Salt and Silver

by Anna Katherine

  “That’s it? Rumors from a vampire is all you know?” Christian snorts. I knew it: snotty bitch.

  “Unfortunately, Narnia killed it before I could keep talking to it,” I say repressively.

  “Hey,” says Stan, and the room quiets. “But if there are Doors in the mall and in the movie theaters . . . why don’t you just leave them alone? Like, who cares? It’s just the mall.” He says mall the way other people say cockroach or dial-up Internet.

  He’s got a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, and looks like he’s about to go over to New Jersey to hit one of the dance clubs. Then he has to open his mouth and say dumb shit? And not stop:

  “People who shop in Bath & Body Works deserve whatever comes through the Door,” Stan announces, and steps up to stand next to me. “It’s Darwinism in action.”

  I really resent being put in the position where I have to be the logical, responsible one. It’s been more than a few years already, and I’m getting tired of it. When do I get to sit around and smoke as many cigarettes as I want and arbitrarily decide what matters and what doesn’t?

  “Shut up,” I tell him. He’s making me look like a moron.

  “So there are really two problems,” Ryan says to the hunters, ignoring us. “Problem one is that the Door here is missing, and we don’t know where it went. Problem two is that there are more and more Doors popping up. Best case scenario with that one: Eventually we run out of hunters, and the world is overrun with demons.” This is the best case scenario? Ryan resettles the Stetson on his head. “Worst case scenario: The world ends in earth and air.” The hunters nod soberly like that makes any sense whatsoever. Except the world-ending part. That sounds bad.

  “I’m already guarding two Doors,” volunteers a youngish looking hunter. Seriously, is he, like, sixteen? Or am I just getting so old that everyone looks young to me?

  While the hunters talk about whether or not these problems are related—the consensus seems to be that they are, because otherwise two mysterious and shitty things are happening at once for no good reason, and that’s just too depressing to think about—I lean against Ryan. Just a little. Just enough to feel that he’s there. He smells like blood, like he’s been hunting, but he also smells like my sandalwood soap, and a little like sweat. It is the sexiest shit I have ever smelled in my life.

  My pheromones want his pheromones.

  I stand on my toes and say, very quietly, in his ear, “What’s ‘earth and air’?”

  His head whips to the side, and he’s looking at me like he’s never seen me before. Surprise surprise, I was listening. But I am also distracted, because there’s this fantastic cheekbone of his, right there, inches from my mouth.

  Which is right when Stan decides that he is not done making me look like a selfish idiot. “Does it really have to come back here?” he asks, and I settle back on my feet and Ryan turns back to the crowd. And, look, I guess I am a selfish idiot, but I don’t need any help displaying that to the public, and Stan is still talking. “Allie doesn’t need any more of this hunter shit,” he says. “And it’s boring.”

  I close my eyes, take a deep breath. I open them again and say, “Stan, why don’t you go home?” And, I add in my head, just forget all about this. It’s not like he’s helpful anyway. It would make my life a lot easier if he didn’t remember anything about the Door or the hunters, really. I’m not sure how it would make my life easier, but I am pretty sure that it would. Like, maybe he’d stop saying dumb shit that just makes me look like another idiot mundane who played with things she didn’t understand.

  Because you know what? That was six years ago. And since then, I’ve killed at least as many demons as a green hunter. I don’t just sit around and let Ryan do the fighting. I’m not very good at it, but I do it. I helped open the Door. I’ll help close it if they ever figure out how. Ryan has slept on a cot in my basement for six years—sometimes, mostly when I am not in it, he sleeps in my bed. Hell, he helps out in the diner when it’s really busy and the Door is dormant. It’s not like I don’t understand the situation we’re in, how dire it can be. It’s not like I don’t understand that at any time, if Ryan or I are just a moment off in our reactions, just a split second, we could be dead.

  Stan glares at me. Go, I think at him. “Just go,” I say wearily. “The hunters and I will handle this.”

  “Fine,” he says, and storms through the hunters. They open up to make a path for him. I hope and pray that’s not what I look like when I flounce off, because he looks like a spoiled brat.

