The Wild Road

by Marjorie M. Liu

  “We didn’t,” Lannes said. “But we were told to find you.”

  Orwell was still looking at the woman, who shifted uncomfortably, leaning in toward Lannes. She said, “Please, we need to talk.”

  “Talk,” echoed the old man, his eyes narrowing. At first Lannes thought he meant for them to continue standing on the porch, but then, haltingly, he unlocked the screen door. He did not open it. He backed away, deeper into the shadows of the house. Lannes and the woman shared a quick look, but it was done, they were here. No turning back.

  Lannes entered first. Very reluctantly. It was dark inside. Piles of laundry, dirty or otherwise, were on the floor, along with stacks of magazines that had fallen over and some bags of rank-smelling garbage that needed to be taken out. A television buzzed in the background. Some news program. Talk of a major hotel fire in Chicago. Investigation ongoing.

  It was a small house with a lot of walls. Lannes’ chest tightened. It was hard to breathe. He swallowed hard, trying to focus on the woman, the old man and nothing else. No time for claustrophobia. No time.

  “Ignore the mess,” Orwell said gruffly. “I don’t get company.”

  “Why did you let us in?” Lannes asked. “Do you know this woman?”

  The old man ignored his questions. “You said you were told to find me? Who did that?”

  “It was on a note,” replied the woman carefully. “Some…odd things have been happening to me. We hoped you could explain them.”

  “Explain odd things?” Orwell laughed, but it was tinged with nervousness. “That’s rich. Did Simon send you? Mr. Simon Says?”

  Lannes frowned. “As she explained, your name was on a note left on my doorstep. Who’s Simon?”

  “A nobody. Just like me.” The old man shot the woman a thoughtful look. “He wouldn’t have sent a girl. He doesn’t like girls.”

  “You recognized me,” she pressed.

  “You look like someone,” Price admitted. “But she’s dead.”

  The woman tensed, but Orwell turned and shuffled deeper into his living room. He kicked aside some clothes and stooped with a groan to pick up a can of beer on the floor by the sagging couch. Taking a long drink, he gave Lannes and the woman a hard look.

  “So,” he said. “Mind if I see the note?”

  Lannes very carefully unfolded it from his pocket, but he did not move. This felt wrong. Not just the mess or the tight space, but the air when breathed seemed to enter his heart instead of his lungs, and it was as though he could taste the miasma of darkness that had settled over this house like an illness, or death.

  Bad vibes.

  The woman also did not move. Her stillness felt the same as that of a fox sniffing out a trap—sharp, smart, hunted. Good instincts. Lannes held up the note like a sign, uncertain the old man’s vision would let him see it but unwilling to go any deeper into the house.

  The old man took another drink of beer and squinted at the note. Then he took a step closer, and another. Until he stopped, staring. Calm enough, on the surface. Perfectly calm. So calm he looked like a mannequin, plastic and frozen.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked, and Lannes realized something in that moment that made him want to take a slow careful step out of Orwell Price’s house: he could not sense the old man’s mind. Not a hint nor trace of it. It was like standing in the presence of the dead, of something empty and hollow.

  Impossible. Lannes was a poor mind reader, but at least he could feel minds. He could sense the weight of thoughts. Orwell Price had none. This confused Lannes at first. And then it frightened him. Normal people did not put walls in their minds. Normal people would never consider it necessary. Normal people would not have the mental strength to do such a thing.

  Which meant that the old man was…something else.

  I should have listened to Charlie.

  Lannes took a risk on the woman. He touched her arm, wrapped his fingers lightly around it, grateful for her thick sweater, and tugged slightly. She glanced at him but did not protest as he made her move toward the door.

  “Don’t go yet,” said Orwell, quietly. “I still haven’t heard about that note. Interesting handwriting, don’t you think?”

  “It’s just writing,” said the woman, as Lannes stuffed the paper back into his pocket. “Unless you recognize it?”

