“Don’t you fucking laugh at me,” he said, almost whispering. He picked up the tequila bottle for the fourth time and began to peel the foil label off the glass.
“I’m not laughing at you. I’m just a faithless old cunt, that’s all.”
“What the hounds taught us, it makes about as much sense to me as anything else I’ve heard. And I need something, sometimes. Sometimes I need to at least pretend there’s something more.”
“Yeah,” Soldier said, standing up, watching him peel the bottle and wondering if Odd Willie would still be drunk when they headed for Woonsocket, wondering if it mattered.
“Soldier, I just don’t know what the fuck you were asking me,” he said and flicked a shred of tequila label at the wall. “I mean, I’ve known you all my goddamn life.”
“I said to forget about it,” and he nodded, but she could tell from his expression that the very last thing Odd Willie was going to do was forget about it. “You better get some sleep. It’s going to be a long day.”
Odd Willie glanced up at her, rubbed his cheeks and smiled one of his crooked, sour smiles. “No shit. Hey, listen. You tell that whore downstairs, you tell her I said she better leave my guests the fuck alone, or she’s gonna be looking for another building to occupy. Or worse. You tell her I said that,” and Soldier said that she would, and then she showed herself out while Willie sat on the mattress, shaking his head and picking at the shiny label on the half-empty bottle of Pepe Lopez.
The entrance to the cemetery is a narrow paved road flanked on either side by run-down saltbox houses, one of them painted a drab peach and the other the color of a pigeon’s egg, and Soldier thinks most people would probably mistake it for a private driveway. Probably no one in Woonsocket, of course, but the people who are only passing through, the outsiders, people who have no business poking about in cemeteries where no one’s buried whom they’ve ever loved or known or to whom they are not even distantly related. There’s a sturdy concrete pillar planted on each side of the road, just past the junk-strewn backyards of the houses, and a PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING sign is hanging from one of them on a loop of wire. It looks to Soldier like someone has been taking shots at the sign with an air rifle, and the metal is crumpled at one corner and streaked with rust. There’s no gate, no padlock, just the rusty sign; the warning would either be enough or it wouldn’t, but she has a feeling that most people in Woonsocket don’t need a warning to steer clear of the place. They’d know better. You could see it in the cast of the sky above the hill, in the way the trees grow a little too wild and a little too close together, and in the way that the patch of land beyond those two pillars seems always shaded by clouds that are nowhere to be found if you actually start looking for them.
“I want to go home,” Odd Willie says and lights a cigarette.
“You think that sign’s meant for us?” Saben asks. “Maybe we should stop and ask fucking permission.” But no one answers her. Soldier cuts the wheel right, turning off George Street onto the road leading into Oak Hill Cemetery, and the Dodge’s engine makes a sudden rattling noise deep in its guts.
“Oh, don’t you fucking dare,” Soldier growls at the car as they pass between the two houses. There’s an old yellow sailboat parked behind one of them, behind the pigeon’s-egg house, its mast broken and leaning to one side, and its name, the Fly-Away Horse, is painted along the prow in ornate crimson letters that have begun to crack and flake away.
“Patience Bacon said…” Odd Willie begins, but then they’re through the pillars, past the pockmarked NO TRESPASSING sign, and his voice trails off as the bare winter limbs flicker like a few tattered frames from an old movie and are replaced by all the lush greens of midsummer. The pale, ice-thin light of the fading day has changed, too, has become the brilliant shafts and bright pools of a June or July afternoon, sunlight spilling through the rustling leaves and falling on the weeds growing along the sides of the road in warm shades of amber and honey. The engine sputters again and dies.
“What the fuck,” Odd Willie says, reaching for the Bren Ten 10mm in his shoulder holster.
Soldier curses the Dodge and slaps the steering wheel, turns the key in the ignition switch, but the car doesn’t make a sound. The Bailiff promised her that he’d told her everything she needed to know, everything to expect from Ballou and the cemetery, but he hadn’t said anything at all about this. She turns the key again, pressing the gas pedal flat against the floor, and again the car remains silent and still.
