The Council of Shadows (21 page)

She stood by the living room window and craned a bit, looking towards Monica's quiet house. Generally Monica had the house open to the air and sun, nice smells coming out as she cooked a little snack for her children.

Oh!
Cheba remembered. La Doña
called Monica to come to her last night and she called her mother and her mother came but yelled and yelled at her. I hope they didn't wake the children. So Monica must be really feeling bad.. . . A session with
La Doña
right on top of the fight with her mother. I guess her mama doesn't really know what
La Doña
is. Will the children travel with them or stay with their grandmother? What about
La Doña
's children?

Cheba thought about Monica for a moment and then nodded to herself. She stuck the cell phone back into her pants pocket and walked out and down the lane.

Ringing the bell of number one wasn't as hard as she thought it would be. She wasn't a petitioner, a stupid from the bottom of the heap anymore. She was somebody who could help, and help in a real way.

The other woman's overly familiar manner and bubbly personality made her feel just like the orange cat backing away from her the first few days she'd been stuck in number five. But she could take it; it was well-meant. She firmly pursed her lips and pushed the button. Monica's ringer was something cheerful that sounded like kids' cartoons.

Monica didn't look much better than Jose when she opened the door: pale, moving a bit carefully, her hair tousled, and her sweatsuit rumpled.

“Oh, hi, Cheba,” she said flatly. “What can I do for you?”

Am I too late? Does she already hate me? No, no, this is just her being tired from last night. The kids are going to be home from school in just a little bit
.

“I am the sorry,” she said. “I . . .” Exasperated with the difficulties of trying to speak proper English, she flipped over to Spanish. “I am sorry, I know you understand my language better than I speak yours. I woke up last night when your mother yelled. I have come to say, I will help you if I am not helping Jose. Can I help now? You need to sleep and I can look after the children. They are nice children and a pleasure to watch.”

Monica sagged against the doorframe. “You'd do that? I can pay you! Oh, Cheba!” Tears leaked down her cheeks. “I've been so afraid somebody will tell
La Doña
what Mom said.”

Cheba nodded firmly and pushed Monica into the house. “Go, go take a nice bath, listen to soft music, sleep. You do not need to pay me money; that we have.

“I will clean for you today, make dinner, watch children. This I can do and will. Then later you will help me buy things so I can make you some crocheted lace collars or trim an apron for you. And we will become friends; friends help each other. Now I pay you back for those first terrible days when you helped me so much.”

Monica gave a sudden sob and clutched Cheba to her in a strong hug. Cheba stiffened, but held still. With a big sniff Monica let go and rubbed her face with a hanky.

“Thanks. Thanks. I know you don't like it here, but, oh, Cheba, I'm so lonely and alone. Ellen was nice. And she's gone and she can never be a friend again. Adrienne will just tear her to pieces when she catches her.. . .”

Cheba turned the babbling woman around and pointed her down the hall. “Bath,” she said firmly, and felt the first glow of positive action in a long time.

T
welve days after he fled Rancho Sangre, Peter Boase stumbled into the bathroom of the motel and fell to his knees before the toilet bowl, retching. The heaves came again and again, even though he had nothing in his stomach but a little water. When that was gone it felt as if his guts were coming up, as if something were going to tear inside and he'd spew blood and bits of organ meat into the bowl.

Only clenched teeth kept him from screaming as the waves of misery swept over him; the nausea, the blinding headache, the fierce itching feeling as if his skin were crawling off his bones, the way the bones
ached
with little jabs of pain in the joints. The flickering of the dim fluorescent light seemed to strobe in rhythm with the gasps that drove themselves through his throat.

I'm not going to die
, he made himself think.
I'm not going to die.

Part of him
wanted
to die. Most of the rest of him wanted the bite, knew that if Adrienne were to appear he'd beg for it, do anything for it. Everything was
wrong
, the whole world was
wrong
. The crooked hang of the shower curtain hinted at obscene possibilities, the grinning fangs beneath the surface of the world. Tendrils crawled at the edges of sight.

He managed to choke out a grunt of laughter. He'd placed himself in a situation where he
had
to endure the unendurable. The cheap motel room didn't even have a phone in the room to call back to Rancho Sangre and tell
La Doña
's parents—

You don't have to think of her as
the Lady
anymore. That sadistic bitch's freaking undead monster parents.

—to come and get him and please, please feed on him. And he was too weak to get dressed, much less go ask for a line at the desk. He'd made his own phone inoperable without more concentration than he was capable of right now.

The nausea died down a little, and the universe stopped trying to buckle in on him in waves of squirming horrors. He crawled to the sink, the cracked bad-smelling linoleum of the floor gouging at his naked skin. The stinks of dirt and stale urine and old sweat and bad, distant ghosts of greasy food set his stomach in a knot again; his senses were superacute now, touch and smell especially.

Peter waited out the spasms and reached the sink and hauled himself up. He didn't want to look in the mirror, but he couldn't help it. The blond stubble on his face was a lighter color than his hair, a tinge of orange in it. The face beneath had fallen in on itself, the skin showing the skull beneath, and his hair was lank and greasy and plastered to his forehead with cold muck and sweat. Dried tears marked streaks down to his chin, and his lips were cracked.

Always thin, his body was skeleton-gaunt now; he hadn't been able to keep any food down for nearly a week. Moving very carefully, he turned on the tap, shuddering at the sound the water made as it hit the discolored porcelain of the sink. For a minute or so he leaned with his hands on the side of the sink, panting. Then he put a light plastic cup under the flow and waited until it overflowed. It took both hands to raise the water to his lips, and he sipped cautiously between breaths.

