Ink and Shadows (7 page)

“Don’t you think he’d be more concerned about a wraith openly attacking us in the garage?” Another mouthful of spit hit the ground, less speckled with blood than the last. Mal filled his tortured lungs with air, trying to catch his breath. “Do you think that was the wraith from upstairs? Should we go tell him?”

“No. Hell no.” Ari turned, his face in profile. “We’re both fine, and I really don’t want to go upstairs to talk to him about his car. We can tell him about this later. We’ll play up the saving you part. He likes you. It might make a difference.”

Nodding carefully, Mal opened the passenger side door, taking a moment to catch his breath. Easing into the Mustang, he felt his body’s tightness release against the cradle of the seat. Leaning his head back did wonders for the ache in his skull. Sighing with a quiet relief, Mal dared a glance at Ari.

“You think the thinning of the Veil’s got something to do with that wraith being so aggressive?”

“I’m guessing yes.” Face set into a grim mask, Ari started the powerful engine, feeling it throb through the steering wheel. “Wraiths don’t attack immortals, certainly not Horsemen. That thing was huge, bigger than the one upstairs was. Must have just smelled the human on us and figured we were prey. I’m hoping there aren’t more like that out there.”

“We’re not that human.”

“Human enough. Human enough for it to want to eat us.” Ari eased out of the garage, keyed up
and watching each length of shadow clustered into distant corners. “Let’s see what we can find and come
back to Death with some answers. Maybe he’ll forgive us about the car.”

K
ISMET
WOKE
up to pain. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been a familiar pain. His body was craving to be drugged. It wouldn’t leave him alone until he took care of its mewling demands.

Countless invisible spiders crept under his skin, torturous pinpricks digging into his nerves and muscles. His bones felt too tight, cramped up against one another. The dryness in his mouth stank of vomit and the sour taste of cheap vodka. He turned his head, his cheek hitting the hardness of the motel room’s matted carpet, a pool of rank wet stretching from under his shoulder blades to the small of his back. It hurt too much to roll over, head pounding from the alcohol he had poured into his stomach the night before. Kismet blinked the grit out of his eyes and tried to sit up.

His belly rebelled, and his world tilted on a crazy axis, the mold-stained paneling on the walls swimming around him. From the smell of things, he had only emptied his stomach on the floor, although, if he didn’t hurry, he knew his piss would soon mingle with the carpet’s more disgusting fluids.

“I’ve got to stop waking up like this,” Kismet muttered. His face felt bruised, runs of cobalt puffing beneath his eyes. Rubbing his hands over his temples,
his fingers shook as the need kicked into his body, leeching his veins dry of every ounce of blood. Each of
his twenty-something-odd years was rubbed into his skin, lines Kismet knew would disappear once he’d
eaten and gotten some water into him. The bathroom’s stained white tiles shifted, and dark splotches
appeared in the mottled shower door. Kismet looked away, refusing to be captured by the moving images.

The shower door rattled, a skeletal hand reaching around to let out the specter of a pale-skinned woman who passed through the tub’s molded plastic side. He’d seen her before, heard her stumble around in the bathroom as she prepared to walk through the outside door, heading to someplace she never would reach.

The ghost in his room reminded him of Lucy. Stick thin with flat, drooping breasts bleached gray in death, dusky pink nipples plucked hard from a perpetual chill. A large swath of scars marbled her belly and thighs, twisting her skin as she stepped out of the tub and reached for a towel no longer hanging off the bathroom bar, torn from one of its fastenings and dangling down toward the cracked linoleum floor. Broken trails of blue ink, dotted and run together, covered the inside of one of her wrists, a name of someone she once loved and possibly left behind. A patch of hair grew sparsely over her mons, touched with the sparks of gray she washed out of her hair with cheap dye, the straggling mop an intense, solid honey blonde with an inch of peppered black growth hugging her scalp.

She turned, her face caved in on one side, and smiled toothlessly at Kismet, fingers trailing down his naked back until the cold of her touch chilled his spine. Shuddering, he pulled away and swallowed the bile rising in his throat, unable to wrench his eyes from the dangling thread of gore suspending her right eye down over her cheek. He knew without looking that her tongue moved through the gash along her jaw, an entire chunk of her face flapping when she walked. Rotted, her teeth were punctuated with large gaps, gums swollen and purple from infection. He’d seen it all before, and Kismet was growing very tired of her walking through his room.

