Salt and Iron (22 page)

Abe shakes his head, mouth still open, question unformed.

James holds up one hand. “I know, I know. I can explain, just hold on. Listen to the rest. When he was… what he was, he could feel the Thing that changed him. And he went looking for her. And she’s in the Firm attic. Remember… remember how we used to tell each other those stories?”

Abe nods, eyes staring, mouth slack.

“There’s really somebody up there. And, uh, I… I think she might be our great-grandmother.”

Abe’s mouth opens and closes a couple of times.

“Skinny Mary told me this story when I first met her, about her sister having a kid with a van Helsing, and how she wanted to be human and couldn’t and so the family baptized her. I don’t think they meant to hurt her. I think they really thought it would make her human, but they made her unseelie instead. Anyway, Skinny Mary tried to get her to change back and she….” He pushes the memories away before they can rush up and overwhelm him. “It’s not easy. I guess she couldn’t do it.” He takes in a big breath and lets it out slow. It shakes a little. And Abe’s still staring at him. “The sidhe probably thought they were saving her, but instead what happened to her drove her crazy. She’s a monster now. She’s what’s in the attic. She’s the Thing.”

Abe closes his eyes for a moment. “The Thing killed Benecio?” he asks at last.

James nods.

“It’s… she’s… at the…?”

He nods again.

“No,” Abe says softly. He rubs at the bridge of his nose. “No, no, no.”

“There’s more.”

“Oh God.” Abe slumps forward and puts his head in his hands.

“I’m a fixer,” he says. After everything that’s happened it feels like such a little thing, like mentioning he’s actually left-handed or something. “I wouldn’t have believed Skinny Mary, except that part makes sense. We know magic runs in the blood. We know it’s a sign of a sidhe-human hybrid. We know it can linger for generations. It makes sense.”

Abe looks up through his fingers.

“Are you one too?” James asks.

Abe shakes his head a little, side to side. “No,” he whispers. “No. I never….” He frowns at James like he might start to cry. “Jesus,” he whispers. “Jesus, Jamie, you never told me?”

“Never told anybody. Except Gabe. A couple weeks ago. Before all this started.”

Abe looks down at the table. “No wonder you’re so fucking screwed up,” he whispers. “God, you, you must have been terrified.”

And that’s the door opened for him. He takes a big breath, the final truth. “I was. But… I told Gabe, and Gabe said I should tell Dad. And… and, look, Dad….”

“I bet he was mad,” Abe says, mouth quirking.

James laughs. “Holy shit, yeah. But not mad about me, mad I’d said something. Abe, look, I think Mom and Dad knew. I don’t know how long they’ve known, but maybe always. I think they commissioned those cards and then made sure Rob came and got me for that job. So I’d touch them. So I’d fix them. Listen, before all this went down, Uncle Abe was going to leave half the business to the Marquezes.”

They sit in silence. James goes back to pointlessly stirring his coffee, and Abe stares at him while he does. The waitress comes by, but both of them have put the menus down and she doesn’t ask. Just looks into their coffee cups and goes again.

“This is awful,” Abe whispers at last.

He leans forward and rubs his forehead. James stops stirring his coffee.

“You okay?”

Abe exhales a shaking breath. “I feel a bit sick, actually.”

James nods.

“Christ,” Abe whispers and rubs his face and the back of his neck. “Christ.” He forces a smile. It’s ghastly. “Monsters are in our blood, Jamie,” he says.

James looks down at his coffee. Abe slumps forward and covers his head with his arms.

He drinks his coffee while he waits, and eventually Abe reemerges from his arms.

“I’m going to fix this,” he says. He begins dumping sugar into his coffee like that’s part of fixing this, whatever
this
is.

“Abe,” James says quietly. “There’s other stuff you should know.”

“I don’t need to. All I’m going to do is go talk to them. I can fix this. They’ll listen to me. Something’s… sometimes things get out of hand. It’s nobody’s fault. There’s a reasonable explanation for everything. There has to be. I….”

James watches his brother stirring the coffee, rearranging the flatware again, looking around the place like he’s got troops stationed somewhere if only he could see them.

“Abe, seriously. This is bad. This is dangerous. Look at what’s happened to Benecio. To Gabe.”

“They’re our parents, Jamie. Mom and Dad will listen to me.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t think they will.”

