The Whole Price of Blood
"I didn’t even want to go to that fucking party.”
The girl didn’t look too bad to Abigail. Her nose was red and a bit swollen, probably from crying and from being mashed into the bathroom tiles. There was a single purpling bruise on the underside of her chin, in the shape of two splayed fingers. Otherwise, she looked like she might have gotten a little dinged up in a fender bender.
Abigail had been doing this long enough to know that what the girl looked like didn’t mean much. You had to look in her eyes to see the real story.
“I mean, fuck—fuck—fucking Emmy,” the girl was saying.
Her name was Katie Delgado. She was pretty, with tawny skin and wide hazel eyes and black hair tied back in a tangled ponytail. It was a fairly anonymous face. A catalogue-model face. One you forget the second you turn the page. She had one slightly snaggled tooth. Aside from the bruise, it was her only real distinguishing feature.
“Who’s Emmy?” Abigail asked, even though she already knew. Emmy McMasters had driven Katie to the ER and was still out in the lobby, rolling her eyes and loudly barking at the nurses about how long they had to wait. Emmy didn’t matter. But Katie had stopped talking, was retreating back into the hollows, and Abigail wanted to draw her out. Just a little.
“Emmy McMasters. Some girl in my occupational health class. We’re not even really friends. We just study together sometimes. She called me, begged me… she just had to go to this party and she couldn’t find anyone to go with her because it was all the way over on the West Side, and come on Katie, it’ll be fun!” Katie chuckled. It was a low and bitter sound, like rocks tumbling in the bottom of a bucket. “She wore me down. The guy was totally random. Todd. I think she met him at Jiffy Lube.”
Abigail nodded and listened. That was mostly what this job was: listening. Just let them tell it in their own way. Or not. Let them cry. Or not. Rage. Or not. Whatever was needed in these short moments between the doctor’s probing and the police officer’s questions. Let them do anything but fold down, reduce into themselves, go in search of that brand new black hole that had opened in the center of their heart and just let its gravity carry them away.
There was no way around the black hole. You just had to go through it. It was Abigail’s job to guide them. She’d been through it before.
Someone screamed down the hall. A woman. It didn’t sound like pain. It sounded like grief. Then the single scream became a chorus. Abigail wondered if it was the family of the stabbing victim she’d seen wheeled through the big double doors as she rode up on her ten-speed.
Katie didn’t seem to hear it at all. She turned away from Abigail, fiddled with the hem of the paper-thin gown they’d given her and stared, unblinking, at the fluorescent light. The black hole was at the edge of her vision. Abigail saw it lurking there, waiting.
“Do you want to tell me about the party?”
Katie looked at her. She didn’t want to but, give her credit, she knew she had to. A gurney rattled past, beyond the curtain, and it brought the rough tang of blood. The smell filled Abigail’s mouth with spit and made her jaw throb. She forced herself to focus. Soon, she thought. But not yet. Not until Katie was done telling her story.
“It was all these older guys,” Katie said. “I mean, not like dad age or anything. Like, in their thirties, I guess. Bunch of douchebags playing beer pong and Guitar Hero like they were freshmen at their first frat party. It was…” She laughed again. “It was fucking embarrassing. I couldn’t believe Emmy was into this Todd guy. He seemed like a total goober to me. But Craig, I don’t know. He seemed okay. Better than the others.”
Her voice caught on the last word. Tears spilled down her cheeks. Her face scrunched up and pulled inward, like she smelled something bad.
“Just tell as much as you want,” Abigail said softly. She did everything softly. That was also part of the job. “We can stop whenever you need to.”
Katie looked at her. Whatever she saw in Abigail’s face unlocked whatever needed to be unlocked, and the rest just spilled out of her.
“Emmy’s in the corner with her tongue in this Todd guy’s ear, and me and Craig, we’re over by the fridge talking about Star Trek, the Steelers, and John Paul Sartre. You know Sartre, the No Exit guy?” She pronounced it Sar-TER, like rhymes with tartar. “I had to read it in my freshman English seminar. I don’t know if I really got it. But Craig, he looks like an MMA fighter or something, but he’d read Sartre. I mean, come on. Really?” Another waspish chuckle. “I thought, I dunno, I thought… maybe? Like, shit, did I really meet someone? Could we go out on an actual date? All these stupid little girl thoughts. And he’s talking, saying things like how he likes to just jump in his car and drive, purposefully get himself lost in the East Mountains or out in the desert past Clines Corners. ‘You never know what you’ll stumble across,’ he said, and then he went off on this story about how he was driving down toward Mountainair at four in the morning and there was a brushfire out in a field and he pulled over and watched it burn for an hour. Said it looked like the night was dancing.”
Another gurney went by, another wash of blood, and Abigail felt something rumble deep inside her. The night doesn’t dance, she wanted to say. Instead, she only nodded.
“I mean, in retrospect… it was all bullshit, right? A total line? Right?” Katie squinted hard at Abigail. She needed Abigail to confirm for her how stupid she had been. Abigail wasn’t going to do that.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Katie shrugged. Her gown slipped a little way down her shoulder and Abigail saw another bruise there. Deeper. Darker. They’d hurt Katie bad, Craig and this other guy. The thing rumbled in Abigail’s stomach again—rumbled and then clenched—and it wasn’t just the hunger.
“Either way, I guess I bought it,” Katie said.
The rest was a version of every other story Abigail heard on these nights. Eventually Katie relaxed enough to let Craig go get her a drink. Then the haze, punctured here and there by sharp moments of terror. The bathroom tiles. The burning in her midsection. Two voices behind her, laughing. The other guy’s rat tail, the pebble stuck in the sole of his shoe. The smell of sweat and blood and something much more pungent coming from behind the toilet.
“‘Stop crying, Katie,’ Craig said, and he sounded sweet, like he did when he was telling me all about how the night was dancing, and almost scared, like maybe he was worried about me, like he wanted to protect me, and that’s when I started to get really, like, terrified. Because… because…”
Katie dissolved into sobs.
Abigail’s stomach rumbled. Her jaw throbbed. She could feel the pressure in the back of her teeth.
