Nightfall (12 page)
Was it a trick? What sort of trick could she honestly manage with this situation? And even if she was, how could he possibly stay back and not help her.
He moved toward her, keeping his eyes on her the entire way.
* * *
“I do not want to talk to you,” she said, pitching her voice low. The absolute last thing she wanted in the world was for the neighbors to hear her. It was funny; she had absolutely no sense that she was unsafe with him. But she wasn’t unsafe around a hornet’s nest either. Didn’t mean that you poked it with a stick.
“I understand,” Julian started, and she cut him off with a sharp gesture of her hand.
“I don’t understand how I feel right now, so honestly, if you tell me that you understand how I feel, I don’t even know what I’ll do to you. So if you could do me a kindness and shut up and go on your way, that would be just wonderful.”
“What you saw—”
Panic ran through her like a waterfall, and she swallowed hard to keep her stomach where it was supposed to be. His fingers brushed her face and she slapped them away, taking big, chest-expanding inhales through her nose and trying to focus on keeping her throat loose.
The images of the fight, and its bloody aftermath, occupied the front part of her mind. When she tried to push them away, they resurfaced again and again. The hands that had brought her such pleasure had been somehow transformed into monstrosities, and he’d used them to shred that wolf, the impossible wolf, which had then turned into a woman, and he’d been covered with blood, and even though he’d clearly washed before he came after her, she could see a fleck in his hair, and another at the corner of his mouth, where his beard had started to grow in, just a shade—
With a nasty
urp
, everything she’d ever eaten in her life was ejected into the grass. He caught her hair, keeping it safe and twisting it back as her body panicked. She managed to keep her legs stiff, simply because some corner of her mind knew how incredibly much it would hurt to fall on her knee. She could shake the image of him kissing her, and then pulling back, and seeing that gorgeous mouth, that amazing mouth, soaked in blood and gorier things.
Her stomach clenched again, and she spat nothing but acid and bile into the grass. She was crying, tears streaming down her face.
His hands were stroking her back, soft and gentle, and she wanted to swat him away again, but it seemed incredibly unkind to do so when he was being so sweet. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. Her legs gave way, but he managed to guide her down so that she sat on her butt, not her aching knee.
“No,” he said firmly. “No, you don’t get to apologize. I’m sorry. I never would have brought you there if I had any idea—” He sighed. “I’m sorry for what you saw.”
What
had
she seen? What splintered version of reality had that been? Part of her already knew the words, but she couldn’t bear to think them. “I don’t know anything about you.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “You know all the things I told you over dinner. My favorite color is green, and romance novels are my guilty pleasure, and I love movies about comic book heroes. I watch documentaries and read science magazines. I love chocolate and I hate nuts in dessert. All of those things are true.”
“You apparently left out some big things.”
He shrugged. There weren’t any street lights, and she could only see him in the light of the moon and the stars, but she didn’t detect any shame or irritation on his face. “Did you tell me every single crucial fact about you, or did you edit a few things out because first dates are auditions as much as anything else?”
She gave him the most vicious look she could manage; she had the sense that he’d see it, even in the dim light. “Of all the ERs in all the world—”
“Why did I have to wander into yours, yes, I know.” He stood, extending his hand to her. She slapped it away again. Even in the dark, she could see him roll his eyes and hear him sigh. “Your knee is screwed up. Did you hit it on the stairs?”
“It’ll be fine.”
“You know better than that. Are you sure you didn’t sprain it?”
He reached to feel the joint, and she slapped his hands away again. “I’m going to start screaming soon.”
He leaned back on his haunches and gave her a level look. She could easily see it coming out of those animal eyes, and that made her shiver. “How much farther is it to your house?”
She tried not to wince as she thought of each and every step between here and there. “About twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes when you’re walking well, which you’re not doing. So probably take you an hour to get there?’
Roxanne tried to find some sort of logic or argument to counter him. “I could call a cab,” she said, finally, a little surprised that she hadn’t thought of that more quickly. She really was in shock.
“You could. If you want to do that, I’m happy to wait here with you until it arrives. And then you’ll never have to see me again.”
She couldn’t stop the part of her mind that asked
But what if I want to see you again
? But she could stuff it down, deep down, where she wouldn’t have to pay any attention to it at all. “I don’t need a damn cab. I wouldn’t need anything at all, if you’d’ve just left me the hell alone.” The tears came again, in more force this time. He let her be for a little while, then delicately placed an arm around her shoulder. When she didn’t hit him, when she in fact let herself curl into him, he tightened the other arm around her as well. She could hear him murmuring soothing things she didn’t quite understand, and she just let herself drift for a little bit, let her mind replay its horror until it was content. Well, not content—she didn’t think it would ever be content. But it at least stopped screaming.
