Red Right Hand (21 page)

Ten steps later, I found half my mother in the curled and charred hydrangea bushes she'd planted the summer I turned fifteen.

I knew it was her by the sparrow tattoo on her ankle, which she'd gotten long before settling down with my father, long before I'd been born. The lines were dark, thick with age, and the colors faded to a pale, watercolor version of their former glory. I knew it was hers by the two bright stars under it, one pink and one blue, added when I and then my brother were born. Her legs stuck up from a hole, twisted and bent, the tattoo almost eye level with me. I carefully touched her leg and found it as cold and hard as clay under my fingertips.

Nausea made me turn and I kept moving.

Jackson! I have to find Jacks. He needs me.

I found him around the corner.

He lay limp and loose across the stomach of a monster, limbs spilled out as if he'd been disjointed. His face was blank and serene, his blond hair sweeping across his forehead the way it always had. It bothered him, but he never wanted it cut. Wearing superhero pajamas in blue and webbed red, he looked like he merely slept sweetly, dreaming of spring days and warm cookies. The monster holding him sprawled on spindly legs, enormous balloon stomach hanging like a loincloth between them. Its jagged teeth, like broken glass in a windowpane, were peeling skin from bone on Jackson's leg. Webbed hands held my brother's frail body while wings of tattered sailcloth slowly beat the air.

I screamed at the bloated horror squatting in the firelight of my childhood home. It goggled at me with blank orbs like peeled eggs gone rotten and continued to munch and chew, mulchy grinding noises leaking from its gaping maw. It shifted and let loose a blast of intestinal wind before settling back to its chewing.

I was taking a step toward it when something clamped on my shoulder and jerked me around in a swirl of absolute darkness.

 

36

T
HE REAL WORLD
smashed into me like the fist of God. I found myself sprawling on the linoleum of my kitchen, feeling as though someone had beaten me. My throat was raw and so was my mind; the images of what I had seen were flash-burned across the theater of my brain like the afterimages of a strobe effect. My stomach twisted, trying to tie itself into a knot, acid boiling rapidly.

I looked up. The Man in Black was on his feet, staring down at me. The coat unfurled at the bottom, slinking across the floor to lightly brush my arm. I shook it off before it could start singing in my brain.

“What. The
hell
. Was that?”

“That is what your world will be if we do not stop my kith and kin from crossing over.” He knelt, coat flaring out around him. “Once an elder god fully manifests in this realm, they will bring their offspring and
their allies. The martial strength of the human race will be the flailing of infants before lions, and you will be destroyed.”

Pushing off the floor, I scrambled to my feet. My knees shook, and so did my hands. At least I was standing. “Why did you show me that?”

He rose in a column of ebony. “That was your gift at work. You Saw what was necessary for you to understand the enormity of the task at hand.”

“Do you have any idea what just went through my brain?” Anger flared as echoes of the images I had seen bounced behind my eyes.

“It was only a pale sliver of the horror that will be visited on this world if we do not finish our task.” He flickered, a filmstrip hitting a snag, and then he was sitting back in the chair, coffee cup in his red right hand. I didn't see him move. One second he stood in front of me, the next he sat across the room. He indicated the empty chair with a flourish of his normal hand. “Sit, Acolyte. I have one more thing we should discuss.”

Anger hummed inside me. My hand fell to the handle of the Aqedah stuck through my belt. It felt right and natural for the handle to be in my palm. “If you try anything like that again, I'll pull this knife and take my chances. I'm sick of you just demanding and casting spells to make me do what you want. It ends now.”

I expected him to get angry, to rise in a roll of black coat and sorcerous wrath and have it out with me there in the kitchen. I was ready for it, hand on the magick knife, body tense, my own magick pumping through my veins and riding a flash flood of adrenaline. My teeth hurt as I snarled. I was ready to fight and ready to die.

The Man in Black chuckled.

