22

Adam

They ate breakfast at the little table in the trailer’s kitchen. Mom had cooked burgers, thick patties of ground beef she’d mixed chopped green pepper and onion into. It was dinner food, but so much better than stale oatmeal.

Jodi, looking resentful, had three. At least she kept any shitty remarks to herself.

The night had passed, quiet and tense. Adam and Bobby slept in their old bed, neither of them fitting, neither of them sleeping well. Adam found the low ceiling too close. It had been a comfort when he was little, like he was safe there, though of course he hadn’t been. His dad had pulled him out by the ankle once, dangling him and spanking him in midair.

Eating, Adam tried to push aside thoughts of Robert Senior.

“There wasn’t anything at the library,” he said. He waffled on telling them about the sheriff’s visit but decided he’d had enough with holding back. It had cost him too much already.

“I ran into Early again,” he said. “I think he’s keeping tabs on us.”

“You can’t really blame him,” Bobby said.

He and Adam exchanged a look. Early had to suspect the bones had been their dad’s, even if he didn’t have a connection between them and the trailer or to their mom.

“I think we should check out the old property,” Adam said. “The homestead.”

“I haven’t been out there since you were little, Bobby,” Tilla said. She looked to the back window. “Your dad loved that place. Said it was some of the only happy memories he had.”

Bobby reached to pat her arm.

Adam didn’t know what to say. She always talked about their father with a bit of fondness, like the terror he’d brought into their lives or the fact that Bobby had been forced to murder him hadn’t happened. It was like there were two versions of Robert Binder Senior, the man she loved and held in her memory, and the one Adam best remembered, the one Bobby had killed.

Then again, if what Early had said was true, and his mother had liked his dad because he was a bad boy, maybe she’d known the whole time. Maybe she could ignore the way he was because she’d loved him, even long after she should have stopped.

“There’s nothing to do here,” Jodi said, dropping her fork on her plate. She nodded to Tilla. “She doesn’t even have Internet.”

“So?” Adam asked, though he could sympathize with the complaint about the Wi-Fi.

“So you have to take me with you,” Jodi said.

Adam thought about it.

The druid was after Jodi. Taking her away from here might be the best thing for Tilla’s safety.

“Another pair of eyes can’t hurt,” Bobby suggested.

“Sure,” Adam said.

And Jodi did have the Sight. She might spot something he didn’t, or might let slip something useful. Adam felt certain there was more to her story.

“Just stay inside the house,” Adam said to his mother.

Tilla tsked.

“I’ve got my shotgun and my Bible,” she said.

“Please, Ma. For me?” Adam asked.

“Fine.”

Bobby rode shotgun as Adam drove. Jodi sat in the back, applying too much makeup from her purse and occasionally giving directions.

“Does anyone live there?” Adam asked.

“Not for years,” Jodi said. “Mom said it’s full of rattlesnakes.”

It was well outside of town, out where the grass went on forever. Bits of rusted barbed wire on old posts, many homemade from trees, separated one acreage from another.

At least the sky was clear and the wind, a near constant, was low today.

They found it after driving for a while. Adam knew how sneaky the plains could be, how you could get lost out here among the endless grass and flat landscape. In Denver the mountains were always to the west. Here, there were no landmarks, nothing most people could use.

Adam didn’t have that problem. He could peek into the Other Side, use the watchtowers to tell him the cardinal directions, though he’d never get used to the missing tower in the east.

The old house had two stories, with a beaten windmill to pull well water.

The paint had been scoured away by the constant wind.

The barn out back was half-collapsed.

Adam frowned. This had been someone’s dream, someone in his family’s dream. He sank a little to see it fallen into ruin.

Adam parked. His stomach fell, a sense of dread washing over him like an inky wave.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Jodi said.

“You feel it too?” Bobby asked.

“It’s a curse,” Adam said. “A ward to keep people out. Give me a sec.”