“Stop freaking out, both of you. It’s nothing,” Saben says. “It’s just a glamour, that’s all.”
“You can fuck that shit,” Odd Willie laughs around the filter of his cigarette, flipping off the safety and cocking the pistol. “Talk to me, Soldier. Tell me what the hell’s going on out there. Why didn’t you let me in on this?”
“Because I didn’t fucking know,” Soldier spits back at him. She gives up on the car and turns her head, looking past Saben White to the place where the concrete columns and the rusty sign and the Fly-Away Horse had been a moment or two before. Now there’s only the narrow road and the tall green trees bending low over it, and the road seems to go on forever. “Somehow, the Bailiff neglected to mention this part.”
“Fuck,” Odd Willie says. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“It’s just a glamour,” Saben says again. “We tripped it when we came in, that’s all. It can’t hurt us.”
Odd Willie reaches for his door handle, then pulls his hand back. “Saben, if you don’t shut the fuck up—”
“She’s right,” Soldier says, turning back to the windshield, and she closes her eyes and listens to her heartbeat—too hard, much too fast. She takes a deep breath and tries to remember everything the ghul have ever taught her about glamours and misdirection. But she never cared much for magick and was always a mediocre student, at best. The rituals and incantations too tedious and tricky, success or failure hinging on the most minute turn of a wrist or the slightest inflection. Better to settle things with her fists or a gun or a fucking sharp stick, she told the Bailiff once a long time ago. He frowned and muttered something about never realizing her full potential. Soldier exhales and takes another breath.
“We probably can’t dispel this,” Saben says, exasperated and impatient. “It’s too big. There’s too much of it. We shouldn’t waste our energy trying.”
“A bloody shame to see you squander yourself on account of laziness,” the Bailiff said. “Stay ignorant, and someone will almost always benefit from your ignorance.”
“You filthy old prick,” Soldier whispers, casting the words like a net, her thoughts like impalpable graffiti, so that the Bailiff will have to stumble over them sooner or later. She opens her eyes to see that nothing’s changed, nothing at all, the truth of things still hidden somewhere behind the glittering mask that Ballou has fashioned for this hill. But at least her heart’s not beating quite so fast, and she’s beginning to feel more annoyed than afraid. “Saben, don’t you have some grounding with shit like this?” she asks without turning her head or glancing in the rearview mirror.
“No,” Saben replies. “I don’t handle glamours. I’m fine with simple photomancy, but this is something else. This is something much—”
“I didn’t ask you for a lecture.”
“He’s strong, Soldier,” Saben continues, and Odd Willie giggles. “You need to understand that; both of you need to understand that. Don’t walk into this thing thinking Ballou’s weak just because he’s a half-breed.”
“Is that your conscience talking?” Soldier asks her. It’s getting hot inside the car, summer hot, and Soldier wipes sweat from her forehead and upper lip. Saben doesn’t reply, and Soldier leans forward, resting her head against the steering wheel. She’s tired of the masquerade, tired of pretending that she doesn’t know what Saben’s done, sick of waiting for her to die, and Soldier wonders if it would all really turn out that much differently if she just killed Saben right now.
“What nex
t?” Odd Willie asks, and ash from the tip of his cigarette falls into his lap and he brushes it away. “What the fuck do we do now?”
“We get out of the car,” Soldier says, because that might be the right answer; it’s certainly the only answer she has for Odd Willie or for herself. “We do what we came to do and hope there are no more surprises. We get the bag out of the trunk, and we walk in.”
“How about we walk the fuck out?” Odd Willie suggests.
“That might be difficult,” Saben says.
“Soldier, will you please tell her to shut up before I shoot her? I’m totally fucking serious.”
“We’re going to get out of the car,” Soldier tells him, and when she checks the rearview mirror again, she sees that Saben’s drawn her own gun. “We’re going to get out of the car now.”
“Fine. Come on, girls,” Willie says. “Let’s all play follow the fucking leader,” and he opens his door and climbs out into the shimmering day. Soldier does the same, and then she tosses Willie the keys across the roof of the car. He misses the catch, drops his cigarette and almost drops the Bren Ten, and has to search about on the ground for a moment to find them again.
