He barely manages to nod.
She smiles.
A glorious last reward, that smile.
But then inside his mind, he sees their faces: Alison. Barney. First he hears his wife burning, then he sees them both alive again—the boy’s kind eyes, his wife’s sweet smile, and a small voice reminds him:
they were stolen from you by this woman’s son, by the man she calls Eros, and now she’s going to steal you from them.
No. That can’t happen.
He has to fix this.
He has to fight.
It takes all his effort to speak—
“I... didn’t... kill... him.”
Moving his hands is like moving mountains. His muscles ache with desire; his flesh resists. And still he manages, inch by inch, to bring his right hand up to the woman’s jaw and grip it while the other hand reaches back behind him and—
It’s like pissing on the Mona Lisa or installing a cheap Wal-Mart ceiling fan in the Sistine Chapel, but it has to happen just the same: Cason wrenches the paring knife from his back and sticks it in the side of the woman’s neck.
The woman screams—
And flings him into the trees.
His body hits an old oak—branches shake and green leaves flutter into the dark as he thumps against a tangle of roots pushing up out of soft earth.
Things happen—things that Cason in a million years could’ve never foreseen.
The woman in straitjacket-and-chains laugh-sobs—a sound so sharp and unnatural that Cason can feel it vibrating in his teeth. Her silhouette flexes and swells—the straitjacket tears and the chain falls away, piling on the ground at her feet.
Her shape now includes a pair of long, dark wings.
And with them, the woman takes flight. Her ascent is imperfect—clumsy, herky-jerky, like she hasn’t used the things in years—but still she catches air and carries herself fast above the trees. The rush of air. Her cackling weepy cry growing swiftly distant.
The beautiful woman cries out. Screaming at the night sky the strangest exclamation—so strange that Cason is sure he could not be hearing her correctly.
Cason scoots back against the tree, catching his breath, taking all of this in. He thinks suddenly to turn tail and run into the woods, darting between trees and hurtling into darkness—but then he fears that whatever just took flight will come for him there. A fear that would once seem irrational but now seems like good practical thinking.
The driver of the Lexus pops the door and steps onto the road.
The driver is a woman. But not human.
In fact, Cason’s starting to think that none of these people are human.
The driver wears an outfit like a chauffeur—a too-thin body tucked away in a black suit that’s all hard angles. But her eyes are black pools, and as she steps alongside the front of the car, the wash from the headlights shows that they’re not black but red, red and wet like blood, like no eyes even exist but for pockets of dripping crimson.
The driver’s fingers are long, too long, tipped with talons that belong on a golden eagle or a big fucking owl.
Fabric rips.
The chauffeur’s outfit—like the straitjacket before—tears, though this time it does not fall away in a pile of ribbons, but rather accommodates the pair of black bat-like wings that unfurl like fiddleheads from the driver’s back.
“Go!” the beautiful woman screams, pointing to the sky. “Find her!”
The driver takes flight with none of the clumsiness of the other woman. Her wings flutter like those of a bat or a small bird, shooting the monster straight up and above the trees until she, too, is gone.
The beautiful woman turns back toward Cason.
Oh, shit.
“You,” she says, pointing. He still feels the gravity of desire, but he’s able to steel himself against it. He stands—his body is wracked with pain. From the pain radiating in his throat to the hole in his back, to the fact he was just thrown against a tree.
The woman glides toward him. She plucks the knife from her neck and tosses it behind her—the blade bounces into a pothole. Cason sees no blood. Just a hole.
“You have no idea what you’ve done.”
“Who the fuck
are
you?” Cason says. He tries to yell the words, but they come out as tattered gasps. “
What
the fuck are you?”
The woman stops. Regains her composure.
“You really don’t know, do you? You killed one of us and you don’t even know what we are.”
“I swear,” he pleads. “I didn’t kill any of you. I... worked for your son. I didn’t kill him. Someone else—this guy, I think this guy did it, this guy with a face full of—” Cason mimes all the cuts and scars with his fingers. “His face was a, a, a mess. Eyelids gone. Lips, too. It was him. I’m sure of it.”
She says nothing. Is that a flicker of recognition across her face?
The woman approaches. Cason can’t help it—he flinches.
Her hand is empty until, with a twist and a flourish, her palm is full with a lush red apple. Skin the color of spilt blood. Stem dark and black like a dried worm.
Gently, she places the apple in his lap.
“You will find this man for me. And when you do, I want you to look into a mirror and hold up this apple. You will take a bite of the apple and then I will come to you. Do you understand?”
Jaw tight, he gives her a curt nod—as if doing anything more would give her license to finish the job she started, tearing his head off and making him love every anguished second of it. The thought sends shivers through his body. Makes him hard.
“Good. You do that, I will pay you in endless riches.” She draws a deep breath. “But fail me, and you and all you love will see hurt like your pitiful human mind could never imagine. The ants once slighted me and now they stay underground to escape my wrath. Do you see?”
“Okay.” It’s the stupidest thing to say, but he doesn’t know what else there is, so he says nothing else.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve a mess to clean up.”
With that, she walks back through the lights of the Lexus, her body once more reduced to dark curves as lush as the apple in his lap. She enters the car through the driver’s door, and the Lexus slides down the road like a retreating shadow.
CHAPTER FIVE
Click Your Heels Together
T
HE MAN THAT
gets out of the car can barely be called that—he’s so clean, so boyish, not a hair out of place, smelling of plain and simple soap. He’s got a deep-deep-vee t-shirt and a pair of skinny jeans and he walks over to Cason on the side of the road and what he says is as forthright as words can come: “Your wife and child are burning alive right now. I can stop that from happening.”
