by Dima Zales
I described the call, then looked around at the others. “So, I think it went okay. Now we all need to put it firmly in our minds that we are going to the mill to save Graham. Graham is in big trouble with his boss, so we have to get there and help him.”
There was a pregnant pause.
“Having a little trouble really feeling that one,” Kara said.
Williams grunted, and Callie sighed.
“We have to do it, right? Otherwise a car’s going to fall on us, or something.”
Callie said, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen the demon do?” After a pause, “Now imagine him doing that to Graham.”
Williams grunted.
“Yeah, got it,” Kara said. “Good one, Callie.”
Wow. And I knew how much Kara hated Graham. Now I really didn’t want to meet Cordus.
Graham-saving thoughts firmly in mind, we started up and headed for the strait. Williams looked straight ahead and drove. The van groaned, squealed, and shuddered. He’d probably need a new one after the abuse we were heaping on it. The rest of us sat there swiveling our heads, looking for weird dangers bearing down on us. The yards ticked by. Nothing happened. Soon enough we were pulling into the mill’s parking lot.
We got out of the van. The parking lot was a jigsaw puzzle of broken asphalt and dead weeds. Flood lights, powered by a noisy generator, illuminated the area. Hoses crisscrossed the lot. It looked like the firefighters had uncovered the mill’s old well and were pumping water out of it. Several fire trucks were parked in front of us, and a handful of firefighters had a hose trained on the smoldering pile of wreckage. Occasionally a gout of fire would erupt from the pile, and the hose would be trained on that area, only to be moved to a new spot a few minutes later.
“Aren’t they going to see us?” I said.
“Williams has a barrier around us,” Kara said. “Can’t you feel it?”
I shook my head.
Kara looked shocked.
“She wasn’t seeing through fully a few days ago,” Williams said.
“But I am now,” I said. “At least, I thought I was.”
“Graham took her to St. Mary’s, and she saw the cemetery demon,” Callie said.
“Look at me,” Williams said.
I looked at him. His Blandy McBlandsville disguise suddenly appeared, competing with his real form. It wasn’t quite as disconcerting as seeing Bob’s disguise along with the real Bob — with Williams, at least there wasn’t simultaneous presence and absence.
“You see my real form?”
“Yeah.” Unfortunately.
Williams held up his right hand.
“Can you sense this little working?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“What the hell?” Kara said, looking freaked out.
“What the fuck has Ryzik been doing with you all this time?” Williams said.
His sudden anger reminded me how much he scared me.
I shrugged, trying to project submission. “Today he had me looking for gifts.”
“Goddamn it.”
“John,” Callie said, “you mustn’t speak that way.”
“Could someone please tell me what’s going on?”
“You’re only seeing half-workings,” Kara said. “You’re blind to the full ones.”
An obvious answer occurred to me. “Maybe that’s because I’m really weak.”
“No,” Kara said. “That can’t be it. No matter how weak you are, you always see both. We’re all sensitive to essence that’s been worked.”
Was I just ignoring something I should’ve noticed?
“What does the barrier look like?”
“Well, it’s more a feeling than a seeing,” Kara said. “There’s this area about ten feet that way that’s just … I don’t know. Different. Buzzy, or something. Sort of quivery.” She tipped her head back. “And it goes up there, and down over there, and there. I can tell it’s all around us. Under us, too.”
Callie smiled. “John’s barriers always make me feel safe. It seems soft and warm to me, like a wall of puppies.”
Williams made a disgusted sound.
“I definitely don’t feel anything like that,” I said.
“So what do we do?” Kara said. “Give up? If she can’t see workings, she can’t see the strait.”
“No, we still have to try,” Callie said. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but somehow she’s going to help. I saw it.”
“What if she walks through the barrier, like you did? She doesn’t know where it is.” Kara turned to Williams. “Can you make one that contains as well as protects?”
“That’d weaken the protection — too risky. Fire turned out to be stronger than I thought it was, last time.”
Williams began rooting around in the back of the van. He came up with a rope, which he had me tie around my waist. He tied the other end around himself, leaving about five feet of slack between us.
“This’ll keep you inside the barrier,” he said. “Don’t untie it.”
He gave me a look that might’ve been stern on another face. On his, it looked like the wrath of god.
I was shaken. Obviously something was still wrong with me, and it was a big deal.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed the new issue to the back of my mind. Confronting was good, but I couldn’t confront everything at once.
We turned back toward the wreckage and stood there for a minute, just taking it in. Slowly, my nerves settled. Kara had said Callie’s gift was infallible. There must be some purpose to my being here, even if I was still broken.
“Anyone see Graham?” Kara asked.
“I don’t,” said Callie.
“We don’t need to talk to him,” I reminded them. “We just need to do what we can to help him.”
Callie nodded and stepped forward. I caught Williams and Kara sharing a look behind her back.
“Callie, why don’t you stay here and keep an eye on the van,” Kara said.
Callie turned back to us, and I realized she was pale and shaking. Why hadn’t I thought of it? She must be terrified. After what had happened to her, she shouldn’t even be here.
“Thank you, Kara, but I need to come with you.”
