by A. J. Aalto
No gun, no weapon, bleeding out fast, I had few options; I crammed my right hand into my jacket pocket and pinched the sachet there. Without making too much noise or obvious motion, I rubbed my glove off against the carpet and spilled the sachet one-handed under the shadow of the bed frame. I dug my fingernail into the plastic baggy of clary sage. With the sage stuck to my bloody fingertip, I drew a hurried pentagram under the bed, dipping back into the powdered herb to trace it a second time.
She noticed that my eyes were open.
“The first time I saw you,” she said dully, “was in the hospital. Buffalo.” She was staring at the knife; I could feel that her adrenalin had fled, leaving her numb. “I figured since you were Mark's coworker, and you were injured, I should come to New York to make sure you were ok. I brought you yellow roses. Do you remember? Yellow roses. For friendship.”
I couldn't have forgotten that day if I tried. She'd walked in looking like the embodiment of Venus, all curves and feminine fluttering, and told me in a voice butter-soft and shortbread-sweet that she was going to be Batten's wife in June, and that she hoped I was feeling better in time to come to their engagement party. In that moment, I could honestly say I'd never felt worse. Prost's .22s hadn't hurt nearly as much.
“The minute I walked in the hospital room, I knew he'd been on you,” she told me, her accent mysteriously gone flat. “It wasn't in your face. You were a great little actress. Did you know about me? I didn't get any impression about that. I just knew you'd had him. And more than once. I guess once wasn't enough for you.”
Blood rattled in the back of my throat and I coughed, letting my head slump to the side. If this was going to work, she had to stay distracted. There was no way I'd fool a clairvoyant if she felt the magic beforehand.
“I could practically see his hands on you. Exploring your hips. Grabbing your tits. Pulling through your hair while he fucked you. He always did like petite athletic blondes. That's his type.” She spat it like it tasted rotten. “Are you a natural blonde, Marnie?”
I am, but no way was I stupid enough to answer her. With no superfluous movement, I tapped out a paper sliver of ghostly winter birch bark, silently acknowledged the appearance of death on it. The pouch held a tiny bit of ground blessed thistle and angelica root that I clumsily fingered out, while nudging a polished shard of tumbled black onyx, murky as the embrace of the grave, into the north position on the pentagram. Danika's breathing was becoming ragged, phlegm-thick with emotion. The light outside had faded again, and the room was dim. With the weather uncertain, I couldn't guess the time. She didn't turn on a light, just sat on the floor in the shadows.
“What did he see when he was down there? Do you shave it?” she went on, low and husky like she was running out of batteries. “I know where he's been, Marnie. Mark loves going down. Doesn't he? Yeah. Mark Batten could eat a peach for an hour.”
Dizzy, frantic that she might have hit an artery, wondering how much blood I'd lost while unconscious, how much I was still losing and how fast, the last thing I wanted to think about was oral sex.
“I could have seen the act,” she enunciated crisply, and I felt another blast of her homicidal disgust. “Could have seen it all, but I couldn't face it. Being there at the foot of your hospital bed, seeing you stare up at me with those big blue doe-eyes, I had to actually block it out.”
A warm pool of blood had settled in my cheek and I let it drool out down the side of my face. I had no time for making a proper circle or polite invitations. The need to protect myself was ringing alarm bells in my ears. I stared blankly at the underside of the bed frame and began in my head:
Dread Aradia, Mother mine/mistress of the night divine/Thy servant's blood adorn Thy shrine/and thus I charge our darkest sign.
A rush of goosebumps spread across my scalp as the magic in me stirred. A lumbering giant throwing off the dust of months of hibernation. A heathen's adamant call under a desolate sky pricked with distant stars.
“Don't you die yet, Marnie,” she warned me, and I knew my color was fading as I willed each sign of life to dial down. My left foot was twitching, but I seemed to have no motor control below my hips to stop it. Had she hit my spine?
“The last time my power blessed me with a vision and that's what I have to remember? To cling to? Watching him screw some scrawny little whore?” She pressed her palms into her forehead, scrubbing as though she could scour her brain clean of the image. “I've been faking it since then. I'm a great little actress too, Marnie. The truth is it's gone, except for flickers I can't control. I'm psi-blind. Caused by the shock of your betrayal.”
