When we were about half an hour from Nantes, he pulled out a gun.
“Fuck, mec!” I was so busy gawping at Antoine and his piece, I nearly plowed into a cyclist, and I had to swerve hard. “What the fuck?”
He just laughed at me, although for once at least it reached his eyes.
“C’mon, Michele. Don’t pussy out, hey? I told you, we go there, I see Radouane… we get laid and, once all the business is done, we’ll go home. Back in Paris by tonight, huh? All easy. Easy like slow dance, huh?”
Antoine held the gun up to his cheek, making kissy lips and swaying his head from side to side as the side of the flattish black muzzle pressed into his skin. If I hadn’t been so freaked out, I’d have rolled my eyes and called him an asshole.
“You know what this is?” he asked, bringing the gun around in front of him, pointing it up at the roof. “You know what’s special about it?”
I shook my head and kept myself focused on the road. It was coming up to lunchtime, but my whole day had already gone to shit. “No. No, I don’t know.”
“Glock 20,” Antoine said proudly. “American. I look like Dirty Harry, eh?”
He laughed again, the fat end of the joint drooping from the corner of his mouth. I didn’t want to say that Dirty Harry carried a Magnum, so I took the bottle of whisky he passed to me and buried my mouth in a big gulp. It burned the taste of the weed away and mixed the stale, hot air into something sour and acrid that coated my tongue. We weren’t far from Nantes. I had been there once before, on holiday when I was a child. I didn’t remember much about it, except that there had been a carnival: lights and music, all twisted together in one warped reality.
“Take a right,” he told me, gesturing impatiently at the windshield, although at least he had put the gun down. “I know where I’m going, mec. Quickly!”
I shook my head, but followed his directions. There wasn’t really much else I could do, although I was beginning to feel afraid, like maybe this was a holiday from which I would not return. Antoine had me skirt the main routes, driving way out past Nantes, toward the coast and, finally, the neat roads fringed with green grass and tidy, white little houses. The midday sun hid its face behind grey clouds, as if it was ashamed to watch us, and rain began to fall as Antoine piloted me toward a speck of nowhere just down the coast from Pornic. Everything was fields and trees, and we no longer played loud rap as we drove. Antoine called it “silent running”, and held the Glock tenderly in his lap. He told me the place was quiet, set back up a long driveway with no near neighbours. I was to come in with him, but I better be ready to run back to the car and drive like a fucking madman. I started to think he might not be intending for both of us to get back to Paris… that maybe I was only ever supposed to go far enough to get him out clean.
Sweat pricked my palms as I nosed the Visa into the bare, gravelled approach that led up to the gîte. With nothing around but trees and swells of green—the last signpost I’d seen was for Monval—I could hear the echo of the sea beneath bird cries, though I couldn’t see it. I was glad of that. I was a city boy; I wanted no part of any great, wide emptiness… no threatening void that only held horizons.
“Stop here,” Antoine said, his face so very still and sullen.
Usually there was some hint of movement about him, some glance or glimmer of impatience that whispered of his dangers, but he was quiet now. Drawn in on himself.
I stopped the car on the grey driveway, within sight of the long, low house ahead. It seemed to cling to the ground like a limpet, hiding amongst the flourishing shrubs and borders; the kind of place that must once have been expensive, with a backyard the size of a field, and maybe a swimming pool. Now, though, it looked unkempt, uncared for… as forgotten as the memories of a dozen childhood summers. Lots of windows, but each and every one shuttered with blinds. I could see why Radouane had picked this place. It was private, remote… the kind of bashed-up, out-of-the-way old house that no one ever bothered to look at twice these days. No sign of anyone. Not even a dog barked. It was the kind of place no one would hear a damn thing, and my heart trilled behind my ribs, my palms wet against the wheel.
Antoine had tucked the gun into his jeans. He motioned me to follow him as he got out of the car and we began to walk toward the house, rain spotting against my face—cool and calm, like a benediction. Humidity purred in the air, and it seemed as if the rain should have smoked, each drop sizzling as it slipped through the heat.
