Salt and Iron (12 page)

Yuko’s hand settles on the door latch. She looks at him, and he nods, and she pulls the door open just a little.

Help
, that is what the word is. Someone is screaming
help somebody help
. Screaming like it’s the only thing they know, like this is a button that is supposed to work and it’s not, but there is no other option, nothing more to do, and even though the button isn’t working, the person screaming is screaming it again and again.

And the person screaming it. The person screaming it. James knows the voice.

He looks at Yuko, and she looks back at him. She opens the door wide enough now that he can see the room beyond, the concrete well falling beneath the metal grating of the stairs. Wide enough that the smell of diesel and of grease and the hot-iron smell of slaughter come rushing up. Wide enough that the screaming wraps around them, and he knows the voice that’s making the cries. He’s frozen by it. Afraid to look.

“Go,” she whispers, and it’s like she’s chipped him free of ice. He starts again, lurching forward through the door to grab the rail, to look down.

In the well of the warehouse, he sees two shapes, one standing against the wall, the other standing just in front of him. Rob and Gabe.

Gabe’s got his hands around the neck of a big dog-looking thing, but it’s a dog-looking thing that doesn’t have any fur and has too many eyes and mouths and is trying to get to Rob, and Rob pulls the trigger on the revolver in his hand, but nothing happens. In the snarling and the snapping noises, he hears Rob swear. He throws the gun at the nearest creature, and it connects. The animal yelps, darts back. Gabe throws down the one he had before and grabs for the last one.

There’s something weird about the way he moves. Not just the strange light or the way fear makes people jump and jerk and start, but James can’t tell what it is, not yet. Gabe closes fingers around the dog-thing’s throat and kills it, just like that. As if it’s easy.

And that’s it. The floor is wet with carnage, and both Gabe and Rob stand panting and still. Then Rob slides down the wall and covers his head with his hands, and Gabe looks at him, then lurches forward, grabs the revolver from where it fell, and
Jesus Christ
, jams it into his own mouth, and James screams “
No
!” at the moment the weapon clicks harmlessly there.

James goes pelting down the ringing metal stairs, has to get there before Gabe tries again, has to get there before Gabe succeeds. But Gabe throws the gun down, staggers back from it, raises his head, sees James. Sees. His eyes the terrible black and red of bruising and broken blood vessels, his mouth slack, open, panting.

James goes slipping across the gore-soaked concrete floor, goes crashing into Gabe, heedless of everything, heedless of the blood and the bruises and the way his limbs aren’t
right
, and feels Gabe collapse against him.

“I gotta wake up,” Gabe tells him. “This is fucking awful. I gotta wake up.”

Gabe’s shaking like a dying thing; he’s shaking like an earthquake.

“It’s okay,” James lies. “You’re hurt, somebody hurt you, but it’s okay.” It’s all he can say, and it’s the most inadequate thing he’s ever said in a long line of inadequacies, but it’s all he’s got.

WHEN YUKO
kneels down by him, the smile that spreads across her face is like the sun rising.

“Thought that was it for our little family,” she whispers. She frowns hard, as if she’s going to cry, then swallows the emotion.

“Sorry, baby,” Rob whispers. “Didn’t mean to make you worry.”

He reaches up and sets his palm gently against her jaw, feeling the warmth, the smooth skin, seeing her close her eyes and tilt her head. “You okay?” he whispers.

She laughs.

“I should be asking you that.”

“I’m okay. Who’s got Howls?”

“Torren’s with her.”

He laughs, but it ends in a choke, and she dips down to fold him up while he holds her and gulps the air, fights down the shakes, the sobs that’ll be waiting as soon as they get back to their place and there’s time and it’s quiet and they’re safe. He’ll go to pieces then. Not now. Well. Maybe just a little bit now.

“Gabe’s hurt,” he whispers. “I was too late.”

“Gabe’s turned,” she says. She shakes her head. “He’s gone unseelie.”

“I know.”

She sighs. “James isn’t going to be able to do it,” she whispers. “It’s going to have to be one of us.”

“No, Yuko, please.” He pulls back so he can look her in the face. “He saved my life. He freed me, out of
iron
, and when the others came, he protected me.”

“He’s turned, Rob,” she whispers. “Not like….” She stops and doesn’t say it, but he knows what she would say. “He’s unseelie.”

