Salt and Iron (20 page)

“Okay.”

When Gabe goes he looks at himself in the mirror. “You’re a fuck-up, James,” he whispers. “You’re a goddamned fuck-up and you got Gabe’s dad killed and now you’re going to get drunk and you’re going to do something dangerous and you’re going to lose him too. You’re going to lose everything. And then you’ll have nothing to lose.”

There’s a weird sort of comfort in that.

He inhales again, trying to make his breathing slow and even. All the terror of what happened to Gabe, what might happen to Rob and Yuko and to Howls, all the horror of it was nothing to how he’s feeling now, like a maple seed spiraling down. Like a child who knows he’s done something bad, something forbidden, who knows his payment is the belt across the backside.

He can’t control his breathing. His vision narrows to the peeling veneer that mars the dresser, so that it’s all he can see. His lungs aren’t working right, and he thinks there’s something wrong. DTs or whatever they’re called. He knows people die from alcoholism, not just from the drinking but the sobering up part too. He’s gasping, thinks he might throw up, but to throw up means not breathing and he’s already not getting enough air and all he can see is….

Gabe’s hand on his shoulder, like an anchor. “Jamie?”

He looks, just moves his eyes, doesn’t turn his head. He feels like he’s going under. Gabe sets the chipped highball glass on the edge of the dresser and frames James’s face with his hands. They’re hot as oven mitts, as heating pads, but James can’t feel them. Maybe his face is numb. Maybe he’s stroking out.

“You’re okay,” Gabe says softly. “It’s a panic attack.”

“Please,” he whispers. He’s panting. It’s all he can say, one syllable, easily gasped. “Please, please, please.”

“You’re safe,” Gabe whispers. “Just breathe like me, okay?”

He uncurls James’s hands from the edge of the dresser and puts one over Gabe’s own heart and one on his side, and James can feel the steady, calm workings of a heart that beats out time like a machine and the even come and go of breath in the lungs. It helps.

“You don’t have to do this either, you know,” Gabe adds as the panic starts to ebb and James is starting to be able to see again, be able to fill his lungs again. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

James is soaked in sweat. The shirt clings to him like raw chicken skin. “If I don’t do this, I lose you. And I’m not losing you too.”

Gabe nods. He takes the glass from the sink and passes it over to James. James takes it.

“I want this so bad,” he whispers, looking down at the rum.

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“One thing at a time, hey?” Gabe says, smiling faintly. “One thing at a time.”

He nods. He drinks. There are chilies in the rum, and it burns through him like a fire. When he sets the glass down, the candle goes out as if he’d dumped water over it. He looks over at Gabe.

“It’s time,” he says softly.

Gabe nods and takes his hand. “Ready?”

James laughs. “Not even a little bit.”

Gabe smiles. “Me neither.”

THE CHAMBER
at the back of the house, maybe it used to be a ballroom or something, because it’s tall and elegant, even if it soars to unseen heights. The walls are painted green, like the color of pistachio ice cream, and overlaid on that are milk-white bunches of plaster flowers and garlands hanging above frames that don’t frame anything.

The floor is checkerboard black-and-white and covered in waxen stalagmites where tall iron candelabra have been standing for God alone knows how long. Seems like time doesn’t pass in this place. He’s slept and he’s eaten, but only as a matter of course, only because there’s been time between those things, and the body has to be fed and rested. A part of him is aware that it’s always that sort of taupey twilight outside and the sun has neither come nor gone, like hunger and like exhaustion. Time just isn’t here. So he has to do those things himself. Like remembering to breathe. He understands now all those stories of people going down into Shadow and coming out to find seven years have passed.

SKINNY MARY
is waiting for them. Skinny Mary and Yuko standing near her, lips white, arms crossed. And the whole court behind them too. The Horses are in their finest. White coats with tails, white ties, skull faces, golden pins in their lapels. Skinny Mary has pulled her hair back in a floppy sort of Gibson-girl bun, and there are white lilies in her hair.