  Once the door closes behind him, Ryan’s hand comes down on my shoulder and squeezes gently. I’m hoping that the squeeze translates into something like, You just did the right thing, and not something like, You are monumentally stupid.

  The hunters are all arguing among themselves, and their faces are grouchy. I tune them out. I’m interested, but hunter politics are bullshit. I’ve only been exposed to them for the last day, and I’m already tired of all the drama. It’s just like government—they’re going to talk and talk and fight and bicker and be annoying and loud, and in the end, the decisions are all going to be made by the one or three people who yell the loudest, are the meanest, and aren’t afraid.

  Ryan pulls out tobacco and rolling papers, and starts rolling a cigarette. I know I’m not supposed to find it hot, but he looks really good smoking. And it’s not like hunters really have to worry about dying of lung cancer; something else inevitably gets them first. I don’t know how Ryan has made such peace with inexorable death. Sure, anyone can get hit by a bus in the middle of the street at any time, but that’s the kind of death we can ignore. Ryan’s death is in the cards; it’s going to happen. It’s just dumb luck that it hasn’t happened before now.

  He looks up and catches me staring at him. He stares back. It’s like the world goes away when he looks at me. The world just goes away. He licks the rolling paper, seals the cigarette, and offers it to me. I hate unfiltered cigarettes because the tobacco is always getting into my teeth, but I take it anyway. He lights it with a Zippo. The smoke hurts my lungs and stings my eyes, but I blow smoke rings and wait for the hunters to stop arguing amongst themselves.

  Here is the thing: Like I could smell the badness on the trains, and hear the Doors whispering in the mall—I know that I’m going to have to do something dangerous. I can tell.

  I have a really bad feeling about it, too.

  7

  When we opened the Door, six years back, for a while I lived in a tiny apartment near the diner because old Sally hadn’t gone to Florida or whatever and left me in charge yet. I’d just broken up with Jimmy—I’d caught him and Amanda more than halfway to doing it next to the grill. It would have served them right if they’d accidentally burnt themselves, but I had to stop them. We’d just gotten in seven orders for pancakes from some high school kids, and with them in the way, I couldn’t fill the order.

  I don’t blame Amanda. She can’t help it. It doesn’t occur to her, ever, that she can’t have something she wants. I used to be like that, so I can appreciate the difficulty. And Jimmy should have known better, but no man can resist Amanda’s stupid mouth and pointy elbows. Honestly, I was more angry that they were messing up my kitchen.

  So Jimmy was history, and Amanda had the sense to stay out of my sight for a while. But little by little, I let her back, and she came.

  That’s why I really keep up with Amanda and Stan. Because even though they have no idea who I am now, and have just the slightest clue what I have to deal with on a daily basis, they stick by me. They could’ve laughed off the whole Mom-and-Rio thing—and they wouldn’t have been the only ones by a long shot—but they didn’t. They stuck it out, and they’re still sticking it out, and for that kind of loyalty, the least they deserve is a little something back.

  I’m sitting on the floor behind the counter, back against the shelving and feet up on a pile of collapsed cardboard boxes I haven’t tossed out yet, and I’m flipping my phone open and clo
sed. I have a cell phone, but Ryan doesn’t. I bet Narnia does. I bet everybody does except Ryan, because having a convenient way to contact him would be too easy.

  No, I’m not being fair. I understand that he needs to stay off the grid. It would be a pain in the ass for him to have a cell phone, to have bills to pay every month, to have a driver’s license. He can’t vote, because he can’t be registered to vote, because what a pain in the ass it would be for him to have to do jury duty or something. It would suck and be annoying, just like it is for everyone else—but twice as bad for Ryan, because he’d spend the whole time worrying about the demons coming through the Door while he’s gone.

  I’m worried about Amanda. I guess I’m worried about Stan too, but he’s been a bitch more recently, and so he gets to have some downtime before I go bugging him. Amanda, on the other hand . . . when did I last see her? Dawn said she called, but it was the diner number instead of mine. I am seriously confused. Maybe I did something?

  Maybe I’m not doing enough.

  But, jeez, it’s hard to have a lot of patience for drama when you run a diner. Diners are hard work. It’s a lot harder than I ever thought it would be, frankly, because I guess I believed a little too much in how diners ran on TV, like on 90210, how they just magically made the Peach Pit a success.

