by J. D. Monroe
Without thinking, her hand flies out for it. Had she been trying, she never could have caught it so perfectly, but something in her subconscious is trying to grab it, curling her fingers to catch it. The ring slides down her thumb before she can fling it free. Tingling cold runs up her arm. She sucks in a sharp breath as a hazy gray veil drops over her vision.
Keep it on, she thinks as she examines the bauble on her finger. Look how pretty it is.
Even in the dim light, the ring gleams. A star is trapped in the blue stone, like a glass cage. The longer she stares at it, the brighter it glows. Her eyes skim off the glittering surface of the ring to the silver cross in her toolbox.
Holy shit, that was fast. She shakes her hand violently, but the ring is stuck.
“Archangel Michael, defend me in battle,” she says. Her voice sounds small and weak, which pisses her off something fierce.
Michael isn’t listening, an unfamiliar female voice murmurs at the back of her mind. Big bad archangels don’t give a shit about white trash who murder their own family.
“I didn’t kill her,” Charity snaps.
Sure tried, the harsh voice replies. Maybe if you weren’t such a shitty shot, you’d have done it. But then, fucking things up is what you do best, isn’t it?
Whatever is bound up in this ring is a real asshole.
“Michael, I implore you to bind this evil and put this troubled spirit to rest.”
The ring flares hot again, and she flings her hand hard enough to send it bouncing into the gravel with a crystalline ting. Color seeps back into the world. As her vision clears, she can see the blistered red outline of the ring around her thumb.
She jams her stinging hand into the glove and seizes the ring between her fingers. Even through the thick leather, she can still feel the cold of the ring. Its whisper is faint, like murmurs through a glass window, but the glove doesn’t completely break its spell. It’s in her head now, and it’ll stay there until she destroys the ring.
Her hands shake as she fills the shallow basin of the crucible with holy water. There’s a low murmuring in the back of her mind, the indistinct ebb and flow of a radio between stations. “I purify this ring in the name of the most High, whose very name causes hell to tremble in fear. I bind it in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
The murmuring grows louder and resolves into distinct words, none of them pleasant. Murderer. Filth. Trash. Unworthy.
“Nothin’ I hadn’t heard before.”
She clambers back into the truck and hauls out the piece de resistance from under a bungee-wrapped tarp. The acetylene torch looks like a scuba setup for a midget, but it cranks out two thousand degrees of curse-destroying awesome.
Whore. Blasphemer, the ring whispers in a dry, sandpapery voice. She ignores it as she tweaks the pressure on the torch. It takes a minute to adjust the nozzles on the two tanks so she doesn’t blow herself up, but she eventually gets it right. Filthy Jezebel.
She laughs aloud. “Jezebel, seriously? Old-fashioned. You talk a lot of shit for a piece of metal.”
As she aims the torch at the crucible, a bolt of pain twangs between her temples, and the metal handle slips from her hand. Instead of a gravel parking lot illuminated by harsh white headlights, she sees her own corpse lying on brown grass. Blue eyes hang over her mauled cheeks. Splintered ribs lay open around shredded raw-meat entrails. It makes her stomach churn, but she forces a grin that feels like a frozen corpse smile.
“You think this is the first time I’ve seen my own pretty corpse?” Her voice shakes as she reaches for the torch and squeezes the trigger. The voices rise in a screech of rage, and the images flash in her mind, rapid-fire and each worse than the last. Her dismembered corpse, bloated and gray, as it bobs in a murky swamp. A vaguely humanoid creature cloaked in blood-red scales, hunched over her and thrusting furiously as her bloodied fingers claw at the ground.
For a moment, her finger slips off the trigger. The ring is barely beginning to melt, like butter softening in the brutal summer heat. It’s a shame to ruin something so lovely. Her fingers are halfway to the molten metal before she realizes what she’s doing. She clamps down on the torch with her left hand and focuses on the flowing script of the tattoo on her right arm. Her Latin pronunciation is shit, but it distracts her from the nightmarish slide show.