“I need to know you’re home safe,” Julian said to her, quietly. “I’m sorry to force the issue, but it’s important to me.”
“What are you caught up in?” she asked. “Why were you really out there, by the woods?”
He sighed, one hand leaving her shoulder to rub at his forehead with the heel of his hand. “It’s not something I want to talk about here,” he said. “I will tell you, if you want to know. But we’d have to go on to your house— or back to mine.”
“Is she still there?” The coldness in her voice disturbed her. She should have done something to try and help the woman. She was a nurse. She should have tried. She could have checked. Was the woman’s heart still beating? Maybe she could have been saved. She had to clamp down on the sensation before it overwhelmed her.
He was quiet for a moment longer than she liked. “I did not move her body. I was more concerned about you than her.”
“Was she an enemy of yours?”
“This is not the place.”
“People are coming out of the woodwork to try and kill you—nearly killing me in the crossfire—and that means that you get to, what, just pretend it’s not happening? Are you going to call the police and tell them that there’s a dead woman in your home?”
She could see his jaw working, hear his teeth grinding together. The hand on her back was twisting into a fist. “No,” he snarled.
She pushed away and leveraged herself slowly to her feet. Her ankles ached, but they held. Sitting had stiffened her bad knee up even further. “Thank you for your kindness,” she said. “I’ll find my own way home.”
He touched his hand to her shoulder, and she slapped him as hard as she could, letting her hand curve so that her nails scraped over his skin. “Touch me again, and I’ll cut that thing off, I don’t care what the hell you are.”
She turned away from him and forced herself into motion, no matter how much it hurt. If he followed her, she’d call the police, tell them that she’d told him to leave her alone and he was refusing. The cops would love a chance to take out a little bit of aggression on an out-of-towner.
She didn’t hear him walk away, but when she glanced back, he was gone.
She walked for about five more minutes. She didn’t want to call a cab. There weren’t any big cab companies in town, and so she’d be calling Raymond Michaels. He was probably drunk or stoned by this point of the night, if he was even awake, and even if she swore him to secrecy and paid him an extra $20, it would still be all over town by morning that he’d given her a ride home from the other side of town in the wee hours. If she was very unlucky, the story would also go that she’d paid him with a blowjob.
So she limped along, determined to get home on her own, or call 911 for an ambulance, but nothing in between.
The car behind her didn’t even try to be subtle. It idled along, barely doing more than rolling, keeping pace with her, as if she were the world’s most pathetic track star. She hobbled along, the pain in her knee growing with every step. Whatever she’d done to the damn thing, she was starting to feel things grinding when the knee flexed. That was incredibly bad.
She stopped. The car stopped too. She sighed, hated herself, and then did her damned best to stalk across the road and open the passenger door. Lowering herself into the seat came very close to making her scream, especially when she had to lift her bad leg in, but she managed it.
Julian was doing an excellent job of not gloating, she absolutely had to give him that. He handed her a bottle of ibuprofen, a bottle of water, and an ice pack, all without saying a word. She took three ibuprofen, drank most of the water, and strapped the ice pack onto her knee.
“I’d like to talk to you before I take you home,” he said. “If you feel safe enough to do that.”
“Sure,” Roxanne said, suddenly tired beyond imagining. “Fine.”
The right thing to do was to call 911. Standard protocol was that washing out a wound was probably enough, the vast majority of the time, but the vast majority wasn’t the same as every time, and human mouths were just disgusting. If the bite was infected and she didn’t get it treated, she could end up septic. She could lose the leg. The leg was full of major blood vessels. Things could spread much more quickly than people imagined. She and Roxie would probably get in some trouble for taking the kit and working on her leg without her being admitted, but she could probably tell them that she’d done it herself, shield Roxie from scrutiny. She’d certainly try.
She could see her phone on the table, right next to the bottle of ibuprofen. She reached for it, and her fingers went right through it.
Something not so far away from her laughed. Something in the corner.
She spun on the bed, facing where the laughter had come from. There wasn’t anyone there. Just like she’d known there wouldn’t be.
