Hellbent

by Cherie Priest

  He said, “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t casually leave the roof. She flew off it, swooped down and took the bone, and left you there. And you weren’t looking so good.”

  The texture beneath our feet changed, and we were over a curb, onto a sidewalk, and running between two buildings. “Aw …,” I burbled. “And you came to check up on me?”

  “It was either that or chase the flying crazy lady, and I thought you’d be less trouble. It might’ve been a judgment error on my part, but there you go.”

  My bearings were gradually returning to me as I healed on the run, but the process wasn’t swift or comfortable. I should’ve just been grateful to heal up from such a crash with so little downtime, sure, but it was hard to feel any gratitude when my head was spinning like a dryer and my semi-ghoul was dragging me toward a car I couldn’t remember having parked. I sure hoped he knew where it was. And I hoped he had the keys, too, because I had no idea where they were.

  “Slow down!”

  “No, we’re almost there!” He was right. I hit the car with a smack as he tossed me up against it and spun me around by my shoulders. “Keys?” he asked as he patted me down like a convict. “Where did you put them?”

  “Pocket?” I guessed.

  Yes, I could feel the lump of them as he swatted at them. “Got ’em.”

  Rifling around in my pants in a rather personal fashion produced these keys, and he abandoned me to let himself into the driver’s side. Momentarily, I heard the power locks click and I floundered for the door latch—but not fast enough to get the thing open before he opened it from the inside.

  “Get in!” he commanded.

  “Working on it,” I groused, climbing into the passenger’s seat—one of my least favorite places ever, might I add—and I reached back behind my shoulder for the seat belt. I don’t always worry about buckling up, but if there was one thing I didn’t need tonight, it was another set of life-threatening injuries. Or injuries that would have been life-threatening if I’d been alive in any proper sense.

  As it was, everything throbbed when Adrian threw the car into gear and pulled out onto the road. If I closed my eyes, I could feel the tiny spider cracks in my skull knitting back together; it tingled and tickled, but not in a good way. It felt like a very strong man giving me a very deep tattoo. On my cranium.

  But like Daddy always said, the sting means it’s working. Or that’s what I told myself as we peeled out of our improvised parking spot and headed back through town. We couldn’t peel out through town, though Adrian gave it a good effort: The quake had drawn all the sensible people out of their homes—and some of the less sensible of those sensible people were loitering in the street, or perilously close to it.

  Riding along while the road was shaking was peculiar, but not altogether different from driving around in a car with terrible shocks. And before long, right as we got outside the town’s city limits, things smoothed back down to usual and the stars quit buzzing up above.

  Adrian was visibly shaken, if you’ll pardon the expression. I guess he wasn’t kidding about being a southern man, and ill prepared to feel the earth move. He looked as bad as I felt.

  “You okay?” I asked him.

  He didn’t take his eyes off the road. “I’ll live. How about you?”

  “My head hurts.” I left out the bit about my shoulders, spine, and pelvis. All of it had been rattled, but the head was the worst.

  “How long will it take you to heal?”

  I said, “I don’t know,” which was true. Depending on my injuries, a couple of nights. Or a couple of hours if I could score a snack. I wasn’t sure how probable this was, and I didn’t feel like bringing it up, so I fibbed. “I’ll be fine by the end of the night. Tomorrow’s dusk, at latest.” It wasn’t a huge fib. Not my worst by far, considering that, within this time frame, I’d undoubtedly be able to fake it.

  “Ray?”

  “Yeah, Adrian?”

  “That was some fucked-up shit.”

  “Tell me about it. She really … she flew off the building?”

  He nodded. “Not like Superman flying. More like Magneto. She drifted, and then soared. I couldn’t have caught her if I tried.” Then he paused before asking, “What happened back there? That was … it was magic, wasn’t it?”

  “Either magic, or that woman is so crazy she can fly.”