“Ecce praecipio tibi confrontare et esto robustis noli metuere et noli timere…”
Suddenly, the murmuring stops. Whatever evil was encased in the ring is silenced, undone as the metal breaks down into a glimmering pool of liquid gold. The sapphire is cracked, but the strange gravity of it is gone. She doesn’t feel any need to touch it, other than to dispose of it.
Thank God.
She drops the torch and digs in the toolbox for an old metal mint container. She carefully upends the crucible into the tin. When the last of the melted gold drips into the container, she pours in a thick layer of consecrated salt and seals it.
Now she’s earned a good night’s sleep.
The Starlight Motel on Highway 16 is a Grade-A dump. It was probably a dump the day it was built, and the years haven’t been kind. In her late uncle’s parlance, this place has been rode hard and put away wet. The metal roof sags, and a rusted deck chair is inexplicably perched on the corner above the dimly lit office, front legs wedged in the leaf-choked gutters. The neon sign reads Ar ht Ot l like a half-solved Wheel of Fortune game.
When she wheels into the near-empty lot, two men are huddled behind a white Toyota, engrossed in what is most definitely a drug deal. She ignores them and hauls her gear bag out of the back seat. Locking the truck is an exercise in futility with the windshield shattered, but everything valuable is in the duffel bag on her shoulder. The crackheads can help themselves to the broken glass and empty water bottles in the floorboard.
As she limps down the cracked sidewalk to her room, she hears the unmistakable sound of people humping in the room next to the ice machine. Apparently, someone is a very dirty boy who needs to be spanked.
Great.
Room 116 reeks of cigarette smoke and mildew, and she’s not sure if the yellow tinge to the walls is an actual paint color or just the accumulated grunge of a few decades. When she fumbles the switch on the nightstand lamp, a fat black cockroach skitters across the table and down the wall behind her bed.
Wonderful.
She throws her bag on the bed near the door, then peels off her sweat-sticky T-shirt. With a grunt, she pries her boots off and shuffles into the bathroom. She perches on the edge of the dingy tub and turns on the water. It comes out cloudy and rusty-brown at first. While she waits for the water to clear up, she eases out of her ruined jeans and examines the aftermath of the night’s misadventures.
Grandpa had a grip on him, that’s for sure. There’s a handprint right above her left knee, as sharp and distinct as if it had been dipped in purple paint and slapped against her tan skin. Hurts, but nothing to be done for it. Her calf is another story. It stings in the open air when she flexes and points her toes to examine it. Four deep punctures, bruised black around the seeping red. There’s no telling what kind of shit is festering in there. The undead aren’t exactly sanitary.
She sighs and steps into the shower. Fire ignites in her calf as the hot water hits the open wounds, but it fades to a distant annoyance under the comforting heat of the steamy spray. The standing water in the tub turns red, then slowly fades clear again as she washes away another dirty night and runs down her mental checklist.
The itinerary has changed. She was supposed to be heading up to Columbia, South Carolina for a job. Four people disappeared in four months, all from the same mile stretch along 77. Now she’s going to have to detour through Atlanta. She’ll get fancied up a little, hit a couple of the bars downtown, run her game, and pad her wallet enough to get her truck fixed. Unlike most of her other necessities, she can’t slip out of a Wal-Mart with a windshield hidden under her oversized jacket. But first, she needs sleep. The rest
can wait until morning.
She wrings out her damp curls and tugs a wash-worn white T-shirt over her head. Her calf is still oozing red, which worries her. Even without the shattered windshield, an emergency room visit is way beyond her budget. Instead, she grabs a towel from the bathroom. The threadbare cloth is scratchy and more gray than white, but it has the clean chlorine smell of bleach, which is about as good as she’s going to get for twenty-nine bucks a night. She wraps it around her leg, ties it in a knot, and sets about her nightly rituals.
