Lethal Control, page 23
part #3 of The DuPage Parish Mysteries Series
“Just a taste,” Nelda Pie said as she gathered blood and let it drip onto the altar: across the coins, like ink on the plastic moon, rippling into a suspended cloud in the coppery rum. Her smile grew. “He’ll want to drink the rest of it straight from the tap, so to speak.”
As she turned, already speaking under her breath, Dag raised his gun and fired. The bullet sparked when it struck something invisible in the air, some sort of barrier around Nelda Pie, and it made a noise like whing as it ricocheted. Then Dag grunted, and when I glanced over, he was clutching his thigh. Blood seeped between his fingers.
“Dag!”
He tried to shove the Sig into his waistband, and then he gave up and dropped it so that he could clutch his thigh with both hands. Blood made a slow, black flood despite his best efforts. I helped him get to the ground.
“Belt,” he said and gritted his teeth.
The air pressure was changing—or something was changing, and it felt like a change in the pressure, that sudden sensation of tightness and weight in my head that quickly approached the threshold of pain. I worked Dag’s belt free as the pressure grew. I felt like my head would pop, but I got the belt around his thigh and tightened it until Dag groaned, but he shook his head when I released it, so I tightened it again. He let out an explosive breath. With a shaking hand, he accepted the end of the belt and nodded.
“Go,” he said.
I glanced at Nelda Pie. She was still muttering her prayer or spell or invocation, whatever it was. Tributaries of black blood webbed Reb’s arm and chest from the cut. An offering Kalfu cannot resist. The pressure was worse, the way it feels when you’d do anything to get your ears to pop. Like something tremendous bearing down on me, compressing everything else so that it could fit in a space—in a universe—too small for it.
“Go,” Dag said. “E, go. God, I am so fucking stupid.”
I checked Nelda Pie again. The flames of the tallow candles had changed, redder now, almost the color of blood. The bonfire had caught, and it crackled and roared, pouring off heat that made the wet grass around it steam—heat that I barely felt.
“Don’t let go of that belt,” I told Dag.
He gave me a bloodless smile, and I kissed him and stood.
I started toward Nelda Pie. As I crossed the clearing, I saw that the grass had been spray-painted in preparation for the ritual. The light from the bonfire made it easy to see now, the whorls and scrawls of the veve, Kalfu’s sacred symbol, marking the off-center corners of the crossroads. A gateway for the lwa. More like a landing pad, I thought as the pressure ratcheted up again. The edges of the clearing were starting to blur, the tall grasses dissolving into gray. This place, whatever it was, was no longer just a place. It was becoming more. It was becoming else.
The red candlelight painted shadows up Nelda Pie’s face. When she turned her head, for a moment, I thought she didn’t have eyes—only dark caverns where they should have been.
“You can’t hurt me,” she said.
“It’s interesting that you say that. Hurting people is one of the things I do best. Of course, usually it’s people I love, but I’d like to think I can apply my talents more broadly.”
Her tongue came out, and in the light, it looked like a fat lizard poking out of her mouth. She ran it across her lips. She smirked. “You can’t touch me.”
“I’ve used that one before. Trust me, therapists have a field day with it.”
“You are nothing. You are a little half-breed, and if I want, I can end you.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
My arm and shoulder broke, and I screamed. It was like something invisible had reached out and grabbed hold of me, crushing the bones. I staggered and went to one knee. The pain roared up like the bonfire, all red and shadow inside my head. For a moment, the shadow threatened to take everything else. And then I breathed through it, the way I’d breathed through the last mile at the end of a run; the way I’d breathed through the nights when the number on the scale made me want to puke or eat or not eat ever again; the way I’d breathed through the first night after I’d found Gard and my parents, and all the nightmare hours since.
After a moment, arm hanging uselessly at my side, I got to my feet. Fire rolled through my head again, but I stayed upright.
Nelda Pie was sneering at me. “Little half-blood. I could find something useful for you to do. You could live a normal life. Kneel, now, and I will consider being merciful.”
