Uriah rolled her eyes. “Cloths enough.”
“Bite the ward, you twit. Knowing that I know, would you like to see me drunk on wassail and licking toads? Talking in tongues? Talking at all? Would you have me make a mistake? What if I get coaxed into a corner? What if I’m convinced or corrupted?”
“Noth you.”
“You put too much faith in me. What if I am forced to make a batch to order for… you can imagine for whom. You can see to what purposes my worms could be then employed. Not just humans, but—”
“Stop!” Uriah barked, her teeth snicking together. Maren realized she could hear the world again.
Uriah’s hands trembled as though palsied. She folded and rewrapped the gum—a challenge, for it continued to kick and bulge until tightly restrained—and secreted it back into her gloss and purse. “Great, this lisp will last for hours. It bit my tongue fifty times.”
“Of course it did. Why do you think I asked you to form the ward? I have Pappenheimer if you… I can finish abstractly, for what I had left to say works against us only in context. Not just on humans, but on anything. Witches and ghouls and gian—”
“—Enough,” Uriah breathed. “I don’t want anyone to… I had no idea it was like that.”
“And I’m glad you didn’t. Begin to understand my recent years. There are things one encounters that are too awful to share with those you care about, or with those who cannot shoulder the burden.”
“You thought I couldn’t handle it? Knowing?”
“No. If I thought that, I would have said nothing. Secrets are like seeing the future. I’m far more sure of the outcome when I alone know. Two is too many, and two will make more.”
“I won’t blab.” Uriah pinched her tongue. “Why tell me now?”
“Because you asked. Also, I was concerned you might be taken—and that, unknowing, you would be taken too willingly. Now you won’t. I can’t have you made into a lever under me.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“—No, and that’s the problem. I couldn’t bear to see you tortured or killed, Uriah—but I tell this to your face: if it comes to that, I shall do my utmost to endure the loss. I mustn’t trade this secret. Not even to save your life.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Mull it over and you’ll see why. You die in either scenario. Also, I told you because there have been other changes afoot. My thoughts on the gift, and the… what I’ve made. This bounty. I’m being followed: the night is young, yet I’ve already run into a lich and several—”
“—Which one? Slager?”
“Mudmush. You’re confusing a necrolich with… Slager can be deemed a vampire, though that’s calling a Bugatti a rickshaw. If he ever was crippled, he is not now, and I want no part of him. Ignoring his physical strengths, he can play the long game, and he has. I ran into him, too—just after the lich.”
Uriah’s brow arched. “And yet you live.”
“I do. I’ve tasted this fresh rot in the wind for years. I wasn’t completely unprepared. I told him as much.”
“You threatened Slager?”
“Directly. I know the location of his lair, and now he knows I do. I implied violence against Carmilla as well. Covering the bases, you know.”
“You didn’t,” Uriah said, her mouth hanging open—Maren could see where the ward had bitten her tongue.
“I did. Under the grace of truth, too.”
“Kings and garters. Maren, if you know where Slager’s manikin breathes, take an obolus, an aspen stake, and have done with him.”
“I pause to kill Slager, especially when it would be I who drew first and final blood. Not to mention, Carmilla is as close to innocent as… she’d avenge him, though. Would you have me kill her, too?”
“I wouldn’t want to, but I would. Slager’s a safety hazard. Kills witches whenever he can.”
“Even if he is now my enemy, I see his place. If everyone killed their enemies, this planet would be bald. Is he selfish? Yes. Evil? I am unconvinced. He has a code.”
“What code? You haven’t seen him working a club. It’s a miracle there’s a young woman left to drain.”
“Competition to you, is he? I don’t want to know the answer. The fact remains that it went better with Slager than I have made it sound. No doubt there will be a reckoning, but I have several pending. The lich out of the old Phidar region was more agitated.”
“That’s the zombie? The mage?”
“You’re getting warmer, though Mudmush isn’t. He’s more skeleton than corpse, though he’d fleshed-out somewhat since the last… whatever he should be called, he has a mind on par with any. Strong magic.”
