by Chloe Garner
“Yeah, in the garage,” Jason said. Samantha looked up.
“What does that prove?” she asked him.
“Don’t the creepy crawlies usually take the blood with them?” he answered.
She frowned.
“He’s a water sorcerer. Maybe the blood would pollute that.”
“I thought thirsty men just drank a lot,” Sam said.
She shook her head.
“It’s true, but the magic evolves differently for different sorcerers. I don’t know what he’s doing, but I wouldn’t rule out the idea that it involves these bodies.”
She looked at the stack for a minute.
“Can we find all of the cases that involved substantial amounts of blood? I think that’s where we need to start.”
She sat at the other end of the couch from Sam and took the next folder off of the pile, feeling queasy. There were still a lot of options for what a sorcerer would do with an exsanguinated body, but none of them were good.
<><><>
“This one,” she said an hour later. “This is the one we should start with.”
Sam looked up.
“What have you got?”
“This is from a week ago,” she said. “Possible she’s still alive, possible she’s the key to finding our sorcerer.”
She tossed the file to him.
“Taken from her backyard eight days ago,” he said, checking his computer for the date. It was hard to keep track without milestones like weekends.
“So how do we find her, if we don’t know how to find him, either?” Jason asked.
“We go look. See what we find that the police didn’t know to look for,” Samantha said. “They still think she’s just missing. Probably looking at family and friends. Neighbors.”
“How did she end up in the blood stack?” Jason asked. Sam tossed him the photo. Drips of blood on the scuffed dirt under a swing.
“How old was she?” Jason asked. Sam looked down at the folder again.
“Six.”
<><><>
They sat outside of the house until nightfall then made their way into the backyard. Thick summer trees kept them from being visible from the neighboring houses, and Sam leaned against the swing set, watching the house as Samantha and Jason looked around.
“I assume they looked for fingerprints,” Jason whispered.
“Yup. Nothing,” Sam whispered back.
“Not all immortals have fingerprints,” Samantha said, crouching. “Their skin goes funny after a few hundred years, and from the look of him, he’s a lot older than that.”
“Awesome,” Jason said.
“How did he get her out of here without her parents hearing her?” Sam whispered. “Her mom said she was cooking dinner in the kitchen and she never heard anything.”
“She should have screamed,” Samantha said. “She bled here. Why didn’t she scream?”
Jason stood sideways next to the hole in the wood chips under the swing, looking down at it.
“Which way would you say she faced?”
Samantha went to stand on the other side of the hole.
“The scuffs should be behind her, not in front of her,” she said. He went and sat in the other swing.
“Kill me,” he said. “I’m six and I scream a lot. Kill me here.”
Samantha put out her hand and Sam handed her Wrath, the hip-sized dual-pointed knife she had given him. It buzzed with a reflection of any anger she felt, by design. It was pretty quiet now, but she knew how loud it could get. She stood behind Jason and pulled him back, pushing his head down toward his chest and putting her hand over his mouth. She stood with the back of his head pressed against her stomach and mimed drawing the knife across his throat.
“I’m impressed you know to do that,” Jason said.
“What?”
“Push my esophagus out of the way of the arteries.”
“Please,” she said. “I’m insulted.”
He looked down at the ground, then over at the other swing.
“Is it just me, or does that look freshly disturbed?”
Samantha pushed the wood chips aside to unearth a layer of darker brown wood underneath. She knelt to confirm it was blood.
“He bled her out here, then covered it over and carried her off,” she said. “She was dead before she left the yard.”
“So where did he take her?” Jason asked. Samantha stood and looked around.
“What would you do?”
“Fence row,” Sam said. “The trees give you a lot of cover, even during the day.”
They clicked off their flashlights, working by moonlight down to the fence line. The girl’s yard was fenced, but the neighbor’s wasn’t. They jumped the fence one after the other and kept walking until they found a thick row of hedge against another fence.
