“Let’s keep going. Keep your peepers peeled for anything weird.”
Kayla nods, and follows me. We walk slowly, taking in everything. Kayla sees it first and grabs my elbow.
“Isis.”
I look to where she’s pointing, and my heart sinks. No, sinks isn’t the right word for it. It falls out through my butt. It’s gone, a heavy leaden thing in its place.
There, against a tree and planted in the ground, is a wooden cross, and at the foot of the cross is a small pile of stones.
“Is that –” Kayla swallows, hard. “Is that a –”
“A grave.” I finish. “Yeah.”
She stays, frozen in place, but I move towards it with careful steps. I kneel at the graveside. The wooden cross is shoddy – somebody just put two thick sticks together with twine – but it’s withstood the test of time. The bark’s eroded off; white, bleached wood all that’s left. You could easily see the white color through the trees and from the lakeside, if you caught the right angle. Whoever made the grave knew their stuff, though. The stones probably kept scavengers from digging the body up and eating it.
The grave is so small.
I already know what’s inside. But that’s not enough. I have to see it, with my own two eyes. I start moving the rocks.
“Isis! What are you doing? Stop it!”
“Go back to the car and wait for me.”
“You can’t just – you can’t just dig that up –”
I look over my shoulder at her. “The truth is in here, Kayla. And I have to know. So go back to the car and wait for me. Pretend I’m not doing it.”
Kayla squeezes her eyes shut, but she doesn’t move. I pull the rocks off, one by one, and use a flat one to start digging into the soft square of earth. As I get deeper, I can hear Kayla start to sob. Her cries echo in the forest, and somehow I know they aren’t the first human tears the trees have seen. My arms ache, my fingers burn, and the blood from my torn cuticles flows over and mixes with the dirt, but I can’t stop. I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. It’s feet down. Two feet, three feet, and then –
And then the dirt comes apart, and there’s a tiny piece of pink blanket sticking out of the ground. I bleed on it. I dig faster, but more gently, just around the bundle that’s starting to form. I dig until it comes loose, and pull it out slowly. Brush the dirt off. Put it on the pine needle ground and open it. It’s pinned, but the safety pin is long rusted and snaps easily, and the edges of the blanket falls apart like a crusted, ancient flower to reveal the center.
I feel Kayla’s heat to my left, her curiosity obviously overcoming her reluctance. But the second the blanket falls apart, she starts crying harder than ever, and pulls away like she’s been burned.
“No. No no no,” she cries. “No. No no!”
A tiny skeleton looks up at me, with eyes too small and too black to see anything. It never got to see anything. That much I’m sure of. Five months? Maybe six, but that’s pushing it. And next to the skeleton is a miniscule bracelet, with letter-beads. My shaking fingers pick it up.
Tallulah
I stare at the name for what feels like hours. Days. Tallulah.
Tallie, for short.
***
The sounds of the basement deafen me the second I walk in. Bull’s Tail isn’t a nice bar, or even a tolerable one – sawdust and piss and vomit crusting in the corners – but it’s exactly what I’m looking for.
It’s exactly the place people’s hopes go to die.
On a Saturday night, it’s as packed as it can be. Men swagger and guffaw into their beer and whiskey, the smell of B.O and stale peanuts overpowering. Rock music blares from the creaky jukebox in the corner and the flickering LED TV above the bar shows a game only a fraction of the patrons seem to care about. The bartender is an older woman with once-bright blonde hair and beauty to spare, but years of wolf-whistles and ass-grabbing has worn her to a pale mockery of that.
“What are you having?” She flicks a half-second, strained smile in my direction.
“Two shots of your strongest. And Gin and tonic. On the rocks.”
“ID?” She asks. I fish it out and she nods. “Alright, one sec.”
I wait. I’m the only one here without a pot-belly, and the women are starting to notice. Good. That’ll make this much easier.
The bartender comes back with my drinks, and I down them as quick as I can.
