Count On Me

by Abigail Graham

  “This is amusing,” she rasps. “I grow tired of it. You know you may think you can win, but you have no choice.”

  “Shut up,” I snap, swinging at her head. She beats the cut away, swings at me, and I duck before it lands.

  “Release me. It’s the only way,” she says, again and again. “Release me.”

  “Never.”

  “Then suffer eternally. I have the rest of forever.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  I lunge at her, and my blade almost meets her flesh before she slaps it away and spins, nearly slashing me across the back before I whip around and parry it. The moves just come to me, flowing from some deep reserve in my mind.

  Now I remember.

  After she impaled me with the magic sword, I cast the spell. I made the magic, binding her to it, but in her wrath she cursed us with the last of our power, to spend our eternity trapped here in suffering so long as she remains imprisoned.

  The two spells clashed and became one, and broke the world. This place became an eddy in the stream of time, where things from all ages flow and gather.

  It shattered me.

  My family, my love, all of them stuck here, and I to be born elsewhere over and over to suffer it again and again, finding them once more only for this to happen.

  Except I’ve never gotten this far.

  “Time is on my side, not yours,” I shout at her.

  Conrad edges closer, a sword in his hand. I wave him off.

  “That’s right, help her,” the creature hisses. “Come on, Conrad. Can you let your precious little woman fight alone?”

  He moves in closer and I bodycheck into him, shoving him back.

  “This is my fight, my love. This is between her and me.”

  “Yes,” it rasps, “it is. I’ve only shown you a fraction of my power. Conrad has kept me well fed. Let me show you.”

  She feints with her sword, and I realize it too late. She thrusts out her hand and grips my throat, lifting me high.

  The creature stares with eyes the color of blood, boring into my own. Her irises twist, shift, and everything changes.

  The thrust of her mind smashes through my defenses like a hammer through dried paper.

  I wake up in my bedroom. My old bedroom. Back home, in the house near Egg Harbor. Over my head is a princessy canopy, pink cotton. I have a four-poster bed with a canopy and pink and cream sheets, like something out of a cheesy home decorating catalog. My room is expansive.

  The house is old, built long before I was born… Wait, that’s not right, long before I was Roxanne, but I was someone else, I can’t remember…

  The windows are very tall. They reach from not far above the floor to the ceiling, throwing grids of light across the room. I sit up and yawn, stretching. My hands.

  The ring rests against my chest, the carved wooden ring. It’s time for me to leave. I have to get to school. No, wait, that’s not right. The new semester starts next week. I go to school then. I have chemistry and biology classes. I’m dreading the dissections, I always hated those, but it’s necessary. I’m going to be a vet.

  Voices. Who’s talking? There are voices.

  I slip out of my room. I’m on the second floor, a few rooms down from the landing. There are many rooms but they’re all closed and cold. We can’t afford the heat, couldn’t even when Mom was alive.

  My heart twists. My mother.

  I slip toward the voices.

  My father is in the parlor. He’s a heavyset, balding, unremarkable man, the kind of man they say has a generic face. He could be a clerk or the guy who checks in your car for an oil change at the dealership or the overweight, balding host at Chi-Chi’s.

  The man he’s arguing with is Death. I’ve seen him before. He wears a sharkskin suit because he should, his white hair swiped back to cling to his scalp like a wave on a frozen shore. In his hand a cigar burns, and when he draws from it, the end glows and sheds falls of ash onto our parquet floors. Every finger of his huge hand has a ring, sometimes more than one, even his thumbs, thumbs so big they look as thick as my wrists.

  “So where is she?” he demands.

  “I need more time,” my dad pleads. “Give me a week, I can get the money together.”

  A second man, a thin man with dark hair who is a pale shadow of the older, eyes my father.

  “Where you gonna get a million dollars in a week?” he says.

  “I don’t know, but I will. Please, my daughter isn’t part of this.”

  A chill passes through me. The only time someone says you’re not part of this to people like these, it’s because you are.

  “One more week, I swear.”