“Go away.” The cold passed over him again and crossed into the main room, where she would disappear within moments of her feet touching the soiled carpet. “You’re like every thing in every place that I’ve lived in. You’re not real.”

Panting, he pressed his face against his hands, letting the roiling screams in his throat lurch out in
quiet sobs. The ache in his belly grew, and his arms throbbed where the nearly healed punctures wept with water, veins tapped dry until they collapsed under the sucking plunge of repeated needles. Kismet
knew he’d have to get cleaned up and go looking for something to ease the dragon chewing away bits of
him.

“I just need to see what Nick gave me,” Kismet mumbled. “That’ll take care of it.”

He forced himself into the recently vacated tub, then let the lukewarm water from the room’s complaining pipes wash over him, scrubbing at his disheveled mane of hair until his scalp tingled. The toothbrush he left in a plastic basket scoured away the fur on his teeth. He’d long since given up looking into mirrors for any length of time. Too many melted faces pressed up against the glass to look back, sometimes reaching through to grab at his face and screech their pain into his mind.

The few clean clothes he had left meant an impending trip to the Laundromat. The shower rod usually held up under the weight of a few jeans and socks. Drying cost too much money, and the woman who manned the coin machine had an eagle eye out for people who snuck their clothes into unattended dryers. He found a rumpled pair of pants under a stiff blanket, then pulled them up over his slender hips, buttoning them closed as he rummaged for a shirt.

“Andreas!” Pounding rattled the thinly constructed door of the room, threatening to shatter the frame and its pot-iron metal lock. “Open the fuck up.”

Kismet debated leaving the door closed and staying silent until the man gave up, but he didn’t have time to wait Carl out. A large pug-nosed man quickly stepped onto the threshold, arms bared and belly peeking out from under the hem of a too tight bowling shirt with its sleeves ripped free from the seams.

“You got some money for me?”

Kismet tallied up what he’d made in his head and winced at the idea of handing over some of it to the motel manager. He’d parceled out a hundred into an envelope. A quick search on the dresser came up with the monies, still tucked safely into the blue-hatched envelope.

Cracking the flap open, Carl counted out the variety of bills, calculating how much the young man still owed. “You got a couple of weeks with this, but you’ll have to come up with the rest of it by next week or you’re out. Understand?”

“Yeah, I know.” Full lip jutted out, Kismet leaned on the frame, refusing to let Carl intimidate him.

The man often pushed his way into the room, going through Kismet’s things while he was gone. Long
used to the intrusions, Kismet no longer left anything of value out, squirreling away everything he owned
into a footlocker with a thick padlock. “You need anything else?”

“You kill yourself with that shit you do, and I’m just tossing your stuff out and letting the fucking homeless pick through it like they do everything else.” Carl poked at Kismet’s chest. “Do me a favor and die someplace else.”

“Go to hell,” Kismet muttered at the closed door, shutting Carl out of view. His clenched fist followed his angry words, slamming into the wall. A deep breath rattled Kismet’s lungs, stretching them out with the room’s curdled air. The carpet’s weave still bore the woman’s footprints, wet splotches tracking through the room until they reached the edge of the bed. Struggling to get his wallet into the pocket of his denim jacket, Kismet stared down at the moist prints until they blurred.

“
Kizzie, are you going to leave me here
?” Chase grabbed at his shirt, the boy’s hand passing through the fabric. The young man burned where his brother touched him, his back itching from the ghostly presence. Kismet reached for the spot, rubbing at the crawling sensation.

Chase’s body was nearly firm, fleshed out and solid. Kismet could almost imagine his brother sitting there, not a day over five. The hardest thing to see was the innocence on his round face, wide eyes with long lashes, frozen in a time when life was a happy romp through empty motel rooms and sleeping under the stars in a park was an adventure. A blink of Kismet’s eyes sent Chase off, and his ghost became a cloud of smoke wafted away from the wind coming through the cracked window.