“Whoa there,” A man to my left says. “You’re awfully young to be drinking that hard.”
“You’re awfully nosy for someone that old.”
He laughs, but it’s not an offended laugh. It’s amused. I look over at him – a tweed suit covers a considerably hefty frame. I recall him walking behind me on the sidewalk. He isn’t fat - in fact quite the contrary. He has broad shoulders and muscles gone slightly to pasture. He sits perfectly straight, but with an easy demeanor to it. His right index finger and the tendon attaching to it in his arm are very well-defined; classic indications of trigger-finger. Military, without a doubt. His hair is white and sparse, and his mustache faint. Dark eyes glitter over at me.
“People only drink like that for two reasons – to remember something, or to forget something,” he says.
“Aren’t you just full of tautologies,” I scoff. The gin and vodka burns on my tongue. The women are moving, and I’m picking my target carefully. It has to be someone stupid enough to assume the worst of me. And that means any drunk man will do.
“It’s a girl, isn’t it?” The military man asks. I don’t dignify him with a response. “Is she pretty?”
I swirl the leftover ice in my glass and remain silent.
“So she’s ugly. Must be absolutely hideous.”
“No,” I snap. “Not that it matters, but no.”
“’Not that it matters’?” He presses. I pause. He’s goading me into talking, but the alcohol is hitting me fast and I have nothing left to lose.
“She’s pretty. I suppose.” I wince. “It’s not that she’s pretty. She’s pretty but that isn’t all she is.”
“Of course not. Otherwise she wouldn’t have you here, drinking and tongue-tied.”
I slide my glass back to the bartender and face the man. He’s faintly smiling, hands wrapped around a bourbon ice. His silence is somehow more irritating than his words, so I break it.
“Men like to categorize women.” I curl my lip. “Into convenient little boxes like ‘hot’, or ‘cute’, or ‘beautiful’. It’s easy for them. It’s never been easy for me.”
“So this particular girl,” the man leads. “She’s none of those?”
“She’s all of those,” I say, a little too quickly for my own liking. “And more than those, and at the same time she’s none of those. She is exactly herself, no more and no less. But saying that now is pointless.”
“Did she dump you?”
“She told me to stay out of her life.”
“And so here you are, stumbling into a backwater bar to start a fight with someone just to vent all that out.”
I narrow my eyes at him. His smile remains.
“I’ve been alive long enough to know the face of someone looking for a fight. And I know the face of someone who knows what it’s like to fight.”
The man’s dark eyes suddenly become unreadable.
“And most of all, I know the face of someone who, deep down in a part of themselves they won’t admit to, enjoys fighting.”
I glare at the bartop, the shined wood reflecting my face. The man stops smiling at me, and takes a sip from his brandy before speaking again.
“You see it sometimes, in the guys. Most of us in the army don’t like what we do, believe it or not. We join for the camaraderie, the sense of belonging, of order. Not for the blood. But every once in a while, you see a real piece of work come through. And they like the blood. Some of them are better at hiding it than others, but it always comes out.”
“What are you saying?” I snarl.
“I’m saying, son, that yo
u’re a monster,” he says evenly. “And you hate what you are.”
My fist connects with his jaw before I can stop it. The ice is gone. The poise and calm, rational demeanor I’d kept myself leashed with vaporizes in an instant and he’s pushing back, shoving me by the shoulders outside, and the bartender is yelling something, and the drunk idiots are hooting and hollering, taking bets, following us as we stumble into the night air. I step in a puddle as I duck under the man’s right hook. It’s so powerful the air trailing behind it makes an audible ‘thump’ noise. He’s huge. He is taller and wider than Leo, and I don’t have a bat. He lunges for me, and I throw a trashcan between our path. He kicks it aside, and it crumples against the wall like a tin can.
And for the first time since I saw Isis on the floor with blood around her head, I feel fear. Real, true, cold fear that reaches into my lungs and pulls them up through my throat.
