IT WAS TWO beers, half a box of cold kung-pao chicken, and one episode of Law and Order: SVU later that the phone pinged with a notification. Jonah could have checked it then, but he didn’t. Instead, he left it until Olivia Benson had stared plaintively after the ADA and straight into the end credits
He took the phone into the kitchen with him and grabbed another beer from the fridge. The glass was wet and cold through his T-shirt as he tucked it absently under his elbow while he scanned the message.
StellaG had gone along with Emily's confidence she’d been remembered. It was a common name; it had been a safe assumption there was at least one of them StellaG hadn’t kept in contact with.
I’m so sorry, Em. I thought someone would have told you, StellaG had written. He did it last year. There was no note, but apparently he’d started to drink again, and I guess he couldn’t face it, you know? He was so into being sober, hosting the meetings, and all that. But my boyfriend, well, ex-BF now, found him, and the whole room just stunk of gin. He’d taken some pills. Broke my heart, you know? God, I can’t believe you didn’t know. You OK?
Jonah felt a pinch of guilt as he traded the phone from one hand to the other and popped the cap off the bottle against the edge of the counter. He ignored it. If he took the time to feel bad about all his past misdeeds…
By the time he worked his penance far enough down the list of misdeeds to get to “lied to a college student,” he’d be dead.
Jonah licked spilled drops of beer off his knuckles and then hesitated as the sharp, yeasty taste caught on his tongue.
He knew Deborah was a drunk; she’d followed him out of the AA meeting. It was a safe assumption that Daniel was too. Both of them had made efforts to get sober and failed? Daniel with a bottle of gin and Deborah with Arlene, the stripper from her story.
It had been a while. The thought hung in Jonah’s head for a long, lazy moment before he realized that he’d not finished it.
He’d only given half an ear to what Deborah shared about the last time she’d lost her sobriety, but he had listened. It just needed to be dug up from the clutter he’d not bothered to file on the way in.
Where had Deborah said she met Arlene? The conference had started in Vegas, but that’s not where she’d ended up. That had been… Columbus.
The same place where Daniel had washed down his pills with booze.
Magic loved coincidence. It gave so much scope. Most of the time, hexes and horrors worked in the shadows. If it drew too much attention—if the modesty curtains of This is How Things Work were yanked back for too many people—it could cause a sort of allergic reaction for reality.
Luckily, people had a real talent for self-delusion. Deja vu. Coincidence. Goose on their grave. It all let people turn a blind eye when the unnatural slipped through the cracks.
The conference had been…
If the information was there in the trash drawer of Jonah’s brain, he couldn’t find it. Last year? Maybe. When had Daniel died?
Urgency itched at the nape of Jonah’s neck. He had a feeling he could guess, close enough anyhow.
He grabbed the clipping from the salt circle and shook it out. Salt clung to grease spots where the paper had been handled, folded, and refolded over and over. The paper pilled up in dry balls when he tried to brush the crust away. He could still make out enough to read the date.
The anniversary of Daniel’s death was… today. Of course. Jonah should have known. This was how his luck always ran.
“If you didn’t have bad luck, boy,” his granny’s voice echoed between his ears, “you’d have no luck at all… but maybe more of your friends would be alive. That’s how it works.”
“No, no, no,” Jonah argued with that as he crumpled the bit of paper between his fingers. “This isn’t on me. Not this year, not last year, and not in fucking Columbus. I’m a Carrow, not fucking Merlin.”
The silence around him reminded him that he wasn’t a Carrow; he was the last Carrow. Because if she’d been alive, Granny would have laughed her tits off at him for that one—either because he was wrong or because he was so full of himself he’d even entertained the idea he could be responsible. His grandmother had found a lot of joy in people’s problems, a lot of profit too.
Except this wasn’t his problem. Jonah tried to believe that. He really did. But it rang hollow. He’d leeched commitment and sobriety out of AA meetings for the last year. Not with a hex. He had just turned up and passively absorbed the ritual of it. Maybe they didn’t know it, but he’d used their problems to his advantage. If he suddenly dropped that now?
Well…
Nature hates a vacuum, and magic hates a hypocrite.
Ram had hitched a ride in the bed of the pickup, hunched down like a hound as he clung on for dear unlife. His face was twisted into a mute, exaggerated howl as the wind stripped bits of his spectral form away and unmade them.
What Jonah saw when he glanced in the rearview mirror was wet, black, and unsavory. There wasn’t a lot left of a body after a decade wedged under rocks at the bottom of the river. Jonah already knew that—he’d checked before he left Babylon—so he didn’t need to see it again. He kept his eyes on the road.
