Salt and Silver

by Anna Katherine

  So now I feel like shit.

  I climb into the boat, careful to make sure it doesn’t rock, and that I don’t touch the water. I’m not sure if it sizzled because it’s cold and it hit something hot, or for another reason. Whatever the reason, I don’t want to touch the water.

  I help Roxie hoist Stan into the boat, and Ryan jumps in, with, of course, a minimum of rocking and splashing. Does he do everything perfectly on the first try? I would hate him for that, except it’s too impressive.

  The boat moves quickly across the water.

  “Do you think this is, like, the Egyptian Hell dimension and we have to put coins under our tongues or something?”

  Roxie snickers. “Where you been learning this stuff?” she asks me. “That’s not how it works at all.”

  “Greek?” I guess.

  Roxie shakes her head. She’s got her hat in her lap, so I can see her hair. Her hair is cropped close to her head, but where it’s growing out, it’s curly, really curly, the way I always wished my hair would be. But my hair is plain brown, not endless black like hers, and it’s totally straight. It’s got a little bit of body, but it’s totally straight.

  “I don’t know where we are. I mean, I’m not sure.” She looks over at Ryan. He shakes his head. Stan is leaning on him, sleeping again.

  “He should be a werewolf by now, shouldn’t he?” I ask.

  “Yeah, he should.” Ryan’s back to grim again. “I don’t know why he’s not. Maybe something in the underworlds is keeping him from turning completely. Most likely it’s just slowing it down.”

  I reach out my hand to touch Stan’s werewolf bite. The glow is still there, and a bruise, like the way he looked when he was shooting up heroin. I tell Ryan and Roxie, and then I say, “That’s why he stopped, you know? Did you know that?”

  Roxie’s got an arm around me now. I’m on my knees in the boat. “He stopped doing heroin because he hated the way his arm looked all the time.” I sniff a little, and try to keep from crying. “He’s such a vain fuck.”

  Roxie and Ryan don’t say anything. I wish it was Ryan’s arm around me. It’s not fair that it’s not.

  I turn, and look over the side of the boat. I can see Ryan’s women in the water, and Roxie’s snakes sometimes. One of the snakes twists and hisses at me, and I jerk back.

  Hey, if I can see them and their avatars, I bet I can see me and mine. I tilt myself further over the side, and I see—

  Blue. Blue light, in dashing fires that sling around me. A pair of ghostly wings rise up behind my back. I suck in a breath, and, I am totally not kidding, one of the little blue fires comes zipping up and into my mouth. I open my mouth and stick out my tongue—it’s right there, bobbing. I let out my breath—the fire goes zipping away again.

  Roxie suddenly hauls me backwards toward the center of the boat. “Play dress-up later,” she says.

  I scowl at her. “I’m blue,” I say loudly.

  “Shh,” she and Ryan chorus. They sure agree when they’re chastising me, even if they don’t agree on anything else. What a pain in the ass.

  I sit down in a corner of the boat, opposite Christian, and stare at his spider. It’s not an ugly spider, I guess, as spiders go. I don’t know—I am not a spider expert. It’s a black spider, with long legs, and beady eyes, and I swear it’s staring back at me, and it’s fucking creepy as these Hells. Christian’s eyes are kind of melting into its eyes, and his legs are kind of melting into its legs, and I don’t like what I’m seeing at all.

  Because I think what I’m seeing is someone actually turning into a demon before my very eyes. Like, I think he is literally turning into a demon.

  I put my head down on my knees so that I don’t have to look at anything anymore. With my face this close to the boat, I have realized a new and horrible thing: The boat is made of blood. It is not some kind of varnish. It smells like human blood.

  I lift my head, but I sniff a little deeper. I smell Stan. He smells different now. Like something stronger is crowding out the things that make him Stan. The stale makeup is gone entirely—there’s a little bit of the stale sex left. Mostly what’s left of Stan are those endless summer sunsets when I watched him practice the ollie over and over again on his skateboard until he got it right, talking shit and maybe wishing I wasn’t too worried about chipping my nails to do something that looked so purely fun.

  That’s what’s left of Stan.