  “Ray …”

  “Magic, yes. It’s magic. Wizards, magicians, sorcerers … all those guys use it. And gals. But I’ve never been inclined to associate with them.”

  “You don’t like people who fling magic around?”

  “It’d be more accurate to say that there just aren’t very many of them. And yes, I’m uncomfortable with it. I don’t like hanging out with people who can do things I can’t.” I rubbed at the back of my head and felt little plates of bone crinkle beneath my fingers. Wincing, I leaned forward so I didn’t knock against the headrest or the window. I put my face in my hands. They were the only cushion I had.

  “That’s good. That there aren’t too many of them, I mean.”

  “Usually, it’s neither here nor there. From everything I know about it, magic isn’t much better than useless. It takes a lifetime to master the basics, and longer than that to learn anything more complicated than levitating quarters. I don’t know how this woman got so good, so fast …”

  “Was she helped by the bones?”

  I pondered this. “Horace says they work like amplifiers, and I’ve never heard of a magician who could blow up houses with lightning, much less start The Big One on a whim. But she has some serious skill, even without them. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s been studying for decades. She was what, maybe in her fifties? If she got started as a teenager, and if she had some natural ability …” The prospect wasn’t helping my headache.

  Adrian pondered my pondering. “So what about vampires?”

  “What about them?” I asked, because I’m stupid.

  “Vampires have decades and decades. Centuries, some of them. Are there any vampire magicians?”

  “Christ, no. And thank God. Something about being dead makes magic a no-go for vampires. Only the living can practice it. Don’t ask me why,” I said quickly, since that was the next thing on the verge of shooting out of his mouth. “I have no idea. But that’s why I’m not an expert on magical mysteries: I’ve never performed any, and I don’t know anyone who has. However …”

  “However … what?”

  “However, I have a sneaking suspicion that Horace is a dabbler. It might be time to call him up and quiz the shit out of him. This woman is dangerous.”

  “Dangerous enough to leave alone from here on out?”

  I shook my head, slowly. “Nah. If there’s time I’ll take another stab at her, once Horace gets a good lead on her credit cards again. Maybe when we get back from Atlanta.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “Clinically so, I’m rather certain of it.”

  “How droll.”

  “Honey.” I was too tired and achy to baby him, any more than he’d been able to baby me a few minutes earlier. “It’s a lot of money. And this is my job. Besides, next time I’ll know what to expect.”

  “Oh really? Are we going by the process of elimination, here? First time you meet, she tries to kill you with a lightning bolt, and then the second time she tries to create the island nation of Los Angeles. Next up, what do you see happening, eh? A hurricane?”

  “Look, I don’t know for certain what she’s going to do, no. But I’ve seen her. I’ve met her. I’ve watched her work. She caught me off guard this time, but it won’t happen again.”

  “Here’s hoping.”

  “You’re such a fucking optimist,” I accused. “Just get us to the hotel.”

  We fumed in silence for another few miles, until finally he asked, “How bad are you hurt, anyway? I’ve never seen you get hurt.”

  “Bad enough to complain. Not bad enough t
o worry.”

  “I thought you were invincible or something.”

  “Think again,” I told him. “I take damage as easily as you do. I’m just better at avoiding it, and I recover faster. Earlier this evening I did a back-flop off a roof, onto a sidewalk. I’ve got some cracks, okay? But it’ll be all right.”

  “When?”

  “Soon,” I promised.

  We dragged ourselves to the hotel room and crashed. Maybe crashed isn’t exactly the best verb I could use. I’d done plenty of crashing already. At least this round was pleasant.

  When I awoke the next evening, Adrian wasn’t there.

  He’d left a note on the television saying he’d gone out to find food and he’d be back soon, which left me with some alone time. I removed the note and turned on the television for company—settling on a Discovery Channel documentary, something about great engineering disasters of the seventies.

  I needed something interesting enough that it didn’t annoy me, but not so interesting that it was distracting.