“One minute,” she says to Odd Willie. “That’s all you’ve got, so stop screwing around,” but he tells her to go fuck herself. Soldier takes another deep breath, filling her nostrils with all the scents and tastes of George Ballou’s illusion. The summer air smells like dandelions and wild strawberries and is alive with the thrum of cicadas. Soldier looks towards the cemetery proper; the road curves sharply to the right before finishing the short climb to the top of the hill, and there’s a low mausoleum not far from the car. Its granite roof is cracked, and the steel door is rusted the color of dried blood.
“Saben, you’re going first,” Soldier says, and Saben doesn’t argue, so maybe she’s figured out she’s living on borrowed time. “I want you at least ten feet ahead of me and Willie.”
“This is fucking insane,” Willie grumbles as he tries to open the trunk and drops the keys again. “I’m telling you, Soldier. This is payback for Rocky Point yesterday. And hell, he probably heard about the shit at that Dunkin’ Donuts, too. This mess is the Bailiff’s way of showing us how fucking pissed—”
“Shut up and open the trunk,” Soldier says, watching Saben. “I want the shotguns while you’re in there.”
“You really think that’s such a good idea?” Saben asks. “Ballou might get the wrong impression, you come waltzing into the drop with a couple of scatterguns.”
“I don’t remember asking you, one way or the other.”
Off towards the river, Soldier can hear the hoarse croak of a duck or some other waterbird, and the trees around them are filled with the raucous calls of catbirds and jays.
“You might want to hurry that shit up back there,” she tells Odd Willie.
The trunk pops open, and Willie takes out a small black leather valise and drops it on the ground. Then he digs about for a moment, drops a lug wrench next to the valise, and starts cursing.
“What?” Soldier asks.
“There’s only one fucking shotgun back here,” he replies, even though she knows damn well there were two when they left Providence, the Mossberg twelve-gauge and her Ithaca Mag-10, the Roadblocker she had that night out at Quaker Jameson’s.
“That’s impossible,” she shouts at Odd Willie. “Keep looking.”
“I’m telling you, Soldier, it’s not fucking back here, and I can keep looking from now till fucking doomsday, and it still won’t be back here, so I still won’t find it.”
“They’re watching us,” Saben says, glancing up at the limbs of an elm. “They’re listening.”
“Don’t you fucking move, not an inch,” Soldier tells her, then walks quickly back to where Odd Willie’s standing at the open trunk. In the trees, the birds are getting louder. And it only takes her a couple of seconds to see that he’s telling the truth. He’s holding the twelve-gauge cradled in the crook of his left arm, and there’s nothing else in the trunk but the spare, a box of shells, a roll of duct tape, and the tire jack that goes with the lug wrench.
“It’s a fucking setup,” Odd Willie says. “Someone fucking set us up, Soldier.”
“Don’t start that,” Soldier tells him, but it’s nothing she hasn’t already thought of herself. The Bailiff sending her off to Woonsocket with just Odd Willie Lothrop and Saben, not telling her about the glamour. And Saben still so cocky and self-confident when she ought to be broken, Saben smirking half the day like a fucking cat with blood and feathers on its paws. “It doesn’t make sense,” Soldier says. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does,” Willie says, and then he points the 10mm at Saben. “She’s in with Ballou, and she fucking double-crossed us. It all makes perfect sense to me.”
“Tell him not to point that gun at me,” Saben says, and she’s calm, so calm it makes the hairs on the back of Soldier’s neck twitch and stand on end.
“Saben, we fucking know,” Odd Willie snarls. “The Bailiff told Soldier everything.”
“Willie, don’t do it,” Soldier says, trying hard to think clearly through the shrill scream of the blue jays and catbirds overhead. There are words hidden in there, she thinks, important, powerful words disguised as squawking birds, if she could only tease the lie apart from the truth of things. “It’s not that simple. It’s just a trick, like the glamour, something else to distract us from what’s really going on here.”