He closed his eyes, took a breath, and focused. Usually he’d assume a position, but he didn’t have the space or a dance partner to invoke the Four of Wands. Instead Adam visualized it, concentrating.

“What’s he doing?” Jodi asked.

“I think he’s spirit walking,” Bobby whispered.

Adam practically felt Jodi roll her eyes as she scoffed.

She said she wanted her birthright, but clearly she had little interest in actually learning.

Ignoring her, Adam sank into himself, down through his body, and out of the car. He opened his eyes.

The scent of blackberries and battery acid filled Adam’s mind as the curse came into view.

A fence of spectral, thorny snakes ran around the property, more solid to Adam’s Sight than the half-fallen, rusted barbed wire. They coiled and hissed, warning him away.

The spell was powerful, but not particularly thick. Adam tested a bit of his will against it. The snakes parted for him. It wasn’t a solid defense, just a deterrent.

“I can make a hole for us,” he said aloud, slipping back into his body and opening his eyes.

He was getting good at the transition, at coming and going between the two.

With a deep breath, he opened the car door.

The weeds and grass were knee-high, and the day was warm. It was a good place to step on a rattlesnake.

“Jodi,” he said, nodding for her to stand beside him.

“What?” she said, shutting the Cutlass’s door with more force than he appreciated.

“Come here. I want to show you something.”

She sighed, but listened.

“Can you see the curse?” he asked.

“No,” she said, squinting.

Adam didn’t know if she was really trying or not.

“Hold up your hand,” he said, doing the same. He pressed against the boundary, the edge of where the snakes coiled. They weren’t real, and it didn’t hurt, just tingled as they hissed and rattled, trying to make him afraid, trying to get him to turn away. “Can you feel that?”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding.

“Good,” Adam said. “Now concentrate, try to push it back, to make a hole.”

The curse gave against her will. With practice and focus, she could be powerful. Adam could teach her, maybe not as well as Silver might, but Vic had been right. Adam should share what he knew, and if what Jodi had hinted at in the bar was true, that her Sight haunted her dreams, he could try to help with that.

Adam added his will to hers, sweeping the spectral snakes aside and gesturing for Jodi and Bobby to follow him onto the property.

“That feels better,” Bobby said, rubbing his stomach.

“It’s not that strong,” Adam said. “Just intended to scare people away.”

“It’s doing its job,” Bobby said, nodding to the house and the barn. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s been here. No graffiti. No squatters.”

“It probably doesn’t work on snakes,” Adam said, nodding to the tall grass and the sunny sky. “Watch out for them.”

“Graffiti or not, it’s a shithole,” Jodi said, though she shuddered at the ruin. “Creepy though.”

Adam had to agree with both sentiments. Several boards had come loose from the wooden siding. The house had been large for its day, a sprawling first story and a second, smaller one. Dead weeds and grass jutted everywhere. Despite all the recent rain, the place was dry, like it had never recovered from the Dust Bowl.

“It reminds me of Liberty House,” Adam said.

“No,” Bobby said, voice sounding distant. “It wasn’t this bad.”

“What are you talking about?” Adam asked, a little of the old anger and hurt rising. He’d forgiven Bobby. Mostly. He tried to tamp it down. “It was a lot like this.”

Adam waved a hand to indicate the cracked window panes and the roof with its missing shingles.

“No,” Bobby said softly.

Adam tried not to glare at his brother.

“But it was,” Bobby said, eyes dipping to the ground. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Adam said with a nod.

“Death wanted me there,” he said. “She wanted me to hate you, but also how to learn to control my magic. She hid what it was from you.”

Adam was trying to let it go. He really was.

Bobby had seen Liberty House as one thing. Adam had seen another, its true form. He knew he shouldn’t resent his brother for being fooled, for not having the magic to pierce the illusion, but he still did.

“Wait—” Jodi said. “Death is a she?”

“Yep,” Adam said.

“Badass.”

“She’s been screwing with the Binders for a long time,” Bobby added. “Our family is just a tool to her.”