Door locked. Windows latched. She takes a plastic bottle of holy water and a can of salt from her bag. She makes a slow circle around the room, flicking holy water into the corners. “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” she murmurs, making the sign of the cross as she liberally sprinkles the door and window. After she finishes with the water, she pours a thin line of salt at the base of the doorway. She checks the lock one last time, then switches off the lamp and grabs her father’s antique gun out of her bag. She lays it on the other pillow and settles into bed.
The room is barely wide enough for her to walk around the bed, but it seems too big and empty for one. She’s been alone for just over two months now, and she still misses the soothing sound of someone else breathing in the quiet of night. Hell, she’d even take a snorer.
She switches off the lamp. Well, she might be lonely, but at least no one is smiling to her face while waiting to stab her in the back. Everything’s got a price, and she’ll take security over companionship any day.
As she closes her heavy eyes, the nightmarish images of the ring linger in her head like the afterimage of a camera flash. She wishes she still had the bottle of Jack to wash her brain clean, but a rough night two weeks ago had seen the bottom of that particular bottle. Instead, she switches on the TV and turns the volume low. The quiet ebb and flow of white noise takes the edge off the emptiness. She closes her hand around her father’s cross.
Just let me get a few hours of sleep. That’s all I need.
She wakes too early with a headache that makes her wonder if she went out and got blackout drunk after all. Maybe she went on a bender with the crackheads in the parking lot. Her body aches all over, and her mouth tastes like something retreated there to die last night. She groans, stumbles to the sink, and dry-swallows three aspirin. Putting weight on her leg makes her calf throb around Grandpa’s bloody fingerprints. She balances precariously on one foot as she brushes her teeth at the sink.
It takes her only five minutes to get dressed and dab a little concealer under her eyes, and another ten to get everything in the room packed. Eight years on the road means she’s real good at moving quick.
She hauls her big duffel bag out to the truck and freezes in place. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
In the early morning light, she can see the filthy footprints from the revenant using her hood as a springboard. That’s nothing a trip through the carwash won’t fix. But the right front tire is deflated like a week-old party balloon, tipping the truck slightly off balance.
No, no, no.
She drops her bag and crouches on the asphalt next to the tire, as if she can somehow revive it with tire CPR. Tracing the clay-caked treads with her fingers, she finds the flat, smooth head of a thick nail. Her head throbs again, and her stomach sinks.
Shit.
Of course, there’s no spare. A few years back, Patience insisted on removing it to make space for their trunks. Ever since, Charity had been meaning to buy a mount to go under the truck, but it was real hard to spend a couple hundred bucks that could bankroll another few weeks of hunting. Every time it got to bothering her, she convinced herself that she was careful enough and she wouldn’t get stranded anywhere, as if good intentions and positive thinking had ever diverted disaster in the entire history of the universe.
She lets out a heavy sigh, shoulders slumping in utter defeat. This is what her old preacher friend Will Halloran calls one of “God’s billboards.” She is obviously doing something wrong with her life. After paying for this shithole of a room, she’s got fifty-seven bucks to get her to Atlanta to make her next score. Thanks to two inches of rusty metal, she’s not getting out of this parking lot, let alone sixty miles up the road. Let it never be said that two inches couldn’t accomplish anything.
What the hell is she supposed to do now? She stomps back into the motel room and flops onto the lumpy, unmade bed with her phone in her hand. Maybe she can call Triple-A and spin a story about losing her card. Doubtful. They’ll run her name, come up with nothing, and she’s back to square one. Insurance company? They’ll take days, and she can pay for exactly one more night at the lovely Starlight Motel. After sweeping out the glass, she could sleep in her truck—wouldn’t be the first time—but the clientele here is likely to make that an unpleasant experience. Maybe spanking-boy down the hall will let her bunk in with him. Ugh.
Instead, she thumbs through the contacts in her phone. It’s a pitiful list to begin with, and even more so since she and her sister went their separate ways. Still, old habits die hard, and she lets the scrolling motion stop with Patience halfway up the screen. Her sister has a way of producing money from nowhere, like a golden goose with anger issues. “Screw that,” she mutters. She’ll walk bare-ass naked and barefoot all the way to Atlanta before she calls Patience for help.
