He’d hated high school, every class but auto shop. Set on a thick slab of concrete, the steel building had been cold year-round. It had been so loud the teachers had shouted their lectures, but it had been the one place where Adam’s Sight didn’t distract him. Sorting parts and fixing things calmed him. That had been one of the worst things about Liberty House, the best thing Bobby had taken away from Adam.
The drive out didn’t require Adam to pass through town, but he did. Guthrie was a little gem, an anachronism full of Victorian houses and red brick streets—remnants from the town’s brief stint as the state capitol.
It had magical history as well. He remembered wandering through fields with Bobby, digging up arrowheads and bones. There were fossils and bog iron, though the water had retreated eons ago. Spirits had drifted near on those walks, always watching, whispering, and tempting Adam to run away with them.
He wasn’t saying goodbye to Guthrie, not exactly. He wouldn’t miss it, but the idea of somewhere new, somewhere his brother was—Adam couldn’t name the squirming feeling low in his gut. Maybe it was time for a change. No. He’d see Sue again in no time.
Adam stopped to fill up his tank and stock up on snacks and a giant cup of over-roasted coffee. He didn’t go crazy with the junk food. Money was tight. He needed more work. He wasn’t bad with engines. He changed oil or jury-rigged repairs for most of the trailer park. It didn’t hurt that he could will an engine back to life, get a little more out of a part if he poured what little magic he had into it. It wasn’t enough to get him a job though. None of the actual shops were ever hiring, and when they were, they wanted at least a high school diploma.
Most of the side jobs Adam did were for people who had as little money as he did. He could keep their cars running without charging them more than they could afford, and the lack of a regular job had given him the freedom to search for his father.
While the Cutlass had a radio, the eight-track player had died years ago—not that he had any cassettes. Adam kept an old boom box in the back seat for when he felt like listening to a CD, but more often than not they skipped, so he just let the classic rock station handle his entertainment.
The world stretched out, sunny and clear, beyond the Cutlass’s hood. When it misted or rained, the ruddy ground looked like old wet blood and it took him forever to hose the mud off the car.
Adam contemplated his options. He could head south, take the slower route through Texas and New Mexico, but now that he’d committed, he wanted it over and done. He’d go through Kansas with its farms floating like islands on the sea of switchgrass.
Flying would have been faster, and possibly cheaper when he pondered the Cutlass’s shitty mileage, but Adam needed time to think.
Adam was going to see his brother.
He’d imagined the confrontation more than a few times, and more often than not the daydream ended with Adam laying Bobby out with a punch.
But their reunion wouldn’t be that simple. Or that satisfying. Nothing was with magic involved. He had to remember that it wasn’t about them or their past.
It was about helping Annie, finding out what haunted her. If Adam was lucky, it would be a ghost, and he could drive it off with some cedar incense and a ward strong enough to keep it away from the house.
A bigger problem might be beyond him. That meant visiting a watchtower. That meant Guardians.
With a sigh, he let the Sight drift over his eyes. Adam couldn’t see the future, not like Sue, but his vision of the spirit world was sharper than most.
It didn’t give him headaches anymore, seeing it overlay the mortal landscape like a ghostly painting atop the real world.
In the distance, the watchtowers spiraled out of the ground. Ruled by the Guardians, gods and entities of such might that Adam wanted nothing to do with them, the towers marked the map’s cardinal points. Whatever had Annie couldn’t be that big or bad, or the Guardians would have intervened. That meant it fell beneath their notice, into Adam’s range.
And yet Bobby had seen something. Perhaps he’d just been spooked, and it would be simple, but Adam’s instincts didn’t say so.
He stared at the Watchtower of the North, a lonely frozen tree, and felt cold despite the sunny day in the mortal realm. Adam had avoided the Guardian races since Liberty House, after his first adventures in spirit walking. He’d lay in his room, fantasizing about escape, wanting out—and then he was. He stepped into a realm of color and light. Fireflies swarmed, leaving trails of light. The moon, so much larger than in the mortal realm, shone full and green above him.
