by Chloe Garner
Samantha closed her eyes and frowned, putting her fingers to her forehead.
“Jason, are you being sensitive?”
“Trying. Maybe. And you look really hot with red hair.”
He played with his fingers for a second, then looked up and grinned.
“Seriously?” she asked. She’d seen that expression before. Seen it work before. And for some reason, it didn’t make her angry. He slid his leg out from under him and leaned over on his hip, curling around her knee and putting his fingers under her chin.
“Seriously hot,” he said, pulling her face down to his. Her lips found his and she sighed, not realizing just how badly she wanted to forget until he opened the door like that. She let him pull her lower as he rolled onto his back. When his hand eased to the back of her neck, though, she sprang away, feeling like the watchdogs in her brain had betrayed her. She found herself standing against the wall, staring at him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “We weren’t doing anything wrong.”
“It’s just a really bad time,” she said.
“That’s our life. It’s always a really bad time. Are you crying?”
She jerked her hand to her face to find tears. She looked away. That’s how desperate I am? she thought. The invitation to just not think had lulled her, even when she had so clearly been able to see it coming.
“Are you okay?” he asked, sitting up, now.
“He’s dying, Jason,” she said. His face grew still.
“I didn’t know it was that serious. I wouldn’t have…”
“I know.”
“What do we do?” he asked.
“Find Carly. Kill her. It might help. Beyond that… I have to find something to counteract six months’ worth of magic.” She looked at him, something in her mind fracturing and letting loose an entire train of thought she hadn’t allowed herself to think about with her emotional mind yet. “Sex. Six months of sex. Do you know how powerful a ritualistic magic sex can be? The marks on his back? I’m not sure he even sees them, when he looks in the mirror. Jason, I know what demons are like when they have sex. They’re violent. They’re completely sadistic and without empathy. Six months, he’s been stewing in that.” She put her hand in front of her mouth, trying to hold back the conclusion that spilled out anyway. “I don’t know if I can.”
He stood and she shifted away from him.
“So we find Carly. We kill her. You’ll figure out the rest of it. I know you. You’ll figure it out.”
She nodded from behind her hand. Her last words were the truest thing in her mind, and she simply grasped hold of his hope in substitution for her own.
“Are you okay?” he asked. Her eyes wandered the room in jerks, her mind working through all of the things she didn’t know, that she couldn’t know. The guesses she was making. She needed to swap sixteen and seventeen again.
“Hey,” he said. She looked at him. “Come here.”
She walked into his open arms, almost hard enough to knock him off balance, and he held her.
“You’ll figure it out,” he said. “I know you will.”
She closed her eyes and listened to his heart, just counting. She realized she was shaking. He squeezed her hard and made soothing noises into her hair. She squeezed her eyes shut and just listened to his heart beating, shutting out the frantic counting and reconsidering going on in her head. The moment of panic passed.
She let him go and stepped away.
“Is there anything else you can do, tonight?” he asked. She shook her head.
“Then stop worrying about it and get some sleep. We’ll start trying to figure out how to find Carly in the morning.”
“I know how to find Carly,” she said absently.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
“More or less, anyway,” she corrected.
“So, we do the next thing. It’s going to be okay.”
She looked up at him. Put her hands on either side of his face and pulled him down to kiss him on the mouth once, gently. Let him go.
“You’re a lot better guy than I give you credit for,” she said. He shifted his shoulders.
“Just don’t let it get out, okay?”
He walked to the door and opened it, looking over his shoulder.
“How long has he got?”
“Carter says maybe a month.”
He pressed his lips together and frowned.
“You’ll figure it out.”
<><><>
Darin was the son of a Ranger who had decided that he didn’t want to it, but who didn’t reject the Rangers outright. He and his wife kept their house open to Rangers who were crossing through. The next morning, he had left for work, and Cathy, after setting a pot of coffee on the table in front of Jason, had excused herself to run errands. Neither of them ever asked if they would stay another night or not. They gave their visitors a lot of space and as much freedom as they could, which made them a favorite among most of the Rangers.
Jason mulled over his coffee. He hadn’t lied to Samantha the night before. He did believe that she would figure out how to save Sam. Believing anything else would be a waste of time. This morning, though, he was feeling modestly angry about the number of times he had wanted to stab Carly and hadn’t done it. Samantha was upset because she had left Sam alone for so long. She was ignoring the fact that Sam hadn’t actually been alone - Jason had been there, watching the whole thing happen. At first, he had encouraged it. Sam having a girlfriend was a rare enough thing that he had a strict policy against discouraging them, even when they were desperately lacking. He would never understand why Sam dug the quiet nerdy ones. Carly, though, was saucy, and clearly hot for Sam. And Sam was happy. First he was shyly happy, then he was openly happy, and then he was negligently happy. And by that point, Jason no longer had a vote in where Carly stayed, or even where Sam stayed. He had known it would only be a matter of time before he went to knock on Sam’s door and found him no longer there.
Samantha may not have swept in to save him as early as she could have, but Jason had watched the entire decline.
