On the Edge, page 3
PARALLEL Universe sat sandwiched between a coffeehouse and a UPS shipping store. It was remarkably clean and organized as comic shops went. In his previous life, Peter Padrake was Commodore Peter Padrake, the scourge of the Blood Sea and loyal privateer of Adrianglia, a country in the Weird. A decade ago he had crossed from the Weird into the Broken to retire, somehow managed to transform his life savings into good old U.S. currency, and opened Parallel Universe. Peter ran his comic shop the way he must’ve run his ship: the place was pristine, the comics categorized by publisher and title, each in a clear plastic sleeve, each clearly labeled with a price sticker. The price was final. Peter detested haggling.
He greeted her with a sour look. Rose knew it wasn’t personal. She was trouble, and Peter detested trouble even more than haggling.
“It’s here.” Georgie tugged on William’s sleeve. “Over there.”
William followed Georgie and Jack to the back of the store.
She smiled at Peter. He did his best to impersonate a stone idol from Easter Island. She drifted away from his stare to the back of the store, looking at the graphic novels on the wall as she passed. She loved comics. She loved books, too. They were her window into the Broken, and they let her dream.
Girl Genius . . . She often wished she could have been like Agatha, building superweapons out of a rusty fork, old bubble gum, and a piece of string. Rose picked up a graphic novel sealed in plastic. Twenty bucks . . . Not in this lifetime. She looked up and saw William listen while Georgie read out the description of the action figure from the back of the box. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, she reflected. Patient, too. Most men would’ve shrugged Georgie off by now. Maybe he was a child molester, after all.
Now there was a messed-up thought. Why would every man who paid a bit of attention to two boys obviously starved for male company automatically be some sort of criminal?
William smiled at her. Rose carefully smiled back at him. Something wasn’t quite right about William. She couldn’t put her finger on it. It was time to collect her brothers and go.
Rose skirted a small display and ran into Jack. He stood in the aisle completely still, knees slightly bent, barely breathing, his eyes focused on a rack of books, looking just like a cat fixated on its prey. She glanced in the direction of his stare and saw a brightly colored comic book. Not a regular American one but a fatter, smaller manga volume. The cover showed a teenage girl in a sailor outfit and a boy with white hair wearing a red kimono. Red letters slashed across the page: InuYasha.
Rose took the comic book off the shelf. Jack’s eyes followed it. “What?” she asked.
“Kitty ears,” he whispered. “He has kitty ears.”
Rose examined the cover and saw furry triangular ears in the mane of the boy’s white hair. She flipped the book. “It says here he is a half-man, half-dog demon. So these aren’t kitty ears.”
Rose could tell by the desperate look on his face that he didn’t care.
She glanced at Peter. “You stock manga now?”
Peter shrugged behind the counter. “Those are used. A fellow brought them in. Selling them as a set, three for ten. If I sell them, I might order some new copies in.”
“Please,” Jack whispered, his eyes huge.
“Absolutely not. You got shoes. Georgie didn’t even get anything.”
“Can I have it then?” Georgie popped out of thin air next to her.
“No.” She could swing three bucks maybe, but not ten, and she could tell by Peter’s face that he wouldn’t be breaking the three volumes up.
“I’ll buy these for them,” William offered.
“No!” She took a step back. They were poor, but they weren’t beggars.
“Look, seriously, I dragged you down here and made you show me the shop. I’m getting the Green Arrow anyway; an extra ten bucks won’t make any difference.” He glanced at Peter. “I’ll pay for those.”
“Absolutely not,” she said, loading her voice with steel.
“Rose, please—” Georgie began in a singsong whine.
She cut him off. “You’re a Drayton. We don’t beg.”
He clamped his mouth shut.
“Figure it out and stop wasting my time,” Peter said.
William looked at him. It was a thousand-yard stare that pinned Peter down like a dagger. It wasn’t even aimed at her, but an urge to back away and leave gripped her. Peter Padrake moved his hand to the drawer where he kept his .45 and stood very still.