Plains of grass and mud were fields of singing flowers in the spirit. For a while, he thought that maybe Bobby was right, that he had lost his mind.
Then he’d met Perak. Beautiful, clever Perak. The elf had looked his own age, but you could never be certain with immortals.
Perak had taught Adam how to control his spirit walking. Perak was his first, best teacher at magic, his first at so many things. Then he’d vanished.
The sun would go out before Adam trusted an elf again.
Driving now, the memory of lying together, moving together, brought a fresh ache to Adam’s heart. There’d been a few guys since, but none he’d let get closer than kissing or a one-night stand. Once things went south of the border, Adam found a reason to not call them back. Kissing was great. Sex was nice, but he craved something else, something he didn’t have a name for.
*****
Adam could have pushed through with more coffee, but he started drifting off somewhere past Colby, Kansas, near the Colorado line. He didn’t want to roll up to Bobby’s at 3:00 a.m. looking like a crackhead, so he pulled over, tugged off his shirt and pulled an old crocheted afghan over himself. It still smelled a bit like Aunt Sue.
Eased into the darkness, he dreamt of home, his first home, the trailer in the woods. In spring the oak leaves were so green, so bright against their gray-black bark. He dreamt of storms filling the autumn sky, and how the trailer shook on its jacks when the wind blew hard enough to signal tornado warnings—not that they had sirens out in the country.
The rain hit the ground so hard the mud slashed and splashed the tree trunks, dyeing them red.
Adam dreamt of his mom, smoking and shaking her head, saying no when he asked if his Dad was ever coming home. Adam almost couldn’t remember her smile. As far back as he could recall, she’d only ever frowned. When he dreamt of Bobby, they were walking together, exploring the woods that had seemed so tall.
He woke with the gauzy memory of his father, a looming bear of a man turned to hazy shadow. Finding a butter knife in the spoon slot of the silverware sorter, he threw it hard enough that a fork jutted from the linoleum floor.
Adam snapped awake, the black-and-red memory of rage scalding him into consciousness. He lay curled in the Cutlass’s back seat, cramped and a little cold. His heart raced, and he took several long breaths to slow it.
It took him several moments to untangle his feelings from his father’s. Adam’s sensitivity, his particular type of magic, left him like an open door. Strong emotions from another person could walk in and set up house. He could guard himself now, thanks to Perak and years of practice, but monsters lingered from before.
Adam shook a little as he climbed out of the car to pee and brush his teeth. He rinsed with the bottle of water he refilled whenever he stopped for gas. Calmed, he climbed back in and checked himself in the rearview mirror.
Adam knew what Bobby would see. Adam’s skin reddened too easily, and his hair flipped in weird directions if it got longer than his pinkie. Most of the time he kept it short, a sandy bristle. Right now it was a little longer.
The switchgrass plains of Kansas gave way to the drier grass of Colorado. Checking the spirit realm, Adam watched the watchtowers change their forms. They shifted whenever the landscape changed. A giant tree morphed into a rocky spire. A clay urn, sever
al stories tall, became an anthill. Even at this distance, Adam could see the orange fire lighting the ants’ abdomens.
He felt power, magic, scattered across the plains in whorls and spikes, creatures and practitioners native to the area.
“Only passing through,” he said, voice raspy from lack of speech. He sent it out like a broadcast. “Not worth your time.”
He hoped whatever was out there heard him. A small player in the game of magic, Adam wasn’t cocky enough to think he could win in a fight against anything higher up the food chain.
To have a chance he’d have to make a pact with a power, a god, a demon—or worse, an elf. The spectrum was full of such votaries, practitioners who put themselves in debt and traded their freedom for more magic. He’d always avoided that road. The only time he’d been tempted had been during his stay in Liberty House, but he’d waited it out, checking himself out the day he turned eighteen. His life was too short to pay such debts, and he’d had enough of elves to last three lifetimes.
