Salt and Silver

by Anna Katherine

  She collapses, still writhing. Which is when I pull the book off the shelf, take three big steps back, and grasp the nail.

  “What are you doing here?” I do my best impression of Ryan’s snarl.

  “Fuck you, human,” it sneers, except the words come out thick and wet because of the flappy feeding tube still sticking out of its mouth.

  “That’s original.” I twist the nail and it squeals. “What are you doing here?”

  “The Door—” it gasps, but I’m not buying it. “In the donation room—new—”

  “Spontaneous?” I ask. The vampire grimaces. I twist the nail.

  “Yes!” Its wings are curling inward. “And more to come, human. Feeding—”

  It gasps again, and collapses completely. Its wings crumple, which looks a bit sad, actually—like an expensive dress dumped on the chair after a party. Nothing I was doing should have killed it, though. I look from the nail to the vamp and then there’s the brunette from the other room, five feet away and glaring at me. She flicks her fingers, and an iron stake with a wooden handle rises from the vampire. The stake’s got dark, coagulated blood on it, and I feel my stomach turn again.

  She’s killed the vamp before I could get any useful information from it. “Thanks a lot,” I say snidely. The stake twitches in the air, and I start to wonder whether confrontation is really a smart move on my part.

  “Don’t you know better than to listen to vamps?” the girl demands. Her eyes flash again, spark!, and I take a step back unintentionally. Now I’m annoyed at myself. No stupid hunter girl should have me running, even if she can float things. I step forward again; her eyes don’t miss anything. She raises an eyebrow before continuing: “They’re all liars. They’ll just suck you in.”

  Pun intended? I wonder.

  “Just because you have a Door spitting out vampires in, what, the donation room? Doesn’t mean you have to be a bitch.” I pull the nail out of the book, wipe it off on my salty jeans—now they need to be washed for sure—and tuck it back into my pocket.

  “Listen, idiot, there’s no Door here—” She blinks, and then stares at me harder. “Or there wasn’t. What did you do?”

  “Narnia.” I didn’t even hear Ryan come up behind me. I suck so bad; if I were a real demon hunter, I’d be dead a million times over already. “Leave her alone.”

  “What the hell are you doing with this mundane?” demands Narnia. What the hell kind of name is that? It’s the name of someone who wears hand-tailored Anna Sui dresses. I hate her.

  She also stressed the “this” in that sentence. Which makes me wonder what stories have gotten out about me. Aside from being the only mundane who’s opened a Door and still has hunters socializing with her, that is.

  I have grown up and gotten over my selfish Hell-magic ways, Narnia. God.

  “She’s killed plenty of demons,” Ryan says. “She knows what she’s doing.” He is totally on my side. I love him. Not love love, but, you know, love. Also, it’s kind of nice that somebody around here appreciates that I’ve made up for past stuff.

  “Bullshit,” she says. Okay, whatever.

  “Listen, that vamp might’ve had something more to say. I salted it. It could’ve been helpful.”

  “Vamps lie. Demons lie.” Narnia steps over the vamp and gets right into my face. “I hear you touched a Door. Pretty stupid for someone who knows what she’s doing.”

  “So you know what you’re doing?” I ask. “Then tell us why the Door in my diner is gone. Go ahead. Best guess.”

  Narnia hesitates, then steps back. Score one for me.

  “That’s what I thought.” I turn to Ryan. “Can we leave now? Something smells bad here.”

  I rocked the junior high social drama scene, let me tell you.

  Ryan rolls his eyes. “We’re leaving. I’ve got what I need.”

  I try desperately to think of something that would be semi-insulting to Narnia while still sounding innocent, and fail miserably. I raise an eyebrow and hope for the best.

  “Narnia says that she doesn’t know how the Door closed. That means it’s something new. That’s information we didn’t have before.” Ryan turns on his heel, duster flapping. “Come on,” he calls over his shoulder. He doesn’t say good-bye to Narnia. I smirk at her before I follow Ryan out of the stacks.

  I’m pretty pleased that I don’t have to get rid of the vampire corpse. Poor Narnia, all alone in her Anna Sui and Clinique face powder.

