Salt and Silver

by Anna Katherine

  “There are avatars, and we think there are gods there. And it can’t be any worse than trying to live through the end of the world.” Ryan pushes the cookie toward me anyway, even though I shunned his cookie! I shunned it. But it’s the vanilla half of a black and white cookie. It is inevitable that I am drawn to it. I reluctantly take a bite.

  “You’re idiots,” I say around my mouthful, then swallow. “You don’t even know if the worst case scenario is going to happen. You don’t even know what your avatars are. What kind of word is that anyway? And don’t get me started on this whole gods idea—”

  “So you’re coming with us, then?” Ryan smirks up at me. Roxie rolls her eyes. When I look at Jackson and Christian, they are both studiously looking elsewhere, not at me.

  “God, of course I’m coming,” I say with a lot more confidence than I’m feeling, and I take another bite of cookie. I know I should say something, should tell everybody what’s going on with me and my worries, but . . . Ryan asked me to come with them. Like I’m a real hunter. It’s sad, and it’s pathetic, and he probably didn’t even mean it like that, but maybe, maybe he did. And I’m surprised to find that that’s really good enough for me.

  In my head, I say, And by the way, I think that maybe I am turning into a psychic demon a little bit.

  Out loud, I say: “Who wants root beer?”

  “Look, I’ve got to know.” I plant a giant root beer in front of Roxie, and she sniffs. Whatever, it’s barely four in the morning. Now is not the time to over-caffeinate. The boys are at the next table over, poring over Ryan’s notebooks, making lists, and swilling down coffee because they do not accept my wisdom. “Did her parents actually name her Narnia, or is it just some kind of stupid thing she does to impress fanboys?”

  Roxie grins up at me. Her scars move in really cool ways when she does that. “Her? She never calls herself that. We call her that.”

  I lift an eyebrow. Roxie takes a big swallow and makes a face.

  “Rich bitch like her, you have to give her a big house, a big wardrobe, and a dozen fur coats before you get in her—and then she’s still cold.”

  I blink a few times. “I have no idea what to say to that,” I tell Roxie, and take a sip of my own root beer. “But I totally did not get that vibe from her.”

  “That’s because you were with Ryan, weren’t you?” Roxie sniffs again, this time a lot more disdainfully. “She’s got a thing for Ryan.”

  “Everyone’s got a thing for Ryan,” I grumble.

  “Uh-huh.” Roxie’s eyes are wise, and I avoid them.

  “So tell me about the thing with the hunters. I just don’t understand. I’d think that demon hunters would all get along, have a union or something, but Ryan says that’s not true.” I sip at my root beer. It’s got too much fizz and not enough flavoring, but I’m going to drink it anyway.

  “It’s got to do with a Scientologist and a loa,” says Roxie like she knows more than that, but when I press her, she stays silent. “Instead of talking about shit that don’t matter—”

  “So you’re a Stetson?” I guess. Otherwise she’d have a problem working with Ryan, right?

  “Well, I’m not a Baseball Cap.” Roxie glares at me. “You got a problem with the Stetsons? Gods, Ryan didn’t tell me that you’re a Fedora.”

  “I’m not a Fedora!” I protest. Only maybe I am a Fedora. “I’m not anything. I think I own a pair of sunglasses. That and this bandanna is as close as I get to covering my hair.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Seriously,” I say, but I can tell she doesn’t believe me. “Look, we don’t have to get along, but you don’t have to insult me.”

  Roxie takes a sip of root beer and makes another face. Oh, whatever. “There’s fucked-up stuff happening all over the city, not just here,” she says thoughtfully. “But Doors appearing, earth and air—why would your Door disappear? It should be really happy here. It has someone to talk to, plenty of people to wheedle into asking for things . . .”

  “That does make sense,” I admit. “But what’s all this earth and air—” I feel fingers on the back of my neck. I shiver. His fingers have calluses, gorgeous calluses, from swinging a sword and using daggers and shooting guns. He squeezes my neck for a moment, then trails his fingers down the exposed knobs of my spine.