  The rest of him is . . . it chitters in my mind, and it smells like death. I am starting to think I am not doing this “smelling” thing entirely with my nose.

  I don’t think there’s any saving him—but I’m not going to give up on him. If there’s a way to save him in these stupid underworlds, I am going to find it.

  Maybe when we sleep next, sat will come visit me and tell me how to save Stan. Or what the blue stuff all around me is.

  Wings are cool, though. I dig the wings.

  The boat bumps up against the lava rocks. I stand up and turn around—I can’t see where we came from anymore, but when I close my eyes, I can see the Door, glowing a little, but it’s really far off in the distance. It makes me think of sitting on the roof of the diner, facing Manhattan. Amanda and Stan and I did that a few times together, stared out at the skyline. Without the Twin Towers there, Manhattan could be any city, except for the bridges. But from the diner, the bridges are blurry, fuzzy, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for you can’t see them.

  That’s what it’s like, looking at the Door across the water with my eyes shut.

  “Come on, Allie,” says Ryan. He’s standing on the rocks, and he lifts his arms to help me down. I let him take all my weight, and he swings me over the side of the boat like I’m weightless, his hands tight under my arms. My duster flaps around me, and I hope it looks awesome.

  I’m unsteady on the lava rocks when I land, and Ryan has to help Stan out of the boat too.

  Stan rubs at his temples, where the kerchief touches. “I’m really hungry,” he whines. “I am really hungry, Allie.”

  Roxie catches my eye and gives me a look, like the kind she gives Ryan, moving her eyebrows and everything. I completely understand what she’s not saying: Stan is not human anymore, and we should kill him.

  I shake my head a little, the slightest nod no. She lifts one shoulder and lets it drop, then turns away. She’s saying: It’s your funeral.

  Christian is clicking away, standing by the Door. This one glows brown. It’s an old, weathered door, like the way my Door was when it first opened. I miss my Door, kind of, but not really. But it was kind of pretty, in a disgusting, scary way. The high arch of the top, the wrought iron fence inside with nothing behind it, just darkness and, sometimes, demons.

  I don’t even have to look at him; Ryan hands me his obsidian knife, and I slice another finger, drip my blood at the bottom of the Door. “You know me,” I say softly. “You know me.”

  Allie. The Door flares a brighter brown, turns almost yellow, or orange, and I have to squint. I look behind me at Ryan. His hands are in fists. He’s not squinting. I pass him back the knife.

  “Ooh, hello,” says Stan. He’s stumbled over to the Door and pressed his hand to the wooden frame. “Hello,” he says again.

  “What the fuck?” says Roxie. She pushes back her duster and puts a hand on her sword.

  “Don’t,” I say. “Don’t.” I pull Stan away from the Door. He whimpers. I pat his hair around the bandanna. Somehow, even through all this, glitter gets on my hand.

  I can still smell the summer.

  “I can’t just give up,” I tell the others briskly, and slide away from Roxie’s disgust and Ryan’s disapproval and Christian’s half-step toward us. “Come on, Stan, through the Door.”

  12

  I would like to think that I accomplished something really important by my decisive actions. Point one: No one messes with my posse. Even with the semi-demonic ones. This is because I am determined, which is another word for stubborn, which is anothe
r word, sometimes, for stupid.

  Here is the other point, the second thing I have accomplished by heading through the Door with Stan, my head held high: I have just marched, unprotected, into an unknown Hell.

  Stan’s ahead of me, and I don’t realize my mistake at first. I mean, the other time I did it, it wasn’t so bad—just a bunch of lava-filled craters to accidentally fall into. At least there was light. In this Hell, we’re in the dark, and it’s a small space, like a closet. I can hear my and Stan’s breathing bouncing off walls, damp walls, that are really nearby. I can’t see a thing, though—which now that I’m experiencing it, gives me a new appreciation for what Stan’s going through, being blindfolded in Hell. I mean, I am in Hell. I can’t see. There could be anything in the dark.

  I’m breathing hard. The sound echoes. Stan says, almost normal, “So what’s this one like?”

  “Um,” I say. I am hoping that the others come through quickly. I would really like to get some kind of light in here, even if it’s the light of Doors showing up in my mind’s eye.

