by Chloe Garner
Sam shrugged.
“Rotten timing,” he said, smiling.
The room was hot and the lighting too dark to see the floor. They were there early, but the music was to Samantha’s taste and the floor was energetic and encouraging. The waitress had given them a good tip. Sam just felt out of place. Samantha fit here because of the music, and Jason fit anywhere they served beer with promotions like two-dollar-Tuesday, but Sam wanted more quiet and less people. He drank, trying to enjoy it vicariously through Samantha, but even that was double-edged.
“I don’t know, man. I think you should try it,” Jason told him.
“No,” Sam said. “Drop it.”
Jason laughed into his beer and shrugged. A girl came over to talk to him, and Sam found himself alone. He drank.
Samantha came back to the table, breathless, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders.
“This is good,” she said huskily into his ear. “Thank you.”
He nodded.
“I’m glad.”
She looked over at Jason, who was sitting on a bar stool facing a woman who had her knees between his and one hand on his thigh like she’d misplaced it there. Samantha laughed.
“I think after this we stop worrying about him.”
“I guess.”
She sighed.
“It’s good, Sam.”
“I believe you.”
“No. It’s good.” She took his beer out of his hand and emptied it in three swallows. “Listen to me,” she whispered.
“I am.”
“No. Listen.”
She put her hand in front of his face and pulled his eyelids closed, not pushing him into a vision, but rather leaving him in darkness. Just the sound of the music and Samantha, a bright spark of life on the other end of a bond. She smiled at him across it, pumped up on endorphins and whatever else it was the music did to her, and he felt her leave.
The song made an awkward transition to the next one and he felt her pause and take breath, then launch herself into the music. This time, he slipped into it, aware only of the feeing of motion that came back at him and the throb and surge of the music. He felt her slip away from consciousness, moving into the part of her mind that just felt and reacted. It was passionate and overwhelming, like holding her against his body, and he found the table with his forehead before he realized his head had dropped. He put his arms over his head, just indulging.
She hadn’t danced in so long. The fire dance had been the first time, and that had been technical and focused. This was like old times, cleaner and lighter than he’d ever known her. Like meeting who she would have been if she had never met Carter, never known about demons, never held power and responsibility. All confidence and potential. She shone white-hot on the end of the bond, and the heat seeped into him. He lost track of time, lost track of individual songs, just letting her tell him what it was she felt.
She grew exhausted, like she’d burnt off everything she’d brought in with her and she was empty and pure. The physical strain was nothing but a metric for finding the end. She dropped out of the trance and Sam lifted his head to find the club mostly empty. She was walking toward him, feeling wobbly, but her gait unaffected.
“You ready?” she asked. He looked around.
“Where’s Jason?”
“I’ve got his keys.”
“You let him go?”
“Yeah.”
“After everything… you just let him go?”
“He’s still echoing the death scream. Either the threat is going to work or it isn’t. I’m not going to spend every minute with him for the rest of his life, and if it’s going to work, it’s going to work tonight more than any other time.”
Sam frowned.
“Did that make sense?”
“I think so. Are you ready?”
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know.”
He pulled out his phone and checked it. It was two in the morning.
“How did that happen?”
She grinned and kissed his cheek.
“Happens to me all the time.” She hesitated. “Well, it did. Let’s go sleep.”
He nodded and followed her out to the car, letting her drive back to the hotel. He was stunned and exhausted, and would have fallen asleep in his clothes if she hadn’t made him put on something more comfortable before he lay down. As he drifted away, he thought absurdly that he was pretty sure she was sitting on the end of the bed painting her fingernails.
<><><>
Samantha was waiting when it happened. Jason had just gotten back to the hotel - apparently the young woman with the purple hair streak had said he should go home now, rather than staying the night - and Sam was dozing fitfully behind her.
“What are you up to?” he’d asked.
“Waiting,” she’d told him, refusing to answer any other questions. This wasn’t his concern.
I was about five in the morning when Maryann showed up.
“Renouch,” she said.
“Maryann,” Samantha answered.
“We really don’t need any more demons popping in and out of here than we’ve already got, thanks,” Jason said, sticking his head out of the bathroom with a toothbrush in his mouth.
“I know why you’re here,” Samantha said. Maryann dropped her head.
“I don’t want to be… this.”
“I understand,” Samantha said.
“They said you could fix it,” Maryann said, playing with a lock of her thick hair. Oh, how Samantha was jealous of that hair.
“Fix what?” Jason asked, spitting in the sink and running the water. He came out into the main room.
Maryann’s eyes darted to Jason, but she didn’t move.
“I know,” Samantha said. “I’m sure they did. I can give you what you came for, but you need to understand. This will be bad.”
“I don’t want to be… one of them.” The girl chewed her lip. “They want me to…” She shuddered and turned her face to the side. Samantha smiled.
“I know. This is the right thing, but you had to ask. It’s going to be worse than everything that’s happened to you so far, you understand?”
Maryann pressed her lips together, face white with terror.
“Do it,” she whispered.