I put my fists up and step around another right hook, but he slams his knee into my chest and I can’t breathe, the world reduced to flashes of white and red and pain. I can barely hear the crowd whooping over the sound of my own surging heartbeat. Someone tries to break us up, but the man shoves them away and lunges for me, and suddenly my feet aren’t touching the ground, his fist in my collar as he lifts me above the cement. Our eyes meet for a split second, his curiously empty of emotion, and he throws me aside. Stars pop in my eyes, and my back hits the brick wall with a sickening thud. I try to scrabble to my feet, but my legs are pained jelly.
The man leans in.
“No one can tame the monster for you, son. Not your parents, not a girl. Not a college or an institution. Only you can do that.”
I spit at his feet, the saliva bloody.
“What do you know about me?”
“Blanche told me a lot about you.”
“Should’ve figured you were one of her goons.”
“Don’t mistake me. I’m not one of hers, and I trust her as far as I can throw her. Which isn’t far, with the way she’s been putting on weight recently.”
I scoff. The man leans back and offers me his hand up. The bar crowd is long gone, the excitement over for them. I glare at his palm, and ease up onto my feet by myself. Every bone in my body screams for me to stop moving, to inject morphine, to roll in bandages, anything to stop the pain.
“I heard about what you did for the Blake family. Word travels fast in the criminal justice circuit.”
“So?”
The man reaches into his jacket and hands me a card. “When you’re ready to use the monster constructively instead of destructively, you come see me.”
He’s gone before I can snipe at him, and I’m alone in the alley with my aching body and bewildered mind. The card is simpler than any I’ve ever seen – simpler than the Rose Club cards, even. And that’s how I know it’s seedy, underworld business.
Gregory Callan
VORTEX Enterprises
I nurse my wounds long enough to get up enough energy to make it back to my car, and collapse. The booze hits my bloodstream, and I welcome the warm relief as it dulls the pain. But with the dullness comes the realization I went looking for a fight. I, Jack Hunter, actively went searching to engage someone in a fight. And now I’m hurt, and buzzed, and my mouth tastes like blood, and all I want to do is go back to that night at Avery’s, to that absurd sea-themed room, to the bed with Batgirl in it, to Isis, to an Isis who confessed to me with tiny, stuttering, shy words, that she liked me, to a moment when everything was simple. Her and I. Her and I in a room, alone.
My phone rings. I wince as I answer.
“Hello?”
“Jack!” Sophia’s sunny voice says. “Dr. Fenwall says the last payment for the surgery came through! Thank you. Thank you so, so much.”
I push out the vestiges of the memories of that night, and smile.
“Don’t thank me. It’s the least I could do.”
“You worked so hard. I’m really grateful. Remember when I said you could choose the place next time we went out?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Dr. Fenwall said he’d let me have a few days out next week. So.”
“I’ll see if I can’t find something fun for us to do.”
“Yeah! But, Avery wants to throw me a surprise party. For my birthday.”
“That’s in March.”
“I know! But if I only have a few days out, she can only plan it then.”
“I thought we hate Avery?”
“We do! I mean, we don’t like her, but she’s trying really hard. And it just seems unfair. And plus, if I don’t make it –”
“Don’t talk like that,” I snap.
“ – If I don’t make it,” she says more sternly. “I don’t want things between us to be bad when I…you know.”
“You won’t.”
“Just, please. I really want to go.”
I sigh. “Alright. I’ll ask her about it.”
“Okay. Thank you. I know it’s hard for you, but thank you.”
“It’s fine.”
“Say hi to your mom for me. Or, I guess I’ll say hi. It still feels weird, though, just popping up on facebook and being like ‘Hey Dahlia! It’s me!’”
“Don’t worry,” I assure her. “She loves you. She always will. You can say hi whenever.”
“Okay! I’m going to try to get some sleep.”
“Good. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Jack.”
When we hang up, Isis’ words ring in my head.
‘She’s dying, Jack.’