  For a second, I think that maybe I thought that, you know, in the thinky Door voice that makes things happen, because suddenly I do sense a light. I look up. It’s green, the color of glowsticks. I am not sure whether this is a good development, but on the other hand, I am really grateful for the light.

  Until it starts to move.

  From the light I can see that the Door opened into a crevice, and the crevice has a chimney of rock leading in a diagonal up. And crawling down, closer and closer, is . . . Have you ever seen a pill bug up close? Cute name for something with no face, over a dozen stumpy, reticulated legs, wet-looking armor plating that slides in and out of itself as it crawls over rocks and feels forward with its long, twitching antennae.

  Now imagine it big. And out of every chink in its plating comes a green glow.

  It’s close now. Directly above our heads. It’s stopped moving.

  And now, the light goes out.

  The darkness closes in on me, darker than before because now I know what’s out there. The bug suddenly lights again, and just as quickly goes out. And again. And again.

  In the distance, high above us, I see another glow. And it’s bringing friends.

  I blink hard. My vision is shot. I don’t need my eyes for this, though: I very carefully, very slowly, reach under my coat and unwrap the cold-iron chain from around my waist.

  “Stan,” I say quietly. The bug above us doesn’t move to my voice, though I think it twitches when the air moves a little near it. “Stan, I need you to sit down, okay?” He doesn’t answer. “Okay?”

  “Is it bad, Allie?” he whispers.

  “It’s going to be,” I say. I run my hand along the chain until I get to the end. The two ends feel solid in my palms, and I fold the chain together so I’m holding a solid loop of pain for any demon that gets near. Silver heals, salt binds, iron kills. Which is good, because there are now four bugs above us, and I count three more above them.

  Stan sits. And I lift the chain up and wait for one of them to get too close.

  The Door suddenly flares open, blinding me again, and Roxie comes through.

  “You all right, chère?” she calls. She can’t see a thing either.

  “I am right here,” I say quietly. “Please watch out for Stan on the floor, and the monsters up and to the right of us.”

  I hear Roxie shift abruptly, and someone’s knife hitting the rocks—I see a spark—

  I wish Roxie could use the sword, since it is big and impressive and I’m pretty sure magical, but I guess a small space is not the best place to use a long-reach weapon. The dark is back, and the bugs have gone black.

  Roxie doesn’t say a word. I am glad she believes me. I wish she’d say something about where Ryan and Christian are. Or just Ryan.

  The first pill bug glows again. Then they all do—seven of them. They pulse, off-rhythm. Roxie inhales. The bugs start advancing, crawling down the walls, surrounding us.

  The Door opens. “Goddammit,” I say out loud, because I just want this done. I wish I was enough of a bitch to have snuck a crossbow into Hell, even if it would’ve screwed our chances with the Door-hounds or whatever. Then I could have pegged off the monsters with, I don’t know, my sudden preternatural ability to aim stuff, and actually been happy about seeing Ryan and Christian alive.

  Well, alive for the moment, anyway. We’re all silent. The Door is dark. We’re working blind. Ryan says, “What’s—” before Roxie says, “Demons above us,” and they all shift and pull out weapons and wait.

  It stays dark for a long time. Long enough that I wonder if the Door scared them off. I hope.

  The bugs flare in unison, like the flash-bang magics an old hunter once showed me, fire and sulphur and a bang you hear in your soul instead of your ears. I squint through the spots in my vision—the bugs are moving. And they’re moving fast.

  Their glow is fading—I don’t think they want to show off their position. The first one to reach us rears up, clinging half on the wall for just long enough to take aim and launch itself at Roxie. Roxie grunts and I can hear her under her breath say “ew ew ew ew ew”—and I hear a crunching noise as she rips the bug off her and throws it at the wall. There’s another crunching noise. I am impressed by her aim.

  Something touches my hair.

  I remember the nights at the diner when we were bored, and the Door was quiet, and Ryan would show me different ways to kill things. I remember this instead of screaming. I twist away from the bug and I swing my looped chain down on the wall where I felt the thing. I hit the top of something, but instead of the nice crunching like Roxie had, the bug just comes loose of the wall and hits the ground. By my feet. By Stan.