My betrayal? Not his, mine. Well then, it was unanimous: all my fault. It's super that everyone could agree on that. Hopefully my scarlet letter would arrive in the mail in time for my funeral.
She had something new in her hand. I didn't know where it came from but it glinted in my peripheral. Oh God. Scissors.
Hear my summons, mighty Crone/cold and darkness dost Thou own/Rule the night, command the sky/cold and dark upon me lie…
“Don't you die on me yet, bitch!” she shrieked, moving forward on all fours too fast. I forced myself not to flinch and pressed my bleeding palm down to cover the sage pentagram on the carpet. The blood hit the center of the spell's sacred circle, mixed with the sea salt still clinging to my palm and flared hot like a blast of sour frost, tart and blistering and terribly vigorous.
All too readily, death magic answered my call.
She grabbed my chin and pulled it to face her, held the scissors above her head as though she planned to drive them down into my skull.
“A misunderstanding! Danielle, please—,” I whispered.
“That's not my name!” she frothed, and instead punched me hard with her clenched scissor-hand in the face again and again until she tired of it. The silver streak of the scissors flashed at me up close, lashed across my vision, held in her knuckles. Terror stole my voice. My head swam and my sight blurred. She left me staring under the TV stand, where tangled snaking cords connected to a dust-coated power bar. The urge to draw on that power instead of the cold touch of death, to use the electricity there to zap Danika Sherlock with a world-class heart attack, tugged me fiercely, fleetingly. I knew the consequences of using witchcraft to do harm. Thrice-fold it came back. But if I was already dying, would it really matter?
Then I thought of Harry, and his lectures about the soul and redemption. Of purity, and salvation. Oh, Harry, my mind cried out, wishing now I'd answered his last call.
Danika took a fistful of my hair in her hand and I heard the snick of the scissors. The sawing motion of my hair being shorn away pulled my head back and forth. Handful by handful she threw it aside, dropped it in sprinkling, tickling piles across my face, and on the blood-soaked carpet.
My fingertips brushed the onyx and I focused on slowing my breath again. Tears welled in my eyes, leaked across my face in thin rivulets. I just let them fall.
I wanted Mark. No, strike that. I wanted my Harry. He was too far away for me to feel him, so I knew he probably couldn't feel me either. It was for the best; he'd been wide awake for grandma Vi's death. I didn't want him to experience the gut-wrenching on-off switch of mine.
Hail Aradia, to thee I bend/Grant thy touch, my life to end/ Death's embrace dost Thou command/ Unlock the gates, take me in Hand. /Breath to cease and pulse to flee/An’ it harm none, so mote it be!
My heart stuttered to a sudden stand-still. It was far from pleasant. The sinking weight of the Lady's dark and grudging gift was not much better. My body fought death immediately; frantically my diaphragm jerked and spasmed, trying to pull air. The pain from the stab wounds diminished, only to be replaced with something far worse: desperate contraction in my chest, the cramp of need in heart and lungs. My tongue crawled against the back of my teeth. I kept my jaw clamped tight. I was drowning, drowning, my airways burned.
I could hear Danika panting, rattling thick with phlegm, as she straddled me again, and I felt her
stare. My dry eyes longed to blink through a mat of shorn hair strands.
“Not pretty now,” she said softly, sliding her fingers to my throat. They were slick; she had cut herself while stabbing me to death. Poor baby.
Despite my lack of pulse and breath, she'd know I wasn't really dead if she got one of her so-called “flickers” about what I was attempting one-handed under the bed. I wondered if my pupils were actually dilated like a real corpse as I stared unblinking. I knew I was still losing blood; I could hear it squelch in the carpet's padding under Danika's knees. She palpated my throat. A retching gag escaped her.
She rolled off me to all fours to vomit forcefully against the side of the bed, splattering my jeans with sour bile. When I retold this story to everyone I knew, I was definitely going to leave out that nasty detail. Add vomit to the stench of old cigarettes in the carpet, spilled coffee, and the coppery tang of blood, and you had the horrible potpourri of her revenge. She stood, wavering uncertainly on her feet, turning her back on me.
