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 assomethinginside noticed him.
What thefuckhad 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 capitalA, 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.
