Salt and Silver

by Anna Katherine

  Though for a Hell, it is awfully empty. What kind of demons does Roxie get, anyway? I wonder about her scars.

  Ryan pauses; beside the path is an outcropping, a bare expanse of stone that the wind has scoured of sand and ash. There’s a cliff face along one side of it—Ryan heads toward that, and sets Stan down. Ryan wraps his coat more tightly around himself, then beckons to me.

  “Here,” he says, except with the Egyptian woman’s voice. He pulls an old, worn-down crayon out of his pocket and hands it over to me. I did not know that there was a crayon color called flesh. Dammit, Ryan, stop being weird.

  I want to say that out loud. Want want want. I can’t seem to talk. Egyptian Woman says, “Draw a circle. Drop your blood. Protect this space.”

  The crayon—it’s more peach than flesh, and not everyone has flesh this color anyway, oh my god, thank you very much—is almost too light to see on the red rock. Whatever. I draw a kind of lumpy oval along the entire bluff, because who wants to be cramped? I have to pull Stan away from the cliff face first, and he thuds over sideways in a way that is almost totally funny. When it’s done Ryan waves Roxie and Christian into the center with him, and I drag Stan over to their feet. I look for a knife to stab my finger with. I am going to be so sore after this—

  I am looking for Jackson’s knife, because his was the cleanest. Dammit.

  Roxie holds out her big knife, which I have seen her slice nasty things with and not clean. I shake my head and pull Ryan’s knife out of my belt loop.

  I nick my thumb and let my blood drop onto the ground. Who cares if I get staph? I’m already in Hell.

  The second my blood hits the ground, my voice comes back with a vengeance. I almost choke on the words I want to be saying—how dare Hell or Kur or whatever take the ability to talk from me? Fuck them—but I know that what I say first is probably important. “You know me,” I say again, and the flesh crayon sparks, and I hear whispers, whispers.

  Allie.

  Hello, Allie.

  We know you.

  We’re waiting.

  Allie.

  Allie.

  There are so many Doors. So many. They’re everywhere. The loudest one is still against the fiery mountain, which suddenly looks a lot closer, so I think that’s still where we have to go. But—how many Doors, to how many Hells, are there?

  Here is the bigger thing I am worried about now: I’ve only dropped a little of my blood here, and I’m being serenaded by Doors. I’ve got a lot more still to do. When does it become too much? And what happens if it does?

  Whatever freed my voice frees up everyone else too. Ryan says, with his own voice, “Ereshkigal might visit. We’ll need to keep a lookout.” Roxie snorts, and then sits cross-legged away from the rest of us to look at the mountain we’re heading toward. She rubs her knee with one hand, and I wonder how old she is.

  Christian goes and sits nearest the path, and faces where we came from. The spider clicks and clicks and clicks. The spider has been clicking for hours, and it’s getting on my nerves, but it must be upset because Jackson is dead.

  Ryan stays and sits with me, and Stan, in the middle.

  “If Jackson were alive,” I ask out loud, “what would I see?”

  Ryan glares at me, and Christian’s spider clicks some more, but Roxie shrugs without turning around. “I’ve never been in a Door with him. Hell, chère, I’ve never been in a Door with me. I didn’t know I was a serpent.”

  I address Ryan. “Ry, you knew about the women, right?”

  “No,” he says. The women have spread out to either side of him, and the lioness is standing erect behind him, staring at me over his shoulder.

  “Who are they?” I ask.

  He frowns, but before he can talk, Roxie laughs low. “I know Isis,” she says. She looks over her shoulder at us. Her snakes hiss. “Underworld, saves her husband. Goddess of magic. Everyone knows Isis.”

  Egyptian Woman—Isis—smiles. It’s creepy.

  I totally ignore her. “Who’s the other one? What’s with the wings?”

  She smiles at me too, and it’s even creepier than Isis.

  Roxie stares at Ryan, squinting. “Ishtar?” she offers. When Ryan smiles at us, it’s with the two women smiling beside him, and the lioness opening her mouth.

  Okay, yes, creepy.

  “You’re creepy and it’s scaring me.”