“So she’s evil?” Jodi asked.

“Yes,” Bobby said.

“Not exactly,” Adam countered.

The brothers exchanged a look.

“She’s more like a natural force,” Adam said.

“I don’t buy that,” Bobby said. “Not after what she did to us. She could have found another way.”

Adam had to nod agreement.

If Bobby blamed Sara for Annie, for her possession and death, well, he had every right to.

“Either way,” Adam said as they approached the house along the driveway’s muddy path, “the druid has worked for her before. She used him to break the seal and set Mercy free.”

“Who’s Mercy?” Jodi asked.

“I’ll explain it, most of it,” Adam said with a pointed glance at his brother, hoping that he successfully conveyed that he’d leave Annie out of it. “If we live through this.”

“Great,” Jodi snarled.

The glass in the front door and the windows was broken but not boarded up. The switchgrass had encroached, coming right up to the walls. Adam tensed, listening for rattles.

He pushed the front door open and found only dried leaves, dust, and shadows.

Bobby shuddered. He froze in the doorway.

“Place like this, big and empty,” Jodi said. “I should tell Billy about it.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Adam said.

Even if Jodi’s stoner clown of a boyfriend could get through the curse, the place couldn’t be safe. Adam just couldn’t say why.

He sensed something, old and lingering, though he couldn’t name it.

The unlocked front door swung open onto a dusty, weathered entryway. The house’s interior smelled a bit like mold, but was otherwise lifeless. The air tasted of dust and too much time gone by.

The floor was broken, split with the now-familiar blackberry canes. They’d climbed the walls to make a prickly, indoor bramble. Thin and reedy, dug into the wallpaper, they shouldn’t be so ominous, but Adam kept his distance. They reminded him of skeletons, of fingers reaching from the ground. A rattle sounded, out of sight, but close enough for the hair to prickle along the back of Adam’s neck.

“That doesn’t look natural,” Bobby said, eyeing the growth.

“It’s not,” Adam agreed, inhaling.

He almost had it, felt certain it was the trace of an old spell, a great expenditure of magic. It coated the walls like fine dust, invisible, but there.

“Let’s stay together,” Adam said, leading them past the little foyer into the house’s parlor.

The place was that old, to have a parlor instead of a living room. The furniture was wooden, spindly and cracked with age. Tilla would have tsked at the sight.

A rug crunched beneath their feet. It had a bit of green to it, long faded but enough color remained to tell Adam it had once matched the pattern of the time-bleached, peeling wallpaper.

“Someone should turn this into a haunted house,” Jodi said.

“Somebody already has,” Adam replied, certain of it.

A spirit circled them. It was faint, just a bit of mist on the Other Side. Adam opened his Sight further, risked being seen in order to see more himself, but the ghost, whoever it was, was too faded, too far gone for Adam to recognize them.

They weren’t familiar, but the flavor of their murder was. It matched the stain behind his mom’s trailer.

Whoever they’d been, however they’d died, they’d met a nasty end.

Adam didn’t want it to be Jimmy, the only other gay family member he knew about. He moved on, into the kitchen.

It looked like it hadn’t been touched since the 1950s. The refrigerator was the ancient kind, heavy, avocado green, and tiny by modern standards.

The stove was cast iron. Despite the dread creeping up Adam’s spine, he could see Jodi’s point. If the curse hadn’t been keeping people away the place would surely have been looted by now. The stove alone would probably go for a few hundred in an antiques shop.

The wallpaper in here had been darkened by the smoke from the stove. Squinting, Adam could make out cutesy chickens in wire cages and roosters, a bit of faded whimsy. Someone had loved this place. Someone had called it home.

He peered out the window. Some of the glass remained, though it had gone wavy with time. Then there was the land. If Sue had owned this, why hadn’t she sold it? Maybe she hadn’t wanted to live here, but she could have used the money.

