“Your ancestors’ ancestors meant for their sacrifice to hold. They had used so much and were not ignorant. They formed the system of their spell wisely.”
“What did they sacrifice?”
“The whole world. They flooded the earth and drowned all the worshipers of the Old Ones under the waters of the Deluge save a handful in a bucket.”
I laugh even though this isn’t funny. I don’t know what else to do, what reaction to have. “Let me guess, the main guy’s name was Noah.”
She looks at me, face blank with seriousness.
“Noach was one of those chosen by Bar-Japeth and the priestess ’Adataneses, but they
were the orchestrators of the flood. Their circle of Sedeqetelebab, Shem, Ne’elatama’uk, and Ham harnessed the life force of the dead and dying to expel the Old Ones to the other side of this universe.”
“Wait.” I can’t believe what I am hearing. It’s so absurd I have to ask, “Noah’s ark was real?”
“Noach?” She laughs. “Noach wasn’t the builder of the vessel. Emzana was.”
“Who?”
“His lover, also the one who encouraged Noach to use his talent for storytelling to take credit for it all in the raw aftermath.”
I mull over what she just told me. I didn’t grow up religious. My town was, my parents are, but it never took with me, especially after … that night (because if God exists then fuck Him for letting that happen to me), but I have a handle on the basics. I was taken to Sunday school enough to know Noah and his ark and the flood and the animals.
Wait.
Am I religious now?
Maybe. I don’t know. I now have irrefutable proof that things that are not human exist. I have met and fought gods and their minions. I have fucking magick in my blood. Hell, I am sitting six inches from a fallen goddess of love.
But religious?
Maybe.
I don’t know.
Don’t ask me to pray for you.
“If they banished all the gods, how did you get here?” I ask.
“Child, I never left.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
She draws a long breath in. “I was born in the mud beneath my mother. I crawled out of the muck fully formed and without void as the woman who gave birth to me lay cooling in the rain. My father loomed over us, his body blocking even the meager sun that tried to break the gray slate of the sky above. I knelt in his shadow as he stared down and waited for him to lift me up and claim me as his child.”
She stops talking and I wait. Even in the heat I can feel the ancient chill of her birthplace inside my skin.
It’s a long moment before she speaks again.
“He turned away and left me there in the mud between the thighs of my mother’s corpse. I wasn’t his child; I was simply his seed planted and sprung to life. Not worth his notice, much less his love.”
A tear tracks down her cheek and as I watch it slide over her skin I feel the hollow ache of abandonment in the marrow of my bones.