She smokes in silence, one booted foot shuffling across the floor while she waits, like half of her is dancing to music he can’t hear. Then she cocks a grin at them when they’re in the middle of the room, the circle of light, the pillars of wax, and Gabe suddenly stops. James glances at him and then looks down. There’s a thin band of salt in a circle on the floor. No, not just one. Three. The first one is thin, white salt like kitchen salt. He would never have noticed it if Gabe hadn’t balked. The second circle is farther in, its radius smaller, and the salt there is almost impossible to see in the low light, black like volcanic sand. The third is the smallest of the circles, iridescent as beetle’s wings, about six feet in diameter. There’s a little dish in the middle of it, a shallow dish, age-dulled. There’s a hammer too, the head gleaming and new, the sticker still on the wooden handle.
This is not a toy
, it reads.

He swallows and looks at Gabe. Gabe’s mouth turns up in a twitching, twisted smile. “Are you fucking kidding?” he whispers.

“You do it or you don’t,” Skinny Mary says. “But no mulligans. No backsies. What you get is what you do.”

He licks his lips. He nods.

“Gabe,” James whispers. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Can’t be a monster or a fucking sidhe, Jamie,” he answers without pause. He nods blindly at Skinny Mary. “No offense, ma’am. I just don’t think it suits me.”

“None taken,” she answers, and she laughs, wreathing her head with smoke. “And we feel the same way.”

Gabe gives James a little push. “Lead on, Macduff,” he whispers.

James crosses the salt. It’s easy for him. He goes to stand in the middle of it and looks down into the dish. It’s as big as a soup bowl, and there are nails in there. Hand-cut nails, the ones with square sides and square heads. They’re old, corroded by the years. He wonders who the last person to touch them was. Then he looks at the hammer. He picks it up. Weight about five pounds, and the head is affixed tight. He peels the sticker up idly and rolls it up so he can’t read the warning anymore. Not a toy. As if he didn’t know.

“Do you know?” Yuko asks.

He looks up at her. She’s come forward just a little, still human shaped but eyes impossibly large, mouth twice the length it ought to be, as if her head might split open on a hinge.

“I can guess.”

She nods. “Palm,” she says quietly. “This isn’t a crucifixion. One will do it.”

“Okay.”

He straightens up and looks over at Gabe. “Ready when you are,” he says.

He sees Gabe’s head come up, his shoulders rise and fall. And then his back stiffens and he begins to push through the salt.

The first ring makes him hiss, clench his teeth, and twist his mouth until his teeth are showing. James can smell burned flesh. Gabe makes a noise. It’s a chorus of sound that dissolves to a single voice, his own, whispering
Oh fuck
over and over again. Then he’s through. He stands between the two rings for a moment, shoulders heaving, the wings on his back standing out around him. Those enormous eyes on his back must be open and staring.

Gabe raises his head. “Jamie?” he asks.

“Here,” he says in a low voice, trying to sound calm, as if this is easy. “One third of the way,” he adds. “You’re doing good.”

“Okay,” Gabe whispers. “Okay.”

He pushes forward, hands outstretched again, and hisses, jerking back, cradling his hands against his middle. “Fuck, I
can’t
,” Gabe whispers. He slides a foot forward as if to kick the salt away, but it stops at the salt, as if there’s a wall there.

“The cost of life is suffering,” Skinny Mary says. “You put your skin on the line or you never go free.”

Gabe lowers his head. He extends his hands, and James can see the skin blistering up, fresh burns on old burns. He bites back an
oh God
at the sight of it.

“Come on, Gabe,” he whispers instead. “You can do this.”

Gabe arches against the pain, shoulders coming up, head down, shoving against the salt, and it passes over his fingers like a luminous line rolling up his skin, leaving it blistered and charred and smoking. “Jesus
fuck
,” Gabe cries, pushing until he’s up to his elbows, “Jesus fucking Christ
almighty
,” and then he’s through that too.

He sags down in the space between the salt circles, shrinking into himself, doubling up like that’ll protect his hands. Something patters down onto the checkerboard floor. Clear glass globes, half a dozen of them, maybe more. They go rolling away like marbles.

James kneels down too, as near as he can get to Gabe without crossing the salt. “Hey,” he whispers, “hey, you did good. You did good. You’re almost there. Take your time, ’til you’re ready. We’ll wait. It’s okay.”

“Jamie,” Gabe whispers, voice broken. “I don’t think I can.”

He would push aside the salt if he was allowed. He would make space or carry Gabe over.

“Please, Gabe,” he whispers. “You’re so close.”

“Hurts.”