“I met him long ago. May it be longer.”
“Doubtful, if you insist on accompanying me. He was humiliated. Mudmush may put together a throng of the returned, given time and motive. I provided both. It would be like him to send an undead horde my way.”
“They’re slow.”
“Don’t stop, though, do they? The humans would like it, if their entertainment is any indication. I would not. Worse would be Phidarian bloodhounds. Literally made of blood, if you haven’t seen a pack in action. They could put the moon herself to bay.”
“Ugh. You know I have a phobia of dogs. The barking ones. Did you kill him?”
“Mudmush? Who can kill the dead? I gave him a blue-light special. Slowed him down. Halved his size. He got off cheap, if you want a joke. Either he has banished himself, or he is still banging on a police car, or he may be standing right behind me. It wasn’t a clear victory. I may have lost.”
Uriah Lee glanced nervously behind her, but her back was to a tree. “You really talked to Slager?”
“I did. Handsome as they come. Polite enough, once he understood that our… I should be disgruntled that he was disinclined to kill me.”
“If he’s bound, that makes… so, a vampire and a necrolich. But not together?”
“Not that I… no.”
“Well, it is All Hallows. Even the independent and antisocial are out and… maybe they’re souling.”
“Nobody sings for bread these days. You’re right enough that they’ve come out to feed, though.”
“Everyone does.”
“But how many do you normally see?”
“I always see a couple.”
“Not enough for you? I was also met by Sarquito. He eats… what, chicken? Hardly a staple of the holiday.”
“When was this?”
“Oh, I don’t—late afternoon? I was at the park. Not this patch nearby, I was… Sarquito is one of Tocaya’s early works, or so goes the rumor. He’s the puckered little…” Maren made circles with her hands.
“Chupacabra?”
“That. And he makes three. Tell me it’s not an omen.”
“Tell me you’re not paranoid.”
“I am paranoid! I’m also alive. Place a bounty for what I’ve made—fine—but anyone with the means to know that wouldn’t need to… no, this bounty is unrelated. If you can’t see the pattern, we should speak of other things.”
“Okay… well, I bumped into a sister. Just before the school dance, I ran into—”
“—Mary Hallett,” Maren said with a snap of her fingers.
“Where?” Uriah swirled in a circle, crouching around the tree, her tiny purse in tiny hands, a snaking vein in the middle of her forehead. Short though it was, her hair tightened into curls and coils.
Maren cackled. “Hallett isn’t here—I can hope she’s not. She was earlier; smack in the daylight. She… do you know of the Bell curse?”
“Duh.”
“The second child of this generation is female. Mary led me like a heifer on a ring. She pushed me into place, and she did it through my blasted seeing stone.”
“But that’s—”
“—Impossible? How well I know. You were there when I made that. You know the depth of charms that a farsight has. Didn’t stop Mary. She sent me the girl-child and vice-versa. I sat on a metal bench like i
t was my idea, slobbering like mastunicola was on the way—yet I was the delivery. Half of it. I still feel a fool.”
“Did you see her? They say that what isn’t burned is…” Uriah wiggled ambiguously.
Maren looked at the climbing candle, white heat rising above the large jack-o-lanterns, outshining the projector—the eyes had burned through.
“Mary’s not much for… she wasn’t there, but she possessed the mother, on and off. Mary granted me the child. Dangled the gift in front of my face. Rang the dinner bell, if you can pardon a pun. I didn’t know until I’d already…”
Uriah clapped her hands to her face. “No! She can’t! She wouldn’t—”
“—She did. It was a close thing, Uriah. Too close. Who’d have said fasting would save me? It was a fine jest, or so I tried to frame it. I was angry, of course—furious—but I thought it a prank in keeping with the old ways.”
“The old ways can go—”
“—Now too much has happened. I don’t see room for coincidence. Not with Slager and Mudmush and talk of bounties. It could be chance, but…”
“It’s not,” Uriah snapped. “Mary Hallett doesn’t consider herself a sister, and she shouldn’t. Sarquito is an abomination—and Mary was touched by Tocaya, too.”
