Shallow Graves (9 page)

In the candlelight I saw, for just a second, a shape beside Rain: a weeping woman with blood on her clothes, holding her face in her hands. I flinched, which only made the throbbing pain in my side worse. I was only imagining it. There was nobody else in the room.

“What happened to her?”

“They took her away.”

I saw that too: the woman screaming, clawing at the floor, kicking as men without faces dragged her through the door. Her screams were so clear I would have sworn they were real. They had the shape of names torn from her throat, of pleas that were so far beyond desperation they were barely even words anymore. I felt her fear as if it were my own, racing blood and pounding heart and cold sweat. The red walls pressed all around, closer and closer, and the woman's hands caught, clawlike, on the doorframe, and she was gone.

I blinked, the walls retreated, and the room faded to dull brown.

“You mean Mr. Willow? He took her away?”

Rain raised a single delicate eyebrow. Her cheekbones were sharp in the candlelight. I tried not to stare. “You met the big man, did you?” Her voice was normal again. “Not many people get to do that. Not me. I got his minions.” Rain jerked her thumb toward the closed door. “That asshole out there. He's our prison guard.”

“I met Mr. Willow,” I said. “I didn't know he was the big man of anything.”

“Is he as scary as they say? I'm picturing the mutant offspring of Charles Manson and Ted Bundy.”

“He looks like a middle-aged Mormon missionary,” I said, and Rain laughed. “I didn't realize he was famous.”

“Everybody knows about Willow,” Rain said, but then she amended, “all the monsters in Colorado, anyway. He's been around forever, but small scale. Family deal. It usually is, you know? Grandpa discovers there are monsters among us back in the day
and spends his life training up all his gap-toothed redneck spawn to hunt them down. They don't usually share it around.”

“Nobody's that good at keeping secrets,” I protested, even though I knew she had to be right. If I was taking the logical approach, I had to accept that. Monsters were real, because I was one. Most people had no idea they existed, because I never had before. Two true things. It was an unsettling realization, to say the least, that those two truths were the new center of my world.

Rain shrugged. “Who would believe them? It's easier to keep a secret if anybody who tells the truth is considered delusional. That's the way it was with Willow's dad. He was this paranoid backwoods militia guy, you know the type, and everybody knew he was batshit. His group fell apart after something bad went down—some members of his congregation died, nobody really knows what happened. But he's been gone for years, and nobody knew his son was carrying on Daddy's mission until a few years ago.” She smiled, quick and predatory. “We ran them out. That was a fun night.”

Violet had said that they moved their congregation from Colorado to Nebraska. I hadn't thought to ask why. I hadn't suspected the reason could be that people objected to being grabbed off the streets and magically imprisoned in bloodstained rooms.

“But you said they got you in Colorado anyway.”

“I guess the asshole decided he didn't want to stay run out.” Rain stretched her legs before her and yawned. “A lot of people are going to be really pissed when they find out he's hunting in Boulder again. It's worse with humans like him, you know? The ones who just hate us because their second cousin's great-grandmother's best
friend saw a scary monster in the woods are one thing. Who cares what they think? But people like Willow, they think they're doing it for our own good. He's even got people like us working for him.”

“Yeah, I met some of them.”

I still didn't know if Violet had been expecting me to stay, or hoping I would get away. And Lyle—I had a pretty good idea that Lyle wasn't exactly cooperating willingly, but I didn't know what hold Mr. Willow had over him and his sister. I still hurt too much from the damage Lyle had done to me to care all that much.

“What do they do to people?” I asked. Rain started to answer, but I added quickly, “I mean the ones they don't kill. Is it some kind of . . . a magic ritual or something?”

“Magic ritual?” Rain laughed again. It was a big laugh, bold and unashamed, and I was really starting to dislike it. “God, you're adorable. Yes, Breezy, it's a magic ritual. No idea what it is, though. I've only ever met one guy who survived it, and he says he can't remember. Of course, that could be all the mind-altering drugs he took to get over the trauma.”

