TWENTY-FIVE

James pulled the car onto a freeway and drove east.

If they’d never left Portland, if they’d never gone to her house, Dee realized things would’ve been different. She’d be calling James a hipster hobo and a weird artist and he’d be smiling and taking it. But here, in this car, it felt like she’d shed her skin—raw and exposed.

No one had ever seen her like that. Cowering and weak, in that house that seemed to sap the life from her. She half expected him to ask questions, to probe at the raw memories.

But he never said a word. He simply drove, his fingers flicking down to the radio when the silence became oppressive. There was something soothing about the sound of pavement beneath the tires, of the low hum of the radio, the voices that occasionally fizzed in and out of audibility, of the taste of stale water when Dee found a bottle in the glove compartment.

They drove for hours, until evening crept in and all she could see were headlights.

They drove.

Because she could not bear to remain still.

It was sometime after night had fallen that James pulled off the interstate, found a dark nook of a gravel road. “I need to sleep,” he said. “You should, too.”

Dee curled up in the backseat, under a thick woolen blanket James pulled out of the trunk. James took the passenger seat, cranking it to a nearly horizontal position.

She should have protested. Sleeping in the same car as a boy.

But when she thought of him, she didn’t think of him as a boy—not exactly. Boys were terrifying in the abstract, all long legs and too-loud shouting and boisterous energy. They were lewd comments and creatures that cowered before the high-heeled terror of self-assured girls like Gremma. Boys were things to be avoided until she was leaner, more confident, until she had actually managed to put together a wardrobe and a life.

When she thought of James, she thought of long fingers smudged gray with charcoal, of notebooks with torn pages, of the way he rolled his jeans up when he stepped into river water, of the pale freckled tops of his feet. She thought of him looking into her eyes and telling her, I chose this, and somehow making her feel in control again.

She trusted him.

It was an odd little realization, in the midst of what was most likely a mental breakdown. She trusted him when she didn’t even trust herself.

Dee listened to the sound of his breathing. She couldn’t see him in the pitch-black, but the occasional whispers of clothing and breath were enough to lull her to sleep.

She woke the next morning, her left arm folded beneath her. She tried to shake off the numbness, sitting up and peering around the car. The sky was light now, white with that predawn glow. James was already sitting up, looking alert but rumpled.

“Where are we?” she said, struggling out from under the blanket. She stepped out of the car in her bare feet, carefully picking her way across the pavement. James had parked on an overlook. There was one other car, a red VW bus with bright yellow curtains.

“Interstate 84,” said James. “No idea how far we went, though.”

She’d read once that the Columbia River Gorge had spent millions of years being carved out by water and wind. But those descriptions didn’t do it justice. Sheer cliff faces rose all around her, the yellow rocks dappled with deep shadows. On her left was a craggy bluff. The wind had scoured away most of the greenery, leaving behind only a few rugged shrubs and bushes. On her right, ancient train tracks stood between her and the wide expanse of the Columbia River. Across the wide river was a sheer, yellow face of naked rock. She felt impossibly small, insignificant next to the towering peaks of raw stone.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

James came to stand next to her. Already, the wind had picked up and his tousled hair was dragged across his eyes. “You never came here before?”

“Not really,” said Dee. “Not a whole lot of family vacations at my house.”

She spoke thoughtlessly, unprepared for how the words would hurt. James knew. He knew. Not even Gremma knew. Dee had tucked away her home life, shoved it far out of sight and mind, hoped that no one would ever see it.

But James didn’t rise to the bait. He dug into his jeans, came up with the car keys, and offered them to her. “You want to drive?”

They continued east.

James pointed out a small town and she swerved onto an off-ramp, drawn in by the logo of a fast-food joint. They didn’t bother to go inside—a drive-through breakfast was good enough. Dee found herself holding the steering wheel with one hand and using the other to balance an egg-white sandwich. James tried to order a milk shake, but Dee put her foot down, getting orange juice and plenty of coffee. James ate pancakes out of a Styrofoam box, plastic fork in hand. The food was too oily and salty, and the coffee was so sharp it made Dee’s teeth hurt. But the discomfort was the best kind—she sipped the horrible coffee and felt more alive than she had in months.