And he had so desperately wanted to stab her. He took comfort that he might yet get to. Or shoot her. Shooting her would be good, too.
Samantha walked into the kitchen with a map.
“Mind getting that?” she asked, motioning to the coffee pot. He moved it to the stove and came back. She opened the US map and spread it across the table, pulling out a handful of red beads and pouring them onto a corner of the map. She consulted a list and started placing beads.
“You seriously stalked us this closely?” he asked.
“Didn’t have anything better to do,” she answered. “Am I right in guessing that she pushed for certain routes, or had stops of her own in cities that you would have never gone to?”
He thought of the nowhere intersection in Wyoming that she insisted she had to see because of the little church there, that had turned out not to exist.
“Yes.”
“Uh huh.”
The beads on the map looked random to Jason, even after she stopped placing them.
“Am I supposed to be able to read something here?” he asked. She shook her head.
“It’s part of a complex geometric pattern,” she said. “I could draw the entire thing, but you’d never be able to recognize it again. The way it lines up, it’s called a shepherd’s path.”
Sam came down into the kitchen, scratching his scalp.
“Morning.”
“Hey,” she said. “So, if I draw the focus of the whole thing, and it’s hard, because it depends on which points she actually picked to…” she glanced at Sam, “emphasize… it’s somewhere here,” she said, pointing to New Mexico.
“That’s a big area,” Jason said.
“I know, but the way a shepherd’s path works, once you get close to the focus of it, you start rolling into it like it’s downhill. If you didn’t know what was going on, you’d never even notice you were doing it. You just have
to go Southwest. It’s a spider’s web. Using the rule that most coincidences are just things demons planned out a long time ago, I’d guess that they have a nice thin boundary set up somewhere, and she was supposed to show in the next day or so with the marks on Sam’s neck and knees completed, and the demon who was trying to possess him at Heather’s place would have all the time in the world. Pick his moment, pick his ritual, cross with as much power as possible.”
Jason looked at the beads.
“How did she do this?” he asked.
“She had sex with him. In the car. While you were driving,” Samantha said. “You guys criss-cross the country enough. She was just biding her time to hit the axis points.”
“Wait a minute. Every one of these is a place where they had sex?” Jason asked, looking at the map again.
“Best guess. Obviously not comprehensive.”
“You guys had sex in Wyoming?” Jason asked. Sam looked at his hands.
“You went in to the bathroom at the gas station,” he said.
Samantha didn’t look up from the map.
“The more accurate the axis points are, the tighter the focus is going to be, but there’s no mind control involved beyond just direction of motion. Once we get there, Sam should still be in control of his decisions. We just need to move quickly before they decide to try to possess him, anyway.”
“You’re sure she’s going to be there?” Jason asked.
“It’s a spider’s web. If she still wants to catch him, that’s where she’ll be.”
“Waiting for us.”
“Yes.”
“As in, a trap.”
“Yes.”
“And we’re going to just walk in and kill her?”
“Yes.”
“How do we plan on that?” Jason asked. Samantha looked up at him, eyes burning hot.
“That part is my job.”
“Oh, come on,” Jason said. “I’ll draw you for it.”
<><><>
They were three hours down the road when Jason’s cell rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and answered it, his face clouding.
“When?”
Sam knew that voice. That tone. His stomach sank and his grip on the arm rest tightened as he waited to hear who had died.
“How is she?”
He started going through the list of people that Jason would get a call about. Who was it this time?
“We’re on our way,” Jason said, putting his foot down on the accelerator.
“Who?” Sam asked.
“Arthur,” Jason said, his jaw clenched. “Something followed Tanner home. Caught Arthur by surprise. Carson is on his way now. Krista is in Maine, and they can’t get her. They’re putting the waypoints into lockdown.”
“Then we should go back to Darin and Cathy’s,” Sam said.
“Like hell we should,” Jason said. Sam glanced back at Samantha.
“He’s dead?” she asked. He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
Sam closed his eyes and let the sadness come. Death was a part of their business, but… Arthur was going to hurt more than most.
“What would you say to him, if you got one more thing to say?” Samantha asked.
“I don’t know,” Sam said, eyes still closed. “Thank you.”
“I’m serious,” Samantha said. “There’s a chance I can take it to him.”
“You what?” Sam asked. She nodded, eyes stony.
“My friend. He keeps some of the people who are most important to me on this time rate long enough for me to cross and say goodbye. It’s possible he’ll hold Arthur, but not for more than a few minutes. What would you say?”
“I should call Tanner,” Jason said, picking up his phone.
“I’m sorry. There probably isn’t time. What would you say?”
Jason pulled over violently onto the shoulder of the highway and spun in his seat.
“You’re serious?”
“Dead serious. Fifteen seconds. The living talk to the dead, not the other way around. What would you say?”
“That he was a father to us, and we’ll miss him like one,” Sam said.
“A damn fine one,” Jason said, then paused. “He went out with his boots on. Like a Ranger.”
“Okay,” Samantha said, then took a deep breath. Sam watched her, waiting for something to happen, but all she did was breathe out. They stared at her.
