Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five (26 page)

Lissandra had read her cards cautiously, and the reading itself had not gone well. There was no true love to be found in the girl's future, but the cards did indicate that she was about to embark on a long and arduous journey.

“I hope it's to San Francisco. I've always wanted to see that big orange gate bridge.” Lissandra didn't think that was the gate she'd soon be stepping through, but she had played along, deciding that letting her believe what she would was better than trying to explain the afterlife to a meth-head whose roots were showing.

Lissandra had been superstitious of heading this far up the coast, even though the cards had indicated that she too was to embark on a new journey. The deer hadn't followed her up past the mountains, and the gypsy missed them terribly. Every night, she would look to the stars for guidance, yet they never shown in such a way which made her consider traveling back the road she had come.

She couldn't say with any certainty that they were pushing her in the direction she had been traveling, either. The only time the stars had ever said anything clear to Lissandra was the night she had begun her travels, hitchhiking and walking through the mountain passes.

It was the night that she woke from the dream she'd had about him. The night that she felt in her heart that he was dead.

It shouldn't have shocked her as much as it did. He'd always been living on stolen time.

The woman who appeared in a stand of trees moved silently. The sound she had made by brushing through the limps was done on purpose for Lissandra's benefit, surely, to announce her presence to the gypsy woman.

Her swinging dark hair and darker eyes were beautiful to behold. Black boots and pants blended with the night, but the white top with the unicorn and the splash of someone else's (or many someone else's) blood across it signaled that she wasn't concerned with blending or traveling into new worlds with any measure of stealth or caution.

She didn't care who saw her coming, and was concerned even less with what whoever saw her thought of her.

“How many of them did you kill?” Lissandra didn't move from her seat at the forest floor. The tarot cards her grandmother had painted and prayed be blessed by the old gods were in her lap.

“I lost count at forty-two.” The Asian girl said it matter-of-factly and considered her environment — the tiny stand of trees which Lissandra had been calling home for the last week. “You were more difficult to find than I imagined you would be.”

Lissandra stared long and hard at the woman who had invaded her grove and massacred her superstitious client list. “You look exactly the same as you did when I was a girl.”

Moon continued her walk towards Lissandra. “Well, you know what they say about us pretty Vietnamese girls. We're timeless.”

“Whatever is said about you, I think we can skip past the whole, ‘We're just two normal girls' conversation.”

Moon took a seat across from Lissandra, assuming a mirroring lotus pose and resting on the soft earth with her. “Have it as you will.”

Lissandra fingered the cards in her lap, shuffling out of instinct. “You didn't have to murder them.”

“So.” Moon completely ignored the meaningless suggestion of the gypsy, “You remember me from your grandmother's house.”

Lissandra nodded. “I don't know what you wanted with her, and I really don't care. I care less what you might think you want from me.”

“Your grandmother was a powerful seer — that's not shocking news to you, I'm sure. She carried it over from the old country and she learned it there from adherents of the old gods. I'm assuming she taught you the same reverence, and all around respect, for your craft and the energies you toy with.”

“She did.”

“I was sorry to hear of her passing, although she was very old when I came to visit her. You were in curls and little girl dresses. The mortal coil can only be wound so tight, even if a god is doing the screwing.”

“Are you here to have your cards read?” Lissandra regarded her with more disdain that she did most monsters who had wandered in and out of her life. This woman would have made a perfect vampire — she definitely had their stuck-up air perfected. But Lissandra was smart enough to know that this one was dangerous to an extent that fangs would have just gotten in her way.

“The only card you'd pull out of that deck for me would be Death.”

Lissandra flipped over the top card and stole a glance down. Death.

“There's no need to waste your time on the tarot with me. I come to offer you something much bigger.”

“You're a demon then?” That made sense. Lissandra had never actually seen a demon as far as she knew, but if anything fit the classic definition…

“I'm not a demon. My name is Moon. And I am, as hard as it might be for you to believe, just another girl trying to make her way in this big crazy world.”

