Red Devil (Dangerous Spirits) (5 page)

She nodded. “Yeah, with just a little schnapps for flavor. Sol always felt better after he took a shot of absinthe, or had a couple beers. Anyway, the vodka should make you feel at home, and it sounds like you need a drink.”

Alexei understood the expression, “I need a drink,” and how here in the States the word “need” lost some of its urgency when put into this expression. Back in Samorodka, he and his friends had emptied many bottles of vodka, but those had not been the times when he’d
needed
a drink.

No, but he “needed a drink” in the English sense of it. Alcohol could loosen the knot in his stomach, mute the endless replaying in his mind of him walking out of the café without his wallet. The only bruises sustained had been to his pride, and he would be able to sleep eventually—but he did want that dullness, that relaxing of the body that followed the burning of vodka.

As long as he didn’t drink too much…his tail twitched. He wondered if Cat still drank, if there were nights when she
needed
to. There was nobody to hold her, to tip the bottle to her muzzle if it were shaking. His paws clenched, and the knots in his stomach twisted, tightened. She never mentioned it in her letters, but then, Cat never would.

A moment later, he followed Meg out to the kitchen. “Do you have a saying in English, something like, ‘Trouble never comes alone’?”

She paused, a bottle in one paw. “Misery loves company?”

“Maybe.” He sighed. “When you have one bad thought and it attracts all the others to you, things you have maybe not thought about for months.”

“Oh.” Meg shook her head. “‘Misery loves company’ is more like, um…if you’re miserable, you want to make other people miserable too.”

“That is not quite right.” Alexei smiled. “I do not want to make you sad.”

“Fox-boy,” Meg said, starting to pour from the bottle into a glass, “I think that’s one thing you don’t ever have to worry about. So let me try to cheer you up.”

Her manner did ease Alexei’s worries, at least a little. Of course Cat was all right. She was just having trouble finding time to write now that school was out. He was being silly—there was no reason she was in trouble just because he’d lost his wallet. He lifted his ears and muzzle and tried to right his mood. “What did you mean when you said I should get candles?”

She laughed. “My vampire fox—Athos—said if Sol wanted to summon his ghost again, there’s a ritual, and there’s candles and stuff. He’s kind of a dork sometimes. And don’t tell Sol. Jesus, the last thing I need is for him to get all weird again.”

He watched her pour clear vodka into a glass and add peach schnapps and some grenadine syrup. It was a mystery to him and Sol where Meg managed to procure alcohol. It happened during the day while they were gone; they would come back to find two six-packs of beer in the fridge, or Meg would announce margarita night and bring out margarita mix and tequila. Alexei usually declined, and he worried as much about the speed with which the bottles vanished as about their appearance, but Meg didn’t show any signs of being worse off for drinking, so he kept his worries to himself. And right now, he’d just told himself to stop worrying about Cat; he wasn’t going to start worrying about Meg.

“Do you know the ritual?” he said.

She stopped pouring and set the bottle down. “No,” she said, turning to him. “No, I am not going to help you chase after something just because Sol did it.”

“It is not for that,” he said.

She squinted at him and then turned back to the drinks, adding a shot from a bottle marked
Southern Comfort
. “It’s supposed to have a couple other alcohols in it, but all I have is SoCo and vodka.” She swirled the drink around, then poured half into a small glass tumbler and held it out to him. “It’s regional cause of the peaches.”

“Regional?” Alexei sniffed, caught the strong scents of peaches and grenadine, and not much else.

“From around here,” Meg clarified. She emptied the rest of the drink into a black coffee mug, wider-mouthed for her wider muzzle.

“You should mix drinks at a bar.” He sipped the drink at the same time she lifted her mug to her lips. Though it had the sting of alcohol, the overwhelming taste was peach, but it wasn’t peach like the fruit. It was swaggering, smug
peach
, as if—as if someone had mashed an overripe peach into his nose and held it there, as if—

As if Kendall were a peach. It was the fruit taste, but stronger, and the grenadine added sweet cherry flavor, but not enough. “Too much peach,” he said.

