Lightbringer

by K. D. McEntire

  “When Dad comes home, I'm gonna tell,” Chel declared one night when Wendy snagged his keys off the nail in the garage. Jon, sitting at the kitchen counter, took one look at Wendy's face and abandoned the area, taking his half-eaten mixing bowl full of mac ‘n’ cheese with him. Chel, ignoring her twin's escape, pushed on, sliding between Wendy and the door to the garage.

  “Where do you go, anyway, when you take off like this? You're not visiting Eddie, I checked. Pick up a skanky boyfriend you're ashamed of, Wendy?” She eyed Wendy's bare arms, peering knowingly at the hollows of Wendy's elbows. “Or maybe got into something a little worse?”

  “I go out,” Wendy replied, and thrust a twenty from the grocery fund into Chel's hand. Money normally shut her nosy little sister up. “Like you can talk. Keep your trap shut or I'll tell Dad how you're slutting it up with that walking disease you call a boyfriend.”

  Pushing Chel easily aside, Wendy reached into her sister's purse, hanging on the hook beside the door, and pulled out a half-full bottle of Phentermine. “Or about these.”

  Humiliated, Chel was in tears; she snatched the bottle back. “Fuck off!”

  “Go to hell,” Wendy snapped back, pushing past her, and slammed the door behind.

  Part of her felt bad about Chel. She knew her little sister was starting to run with the wrong crowd, starting to get in over her head both at school and after, but there were Walkers left to reap. Life, as her mother used to say, could take care of itself. Wendy just had to watch her own back. As she pulled out of the driveway, Wendy glanced up and saw Jon sitting in his windowsill, shoving spoonful after spoonful of cheesy pasta into his mouth and shaking his head. She ignored him, punched the volume on the stereo up, and spun out into the night.

  Weeks passed. Wendy hunted.

  Thanksgiving was subdued. Dad had left earlier; he wanted to spend the evening with Mom at the hospital, and Nana had tottered off to the guest room by eight, leaving Wendy to stuff the vast remnants of their Thanksgiving fare into her mother's weathered margarine tubs and wash the dishes by herself.

  It was a dismal job. The stuffing had been soggy, the turkey underdone, and Nana's cranberry sauce had been the wrong kind, not the canned sort that you sliced in paper-thin layers but the other type, full of pits and twigs and gooshy blobs. Chel had picked at her plate—shredding her roll and feeding it to Nana's ancient poodle under the table, hiding the dollop of green bean casserole under her mashed potatoes—but Dad hadn't noticed.

  Jon, on the other hand, ate more than enough for the both of them. He was starting to get round in the face and when Wendy, pitying him, had tried to convince him to join her in a pickup basketball game after dinner, he'd turned her down, preferring to mix up a batch of fudge instead.

  “Fine,” she snapped, irritated that he wouldn't help her take her mind off things—off having a holiday season without Mom. “It's your gigantic ass. Do whatever you want with it.” Wendy stalked away, ignoring the bewildered hurt on Jon's face.

  Life without Mom, she thought hopelessly, had finally begun to fall apart. In her room Wendy hid in the back of her closet, pulled Jabber into her lap, and cried herself to sleep with the ghost of her mother's cat in her lap.

  Weeks passed. Wendy hunted.

  Three months. It had been three months—twelve whole and seemingly endless weeks—since Piotr had learned that Wendy was the Lightbringer. Piotr haunted the trails between the city and the valley, lost in his thoughts and brooding.

  To keep himself from literally haunting Wendy's home, Piotr wandered. He crisscrossed well-known trails and streets until he was not a person in the strictest sense of the word, merely a restless spirit walking; striding through the hours of the day in agony until the only face he could see was hers, his every thought tangled around the pain they'd caused one another. Time away from her had given him some hard-earned perspective. Piotr understood why she'd lied about being the Lightbringer at first, but couldn't wrap his mind around why she'd continued to do so. Didn't she trust him? Didn't she owe him that, at least?

  This brooding lasted until Piotr, finally closing the circuit towards the city, found a pair of thick-rimmed glasses just outside Elle's territory. Piotr leaned down, picked them up, turned them in his hand. They were black plastic, horn-rimmed, and familiar.