They returned to the interstate. Driving along I-84 left little room for conversation. The road had sweeping heights and dangerous curves, and they were nearly always in sight of the river. James sat with his feet on the dashboard, his window slightly cracked.

At one point, Dee’s phone buzzed.

why did you miss school, came Gremma’s text.

“Text back,” said Dee. “Just say road trip.”

“Your roommate won’t rat you out?” asked James.

Dee snorted and waited for Gremma’s reply. Sure enough, it said:

WITHOUT ME, YOU BITCH?

“Gremma encourages bad behavior,” said Dee simply. “It means she has more company.”

James laughed. “I like her.”

“Don’t get ideas. First off, she doesn’t do boys. Second, she would swallow you whole and hack up your bones like an owl.” A pause. “Then again, you might go for that kind of thing.”

James’s grin widened. “Why do you assume I’d go for the scary girls?”

“Because you sold your heart to a demon.”

“Fair point.”

Part of Dee felt she should have been at Brannigan. She should’ve been in classes, doing homework, living out her normal life. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t pretend to be fine—and it was freeing to realize she didn’t have to. In this car, she was safely removed from her real life.

They arrived at their destination around midday. James was driving again, and he turned onto 730 East, toward the Washington border. She saw the sign for the upcoming town and raised her eyebrows.

“Walla Walla?”

James shrugged one shoulder. “I like any town that sounds like it could be named after a Muppet,” he said blandly.

Dee stared at him. “Really?”

A smile broke across his face. “Come on. Out of all the things I’ve said, that has to be the most normal. Besides, we need to stop somewhere. I figure this is as good a place as any.”

They found a hotel on the edge of town. It was a chain, plain and standard, with the promise of a continental breakfast in the morning.

They ventured inside the room together; neither had luggage, which made Dee feel oddly unburdened. It was clean and neat, with some Western theme to it, all the fabrics and paints in varying shades of orange and brown.

Two queen beds. “I get the one next to the bathroom,” said James.

Dee gave him a hard look. “Way to be gallant.”

“Actually,” he replied, “the one closer to the bathroom is nearer to the door. Should anyone break in, they’ve got to go through me first.”

She fought back a smile. “Are you anticipating a break-in?”

“Hey, that would be tame, considering our lives.”

“True.”

It should have been weird—she was in a hotel room with a boy. But James kept to his side of the room, remote in hand and flipping through television channels. He found some cooking competition and settled in, tossing his worn shoes off the bed. It was strangely domestic, she thought.

Dee showered. She hadn’t brought extra clothes, so she put the same ones back on. But she felt better—the hot water loosened some of her knotted muscles, and she felt clean, lighter.

James was still watching the reality cooking show when she emerged, and she sat down on her own bed. It was strangely entrancing to watch the lives of other people, see them made into dramas. It was a relief to step outside of herself, to lose all sense of identity in the flashing images and sounds.

 

They went out for lunch.

Walla Walla had a very pretty downtown historic district. The sidewalks were wide and tourist-friendly, with plenty of lamps and benches. Decorative statues rose from the sidewalk like concrete flowers, twisting up toward the sky.

They bought sandwiches from a cafe and ate sitting at one of the benches. The sunlight beat down on Dee’s bare arms and she allowed herself to take in the heat and food.

“Thank you,” she said.

He looked up over his sandwich. “For?”

“This.” She gestured vaguely around them, at the old-time street and tourists. “I mean, you didn’t have to. And for—well, not looking at me like there’s something wrong with me.”

He looked at her. “Do you think there is?”

“I feel like that sometimes,” she said, pressing her fingertips to her skull, as if she could push the thought from her mind. “I feel like I’m just this collection of broken pieces I don’t know what to do with.” It was all too easy to remember the homunculus, that monster of human parts, and imagine herself in such a state.

“What did they do to you?” he asked softly.

She laughed and it came out mangled. “Nothing, really. That’s the worst part. It was all little stuff. They never beat me or starved me. But they’re alcoholics, both of them. Dad first, and then I think Mom started drinking just to numb him out. Half the time they’d ignore me. Mom tried, but Dad’s a mean drunk. He’d go looking for targets to vent at, and I was one of his favorites. Anything I did was wrong. If I was interested in a school subject, it was the wrong one. If I showed an interest in a hobby, he’d tell me it was a waste of time. If I showed any kind of emotion, he’d tell me I was too sensitive. I learned how to deal—how to make myself small or stay hours at the library.