Meg said, “Needs more grenadine,” and took his glass.

The association of Kendall made him not want to drink any more, but when Meg gave him the tumbler back, he took another sip to be polite. The flavor was smoother, not as intensely peach, and the sting of alcohol only brushed the back of his throat. “It’s good,” he said.

“Right.” Meg drank hers and looked pleased. “Not too bad. I wonder what the other alcohols add.”

Alexei shook his head. “I have no experience of that.” He tipped the cup to the end of his muzzle again and let the sweet-sharp tang roll across his tongue as the peach-cherry filled his nose.

“Hey,” Meg said, “don’t drink it too fast.”

The drink warmed his stomach and chest. Already his shame was receding, drowned in vodka and peach and camaraderie with Meg. “I am Siberian,” he said. “This is vodka. I am born to it.” He said it without knowing where he pulled the words from, and then remembered that it was something close to what his father’d used to say when his mother said he’d had enough. He set the drink down.

“You don’t like it?” The otter tapped her coffee mug. It had a chip on the rim where the white ceramic showed through the black glaze.

Alexei flicked his ears. “You are right. I should not drink it so fast.”

“A second ago you were ‘born to it.’”

“What do you call it?” he asked, to change the subject.

Meg lowered her broad nose to her mug. “The original recipe is called a Red Devil, but I changed it around a little.”

He traced a claw around the rim of the glass. “Red Devil. My sister and I called our blood that, sometimes.”

Meg arched an eyebrow. “I get enough fake blood with Athos, okay? Anyway, this looks more orangey.”

“It was a story.” He stared down into the cup, seeing the orange of the sunset over the river, of Prababushka’s fur, her long-remembered scent, her voice in his ears.

“Well?”

Meg was staring at him, tapping one finger on her cup. He blinked, and Samorodka fell away from him. “Well? What?”

“Are you gonna tell me the story?”

“Oh. If you like.” He pulled the words from his memory, taking time to translate them. “My great-grandmother told me. Give me a moment to get the words.” Fairy tales here started with a different phrase, so he used that one. “Once upon a time…a fox prince lived in a castle near a wood. His father—the king—had lost his oldest son to, er…” He clucked his tongue. “Not wolf, but wild wolf? In Siberian, the word is wolf-monster.” Although his great-grandmother had used a different word still. She had grown up in Lechia, one of the Slavic regions to the west that was now part of—Alexei couldn’t keep track of which country was which now. But she’d used still a different word for it.

“Animal-wolf,” Meg said. “Some people say ‘feral-wolf,’ too.”

“Animal.” Alexei nodded. “So the king tells his son, you may not go into woods. Tch—into
the
woods. But the son, he loves the trees and the—the animals. All the peasants, all the servants, all the people can go to the woods to hunt, but he is trapped in the castle. ‘As long as my blood runs in your veins,’ the king says, ‘you will be my heir and stay here.’

“One night he watches the full moon rise over the forest, and his wish calls to it. ‘Free me from this red devil in my veins!’ he cries.

“A wood-witch hears and comes to him. The prince is suspicious, but the witch cuts her arm and shows him the green sap in it. ‘I can put this green sap in your veins,’ she says, ‘and then you will be able to wander the woods free of danger, free of duty.’”

“I wonder why people in fairy tales are so stupid,” Meg said.

Alexei and Cat had sat together in that old ramshackle shed, looking at the river and the scraggly woods beyond, and had cried out the prince’s plea. They would have taken the wood-witch’s bargain, if she’d come to them. “The prince wanted desperately to escape his life. He could see no other way out.”

“He was a prince.” Meg shook her head. “Some people don’t know how good they got it.”

“‘Prince,’ in Siberia, may be simply head of a tribe. It is not…” He waved his arms. “Gold and money and fancy clothes. Not like that cartoon movie.”

“He lived in a castle,” Meg pointed out.

