Oasis

by Rachel Caine

  "It doesn't matter. There are lives at risk. You know Kevin -- do you trust him with the kind of power Jonathan represents? Hell, with any kind of power? I don't. We both saw what he did to his own stepmother." I bit my lip, watching him. He was still holding my wrists, and warmth pulsed up into me from his touch. "David, this may not be safe, but it has to be done. Somehow."

  "I know."

  "I just --" I was on verge of tears, suddenly. Adrenaline and exhaustion carbonating together in my blood. "God, I just want to rest. I just want to forget."

  He let go of my wrists and put his hands on my face, tilting it up, and then he kissed me, and all of the fear and exhaustion melted away. His lips were damp and hot and silken, and he tasted like the chocolate shake and a dark, male undertone that made me moan and suck the taste off his tongue, and God, stopping at a motel? Best idea ever.

  He broke it off and studied me with a warm, yearning distance of about an inch between us. "You should rest." His breath moved over me like his touch. His voice vibrated inside me, deep inside. I resonated to his sound, his touch, everything about him.

  Rest was just about the farthest thing from my mind. "Later," I promised breathlessly, and swayed toward him. Our lips brushed, lingered, slid away. Teasing. "Maybe I need to relax first," I murmured. Another gentle slide of our lips, not quite a kiss. "Maybe I need to spend a long ... time ... relaxing."

  And unspoken, we were both thinking that somewhere out there Jonathan was lurking. Maybe focusing his attention on us. There was no hiding from him.

  David's eyes were brilliant, molten copper, and his skin was a hot inhuman gold, and he was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

  "A long time," he whispered, and we were breathing the same intoxicating air, living in each other's space, each other's skin. He was hot enough to melt me. "Yes. I think maybe that's a very good idea."

  He picked me up and carried me to the bed, and for a long, long, long time, Jonathan and the crappy motel decor and the world waiting to destroy us beyond the door ceased to matter.

  ###

  I woke up and it was dark and quiet outside, just a low plaintive moan of wind rattling the big windows. I rolled over on my side, instinctively searching for David's warmth -- the night had gotten cold, the way the desert does once the sun disappears -- but he wasn't there.

  Wasn't anywhere.

  I sat up slowly, listening, but there was no sound in the room except for a low, slow drip of water from the tap in the bathroom. The clock showed me a dim glow that, when I squinted and blinked, read 3:27 a.m.

  I got up, found clean underwear and some not-to-badly-wrinkled rolled up blue jeans and a knit shirt in my bag, toed on shoes and walked outside into the still, chill night.

  The sky was unbelievable. Clear from horizon to horizon, a black bowl crowded with stars. I stopped, staring, and craned my neck back to get the full effect. Dizzying. I breathed in deep and felt clean, cold air fill my lungs. I wished I was an Earth Warden, because this seemed to be a place where having a connection to the land would be amazing ... even dull as I was to that side of things, I could feel a kind of power here, a slow, strong pulse that made me want to lay down on the ground and let it flow through me.

  When I let out my held breath, it came out as white mist. Colder than I'd thought. I shivered a bit and looked around. Except for my Dodge Viper crouched in its space, looking like a wildcat ready to spring, there were only two other cars -- one, a sun-faded Ford pickup with a missing tailgate, was parked at the office, so I figured it was the manager's. The other was the dusty old Cadillac with its coating of road dust, parked in front of the last room in the motel.

  As I stood there, wondering where David had taken off to, and why, I heard someone open a door and close it. When I looked over, I saw that someone had come out of the Caddy's room -- a man, medium height, slender, wearing a black knit shirt and black jeans, with a sleek-looking black leather coat over the monochromatic ensemble. He had close-cropped brown hair, military style, and as I watched, he leaned against the cinder-block wall and lit up a cigarette. I realized I was staring when he cocked an eyebrow at me, and went back to studying the sky. The moon was almost full, a big white eye staring back.