It had rained while he was asleep. The road was black and slick, flecked with rainbows. The spray hissed up from under the pickup’s wheels as he put his foot down on the gas. Closed-up storefronts zipped by in his peripheral vision as he navigated his way back to the church hall.
He wasn’t entirely sure what he was going to do if the place was locked up when he got there. The whole “anonymous” part made it hard to track down any of the other people at the meeting.
Everyone you love dies, Ram howled in the background, and they always will.
Jonah didn’t have to spin the truck into a hard left at the intersection. He could have gone straight and followed the street around instead. It would have added a few seconds to the trip. He took the turn anyhow. His body leaned into it, as if he could help muscle the metal and rubber around the corner.
In the back, Ram bounced around like a ball and barely managed to grab hold of the tailgate before he wiped out on the road. His body stretched out like taffy, the details smudged and faded down as they got further away from the little black pickle that was Ram’s memory of himself.
The scream that scraped out of the ghost was thick and voiceless, a static snarl that didn’t go up and down. In the morning, when people got up, they’d find the milk soured and their eggs gone off.
Jonah straightened the truck up. He could see the church hall halfway down the street, tucked in between a laundromat and a salon. The moon picked out the details on the two businesses but seemed to slide off the church hall. Shadows clotted in windows and huddled on the doorstep, dark and heavy as cats.
Something was here.
Jonah could feel it in his jawbone and balls. The taste of it bloomed on his tongue—hot grit and something sickly sweet and oily that made him gag—and he could feel the usual cloying mire of love and anger and frustration.
He popped his jaw—first one side and then the other—and pulled in to park in the puddle of light from the streetlamp. It felt safer, even though he knew better. Jonah took his key out of the ignition and got out of the car. The second he closed the door behind him, the bulb blew overhead and showered bits of hot plastic and glass down on him.
“Shit,” Jonah muttered and brushed them off the backs of his hands. Raw patches scabbed the skin like freckles.
Granny’s going to tan your hide, Ram hissed at him.
“Stay here,” Jonah told him.
Instead of wasting his voice on that, Ram just gave Jonah the finger. Fair enough. Jonah tucked his keys in his pocket and jogged along the sidewalk to the main doors. They were open.
Fuck. Jonah hated it when the universe cooperated with him. It always came back to bite him on the ass. He pushed the door open and felt the itch on the back of his neck as something inside noticed him.
What the fuck had Deborah done to get involved in this?
The air inside the building smelled of whiskey and smoke. Jonah could almost taste it, thick and sticky as mud. It warmed his stomach like a good shot of Jack Daniels and made his brain slow as it fumbled over the next step.
Jonah bit down on the side of his tongue until the flesh split and blood dribbled out. Salt and iron. The taste of it scoured away the spell and cleared the fog that clotted behind his sinuses. Most of it, anyhow. He ignored the rest as he felt his way forward through a space that should have been dimly lit instead of black.
Something breathed on the back of his neck. The conviction it was one of his dead—loved or hated, he didn’t know—bloomed in his chest like it would split it open. It rusted and crumbled as it scraped against the fact that Jonah didn’t care.
In his family? It was more disturbing if the corpse stayed properly dead than if it didn’t.
Jonah stalked forward and felt the old cocky confidence square his shoulders and loosen his muscles.
This? He could deal with this. The things that breathed heavily in the shadows and licked against your nerves? That was just a miasma, the supernatural equivalent of the BO your uncle left in the dining room when he came to call. There were places in Babylon that even the rats avoided, where the stagnant magic had soaked into the dirt so deeply it would never be clean again.
It just creeped people out, the same way a pig farm stink made them retch.
Whatever had left its spoor here, though, that was up ahead. Was Jonah really sure he could handle that? With no hex on his tongue and his pockets empty, his fingers clean?
In the dark, something choked and retched. It should have sounded pathetic, but there was malice in the phlegmy croak that hunched Jonah’s shoulders up around his ears.
Jonah walked gingerly toward the sound. He supposed he was about to find out one way or the other if he could handle hell “sober” or not. If he had to put money on it, it’d be not.
The dense, black darkness faded as Jonah pushed through the barrier. The fitful flicker of the lights overhead faded back in and picked out the details in the hall.
Jonah saw the broken ladder first. It lay on its side like a drunk capital A, propped on the prone body under it. Luke sprawled out inelegantly on the old, scarred floor, with one leg twisted painfully under him and a dark halo of blood under his head.
Something squatted on top of him. Strings of gray hair hung over its face, matted into elf-locks and knotted with old cigarette butts. Bony knees—in the literal, worn brown, exposed joints meaning of the word—poked out from under the ragged hem of an old nicotine-orange nightie. Thin, leathery fingers dug into Luke’s face, shoved up his nose and jammed between his teeth. Its back jerked and hunched as it retched up gouts of yellow-frothed bile that dripped into Luke’s mouth.