  “I recognize a lot of things,” Price whispered, knuckles white as he crumpled the beer can in his fist. “I recognize the morning, and the shit taste in my mouth when I open my eyes after a bad night’s sleep. I recognize the pain in my gut when I’ve eaten something I know is bad for me, and I recognize, too, that I have no self-control. But sometimes a man needs to eat some shit. No matter what it costs.”

  Lannes stepped in front of the woman, his wings straining against the belt. Power gathered in his chest and his skin tingled. Every instinct was pulsing. The walls were closing in. He put one hand behind him and pushed the woman back toward the door.

  “The note,” Orwell whispered. “Goddamn that note.”

  He threw aside the beer can. It hit the television. In the same swing, he swooped down with surprising speed and jammed his hand past the cushions of the couch. He came back up with a gun. Behind Lannes, the woman made a sound.

  Orwell shot him. No hesitation, not even a blink as he pulled the trigger. The bullet slammed into Lannes’ chest just below his heart, shattering ribs. Lannes staggered, almost blind with pain, but his adrenaline kicked in and his vision cleared in moments. He was certain there must be a hole in his torso the size of his fist, but when he glanced down, he saw no wound. Just the illusion of clothing. He looked up and found Orwell staring in disbelief.

  Lannes charged. Orwell managed to get off another shot that hit him in the shoulder, smashing bone and spraying blood—which spattered through the illusion and hit the wall. He staggered but had just enough momentum to slam seven feet of hard muscle into an old man who was soft and weak limbed. Both of them went down. Lannes heard ominous crunching sounds beneath him. Orwell howled.

  Lannes wanted to scream, too, but he kept his mouth shut. This was not going to kill him. No gunshot had ever taken out a gargoyle; it took a grenade to do that. Blow him to bits and he’d never regenerate. Cut off his head, burn him to ash—these things would kill him for good. His wounds would be fine in hours.

  The problem was the woman. Orwell Price. Witnesses. They had seen him shot point-blank. He hoped neither noticed the fine mist of blood on the wall.

  The woman fell on her knees beside them. Her concern rolled through Lannes’ mind like a warm bath, until it was all he could do to focus on disarming the man beneath him. He had never felt anything like her heart. Her compassion could have been a drug. He would have been happy enough to lie still and savor the heat of her mind, like a monstrous Rip van Winkle, lost for years in a dream. Her presence, for one brief moment, drowned the pain.

  And then that pain hit him again, and he swallowed a groan. Orwell Price did no such thing. He squealed like a stuck pig, screaming obscenities. Lannes had his gun hand pinned. The old man loosed another round, which hit the wall, and then the woman leaned backward, scrabbling toward the television, and returned with a ten-pound dumbbell that she raised above her head. Orwell’s eyes widened. He tried to move. The woman brought the weight down hard on his wrist.

  Another crunch, another scream. The old man released the gun. The woman grabbed it.

  And then something odd happened. Lannes felt her mind change.

  Her emotions were so deeply embedded inside him that he sensed the shift immediately. As though something…suddenly joined her. A completely different vibration. She was not alone in her mind. It felt the same as two brains stuffed in a jar, but only one of them was in control.

  Lannes grabbed her wrist, trying to see deeper. All he found was another wall. A wall like the one keeping him out of Orwell’s thoughts. And a presence that was cold and old and alien. An intruder.

  He had no time for horror. The psychic intr
uder twisted the woman’s mouth into a hideous forced grimace, which might have been a smile but looked more like she was about to sink her teeth into the old man’s throat. Her eyes darkened. Her skin drained of color and her lips turned white.

  “Murderer,” she whispered to Orwell, and the fear that rolled off the old man was so thick, so repulsive, Lannes wanted to gag.

  “It is you,” Orwell breathed.

  “Yes,” the woman murmured, and raised the dumbbell above his head one-handed, aiming like she was going to punch his face into pulp. Lannes let go of the old man and grabbed both her wrists, dragging her close. He tried to force himself into her mind, clawing at the psychic wall.

  For one moment, across their link, he felt the woman—the woman he knew—doing the same on the other side. She was fighting desperately. Trying to regain control over herself. Like dragging her nails down the inside of a coffin. No yield, no freedom. Just death.