  Little did I know. I had a lot of ideas when Sally left town, and implementing those ideas led to a lot of interesting misunderstandings. For example, if you write the menu in poetry, you get a lot of truckers and demon hunters ordering what they think is steak and potatoes, but turns out to be steak tartar with asparagus.

  Let me tell you something. If you ever serve a truck driver steak tartar with asparagus and herbed new potatoes with ghee, they will send it right back and ask if you have meatloaf.

  That was the last time I let Dawn write the menu. From then on, we went right back to using the original Sally’s cookbook. No one can go wrong with Sally’s steak and potatoes—or her meatloaf.

  I am behind the counter right now because, seriously, listening to the hunters is really boring. From what I understood, the Baseball Caps didn’t trust the Fedoras or the Stetsons, while . . . well, you can guess the rest. It’s one big show of mistrust. Who screws up the most, who gets killed the most, their philosophies of hunting. I think it’s not a surprise anymore that Ryan doesn’t want to have sex with me—I am pretty sure that I’m a Fedora. They’re the ones who keep demons alive and torture them while asking questions about the underworlds, and that’s the suggestion of every Fedora in the room—find a demon, capture it, torture it with holy water, and make it answer some damn questions about what’s going on. That’s a plan I can get behind.

  The Baseball Caps think nothing is wrong. They’re all easygoing like Owen, with an undercurrent of meanness. They kind of make me think of the little kids who pull wings off butterflies. Not to get anything, not for information, not because it has to be done—but because they like it.

  Eventually, things get quiet. I pop my head over the counter. The diner is empty except for Christian, Jackson, that tall black female hunter—Roxie—and Ryan. They’re talking quietly in Ryan’s corner booth. They all have coffee, clearly gotten from the bodega down the street. Ryan hates having to make his own coffee, and clearly no one thought to ask me. I make great coffee. A little smoky, a little bitter, a little dark, a little mellow.

  I stretch, and stand. No one looks at me. Fine. I flip open my phone and call Amanda. No answer. Her voice mail is full. I call Stan. He, at least, answers.

  “Heeeeyyyyy.” It’s all long vowels. “Whassaaaaaaap?”

  I cringe. “Stan, the hunters are gone, you can come back now.”

  “What hunters, Al? What are you even talking about? Crazy girl. Nobody hunts in Brooklyn. The B-K-L-Y-N!” he crows. So high. So so high. Or drunk. Or both.

  “The hunters, Stan. You know. Like Ryan.”

  “Oooh, is that your boyfriend?” says Stan.

  “What? You know Ryan.” I pull the phone away from my ear and check the caller ID to make sure that I actually called Stan and not some random accidental person. But it’s Stan.

  “Sure I know Ryan. Surrrrre.”

  “Don’t forget to drink some water, Stanley,” I say, in my bossiest voice. I hear people in the background calling to him. “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Bee-oy friend!” he chants, and I click my phone shut.

  Boyfriend indeed.

  Why does Stan not remember anything about the hunters? Maybe he’s just high. Or maybe—

  Oh shit. I drop down behind the counter again.

  Okay, this is stupid, but I am trying to work through this. The Door in the hospital told me to touch it, and I did, right? It used its voice, the one that sounds directly in my head. I told the leaf thing to tell me why it was here, and it did, in a weird way. I even told the hollow woman to go away, and she did.

  I said it in my head, with my thoughts.

  Maybe I told Stan to forget. That cannot possibly be what happened, though. Right?

  Okay, so maybe now I’m psychic. That would be good, right? Then I can help assign hunters, maybe beat up Narnia without getting my own ass kicked—except how the hell did I just become pyschic, like, now?

  . . . You know, I’ve been around a lot of Doors today. A lot of wish-granting Doors.

  I do not like my random logic chains. Hunters in my diner, saying you can ask a Door for things without really asking . . . and the diner became really successful once the Door opened in the basement. Once Stan and Amanda and I opened it. I thought—okay, what I thought my Door gave me, when we first opened it, was Ryan—and I hate thinking that, hate thinking that I owe a Door to Hell for the best thing that’s ever happened to me—but what if I was secretly asking it for my diner the whole time? That would explain why the diner was empty today. No Door, no successful diner.