  The bookstore was in chaos when he arrived. Most of the Riders were gone, as were the Lost, leaving only Elle, Lily, and James. When Piotr arrived he found Lily meditating cross-legged in a corner beside James. James, battered about the head and neck, puffy with bruises and gashes, sported several even more severe wounds on his arms and legs. As Lily's hands moved over them the cuts knit closed, but they were not seamless or pretty. Lily did not have a Lost's healing touch.

  “What happened?” Piotr asked, but knew it was a useless, futile question. He was a tracker and what had happened here was clear. Footsteps in the dust were marred by long, swishing swipes. Rider essence lay in puddles, silver pools that dried to dark and tainted grey. The floor was riddled with dime-sized holes, bored through in Swiss cheese patterns, and there was an unmistakable smell of wet rot in the air.

  The Walkers had grown tired of trying to pick the Lost off one by one and had staged a mass assault.

  “Those hoods snatched Dora,” Elle told him later, after they'd gone through the remnants of the Lost to assess the damage and estimate a sort of head-count of the taken. “Specs too. The rest of the Riders are on the lam, heading east. I sent Tubs with Kurtz, for safety.” Elle rubbed the bridge of her nose with one hand, filthy with dust and the day's fight. Her other arm lay in her lap, lumpy at the elbow and oozing a thin stream of essence, snapped in four separate places. Large hunks of her golden hair were sheared away at the skull; she now had a jagged cut that wound across her forehead and diagonally down one cheek. It matched his scar.

  Catching him examining her face, Elle's eyes flashed warning. “I told them to pack their glad rags and get a wiggle on, no turning around. Kurtz took charge and they're heading for Nevada. They ain't ever coming back.” She almost spat the words.

  So that was it. They were alone. Why was he not surprised?

  Piotr nodded, numb, and left Elle's side, wandering through the bookstore. He picked up an item here, an item there. Dora's sketchbook had been left behind. It was not made of the same stuff she was; he would not be able to tell if she was safe by looking at it. All the same, Specs' glasses were whole, and that indicated that Specs, at least, was unharmed. It was hope. Piotr seized on that.

  Without one of the Lost there to help, the healing process took a few weeks. When James was up and on his feet again, he and Elle organized a citywide search program. “If we can't find them like this,” he claimed, his dangling cornrows brushing the edges of the map Elle had scrounged from amid the rotting books, “we won't find them.”

  Enough time had passed that it was looking like the remaining Riders weren't going to find more than scattered clues. The Lost appeared permanently gone, but at least Dunn's hat remained solid, as did Specs' glasses and Tommy's cloak. They were still alive—at least, in a manner of speaking.

  Practical by nature, Piotr set out each day expecting nothing and came back with exactly that. So it was to his great surprise when, traveling through the edges of Mountain View towards San Jose, a copy of the map with the search parameters in one hand and a flare in the other, he spotted a quartet of Walkers. One of them was struggling with a small and shrieking figure. A familiar figure.

  “Specs!” Piotr yelled and, without thought or plan, dropped the paper and flare, flinging himself into the fray.

  The Walkers had changed and not for the better. These beasts had faces elongated into unimaginable abominations, twisted and warped into monstrous shapes, with stitches of sinew thick as twine holding the gaping flaps of their essence together. These Walkers had been healed and then marred again. The purposeful scars were doubly hideous, lying so starkly against the fresh flesh.

  Piotr, approaching at speed,
drew Elle's dagger and leapt at the Walker holding Specs. The Walker went down—end over end—and Specs, yelling with surprise and glee, tugged free.

  “Piotr! Piotr! I knew you'd come! I knew it!”

  Mindless with rage, Piotr began slashing at the Walker. Every cut he made—shallow and deep alike—broke fragile skin and spilled a foul-smelling, noxious liquid. It was not essence; it was too thin, too runny, and when it touched his hands, it stung.

  Another fine spray of droplets flew, dousing him, and Piotr felt the burn of it eating into his skin, his pants and arms. Now he knew what the holes had been—these Walkers bled something beyond mere essence. Whatever they bled was acid to ghosts, essence-burning and foul, like unadulterated death. Piotr ignored the pain and continued stabbing.