Not
what
it is, I thought. She had that wrong.
Who
. Mr. Willow and Violet had both been absolutely clear on that point. There was a
who
involved. A woman they called Mother who liked to be given gifts of bound and bleeding monsters wrapped up with a bow.

Rain went on, “What I don't get—”

She stopped, cocked her head to one side.

There were footsteps outside the room and a man's murmuring voice.

Rain crept over to the door. There was no shimmer of air when
she leaned close, no sparks of light. I didn't know what I was expecting. A little more flash. Magic was supposed to be flashy.

The man said, “It's fine, it's strong enough, I swear. Yeah, I can hear both of them. Even the— Yes. I won't. Nothing's going to—” A pause. “Fine. Whatever.” His voice grew quieter, and his footsteps retreated.

Rain sat down again.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“He's our prison guard.”

“Is he—is he human?”

“Far as I know.”

“Is he alone?”

“For now, yeah, but he'll have help when it's time to take us away.” Rain leaned back on her hands and gave me a narrow look. “Don't even think about it. Even if he opens the door, we won't be able to get out. It's stupid to try anything while we're stuck in here, so don't.”

“Does it work?” I asked.

“Does what work?”

“Whatever they do to people.” I already regretted asking, but it was too late to take it back. “What they do when they say they can help. Does it work? You said you knew somebody who did it.”

She looked at me for a long time before answering. “If you wanted to find out that bad, you should have just gone with them.”

“They were a little evangelical for my tastes.”

But she was still staring at me. “Whatever you're thinking, you need to get over it,” she said. “We are what we are. Most of us are
fine with it. There's no point in hating something that's natural. What you're asking, that's like asking a human if they can be a chimpanzee instead. Stop thinking about it. It's only the humans who think we need to be fixed.” There was a nasty twist on the word
fixed.

My instinctive thought: but I am human. I bit my lip to keep the words from escaping.

I felt a pinch in my gut, a queasy uncertainty that was more emotion than rational thought. When I let myself think of how it might go, if Mr. Willow's Mother could do what he said she could do, the possibility was so tantalizing it made my breath catch. I could get rid of these shadows, this body, this aimless flight from everything familiar. I could go home.

But right on its heels came the rest of it: Esme drooling on her towel, the knitting woman by the window, the children who played without joy, without sound. Violet touching my face and telling me to run. Lyle's apology rasping in my ear.

I needed my notebook. I needed my Real/Not Real list. I needed my observations and hypotheses. I didn't know who to believe. I didn't know what to think. Rain didn't know what I had done, didn't know I had a body count just two weeks into my new life as a monster. I wondered how she would react if she knew, if she would be less amused, more wary, or if stories like mine were common in her world.

Mr. Willow didn't know what I had done either, and he already thought I was an evil thing that needed to be destroyed.

The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all smeared in those shifting,
changeable shades of red and brown. I didn't trust the judgment of anybody who could put people in a room like this. It was better to think of the walls that way:
red
, not
bloodstained.
Bloodstained didn't even do them justice. Blood soaked. Blood drenched. I didn't know how much blood that would take, or why it could keep us in. I doubted blood by the pint from the local butcher shop and a fancy textured roller from Home Depot were how they went about making a room like this.

I had no idea what time it was. There was no light visible through the boarded-up windows. I didn't think much of Rain's sit-and-wait plan, but I didn't have any better ideas. I couldn't learn anything new as long as we were stuck in here.

I couldn't lean against any of the walls without making myself sick and there was no way I was going near the stained mattress, so I lay flat on my back to ease the pain in my side and entertained a lot of creatively nasty thoughts about Lyle and his claws. Lyle, Lyle, venomous humanoid crocodile.

Not for the first time, I missed my stars. It was cold in the darkness, cold and lonely and empty and I had been dead, but it was quiet and peaceful. Nobody had ever tried to strangle me or drug me or rip me apart with their claws when I was floating in the stars.