  He tried to close the gap between them, but the wall pressed forward, shutting him out of her mind. Pain flashed through his eyes. He heard a voice inside his head, soft and sibilant, but the words made no sense. He tried to hold onto both her mind and body, but the woman—the intruder inside the woman—was too strong.

  You cannot stop me, whispered the voice. You, monster.

  An immense force slammed into his chest. A wave of hard air. He lost his grip on the woman’s wrists and tumbled backward, landing painfully on his bound wings. Invisible fingers tore at the wounds in his chest hard enough to make him scream. Orwell also cried out. The old man began scuttling across the carpet toward the kitchen. The woman leapt over his fat body and pinned his wrinkled neck with her knee.

  All the fight went out of him. He lay as still and dull as a rag doll, but his gaze rolled sideways, searching out Lannes, and the terror the gargoyle saw in that brief glance was rich and real and desperate. Orwell flung out his hand, and for one brief moment, the walls surrounding his mind tumbled down.

  Lannes caught flashes: a forest, a wild garden filled with dried cracked fountains and a shining red dome. An old graveyard and crows staring with death in their eyes. He saw children sitting in a circle, holding hands. He felt power.

  The woman raised the dumbbell above Orwell’s head. Lannes, still caught in memories not his own, could not move fast enough to stop her.

  She crushed the old man’s skull.

  Chapter Seven

  This is the way he goes, whispered a voice. And it is a good way.

  Good way, bad way—it was part of a nightmare the woman could not free herself from. Memories lost, and now her free will. Everything had gone insane.

  She felt the impact of slamming a heavy weight into Orwell Price’s head. She heard the crunch of bone and saw with sick horror the dent she had made in his face. But she could not stop herself, not for all her strength. And when she screamed, nothing came out of her mouth but a sigh of satisfaction—and when she kept screaming, her voice split against the inside of her skull like a bird tearing its wings against a wall of knives.

  Hush, said that satisfied voice. This will be over soon.

  Stop, replied the woman, desperate and grieving. Please, stop.

  Not until I am free, whispered the voice, and the woman felt a presence like fire lick at her mind, burning her down to the soul.

  Then, nothing. The ghost in her heart disappeared, and its sudden absence made the woman feel so light she thought she might float away. Her mind felt raw, as though her thoughts had scratch marks, or as though open sores pocked the inside of her skull. Pain pulsed between her eyes, but only for a moment, replaced by overwhelming languor. Her eyelids drooped. She wanted to sleep.

  Instead, she told herself to flex her fingers and curled them into a fist. Her legs tingled and her feet ached. Her lungs felt as though she had been breathing flames.

  She had her body back. Her mind. And a murder on her hands.

  The woman yanked herself from Orwell’s warm corpse and felt hands touch her waist. She shrieked…then remembered Lannes and spun around on her knees, desperate to see his face; something, anything familiar.

  For a moment, he was nothing but a blur inside her vision: darker, larger, his face craggier and his hair longer—and then everything coalesced with crystalline clarity, and he was as she remembered.

  Except, there was a hollowness in his eyes, a bleakness in the way he looked at her, which made the woman want to throw her hands over her face and run.

  She almost did. He grabbed her wrists. His skin was warm, his grip strong.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, his voice strained. She could not answer him. Too dumbstruck. Still horrified by what she had watched herself do. He stared a moment longer; then, almost reluctantly pulled her close. She did not resist. She did not touch him back. She could not. He kept her arms pinned to her sides and his voice filled her ear, a low murmuring rumble. She started shaking. He held her tighter, against a chest that was broad and smooth and felt suspiciously like warm skin. She thought she felt blood, but when she looked there was nothing. Her hands, though, glistened red and sticky.

  Déjà vu.

  Lannes pulled away just enough to stare into her eyes. Again, for a moment his body blurred, and something just behind his shoulders wavered like a ghost—but then she blinked and nothing odd was there. He was just a man.