  “Ištar.” It sounds different when Ryan says it, there’s a slither, there’s death. “And not Isis. sat.” It sounds almost exactly the same. Plus one point for having his avatar be three women goddesses, minus a million points for being a jerk.

  “Okay, whatever,” I say. “And the lioness?”

  Roxie shrugs. “Got me.”

  Ryan turns and looks at the lioness for a minute. When he turns back to me, he changes the subject. “I think Stan won’t wake up,” he says.

  Stan mumbles, “Don’t wanna.”

  He’s alive! But he’s got a demon in him. I am very torn. Ryan bends over and tugs Stan’s kerchief into a roll, up and over Stan’s eyes. Ryan looks at me. “Don’t let him see any of this, Allie.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so, dammit.” He looks tired, and not like he’s my age at all. He rubs his face and tries again. “Sorry,” he says. “He can’t see where he is, because he won’t be the only one looking. The werewolf is inside him now—it’ll see Kur, and worse, the things in Kur will see it. They’ll track him here.”

  Ryan stands. He pulls at his Stetson’s brim, half-hiding his face, and he walks over to Christian.

  I look down. Stan’s trying to sit up. In a slurred voice, he says, “Allie, what the fuck . . . ?” He reaches

  up to the kerchief, and I yank his hand away.

  “Hi, Stan. Don’t touch that.”

  “But I can’t see,” he whines.

  “I know,” I say. “But it sucks to be seeing things right now, anyway. Just listen to me, okay? Okay?” He nods finally, and I lean him up against me. I put my nose in his hair. He smells like cigarettes and glitter. “What do you last remember?”

  I can feel him make a face against my shoulder. “I was coming home. No—I was coming to the diner. I just had an amazing time with Matt—did I tell you about Matt?”

  “No,” I say.

  He sounds almost shy. “I met him a couple weeks ago. He’s so great, Allie, he’s like—remember when we were kids and we used to describe who we wanted to marry? He’s like the guy I always wanted to marry.”

  I always wanted to marry someone handsome and rich. Amanda wanted to marry someone exciting and famous. Stan, of course, wanted true love. I don’t remember much more than that, because I’m a terrible friend.

  I stroke Stan’s hair.

  “Tell me about him,” I suggest, and try not to make it an actual suggestion, but just the kind of thing one friend might say to another.

  “He’s got these eyes, Allie, and he can dance. He likes the same music I do, the club stuff, but he also likes classical. He plays the piano. His hands . . .” Stan trails off and makes a snuffling noise into my neck. I start to cry. Because here is my friend, one of my best friends, and he’s dying. He’s dying and there’s nothing I can do. He doesn’t have an avatar. He smells like he belongs here. And his arm has stopped glowing. There’s not even a pinprick where the werewolf bit him. It’s all in him now.

  So as he tells me about Matt, I cry, because there’s no way. There’s no way anything is going to be able to fix this.

  “And then there was a weird buzzing, Allie, like you know how my ears got when we tried that amyl nitrate?”

  “Nitrite,” I correct automatically. I sniff and try to dry my eyes with the sleeve of the leather duster. Not exactly what it was made for. “Yeah, I remember.”

  That’s what they sound like—buzzing, like flies or bees or anything with really fast-moving wings. Demons seem to love taking on the forms of insects, the kinds of insects that have been pestering humans for thousands of years. It
’s the perfect disguise, isn’t it?

  “The buzzing . . .” Stan trails off and curls into me tighter. “Matt was buzzing, Allie. And then he scratched me with his fingernail, and then I was buzzing, and I don’t remember—there was this guy in a leather coat, and he brought me to you.”

  “That’s Ryan,” I tell Stan. God, he doesn’t even remember Ryan. I can’t even.

  “Is Ryan your boyfriend?” Stan’s going for light-hearted, but he sounds like he knows something’s wrong. I doubt he knows he’s going to have to die or turn into a demon, a buzzing insect parasite of a demon who’d kill me as soon as he’d look at me.

  I doubt Stan knows that, but he’s got to know that something is really really wrong.

  “Yeah, Ryan’s my boyfriend,” I say into Stan’s hair.

  “Hey, go you,” Stan says, and I think he’s actually happy for me. Even with all of this, he’s happy for me. God, I am such a bitch.