“This is where I would turn back up to the street. If he scouted it, he could have left a car here,” Jason said. Samantha turned her flashlight back on to find a long streak of dried blood down the wood fence.
“Yup.”
They followed out to the street, but none of them had expected to find much beyond that.
“See what Kerk can turn up,” Samantha said. “Abandoned buildings, traffic tickets given to people who don’t exist, cars registered to dead people. See if he can get us a lead. He’s living some kind of life, here, but he can’t have a legal identity. He has to have taken someone else’s.”
“Use the people he killed,” Jason said as they walked back to the car.
“I love how you two assume I’m the one who has to work with him,” Sam said.
Jason clapped him on the shoulder.
“We just both believe you’re the only one who can.”
“Mmm hmm,” Sam said skeptically.
<><><>
Samantha kept the first watch around dawn, trudging up to bed a few hours later after she woke Sam. Kerk was working on leads, and they were all grateful for sleep while he worked. Jason hadn’t slept in three days. She noted when Sam went back to sleep in her dreams, later, because he became a figmented character, always in and out, confused. When they joined their dreams together intentionally, they became lucid. They could hold conversations that they would remember. When they slept normally, they bounced off of each other’s dreams the way an environmental noise might make its way into a dream. It was comforting to have him there, but she didn’t remember much of it other than the idea.
They came downstairs around lunchtime and Sam logged online while Samantha scrounged food out of the kitchen.
“It occurred to me,” Jason asked. “I’ve never heard of a thirsty man having a partner. Do they ever come in packs?”
“Not really,” Samantha said, grabbing a box of crackers and settling on the couch next to Sam. “I can’t explain why wraiths do actually, but the really strong dark magic users tend to be loners. Too many opportunities to sabotage each other and not enough reason to trust.”
Jason nodded.
“At least there’s that.”
Sam looked up.
“He’s got a list,” he said. “Anyone who looks like they might be using a stolen identity and his best guess on where to find them.”
“Good work,” Jason said. “Let’s go.”
Sam sighed.
“I miss Simon.”
“I know, buddy,” Jason said, rattling his keys. “We’ll figure it out later. Let’s go catch this bastard, first.”
Samantha took her box of crackers with her, crunching contentedly in the back seat as Jason drove. She hadn’t yet replaced her stash of junk food under the bench seat in the back of the Land Cruiser, and it bothered her. After a few more handfuls, she stashed the box under the seat, then leaned against the door and stared, only half-seeing, out the other window.
<><><>
“This is it,” Jason said, pulling over. He looked across Sam at the house in Kerk’s list.
“The name is Emma Ross,” Sam said. They sat for a few minutes, watching the h
ouse, then Jason turned in his seat.
“How dangerous is this guy, really?” he asked.
“He was halfway through what sounded like the incantation to liquefy your innards,” Samantha answered. She looked happy, in a distant kind of way. Sam laughed.
“So, on a scale from one to ten…” Jason said. Samantha snorted. He opened his door. “I’m going to go knock.”
“If he answers in anything other than English, let me know,” she answered, shifting in her seat. Jason had just remembered that Kara was waiting for him in New York. He had no interest in dragging this out any longer than it needed to go.
He walked up to the front door and knocked, actively feeling the weight of Anadidd’na on his back. He felt light on his feet, like he was finally doing what he was good at again, after a long break. The door opened, and he raised his eyebrows.
“Hi. I’m looking for Emma Ross,” he said, trying not to laugh. The pudgy man had crumbs from half a dozen different salty snacks on his shirt, and he was greasy enough that he’d be genuinely hard to catch, if he tried to run. The man blinked through thick glasses as his pupils contracted in the evening light.
“She’s not here right now,” he answered after a long pause and three swallows.
“Thank you,” Jason said. “Appreciate your time.”
The man backed away from the door and closed it before Jason had managed to turn around.
“That’s one down,” he said to himself as he got back in the car. He started the engine.
