She blinked a few times, feeling water spill from her eyes, then braced her hands on the floor. At some point, she’d struggled back from the monster. The delusion of a monster. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. It was pacing around her still, laughing its snarly laugh. It was tearing into her guts whenever it felt it convenient. The power Santhe had given her was long since gone. There was nothing more. She was filled with darkness.
She was dreaming. This wasn’t real. It was a fever dream. She needed to get the bedroom, put her phone back together, and try to make it work. If it didn’t, she needed to…she needed…
The monster was biding its time now. Was her fear and confusion making it stronger? Making her tastier? Was this like spicing a pot of beans? Would her soul taste that much better it was properly seasoned?
She needed to stand. There was something incredibly important that she had to do. She’d dreamt of it. She couldn’t quite remember now, but she would, once she was standing.
A shower. She needed to cool her fever. She had obvious burned off her ibuprofen dose. She needed more. Her leg hurt so badly that she couldn’t put weight on it. She looked down at her thigh—when had she taken her clothes off? Why was she naked? She’d gotten in touch with Santhe, but that had been a chat, just a conversation. And then the dream. Had she had a bath? She could smell lemon. Everything smelled of lemon. Too much. The scent flooded her senses, along with the rank odor of rotting meat, and her gorge rose violently. She fell over on her hands and knees, her body heaving, but nothing but a string of bile came out of her throat.
Something was wrong—something was really wrong. She needed help. Where was she? She looked around. This wasn’t her house, not her apartment. She’d gone to Roxie’s. Why wasn’t Roxie here? Why wasn’t she helping?
Why did it smell like rotten meat? Why was her entire body on fire? She looked down, saw the wound on her leg where that bitch had bitten her. It was infected, shiny and bright red, stretched taut with fluid and infection. Dark red lines stretched out underneath her dark skin. Infection. Infection that was going to kill her. Why was she still sitting on the floor? Why could she smell blood?
She needed the hospital. She needed help. There was no way to get there on her own. She needed to find her phone and call 911. She would tell them she stole the kit on her own, treated herself. She wouldn’t say a thing about Roxie.
She took two steps, and then the world spun like a dandelion seed on a strong wind. The floor rose up and crashed into her. The world faded in and out, replaced with that dark place in her dreams, where the monsters came out of the cracks in the floorboards and chewed on her guts and her fingers.
She tried to find some magic, some of
Mamà’s
magic, some of Santhe’s magic, to chase away the nightmares, but she couldn’t feel the warmth of it anymore. There had been a time, when she was a little girl, that it just flowed through her like breath and belief and laughter. As she’d grown, she’d come to believe that her magic was her understanding, her ability to listen, to tell a person’s story in such a way that they could become part of the community again. The roots and the herbs and the saints and the chanting, that was all psychology at work. She’d believed in magic, but in an abstract way—the way one believed in vaccines, or in the ability of planes to fly. She thought it was someone else’s concern.
Santhe had shown her, if not magic, then that thinking of magic could do magical things. She could draw a circle and tell herself that she was fighting off a demon, and that would help her body muster the antibodies it needed to fight off an infection.
Only now, it hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t been anything like enough, and she was going to vomit again, her head was spinning, and she was naked. She was naked, and the monster that didn’t exist was stalking her, stalking and laughing.
The woman in the bar. She’d called herself Susan. She’d attacked Izzy in some way, something beyond the physical. If someone came to her and told her that, she’d be taking them to the hospital and quietly alerting the doctors to get a psych consult, and maybe that was what she needed, too. But she also knew what had happened. She knew what she had seen.
Who was crying? Someone in the room was crying, someone was sobbing. Why were they doing that? Why couldn’t they stop? It sounded like their heart was breaking.
She dragged herself up on her hands again. Her heart was pounding so hard that she could hear it throbbing in her ears. Her skin felt so tight that she thought it might split open. Her lungs were burning, now, heaving as they tried to pull air into her body. And she was spinning, spinning fast and hard, and this time, when she fell down again, she knew that she wouldn’t be getting up again. Not now. Her eyes closed, and the demons came for her. She gave herself up to them, let them devour her, body and soul.
There was a pleasant ache between Roxanne’s thighs as Julian steered the car back towards town, and her house. It was a nice ache, a well-used ache, but it was also surprising and new. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever had sex that was aggressive enough to leave her understanding that old expression her girlfriends used—ridden hard and put away wet. She’d always laughed along with them, making faces like she understood, but really? Sex had always been so uneventful, a lot of lead-up for so little pay off.
Now, her body felt delightfully stretched, deliciously worn. Everything from her inner thighs to her upper abs felt like she’d just done a hell of a workout class. She could feel small, stingy scratch marks that she was quite sure were from the pine tree bark, and she didn’t care. Because she could also feel the warmth of his arms wrapped around her, and the way he’d trembled in the moments after his release, the way his eyes had locked on hers and seemed to devour her, reflecting back at her only the best parts of herself, as if that was all he could see.
