The boy hurries over to the skillet, picks it up with a mad, empty gleam in his eye.
Cason’s mind is a pinball machine on full tilt. But through it all, a single thought screaming louder and louder:
Don’t hurt her don’t hurt her don’t hurt either of them—
Run
.
He grabs her arm, shifts his weight and twists—
Alison flips over his shoulder onto her back.
Barney’s mouth opens. A keening wails from the back of his throat—not a human sound, but the sound of storms and wind and rain tearing through an open window.
Everything’s a blur—Cason’s back up, feet planted on the lawn, then on the sidewalk, careful not to trip on concrete buckled by tree roots swelling underneath. Barney’s after him, skillet spinning in the child’s grip. Before Cason knows what’s happening, he’s slamming hard against a yellow car door in the street—
Big black hands grab his shoulders, pull him into the passenger seat through an open window. His feet still dangling—a skillet cracks hard against his ankle. It’ll bruise, but the thickness of his boot saves it from anything worse than that.
“Holy shit, man!” Tundu cries, then steps on the gas like a man trying to break another man’s neck just by standing on it—
Tires squeal.
The car moves and Cason tumbles inside.
T
HEY SIT IN
the car for a while. Nobody saying shit. Tundu occasionally gives Cason a look—an incredulous and expectant
whoa-what-the-fuck
look—but Cason just tries to keep his eyes forward. He leans forward, plants the heels of his hands on the cab’s dash. As if doing that will steady the world and force it all to make sense.
Tundu pulls the cab south out of town. Back on the highway, heading toward the turnpike. Finally, Tundu speaks: “Yo. Man. You got a knife sticking out of your back.”
“Uh-huh,” Cason says.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Yeah.”
“On my seats.”
A hard swallow. A sniff, a blink. “Sorry.”
“You need a hospital.”
“I’m good.”
That does it. Tundu topples off the ledge, and with him falls any sense of calmness or propriety: “You got a fucking knife! In your fucking back! Hey! Man! Some little kid was hitting you with a frying pan! Some crazy bitch beating you up on the lawn! What the hell, man? What the
hell
was all that about?”
“She’s... not a crazy bitch.” Cason’s jaw sets tight. “Something is wrong with her.”
“Yeah. She’s
crazy
like a
crazy bitch
.”
“I said she’s not a bitch. And she’s not crazy, either. She’s got a, a...” He wants to say,
she’s got a spell put on her
, but he bites those words in half before they get out of his mouth. “She’s my wife, okay? That was my wife and son.”
Tundu’s gaze darkens. Eyes narrow to suspicious slits. “What’d you do?”
“Huh?”
“To them. What’d you do to them to make them want to kill you like that?”
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing. That was something.”
How to say this without sounding like a lunatic? “Somebody lied to them. About me. Told them things that make me seem like a different person.” That itself is a lie, but it sounds far more believable than the truth. “I thought... I thought it had been enough time and they’d learned the truth by now or that they were, I dunno,
over
it. I guess they’re not.”
The spell should’ve been broken
.
The very thought that this is still happening, that they don’t just want to be away from him but want him actually
dead
robs his body of strength, his mind of will. He wants to open the door and just roll out onto the highway. Face scraped off. Body dragged under the too-many tires of a tractor-trailer. Cason slumps against the window.
“That’s... that’s tough, man.” Tundu’s gaze falls back onto the road.
“It is. And I don’t know what to do about it. Nothing, I guess. Not a damn thing.”
“Maybe she’ll come around. A few more weeks. Months.”
“It’s been five years.”
“Oh.”
Another span of silence.
“Where am I taking you?” Tundu says, following signs toward the turnpike.
“I don’t... I don’t even know.” With E. dead and Alison still treating him like an enemy of the state, where
is
there to go? “Back to the city. Motel or something. I still got some cash left.”
“Shit. You can stay with me.”
“Huh?”
“No, man, it’s nothing weird—but my one younger brother just moved out, so the couch is open. It’s not too comfortable—I tell you, it’s like sleeping on a bag of rocks, you know? But you can stay for the night.”
“I don’t want to put you out.”
Tundu waves it off. “You already put me out. Too late for that.” He offers a smile to show he’s not mad. A big smile. Toothy. A deep basso laugh follows. Cason didn’t think people even laughed like that:
HA HA HA HA
. “Besides, I make you pay me. I need the money.”
“Just tonight. Then I’ll be out of your hair.”
“I don’t got no hair, man.”
“It’s a saying. An expression.”
“Right, right.” Tundu nods. “Hey, you still got a knife in your back.”
“It’s not puncturing anything important. Not too deep. Long as I lean forward in the seat I’m okay. I’ll take it out at your place—you got a shower? Gonna bleed more when I pull it out.”
“You paying, then it’s cool by me, chief. Cool by me.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Mother May I?
C
ASON PULLS AT
the doors, hands scalded, the palms blistering as he tries to open one, then the other, then back to the first door again. The window is cracking, warping. Inside it’s all dancing orange light and greasy black smoke and the shadow of a body—his wife’s body, thrashing around like a moth burning against a lamp bulb.
Then the body stops moving.
He can’t even see the car seat in the back.
Alison. Barney.
Taken from him.
He falls backward. Onto the road’s shoulder. Cason rolls, presses his forehead against the ground hard enough to draw blood. The skin on his hands is soft and shiny and red and he drags them against the gravel. Flesh sloughs off. He doesn’t even feel the pain, which sucks because he wants to feel it,
needs
to feel it.
