Darkness Calls (3 page)

I placed the milk on the stainless-steel counter, next to some bags of frozen blueberries set out to defrost. There were muffins within reach, and I grabbed one and took a bite. Banana and walnut. Very nice. I was suddenly starving. I had a lot of bodies to feed. Based on the way my morning had already started, I might not have another chance to eat for a while. And I was not a good grouch when the blood sugar dipped. Hell, no.

“You’re late,” said a quiet voice, off to my right. No accusation, just a statement of fact.

“Five minutes,” I replied, leaning against the counter. The tip of my scuffed cowboy boot nudged an equally dirty tennis shoe. “Sorry.”

“S’okay. I knew you’d be here.” Said in that same matter-of-fact tone. Said with trust. A rare compliment, startlingly unfamiliar to me, and one that made my heart do a funny little twist. My mother would not have approved.

The boy in front of me was young, no older than fifteen. Byron. No last name. Maybe not his real name. A mystery, in more ways than one. Thin as a rail, with black spiky hair that framed a pale, elfin face. Tough, sweet kid, in that quiet way people underestimated. No swagger, no charm—just a backbone made of pure intelligence. He had lived on the streets, been abused on the streets, and was finally adjusting to a roof over his head. Regular meals. Toilet paper. A lock on his door.

He had jeans on, and a loose, long-sleeved gray shirt that was fraying around his bony wrists. Over that he wore a stained white apron covered in red lips, like some giant woman slathered in lipstick had kissed the hell out of him. Byron hated the thing, as any self-respecting teenager would, but the rest of the kitchen staff loved seeing him in it, and the kid was surprisingly polite—or appropriately terrified—when it came to talking back to an army of women.

He held a folded newspaper, which he slid onto the counter. Nothing interesting about the headlines, except for one brief column that read: MONSTER OR HOAX? SIGHTED IN PARIS.

I leaned in, too sensitive to weird news to dismiss anything out of hand, but all the article said—with an air of utter disbelief—was that some woman claimed to have been bitten by a very hairy man with extremely long and pointy teeth—and that he had apologized profusely afterward, and run off sobbing. Not exactly what I would call a sign of demonic activity.

I raised an eyebrow. “I’ve told you not to talk to hairy strangers, right?”

“Define hairy,” Byron said, but there was a rare faint smile on his face, and I almost smiled back.

“So, did you finish it?” I asked him, taking another bite out of the muffin. Trying not to think of the dead girl when I looked at his face. She had been his age. It could have been Byron dead in that alley, once upon a time. I was beginning to regret letting Archie Limbaud off the hook. I had killed the demon responsible for the girl’s death, but that did not feel like enough.

You never blame the hosts,
whispered my mother’s memory.
Not even for the weakness that let the demon in. We’re all weak, baby. Just in different ways.

Byron scowled. “The math, or Schopenhauer?”

I handed him a muffin of his own, forcing myself to breathe. “Both.”

He picked at the paper wrapper with a chipped black fingernail. “I left the algebra problems on Grant’s desk. I also read the pages you gave me.”

“And?”

“And I’m not in college,” he replied, though he sounded older, and more mature, than most of the university types he had begged money from not so long ago. “German philosophers make no sense.”

“You’re smart,” I said, knowing I was pushing him; knowing, too, that he could take it. “Tell me what you read.”

Byron rubbed his nose. “Stuff. Reality is an illusion. Desire, instinct, is a thing.”

“Good.” I crumpled my muffin wrapper and tossed it in the garbage. “Think about that, then write me a paragraph or two about whether you agree, and why. I want it by tomorrow.”

He froze in midbite. “You gave me history homework yesterday. And more math.”

I ruffled his hair. “So?”

Any other kid would have shot back some zinger, a roll of the eyes—a tremor of defiance, at the very least—but Byron was not like most teens. He studied me with a solemn thoughtfulness that made his young face age—boy to man, to wizened sage—but it was his eyes that made him appear profoundly old, as though years beyond reckoning were piled upon his soul.

It’s time,
I thought, caught in that gaze.
He’s going to ask me why I try so hard with him.