She reached out and took Katie’s hand. Squeezed.
The name fell into her mind, as she knew it would:
Craig Mellick.
#
He rode into the village on a pale brown horse. The horse pulled a cart. Inside the cart were two coffins. One for him and one for her.
But she didn’t know that yet.
The village had no official name. The people who lived there called it Esmeralda, after the old woman Esmeralda Hilargi, who had come over from the Old World—from Basque country—a century before and planted a stick in the dirt and under the stick found a spring, cool and clear and sweet. She lived there for another fifty years, in a crumbling mud and thatch hut on the northern edge of the village. Others heard about the spring and came from the North and the South, and there they settled. Some said Lady Esmeralda was a witch. Her name meant moon in Euskara, her native tongue, and many thought that was an ill omen. Everyone had heard the stories from their grandfathers and knew the Basques were an odd, witchy folk. But others said she was a saint. She had found the spring, after all, in the middle of nothing but dirt and creosote. Abigail Conchita Villareál, nineteen years old and the youngest of seven daughters (all of them married but her), thought Lady Esmeralda had probably just been lucky.
The village lay in the badlands just south of the company town of Eddy, where the white cattleman Charles Eddy held sway. A few years later they would rename the town Carlsbad, after the famous Karlsbad spa in Czechoslovakia. It would become famous for the deep caverns off to the West. The little village of Esmeralda, caught in the desert between Carlsbad and the caves, would be forgotten. Like an animal felled by a snakebite, it simply lay there and dried up until nothing was left but its bones.
Abigail returned to Esmeralda many years later, in the dead of night. Everything she did now was in the dead of night. She parked her (at the time brand new) Edsel Ranger on a rutted dirt track just east of Whites City and hiked out into the badlands, where she found nothing left of the village but a few burnt timbers and a weed-choked pit that might once have been a foundation. She thought it must have been the old meeting hall. She jumped down into the pit and dug around for a while, pawing at the tight-packed dirt with her bare hands.
It didn’t take long to find the skull. A single gold incisor jutted from the lower jaw, and so she knew to whom it belonged. Father Cristobál Garcia, the young priest up from El Paso. She had seen that tooth flashing from the pulpit every Sunday morning for more than a year.
Abigail trekked north from there and found Lady Esmeralda’s hut, which had been abandoned even in her time. Improbably, it still stood. It was half caved in and empty of all but a colony of bats roosting in the low, dried-out vigas. She sat inside for a moment, arms clenched around her knees, and willed tears to come. Willed herself to feel anything but that odd, not unpleasant emptiness. Then she plodded out of the desert and back to the road. The sun was starting to shoulder its way past the horizon. A few golden tendrils explored the star-studded black like the ships of Columbus. She opened the Edsel’s trunk and crawled inside.
He came into the village on a pale brown horse. The horse drew a cart. He sold all sorts of things out of that cart, tinctures and remedies and cast-iron pots and ornate brass spurs imported from the East. He was tall and milk white and had a strange, slithering accent. Years later, in their midnight travels together, Abigail learned that he hailed from an island off the northern coast of France called Enez Vriad. But his accent wasn’t French. He told her he was what was called a “Breton.” But she suspected the accent was a hodgepodge of everything from everywhere he had ever been. And he had been to a great many places.
He came into the village on a pale brown horse. The horse died, and the Breton stayed longer than he should have. He put up a black tent in the hardpan just past Lady Esmeralda’s hut. His smile was winning and cruel. The women whispered and giggled. The men grumbled, but still sampled his wares. It wasn’t often in Esmeralda that you could get bronze spurs imported from the East.
Before long, the people began to die.
#
Once Katie stopped crying, Abigail explained her role. She was there to be a liaison, if Katie wanted it, between Katie and the police, between Katie and the doctors, even between Katie and her own family. Abigail could refer her to counseling services, to pro bono legal advice, to clergy if need be. She was there to be a support. An advocate. Nothing more.
“I’m here to help you understand one thing,” Abigail said. “None of what happened to you is your fault.”
Katie looked at her dubiously.
“I’m here to help you get your power back,” Abigail continued. “From here on out, you don’t owe anybody anything. You didn’t before, but now you know it.”
“What about the cops?”
Abigail squeezed her hand. “Not even them,” she said. “You can tell them what happened if you want to. You can give them names, addresses, witnesses, whatever you want. But you don’t have to. It’s your choice.”
As she spoke, she pushed. She hated this part, but it was necessary. A trickle of impressions flowed from her fingers into Katie. There were no words, but the message was clear:
STALL THEM.
“I don’t know,” Katie said. “I mean, I gave Craig my phone number. Couldn’t he use that to get my address? Like, if I tell the cops his name, and then they go talk to him and they don’t end up doing anything, couldn’t he, like, come find me?”
“That’s a question for the police, and maybe for an attorney,” Abigail said. “Do you want me to help you find one?”
“I don’t know,” Katie said again. The gravity of all this was dawning on her. Not just the assault, but everything that comes after.
“That’s okay,” Abigail said.
Katie nodded. Another tear traced down the curve of her cheekbone toward her ear.
“There’s a police officer out in the lobby,” Abigail said. “I’m going to go talk to her and let her know how you’re doing. She’s here to take your statement. Would you like me to sit in here with you while you do so?”
Another push:
No.
Katie shook her head. “I can… I think I can handle it.”
Abigail opened up her backpack and dug out a card. Across the top, in gilded gold, was an acronym: RGRCAC. Rio Grande Rape Crisis and Advocacy Center. Her current name—Abigail Duran—lay beneath that in stark, sans serif black. Along with an email and phone number.
“Don’t hesitate to contact me,” she said. “For anything. I’m a phone call away.”
Katie nodded again. Abigail turned and started for the door.
“Hey,” Katie said from behind her.
Abigail stopped, hand on the doorknob, and turned.
“How old are you?” Katie asked, then blushed. “I mean… sorry… you just… you look younger than me.”
Abigail smiled. It was a thin smile, mostly lip. She needed to be careful. By now her gums would be receding. She didn’t want the girl’s last image before the police came in to be of Abigail grinning back at her like a shark.