  Furious or not, Piotr was still only one man, and one who was severely outnumbered. Before he could finish off the Walker, two of the others dragged him, kicking and cursing, free. The other, moving swiftly, corralled and captured Specs again. They forced him to kneel on the ground. One gripped him by the hair, dragging his head back and exposing his neck. The other wrapped powerful fingers around his wrists, locking him in place.

  “Rider.” Piotr was unsure which one of the Walkers spoke, as all four of them—including the one he'd attacked, which was only just now gaining its feet—nodded. “It is a Rider, yes, yes. Tough meat.”

  “Filthy kid-killing pigs,” Piotr spat back, jerking left and right but unable to free himself. He began cursing as violently and loudly as he could, lapsing into Russian and back to English without thought, hoping that perhaps Elle, whose patrol circuit was supposed to cross his today, would hear. The Walkers ignored his tirade, seeming content to talk among themselves.

  “White Lady will want him.” More nods all around.

  One frigid finger ran across Piotr's neck, over his chin, and pushed its way into his mouth. He could feel burning begin as the blood-flecked nail scratched the inside of his cheek. It was sharp and strong enough to cut him deeply. Specs, watching from a few feet away, moaned.

  “Eat his eyes. Suck him dry.” Nod-nod, agreement all around.

  “Greedy Lady,” one of the Walkers suggested. “All the meat for her, even tough meat. All the tasty for later. No tasty for us.”

  It sounded almost forlorn at this tidbit, and somewhat annoyed. The finger in Piotr's mouth withdrew, pulled back, and then stabbed him in the shoulder hard enough to pierce him through. The finger, knuckle-deep in his shoulder, twisted and wiggled, having just enough room to poke Piotr in the collarbone. The shock of its jagged nail scraping and flicking at his bone was enough to elicit a shrill and terrified scream.

  “All the tasty for her plan,” the Walker said again, dropping down so it was face to face with Piotr. Its tongue, obscenely long and mottled grey, rolled out of its mouth and rasped its way over Piotr's cheeks, licking away his sweat and tears. The end was forked like a snake's and flicked with eerie rapidity, sliding over his eyes and collecting the agonized tears that leaked from the corners. “No tasty for us…but Rider could be tasty. Tough, yes, but a tasty we don't have to share. We eat Rider instead.”

  The hands binding his wrists tightened and Piotr closed his eyes, preparing for the worst.

  It took Eddie, waiting for Wendy by her locker the day school let out for Christmas break, to knock some sense into her.

  “Hey hot stuff,” he said as she spun the lock and started sorting through her books, choosing which ones would go home over break and which she'd leave at school.

  “I see you're scowly as usual.” Eddie waited and when she didn't answer, added, “So, is your phone broken? Cuz I've left you, like, a hundred or so texts and someone hasn't been returning them. I'll totally buy you a new one for Christmas if you want. I already have a gift for you but there's this sexy little black flip phone that—”

  “Lay off,” she said, not unkindly and, with a shrug, merely piled the whole lot into her bag. The nightmares that kept her up to all hours had long since begun to take their toll; Wendy was passing her courses but only just barely. Even math had begun to slip.

  White Lady's threats or not, Wendy intended to take a few days off reaping and spend part of her holiday studying up. The ACTs and SATs were coming up and at this rate there was no way she'd get a scholarship. Not like she had much of a choice where to go to school. Until Mom came out of her coma, it was community college for her and Wendy knew it.

  “You know, grumble-puss, I don't think I'm gonna,” Eddie replied. His voice was so mellow, his smile so sincere, that Wendy missed what he was saying altogether.

  Wendy sighed, rolled her eyes, and finally turned to face him. Unlike her, Eddie looked well rested. His clothing was neat and clean, his hair had been freshly dyed glossy blue-black, and the kohl lining his eyes was smudge-free. “Gonna what?”

  “Lay off.” Reaching past Wendy, Eddie shut her locker door with a sharp snap. Then, taking her elbow in one hand, he firmly guided her past the pulsing throng of other students gathering their things and fleeing the building, to a bench outside.

  There he forced her to sit.

  “Eddie. Eddie! Hey, let go!” Irritated with his gall, Wendy struggled, but Eddie's grip tightened and he refused to unhand her. “Eds, this is not funny.”

  “Never said it was,” he replied as pleasantly as before. “But you, missy, and I are going to have a bit of a talk. And since you've decided texting is too gauche, we're gonna do it the old fashioned way. Analog style.”

