by Kali Wallace
I opened my eyes. The room was dim but not completely dark; faint light flickered behind me. It took some effort, but I managed to sit up and look around. I was in a closed room. A trio of fat candles sat in the center of the floor. There was no furniture except a flat, stained mattress slumped against the wall. There were two windows, both boarded up on the inside. I couldn’t tell if it was day or night.
The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the crown molding and closed door, the plywood over the windows, it was all painted red. When I looked straight at it, the paint was a dull, dirty reddish brown, sloppy and uneven. The wallpaper underneath showed through in spots, a pattern of flowers and birds and delicate trees. But when I glanced to the side, the walls almost seemed to glisten in the unsteady candlelight, slick and shimmering as though streaks of paint were still wet, and in those sidelong glances it was all red, a deep and suffocating red wrapped all around me.
Thump.
I wasn’t alone.
There was a woman sitting in the far corner of the room. She lifted her bare feet—they were bound together—and brought them down again. Thump. There was a wide strip of duct tape over her mouth, and her hands were behind her back. Thump. She tossed her head impatiently, a motion that reminded me of a skittish horse.
“Okay,” I said. “Just a second.”
I wasn’t sure I could stand, so I crawled. Caked mud and blood flaked from my clothes and skin. I was filthy, completely disgusting from head to toe, and the effort of creeping across that eerie red room made my head spin. When I got too close to the candles I felt a shivery chill, so I kept my distance. I paused to let the nausea subside, then crawled the last few feet to the woman.
“This is going to hurt,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. I ripped the duct tape from her mouth and she exhaled loudly.
“My hands,” she said. She slid away from the wall and twisted around. I tore the tape from around her wrists. She balled it up, tossed it away, and began peeling the tape from her ankles. “You’re awake.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“You were out for a long time.”
“How long?”
“And when I say out, I mean you weren’t breathing.”
“Heavy sleeper,” I said. “How long?”
“How should I know? It’s been at least a day since they dumped you here.”
I rubbed at the grime on my face. It hurt to talk, hurt to sit up, hurt to move. My tongue was still sore from the punctures of Lyle’s claws.
“You look like shit,” the woman said.
“Thanks. I feel awesome.”
Through the torn dress, I could feel the four hot, swollen slashes on my side, scabbed over but not yet stitched back together. Maybe they were too deep to heal by themselves, or maybe Lyle had venom in his claws. I tried to remember the colorful diagrams I had learned in tenth grade anatomy class. Was my liver on that side? My appendix? I couldn’t remember. We had only ever looked at pictures of human bodies. The only real corpses we cut up were euthanized cats. Mr. Beautiful. That’s what Melanie and I had named ours, because he was the ugliest cat we had ever seen. Melanie did most of the dissecting. She wanted to be a doctor someday and cutting up Mr. Beautiful was the most fun she ever had in school.
I stopped bothering my wounds and rubbed my hands over my face, winced through the pins and needles. The room was small and square. No closet. The door was closed. The candles smelled like vanilla, cloyingly sweet, but it wasn’t enough to hide the stink. Bleach, and beneath that, unwashed bodies and sweat, piss and shit, the faint metal stench of blood.
Everything was red. So dull and dirty and red.
The woman was staring at me.
“Where are we?” I asked. “Are we still in the farmhouse?”
“What farmhouse?”
“At the church. In Nebraska. Mr. Willow’s church. Isn’t that where we are?”
“Oh, is that how they got you?” The woman laughed. It wasn’t a friendly sound. “That’s perfect. Did they tell you they wanted to save your immortal soul and take away everything that makes you evil?”
“Something like that.”
“And you walked right into it.”
Walk right into it was exactly what I had done. I hadn’t seen the danger until it was too late.
“I have no idea where we are,” the woman admitted. “We’re in a house, but I don’t know where. It might be Nebraska. We could be on the freakin’ moon, for all I know. I was in Colorado when they grabbed me. This guy bought me a drink.” She made a face and touched her jaw with one slender hand; there was a fading bruise on her left side. “Tasted like shit. Never trust a frat boy in a Steelers jersey who wants to buy you a drink. I can’t figure out what you are.”
“What?”
“You. What are you? I’m usually good at this, but I can’t figure you out at all. You’re breathing now.”
She unfolded her legs and stood, walked closer and sat down again on the other side of the candles. She was strikingly beautiful, so beautiful I felt guilty for my initial impression of horsiness. She had auburn hair cut in a severe pageboy, pale skin, and wide golden eyes, and her limbs were long and ballet elegant. I guessed she was in her thirties, but I wouldn’t have bet on it. She wasn’t a killer. There were no shadows of guilt clinging to her.
“Come on, share,” she said. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. What are you?”
“Schrödinger’s cat. Nice to meet you.”
She snorted, unimpressed. “It’s not like it will matter by the time they’re done with us. What’s your name? Will you tell me that, or do I have to keep thinking of you as Smelly Girl?”
“Breezy,” I said. I could have lied again, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Were your parents hippies or something?”