“They will,” he says again. He gets to his feet, pulls a big bill from his wallet and drops it on the table. “They’ll listen to me, and they’ll
see
, and they’ll change. They’re not bad people, they’re just…. They’re just in over their heads. Give them a way out and they’ll take it.”

James catches Abe’s sleeve. “Please,” he says.

Abe smiles at him, boyish and bright, really selling it. “I got this. Don’t worry. Tomorrow you and Gabe are coming home, and by Friday everything’s going to be fixed. Trust me, okay, Jamie?”

“I trust you,” James says. He’s never been so honest in his life. “I do. But not them. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I’ll be okay. I got this,” Abe says again. “By the end of the week all this will be over.” He leaves. The little bell tinkles on the door when it opens and closes again.

James finishes his coffee. He feels worn out, weak. The thing is, the air was fine, normal, clear. No fracturing, no changing. Whatever happens next, there was never anything he could have done about it.

HE TEXTS
Keep an eye on Abe
to Rob. He smiles at the waitress and passes the money Abe left over to her. She reaches into her apron, and he shakes his head. “Keep the change,” he says.

The waitress looks at him for a moment. Then she smiles. She smiles a little, a warm smile and genuine, not a professional sort of smile.

“You’re the van Helsing boy,” she says. “The one who’s making trouble all over the place. People been talking about you. I hear you helped turn an unseelie back. Is that true?”

“Jesus,” he says softly. “Word gets around quick.”

She laughs, the scratchy laugh of too many cigarettes. “You think people aren’t going to talk about something like that?” She shakes her head. “They say you’re going to stop the Thing.”

He nods. “Going to try.”

“Well,” she says. She shrugs. “Well, I got a message for Gabriel, from Skinny Mary.”

He nods, swallowing. “I can take it to him.”

“She says he should take your grandma out. Make sense to you?”

Let her out of the attic James’ parents have been keeping her in. That would unleash the Thing on the city, which is impossible. Innocent people would die. It’d be a bloodbath. His parents have been wrong about lots of stuff, but not about that. The Thing loose in the city would be an apocalypse.

But they made a deal with the sidhe. And you don’t go back on those kinds of promises.

“Not really,” he says, rising. “But I get it.” His shirt is stuck to the small of his back, and his pants are stuck to his ass. He’s sweating like he’s outside, like the AC doesn’t work. His hands are shaking a bit. “Tell her I’ll… I’ll let her know when it’s done.”

He knows she watches him when he goes.

ABE DOESN’T
go directly home. Instead he stops at the New Glamis police station, smiles at the clerk on duty, says hi to a couple of the blues who are taking advantage of the break room, and finds his own way down to the holding cells, even though he’s technically supposed to have an escort down there.

“Can I have Mr. Lennox in an interrogation room, please?” he asks, and Kareem, the sergeant who always either worked the desk or the door, nods.

“Get comfy behind door number one and I’ll bring him in,” he says.

So Abe sits there fidgeting with the buttons on his sleeves for five minutes, until Kareem opens the door and Lennox comes shuffling in. Abe and Kareem nod at each other, and Kareem closes the heavy iron door. Abe looks over at Lennox, and Lennox looks back at him, not dead on, but with his head a little turned, like he’s not sure what to make of Abe, not really.

Abe’s seen the man before, and pictures of him, but this is the first time he’s ever been within spitting distance of him. He’s small and he hunches, and he squints like maybe his eyes aren’t so good, and right now he’s gripping his cuffed hands before him, wringing the fingers one at a time on one hand and then switching to the other, as if they ache or he’s afraid Abe’s come here to take them from him. Maybe, if the trial goes the way Abe figures it’s going to, that’ll be the price for divination. But he’s starting to think it’s not going to come to that.

“Mr. Lennox,” Abe says, rising a little and gesturing to the chair opposite. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

“Yes, sir,” Lennox whispers. He goes and sits, hands gripping each other in his lap. Abe sits down again too.

“Mr. Lennox, I’m going to ask you a question. It… may seem like a strange question to you. There’s no subtext to this question. The question doesn’t mean anything special, and I’m not speaking in some kind of code. I only want you to give me a factual answer. Is that all right by you?”

Lennox’s eyes dart side to side. “Yes, sir.”