Kismet stared up at the ceiling, counting slowly to regain his composure. His brother never aged, never fought with him or stole food from his plate. That sibling was long gone, and all that was left was a construct of the insanity that plagued their mother.

The itch in his arms nicked his attention, and Kismet fought not to rub at his tortured skin. He moved to close the curtain and spotted a police cruiser slowly working its way through the parking lot.

His face was known to the local cops, a throwaway child of a drug-using whore. Kismet didn’t want company, and definitely not uniformed company. He’d been told more than once that he would end up like his mother, dying from too much liquid poison and disease in her veins while her body stiffened and crackled to a dry rot under San Diego’s intense summer heat. The system picked him up and chewed on his ass for a while, spitting him out unceremoniously when he turned seventeen. He’d been one of thousands of faceless kids serving a sentence for a parent’s neglect. Kismet figured he survived the experience. He knew there were others who weren’t as lucky.

His mangled brain often reminded him he could have done without the ghosts his mother left behind.

They were everywhere, some of them with faces, just floating ovals with wide mouths and sharpened eyes. Others had full bodies, slithering around him in an attempt to pull Kismet with them as
they walked in circles around the small tight spaces their memories lived in. More were just shapes
moving in the corner of his vision, tidal pools of slippery forms that grew claws and teeth to score furrows
on his vulnerable flesh. As a child, he bore more than one set of raking scratches on his face or arms
from the nightmares that crawled into bed with him.

“Shit. Take your time, Kiz,” Kismet scolded himself, teeth chattering under the pressure of his
body’s need. “Got to make this last.”

Prepping the powder was easy. Working up the nerve to inject himself was harder. He hated needing the drug. Hated what it did to him.

But the nightmares were horrific. And were getting worse all the time.

The tiny vein proved stubborn, sliding around the needle tip. Working it around, the skin puckering as the metal slid farther down the vein’s length, Kismet sighed with relief as a burst of blood stained the heroin darker. Holding the tubing taut, he slowly tapped at the end of the plunger, releasing small amounts of heroin into his blood.

Swallowing hard, Kismet dragged the needle free from his arm, and his body rode the euphoria. The wave hit him again, carrying him off with a burble of nonsensical sounds he couldn’t follow.

His legs were unsteady under him as he turned, trying to crawl across the bed. Flailing, his foot hit the bed frame, and Kismet landed facedown on the wadded-up covers he’d thrown on the floor.

“Mess.” Phantom toes nudged at his face, their nails covered with chipped lavender polish. They were wet, dripping with fading soap bubbles and water. Despite the obvious evidence of a recent washing, Kismet could see the caked layers of dirt caught on the nails’ cuticles. The toes shoved at his cheek again, digging into the tender flesh beneath his eye. Tongue working free from the hole in her face, the ghost struggled to speak, a loose tooth jiggling in her gums as she spoke. “You’re a mess.”

The carpet moved under him, a rippling mass of fibers sliding him away from the bed. Grabbing at the open footlocker, Kismet struggled to remain flat, but the floor had other ideas, flipping him easily onto his back. The owner of the toes stretched up above him, her face a blank circle with no emotion. He recognized the woman from the tub, her nude body slack from use.

Behind her a man Kismet had never seen before loomed, the shape of him dark and foamy at the
edges. His features were lost behind a haze of nothingness, dull sooty noise blinking in and out. The
paneling played peek-a-boo through him, fists raised up behind the woman’s head, danger paused for a
short eternity. Kismet could feel the rage pouring from him, amazed the woman could be standing there
without screaming. The man’s hands rushed down, suddenly popping her head apart in a splash of
brains, the wet splattering across Kismet’s face.

Then they were gone, leaving him with the gore sinking into his scalp.

Fighting back a scream, he pulled himself up onto his feet, swaying until the bed hit the back of his knees. Tumbling onto the hard mattress, Kismet pulled a lungful of air into his chest, trying to shake off the vision of the woman’s murder from his mind. His eyes bulged as the ceiling bowed, a single drop of black peeling out from the cracks in the plaster. It struck the mattress, a spot spreading out next to his ear, hissing as the bedding began to smoke and the inky shadows spread, edging closer to his tender skin.