My parents had named me Breezy because they were young and sleep deprived and overly fond of marijuana when they found themselves in possession of a newborn neither of them had planned for. They were graduate students, Dad in biochemistry at MIT and Mom in neuroscience at Harvard, and they wrote their theses in a one-bedroom Somerville apartment while a fat, red baby squalled in the crib. As an infant I looked like a lumpy red potato with a smear of black slime mold for hair. It’s not like they were planning on getting any sleep anyway, Mom liked to say, so after they got their PhDs, they decided they might as well get married and make more screaming, red-faced, half-Chinese, half-Irish babies. Two more, also girls, Meadow and Sunny, because Mom and Dad never got over the embarrassing-names phase of parenthood. We all grew up to be short and black-haired and looked mostly Chinese except for our freckles, which came from Mom’s side of the family.
The woman’s question put a tight, cold knot in my stomach. I didn’t want to think about Mom and Dad and my sisters.
“Yes,” I said. I halfheartedly considered a new version of the patchwork girl: my sixth-grade locker neighbor Free Farmer had wannabe hippie parents, never mind that they had been born in the late seventies themselves, and she had rebelled by going full Goth as soon as she was old enough to pick out her own clothes. But that all felt like too much effort for the sake of a lie, so I only said, “It could have been worse. It could have been Zen or Soulfire or something. I can’t even imagine what kind of names they would have stuck on my siblings if I had any.”
The woman laughed. “Hey, I’m not judging. You can call me Rain.”
“Great. Together we can be the weather report.”
My leg didn’t ache quite as much anymore, so I stood up, paused to get my balance, and walked to the door.
“It’s locked,” Rain said. “And it’s—”
I didn’t think it would be as simple as opening the door and walking out, but I wasn’t expecting what happened.
I reached for the knob and there was a cool, solid pressure on my skin. Before I could react, the cold turned to heat, searing heat like putting my ha
nd on an electric stove coil, and I was overcome with a dizziness so intense my vision darkened. I stumbled away from the door, gagging and gasping.
“That,” said Rain. “It’s locked. Just for us.”
There was no burn on my hand, but I could still feel it.
Rain leaned back on her elbows and watched me make my way around the room. The same thing happened when I tried to touch any of the walls and when I got too near the candles. I couldn’t even get close enough to pry around the plywood over the windows.
When I gave up, Rain said, “They wouldn’t be very good at catching monsters if they didn’t know how to monster-proof a room.”
Monsters. There it was. A word I had been deliberately not thinking for two weeks.
“It’s . . .” I didn’t want to say it out loud. “How?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Magic. How else?”
And there was the other one: magic.
“Like in Harry Potter?” I said stupidly.
Rain laughed. “Yes, exactly like that. Gosh, if only we had our unicorn hair wands, we could get Professor McGonagall to help.”
I tried to glare at her, but my heart wasn’t in it. “I’m kind of new at this. I don’t know how it works.”
“See the walls? That’s how it works.”
I picked at the edge of a ruddy brown floorboard. I had no trouble touching the floor. “What is it?”
“Well, it’s not paint, and it’s not ketchup.”
I shuddered and wiped my hand on my dress. I didn’t want to believe her, but magical force fields made of blood weren’t much of a stretch after everything else that had happened.
“But who does this?” I asked. “How do they know how to do it? How does it even work?”
“You really are new at this, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Very.”
“That’s . . . kind of interesting, actually. Most of us are born into it.”
“Born into what? What are you talking about?”
“Sit down,” Rain said. “You’re making me dizzy. Why don’t you start by telling me what you know, and I’ll tell you how you’ve got everything wrong.”
I sat across from her and tried to find a position that didn’t make every part of my body ache. I barely knew where to begin. Since I had woken up—come back—I had been assuming I was the only one. I had tried to figure out what I was by looking on the internet, naturally, but the internet insisted giant four-foot-tall frogs stalked unwary travelers in the wilds of Ohio. I couldn’t believe any of it. Then there was Violet, telling me there were other things like me in the world, not just a few, not rare, but everywhere. Common enough that people went looking for them at truck stops. Common enough that Mr. Willow had built an entire church around hunting them down.
Us. Hunting us down. I wasn’t on the outside of this, looking in at the monsters and marveling at their bad luck. I was in the cage.
Monsters and magic. It was a little late for me to be having a This can’t possibly be happening freak-out, but I felt one coming on anyway. I needed to stay calm. Take the logical approach. I had spent my entire life before I died knowing exactly what I wanted to do and exactly how I was going to do it, and now all I could think was that I really wished I had my notebook so I could add to my Real/Not Real list. That might make me feel better. I was a little bit disgusted with myself.
But I did have questions.
“Some people aren’t human,” I said. “Right?”
Rain snorted. “Gosh, really? Maybe some of them are in this very room.”
“And some people can do magic.”
“Sometimes they’re even the same people.”
“Only sometimes?”
“Sure. Not always,” she said. She was delighted by my ignorance and not bothering to hide it. “Mostly it’s humans who do magic.”
“Like . . . wizards?”
That earned a deep, throaty laugh. “They don’t call themselves wizards.”
“What do they call themselves?”
