Salt and Iron (18 page)

She shrugs. “I can make it so that you can get the wings and mouths and the teeth and the claws, get them all to disappear. I’ll set it all up for you. And if you succeed or not, that’s up to you. Sure I can. If you want. If you think you’ll live through it, and if you think you want to try.” She shrugs. “Cost you three favors.”

He nods once, then again. You don’t make deals with the sidhe. You never make deals with the sidhe. He always used to wonder what the hell kind of an idiot would know that and then enter into a deal anyway. You’d have to be stupid. Or desperate. Maybe a little of both.

“Okay.”

She smiles. She looks at the Baron, and he looks back at her. “You’re building your portfolio today, Miss Mary.”

“Yes, sir, I am,” she answers.

“What do I have to do?”

“In good time,” she answers, nodding at Gabe. “I’ll tell you in good time.”

“Nothing that’ll hurt James.”

“Not the deal,” she says, but she gives him a heavy-lidded smile. “But you don’t need to wax worried over that. He’s kin. And unlike some of my blood, I don’t take against my own if they’ve never done anything bad to me.”

He thinks about that. He thinks about that and chews his lip. “The van Helsings…,” Gabe starts, and his voice trails off.

“Go on, son,” the Baron says. “You’re not cussing in a church.”

“They did this, didn’t they? All of this.” He wasn’t going to talk at first, but now, now it’s coming tumbling out of his mouth. “They’ve been using James. To fix things for them. Since he was a kid. They knew, and they were letting him destroy himself so they could keep using him.”

Neither Skinny Mary nor the Baron speak, but they look at each other.

“They saw the cards,” he says. “James showed them the cards, and they saw my dad and me, and they were scared. So they killed him, and they gave me to the Thing. They wanted to turn me.” One death is an accident, two is a tragedy, but three dead is a problem. But turn him, and if the Firm couldn’t kill him, the sidhe would. “So I’m as good as dead too.”

He sighs. He’s pretty sure all the grief he can muster came out when he was alone in the motel, but sometimes it catches and gusts at him, like now. His sigh shakes and ends in a little sound. A couple of days ago everything was routine. A couple of witches out at an abandoned house. Rote, by the book, almost boring. Tip, arrest, interrogation. He tries to figure out where it went wrong. Maybe the images on the cards. Maybe. Maybe the interrogation. Lennox called that damn meeting and then wouldn’t speak. Wouldn’t speak after James came in.

Something clicks into place. He straightens up.

“He’s thinking,” Skinny Mary says.

“He’s got something,” the Baron says.

“How ’bout you share that?” Skinny Mary asks. “You know the mortals best, and whatever they’re doing with the Thing, they’re making unseelie, and no offense, son, but you guys are a fucking handful, and we don’t want any more of your kind.”

He rubs at his face. He wonders if there’s a mouth on his back too. If there is, he wants to open it. He tests it, and Skinny Mary and the Baron both lean back in their chairs, so that’s probably a yes.

“They commissioned those cards, didn’t they?” he asks with both mouths, the sound of it a growling chorus. “And set James up to fix them. Then they set Dad up to get killed, and they gave me to the Thing to turn me. Because….” He gets it. He
gets
it, and he’s angry. He has more mouths on his back, and they’re opening up now too. “Because he told me what he was. So I had to die, because I knew, and he had to kill me, because James is a good man. He’d blame himself. He’d think he’d accidentally fixed it. He’d never tell anyone again.”

He looks down at his hands. His nails have grown, and they match the porcelain of the coffee cup he’s holding.

“How did they make contact with the Thing?” he whispers. “How did they make a deal with it?”

Skinny Mary smiles, faint and nervous. She licks her canine.

“Oh, honey,” she says. “We wonder that too, us both.”

He nods. That’s something he wants to know, and he wants to know it now.

“Now,” Skinny Mary says, sitting forward. “Now I never had an unseelie on the payroll before. You ready to earn your way out?”

He nods.

“Good. First, you’re gonna take a message to Abraham van Helsing for me. Second, you’re going to find me the Thing.”

“Third?”