She pokes the screen violently and scrolls until she ends up at Zachary Thomas. She scrolls back up, scowling as her sister crosses the glowing screen again. She stops at Mike Dupree.
Her cousin’s voice is gruff and bleary when he answers. Right, it’s six in the morning, when normal people are asleep. “Charity? You all right?”
“Sorry to wake you,” she says. “Need a big favor.”
3. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
THREE DAYS LATER
CONSIDERING COUSIN MIKE DROVE NEARLY SIX HOURS in a borrowed wrecker with no air conditioning to bail her ass out, she ought to be a lot nicer. Before three days ago, she hadn’t seen him since she was barely a teenager and her mother was still marginally sane. But if he tells her the story about the time he went to the Masters and met Arnold Palmer in the bathroom again, she’s going to tie his balls in a knot around his crooked nose. It’s just a few more days, she keeps telling herself. It has to be, for both of their sakes.
Mike Dupree, second cousin on her mama’s side, owns a dive bar in Tipton, a burg in South Carolina that always smells like cow shit and road-killed skunk, thanks to the waste processing plant on the edge of town. The bar’s sign reads The Somewhere Saloon, as in “it’s five o’clock somewhere.” It’s clever, but Charity is damn near certain that Mike’s regulars aren’t overly concerned with what proper society considers the acceptable time to start throwing back dollar beer specials. The place starts filling up around three, when the swing shift guys get off work at the waste plant, and it only gets busier until the bar closes at two in the morning.
She plunges her hand into a bath of soapy water to wash out another round of pint glasses. If her sister saw her now…
This is the price of pride, Charity Lee.
Mike offered to carry her on home to Aran Valley, but she told him he might as well drop her off on the side of the road in her underwear. Showing up in the hunting town with broken fingers and missing a few pints of blood is nothing to be embarrassed about. They’d get someone with steady hands to stitch her up, then buy her round after round of whiskey at the tavern while she told the story, which would grow more impressive with each retelling. That’s just how they rolled at home.
But she’ll be damned if she’s going to slink back into town for the first time in six months with an empty wallet and a broke-down truck. It’d be all knowing looks and we’ll get you back on your feet to her face, and a whole lot of I told you so, she ought to have never split up with her sister behind her back.
About two months after their split, she got a flurry of text messages and calls asking where she was and why Patience was all alone back home. Was Charity hurt? I
n trouble? A day later, the messages dried up, except for a few variations on I hope y’all straighten things out. There was no telling what story Patience told, and Charity didn’t need the burden of explaining herself to a bunch of nosy-ass small town folks who belong in the none of your damn business category.
Besides, she’d be in the same boat anyway. If she went on home, she’d probably get put to work doing odd jobs for a twenty here and there. So she’ll stay here, where at least no one knows her, and she can keep the ragged threads of pride she still has left. Mike pays her forty bucks a shift, which she suspects is an excessively generous family rate, and lets her keep whatever she makes in tips. She eats for free, which is fine so long as her tastes run to anything battered and deep-fried.
Mike’s got a new girlfriend living with him, and while he didn’t say as much, a younger woman sleeping on his couch wasn’t helping their relationship. After the first night, she overheard the girlfriend—Melinda—griping at him out on the back porch. Apparently, she didn’t give one shit if Charity was his cousin, because she wasn’t putting up with some “white-trash bimbo in the other room.” Mike argued back at her; Charity was a second cousin, but family was family as far as he was concerned.
And Charity’s been called a whole lot worse than white-trash bimbo. She still doesn’t care for it, and Melinda really ought to look in the mirror to see that the bleach-blond pot is every bit as black as the kettle. But Mike is a stand-up guy and doesn’t deserve to have the cops show up on his doorstep to break up a fight.
Instead, Charity packed her bag silently while they fought and told Melinda she’d reduce the bimbo population of Mike’s house to one and find somewhere else to stay. Mike’s relief was palpable, and he sheepishly offered a truckbed camper attached to a rust-bucket of a pickup parked out behind the bar.