“Soldier, you told me what she did,” Willie says, not lowering his pistol. “You told me—”
“I told you to stop pointing that goddamn gun at Saben.”
“You know I’m right. You know she did it.”
“At the moment, Willie, I don’t know my ass from a goddamn hole in the ground, and I’m not going to tell you again to stop pointing your gun—”
“Then it was the Bailiff,” Odd Willie says, and Soldier can see the way his finger’s begun to tremble against the trigger. “If it wasn’t her, it was the fucking Bailiff did it, because someone fucking set us up.”
“Soldier,” Saben says, her voice still smooth as ice and milk, and Soldier realizes that the light around her has begun to bend and glimmer. “If he doesn’t stop, I’m going to have to make him stop.”
“We know about the kid,” Odd Willie says, grinning the way he does when he’s setting a fire or telling a joke he thinks is funny. “We know about you and Sheldon Vale. We know about the deal you made with these beaver-beater cocksuckers.”
Saben’s eyelids flutter, and her gun slips from her hand to the ground. “You know what the hounds want you to know,” she says. “No more, and no fucking less.”
“Did they tell you that you’d get the kid back?” Soldier asks her, trying not to sound scared, and she thinks they might have had a chance, if Willie had left the shotgun lying where she could reach it. If she had the shotgun in her hands right that second, and it was loaded, and there was already a round in the chamber, all that and a lucky shot and they might have a chance of making it back to the entrance of the cemetery. “Is that what they promised you? That you and Sheldon could hide up here in the boonies with your mongrel?”
“Put down the gun, Odd Willie,” Saben says, and her eyes roll back to show the whites. “You don’t have to die here today.” An orb of blue flame has begun to writhe about her left hand, leaking from the Seal of Solomon, licking harmlessly at her skin.
“Fuck you,” Odd Willie snarls and pulls the trigger.
The bullet explodes above the Dodge, spraying shrapnel and molten blue droplets. There are specks of blood on Odd Willie’s face, and Saben White’s wrapped in a writhing sapphire cowl of fire.
All lost, the birds scream from the trees. Poor little soldier girl, all lost now, and she can feel the tiny piece of steel embedded in her throat, a bit of Odd Willie’s bullet, can feel the blood pumping from her body and spattering the grass at her feet. All lost, lost, lost now, poor little Soldier girl. Should
have stayed where you belonged…
Her knees feel weak, and she reaches for her gun, blinking and squinting because the daylight and the fire from Saben’s tattoo are blazing. Her hand closes around the butt of her pistol, but now Saben has turned towards her, and Odd Willie has slumped over dead into the open trunk. The light is blinding her.
Lost, lost, all lost, little girl.
“Let go,” Saben says, and the blue flame coils and uncoils like snakes, weaving and unweaving, and…
…All lost, lost, lost now, George Ballou’s fairie birds sing, their machete voices carving great slashes in the world. All lost…
…and she sets the glass of Wild Turkey down on the wide mahogany dining table, and looks up at the tall clock on the mantel, the skin of a dead girl’s face flayed and tanned and stretched taut, and the fish-spine hands of the clock stop, and then begin to move backwards. She reaches for the whiskey bottle…
…and Soldier opens her eyes, her forehead still leaning on the steering wheel.
“What next?” Odd Willie asks, and ash from the tip of his cigarette falls into his lap, and he brushes it away. “What the fuck do we do now?”
Soldier raises her head, an oily smear of sweat left behind on the steering wheel, and her right hand goes to the spot where the shard of the ruined bullet from Odd Willie’s 10mm hasn’t yet punched a hole in her jugular. She looks out the windshield, across the hood, and sees the black thing squatting in the road in front of the car, the thing that isn’t a man and isn’t a hound, either. It grins at her.
“No,” Saben White says. “That’s an awfully neat trick, Soldier, but it’s not gonna save you this time,” and the black thing stands up. Odd Willie screams and his gun goes off, blowing out the windshield and deafening Soldier in the instant before the butt of Saben’s pistol connects with the base of her skull, and then there’s only silence and winter cold and a bottomless, merciful oblivion.
Daughter of Hounds Page 19