  “Give me your hand,” the old man says.

  He takes my father’s hand, freely offered. As casually as he might flip a light switch, he breaks my father’s pinky and ring finger. He stifles a scream.

  “One week,” the older man says, “I come back. You have a million dollars cash, small bills. You don’t, your little Roxanne comes with me. You just think of her screaming, ‘Daddy, Daddy, help me’ while you get that money, so you make sure it doesn’t happen.”

  They leave. The doors slam, and I descend the creaking staircase to find my father weeping and cradling his maimed hand. I stand over him.

  “Why?” is all I can manage to say.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “So sorry, Roxanne. There’s a way. I just have to sell my debt. I can get the money, everything’s going to be fine.”

  It’s not going to be fine. It’s not going to be fine. It’s not ever going to be fine because it hasn’t been fine since Mom passed. Even if he somehow gets out of this, there will be more shark-skinned men threatening to drag me off into the night, and one time they will.

  So I have to leave, right now. I turn. My passport is upstairs, my bag, my bank and credit cards, and five grand in cash that Pops set aside for me. I’m going to get it and I’m gone, tonight. I’ll be at Heathrow by tomorrow morning. Just run, Roxanne. Run run run.

  The doors bang open behind me.

  Wait, this didn’t happen.

  Powerful hands close around my arms.

  “There she is,” the old man says, his cigar breath stinking like death in my ear. “Here you are, girlie girlie.”

  My eyes squeeze shut. This didn’t happen. It can’t be happening. It can’t be.

  “Oh, it is,” he murmurs in my ear, reading my thoughts. “I’m your daddy now.”

  “Get off me,” I scream, shaking loose.

  Nobody’s taking me anywhere.

  I’m a witch, motherfucker.

  I spin and throw out both hands.

  Yes, Roxanne. Remember.

  Sharkskin Suit blasts backward, crashing through the doors.

  I whirl, and…

  Strange steel black claws. The pale, sickly thing hisses at me.

  “Oh, fuck you,” I snap, swinging at her again. “Did you really think that was going to work?”

  She screeches, turns toward Conrad, and spins back to deflect my blow.

  “You’re not touching him, or anyone else. I don’t care if I have to fight you forever, you’re not leaving.”

  “Think about it,” she hisses, darting back, circling me. “What does it matter to you? We can go our separate ways. Take your pets and leave, Eliara.”

  “My name is Roxanne. Roxy. Stop fucking calling me that.”

  “It doesn’t matter what name you wear, it’s all the same,” she hisses, chuckling softly. It sounds like a death rattle. Maybe it is.

  Wait.

  “You can’t leave,” I say. “You can kill me over and over and over and it doesn’t matter, you’ll never leave.”

  She hisses.

  Damn it, I’m right. That means something. It means something!

  “Yes,” It seethes, circling me. “We’re trapped. You and I together, in a hell without end. Let me show you.”

  She looks past me, focusing her gaze on something else. Someone else.

&n
bsp; Conrad stops in his tracks. His eyes glaze over, go vacant.

  “What are you doing?” I demand, one eye on her as I watch him.

  He tests the weight of the sword in his hand, moving jerkily, like a puppet. His head hangs even as he moves, charging at me.

  I barely have time to get my sword up to fend off a ringing blow, then another.

  “Conrad!” I scream, “Stop it!”

  “He can’t hear you,” the thing hisses behind him, “his soul is mine. They’re all mine. Release me and I’ll give him back to you.”

  I saw the world she’ll make if I release her.

  “Conrad, snap out of it, it’s me. Come on, listen to me!”

  He doesn’t even see me. He hammers at me with blow after blow, swinging wildly, barely staying on his feet. Grim determination sets my jaw as I realize what she’s doing.

  She wants to make me kill him.

  “Conrad,” I plead. “I know you’re in there, it’s me. You have to wake up. Wake up!”

  I back away from him, opening some distance. I’m still missing something, something important.

  In my dream, when I beat back Sharkskin Suit. I didn’t have a sword. I didn’t need one.