Adam sort of wished his mom had come. She might have been able to shed some light. The place was old, like turn-of-the-last-century old, but his grandparents had been in their prime in the ’60s and ’70s. It had stayed in the family a long time.

“I don’t get it,” Adam said. “Why didn’t we come out here when we were kids?”

“Huh?” Bobby perked up from where he’d been searching the cabinets, looking at the old dishes and boxes of cereal or canned goods, their contents or labels completely nibbled away by mice and age.

“Wait,” Adam said. “Where’s Jodi?”

“In here,” she called from down the hall.

Adam found her in a bedroom.

A massive bed had once stood in the middle. Its posts were collapsed now, its mattress rotted away. In its center was a tangle of blackberry canes, all dried and dead, but they’d decayed into a long, oblong shape. It looked like a nest, or a cocoon.

Adam scowled at it.

“What does it mean?” Jodi asked.

“I don’t know,” Adam admitted. “The druid’s magic comes from nature. He’d bonded to it, but he’s a warlock too. He’s maimed magical creatures to make charms.”

Adam had felt something in his own wound during their fight at the bar, but the druid didn’t have a wound. There was something about what Adam had done to himself that he didn’t understand. He needed Argent or Silver, someone who could explain.

This was the center of the spell he’d detected, whatever lingered on the walls.

“We need to figure out what happened to Jimmy,” Adam said.

“You think this was him?” Bobby asked, nodding to the bed.

“I don’t know,” Adam said, and he was getting really tired of saying that.

If Jimmy was the warlock it made a kind of sense that he’d kill Noreen. Maybe he’d hated her as much as she’d hated him. But why wait so long, and why kill Sue?

Adam grimaced at the thought of a spell that could look like a heart attack.

But maybe it wasn’t just murder. Maybe Jimmy was collecting all the Binder trading cards, stealing their magic for some purpose.

“No books or anything,” Bobby said, completing a look around the room. “Nothing useful. No clues.”

Jimmy hadn’t lived here. Adam would have liked to see his room. That might have provided some clues.

This whole place felt wrong. The curse kept its distance, lining only the fence, but the queasy taste of the stain had thickened.

Adam turned to Jodi.

“Did your mom have anything of Jimmy’s?” Adam asked. “Did she tell you anything else about him?”

“No,” Jodi said, shaking her head. “Like I said, she hated him.”

“And Sue didn’t have anything?” Bobby asked, peeking into the closet.

“No,” Adam said. “It was a small trailer. I would have seen it.”

He still didn’t understand why Sue had erased her youngest son so completely. Maybe it had hurt too much, but he wondered if it was a clue. Maybe Jimmy had gone bad and that had been the thing that had broken Sue’s heart.

“Let’s try the rest of the rooms,” Adam said.

He brought up the flashlight app on his phone and led them down the narrow hall. Long rugs remained, just as dirty as everything else. Something rattled the metal furnace grate.

Fantastic, Adam thought.

There was a crawlspace. That was somewhere he never wanted to peek.

The back part of the house had been added on. Or maybe it was older, the original part. Either way, the ceiling pressed close. The rooms here were smaller, like the house was shrinking. The floor was uneven, like something had given away between where they stood.

Adam stepped carefully into a tiny bedroom.

It held a desk and a typewriter.

Jodi practically leapt forward. She opened the desk drawers, riffling through them.

“There has to be something,” she said.

“What are you hoping to find?” Adam asked.

“My birthright,” she stressed, like they should know.

“Why is this so important to you?” Bobby asked. “What does it even mean?”

“We got nothing,” Jodi said. “Sue gave us nothing. Mom didn’t even want me.”

Jodi kicked the wall.

“Is that why you were doing those tarot videos?” Adam asked. “Trying to get Sue’s clients?”

“I have the Sight,” Jodi snarled. “What good is it if it can’t pay the rent?”

“It’s not,” Adam said, shaking his head. “Not any good, most of the time.”

Adam should know. His Sight and magic had been more of a curse than a blessing. He traded a look with Bobby and knew his brother was thinking it too.

