Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits (29 page)

“You’ll pay for Nergal,” Long Mu says, her voice barely above a whisper. A green dragon lunges from her arm, breathing a cloudy ochre vapor before she reels it back to her flesh. “You cannot do what you do and escape justice.”

“We’ll see,” he says.

Shango sucks in a deep breath.

The ground begins to rumble. Overhead: thunder.

In Dana’s hand, a lash made of water grows. She cracks the air—mist flecks Frank’s face.

And once again the dragons begin to emerge from Long Mu’s arms. Small, now, small as rats, but growing bigger.

Aphrodite nods. Gives them the signal.

They attack at once.

A jagged knife of lightning strikes from above—

A red dragon grows ten sizes and belches a plume of flame—

The tip of the water whip sails toward Frank’s head—

Movement behind him, too, as the Driver pounces from the dark—

And all of it stops. The lighting crackles above his head. The fire parts in front of him as if it’s a river and he’s a stone in the water. The water whip dissipates. And the winged Fury is bowled backward, ass over teakettle.

In front of him he holds a severed hand.

Gray-green flesh. Nails craggy, broken. On each fingertip burns a small blood-red flame, flickering in the night. The palm is marked with a sigil carved into the wrinkled palm: several upside-down triangles merging into a flourish, crossed with what looks to be the letter ‘V.’

Aphrodite gasps. A pleasing sound. Frank says, “I like that I can still surprise you.”

“A Hand of Glory,” she says. Straightening and scowling as she says it.

“Ayup. This old baby’s my Get Out of Jail Free card, innit?”

Long Mu weeps. “He cannot escape us! Murderer! Murderer!”

Frank chuckles. Starts to back away.

They try to follow. But can’t.

Even the Driver squirms out of his way.

Frank waves goodbye with the Hand. “See you later, cats and kittens.”

Then he turns tail and runs like he’s never run before.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Lineage

H
E’S STARVING.
H
IS
body feels like a hollow shell of itself, waiting to be filled up with—well, not guts or lungs or blood, but potato chips and slushies and those little doughy-chewy pretzel bites dipped in the nuclear-yellow probably-plastic cheese. It was like this after a fight, too—the worse the fight, the more ravenous Cason felt.

He’s never before felt this hungry.

He comes out of the convenience store with both arms loaded. One bag looped around the crook of his elbow while his hand shoves a super-size Snickers bar into his maw.

Back in the cab.

Psyche still in the back. Tundu outside the car, pacing, using his cell. Talking to his family.

“
Ahm sho hungry
,” Cason gurgles, finishing off the Snickers and dipping back into the bag for a sack of Bugles. Little crispy horn-shaped corn snacks.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.

“It’s your body repairing itself,” Psyche says from the back. “The human part of you needs it. To replenish. To rebuild.”

“Oh,” Cason says, gob-flecks of corn chip peppering the dash. He wipes them away with the back of his hand. He
does
feel better. Not perfect. Not all the way back up to speed. But good. And he feels thin, too. Ropy. Strong. Like he’s back in old fighting shape. All the lumps and mush have burned away. Tightened up. “Okay.”

“I sense you’re feeling guilty about Frank.”

Dry swallow. “I don’t want to talk about this.” He pops the cap on a Dr. Pepper. Guzzles it. Burns his throat as it charges toward his guts.

“You shouldn’t feel bad. He was leading you astray.”

“Please.”

“He lied to you. He knew that you weren’t human. Did you know that? He knew.”

“I’m not talking about this. We just left him—no. We’re
really
not talking about this.” He finishes the Dr. Pepper, gasps for breath, then shifts his torso so he’s staring back at the pale, wild-haired girl in the back of the cab. “What I want to talk about is: who the hell am I? We didn’t finish that part of our conversation. I want to know who I am. I know I’m adopted. And now you’re telling me I’m... I’m not human. And shit, who knows? Maybe you’re right. I just broke my legs and now I’m up and walking around. I got the shit kicked out of me and while I do in fact feel like I was hit by a dumptruck, I should be in traction for the next six months. So, you’re telling me I have divine parentage? Then I need to know who. Who are my parents, Psyche?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure that out since I met you.”

That’s not what he wants to hear. He tells her as much.

“I know. But it’s true. The others, at the farmhouse. I think some of them knew. They must’ve. They targeted you for a reason. But I wasn’t privy to that. Aphrodite didn’t even know. Not all of it, at least. I think the others did this to you without... without her involvement. If she was involved, I’d know. I was her shadow for a very long time.” She sighs. Under her breath: “My mother-in-law. Ugh.”

Outside, Tundu paces, gesticulating as he talks into the phone. Trying to explain to his family where he was all night. Tundu said that Frank called him, told him the story—or most of it—and that Tundu didn’t hesitate. Cason, he said, was his friend. And he said the last few nights he went to bed feeling helpless, a small man in the face of very real gods. He doesn’t want to feel helpless, he said. So, here he is.

“Can’t you...” Cason gesticulates around his brow. “Get into my head, figure it out?”

“I do see someone. I see your mother, I think. A woman. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Humming a song. The song about the mockingbird and the diamond ring. And I smell the city and I hear cars honking and—that’s all I see. It’s buried deep. From a long, long time ago.” She pauses. “But there is something else.”

She hands him a road atlas.

On the cover is an icon of a man holding up a globe. She taps the man on the cover. “Atlas. I know him. Well. I’ve met him. Dumb as a sack of amaranth. Couldn’t find his own tiny shorts with all the maps in the world, so I don’t know why he’s on the cover of this one.”