Abe nods and leans forward. He speaks softly. “Who asked you to make those cards?”

Lennox’s eyes grow wider. His jaw begins to quiver. “Well, sir, I don’t know the name, sir. There was just a guy what come up to me in the bar and says….”

“I know,” Abe says softly. “I read the report. But I want the truth.”

Lennox swallows.

Abe pushes down the anxiety that is creeping up, tightening his chest, making his back run with sweat. “If you’re convicted, they could cut off your hands, and the hands of your daughters,” he says quietly. “You might just get off with a piercing, but if the judge sees those cards….” He shrugs. “And Mr. Lennox, I’m not interested in the man who makes the big salt circles or his girls who make cards. I want to know who put you up to this.”

Lennox doesn’t move. He stares at the wall behind Abe as if there’s a TV screen there.

“You’re not going to say anything?” Abe asks. “You’re going to cover for the person who paid you? Could anybody possibly pay you enough? You’re going to lose your
hands
, Mr. Lennox, and that’s if you’re lucky. You may very well end up on death row. What could possibly be more valuable than—” He stops. Lennox looks up at him, and they stare at each other for a moment. “—your life?”

Lennox shakes his head once. “No, sir,” he says softly. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Your daughters’ lives.”

Lennox’s eyes flick up to Abe’s and then past him again. A tiny, fractional nod.

Abe leans forward, face toward the table so if anyone is lip-reading, or if the video of his interview is ever at issue, no one will be able to read his lips. “They go free. You lose your hands. He gets the cards.”

“She,” he whispers.

“Who?”

Lennox tilts his head a little, mouth turning up at the corners. “C’mon, son. I’m sure they keep all this in the family.”

He tries not to feel his stomach falling like an elevator with the cables cut. He tries not to jump to the only rational conclusion.

“Pretend they don’t,” Abe says softly. “Pretend they don’t, and pretend I can bail you and your daughters out now and put a hundred bucks in your hand and you can get out of state before nightfall.”

Lennox licks his lips. “Okay,” he whispers. “I’ll tell you on the steps.”

Abe hesitates. Then he nods and goes to see Kareem.

IT’S QUICK.
He puts the cost of the bail for the three of them on the company card and signs the papers himself. He gets a few weird looks when he does it, but nobody says anything. At least not to his face. They go out, all four of them, into the humid autumn air, and on the steps, like he promised, Lennox turns to him.

“You done a kind thing,” he says softly. “They say you’re the good son. Seems like it.”

Abe doesn’t answer. He shrugs.

Lennox takes Abe’s hand and shakes it, and when Abe looks down he sees Lennox has palmed a piece of paper into Abe’s hand. He pulls his hand back, closing fingers over the paper.

“I hope so,” he says. “It’d be nice to be the good one.”

Lennox shrugs. He glances at his daughters. “There’s room for two good kids, you know.”

Abe laughs softly.

The nearest sister goes up on her toes and leans in, kissing him on the cheek. Abe stares, stunned, and before he can speak, the second sister is up on her toes, kissing his cheek. He watches them go, rushing across the hanging green, clothes blowing in the September wind. When they’re on the far side of the square, he opens the paper and reads what it says.

’til the sun goes out and fools rush in, death cannot harm you

It means nothing to him, but he’s paid an awful lot to get it, so he folds it back up small, tucks it in his pocket, and goes to see his mother.

WHEN ABE
comes to see her, it is exactly as she expected it. Her son has always worn his heart on his sleeve, and from the moment he comes through the door, she can see that a friend is gone and his heart is broken in his chest and Abe van Helsing is in earnest mourning.

He’ll mourn, and a part of her will mourn with him, but the lion’s share will keep its seat and know the cost. She always thinks of him as fair. Where James has her husband’s dark good looks, Abe is every bit her. He’s lost the golden hair he was born with, age has darkened it to a caramel sort of color, but he has the heart shape of her face, and he has the hazel eyes that she does, but in spite of his similar looks, he could not be less like her in any respect. His eyes, for example, are threaded with red, and hers are ivory pale.

“I heard about what happened, sweetie,” she says. If this was James it would be a simple thing. She would settle him on the couch and bring him drink after drink until he mellowed, until he grew weary and pliable, and this is the trouble with having two sons, one who is golden and who does his duty and knows what’s right and what is wrong, and one who is useful.