by Chloe Garner
A while later, as her knees and hips started to complain, she realized that he was mostly just watching her. She pushed against him again, turning across his body to tighten the grip his arm had around her back, then put her mouth to his ear.
“What’s the matter, Jason?”
He looked at her cautiously, not recognizing her tone.
“I don’t dance like that,” he answered. She smiled without pulling her face away, letting him feel her expression at the corner of her mouth, with her cheekbone pressed against his.
“Why not?” she asked, rolling her body again with the rhythm of the song. “It’s just like sex,” she paused turning her head and swiveling her hips to cross to his other side, “only you’re wearing clothes,” she tipped her head back looking at the wall behind her, then looked him in the eye and put her face against his again, “and everybody’s watching.” She bit his ear.
His arms tightened around her waist and chest, and she did a back bend to the hips, slowly rolling up to face him, then closed her eyes, lost in the heat and the touch and the black again. This time he came with her.
Eventually, joints aching but muscles hot and blood pumping willingly, they ended up against a wall. He pushed her into the wood and put his fingers up through the hair on the back of her head, throwing ripples of cascading sizzle down through her knees. His thumb found the hollow under her jaw and he kissed her, hard. He switched hands on the back of her head and turned his head to the other side, pulling her waist against him, and she wrapped her arm over the top of his head. Suddenly something was very wrong, and she twisted her head to the side, putting her hand into his shoulder to push his weight off of her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, voice drunk with hunger.
“Sam just figured it out,” she said. He was completely clear of her by the time she finished speaking. He looked at her guiltily, and she couldn’t look at him at all. The abrupt conversation with Sam was confused, muddled. She was sorry, he was sorry. He was upset. He didn’t care. He was lying to her. Her blood ran cold in the transition from hot sweat to shame.
“You want to go?” Jason asked. She nodded.
The bar part of the bar was emptying out, but it looked like the DJ was going to have an audience through closing. Jason got the front door for her, and she walked through, still unable to look at him. They walked in silence most of the way back to the hotel, then he paused.
“Look, um. Everyone’s nervous about their first time, right? That’s just normal,” he said. She waited. He twisted his mouth to the side. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. I promise.”
She slapped him. She didn’t feel it coming, it just happened.
“Never, ever speak to me like that again,” she said. He watched her, surprisingly unruffled. She thought about it, then dropped her head, blushing. “Thank you.”
She heard him smile.
“I so don’t want to know what you plan on telling Sam,” he said, opening the front door of the hotel for her.
<><><>
Sam opened the door for her as she got to it and Jason pulled his mouth in an amused grimace as he unlocked his own door and disappeared inside.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at Sam.
“I’m sorry. You surprised me. I just…”
“Can we not talk about it?”
“Yeah.”
The relief was simultaneous.
Somewhere between Des Moines and Omaha, Jason declared a cleaning day. Samantha sat cross-legged on his bed surrounded by the array of guns he and Sam had ferried in by duffel bag the night before, listening to him buzz his hair short again. Sam looked over from the computer and laughed.
“Why don’t you help?” Samantha asked.
“Jason’s particular. He’d just redo anything I did,” Sam said. Samantha nodded, picking up and breaking down one gun after another. The mechanical familiarity of it made her happy. Jason turned on the shower to rinse his head off, then walked back into the room, toweling his head off, his shirt wet.
“Move it,” he said. “Get your own stuff done.”
Samantha scooted over to the other bed and looked at first Jason, then Sam. Sam looked up, a little alarmed.
“What are you doing?” he asked. She bit her lip, then grinned and stood to peel the comforter down to the foot of the bed and pulled her backpack up onto the bed with her. Jason and Sam both froze as she started to unpack it. Crow bar, hatchet, and hunting knife they knew, but she kept pulling the weapons she had carried around the country on her back out of the bag, laying them out in array. It was such an effort to get them all back into the custom-designed harness she had assembled in the bag that she didn’t often indulge herself, unpacking them, any more, but she missed them. Each blade had history, and she ran her thumb across each edge, frowning at nicks and dull spots or stains on the metal. Jason stood to come watch her, and Sam sat up taller in his seat.
She pulled her notebook and put it next to her for the listmaking that would inevitably come next, then pulled the small selection of guns that she carried - a simple handgun, a rather less simple handgun, and a snub-nosed shotgun with a shortened wood stock. Jason held his hand out for the last, and she gave it to him, pulling the boxes and bags of bullets out of the pouch along the side wall of the backpack and putting them with their guns. Jason traded for the simple handgun and she put the shot gun where it went.
Of the things she intended to catalog, she was down to the spell ingredients and mixing and storage implements. She glanced up, then plunged on, pulling out first the cartridge container for the dark ingredients and laying the round glass vials in a peacock pattern to her left side, then pulling out the second container with light ingredients and putting them on her right. The natural ingredients she left in their carton. The handful of iron rods - two feet long, each - she piled beyond the knives, framing them.