“You just think that, or you know it?” Williams asked.
“I know it.”
He didn’t look happy, but he said, “Okay. Let’s go.”
As a group, we moved toward the wreckage. We got within about a hundred feet of the pile before Graham stepped out from behind a fire truck. He looked angry. Maybe a little scared, too. My bet was that he’d never expected us to make it this far. He planted himself in front of us, clearly thinking his best offense was to force us to do something he didn’t want us to do — walk past him.
But that’s just what we did. I said, “We’re here to help you,” as we went by. He didn’t respond but just watched, amazed, as we trooped past.
We stopped about twenty feet from the edge of the wreckage that used to be the old mill. I wasn’t sure whether I should focus on Graham or the fire in front of me.
Callie said, “Can you see anything, Beth? The strait’s right there.”
She pointed at an area near the center of the wreckage, where some part of the structure hadn’t collapsed completely.
“Try focusing really hard. It looks to me like a dark blue tube sock, all stretched out like a hose.”
A tube sock? Seriously?
I took a couple steps forward and stared at the spot she’d indicated.
My movement seemed to shake Graham out of his paralysis. He made an angry sound and ran right at me.
Things happened fast. Callie lurched toward Williams, her hand stretched out. Before she could reach him, he grunted like he’d been punched and went down. Graham jumped over Williams and tackled me. I fell hard with Graham on top of me and hit my head on the pavement. A second later, I heard a loud sound, and Graham collapsed on me. Something warm and wet washed down the side of my face.
Graham was lying beside me. A pool of blood was forming under his head. He was either unconscious or dead. A little bit to my right, Callie was helping Williams sit up. The big man was as white as a sheet. He looked sick and shaky.
“Fuck,” he said. “No way he should’ve pulled that off. Barrier was as strong as I could make it, and he still broke through.”
I looked at Graham, who hadn’t moved. I touched the side of my face, and my fingers came away bloody.
“Did someone shoot him?”
“I think his own luck zapped him,” Kara said, and laughed a little crazily. “There was an explosion in the wreckage. This thing flew out and hit him in the head.”
She toed a dark hunk of metal that was lying at her feet.
“A fireman got hurt too.”
Sure enough, the crew had dropped the hose and was helping one of their own across the lot toward the road. The injured man was hopping along. Maybe some debris had hit him in the leg.
“Come on. We still have to try with the strait,” Callie said.
I looked around, trying to gather my wits.
“What should we do about Graham?” I said.
“Leave him,” Williams said angrily.
“No, we’re supposed to be helping him, remember? If we leave him to die of his injury, we’re not helping him. The luck will turn against us.”
“Not if he’s dead, it won’t,” Williams said.
Kara sighed. “Too big a chance — he could do a lot of damage before he dies. I can heal the head injury but leave him unconscious.”
She put her hands on him for a few seconds, then leaned back. I couldn’t see any difference.
I had to admit that I didn’t really want to see him wake up. Not right then, at any rate. His attack had really rattled me. He’d seemed like a pretty suave guy. I’d have expected some complex and nuanced assault — manipulation, a trick, something like that. Instead he’d just knocked me down like a schoolyard bully.
I gave myself a mental shake. It was dumb to spend time being disturbed about the specific way someone attacked you.
We got ourselves together. Williams staggered up, and Kara and Callie each took hold of one of his hands.
“What are you doing?”
“He needs help making a new barrier,” Kara said. “Getting your working busted that way really takes it out of you.”
“We can share our strength with others this way — skin-to-skin contact, plus intent,” Callie said. “Kara and I don’t have John’s gift for barriers. Kara’s keeping us unseen right now, but she can’t protect us from the fire. John can, but he’ll need to pull on our strength to do it.”
“You should only do this with someone you trust,” Kara added. “Once you open yourself to someone, it’s pretty easy for them to pull more than you want them to.”
I nodded. Even thinking about doing that with Williams made me feel ill.
When they gave me the go-ahead, I stepped toward the wreckage. The fire was picking up again in the center, now that the firefighters had stopped hosing it down. I peered into the fire, trying to see past it.
“Don’t try to look through it,” Callie said from behind me. “Look into it. Look deep, not long.”
I nodded, though the difference between looking “deep” and looking “long” didn’t make a lot of sense to me.
“Remember, you’re looking for a catch or hitch — an anomaly of some kind.”
I tried to do as she said. I stared at the mound of twisted metal, trying to make out the shapes and colors, the lumps and cavities. I didn’t see anything shaped like a tube, much less a tube with a hitch in it.
Fire sprang up in the spot I was studying. I watched it leap and shimmy like a living creature. I noticed its yellow and orange, and the pale white at its heart. There was more to it than what I was seeing, I realized. What I saw was a tiny outpost of a whole world of fire. It drew me. I wanted to see the whole. It was just a little ways away.
“That’s good, Beth,” Callie said shakily. “I think you’re seeing it. When it pulls you, let your sight follow. It will probably look like a tunnel to you.”
“It doesn’t look like a tube or a tunnel. It doesn’t look like anything.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “Whatever it looks like, try to find something out of place.”