It stank of liquor, the hot, eye-watering stink of something drunk but undigested.
Still want to kiss him? The frantic, irreverent thought skittered through Jonah’s head. He let it fall out the other side. It was just a distraction, an attempt to anchor him to the real world.
The spells scratched at Jonah’s throat like a cough and made his fingers itch. He pressed his swollen tongue hard against the roof of his mouth and resisted. Not yet. It was something between a comfort and a threat that Jonah knew the hex would still be there if he needed it. It was a bottle of rotgut that he couldn’t pour down the sink or forget, no matter how hard he tried.
“Alive as you but without breath, as cold in my life as in my death,” Jonah said. His voice tried to stick in his throat, but he forced it out as he waded forward through the slow, thick air. “Never a thirst though I always drink, dressed in mail but never a clink. What am I?”
It was an old riddle, but that didn’t matter. The only thing the dead ever learned was that they were dead, and the knowledge of it gnawed at them. Philosopher’s debate or a children’s riddle, they couldn’t resist. Just in case they could work out how to undo whatever had been done.
The thing raised its head. The spill of old vomit dried up as it gagged it back down, a dark stain that bulged against the see-through walls of its hollow throat. Through the knotted hair, Jonah saw a gash of red—lipstick? Blood?—open.
“I’ve always been the weirdo, with flowers in my hands,” it sang in a shivery, sour, minor tone that made Jonah’s teeth itch. All the dead had were the memories of their life. To communicate, they had to unravel and spend those memories, every word a little bit of the spirit hollowed out. Take away enough and all that was left was a hag. There wasn’t much of a person left in this thing to start with, and a lyric less now.
What they meant to say was down to interpretation, but it pretty clearly hadn’t gotten the answer to the riddle. Which was good. If it had—the theory went—it could have switched places with Jonah.
Alive again. Sort of. They weren’t really very good at it anymore, no matter how much they wanted it.
“No,” Jonah said. “Try again.”
The thing tilted its head too far toward its shoulder as it picked through what it had for round two. A pallid, puffy tongue darted between broken teeth as it thought.
Jonah was nearly close enough to touch Luke. He had no idea what to do after that.
OK, that was a lie. He had lots of ideas about what to do, but none that were acceptable.
On the floor, Luke stirred. He tried to move, groaned, and then choked on whatever had poured into his throat. Bile came down his nose and dribbled from the corners of his mouth. That was when he registered the nightmare that squatted on him—the taste and the smell and the grotesque wrongness of it—and started to scream. He lashed out frantically in a desperate effort to get it off him. He slapped at it with both hands as he kicked at the ground to try and scramble away.
The thing just grabbed his face again. It ignored the thud of fists against its shoulders and stomach. Or maybe it just didn’t notice them. It was possible to hurt a ghost, but not like that.
No. Jonah glanced around and checked out the refreshment table, still scattered with bits of sugar and used coffee cups. To hurt a ghost, you needed salt, iron, or something else that was… anathema to it.
“Are you going to try again?” Jonah snapped his fingers to get the hag’s attention back. It didn’t let go of Luke, but it did swivel its head around like an owl to look at him. “What am I?”
It dropped its jaw open like a snake and hissed out a jumble of noises—chimes and bells and a bright, careless cackle of laughter.
“Not that either,” Jonah said. “Third time’s the charm.”
It was a turn of phrase. That was all. The hex still clamped down on his tongue like a vise when he said it, sealed it with his own blood. His jaw seized up, and his teeth clamped together so that he couldn’t pull a fast one.
Shit. That was all he needed.
Jonah ignored the claustrophobic clatter in his head and scuffed forward another inch. The hag watched him with blank white eyes through the trash-locks of its hair. Its mouth opened and closed as it scrabbled for one last answer, and Jonah didn’t even let it cross his mind how much it looked like a fish.
He could feel the hexed hook in his tongue quiver with the desire to pull him over, dunk him back into the stagnant water of magic. It would get him killed, but that didn’t matter. The unnatural would rather have a dead Carrow in its pocket than a living one free.
It was going to have to wait for that, though.
“It’s going to be hot today. 101. Maybe they’ll call it off?” There was an aftertaste of sweetness to the hag’s thinned-out memory, cut through with the rancid present.
“Three strikes,” Jonah said as his jaw released. “You’re out.”
