by Hannah Marae
He cut her off, leaving her gasping as his hand lashed out in an impossibly fast motion, grabbing her by the throat. Mab was lifted off the ground, feet kicking wildly. The vise-like grip around her throat tightened as she looked into narrowed eyes that glowed like embers.
Eden sucked in a ragged gasp.
She lay flat on her back, arms splayed at her sides, eyes lost in the growing night. Paralyzed. Disconnected—as if she were watching herself from somewhere far away. She didn’t know where she was or what happened.
But it had worked.
She had seen Mab.
Pins and needles. Sensation returning to her limbs. The confusion subsided. With some effort, Eden raised her head, the world around her swimming back into place.
“Wake up, goddammit.” Zeke’s voice was low and quiet, edging toward panic. “Fuck, not again.”
Eden reached out. Her hand scraped against the dirt. She wanted to tell Zeke not to worry. That she was okay. Her mind felt strong, her body catching up. In a few moments, she’d be good as new, and they could finally move on.
It was a risk, but it was worth it.
It was a risk, but it was her risk.
Her fingers brushed against something cold. Eden tilted her head to see her hand entwined with Lazarus’s. He was lying beside her in the dirt, dark hair matted over his sweat-sheened face, an angry red mark wrapped around his throat.
Eden struggled to sit up, the world flip-flopping around her. Zeke knelt over his cousin, hands flashing to the pulse point on his neck.
“What—”
Lazarus convulsed, chest heaving as he gasped at the air. He sputtered, ragged breaths breaking into throaty coughs. Zeke hovered over his cousin, helping him sit up.
“Jesus, Laz.” Zeke raked his fingers through his dark hair. “You scared the shit out of me.”
Before, Lazarus had seemed so poised. Purposeful. Now, he looked like he’d been through hell. His skin was sallow and waxy; when he opened his eyes, they were rimmed in red. His hands swept across the dirt as he weakly propped himself up.
“What the fuck was that?” Lazarus ground out, his deep voice hoarse and scratchy.
Zeke helped Lazarus to his feet, and Eden followed. “It got the drop on you,” Zeke explained. “You almost had him, but he was fast.”
“No.” Lazarus turned his narrowed eyes at Eden. They seemed darker than normal, angry voids that ripped into her. “You. You touched it.”
“I—” Eden flushed and looked away, unsure what to say, unable to meet the accusations. She wrapped her arms around herself, staring down at her battered pink high-tops.
This isn’t me, she wanted to tell him. Between her and Mab, Eden had been the careful one, always keeping one eye behind them and the other ahead, watching the world from all directions. She used to pride herself on considering all her options; she understood that an action could spiral into something that couldn’t be controlled. But she was so desperate to find Mab she never thought what consequences touching the spirit would have and how it would affect someone who wasn’t herself.
“You touched it on purpose. Why would you—You told me.” Lazarus clenched his jaw and pinched his temple between two trembling fingers. “You told me you’d stay safe, and then you ran up and touched it.”
Zeke shuffled between his feet, kicking at the ground. “And then the light show happened. Again.”
“I’m sorry.” Sucking in a breath, Eden held up her hands. Both Morgans stared at her, Zeke confused and Lazarus just plain angry. She barely knew them, yet still, she hated for them—for anyone—to look at her that way. “Please. I can explain.”
She told them what happened and, miraculously, they listened. She went back to the spirit in the church’s basement and her vision of Mab in the forest. “I thought if I could make it happen again, maybe I’d have some clue as to where she is. What happened to her.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Zeke asked. “We could have figured it out.”
Eden crossed her arms. “Seriously? If I came to you and said I was going to touch a spirit so I could see Mab, would you have been okay with it?”
Neither of them spoke. Lazarus muttered something under his breath, bending to grab his shotgun off the ground before walking back to the truck. Eden watched him go, wondering what would happen next.
“So what did you find out?” Zeke asked as they followed Lazarus back to the truck.