  From the corner of her eye Wendy spotted Jon and Chel round the corner of the school, bags in hand. They spotted Eddie and approached slowly, standing just behind him, only a few feet back but far enough out of her range that she couldn't reach them without struggling free of Eddie's iron grip on her arm.

  “All of you are in on this?” Bitterness crept into Wendy's voice. “Manhandling me for whatever reason? Way to gang up, guys. I knew I could count on you three to stay classy.”

  Jon shuffled his feet. “Wendy, we're worried about you. You're not sleeping.”

  “I'm aware of that, thanks.” She jerked the arm in Eddie's hand and his grip tightened firmly, not quite painfully, but close. “I'm fine. Let me go.”

  “You're not fine,” Chel replied coolly, snagging Wendy's bag from the bench beside her where Eddie had set it. The heavy weight of the books was almost too much for her; she tilted slightly as she hefted the bag over her shoulder. “Look, you talk with her all you want, but we're gonna miss the bus. I'll drop these off in her room.”

  Eddie nodded. Jon moved around the side of the bench and sat beside Wendy. For the first time in weeks, Wendy really looked at her younger brother, and was more than a little horrified to see the puffiness in his cheeks, the dark circles beneath his eyes. His shirt was old and too tight; his gut was now hanging over the waistband of his jeans. Jon, realizing that Wendy was examining him closely, blushed dark red.

  “Shut up,” he said before she could speak, and patted his belly. “I'm working on it.” He glanced over at Chel, who was patiently waiting at the sidewalk. She had a protein bar in one hand and was breaking chunks off to eat, grimacing with every bite. Her face, Wendy noted, was not as gaunt as before.

  Jon gestured toward Chel. “Things have been tough on all of us, right? With Mom and everything, Chel and I sort of depended on you to stay cool and keep us sane.”

  Ashamed, Wendy struggled with her reply. “That's not it. I—I—there's been these bad dreams and—”

  “I'm not surprised, all that stress. Look, what we've been doing to you isn't fair,” Jon interrupted. “We figured you'd just keep on truckin'—at least I did—and I never thought ’til recently that maybe it'd be hard on you, you know, being in charge when Dad's gone. Then you Hulked out and got all mega-bitch and you took us by surprise. Well, you took me by surprise. I think you bitch-slapped Chel into a whole new personality.”

  Eddie's hand dropped off her arm. Wendy rubbed the sore spot but she no longer felt the ne
ed to flee; it was as if she were rooted to the bench, stunned speechless by her normally taciturn brother's urgent tone.

  “Wendy, you woke us both up, okay? You had your say, you really hurt my feelings and scared the crap out of Chel, but you got our attention and we listened.” He glanced over at Chel, still waiting out of earshot. “It may not look like it at first glance, but I promise, we're both working on it.”

  “I'm sorry,” Wendy whispered. “I didn't mean to hurt you.”

  “My mouth, my body, my fault,” he replied. “You're not the boss of me. Besides, I don't regret a single Cheeto.” He smiled faintly, still pink from embarrassment at her close assessment, and hugged her again.

  “Just listen to what Eddie has to say to you, okay? You've been a ginormous hosebeast but you've been under a ton of stress with Dad being gone. Chel's pissed right now, but she's like me—deep down all we want is for you to be happy. That and for you to quit stealing Dad's car, cause he's gonna kick all our asses if he figures that one out.”

  Then, hitching up his pants self-consciously, Jon picked up his things, bussed Wendy on the cheek, and left. He joined Chel at the bus stop, shouldered Wendy's bag himself, and they walked away toward the bright yellow line of buses pulling into the school's drive.

  “Wow,” Wendy said, watching her too-thin sister and growing-overweight brother drift into the throng of students climbing aboard their rides home. “Jon grew a pair. Big brass ones.”

  “Yep,” Eddie agreed, “the day comes in every young boy's life when he's called a fatass by his beloved older sister. Or so I've been told, being an only child and all.”

  Wendy winced. “I've really been in my own world, haven't I?”

  “That's a polite way of putting it,” Eddie replied. “Another way is that you've been a screaming bitch, impossible to be around, um…almost completely irresponsible except for school and your ‘side job.’ And, oh, yeah, I did mention total bitch, right?”