“That’s a pretty sweet deal,” I said as I started forward again. Twenty feet closed to fifteen. Fifteen closed to ten. I wanted to crack that sheet of ice inside myself, to disappear into the cold relief from this pain. But I’d spent a lot of my life finding ways not to deal with my pain, and if I wanted Dag—well, that was the answer. I wanted Dag more than I wanted to hide from the pain. And that meant figuring out healthy ways to deal with it. Or some shit like that. “Here’s the thing about me, though: I have never been normal. Ever. I am seriously fucked up.”
Ten feet closed to five. I could feel the barrier around her like a static charge in the air. She closed one hand into a fist, and my leg exploded—that’s what it felt like, anyway. I screamed as I fell, and I screamed again, a soundless, airless scream, when I hit the ground.
Just a little, part of my brain begged. Just a little. Just to feel better. You need to feel better.
But the weird thing about needing to feel better? All the ways I’d tried over the years, they’d only made me feel worse. Maybe, I was starting to think, maybe you just had to feel like shit for a while. Feel like shit, and let somebody you loved help you until you could do it on your own.
Those thoughts came in fragments through the pain. And after what felt like a long time, I got onto my uninjured side, propping myself up with one hand. Kalfu had almost reached us; the sense of pressure still made my head scream, but now I could feel Kalfu himself—the untrammeled vastness of his existence, the lwa of the crossroads, the overlap of place and divinity. Kalfu. Carrefour. The lwa of thresholds. The lwa of confluence. We had all flowed together here, I thought. Flowed together into one great river.
“I’ll let you keep this body, since you like it so much.” Nelda Pie stared down at me. “I’ll let you keep it all if you beg. When I ascend, light the candles, make an offering. Be the first to feed me with your prayers, and I will reward you.”
“Being a god is starting to sound a lot like being me.” I dragged myself as best I could toward the low hum of her barrier. “Always hungry. Always pissed off. I know what you’re trying to do. Your plan has gone to shit; your followers are dead or dying, and you’re going to ascend, and nobody will know, and nobody will pray to you, and you’ll starve to death. Alone, all alone, with nothing but your fear. I’ve been there, bitch. Good luck.”
Her face froze. She drew herself up, opening her hand, and I knew the next time she closed it, my head would burst, or my heart, and that would be the end. Show’s over, lights go down, get your orangeade for the road as you exit through the lobby.
“You little piece of shit,” she said. “Nothing but a bag of meat, letting the thing in the grass spread itself inside you. Nothing but dirty blood and rotting meat.”
At night, once, I had lain on the ground next to Gard as a storm moved out, neither of us minding the wet grass because we’d gotten soaked playing in the rain, and the stars had come out overhead, and he’d held my hand and said, in a child’s voice, “I love you.” We’d been little then. I hadn’t thought about that in a long time.
“You drove that thing out of the bayou,” I said, drawing the harvest knife with my good hand. It burned my palm, but stacked up against everything else, it was hardly noticeable. “You and your fucking chimeras. You started all this. Dag could tell you all about it, about apex predators, about behavioral responses. But you know what I care about? Gard. And my parents. And Ray and Mason and the rest of the support group. And Ivy Honsard, and everybody else who’s died because you were so fucking greedy, you displaced all those things and sent them into our lives. So, I owe you, and this is payback. I want you to know that.”
Sneering at the harvest knife, she said, “Cold iron won’t help you.”
“You know what I’ve been working on?” I said. “I’ve been working on this cognitive disconnect. I am not my body. That’s a big thing to work on. There’s more to me than a meat suit. But you know what’s funny? Not ha-ha funny, but funny like a kick in the teeth? Right now, the thing that’s going to fuck you up? It’s my body. My blood, actually.” I grinned like I had a razor between my teeth. “Miss Kennedy helped me figure it out. She didn’t mean to, but it happens that way sometimes; she knows everything because she’s a librarian. Wrong blood plus big ritual equals major bad news.”
I had to hold the knife with my bad hand. It was awkward because the bones in that arm had been broken, but I managed to open a cut the width of my palm. Then I slapped my bloody hand on top of the altar, smearing my infected blood over Reb’s.
Kalfu arrived.