THERE WERE FOOTSTEPS
in the hallway again. I sat up, and Rain rose to her feet. A key rattled and the door opened.

I was expecting somebody like Mr. Willow, with his have-you-accepted-Jesus-as-your-savior hair and warm smile, but the man in the doorway looked like he had reached the age of thirty without realizing he wasn't a frat boy anymore. No Steelers jersey, but he had blond hair in gelled spikes, a T-shirt advertising a craft beer, baggy cargo shorts, and a tattoo of a sunburst on his right calf.

He also had a shotgun. He raised it to his shoulder and pointed it at Rain. “Don't say anything.”

“Why not? Don't you want to chat?”

“Shut up,” the man said. “Come over here.”

Rain smiled. “Come and get me.”

“I don't have time for this,” he said. He didn't come through the door.

“Oh, are we interrupting your busy day?” Rain said. “We're so sorry about that.”

“Shut the hell up.” Holding the gun with one hand, the man reached into his pocket with the other and brought out a stiff plastic zip tie. “Don't say anything. Put this on. Both hands.”

He threw the tie at Rain; it dropped to the floor. She nudged it with her bare toe.

“Seriously?” She glanced at me. She was grinning. “Can you believe this guy? He thinks he's in a cop movie.”

“Wrong genre,” I said. My mouth was dry. I wasn't happy she had reminded the man of my presence. I tensed when he turned the gun in my direction.

“You get back,” he said.

I slid along the floor until I felt the magical wall at my back.

The man turned his attention and the gun back to Rain. “Put those on and get over here. Don't talk. Don't say one word.”

“Where's your backup?” Rain said, and her voice was changing again, slowing down, deeper, almost sultry, like she was flirting with him, but there was nothing flirtatious about the look in her eyes. “Aren't you supposed to wait for help before you let the animals out of their cage?”

I could see it, the cage in the old-fashioned wallpaper beneath the blood, vines and leaves turning to iron.

“Shut up! Either you come with me now, or you stay in there.” He didn't say
permanently
, but only because he didn't have the appropriate sense of drama. He was shaking, nervous and scared; there was sweat trickling down the side of his face.

“I think you should come in here,” Rain said.

“Stop wasting my time. Stop
talking.
”

“I really think you should come in here. We have something to talk about.”

He really should come in here. It was warm and red and so much better than out there.

I shook myself. I didn't want him in the room. I wanted him to leave.

The man looked just as uneasy as I felt, but when Rain said it a third time—“Come in, Brian, let's talk about why I'm here”—he stepped through the doorway.

As soon as he was inside the room, I felt it.

He was speaking to Rain, telling her to shut up again, shut up shut up shut up, but I couldn't focus on the words.

With the others, the man at my grave and Duncan Palmer in his blue Corolla, the war vets in McDonald's, the people I passed on the street, it felt like clinging vines, a tangle of shadows invisible but still somehow dark, dirty gray banners trailing behind them, a constant reminder of what they had done.

This man was nothing like that.

This man was a flood of thick black oil. His stupid hair, his angry expression, all of it vanished in the overpowering roar of the people he had killed. He had killed so many people that's all there
was to him, those dark tentacles swirling like a living thing, grasping and strangling, reaching from his mouth, from his eyes, tangled about his arms and legs like ropes, dragging him along as though they were alive and he was only their puppet.

I couldn't imagine how somebody so young could have taken so many lives.

I heard twin shouts, the man and Rain, but I paid no attention. A strangled cry ripped from my throat. I flung myself at the man and tackled him around the waist. He was bigger than me, a full foot taller, but I caught him by surprise. He tripped backward, went down on his ass.

He swung the shotgun around, struck the side of my head hard enough to make white spots erupt in front of my eyes. He was shouting. Threats, curses. I couldn't understand him. I didn't care. I couldn't hear anything except the furious roar and the jackhammering of my own heart. The man rocked up on his back and kicked me, planting the sole of one shoe on the unhealed slashes from Lyle's claws. I screamed and doubled over, rolled to the side as he fired the gun.