Denver appeared, a pool of sprawl ringing a downtown cluster of taller buildings. He got closer, past the airport, and the mountains loomed.
In the spirit realm, a red shape hung over the city, puffing and pulsing like a blood-filled organ. Tendrils like veins reached for miles, tethering it to the ground. Shaking, Adam gripped the steering wheel and pulled over to the shoulder. He stumbled out, felt the wake of a passing car, but still did not take his eyes off the sight in the sky.
Colossal, hovering, it felt like a stain, a poison cloud pressed against his senses. Perhaps Bobby had seen something after all. Under an apparition like that, only the least sensitive wouldn’t.
Adam cocked his head to the side and drew his walls up around himself. He couldn’t let that thing past his defenses.
Back in the Cutlass, he followed the directions his phone gave him, south and into the city, but he needn’t have bothered. The nearest tendril, one of the thickest, dove straight into Bobby’s ugly yellow house.
6
Adam
The house looked like a wedding cake or an Easter bonnet. Confection yellow, it sat on a square of green unmarked by dogs, weeds, or decorations. The windows were so shiny Adam couldn’t see inside.
He hadn’t known what to expect from Denver. Something different from Oklahoma City, sure, but this suburb was a little scary and slightly creepy in its cleanliness.
He parked the Cutlass on the street, pleased to see the battered car mar the scene. Climbing out, he closed the door with a strong shove and stared at the thing in the sky.
“Damn, that’s ugly,” he muttered, feeling small and exposed, he resisted the temptation to crouch, to hide.
The bloody tendril shifted in the wind, a gory rope mooring a tumorous blimp. Yellow electricity, sallow life, sparked across the tendril. High school biology had been a long time ago, but he thought the spirit had the same general shape as a heart. Purple and veined, it pulsed faintly, beating, like it might squirt blood across the city. Adam had never seen anything like it.
Slow, like a sleepy bull, the spirit turned toward him. Yellow eyes opened along its tendrils. They swiveled, random, searching for Adam.
“Shit!”
He leapt back, pulling his senses away and shutting down his Sight before the thing could focus on him.
Shaking, Adam looked around, saw only the mundane, the street and houses, but he felt the spirit lurking beneath the surface of his perception, like water moccasins on the lake back home. He kept his senses closed, exhaled. Sometimes half of magic felt like focused breathing. If he could not see the spirit, it could not see him. It could not cross over without a body. And this was a spirit that should not be let in.
He’d been stupid to look too closely, to draw its attention.
“Adam Lee?” a sawing, familiar voice demanded, “What are you doing out there? You look like a crazy person.”
His mother stood in the doorway, behind the porch’s white railing. Her nicotine-riddled voice and look of disappointment took him back to high school, to before Liberty House. She did not come to meet him.
Adam slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked toward her.
“We don’t say crazy anymore, Ma,” he said. “We say things like ‘mentally handicapped’ or ‘challenged.’ ”
Tilla narrowed her eyes, like she always did when she didn’t understand him, which was always.
She stayed inside the door, as if the daylight might burn her. Adam looked from her to the sky, where the spirit lingered on the Other Side. Perhaps she sensed it hiding there. He’d always assumed he’d gotten his Sight from his father, and he’d always wondered how much, if any, of the spirit world Bobby could see. But his mother had no Sight. She’d certainly had no trouble trying to pray away the things he’d seen as a child or signing the forms for Bobby to have Adam committed. Maybe the spirit was so big even true normals could feel its presence.
“Are you coming in?” she asked. “Or are you going to stand out there all day being a smart aleck?”
“Missed you too,” Adam said. He wasn’t certain he meant it, and yet he wasn’t angry with her, at least not like he was with Bobby. Thinking of his mother just made him sad, like they should love each other but didn’t. Too much difference lay between them.
He reached the porch. Tilla measured Adam with her eyes. Taller than her by a hand’s length, Adam looked down to take her in.
