26

The Nothing

The voices hammered at him, maddening in their constancy, in their chorus. They rained their words like hot fists on naked skin.

He’d done it to himself, let them in, and now he drowned as they snaked through him, piercing and cutting like barbed worms.

An instinct, like breathing—not that he was breathing—told him to focus.

He pulled himself into the smallest, tightest ball, like a roly-poly. Someone had taught him how to make them race over cardboard, but he couldn’t remember who. The tiniest spark, the littlest flame, lay at his center. He cradled it in his hands. Quivering, careful, so careful not to blow it out, he whispered to it.

Who are you?

Adam.

He was Adam Lee.

Binder.

Just knowing that much stoked the flame.

It all rushed back. He rushed back. The voices remained, gathered like a storm outside the ward he’d drawn over the core, the tiny spark of his consciousness.

Thank you, he thought to his teachers, to Sue and Silver. Instinct born of practice had saved him.

He’d drunk the demon’s power and with it, all the things it had consumed. Were he in the world, he’d be possessed by a legion of murderers, but here, in the Nothing, he had no one to hurt.

Still, the thing he most feared, that he’d tried to prevent, had come true.

His entire stay at Liberty House had been an exhausting exercise in pushing away the voices, in trying to keep the other patients’ thoughts from becoming his own.

They hadn’t won then, and he wasn’t a frightened teen anymore.

Slowly, carefully, Adam began to untangle the strands.

He had no idea how long it went on, sorting what was his from what was not.

This memory of burning trash with his mother? His. The trip to the zoo with his class, where he’d pushed another boy into the moat around Monkey Island, seeing him crack his skull and the slick, dark stream of his blood? Not.

The cooling anger at his father, blue and black? His. The impulse to put his hands around his little sister’s throat and squeeze? Not.

So it went. On and on.

Adam snipped the threads. He pulled out the barbs, the hooked thorns.

There were things of his that he could remove, memories and feelings that had hurt him. Each one was a choice. He kept them all. He wouldn’t be less. He’d stay himself.

Finally, eventually, he was alone, drifting silently in the nowhere.

There was a pressure, not water, not air. He could see, but found no light, no darkness.

The pounding in his ears had quieted. He didn’t try to speak or scream. It was almost restful, this near oblivion, but Adam did not dream. He couldn’t turn off his mind.

He couldn’t feel Vic anymore, about the only thing he could feel was the hole in his chest, the warlock wound.

It swirled and pulsed, a black sun in the greater darkness. It didn’t hurt anymore. It was cooling. He was cooling, losing sensation at the edges of his awareness.

I’m sorry, he thought, apologizing to the things he’d killed.

The cold crept closer. The spark grew dimmer, and Adam shrank. He could not survive here. Nothing could.

At least I saved them. He hoped they found a way home.

The Nothing receded without warning.

Adam lay on a familiar roof. He stood, testing his muscles, and they ached from disuse. This was Sue’s trailer, from before John had destroyed it, before Adam had painted the roof white in an attempt to help keep it cool in the summer so they could save on the electric bill.

Dark water flooded the trailer park, making an island of each mobile home.

No lights were on, not even the streetlights that marked the alleys between the lots. He saw no movement, heard none of the noises, the buzz of televisions, the crying babies, or the domestic disputes that always sounded from the place, even in the latest hours.

He sensed no people, no life.

There was no wind, but the leaves of the cottonwoods rustled endlessly.

This didn’t feel like the spirit world. There was no green moon, no watchtowers. But there were stars, too many, an impossible number. No light pollution of any kind, not from Guthrie or the broad arc of Oklahoma City on the southern horizon.

Still, it was familiar.

Except for the tree.

It sprouted from the trailer’s roof, reaching for the sky as it scattered a circle of tiny yellow leaves on the tar paper roof. They fell slowly, like golden snow.

A single naked body was pinned to the thorns clustered on its bark. Bound in its branches, John hung on its thorns, eyes and mouth open in silent agony.

The tree burst into flame, though it didn’t ignite the trailer’s roof. John opened his mouth. Pain wracked him as he burned, but still he made no sound. Water crawled up the bark, oozing from the roof. It doused the tree, and John, but filled his open mouth until he sputtered and choked, drowning on what had spared him. When that ended the tree turned green. Its thorns sprouted, piercing Adam’s great-grandfather. The leaves began to yellow and sparks lit at their edges.

“That’s a mess, ain’t it?” a voice asked.

