by C L Walker
I didn’t want to die – I’d barely had a chance to live yet – but I was done with Trevor Foster. He could have his town. I wanted nothing more to do with him.
An ant crawled into my open, dry eye and I couldn’t even blink.
When Patty pulled up, I didn’t think she was real. How could I? There was no chance of her looking for me on that road, no chance of her looking for me at all. Her beat-up hatchback came to a stop in the perfect spot, despite me being hidden by tall weeds and unable to move.
She got out and stretched, turning to face the sun. She looked like an angel, though in fairness I don’t think my mind was functioning properly.
She leaned against her car and took out a pack of cigarettes. She didn’t smoke, had in fact directed pointed comments at Martha – an elderly teller from the bank – when she went out for her smoke breaks. There was still no reason to believe this was real.
She had one out and took out her lighter, before looking up briefly as though fearful of someone catching her, and saw me. I was going blind, the sun cooking my eyes for the insect feast, but my heart shuddered in its broken cage when her eyes passed over me. For just a second I wondered what devil had put her there to taunt me. And then she looked back, and dropped the cigarettes she had never smoked before and would never try again, and ran to me.
The next hour was a blur, my sense of time as broken as the rest of me. She got me into her car, planning on driving to somewhere with reception, and I managed to direct her to Claire and the diner. She had no reason to listen to the ravings of a dead man, but she did.
I woke in a bedroom, Claire and Patty both watching me. The pain was still there but somehow diminished, or maybe I was getting better at working out what part of the healing process I was at. I didn’t know and it didn’t matter.
“Water,” I managed to croak, and a straw appeared. The cold relief numbed my throat and had me choking, but when I was done coughing I asked for more.
I faded away again, waking up in the night to an empty room. I tested myself, starting at my head and moving each muscle group and joint in turn. I was taking inventory, forming a checklist of things that still needed work.
I could move everything. My muscles all pulled and my joints all worked, and I wasn’t choking on blood so my organs seemed to be in order. Whatever had kept me going and allowed me to amplify the damage Foster had done to me had left me with enough health to recover, it seemed.
I could feel the yellow energy descending on the town outside. It was probably what had woken me up. I got out of bed slowly, still testing myself for unexpected weakness, and shuffled to the window.
I was at Claire’s house on the outskirts of town, a rundown place with four walls and running water, but little else. It gave me a closer view than the motel had. The energy fell from the sky, slipping around the buildings and worming its way into everything, including the room I was in. It searched every corner before finally settling on me, but when it tried to enter me it recoiled like a living thing. It left the room to find a more acceptable host.
The lightshow was done just as the sun began to rise, and I turned away from the window to find my clothes. My rescuers had been to the motel and my suitcase was waiting for me at the foot of the bed. I put on jeans and a t-shirt, then packed another change of clothes in a backpack I kept in the suitcase before leaving the room.
Claire was waiting for me at her kitchen table, drinking fragrant tea from an oversized coffee mug. Patty was sleeping on the couch, the only other furniture in the house.
“The wounded hero rises,” Claire said. “You’ll have to tell me sometime how you heal so quickly. Coffee?”
I nodded, unsure what to say to her. She and Patty had saved my life and all I felt was resentment, as though they’d done something wrong. Again, I had no interest in dying, so the feeling confused me.
She rose and poured from a coffee pot she had ready. I drank it black and bitter, finishing it quickly and holding the mug out for more. She smiled and topped me up, then went back to her spot at the counter.
“I take it the job didn’t go well?”
I shook my head.
“Did you see the dagger?”
I was angry with her for asking, for showing what she was really interested in when the most important thing was Mouse. I shook my head again.
I think she finally noticed I wasn’t doing well because her voice changed, becoming more supportive and caring. I knew it was an act but it helped, anyway. “Can you tell me what happened?”
I nodded and finished my coffee before telling her everything. I recounted the day without emotion, getting the facts out and ending with Patty’s impossible decision to take up smoking just as I needed her. I poured myself more coffee while Claire thought it over.
“That force you felt keeping you alive sounds like Wanehl – Despair – but I don’t know how he would have done it. I can’t affect you at all and I don’t see why he would be any different. Trying to heal you last night was pointless. Luckily you’ve got your own abilities to take care of that.”
“Foster said Mouse was a true vessel.”
“A naturally occurring true vessel is rare. There’s never more than a handful in the world at any one time.”
“And unnaturally occurring?”
“When we – the gods, that is – die, we move on to a new host. In that moment we can select anyone we like and they become a true vessel. Otherwise I don’t know of any way to create one. It’s a coincidence that she would be one and somehow end up with you, but your life is full of coincidences.”
I looked at Patty on the couch. She was awake and listening, pretending to be asleep so we wouldn’t exclude her from the conversation. Her arrival was more than coincidence; it was miraculous.
“Could Wanehl be responsible for it? For the coincidences?”
She shook her head. “He couldn’t turn Mouse into a true vessel any more than I could, and as I said I have no idea how he’d gift his power to you when you needed it.”