“They used to tell me to keep the house clean,” she said. “That if social services ever came by, if they saw a messy house, they’d assume the worst. And I’d be taken away to some horrible place.”

“Did social services ever come by?” His tone was deceptively light.

“Once.” She ran her fingertips over her jeans. “A neighbor heard one of the arguments. But my parents were always at their best in the mornings, and that’s when the social worker stopped by. My father has always been charming, when he needed to be. And he has his own business, and the…”

“The house was clean,” said James.

Her throat ached. “Yes. But it wasn’t all bad. They had their good points. Which makes this worse somehow—I know they’re people. My mom is so kind, ridiculously so at times. She always stopped to talk with homeless people, when most everyone likes to forget they’re people. Dad would try, sometimes.” She swallowed. “But when I was thirteen, things changed.”

“How?”

They had finished their sandwiches by now; Dee stood, tossed her napkins in a trash can made from a vintage barrel.

She bent down and pulled off her boot, carefully placing her sock on top of it. She held up one foot by the ankle, turning so that her back was to James. She heard the moment he saw the scar—the smallest inhale.

“He’d thrown a plate,” she said tonelessly. “She was crying in the yard. I tried to clean it up, but I ended up stepping on a piece instead. I tried to hide the blood—I didn’t want anyone to worry, so I dug the glass out myself in the bathroom. I was stupid, though. I left bloody towels in the hamper, so it was obvious.”

“Was that a wake-up call for them?” asked James.

Dee smiled, felt it crack her face wide-open. She kept her back to him, so he couldn’t see her. “The bloody towels were obvious. But they never noticed a thing.”

James touched her shoulder. “A wake-up call for you, then.”

Dee turned around, eyes on the sidewalk. She let go of her ankle, and her toes brushed bare ground. She hadn’t let Gremma paint her toenails in a couple of weeks, so the purple polish had chipped. “It was then that the bad stuff started outweighing the good. I started researching boarding schools a month later.”

James looked at her, but it wasn’t a look of pity or disgust. It was one of awe. “You saved yourself. And when the money for the boarding school ran out, you did it again. You went out and found a demon.”

“More like he found me,” admitted Dee.

“Still,” said James. “It was brave.”

She snorted. “Running away?”

He answered her with all seriousness. “Surviving.” He bent down, took her sock, and glanced down at her bare toes. “May I?”

She balanced with one hand on his shoulder. He was still wearing that plaid flannel, the material gone soft with wear. He tugged her sock back on, straightening it so the seam lined up perfectly with her toes. The boot was next. He carefully pulled it into place.

The gesture was such a small thing, but it touched her.

When he stood, he was smiling. “All right. So today is Friday. You’re skipping school. Anything you want to do while you’re being a delinquent?”

She considered; something had been nagging at her, something she hadn’t allowed herself to truly think about until now.

“Can we go to a library?” she asked.

He laughed.

 

There was a public library. It was well cared for and clean. Everything smelled of old paper and clean carpets and people—students and adults alike, deodorant and sweat and perfume. It was a very lived-in scent, and it was comforting. Dee asked a librarian for the computers and found herself directed around a tall series of shelves.

James trailed behind her, curious but agreeable—his default state, as she thought of it. She went to one of the computers and opened up a web browser. “That female d-thing,” she said, stumbling over the word demon. There were too many normal people about—students and seniors, browsing the shelves. “She said something. A word I didn’t recognize. I wanted to look it up.”

“You do realize we have phones for that, right?” said James, smiling.

Dee threw him an annoyed look. “Maybe I feel like not staring at a screen the size of my palm.”

That got her a laugh. “What did the demon say?”

“Burrower,” she replied. “She asked how we would do up against a burrower.”

James’s brow creased. “So the demons’ mortal enemies are… gophers?”

Dee held back a snort. Her fingers typed the word and at once—sure enough, the first hit was a page on vermin control. “What a terror,” said James drily as a picture of a mole came up. “Look at those whiskers. Truly a thing to be feared.”

“There’s got to be more than one meaning,” said Dee as she scrolled down the search page. Pest control, wildlife, a brand of shovel, and then—

Her fingers came up, touched the computer screen. Left little smudgy fingerprints in their wake.