“I have had the same thought. Though as to the… chupacabra… what’s Sarquito’s angle? He’s always been friendly to me. Remained so today. Licked my hand. Here, smell it. Stinks like three kinds of death.”
“Cute,” Uriah said, but she grasped Maren’s hand in both of hers. She sniffed once; again. Uriah slid the tip of her nose from Maren’s elbow to the end of her fingers.
“He didn’t swallow me.”
Uriah’s eyes were wet when they opened. “I thought you might… might have changed. Completely. You look so old, Maren—but you haven’t… you’re the same.”
“Did I always reek of rotting spit?”
“That’s not what I—you taste as you always have, of licorice and leaves. I don’t get the chupacabra.”
“Maybe it was my other hand,” Maren said, sniffing herself.
“Stop it. You said to speak of other things.”
“We are out of subjects to change. We mustn’t speak of what I’ve made, we have chatted about what I’ve seen, and there is no gain talking about what we don’t know… and by all means, let us not speak of us.”
“Why the bounty?”
“There is a secret in the wind, Uriah. This bounty may be about my… transgression—but I fear it’s about the gift. If it is, we may be losing a war we thought long settled by murder and treaty. We may lose before it openly begins. Slager hinted that—”
“—You said not to talk about what we don’t know. Slager feeds himself dawkins, and he feeds anyone else half-truths. Talk about something normal. Tell me I am pretty.” Uriah struck a pose.
“I’ve told you that before.”
“Some words should be said over and again. The best enchantment is repeated daily. Words from your mouth.”
“Yes—and put there by you. I didn’t apply that indiscriminately. Repeated, some words are dangerous.” Maren breathed deeply, enjoying a wave of smoke.
“A pity I can’t put sense into you.”
“Uriah, I don’t know what to say about this bounty situation, which is bad enough. Worse, I don’t know what to do. Watch a house burn, I suppose.”
“You should say that I am pretty. The obvious falls easily from the tongue.”
“You’re pretty,” Maren said monotonously, glaring at the climbing candle. A light went on in a room she had not filed as belonging to the woman or Burt.
The boy, then. The night worm would guide Austin outside. He would stand in one place, waiting in bare feet and pajama bottoms. If he had a bear or other stuffed object, he would hold it in both arms. Such would be the counsel of the worm.
Uriah squinted at the house. “You are wound tightly. Where is your usual freedom?”
“I have asked myself the same. I am distinctly unfree. I fought in the wars of men and more for… you did the same. I thought it would last longer. We lost many a friend. Lost many an enemy.”
Uriah sighed. “Yeah. Peace is a peanut shell on the floor of a bar. I thought we’d won forever. What are we without liberty? I feel miserably human.”
“There is no more delicate state of freedom than to call it won. I knew that, but, as with the nature of the gift, I chained myself to my research and closed my eyes.”
“I hear that. To me, freedom is waking to wonder where you are, rising in shock at a new body naked and breathing at your side.”
“I won’t ask your definition of responsibility.”
Uriah tapped at a horn of gel-sharp hair. She smiled deviously, her lips pouting. “No lovers for you, I take? Or do they shout bingo and drop an Alice?”
“My joints wouldn’t take a roll in the hay,” Maren admitted. “It is a small forbearance. I can manage another year as well as this one. The gift is… I’m not deathly. A few aches and slower pace wins over the death of others.”
“Ugh, atonement.” Uriah yawned, her teeth straight and large. She had, Maren noticed, worked the orange out of them, unless…
“Are you low on iron?”
“Hah! You couldn’t lift me if you tried.”
“I could take you to the—no, I won’t wrestle in the street,” Maren said archly. “You are devious.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. You also say it like you’re not. On the gift, it’s not poisoned. I’d be the first to go.”
“How many poisons can you count? Think of the ones you would fear. The worst do not kill quickly, if at all.”
“No, but… if you have become a saint, don’t you think of how many more you might help, being sound of body and mind? The gift would give you the ability.”