  "I hope you're not a werewolf," the man said.

  I looked at him, startled. His cigarette glowed hot red, then subsided to embers. He blew smoke out into the clear, still air, and it hung indecisively between us.

  He made a lazy gesture up at the sky with his free hand. "Moon," he said. "Full."

  "Not quite," I said.

  "Not quite full, or not quite werewolf?"

  I showed teeth. "Either way, I don't eat strangers."

  He sucked smoke and considered me silently. I wasn't sure about him. If I'd really been what I appeared to be -- a young woman, alone, in the middle of nowhere in a deserted motel, vulnerable -- then I'd have been deeply worried. But I wasn't, and he was right about one thing: I was a man-eater when I needed to be. Even if David had taken a long walk and wouldn't be around to defend my honor, I was quite capable of doing it myself.

  I drifted up into the aetheric, which was just as still and silent as the desert in real-world; it was layered in white and silver and velvet blues, and it was full of that silent pulse, too, that powerful sense of being. But the Man In Black was just a man, not a Djinn, not a Warden. Hence, nothing to be worried about.

  Except that his aetheric image was ... unsettling. Most normal humans don't display well on the aetheric -- they're shapes, ill-defined, insubstantial. Not enough presence and power to manifest clearly. But this guy was different. In the aetheric, he was bigger, more muscular, and instead of being dressed in black he was dressed in white. Or, it would have been white, if it hadn't been drenched in blood.

  Blood running in thick streams from his hands as he lifted the cigarette to his lips. Pattering from his earlobes to his shoulders. Dripping from his elbows and the hem of his coat. He was standing in a pool of it, shining red, and he just kept dripping. I couldn't tell if the blood was someone else's, or his own -- whether he thought he was a murderer or a victim.

  Either way, it was disturbing. I'd never seen anything like it. People saw themselves as supermodels, yeah. Gender-switchers. Knights in armor. Kick-ass bitches in leather jumpsuits. Maybe the occasional pirate. People tended to dress themselves up in their soul-selves, and it was one big, long costume party up on the aetheric.

  But he was just ... odd. So full of oddness that it made me shiver.

  I dropped back into my body with a snap, took one last deep breath of cool air, and walked away, toward the office.

  "Hey," the guy said. I glanced back. He hadn't moved, but he flicked his cigarette down to the ground and crushed it out with his boot. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

  I kept walking.

  The creaking glass door brought with it a rush of too-hot air and a smell of slightly stale cheap cologne, tobacco, body odor gone just slightly rancid. For a second I wondered if I'd be better off outside with the creepy guy, but the man behind the counter was grizzled, sixtyish, had little half glasses and crazed Albert Einstein hair, and who could be scared of Einstein? He was reading a magazine he hastily stashed under the counter when he saw me coming. I didn't imagine he was reading it for the articles, if you know what I mean.

  "Hi," I said. He grunted, pale eyes studying me. "Listen, you're probably an expert on roads around here. I'm looking for some way to get to Las Vegas that's not as direct as the freeways. Maybe a scenic route? Back roads?"

  He frowned at me, thick eyebrows rustling together, and I resisted the urge to tell him that if he wasn't careful they might stick together like Velcro; he reached under the counter, rummaged around, and came out with a big road map that he unfolded out onto the cracked vinyl-topped counter between us. He didn't bother to turn it toward me.

  "Scenic," he said. "Ain't a lot of scenic around here unless you fancy desert."

  "I like desert."

  "All looks the
same," he shrugged. "Seen one part of it, seen it all. Better off sticking to the highway, get there quicker. You break down out here, you ain't got a lot of help coming. Cell phones don't work a lot of places. Sun gets brutal."

  "I know," I said. I knew all about the sun in the desert. That was a memory I didn't call up often, and flinched away from it. "Just show me."