Alexei sighed. “The prince said yes.” He ignored Meg’s eyeroll. “So the witch took his blood and poured it into a wood-golem.”

“A what?”

“A golem is a…” He gestured up and down his body with a paw. “Made in the shape of a fox, but of wood, but can move. A statue that can move.”

“That holds blood.”

“The wood-witch animated the golem with the blood of the prince, and put her green sap in his veins.” Meg opened her mouth to comment again, and Alexei hurried on with the story. “So the prince was able to escape the castle, and he ran into the woods he loved so. But away from the fires of the castle, the sap in his veins thickened and slowed. When he returned from the woods, thirty years had passed, and his father was dead, and the wood-golem sat on the throne.”

Meg watched him expectantly. When he didn’t go on, she said, “Then what?”

He blinked, and picked up the drink again. The orange liquid left traces on the glass where it surged up and fell back. “Er. That is the end of the story.”

“Did he get the throne back? Did he get his blood back?”

Alexei breathed in the peach aroma, the cherry flavor, the sting of the vodka. “I do not know. I suppose he was made to live with his decision.”

“That sucks.” Meg finished the rest of her drink and set the mug in the sink. “I mean, he was the prince, right? Don’t those spells always have a way of reversing?”

“I don’t know,” Alexei said. “You could ask your friend.”

Meg looked levelly at him. “I’m not going to ask him how to summon a ghost. I told you, it’s stupid.”

“I did not mean that.” Alexei paused, the idea resurfacing in his mind. “But if you do not believe, what harm is there?”

Her eyes slid to Sol’s room, then to his glass. “If you’re not going to finish that, I will.”

“Please.” He handed her the drink.

She lifted it to her lips and then met his eyes again. “Sol went through a lot of crap, and he’s still kind of hung up on that dream, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m sure he’d tell you to do it, but I feel like it’s my fault for pushing the absinthe on him, and I don’t wanna encourage you to believe in it too. Last thing I need is both of you moping around after dreams.” Before he could mount an answer to that, she drained the glass and set it down with a clack. “So you escaped, right, like that prince in your story? I guess you don’t care if you go back. But your sister’s still there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you miss her?” She didn't face him as she asked, staring instead at her claws on the tabletop.

The vodka’s warmth, cushioned by the sweet syrups, did not distance him from the world as much as Siberian vodka had. “Very much. This is one of the things I was miserable about.”

Meg turned quickly, her piercings clinking. “Whoops. Sorry. You don’t have to—”

“I don’t mind. But no, I would not go back.” He tapped the table with a claw. “She would not want me to. She wanted me to come to the States because I could be happy here.”

“Uh-huh.” Meg brought the glasses to the sink. “Is she happy there?”

Alexei saw the shed, the small flowers sitting against the rough, diseased wood. “I promised I would bring her with me, that I would find a way.”

“Very noble.” Meg’s thick tail tapped the table leg while she washed the glasses. “But maybe you should keep yourself here first.”

Chapter 4

When Sol came back a little later, Meg had disappeared into her room and closed the door, and didn’t come out. Sol talked effusively about his date, how Mitch had been just so much fun and talkative and real (and not like that guy he’d met on the Internet, Alexei heard even though Sol did not say it). He’d asked Sol about the story he was writing, was impressed with his creativity, and wanted to get together again Saturday night. “I figure the barbecue will be over by six, so I told him eight.”

“Do you want me to come along again?” Alexei asked.

“No, no.” Sol laughed. “Thanks so much, though. I felt a lot better knowing you were there.” And he went on, his tail wagging still, so that Alexei didn’t feel like spoiling his evening by telling him about the lost wallet.

He told him the next morning on their way to work, and Sol said he would look out for it around the bus stop, but Alexei knew it was gone. He must have dropped it outside on the street, or else someone had found it in the coffee shop and taken it. So he came by Sol’s store after his shift ended and bought a new wallet for ten dollars, a cheap bright yellow nylon thing that he hoped would not disappear easily.