Adam turned and found the blond cowboy from the underworld standing behind him.

“You,” Adam said, recognizing him now. “Jimmy.”

“Hello, coz,” Jimmy said with a smile and a tip of his hat.

“You threw me off with the whole roper thing,” Adam said, nodding to the boots and chaps.

“Hey, ropers are posers. I ride.”

“I didn’t know that about you,” Adam said. The tree ignited again. John screamed. Adam wanted to look away, to close his eyes, but he couldn’t. Even as he focused on Jimmy, John drowned over his shoulder.

“It’s kind of new,” Jimmy said. “Since, well, you know.”

He made a slicing gesture across his throat.

“What’s happening to him?” Adam asked, looking back to the water, to the flames, to the long, piercing thorns. John met Adam’s eyes and begged, sobbing. The cycle started again.

“That’s the threefold death,” Jimmy said. “It’s the fate of any druid who betrays their nature, who betrays nature itself. Those are the rules.”

The rules, Adam thought. Death’s rules. And life’s.

So these were the consequences of breaking them, at least for John.

“How is he a druid?” Adam asked. “He’s always been called that. Seamus explained a little of it to me, but what does it mean?”

“I guess it’s time for a little family history,” Jimmy said. His drawl was stronger than Adam’s, maybe that too was a cowboy thing.

Dust clogged Adam’s throat as the scene changed.

“What is this?” Adam asked. “Why are we here?”

“It’s last call, Adam Lee. You’re backstage. Might as well take the full tour.”

John and the tree came along for the show, but it was dust that doused the flames and choked his throat.

They stood outside a small house. The wind had scoured any paint from its boards.

Adam recognized the flat, rolling landscape, the endless sea of switchgrass, and the beaten windmill pumping up water.

This was the old family homestead, well before Adam or Jimmy’s time. John’s tree sprouted seed pods. They rattled as they fell to the ground and sprang to life as rattlesnakes. Slithering, they crawled across him, covering him, strangling him before the cycle of burn and drown and strangle started again.

A little boy, cotton-topped, ran across the ground, laughing. He didn’t notice his visitors.

“That’s him, isn’t it?” Adam asked, looking between the child and the tree.

“These are his memories,” Jimmy said.

“Why are you showing me this?” Adam asked. “How are you showing me this?”

“Murder is a very intimate thing. He tied us together when he killed me, especially how he killed me, drinking my life to make it his own. As for why, there are things you should know, things you should see.”

“But why?”

“Because you have a choice to make.”

Baby John aged.

He worked the farm with his parents.

Adam studied these ancestors, but didn’t see himself in their rough clothes and dust-streaked faces.

Except for John. Adam had John’s eyes, his sandy blond hair, and his lean frame.

When Johnny started talking to the trees, his parents shared a knowing look. They smiled when he told jokes to the frogs he caught in the pond and the frogs laughed for only him to hear.

One night, after dinner in the little house, John’s mother brought a small bundle out of her hope chest. Adam knew that soft leather wrapping. The tarot cards, the ones Sue had given him, the ones Jodi coveted.

Adam’s great-great-grandmother taught her son to use his Sight. She walked him through the cards and their meanings, much like Sue had taught Adam a century later.

At midsummer she took him into the fields, had him strip naked and lie upon the earth. She called the corners. She asked him three times, and three times he swore. John dedicated himself to Life, to the land, to nature itself. She gave him blackberry canes, and he gripped them, spilling his blood on the earth as a promise.

He grew up.

The house got new paint. They added a barn.

Adam held his breath when the rain stopped. He knew what was coming next. Every Oklahoman knew what had happened next.

John stared at the horizon, silently willing the clouds to gather, pressing his magic to bring relief, but it was not enough.

The ground cracked. The grass died. The pond dried up. John’s frogs died.

The trees, and even the blackberry brambles he’d fed with his blood, spit, and seed when he’d been sworn to the old ways, died.

A horde of starving rabbits swept over the farm, and the rattlesnakes ate well.

Others passed on the road west, wagons full of people heading somewhere else. John said goodbye to the girl he liked as she climbed atop a wagon, California bound.

The Binders stayed. This was their plot, their lot, their land.

They hung sheets soaked in well water on the windows, over the door. They wore bandannas and rags about their mouths and noses as the dust coated everything. They choked. They coughed almost constantly.

When John’s mother was caught outside in a storm she was slow to die. For weeks she hacked up brown dust and phlegm. John tried to save her, but once again his magic was not enough.