I glanced at the gîte, and thought I saw a face in the farthest window: a girl, dark-skinned and wide-eyed, yet unafraid. When I looked back, blinking through the thickening rain, she had disappeared behind the blinds once more.
Beside me, Antoine’s lips curled into that snake-sway smile of his.
* * *
Esther
Radouane called it a party: his terminology for getting a bunch of girls together and shipping them off to take care of clients for a weekend. Any big deal, any major score he wanted in on—or anybody he’d managed to piss off, with his winning charm and top-drawer personality—and he applied them like bandages or buttercream, either patching up problems or sweetening the pot.
She had agreed to go, which was more than the other girls had. Two Macedonians, a Bosnian, and a couple of French junkies from the Loire… out of the six of them, Esther was the only one who spoke coherent English. The Bosnian was almost as high as the French girls, and the Macedonians only spoke to each other—they seemed to have some intense and dubious bond going, given the way they clung to each other in the back of the van—so, especially considering her poor French, communication was limited. It didn’t really matter.
Do a favour for me, Radouane had said when she returned. Back to roost, he called it. His blackbird. Like that shit was cute. Go to Pornic and wait for me. I’ll meet you there. It won’t take long.
She’d nodded, let him believe she still liked it when he touched her. Maybe he didn’t see through it. Maybe he thought he was still playing her—that he’d played her in Illinois, when he offered to get her into France, offered her the new life she’d never have gotten any other way.
Esther didn’t know much about his plan. Just that there was a deal worth a lot of money going on, and that some kid who hustled dime bags thought he could cut in. Radouane wanted to play the brat off against the big boys; scare him a little, perhaps. Maybe he planned to kill him. Maybe he planned to throw the deal in the first place and screw over the Slavs, or Germans, or whoever the hell was making the score this time. She didn’t need to know, and didn’t care to.
Dusk was drawing in when they arrived at the house, and Esther blinked as she stumbled from the van, staring up at the mingled hues of blue, purple, and red mixing like spilled paint or vivid bruises across the sky. Although it was undeniably beautiful, the echo of the daylight raised shivers on her skin. Esther belonged to the night, her darkness wrapped in its embrace, where no one could see the terrible things she did. As the shadows came for her—skimming across the flat, boundless fields, where the wind swallowed up sound—she feared them, and the things they would give her the freedom to do.
The boys who did Radouane’s dirty work and cleaned up his messes, hung around on the house’s grey gravel driveway; the red stars of cigarettes being lit, one by one, pricked the dimness.
She went inside with the others, and the feel of the place closed over her like a dark pond, damp-smelling and clammy. The heat outside seemed to have perfumed the air within, lending it a flavour, a texture… something that spoke of the summer’s corruption. It made the beast stir within her, the flesh-print of a memory that rippled beneath her skin, stretching out in luxurious remembrance of the way it felt to feed. Tonight would be as good a night as any, she supposed. Like gutting fish in a barrel… but it would be better to wait a short while. Better to play along for now, to choose her moment. She’d been hiding in plain sight for so long that one more night shouldn’t matter. Just one more, and then she would creep away.
&
nbsp; This place was isolated. Quiet. Radouane’s father owned several of them; holiday chalets, cottages, and villas rented out to rosbifs and other tourists. Esther doubted he knew what happened here in the fallow seasons… unless he was complicit in his son’s schemes. Did he know? Did he sanction these empty times, allowing Radouane to fill the slow weeks with these jokes of human beings? Radouane arrived around ten that night, and the Slavs, or Germans, or whoever the fuck they were appeared less than an hour later. The entire place changed its face in a moment. Music, champagne… all the trappings of the party he’d promised them. Two of the men—shaven-headed white guys with heavy gold rings on their hands—had the Bosnian girl on one of the pale cream couches. She didn’t seem to notice it much.