  I ran myself a hot bath and came out of it feeling a lot better, if not great. So I’d hardly lied after all, which was nice, I suppose. But when I stood naked before the full-length mirror on the closet door … ugh. It wasn’t pretty. When I twisted my neck to get the full view, I could see my shoulder blades, hips, and lower spine showing through my skin in a shadow play of conspicuous bruising.

  I looked like an X-ray in reverse.

  I prodded myself gently, even the back of my tender noggin. Nothing was broken anymore, and the painful smashed spot had filled itself out while I slept. As far as hangovers went, I’d had worse.

  From the back of the bathroom door, I grabbed a robe and put it on. I didn’t want to look at myself, if for no other reason than that it reminded me how I was getting hungry from all this healing, and looking at those bruises got me thinking about how a good meal would fix them up right quick.

  I flopped down on the bed with the television remote and my laptop, and reached into my go-bag for my primary cell phone.

  Horace didn’t answer when I dialed him up, but I left him a message that was cryptic enough to make him call me back. If he thought I had the bones, he’d go have himself a celebratory drink and get back to me when he felt like it; if he thought I didn’t have them, he’d stew about it awhile just to punish me.

  I know this guy. He’s easy to handle if you figure out where his buttons are.

  As I waited for him to call, I settled in with my laptop and the semi-crappy wireless Internet provided by the hotel.

  I struggled with the spotty coverage until I’d retrieved my email and discovered a query from Ian, wondering how things were going. It was so very like him to email. Silly man. Never wanting to intrude with something so gauche as a phone call. A warm fuzzy ran up my bruised spine as I typed out a quick reply, swearing that all was well and we’d be home soon—and I’d tell him everything.

  I also had an email from Horace, including a PDF of the odds and ends he’d been able to gather on Elizabeth Creed, and since I was still vegging out in my borrowed bathrobe, and since Adrian wasn’t back yet from his hunting and gathering (I stifled a pang of envy because it was silly, and I could go hunting, too, if I really wanted to) … I settled back against the pillows to read.

  The better I could get to know my enemy, the more effectively I’d confront her next time.

  Also, having encountered her face-to-face, I was curious.

  How does somebody go from being a respected aerospace engineer to … to … whatever she was now? A schizophrenic sorceress with world-destroying ambitions? It was strange to me, how someone who built a career looking into outer space could show such rage toward her home planet. Or maybe it would make perfect sense, if I could see it from another angle.

  I opened the PDF, and from time to time I followed up with the Internet. Over the course of an hour, I teased out bits and pieces of information about Elizabeth Creed until I had an uncomfortably clear picture of her psyche to go along with the image of her face, which was burned into my brain. Her face, after all, was the last thing I’d seen before grabbing that bone and going off the roof.

  When I say that the picture was uncomfortably clear, I mean it.

  Elizabeth Creed was born in 1953, in Houston, Texas. Her mother died when she was young; her father was a chemist working for the Dow chemical plant in Freeport. She first began to display psychological problems in grade school, and was briefly institutionalized as a teenager, but she was released with a high school diploma and very high test scores in math and science. She went to the University of San Francisco, which partly explained what she was doing in the region. She was married in 1974 to a guy named Harold Hopkins, which explained the rest of it.

  Their wedding had been held on the mission’s grounds.

  Her words came back to haunt me. Mistakes need to be unmade.

  Did she honestly think she could … what? Turn back time? Reverse her marriage—make it so it’d never happened? I kept reading, and learned for certain what I could’ve guessed: Her marriage ended badly three years later, when Harold left her for another woman. In 1978, she was institutionalized for a second time, and formally diagnosed with schizophrenia.

  But she was very, very smart. Upon her release, she changed her name, taking on the identity of Rachel Olsen and getting a second degree, this one from MIT. She went to work for NASA, which meant the woman had some major identity theft skills—but I knew what that was like, didn’t I? I’d done it before, myself.

  My imagination could fill in some of the holes. She had taken her medicine in secret, visiting psychologists under other assumed identities. She’d struggled in the dark, battling her own mind as it turned on her.