She looked back at the nightstand. Her phone wasn’t sitting there at all. It had fallen to the floor, and was now sitting in a puddle of water from where the glass had spilled. The urge to punch the wall rose up, solid and strong, and she forced herself to choke it back. All she’d manage to do would be to break her fingers. She wasn’t together enough to punch properly.
She reached down for the phone, her head swimming so hard and fast that she thought she might vomit. She managed to choke the salty taste back and away. It took several thick, heavy gasps, but she managed to pick up the phone without slicing her fingers open, or barfing on the floor.
Of course, the phone had shorted out. The urge to punch the wall resurfaced. She forced herself to carefully pry off the back and pull out the battery, laying the pieces out carefully on the covers to dry. Usually, it took more water than that to kill a phone, but that was her luck. Lovers who bit, the one bite wound that turned into a ridiculous infection even after treatment, and a phone with more temper than her own mother.
The laughter again. Echoing this time, moving in surround sound, making her spin to look for it, making her dizzy, leaving her tumbling down to the bed, bracing herself for the impact as the laughter barreled in. She covered her face with her hands, feeling the cold spray of spittle as the shadow laughed in her face.
And then it backed off, but its presence—its presence was very much there.
Izzy closed her eyes and tried to gather her energies. She needed to protect herself. She needed to create a circle. But her head was swimming in circles. She needed help pulling herself together.
An idea came to her, and she found herself smiling. Roxie, like most of her friends, didn’t have a landline phone anymore, so she was out of touch with the world until her phone dried out. But Roxie did have a computer, and she could probably get in touch with one of her friends online. Most of her relationships in the computer were just text based interactive porn, really, but there was one woman—Santhe, if she could reach Santhe, she would help. She wasn’t a
curandera
, but she had her own sort of sympathetic magic.
Dragging herself upright was a feat, and she had to lean on the furniture to move from one place to another. Even then, her head was spinning viciously.
Was it possible that all of this was just an aftereffect of shock? She’d bled a fair amount in the room before she’d been able to get herself moving. The bitch who’d bitten her had been long since gone, but there’d been blood all over the bed. Izzy’d dragged herself up to moving, already feeling weak and strange, and trying to shake her head to get the foggy sensation to pass. She didn’t remember much of the drive back to Sweetwater, or begging Roxanne to get her sorted. She’d been more aware by the time she got to Roxie’s place, and after she’d fallen asleep for a bit on the couch, she felt almost normal.
But as she’d watched Roxanne getting ready for her date, trying on dozens of outfits and fussing over her jewelry, she’d started to feel worse. She’d thought of asking Roxie not to go, suggesting that maybe she really did need to go to the ER, but she’d thought for sure that everything would be fine. That it wasn’t worth worrying her friend, who was finally looking excited about someone for the first time in an age. She’d been sure that she’d feel better as soon as she’d slept.
And maybe she would. But that laughter… she wasn’t religious, not exactly, but there were some things that she just didn’t dare ignore. There was something watching her. She was very sure of it.
She stumbled out to Roxie’s laptop and managed to turn it on. The screen kept fuzzing out in front of her eyes, and the sense of imminent attack was growing stronger. The short hairs on the back of her neck were on high alert, and she had to swallow the urge to rush. It wouldn’t help her.
She navigated to her email and her chat program and logged in. It was late, but Santhe sometimes had a sixth sense about things. Izzy was hoping against hope that she would sense that she was needed.
For a long moment, she couldn’t locate the other woman on the list of people logged into chat. She felt her heart sink, felt that sense of laughter begin to start up again—and then her named popped onto the list like a rosebud opening in spring. Izzy laughed this time, and she felt the mirth push the watching thing back a few paces. “That’s right, motherfucker,” she murmured as she typed in the chat window as quickly as she could manage.
Hey beautiful. I could use your help tonight, if you’re up for a little bit of ritual.
Santhe’s reply came faster than Izzy could have hoped for.
I’m always glad to help, Luna. What do you need.
She took a deep breath. She needed to play this honest if the magic was going to work.
I have a crazy feeling, like something’s following me, wanting to hurt me. I need to gather some magic to make myself safe, but I’m having trouble concentrating. Do you think you can help?
Absolutely
, came the reply.
Where should I meet you
?
Relief flooded her heart, making her knees sag.
The beach. Does that sound good?
You know it’s my favorite. Give me ten minutes.
Izzy agreed, then closed the computer screen. Her head was swirling worse than ever, but the next step needed to be a hot bath. The heat would help her focus, help her shake off some of the lurking misery that was creeping up her body. It was a strange sensation, noticeably external, but it felt like it was sure to creep inside of her and tear her to pieces.