Oh, God, it's going to stay down,
he thought.
I'm dehydrated. I
need
this water.

Slowly he reached to a capful of pills. They were a prescription sedative he'd taken from Monica's bathroom before he left; it felt obscurely like a betrayal, although she'd have no problem getting more. The dose was two; in his present state he didn't dare take more than one. Another cup of water to wash it down, and an anxious wait until the nausea didn't grow any worse. He shuffled his feet around, feeling dizzy as he turned despite the caution.

One step to the bathroom door. Grip it, lean, pause. A slatted window across the room, a stained carpet, a chair and table, the mess of blankets and sheets on the bed. Step. Step. Step. Then a slow lowering onto the messy surface.

It's
not
a mass of flesh-eating beetles. It's not a pit of black slime. It's a
bed
; you're imagining things.

He startled himself by yawning. Then he turned onto his side, grabbed a pillow, and held it to his stomach as he curled around it. Sleep was an escape, a door he longed to dive through, but only by relaxing could he seek it. The sedative helped, a little. He forced himself to take slow breaths instead of panting. Let the pain flow through. No stopping it along the way, not magnifying it by paying attention. Just let it go as another physical sensation. Another yawn. He shut his eyes and looked at the random patterns on the inside of his eyelids.

A deeper darkness. When he awoke the sun was bright outside the window. He raised his head to look at the clock; it was two, which must mean the afternoon.

I feel better,
he thought.
Which is to say, I feel like absolute shit.

Stiff, sore, weak, headache, dry grainy eyes. His hand rested before his eyes, and it was like a yellowing spider, the knuckles enlarged like the swellings in a root. Moving it hurt, and parts of it felt as if he had deep paper cuts.

“Sit up,” he murmured, and then stopped at the shrill squeaking sound of his voice and the way it hurt.

Still, he sat up. The room swam for an instant, and then steadied. He braced the mummy hands against his knees; they were knobs in the middle of sticks, and he could count every one of his ribs along the way.
Push, very carefully
. He came erect, tottered, and walked to the door of the bathroom. Fresh misery washed over him for an instant at the effort, then receded. He clung to the doorjamb and laughed weakly, a croaking like something that lived in a summer pond back in his parents' Minnesota home.

Then he arranged himself and walked two steps to the sink. That was triumph, and he felt himself grinning idiotically. His throat was dry and raw; he sipped three cups of water carefully, and felt it sinking into his tissues, bringing them back to a painful life. Outside in the room were the supplies he'd laid in before the withdrawal symptoms got too bad, and he made his way there. A can of chicken broth with a pop-top lid; he was panting and trembling again before he got it open, but he did, and spilled only a little to run down his chin as he drank it. The rich fatty salty goodness of the clear fluid was almost too much, and he fought to keep it down with deep breathing.

Back to the bed. Sleep, a falling into a welcome darkness.

But yellow-flecked eyes waited there.

 

 

This time the misery was less when he woke, but for a moment Peter couldn't tell where he was. Twelve, Christmas, lying sick with the flu while the rest of the family was down in the living room. The model of the
Enterprise
hanging over his bed, the Hubble photograph on the cupboard door, the Xbox on the desk, the shelf with his Jack London and schoolbooks. Mom would come soon, and spoon some of her chicken soup into his mouth, and change the cloth on his forehead—

Cold clarity, and tears ran down his cheeks again in reaction.

He coughed, deep, and had to spit as dryish sticky phlegm filled his mouth. Fastidious reflex made him blunder into the bathroom to use the sink for it, then he forced himself to stop and move with the aching care of a very old man. A clinical appraisal told him he was a little more mobile, but just enough to hurt himself if he wasn't cautious. For the first time in a while his bladder was full, and there was a stinging pain at the beginning of the dark yellow flow.

He drank more water, more broth, blundered back to bed and collapsed as if bludgeoned. His dreams were memories: ice spray whipping in a glittering veil off a hillcrest under moonlight as he crested it on his skis, gray slush on a city street, a canoe and big mosquitoes and white birch trees. A chocolate bar forgotten in one hand as he stared at a textbook and suddenly he
understood
what that theorem meant, the multilayered elegance of it clicking home in his mind. Ruth's shy smile . . .

But all with a sense of
wrongness
. It faded as he woke, coughed, and wrinkled his nose at the smell of stale ancient sweat that filled the room. Flies buzzed near the ceiling. He hadn't noticed those before, but now his eyes tracked them for minutes at a time.

For three days he kept up the pattern, sleeping, eating what he could—he graduated to crackers as well as broth—sleeping again. When he was stable enough for a shower the relief was inexpressible, though going back to the smelly sheets was hard for the moments it took to tumble into unconsciousness.

 

 

“You say you don' want the maid,” the manager of the motel said; he was a short, thickset dark man in a stained T-shirt.

“That was then. This is now. Now I want the room cleaned,” Peter said.

The office had a tall, dirty glass wall that turned it into a solar furnace. The air-conditioning unit in a side window rattled and wheezed, laboriously dumping the heat back out into the environment and leaving a slight smell of mildew in the cooler air. Peter reached carefully into his hip pocket and took out his wallet, then fanned another three hundred dollars onto the desk.

“Okay,” the man said.

“And that covers the next week.”

“Maybe you should pay extra,” the manager said.

“Maybe I should pay less. Maid service is part of the standard charge.”

There was open contempt in the motel operator's gaze; he might as well have said
junkie
aloud. After a moment he shrugged and swept up the money.

“Okay, one more week.”

“Is there anyplace in town to get something to eat?”

“This isn't like the city, mister,” the man said. “Hell, it ain't even like it's a town.”

Peter managed to smile; his lips weren't so dry and cracked now.