“No way that guy’s got a girl living with him. He’s on his third Red Bull and his buddies online are wondering where he went.”
“You don’t know that,” Sam said.
“No. Yeah, I do.”
“Could be his mom,” Samantha commented.
“If it weren’t for the fact that he is the worst liar in the world… no, you’d still be wrong. House smelled like he’d been rubbing against the walls to get clean. It’s his house, and he lives there alone.”
“All right,” Sam said. “Next up.”
They went to four more locations - a house, a butcher shop, and two apartments - before they got to the little, run-down house outside the city. Weeds grew up the walls, making it easy to miss from the road.
“Why didn’t we start here?” Jason asked.
“Kerk wasn’t sure it existed,” Sam answered. They pulled into the driveway and got out. A dead tree obscured the front window from the car, and they went around to the back door, because the front door looked like it was boarded over. Jason looked through another window.
“It’s not as bad in there as it looks from out here,” he said.
“You want to knock, or just go in?” Sam asked. Jason answered by kicking the door in. It didn’t put up much of a fight, the door and the frame competing for which could shatter most completely. He drew Anadidd’na and went in.
The rooms were furnished with shabby but functional furniture, and while there were cobwebs in most corners, the main space of the rooms showed regular use.
“This is him,” Samantha said.
“How do you know?” Jason asked.
“It’s a feeling. The immortals leave it wherever they go. Old and unhappy.”
“All old people are old and unhappy.”
“This is more malicious,” she said.
“It may be his place, but he’s gone,” Sam said. “Look at the dust spots on the table and the desk.”
“He still uses a tower,” Samantha commented.
“And he took it with him when he left.”
Jason found a bedroom with a weary mattress on a full bed. No sheets. Samantha and Sam came up behind him to see, as he turned the doorknob on the next room.
The smell was enough to knock him back. From where he stood, he could just see the murky water in the bathtub and the remains of whatever the thirsty man had left to rot in it. Sam turned away, and Jason heard him throw up. The smell made him nauseous, but his will wouldn’t let him run away. Samantha stood next to him, face stony.
“That’s why he doesn’t want the blood,” she said.
“I don’t get it,” Jason said.
“He drinks it,” Sam called from the kitchen and retched again.
“He drinks the water,” Samantha said. “He dissolves people in it and drinks it. It’s where he gets the power for the youth rituals.”
She looked hard toward Sam; through walls and furniture, Jason knew that look was directly at Sam. It was uncanny.
“Pull yourself together,” she whispered.
“That’s cold,” Jason said.
“Hard and dark are different things,” she answered. “Close the door. There isn’t anything we can do for her.”
“We could tell her parents.”
Her face softened and she looked down and away.
“Would you want to find that?”
“No, but I’d want to know. They look at her bed every night and hope.”
“That’s supposed to be my side of the argument,” Samantha said. “That truth is better than easy.”
“Then make it.”
She nodded.
“I’m still remembering.”
He gave her a sideways smile, sympathetic, and they went to find Sam.
“He’s long gone, it looks like,” Samantha said as they got back in the car.
“We have any way to track him?” Sam asked. Jason shook his head.
“He’s in the wind. Add him to our hit list. We’ve got things to do.”
Samantha nodded agreement, and they went back to the house, did a quick packing job - during which Jason was pretty sure three bags of groceries ended up under the bench seat in the back of the Cruiser - and headed back to New York.
<><><>
They didn’t talk much on the drive back to the city. Kara was still there, but impatient to be on the road for another job. Sam and Samantha had gone to get food, Jason and Kara had had destructive, athletic sex in the apartment, and now Samantha was putting things back where they went. She had forgotten more than she had realized, and Jason’s argument at the sorcerer’s house was bothering her. Sam had needed to be shaken - he had mentally thanked her for it - but she might have actually left the little girl there indefinitely. Sam had called the police from a gas station and told them that they had broken in on a dare and found the girl there. The coroner would conclude that she died quickly. Her family could bury her.
Six years old.