  I melt. But I want to remain firm. “Thank you for asking me to go through whichever Door you eventually decide on,” I say resolutely. Best offense and all the rest of that stupid phrase.

  Ryan slides in next to me, and keeps sliding until I move over, but I can’t move far enough away. He’s pressed up and down my side. “You’re not,” he says. Guess I’m not hunter enough for you after all, huh. My tiny little fantasy begins to wither. Well, screw that.

  “I am. You said I was and I said I was and I’m going to,” I insist.

  “I wasn’t serious when I asked. And no, you’re not. You have nothing to do with this. Your Door probably only moved—”

  “So I should just care about my Door? Forget it. Stan and Amanda and I opened the stupid thing in the first place, and thanks to us there’s who knows how many demons and deaths and hunters out of commmission, and I can’t just—I can’t just go to sleep and forget what I owe.” Damn, I hate being an adult.

  “Who do you think it’s going to help if you get hurt yourself?” demands Ryan. “It’s not going to help anyone. You’ll just be dead.”

  “So I’ll be dead,” I reply with a calm I don’t feel. I do not want to die. Not. “At least I’ll know that I helped fix the mistakes I made. That’s one of the things—you know that’s one of the things I’ve learned these last few years. And you trained me yourself. I can kill a vampire, destroy a werewolf—”

  Roxie is watching this with growing interest, but when I mention that I fought demons, she jerks her chin at me. “You fight?” she asks me. I nod. “You fought an elemental yet?”

  “Uh . . .” I look over at Ryan.

  He shakes his head. “You’ve done kid fighting. It’s chump stuff. Hell plays with your mind, Allie. There’s big monsters there. There’s things so small you’ll never see them get you. It’s not smoke and mirrors. It’s real.”

  “I think I know that already. I did touch the damn Door, you know. I felt it.”

  “And you fainted.” Ryan is heating up, where he’s pressed against me. He puts a hand over mine on the table. Roxie’s eyebrows almost hit her hairline. Mine too. “I can’t let you do it, Allie. You’re not ready.”

  “And you are?” I snatch my hand away. I hope he doesn’t think I’m rejecting him. I’m not. I’m just mad. I’m just—um, I guess I’m rejecting him. But just for the moment! “I don’t think anyone is ready to travel through a Door into Hell. So I might as well.”

  “We need you here.”

  “Why?” I am full of challenge. And I think I’m winning, too, because Ryan is not making a lot of sense. I take another sip of gross watery root beer. Ew. When next I am not fighting for the survival of humanity, I will adjust the ratio of soda water to syrup in the root beer.

  Ryan says, “Allie—”

  Roxie thunks her root beer down. “Listen, you two. As fun as this is for me, we really need a plan. And we need it soon. Argue this later.” Roxie pushes her glass aside and leans across the table. “If we’re going to go through a Door, Ryan, we’ve got to have supplies. We don’t know what kinds of Hells we’re going to end up in.”

  I frown. “I thought there were only nine?”

  “Each Door,” Roxie says, “leads you to one Hell. But you have to go through nine Hells before you can come back to our dimension—if you can get out at all. We think there’s hundreds of Doors in every Hell, and they lead to hundreds of different Hells. It’s a spider web of choices, and we need to be prepared for any of them.”

  I frown. “So how are we going to find what we need? I mean, won’t we just get lost?”

  Roxie frowns back. “It’s a quest. They’re all structured differently, organized di
fferently, and they all do different things to the people who take part in them. So maybe being lost is part of that. Or maybe ‘lost’ doesn’t mean the same thing there.”

  I throw my hands in the air. “But you just said we might not get out of Hell anyway! So we go in, have no idea where we’re going, and have no way of getting out? That is insane.”

  “Glad you think so, because you’re not coming,” says Ryan. He slides out of the booth and stands up. “Roxie. You coming with me?”

  “No,” she says. That is what resolute sounds like. But she’s looking at me oddly, and I feel—worried. “I do think we need to talk,” she says to him, “about some of what Allie’s just said—because she’s right—but if she wants to fight and die, she needs to be allowed to.” Roxie’s voice softens. “No one gave us training or engraved invitations when we started, Ry.”