I again focused on the fire until the pulling feeling happened. I looked deeper. Flames suddenly engulfed me, but they didn’t burn. Distantly, I could hear voices, but what held my attention was what I saw — not a tunnel, but an expanse of black, craggy ground, sloping gently upwards toward a low hump that convulsively spewed white-hot fire. Red embers spouted up from the white heat, settling in graceful arcs, and pale gray smoke drifted up against a black sky. Long tendrils of orange wound down the slope toward me, pooling here and there like fire-licked mirrors. A distant sound caught my attention — a clattering roar punctuated by sharp pops and booms. It swelled until I couldn’t hear anything else. I began to feel heat on my face.
Was this what the strait looked like inside?
I was supposed to look for an anomaly. I glanced right and saw more of the same — blackness and fire. Then I looked to the left and saw the most surprising thing. A folding lawn chair was perched on the jagged rocks. In it sat a man, or rather, a man-shaped creature. His surface was similar to the black rock all around me, except it seemed to be riding on a molten core, which occasionally blossomed through a crack, then cooled and darkened. He was sizzling softly. Impossibly, he was reading a paperback. As I watched, he shifted and crossed his legs, then glanced up. His eyes narrowed and swept over and around me a few times before catching my gaze. A look of astonishment spread over his face. The book in his hands combusted in a puff of ash and smoke.
Frightened by the realization that he could see me, I pushed the heat and sound away and then pushed harder, reminding myself that I wasn’t actually standing in that landscape. It’s just a picture in the fire, a picture in the fire, I chanted in my head, Go away, go away, go away. Slowly the scene shrank and lost its sensory richness until it was just an image. I closed my eyes for a long second, and when I opened them, all I could see was smoldering wreckage. I couldn’t see any flames.
I looked away and saw that things around me had changed. Callie was still standing next to Williams, holding his hand, but Kara was lying at his feet. Williams himself looked pretty damned wobbly. The asphalt was slagged to molten tar in an arc around us. I shivered. The fire had come for us, but Williams’s barrier had held.
“Is Kara okay?”
“She will be,” Callie said. “When the fire surged, John pulled enough to drain her. She’ll be back to normal in a few days. Until then, she’ll be weak and ill.”
It was a damned good thing Callie had come with us, I realized. Williams had needed more than what Kara had.
“We need to back off,” Williams said.
It took a while. He gripped Graham by the front of his shirt and dragged him along while keeping a hold on Callie with his other hand. I pulled Kara along by the ankles. She wasn’t big, but I wasn’t strong, so it was hard. We moved back about a hundred feet before Williams seemed to feel safe dropping the protective barrier.
I was bagged, and Williams looked even worse. Callie might not have been so tired physically, but I could see she was mentally exhausted. I didn’t blame her — I couldn’t imagine facing that fire again after what had happened to her. I went and sat next to her and took her hand.
“You were really brave to come back here,” I told her.
She smiled and squeezed my hand.
Williams said, “What’d you see?”
I described it to t
hem, including the guy in the lawn chair.
There wasn’t a moment of stunned silence. There was a full minute of it.
Williams said, “Limu.”
Finally Callie said, “You saw through the strait. You saw through and —”
“Talk about that later,” Williams interrupted. “We have to tell Cordus about Limu.”
“Who’s Limu?”
“That’s who you saw,” Callie said, sounding shaky. “The great demons are territorial. This is Lord Cordus’s part of the world. Lord Limu claims the Pacific Rim.”
Williams said, “Call Cordus. Now.”
“Graham has to do it,” I said. “This was all supposed to be helping him, remember?”
“Fuck him. It’s over. It doesn’t matter.”
“Oh my god, don’t be so dense!” I said, my exhaustion making me forget who I was talking to. “If we were faking it, his luck wouldn’t have helped us. But it did help us. That means we really were helping him. Now is the point when we can actually give that help, so we have to do it. From how the luck shook out, we already know what decision we make at this point. We’re just following through with what we already know happens. Got it?”
Williams stilled and focused on me. I felt like one of those red dots from a laser sight had appeared right between my eyes.
Callie interceded. “I don’t really understand it either, John, but I think we should let Beth decide. It was her idea, and it did work.”
If looks could kill, the one Williams gave me would have. It also would have cremated me and scattered my ashes at sea.
I didn’t realize I’d tightened my grip on Callie until she started saying my name and patting my arm with her other hand.
“Sorry,” I said, letting go.
Don’t make him angry, I reminded myself. Maybe he wouldn’t hurt me with Callie right here, but she wasn’t going to be with me 24/7.
After an uncomfortable silence, I said, “So, any ideas on how to wake Graham?”
Williams hauled himself up and, ignoring Callie’s protests, came over and gave Graham a couple kicks. Jesus, what a monster.
Graham groaned and rolled over, holding his side. Then he saw us, and froze. He looked entirely different than the person I’d come to know over the past few days. The confident, friendly, flirty guy was gone. What I was seeing now was a man stripped of everything — horrified, desperate, like an animal in a trap. It hurt seeing him like that, however much of a liar and user he might be. At that moment, for the first time, I really wanted to protect him.