At one point in the drive, he touched her knee with his fingertips. Delicate, soft, almost tentative. He withdrew it quickly, but after another few miles, he seemed to pull his courage back into place. He reached out again, resting his hand on her thigh. She let hers rest on top, and he lifted his fingers so she could twine hers together.
There was a rush of electricity between them that she couldn’t explain. It vibrated between their two hands, and she thought that if she pulled hers back, she’d see sparks arcing between them. There was no sensible explanation for it. Sure, it had been pretty amazing for her, but he didn’t look like the kind of guy who had trouble finding partners, and he didn’t touch her like someone who lacked first-hand experience. It was one thing for her to be all over the moon about him, but he kept looking at her like he’d found a precious gemstone lying in the parking lot of the run-down gas station that most people didn’t dare stop at.
“Thank you,” she said, after a little bit.
He glanced at her, his expression radiating confusion. “What for?”
She laughed and squeezed his hand, not really wanting to say it out loud.
“For—back in the trees?”
“It was pretty amazing.”
He was quiet for a little bit, and then his words surprised her. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“For whatever happened in your past that makes you think that’s something you need to say thank you for.”
It was the quietness in his voice that tipped her over the edge. Something deep inside her cracked a little bit, and slowly, impossibly slowly, began to crack open. She watched it with her heart, wondering if more tears were going to overwhelm her now, but instead, she felt a deep and profound lightness spreading through her. “It wasn’t anything in particular,” she heard herself say. “Just a— an accumulation of badness, I guess.”
He nodded. “I understand.” He squeezed her hand gently, and the silence in the car settled into a soft, companionable peace. It left her feeling content, happy, calm.
That feeling was shattered as soon as they pulled into her driveway. There was something wrong; she knew it before he stopped the car. When she glanced over at Julian, she saw his body tense as a tuned string, ready to vibrate into sound at the slightest touch. “What is it?”
“It’s your house,” he said. “You tell me.”
She looked over the building, trying to find the words to explain the things that were cueing her. “There are too many lights on. Izzy said she was going to bed when I texted her earlier. Things should be dark. And there’s just something… wrong, something very incredibly wrong.”
He nodded. “I smell something. Something… surprising. Unpleasantly surprising.” He opened his car door. “Stay here.”
“Like hell,” she said, pushing her own door open.
“I can’t protect you and move like I need to.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So don’t protect me. I’m tougher than you think. Plus, it’s my damn house. I know where the guns are, and where the baseball bats are.”
A faint smile ghosted over his mouth, and then he was in motion. He blurred through the darkness, his body fading around the edges in a way that made her stomach turn inside out at the wrongness of it. Would she ever get used to that? Did she really want to?
He went around the side of the house, and she headed for the front door. As soon as she had it open, she called out Izzy’s name. Something smelled disgusting, like shit and blood and horror. Like rotting animal. She had a flash in her mind of Izzy, lying in a pool of blood, torn apart like that woman at Julian’s house, like Julian himself had been when he was first brought to the hospital. Shredded into bits, but with no supernatural healing factor to protect her. “Izzy,” she called out again. This time, she heard a faint moan. She ran towards the sound. The foul smell grew, and it wasn’t until she almost tripped over her friend that she recognized the bundle of tangled blankets and foul waste in the hallway as her friend.
For one moment, she was completely panicked, almost unable to breathe. She’d been right about the smells. The waste that had befouled the blankets was a horrid mix, and she gagged before the switch in her brain flipped, from friend to nurse. There was no one else here who could help. She touched Izzy’s forehead, found the skin so hot that she snatched back her hand, shaking it to wave off the heat. Izzy’s eyes were open, but they were glassy with fever, staring at nothing in particular. Her skin seemed too tight, stretched taut over her bones.
What in the world could have happened to her? This was too fast for it to be blood poisoning from the leg wound—people didn’t go septic overnight. Not unless the original wound had nicked a major artery, but if it had, she would have bled out before she got back to Sweetwater. Nothing outside of a movie made people this sick this fast, and shitting blood— God, that was rarely a good sign.
She pulled out her phone, and had actually hit the nine and the one before Izzy touched her hand. She looked down at her friend and saw some sense in the eyes. “No,” Izzy whispered, her voice hoarse with the fever, sounding like she’d been screaming for hours. “No. Just. Help me clean up.” She smiled, looking more like a skeleton than the beautiful girl Izzy’d left behind a few hours ago.
“Izzy. Your fever has to be over 106. You know the risks. You could be boiling your brain.”
“There’s nothing the hospital can do about a demon,” Izzy said. Her hand scrabbled at the phone, trying furtively to pry it out of Roxanne’s hand. She sighed, staring at the number she’d almost finished dialing. The screen dimmed after a moment, and then went black. She set the phone aside.