But Byron didn’t. He finished taking a bite out of his muffin and nodded slowly.

“Tomorrow,” he said, still chewing, and looked behind me, just for a moment. I glanced over my shoulder. Found the dreadlocked girl who had been carrying the milk deep in conversation with one of the older volunteers, a woman with tanned, sinewy legs, who wore shorts and clunky sandals every day—no matter the weather.

They were staring at me. The young woman flinched guiltily when she found me looking, but the other woman—Doreen, I think she was called—held my gaze, frowning.

“Let me guess,” I said to Byron. “I did something.”

“She thinks you’re violent,” replied the boy bluntly. “She told me so. Warned me to stay away from you.”

I gritted my teeth and deliberately smiled at the middle-aged woman. “Obviously, you listened.”

I had an ugly smile. Doreen finally looked down and turned around to busy herself with unpacking cereal boxes. Byron said, “She doesn’t know anything. Except that you sleep with Grant. And that you scare her.”

“She told you that, too?”

“No,” he said softly. “You make a lot of people uneasy.”

I gave him a sharp look. “Is that how you feel?”

“I feel safe,” he replied, without hesitation; and finally there was some defiance in his voice, in the tilt of his chin and the glint that flickered in his eyes. Again, my heart twisted; and again, I thought of my mother.
Dangerous,
she would have said.
You put yourself, and others, in danger. Our kind were not born to make roots. Or friends. Or love.

But I was not my mother. I was a sucker. An idiot. My free will was my reality—for better or worse.

“Good,” I said, which was all I could manage; and then: “Stick close to the shelter for the next couple days, okay? If you decide to go running around, find me first. Find Grant. But don’t go out by yourself. Got it?”

Byron frowned. “No. Why?”

Because someone shot me in the head this morning, and he might know you’re a weakness of mine.
But all I said was, “Perverts.”

“Perverts,” he said, giving me a piercing look. “Right.”

I patted his shoulder—and then turned around to look at Doreen again. Her, and the rest of the kitchen. Watching faces. Letting the men and women watch me in turn, on the sly, from the corners of their eyes. For six months I had avoided answering personal questions—as had Grant—and so gossip and speculation had become my own mythology and mystery: the woman who lived with the man in charge, the quiet woman, the dangerous woman. Reinforced, here and there, by the occasional act of violence. Folks who came to the shelter occasionally misbehaved. I lent a hand when that happened. And though I had never stayed in one place long enough to earn a reputation, I had one now.

I was security. A good right hook. A thousand yard stare. A woman reduced to adjectives, all of them well placed and accurate—in that way only half-truths could be.

I took another look at Doreen’s back and got hit with a wave of loneliness so profound I wanted to run—run back to the solitude I had left behind. Being alone was easier than this. I had no skills in dealing with running mouths and bad opinions. I had never imagined I would find myself in a situation where I would give a damn.

And I still didn’t. I couldn’t. I mustn’t.

I looked for Byron and found him already on the other side of the kitchen in the serving line, spooning hash browns onto trays. Penned in by two old ladies, his head carefully down—though he made brief eye contact with the few women who held out their trays to him. None of the men, though. He avoided men, except for Grant.

The boys stirred against my skin; a rumble in their dreams, some uneasy discomfort that tugged suddenly, quite sharply, between my breasts. Pulling me forward, toward the serving line. Not to Byron, I sensed. Something else. I started walking, weaving around workstations and volunteers, and peered from the kitchen into the cafeteria. I couldn’t catch sight of much. Mostly just the center of the dining area, in front of the double swinging doors.

Which was enough to see the man who walked in, moments later.

He was not a zombie. But he made my skin crawl—literally—and the boys, even in their dreams, went wild with fury, their agitation so violent their tattooed bodies felt like bubbles in my blood, breaking against the underside of my flesh. I rubbed my arms to calm them, but the boys kept fussing. They wanted to kill that man.

He was not entirely ordinary. Tall, reedy, with a long face that was deathly pale except for two red splotches high on his cheeks. His brow shone with sweat, though it was only forty degrees outside, and his posture was so straight he reminded me of a nail. He was also a priest. Black slacks, black shirt, that little white square of a collar peeking through his unzipped black Windbreaker.