“It’s done,” she said.
“That’s it?” Jason asked. She nodded.
“Time goes faster on the other side. I talked to him for a few minutes, then thanked my friend and came back.”
“What did he say?” Jason asked. She shook her head.
“I couldn’t tell you, if he had. The dead function under certain rules, and until he learns them, he isn’t allowed to speak to us. I told him that Tanner and Carson and you and Sam were all going to be with Doris by tonight, that he knew how much he would be missed, but he was leaving behind a group of the strongest people I know, and that I knew they’d make him proud. And then I told him what you said. He smiled.”
“What’s going to happen to him?” Sam asked. It was strange, thinking about someone being somewhere else specific, rather than just gone. She shook her head.
“I certainly couldn’t tell you that, even if I knew. That’s the strictest barrier between the living and the dead - what happens next.”
“So what do we do?” Sam asked, glancing at Jason.
“Same thing you were going to do. Go comfort Doris and your friends. Grieve. I didn’t change anything. I just bought you one last minute.”
Jason pulled off of the shoulder back onto the highway.
“We make Kansas City by nightfall,” he said. “No questions.”
<><><>
The next two days were mostly numb. There was a lot of crying, there was a lot of story-telling. Jason sat next to the fire in the den, feeding it the wood that Arthur had split before the last winter. It was too warm for a fire, but it seemed to make all of them feel better. In ones or twos, Carson, Tanner, Krista, Sam, and Samantha cycled through, sitting with him and Doris.
On Sam and Samantha, there hung this torturous sense of time slipping. She had tried two more things, one - Sam had told him - had involved a length of his hair, and the other involving a lengthy incantation and candles made from whale blubber. Jason had wondered if those were legal. Neither had accomplished anything. Samantha, particularly, seemed depressed, but Doris and her family mistook it for empathy.
Jason put another log into the fire, closing the glass doors over the fireplace. He had asked Doris if she would like to be alone, or if she wanted him to get anyone else to sit with her, feeling inadequate in his silence, but she had smiled and come to sit next to him in front of the fire for a moment.
“They all want to remember,” she said, leaning her head on his shoulder. She sighed. “I’ll remember with them, because that’s what he would want, but I don’t need to remember. He was my whole world. He’s gone, but I still feel him here, in everything about this house. I just want to sit with the memory of him.” She looked up at him and smiled, tears brimming in her eyes. “You remind me of him. Tanner’s his spitting image, and Carson moves like he did, but they’ve both got a lot of me in them, too. You act like him. This is exactly what he would do, and it comforts me.”
The tears spilled over, and she dabbed them away with her fingertips, then went and got a tissue and sat back down in her chair. Jason stared at the fire.
“He died with his boots on,” he murmured.
A few minutes later, Krista came downstairs. She had been going through the attic to have something to do, and she had found an old photo album that she wanted Doris to go through with her. Jason started to stand, but Doris put her hand out as she stood to join Krista on the couch.
“Please,” she said softly.
He sat back down on the bricks and started to pull kindling off of another split log, putting it in the bottom of the wood tray. On longer trips, he and
his dad had stopped over here, and Arthur had taught him how to build a fire. His dad had taught him how to put tree limbs into a tepee and fill the whole thing with leaves, then shove burning newspaper into it to light it off. Arthur had taught him the art of it. Steel and flint, dried grass, kindling, to larger sticks and finally split wood. And you always left as much kindling as you used.
Sam and Samantha were off emoting. He and Sam grieved differently. Sam wanted to wallow. To drink and tell stories and be upset. Jason would hurt quietly for a long time, completely inside himself. For all he made fun of his brother, he was glad that he had Samantha to talk to. It left him space to stare at the fire in peace. In quiet, at least.
Doris and Krista were crying.
Strangely, he thought of Kara.
When one of the waypoints was threatened, even when it appeared to be coincidence or an obvious cause, they locked them down. The rule was that every Ranger was to go to their nearest waypoint and stay there. As they figured out where there were too many Rangers and too few, they would redistribute them, and then they would wait. The all-clear on this one would probably come pretty quickly, less than a week, because Tanner knew exactly what had followed him home, and that it had nothing to do with Arthur, but they would be careful, anyway. He had called Darin and Cathy and apologized for coming here, instead, but Darin had expected nothing else. They had a houseful, he said, and would probably be sending a couple of Rangers south, anyway. Jason had no idea where Kara would be, but she would be gnawing at the ropes, wanting to get loose and go kill things again. He wondered who she was with.
His phone rang.
“Sorry,” he said, looking up at Krista and Doris, then walked into the kitchen to answer.
“Hello?”
“Jason Elliot?” a man’s voice asked.
“I can get him a message,” Jason answered.
“He gave me his card… I need to speak to him,” the man said.
“When did he give you his card?” Jason asked. He gave his phone number to the non-initiate survivors of their work, Allison had one, in case they needed to get in touch with them for follow-up work, but it led to this chicken-or-egg confrontation where neither he nor they wanted to disclose what had happened to a stranger.