There were a number of things left in her backpack, but they were either parts of the harness or still too personal. She slid the backpack over the edge of the bed and took a deep breath, sighing happily as she looked at the gleaming steel.
“You are just full of surprises, aren’t you, Sweetheart?” Jason asked. She grinned up at him, feeling childish for how much his approval meant to her. Sam got up and walked over to look at the collection.
“All requires hand-to-hand,” he observed. He was impressed, but a little worried. She waved her hand at the other bed.
“I can use anything over there. I can’t carry a rifle, so one gun is as good as any, with the right bullets in it. Well, mostly. But a well-formed blade… I just can’t say no to them,” she said.
“Apparently,” Jason said, beginning to go through the blades.
“Careful. She bites,” Samantha said. Jason grinned at her, switching to the next one and tossing it against his palm, feeling out the weight of it.
“This is nice,” he said.
“Throws well,” she said, glancing up at Sam. He picked up the special gun and looked at it.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Something I’d never let you see, if you were anyone else,” she said. “A dear gift, with some characteristics I am led to believe are unique. They say it can’t kill humans, for one.”
He pulled the barrel off of it and looked down it.
“Looks normal to me,” Jason said, surveying it, then returning his interest to an ornate knife. Samantha smiled, pleased that Sam had recognized it, unsurprised that Jason hadn’t.
This is my soul, laid bare, she thought, looking over the bed. Well. The constant pull to the one thing that was missing, stitched into the back of the backpack, put away more than two years ago, it never let up. It was missing. She pushed it away, smiling at the blades again, then getting the sharpening kit and oiling cloth from where she had set it, she set to work on the first blade.
“What is all this?” Sam asked, running his fingers across the glass vials. “You really are a witch, aren’t you?”
“No,”
she answered, absorbed in her task. “I’m broad spectrum. A witch is natural.”
There was silence, and Samantha looked up.
“What? You thought the incantations were something else?”
“Witches are on the list of things we’re after,” Jason said, returning to his bed. Samantha laughed and pointed with the knife at Sam’s chest.
“You’re a White Flame. Some coaching and you might make a White Knight.” She looked over at Jason, who didn’t seem as concerned as Sam felt. “Let me guess. You can do the exorcisms, but you have to go through them a few times to get them to work.”
Jason looked at her and cocked his chin to one side, then returned to his work.
“If they work at all,” Sam said. Samantha shrugged.
“I can test you, if you want. I’m light at everything except magic.”
Sam tried to find a corner of the bed to sit on where knives wouldn’t slide down into him.
“I wouldn’t mention that to our friends,” he said. “A witch is a witch, to us.”
“Heather understood,” Samantha said. “You guys are just narrow.”
Jason snorted.
“Said the virgin,” he said. Samantha raised her head and looked at nothing, then turned her head to stare at him.
“What has that got to do with anything?” she asked. He shrugged.
“Just seemed like a funny accusation.”
She glowered at him and Sam glanced from one of them to the other for a moment, then stood and retreated back to his computer.
“Simon’s online,” he said.
“Don’t care,” Jason said in a singsong voice. Samantha returned to the blade in her hands.
“He’s got something,” Sam said.
“Don’t care,” Jason said again.
“People traveling to a town for medical treatment and disappearing,” Sam said. “Jason, we need to do this.”
“You know the rule,” Jason said. Samantha looked up, confused.
“Once he declares a cleaning day, if he finishes cutting his hair before I have a reason to postpone, he gets to spend the entire day cleaning guns.”
“I’m on vacation. Try again tomorrow,” Jason said, cleaning out the barrel of a rifle. Samantha returned to her knives.
“It’s in Southern California,” Sam teased. “And Simon says he has a shipment to go in the mail.”
Jason set the gun down in his lap with a sigh of exasperation.
“Every time, Sam. Every time. This is the rule.”
Sam waited. Samantha started to pack back up.
“Fine. We check out today, but we do not check out early.”
Sam returned to his computer and Samantha continued packing knives. She’d get through her vials, as long as she had them all out. She’d been meaning to, anyway.
“Southern California on short notice,” Jason muttered.
<><><>
They slept in the Cruiser someplace in Utah.
Samantha’s laptop died, and she sat up all night on the hood of the car in her pajamas, watching the stars and talking to Abby.
<><><>
The hotel that Simon had booked for them was just off the interstate. The town they were headed to was about thirty minutes east, up in the mountains, and apparently didn’t have any lodging.
“Freaking hippies,” the desk clerk said when Jason asked.
“People move out there for the air, and they come right back because the lot of them are freaks.”
“Okay, then,” Jason said, turning back. “Sounds like we came to the right place.”
He handed Sam his room key and they walked back outside. Samantha was sleeping.
“No time like the present?” Sam asked.
“I want presents first,” Jason said. Sam grinned and they drove around to the back side of the hotel and found the room. The package Simon had promised them was on the table. Samantha went in to brush her teeth while Jason pawed through it.
“Ammo… ammo… the new barrel for my VTAC… nice…”
Samantha came back out, finding Jason up to his elbows in ordnance.