  Looking into his eyes was like getting hit in the face with cold water. She shuddered, trying to free herself, and glanced down. Got another shock. The front of her sweater was smeared in blood—bright red blood, where there had been none only moments before. Black spots filled her vision. Lannes caught her, and she was too numb to shake him off.

  “You’ve been hurt,” she mumbled, hardly able to speak.

  “I’m fine,” he whispered.

  “We need to call an ambulance.”

  “No.”

  “Look, blood.” But the only blood was on her hands, and not his body. He had no visible wounds. She was losing it. She’d already lost her mind.

  Her gaze fell again on the old man. The dumbbell was embedded in his face. Blood pooled around his head. He was so very still. Maybe she had missed a step. Perhaps the blood on her hands and sweater was from him. It made sense.

  The woman tried to go back to the old man, but Lannes held her still. “Don’t. It’s too late.”

  “No,” she said, and he let her go, though she felt his palm trail warm and heavy down her spine as she scrambled away from him toward Orwell. She only got halfway. She had to swing back, palm pressed to her mouth, fighting not to vomit.

  “I killed him,” she rasped. “Oh, God, I killed him.”

  “You’re wrong,” Lannes said, his voice strained. He started to stand, but moved stiffly. The woman did not think. She tried to help him, reaching for his back.

  He flinched. “Don’t touch me.”

  The woman backed off. Red-hot shame poured through her. Lannes, staring, said, “No, don’t…that’s not what I meant.”

  But she understood. It made sense. She had just killed a man.

  No, she told herself in the next breath. It had not been her. Not just her, at any rate. Someone else had been in her mind. Not that anyone would believe that.

  Tears filled her eyes. She stumbled sideways, looking for a phone, and found one beside some withered and yellowing issues of Playboy magazine.

  “What are you doing?” Lannes asked sharply.

  “I need to report this to the police,” she shot back. “I can’t just leave him.”

  “You have to,” he growled. “We made too much noise. We need to get out of here.”

  The woman hesitated, torn. It was not right. Not right at all. But after a moment staring at the phone, she nodded. No arrest. No confessions. She did not want Lannes to get in trouble. And she needed her freedom if she was going to learn the reasons for what had just happened.

  She did not, however, return to Lannes. She saw a door in front of her. Ignoring his hisses to stop, she hobbled into a bed
room, standing for a moment in its dark shadows and smelling the overwhelming scents of moldy old carpet and dirty body. Rumpled covers filled the bed, and stacked boxes lined the cracked wall. More clothes were on the floor. No pictures. Nothing personal. Nothing that rang a bell.

  She heard Lannes in the hall, breathing hard. He took up the entire space, was almost too large for the house. She smelled blood and at first thought he was bleeding, but his chest appeared miraculously unscathed by the bullets Orwell had fired, and the dark brown carpet—if there was blood on it—hid stains well.

  “Find anything?” asked Lannes, and when she shook her head, he said, “Come on, then. We have other options.”

  She could not imagine what those were, but she was already having trouble thinking. Her mind felt numb. Death on one side, life on the other. She washed the blood off her hands in the bathroom, and closed her eyes rather than look at her reflection in the mirror above the sink.

  But when she passed Orwell’s body, her stomach rebelled—as did her heart. She remembered again his terror, and the impact of the dumbbell as it crushed his skull. She could still hear the echo of that presence speaking through her. Using her to kill.

  A sob crawled up her throat. Lannes grabbed her arm, practically lifting her off her feet in his haste to get her to the door. He glanced back at the dead man. “I’m sorry I brought you here.”

  “You couldn’t know,” she whispered, feeling awful. Like a monster.

  Lannes gave her a hard look. “I’m not sorry he died. I’m sorry you’re suffering because of him.”

  She stared. He opened the front door and shoved her into the sunlight.

  They did not drive back to downtown or return to Frederick’s home. Lannes got on I-294 and headed south, out of Chicago. After twenty minutes spent in utter silence, the woman said, “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lannes. “South feels right.”

  Nothing felt right. She had awakened in a nightmare that was only growing larger, stranger. She could not imagine where it would end.