“It’s okay,” Abigail said. “Trust me. I’m older than I look.”
#
A woman did this to me, he whispered to her once, long ago. And now I’m doing it to you.
Before anyone figured out what was going on, it was too late.
She remembered the pyre out in the desert, black smoke belching into the morning sky. Father Garcia was there, reading mad-eyed from Proverbs: there are those whose teeth are swords, whose fangs are knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, the needy from mankind! A sweet, cloying smell hung in the air like a shroud. A dozen bodies lay stacked in the flames, including two of Abigail’s sisters, one of her sisters’ husbands, and her father. Only ten or so villagers had come to witness the expiation. Many times more lay shut up in their homes, already sick and hiding from the sun.
Abigail made it to the fire, but she didn’t last long. The Breton had been to her too, in the small hours of night, and now the daylight was a thousand weasels nibbling at her flesh. Before long, she feared her skin would begin to smoke.
She trudged back up the stony path toward her father’s house. She intended to crawl under her bed and wait until nightfall.
Father Garcia’s words, high and terrified, crawled after her:
The leech has two daughters: Give and Give. Three things are never satisfied, four never say enough…
#
Craig Mellick.
Luckily, he didn’t live far. She knew this because of what he had done to Katie. They were linked now in ways he couldn’t imagine, bound together by threads of dark energy and gummy tendrils of dark matter. And now—because of the touch—Katie was linked to Abigail. They formed a chain, her at one end and Craig at the other.
His house was off Third and Marble, not far from the brewpub. There were still a few people lingering on the patio when she rode by. Music blasted from speakers: AC/DC, she thought, but there was too much thumping bass to be sure. Albuquerque, as always, was a relic from the past. Just like her.
It was all to the good, though. It meant it hadn’t gotten too late. She would have plenty of time. Sunrise was still hours away.
The brewpub was a thin cone of life in a sea of pregnant black. Then she was past it, and the city died around her. The mostly abandoned warehouses loomed like ancient temples. Temples like the ones the Breton had told her about, deep in the jungles of Cambodia and buried beneath the sands of the Arabian Peninsula. He had seen them over the course of his many night-bound travels.
Craig’s house was a low, crumbling bungalow set back from the road. The once-pink stucco had gone as gray as a dead man’s face. The lights were off and there were no cars in the weed-choked gravel drive. She pedaled toward the back and stashed her ten-speed behind the plastic recycle bin.
Craig had a roommate (not rat-tail, unfortunately). He was beefy and bearded, his face tired and sullen behind the dirty mesh of the screen door. He wore a frayed terrycloth bathrobe. A snake tattoo twisted out of it, slithered up his muscled chest, feathered his neck with its forked tongue. A tough guy. That was fine with her.
“The fuck,” he muttered through the screen door. “Who’re you?”
“Invite me inside,” she said flatly.
He pushed the screen door open, as she knew he would, and leered out at her.
“Get the fuck out of here, you fucking junkie,” he said, “‘fore I snap your little chicken neck.”
She reached out and took his hand. Immediately, she knew his name was Frankie McDeer, and that he worked at a body shop out on South Coors, and that his sister died of leukemia when she was nine and he was still in diapers. She also knew rat-tail’s name: Jordy Metucci. He lived in an apartment up by the university. Another link in the chain.
“Invite me in,” she said again. And pushed.
His eyes widened almost imperceptibly.
“Come in.” All the anger sieved out of his voice. He pushed the door all the way open and stood aside.
“Go back to bed,” she said as she passed and moved into the hallway.
He nodded and shut the door without a word.
#
Craig’s bedroom was at the end of the hall, just off of the bathroom. She considered waiting in the bathtub, thought that would be fitting, then decided against it. Craig’s room was cramped, nearly filled with the queen-sized bed. Piles of clothes, an old pizza box, a big Scarface poster on the wall. Perfect.
Her eyes fell to the nightstand. It was piled high with books. Two Stephen Kings, the third Harry Potter, some textbooks and—protruding from the stack near the bottom—a battered copy of Sartre’s No Exit.
I’ll be damned, she thought.
A big, incongruously antique wardrobe stood against the wall near the closet door. She stood in front of the mirror. It was splotched with fingerprints and showed nothing but the unkempt bed behind her.
There was a gap between the top of the wardrobe and the ceiling. She spidered up it and crouched there.
Her stomach rumbled. Her jaw throbbed.
She waited.
#
Craig stumbled in an hour later, reeking of booze and sex. He hummed lushly to himself. It took her a moment to recognize the song: Ain’t Misbehavin’, by Fats Waller. She had seen Waller play once at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, back in 1939. Waller was a big, gregarious man, and the smell of his blood was hot and full of smoke. It carried across the room and overwhelmed all her other senses. All her reason. She’d wanted to follow him back to his home in Addisleigh Park and have herself a drink, but the Breton forbade it. Then—as now—she could never restrain herself to a single sip, and the Breton was fond of jazz.
Craig hummed. You’re full of surprises, she thought.
He flopped onto his bed and let his arms fall open at his sides. He let out a phlegmy little sigh. Abigail studied him. He was a big guy, though not as big as she had expected. Not quite six feet and corded with smooth, unworked gym muscle. His face was wide and open, almost bookish, and a pair of thin-framed glasses had fallen askew across his nose. He wore a tight, plain-white tank top that showed off his myriad tattoos. Interestingly, they all seemed to be literary references. There was Hamlet’s hand clutching the skull, Poe’s raven, Sherlock’s pipe and deerstalker cap. Across his chest lay an intricate relief of a crumbling colonial manor that she thought might be Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. The work was exquisite. None of it really jibed with the Scarface poster, or the pizza box, or what he did to Katie. For a moment, she wondered if she had the right guy.
Then she thought about his story of getting lost in the desert, how sweet he’d sounded when he told Katie not to cry.
So he can read, she thought. Even de Sade could turn a nice phrase.
The Breton had his trinkets and his tinctures. Craig had his pretty words. That was all.
Craig’s lips fell into a contented smile. His teeth, she saw, were straight and white and a bit too small for his face.
“Craig,” she said.