She shambled into the bathroom and turned the water on as hot as she could stand. She knew Roxie kept a stash of essential oils that she liked to add to her bathwater. She pawed through until she found what she needed. Lemon, for cleanliness, and rose, for Santhe and for sensuality. She found an olive oil base she’d given her friend ages ago, which predictably Roxie had never used, and she mixed the oils in until they were strong and powerful. She poured a dollop into the bath water, imagining it infusing each drop with protective powers and sacred essences. She anointed her wrists, her ankles, the mound of her sex, and each of the sacred energy places on her body, up to her forehead. When her fingers touched that last spot, she felt a rush of power, a sense that something sacred had closed around her, and that for the moment, at least, she was safe.
It was moments like this when she remembered what a
curandera
was. What a witch was. It was more than just stories and counseling. But she locked that knowledge away so much of the time. Using this to solve every problem wasn’t just irresponsible; it was dangerous.
But something was after her. She was more than sure of it, and she had to protect herself.
She slipped into the bath, hissing at its heat, and laid her head back on the edge, suddenly incredibly grateful that Roxie had spent half a fortune on a tub long enough to lay down in. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply of the mixed scents of lemon and rose, and sent her mind far away.
The beach where she met Santhe was something they’d created together, one night when neither of them could sleep. She saw it as a tropical beach, pale sands and turquoise water. She knew that in Santhe’s mind, it was more northern, with gray waves and pebbled shores. But they still met there, somehow, in a little cabin they’d built together out of imagination and faith. The aches and heat of Izzy’s body were far away, though from the look of concern Santhe wore, not all of it had been left behind.
“Iz,” she said, and her voice always struck Izzy as much deeper than should have been produced in her narrow frame. “You look like shit.”
“Something’s after me, Santhe. I need help.”
“Anything,” the other woman said. Izzy didn’t waste time. She reached out her hand, her mind’s projection of her hand, and wrapped it in Santhe’s fingers. Their skin, the barriers between them, held up for only a moment before they blurred, blending together in a rushing haze. Santhe’s skin was even darker than Izzy’s, a dark, cool brown, and when Izzy’s own deep brown complexion melded with it, the resulting color was one of the most exquisite things she’d ever seen.
“What can I give you, Izzy, my love?”
With their hands joined, Santhe’s words thrummed the chords of her soul. Izzy’s head dropped back, and Santhe took the opportunity to stroke a finger up the pulse of her throat. They didn’t merge there, not quite, but Izzy’s aura rippled with waves at the caress.
“I’ve never seen such darkness,” Izzy said. “Never in all the places I’ve been, in all the things I’ve done. I need strength. Courage to fight it.”
“I have that,” Santhe said. At her words, Izzy felt the power pour into her, boiling into her center, feeding her aching spirit. The sense of safety, back in the real world, intensified. “What else?”
“What can I give you in exchange?” Izzy asked.
Santhe laughed, her voice rain pattering on a the grass. “May I taste you, beautiful one?”
Something deep inside of Izzy twisted with longing. “I don’t know how that’s me giving you anything?”
“It helps you stay safe. We’ll build the power together, and you can fight this thing. If you can defeat it, or at least send it back where it came from, you make the world safer for all of us.” She stroked Izzy’s cheek again, and the sheer power that Santhe carried made Izzy’s head swirl.
Santhe’d learned such a different way than Izzy had. Izzy fought for her community, her tribe. If that benefited the world at large, fantastic, but it wasn’t her priority. Santhe seemed to think almost the other way around. But then, if Izzy had access to the kind of power that was pouring through her astral body right now, she might think in terms of the top of the pyramid too.
She opened herself to Santhe, and the other woman’s spirit merged into her without hesitation.
They’d only done this a handful of times, usually when Santhe needed some small extra help to fight something on her end. It was addictive, this kind of total joining. It could make it utterly impossible to find any kind of satisfaction in a more physical joining. That wasn’t the intent of this connection. What was the line from that play? That only poets and saints understood. Something.
It wasn’t possible to be this close physically, which was good, because if it was, humanity would never have bothered using tools. As Santhe’s heart grew closer and closer to her own, she felt her body thrum with borrowed power and energy. It was unlike orgasm, and also the pinnacle of what that experience could be. What passed for a spinal cord in this body bowed with the rush of energy that flew through her, circling and channeling.