“Something higher than you, then. A more powerful god?” I had bought the story, I realized. I now believed in gods and holy powers, accepting them as part of the world.
“There is nothing more than us. We were there when the world first formed and I have never seen anything that would lead me to believe there were more of us, or that there was a greater power.”
“Fine, then it’s all coincidences.” I still had my backpack over my shoulder and I saw her looking at it. “I’m leaving,” I said before she could ask.
“Going where? I know you have debts to pay. I’ve been inside Mouse’s head, and your entire life hinges on completing your job.”
“Then I’ll find some other life, and if they want to collect on my debt they can try.” I was perfectly calm. No emotion to my voice or in my head. I was done, with the job and with Midway, and especially with magic and gods.
Patty sat up and looked at me through the gloom. “This town needs you.” She got up and moved to the counter beside Claire. “She says there’s something happening here and it’s going down tonight. If you won’t stop it then who will?”
Her hair was a mess and she was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing when she picked me up. I owed her my life, but I didn’t feel the need to explain myself.
“She has a point,” Claire said. “He has the dagger and he’s started the summoning. There’s rumors Littleton is gearing up to strike back for the raid. Things are going to go very badly tonight if you don’t do something about it.”
“Then let it.” I walked to the front door and unlocked it.
“I’m sorry about Mouse,” Patty said.
It made me pause for a moment, if only to realize that Claire hadn’t said it first.
“Thank you.”
I opened the door and stepped out into the already warm dawn. The highway was a brisk, twenty minute walk and I planned on hitching from there. I didn’t want to take a car and be stuck with a reminder of this ma
gic infested town.
The sun was up and hot as I walked along the edge of the road. The highway was old, cracked, and in need of repair, but it was also the main artery for this and several other counties. There was a steady stream of cars but none of them stopped to pick me up. I made it to a fuel stop with a trucker bar a little after midday.
I was soaked with sweat and still bruised from the night before when I stepped into the cool interior of the bar, so I could understand why several of the patrons looked at me the way they did. The place was about half full, despite the time of day. I took a spot at the bar and ordered a Coke.
When Slimy Joe, the used car salesman from Midway, walked into the bar I realized that bizarre coincidences would probably rule my life now. I turned away from him so he wouldn’t see me and quickly finished my drink.
“What are you doing here?” a gruff voice from the back of the bar said.
“Whatever I want.” Slimy Joe’s voice was different, menacing and direct, looking for a fight.
He got one.
I turned to watch so I could plan my escape. I didn’t want him to see me and try to drag me into his problem. The gruff voice belonged to a cliché of a biker, wearing leather and chains and looking like he’d only just come from his last fight. I expected Joe to back away, but then I saw the look on his face.
He actually had come looking for a fight. There was mania in his eyes and his hands were curled into fists so tight he might never open them again. He sneered as the biker approached, shifted his feet to get into a more appropriate stance, and waited.
“I told you last time,” the biker said as he cleared the last of the tables between him and the car salesman.
“Who listens to you?” Joe replied. He waited a beat, just long enough for the biker to open his mouth with a retort, before leaping at him with all the elegance of a drunk squirrel.
They clashed and Joe got the upper hand. He was swinging his fists unpredictably, insanely. It would have been comical if he wasn’t landing a few to the biker’s face and drawing blood.
Another guy stood from a table near the fight, this one older, with a grey ponytail. He tried to grab Joe and got an elbow to the face for his efforts.
Two more rose, ready to join the fight as Joe took the biker to the floor and kept pummeling him, smashing his face over and over with those tight fists.
I stood as well, whether to leave or to help, I’m not sure. The bartender reached over and took hold of my arm.
“You’ll want to stay out of this,” he said when he had my attention. “This is a long time coming, and if he doesn’t learn his lesson now he never will.”
“Lesson?”
“Joe’s been coming in here forever but the last few nights he’s been picking fights. Last night we tossed him out and told him to stay tossed. He deserves this.”
I turned back to the fight and Joe was finally being dragged off the biker, who looked unconscious. The old guy with the ponytail told two others to hold Joe while he took his turn punching him. A queue was building up around him, everyone hungry for their turn to hurt someone.
The bar wasn’t far enough from Midway to escape that yellow energy every night. I could see it in their eyes, the same as the look in Brick when he’d seen Stephen at the Littleton party. This wasn’t who they were, and I was willing to bet it wasn’t going to get any better before whatever Foster had planned. If it was bad enough for someone like Slimy Joe to go picking fights in a bar he knew was filled with people who wanted to stomp on him, then things were going to get really bad when the people of Littleton struck back at Midway.
And it wasn’t my problem, so I left. I closed the door on the sounds of people beating someone to death and stepped out into the unrelenting sunlight.
It isn’t my problem, I kept telling myself as I walked away and stuck my thumb out for a ride I wasn’t going to get.
I could feel the world conspiring around me and I didn’t like it. From the moment Mouse fell, everything had either gone my way or steered me back toward Foster. Patty finding me, of course, but even my escape. What were the odds that I managed to run through the whole mansion and never run into anyone who could stop me? What were the odds that they couldn’t find me in the forest as I escaped?