“He saved my life.”

She stares at him, mouth twisted in sorrow and in grief. “Death might be the kindest way, you know.”

“If he wants death, let him choose it.”

She sighs and thumbs something slick from the side of his face and shakes her head slowly side to side, as if she’s got water in her ears. Then she sighs once more. “Saved your life?” she whispers. “Really?”

He nods. He’s starting to shake now, as shock takes hold.

“Where’s the Thing?”

He shakes his head. “Don’t know. Don’t know. Not here anymore. You can feel it when she’s near. Never felt anything like that before.”

She nods, frowning. “Okay. Okay.” She pauses, looking over her shoulder. The carnage, the dead unseelie creatures. And Rob still alive. She shakes her head. “Okay. Look, the others called, and Abraham van Helsing’s on the way, so if we want to keep Gabe alive we’d better get him the hell out of here.”

GABE’S HEAD
rolls as if his neck is broken, and even though he’s upright, he’s not really on his feet. James hops up into the bed of Rob’s truck, and between him and Rob they get Gabe up into the bed. It’s unlined, metal scraped up and dented from hauling whatever it is Rob finds the time to haul around. James settles down in the corner near the back window of the cab and holds Gabe against him.

Gabe’s breathing is ragged and uneasy. The muscles of his back jerk and twitch like they’re being shocked, like something’s trying to crawl out from under them. Maybe something is—James has heard of turning seelie, but he’s never seen it. He doesn’t know what to expect from an unseelie turning. No idea how long they’ve got, he doesn’t know if they can stop it or what’ll happen when it’s done.

Rob jumps up into the driver’s seat, and Yuko follows in the passenger’s side. She throws her helmet in the well at her feet and then reaches up to unlatch and slide open the little square window. She cranes around. “How’s he holding up?”

James shakes his head. “Dunno. Look, I don’t know where you were thinking about taking him, but I, look, will you take us where I say?”

She looks at him for a moment, maybe trying to decide if he’s too upset to be rational, maybe trying to tell if he’s drunk. “Where?” she asks.

“Get out onto the highway, going south,” James says.

Rob turns, pulling himself around by hooking an arm over the back of the diamond-patterned seat. “There’s nothing out there,” he says. “We don’t know how much time he’s got.”

“There’s somebody out there,” James says. “The old church, down from the old Sweno place, where we picked up the witches, remember?”

Rob’s eyes narrow. Then he turns back, the truck engine roars to life, and they lurch forward, James cradling Gabe’s head against his shoulder.

“What’s going on?” Gabe whispers.

James smooths the grease-and-blood-caked hair back from Gabe’s bruised face, for all the good it does with the blowing wind. He covers Gabe’s exposed ear and holds him close.

“You wanna explain?” Yuko hollers.

James scoots a little closer to the window. The damp, warm wind blowing at him pulls the words away. He has to almost shout. “Skinny Mary’s there.”

Yuko looks back at him. Her expression doesn’t change; her eyes stay exactly as they were. Perfect poker face. There’s a reason James never plays with her.

“You want us to go to Skinny Mary, the three of us Firm employees, plus one wounded.”

It’s not a question, it’s a statement, and it’s delivered in a perfectly neutral tone.

He nods. “If there’s anybody who knows what to do, about a turning I mean, it’d be her. Or the Baron.”

“The Baron,” Yuko says. “Baron Samedi, you mean.”

He nods. She closes her eyes for an instant and opens them again.

“You have some explaining to do.”

He nods. “Later,” he says, promises. “I’ll tell you everything. Later.”

“Where’s the turnoff?” Rob shouts. Seems odd, since he drove out here last time. “Everything looks different in the day,” he says in response to James’s expression.

James ducks down so he can see through the rear window and the windshield glass.

“About five hundred feet. Left-hand side.”

They slow, and the force of it squashes James against the rear window and squashes Gabe into him. The road gets rough, knocks his spine against the truck bed so he has to lean forward, and Gabe groans.

“What happened?” he asks again.

James smooths back his hair. “Hey, sit up for a sec. Can you do that?”

Gabe nods, pushes himself upright like a sleepy child. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “Yeah, I got it. Something happened to me, didn’t it?”