“What’s your point?”

Psyche flips to the middle of the book.

Hands it to him.

It’s open to the state of Kansas.

“I see a crimson thread,” she says. “A literal bloodline. Faint. Like someone is trying to hide it. But it’s there. It starts with you, and connects here.”

She taps the map.

“Concordia, Kansas,” he says.

“Yes. Something is there. Something bound to you.”

“Then that’s where I’m going.”

“Are you sure? There’s no promises that this harvest will yield fruit. We could find your wife and son. I could... try to quell their... feelings about you. I’ll do it. To make up for my... transgressions.”

“No. I have big question mark-shaped holes inside me, and I need answers to fill them. Somebody’s messing with me. And worse, they’re messing with my wife and my kid. I still don’t know why or who I even am, so...” He trails off. “Concordia, Kansas, here I come.”

PART THREE

TO THE HEART

OF THE MAZE

CHAPTER THIRTY

This Tenuous Thread

T
HE PLAN IS
simple.

Well. No. It’s not really
simple
. It’s actually quite complex.

But it’s simple in theory. Coyote finds elegance in complexity.

The woman, Alison, is inside this police station. In a holding cell. Awaiting—well, whatever it is you await when the police think you stole a car.

Coyote will crawl through the air ducts.

He’ll use his nose to scent his penis, which gives off a piquant, ermine-y odor that the ladies cannot resist. This will likely lead him to the evidence room, where he will find within the full-figured, robust-shouldered, ginger-topped Officer Bonita Squire, and he will then cast into the ducts his Bonafide Penis Returning Powder, a fine concoction made of lavender, sage, beaver pelt, and the dried, pulverized shame of an ugly swan.

Then, he will descend into the evidence room.

As his penis stirs to life and seeks to return to him, he will begin to seduce the lovely Officer Squire, and just as he has disrobed her and laid her on a cardboard pallet, his penis will burst through the wire cage and reattach to his pelvis and he shall fornicate with her until she achieves the mighty gush of a well-satisfied woman. That will, of course, put her to sleep. From there he will steal her outfit, paint his hair orange, fill the outfit with whatever he can find nearby to pad the uniform, then wander into the small police building while masquerading as the beautiful, thick-bodied Officer Squire.

Then, blah-blah-blah, down to the basement, unlock the door, open the holding cells, free Alison, and once more find and follow the golden thread to its natural and necessary conclusion. Whatever that may be.

Excellent.

Coyote stands out back of the police department, hunkered down behind a few scrubby shrubs. He crawls over to the vent. Rattles it. Plucks numbly at the four screws with his hands.

“I should really have a screwdriver,” he says.

It’s then that a big fat horsefly lands on his shoulder.
Zzzzzvvvpppt
.

He flicks it away.

It returns. This time, to the other shoulder.

He swats at it. It takes flight.

Then: on the bridge of his prodigious nose.

Oh, no.

He can barely make it out, but it’s there—the horsefly has a human-looking face. Green fly eyes, but the rest is all tiny human.

It all happens so fast.

There comes a
whumpf
of air, a reverse imploding thunderclap—

There stands a tall, lithe man with dancing green eyes and long greasy hair draped around sharp-angled shoulders, ill-contained in a v-neck black t-shirt.

The man snaps his fingers, and in his hands a serpent appears. Black skin, green eyes, long fangs.

“You sonofab—” But Coyote can’t finish the statement. The snake stabs out with its triangular head and bites him right on the cheek.

The venom is quick like a jackrabbit chased by a hawk—

Lickety-split, it’s through Coyote. The world tilts. His chest tightens.

He’s hit in the face with a tidal wave made of his own unconsciousness.

Boom.

L
OKI STANDS OVER
Coyote’s body. Not corpse, of course—the mangy trickster isn’t dead, just resting. Gods don’t like to kill gods when they can help it. Put them out of commission for ten minutes, ten years, ten glacial epochs, fine. Death, though, is so permanent. Rude, too, though Loki has little concern about violating social norms.

Time is running out. The thread fraying, ready to snap.

Coyote would’ve taken too long. He always takes too long.

Loki pulls out his iPhone. Texts to Eshu:
In progress
.

Then he enters the police station, whistling.

A
LISON SITS.
T
HE
jail cell is cleaner than she anticipated; some part of her figured this place would smell like body odor and other... fluids. But it doesn’t. It is, in fact, only one of three cells, and now she knows the difference between holding cells (‘drunk tanks’) and a full-bore penitentiary. This is the former, and thankfully not at all the latter.

Just the same, it does little to quiet her slow-simmering panic and despair.

Because the penitentiary—jail, prison, the Big House, the Hoosegow—is where she’ll be headed. She committed Grand Theft Auto. She stole a car, with the help of a man who was probably not at all a man, because he was, at least in part, some kind of rangy, mangy wolf-dog-dingo thing. She didn’t even bother telling the police what’s really going on. What’s the point? She’s already starting to wonder if this is the result of a complete and total breakdown of reality. Why chase the rabbit down its hole?

They offered her a phone call, but she didn’t know who to call. So she called her mother at the hospital. Her mother started crying. Said Barney still hadn’t woken up. Alison started to cry, too, told her where she was. Her mother said she’d get a lawyer. They’d figure this out. Mom says what Alison is thinking: “You just... had a nervous breakdown, is all.”

And now she sits. Empty of tears. Empty of most everything, it seems. A tray of fast food nearby that she hasn’t touched. The cops here have been very nice. Which she doesn’t deserve, but it is what it is.