  I rush to catch up to Ryan.

  “I don’t think the Door closed,” he tells me. “It’d be one thing if Owen’s was gone too—that would mean the world was ending in water and fire, and we don’t have the manpower for that.” I cannot even tell if he’s joking. “But it’s just your Door—and if Narnia doesn’t know how it could have got gone, then it’s not gone.”

  “Because Narnia knows everything,” I say sarcastically.

  “About this? Yeah. She’s psychic. A witch.”

  Psychics? I didn’t know they were real. “Are all psychics witches?” I ask, and that gets me an exasperated glare. “Okay, I guess not.”

  “She feels the Doors. Kind of the way that you do, but professionally.” What I do? Huh. Allie, Amateur Psychic. I could make millions. But now I’m wondering how that kind of skill could be helpful to hunters. Maybe she “feels” the Doors and knows when new ones show up? Maybe she assigns hunters to Doors. That would make sense.

  Except the idea that Ryan watches my Door just because he was assigned there and not because he wants to protect my poor mundane self is . . . really kind of gross.

  Okay. Deal with the issue at hand, then wallow in self-pity.

  Ryan’s still talking. “It could have moved. That’s what she suggested. That it moved.”

  “Okay. So say it moved. How do we find out where my Door moved to?” Look at me, dealing with the issues. I’m still rushing to keep up with him as we burst out of the library. Even though it was well lit, the sunlight is even brighter. I squint, my vision blurring. Everyone’s out and about today. Why aren’t all these people at work? They’ve probably all called in sick to take advantage of the first nice day of spring. No rain, it’s over seventy degrees out, and the air smells fresh and clean. Especially after all the death of the Doors.

  “We don’t. You’re going back to the diner. Now that I know you had nothing to do with this, you stay out of it. No more touching Doors for you. No more going near them until I figure out what’s going on.” Ryan pushes the Stetson back on his forehead. He has a little hat line, and a little tan line, both in the same place.

  “I’d rather stay with you,” I tell him, not even thinking, but the moment I say it I know it’s true. He stops to wait for the light to change; he’s heading for the subway. I can tell he’s mulling this over.

  In the last few years, I’ve gotten to know Ryan really well. Or as well as anyone knows him, I guess. We’ve spent a lot of time together. When he’s not sleeping in front of the Door or watching the Door, he’s in the kitchen with me. He tells me stories of demons he’s fought sometimes, when he’s in a good mood. When he’s in a bad mood, he sits and chops potatoes, or scrubs the heck out of pots. Once I woke up late and came down to the kitchen in a rush only to discover that Ryan had done almost all the prep work for the day and when I looked at him with my eyes wide, he just shrugged and said, “Couldn’t sleep.”

  I’ve slept in the same bed with him more times than I can count—just slept—and when he can’t sleep, I know it’s because of nightmares. I have them too, but I bet his are worse. Mine are almost always about him dying—sometimes about me dying. Almost never about me dying, though, because in my nightmares? He always saves me. He always saves me. I have never had a nightmare about dying in which he did not at least try to save me. When I die in my dreams, he’s always dead first.

  The first time I almost died in real life was about a year after we opened the Door. I always want to say “after the Door was opened”—I never want to take respons
ibility for it. But I make myself, because I’m an adult now, and that’s what adults do. Adults take responsibility for the dumb shit that they do.

  That first time I almost died, Ryan jabbed me with a syringe full of something that made me feel like I was floating, but I could still feel the pain. The demon—a semyazza, he later told me, which I had to look up on the Internet because I didn’t know what it was—had ripped open my stomach.

  The semyazza, if you don’t know, is a demon that eats humans. It starts with the intestines. I was in the basement getting rice, and Ryan, it turned out, was in the kitchen. The Door just opened, just spit a demon out, and wham, I was down, screaming, and Ryan, just like in all my dreams, saved me.

  This was before I knew how to fight, before Ryan decided I had to train, had to quit smoking two packs a week. It’s been years, and I’m down to a little more than a pack a month—I always smoke when I count out the register. One cigarette every day.

