“I was afraid of that,” said Charlie.
“Jesse wants me to try to find the place it all happened. Out at the lake. They’re taking me out there tomorrow.”
“Oh bloody hell,” said Mel. “It’s been two months. They don’t have to go tomorrow.”
I shrugged. “Might as well. I have the afternoon off.”
“The lake,” said Charlie thoughtfully.
I’d told everyone I’d driven out to the lake. I hadn’t said that what happened afterward also happened at the lake. Till tonight my official memory had ended sitting on the porch of the old cabin.
“Yes. I was—er—held—at a house on the lake. They want me to try to find it.”
Either Mel or Charlie could have said, when did you remember this? What else do you remember? Why did you tell SOF when you haven’t told us? Neither of them did. Mel put his arm around me. “Oh, gods and frigging angels,” he said.
“Be careful,” said Charlie.
One of the (few) advantages to getting to work at four-thirty a.m. is that you can be pretty sure of finding a parking space. When I come in later I’m not always so lucky. I’d had to park the Wreck in a garage lot that evening, and it was locked at eleven. Mel took me home. When we got there and he turned the bike off the silence pressed against me. The sudden quiet is almost always loud when you’ve been on a motorcycle and got somewhere and stopped and turned it off, but this was different. Mel didn’t say any more about the night’s events. He didn’t say any more about SOF taking me out to the lake the next day. I could see him wanting to…but as I’ve said before, one of the reasons Mel and I were still seeing each other after four years was because we could not talk about things sometimes. This included that we both knew when to shut up.
It was blissful, spending time with someone who would leave you alone. I loved him for it. And I was happy to repay in kind.
It had never occurred to me that leaving someone alone could harden into a habit that could become a barrier. It had never occurred to me before now.
I had to repress the desire that he not shut up this time. I had to repress the desire to ask him if I could talk to him.
But what could I have said?
We stood there in the darkness for a minute or two. He was rubbing another of his tattoos, the sand wheel, on the back of his left hand. Then he came with me to check that I still had Kenny’s bicycle and the tires weren’t flat. Then he kissed me and left. “See you tomorrow,” is all he said.
I reached over my head to touch the wards strung along the edge of the porch roof on my way indoors. These were all Yolande’s. Her wards were especially good and I’d often thought of asking her where she got them, but you didn’t really ask Yolande questions. I had noticed that her niece, when she was visiting, didn’t seem to ask questions either, beyond, “I’m taking the girls downtown, can I bring you anything?” And the answer would probably be “No, thank you, dear.”
I wiggled my fingers down the edges of my pots of pansies on the porch steps, to check that the wards I’d buried there were still there, and that a ping against my fingers meant they were still working. I straightened the medallion over my downstairs door and lifted the “go away” mat in front of the one at the top of the stairs to check that the warding built into the lay of the planks of the floor hadn’t been hacked out by creature or creatures unknown. I fluttered the charm paper that was wound round the railing of my balcony to make sure it was still live, blew on the frames of my windows for the faint ripple of response. I didn’t like charms, but I wasn’t naive enough not to have good basic wards, and I’d been a little more meticulous about upkeep in the last two months.
Then I made myself a cup of chamomile tea to damp down the scotch and the cheese. I took off the bunny pajamas and put on one of my own nightgowns. The toilet paper had held; there wasn’t any blood on the SOF thing. I put my still-wet clothes in a sinkful of more soap and water. Tomorrow I would put them through a washing machine. I might throw them out anyway, or burn them. (I still hadn’t burned the cranberry-red dress. It lived at the back of my closet. I think I knew I wasn’t going to burn it after the night I dreamed that it was made of blood, not cloth, and I’d pulled it out of the closet that night, in the dark, and stroked and stroked the dry, silky, shining fabric, which was nothing like blood. Nothing like blood.) My sneakers would live. I had dozens of T-shirts and jeans if I decided I wanted to burn something but I wasn’t going to sacrifice a good pair of sneakers if I could help it.
I pushed open the French doors and went out and sat on my little balcony. It was a clear, quiet night with a bright quarter moon.
When Yolande had had mice in her kitchen I had set take-‘em-alive traps and driven the results twenty miles away and released them in empty farmland. (Wards against wildlife are notoriously bad: hence the electric peanut-butter fence to keep the deer from eating Yo-lande’s roses. And a house ward successful against mice and squirrels would be almost the money-spinner that a charm to let suckers walk around in daylight would be.) I couldn’t kill anything larger than a housefly. I’d stopped putting spiders outdoors after I read somewhere that house spiders won’t survive. When I dusted, I left occupied cobwebs alone. I hadn’t drawn blood in anger since the seventh-grade playground wars.
I don’t eat meat. I’m too squeamish. It all looks like dead animals to me. On the days I cover in the main kitchen, the only hot food is vegetarian.
Maybe my mother had successfully coerced and brainwashed her daughter into being a nice, human wimp.
But I’d blown it. I’d blown it when I’d turned my knife into a key, because it was the only way to stay alive. Because—maybe only because I didn’t know any better—I wanted to stay alive. I looked down at my arms, at my hands cupping the tea mug, as if I would start growing scales or fur or warts—or turning blue—immediately. Most demon blood doesn’t make you big or strong or blue though, whether it comes with magic ability or not. A lot of it makes you weaker or stupider. Or crazier.
I’d been doing okay as my mother’s daughter. My life wasn’t perfect, but whose was?
Yes, I’d always despised myself for being a coward. A wuss. So? There are worse things.
And then I had to drive out to the lake one night. They’d started it. And I may be a wuss, but I’ve never liked bullies. Maybe, if it was all about to go horribly wrong, I could at least go out with a bang.
How cute and sweet and winsome and philosophically high-minded, that I didn’t like bullies, that I wanted to go out with a bang. I was still a coward, I had a master vampire and his gang on my tail, I was all alone, and I was way out of my league.
“Oh, Constantine,” I whispered into the darkness. “What do I do now?”
I slept the moment my head touched the pillow, in spite of everything that had happened. It was very late for me though, and I’d had two generous shots of scotch. The alarm went off about three hours later. I woke strangely easily and peacefully. I can get by on six and a half hours, just, and only if I’m feeling lively generally, which I hadn’t been lately. Three hours’ sleep doesn’t cut it under any conditions. But I sat up and stretched and didn’t feel too bad. And I had the oddest sensation…as if someone had been in my bedroom with me. Given the events of the night before, this should have been panic stations, but it wasn’t. It was a reassuring feeling, as if someone had been guarding me in my sleep.