Samantha nodded and stood, putting a hand behind her to Jason to motion for him to keep his distance. Sam woke and rolled onto his back to see who was talking, and she pushed at him, asking for silence. He was sleepy and confused, but he went along with it. Samantha smoothed her dress and held out her hands. White nail polish with red undersides. She’d done this once before, at Nuri’s request, for a demon who had enemies on the other side. That time, it had frightened her. Inflicting so much pain had still been new to her.
She put her fingers on Maryann’s head, thumbs just in front of the temples, fingers in a circle behind her ears on each side. At the pressure from her thumbs, Maryann knelt.
“All I can say to you is that it will end,” Samantha said, then closed her eyes and drew power.
It was much like what she had done for Sam when he was first turning psychic. She channeled warm, light energy from her core out through her hands and pushed it into the demon’s head. The problem was that while it was a blessing on a human, promoting health and stability and driving back dark, it was destructive to the demon. She whimpered as the light drilled into her brain, then gasped and opened her mouth to scream.
“Shhh,” Samantha said softly. It didn’t change anything except that when the demon breathed back out in a scream, there was no noise. As the channels widened, Samantha poured more power into the unfortunate girl, feeling the skin split under her fingers and the red nail polish mix with demon blood. There had once been a market for these procedures, and Samantha had read a diary written by a white knight who had performed them. He said it was about the quantity of power the demon’s body consumed, not about how long the two powers battled. The greatest mercy, he theorized, was to dump powe
r as fast as possible to get it over with. Unable to argue with his thesis, this was the guideline Samantha followed. Maryann put her hands up to hold Samantha’s wrists, and Samantha pushed power across into her, creating a wider and wider breach as the girl’s mind gave way before it. The silent screaming never stopped, but she couldn’t escape. She couldn’t even fight. She’d given her consent, and Samantha had Maryann in her power. According to the white knight, to quit partway through was to throw all of it away. The demon’s nature would grow back to nearly where it had started, and it would require starting from the beginning again.
Minutes later, Maryann slumped sideways, and Samantha let her go, shaking out her hands.
“What did you do?” Sam asked.
“I burnt her gray,” Samantha said.
“She’s gray now?”
“Yeah.”
“She looks dead,” Jason commented. Samantha remembered the panic, thinking she’d killed Nuri’s friend, but Nuri had assured her that this was part of it. Samantha went to change out of her white dress and sat down on the bed to clean off her nails and repaint them black.
“You’re rough on her kind, aren’t you?” Jason asked.
“I guess so,” Samantha said, thinking he meant Brandt.
“I mean, we left an angel laying in a hotel room two hundred miles south of here, looking just like that,” Jason said.
“I forgot about him,” Sam said. “Should we be worried?”
Samantha shook her head, watching Maryann. For as new as she was to this side, it was going to be a rough transition.
Samantha wanted more than anything to go put on the shirt and boxers she still hadn’t returned to Jason and get into bed; her head hurt with lack of sleep, and Sam was sending of powerful sleepy vibes. Jason hopped onto his bed and lay with his ankles crossed and his arms behind his head, watching.
Samantha stood.
She would see it through.
Finally Maryann stirred. She pushed herself into a huddle on the floor, looking around with wide eyes.
“Do you understand?” Samantha asked. The girl’s eyes shifted slowly to Samantha and she rose.
“Yes.”
“This is what I have to give you,” Samantha said. “Good luck.”
Maryann looked around the room again, as if seeing the world with new vision, then she glitched and was gone. Samantha drew a heavy sigh and went for the bathroom. Her dreams were calling her.
<><><>
Samantha led Sam down the hallway at Nuri’s club, hardly seeing the purple floorlights, choosing not to see the half-open curtains in the rec rooms and what went on inside them. Sam had been through this hallway enough to know better than to look. She went through the black-lit bar with its slow, deep, bumping music emanating from the floor. Sam was in solid black this trip - as was Samantha - so they didn’t stand out here as he once had. She’d felt him pick up the persona as they hit the door. Dark, big, confident. He belonged here. Jason had given ultimatums, arguing that he should be allowed in this time, and Samantha had turned him down. He wasn’t ready.
Besides, she was here to talk to Nuri about him, and that would just be weird.
They reached the door at the end of the last hallway and found a tall man, built like a whip, guarding the door.
“Anadidd’na Anu’dd and Anu’dd Anadidd’na to see Nuri,” Samantha said. The demon hissed and vanished. It was rude to speak in angeltongue here, but rude was just another form of politics. The demon returned and gave her a small shrug. Samantha glanced over her shoulder at Sam, a confidential motion that didn’t say anything to Sam, but said everything to the demon. We know. It was the generic information of insiders, emphasizing that a demon assigned to stand at the door did not know.
Nuri was lying across her couch in the center of the room, head propped up on long, thin fingers.
“I’ve expected you,” she said. Samantha bent at the hips in a sign of respect, and Nuri’s mouth curled into the particular smile Samantha had once found terrifying. Affection was an unusual thing for demons; it didn’t come natively to them. They faked it routinely, of course, but it was odd for a demon to express true warmth. Nuri’s smile was the smile of a demon who had never needed to learn how to affect love. Her mouth simply never turned in a way that expressed happiness. There was a deep history of immense cruelty on those lips. The lie, or the truth, of affection was in her eyes. Lying with her mouth was too easy, so she never did it. Eyes told more nuanced stories.
