Salt and Silver

by Anna Katherine

  “No kidding,” I’d agreed immediately. Who ever would have thought that I’d get a job? Not me; my life was so derailed. “We should buy something with my tips!”

  “What did you make?” Amanda didn’t even bother to try to sound interested, but I pulled the crumpled dollar bills out of my pocket anyway. My gorgeous white Prada pantsuit was stained beyond the talents of even the most skilled dry cleaner, but I felt a weird kind of pride anyway. I’d done a job, and, okay, I hadn’t done it very well, but I hadn’t dropped anything, and only one person complained about getting regular Coke when she’d ordered a Diet.

  “Fifteen bucks,” I said proudly, and displayed my dollars.

  Amanda pulled one from the pile. “We should totally cast a spell over the money so that it multiplies without you having to do a lot of work,” she said, spreading the dollar out on the floor.

  “You’re an idiot,” said Stan, but he sat up, clearly interested.

  I want to say that I wasn’t interested. I want to say that being poor gave me a new sense of purpose. But that would also be a lie. A damn damn damn lie. Because no matter what books and movies and television shows try to get us to believe, there’s nothing good about being poor. There’s nothing good about living in someone else’s house, even when that someone else has been your best friend since childhood. There’s nothing to be gained from being in a situation where everyone you’ve ever known has only pity for you to your face, and nastiness behind your back.

  I could have lived my whole life without knowing who my true friends were, and been happier for it.

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  “It has to rhyme,” said Amanda seriously, and I agreed. After all, we’d seen The Craft about a million times, and all their spells rhymed.

  “Um . . .” I stared down at the money. “Shouldn’t we make a circle too?” I pulled a tiny piece of chalk out of my pocket; I’d used it earlier to write specials on the board behind the counter. The dinner special was meatloaf with mashed potatoes, string beans, brown gravy, and a cookie, for five dollars. No wonder the diner was struggling to make ends meet if Sally didn’t even charge real prices for the food, seriously.

  “Here, give me that.” Amanda grabbed the chalk away from me and drew a clumsy circle on the concrete, put the dollar bill in the center.

  “You guys are crazy. Magic isn’t real.” Stan poked me in the side. “Let’s do the X.”

  “No—not yet,” I said, and brushed his hand away from my side, where his finger kept poking me. “Quit it.”

  “Shut up!” said Amanda. “Okay, I think I’ve made up an excellent rhyme here.”

  “Go for it,” I told her. We dragged Stan into the circle and sat around it, our legs crossed, knees touching, holding hands.

  “I think first we need blood,” said Stan. “If we’re going to do this, I mean, we should do it right, right?”

  “Where are we going to get blood?” I looked around, but it wasn’t like Sally left knives in the basement or anything.

  “I know!” Amanda pulled her purse to her chest. Manicure scissors.

  “Very clever,” I said approvingly.

  “I am the best,” she agreed, and scratched the scissors down my finger. A few drops of blood into the cap of her eyeliner. Then Stan’s blood, then her own. Our blood looked almost black under the dim lights of the basement, and I felt a little nervous. Who knew what could happen with the blood? Amanda set the eyeliner cap in the center of the circle, on top of the dollar bill.

  “Ready?” She looked at Stan, then at me. I nodded as decisively as I could, which I don’t think was very decisive at all, since I was extremely drunk, and if I nodded too hard, I’d’ve probably fallen over.

  “Ready! Steady! Go!” yelled Stan, and started laughing.

  “Sun and moon, fork and spoon,” intoned Amanda. I giggled, and she squeezed my hand too tightly.

  “Ow!”

  “Shut up, I’m casting a spell!”

  “You guys—” Stan started.

  “Shut up,” insisted Amanda, and started again. “Sun and moon, fork and spoon, grant our wish for money to coooooome.”

  “That does not rhyme,” I said, and started giggling, then couldn’t stop. Too much vodka! I was so stupid, I had no idea what that not-rhyme would do. “Is the chalk glowing? That’s awesome, I didn’t realize it was phosphorescent.”

  “That’s only in the ocean, dumbass,” said Stan. He leaned backwards as far as he could go, pulling Amanda and me off balance.