  I lift my heel and stomp.

  Now there is a crunching noise. I lift my foot, and there’s a tiny glow beneath me: I hit the glowy goo bits.

  I turn around to keep my back to the wall again, and wait. In the midst of shuffling footsteps and the quick turns of leather moving, I hear a sharp clang, someone’s knife on stone, a hard brush against my hand, and then the crunch we’re all waiting for. It’s all quiet for a moment. And then Ryan saying, “How many?”

  Roxie says, “Three.”

  Christian clicks. But he does it once, so I’m figuring that’s his count.

  “One,” I say.

  “Really?” Roxie says.

  “Shut up, yes.”

  “And I got two,” says Ryan. People were apparently busy while I was squishing things. “That all of them?”

  “I think so,” I say. I lift my foot. A tiny bit of glow. “But I have an idea,” I say.

  When you open demonic pill bugs, you get to their glow. When you dip something like, say, the tip of Ryan’s obsidian knife before he’s noticed what you’re doing, you can get enough of a light to see about a foot. Though it rubs off really easily, which is the only reason why Ryan will talk to me ever again.

  Roxie sticks her hand into the demon and then lifts her fist, dripping—she scans the walls. “Nothing,” she says. “I think we’ve got them for now.”

  “That is really gross,” I say.

  “Grow up,” she says, but she smiles at me, so I think I still win points for holding my own in the fight. She nods. “You should do the spell. Then we can get some rocks, light ‘em up, get out of here.”

  I reach for Ryan’s knife, then realize: It is covered in bug guts. He raises his eyebrows in the way that means You are the one who put the knife in demon goo. I scowl and stick my hand out for Roxie’s. She laughs, and gives me the one that isn’t dulled. Roxie was the one whose knife hit the wall.

  I slice my finger—this is really starting to hurt a lot, maybe I should start using my arm instead?—and drop the blood, say the words. Doors light up.

  And up. “Sorry, everybody,” I say. “Everything’s thataway.” I point. At the very least, we’re going to have to shimmy up the rock chimney to get anywhere near the next Door.

  Christi
an’s feeling around with his spider legs, and pushing rocks over near the open dead bug. He is helpful. I feel sorry he’s turning into a demon.

  I kneel and start dipping rocks into the goo, and as Christian starts doing the same, that’s when I see that I’ve got a cut on the back of my hand. It’s small, just a chunk of skin torn away down to the blood. It could be from a flying chip of rock from where Roxie’s knife cut into the side of the crevasse, or it could be from the bug.

  I swallow. “I need silver, oh my god,” I say, and Ryan looks over at me from where he’s cleaning off the knife again on his shirt.

  “I—” He stops and clears his throat. “We have nothing to melt it with, nothing to melt it in.”

  “Didn’t anyone bring a lighter?” I demand, and Roxie shakes her head.

  “Even if we had brought one, chère, it wouldn’t get hot enough. And there’s no place to start a fire and magic it hotter.” She swings her arm out, indicating the crevasse we’re in. The rock—now that there’s more, steadier light, it looks like sandstone, maybe, or something else that’s kind of soft and weird looking. What is it called? Sedimentary rock, right? That’s the kind that builds on itself until it has so many layers and is really tall.

  I take a deep breath and close my eyes. The demon goo stinks, and Christian’s still dipping more and more. The light’s getting brighter. And I’ve got a cut on my hand.

  I can’t tell if it’s green from the light of the goo, or green from—

  “Okay, I guess we just have to wait to see if I am infected with demon.” I am nowhere near as calm as I sound.

  Ryan takes my hand and stares down at it. His hat covers his whole face. I can’t see what he’s thinking.

  “You could ask the Door,” he finally says. What? Is he seriously suggesting I ask a Door for something? Who is this stranger?

  On this side of the Door, it is a cave into rocks, and it glows a greyish silver. It looks sluggish, like it doesn’t get a lot of use. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s lonely, like all the other Doors here. Like Owen’s Door in the hospital. Maybe it just wants someone to love it.