The tall black woman rose slowly from her couch, like a cat uncurling itself in the sun, and she came over to take Samantha’s hand.
“Let’s talk, you and I,” she said.
“Yes,” Samantha said.
“Sam!” Kjarr thundered from the other side of the room. Sam and Samantha both turned to face him. Nuri released Samantha with an eye glimmer and Samantha ran across the room, letting the great Norse demon crush her in a hug. He set her back on her feet and turned to Sam.
“The rumors I hear are intriguing,” he said to Sam. “Let’s let the ladies talk, shall we?”
Sam had expected it, and accepted Kjarr’s invitation to leave graciously. Samantha had never told him how special a private audience with Kjarr was because she liked Sam’s presumptuous familiarity. She looked after him as they left, then went to sit by Nuri in a pair of indulgent velvet chairs.
“You have the echo of the scream on you,” Nuri said. “We felt it here. It was well done.”
“You know I’m not proud,” Samantha said. Nuri gave her a subtle, predatory smile.
“Yes, well. I’ll be proud for you.”
Samantha dipped her head, flattered despite herself.
“We have much to discuss,” Nuri said.
“Yes. We do.”
<><><>
Kjarr poured Sam a drink and sat down in a rolling chair in front of the blue-lit control board that oversaw the workings of the club. The room was blackout dark, with only the suggestion of shapes that may or may not have been animate. Sam knew they were alone, but his mind played tricks on him when he was in this much darkness. The things on the other side that he mostly ignored felt closer.
“How is my girl?” Kjarr asked.
Sam sipped at his drink. Once again, Jason would have appreciated the quality more than he did, but he had developed a much better palate in the months living in New York, and he at least could gage the expense.
High.
Very high.
“It’s complicated,” he answered.
“Usually is, with her,” Kjarr said, turning his head. “We have time, I suspect. Big things are afoot. They’ll be talking for some time. I understand Carter summoned a council.”
“Is that a question?” Sam asked. He didn’t like being disrespectful to the big, happy man, but caginess had become more native. Demon politics. Kjarr roared with laughter and slapped Sam’s knee.
“No, I suppose it isn’t. How did it go?”
“Sam seemed happy,” he said. Kjarr played with an ice cube in his mouth, clicking it in his teeth before he spat it back in his glass and refilled it.
“I’m glad to hear that. Things have been… off balance here, of late. Carter needs to reassert power. Especially with your Sam gone, off chasing her own enemies again.”
Sam hadn’t realized that their departure might have changed anything, on a larger scale. The way the demons reacted to him had changed, but he had never considered that he and Samantha might have been changing how they acted in general. Kjarr was watching him. For an instant, Sam thought he might have seen the demon’s eyes glint blue. It meant the demon could see in the dark. Night Watcher, they were called. A very old, very obsolete sect. Sam felt little uncomfortable, and at a disadvantage, drinking with a man who could see him, but who he could not see. That was the point of this room, he realized.
“I think she’s better,” Sam said. “With Jason back, she has a lot less guilt. She’s happier.”
“Even after torturing a demon t
o death?” Kjarr asked.
“You know about that?” Sam asked.
“We knew the moment it happened,” Kjarr said. But, yes, we have the reports from hellside, as well.”
“Wow,” Sam said.
“Yes,” Kjarr said. “How did she do with that?”
Sam wasn’t sure how to play it, so he went with truthful but indirect.
“We went dancing afterward,” he said.
“We did, did we?” Kjarr asked. Sam hid behind his glass. Kjarr laughed again, softer this time.
“I’ve always had a knack with human women,” Kjarr said. “When a woman moves like she does, I find it’s best to be the one moving with her.”
“We aren’t like that,” Sam said.
“Of course, the bond.” There was a low, throaty growl. “It’s a shame.”
Sam didn’t answer. Kjarr clapped him on the knee again.
“Tell me about your brother.”
<><><>
“Kha,” Samantha said. “He said that Jason is kha.”
Nuri leaned back in her chair, putting one finger up against her temple.
“Yes. I’d heard that.”
“What does it mean?” Samantha asked. “He said that they were going to ‘have’ Carter, and that they were going to ‘have’ Jason, too. I think they’re connected. He wasn’t able to lie to me, but he didn’t put them together.”
Nuri’s thin pink tongue wetted her lips and her eyes narrowed.
“You are a shaman. I am a demon. Sam is psychic. Jason is kha.”
“I don’t understand,” Samantha said.
“You are a shaman because you fit into it categorically. As it is with me and my demonic nature. Sam and Jason are what they are, not because they fit in a category, but because it is fundamental to their character. They don’t identify. It simply is. It is very subtle.”
“And what does it mean?”
“Carter is kha as well.”
“What does that mean? How do they know?”
Nuri leaned back in her chair, tipping her head back as if she were drinking something.
“You have your legends and we have ours. You have your astrology, and we have ours,” she said.
“This is fivepoints stuff, isn’t it?”
Nuri’s face didn’t reveal anything, but the way she drew breath communicated amusement to Samantha.