He opened his eyes. They flitted, unfocused, about the room.
“You didn’t imagine it, Craig. I’m here.”
His gaze followed the voice to the top of the wardrobe. He squinted behind the glasses, trying to resolve the looming shadow into a person.
“The fuck—?”
“Katie wants to know if it was a line.”
“What?”
“The thing about watching the fire, and how it was like watching the night dance. She wants to know if it was a line.”
His eyes snapped into focus then. The hardness was there, instantaneously. Now she could see it. She could see the monster.
“Who the fuck are you? How did you get in?”
“Your roommate invited me,” she said. “That’s the way it works.”
Craig sat up and rolled to his side. He banged open a drawer in the nightstand, knocking the two Stephen King books to the floor. She saw the glint of the pistol barrel, buried under a stack of foil-wrapped condoms.
“Was it a line or not?”
Then the barrel was pointed at her. His hand was shaking.
“Get the fuck out of here,” he said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I’ll put two in your fucking skull. Bitch.”
No pretty words now, she thought.
“So it was a line, then,” she said.
The gun was a revolver, the old-fashioned kind where you had to cock the hammer back to fire. The sound was very loud in the tight room.
“I’m not fucking kidding,” he said.
Abigail smelled his fear, and his anger, and the hot blood pumping beneath it. Her mind spiked with hunger. It came from deep in her bones, from the roots of her teeth. Her stomach turned over and roared, loud enough for him to hear. It was time.
She loomed out of the darkness, letting the thin moonlight reveal her. Her lips tore back from teeth gone long and brittle. The throb in her jaw turned to agony as the teeth shot out like pellets and clattered to the scuffed wood floor. That would confuse the police, but she didn’t care. By then she’d be gone. Back on the road. Hardly a memory. Poor Katie would have to find her own way, which broke Abigail’s heart. The RGRCAC would help her, though.
One of the teeth caught Craig in the cheek, just below the rim of his glasses. He yelped and reared back. The gun clattered in the darkness, the flash as bright as an exploding star, and she felt the bullet whiz past her head and slam into the ceiling above her.
By then the other teeth—her real teeth—had distended through the gums, tearing through her lips as they snapped into place. The agony was gone. She ran her tongue over their serrated edges, loving and hating their feel in equal measure.
“Frankie!” he shouted, high and reedy.
She fell on him. Batted the revolver away like a toy.
“Frankie! Call the—!”
But then her hand clamped around his throat and his voice irised down to a squeak. She grinned through her shredded lips, watched as the blood--her blood—spattered his face. One drop fell on his glasses, shielding the wide, terrified blue eye.
She let him take her in. All of her.
She exhaled, blasting the rotten meat stench of her change into his mouth. He tried to push her away, beat at her sides with closed fists. He was strong. But she was so much stronger.
A woman did this to me, the Breton had told her, and now I’m doing it to you.
She removed her hand from around his throat. He screamed. She thought he was trying to shout Frankie’s name again. It didn’t matter. Frankie was going to sleep through this. He was going to wake up refreshed and happy, until he stumbled on what she had left for him.
The leech has two daughters, she thought. Give and Give.
Her teeth scissored onto Craig Mellick’s throat. The scream turned to a gurgle, high and liquid and filled with pain as she shook her head back and forth like a dog. Blood painted her face, her neck, her plain black T-shirt. It arced up and spattered the walls and ceiling, smeared ropy splotches across Al Pacino’s snarling mouth. It pumped out of him and into her, warm and thick and nearly as sweet as cream. She didn’t expect him to be sweet. If she’d had to guess, she would have said he’d taste like beef jerky.
Craig spasmed for a moment beneath her, as if in climax. Then he let out one last wet sigh and lay still.
Abigail sat astride him. She pushed herself up and licked the viscera from her teeth. Her head swam. Blood--new blood—roared in her ears.
From far off, the sound of sirens. Someone had heard the gunshot.
She was still hungry.
It was time to go pay a visit to Jordy Metucci.
#
You’ll never do it to me again.
#
Twelve hours later, Abigail found herself staring into the motel room mirror. Her reflection had returned, as it always did after she fed. It would remain for months, maybe even a year, before eventually fading like an old photograph.
Her lips were a tangle of mostly healed, hard white scars. It looked as if she had taken a razor blade to her lips once, long ago. In another two or three days, the scars would be gone.
She smiled and inspected her teeth. They were small and oddly shaped, like baby teeth. They’d also look normal in another couple days. The real teeth had retracted back into their caverns, awaiting the next change.
Her face was almost anonymous again. A catalogue-model face. One you forget the second you turn the page.
You had to look in her eyes to see the real story.
She wondered how Katie Delgado was faring. The questions would be harder now, once the police descended on Craig Mellick and Jordy Metucci and found what they found. They’d wonder who Katie had spoken to, who she knew who would exact that kind of vengeance on her behalf. The guilt sat in Abigail’s stomach like a brick. It couldn’t be helped. It was the price of blood. She had tried to pass some of her strength to Katie before she had left her. She hoped it would be enough.
She turned back to the room. It was a Motel 6 outside Tucumcari. She’d just managed to make it before sunup, and barely had enough time to put the cloth up over the windows. She slept for hours, sated, but now the sun was going down and it was almost time to move again. She’d hit Amarillo by late evening, and then (hopefully) Wichita before morning. From there, she didn’t know. She just needed distance.
The police would, by now, have begun to suspect her. But that wasn’t her concern. She’d be like smoke to them, torn away by a breeze.
Her concern was the Breton. She’d sensed him lurking for weeks, circling her like a shark, and after what she’d done to Jordy Metucci, the image pounded into her like a nail. He was driving a truck. A big one. Not a semi. More like a bread truck. He was no more than a couple hundred miles away. El Paso, maybe. Or Flagstaff.
Her sense of him was always stronger after she’d fed.
And if she sensed him, she knew he sensed her. She’d gotten away from him once, and understood that he didn’t mean to let her get away again.
It had been stupid for her to come back to New Mexico, to stay for so long. It made her complacent. But that was over now.
The coffins were in the back of the truck, behind a windowless steel door.