He screamed in like a train—an enormous presence barreling through me, through this place, through the universe. I caught a glimpse of something. Impressions mostly: a young man with skin darker than mine, a flash of red the color of heart’s blood, rage like snapping teeth. Then Nelda Pie jerked up onto the tips of her toes, her body quaking, her eyes wide and staring sightlessly, her mouth hanging open. She screamed—a thin, sleepwalker noise—and dropped back onto her heels. I caught a glimpse of her face, and I saw her eyes: hers and not hers. Nelda Pie was in there, but something else was looking out at me. Kalfu. The lwa, riding the priestess who had called him, furious at the tainted blood he’d been offered and the revelation of her treachery.
With Kalfu riding her, Nelda Pie threw herself into the bonfire. Her robe caught like flash-paper, and the smell of burning hair and skin wafted out on her first scream. I couldn’t stand to watch, so I flopped my way over to Reb. He was still bleeding steadily from the cut on his arm; it was a bad one, and he needed a hospital. But then, so did I. And so did Dag. And so did Nelda Pie, although I figured, I wouldn’t rush anybody on that one.
After a while, she stopped screaming. Darkness lowered itself, and when I risked a look, the bonfire had burned down. I couldn’t make out anything in the gloom, but I didn’t think even bones were left. The stink of burnt hair and the charred meat smell filled my lungs. On the altar, the tallow candles flared. Then they went out, all of them, all at once. The embers of the bonfire looked like dying stars spun out in front of me.
For a moment longer, the sense of Kalfu’s weight, the immensity of his presence, lingered. And then it was gone, and the relief made my eyes tear up. The frost fever inside of me eased, and then it was gone completely. A series of pops and cracks came from my arm and leg. The sensation was like one of the few times my dad had tried to take me and Gard camping, the tent poles snapping together, seemingly all by themselves. When I tried to move, everything responded the way it normally should have, and I scrambled upright. Reb’s cuts were gone, and he lay pale and unmoving, but breathing. At the edges of the crossroads, I could see acre after acre of tall grasses, the silhouette of the juke, the smoke still eddying up from whatever Fen had blown to hell in the oyster-shell lot. We were back.
Dag made a punched-out noise.
“Dag?”
I sprinted over to him, but he didn’t look up. He was wiping blood from his leg, working a finger in the hole that the bullet had torn in his jeans. The skin underneath was smeared with blood, but it looked unmarked, and the cuts and slashes on his neck had vanished.
The rustle and crunch of the grass made me raise my head. A shape moved toward us, and I glanced down, squatted, and ran my hands over the ground. The stiff blades of spray-painted grass gave me nothing; where was Dag’s gun?
When I looked up again, I could make out the lines of Fen’s face, but the weak light from the embers made it difficult to see details. She was carrying something over her shoulder. That fucking shotgun she loved so much, I guessed. From the edge of the clearing, she stared at us, obviously trying to make up her mind about something. I patted the ground around me, moving my hand in wider circles. My fingers brushed the textured polymer grip.
“Twenty-four hours,” Fen said in a voice that was impossible to read.
“Twenty-four hours,” Dag said.
She watched us a moment longer. Then she turned. Behind her, the juke was framed against the sky, backlit by something burning. Against that light, something swelled from the roofline—something bulbous, a nightmare squeezing itself between the Stoplight’s rafters, dragging itself free. Whatever it was—chimera, or a supernatural creature, or something worse that Nelda Pie had called up—I knew the Sig wouldn’t be enough. I knew I needed to get up, fight, move, do something.
But I couldn’t. I felt empty, hollowed out now that the cold fire of the hashok’s infection had been extinguished. On one of Dag’s nature shows, they’d been in a helicopter, looking down at a canyon: one side of it bristling with pines, and the other side nothing but deadfalls and a few scorched trees. They called it a burn, where a wildfire had gone through and eaten everything up. So I sat there, staring at the juke, watching that new nightmare grow like a blister.
Then Fen raised the shotgun to her shoulder, lined up a shot, and fired.
Two things happened.
First, I realized she was definitely not using a shotgun.
And second, a rocket-propelled grenade hit the back of the Stoplight, and the building exploded. The swollen shadow twisted and burned, shrieking as it deflated. And then, with a hissing noise that was clear even from a distance, it sizzled away to nothing.
