I lit a cigarette, planning to collect my thoughts and try to gain some kind of focus again. I was exhausted, and wounded, and I simply could not to let my distraction get in the way. I had a lot of balls in the air just now, and any one of them could kill me when they dropped. The collect-my-thoughts plan got derailed fairly quickly, though, as I started coughing my damn lungs out.
Something in my chest gurgled wetly and every time I was wracked with coughs the pain got so bad it made my vision dim. Mournfully, I tossed the cigarette out the window.
I really could have used that smoke, too. My nerves were about shot.
I had some medical supplies in my workshop back at the house. Hollowman, Ordermen, Corruptions and foul-tempered vampires could all take a damn number until I had enough of my shit together that I could enjoy a simple cigarette without nearly dying.
The Malibu groaned warningly as I started it again, and set course toward Honey’s bar, where Gene was going to meet me with my car and my stuff. While I was driving, I noticed a wet feeling on my chin, and when I wiped at it with my hand I found it flecked with blood. I was coughing up blood now. Oh, joy. One or more of my busted ribs were probably puncturing a lung, then. Probably happened when Cat slammed me down in the cemetery… or when I was jumping down into Irish’s crawlspace.
The car made some more regrettable noises on the drive, and I couldn’t nudge it above forty miles an hour anymore. It wasn’t in any better shape than I was. The engine got so hot that I had to send the shadow under the hood to siphon off enough of the excess heat to keep it from overheating. She did it without complaint, which was a little worrying in itself. She was getting weary, too, despite the generous feedings she’d had tonight.
There wasn’t any parking available on the street, but the back lot was only half full. The Malibu made a final-sounding rattle when I killed the engine, and I had to shoulder the door twice to force it open – and act I regretted almost immediately, as the impacts caused another coughing jag.
I snagged Cat’s steering wheel and stepped out into the rain, lifting my face up. The rain was cold, sharp with the promise of sleet to come later in the evening, and it felt fantastic on my face. I drew in a slow breath, feeling my chest burn as it swelled. My ribs slipped and shifted unpleasantly, and I let the breath out.
The shadow moaned a warning, and I turned, spotting Irish on the back steps of the bar. Finally, I catch a break! I’d had no idea how I was going to find him before Tanner and Cat did. I splashed across the lot, tilting my head to one side as I took in the picture.
He was sitting with his head hanging down, elbows propped on his knees. He had a bottle in one hand, and there was an empty on the kitchen steps beside his boot. He was drenched, too. Soaked to the skin; how long had he been sitting here, in the rain?
“Hey, Irish.” He didn’t respond right away. He just sat there, staring at the stained wooden stair between his feet. When he looked up, it took him another heartbeat to focus on me. He looked rough. Not beat-up rough, but worn-out-drunk rough. His eyes were bloodshot, his clothes still muddy and bloody and torn from the fight at the Ford plant. He looked ten years older.
“What the hell happened to you?” Only, drunk as he was, the words came out all slurred together. Between that and the heavier-than-usual accent, it took me a second to figure out what he’d asked me. I stared at him, brows knit together in a tired frown.
I wanted to feel relieved. I had been looking for him, after all. Somehow, I’d got it into my head that all I needed to do was find Irish, and between the two of us, we’d fix this mess. My brain, his brawn; look out Detroit because we’d be unstoppable. Seeing him in this state took the wind right out of my sails, and I felt my own shoulders slump.
My ribs twinged, and I made myself straighten up.
“What the hell happened to you?” I shot back, putting my hand on my hip and trying to work up a decent glare for his benefit.
“Got fired.” He lurched to his feet, and to his credit he got down the slippery wet stairs without so much as a wobble. He offered me a mostly-empty pint of Wild Turkey. “Yer mouth’s hangin’ open.”
I shut it with a snap. “Fired? You got fired?”
“Aye, said I did, din’t I? Called for back-up, figger’d I’d need help with the outsider beastie, an the sanctimonioush, small-minded, vindictive bastards fired me.” He grinned, and it was the saddest, most bitter expression I think I’ve ever seen. I stepped back from that grin. “Wh’ve ye got a steerin’ wheel?” He peered over my shoulder at the Malibu, eyebrows crinkled in confusion. “Another steerin’ wheel, that is. Ye’ve got two, I mean. Odd, that.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ.” I tossed my hands in the air, and regretted it immediately as pain ripped up the side of my chest. I clapped a hand over my ribs, grinding my teeth together. In the back of my head, the shadow was hissing and whining. “What are you doing out here in the rain?”