One for him.
One for her.
The girl didn’t look too bad to Abigail. Her nose was red and a bit swollen, probably from crying and from being mashed into the bathroom tiles. There was a single purpling bruise on the underside of her chin, in the shape of two splayed fingers. Otherwise, she looked like she might have gotten a little dinged up in a fender bender.
Abigail had been doing this long enough to know that what the girl looked like didn’t mean much. You had to look in her eyes to see the real story.
“I mean, fuck—fuck—fucking Emmy,” the girl was saying.
Her name was Katie Delgado. She was pretty, with tawny skin and wide hazel eyes and black hair tied back in a tangled ponytail. It was a fairly anonymous face. A catalogue-model face. One you forget the second you turn the page. She had one slightly snaggled tooth. Aside from the bruise, it was her only real distinguishing feature.
“Who’s Emmy?” Abigail asked, even though she already knew. Emmy McMasters had driven Katie to the ER and was still out in the lobby, rolling her eyes and loudly barking at the nurses about how long they had to wait. Emmy didn’t matter. But Katie had stopped talking, was retreating back into the hollows, and Abigail wanted to draw her out. Just a little.
“Emmy McMasters. Some girl in my occupational health class. We’re not even really friends. We just study together sometimes. She called me, begged me… she just had to go to this party and she couldn’t find anyone to go with her because it was all the way over on the West Side, and come on Katie, it’ll be fun!” Katie chuckled. It was a low and bitter sound, like rocks tumbling in the bottom of a bucket. “She wore me down. The guy was totally random. Todd. I think she met him at Jiffy Lube.”
Abigail nodded and listened. That was mostly what this job was: listening. Just let them tell it in their own way. Or not. Let them cry. Or not. Rage. Or not. Whatever was needed in these short moments between the doctor’s probing and the police officer’s questions. Let them do anything but fold down, reduce into themselves, go in search of that brand new black hole that had opened in the center of their heart and just let its gravity carry them away.
There was no way around the black hole. You just had to go through it. It was Abigail’s job to guide them. She’d been through it before.
Someone screamed down the hall. A woman. It didn’t sound like pain. It sounded like grief. Then the single scream became a chorus. Abigail wondered if it was the family of the stabbing victim she’d seen wheeled through the big double doors as she rode up on her ten-speed.
Katie didn’t seem to hear it at all. She turned away from Abigail, fiddled with the hem of the paper-thin gown they’d given her and stared, unblinking, at the fluorescent light. The black hole was at the edge of her vision. Abigail saw it lurking there, waiting.
“Do you want to tell me about the party?”
Katie looked at her. She didn’t want to but, give her credit, she knew she had to. A gurney rattled past, beyond the curtain, and it brought the rough tang of blood. The smell filled Abigail’s mouth with spit and made her jaw throb. She forced herself to focus. Soon, she thought. But not yet. Not until Katie was done telling her story.
“It was all these older guys,” Katie said. “I mean, not like dad age or anything. Like, in their thirties, I guess. Bunch of douchebags playing beer pong and Guitar Hero like they were freshmen at their first frat party. It was…” She laughed again. “It was fucking embarrassing. I couldn’t believe Emmy was into this Todd guy. He seemed like a total goober to me. But Craig, I don’t know. He seemed okay. Better than the others.”
Her voice caught on the last word. Tears spilled down her cheeks. Her face scrunched up and pulled inward, like she smelled something bad.
“Just tell as much as you want,” Abigail said softly. She did everything softly. That was also part of the job. “We can stop whenever you need to.”
Katie looked at her. Whatever she saw in Abigail’s face unlocked whatever needed to be unlocked, and the rest just spilled out of her.
“Emmy’s in the corner with her tongue in this Todd guy’s ear, and me and Craig, we’re over by the fridge talking about Star Trek, the Steelers, and John Paul Sartre. You know Sartre, the No Exit guy?” She pronounced it Sar-TER, like rhymes with tartar. “I had to read it in my freshman English seminar. I don’t know if I really got it. But Craig, he looks like an MMA fighter or something, but he’d read Sartre. I mean, come on. Really?” Another waspish chuckle. “I thought, I dunno, I thought… maybe? Like, shit, did I really meet someone? Could we go out on an actual date? All these stupid little girl thoughts. And he’s talking, saying things like how he likes to just jump in his car and drive, purposefully get himself lost in the East Mountains or out in the desert past Clines Corners. ‘You never know what you’ll stumble across,’ he said, and then he went off on this story about how he was driving down toward Mountainair at four in the morning and there was a brushfire out in a field and he pulled over and watched it burn for an hour. Said it looked like the night was dancing.”
Another gurney went by, another wash of blood, and Abigail felt something rumble deep inside her. The night doesn’t dance, she wanted to say. Instead, she only nodded.
“I mean, in retrospect… it was all bullshit, right? A total line? Right?” Katie squinted hard at Abigail. She needed Abigail to confirm for her how stupid she had been. Abigail wasn’t going to do that.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Katie shrugged. Her gown slipped a little way down her shoulder and Abigail saw another bruise there. Deeper. Darker. They’d hurt Katie bad, Craig and this other guy. The thing rumbled in Abigail’s stomach again—rumbled and then clenched—and it wasn’t just the hunger.
“Either way, I guess I bought it,” Katie said.
The rest was a version of every other story Abigail heard on these nights. Eventually Katie relaxed enough to let Craig go get her a drink. Then the haze, punctured here and there by sharp moments of terror. The bathroom tiles. The burning in her midsection. Two voices behind her, laughing. The other guy’s rat tail, the pebble stuck in the sole of his shoe. The smell of sweat and blood and something much more pungent coming from behind the toilet.
“‘Stop crying, Katie,’ Craig said, and he sounded sweet, like he did when he was telling me all about how the night was dancing, and almost scared, like maybe he was worried about me, like he wanted to protect me, and that’s when I started to get really, like, terrified. Because… because…”
Katie dissolved into sobs.
Abigail’s stomach rumbled. Her jaw throbbed. She could feel the pressure in the back of her teeth.
She reached out and took Katie’s hand. Squeezed.
