Salt and Iron (13 page)

“You think that job was a trap, you mean?”

“Maybe. Or….” He bobs his head. “She said
gift
. She said it twice. Maybe it wasn’t a trap so much as a delivery.”

James doesn’t think he can feel worse. He doesn’t think he could feel any sicker than he already does, but his stomach twists again, and it feels like the place under his breastbone where worry lives has been scraped completely raw.

“Who would have done this?” he asks.

Rob shakes his head.

“Uncle Abraham and now Benecio and Gabe. It’s like somebody’s playing with us. Taking the Firm apart. Only the sidhe could do this kind of thing.”

He shakes his head again. “The seelie hate the unseelie precisely because nobody can control them,” Rob says quietly. “You know that.”

James sighs and looks down at his hands.

“Yeah,” Rob says. “I don’t know who, either.”

Yuko comes back across the parking lot. She points. “Room thirteen,” she says. It’s on the other side of the lot. Rob nods and starts the truck and backs into the parking spot closest while Yuko opens the door. She comes over to the truck when Rob turns the engine off. She leans against the side, arms folded.

“This is bad,” Rob says. She nods. “I’ll submit a report directly to Abraham and Maria as soon as we get back. I’ll keep this part out of it.”

“Do. And maybe don’t be as honest as you usually are,” Yuko says quietly.

Rob frowns at her, and James sees her shoulders rise and fall. Rob’s frown gets deeper, and shrugs back, but it’s not mocking. There’s something being communicated in silence there.

“What?” James asks.

Yuko sighs. “There’ve been rumors about a Thing attacking sidhe for a while now.”

“Yeah,” he says softly. “I heard about it. From Skinny Mary.” He expected her to be surprised, but if she is, she’s hiding it really well.

“Well,” she says, “I don’t think the van Helsings are the only thing sidhe parents scare their children with.”

He’s never really thought about that before, sidhe children. Never really thought of the sidhe as anything but monsters. “Sounds like it’s just called the Thing. Seems to turn sidhe from seelie to unseelie.” He shrugs. “Don’t all sidhe hate the Firm? I mean, we’re trying to push them back into Shadow and make them stay there.”

“Well, there’s hate and then there’s hate,” Yuko says, shrugging back at him. “Some of them will fight you if you go after them, and some of them will rip you to pieces and eat your still-beating heart hot in your chest.”

She says it with a hard edge, like maybe she knows this. Like maybe she’s seen it. James keeps his mouth shut about that, but something percolates through. “You think maybe this Thing is what killed Uncle Abraham?”

Rob nods. “Gabe’s a mess,” he says softly. “The savagery would match.”

Yuko nods back at him. “Yeah, it would.”

James sighs. He rubs at the back of his neck and feels dust rolling under his fingers. “Do you want me to tell Mom and Dad?” he asks. “About Benecio and Gabe, I mean? It might be easier to take, coming from me.”

Yuko nods. “You or Abe would probably be best.”

“Yeah,” Rob agrees. “If you’re going to stay here with Gabe for a bit, and I think you probably should, it’s probably better if I go to Abe before I send in my report. If he wants to talk in private with your parents, it won’t be remarkable. Good thinking. Now come on. Let’s get Gabe inside.”

James lets Rob gather Gabe up like a child and carry him down from the truck bed and into the dark and chemical-smelling room beyond. James follows, and Yuko comes last, closing the door behind her.

Rob lays Gabe out on the hard box of a bed that dominates the room. Gabe shivers, as if he’s fevered, and contracts, knees coming up to his chest. James hauls up the end of the garish quilted comforter and folds it over Gabe. He settles on the edge of the bed, hand on Gabe’s face.

“Hey,” he whispers, “hey, Gabe? You okay?”

Gabe makes a little noise, eyes closed, and burrows deeper under the blanket.

He hears Yuko’s soft sigh. “I’m worried,” she says in a low voice.

“He’s gone,” Rob whispers back.

“It’s not him I’m worried about,” she answers.

James sighs and scrubs his face with his hands. “Don’t worry about me.” He laughs and tries to look at Rob, but finds he can’t. “If I hadn’t been shit-faced, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Worrying about me is a waste of time. I don’t want you guys to worry about the shit I might do anymore,” he adds. “I’ll do the right thing. Keep my head down.”

“Hey,” Rob says.

James looks up, meets Rob’s eyes.

“You think you’re dead weight, but you’re not.”