He scowled, and glared at the bar accusingly. “She kicked me out.”
“Honey kicked you out? For what, buying too much booze?”
He laughed, and the sound made me shiver. I’d heard him chuckle before, but never laugh. It was a spiteful, hateful sound. “Nah, fer fighting. Oh! Reminds me!” he dug around, feeling for his jacket pocket, but the torn garment didn’t hang like it used to. When he did find the pocket, he reached in and fished around for something. “I saved these for you.”
He held his hand out, palm up, and proudly displayed three teeth. Slightly bloodstained. I took them, carefully. “Aw, gee, Irish. You shouldn’t have.”
“Oh, ye sound offended, but I see you just put those in yer pocket.” He wagged a finger at me accusingly. “No doubt ye’ll use ‘em for some foul and unspeakable act of the blackest magic. And good for you.” He staggered back a few paces and sat down hard on the lowest of the kitchen stairs. “May the forces of darkness be kinder to ye than the forces of light have been to me,” he whispered, and took another long draw from the bottle.
“Alice?”
I turned towards the back door. Honey was framed in the light spilling out from the kitchen. She had a bag of trash in one hand, and was shading her eye with the other, squinting into the rain at us. She tossed the trash into the dumpster as she came out the door, sidestepping Irish as she approached without sparing him a glance.
“You look like hell!” She caught my arm, standing me back so she could look me over. Her eye was wide. “What happened to you?”
“I’ve had a night, Honey. And I’m not done yet. Brought you a present, though,” I grinned, and handed her the trophy I’d taken from Cat’s car.
“Uh. A steering wheel?”
“Yeah. Got it from the new Inquisitor in town.”
Honey gazed in awe at the wheel, holding it more gingerly now, a grin growing on her face. “What, seriously? The chick?”
“Yep.” Honey squealed and did a little dance, taking my arm and hustling me toward the door a little faster than I was comfortable with.
“That’s an Inquisitor’s steering wheel?” Irish growled, suddenly standing. Honey pulled me past him, resolutely ignoring the big man. Wow, what had he done to get her panties in such a twist? “Ye expect us to believe that?”
I stopped on the stairs, with Honey pulling at my arm with one hand. “Yeah, I do. Spoils of war. I was wanting to talk to you about that, actually.”
“That never was.” Irish said, crossing his arms as he glared at the steering wheel. “Belongin’ to an Inquisitor, never. She’d never let you get away alive.”
“And yet,” I held my arms out to show off the fact that I was alive. “Here I am.” I let Honey drag me inside, and the heat of the kitchen felt like a slice of greasy heaven.
“Hey, Rich!” she yelled, and her cook looked up from the sandwich he was assembling on the cooking line. “Alice brought me a steering wheel!”
“Tha’s cool,” he said, taking a half-second to take in the view of Honey’s rain-dappled cleavage and going back to work with a smile.
“I am so hanging this on the wall.” She hefted it like a rack of trophy antlers, grinning. “This gets you drinks on the house tonight, chica!”
Honey’s admiration put a pleased little smile on my face. For a moment, anyway. The change in temperature from the cool night air was making it hard to breathe again, and I was really starting to worry about that hot, heavy feeling behind my ribs.
Irish followed us inside, closing the door firmly behind him. “Ye said spoils. Of war.” He was glowering impressively, and it was a more familiar look than the bemused despair of a moment ago. “There’s no way.”
Honey stepped up to him and held out her hand. “Bottle.” Without looking away from me, he placed it solemnly in her hand.
“What the hell?” I gestured at the bottle in Honey’s hand.
She placed it on the kitchen countertop, with a thud. “He’s cut off,” she replied. “He wants to come inside, fine. It’s pissing rain out there. But he’s lost his boozing privileges tonight.” She looked back to me, and her expression softened. “Alice, babe, you really do look like shit. Are you okay?”