Old John, hanging on his tree of torment, groaned with deeper agony, the pain of reliving this, his beginning, his turn toward Death. He wasn’t spared the sights of his past any more than Adam was spared the sight of his torture.

They buried her in the shadow of one dead oak. Adam thought he’d seen its stump, time hardened, his great-great-grandmother’s only tombstone.

Adam could feel John’s pain, past and present. Beneath it was his terror, the looming constant knowledge that he might be the next to die.

The government sent men, offered them a little money to plant trees, and they did. But still it didn’t rain. The trees helped a little, made a fence to fight back the dust, but most of them died too.

A few more dollars, a few more trees.

John’s dad was nearly done planting his row when he fell over, his eyes wide, his face slack.

John helped him into the house, into bed, but he couldn’t move. For days he lingered, alive but stricken, paralyzed. He muttered, a sound like Johnny, but it came out wrong.

There was no doctor left in town. He’d taken his family west.

John fed his father, cleaned his piss and shit and changed his clothes.

He ransacked his mother’s hope chest, and there he found the book, buried at the bottom, underneath some boards. It was in German, covered in chicken-scratched writing and drawings.

John could read German. His grandmother had taught him and his mother had kept it up. So he read by the flame of an oil lamp, turning the rough pages this way and that. Adam had never seen anything like it. Someone had written a full page, then turned it and written over it diagonally, then done it again in the other direction. Each page was three in one.

Adam’s palms itched to hold that book.

A family grimoire, full of spells, history, and secret knowledge passed from Binder to Binder over hundreds of years.

Johnny found what he was looking for. Not a cure, but a solution to his fear.

He read it again and again.

In the other room his father lingered, edging toward death.

Adam watched the terror take hold of his great-great-grandfather when he saw what Johnny had decided.

Johnny eyed his father as he went through the motions of care. He built up all the reasons he had to do it, hardening his heart, remembering every blow when he’d made a mistake, inflating every cruelty, concocting a death sentence.

Then he took his father’s life. John carved out his father’s heart, replaced it with mud and sticks, with bog iron, obsidian, and blackberry canes, things from the land, things from his mother’s hope chest. There was so much blood.

Then Adam looked away, back to the tree and the terrified old man bound upon it. Tears streaked his face.

“He couldn’t bear it,” Adam said. “He couldn’t bear the fear of death.”

He hated that he felt John’s pain, that he could feel sorry for him. The boy who’d laughed with frogs and talked to trees, who in another time would have been a true druid, whose gift was a way with nature lost to the centuries, turned murderer and warlock out of a terrible, relentless fear.

“It’s sad really,” Adam said.

“Yeah,” Jimmy agreed. “But he did murder me, so you know, fuck him.”

Adam couldn’t argue with that, but he also had to wonder if he would have made different choices. He’d like to think he wasn’t capable of that, but he’d killed a demon to set his father free. He’d killed another to save Vic and the others. Bad as it had been, he’d taken a life. Three times now, he’d taken a life.

“You made choices, Adam,” Jimmy said. “He made several. All the wrong ones, again and again, for a hundred years.”

“I know,” Adam said, to both things.

Sue had always said he was too tender-hearted for this world. She was right. Here he was at the very end of it, feeling sympathy for the monster who’d killed her.

There’s still time to save her, John’s note, his bait to bring Adam back to Guthrie, had said.

More history unwound as the threefold torment continued.

John had an affinity for life, for animals, snakes especially. A born druid. He listened to the wind shift through the switchgrass. He could hear something in it that Adam could not. His own power wasn’t tuned to nature, to the physical world, but to the spirit realm.

John practiced with rats and barn cats. He called them with his power, earned their trust, and snapped their necks.

Adam seethed to see him use the tarot cards, to know that his magic had touched them too. They were linked by blood. Maybe that was why Adam was here, witnessing all of this. Maybe this was part of his punishment for the lives he’d taken.

It only got worse. John hid what he’d become. He married, brought his bride to the farm. Evelyn never saw the lack of light in her husband’s eyes. Their kids didn’t see it. Not James, Jimmy’s father.

Only Sue, James’s bride, had an inkling.

But none of John’s experiments brought another success, brought the infusion of power he needed to stave off the inevitable. Not even the drifters he buried in the woods fanned the spark of his life.

He obsessed over it, the little light inside him, how bright it was, how long it might last.

He tried to make batteries, charms that might store the power of the things he killed. Adam knew most of them as they crossed John’s memories. He’d hunted them down and destroyed them.