  My own mental health issues had come and gone the same way, diagnosed nearly a hundred years ago as simple “hysteria,” which only meant that I was a woman and really, who gave a shit what was actually wrong with me? Or that’s how I took it at the time. I was fortunate that my father hadn’t sent me away, even though he could have, and even though he was urged to do so more than once.

  It wasn’t until the eighties that I finally figured out what was wrong with me. Severe obsessive-compulsive disorder with a touch of the old manic swing.

  For added irony, OCD is something that defines vampires in a number of traditions around the globe. Have you heard the old stories? All you have to do to get rid of us is throw a handful of rice, and we’ll have to stop and count every grain before pursuing you … or you can do the same with sand, or running water, or crossed lines. Some people have argued that the running water and the cross are religious wards, water being the element of baptism and the cross as the sign of Christ. But people like me—and maybe people like Elizabeth Creed—we know better than that. We know how it feels to hesitate before something that’s moving, unwilling to put a toe in, and unwilling to step across it for no logical reason whatsoever. And step on a crack, break your mother’s back. The more lines, the more prohibited things to step on—and things to avoid.

  In the years since figuring out my problem, I’ve often wondered why it wasn’t fixed when I died and became what I am now. How come my mental malfunctions weren’t repaired like my asthma, my allergies, and my nearsightedness when the supernatural blood went coursing through my veins? Why did I get stuck with the one truly bad thing—the thing that kept me from a normal life, and now keeps me from a normal afterlife?

  I looked at my go-bag, loaded with a thousand and one things I would never need in a hundred jobs, in a thousand years. I considered my army of cell phones, my elaborate precautions, my grasping nature that never finds enough to hold just in case tomorrow everything implodes and I have to start over … so I won’t start over with nothing.

  And when I looked at Elizabeth Creed’s life story, something in my stomach constricted with sympathy. Such a mind, such potential. Did the magic make her mad, or was she born that way, same as me?

  I suspected a congenital probl
em. Magic isn’t like hat-making; there’s no mercury in it to create a wild-eyed stereotype. Wizards, magicians, sorcerers—whatever they call themselves—they’re usually a controlled, calculating lot.

  I’d like to say “You’d have to be,” though Elizabeth Creed was pulling it off with full-blown schizophrenia, so I might be wrong. It definitely takes a mind that’s comfortable with vast catalogs of data, and a firm memory, and a serious attention to detail. Either Creed had all these things lurking beneath her illness, or she’d found a way to work around them.

  In 1996 Elizabeth Creed had been discharged from NASA and arrested for her identity theft, but by all appearances she’d only impersonated the dead and hadn’t screwed up anybody’s credit score or given anyone a criminal record. Back then it wasn’t all digital, like it is now. One number couldn’t unhinge an entire lifetime. She hadn’t hurt anyone, she’d only lied, and she’d lied in order to survive as a free woman. It was hard to hate her for it.

  Well, it was hard for me to hate her for it, even though my back cracked as I sat up and adjusted myself on the bed. As I’d been reading, I’d sunk lower and lower into the bedspread and deeper into the feather pillows. I hate feather pillows. Nobody gets any decent support from those things. They’re worthless.

  As I was extricating myself from this downy quicksand, I heard a keycard in the lock and Adrian came slinking in—peeking around the door before letting himself inside.

  He said, “Hey.”

  I said “Hey” back. “How was supper?”

  “Fine. I found a TacoTime and went to town. I was starving when I woke up this afternoon.” Nice, how easily he was adjusting to vampire time. Or maybe it was only that he was already adjusted to drag-queen time. Come to think of it, they were probably similar. “Sorry I was gone so long, but I assumed you’d call if you got worried.”

  “No problem. It gave me time to catch up on my reading.”

  “And take a bath? God, the windows are still fogged in here. How hot did you run it?”

  “As hot as it would go. It felt great.”