She coughed, spitting to clear her mouth. “Getting late. Be on my way…” she breathed, whipping off the robe and depositing it in a swish of terry on the floor. She peeled off the yoga pants to reveal weatherproof rubberized pants, the kind worn by hardcore all-weather fishermen. They were wet with my blood but would wipe off easily. “You had what's mine. Now I'll have what's yours. That's the promise.”
And my brain shrieked, Harry!
EIGHT
Funny things occur to you when you're dying. Bleeding out for the second time in three months, I thought deliriously, I could have used that damned No. 2 pencil. And: Soft palate impalement. That's what Batten called it. And: I think Batten waters down his cologne. How can I prove it? And then: I'm going to die, here. I don't want the reek of vomit to be the last thing I smell.
When I was sure she'd gone, I broke the sage pentagram with a trembling hand, accidentally flicking the onyx deep under the bed. The shuddering breath that followed was sweet, but the sharp pain of the stab wounds returned with my life. I'd never imagined anything could hurt more than gunshot wounds. Stab wounds gaped, flesh mouths silently screaming scarlet; every slight breath I hitched-in made it so much worse. Unfamiliar noises scratched and scrambled along the back of my throat, injured animal noises, sounds of plain, mindless desperation.
My cell phone was smeared with blood that had poured down my back to soak the rump of my jeans, and rolling over to free it from the sticky denim was torture. Sounds were starting to filter back: cars on the street, a motorcycle rumbling by. She'd left the door half open. Frigid winter air spilled in. Could I get up enough voice to shout for help? Would anyone hear? The front desk guy? A passerby? Out here? Not likely.
There was so much residual rage in the room I could taste it on the back of my tongue; I gagged, which tugged savagely in what must have been the worst stab wound, in my belly. I huddled around my pain, hissing through my teeth.
I should have dialed 911 first, but my heart contracted frantically for my Cold Company, hammered with an un-ignorable drumming, fists on taut skins, a violent thundering pushing hot urgency through my veins. I knew this was the Bond's doing, the near-severing of our mystical tether firing off unrelenting pressure to reach him: my partner, my advocate, my champion, nothing else mattered. Swallowing back panic, I thumbed-in his number.
One ring. No answer.
Two rings. Harry, please!
Three rings and it went to his civilized, articulate message. I sniveled something indecipherable and tried again. No answer. No answer. If he was prone now in his casket… Oh, Harry, get out get out!
I spit out a blood-choked sob and dialed 911. Dispatch had barely said a syllable when I was gasping at her repeatedly, “she stabbed me, she stabbed me.” Part of my brain told me to smarten up, stop being a victim, calm down and tell her how to find me. But it was too incredible. What I wanted to shout was: That snot-gobbling fuckpuddle Danika Sherlock stabbed me. But what came out was a bawling, “Please, please send help!” My innards quivered nonstop. My vision started to blur. That's never good. The operator was asking me something. I didn't understand any of it. “Ten Springs Motor Inn…” My clammy hand reached for and found the knife she'd used. I rubbed my other glove off against my hip, and gripped the knife in my left hand, hard.
A blast of imagery slammed my head back into the copper-soaked carpet. I wrenched my eyes shut, as if that could protect a Groper from what she was seeing: that crazy nutjob had watched my cabin, had been inside, inside! Plotting it out. She had been told explicitly, repeatedly like a drill, how to break the DaySitter Bond through death or refusal to feed, mine or his. Sherlock had been waiting for her chance to strike like an injured king cobra in the shade of a Jeep. This day had been earmarked. On a calendar. In smudgy blue ink. For some reason, that struck me as insult atop injury.
If she thought she could just waltz up to Harry and say: “Marnie's dead, so you're with me now” she was streaming headlong toward a bad death. What a low opinion of me she must have, to think my companion would be so easily lured away. Harry would put her through a wall, repeatedly, and when the authorities found out, they'd swear out a warrant to have him staked. Kill-Notch Batten would eagerly volunteer for the job. This was the end of everything. If I lived, I wouldn't want to.