  Conrad’s own words burn in my ears. You were a witch.

  The creature eyes me, her dead gaze wary, a tinge of fear in the way it darts back and forth.

  “Kill her,” she hisses.

  It’s not him. She’s controlling his body somehow. I have to break that connection.

  Conrad lunges at me, awkward and graceful at the same time, as if pulled by the sword in his hands. I slip out of the way but don’t parry. I drop my own weapon and throw myself on him, locking my arms around his neck.

  The thing smiles. All he has to do is twist and he’ll open me from gut to throat with a sword slash.

  I kiss him first.

  Our lips meet and I feel something oily under them, an invisible sheen of intangible filth. It’s her power, her control over him. I push harder, somehow mentally push, and it snaps back and our lips lock.

  Conrad’s eyes flick open and he drops the sword in his hands to embrace me instead.

  The creature snaps back as if struck, welts hissing on her skin. I glance down at the crystal sword and kick it aside. I don’t need toys and trinkets.

  I am a witch.

  She surges at us, shrieking, swinging the pale blade. I raise my fist and catch it on my palm. It should shear right through my arm to the elbow, but it doesn’t. The steel howls and shatters, casting razor-sharp shards back in her face.

  It was never about a sword or a cave or a secret tunnel. It was about me. This is what I’m for.

  She rips the steel shards from her face, hurling them aside, hissing as strange black ichor leaks from her wounds. The stench is unbearable. Her ghostly pale beauty was just an illusion, too. I am confronted by a ratlike thing with straw-brittle hair and sagging, sallow skin lined with veins. It hisses with too large a mouth, baring oversized fangs.

  When it speaks now the words tumble out malformed, mangled by fangs and a crooked jaw.

  “You think you can stop me?” it snarls, rising up on its toes.

  “Yeah. I do.”

  She hisses, charging at me on too-long feet, black claws bared. I catch her wrists and she shoves me back, digging long talons into the stone floor as her claws twist and snap inches from my face.

  Grinning a crook-mouthed grin full of needle teeth, she lunges for my throat to tear it out.

  Conrad steps behind her with the crystal sword in his hands. The hilt in one hand, the blade grasped in the other, he locks it under her chin and yanks her back, off of me. The sharp edge digs into her flesh, cutting up into her jaw.

  The stink is like a rotten animal bursting open, almost unbearable. She’s been dead for thousands of years, and reeks of corruption. She drives her elbow into Conrad’s stomach and something pops. He lurches back, hand bleeding, and the sword falls.

  She surges for him, claws ready, fangs bared.

  I cry out in a wordless, ululating wail, drawing down from the depths of my being. I catch a glimpse of my hands, wreathed in amber light, but I’m too busy to wonder what that means. I sink my fingers into her rotten flesh and throw her back.

  She is unclean. Unnatural. She is not of this world. A second set of eyes opens on her forehead, then a third and a fourth. Her body grows fat and saggy, the torn remnants of her gown hanging from her flesh as it stretches over something hard and black, starting to split. Her arms bisect down the middle, sharpening to points.

  “Look at you. Just something scuttling to be stepped on.”

  It no longer has any mouth to speak, so it hisses, stalking forward, dripping venom.

  “Web weaver, defiler,” my voice shakes the stones, “unclean thing. I deny you. I cast you out.”

  I throw my arms back and blaze. Light ripples in waves from my body. The screeching thing recoils from me, smoke rising from its body.

  “Nature cannot abide you, dead thing. Feel her wrath.”

  I extend my hand, and Conrad takes it.

  I pull him to me and kiss him and the lamplight becomes the sun. The thing screeches, trying to shield itself within its own shadows, but the light is too bright.

  They hate joy, these things. They hate laughter and light and all that is warm and good, but love they hate most of all. It was love that caged it, and now love that destroys it.

  As strong as I am alone, my power grows exponentially when he takes me in his arms.

  What better way to break the curse and slay the monster than true love’s kiss?