My ears rang, and for several seconds I couldn't hear anything at all—then I heard the second shot, also wide, that time because Rain had kicked him in the face as he was climbing to his feet. She was shouting too, but her voice was so faint she could have been miles away. All I could hear was the ringing. The pain in my side was overpowering, sickening, and I was distantly aware of another, smaller pain, a new one, sharp points of heat in my shoulder and neck.

The man got his feet under him and lunged toward me,
swinging the shotgun like a bat. I ducked and grabbed his arm with both hands, digging my fingernails into his skin. He beat at my back with the gun, but I held on, and I
pulled.

It had been so easy with the man in the car, a clean break like a bone snapping. This wasn't easy. There was too much, so many deaths, and he carried all of them, dragged them in a thick black web. I tried, I tried, but it was like falling face-first into a thicket of thorns. The pain was overwhelming.

I let go.

The man dropped like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The shotgun clattered to the floor.

Somebody was screaming, screaming without words, impossibly loud inside my head. I collapsed.

I trembled on the floor for a long time, eyes squeezed shut, unable to move.

The man's memories swallowed me in a black tsunami. His hand tight around pale wrists and ankles. Men, women. Small wrists, small ankles. Children. Some in the red room, some in a dark tunnel, an endless hungry throat. The fingers of his victims scrabbled on hard rock, clawed until they bled. The sweet scent of pine trees and the stench of blood. Gritty sand beneath my shoes. The crunch of small white bones. The startling clang of a metal door slamming, and another, and another, and laughter down a long, long tunnel.

There were too many of them, all jumbled together and confused. I couldn't separate them because he couldn't separate them anymore.

The pleas and screams faded. It felt like hours, but only moments passed. The world beyond his memories began to penetrate.

“Holy shit! What did you do?” Rain was shouting, her voice so loud it was a drumbeat inside my skull.

I tried to tell her that I didn't know, but the words came out as a pained gasp.

“That was
awesome
. What the hell are you?”

I couldn't speak. I opened my eyes, got my hands under me and pushed myself up. Rain was standing on the other side of the room, staring at me with her eyes wide, her mouth open.

“Holy shit, girl. Why aren't you dead? He shot you!”

“I don't know. He missed. I don't know.”

Both blasts from the shotgun had gone wide, but I was bleeding sluggishly from pellet bites in my arm and the side of my neck. The wall behind me was pockmarked, pale wood showing through chips in the blood.

Already the pain was burrowing away. I couldn't ignore it, but I could bear it. I had spent the first seventeen years of my life never suffering anything worse than a sprained ankle and monthly cramps, but I was getting used to hurting all the time. I had never thought being dead would hurt so much more than being alive.

I breathed until I was steady, then inched across the floor toward the man.

“What are you doing?” Rain said. “Stop it. You're messed up. Relax. What are you doing?”

When I looked up at her, the shock on her face slowly gave way
to a wide grin. I had attacked a man in a blind animal rage and she didn't know why, but it didn't frighten her. It delighted her.

I felt shamed and sick to my stomach. I couldn't look at Rain anymore, so I studied the man on the floor.

“How did you do that?” she asked.

“He's not dead,” I said. I needed her to know that. “He's not dead. Just unconscious.”

Even as I said it, I knew it wasn't strictly true. I hadn't knocked him out with a blow to the head. This was different.

His blue eyes were open, and he was breathing. I pressed my fingers to his neck; his heart was beating. There were scratches in his arm where I had dug in my fingernails. I looked at my hands, but I was covered with too much of my own blood to see any of his.

His memories were still jangling and clashing in my mind. He had come into this room alone before, without waiting for help, and that time he had been armed with a knife. A young man cowering on the mattress had bled out from twin long slashes down his arms, and his blood had seeped through the mattress and into the floor, drying in eerily red stains. For days afterward, the man had opened the door to check that his victim was still dying, and he had sat down cross-legged in the open doorway and whispered to himself: “He can't get out, he can't get out, he can't get out.” It took a long time for the young man to die.