“You got hurt, Gabe,” James whispers. “Just hold on. I’m gonna get you help.”

Gabe nods, moving slow, like the air’s thick, like his head is too heavy to lift. “I don’t feel right,” he whispers.

“I know,” James says. “I know. Hold on.”

The truck bumps to a stop, and James jumps out, over the side, lands in the tangle of rampant resurrection vine and hurries up, toward the church.

Maybe it didn’t look so dilapidated when he was there before because it was so dark. Maybe it didn’t seem so broken down because of the golden candlelight, because he was drunk and the edges of the world were fuzzy and he wasn’t really paying attention to the place, anyway. He’d been paying attention to Brett, to the other sidhe, to not ending up dead. He hadn’t been looking at the way the roof was sagging between the beams and the way the building itself sits cockeyed on the swampy land.

He goes to the door. It’s closed up tight, and there’s an iron lock hung like a rusted garland across it. He could use Brett now. A Dullahan would come in real handy. Maybe knocking will be the right thing to do. He’s never gone looking for the court of the sidhe queen before. So he knocks. The door sags inward a little, hinges groaning. He pushes and it falls open and the church lies there before him, daylight pouring through the broken roof, arrowing onto a verdant floor, illuminating the peeling black letters that read:

The harvest is past

the summer is ended

and we are not saved.

He hears the crunch of the broken step behind him and turns. Yuko stands a few steps back, looking on.

“It was here,” he says, feeling small and stupid. “It was here.”

“Well, it’s not here anymore,” she answers. “Come on.”

He turns to her, exhausted. Defeated. “Where?”

She smiles at him and claps him on the shoulder. “When things go to shit, what do you do?” she asks. “You lie low somewhere safe ’til the dust settles. You know the Summer Court?”

A shabby motel just outside of town, near a gas station and a liquor store and a stand of rural postboxes. He nods.

“We’ll set you up there ’til the dust settles. We’ll play it by ear ’til then.”

He nods, hands clenching and unclenching in the air. “Okay,” he whispers.

SUMMER COURT
is paint-peeling, reddish, one level, standing there in a puddle of tarmac that’s crumbling at the edges and lit by orange sodium lights. Yuko goes to the office and gets the room, and he and Gabe and Rob wait for her to come back. Gabe’s eyes are closed now. His breathing’s settled out, like he’s sleeping, but his back is still jumping and twitching like there’s a living thing in there. James passes his hand up and down over the muscles, as if contact could soothe and still them. The spasms don’t seem to be hurting him. Nothing seems to be bothering Gabe near as much as it bothers James.

“How’s he holding up?” Rob asks, turning in his seat. James shakes his head.

“No idea. Maybe okay? He doesn’t seem to be hurt, but….” He frowns. “There’s something not right.”

“There’s a lot not right,” Rob mutters.

James nods. “Do people get unturned?” he asks softly. “Is it like magic? I can read people out. Can somebody read him out of the turning?”

Rob glances in the direction Yuko went. He shakes his head. “I never heard of that before,” he says. “Yuko’s good with that stuff. Not me. You should ask her.”

James nods and swallows and doesn’t think about it.

Rob licks his lips. He twists a little more where he’s sitting, pulling himself around with his arm over the back of the seat. “Look, James, the Thing. The Thing that did this. It told Gabe that he was a gift.”

“What?”

“He told me they said no one would come for him, because he was a gift.”

“A gift?” James whispers. He can almost hear his father’s voice say
don’t parrot
, but he feels like he has to say the word to make some kind of sense of it. He looks down at Gabe’s battered face, the rotten-fruit color of a bruise forming around one eye, lurid in the orange light. “Somebody gave him to them?”

“Maybe he was raving, but he seemed pretty lucid to me,” Rob says. “And… and it told me it didn’t know what to do with me. That if it was good it might be allowed to have me.”

“What?”

Rob sighs. “That mission was a total facefuck, start to finish. We heard it was a little nest because some kids had been making animal sacrifices. But the Thing that was there was….” He swallows hard and shakes his head. “Never, in all the years I’ve been doing this, did I ever see anything like what I saw today. That Thing in there, it was powerful. And it killed Benecio, turned Gabe, and held on to me. That’s not a crazed animal, and that’s not a psychopathic magic user or something. I think someone’s controlling it.”