Salt and Silver

by Anna Katherine

  “Kind of like that, yeah,” says Ryan.

  “But a golem,” says Roxie tiredly. “Every once in a while, we’ve got to kill a golem.”

  “Golems?”

  “It’s not really a zombie.” Ryan shakes his head. “It’s a man, made out of mud, and in its mouth it has a piece of paper with the Hebrew name of God on it. Or sometimes it works with a piece of paper that says ‘life’.”

  “So if I built a golem, it could go on a rampage and, like, destroy the city and eat everyone’s brains?”

  “They don’t eat brains.” Ryan pauses. “They can be violent, though.”

  “Now that the Kabbala is everywhere, more people are building golem,” Roxie says. “They’re considered elementals because they’re made of the earth.” She stumbles, but catches herself before I can catch her. Not like I’d be a lot of help; we’d probably both fall down. But it’s the thought that counts, right? “Williamsburg had an infestation a couple of years ago, back when it was mostly a Jewish neighborhood. A lot of Hasidic Jews study the Kabbala, and it’s always some obnoxious teenager looking to prove that he doesn’t have to be over forty to study it.”

  “Is that, like, a law? Because I can really see Amanda making some golems and setting them loose. Honestly, an army doing her every bidding? Maybe that’s why she’s not answering the phone.”

  Ryan frowns at me. “Amanda isn’t smart enough to build an army of golem.”

  “Amanda,” I counter, “was smart enough to open a Door.”

  “Amanda wouldn’t get her hands dirty enough to build men out of mud,” Ryan amends. “And it’s just a guideline.” Ryan quietly, unobtrusively, pushes me toward the wall so he can walk next to Roxie. There’s no way she could knock him down, so I’m definitely in support of this plan. “Like people who are over forty never do stupid shit like make golem and set them loose.”

  But I’m not really listening anymore, because I hear something: the shushing again. There’s a corner in front of us, a sharp turn to the left.

  If it is another lamia, I am going to kill it.

  We round the corner, and it’s not a lamia, thank god.

  It is a corridor with a thousand glowing Doors, marching on either side to infinity, or something equally poetic. Whatever. I am unimpressed.

  Really? one of them says.

  What would impress you, Allie? another one says.

  We could give it to you, says another.

  Oh shit.

  “We’ve got problems,” I say.

  “Figures,” Ryan grinds out. He’s staring at something I can’t see, and his nails are digging into his palms. “Is the Door we need nearby?”

  We could bring you to it, says the Door to my right, ever so helpfully.

  I roll my eyes. Doors unleash horrible, scary demons, and I guess they can manipulate your emotions and trap you in them, but really?

  I am realizing that when they’re just talking to you, a lot of Doors are kind of whiny.

  I turn to say as much to everybody else, kind of reassure them that everything’s going to be okay, but—um, maybe everything is not going to be okay. Ryan is swaying in place, muttering “Not real,” over and over. Christian has taken off his baseball cap and is holding it out toward the Door on the left. Roxie is playing with her knives, and not in a reassuring way. Stan is actually about to touch a Door.

  I yell “Stop!” and because I am an idiot, I think it too.

  Everything pauses, everybody stuck in place. Only the avatars are moving still, and they are looking at me with weird expressions. The Door next to me says, We are glad we could do that for you.

  Oh my god, I am tired of this bullshit. I look around. Up ahead is a Door that looks a bit off. I march up to it. It looks the same as the others—almost—but it smells really different. “Hi,” I say.

  Hello, Allie.

  I go back to the group, and one by one drag them over to the Door. When I’ve got them lined up as close as I can, I think to the Doors, Go.

  Everyone gets unstuck, like a wax museum come to life. And I shove them all as hard as I can through the Door—it doesn’t even want my blood, it just wanted me—and follow immediately after.

  15

  My knees go out from under me, and I’m face down. At first I think I’ve fallen off a ledge.

  All I can hear is crying and screaming. Under me is garbage, trash, it’s disgusting, and I can smell it because my face is in it. The whole dimension smells of it.

  Under the garbage are people, and they are people, and they are screaming, and in front of me is a semyazza, and I start screaming, just like the people under the garbage.