And Saturday afternoon, with the sun blazing overhead and the humid air almost thick enough to swim through, they went out to the VLGA picnic in the backyard of Jerry’s house. Jerry, a tall, slightly awkward rabbit, alternated between hurrying to ask if any of his twenty or so guests needed food or drink, and standing with his back to a tree, ears down, eyes wide. Alexei, sitting with Sol, asked Liza if the rabbit were okay.

“He is always like this,” she said. “He wants company, then is afraid something will go wrong. But he loves to host.” She glanced up at the second floor of his house. “His mother never comes down. Maybe she is just up there decaying in a rocking chair.”

Alexei wasn’t used to this gruesome imagination from Liza, and his flattened ears must have reflected that. She leaned over. “Norman Bates?
Psycho
?”

“Oh,” Sol said. “Didn’t they remake that a few years ago?”

“The remake is terrible,” Liza said. “Go watch the original.”

After that, Alexei kept looking up at the second floor windows, looking for a shadow of ears or any sign of movement. Sol didn’t seem bothered by the prospect of being watched by an old rabbit who might be dead. But Alexei knew from Samorodka that ghosts would not always be as helpful and friendly as Sol’s Niki had been.

Jerry grilled hot dogs for the carnivores and small squash and corn for the herbivores, and the smells mingled pleasantly with the smoke of the coals. The hot dogs were juicy and salty, and Alexei liked the sharp bite of the mustard, the soft sweet bread of the buns. He ate two while chatting amiably with Liza and Sol about movies and some of their friends, and besides the second floor windows, the other thing he watched was Mike.

It seemed to him that Kendall was pursuing Mike, and that the sheep tried to escape from time to time, but he couldn’t be sure. Maybe Mike was just being polite and trying to talk to all the people at the picnic. Twice, though, Mike excused himself and turned to someone else only to have Kendall come back to join him and the other person. Not that the sheep looked irritated; in fact, Alexei had never seen Mike upset. Either he was very good at hiding it or he was the kind of wonderful person who didn’t get annoyed at other people. Sol, meanwhile, had either forgotten his promise or was waiting until they’d all finished eating, because he didn’t even look at the marten. Alexei didn’t mind; he was working himself up to talk to Mike, rehearsing what he wanted to say.

Kendall, reminding everyone that he was VLGA president, started organizing games when most of the group had set down their plates. This took him away from Mike; Alexei watched as the sheep walked over to the grill and took an ear of corn and one of the squashes, then spread hummus on a small tortilla and wrapped it around the squash.

An elbow caught Alexei in the side. He turned to see Sol grinning at him. “Go,” the wolf hissed.

“He’s eating.”

“He’s alone. Go say hi.” Sol practically shoved him off the bench. “I’ll go help Kendall with the games so he doesn’t interfere. Not that he would.”

Alexei laughed nervously, looked up at the second floor windows, and then hurried over to where Mike was just taking the first bite of his squash-hummus wrap. The sheep looked up and smiled as Alexei approached.

“Hi there,” he said. “Fun party. Hey, here’s the music, before I forget.”

He gave Alexei a small USB drive. The fox slipped it into his pocket and held out the CD he’d made. The sheep reached for it, but Alexei held it close. “Is that your Siberian metal?” Mike asked.

Alexei nodded. “I made this for you, but…”

Mike smiled. “You don’t have to be ashamed of it. I’m very open-minded.”

“It is not that. It is…” He lowered his voice. “When I listened to this, I was…younger. It is not something I listen to very much now.”

The sheep smiled and patted Alexei’s shoulder. “You know what? I used to listen to boy bands not so long ago. I promise I won’t think less of you. Okay?”

Alexei smiled. “Okay.” He held out the CD. “But you must also give me some music of boy bands, then.”

The disk caught the light as Mike took it, a shimmering rainbow dancing along the silver edge, and the sheep’s laugh was just as bright. “All right, I’ll see if I can dig some up. Fair’s fair.” He shoved the disc into his back pocket.