Apparently, the kitchen fluorescents weren’t doing me any favors. “Broken ribs,” I admitted, with some reluctance. I chewed my lip, considering. “Might be internal bleeding, too, now that I think about it.” Her eyebrows rose, the one coming out from hiding behind her eyepatch. “And maybe a little bit of a concussion?” I added. “I’m having some trouble concentrating, but it’s hard to tell if that’s me or just the night I’m having.”
“Uh.” Honey came in close, taking my face in both her hands and peering carefully into my eyes, one after the other. She turned my head to face the light, watching to see how my pupils responded. “You know that’s not good, right? Should I call an ambulance or something? And my God, Alice, you’re as cold as ice! We have to warm you up!”
Rich had paused in his work, having slipped a metal platter of something into the broiler. “Hey,” he called, “are you two going to kiss?”
Honey and I shot him the bird in unison, and he laughed good-naturedly. She studied me again. I was still standing, breathing, and being snarky, so I couldn’t be too near death’s door, right? Still, there were layers of worry in Honey’s eye.
“No ambulance needed.” I waved her off. Someone suitably edible would come my way before too much longer. I hoped. Actually, considering how bad I was feeling, it was probably going to have to be a couple of someones. I kept the grimace off my face. I hated having to be such a pig about it, but that’s life. At least, it was my life.
Honey nodded, and pointed me toward the employee washroom. “Go clean up. I’ll be waiting out front when you’re done, with a tall glass of whatever-the-fuck-you-want.” She grabbed Irish by the sleeve and pulled him through the batwing doors with her. “And coffee for you,” she snarled as they went.
The bathroom was a nasty little cement cubicle with a disgusting toilet and a fugly sink. There was a cloth-sack hamper full of stained aprons and kitchen rags, and a short wooden bench with the words ‘DO NOT FUCK HERE’ painted on it. I made a face at the mess, dreading what was about to happen. The shadow began to slither and waft forth, exploring and tasting the nooks and crannies and textures of the nauseating little room no matter how much I wished she wouldn’t. I was worn too thin, and was too weary, to fight her over it. I’d just have to live with it.
I turned to the mirror over the sink, which was foggy and smeared with grease. Even so, I could see what Honey had meant.
I’m pale to start with, but tonight, I was positively ghostly. I had a big black bruise blooming along the right side of my face, probably from the accident, and the eye on that side was full of blood. My lower lip was fat and split, and, now that I had a second to check, a few teeth were loose, too. Awesome.
The gash in my hairline had finally quit bleeding, but it looked pretty bad as I leaned towards the mirror, parting my wet hair with my fingers to inspect it. I poked at the tender wound. It was four inches long, easy, and I had to gingerly pluck a few pieces of safety glass out of it. Most of my hairline was clotted with blood, and fussing with my hair caused my fingers to come away bloody. The rain had caused a lot of the dried blood to run red again, and there were rivulets of crimson running down my face and neck.
Oh, yeah, I looked hot. I was annoyed that Irish had seen me looking like this, and then spent some more time being annoyed that I was annoyed by that.
I washed my face and rinsed my hair to remove as much of the blood as I could, then steeled myself for the worst. When I tried to lift my shirt to check my ribs, I found that I couldn’t. It was frozen to me. I had to wet it with warm water before it would budge. Finally, I managed to work it loose, and what I saw made my breath hiss out in a burst of displeasure.
No wonder it hurt so bad.
My skin was black from under my bra most of the way to the waist of my jeans, in a wide swath. It made the bruise on my face look like nothing. Worse, I was pretty sure it wasn’t all bruise. Poking at it, I discovered that some of the skin there was stiff and frozen solid.
I’d kept the shadow too busy tonight to hold the ribs in place herself. She’d been using her resources elsewhere, so she’d tried to freeze my insides together. Some of what I was looking at here was deep frostbite. If I were a hundred percent human, I’d probably be dead right now just from the hypothermia.
That couldn’t possibly be good.
Worse yet, I still felt hot behind my ribs. Definitely bleeding somewhere in there. Probably a lot, too. I dropped my shirt back down and glanced up at my reflection. She looked pretty worried.
I gingerly dried my hair as best I could with some paper towels, and finger-combed it back, binding it back into a ponytail again. With the blood washed off my face and the clots shaken out of my hair, I looked a bit better. Not good, but better than I had a moment ago.