She sits back, and she
hmmms
a little. “Little Jimmy isn’t the only one in the family who’s friendly with time,” she says. “That’s it for now. You get going. You tell van Helsing you’re not dead. And we’re not hunting you. You tell him he still oughta be afraid.”

He smiles with all his mouths. “Yes, ma’am,” he says quietly.

HE HAS
never flown before, but it is easy to do. It’s dark, he’s a dark thing in a clouded, unlit sky. If anybody did glance up, he’s confident they wouldn’t notice him.

He lands on the tar-paper roof that adjoins Abraham van Helsing’s office, and even though the angle he’s viewing the world from is different now, it’s easy for him to orient himself. He goes to the door, walking backward, aware that the tar paper is peeling and flaking out from under him when he walks.

He reaches for the door handle and finds it locked, but he holds it for a moment, and the brass sags as if he’s pulled it hard, and the door sighs open. The curtains billow out and then slip back inside again. He follows them.

The yellow-wood-paneled office smells like home. Leather and wood polish, ink, coffee, paper. The office is lit softly, the desk lamp the single thing illuminating the room. He goes to the desk. Papers there, and a browning smear, as if someone spilled a little out of an espresso cup. He looks. His fingers yellow whatever papers he touches, so he touches lightly and little.

The paperwork is the letter about the estate of Uncle Abe, a formal thing, signed by lawyers and addressed to Abraham van Helsing the Younger, and his whole name is written there.

Something cold and angry and satisfied makes him smile when he sees it. He reads the rest, sees his own name there, and
Benecio Marquez
. He sees what’s written there and understands.

TO MY
friend Benecio Marc Gabriel Marquez, if he survives me, a fifty percent interest in the Firm, so that he and my nephew shall be joint owners….

HE GOES
to the wall where all the hidden doors are. The wall is flat and plain, no paintings hanging on the wood paneling there. They’d get in the way of the safe, the hidden door that joins up to the library on the other side of the wall, the secret passages he and Abe and Jamie used to play tag through when they were little.

It’s not easy to find things when he’s facing them, not with his eyes on the wrong side of his body now, and his arms still bend the way they used to, which means he can either see properly or he can touch properly, but not both at the same time.

He slides his hands across the wood, cool and satiny turning dry, splintered, and peeling under his hand. It’s a canvas of sorts. He reaches so that his arms are extended above him. He lays his palms flat against the wood and recalls the words he’d tried to kill himself with.

His skin crawls. His fingers ache as if they’re being stretched. His eyes open, and he can see the empty desk, the tufted leather chair, the door standing just behind, sees the crack that forms between door and jamb because someone is pushing into the office. He is already caught in the act, and he doesn’t care. Not even when Abraham van Helsing comes through the door and starts like a boy. Gabe’s hands hurt; his palms ache. He can’t stop the words now, not even if he tried. The words come pouring out of his skin.

I shall make Jerusalem a heap of ruins….

Abraham makes a choking noise. His face drains out like someone’s tapped a vein. Gabe can’t blame him. The wings, the eyes, the mouths, the horror of the body standing here, the man they fed to the Thing, the man who’s writing on the wall, and the pull of the writing, natural human curiosity that’s screwed them all over at least once, that’s part of why Gabe is such a good reader. That’s part of why Gabe’s had so much practice reading out people who get read-in.

People who can read, do automatically, and words have power.

I SHALL
make Jerusalem a heap of ruins and a den of jackals.

I shall make the cities desolate, with no one left alive.

GABE’S BODY
heaves and shakes, the words coming out of him like vomit or blood. Skinny Mary told him to go and be seen and to make Abraham afraid, and that is exactly what he is going to do.

Abraham staggers against the doorjamb. Gabe pulls his aching hands back from the peeling wooden wall and realizes he’s out of breath, like he’s been holding it since the door opened, maybe for longer. He tries to steady himself. There’s something he wants to say. He turns, so that he can speak with his own mouth, even if he can’t see when he’s facing that direction. He’s not sure what he wants to say. He’s not sure what the words are going to be until he says them, softly, quietly.

“‘And his name was Death, and Hades followed with him.’ You made me this, Abraham. Are you sure this is what you wanted?”

Then he moves to the door. He wants out, before Abraham comes back to his strength and calls for help or comes after Gabe himself.