“Would a demon even know if it was a demon? Wouldn't it believe that it was just a poor lost soul, fighting against a world that didn't understand its desires and meant to oppress it?”

“Demons know they're demons. They know it with an even greater certainty than angels believe themselves to be angels.”

Lissandra flipped through the cards again in her skillful hands.

Death.

“Why?”

“There's no motivator like being the social outcast of the supernatural world.”

“No.” Lissandra looked into Moon's eyes. “If we're just two girls making our way in the world — just normal and everyday plain Janes — then what could I possibly want with you, or you with me?”

Moon smiled. “See Jane scry.”

“Telling your fortune only seems to lead to one place.”

“I don't want you to tell my fortune; that's already carved in stone.” Moon pushed herself up and was on her feet faster than Lissandra's eyes could follow the motions. “I want you to tell the fortune of the whole world.”

“I'm assuming that you made the same offer to my grandmother, and I am sure I know what her answer was to you.”

“True.” Moon looked up to the stars, which gave Lissandra no solace. “But I don't need to borrow your cards to predict that you're going to eventually give me a different answer.”

Moon whistled as a songbird might.

Lissandra took in the sudden movements just beyond the trees all around her. The men wore military gear and their blacks and
greens had done the blending that Moon didn't feel she had to — masking their presence until the signal had been given. They crossed the break in the trees and surrounded the girl, leveling more automatic weapons on her than would be necessary to end her life.

“She has a pistol hidden in her lap.” Moon called out the information as an after-thought and Lissandra found herself grabbed, disarmed, and hoisted almost as quickly as the words had been spoken.

Moon was slipping leather gloves over her fingers as she walked back to the captured girl. The men who had her forced Lissandra's wrists into cuffs as Moon delicately bent at the knees and retrieved the tarot from the ground, slipping them into the bag Lissandra transported them in. “I'll keep these safe for you, but once you see what you'll be telling fortunes on from now on, I doubt you'll ever bother with them again.”

“You don't know anything about the energy those cards can tap.”

Moon laughed It stayed pleasant and conversational — just two girls talking. “You've no idea what energy really is if you're impressed by the parlor tricks you've been doing for simpletons while camping out behind biker bars.”

“We'll see.” Lissandra didn't bother to struggle; she was handcuffed and had three men on either side of her.

“Oh, you'll see, gypsy Lissandra …and once you do, it would be like trading in a hyper-sonic fighter jet to go back to…”

Moon let slip the smile Lissandra was learning to hate.

“…a skateboard.”

~20~

W
AITING
FOR
S
OLOMON

“HONEY, YOU ARE GONNA WASTE AWAY if you don't eat some of that pie.”

Anastasia heard the words of Mrs. Suzanne, as she sat at the counter in the all-night diner of the same name and let her eyes run over the perfect intersecting lines of crust atop the wedge of pie before her. She watched big red cherries and the sugar-laced concoction that held them all in place slowly succumb to gravity, oozing down the sides and onto the white plate.

It was such a deep red it inspired a hunger in her, which she was currently keeping suppressed, that had very little to do with tasty fresh cherry pies.

Anastasia let her eyes trail up to the large, older black lady with the knowing face that seemed to hint at its own ever-suppressed grin. A clean white bar towel was clenched in a fist that never seemed to leave the spot at Mrs. Suzanne's waist where it was hooked. There were a few more customers down the counter from Anastasia and a few scattered tables of mostly long-haul truckers. Currently, Mrs. Suzanne was focused on her alone, it seemed.

“I promise you, you will not find a better pie in the entire state.” The woman seemed almost offended that Anastasia hadn't touched the pie or coffee which had been set out for her. Billy had already destroyed a cheeseburger and an entire plate of onion rings. Begging for the diner's phone book and getting a pocketful of change from
Mrs. Suzanne, he'd been down the hall in the back of the diner on a payphone for what seemed like an eternity.

“It's not the pie, I promise,” Anastasia assured. “It's just I'm not as hungry as I thought I was. My stomach is upset.”