  And what if I haven’t stopped asking it for things, and the Door’s just been giving, and giving, and—What if I asked for something to make me important to the hunters? What if I asked to be important to Ryan?

  On top of that, Ryan’s always told me that wishing for things from the Door dries up your soul and turns you into a demon. But sometimes he says a wish lets the Door open to release another demon. I’ve never bothered to find out if either one of them’s the truth.

  All I know is, if I become some kind of psychic demon, I am going to be pissed.

  When I pop back up and look over at Ryan and the others, they are still talking in low voices, not looking at me. So I open the dessert case and pile black and white cookies onto a paper plate and bring them out. I need to ask them about this. I need to know if I am accidentally turning into a demon and if that is making me kind of weirdly psychic, or if I’m weirdly psychic and only coincidentally turning into a demon.

  Ryan is the one talking, but he falls silent when I come up.

  “Well, what’s the verdict?” I say. I will enter into the subject of my possible demon-ness with subtlety.

  “The Baseball Caps are idiots,” snorts Jackson.

  “Shut up,” says Christian, but he says it like he knows that his crew sucks.

  “We’re . . .” Ryan stops, sips his coffee, grimaces. Yup, he wishes he had my coffee. “We’ve decided to go with the worst case scenario. Which means that some of us have to go into a Door and ask for help.”

  “Uh. What?” I cross my arms over my chest. “What?”

  “You heard me.” Ryan takes a bite of a cookie. He only likes the chocolate halves. I only like the vanilla halves. We’re meant to be, in some other world, some world where there are no demons.

  “It’s the only way,” says Roxie around a mouthful of cookie.

  “I think I need to go back behind the counter until you are no longer crazy,” I say, even though I know it won’t do any good, because this is the kind of harebrained scheme that has Ryan written all over it. Not that he’s ever had a really stupid plan before, actually, but he’s like me in that
way: one minute he seems perfectly logical, and the next minute his logic has gone to a completely bizarre place that nevertheless still makes perfect sense. “Did you say that instead of doing magic, torturing a demon for information, or waiting to see what happens, you all want to actually go in through a Door into an actual Hell dimension to see if you can find help? In Hell? For a world-ending ‘scenario’ that no one has yet explained, by the way.”

  “In Hell dimensions, there are avatars that come down to protect you,” says Christian, ignoring my obvious play for the whole earth-and-air info. “I’m not sure exactly how it works, but that’s what I’ve heard. We’d ask them for help, and they’d—do something. Maybe talk to the gods for us or something.”

  “This sounds like one of Ryan’s cheap novels.” My arms are still across my chest, and I still can’t believe what I’m hearing.

  “Sometimes the novels get it right,” Ryan tells me. “You know that, Allie.”

  “If we can get to one of the nice Hells—”

  I cut Jackson off with a shriek. “One of the nice Hells?”

  “They’re not all Hells,” says Roxie. She has some kind of drawl. It’s different from Christian’s midwestern twang; more of a Deep South thing. What’s she doing in Brooklyn, of all places?

  “What do you mean that they are not all Hells?” I am totally suspicious of this new information.

  “They’re not—” Christian stops and frowns. “They’re not Hells. They’re underworlds.”

  “And the difference is . . . what exactly?”

  “The difference is that not all underworlds are scary and evil. The underworld of the ancient Egyptians is fields and rivers.” Ryan leans back and offers me the vanilla half of the cookie.

  “I shun your cookie,” I tell him. “How the hell do you know what an underworld is like?”

  “The Egyptian Book of the Dead,” chorus all three of them.

  “But you don’t know if that’s real!” I protest. They exchange oh, what a stupid mundane looks, and I scowl. “Listen. I think it’s really cool that you guys are so into protecting humanity—which you clearly all hate and disrespect all the time—but I think this is going a step too far. What’s in a Hell that can tell you anything about what’s going on? Not to mention that if you go into a Hell dimension, you’re going to die. You’ll be attacked by demons, and they will kill you. This is totally straightforward. It’s not like it’s a surprise or something.”