She picked up the books and put them on the counter. “Ten, you said?”
“Ten sixty-nine with tax,” Peter said, his gaze fixed on William.
Rose smiled. She had exactly ten seventy-five in her purse. Gas money. Rose pulled out her pocketbook, extracted the soft dollar bills and three quarters, handed them to Peter, got her change, and all with the same smile on her face, she gave the books to the kids and marched out of the store, boys in tow.
“Rose, wait.” William followed her.
Just keep walking . . .
“Rose!”
She turned and looked at him. “Yes?”
He closed the distance between them. “If I hadn’t said something, you wouldn’t have bought the books. Let me make it up to you. Go out to dinner with me tomorrow. My treat.”
She blinked.
“I don’t know anybody,” he said. “I’m sick of eating alone. And I feel bad about the store.”
Rose hesitated.
He leaned a little to look her in the eyes. “I really want to see you again. Say yes.”
It had been forever since she’d been on a date. Any kind of date. Four years.
Tomorrow was Wednesday, the first day of school. The kids would want to see Grandma to tell her all about it. She could swing a dinner. But there was something about William that put her off. He was handsome, and she wanted to like him. She just didn’t. The stare he’d given Peter had been almost predatory. “You’re not my type.”
“How do you know? We haven’t said more than twenty words to each other.”
That was true. She didn’t know anything about him. But it was far more prudent to turn him down and go back behind her ward stones. To hide. And with that thought, something inside Rose reared up, the way it had in the beginning of fifth grade, when Sarah Walton first called her the daughter of a whore. The same Drayton stubbornness that made her grandmother famous reared its head. No, she thought. They wouldn’t make her cower behind the ward stones for the rest of her goddamn life.
But they wouldn’t force her to do something she didn’t want to do either. That would be equally weak.
“You’re a nice guy, William. But I really can’t. Tomorrow is the first day of school, and I need to be home.”
He looked at her for a long moment and raised his arms, palms out. “Okay. Maybe we’ll run into each other again sometime.” He made it sound like a promise.
“Maybe,” she said.
THREE
WEDNESDAY rolled around way too fast.
A white truck sped by her, its horn blaring. Rose didn’t even spare a glance. The needle on her fuel gauge had rolled to the left of the yellow “E.”
“Just make it to the Edge,” she murmured. “That’s all I ask.”
The old Ford rumbled on, creaking. She kept the speed at thirty miles an hour to save the gas. In the distance, the sun set slowly, threatening the sky with red. She was so late.
She had to stay overtime—at the regular seven-bucks-an-hour rate as usual. The T-shirt printer had an emergency. Some disgruntled employee had sprayed the floor with the tacky liquid they used to keep the T-shirts in place while the designs were inked into them. By the time the owners realized what had happened and called Clean-n-Bright, the floor was a horrid mess of every type of dirt imaginable. Only one thing removed the tacky spray—turpentine. She and Latoya had spent the last two hours crawling on their hands and knees drenching the tile in it. Her fingers smelled like turpentine. It was everywhere, on her skin, in her hair, on her shoes . . . Her back ached. She needed to get home and take a shower. True, she was a cleaning lady, but that didn’t mean she had to smell like one.
A small part of her regretted not accepting William’s offer. He wasn’t boyfriend material, but he could’ve been a friend. Someone outside the Edge to talk to. Water under the bridge, she told herself. She said no, and she’d live with it.
Ahead the familiar curve of Potter Road appeared from the greenery. Finally.
The truck sneezed.
“Come on, boy. You can do it.”
The Ford sneezed again. She took her foot off the gas, guiding the old truck into a turn, and let it roll up the road into the trees. They were down to ten miles per hour now. A bit more gas. A bit more . . .
They crossed the boundary, and the magic flared within her, filling her with warmth. The engine died with a soft murmur, and Rose let the truck glide off the road into the tangled brush. The greenery snapped shut behind her. She parked, got out, locking the Ford, and patted the hot hood. “Thanks.”