  I hear a chuckle, and when I look, there’s Ryan, squatting next to me. “I prefer ‘significant other’,” he says seriously. “ ‘Boyfriend’ is so trite.”

  I laugh and laugh until I cry again, and then I’m leaning against Ryan and sobbing into his fucking coat, because my best friend is going to die and it’s my goddamn fault. Jackson died and it’s my fault. Everything sucks, we’re in Hell, and the world feels like it’s ending, and it’s all my fault.

  Stan goes to sleep. I do too. Maybe it is not wise to sleep in Hell. With a transitioning werewolf. In the freezing cold.

  Maybe I don’t care.

  The light never changes. The ash-snow hits the edges of my circle and swirls in little dances. I close my eyes. The last thing I see is Roxie, rubbing her knee. The last thing I feel is a light touch against my hair.

  When I wake, it is because there is someone talking really, really loudly.

  When I open my eyes, there is a fucking snake-faced dragon slithering its way through the black sky above us.

  Stan says, “What the hell is that?” and he tries to pull the kerchief down again. I put my hand over the kerchief, and press the cloth against his eyes.

  “I will tell you really soon,” I say, and I hope it is not a lie.

  Rites! the dragon is screaming. There are rites to be performed in the netherworld!

  “Stand back!” Roxie says. She is standing at the edge of our bluff, her knives out, her scars like snakes burning bright and silver. She flexes, her weight balanced, and her grin is wide and fierce.

  Christian moves slowly, but he ignores Roxie and gets into a support position behind her, his spider crouching, spread-legged, poised for the catch.

  Ryan doesn’t move to support. Instead, he comes to me, and I don’t know why—and then I remember what Roxie said before, about grouping the blood kids together.

  “I know,” I say angrily. “Take him.” I help Stan up and thrust him at Ryan. Ryan grabs Stan clumsily. Stan clutches Ryan’s lamia coat and murmurs something I bet Matt would really love, and Ryan’s expression is nothing, nothing.

  Fuck him.

  Shit, I did that already.

  Rites! The dragon is slithering its way through the sky, a beacon of angry muscle and scales that swims through eddies like an eel through water. It’s coming closer.

  Ryan turns away from me and drags Stan along with him. “Are you Ereshkigal?” he shouts to the snake. Great. Roxie doesn’t turn away from the dragon coming toward us, but her snakes all turn and shriek at him in a way I never, ever want to hear again. At any rate, the dragon doesn’t answer. “Are you Neti?” he tries again, because he is made of stupid.

  The dragon’s mouth is the size of five of me, stacked head to foot. I know this because it has just opened that mouth and I can see exactly where I’d fit in it.

  Ryan is shouting more things, this time in a language that must be Sumerian. The dragon is shaking its head, and coming closer. Roxie’s knives are glinting. She’s going to step over the circle. Christian just looks up, his hands bare, waiting.

  And then there’s me.

  I am a girl who runs a diner. It’s not even my diner. I slept with a guy I’ve wanted for years, and right now all he wants me for is blood magic. One of my best friends is going to die unless we can fix him in Hell. I don’t know where my other best friend is, and whether to be grateful that her hiding out from me means that maybe she won’t die today.

  There is a dragon above me, and I can smell its anger. But I am angry too, damn it.

  Allie.

  It’s just a whisper. But it’s a whisper I know.

  It’s the Door across the mountain.

  Allie. Is there something you need, Allie?

  The dragon reaches us. It balances in the air in front of Roxie. As it opens its mouth, Roxie screams and jumps at it, cutting at the dragon’s eyes and snout. She gets one slice, along the edge of its mouth; boiling blood spills over the rocks and runs perilously close to our feet.

  The dragon screeches, losing speech, and Roxie tumbles back onto the bluff, breathing hard. The cut on the dragon closes as if it had never been.

  Is there something you would like, Allie?

  There is only one thought now: Out out outoutout—Done, the Door whispers, and the mountains fold around us, and the whispering Door opens beside me, and I grab Stan from Ryan’s arms and push him through. Ryan is staring at me, and he looks—whatever, he can be disappointed in me later, after we are alive and somewhere else. Ištar, the woman with wings and stars, puts her hand on his shoulder and he nods abruptly and turns to get Christian.