The name fell into her mind, as she knew it would:
Craig Mellick.
#
He rode into the village on a pale brown horse. The horse pulled a cart. Inside the cart were two coffins. One for him and one for her.
But she didn’t know that yet.
The village had no official name. The people who lived there called it Esmeralda, after the old woman Esmeralda Hilargi, who had come over from the Old World—from Basque country—a century before and planted a stick in the dirt and under the stick found a spring, cool and clear and sweet. She lived there for another fifty years, in a crumbling mud and thatch hut on the northern edge of the village. Others heard about the spring and came from the North and the South, and there they settled. Some said Lady Esmeralda was a witch. Her name meant moon in Euskara, her native tongue, and many thought that was an ill omen. Everyone had heard the stories from their grandfathers and knew the Basques were an odd, witchy folk. But others said she was a saint. She had found the spring, after all, in the middle of nothing but dirt and creosote. Abigail Conchita Villareál, nineteen years old and the youngest of seven daughters (all of them married but her), thought Lady Esmeralda had probably just been lucky.
The village lay in the badlands just south of the company town of Eddy, where the white cattleman Charles Eddy held sway. A few years later they would rename the town Carlsbad, after the famous Karlsbad spa in Czechoslovakia. It would become famous for the deep caverns off to the West. The little village of Esmeralda, caught in the desert between Carlsbad and the caves, would be forgotten. Like an animal felled by a snakebite, it simply lay there and dried up until nothing was left but its bones.
Abigail returned to Esmeralda many years later, in the dead of night. Everything she did now was in the dead of night. She parked her (at the time brand new) Edsel Ranger on a rutted dirt track just east of Whites City and hiked out into the badlands, where she found nothing left of the village but a few burnt timbers and a weed-choked pit that might once have been a foundation. She thought it must have been the old meeting hall. She jumped down into the pit and dug around for a while, pawing at the tight-packed dirt with her bare hands.
It didn’t take long to find the skull. A single gold incisor jutted from the lower jaw, and so she knew to whom it belonged. Father Cristobál Garcia, the young priest up from El Paso. She had seen that tooth flashing from the pulpit every Sunday morning for more than a year.
Abigail trekked north from there and found Lady Esmeralda’s hut, which had been abandoned even in her time. Improbably, it still stood. It was half caved in and empty of all but a colony of bats roosting in the low, dried-out vigas. She sat inside for a moment, arms clenched around her knees, and willed tears to come. Willed herself to feel anything but that odd, not unpleasant emptiness. Then she plodded out of the desert and back to the road. The sun was starting to shoulder its way past the horizon. A few golden tendrils explored the star-studded black like the ships of Columbus. She opened the Edsel’s trunk and crawled inside.
He came into the village on a pale brown horse. The horse drew a cart. He sold all sorts of things out of that cart, tinctures and remedies and cast-iron pots and ornate brass spurs imported from the East. He was tall and milk white and had a strange, slithering accent. Years later, in their midnight travels together, Abigail learned that he hailed from an island off the northern coast of France called Enez Vriad. But his accent wasn’t French. He told her he was what was called a “Breton.” But she suspected the accent was a hodgepodge of everything from everywhere he had ever been. And he had been to a great many places.
He came into the village on a pale brown horse. The horse died, and the Breton stayed longer than he should have. He put up a black tent in the hardpan just past Lady Esmeralda’s hut. His smile was winning and cruel. The women whispered and giggled. The men grumbled, but still sampled his wares. It wasn’t often in Esmeralda that you could get bronze spurs imported from the East.
Before long, the people began to die.
#
Once Katie stopped crying, Abigail explained her role. She was there to be a liaison, if Katie wanted it, between Katie and the police, between Katie and the doctors, even between Katie and her own family. Abigail could refer her to counseling services, to pro bono legal advice, to clergy if need be. She was there to be a support. An advocate. Nothing more.
“I’m here to help you understand one thing,” Abigail said. “None of what happened to you is your fault.”
Katie looked at her dubiously.
“I’m here to help you get your power back,” Abigail continued. “From here on out, you don’t owe anybody anything. You didn’t before, but now you know it.”
“What about the cops?”
Abigail squeezed her hand. “Not even them,” she said. “You can tell them what happened if you want to. You can give them names, addresses, witnesses, whatever you want. But you don’t have to. It’s your choice.”
As she spoke, she pushed. She hated this part, but it was necessary. A trickle of impressions flowed from her fingers into Katie. There were no words, but the message was clear:
STALL THEM.
“I don’t know,” Katie said. “I mean, I gave Craig my phone number. Couldn’t he use that to get my address? Like, if I tell the cops his name, and then they go talk to him and they don’t end up doing anything, couldn’t he, like, come find me?”
“That’s a question for the police, and maybe for an attorney,” Abigail said. “Do you want me to help you find one?”
“I don’t know,” Katie said again. The gravity of all this was dawning on her. Not just the assault, but everything that comes after.
“That’s okay,” Abigail said.
Katie nodded. Another tear traced down the curve of her cheekbone toward her ear.
“There’s a police officer out in the lobby,” Abigail said. “I’m going to go talk to her and let her know how you’re doing. She’s here to take your statement. Would you like me to sit in here with you while you do so?”
Another push:
No.
Katie shook her head. “I can… I think I can handle it.”
Abigail opened up her backpack and dug out a card. Across the top, in gilded gold, was an acronym: RGRCAC. Rio Grande Rape Crisis and Advocacy Center. Her current name—Abigail Duran—lay beneath that in stark, sans serif black. Along with an email and phone number.
“Don’t hesitate to contact me,” she said. “For anything. I’m a phone call away.”
Katie nodded again. Abigail turned and started for the door.
“Hey,” Katie said from behind her.
Abigail stopped, hand on the doorknob, and turned.
“How old are you?” Katie asked, then blushed. “I mean… sorry… you just… you look younger than me.”
Abigail smiled. It was a thin smile, mostly lip. She needed to be careful. By now her gums would be receding. She didn’t want the girl’s last image before the police came in to be of Abigail grinning back at her like a shark.