It should not have made a difference, but it did. I had been very nearly murdered less than an hour before, and now a priest had shown up whom the boys wanted to kill. I did not like coincidences—even if this one failed to add up.

I tapped Byron on the shoulder. “Go get Grant for me, will you?”

He looked back at me, his eyes black as coal, and old, so old. “Because of that priest, right?”

He was good at surprising me. “Smart kid.”

Byron did not blink. “I don’t like him.”

Smiling never came naturally to me, but my mouth tilted, just so. “Better than smart. Brilliant. Now go get Grant.”

Byron ducked his head and nudged the volunteer beside him, handing her his spoon before he stepped out of the serving line. He hung his apron on a hook by the kitchen door and left. Fast, efficient. Good at not asking questions.

I looked again at the priest. He had moved deeper into the cafeteria and was turning in a slow circle, searching the crowd. Zombies watched him. Three, scattered amongst the humans. Auras stirring black and listless. Two men, one woman, wearing dull frayed coats and knit caps. Cold-weather clothes for a cold Seattle winter.

It amazed me, always, that humans could be so blind to the dangers around them. No one looked twice at the zombies. Folks sat elbow to elbow with them, chatting, making nice.

But I knew. I stared. Only one of them met my gaze. Brief, haunted. Pale. His leg twitched under the table. I did not look away. I liked his fear. It tasted bloody and warm, and the boys were always hungry for a fat demon: a little possessor; zombie-maker, parasite. Burrowers, borrowers, drifting on the outskirts of human minds, searching for weakness, a hot harvest.

Demons made pain. Demons ate pain, which was nothing but another kind of energy: a dark emanation. Demons whispered inside the ears of the soul and turned grand-mothers into murderers, awkward boys into rapists, men like Archie Limbaud into sadists. All of them, zombies. Human shells inhabited by creatures who thrived on patterns of suffering, ever-widening circles of despair.

I was good at killing the parasites. I had to be. No one else was around to do it. Hardly anyone knew they existed. I was the last of the Wardens, all that was left of a race of men and women created to stand against an army of demons, the very worst of which were caught behind the veil: a multidimensional prison, floating in time and space. Weakening, ready to fail.

When it did, the world would end. Ten thousand years of peace, about to get broken into a million little pieces.

But here, in this homeless shelter, a sanctuary for the devils. Because I had made a promise.

I left the kitchen through a side door that led directly into the cafeteria. The priest had his back turned. I listened to the soft roar of breakfast conversation as I walked toward him. Beneath the voices I heard strains from
South Pacific
playing softly over the intercom. One of the volunteers had been to New York City to see the revival at Lin coln Center, and it was his new obsession. I walked to the perky beat of Mitzi Gaynor washing men out of her hair, and found myself sympathizing. At least, with regard to the priest.

He turned as I approached. Closing the distance did nothing to improve my feelings about him. He was taller than me, almost skinnier—and the dark clothing, the pale translucence of his damp face and brown, stringy hair, only enhanced the skeletal qualities of his body. The red flush in his upper cheeks looked as though he had jammed his fingers in a pot of rouge, and rubbed and rubbed.

The priest tilted his head, a faint, tremulous smile touching his mouth. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Hello,” he said, his accent Italian, his voice far calmer than the twitch in his cheek, the flutter of his eyelid. His looked at me as if we were already on a first-name basis, and the familiarity of his regard made me uncomfortable; even nauseous, as though his facial tics were a rocking boat.

“Can I help you?” I asked, holding steady as Zee pulsed in agitation between my breasts. Dek and Mal tugged beneath my scalp—like twin barbs twitching in a fish’s mouth—while Raw and Aaz burned against my hands, simmering in soft rumbles that scorched me to the bone. Something wrong. Something wicked.

The man did not immediately answer. He held my gaze, unblinking, as though he was not a priest but some spiritual scientist, dissecting my soul in strips, cutting and cutting with delicate, deadly precision. A fast analysis, cold, and as with his voice it belied the sweat and unease, the radiating uncertainty of his posture.
Just a mask,
I thought.
Or a symptom.