It was a picture of a beast, inhuman, with many legs, rising from the depths of an ocean.

She heard James swallow.

Dee clicked on that page and up popped an info site on Lovecraft.

For a minute, neither of them spoke.

“Old gods,” said Dee quietly. “A burrower is a type of old god.”

James laughed nervously. “But—but this is fiction, right? I mean, I read that ‘Cry of Cathalhoo’ thing when I was in high school. The only thing I remember was that everyone who learned about the creature ended up being murdered by some cult. Oh, and Lovecraft was kind of a racist.”

Dee pointed at the computer screen. “You mean ‘The Call of Cthulhu’?”

James blinked, unashamed. “Literature was never my thing. Name three Impressionists, and then you’re allowed to criticize.”

“Fair point,” Dee said, unable to hide her smile. “But I mean, think about it. The Daemon said that this wasn’t the first time demons had revealed themselves. What if… we aren’t the first generation of heartless?”

James considered. “That would explain a lot about Bosch’s paintings.”

“There are tales going back thousands of years about deals with demonic creatures,” said Dee. “Faust, Rumpelstiltskin, meeting creatures at crossroads, even blues singers claiming to have sold their soul for talent.”

James looked impressed.

“But the thing is, the demons of today aren’t buying souls. They want limbs—which they make into homunculi, and use to destroy the voids.”

She gave James a steady look. She trusted him. “I saw something,” she said quietly, “the first time I was in a void. At the hospital. It was only a moment—and it didn’t look entirely like that picture, but it wasn’t… well, it’s not entirely off. And when we were in that last void, when I saw the homunculus—it had something in its hand. A freshly bleeding leg-like thing.” She leaned forward. “Is there anything you haven’t told me? About what happened in Rome?”

She wasn’t sure what to expect. Perhaps he would look offended or angry, or maybe he would push his chair away from the table and stride out of the library. But he did none of those things. His shoulders slumped, and he let out a breath.

“Rome wasn’t like Portland,” he said quietly. “I wasn’t friends with anyone in my troop. We were simply all thrown together, told what to do and how to do it. The Daemon kept us on a tighter leash; we all lived in the same apartment for a while—except for the Daemon himself. He just popped into the kitchen when he needed us. It was… well, it was one of the best times of my life—but also the worst. I spent my days painting like I’d only ever dreamed of, and I started getting attention, but then at night me and the three other heartless would be in dark alleys, kicking rats out of the way as we tried to find voids. And for a while, it worked. But things… didn’t go well.

“We lost one guy inside a void. Something… grabbed him. I never saw what it was. I was in the mouth of the void, keeping it open. The girl who was with him swore she saw a monster, but she wouldn’t—or couldn’t—describe it. I would’ve gone back for him, but the charges were set and the timer was ticking down.” Something like shame crossed his face. “Another girl decided that the knitted hearts were the key to the Daemon’s power, so she dissected hers. But the moment it unraveled, she just died. Like Cal. You saw what happened.

“After that,” he said, “there were only two of us. The last girl’s two years were up, and she got her heart back. I saw the Daemon do it—that’s how I know it’s possible. He just… pushed it into her chest. Like popping a socket into place. And then I was the only one left, and the Daemon said that Italy wasn’t a territory he needed to worry about anymore. He said Portland was the new hotspot, and he told me we would be going there instead.

“When I got to Portland, the Daemon had already made his deal with Cora. Then he recruited Cal, and then it was the three of us for nearly two years.” His mouth twitched. “That is, until that void opened up in a hospital.” He regarded her almost fondly, as if this twist of fate had been a welcome one.

But she barely heard the last bit; her attention was elsewhere. Nearly two years.

“When is your deal up?” she asked. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or frightened to know that he wouldn’t always be heartless with her.

James’s smile seemed to vanish. “Soon enough.” He turned his attention back to the computer screen. Without meaning to, Dee had left the page open on a painting of what must have been Cthulhu. It was a roiling mass of tentacles and teeth, frozen forever in the act of rising from some great depth.

“Old gods,” said James quietly. “Here’s the thing I’d like to know. If demons are, well… evil, then how bad are the things they’re fighting against?”