John could lure people to him, trap them in dreams and illusions, and use their pain. Still they weren’t enough. He sawed the hand from a Saurian. He killed a leprechaun girl with a garrot. Her death was long. He did it that way on purpose, ensuring that her pain would linger in the charm he carved from her bones.

Adam understood Seamus’s zeal then, his need for revenge.

None of it mattered. John still aged. He would still die.

The idea grew and grew. It had worked only once, with his father. It wouldn’t work again without a blood sacrifice, one of his own flesh.

John sized up his grandchildren.

Tommy, Noreen, Robert, and James Junior, who everyone called Jimmy.

Adam knew what was coming. He tried to look away, but Jimmy leaned close.

“Pay attention, coz, this is the important part.”

Adam could feel it, even as the moment of the murder loomed. John loved Jimmy, as much as he could love anyone. Jimmy was like him. He could hear the trees. He had magic and Sight from Sue’s blood, a new mix that would have made the ancient Binders proud.

Cowboy Jimmy hung his head.

In the past, John waited for Jimmy to drop by. John knew not to invite him, not to leave any hint that it was premeditated, not to leave any clues.

He regretted it even as he planned it, knowing that the love he felt would deepen the sacrifice. The bond between them, and the betrayal, would flavor the meat.

“I’d noticed he’d been down when I called him,” Jimmy said. “I went by to cheer him up. He knew I would come, even if he didn’t ask me to.”

Jimmy’s ghost shook his head as his past self drove out to the farm in the old Ford truck he’d fixed up.

“Thing was, he wasn’t faking. He was down because he’d already decided to kill me. He was never dumb. When I told him I was gay, he said he was happy for me, that he loved me, and I felt that. That felt right.”

As he spoke, Jimmy approached the house. John waited in the rocker on the porch, asked him to come check on the tractor in the barn. Jimmy was happy to help. He was good with cars.

“I didn’t understand that it was because he knew I’d never have kids,” Jimmy continued, speaking calmly as he and Adam watched John lift the sickle. “I was safe to try with. If it didn’t work, the line wouldn’t end with me. Noreen, Robert, and Tommy would make more Binders, more descendants for him to use like cattle.”

“But it did work,” Adam said, not knowing what else to say. Jimmy had been a football player, a jock fond of the weight room. If he’d known to fight he might have won, but John charmed him like he’d charmed the snakes and cats.

Jimmy stood dazed, unfeeling, unprotesting, as John took the sickle and slit his throat.

Adam wanted to vomit, a visceral reaction from a body he could no longer feel. Maybe he was already dead. If this was the final show before the lights went out, Adam would have preferred to see anything else. Mostly he wanted to see Vic again, to drift off in a happy dream of a life together.

Sobbing, John bound Jimmy’s body. He performed the ritual, carving out Jimmy’s heart. When it was done, finally done, John wrapped Jimmy up and disposed of him in the old well. The grief running through him was eclipsed by the sheer relief, the knowledge that he could cheat death. He had given the flame another round of fuel.

Adam looked to the tree. John had stopped screaming. The tears sizzled on his face as he lit again.

John returned from his grisly work, covered in Jimmy’s blood, to find a man and a woman gathering signatures for a petition on his porch.

They clicked their pens and the little cylinders grew and grew, sprouting blades. Shadows crept over their bodies, forming hoods and robes that Adam knew well. Skull masks in place, the Reapers took John into custody.

On the tree, drowning in water again, John groaned. He ignited. He choked on a writhing snake.

“You’ve seen most of it now,” Jimmy said. “Don’t you think he deserves it?”

“I don’t think it’s my place to say,” Adam said, watching the old man writhe on the thorns.

“He murdered me,” Jimmy said with a hint of anger. “He murdered my mom and aunt.”

“Yes,” Adam said. “But it’s not my place.”

“How can you feel sorry for him, Adam Lee?”

“How can I not?” Adam gestured to the tree, its thorns, its snakes and sap. “That’s torture.”

“But you’re bound to kill him. You promised Seamus.”

Bending, Jimmy lifted the sickle from where it had fallen among the tree roots.

“I did,” Adam said. There was no denying it.

He’d done it out of desperation, to learn who had set things in motion, who’d brought him to Denver. Another cocky decision made in haste, now come back to bite him on the ass.

Still, he’d saved Vic that way. He’d never regret that.

Please be alive, Adam willed. Be happy.