James looks back down at Gabe, curled up, shivering. “Look, Rob, you don’t have to—”

“Have I ever blown smoke up your ass?”

He thinks about it. “No.”

The fact is, Rob and Yuko might be the only two who’ve never let him get away with anything. They might be the only two who’ve told him what he needed to hear rather than what he wanted.

“Someone killed one of the Marquezes and turned the other, and the senior van Helsing’s been murdered. You should consider yourself a target,” Yuko says. “Keep your head down ’til either Rob or I gives you the all clear, and keep Gabe out of sight. We’ll check in with you by phone every twelve hours. You don’t hear from us, we’ve got bigger trouble than we thought. You got it?”

“Yeah.”

Rob chews his top lip for a minute. “How much do you drink?” he asks.

James shrugs. “Some. Too much, maybe?”

“It’s not the kind of thing you just stop doing.” He leans back and looks out the window at the truck stop on the other side of the road. “Booze, first aid kit, salt. What else?”

“Food,” Yuko says, smiling faintly.

Rob laughs. “Yeah. Food too, I guess.” He nods at James. “I’ll be right back.”

James nods. “Thanks,” he says softly. He means for everything.

IT’S THE
smell that Gabe notices first. It seeps in, unfamiliar enough to rouse him from the dream. A nightmare of a mission gone wrong, of captivity, of hands on him, of his body exposed, made meat, made thing, molded into something else, of blood and terror and finally, of James. James holding him. He must have slept again after that, after the nightmare. But the smell is a thick sort of chemical smell. The sort that clings to hair and skin, the sort that covers up the smell of bad drains or old cigarettes or carpets desperately in need of a clean. The smell of a cheap room at a motel. The smell of his childhood.

“Abe,” he hears James say in a low voice. “Hey. It’s me.”

James is speaking softly, not to him. The conversation is one-sided, soft, almost a whisper. He hears the clink of glass on glass and the slosh of liquid pouring.

A pause. James sipping whatever today’s medicine is.

“Look, I need to talk to you. It’s important. Yeah, I’m not… no, I’m not….
Listen
to me, for Christ’s sake. Let me
talk
.”

A pause. A sigh.

“Please, Abe. Please, just….”

A pause.

“No, I’m
not
okay. I-I’m out of town. And I’m not coming back into town for a while. Out on Old Field Highway. Yeah, the motel just before the junction? Hah. No, it’s gross, but it’s okay. Look, though, look, there’s a gas station across the street, with a diner. Can you come tomorrow? There’s something I need to talk to you about, and you have to keep it quiet, okay? Where I am, I mean. And that you’re going to meet with me, okay? No. Please, Abe.” He sounds so tired. “Please, I’ll explain everything. Keep it to yourself, though, okay? Not even Mom. Yeah. I
am
scared. Okay. Okay. No, we, uh, I’ve got everything I need. Just show up, okay? Okay.”

He hears the phone thump softly on the table, hears James sipping his drink. Gabe opens his eyes.

White streetlamp light comes arrowing in under the blackout curtain. It breaks on the little table right under the window. There’s a sharp-shouldered bottle two-thirds full of liquid on the table and beside it a crumpled bag. And a shape in the darkness near the door. He hears the click of a lock turning, sees the shape move, and he jerks back, or tries to. He’s stuck. It takes him a minute before he understands that his hands are cuffed to the bed frame.

“What the
fuck
?” He hears the panic in his own voice.

“Hey, it’s okay.” A whisper. James’s voice in the dark. Slurring a little. “It’s okay, Gabe. It’s me. You’re safe.”

“Safe?” he echoes. Moving his mouth makes the skin of his face pull and sting, as if his face is covered in scabs. “Why am I cuffed?”

“Sorry. Just… I had to go outside for a couple minutes. Wasn’t feeling very good.”

“James, what the hell? What’s going on?”

“It’s okay,” James says again. His voice is soft and soothing, and there’s something familiar about the repetition of those words. “What do you remember?”

He sags back down. There must be a reason for this. He’s a got a yawning hole in his memory. Something must have happened. He trusts James. He has to trust James.

“Nightmares,” Gabe whispers. “I only remember nightmares.” Had to be nightmares. “My dad….”

“Yeah,” James whispers. “Rob says. Rob says he’s gone. He’s gone.”