“It’s okay,” Abigail said. “Trust me. I’m older than I look.”
#
A woman did this to me, he whispered to her once, long ago. And now I’m doing it to you.
Before anyone figured out what was going on, it was too late.
She remembered the pyre out in the desert, black smoke belching into the morning sky. Father Garcia was there, reading mad-eyed from Proverbs: there are those whose teeth are swords, whose fangs are knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, the needy from mankind! A sweet, cloying smell hung in the air like a shroud. A dozen bodies lay stacked in the flames, including two of Abigail’s sisters, one of her sisters’ husbands, and her father. Only ten or so villagers had come to witness the expiation. Many times more lay shut up in their homes, already sick and hiding from the sun.
Abigail made it to the fire, but she didn’t last long. The Breton had been to her too, in the small hours of night, and now the daylight was a thousand weasels nibbling at her flesh. Before long, she feared her skin would begin to smoke.
She trudged back up the stony path toward her father’s house. She intended to crawl under her bed and wait until nightfall.
Father Garcia’s words, high and terrified, crawled after her:
The leech has two daughters: Give and Give. Three things are never satisfied, four never say enough…
#
Craig Mellick.
Luckily, he didn’t live far. She knew this because of what he had done to Katie. They were linked now in ways he couldn’t imagine, bound together by threads of dark energy and gummy tendrils of dark matter. And now—because of the touch—Katie was linked to Abigail. They formed a chain, her at one end and Craig at the other.
His house was off Third and Marble, not far from the brewpub. There were still a few people lingering on the patio when she rode by. Music blasted from speakers: AC/DC, she thought, but there was too much thumping bass to be sure. Albuquerque, as always, was a relic from the past. Just like her.
It was all to the good, though. It meant it hadn’t gotten too late. She would have plenty of time. Sunrise was still hours away.
The brewpub was a thin cone of life in a sea of pregnant black. Then she was past it, and the city died around her. The mostly abandoned warehouses loomed like ancient temples. Temples like the ones the Breton had told her about, deep in the jungles of Cambodia and buried beneath the sands of the Arabian Peninsula. He had seen them over the course of his many night-bound travels.
Craig’s house was a low, crumbling bungalow set back from the road. The once-pink stucco had gone as gray as a dead man’s face. The lights were off and there were no cars in the weed-choked gravel drive. She pedaled toward the back and stashed her ten-speed behind the plastic recycle bin.
Craig had a roommate (not rat-tail, unfortunately). He was beefy and bearded, his face tired and sullen behind the dirty mesh of the screen door. He wore a frayed terrycloth bathrobe. A snake tattoo twisted out of it, slithered up his muscled chest, feathered his neck with its forked tongue. A tough guy. That was fine with her.
“The fuck,” he muttered through the screen door. “Who’re you?”
“Invite me inside,” she said flatly.
He pushed the screen door open, as she knew he would, and leered out at her.
“Get the fuck out of here, you fucking junkie,” he said, “‘fore I snap your little chicken neck.”
She reached out and took his hand. Immediately, she knew his name was Frankie McDeer, and that he worked at a body shop out on South Coors, and that his sister died of leukemia when she was nine and he was still in diapers. She also knew rat-tail’s name: Jordy Metucci. He lived in an apartment up by the university. Another link in the chain.
“Invite me in,” she said again. And pushed.
His eyes widened almost imperceptibly.
“Come in.” All the anger sieved out of his voice. He pushed the door all the way open and stood aside.
“Go back to bed,” she said as she passed and moved into the hallway.
He nodded and shut the door without a word.
#
Craig’s bedroom was at the end of the hall, just off of the bathroom. She considered waiting in the bathtub, thought that would be fitting, then decided against it. Craig’s room was cramped, nearly filled with the queen-sized bed. Piles of clothes, an old pizza box, a big Scarface poster on the wall. Perfect.
Her eyes fell to the nightstand. It was piled high with books. Two Stephen Kings, the third Harry Potter, some textbooks and—protruding from the stack near the bottom—a battered copy of Sartre’s No Exit.
I’ll be damned, she thought.
A big, incongruously antique wardrobe stood against the wall near the closet door. She stood in front of the mirror. It was splotched with fingerprints and showed nothing but the unkempt bed behind her.
There was a gap between the top of the wardrobe and the ceiling. She spidered up it and crouched there.
Her stomach rumbled. Her jaw throbbed.
She waited.
#
Craig stumbled in an hour later, reeking of booze and sex. He hummed lushly to himself. It took her a moment to recognize the song: Ain’t Misbehavin’, by Fats Waller. She had seen Waller play once at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, back in 1939. Waller was a big, gregarious man, and the smell of his blood was hot and full of smoke. It carried across the room and overwhelmed all her other senses. All her reason. She’d wanted to follow him back to his home in Addisleigh Park and have herself a drink, but the Breton forbade it. Then—as now—she could never restrain herself to a single sip, and the Breton was fond of jazz.
Craig hummed. You’re full of surprises, she thought.
He flopped onto his bed and let his arms fall open at his sides. He let out a phlegmy little sigh. Abigail studied him. He was a big guy, though not as big as she had expected. Not quite six feet and corded with smooth, unworked gym muscle. His face was wide and open, almost bookish, and a pair of thin-framed glasses had fallen askew across his nose. He wore a tight, plain-white tank top that showed off his myriad tattoos. Interestingly, they all seemed to be literary references. There was Hamlet’s hand clutching the skull, Poe’s raven, Sherlock’s pipe and deerstalker cap. Across his chest lay an intricate relief of a crumbling colonial manor that she thought might be Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. The work was exquisite. None of it really jibed with the Scarface poster, or the pizza box, or what he did to Katie. For a moment, she wondered if she had the right guy.
Then she thought about his story of getting lost in the desert, how sweet he’d sounded when he told Katie not to cry.
So he can read, she thought. Even de Sade could turn a nice phrase.
The Breton had his trinkets and his tinctures. Craig had his pretty words. That was all.
Craig’s lips fell into a contented smile. His teeth, she saw, were straight and white and a bit too small for his face.
“Craig,” she said.
He opened his eyes. They flitted, unfocused, about the room.