He lunged forward, grabbed Luke by the ankles, and yanked him backward unceremoniously. The groggy dark-haired man yelped in confusion as he skidded along the floor, jeans and hoodie slicked with the filth that had dripped out of the hag. A wild swing caught Jonah on the nose, hard enough to make Jonah stagger briefly at the flash of pain.
No good deed goes unpunished, the memory of his gran reminded him sharply, so make sure it doesn’t go unpaid for either.
He ignored her as he grabbed the collar of Luke’s hoodie and hauled him to his feet. The hag hunched over, limbs tucked awkwardly under a bone-and-dried-meat torso, and squalled in awful bone-rattling rage as it scuttled after its prey.
“Wha… what the fuck?” Luke managed. He retched and doubled over to spit out bile-yellow puke. He got it on his shoes as Jonah dragged him through it and made a disgusted noise at the squelch. His breathing was ragged and uneven, halfway to a panic attack. “What’s… what is that?”
Jonah didn’t have time to go through that particular primer. He hung on to Luke with one hand and grabbed one of the carafes of coffee with the other. The lid was already off, coffee-stained plastic laid out on the cheap paper tablecloth. Jonah gripped it by the mouth and swung it up and round.
The hag lunged for him—broken, filthy hands outstretched—and the arc of lukewarm black coffee splashed into its face. It recoiled as its skin blistered like it had been hit with battery acid, withered away in ragged black-stained patches that you could see bone through. The skin around its bloodred mouth split in two long, dry wounds that ran nearly to its ears.
It wasn’t iron or salt, but what better repellent for a creature that stank of piss and sour liquor than black coffee from an AA meeting? Enough people believed in it, prayed to it every morning as they tried to exorcise the regrets and the headache of the night before.
The hag writhed on the ground as it spat and dug its fingers into the floor, the wood suddenly rot-brittle and full of old bugs.
Jonah swept his arm along the table and knocked a dozen half-full plastic cups and stained plastic spoons down onto the hag. While it screamed and tried to scrabble away, Jonah forced Lucas into an unsteady run toward the door. The shadows clung to them, sticky as old cobwebs, and Jonah could taste the old whiskey stink of the hex as it followed them out.
The door was still cracked open as Jonah had left it. He stiff-armed it open and nearly fell down the steps outside. The night air tasted clean and cold as he sucked it in. It must have hit Luke too, and he suddenly tried to push Jonah off him.
“What… what did you do to me?” he slurred, his words thick and sodden. Luke gave Jonah another furious shove and staggered backward, unsteady on his feet as he swung his head around to search for the thing they’d left behind. “What happened? What the fuck was that?”
He stopped and lifted his hand to touch his face. Exaggerated horror pursed his eyebrows and turned his mouth down at the corners as he asked aloud, “Am I… am I drunk? Fuck. Fuck. What—I haven’t had a drink in fuckin’ years.”
Tears prickled visibly at Luke’s eyes, wet and liquid along his lashes. Jonah could sympathize with the reaction, but they didn’t have time for this.
Jonah grabbed Luke by the shoulder and shoved him roughly toward the truck.
“I’ll explain later,” he said. “Right now? Get in.”
Luke balked and tried to twist out of his hoodie, the sleeves stretched and tangled around his arms. “I don’t know you. Why should I go with you? What the fuck just happened?”
“Get in the car,” Jonah repeated as he scruffed Luke like a reluctant cat. “You want anyone else to see you like this?”
The idea of that made Luke turn compliant. He let Jonah shove him into the passenger seat and stayed there. Jonah slammed the door and stood for a moment, hands braced against rusted metal. He took a deep breath and pushed himself upright, keys already in his hand as he loped around the front of the car.
It took three tries to get the engine to turn over. Jonah could feel the pinch of the hex on his jaw as he cursed and gripped the wheel in one hand. It finally coughed to life, and he slammed his foot down on the gas as he pulled carelessly out from the curb.
The streetlamps flickered uneasily overhead as Jonah drove under them. At the end of the road, just as he was about to turn the corner, Jonah checked the rearview mirror. The hag limped down the road after him, each flicker of electric light making her stutter closer. Slow but determined.
Jonah swallowed and tasted whiskey. His grandad’s brand, unlikely as it was inevitable.
This wasn’t over. The hag had marked Luke as its own, and a missed chance wouldn’t put it off. Nothing was ever that easy.
Jonah took the corner tight and cut off his line of sight to the hag. He spun the wheel and jumped the curb as he cut down Chaldea and across the intersection. It wouldn’t solve the problem, but muddying his trail would slow it down.
Probably.
He checked the rearview mirror again. This time the only ghost there was the one he’d brought with him. Ram leered at him from his perch amidst the tools and work bags, glad as always to see Jonah didn’t get to enjoy his life.