It crashes over him, as if somebody pulled something out of him, as if there’s someone in his chest trying to break apart his sternum. He gasps, convulses around it, can’t breathe around it, and then he’s sobbing like a child, hiding his face in a mattress that smells like old cigarettes and stain remover and industrial laundry. The bed dips under James’s weight, and a cool, heavy hand settles on his shoulder.

“I know, man. I’m sorry.”

So now he’s an orphan. It hits him hard like a storm and then passes, and in its wake he understands that if the horror of what happened to his dad is true, then so is the rest of it.

But if they’d changed him, if they’d turned him, if he was one of them now…. It’d be one thing for James to try to rescue him, maybe. Maybe that would happen, because he and James, they’re probably in love. Maybe. He thinks they are. But Rob and Yuko, no, they’d have finished it.

Every part of him hurts, like he’s taken a fall from a height, and his face is swollen, mouth swollen stiff on one side, the skin stretching against something that doesn’t flex as well as it should. “What happened to me?” he whispers, voice ragged from the sobbing. “What’s wrong with my face? Why’m I cuffed?”

He hears James’s shaking inhalation. “Gabe. Gabe, listen. You got hurt.”

Like falling. It’s like he’s falling.

“You got hurt. They got you and they changed you.”

Not a dream. Not a nightmare. A monster.

“How bad?” he asks, even though a part of him understands that he could test it, that there’s a pool of wild strength in him that wasn’t there before. He’s afraid to touch the surface of it. Afraid to know how deep it goes.

“Rob says you saved him. He says you stopped them from turning him too.”

“How bad
is
it?”

The beat of silence tells him everything he needs to know. “Listen….”

It’s bad. It’s so bad James won’t say it. “You should have killed me,” he says, aware on a sort of intellectual level that it’s factually correct, that he had tried to do it himself and hadn’t been able to. “Who’s going to do it? Why am I here? Where is this?”

“We’re… we’re out of town for a little bit, you and me.”

Out of town. Silver bullet in the back of the head. Black garbage bag shroud. No consecrated ground for him.

“Yuko and Rob helped get you here. We just… we just have to lie low for a little bit. ’Til the dust settles. Then we’ll figure it out.”

“You’re
hiding
me?”

“Shhh,” James whispers. He slides down to the floor, head leaning against the edge of the bed, and the light breaks on the glass in his hand, turns the little smear of liquid in it silver like a mirror. “Please, Gabe, you gotta keep your voice down. We’re hiding.”

He hears the word, and it’s as weird and surreal as the rest of it. He shakes his head. “Jesus, Jamie,” he whispers. “You’re going to end up dead for doing this.”

“Please.”

James’s hands, cool as water on his face.

“Please, just trust me, okay? Stay quiet for a bit. I’m gonna… I’m gonna figure this all out.”

They’re quiet for a while, the two of them. Gabe sighs. The skin of his back is crawling, like something’s tickling it. He cranes his head around to see, but it’s too damn dark.

“Hey,” he whispers. “Can we have some light?”

“What?”

“Can you turn on a light? I wanna see something.”

A pause. A long pause. James is silent, not even breathing.

“What?” he asks.

“The lights are on.”

It’s one too many things. He can’t. Like hail pinging off a window. “Well, turn them up, then.”

“No, the lights are on. Are… can’t you see?”

He realizes he’s chewed his bottom lip raw, tastes the blood. “Don’t fucking joke.”

“Gabe.” James’s voice breaks. He turns, just a shape really, just white and black. Hands on Gabe’s shoulder, sliding up to his neck to cup his chin. “Does it hurt?”

And this too. And this too.

“No,” he says, voice scraped raw. “It’s… it’s just like night. You’re not… you’re not shitting me, Jamie?”

“No. It’s the middle of the afternoon. The lights are on. All of them.”

He sighs. He can’t even think. His mind just stops, won’t parse it. He closes his eyes and realizes he can still see. Sort of. He can see the lurid pattern of the hideous quilted bedspread, the colors of it muted and dull. He opens his eyes again and looks, but he can’t see it anymore. He turns, twisting, craning.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, it’s nothing.” Damned if he’s going to tell the one person in the world who’s here with him, the one person who doesn’t necessarily want him dead. Damned if he’s going to say he can see where the blankets cover over him like his head is on the wrong way. As if there were eyes in his back.

THE NEXT
morning, James scuttles across the road, hating the heat, the exposure, the hammer of the sun, the way everything is edged with metal and gleaming, and comes back with breakfast from the diner. He doesn’t know what Gabe’s going to want, so he gets them both pancakes. At least they can eat them cold.