“What I think is that you were present at Eden.” Irritation pinched the corner of Maren’s mouth. “Now you’ll say Eden never existed—and you know, because you were there.”
“Quit telling me what I think. We should save these barbs for brunch. The talk of it has made me hungry.”
“That or whatever else you’ve consumed.”
“Comment on my health when you no longer look a corpse,” Uriah said. “I need to find a bush again. Farewell, my love, and do not die. There is little repairing a future set by the past.”
“I don’t accept fate as established or ineluctable,” Maren growled. “There exist great powers, I will concede, but—”
“—Don’t get on a rant. It’s not like any of them will pick up the phone,” Uriah said, squinting. She squealed suddenly with false glee, her voice piping that she’d found her doddering nan.
Maren watched the minivan roll into range. As Uriah hugged her close, Maren’s ribs flexed, and she suspected—not for the first time—that Uriah Lee might consume a great deal more of the gift than anyone knew.
“Get off.”
“Anything you say, grandmother.” Uriah Lee jumped forward with the skittish, hopscotch speed of a winter sparrow spying a seed in the snow, pecked Maren on each hollow cheek, spun as though she were not wearing four-inch heels, and was off, a ritzy fashion bag weighted with sweets jostling against the exaggerated sway of her trim hips.
“Hey, that’s not fair!” Maren complained. Where the bag had come from was anyone’s guess, but Uriah Lee had always been talented at hiding things. Too talented.
“It’s not cheating if you show it off,” Uriah chimed.
Maren felt a pull that had nothing to do with spoons or prisms. Perhaps they had both fallen to a flawed potion.
The sensation was not new, and, in its way, was worse than any concoction or drug. Worse was to love, and against her will—two perspectives sharing the same origin.
Uriah Lee waved at the minivan’s stoic driver, opened the sliding door with show of teeth, and complimented outfits until her laughter mingled with that of children, and was lost.
“Seven circles,” Maren
said, realizing that she was fully illuminated as the climbing candle burned through brick.
19
The tabby lay on his side, gray as burnt incense. He had been a longhair. Bacteria were wasting no time bloating the tom to twice the cat he had been in life—and he’d been sizeable.
Hit by a car, no doubt.
Normally, she would have continued walking home, but Maren did not feel quite herself, nor did she feel as tired as she would have liked. With an oath that included Uriah’s name, she bent into the gutter.
Gentle heat rose from the necklace of spoons, and she shot a sharp glance at a two-story home fifty feet away. A lamp snapped off, but not before Maren saw the swollen face of a young woman—thirteen or fourteen, heavyset, dark of skin, round of face, her features tear-streaked and puffy.
“So you were loved, were you?” Maren rubbed her fingers against the usual direction employed to stroke a cat, tracing the diving, circling stripes of gray.
She rocked on her knees until wet leaves cushioned the asphalt. “Love makes a mess of things, but vehicles do a fine job, too. Do you imagine you can be welcome again? Cuddled and cradled and kissed? Invited to bed? You look like you’ve been at a cabbage buffet.”
There was no answer, of course, the cat being dead. Slick fluid puddled from its open mouth. Viscera and blood had squeezed from other exits like magma, the most fluent of which had reached for a storm grate.
“This is stupid,” Maren said. She opened the bowling bag anyway, found Hecksbesen’s skull, and placed the crow’s beak inches from the ruined jaws of the tabby. A triangle of the tom’s ear was glued to the pavement with whatever brains a cat carried.
“I’d guess you won’t miss some of those,” Maren said, and although she meant to be cruel, her voice was rough with sorrow.
Seeing no call to waste salt, she placed a nub of instructor’s chalk on the ground—it appeared more yellow than it was in the low sodium of the nearest streetlamp.
“I can never get a well-lit operating theater,” Maren said softly. She bent over the roadkill with a twinge, shifted into low song, inhaled for the final verse with a whistle, and blew into black lips that remained as pliant as cool sap.
All Hallows Page 25