She had seen Mab, Eden was sure of that now, but she didn’t feel any closer to answers. A dark forest, a figure on the path, just flashes of images that made no sense. Mab could be anywhere, but at least she was alive. “I don’t know,” she told Zeke. “Not yet.”
——
By the time they pulled into town, it was too late to move on. Though Eden thought about protesting, she remained quiet. Lazarus hadn’t argued when Zeke took the driver’s seat, and that was a sure sign he needed rest.
The drive only lasted long enough for them to return to town and find a motel. The time was spent in tense silence, Lazarus leaning against the window with his arms crossed and the collar of his jacket pulled up like he was trying to disappear. Eden wished she could find the words to make things right. She wished she dared to say them.
They waited in the truck as Zeke ran into the main office. The silence was painful, and Eden thought they were both painfully aware of it. When Lazarus finally spoke, his words came out like gravel, his voice hoarse. “Do you know what happens when you’re touched by a spirit?”
“No.” She hesitated. “You said it was bad, but . . .”
With some effort, Lazarus turned in his seat. He didn’t meet her gaze, staring intently out the windshield instead. She studied him, eyes trailing down his long face along the pointed nose that was just a bit large and cheeks dusted with stubble. His jaw tightened as he clenched his teeth, and Eden couldn’t tell if he was fighting to get the words out or to keep them inside.
“What happens?”
He let out a bitter sigh, turning so his dark eyes locked onto her own. And she could see them, see the sadness that he kept locked away, see it exploding to the surface.
“Your soul.” Lazarus reached out to brush his fingers across the glowing tattoo on her collarbone. A shiver rolled down her spine, her breath hitching. “Touching a spirit is touching the Good Night, and the Good Night is selfish. It does not let go of souls. Every moment of contact flays a soul from the body, and once it’s gone, there’s no going back.”
“So you . . .”
He pulled his hand back, fingers flexing. “Had a close call.”
Eden looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean for it to happen like that.”
Lazarus grabbed her hand, and Eden looked into his eyes, expecting anger or disappointment, but all she saw was regret. “Things never go the way we think,” he said. “Not for us.”
The truck door opened. Wordlessly, Lazarus dropped her hand before turning back to the window. Zeke climbed in, spouting out their room numbers, utterly ignorant to the tension that was becoming strangely familiar.
They left the main office, driving down the lot to park in front of a bank of rooms. Zeke grabbed the bags while Lazarus staggered up the stairs with their room key. Despite the sigil urging her forward, Eden was looking forward to the rest. These past few days had her feeling scattered. It seemed like everything was changing too quickly for her to understand. Twice she had been touched by a spirit. Twice she had seen Mab. Whatever was happening to her, it wasn’t normal. She wondered if it had something to do with her magic, if the power that resided within her was somehow amplified.
As they approached their rooms, Hades scampered ahead. He slid to a stop, his form going intangible until he erupted into a misty cloud of smoke.
“Is that normal?” Eden asked as the smoke seeped through the crack beneath the door.
“He’s a hellhound,” Zeke answered cheerfully. “There is no normal.”
They found Hades back i
n his shepherd form inside the room, already curled up on one of the twin beds. Zeke closed the door as Lazarus collapsed onto the bed, grunting as the dog sprawled across his chest. It was getting late, and they were all exhausted. Eden was about to retreat to her own room when Zeke announced he would run down to the pizza joint across the street. Starving, she settled on the other bed to wait for his return.
With Zeke gone, quiet descended upon the room. Lazarus leaned against the headboard, typing something on his phone. She wondered if he was checking in with Ignatius.
When the silence became unbearable, Eden reached for the remote. “Do you mind?”
He shook his head, so she flicked on the TV. It went straight to the local news, a man rattling off the weather report. She left the volume on low and sat back to watch the images dancing on the screen.
She wanted to figure out how to get back to the conversation in the truck. There was something more there, behind Lazarus’s eyes, and she wanted to know what it meant. He was so close to revealing himself. But every time Eden opened her mouth to speak, her lips turned to stone. She’d only known the man for a few days. What business did she have asking him to unpack his baggage for her to examine?