I put my head on the steering wheel and pretend I’m somewhere else. Somewhere warm. Somewhere like that ridiculous sea-themed little room.
-8-
3 Years
27 Weeks
2 Days
Since the trial, Mom’s been getting better.
I don’t know if better is the right word. She had to be so strong for so long, just for me, and now that I’m back she’s leaning on me again, and I don’t mind, it’s the norm for us, but I can’t help feeling like I’m a cane sometimes instead of a daughter, but then I get guilty about thinking that and make her dinner and bring her tea and tell her it’ll be alright, instead. Love is being there for someone. If there’s one thing I learned from Aunt Beth, it’s that family means being there when no one else is.
Mom’s going to twice as many shrink appointments, but they seem to be helping. I see Avery at the office, sometimes, and she gives me a passing sneer before flouncing out the door. She’s bitchier lately, and that means she’s happier, and that means Sophia’s probably talking to her again. Avery’s basically her yo-yo, and Sophia pulls her back and forth for her amusement. But you can’t tell Avery that. Sophia can do no wrong in Avery’s eyes. I feel sorry for her. I pity her. And pity’s not healthy, but after everything Avery’s done to me, to Kayla, to Jack and Sophia and Wren, I can’t bring myself to feel something better towards her. And it’s shitty of me, and it’s not very Isis Blake-like.
I’m changing. The old Isis would’ve tried harder to be friends with Avery again, even through all this bullshit. The old Isis would’ve soldiered in with a smile and taken all the blows.
I’m getting worse. I am the villain, after all. The fire-breathing dragon. So it makes sense.
The hospital is quiet. Like the grave. Except people here are trying extremely hard not to be in graves. Very hard. At least four morphine drips and two crappy hospital food trays worth of hard.
Being back here makes me feel claustrophobic – the smell of antiseptic, the people in gowns wandering like ghosts from room-to-room, the nurses and interns all staring and trying to decide where I belong in their mini-ecosystem of healing. Naomi isn’t on duty, which I’m grateful for. I don’t want this to be any messier than it has to be.
Who am I kidding, I totally want it to be messy. Bring on the best mess.
I poke my head into the kids ward for just a second when the guard steps away to pee. Mira and James wave frantically, and I wink and p
ut the plastic bag of presents down inside the door. They come rushing over in their little cartoon-character pajamas with big smiles on.
“Mira said you’d never come back!”
“Did not!” Mira sticks her tongue out at James.
I laugh and ruffle their hair. “I can’t stay long, but I’ll come back in the daytime this week, okay? For now just open the presents. But don’t tell Naomi where you got them. Just say it was from…uh, Jesus. Not that I’m Jesus. Uh.”
They nod frantically, and Mira hugs me around the neck so hard I think she’s trying to merge with me on a cellular level. I manage to pry her fingers off and sneak out just as the guard rounds the corner. The sounds of tearing wrapping paper and squealing reverberate behind me. I made some spawn happy. And that definitely does not make me feel all gooey and happy inside in the slightest because goo is super disgusting except when it is cheese goo on pizza and –
Sophia’s open doorway looms before me. It’s dim, and the usual flower vases line her window. I can see her feet under the blanket.
I stand there for what feels like years. And then I take a deep breath and walk in.
She’s not asleep like I’d hoped. She’s very much awake, blue eyes staring at me over the cover of a romance novel. This one has a knight on it, and a very lost-looking busty lady.
“Yo!” I smile.
“I thought I told you to leave me alone,” she deadpans.
“Uh, yeah, I’ve never been very good at following directions. Or respecting people’s wishes. Or anything at all, really. So here I am. Doing…here stuff.”
She shoots me a withering look. “You’re annoying.”
“That, my dear, is nothing new!” I sit on the end of her bed. “In fact, ‘tis ancient knowledge. The Egyptians foretold of my coming. Actually they mostly told stories about how Isis got it on with her brother. Incest was big back then. So was not living past thirty.”