It was the first day of school, and she was out of gas. At least Grandma had agreed to pick the kids up at the end of the road and watch them until Rose got home from work. Usually they walked by themselves, but today had to be special. They’d be bursting at the seams with earth-shattering revelations about going back to school.
Rose started up the road. Around her the Wood crowded the dirt path: huge trees braided their dark twisted limbs, the ground between their trunks soft with centuries of autumn. Pale blue horsetail vines tinseled the branches. Twilight crouched among the trees. The blanket of kudzu that swallowed trees whole in the Broken stopped at the boundary, and here the Edge moss had taken over, hugging the tree trunks like a velvet sleeve and sending forth tiny flowers on thin stalks that looked like overturned lady shoes: bright purple, mint green, lavender, pink. The scents of a dozen herbs mixed into an earthy, slightly bitter spice in the air.
Sinister noises came from the gloomy depths of the Wood, and occasionally a glowing pair of eyes ignited in the canopy. Rose paid it little mind. The Wood was the Wood; most things around these parts knew who she was and let her be.
Two miles separated her from the turnoff to the house, and Rose fell into a familiar, comfortable stride. It lasted until the third turn of the road. She halted. This was the spot where the man with two swords had leaped onto her truck.
Rose looked at the dirt tracks. Now that had been something else. As far as she could remember, the truck hood came to a little above her waist. She rocked experimentally on her toes and jumped as high as she could. Not even close. If she took a running start, she could maybe get one leg up on the hood. But he had leaped onto the moving truck, landed on his feet, and kept going like it was nothing.
A tiny high-pitched noise from above made her raise her head. To the left a tall tree spread its branches over the path, leaning to the road. About nine feet off the ground, just before the tree trunk forked in two, a skinny shape hugged the bark. Kenny Jo Ogletree.
Kenny stood pretty far down on her favorite people list, only a step above his mother, Leanne, who had been best friends with Sarah Walton during high school and whose chief achievement was scrawling WHORES BITCH on Rose’s locker with a permanent marker. Grammar wasn’t among Leanne’s strengths, but bullying she had raised to an art form.
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree—at nine, Kenny was a bully and a loudmouth. About a month ago he and Georgie ran into a misunderstanding over a softball game and had to have words. If it wasn’t for Jack, Kenny would’ve beaten Georgie bloody, but all the kids were afraid of Jack. Jack fought like every fight was his last, and he didn’t always stop when he won.
Kenny clutched at the tree, standing absolutely still. His hands had gone white-knuckled with desperation. Grime stained his shirt and threadbare khaki shorts, and a long scratch along his thigh slowly dripped blood onto his calf. Kenny stared at her. His eyes were glassy, the whites starkly pale. Whatever problems she had with Leanne paled when faced with a nine-year-old boy terrified out of his wits.
“Are you okay, Kenny?”
He just stared.
The bushes on her left rustled. It was a purposeful, predatory sort of rustling. Rose backed away slowly.
A shiver ran through the thin stems. The branches bent, dark triangular leaves parted, and a creature stepped onto the road. Four feet tall, it stood upright, its body a mess of rotting, putrescent tissue clumped together in a grotesque patchwork. Rose saw the scales of a forest snake on the left leg, reddish fox fur on the shoulder, matted gray squirrel fuzz on the chest, brown stripes of a pig on the lower stomach . . . Part of its gut was missing, and a rotting mass of intestines glared through the hole just under a narrow flash of ribs.
Its face was horrible. Two pale baleful eyes stared at her from deep sockets. They brimmed with intense, focused hatred. Under them a wide mouth gaped, armed with sharp triangular teeth, sprouting from the jaws in several rows.
A ragged, whispery wheezing came from the creature, heavy and wet. A wold. A thing of hate and magic, a living curse that drew power from its creator’s rage. Someone had cursed some land or a house nearby, and the Wood gave the curse a form and a purpose: to kill everything it came across.
In the tree, Kenny whimpered like a kitten.