That’s when it all stops.
The flames lay still behind the glass. A burger wrapper blowing nearby stops in mid-tumble and stands impossibly on its paper corner, poised but never falling. The air is warm and unmoving. Cason feels light-headed.
That’s when he sees a car pulling up.
T
HE ROAD IS
rough and the memory is broken as the cab skips across a pothole. Cason blinks, tries to figure out where they are. All he sees are trees. Dark trees lining an empty back road. The fuck?
“This isn’t the turnpike,” he says.
Tundu says nothing. Hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel.
“Hey,” Cason says again. “Where are we?”
Tundu’s head shifts, lolling limp against his shoulder. Mouth wide in a gaping, drunken smile. Tongue out. Eyes rolled way back into his skull.
A moan drifts from the cabbie’s lips.
Cason goes to shake him, but then—
Pop!
The cab shudders. Another three noises in swift succession.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
The car sinks on one corner, then the others. The tires are blown.
The engine gutters; dashboard lights flicker before going dark.
The cab drifts another ten, twelve feet, then stops.
From the hood, a
tink-tink-tink
of the cooling engine.
Tundu slumps against the steering wheel. His head honks the horn: a droning beep. Cason pushes him back into the seat. Worry bleeds into his gut, forming a septic pool. He reaches out, tries the key. Nothing. Not a spark. Dead battery. Or something else, something far stranger and far worse.
Turns out, though, that Cason doesn’t know what
strange
even is—but he learns fast. Ahead, headlights cut holes through the night as a car heads toward the cab. When Cason shifts in his seat, he hears a
squish squish squish
by his feet and a sudden smell rises in the cab: the smell of the beach, of the ocean, of brine and salt and dead fish.
Water is seeping into the cab. Rising one inch, then two, then three around his boots. Milky foam pools around the leather.
Cason cries out, pops the door, tumbles out onto the empty road. Trees sway and hiss above in a sudden wind, shushing him as that car grows closer.
This all seems suddenly too familiar.
No, not again, not possible, he’s dead...
The approaching car is a pearlescent white. A Lexus, by the look of it. It stops about ten yards away. Dust and pollen caught in the beams. Cason feels blinded.
The driver—
He sees a shape, a shape that doesn’t make sense, with margins that shift and seem impossibly inhuman...
The back door on the driver side pops open.
One figure steps out, leading a second someone by a length of... chain? Both women, by their shapes. The leading figure is tall, hair long around her shoulders, and even witnessing her shadow Cason feels the world shift like a listing boat—the curves are perfect, the lines elegant and inalienable, and again he smells the sea, but now the smell is heady, lush, intoxicating. A call by the waves to wade in and drown in the deep.
He swoons, almost falls.
The other woman stands bound in a straitjacket, which is in turn swaddled in lengths of golden chain. Hair a mad black porcupine tangle. She shakes her head like a dog with an ear infection, sobbing and muttering. But Cason can’t look at her for long; his eyes are drawn back to the first woman, dragged there like a fish reeled toward the fisher.
“Kneel,” the tall woman says. Her voice is sonorous, and syrupy sweet. And without flaw. Cason can’t help it—it’s like someone else owns his legs. He does as she commands, knees hitting the road hard.
He sees then she’s not wearing any shoes.
Bare feet pad against the road as she approaches, weightless as light across water.
The forest seems to ease toward her, then away from her.
“You killed my son,” she says.
He feels like he’s drowning in her presence.
“I... don’t know what that means...” he says, gasping for air.
“Eros. My son. You did what is not to be done. You killed him.”
Eros. E. E. Rose E-Rose Eros.
“I didn’t—it wasn’t me—”
“The truth, now.” Sand and shore and sea, the smell crawling into his nostrils. “How did you do it? How did you manage to kill what cannot be killed? We kill one another, but you are not allowed such fortune. To you that door is locked. Where did you find the key? And what key did you find?”
He shakes his head. “I swear, I don’t know what you mean.”
She backhands him.
His head rocks. He tastes blood. He loves it. He
hates
that he loves it.
“You found a way to kill him. To
undo
him from the tapestry, to chip his face from the frieze. Even the Great Usurper did not kill—but you do?” She pulls him close, and it’s now he can see her face. Her beauty washes over him like a tide. Golden hair like liquid light. Lips like bleeding pomegranate. Eyes cut from alabaster and emerald and onyx. Her exquisite face twists with pity and disgust. “One of the weak-kneed striplings—a squealing pink piglet—ends my son’s time, a time that should have been an
eternity
?”
She lets go of the chain—it drops to the ground, rattling against the asphalt.
Both of her hands close around Cason’s throat.
Her touch is like a kiss. Even as she tightens her grip. Even as she lifts him high, legs dangling, tongue growing fat in his mouth with the blood pulsing at his temples. He finds himself wanting to taste those lips, to crawl inside her and forever be lost among the labyrinth of her guts, her lungs, her heart—he knows this is wrong, that this is as artificial as a drug-high, as manufactured as the magic E. cast on others, but he can’t help it. Even as darkness bleeds in at the edges of his vision he welcomes it.
“I’m going to keep squeezing,” she says, her breath fragrant, her words honeyed. “I’m going to let my fingers join in the middle, your neck melting beneath my palms, your head rolling off your shoulders. Then I shall take your head and I will have it bronzed. I’ll use it as a trashcan. Or an ashtray. Or a place where guests may scrape
filth
from their
boots
. Would you like that?”