“There’s nothing here,” Bobby said, trying to assure Jodi.

Rust and dust, Adam mused. That was all the Binder legacy had to offer, the only birthright any of them had gotten.

“There’s always the barn,” Bobby suggested, looking out the window. “Let’s check there.”

They were out the back door, halfway to it when the windmill creaked, not quite turning. It was rusted and missing too many blades to pump water.

“It’s the well,” Adam said, feeling it in every bone, every cell. His Sight wasn’t like Sue’s, but when it came on like this, Adam knew he was right, dead right.

Bobby and Jodi did not argue. As one, they moved that way, off the tilted concrete pavers of the porch.

The stain got worse the closer they came, pressing in, thick and greasy. The land had been something once, someone’s hope for a farm, but now it felt infected, sick and dying.

The grass whispered in the wind. The sun was bright when Adam would have preferred frost. It would have provided less cover, which meant less chance of snakes. He thought he heard rattles, but it might just be the wind mixing with his imagination and the yellow sour feeling in his guts.

The well was a cement ring capped with boards, thick planks nailed together.

A row of cottonwoods, a line someone must have hoped would break up the sheer flatness, stood dead nearby. The wind had stripped their bark, leaving them gray and pale like the grasping bone trees of Adam’s recent dream.

Like everything else about the homestead, the well’s cap had seen better days. Maybe once it had been colorful. A few traces of John Deere Green remained.

With a nod, Adam and Bobby took opposite sides and hefted off the cap. A gust of something foul, mold, old rot, and the unmistakable odor of something long dead washed over them. Adam gagged as Jodi leaned forward with her phone’s flashlight, the lip of her T-shirt pulled up over her mouth and nose.

Adam held his breath and peered into the well.

A long bundle, bedsheets and a blanket tied with rope, was submerged in murky water. A body.

Adam and Bobby staggered back. Jodi kept looking.

“Jimmy?” Bobby asked. “Or someone else?”

“We need the sheriff,” Adam said. But he wasn’t certain how they’d deal with the curse.

A cold breeze rose from the well.

The familiar scent of battery acid and rotting blackberries came in bits.

The rattle of a snake sounded, closer than ever.

Adam tensed, every muscle going rigid, torn between fight or flight. He looked to Bobby and Jodi. They’d felt it too.

“Run,” Adam said.

The three of them took off across the grass.

They’d almost reached the Cutlass and found snakes curled, blocking their path.

Adam skidded to a stop.

The grass on either side of the driveway rippled. More rattlers, dozens, maybe hundreds, slithered toward the three Binders.

They piled together, wriggling and rising.

“Where’s my cigarette lighter?” Jodi asked, rummaging in her purse as the snakes began to circle, forming a ring around them.

“You’re going to smoke a joint?” Bobby demanded. “Now?”

“I’ve got hairspray, dipshit,” Jodi said, wielding a can and shaking it. “Southern girl’s flamethrower.”

“I don’t think it will help,” Adam said, reaching for his magic as the snakes made a writhing, slithering wall.

The three of them pressed together, back to back as the diseased magic filled the air. It mixed with the snakes’ musk, so thick that Adam gagged.

“Dammit,” Adam said.

“How’s he doing this?” Bobby asked as the ring around them began to tighten.

“He’s a druid,” Adam said. “Animals come with the territory.”

“Let’s break through,” Bobby said, eyeing the wall of tails and fangs.

The rattles grew louder.

“Not a good idea,” Adam said.

“Can you do what you did last time?” Jodi asked.

“No,” Adam said.

The druid was smart. His control over the snakes wasn’t made of death magic. It wasn’t like the blackberries, a single spell. It was dozens of little spells, cast in waves.

Adam simply didn’t have the magic.

Extinguishing them, countering them the way he had before, would kill him.

He raised his defenses, drew a circle with his mind, and made a sphere. Adam poured his will into it. The effort made his knees buckle, but the squirming ring stopped its advance.