  The spidery, foul thing shrieks, and bursts like a rotten melon, burning in the light. As it melts into a hissing puddle, its rotten flesh spreading out in a thick black ichor, it reveals something inside.

  A shivering, spectral form, half there, half not. A girl. She looks up at me and a warm smile spreads on her face as the light soaks her, washing her clean, washing her away into what comes after.

  Conrad releases me, tears streaming from his eyes, and kisses me again.

  “You are so beautiful,” he says. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  The ground rolls under my feet.

  “Okay, now let’s get the kids and get the hell out of here.”

  We break into a run, leaving the hall behind. Outside, the sky has gone mad. It’s like staring up through shattered glass. The stars are insane, and there is not one moon but five, two overlapping as the sun sets in the east and rises in the west.

  “What’s happening?” Conrad cries.

  “My spell broke time, and now it’s putting itself back together. We need to get out of the castle right now!”

  Conrad doesn’t argue.

  “What’s happening?” Adrian shouts, carrying Nina.

  “Everybody out of the pool!” I shout back, running.

  The drawbridge. There’s barely anything left. It collapsed when Manfred’s men cracked to pieces…except it’s also intact. It’s night, but also day.

  I can do something. I reach out with my hand, but something else, pulling from deep inside, and I make it be daylight, make the bridge whole again.

  “Go, run,” I pant, “I can’t hold it long.”

  Conrad picks me up over his shoulder and bursts into a run, pulling Adrian by the hand. We dart across and barely make it before the bridge explodes, not once but a thousand times at once, as if remembering every time Manfred destroyed it only for the hitch in time to snap it back together when I died again.

  The gatehouse groans as we pass through, collapsing as if struck by an invisible fist. Conrad stops fifty paces down the serpentine road and looks back. I slip to my feet and press against him as he wraps his other arm around the children.

  The highest tower of the inner wall bucks up, as if something huge has moved beneath it. It leans drunkenly then spills over and crashes into the wall, shattering it. The inner walls crack and crumble, falling in as debris sli
des down into the mountain crevasse.

  Even as it tumbles apart, vines erupt from the earth, their scratching fingers tearing into the stone as a child might tear into a cake. It sinks in here and erupts out there. Once again the ground rolls and heaves, and the entire castle begins to recede, sinking into the earth as the stones rise to swallow it.

  When the rumbling stops, the castle is a ruin, strewn with veins and leaves. The foliage is rolling up the mountainside, fresh grass and trees springing from the ground, reaching up too fast.

  No, catching up. We’re returning to normal time. I hold Conrad close, suddenly afraid that after all this, I’ll lose them yet again, but the rampage of years doesn’t touch us.

  When it’s over we stand on a road through trees, the four of us panting, Nina sobbing into my leg as Adrian laughs, and Conrad stares up at the castle’s shattered remains.

  I remember now.

  The undead polluted our minds, stole bites and chunks of our souls to stop us remembering. It was as Conrad said—his father meant to burn me at the stake.

  In his defense, I was a witch. I stole her power and sealed it in steel, making her a pale shade of her former self, granting it to Conrad to empower him to guard against her, but she used her gifts of illusion to trick and betray us, and killed me.

  With my dying breath I damned us all to this hell. The vampire ripped my soul apart, scattering it through time and space.

  “She didn’t know,” I laugh.

  “What?” Conrad says.

  “She thought she was killing me or torturing me, but she made me even more powerful. I just had to put myself back together.”

  Conrad locks me in his arms and squeezes me hard.

  “I’m so sorry,” I wail into his chest. “It’s my fault, all of it. I trapped you here in this hell.”

  “But I have you,” he says, “and that’s all that matters. The memories will fade, and we’ll make new ones. Let’s go home.”

  “Home?” Adrian says. “Father, the castle is a ruin.”

  He laughs. “When I say home, I mean anywhere but here.”

  17

  Going Home

  Roxanne

  The villagers stare at us when we approach. Conrad is still stripped to the waist. Adrian is stronger now, his head high. He carries his sleeping sister down the road.