I turned for the door, and something buzzed against my chest, making me jump and slap for my coat pocket. A hard lump vibrated under my palm, and I remembered the phone I’d lifted from Cat’s front seat. Cat’s cell phone was one of those clunky, industrial-strength flip phones construction workers carry around. It didn’t have much by way of features, but I could probably have bounced it off an on-coming semi and still made a phone call with it. I pulled it out and flipped it open.
It was a text message: Vn. Qrt1 88 mS T.
I frowned at it. I know the kids type funny on their cellphones, but I didn’t think it had gotten that bad. Must be code? Like, a special Order code? Well, how handy was that? I had an Orderman right out front. And maybe if he wasn’t too drunk to read, he could tell me what this meant.
Probably nothing good, but like GI Joe used to say, knowing was half the battle.
When I stepped out front, there was a full-blown brawl in progress. Honey was behind the bar, resting her chin on her hand and looking tired as a dozen burly men and a few scrappy ladies attempted to beat holy hell out of each other.
“What happened?” I yelled.
Honey shrugged. “Some guy offered to buy Irish a drink,” she replied, raising her voice to be heard over the shouting.
“So?”
“So Irish said he didn’t need his pity and threw the guy into a table of auto workers.” She shook her head. “It kind of escalated from there.”
“Huh.” I moved behind the bar to stand beside Honey, and watched as an older woman swung half a broken chair into a biker’s crotch. Poor guy was already unconscious. It seemed like overkill. “So, that bathroom of yours?”
“Yeah, I know. It’s a hole.”
“But really soundproof.”
We watched the fight together, and I gingerly lit another cigarette. As long as I took small puffs, I was okay with it. I managed to pick out Irish in the melee – he was being held by two other guys while a third was punching him. Considering the mess I was in, and the likelihood that at least the Order part of all that was his fault, I decided I was okay with that.
The front door opened, and a smaller man in a trench coat and a felt hat came in. He had a huge striped scarf, much of it wrapped around his face. I smiled, and nudged Honey with my elbow. “My ride is here. Have you ever met my ex?”
A heavy beer mug hit Gene in the side of the head, and he didn’t even flinch. He did look to see where it had come from, in time to catch a fist right between the eyes from a big blond guy with a buzz-cut and a swastika tattoo on his forearm. The blow snapped his head back, but just the same he reached out and grabbed the bigger man by the neck and lifted him off the floor.
Honey whistled. “Tougher than he looks, isn’t he?”
Gene threw his attacker through the front door, clean off the porch and into the gravel bike-parking area out front. I nodded. “It’s the embalming fluid. Really toughens up the muscle fibers.”
Gene walked slowly into the fight, and grabbed another two brawlers and dragged them to the door. They, too, landed out front with a meaty pair of thuds. The next pair saw him coming, and one of them pulled a knife and sank it into Gene’s stomach, which I’m sure annoyed him. That was a London Fog coat, and he’d really been fond of it. Gene took a moment to open a window and knocked their skulls together hard enough to make a resounding crack echo through the room. The brawl came to a stop as he took one of the unconscious bodies by neck and belt and heaved him out the window. From ten feet away. The second one soon followed it.
He turned back to the crowd, and several of the smarter ones ran past him out the door. The three who’d been beating on Irish decided to fight, though.
Honey sighed. “So much for tonight’s business. Might as well close early. It’ll be dead the rest of the night.” It made me laugh so hard I had another coughing jag.
Honey patted my back, which made it worse, and I nearly blacked out before I got my breathing under control again. When I looked up, I saw that Gene had lost his hat and scarf and was throwing the last of the brawlers out the front door. He had another knife stuck in him, too, this one in his neck. I’d have to fix that for him, I thought. He won’t be able to see what he’s doing in the mirror well enough.
Gene closed the door and turned around, his dead face as expressionless as always. Honey, wide-eyed, took in the filmy, dead eyes and the black twine sewing his mouth shut, and whimpered softly. Irish climbed to his feet carefully, and looked up.
“Eugene?” he whispered.
Gene turned, meeting the gaze of the drunken former Orderman. “Dear Lord in Heaven, Eugene…” Irish moaned. “What has she done to ye?” Irish suddenly had his big .45 in his hand, and had it pointed at me.
“Wait,” I said, just as Irish pulled the trigger.
Table of Contents / Chapter Twenty-Three >>
Black Alice by Marci Sischo and James Agle is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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