  “I can’t let her, Roxie. I can’t.” Ryan’s voice is low, and he’s got an actual expression on his face instead of the grim visage he normally sports. He looks . . . pained.

  “Yes, you can,” I say, and jump out of the booth. “Although now that you’ve made it sound so attractive . . .”

  “Shut up,” Roxie and Ryan both snap.

  Ryan resettles his hat on his head and has what looks like a totally silent conversation with Roxie via their eyebrows.

  “Okay,” he finally says. “Okay. You can come with us. But—Allie. I’m in charge.”

  “I’m in charge,” Roxie corrects.

  “One of the two of you is in charge. Got it.” I nod.

  Except now I don’t want to go. I’m not even half interested. Because now it sounds like I will probably really actually die a real and actual death once we step through a Door. And I don’t think I’m ready for that. I haven’t even talked Ryan into bed with me yet.

  Roxie looks at us, then says she’s going to check out the basement. Ryan stops me with a hand on my shoulder when I try to follow.

  “What’s going to happen if you get killed?” he says quietly.

  “You know what’s going to happen. The diner’s going to close, Stan’s going to get HIV, and Amanda’s going to die of an overdose.”

  “Those last two things might happen anyway.”

  I can’t look at him; the sympathy in his eyes makes me want to puke. Puke or cry.

  “Ryan . . .” I sway toward him, and he steps away.

  “We have to get ready,” he says, back to all grim business.

  8

  So Roxie said she was going to tell me what was going on. This, it turned out, was a fib.

  Roxie and Ryan talk and talk, to each other, sometimes in English, mostly not. Stupid Sumerian.

  Okay, actually I think they’re speaking French. Which might as well be Sumerian. I took Spanish in school, and I remember this: Hola. Yo me llamo Allie.

  If they really wanted to teach us something helpful in school, they would have taught us Old English. There are tons of magic books written in English that I can’t understand because it doesn’t make a lick of sense to me at all. It’s all spelled wrong—S is F and F is Y, except when it’s TH. Seriously.

  Christian and Jackson show up periodically with new piles of stuff, get told things I can’t understand, and then go out again.

  Ryan and Roxie don’t chat, they don’t grin, they just exchange theories on what we need to bring. There’s nothing for me to do except listen—listen and then wander downstairs to sit on the floor of the basement. I guess that I could have gone upstairs to my room and gone to sleep—it’s almost dawn now—but somehow that would mean that I was leaving the field, going off to do a normal thing. I don’t know. Maybe if I stare at where my Door used to be, it will magically appear and then nobody has to go to Hell at all.

  I am so pathetic.

  There is a rubber mat down on the part of the floor where we keep the extra canisters of soda water. I sit there because I’m worried I’ll fall asleep if I sit on Ryan’s cot, but apparently it is still way too soft for my sleepy self. I wake up, a little, when I feel someone cup the curve of my hip.

  “It’s just me,” murmurs Ryan into my hair. “Meeting’s over for a while. Relax.”

  I cannot relax. “How can I?” I roll over. Ryan’s lying beside me; I must’ve been dead to the world for him to manage that without waking me. His coat is off, and his black T-shirt is showing off those fantastic arms. So now it’s him and me, face to face, on the edge of a rubber mat on the basement floor. He’s got a lot of stubble, and I want to run my hands over it. I want to kiss him. I want—

  “Allie,” he says softly. “Allie, when I go through that Door—”

  “When we go through the Door.”

  His eyes are sad. He raises a hand and touches my cheek. “It’s not a good idea,” he says.

  “Which one?” I ask. “You going through the Door without me, or you coming all the way down here to convince me otherwise?”

  He smiles like he doesn’t mean to, and all I can think is, Score. His hand is resting on my cheek now, and his thumb is teasing my mouth. “At least the coming down here one,” he says. “I think I’m bruising.”

  “You are such a baby.”