  The people are naked and writhing, and I crawl as fast as I can backwards, backwards right into Ryan, screaming.

  I will never say “if I’m lucky” ever fucking again.

  The lioness leaps in front of me, and, frankly, I’m sick of the symbolism of everything, and I’d like something to be straightforward, just for once, please, Christ.

  I know he’s moving, and I know I’m probably hampering him, but I don’t look above the hem of Ryan’s coat. I hear a thunking noise.

  “Oh, honey—” Roxie is kneeling next to me, her hat pulled down, bandanna in hand, and she pushes my sunglasses down over my eyes, and everything dims, the screaming, the smell of garbage, everything.

  “ ‘Oh, honey’ what?” I ask. My voice is hoarse from screaming, and my body won’t work, I can’t stand up.

  “This is the Hell,” she tells me, and puts her arms around me, and the snakes cover me. “The one you know.”

  The one I know?

  Oh. The one I know. The one I kind of believe in. Belief makes things real sometimes. You learn that from the hunters too. “Shouldn’t the snakes be evil here?”

  “And Moses made a serpent of brass,” says Ryan. He squats next to me. Roxie pulls Stan over, and now Stan and everyone is coiled around me. Unlike all the other hells we’ve been through, this one is filled with creatures, surrounding us and watching us and coming too close. I am fucking petrified of semyazzas after what one did to me when it came out of my Door five years back. I touch my hand to my stomach, over the scar. There could be another semyazza out there. There could be lots. They could be hiding; they could be waiting.

  “And Moses made a serpent of brass,” Ryan repeats, Ištar and sat’s voices high behind him, reverberating in my ears over the screaming from below us, and then Christian joins him, the clicking soft, “and put it upon a pole,” and now Roxie too, “and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived. And the children of Israel set forward.”

  “Come on,” Stan whispers to me, “who’s my tough girl?” and I feel better, and when they help me stand, the semyazza is in pieces all over the place. Ryan’s knife, the big obsidian one, is gleaming, clean, on the ground. He picks it up.

  “Let’s go,” he says. This dimension is harder for me, and there are dragons that look like dead worms, worse than the Kur dragon, flying above us, screaming with the humans, and the snakes on Roxie hiss and slither, and Christian’s spider clicks as we walk forward. Ištar and sat and the lioness pad in front of us, even in front of Ryan.

  Stan stumbles next to me. Now that I’m really looking at him, even through the werewolf he looks sick. He must believe in this Hell a little bit too.

  I wonder what it’s like to be gay and believe in this Hell. Believe that maybe this is where you’re going to end up. Except Stan is already dead, and this is a werewolf in his body.

  “I’m hungry,” he groans. His hand is on his stomach, and I close my eyes and look away. Everything is dim through the sunglasses; I can barely see the Doors.

  “I can’t see a Door,” I say.

  “What?” yells Roxie, looking over her shoulder at me.

  “I can’t see a Door!” I call back. It hurts to yell. I just want to lie down. I want to lie down and give up.

  Then Ryan is at my side. “Allie.
Allie. Come on. Keep walking.”

  “I don’t want to, I want to lie down, I can’t do this, Ryan, I can’t do this, I can’t keep going—”

  I slump to the floor. The screaming is fucking deafening. Everything hurts, everyone hurts. It’s so lonely here, it’s so scary, everyone is so scared—

  The next thing I know, there’s a sharp pain. Ryan’s got his obsidian knife in his hand, and a grim look on his face, and my battered and bruised hands are bleeding. The smell of blood brings me back to myself, and I sniff, let out a long breath. Ryan holds my bleeding hands—he cut my palms—over the circle he drew in “macaroni and cheese”-colored crayon. The blood hisses and spits where it hits the ground.

  “Talk to the Door,” he says firmly. “Find the Door.”

  I press my palms to the circle, pressing the blood in, and close my eyes. The screaming dies down—just a little, but enough to let me see.

  “It’s through. It’s through—it’s maybe—maybe another hour?” I guess.