“Magicians, mostly. Sometimes the old ladies or Wiccan chicks call themselves witches. There was this dude in Palm Springs who called himself the Grand Majestic Sorcerer of the Imperial Valley, but he was a douche and I think somebody ate him. The rest are just magicians. And, no,” she said, before I could ask, “I don’t mean the top hat and rabbit on a stage in Vegas kind of magician.”
Too late. I was already imagining the top-hat-and-rabbit variety. “So the people who put us in here, they’re magicians?”
“At least one of them is,” Rain said. She looked around the red room and shrugged. “A pretty good one too. This is some serious shit.”
Is the other one secure? Mr. Willow had asked over the phone. Like he was asking about a rabid animal. I wondered if it was impolite to ask Rain what she was, after I had refused to answer that same question from her. I decided I probably ought to work up to it.
Instead I asked, “How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a week.”
“Alone?”
Rain was silent for a long moment, and when she spoke again her voice was lower, slower. “Not at first. There was somebody else when they brought me here. A woman.”
In the candlelight I saw, for just a second, a shape beside Rain: a weeping woman with blood on her clothes, holding her face in her hands. I flinched, which only made the throbbing pain in my side worse. I was only imagining it. There was nobody else in the room.
“What happened to her?”
“They took her away.”
I saw that too: the woman screaming, clawing at the floor, kicking as men without faces dragged her through the door. Her screams were so clear I would have sworn they were real. They had the shape of names torn from her throat, of pleas that were so far beyond desperation they were barely even words anymore. I felt her fear as if it were my own, racing blood and pounding heart and cold sweat. The red walls pressed all around, closer and closer, and the woman’s hands caught, clawlike, on the doorframe, and she was gone.
I blinked, the walls retreated, and the room faded to dull brown.
“You mean Mr. Willow? He took her away?”
Rain raised a single delicate eyebrow. Her cheekbones were sharp in the candlelight. I tried not to stare. “You met the big man, did you?” Her voice was normal again. “Not many people get to do that. Not me. I got his minions.” Rain jerked her thumb toward the closed door. “That asshole out there. He’s our prison guard.”
“I met Mr. Willow,” I said. “I didn’t know he was the big man of anything.”
“Is he as scary as they say? I’m picturing the mutant offspring of Charles Manson and Ted Bundy.”
“He looks like a middle-aged Mormon missionary,” I said, and Rain laughed. “I didn’t realize he was famous.”
“Everybody knows about Willow,” Rain said, but then she amended, “all the monsters in Colorado, anyway. He’s been around forever, but small scale. Family deal. It usually is, you know? Grandpa discovers there are monsters among us back in the day and spends his life training up all his gap-toothed redneck spawn to hunt them down. They don’t usually share it around.”
“Nobody’s that good at keeping secrets,” I protested, even though I knew she had to be right. If I was taking the logical approach, I had to accept that. Monsters were real, because I was one. Most people had no idea they existed, because I never had before. Two true things. It was an unsettling realization, to say the least, that those two truths were the new center of my world.
Rain shrugged. “Who would believe them? It’s easier to keep a secret if anybody who tells the truth is considered delusional. That’s the way it was with Willow’s dad. He was this paranoid backwoods militia guy, you know the type, and everybody knew he was batshit. His group fell apart after something bad went down—some members of his congregation died, nobody really knows what happened. But he’s been gone for years, and nobody knew his son was carrying on Daddy’s mission until a few years ago.�
� She smiled, quick and predatory. “We ran them out. That was a fun night.”
Violet had said that they moved their congregation from Colorado to Nebraska. I hadn’t thought to ask why. I hadn’t suspected the reason could be that people objected to being grabbed off the streets and magically imprisoned in bloodstained rooms.
“But you said they got you in Colorado anyway.”
“I guess the asshole decided he didn’t want to stay run out.” Rain stretched her legs before her and yawned. “A lot of people are going to be really pissed when they find out he’s hunting in Boulder again. It’s worse with humans like him, you know? The ones who just hate us because their second cousin’s great-grandmother’s best friend saw a scary monster in the woods are one thing. Who cares what they think? But people like Willow, they think they’re doing it for our own good. He’s even got people like us working for him.”
“Yeah, I met some of them.”
I still didn’t know if Violet had been expecting me to stay, or hoping I would get away. And Lyle—I had a pretty good idea that Lyle wasn’t exactly cooperating willingly, but I didn’t know what hold Mr. Willow had over him and his sister. I still hurt too much from the damage Lyle had done to me to care all that much.
“What do they do to people?” I asked. Rain started to answer, but I added quickly, “I mean the ones they don’t kill. Is it some kind of . . . a magic ritual or something?”
“Magic ritual?” Rain laughed again. It was a big laugh, bold and unashamed, and I was really starting to dislike it. “God, you’re adorable. Yes, Breezy, it’s a magic ritual. No idea what it is, though. I’ve only ever met one guy who survived it, and he says he can’t remember. Of course, that could be all the mind-altering drugs he took to get over the trauma.”
Not what it is, I thought. She had that wrong. Who. Mr. Willow and Violet had both been absolutely clear on that point. There was a who involved. A woman they called Mother who liked to be given gifts of bound and bleeding monsters wrapped up with a bow.