The wold opened its mouth wider and stepped forward, menace radiating from it like a foul corona. It wanted to murder her, to take a piece of her flesh and make it its own.
Rose raised her right hand.
The wold hissed. Its twisted limbs opened wide, releasing yellow claws.
A light sheen of magic coated Rose’s fingers. The magic vibrated in her, straining to break free.
The wold ran at her, its black maw gaping, teeth and claws ready to rend.
Rose flashed. Magic shot from her hand in a glowing whip of white and struck the creature in the chest. The wold’s momentum carried it another step, but the icy white flame of the flash burned it, burrowing into its chest, seeking its malice-coated core. Dismembering it wouldn’t be enough. She had to kill the curse itself.
Chunks of flesh rained from the wold. Rose advanced, keeping the whip of light fixed on the creature. Her arm throbbed with tension.
The wold fell apart, revealing a small mote of darkness churning with violent red and purple flashes. Rose squeezed her fist. The white whip clutched at the darkness. She strained, squeezing tighter, her nails biting into her palm. With a sound like a cracked walnut, the mote collapsed in on itself in a shower of white sparks and vanished.
Rose let out a deep breath, stepped over the carrion littering the path, and walked up to the tree. “Come on,” she said, holding out her hands.
Kenny stood frozen. For a moment she thought she’d have to go get his mother, but suddenly he let go and slid down the trunk, scraping himself against bark and all but falling into her arms. She had to drop him on his feet—he was too heavy.
“It’s gone,” she said and hugged him. “Dead and done. Understand?”
He nodded.
“It won’t come back. If you ever see another one like that, you run to my house as fast as you can. I’ll kill it. Go home now.”
He peeled down the road at a dead run, veering left, toward the Ogletree house.
Rose looked back at the carrion strewn in the dirt. Only a handful of families could claim a magic user strong enough to create a wold, and all of those capable were older people and supposedly knew better. A wold couldn’t be stopped. It was the kind of weapon that killed everything it came across. She hadn’t seen one for years. The last time one popped up, it took a full-blown posse to hunt it down with gasoline and torches.
Something had to have gone seriously wrong for one of the locals to curse a wold into life. Something dire was happening. Cold dread settled in the base of her neck. For a moment she considered following Kenny Jo to find out if Leanne knew anything about it, but decided against it. Shortly after high school, Sarah had married well and moved to a nice house in the Broken. Rumor said, Leanne wasn’t welcome at Sarah’s new dream home, and it made her only madder at life than she already was. She and Rose hadn’t spoken to each other since high school. She seriously doubted Leanne would suddenly open up to her.
Rose started up the road at a brisk pace. The faster she got home, the sooner she’d make sure that the boys were safe.
Few things happened in East Laporte without Grandma Éléonore’s knowledge. She would just have to ask her about it.
“MÉMÈRE?”
Éléonore glanced at Georgie’s face. She never could get him to explain how he knew to call her that. She had never spoken a word of French to either of them. But Georgie started saying it when he was two, with a light Provençal overlay. She had a feeling he didn’t know himself why he did it, but every time he said the word, it brought her back to dry, warm hills, where she sat in the sunshine next to her own grandmère , nibbling on fougasse that left a faint orange taste on her tongue and watching the men down in the village play la longue with the grace of ballet dancers.
She smiled at him. “What is it?”
“Can we go outside?”
Two pairs of eyes blinked at her from angelic faces: Georgie’s blue and Jack’s amber. Hooligans, both of them. “Is it dark?”
“We won’t go past the ward stones.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, and you think I was born yesterday, no?”
“Pleeease.” Georgie’s eyes would’ve done any puppy proud. Behind him Jack nodded earnestly.
“All right.” She gave in before her heart melted. Rose would be none too pleased if she found out, but what Rose didn’t know, she couldn’t fuss about. “I don’t trust the two of you. I’m coming out on the porch.”
They were out the door before she got up off her chair.
Éléonore took her teacup to the porch. The old rocking chair creaked under her weight. The boys dashed into the yard.