“I felt that,” Jodi said with a gasp. “How are you doing that?”

The snakes were a storm and the three Binders were its eye. The writhing bodies piled higher and higher, ankle-deep against the dome Adam had constructed.

The druid appeared. He moved like the snakes, jerking, pulled toward them.

Had he risen from the well?

Adam still couldn’t see his face inside the hood, still could not say if it were Jimmy or someone else.

Either way the druid still clutched the skull, Robert’s skull, in one hand. In the other, he held the rusty sickle.

“That would be cool if we weren’t about to die,” Jodi said.

“What do you want?” Bobby railed at the figure.

Adam had to keep his concentration. He had to keep the sphere around them, keep the snakes away. It would only take one moment, one lapse, and they’d drown in fangs and venom.

Birthright, the druid mocked, pointing his sickle out toward Jodi. Blood calls blood.

“It’s another projection,” Adam said through gritted teeth. “He’s not really here.”

The well had been booby-trapped. They’d triggered it when they’d moved the cap.

The snakes were real. Nests of them were common enough in grass fields like these.

“Who cares, he can still kill us!” Jodi shrieked.

“Stay behind me,” Adam said.

“There’s nowhere else to go!” Jodi shouted. “Can you stop it?”

Adam ignored her and focused on the druid. This was their chance, maybe their only chance, for answers.

“What birthright?” Adam asked, eyes flicking from Jodi to the druid. “Why do you two keep mentioning that?”

Binders. Binder blood. My harvest. The druid pointed to Bobby and called in a gravelly, deep voice, Robert Jr., Bobby Jack.

“Who are you?” Bobby demanded.

Adam’s defenses were cracking. He could feel Jodi’s terror and Bobby’s desperation.

The snakes swarmed, closer and higher, breaking against the sphere. Adam could feel them wriggling into the earth, trying to get through that way. There were hundreds of them now, maybe thousands.

Adam felt the strain, the push of the snakes, the spell driving them to attack.

“Why are you killing Binders?” he demanded, desperately trying to find a way out.

My blood. My harvest.

“Life,” Adam said. “He wants life.”

The druid was stealing magic.

Mercy had done something like that, drained practitioners of life, trying to rebuild itself from the bits of power it stole. The spirit had been ancient, birthed long before the rules of life and death had been set in place, that was why Death had wanted it off the board so badly.

But the druid had to work inside the rules. He couldn’t take from just anyone.

“His descendants,” Adam said quietly. That was why the stain here was so much worse, sunk so much deeper into the land. It had started here. It had gone on here for a while.

“He can’t be Dad. Or Jimmy,” Adam continued. “He’s much older than that. He’s been killing a long time. Haven’t you?”

The druid didn’t answer, but he grinned inside his hood.

The tide of snakes was chest high now. They bit and hissed, their rattling incessant. The pressure increased. Adam felt something in his head snap. A sharp pain and blood trickled from his nose.

The sphere around them held, but Adam felt his life draining away. He poured everything into it, his love for Vic, the forever pain in his chest. It was like giving blood, too much, too fast. He bobbed, ready to collapse.

“Adam?” Bobby asked, worried.

“I have an idea,” he said, handing him the keys to the Cutlass. “Get ready to run.”

Just that motion almost cost Adam the sphere. He was shaking, like he’d run miles on an empty stomach.

Adam contracted the shield, all of his magic, all of his life. The snakes swarmed closer, almost to them.

“What are you doing?” Bobby demanded, panicking.

“Just run, Bobby. I’m going to make you an opening.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll see you on the Other Side,” Adam said, wishing it were true.

He squeezed the rest of his will, the rest of his magic and life into a ball and pushed it outward all at once, detonating it like a grenade. It ripped through the snakes, breaking the druid’s control. The swarm broke and fled, their concentrated will dissolving into confusion.

“Go!” Adam shouted. It would be the last thing he said.

He fell to his knees. The world went black.