“I know. After this I’m gonna….” He looks around. Going to what? “I’m gonna look after you.”

Gabe’s breathing’s leveling out, but he hasn’t uncurled, and James can’t see how bad his hands are.

“I can’t see you,” Gabe whispers.

“I’m here. I’m right here.”

“What if you’re not?”

James’s mouth dries up.

“What if this is all in my head? Or what if this is a trick? What if I’m doing something that’s going to lock me into this, and I’ll never get free again?”

He has no answers. He knows you never bargain with sidhe, but he’s done it anyway, since it was all he could do. But he can’t promise Gabe he’ll be okay. Gabe’s an arm’s length from him, and he can’t even touch him. His wings completely obscure him, like a child who’s pulled the covers over his head to escape the monsters. He looks over, into the darkness where he knows Skinny Mary is watching. Something occurs to him.

He gets to his feet, goes toward her. He sees the candy-skull grin on her face.

“Auntie Mary,” he says, and he can hear his voice shaking just a little. Trying to stay calm, quiet, desperately wanting to yell. “Who else has ever done this?”

That candy-skull grin gets wider. More teeth, perfectly in line, like tombstones row-on-row.

“If memory serves, my sister gave it a shot.”

He should have known. He should have been smarter. He should never have made a deal with the sidhe. “What do you mean, ‘gave it a shot’?” He asks, even though he’s pretty sure he knows.

“Well she’s the Thing, isn’t she? Not the type to dandle babies on her knee, now is she?” Skinny Mary’s voice is soft, light, as if this is some kind of a joke. “She gave it a shot. We arranged it. But….” Her grin fades like a lamp going out. “It ain’t easy, nephew mine, this undoing. Goes against nature and tradition and the rules.” The smile flickers back to life again. “But who am I not to take a deal when it’s so sweetly offered?”

“Who else?” he asks. “Who else has tried it? Who’s gotten through?” He thinks he knows that answer to that too.

“Nobody,” she tells him. “Not in my lifetime. And surely not in yours.”

He feels weightless for just a moment, as if his head has taken leave of his body, and is floating anchorless in the dim dark.

“Nothing’s fixed,” he says then. He’s not sure where the words are coming from at first, if they’re inside his own head out coming from his mouth. He swallows, finds his mouth dry as brick dust. “Nothing has a fixed destiny,” he says a little louder, “till I make it that way.”

“Attaboy,” she whispers like a sigh.

So he goes back to the salt and looks this time, not at Gabe, but at the space above him, the nothingness there. It’s dark and it shimmers, like an oil slick on nighttime water. Hardly visible, but visible all the same. “Gabe,” he whispers. The words are not for the others to hear. “I’m not going to make you do it, but I want you to live, okay? You promised me. You promised.”

Destiny shimmers just a little, and goes back to steady rippling.

“When I get there,” Gabe answers in a muffled voice, “you’re gonna put iron in my skin.”

James nods. “Yeah. That’s the last thing.”

“When I got Rob out of the warehouse, I had to touch the chain. The pain was so bad it made me want to die. You’re going to do that to me.”

James eases himself down to his belly on the checkered floor. He looks for Gabe’s hidden face a long while. “You don’t have to do this,” he says at last. “Time’s loose over you right now. It can go either way.” He rests his cheek on the cool tiles. “However it goes, that’s fine by me. As long as you don’t send me away, I don’t care what you are.”

Gabe turns his head. He smiles a faint, pained smile. “I’m a monster, Jamie.”

“And I’m a drunk, so we’re a pair.”

Gabe is silent for a while. He sighs, a tired sound. The sound of somebody in shock, somebody dying. The kind of sigh you hear before somebody say
It doesn’t hurt anymore
.

“Make it quick, okay?” Gabe whispers.

“Deal.”

Time snaps into place.

Gabe uncurls and rights himself, and hauls in a deep breath. When he extends his hands James can see exposed muscle, blackened tendons, the tooth-white of fingertip bone. He pushes against the salt, screaming as he does, and the iridescent salt seems to drag over his skin, unzipping places on his hands, his forearms, his arms, his chest and torso, his legs. He falls into the last circle, and James catches him under the arms and eases him down.

“Gabe,” he whispers. “Come on, Gabe? You with me?”

“You said you’d make it quick,” Gabe mumbles, one charred and unzipped hand sagging open.