“This is why I have fallen in love with your race. Given an inkling of power, you go instantly to war. You are perfect instruments of chaos, ready to take life, the thing you hold most precious in yourself, from another. You ruin the world that gives you sustenance and believe yourselves immortal while fearing your own death every moment. I could not have created you more perfectly myself. It warms my heart.” He smiled, sharp-pointed and wide. “All of them.”

I wasn't expecting humor. It took me by surprise, and I faltered, taking a step back.

He motioned to the chair again. “Sit. I have no threats and no incantations, simply an offer that you need to hear, Charlotte Tristan Moore.”

My fury fell away, slipping off like scales, but I wasn't ready to simply take the chair and parley. I kept my feet, and I kept my hand on the knife. “First, tell me why you won't let Daniel go. I need a reason.”

I loved him. I had to try.

“You are familiar with the concept that gods gain power from their worshipers.”

He didn't phrase it as a question, but I answered anyway. “Yeah, Neil Gaiman covered that idea. A lot.”

“The concept holds true in this case. Your magick is inside you, but it needs a catalyst, an outside power source for you to use it. His feelings for you make him that catalyst.”

An image of Daniel outside the hospital earlier filled my head. He had been sick and weak. My mind flashed forward to him after teleporting to that room, the room with those animals. In my memory he was pale, his skin washed out and his hands shaking. Flash forward again to him here at the table, unable to sit up straight, looking like death warmed over.

It all fell into place, crashing inside me like Tetris played with twelve-ton stones.

“You bastard.” My voice was low and harsh. “Every time I use magick, it steals some of his life. You knew, and you waited until now to tell me?” My hand tightened on the knife.

“It is the way magick works, Acolyte.”

“Not anymore. Not him.” The knife slid out of my belt. “Let. Him.
Go.
”

The Man in Black set down his coffee cup, red right hand slipping under the flap of his coat. “You should hear my offer before you do something rash.”

“Let him go.”

He stood. “I can free you from the memory of what happened, Charlotte Tristan Moore. I can wipe it from your mind as if it never occurred.”

I said nothing, just stared at him. His coat rustled, but he was motionless, as if he had been carved from obsidian and sandalwood.

He continued. “You need never again flash back to that night. You can be free of the fear, the anger, the pain you have carried with you for a decade now, and it will require only one thing of you.”

We stared at each other. I didn't know what my face looked like, but his was perfectly blank, Semitic features closed and dark.

Free.

He offered me freedom from a prison I'd been locked in for nearly half my life. Somewhere deep in my heart a yearning for that sprang up. To not spend my entire life worrying about every man I met, to not have nights when I couldn't sleep in the bed because of the feel of the mattress underneath me. To not have every ache or pain, every headache, be an instant reminder of how I'd been hurt so long ago.

And I would only have to sacrifice Daniel for it.

 …

It was too much.

I opened my mouth, not sure what I would say. Daniel's voice cut me off before I could speak.

“Name your price, and we'll pay it.” He stepped into the room. “Master.”

The Man in Black smiled.

Oh, Daniel, what did you just do?

 

37

M
Y BEDROOM DOOR
shut with a loud
click
. I stood, my hand on the knob, not turning around, not moving, just standing there facing the white painted wood.

The Man in Black had left us downstairs in a swirl of coat, saying he had to prepare for our next encounter. The pale light of a coming dawn pressed against the window. The Man in Black said his spell would end then, meaning my roommates would wake up, so we were waiting in my room, out of sight and away from any questions they might have. It'd been a silent walk up the stairs. We hadn't said a word to each other since Daniel's declaration in the kitchen. I could feel he wanted to speak, but I didn't know what to say. My thoughts and feelings swirled in a maelstrom of confusion.

“Charlie.” Daniel's voice came from behind me. “Talk to me. Please.”

I didn't turn around. “I just need a second, Daniel. Give it to me.”

He didn't say anything else. I felt him step close to me, stop, and then step back.

He doesn't know. He can't.