  “Anything can glow,” I argued, leaning toward him.

  “Wait, there’s more to the rhyme: Give us more for less, give us this diner’s best, give us the wishes we seek, give us everything we can keep!” Amanda finished triumphantly, and the chalk was seriously glowing.

  And then there was a door. A door right up where the wall behind Stan used to be.

  “Uh—you guys . . .” I trailed off and pointed behind Stan. “There’s like a giant door or something down here. I think—what the fuck?”

  Yes, I have a potty mouth.

  Still.

  “Ha ha, sure,” said Stan, and he didn’t turn around, and there was something coming out of the door.

  Amanda shook her head. “No way! Stan, seriously, no way!”

  And Stan turned, and we were all just frozen as something, something with legs, came out of the door, and Amanda crowed, “It worked! We cast a spell!”

  I don’t remember a lot of what happened next—it’s all blurry in the way only alcohol can make memories fade. There was a loud bang—it’s a wonder the old lady didn’t wake up from the noise. There was a bright stripe of light. The next thing I remember clearly is that there was yellow goop all over Stan and Amanda and me. Nothing could save my Prada now. The guy standing over us with a sword in one hand and a shotgun in the other had big eyes, dark eyes, and really sexy stubble.

  Ryan has never told me how he got to us so quickly, and I’ve never asked. I don’t want to know how close we all came to being eaten by a yellow slime monster with, I should point out, a lot of legs.

  “You fucking idiots!” he yelled, and his voice had the tinge of an accent—something Southern and rolling that made me think of ranches and horses and cowboy hats. And, oh yes, he owned that cowboy hat on his head.

  “You can’t call us idiots!” said Amanda, hands on her hips. But oh, man, this guy could call me anything he wanted as long as it was in bed.

  Behind him was—well, was what I now know is a Door. Amanda’s stupid rhyme opened a Door into Hell. But at the moment, all I could think was that it was pretty.

  Helloooo, pretty, I thought, and felt a warm shiver go through me.

  “Don’t talk to it. Don’t—hey! Girl! Listen to me!” Suddenly the guy’s hands were on me and he was shaking me. “Do not talk to it, do you understand?”

  “I’m not talking to anything—and I’m not an idiot,” I said disdainfully. Let me tell you how disdainful I can be: very.

  “Yeah? Where I’m standing, you folks sure are, all of you.” He stepped back, stood up straight. “You just opened a Door—” I could hear the capital letters in his voice “—into the worst place you can imagine.”

  I looked over at Amanda. She looked half bored and half dismayed at her ruined outfit. Stan was staring at the Door behind the guy.

  “Who are you?” I asked him. “I mean, you can’t just come busting in here and kill some thing and get us covered in this garbage, and not tell us who you are.”

  “You can call me Ryan, and I’m here to save your asses, so if I were you, I wouldn’t complain.” He looked around the basement, and pulled a towel off the stack. We all watched as he cleaned off the sword. His shotgun had disappeared into his crazy flowing leather duster.

  “I cannot imagine,” said Amanda in her haughtiest I-am-the-princess voice, “that you could say anything at the moment that I’d be interested in.”

  “Then don’t listen. You can die for all I give a shit after th
is stunt.” He turned his focus on me. “You listen.”

  “I’ll listen.” I nodded. “But, uh, I’m drunk. You could be a hallucination. And that . . .” I waved toward the Door behind him. “That could be a hallucination.”

  “That’s not a hallucination—it’s a nightmare. It is your worst fucking nightmare ever, I promise. It’s a Door into Hell—several different Hells. And you idiots opened it somehow. What did you ask for? Money? Fame?”

  “Money,” I admitted.

  “Don’t talk to him,” Amanda admonished me.

  “Something is happening,” I said to her. “Don’t you want to know what the hell is going on? We didn’t even take the X!”

  “I took the X,” said Stan. I ignored him and turned back to Ryan, craning my neck to look up at him.

  “I can . . .” I trailed off. “It’s, like, is there a whispering? Do you hear it?”

  “That’s the Door. It wants you to talk to it. It wants to give you everything you’ve ever wanted. Don’t take it. Don’t ever take it.” He lowered his voice. As he talked, his hand clenched and loosened on the sword. “Hell is real. All the Hells are real. Demons are real. Any kind of demon you can think of—it exists.”