Dingy silver streaked her hair. The rest was the same sandy brown as his. He’d remembered her being taller. The wind, the constant work, and the red Oklahoma grit had worn her down to a rocky pear shape. The smell of burnt coffee and menthol cigarettes clung to her. So much memory came with that, her holding him, lifting him up. She didn’t embrace him now.
She still smoked. That had to piss Bobby off. It chased off some of the lingering chill to know his mother and brother weren’t in lockstep. They usually were when it came to what they thought best for Adam.
“You’re too skinny, Adam Lee,” Tilla said, completing her assessment with a nod. “Doesn’t that woman feed you?”
“I eat, Ma,” he said, bristling at her mention of Sue. Adam didn’t know why his mother hated Sue, but he suspected Tilla blamed her side of the family for his Sight, like how she believed he’d caught being gay from missing his father, even though he’d been kissing boys in kindergarten.
And he hadn’t lied. He ate when he could and what he could afford to.
“You should have stayed at school,” she said, firing a warning shot he knew would likely become a barrage when Bobby joined in.
“It wasn’t a school, Ma,” Adam said. He kept his voice calm as his guts tightened, bracing for the coming fight.
She glared at him. Great. He’d already pissed her off. That had to be a new record.
Adam didn’t want to fight about Liberty House, at least not yet. And, as tempting as it was, he didn’t turn around and walk back to the car.
He’d tried to tell them, that the orderlies were thugs and bullies, that the “classes” he took were just a room full of drugged-up patients with a TV, a beaten VCR and no movie newer than 1989. Sometimes it was just the same movie, day after day in a cinder block room with a water-stained ceiling.
His one relief, for a while, had been his nights. There had been spirit walking. There had been Perak. Then there hadn’t. Perak had vanished without warning or explanation, leaving him no comfort and no escape from the horrors of his days.
Mind-numbing boredom, the side effects from drugs, drool and pissing himself, and the ice water baths when he rejected the pills, crept into his nights.
His mother hadn’t believed him. She hadn’t come for him.
But it was Bobby he really didn’t want to see.
“Where is he?” Adam asked.
“At work,” his mother said. “He might be home for dinner.”
So nothing had changed. Adam’s brother still put his success, his own goals, above his family. Adam swallowed a sneer and followed his mother.
A mantel over the gas fireplace held the only hints of home, a few rose rocks and a chunk of the bog iron they’d dug up as kids. The art, prints of country sides, was thoroughly cheerful.
She stopped in a kitchen bigger than Sue’s living room. Granite and polished steel appliances gleamed with money and newness. More of the wedding cake effect. More shine and bright white trim.
“You know,” Adam muttered. “For the straight one, Bobby lives in a pretty girly house.”
His mother turned away from him, like she always did when he mentioned his orientation.
“Annie picked it,” she said. “Before.”
“When did this start, Mom?” Adam asked. He didn’t want to mention the spirit. It would only panic her or trigger the old belief that he was crazy.
“Bobby called me a month ago,” she said. “Asked me to come out and help.”
Adam put his backpack on the counter.
“Can I see her?” he asked.
With a little nod, his mother led him from the kitchen and upstairs.
The bedroom had a deadbolt that locked from the outside. His mother flipped it and cracked the door to peek before giving it a firm push.
A woman lay atop the bedspread. Adam sort of recognized Annie from the pictures she sometimes emailed, but he couldn’t imagine this pale, drained shell writing the cheery notes highlighting her life with Bobby.
Hey, Adam. I hope you’re well. Happy birthday! We’re spending Christmas in Aspen.
This Annie had a translucent quality, like a bit of soap worn too thin and close to slipping down the drain.
Adam approached quietly, wary of disturbing her, but his mother strode in.
“She can’t hear us,” his mother said, gesturing toward the bed. “Robert has her too sedated.”
“I know how that feels,” he said.
They’d diagnosed him as psychotic and fed him enough drugs to keep him sick and slow. What he felt from Annie reminded him of those days.
White Trash Warlock Page 4