  I turn and jump through.

  11

  The fiery mountains weren’t where the Door was, it turns out. It’s the Door that has them.

  I pop out on the edge of a crater. Sand and smoke and heat, a lot of heat, and I am already sweating. A belch of steam comes out of the crater, and it is loud. Stan calls out, “If nobody tells me what is going on, I’m gonna take off this stupid blindfold.”

  “It is a bandanna,” I say loudly. “And don’t do that. I’m here.” I turn in circles—I see two, four, six immense cones of black stone rising from dark waters in the distance, and I’m standing on the summit of the seventh—and Stan has crawled away from the Door and is, I kid you not, like five steps away from tumbling into the gigantic crater and into a pit of lava many, many feet down.

  I skip around the Door and pull him away from the edge. “There is a giant pit of lava to your right, FYI,” I say to him. “Do not fall into it.”

  “Sure,” he huffs. “Where’s Ryan?”

  That is a good question. Pop. I look. There’s Christian, and his creepy spider. Pop. And there’s Ryan and his women. sat looks around, dizzying, and stops when she sees me. Ryan doesn’t look at me, but keeps his eyes on the Door.

  One minute. Two. And then Roxie pops out, and she’s got a brand new cut on her. Ryan finally looks at me, and nods like I’m a soldier. Whatever. I know my place. I poke Christian until he gives me a knife, and I cut the pad of my other thumb. “You know me,” I say, and the Doors light up—they literally light up. When I close my eyes, I can see a map of Doors, each Door a different color light. I didn’t know there were that many colors in the world.

  Maybe there aren’t. Maybe there are just that many colors in Hell.

  I can hear some of them laughing.

  The loudest one is a Door on the closest cone-island. Only about a day’s walk, maybe, except for the part where there’s all that water between us and it. I point. The others sigh.

  Steam bursts from below again, and the sound blocks out everything else for a moment. It is not the best place for talking, but Ryan turns to me. “What did you do?”

  He asked me that—what, yesterday morning? He sounded so different then. More worried, less . . . whatever this is. “We were going to be dragon meat,” I say. “The Door offered something different.”

  “Idiot,” Roxie snarls. Her hand is pressed up against her side, where blood is leaking out of a long, wide, shallow
cut—a tooth that missed its mark. Her snakes are coursing over it, their silver tongues licking out, and I can see the cut growing slowly smaller. “I had it,” Roxie says.

  “Bull,” I say. “It was a million times our size and a dragon.”

  “What do you think I fight?” she says angrily, and stalks away, heading down the black island.

  “She fights elementals,” Christian says to me—no, his spider says it, clicks and hisses. “She fights the giant things with no names, that come from the snow and wind.”

  Excuse me, but I am under the impression that I just named it by calling it a dragon.

  I do not say that out loud.

  I turn to Ryan, and he nods. “She would’ve stopped it.”

  “I—” I just can’t.

  Christian turns without a word and heads after Roxie. Hell has not improved him.

  Ryan says, “Stan, can you walk?”

  “Yeah,” says Stan, and he stands carefully and holds out his hand. Ryan takes it, and he looks at me.

  “You won’t need your bandanna here,” he says quietly. “We’re not following the Sumerian Hells. This is something different. Keep your eyes open.”

  And he carefully leads Stan away.

  I am concerned about how we’re going to get to that other island.

  The others don’t seem to be, though. It was an easy climb down—just walk, and avoid the gushes of lava that come from random breaks in the cone, and hate everyone around me. Very easy. I wish I had a Snickers. I’m not the biggest fan of candy, but I feel weird, dizzy.

  At the bottom now, on a shore with no sand, just ugly lumps of what must be cooled lava reaching into the water, they turn and look at my expectantly. Even Stan, and he can’t even see.

  I pull the flesh crayon from my pocket. There isn’t actually much of it left. I hope Ryan has another crayon with another gross name, because otherwise we are going to be out of luck. I refuse to draw smaller circles.

  This is because I am stubborn, and possibly stupid. As has been demonstrated. I am living up to my peers’ suspicions and expectations.