He walks backward to the door, goes out onto the warm and windy rooftop, lets the wings spread out around him, goes. There’s a weightlessness in his belly where before there was a bar of lead.

First task done.

THE SECOND
task is to find the Thing. He feels its presence, and it’s no surprise. The nearer he gets to the Thing, the less he feels the loathing that’s settled in his breast. The thing about that is, when he’s flying away from the Firm, the feeling diminishes. He alights on the domed copper roof of the Russian Orthodox church near city hall and rests for a bit. He closes his eyes, perched like a gargoyle and glad of the darkness.

He lets the feeling tug him like a fishhook. When he opens the eyes on his back, he can see something glowing like a fire on the top floor of the Firm building. He goes after it, lets the sensation reel him in, to the window where the glowing pulses softly like a star. He’s panting and he’s sweating. His back isn’t used to the strain of flight, and the wings are still new. They ache like bones that were broken and didn’t heal right. He’s tired. He goes to alight like a bird at the window. His hands burn, blister, and char. He jerks back, almost goes tumbling down, and looks at the line of bright yellow and bright pink salt on the inside of the window ledge. Then he looks at the woman who’s standing there looking at him.

If the Baron glows and Skinny Mary shines, this woman burns with a low, pulsing light. She’s looking at him. The face he couldn’t see before she turned him is visible to him now. She’s pretty. Curling black hair, full lips. Ears pierced and weighted down with gold. Heavy gold necklace looped three times around her long, black neck. Heavy gold bangles on her wrists. She’s staring at him.

“Open,” she says.

He realizes his hands are at the window. He realizes his hands are scrabbling against the salt, trying to get under the frame, trying to pull it up. He doesn’t even realize it hurts, it’s agony, that there are silver nails hammered into the frame to keep the glass in place, that his fingers are burning to the
bone
.

It’s his own screaming that alerts him. It sort of wakes him up. He turns around to see and the woman in the window tilts her head at him, still staring, talking to him. He hears the chorus of voices not through the glass but in his head. “Open,” it says over and over again, even though his hands are a ruin of charred flesh and bone, even though the pain is going to make him faint.

He pushes off from the building, moving like a swimmer against a riptide to get to the dome of the church.
Open
, she’s telling him,
open
, but it’s less loud way over here, less of a command. He curls around his charred hands and lies still for a while. It rains a little, even while the sun is cracking in shafts through clouds, like the weather doesn’t know what it’s about. The damp cools his hands and washes his face.

He stays there until he’s caught his breath, until he stops shaking, until his hands are twisted gloves of burned meat but the bone tips no longer show. He goes back to Skinny Mary.

JAMES WAKES
up because someone’s closed the door to the room with a soft
thump
. He cracks an eye open. It’s Gabe, moving very carefully, hands following the line of the wall, to where the table is.

He’s still shirtless, and James figures they’re never going to find something that’s going to fit over those wings. He’s breathing hard, and when he sits, he sits down heavily and slumps forward, elbows braced on his knees, head hanging.

“Hey,” James whispers. “You okay?”

Gabe’s head comes up and sinks down in a nod. “Yeah,” he whispers. “Yeah, just tired.”

James sits up and rubs the sleep from his eyes.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ve been… I was….” Gabe shakes his head. “I was doing a job for Skinny Mary.”

“What?”

“We were gonna talk about it later, but I couldn’t sleep and you were too tired.” He steadies himself with a big breath. “Never flown before. And….” He shakes his head again. “Flying’s pretty tiring. And I found the Thing.”

He turns over his hands as if he’s looking at them, and James sees how twisted and burned they look, as if somebody’s held them in a fire.

“Shit,” James whispers, scrambling out of the bed, “Jesus, Gabe—”

“It’s okay. It hurts and it looks bad, but it’s not. I mean, it’s healing. They’re almost better now.”

James subsides onto the floor in front of Gabe.

“This is better?” he asks.

“Yeah. A lot.” He smiles with one side of his mouth. “It’s what happens when I hit salt.” He shakes his head. “But look, Jamie, I… I went into your dad’s office. I, uh…. Uncle Abraham’s will was there.”