Esther was given one of the older men for a while. Back bedroom with a window that looked out across the fields, sky falling like a curtain over the spines of hedgerows and fluffed-up summer trees. On her back, upside down through the glass, the world beyond was an edgeless dark that grew thicker as she watched it. Thickened like cooling blood, like mud, like water freezing over. By the time he was done, it had grown impenetrable, impassable, pierced only by the tiny fires of stars lit within the cold. They winked at her, calling down to her and the beast she hid inside.
She dressed, went back to the room that held the booze, coke, and assholes, and Radouane greeted her with a smile and a joint. She was exotic tonight. Américain, they all insisted, and Esther didn’t bother to correct them. She was the import, along with the whisky and the guns. The temptation to let her mask slip had rarely been stronger; her fingers itched for the feel of skin tearing beneath them, and the hunger for blood-salt made a home in her mouth. She wondered, as she often did, what they’d think if they knew what she was. Men like these did not believe in monsters. They always thought they were the scariest thing in the world—the biggest, the toughest, the meanest—as if their violence made them narrow, hemmed them in on all sides by its hardness.
The thought amused Esther. It almost made her want to hold out against temptation, to do all the things Radouane wanted tonight, and then to leave under the shadow of the next darkness… a quiet darkness, instead of one raging with blood.
For a while, she tried. She held onto the thought of the money and let the smoke curl around her, hoping it would numb the beast without gnawing away at her resolutions. Even monsters had to know restraint, and she wanted to believe she was capable of that.
After all, if a shadow is only given definition by the light, then a monster must find its shape outside the darkness.
She put the joint to her lips, and watched the dance the humans made, each one of them so convinced of his own superiority, as if they weren’t all so fucking transparent. Radouane smiled, the sleeve of his black leather jacket skimming his chunky gold watch as he reclined back against the couch, his other hand a possessive weight on her thigh. Esther looked down at it as if his flesh was an improbability, a nothing blown against her like a fallen leaf caught in the breeze. Perhaps she should never have tried to believe that she could be a part of their world. No matter how secret she kept herself, how tightly she locked her hunger away, she was not of their kind.
She had no place among them. Perhaps the time to pretend anything different was past.
* * *
Michele
There was blood everywhere. I couldn’t get past that. So much of it, smeared across the windows from the inside… and not just blood. Flesh, bone, maybe brain matter? I didn’t know. I was no doctor, no mortician, no fucking psychopath who looked at the carnage we saw in there and thought it could have been wrought by human hands. Bodies lay on the beige carpet, the pale couches spattered red and the faded wallpaper redesigned with arcing spots and streaks of blood.
“Fuck, mec…” Antoine shook his head as we surveyed the mess inside.
The front door was unlocked, and nothing halted our progress as we moved through the gîte, encountering corpse after corpse. Men in black leather and gold, women with their bare breasts bloodied. It was a mess, a degeneration of flesh torn apart, laid out wet and glistening, and the stultifying air was thick with the smell of meat and copper.
Shots had been fired. At least three of the men in the main room still held their guns—Glocks, like Antoine’s, and he laughed at that, motherfucking laughed—but no bullets could do the extent of what had been done here. I wanted to puke, to get out, to run away, but Antoine gravitated to the low coffee table in the centre of the room, smiling at the plastic-wrapped kilos streaked with red and brown. His head moved from side to side—that snake-strike dance—and he laughed to himself as he looked down at the body of the man slumped against the couch.
“Ah, Radouane,” he murmured, unclasping the watch from the dead man’s wrist. “I always said you’d get yourself in trouble, mec. Too much for you, the big boys’ game, no?”
“Antoine, are you crazy? Whoever did this––”
“Relax, Michele.” He turned to me with his false smile and his dead, dangerous eyes, the Glock held in one hand and the watch dangling from his fingers. “They just fucked each other over before we got here. It’s fate, mec. Providence. Life is making it easy for me, huh?”
It was then that I saw how crazy Antoine really was. In my sweat-stained panic, my fear that made that hot, stinking room feel cold, I could see the edges of his madness, and the bare, hard face of the monster staring back at me.
A movement near one of the bedroom doors caught my eye, and we turned. I thought at once of the girl at the window and, at first glance, it could have been her. She was young, her black hair pinned back high and tight, but her pink leather jacket was riddled with bullet holes, and she was misshapen, miscast; a creature made to look human but wrought from different proportions.