  He traced a couple of skinny little road map lines with a blunt, stained finger -- evidently, he worked on the Ford himself to keep it running, and he'd never heard of those industrial-strength grease-cutting soaps -- and I made some notes on a fly-specked piece of paper with a stubby pencil.

  The proprietor looked over my shoulder as I wrote, staring out through the glass door. He grunted again. I looked up, then back; Caddy Guy was out there, smoking another cigarette, strolling the parking lot and blowing clouds at the sky.

  "Friend of yours?" he asked.

  "Don't know him," I said.

  "Huh." He looked at me, pale eyes bright behind the Einstein glasses. "Saw you with a young fella earlier. Not him?"

  "No, not him."

  "Where's your young fella,then?"

  "Asleep," I said shortly. "Thanks for the info."

  "Checkout's at eleven a.m. sharp," he said, and folded up the map with a snap of his wrists and thick rustle of paper. I was right, those eyebrows were just never separating again. He'd have to get out the scissors to cut them apart. "You oversleep, you got to pay another day."

  I wasn't about to oversleep. I could feel my body craving rest, but it'd have to get by; no way was I going to shut my eyes at this point. Not with blood-dripping-guy stalking the parking lot, and Slightly Creepy Einstein in here watching my every move.

  I missed David.

  I left the office and avoided my fellow motel visitor on my way back to my room. I unlocked the door quickly with the chunky old-fashioned key, locked it behind me with the push-in lock and the deadbolt and the slide chain, checked the drapes to make sure they were fully closed, and sat on the cold, empty bed with my legs crossed.

  I drifted up on the aetheric and sent out a wordless call along the shining silver strand that bound me to David, or David to me, or both of us to the other. I felt it zip away, stretching off into the distance ... far, far away.

  Wherever he'd gone, it wasn't just distant in terms of geography. I felt a pulse of reassurance along the link, something along the lines of I hear you, back as soon as I can. Nothing clearer than that.

  I meditated until my back got sore, and then braced myself against the headboard and picked up the book David had left behind. I'd always liked Spenser, and the clean, crisp rhythm of Parker's words.

  Even so, I was only three pages into it when I fell asleep.

  ###

  I woke up to screaming. Genuine, honest-to-God screaming. I flailed, dropping the forgotten book to the floor, vaulted out of bed and landed barefoot on the thin carpet with my heart pounding an erratic salsa rhythm. I jerked aside the curtains and winced at the sudden blinding blaze of light ... the motel faced east, and the sun was well over the horizon. Out here, you were strongly reminded that a star was a big ol' fusion reactor, because it looked dangerous and bubbling and radioactive, closer than it did in safer climates.

  The screaming was coming from the Dairy Queen next door.

  I stuck my feet into my shoes, grabbed up the key and unlocked the door with shaking hands, then pelted across the parking lot. On the way, I was joined by a dark figure heading out of the last room of the motel -- Number 10 -- who paused to pop the trunk on his Cadillac and retrieve something.

  The screaming had the high, panicked pitch of a kid in real trouble. I skidded to a halt at the double doors of the DQ dining area and grabbed the handle, but it was locked. I rattled it and made a cave of my hands to try to see into the shadows inside.

  I saw the girl who'd served up my shake pressed against the wall, fists crammed against her mouth. Still screaming. Staring at something hidden behind the counter. I banged on the door hard. Glass and metal rattled. She dashed over and did unlocking things, and as soon as the door was open threw herself on me like a shaking, girl-sized limpet. I couldn't make anything out of what she was gasping at me, so I peeled her off and edged over to peer over the counter.

  I'd seen dead guys before, but this guy was really, really dead. In pieces. There was something particularly revolting about a dead guy in pieces on the floor of the DQ, under the brightly-colored posters advertising tasty frozen treats and brazier-cooked meat products.

  I swallowed hard, several times, and tried not to breathe through my nose.

  "I'm no doctor," the guy in the black leather jacket said casually, leaning over the counter, "but that guy may need medical attention."