Kara came out of nowhere and hugged Samantha.
“I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “You have to come to Little Rock. We’ll dance and catch up. Okay?”
“We’ll see,” Samantha said, not wanting to commit to an ongoing relationship with the Rangers that she wasn’t mentally settled on, yet. There was still too much going on for her to consider going back to that period of normal yet. She could tell Sam missed it, but he agreed. Jason wasn’t used to being human, yet, and wanted everything and nothing.
Jason hugged Kara at the door and kissed her hard as Samantha and Sam studiously avoided watching, and then she was gone.
“I’m beat,” Jason said as they ate. “Tell me again what we’re doing next?”
“We need to go close the hellsgate you were in,” Samantha said. “If it’s as big as you say, I’m going to have to get in touch with Argo for help.”
“Who’s Argo?”
“He’s one of us. He’s responsible for most of the southwest.”
“That sounds like a blast,” Jason said. “Is he anything like the rest of you people?”
“You mean Bane and Carter? And Lindsay? And Lange? Yeah.”
“Sure we can’t manage this one on our own?”
“I know if I have to pull down an abandoned shopping mall, he should be involved. I don’t want to start a turf war with Argo.”
“If you say so,” Jason said.
“Hey, what are you going to do about your sniffer hellside?” Sam asked. Samantha frowned, feeling a jolt of guilt.
She had forgotten about the woman after Jason had gotten back. She was an escapee from a hellfactory, and she had agreed to look for Jason in exchange for enough power to cross to the earth plane and get out of Hell. Samantha was pretty sure that the woman understand that she was technically a demon, now.
“I don’t know what I can do,” she said. “We had a contract. It was a fair one; I didn’t slant it at all, but she didn’t accomplish the terms.”
“So you’re just going to leave her there?” Sam asked. “What happens if they catch her?”
“I suspect she isn’t autonomous enough to withstand being claimed,” Samantha said. “Either she lasts long enough to really be a class 1 or she goes back to a factory.”
“Who are we talking about?” Jason asked.
“Sam had a demon looking for you, hellside. We called her the sniffer. If she’d found you, Sam was going to get her out.”
“And she didn’t help find you,” Samantha said.
“So?” Jason asked.
“So?” Samantha answered.
“So you’re just going to leave her there, after she took all those risks for you,” Sam said. Samantha shrugged.
“You can’t empty Hell.”
“You aren’t talking about emptying it, are you?” Jason asked. Samantha had an epiphany.
“Freewill,” she said. They stared at her. “Demons are bound by contract. It’s their culture, and a contract isn’t valid if both sides don’t have a stake. You can’t just give something away. But I’m human. I have real, live freewill, and I can do whatever I want.”
“Like take a rifle to Hell,” Sam said, raising an eyebrow. She pointed a finger at him. He was happy, and she was relieved.
“Screw the rules. I’m human, they’re demons. Their rules don’t apply to me. I’m going to go get her.”
“How?” Jason asked. “Not that I don’t approve of helping the people who help you, but where are you going to get the power for her to cross?”
“The same way I always would have,” she said. “I’m going to buy it.”
She glanced at Sam as she pulled away, and he nodded. She crossed.
<><><>
She hadn’t crossed hellside since God had shattered the darkroot in her brain. She’d gotten used to the soulburn, before. It came back at her with an intensity she had a hard time remembering. Sam and Jason hadn’t noticed it when they’d crossed, because it took awareness to know what it was, but knowing what to watch for, she realized how badly she had let herself be altered by the place. Hell encourages tourists for a reason. She swallowed and rubbed her arms, wondering how she intended to find Sniffer. She had been crossing multiple times a day for so long, she had come to expect that the woman would be waiting for her each time with her updates. She hadn’t crossed in more than a week. Even with the hellsgate open, that meant it had been hundreds of years, maybe thousands, on this side. Surely when she had stopped crossing, Sniffer had eventually given up on her and went to make her own way.