  “We’re going to stay here for a while, then, Allie.” Ryan is crouched next to me, but he’s careful to keep his duster from breaking the circle. His duster made of lamia skin. Lamias eat babies. I’m wearing lamia skin and they eat babies, and—

  I feel vomit rise in my throat and I clap my hands to my face. There’s blood all over my mouth and teeth and tongue, and I can taste it, metallic like the smell of a wet penny.

  “Oh, god,” I groan, and fall over. “Do we have to stay here? I can’t, Ryan, I can’t—”

  “You can, and you will,” he says firmly. He gets down on the ground next to me, and pulls me so we’re heart to heart. The lioness settles down next to us. Ryan doesn’t just wrap me in his coat this time; he pulls his hat so it shades me, and the screaming goes quiet.

  I can feel everyone else curl around us. I guess we’re all secretly afraid of this Hell dimension. I guess none of us ever wants to believe this part is real. It’s easy to ignore crazy Norse demons and weird Sumerian demons and stupid vampires—it’s all so old, it’s all so meaningless to our everyday lives.

  But we’re saturated with Christianity, and even Judaism to some extent, I guess, and the more I think about it, the more I realize how immediate it all is. There are things here that I’ve never seen before, but I still sort of recognize them, you know? Things with sneering human faces, long horns, parts of animals all mixed together. Demons, the way we’ve been taught.

  One of the things comes close and sits just outside the circle. It looks like a man on a snake-necked lion, except the man has the head of a bull and a sheep growing out of the back of his neck. As the heads breathe, they exhale steam. The steam smells like sulphur. That’s brimstone. That, kids, is tradition.

  I fall asleep to the sound of Roxie, Christian, and Ryan murmuring to each other; I fall asleep in a cloud of steam to “Be gracious to me, O God, be gracious to me . . . Be merciful unto me, O God, my soul is among lions . . .”

  I don’t dream, which is kind of disappointing. When I open my eyes, though, I do feel really rested, and—

  And I’m naked. And I’m on a grassy hill. And there is a rock under my ass.

  “Uh, Ryan?” I blink, and he’s next to me, sprawled on his back. Also naked—except for his hat. Which, let me just say, is incredibly sexy. I don’t see any avatars around. Am I dreaming? Best dream ever. My hair is loose, and when I crawl on top of him and tuck my face into his neck, my hair is just long enough to touch his chest. He smells delicious. I want to eat him up.

  Uh, not literally.

  “Ryan,” I murmur into his neck.

  “Allie,” he gasps, and sits up. I’m on his lap again, and, oh, god, does he feel good.

  “Please—” I feel like I’m always begging him for things, and this time he gives me what I want, just lifts me up and sets me down, inches sliding in, and then he’s inside me, burning hot, and I’m moving on him, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I never want to feel anything else but Ryan inside me.

  He bites down on my neck and I shudder over him, coming hard; he’s barely even touched me, and I’m coming.

  Then he flips us over, and I’m on my back, my legs wrapped around his waist, heels digging into thick muscle, and I’m coming again as he lifts me up and slams into me, over and over again. My arms are stretched out to the side and my head is turned to the side, and I’m gasping, I can’t catch my breath, it’s just waves of pleasure crashing over me, pulling me under.

  All I can feel is Ryan.

  When I open my eyes again, I’m sore all over. I look down at my body. Still naked. Still on a grassy knoll somewhere. Covered in red marks that will blossom into bruises, and bite marks. He bit me hard enough on my left breast that I can still see the imprint of his teeth.

  I let my head fall back to the ground, and there’s that damn rock again.

  I roll over, and look over at Ryan from under my eyelashes. At some point in our crazy sexual fury, his hat got knocked off, and his hair is sticking up everywhere. It’s getting long, and it’s almost curly. I want to run my hands through it. I want to bite him, and chew on his lips, and suck on his nipples, and touch him everywhere—but it’s not the furor of before. It’s just what I want, not what I have to do.

  “Uh . . .” I turn away from him and put my head in my arms. The grass smells like grass, and it’s so wonderful, such an amazing change from the smells of blood and death. The sun shining on me is warm, and I feel comfortable for the first time since I found out the Door was gone.

  “Allie,” he says, and touches my shoulder gently. “Allie.”

  “Yeaaaah,” I say.