  Laconic, and not funny. I whirled toward him. He had a shotgun propped casually up against his shoulder, and sunglasses pushed up on top of his head, and he looked bland and utterly disinterested as he stared down at the pieces of what had formerly been known as Bob or Fred or Joe.

  "Call the police," I said. I was facing Mystery Man, but I was talking to the girl, who was hovering by the door. She pushed through and sped off at a run, hopefully for the phone in the motel office. "You know anything about this?"

  "Why would I?" he asked.

  "You come fully equipped for killing people."

  "Yeah, not for chopping them into bits, though. And you seem awfully damn calm about it," he pointed out. I wasn't, in fact. My heart was pounding hard, and my hands were shaking, but I knew how to fake it. "Look, I was kidding about that werewolf thing last night, but ..."

  "Can it." I could do a lot of things, but quipping over a corpse was a little beyond my gag limit. "Any idea who he is?"

  "Not a clue." He studied me for a few seconds. "Let's take this outside. We've already left enough forensic crap on the scene of the crime."

  He spun on his heel and walked out, elbowing the door open rather than using his hand. Fingerprints, right. I'd left mine all over it. Out in the sunlight, he looked even more normal than before -- not a remarkable face, dark eyes, intermediate-colored skin, eyes and nose and mouth all in normal proportions. Nothing you'd fall instantly in love with or photograph or remember five minutes later.

  Except for the deadly-looking shotgun he was holding, of course. That made him stand out.

  He saw me staring at it and dropped the barrel to point toward the ground. "Precaution," he said.

  "You always carry that kind of stuff?"

  "Pretty much, yeah." He walked back to the Caddy's open trunk and stowed it away in a rack that seemed specifically built for the purpose. Or maybe it was meant to hold fishing rods. How would I know? "What's your name?"

  I wasn't planning to get chummy with the potentially crazy and definitely well-armed. "Gail." Gail, as in gale-force winds. I'd have gone for Wendy if it hadn't been so cute and associated with fast food.

  "You?"

  "Brian McCall," he said. "Pleased to meet you." He slammed the trunk, pocketed the keys, and leaned against the dusty car. "We've got about ten minutes, give or take, to get our story straight."

  "Story? I don't have a story. Maybe you have a story."

  "Oh, I've got one," he said, poker-faced. "But I'm talking about the story of the dead guy in the DQ. Which, seeing as I don't think the little girl did that, just leaves a few suspects. You, me, the motel manager, or some crazy drifter who happened to break into a Dairy Queen. The motel manager, he's local. They'll like to have a nice easy answer, and you and me, we're easy. Unless you've got an alibi."

  I didn't. I swallowed hard.

  "Didn't think so," he said, and rolled his shoulders in a gesture that wasn't quite a shrug. "Me neither. I was thinking ... want to be alibi buddies?"

  "Not if you did it."

  "Lady, if I did it, I'd damn sure be halfway across the state by now and not hanging around for the discovery of the corpse," McCall snapped, and I believed him. He looked like the kind who'd know exactly how to get away w
ith murder. "I thought you checked in with some guy. Where's he?"

  "Off on an errand," I said.

  McCall fixed me with a stare. "The cops are going to be very interested about why he bugged out in the middle of the night. Not to mention how he bugged out, seeing as you came in the same car and we're in the ass of nowhere."

  Lies were going to get too elaborate. I kept silent, staring back, and raised an eyebrow. McCall, unexpectedly, grinned at me.

  "I like you," he said. "You don't fluster."

  "I'm too damn tired to fluster."

  He started to say something, then stopped, face smoothing back into an expressionless mask. His eyes were fixed somewhere just over my shoulder.

  "What?" I started to turn.

  "Don't move," he said. I froze. "Stay here."

  He hit the remote control on his keys and popped the trunk of his car, yanked the shotgun out of its brace, and headed for the office.

  Great. My new alibi buddy was about to rob the place. My day was just getting better.