  “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever—”

  “Shut up,” Ryan and I said at the same time. Amanda looked hurt for a split second, then just annoyed.

  “I’m out of here,” she said, and stood up. “Come on, Stan.”

  He stood up too, and looked at me apologetically. “Sorry, Allie,” he said, “but Amanda’s right. This is totally fucked up.”

  “You’re fucked up,” I said, and stayed where I was.

  Amanda shook her head. “You can make nice with the unwashed here, Allie, but Stan and I are going home.”

  And they did.

  Sometimes I still can’t believe that they left. But sometimes I’m surprised that they stayed as long as they did. Sometimes I’m surprised that I was even surprised that they left. Despite being my best friends, I always thought I didn’t have any illusions about them.

  “I didn’t actually expect them to leave,” I told Ryan after the door slammed.

  “I did.” He sat down in one flowing motion, crossing his legs, mimicking my position on the floor. He laid his sword next to himself; it pointed toward me.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” I requested, because really? “This is the most interesting thing to ever happen in my whole life.”

  “This is the worst thing to ever happen in your whole life,” he told me, and I didn’t believe him. I still don’t, because—this sounds terrible. This sounds terrible, but as hideous as the Door is, and as horrible as everything that’s happened has been, I just can’t regret meeting Ryan. I can’t regret learning about everything he’s taught me.

  All the things that being poor are supposed to do, like teach you to be strong and self-reliant and resourceful? I learned all that by fighting demons with Ryan.

  From where I’m sitting in the back seat of a cab, Ryan pressed up against me, Brooklyn looks as beautiful and peaceful as it did the first time I drove through it, that first day of work at Sally’s. It is beautiful and peaceful. It’s full of culture and cool shit completely ignored by tourists, like the botanical garden and the tiny Italian restaurants in Bay Ridge and all the old Greek diners and the Verrazano Bridge. But it’s also got a couple of Doors to Hell hanging around, and they ruin everything.

  The inside of the library is cool and quiet and brightly lit. I can’t hear any whispering from Doors, so I am kind of not seeing the point of being here.

  Ryan leads me to the right; it’s the romance novel section. “Stay a minute,” says Ryan firmly, and leaves me.

  Yeah, right.

  I wait until he’s a few steps away, and then I follow him. Up a bunch of stairs, through a bunch of doors, and into a bright, airy room with lots of tables and computers and the slight smell of plasticky ozone. There’s no way Ryan doesn’t know that I followed him, but he’s ignoring me. I press myself against the wall outside the door. No point in pushing things. I peek around the side to watch him lean down and kiss the lone inhabitant of the room on the cheek. She’s surrounded by books, but I can still see that she’s a tiny brunette, like me if I was made of bones and cocaine. She’s got big eyes that speak of a lot of expensive eye makeup, and shoes I know I would’ve had in my closet back when I had money.

  She is not dressed like any librarian I’ve ever seen. There’s no way her tidy dress is off the rack. I’m not a betting girl, and I wouldn’t swear to it, but I’m pretty sure she’s wearing Anna Sui.

  She’s also looking at Ryan in a way I think is inappropriate for coworkers.

  Unfortunately, I cannot hear them through the damn wall. That’s probably why he didn’t make a scene when I followed him. Stupid Ryan.

  Ryan’s back is to me, but the girl is facing me, and when she looks at me, her eyes flash. Not metaphorically. They flash, green, sparked through with gold, and when she smiles, she looks venomous, like she could kill me with a crook of her finger. Or her brain.

  I am not one to run away from a fight, but I know when I am outclassed by someone really powerful. If she wants to go one on one, I can pull hair and bite as hard as the next girl, but she seems like she’d fight dirty.

  Fine. When I walk away, I am definitely flouncing. Ryan and his stupid cronies sometimes bring out the worst in me.

  The stacks of the Brooklyn Public Library look like the stacks of any other library. The books smell delicious, like old paper and ink. I never appreciated stuff like that when I was younger, but I have a new outlook on life since the Door was opened. It turns out that a lot of the stuff in fiction is real, and novels can be helpful. Some of them, anyway. Some of them are total bullshit.