  “You sleep on basement floors.”

  “And you joined me, cowboy.”

  His smile drops away, but not in a bad way. “You made it look good,” he says.

  My brain kind of shuts down.

  Ryan gets an intent look, not quite like any I’ve seen before. His draws his hand away from my cheek and instead tucks it under my hair, and I’m pulled to him like I was pulled to the Door yesterday. I’m drawn to him like I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to, and I move until I’m almost lying on top of him, and we’re breathing the same air.

  We’re breathing the same air and then our mouths are touching. His mouth is hot, and his jaw is just as scratchy as I thought it would be. Where he rubs up against me, I know I’m going to be red.

  His lips are soft. I usually think they’re hard, maybe because he’s always pressing them together. Maybe because the first time we kissed they were. I moan a little—I don’t mean to, but my body is on fire—and I press against him harder, moving so I’m straddling him and he’s on his back. I move my hands to his shoulders, like to hold him down, but he’s got both hands in my hair—he’s not going anywhere.

  He licks at my lips, and I open my mouth. He tastes like dark, strong, black coffee. No sugar. He tastes like heat and passion, he tastes like everything I’ve ever wanted and nothing I’ve ever had.

  “Please,” I say into his mouth. “Please.” I don’t know what I’m asking for, but he must, because he sits us both up with me straddling his lap. He strips off his t-shirt, then he strips off my T-shirt. He brushes his thumbs across the silver scar on my stomach, and it’s numb and tingly and embarrassing and amazing, all at once. His hands drift around and he runs his fingers up my spine—I shiver.

  He takes a moment to very carefully remove my bra, and he lets out a breath when he sees my bare breasts. I think hysterically that I hope Roxie isn’t around, because I’m not into giving a show.

  When Ryan pulls me back down, my nipples press against his chest, his scars, and I moan again. His mouth captures mine, and he rolls us over until he’s settled between my legs.

  “Yes,” he says tightly, and his hips buck into mine. He’s hard, I can feel it through his leather pants, against my jeans, hitting me right where I want him—where I need him to be.

  “Yes,” I repeat, and get my hand between us. His pants are all buttons, and I fumble and swear. He laughs breathlessly. The leather is tight, and uncomfortable to me; I can only imagine how uncomfortable they are to him. He raises himself up on one hand above me and unbuttons his pants. He’s not wearing anything underneath. Jesus. I never was good at keeping my hands to myself—he’s hot and hard, and I just want to taste him, but he doesn’t let me. When I struggle to move, he gets his hand between us, and unzips my jeans. I push him off, and wriggle out of them, pulling my plai
n white underpants—work underpants, not what I would have worn if I’d thought this might happen—down too.

  When I look up, he’s standing, totally naked. How he got out of his pants and boots so quickly, I have no idea, but he has, and he’s standing there and staring at me like I’m everything he’s ever wanted and couldn’t have. His fingers are digging into his palms, and he’s breathing like he’s running a marathon.

  “God,” I say. “I can’t even.”

  “Me either,” he replies roughly, and kneels beside me. His movements are smooth, unhindered by any old injuries. I can’t imagine . . . he’s fought demons for so long, and despite his scars—mental, physical, whatever—he’s relatively unscathed. And he’s hard. And I really really just want to lick him all over.

  “I just want to lick you all over,” I say, and he shudders, and that’s hot too, because, god, what is sexier than being wanted? I never knew.

  “Jesus, Allie, you . . .” He’s too far away for me to touch. I kind of want to cover up, because the scars that are so sexy on him just make me feel exposed. All my flaws for him to see under the stark light.

  But his eyes are hot, pupils dilated, and suddenly he looks young, and wolfish, and—

  He leans over me, his arms to either side, and his breath touches the skin of my belly as he gets close, so close. “I’m going to touch you,” he says, and his voice is low and deep and I can feel it all up and down my skin, up to my breasts and down to my clit and I can’t help but move my hips to the sound of him. “I’m going to know every part of you,” he says, and it sounds like a threat; it sounds like a promise. My breath catches in my throat.