“Gas leak,” Fen said. “I told you: I blow it up, me.”
DAG (5)
We traded Reb for Kennedy, and we drove home.
There wasn’t anything else to do. We didn’t need the hospital, although I couldn’t say why Kalfu had healed us—or even if he had meant to do so. Sticking around to explain things to the fire department would only have made things worse. And we couldn’t dig through the burning rubble of the juke joint—even if we had wanted to. Not all chimeras were bad—Posey was proof of that, as was Eli—and I felt sorry for the ones who had been desperate and who had gotten themselves tied up with Nelda Pie. But sorry was one thing, and the ones in the Stoplight had tried to kill us, after all.
That first night, Kennedy slept in our bed. That’s all she needed, she told us: sleep. She still had bite marks all over her, but if they’d been venomous, it didn’t seem to be affecting her any longer. That might have had something to do with Fen lighting up the Civil War lady like a jack-o'-lantern, but again, what did I know?
I made up the couch for Eli, and then I put a pad and a sleeping bag on the floor for me. I got Eli in the bathroom. I made sure he brushed his teeth. He drank water when I told him to, and he didn’t object when I put him on the sofa and pulled the blankets over him. He’d been like that since the footpath crossroads behind the Stoplight—a fugue state, I think it was called. Or maybe something else. His eyes were open, and when I asked him questions, he answered, and he could do whatever I told him. But that was all autopilot; nobody was home.
When I crossed the room to turn off the lights, he sat up, the blanket falling away, and said, “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere. I’m turning off the lights, and then I’m getting in my sleeping bag.”
He stared at me. His hair was looking decidedly less windblown, and his pulse beat in his throat. His eyes were hazel, though. My Eli’s eyes.
“How about I don’t turn off the light?”
He gave a half-nod.
I got him settled in the makeshift bed again. As I was drawing the blanket up, I stopped. I picked up his hand. I traced his fingers with my own, and then I turned his hand over and did it again.
The fingers of his free hand brushed my cheek. Eli’s fingers. My Eli’s fingers.
I took a wet breath, and then I squeezed his hand—probably too hard, probably hard enough to hurt, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Ok,” I said. I had to clear my throat and take another of those ragged breaths. “That’s good, then.”
I got in the bag, and I fell asleep holding his hand. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night, and Eli was on the floor with me, tangled up in the blanket like a cat that had gotten into the yarn.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
I smoothed his hair. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about.”
“I hurt you. I could have killed you.”
“We’re both all right now,” I said. “That’s what matters.”
He started to cry, and after a while, he fell asleep. I fixed his blanket, gave him half the pad, and fell asleep myself.
In the days that followed, we both were kind of numb. I was, anyway, and it seemed like Eli was too. And that explained part of it. We talked. We watched TV together. We slept together. I went to school. Eli went to work. Kennedy made him cover her shifts at the tour company, and when he came home, she interrogated him and grumped and complained and talked loudly and at length, to anyone who would listen—mostly me—about Eli taking all her tips. By the end of that first week, with the spider bites mostly healed, she moved back home, and I realized it had been seven days, and I hadn’t even thought about sex. I thought about it some more, and in the end, I didn’t say anything to Eli.
That was the first week.
Since that night at the crossroads, he’d been Eli again. No sudden bursts of violence. No glowing blue eyes. His fingers, his skin, all of him—he looked the way he always had. We talked about it once, and he’d gotten brittle and terse and strangely defensive. Maybe not so strangely, considering he’d once tried to run away after I asked him about a box of Cosmic Brownies. But the bottom line, as far as I could tell, is that we just didn’t know what had happened. Maybe this had been Kalfu’s gift, part of the healing—wiping away the hashok’s DNA that was colonizing Eli’s body. Or maybe it had been a side effect, part of Eli using his blood in the ritual to summon the lwa. Or maybe it had been none of those things; maybe the infection, or whatever it was, had simply gone dormant—into remission, so to speak. The second time I tried to have a conversation, Eli went for a run. He didn’t say anything. He just stripped down to his shorts, laced up his shoes, and left.