“I’m going to need to go get this sighted in,” Jason said. Sam grunted from his computer.
“Will you come look at these?” Sam asked. Samantha joined him. “There are just too many for me to be sure I’ll remember them all.”
She nodded, looking at photo after photo of people who had gone missing.
“This is going to be a bloodbath,” she said. Sam sighed.
“Looks like. I don’t know how they’re getting away with it.”
“He got grenades!” Jason crowed. Sam glanced over at him.
“That’s nice.”
“Isn’t it illegal to ship those?” Samantha asked. Both of them looked at her. “Withdrawn.”
“Are you ready now?” Sam asked. Jason had a grenade in each hand.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Tell Simon he outdid himself.”
“You want to go back to bed, or you want to come with us?” Sam asked Samantha. She cocked an eyebrow at him and he laughed.
“All right. Let’s hit the road.”
<><><>
It looked like any other little town up in the mountains. A little autoshop catty-corner to a gas station, little one-story homes with chain-link fences all the way up to the road. A few people were out walking or on bikes, and a bar had a couple of trucks in front of it. Up in the hills were more houses, some larger, some not.
“Menacing,” Jason commented. A truck rumbled past, kicking up dust, and Sam pointed.
“Her. Do you see her?”
“I do,” Samantha said.
“And there, that guy.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s up?” Jason asked.
“They’re here,” Sam said. “That guy, there. His name is Phil.”
“You want to go say hi?” Jason asked.
“The missing people. They’re here,” Samantha said. Jason pulled into the parking lot for a dusty convenience store and they got out. There was a bell tied to the inside of the door that jangled as they walked in, and a girl looked up from a magazine at the front desk.
“They look like hippies to you?” Jason asked. The girl shot him a dirty look and returned to her magazine. There were a pair of men with beards on one of the aisles, and they stared at Sam, Jason, and Samantha as they walked past. Samantha had the urge to pull the knife out of her boot, and she noticed that Sam had his hand inside his jacket. Something was very off. Jason bought a soda.
“One of them might have been from the pictures, without the beard,” Sam whispered to Samantha. She nodded. She had noticed him. They got back into the Cruiser.
“Want to just shoot the whole town and call it a day?” Jason asked.
“Are they afraid of something?” Sam asked. Samantha pointed.
“You can tell a lot about the health of a town from the health of their church.”
“I hate churches,” Jason said. “Give me the heebie-jeebies.”
“You just don’t like the idea of God watching you,” Sam said. “She’s right. Let’s go see. Maybe the pastor will talk to us.”
The side of the church was less parking lot and more just a dusty transition between building and road, but Jason parked anyway and they walked around to the front door. Samantha took two steps into the building and stopped.
“Nope. Uh uh. I can’t do this.”
“What?” Sam asked. She held up her hands.
“I don’t go here. They use this space for something specific, and I’m not allowed to endorse. I have to wait outside.”
“What does that mean?” Jason asked as he watched Samantha leave.
“Not a clue. But she wasn’t kidding. She couldn’t come in here.”
“Can I help you?” a man in cowboy boots, jeans, and a plaid shirt asked.
“Looking for the pastor,” Jason said, looking the man up and down dismissively.
“That would be me. Do you have an appointment?” he
asked. Jason tipped his head, peering into the corners of the sanctuary behind the cowboy.
“No,” Sam said. “We just wanted to ask a few questions.”
“Oh,” the cowboy said suspiciously.
“There are a lot of people here whose families think they’re missing,” Sam said. The man sighed.
“Meddling outsiders, I’m afraid,” he said, catching Jason’s shoulder as he tried to sneak past, spinning him back toward the door. “We’re not big fans of them around here.”
“Why do their families think they’re missing, if they’re all right here?” Sam persisted even as they were shepherded to the door. Finally in the doorway, the pastor paused and let them stand.
“They all know where their loved ones are. They just don’t like who they’ve become.”
“Who is that?” Sam asked.
“Part of our community. There are insiders, and there are outsiders. Outsiders… Well, we don’t expect you to understand. Why would you? We’ve all been saved.”
“Saved?” Jason asked. The man smiled and opened the door.
“No one is going to make you leave, but you should, anyway,” he said, scooting them out the door and closing it behind them. Samantha wasn’t outside.
“Where is she?” Jason asked, shading his eyes.
“Walking around the building,” Sam asked. “There.”
She rounded the corner.
“That was fast,” she said.
“He certainly wasn’t happy to see us,” Jason said.
“He said they were saved,” Sam said. Samantha frowned.
“I’m not happy here,” she said. “It’s foreboding… Like looking down into a grave.”
Sam nodded. A woman down the street was staring at them, frowning. Samantha approached her, but she turned and walked inside before Samantha had gotten inside of shouting range. Samantha turned back and spread her arms. Jason and Sam went and got back into the Cruiser and Jason drove down to pick up Samantha.
“What now?” she asked.
“I need to let Simon know this isn’t a missing-persons thing,” Sam said, “then we regroup and try to figure out what else we might be looking at.”