I took a deep breath and held it, letting it sit in my lungs. The pressure built and I still held it, kept it until it began to burn, held it hostage until my heart began to beat harder, until my pulse pounded in my chest and temples.

Black spots speckled the edge of my vision.

I let the breath out slowly, allowing it to carry away my anger and leave behind a hard shell of calm.

I turned around.

Daniel stood looking at my bookcase, leaning in and reading titles off the spines. It was a cheap thing made of particleboard and laminate. I'd bought it at a box store and kept it for years. It had made two moves it wasn't designed to endure, once to college and once here. Because of this, and the amount of books I'd shoved on it, it leaned to the left and had to be propped up with folded cardboard to retain its upright position. Books of all kinds hung off the edges of the shelves. They jutted and jumbled, haphazard and threatening to fall for lack of space. Hardbacks, paperbacks, graphic novels; some new, most old and used; in double-stacked rows organized only by size and how they would fit on the shelf. I read everything and anything, judging each book and each writer on their own merits but keeping almost everything I consumed. In each book I found something—its language, its imagery, a character, the plot—to be worth retaining.

I don't loan my books. Don't even ask. I'd loan you my kidneys first.

Daniel realized I was watching him. He half turned. “You said you were a reader. I had no idea it was…”

“How much did you hear?”

The question stopped him short. For a long moment he didn't say anything.

“You heard why he won't let you go.” I didn't make it a question. “You understood the part where every time I use magick it kills you a little bit.”

He nodded.

“Then why in the world would you agree to keep helping him?”

He stepped forward. “Because I was in the room tonight with those sons of bitches who hurt you. I saw your pain because of what they did, and if the fucking God of Nightmares can take that away then I'll pay the price. Gladly.” His brows pulled together, mouth set in a straight line of determination, but he was still so very pale, eyes still buried in dark hollows.

“I'm touched.” I put my hand on his arm so he would know I wasn't just saying it. “I really am. But you can't.”

“I'm the only one who can.”

“
I
can't let you do that.”

“Why not?”

I looked away, pulling my hand back.

He grabbed it, holding it fiercely. “Why not, Charlie?”

“Because I love you, dammit.”

There. I said it.

We both froze. The words hung between us, locking us in that moment. A small part of me was more afraid right then than I'd been all night, with all the terrors I'd been through. Afraid he would push me away. Afraid he would laugh at my love.

Afraid he would use it to hurt me.

His hand slipped from my fingers, moving up my arm, then warm against my neck. He cupped my face and gently turned it toward his. His eyes were bright, intense. The look in them burned into my soul, lighting me from the inside.

“I love you too, Charlotte Tristan Moore.”

He kissed me, and the world went away.

 

38

J
ERKED FROM A
dreamless sleep, I awoke in a tangle of covers and clothes. Sunlight slanted in from the blinds on the window. Late afternoon. The sun came up on the opposite side of the building in the mornings. Daniel lay beside me, out cold, a thin sheen of sweat across his forehead. It was stuffy in the small room, the air thick and still. We'd fallen asleep. I hadn't meant to fall asleep.

I'd never slept with a man before.

Sitting there in the overbright room, I realized I wasn't panicked. I wasn't scared. It somehow felt right. Different. A little strange … but
right
to be inches from Daniel's sleeping form. He stretched on his back across one side of the mattress, both arms laid over his head, his stomach exposed where his shirt had ridden up.

Isaac on the altar.

The thought made my eyes drift to the Aqedah. The ancient knife sat on my bedside table beside the dog-
eared, thrift-store copy of
The Wasteland and Other Writings
by T. S. Eliot, highlighted red by the cheap alarm clock.

Something shrilled under the covers. My phone. My phone was ringing. Throwing the comforter aside, I dug it out of my pocket, reading the display to see who was calling before putting it to my ear.

“Mom?”

My mother's voice came across the line. It sounded hollow, echoing lightly, like the connection was off. “Charlie, are you okay?”