Oddly elongated wrists forced her hands into a loose-jointed pose, blood-dipped fingers splayed and reaching out. Hips, back, neck… everything seemed shifted somehow, angled wrongly, and her chin, cheeks, forehead, and nose all hung crooked, swelling and moving beneath the skin. Lips peeled back from a raw, red mouth, that whole inhuman face rippling like water breaking beneath a stone.
Only her eyes seemed real: dark and wide, but more full of life than any I had ever seen. Unafraid, yet not brave through anger or blind fury. The stare that met mine was that of another creature entirely, and with it she looked straight into my soul.
I heard Antoine speak as he raised the gun. He called her a stupid whore, and I barely saw my hand move. I struck him, pushed him as hard as I could, sending the shot off-balance and him stumbling to the floor, falling among the dead.
He rose angry, angry like a wild dog, and yet his eyes still held that same dullness, that lie of life. I saw the Glock’s flat muzzle swing toward me, heard the noise and saw the flash, but felt only the concussive force of the blow. No pain. I was aware of falling, of the preternatural movement of the girl as she sprang at Antoine and split his throat apart. His blood spattered my face with wet heat.
I tasted salt. How strange that she seemed more real than him… more honest, if not more human. Antoine gave one last gurgle, and the soft growl of the girl’s breath scraped the air as she left him and moved closer to me. It brought with it the scent of blood, a heat that washed over me in bitter sourness.
Her teeth closed on my throat, and I knew nothing more.
* * *
Esther
She didn’t know why she did it. She didn’t know why he had done it, come to that. What human was moved to save a monster? But he had. He had walked into that theatre of death—the scene of all that rage and mistrust—and he had tried to save her… and now he was dying on the threadbare carpet.
Radouane had shot first, killing one of the Slavs. That had been his plan from the start, though he’d over-reached himself, as usual. Always thinking he could have it all: keep the product, knock out the competition, kill the dime-bag boy—when he arrived—and be the big man left holding all the goodies. He always had been an idiot. Of cou
rse, it had ended poorly, ended in a firestorm that grew frenzied after the first bullets passed harmlessly through her. Suddenly, it had stopped being about the men, their money, and their macho pissing contest… it was almost funny to watch the ones who hadn’t already shot each other come together in panic, firing blindly at the monster.
Silly, silly boys. Esther was not sure which she had killed and which were down to the number of bullets flying. After a while, between the feeding and chaos, it grew hard to tell which bits belonged to which body anyway. Perhaps it didn’t matter. She ate herself sluggish, resting in the sunlit hours until the sound of tyres on gravel woke her.
She had been foolish, perhaps. She had certainly surprised herself.
Perhaps it had been something in his face, in his eyes… that moment of complete serenity as he turned on his companion, pushing the gun aside. He wasn’t to know bullets couldn’t hurt the dead. He had made a choice, allied himself with her against the other, even though she was clearly not his kind.
Esther hadn’t expected that. Hadn’t believed it was possible.
It had happened all the same, and she had seen the shadow-petals inside the other: dark flames that had long since burned out his core. She had seen it in the way he smiled as he’d fought back, raising the gun and then blowing a hole through her would-be saviour’s chest. A callous, easy cruelty; a pleasure found in blood that was familiar to her, and yet which she wanted nothing more than to deny him.
He’d tasted rotten when she bit him. No sweetness in his blood, his life a bitter thing that had corroded within him. His death hung on her mouth like a mirror of her future, and it revolted Esther.
Perhaps that was why she spared his friend.
She knelt over the brown-skinned boy bleeding from the chest, and watched the ragged little gulps he made as his life edged away.
What did she hope to gain? She wondered at her reasoning, even as her fingers traced the contours of his clammy face. Perhaps she was just tired of being alone, being adrift… being the outsider. Perhaps she simply wanted to return the favour. He’d tried to save her and, though the gift of life was beyond her, maybe this was enough.
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