It was a relief when Zeke returned. He laid out a large, steaming pizza with everything on it. Passing out a stack of napkins in place of plates, they settled into an awkward rhythm. Lazarus and Hades stretched on one bed, Eden and Zeke sitting cross-legged on the other with the pizza box between them. Commandeering the remote, Zeke flipped the channel. He cranked up the volume, settling on a game show featuring cosplayers answering nerdy trivia questions.
Zeke made a game of answering along with the contestants. Darth Vader! Adamantium! Ms. PAC-MAN! He spat out the answers before the cosplayers could even tap their buzzers.
“You should go on this show, Zeke,” Eden said as the episode came to an end. “You could win the grand prize.” She read the screen. “Five thousand dollars? Really, that’s it?”
“He’d need a costume,” Lazarus pointed out.
Grinning, Eden reached for another slice of pizza. “But what would it be? A superhero?”
“Keebler elf,” Lazarus shot back. For the first time, he wore something close to a smile, the color returning to his face.
“You guys are the worst,” Zeke complained. “Look at me.” He tossed his wavy black hair, ran a hand over the stubble on his chin. At their blank looks, he sighed. “Aragorn. Obviously. Get a little culture, jeez.”
It was a pleasant evening, far more enjoyable than it had any right to be. Eden felt strangely at home with them, like Lazarus and Zeke operated on a wavelength she could ease into. It was something she was always looking for: that sense of belonging that she had only ever found with Mab. She realized how lucky she was to have found them.
Honestly, it felt a little like fate.
Zeke whistled the opening bars of “The Imperial March” as he and Eden crossed the parking lot of the Divine Cosmos Motel, heading for the gas station on the other side. Dawn was cresting over the horizon, and everyone was raring to go. All they needed was to gas up the truck and, more importantly, make a snack run.
Zeke grinned as they passed through the automatic doors into the promised land. Grabbing a wire basket, he got to work filling it with powdered donuts, potato chips, beef jerky, and pretty much all manner of junk food he could think of.
After the day they’d had yesterday, he was gonna need it.
“How are you so chipper?” Eden asked as she browsed a basket of bruised fruit. She looked a little worse for wear, her hazel eyes heavy, brown hair thrown into a hasty bun. She left them a bit past midnight, presumably retiring to her own room to get some rest. She still looked tired as hell.
“I slept like a baby. You should try it sometime.”
She shrugged him off, opening a cooler to examine the label of a soda can.
Zeke assumed she was still thinking about last night. Hell, she looked like she’d been thinking about it all night. That was no good. Yeah, it was an asshole kind of move she pulled, and things almost went to shit after, but Zeke couldn’t say he blamed her. Far from it, in fact. He’d made his fair share of stupid mistakes, both of the clumsy and ignorant variety. In the end, everything turned out fine.
Eden would be fine, too, after she got some sleep.
As Lazarus was fond of telling Zeke, no amount of caffeine could do the same as a good rest.
But it’d do him some good. A lot of good, actually, considering he was about to kick Laz out of the driver’s seat. Zeke grabbed a couple cans of his favorite energy drink before moving to the self-serve coffee machine against the back wall.
“How is he?” Eden closed the cooler and followed him across the store.
Zeke shrugged. “I mean, it’s Laz. He’ll be fine. He doesn’t stay mad.”
“He doesn’t?”
“Nah.” Zeke grinned. “If he did, I’d be screwed.” When she didn’t respond, he continued, “Look, it was a shitty thing to do. I get trying to have another vision or whatever, but you don’t keep that shit to yourself. That’s like the first rule of hunting.” He paused. “And zombie movies.”
“Zombie movies?”
“Yeah! Someone always gets bitten and hides it. Then they turn and—” He rolled back his eyes and groaned.
Eden raised a brow. “I’ve never seen a zombie movie.”
“Okay, first”—Zeke held up two fingers—“that is tragic. What’s the matter with you? Second, Laz will be fine. You’ll be fine. We’re gonna get past this.” He turned his attention toward the coffee dispenser on the counter.