And that’s all he has to say. Cason cares nothing for conditions, wants to hear none of the details of the deal. Because no proviso or clause could possibly be worse than the death of his wife and his baby boy. Cason says yes. Not once, not twice, but a dozen times. Yes, yes, yes, the word falling out of him between hitching sobs, around snot-bubble nose and saliva-string lips.
The boyish lad touches his brow and smiles. “Good. Now it’s time to come home, Cason.”
H
E SMELLS SAUSAGE
cooking. Cason lurches up on the couch, almost throws up. Feels his cheek sting from where the rough-hewn cushions bit into the skin, leaving hashtags.
Pain rides him like a horse. His back itches. Something tugs at the skin there: a bandage. He feels its margins under his shirt with probing fingers.
Two black kids—one boy, one girl—run past him. The girl chasing the boy with a fat cockroach squirming betwixt thumb and forefinger.
The living room isn’t much to look at—peeling water-stained wallpaper of a paisley variety, striations of mold on the ceiling, ragged berber carpet bubbling up in spots. A small flat-screen television sits in the corner on an overturned plastic storage container. The screen is spider-webbed in the corner, the plastic around it cracked—but it still shows a picture. Some PBS kids’ show.
Sid the Science Kid.
The show is warped by shadow.
From another room, the girl yelps. Then screams. “Abasi hit me with a shoe!”
The boy yells: “Afrika chased me with a bug!”
“Shoe!”
“Bug!”
“Hey you kids!” Tundu yells, coming into the room, shaking a spatula. Both of the children re-enter the room. Afrika is rubbing her head. Abasi looks quietly pleased with himself. Cason sees neither shoe nor cockroach. “Afrika, what do I tell you about picking up bugs? And Abasi:
no hitting your cousin with a shoe
.”
“I can hit her with something else?” Abasi asks.
Tundu flicks the boy in the ear and sends them both running.
He sees Cason. Waves the spatula. “Hey, chief. You’re up.”
“Yeah. Uh.” He rubs his eyes. “This your place?”
“You betcha, man. You betcha. Hey. I got breakfast. Eggs. Sausage. And, aah, doughnuts. You like doughnuts?”
Cason looks down at his paunch, shrugs. “Guess I do.”
T
HE TABLE ISN’T
much of a table—it’s a boxy fold-up card table shoved into the corner of a (barely) walk-in kitchen. Torn-up linoleum lines the floor. The only two appliances in the room are an avocado-green oven and a harvest-gold fridge.
But it smells good in here. Tundu puts a paper plate down, and on it sits a big floppy egg atop a couple sausage patties. On a smaller plate, Cason gets a doughnut that isn’t like any doughnut he’s ever seen—it’s triangular, like an empanada, and crusted with sugar and busted-up peanut pieces and drizzled with a zig-zag of honey.
Cason goes there first. When he breaks the ‘doughnut’ open, a cloud of cardamom perfume hits him square in the nose. Unexpected, but only serves to make him hungrier. He tears into it like a starving dog.
“What the hell is this?” Cason asks, cheeks bulging.
“I told you. Doughnut.”
“Ish no doughnut.”
“It’s a... a Kenyan doughnut, let’s say. Mandazi.”
“Ish good.”
“Yeah, yeah. Not bad, not bad.” Tundu sits, starts digging into eggs.
Cason says, “About last night.”
“Mm. What about it?”
“How much did you see?”
“I saw everything, man.”
“Everything.”
“Your wife beating the shit out of you. The... the little boy with the skillet? I see it all, chief. I see it all.” Tundu laughs.
“And the thing with the Lexus? And the woman and the...” He lets his words drift.
“Whaddya you mean, man? That lady scramble your brain with that pan.”
A thought strikes Cason:
did any of that really happen?
“Maybe so.” He rubs his neck. It still feels sore.
“So whatchoo gonna do now, Mister Cole?”
“Cason. Or Case.” He cuts into the sausage. “I don’t really know. Yesterday I had a job, and it was a shitty job, but it was a job. And that job gave me a place to stay, and now...” He chews. “Both of those things are gone.”
“What’d you do for work?”
“Bodyguard bullshit. For someone who didn’t need his body guarded.”
Because with a touch of his finger he could have you flailing like a fucking Muppet.
“Used to be a fighter, though. Once upon a time.”
“A fighter. Like, boxer.” Tundu mimics the sweet science, both fists up in a comical boxer stance. He fake-punches the air in front of Cason’s head.
“MMA. Mixed martial arts. Little bit of hapkido, bit of Brazilian jiu jitsu.”
“You any good?”
“Was. Called me ‘The Beast.’ They said I was a rising star.”
“Why’d you give it up?”
“I….” He thrusts his tongue into the pocket of his cheek. “I just did.”
“Well, Cason the Fighter-Man, you can stay here for the rest of the week if you like. Cheap! I can even put in a word for you at the cab company. Boss is a real shit, you know—he’s both the turd and the fly eating the turd—but the job is the job and driving a cab is a bit of all right, man. Gives you time to
think
.”
“Thanks, T., I appreciate it. And I’ll think about it. Hey, can I grab a shower?”
T
HE HOT WATER’S
a scorcher and the cold water’s like a winter puddle, and the shower offers nothing in between. Cason goes with the hot. Leaves him lobster red, but the pain is good. Makes him feel alive. Keyed up.
The bathroom itself isn’t much to look at. All Pepto pink tile. Small, too. One bathroom for a big family and the counter is evidence of that—everybody’s things crowd the counter, leaving little space. Soaps and off-brand toothpaste and a box of tampons and a spilled paper cup of Q-tips and cottonballs.
The mirror’s clean, but cracked. Smudged with fog from a too-hot shower.
Cason stands, fresh out of the shower. With the flat of his hand he opens up a patch of clean mirror and takes a good long look at himself.