The door swung open to the dusky outside and I froze, holding the phone half-leaning upright against one elbow. The jig was up. She'd put the blade across my jugular this time. I clutched the knife so tightly that my knuckles flared with pain, laying my thumb along the hilt like Harry had shown me long ago. I waved it at the figure in swift, warning arcs.
The legs that straddled the threshold were wide, sturdy and undeniably masculine. And dressed, I noted deliriously, for a winter night's ride. A double-breasted chesterfield overcoat I recognized flapped around his thighs, above salt-flecked biker boots that were otherwise perfectly polished. Only one man I knew was that persnickety. A cry of relief leaked from my throat.
Harry moved swiftly across the room in his dizzying blink-step, pale lips curled back in a silent snarl. He kicked the ruined TV out of his way; it tumbled through the air casting shards of glass and metal in a shower. Sweeping down beside the bed on one knee, whispering in furious French as he always did when angry, his tongue worked the words like a spell, his mouth caressing the sounds with a voice slightly sibilant around a hint of fang. The scent of blood in the air had him trembling badly. The old ones may play poker-face better than any human, but in times of bloodshed or in the face of arterial spray, even they inevitably lost their cool and had to work hard at controlling near-ejaculatory enthusiasm.
“Who's a brave soldier, then?” he said as he assessed and surveyed the damage with quick hands that scanned and catalogued too fast to follow, unzipping my jacket, clutching my shirt front to yank it out of his way. With a sharp jerk he shred its remains up the front.
“This…” Apparently there was no word for it in any of his languages. He diagnosed the wounds rapidly with bleak ash-grey eyes that had seen centuries of triage and casualty, much of the latter caused by him. “Right, then. Do not fight me, love, there is no other way.”
His hand snaked behind my head and pulled my face into his left elbow. I hadn't seen him break his skin there, but a small wound was pressed to my lips. Dizzily, I closed my eyes and calculated the odds that he knew better than me what was best. Something leaky-sweet passed my lips and hit my tongue. Heady like thinned molasses but strangely tingling, alien and funky like a tomato gone bad. I didn't want to swallow as it trickled to the back of my throat; I gagged and turned my head.
Harry growled impatiently; the hand on the back of my head tightened, fingertips digging into my scalp as he forced my face back to his elbow.
“Time for trust, Dearheart.”
“Don't rush me, I'm enjoying the foreplay,” I groaned.
When I gagged a second time, he said, “You are out of options, now, DaySitter. You have lost too much.”
/> I'm going to die in the vomit-stink room. I opened my mouth around the wound and sucked, hastily swallowing. Unfortunate images flashed in my mind's eye: a waterlogged grave, a dripping crypt, an age-slicked corpse in a swamp. Once the cool, runny fluid of Harry's veins cleared my taste buds, something deeper inside me rolled over with savage energy, swirled its cold fist around in my gut like it was stirring a slushy. I felt Harry's fingertips dabbing at my wounds, and that same ancient, unnatural energy ravaged my skin, tingled icy-hot like Vick's Vapo-Rub. I thought deliriously, revenant blood would be great for chest congestion due to cold and flu.
Harry was watching me with a medic's attention. Satisfied, he shoved my gloves in his pocket and collected me carefully, lifted me as though I weighed nothing. Considering he could bench press a two-ton dumpster, my hundred and twenty pounds wasn't a huge struggle. He gathered me into his chest to shelter me from the cold, hurrying from the room before I could wail an objection. The clouds were good and deep above us, solid asylum, and the wind had picked up to howling intensity, screaming through the Aspens.
(“Don't you die yet, Marnie—don't you die on me yet, bitch!”)
Harry's persimmon-red Kawasaki Vulcan lay on its side, hastily-discarded next to Room 4. He slid me into the back seat of the Buick awkwardly. I backpedaled on my hands across the faded plush tan fabric. Despite the pain ripping into various parts of my body, I'd never been happier. My Cold Company was here, and as close to alive as he'd ever be. As a big plus, I was now feeling pain right down to my toes. I wasn't paralyzed. Yippee!