“How’s the squash?” Alexei nodded toward the wrap.

“It’s good. The hummus is a little bland, but not bad. How were the dogs?”

Alexei smiled, tail wagging. “They were good. The mustard is very nice.”

He cursed himself immediately—talking about mustard? But Mike looked toward the condiment table and said, “Really? Maybe I should try that instead of the hummus.”

“Or together,” Alexei said.

Mike grinned. “Or together. Do you cook?”

“Only a little. I am learning. My roommate cooks.”

“Sol?” The sheep turned his large horns to where the black wolf was arguing with Kendall about some rules. Sol’s tail wagged and he was grinning, so it was a friendly argument.

“No. We live with Meg, an otter. She is straight—I think—and very practical about the world. She believes in things she can see and touch, like fish. Not in things she cannot. Like—ghosts.” He’d almost said, “love.”

“Well,” Mike said with a laugh, “I can’t say I blame her too much.”

“Liza says that Jerry’s mother might be a ghost.” Alexei shook his head and smiled. “We had a house in Samorodka that was haunted.”

“Oh, come to think of it, we had a haunted house too!” Mike lit up with the memory. “I didn’t really believe, but you know, I went out there once with some friends and there were weird noises and my friend Jas said he heard something talking. None of the rest of us did, and we said he was drunk, but…” He rubbed his muzzle. “He never liked to talk about it after.”

Alexei’s tail wagged. “I know some ghost stories as well. Meg laughs at them, but Sol says, ‘Who are we to say that what others see is not real?’” Stop telling Mike what other people think. He kept his smile on. “I think Sol is right.”

“You believe in ghosts?” But Mike didn’t say it the way Meg would have, with snark and edge. He said it with a “convince me” expression.

The conversation had headed abruptly into territory that Alexei wasn’t sure he wanted to be treading. “Is that strange?”

“Well…” Mike finished his wrap and rubbed his paws together. “Maybe a little. But I haven’t seen what you’ve seen. Maybe ghosts are just rare.”

“Maybe.” This would be a good place to end the conversation. Mike had turned those brown eyes on him and was still smiling, and his golden horns caught the sun, and oh, the fox thought, if some spirit were conspiring to produce the perfect moment for Alexei to ask him out, its plans had come to fruition now. Alexei struggled with the words, flipping through phrases in his head, but his chest and throat felt tight, and he kept worrying,
what if he says no? What if he is just being polite?

“Heads up!” came a shout from the other side of the yard, and Alexei half-turned.

A hard blow struck his chest, hard enough to send him staggering back a step, and for a moment he was back in his living room. But there was no dull thud of a bottle to the wood floor; water exploded at his muzzle, into his nose and even into his ears. The world slowed, chill and wet, and his head spun. “Wha—?”

Water trickled down his sides, into his pants, even as he held his shirt away from his fur. The rubber scrap of a balloon fell limply to the ground. Laughter and cheers surrounded him on all sides.

“Kendall!” Mike stifled a giggle and then put on an annoyed voice. “Don’t be an ass.”

“What? I’m trying to get people to toss water balloons around,” came the pine marten’s voice. “Just having a little fun.”

“Maybe you should wait ’til people expect it.” But Mike’s annoyance was diminishing.

“I said, ‘Heads up,’” Kendall replied, closer now. Alexei looked up to see him next to Mike, shirtless, drops of water beading on the fur of his arms and his broad chest. The oils in his fur kept the water from soaking in, as it was doing to Alexei’s thin summer coat. Behind Kendall, Sol stood with flattened ears, one paw rubbing the back of the other. The pine marten, in contrast, just swaggered, grinning, paws on his hips. “You okay?”

“I am wet,” Alexei said, hating himself for looking at Kendall’s chest and arms. He scowled and stared at the ground.

Kendall laughed. “That’s what happens when you get hit with a water balloon. Take your shirt off, come on.” He gestured, showing off his chest and stomach to Mike.