“You didn’t imagine it, Craig. I’m here.”
His gaze followed the voice to the top of the wardrobe. He squinted behind the glasses, trying to resolve the looming shadow into a person.
“The fuck—?”
“Katie wants to know if it was a line.”
“What?”
“The thing about watching the fire, and how it was like watching the night dance. She wants to know if it was a line.”
His eyes snapped into focus then. The hardness was there, instantaneously. Now she could see it. She could see the monster.
“Who the fuck are you? How did you get in?”
“Your roommate invited me,” she said. “That’s the way it works.”
Craig sat up and rolled to his side. He banged open a drawer in the nightstand, knocking the two Stephen King books to the floor. She saw the glint of the pistol barrel, buried under a stack of foil-wrapped condoms.
“Was it a line or not?”
Then the barrel was pointed at her. His hand was shaking.
“Get the fuck out of here,” he said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I’ll put two in your fucking skull. Bitch.”
No pretty words now, she thought.
“So it was a line, then,” she said.
The gun was a revolver, the old-fashioned kind where you had to cock the hammer back to fire. The sound was very loud in the tight room.
“I’m not fucking kidding,” he said.
Abigail smelled his fear, and his anger, and the hot blood pumping beneath it. Her mind spiked with hunger. It came from deep in her bones, from the roots of her teeth. Her stomach turned over and roared, loud enough for him to hear. It was time.
She loomed out of the darkness, letting the thin moonlight reveal her. Her lips tore back from teeth gone long and brittle. The throb in her jaw turned to agony as the teeth shot out like pellets and clattered to the scuffed wood floor. That would confuse the police, but she didn’t care. By then she’d be gone. Back on the road. Hardly a memory. Poor Katie would have to find her own way, which broke Abigail’s heart. The RGRCAC would help her, though.
One of the teeth caught Craig in the cheek, just below the rim of his glasses. He yelped and reared back. The gun clattered in the darkness, the flash as bright as an exploding star, and she felt the bullet whiz past her head and slam into the ceiling above her.
By then the other teeth—her real teeth—had distended through the gums, tearing through her lips as they snapped into place. The agony was gone. She ran her tongue over their serrated edges, loving and hating their feel in equal measure.
“Frankie!” he shouted, high and reedy.
She fell on him. Batted the revolver away like a toy.
“Frankie! Call the—!”
But then her hand clamped around his throat and his voice irised down to a squeak. She grinned through her shredded lips, watched as the blood--her blood—spattered his face. One drop fell on his glasses, shielding the wide, terrified blue eye.
She let him take her in. All of her.
She exhaled, blasting the rotten meat stench of her change into his mouth. He tried to push her away, beat at her sides with closed fists. He was strong. But she was so much stronger.
A woman did this to me, the Breton had told her, and now I’m doing it to you.
She removed her hand from around his throat. He screamed. She thought he was trying to shout Frankie’s name again. It didn’t matter. Frankie was going to sleep through this. He was going to wake up refreshed and happy, until he stumbled on what she had left for him.
The leech has two daughters, she thought. Give and Give.
Her teeth scissored onto Craig Mellick’s throat. The scream turned to a gurgle, high and liquid and filled with pain as she shook her head back and forth like a dog. Blood painted her face, her neck, her plain black T-shirt. It arced up and spattered the walls and ceiling, smeared ropy splotches across Al Pacino’s snarling mouth. It pumped out of him and into her, warm and thick and nearly as sweet as cream. She didn’t expect him to be sweet. If she’d had to guess, she would have said he’d taste like beef jerky.
Craig spasmed for a moment beneath her, as if in climax. Then he let out one last wet sigh and lay still.
Abigail sat astride him. She pushed herself up and licked the viscera from her teeth. Her head swam. Blood--new blood—roared in her ears.
From far off, the sound of sirens. Someone had heard the gunshot.
She was still hungry.
It was time to go pay a visit to Jordy Metucci.
#
You’ll never do it to me again.
#
Twelve hours later, Abigail found herself staring into the motel room mirror. Her reflection had returned, as it always did after she fed. It would remain for months, maybe even a year, before eventually fading like an old photograph.
Her lips were a tangle of mostly healed, hard white scars. It looked as if she had taken a razor blade to her lips once, long ago. In another two or three days, the scars would be gone.
She smiled and inspected her teeth. They were small and oddly shaped, like baby teeth. They’d also look normal in another couple days. The real teeth had retracted back into their caverns, awaiting the next change.
Her face was almost anonymous again. A catalogue-model face. One you forget the second you turn the page.
You had to look in her eyes to see the real story.
She wondered how Katie Delgado was faring. The questions would be harder now, once the police descended on Craig Mellick and Jordy Metucci and found what they found. They’d wonder who Katie had spoken to, who she knew who would exact that kind of vengeance on her behalf. The guilt sat in Abigail’s stomach like a brick. It couldn’t be helped. It was the price of blood. She had tried to pass some of her strength to Katie before she had left her. She hoped it would be enough.
She turned back to the room. It was a Motel 6 outside Tucumcari. She’d just managed to make it before sunup, and barely had enough time to put the cloth up over the windows. She slept for hours, sated, but now the sun was going down and it was almost time to move again. She’d hit Amarillo by late evening, and then (hopefully) Wichita before morning. From there, she didn’t know. She just needed distance.
The police would, by now, have begun to suspect her. But that wasn’t her concern. She’d be like smoke to them, torn away by a breeze.
Her concern was the Breton. She’d sensed him lurking for weeks, circling her like a shark, and after what she’d done to Jordy Metucci, the image pounded into her like a nail. He was driving a truck. A big one. Not a semi. More like a bread truck. He was no more than a couple hundred miles away. El Paso, maybe. Or Flagstaff.
Her sense of him was always stronger after she’d fed.
And if she sensed him, she knew he sensed her. She’d gotten away from him once, and understood that he didn’t mean to let her get away again.
It had been stupid for her to come back to New Mexico, to stay for so long. It made her complacent. But that was over now.
The coffins were in the back of the truck, behind a windowless steel door.
One for him.
One for her.