“What?” Rain said.

I was staring at the mattress. “He was going to kill you. He's—he's killed a lot of people.”

Rain looked at me curiously, her beautiful amber eyes glittering
in the candlelight. “I kinda figured. But how did you know?”

“It's not paint,” I said, too tired for sarcasm, “and it's not ketchup.”

“No, come on. You've got something else. How did you know?”

I shrugged. “I don't know.”

“That,” she said, “is very interesting. But I don't think you're lying to me. I think you really are that clueless.”

Another shrug.

Rain reached out hesitantly, her palm open toward the wall. She recoiled with an expression of distaste. “Still there. I could have told you that. I did tell you that. Him being—” She gestured vaguely. “Didn't make any difference. Is he going to wake up?”

The man's blue eyes didn't blink, didn't contract, didn't flinch when I snapped my bloody fingers in front of his face. I could barely stand to look at him. Something about his blank stare was so much worse than the man I'd left dead in the car beside a country road. Unfinished in a way that felt like an open wound, a gash that should have been cleaned but was instead left to fester. His face was rigid, not slack; every muscle in his body had tensed as he fell. I didn't want to know what was happening behind his open eyes. I could still feel the oily cloak of his shadows, coiling and twisting like a knot of snakes. I had stripped some of those shadows away, but not all of them. He had killed so many people.

I searched through his pockets. I found the key to the room, a phone, a wallet.

Rain huffed in amusement. “Are you seriously robbing a corpse?”

“Not a corpse,” I said, but I was barely paying attention to her.

He was twenty-nine years old. Not a registered organ donor. He had been sunburned the day they took his photo.

“Brian Kerr,” I said. Brian, the man Mr. Willow had been speaking to on the phone, if it even mattered. “Lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Maybe that's where we are.”

I set the wallet aside and picked up the phone, tapped the screen. No password protection. I looked at it for a few seconds before lowering it. I didn't have anybody to call. I didn't think this was a situation in which 911 would be appropriate.

“Do you have somebody you can call for help?” I asked.

Rain said, “Slide it over here.”

“There's probably a GPS thing on there, to find out where we are.”

Rain rolled her eyes. “Thanks, I never would have thought of that on my own.” She spent a few seconds playing with the phone. “Jesus, we're in the middle of nowhere. I hate Wyoming. All the humans are crazy in Wyoming.”

I crawled away from Brian Kerr's unconscious body, as close to the wall as I could get without feeling any worse than I already did.

“Do you know someone who can help?” I asked again.

Rain looked at the phone, looked at the stained mattress, looked at me.

“How many people do you think he's killed here?” she asked. “I mean, right here, rather than taking them away?”

“At least one. Somebody who took a long time to die.” The young man had been pleading for help long after any normal person—any
human
—would have bled out. “Does it matter?”

“It matters what kind of blood they used,” she said. She glared at the phone. “Who the hell even remembers phone numbers anymore?”

She shrugged and dialed, listened for a few moments. “Hey, it's me. Rain.” A brief pause. “Yeah, ask me if I care. I've been stuck in a— Just shut up and listen for a second, okay? I need your help.” She sounded chipper, cheerful even, no trace of fear in her voice. “Because you owe me. Do you remember what happened— Yes, I am. I am absolutely using that. You owe me. I know you don't want anybody to know what happened. You think everybody's all welcoming and friendly in Boulder, but if they—” Her smile was sharp. “I didn't even know you knew words like that. I ought to wash your mouth out with soap. I need a ride.” Another pause. “Not that far. Just outside of Cheyenne. It's in Wyoming, asshole. The big square north of the big square you live in. No, it's not. It's not that far.” She rattled off an address, repeated it patiently, and said, “Write it down. And hurry.”

She hung up and set the phone on the floor beside her. She hadn't said a word about me.

“It will be a couple of hours,” she said. “He's coming up from Boulder.”