The sheep was smiling now, perhaps reassured that Alexei was okay, perhaps just amused by Kendall’s prank. Alexei made one more ineffectual brush at his shirt and then stalked back to the picnic tables. “Hey,” Kendall called after him, “you can throw one at me if you want.”

Alexei plopped down on the bench. Sol sat beside him, tail brushing his, and put a paw on his knee. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t notice until he was about to do it. But he’s just playing around.”

Alexei crossed his arms on the table and dropped his muzzle atop them. “Because I was talking to Mike, he wanted to make me look stupid.”

“He was trying to include you. Come on, don’t sulk.”

But Alexei, lost in his own thoughts, spiraled downward. He would always be mocked, always be pushed aside by the Kendalls of the world. He had run away from exactly this in Samorodka, where a pudgy fox could not be allowed to play football, where a fox who did not want to play war with his friends would be pushed down and shut out, where a fox who was not interested in vixens would be subject to curses and demeaning insults and threats of being sent away with drug addicts and criminals. And here he had found freedom, he was playing football and had gotten into shape, and none of it mattered, he was still that pudgy, gay fox being laughed at. He felt that even the ghost of Jerry’s mother, there on the second floor, was staring down at him. He imagined her with greying fur, drooping ears, grinning ear to ear and cackling.

“I want to go home,” he said, worried that he might embarrass himself further.

“I think they’re going to do egg races,” Sol said. “You don’t want to—”

“You can stay.” Alexei stood up, even though he did want Sol to come with him. “I don’t mind. But I am going home.”

Sol did stay, and Alexei walked out quickly, without saying thank you to Jerry or good-bye to Liza or Mike. He thought he heard someone call out after him, but he was already in a black mood in which he wanted no pity from anyone, so he turned the corner of the house and walked down the path to the front gate, and nobody followed him.

The sun beat down on his black ears, but he didn’t want to sit on a bus with a water-splattered shirt. After three blocks, he looked around at all the people walking shirtless through the streets and thought about taking his shirt off. Then he remembered Kendall saying,
Go on, take your shirt off
, and he kept it on.

Panting harder, half a mile farther along, his shirt was drying out but his fur was still wet. Kendall was back in Jerry’s yard, and would never know. So Alexei stopped on the sidewalk, grasped the bottom of his shirt to lift it over his head…and stopped. What if some of the people around him laughed? What if Sol or Mike decided to come after him in a car? He released the shirt. His fur would dry out eventually. Even if it was a hot day, even if the fox across the street had a bare white-furred gut hanging over his belt, even if the deer jogging by was wearing nothing but a tight bra and shorts…

He arrived home, panting, to find the apartment even more stifling than the outdoors. “Can I open a window?” he asked Meg, closing the door behind him.

“Open yours,” she called from her bedroom, and then her head showed through the doorway. “Picnic over already? Where’s Sol? He go right to his date?”

“He is still there.” Alexei strode to his bedroom, letting the door swing closed behind him, though he didn’t shut it all the way. His scent and Sol’s hit him in a wave in the oven-like heat of the room. He leaned over the desk, fumbled with the window catch, and then shoved the window up.

The air he’d just walked in from, hot, muggy, and thick with construction dust, felt refreshing compared to the oppressive apartment air. Alexei pushed the fan into the window and breathed in, sitting on the desk with his head against the window screen.

Meg pushed the door open. “Everything okay?”

Here, back in his home, the specters of the past receded. Alexei nodded, curling his tail across the top of the desk and resting one paw on it. “I got tired of the picnic,” he said.

Her eyes drifted downward. “Spill something on your shirt?”

“Someone else did.”

“Ah.” She folded her arms. “And Sol just let you leave on your own?”

“I told him he could.” He looked away from her, back out at the construction site. Two bulldozers sat idle amid huge piles of dirt behind the chain-link fence. A rack of lights loomed above, two of them aimed directly at him. “Do they work at night on those sites?”