  I can feel him moving against me as he sits up. “Fuck.”

  “Mmmm,” I say agreeably.

  “Ashmedai,” he tells me.

  “Bless you,” I say, as if he had sneezed. That’s what it sounded like, anyway. I mean, I am used to the weird languages, and all that crap, but Ashmedai is a new one to me.

  “Ashmedai. Trickster demon. Shit. And we saw it, too. It was outside the circle when we went to sleep.”

  “The weird lion-snake thing?” He nods. I am getting a sneaking suspicion. “What does this demon do, exactly?”

  Ryan sighs, and rubs his face with his hand. “It gets people to have sex.”

  “What?” I sit up too and my hair falls everywhere. I can still feel Ryan’s hand in it, pulling my head back so he could suck on my neck. I shiver a little. I want him again. Except . . . “We were just raped by a demon?”

  “No,” Ryan says. “He wouldn’t have made us. He . . . represents what’s already there. The Christian demons are all like that. All sin exists within man, so—”

  “So this guy shows up, gets us naked, and all he’s doing is just telling us that we want to do it anyway?” Ryan looks away. I blink hard. “Okay, or that I want to do it. Not you, evidently. Sorry that the demon clue-mobile ran you down. He’s not coming back, right?”

  Ryan shakes his head but he’s looking at me again. “It’s not just you, Allie,” he says. “You know I feel—”

  “Shut up,” I say. “I don’t need you to be a hunter or a hero or whatever and save me with the power of flirting. I’ve seen you do that with other people. I’ve seen you do that with Dawn, with Amanda, with stupid blonde girls on the street—hell, I’ve seen you do that with Stan. So what if I have a demon airing my dirty laundry? I don’t need you to make it better.”

  The calluses of his hand—gun calluses, knife, all hard work and magic—they feel rough on my face when he turns my head toward him, and his mouth comes down hard on mine. He tastes like grass, and salt, and heat, and now. He breaks the kiss suddenly. I’m afraid, but he’s just staring at me, and—he hasn’t looked that way since the first time we kissed, like I was killing him just by existing. Like he was killing me.

  “No,” I say. I pull my hands up; I cup his jaw so he can’t turn from me again. “I am real. I am here. And you aren’t the death of me.”


  I say this out loud, and then I say it with the brush of my lips against his forehead, against that hot skin and lines of worry. I kiss his cheek, and his nose, and him. I kiss him, and his mouth opens under mine and I’m falling into him, into the feel and the taste and his hands wrap around my waist, pulling me up and tight against him.

  We can get closer. I know we can. I draw him back to the ground, my arms around him. He sighs, and lays his head against my collarbone.

  “I need to tell you, Allie. I want you to know,” he whispers on my skin. It’s so quiet, so light, that the breath runs across my skin and my nipple peaks up high and hard just from the sensation. His hand moves, slowly, up to my breast. His palm touches my nipple, making it trace circles on his hand, a single pinprick touch that drives me wild. He pauses, and moves his hand away again, like that’s a candy he’s not allowed to taste.

  “My avatars,” he says. “They’re not goddesses. They’re every woman I’ve ever been with. Ever cared about. Three women, all dead. They’ve followed me. They’re warning me. Warning you.” His voice is empty, and alone. “It’s a bad idea, Allie. It’s always been a bad idea.”

  “You idiot,” I say, because he is, and I want to cry. “So sat, Ištar, the tabby cat—were they hunters?”

  He takes a ragged breath. “No, they were normal girls, just like—”

  I pull his head up, and he’s shocked enough to stop talking. “Not like me,” I say fiercely. “Look at where we are. No offense to your ghosts or anything, but I bet they’d be shitting themselves if they went through a Door to Hell. I bet they didn’t kill demons. I bet they didn’t fight. I’m not them, Ryan. I was never them. You get to keep me.”

  He is staring at me, lost and uncertain and for a moment I swear I hear the lioness purr, and in that moment his eyes fill with something I’ve never seen before, ever, not from him or from anybody, and when he kisses me, it’s like we’re kissing for the first time, except this time it’s gentle, and a little awkward.

  I can speak his eyebrow-ese now, but I have no idea what he’s saying with his mouth.