  It’s all fuzzy and hazy, but I know what he did. I know he pulled out the soldering iron that he kept in the basement, and a piece of silver that he muttered some Sumerian over, and dripped the silver into my stomach. I have a huge scar, bumpy, still red after all these years. It’s kind of ugly, but I also like it. I know it’s fucked up, but I like all the scars that I have. They mean that I’ve survived.

  I’ve got scars on my arms and scars on my hands and a really bad scar down my spine. But I’ve never been to a hospital, because Ryan’s always gotten to me with the silver cauter in time. And sometimes I’ve had to do him. I know exactly how to do it now; he made me practice on oranges.

  But it’s like I said: My hands always shake.

  The scars look just like the scars I’ve gotten from cooking—from cutting myself with knives and burning my hands on the grill. That’s the way it goes in a kitchen. That’s the way it goes with demon hunting. I can give a shot of morphine with the best of them now, and sew up cuts with a needle and thread. My first aid kit doesn’t look like anyone else’s, I guarantee you that.

  I think that if it had been anyone else, anyone besides Ryan, I probably wouldn’t have learned as well how to do all the things that need doing when you fight demons. But—and I know this is stupid, I know it’s wrong, but . . . but I learned how because I wanted to be able to save Ryan. I couldn’t stand it if something really horrible happened to him, if he was out of commission, if there had to be another hunter in my basement.

  Maybe, like baby kittens or something, I imprinted on him that first night he showed up. Maybe it really is love—I don’t know. I’ve never been in love before, so I couldn’t say. But I busted my ass learning how to fight, how to stake a vampire, how to cut the head off a jinn, how to sprinkle blood in the right pattern to trap a shedu. I did it all so that I could save Ryan, I think. I don’t even know. I’m not even sure. But maybe, maybe that’s why I did it.

  I look over at him. His nose has been broken a bunch of times, and he has scars on his face, on his neck. Some of them look like they were maybe done on purpose, but he’s never said and I’ve never asked. I did ask once if I could tattoo talismans all over me to prevent demons from getting me, and he just laughed and said that stuff like that only works in movies and on television. He gave me a talisman to wear after that, though; a Seal of Solomon. It’s inscribed on a huge silver disk, and I never wear it because it is so heavy that it hurts my neck, but sometimes I sleep with it under my pillow.

  The Seal was the first sigil I ever learned to draw. It’s a six-pointed star in a circle, with a dot between every two points. Very easy, very protective. The trick to make the magic strong is to interlace the lines, rather than intersect them; the more intricate the design, the more protection, the more magic. He told me the triangles represented elements, and he said it reminded him of me. I’m still not sure what that means, and Ryan hasn’t said, but I hope it’s more than just a nice thought.

  “You have to promise not to touch any more Doors,” Ryan says at last.

  “I swear.” That could possibly be a lie. It wasn’t like I chose to touch the Door at the hospital.

  The sun is high in the sky and beating down on my head. Sometimes I wish I were blonde; I bet blondes don’t get hot as quickly as brunettes do.

  “Sure,” he says, and clearly doesn’t believe me. “I’m—”

  I’ve never seen him at a loss for words before, but he stops right in the middle of a sentence. The traffic light’s changed and everything, but he’s not moving.

  “You,” I prompt.

  “I have no idea,” he confesses. I’ve never seen him look so unsure. “There’s a place the Door could be, but it’s just—I’ve never actually seen a Door move before. Ever. I’ve never even heard about it. But most of the Doors are—this sounds so stupid, even to me. But most Doors are in malls.”

  “In . . . malls.”

  “A lot of people, a lot of noise, a lot of confusion. A lot of basement rooms no one goes into.” Ryan ticks these points off on long, well-shaped fingers that I’ve had more than one fantasy about. His nails are always clean, and that’s pretty impressive considering what he does for a living. “Malls are great places for demons,” he finishes. “They blend in with the disaffected youth. So if your Door moved spontaneously, maybe it went there.”

  “Well,” I say brightly, “I am great at malls. Let’s go.”