“Hunting is more than just a job for Lazarus, isn’t it?” Eden leaned against the counter as Zeke started filling a paper cup with burned coffee. He glanced over, then noticed the case of donuts on the counter. Coffee in one hand, he began filling a bag with maple bars.
“It’s more than just a job for all of us. It’s not like we get paid to do this shit. We only call it a job because calling it a case sounds pretentious as hell.”
“Yeah, but it’s different for him, isn’t it?” She furrowed her brows. “Something about it is personal. Whatever happened last night, he was shaken. Both of you were.”
Sighing, Zeke glanced out the window. Lazarus stood by the truck, waiting while the old beast sucked up its weight in gas. Eden was fishing for information that wasn’t his to give. But Lazarus made it so hard for people to get in. Hardly anyone knew him anymore. Half the time, even Zeke felt like a stranger.
Maybe a little context would help the road go more smoothly.
“His parents are both dead, you know.” It was a terrible place to start, but that was the crux of it. All of Lazarus’s problems stemmed from there. “His dad died before he was born. A hunt gone bad, they say. His mom was more recent. Almost five years now.”
“God,” Eden whispered. “That’s terrible.”
Zeke gave a bitter chuckle and wondered if she regretted pushing into Lazarus’s past. It wasn’t exactly pretty, but now the story was half-told, and he wasn’t about to leave it hanging. “You know what happens when you touch a spirit?”
“Lazarus told me,” she said. “It strips away your soul.”
“Did he tell you it’s happened to him?”
Her eyes went wide, her mouth agape. “Lazarus went into the Good Night?”
“Yeah. The job went bad, like last night. No matter how prepared you are, there’s always a chance things will go sour.”
“What was it like?”
“He doesn’t talk about it much, but things slip, ya know? He never talks about how it felt, but sometimes he mentions what he saw. Mountains. Darkness. Stars.”
“But how did he make it out?” Eden pressed.
Zeke knew he should stop. No one in the world, except Ignatius, knew what happened to Lazarus that night. Hell, Zeke was there, and he still didn’t know the full story. But he’d been holding onto it all for so long. Years. It felt even longer.
“The Good Night takes in souls. It doesn’t let them out,” he said. “But there’s a loophole. If you do it right, get a little help, you can trade one soul for another. Balance is maintained, and the forces of Purgatory are none the wiser.”
She chewed on this, realization slowly dawning in her eyes. “His mother.”
“Yeah. She and I, we found him lying there, nothing but a husk. His soul was just . . . gone. She worked out what happened pretty quick.”
“And she took his place.”
“Of course she did.” Zeke remembered that night in painful detail. The anguish on her face as she ordered him upstairs, the way she knelt over Lazarus with tears in her eyes. Later, Zeke learned she had summoned a reaper with a spell he’d never known existed. “And I’ll never forget the look on his face when he came back and she was gone. When he realized what she’d done.”
The door chimed as Lazarus walked in. Zeke turned to Eden and held his finger to his lips. She nodded frantically and turned to the coffee machine, dispensing her own steaming cup. Finishing with his donuts, Zeke turned as Lazarus found them. His cousin stared at the basket with an appraising eye.
“Do not judge my food, Laz.” Zeke dropped the bag of donuts in the basket and swept past. “This has been a crazy week.”
“Try some protein once in a while,” Lazarus suggested. He grabbed a chicken salad out of the fridge and one of those nasty veggie concoctions that masqueraded as juice. “Or something green.”
“Blech. Lettuce doesn’t even count. It’s just rabbit food.”
They grabbed an armful of water bottles and checked out, then went back outside.
When he noticed Lazarus walking toward the driver’s side, Zeke threw himself across the hood and tumbled off the other side. “No way, not on my watch. Back away from the wheel.”
“Seriously, Zeke?” Lazarus rolled his eyes, which were still looking a little bloodshot. “I’m fine.”
“You’re still recovering! You’ve barely slept. I can see the bags under your eyes from a million miles away!” Zeke climbed to his feet and crossed his arms over his chest.