The gods were playing with me and I wasn’t interested.
I walked for an hour, done with trying to hitchhike and walking with my head down to keep my face out of the sun. A car pulled over to the side behind me, and when I didn’t turn to acknowledge it, it simply followed, keeping pace with me but letting me turn in my own time.
I spun around and yelled at the car. “I know what you’re doing here and I’m not interested.”
The woman behind the wheel of the beat-up station wagon, a middle-aged woman with librarian glasses, just watched me and kept quiet. I turned and stomped away, but her tires crunching over the gravel behind me was a taunt and I didn’t last long.
“Whatever you want, I’m not interested.” I rounded on the driver’s side and waited for her to roll the window down. It was an old manual winder and it took her a while, but the calm look on her face never slipped and her eyes never left mine.
“You have to go back,” she said, but it wasn’t her voice. It was something pretending to be her, acting like a person. Even her accent was subtly wrong.
“Are you Wanehl?”
“No. I’m something else.”
“What?” I was scared of this being in human clothing and I didn’t know why. She had done nothing to intimidate me, and yet I had to force myself to step forward and face her.
“I am something greater, and I need you to stop being a petulant child.”
“Bite me.”
“One of your late friend Angelica’s favorite things to say.” The woman gave a sour little smile. “Go back to Midway and I will give her back to you.”
“What?” I’d met a god – Claire – and I was pretty sure this woman wasn’t one. Or if she was she was more alien, more powerful… Just more.
“I will fetch her soul from the nether and put her back together. I will ensure she lives a long and healthy life and never wants for anything ever again. I will reward her for your actions.”
“What are you?”
“More than you can comprehend, and I need you to complete your task.”
“You’ll bring her back and let us leave?”
“I’m sorry, but it is unlikely you will survive, Merikh.” The woman didn’t sound sorry. “But I will make sure Angelica does.”
I swallowed hard to get rid of the bitter taste in my mouth. “Why can’t you just take care of it yourself? If you can bring people back from the dead, you can do anything.”
“Almost.” She sighed, shook her head. “You’re scared.”
“I’m tired of—”
“You’re scared and you want to run away without Mouse to help you. You’re the same scared little boy who couldn’t face his responsibility to the clan and faked his own death to escape. You’re frightened because this is something you might fail at.”
“I fail plenty.”
“You wanted to run as soon as Trevor Foster used magic, and you’ve wanted to run every second since.” Coming from this woman, the words were a scolding from an adult to a child. “Only Mouse kept you from doing so, and now I offer you the chance to get her back and you cower away.”
This being had a point, but I thought she was laying it on a little thick. “Do you watch me in the shower, too, or just when I’m out with friends?”
“You can leave,” she said, ignoring me. “And you may even get to enjoy your life, though I doubt it. If you do, keep in mind what I’ve offered you. Ponder what you’ve given up for your cowardice.”
The being within her had grown bored with me, it seemed. I could see the moment it left her; one second she was calm and distant, the next she was looking out the window at the stranger who had her on the side of the road.
She screamed, predictably, and put her foo
t flat on the accelerator. I was showered with gravel and dirt and left to bake in the sun.
I wanted to keep going. Midway was a darkness at my back and I couldn’t face it again. Magic had killed Mouse’s husband and it had killed Mouse. It was their fate and perhaps I needed to accept it.
Which is something the cowardly me would say. The brave me, the one who was in business with Mouse, would laugh at the first one and tell him what an idiot he was being.
I shook my head, to clear the cobwebs and to shake off the dust, and turned back toward the bar. A moment later an air-conditioned SUV with a blank-faced man behind the wheel pulled up and unlocked the door.
“My own chauffeur,” I said as I climbed into the cold, dark interior. “You shouldn’t have.”
“You have very little time to come up with a plan. Your recalcitrance has probably lost you your victory.”
“I don’t know what recalcitrance means,” I said, relaxing into the soft leather seat and closing my eyes. “Just take me home, Jeeves.”
The journey wouldn’t be long and I didn’t have time to chat with the mysterious power behind the SUV guy’s face. I had to work out how I was going to take out a man who’d beaten me every time we faced each other. I had to work out how I was going to stop a town from imploding. And I had to do it without Mouse.
We passed the bar. An ambulance was outside with its lights flashing. One of the paramedics was wheeling an unconscious, bruised and beaten Joe into the back.
It was going to be an interesting night.
Chapter 16
The SUV guy spun his tires when he pulled away. Whatever had been poorly concealed beneath his skin was gone. He was confused, and he took it out on me by yelling and threatening to call the cops if I didn’t get out.
Patty was still sitting on Claire’s couch, but the waitress-god had gone to work. When I knocked, it took Patty a minute before she opened the door.
“You’re back?” she said, angry at me.
I could understand why. I nodded and she stepped aside with an exaggerated flourish. I entered and took a seat on the couch. I waited while she got control of herself enough to look at me without sneering.