He would have added something about finding a nice boy or girl and settling down, but couldn’t bring himself to that.

“That oath he took was binding,” Jimmy said. He cocked his head toward the burning tree. “You were always smart enough to not pledge yourself to a power—until you weren’t.”

Adam nodded. There wasn’t really another response.

“And now you see what happens to those who break binding oaths,” Jimmy said, cocking his head toward the burning tree.

“Yes,” Adam said.

The Reapers brought John to Death, not Sara. She did not show him her human face. She chose an old graveyard on a hilltop, something appropriately remote and overgrown for the setting of their meeting. Adam knew now what she’d wanted, a way into herself to get Mel back.

She used John to free Mercy. She manipulated the King of the Elves into conflict with his son, a growing rift that would eventually lead to his death if he couldn’t open his mind, and she’d known he wouldn’t. A being that ancient and powerful wasn’t capable of change. His rigidity would have forced Silver’s hand, and Death had known that.

Because she’d needed their lives, Mercy’s and the king’s. She needed their souls to buy time, to hold it all together until she could get Mel out.

John probably never knew, not even now, how far back her plan for the Binders went, how she’d manipulated their bloodline. Adam would probably never learn the depth of it. He didn’t think he was dead, but whatever this was, nothing lasted forever. Even the torture had to get old. How long could it keep hurting?

Last call, Jimmy had said.

Adam might as well watch the end of the movie.

John went to work for Death as a Reaper, moving between the spirit world and the mortal. She helped him fake his own demise, and everyone assumed he’d died of a broken heart when Jimmy disappeared. Sara had always been clever, and the body they buried looked real, probably had been real, some other corpse made over with a glamour.

Then John got clever. Working his own agenda, he arranged to leave a package for Adam, listening to the trees, to a little prophecy. He planned a trap for his great-grandson, the next in line for consumption. John would take his life like he had Jimmy’s. Adam Lee had the Sight, and he was gay. It wouldn’t stop the flow of new descendants.

“Gay people can have kids, asshole,” Adam said.

“He figured he could go on forever,” Jimmy said. “Feeding off the family.”

“He wanted me next,” Adam said. “But he said he couldn’t feed on me after I turned warlock.”

“Not the way you did. He didn’t expect that. Your magic isn’t the same now,” Jimmy said. “It’s not just life and spirit.”

“Yeah,” Adam said, rubbing his fist over his heart. “It’s death now too.”

“I wish I’d lived to meet you, Adam Lee,” Jimmy said. Around them, the memories faded to black. The show was over.

“Why are you a cowboy?” Adam asked.

“Well, they’re hot, right?”

“I guess so. Vic’s uniform is more my thing.”

Jimmy laughed. “I found myself dead with nothing to do. Those of us with Sight or magic aren’t like the others. We tend to linger, so they put me to work. We realized what was happening and started rounding up souls for the trains, moving them past the desert before the demons could snatch them. We stayed behind so they could move on.”

Adam didn’t ask how they kept themselves together. He knew. Vic had told him how Noreen and the others did it.

“You sacrificed your end for others?” Adam asked.

“It’s a living,” Jimmy joked.

“I think I would have liked you, cousin,” Adam said.

The ghosts that Shepherd looked after, the woke, had to be the ghosts of witches or practitioners, sensitives who could linger. Even Noreen must have had a little magic then, even if it had only been a spark.

Practitioners made better ghosts. Adam filed that away, in case he survived.

The edges of the landscape darkened. The shadows stretched and resolved into trees taller than any Adam could imagine. Rot and damp filled the air. Fireflies, green sparks, danced in the hollows between the trunks. Adam’s boots sank into the soggy soil. The scene was silent, like even the crickets and birds had paused to hear.

On the tree, John still burned. He still drowned. He still died, over and over.

“Time’s up,” Jimmy said. He offered the sickle to Adam the way you offered a knife, handle first.

Adam took it. The blade was rusted, with splotches like drops of old blood. Maybe they were.

“Now you have another choice to make, Adam Lee,” Jimmy said.

Shadows stepped from the forest, navigating the gnarled roots that gripped the ground like giant toes.

Adam knew some of these ghosts. Sue, Noreen. There were others—the Saurian, a centaur, some spritely thing Adam did not know the name for. The leprechaun from Seamus’s calendar came last.

“He killed us,” Jimmy said. “You’re sworn to kill him.”

“I am,” Adam said.

“So what are you going to do, cousin?”