  I wander through the corridors, down stairs, around corners, until I’m well and truly lost in the stacks. It’s kind of nice to be in such complete silence. No one is around, and there’s no whispering from a Door, and my nausea is totally gone.

  It’s not Dewey Decimal, but the book spines near me say that I’m apparently in the BS section. Since all these books are on religious topics, that is pretty funny in a library geek kind of way. (Shut up: Concepts like “vivification” don’t just research themselves.)

  The yellow overhead lights cast weird angled shadows; I thought I was alone, but there’s a dark shape moving along the shelves ahead of me. Student? Homeless guy? Kind of worrying, either way. A shadow is cast along the floor: tall, with what looks like wings, but when I check out the moving thing again, it doesn’t have any. That means demon, shit shit shit. What is with today? I’ve seen more fun this morning than I did all last month.

  The only demons I know that cast a winged shadow are the vampires. They’re another species that isn’t actually sexy. Yet more crap that novel writers get wrong. Vampires are like . . . they’re like butterflies. Evil fucking butterflies. They’re always gorgeous on the outside, like the goths who hang around the East Village, wearing perfectly applied makeup and knee-high boots with lots of buckles and elaborate corsets even in the summertime. But people forget that butterflies use their proboscis—that’s kind of like an antenna that they use to suck up food—to do all sorts of things besides poke at flowers. Some butterflies will drink rotten fruit, or slimy dung, the sweat off your shoulders—they’ll drink carrion. Corpse-sucking butterflies, people.

  That’s what vampires do with their mouth and their wings; they just wrap up their prey and suck all the life out of them. Blood, plasma, souls.

  Ryan says the soul is in the throat. I don’t know if I believe him or not.

  The first thing I learned from Ryan after he stormed the basement is that iron kills, and silver heals. Ryan has all sorts of silver cauter scars on his body—I put some of them there, trying to save him from this demon bite, that demon spit. I even have my own silver scar that Ryan gave me after my first one-on-one run-in with something nasty.

  Yeah. After that, and the
burning silver, and the smell of my own muscle cooking? I don’t walk around weaponless anymore. Even in my last pair of clean jeans that are too tight, instead of a belt, I have a chain made of iron threaded through the loops. I can pull it out and use it to fight almost anything.

  “Hey.” The vampire moves out of the shadows and toward me, almost purring. She’s gorgeous, and, yeah, in a corset. It’s red and black, and I’d be jealous, except I know she’s a bloodsucking fiend from beyond the grave. From beyond the world.

  “Hey,” I say again, and start backing up, but she’s got super-speed and I’m just a human, so the next thing I know, she’s nuzzling my neck, which is obvious and stupid, and I make a little sighing sound like I imagine people enthralled do. How would I know? I don’t do the thrall thing. Too much silver in me already, I guess. I feel a little nudge on my neck, and that’s my cue.

  Here is the second thing I learned from Ryan: Salt binds things.

  I tuck my fingers into my right back pocket and pull out a dime bag’s worth of heavy kosher margarita-quality sea salt, and toss it at my neck, right where I can feel a sharp poke. The vampire rears back, kind of sneezing, and ew, I can see this long curled proboscis flapping from beneath the vampire’s tongue, and more coming out of the chocolate brown and gold-spotted wings that have spread from her back. The vamp proboscis looks like an old rubber medical tube, the kind nurses use to tie off your arm for blood tests. The very tip is dark red—that’s me in there.

  I swipe at my neck and get a smear of blood on my fingertips. Not a lot—I didn’t really let it go on long enough. I never do, which hasn’t ever been a problem, but Ryan bugs me about it every time he catches me at it. I wipe my finger on the nearest squishy thing: call number BS543.A1.

  Salt binds; it’s called contagion magic. A little salt here, a little salt there, and now whatever happens to my blood in one spot happens to my blood in the other.

  This vamp isn’t worth my iron belt; instead I pull Betsy, my iron nail, from the same pocket as the salt and shove it through the blood stain and straight into the book beneath. The vampire starts screaming. She claws at her face, ripping at the proboscis.