Mrs. Suzanne shot a look back down the hallway towards where Billy had run off to. “Stomach, huh. Girl your age ain't much good at catching the indigestion. So that can only mean one thing.”

Anastasia stared into the woman's probing big brown eyes, and then what was implied came to her. “Oh. No, it's not possible. I can't get pregnant.”

Mrs. Suzanne shook her head. “Yeah, that's what my sister Cissybelle said.” Mrs. Suzanne began to use her non-toweled hand to point about the diner. “When she was forty-three years old, she got knocked up with Lula over there, waiting them tables. She started up with that noise again after she was born. Wasn't six months later she had Silas Jr. over there baking in the oven.”

“I'm pretty sure it's physically impossible for me to bear children.”

“I ain't talking about bearing nothing. You sound like a doctor, and they don't know nothing. You know what I'm talking about and you don't catch it from a teddy bear.”

Anastasia didn't question. “Well, I was careful, and it's been awhile.”

“How much'awhile'?”

“Seven…no, eight weeks.”

Mrs. Suzanne shook her head. “Uh huh.”

“No really, I don't ovulate.”

“Bunnies hide pretty eggs in the strangest places, and kids still find ‘em.”

Anastasia knew what she was talking about was impossible. Wasn't it?

“Lemme ask you somethin'. What are you doing with that fast boy anyhow?” Mrs. Suzanne drummed her fingers on her counter.

“We are not together.”

“Says you. I heard the two of you arguing while he was stuffing his face full of my onion rings. Y'all are together.”

“We are completely not together. We're just on a road trip.”

Mrs. Suzanne's expression said she wasn't buying it. “A girl and a boy fight like you two do can only mean one thing.” Mrs. Suzanne
looked down the counter and raised her head into the air. Without turning, she called out to the tall, older black man on the other side of the open window that looked into the kitchen. “Solomon, how long is this man at the end of my bar gonna have to wait on them eggs?”

The man didn't look up from his smoking griddles to answer her, and the expression on his face didn't change from one of stoic indifference. “Coming right up, my eternal joy and sunshine.”

Mrs. Suzanne looked back down to Anastasia. “I rest my case.”

“I can promise you two things that you can take to your grave. One, I am not pregnant. Two, he and I are not, nor will we ever be, together.”

Mrs. Suzanne leaned in to rest on her counter before Anastasia. “You know, this place been here a long time, twenty-seven years. This ain't the first time I've seen that boy. He used to be stationed up at the army base, and he was in here all the time. And every time I seen him, he'd been out drinking and carousin' and had a new girl with him.”

Anastasia put on her best
I don't give a damn
face. “And that would be his business, because we are not an item, and I'm not trying to be one of his clueless bimbos. He and I have history, and we have common interests currently.”

“It can't be all driving, sugarplum.”

“No, sometimes we come into diners so he can eat cheeseburgers while I get interrogated about my love life.”

“Darlin', I'm not the Hometown Security Administration. Besides, who else you gonna talk to about him?”

“I really enjoy
not
talking about him. I enjoy not thinking about him when he's not around even more.”

“A pretty girl like you shouldn't be wasting time running across the country with a wild hooligan like that. You still got your good looks—well, I do too, even though I'm sixty-seven. You should be out meeting a nice man who'll take care of you and thinking about settling down, before things start stacking up so high you can't get out from under ‘em.”

Anastasia didn't know why she was talking to this woman. “Well, things have unfortunately stacked up, and to squeeze out from under them, I'm stuck with the hooligan for now.”

“It don't have to be a prison. You made a choice to go on the trip you're going on. If it ain't headed towards paradise, you can always buy a new ticket.”

“Like, ditch the troublemaker and run?”

“Ain't no shame in it.”

“Suzanne, there's nothing but shame in it. It's all shame.” Anastasia stared into the woman's eyes and studied the lines in her face. She'd been pretty when she'd been Anastasia's age. All those choices, those possible pasts, what had Mrs. Suzanne run from long ago that had led her to this place? More importantly, after the things Anastasia had seen and the nature of creature she was, what did time even mean anymore?