  “Is there even a mall in Brooklyn, or do we have to go into Manhattan?” He resettles the Stetson on his head.

  “Oh, there is definitely a mall in Brooklyn, and it’s full of disaffected youth,” I assure him. “But . . .” I stop and sigh.

  Ryan eyes me warily. “But what?”

  I scowl. “It means getting back on the damn bus.”

  5

  We actually have to take both a train and a bus. Luckily, the train is mostly above ground at this point. It’s not the 1970s; the New York subway system isn’t very scary anymore. But it is a haven for demons. All those catacombs, tunnels that aren’t used anymore . . . It’s like demons have a homing device. The ones that get past Ryan out of our Door always seem to end up in the subways.

  I don’t want to get on the train, though. I really don’t want to. It’s not like I can hear a Door whispering or anything, I just . . . don’t want to get on the train. I feel like I did in the hospital hallway. This is a bad idea.

  Ryan takes my arm and gently tugs until I step through the open doors, and I hang onto him, put my face in his chest. He doesn’t smell like blood anymore; he must have showered in my apartment above the diner when I was dreaming about werewolves. He smells like sandalwood.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I can see shadows with wings, and I swallow back the bile that rises in my throat.

  “Ryan,” I whisper urgently.

  “I see them,” he says calmly. Too calmly. “They won’t come near us. You still smell like the dead one.”

  He murmurs quietly to me about demons and animals and the importance of smell identification to largely noctural creatures. It sounds like garbage, but it’s comforting. When the subway stops, we get out, even though we’re not at our stop yet. We get into a different car. This one feels wrong too, but there are no winged shadows, so I just stand with my face in Ryan’s chest, and breathe in the smell of sandalwood.

  As soon as we step off the bus and onto the mall grounds, I can hear the Door whispering. We find it easily; it’s in the basement, right underneath the first-floor Bath & Body Works.

  This Door is ugly, and it’s not the one from the diner. I don’t recognize it—but it has the wrought-iron fence inside it. I mean, it can’t actually be iron, because then nothing would ever be able to come out of it. Or maybe it is iron, and that’s why stuff doesn’t come out 24/7 and require legions of hunters to contain. Maybe the demons have to figure out ways to slip through the iron bars without killing themselves.

  I don’t know.

  All I know is that all around us are the bodies of dead teenagers and mothers and babies. I c
an’t look. Some of them have had all their blood sucked out. Some of them are only bones. Some of them are just dead, maybe hunters who didn’t make it past their last fight.

  Dead people, in case you’re wondering, don’t look like they do in the movies, or on Law & Order, or even at the open-casket funerals. The dead we see at funerals aren’t what death really looks like—they’re all made up and pretty, ready for a show.

  Death looks like wax, and weight, and grease. Death looks like what I’m seeing here.

  The smell isn’t, though—it’s the fruity floral chemicals from upstairs, filling the air.

  On top of all this, the whispering of the Door is really getting to me. While Ryan is poking around like there isn’t a giant pile of rotting people in the middle of the room, I sit down on the dirty concrete floor, nice and far away from bodies and Doors and grossness. The nail in my pocket digs into my butt, but I can be uncomfortable for a little while. I’m hungry and thirsty and tired, and I’m still angry that Narnia killed that stupid vampire while I was talking to it, and that I freaked out on the trains where Ryan could see me, and—

  Allie, whispers the Door. A different, smaller voice says, Allie.

  I ignore them both.

  Allie.

  Allie.

  Allie.

  What? I snap.

  We can give you what you want . . .

  What I want, I grumble in my mind, is some french fries.

  The Door . . . it snickers. That’s the only word I have for it. The Door laughs at me. A tiny titter comes from the second voice, and I am thinking about doing something unwise.

  We know what you want, the Door says. Your mother. Your family. Your money. We—

  “Allie,” snaps Ryan. From his tone of voice, I’m guessing he’s said my name more than once.

  “What?” I draw the word out. Doors make everything move in slow motion. My stomach roils as I remember what it was like to touch the Door in the hospital.