Izzy seemed to relax at that. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Can you help me shower? I’m disgusting.”
“What’s happening, Iz? You look—”
“Under attack,” she murmured. “Demon. Or something. Only explanation.” She locked her fingers around Roxanne’s arm. “Need to cool down. Help?”
Everything in her screamed that this was a horrible idea, but she choked it down. She’d want Izzy to listen to her, if the situation were reversed. She wrapped her arm around Izzy’s shoulders and helped her move from laying down to sitting up, and then to standing. Izzy shook like a leaf in a stiff breeze, but she supported more of her weight than Roxanne had expected.
Izzy’d lost her clothes at some point, her pants and her shirt. She still had a bra and her panties on, but they were covered in vomit and diarrhea and smelled of bloody mess. The wound on her leg was bright red, the skin swollen and tight. “Izzy,” Roxanne started.
“I know,” Izzy said, that brightness shining in her eyes again. “I know it looks bad. But I’m telling you, it’s just the demon.”
They took a few slow and careful steps towards the bathroom. “What demon, Izzy?”
Izzy looked at her like Roxanne was a child. “Can’t you smell it?”
Roxanne let the question go unanswered. She heard the front door open and close, and her heart started to slam in her chest like a jackhammer.
“It’s just me,” Julian called out. “I’m not finding the source of the scent outside. Did you—” His voice trailed off as he walked down the hallway. Izzy was fading fast, and her weight settled more and more on Roxanne.
“Found it,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “Can you help me wash her off? I need to see what’s going on. She doesn’t want me to call 911, but the leg, I’ve never seen a wound look that bad on someone in twenty four hours, not if it’s been treated.”
His eyes were fixed on the swollen redness. “Tell me what did that to her,” he said, his voice sharp.
Roxanne shifted uncomfortably, Izzy’s weight landing fully on her shoulder now. “It’s not really my story to tell.”
His gaze shifted slowly from Izzy’s thigh up to Roxanne’s eyes. She hated that she flinched under the weight of his stare, but it was true. There was something wild in his eyes as he stared at her, something vicious and cruel, something that had more to do with the animal that she knew now was in him than the man. Who had been scouting around her house? What shape had he taken once he was out of her sight? She shivered.
“Tell me,” he said. His voice was low, and even though his tone was even and steady, the threat was there. It wasn’t that she thought he’d hurt her, not exactly— But she suddenly trusted him a lot less than she had.
“She got bit.” Izzy let out a small, quiet groan in her arms, and Roxanne tried to adjust her so that her weight was better supported. He raised an eyebrow, still not doing anything to help her. She felt tension rise through her and did her best to shake it off. She didn’t need it right now; it wouldn’t do her any good at all. “She got bit by a lover. The way she explained it, they were playing rough, and it got out of control. The wound was well-cleaned; it shouldn’t be doing this.”
He nodded. “How much do you know about her?”
“She’s my friend,” Roxanne hedged.
Julian didn’t nod again, just kept his gaze fixed on Roxanne. “How
well
do you know her?”
Roxanne fought the urge to glance at Izzy. How much did she really know? Izzy was the nurse in the ER who was most fluent in Spanish, who sometimes had amazing luck getting patients to comply with treatments when they insisted to the more Anglo girls that they wouldn’t put up with anything. Izzy had a way of going into the room and touching their hands, speaking to them in a quiet, soft tone, her Spanish too rapid and regional for Roxanne to catch anything other than the gist of what she said. Her revelation tonight about her preferred lovers wasn’t exactly a surprise, but it certainly wasn’t something that Roxanne had known, or even really suspected, before Izzy had spelled it out for her.
She’d tried to act like she knew what it was that Izzy did, hoping that Izzy would explain it in more detail. But other than her quiet acknowledgment that there was some sort of position she held within her community, she hadn’t really said anything more. She’d dodged around the question, like she always did.
But at the same time, Roxanne was quite sure that whatever power Izzy had, whatever it was that she did, it was done for the good of the people she cared about. “I know enough,” she said, meeting Julian’s gaze with something like confidence. “I don’t know what’s going on here, I don’t know what’s happening to her, but I know she’s a good person.”
“Is she a witch?”
“Are you serious?”
He gave her a funny look, like he was a short step from patting her on the cheek. “Yes.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. She doesn’t wear the jewelry.”
He turned his face to the side for a moment, like people did when they were trying not to laugh at a child. She was fairly sure that if she hadn’t been holding Izzy at that moment, that she might have kicked him in the knee.
“Look,” she said. “I know she looks like she’s made of fairy dust right now, but she’s heavier than she looks, and I need to get her into the shower and cleaned up, and see if I can tell what’s going on here so I can make a call about taking her to the hospital or not. Are you going to help me?”