Red Right Hand (5 page)

Daniel stared at Nyarlathotep, his eyes wide and unblinking as though he had never seen anything so amazing.

No.

This wasn't my fault. It wasn't. I didn't bring this weirdness into my life. Everything in me screamed to run, to bolt, to get as far away as possible from the Man in Black and whatever he wanted me to do.

I still could. He stood far enough away in his flappy black coat that I could be gone before he grabbed me. I'd had years of obsessive sprint training since that night, training so I could get away from people and situations. Those skills would pay off, and I would be gone.

But Daniel would still be here. Left behind. Left to the mercy of the Man in Black.

My ear throbbed at the thought.

I can't. I just can't.

“If I help you tonight, will you go away and leave us alone?”

The Man in Black nodded.

“Swear.”

“Do your duty tonight, Charlotte Tristan Moore, and I swear on the sanity of Azathoth that I will leave you and he unmolested for the rest of time itself.”

What does that even mean?

Did I trust him?

No.

Did I have a choice?

I couldn't see one.

Dammit.

My father's advice rang through my mind.

If you can't get out, then get through.

Simple words that are hard to walk but still true.

“Get in the car. Let's get this over with.”

 

8

T
HE BLACK COAT
rustled uneasily next to me, nearly quivering as it lay folded against the Man in Black. An edge of it curled to brush my knuckles as I shifted gears. A burst of noise, like a snatch of music when you're pushing the button on the radio too fast, garbled in my head, making me jerk away, grinding the gears of my Honda. The car, nearly as old as me and still on its original transmission, lurched violently.

Pull it together.

The coat fell away, slipping into a puddle of darkness.

The Man in Black filled the seat next to me with a solid presence, looking out the windshield as I drove. His saturnine face was all sharp angles and strange geometry cut from random lights as we passed. Sitting in my worn-down Honda Civic, he didn't even look real. Up close he was an optical illusion, a special effect in a low-budget horror movie.

That's fitting.

I glanced in the rearview mirror. Daniel sat folded behind us, feet up with no room for his legs. He wasn't overly tall, five-ten or so, but the Honda's backseat was pretty small and my floorboards were full of trash. I don't keep a clean car 'cause I just don't care that much. There's no food trash—my car doesn't smell—but anything paper or plastic I just toss in the back.

Daniel's eyes met mine in the reflection of the rearview mirror. They weren't back to normal, but at least they'd lost their mile-long stare. He had nice eyes, quick and kind. They nearly twinkled when he wasn't thinking with the hyper-focus of a student who could keep up, but not without work. He still had to be half drunk, as I'd been when I left his apartment, before the night turned vicious on me and any buzz had been doused from my system by fear, horror, and adrenaline. He did look stoned though, the micro-muscles in his face relaxed to almost strokelike looseness.

It was the same look my ex-boyfriend Thom had gotten when he went on a narcotic nod.

I never joined him, never that far, but I'd watched him slip off into the arms of Morpheus while dulling my mind on weed and pills. I did it just to be able to get through a whole day after … after what happened. My therapist at the time had prescribed a laundry list of pills to get me through, but those just deadened everything and put me to sleep.

Those drugs made sure I didn't think about what happened, but they did it by making sure I couldn't think about anything. Left dead awake, I wandered through my life not feeling, not caring, just sleepwalking and nearly nonfunctional. I
needed
to be able to live, to deal with the thing—but only a little at a time, holding it at a long arm's length. Working my way up to working my way through it.

So I self-prescribed, dropping into behavior I'd only been
around
before, never involved in. I burned out my brain cells and short circuited the memory so I could get to the end of
that
day and damn tomorrow for not being real.

Thom had been the way I accomplished that.

I'm a terrible person.

He was a nice guy, a sensitive art type who never met a drug he didn't like, so he had the connections I needed. He'd liked me for years during middle school and was enough of a nonjudgmental hippie to still like me after I got out of the hospital.

Guilt stabbed deep as I remembered pushing Thom to tie off, to shoot up, to nod away. He'd been headed there before me, but I
needed
him to give me painkillers and company without the threat of sex. Threat is the wrong word. He was too nice to push, never would if I'd given him the chance, but he'd want it, all boys do, and I just couldn't. Just before he would drop all the way gone, he would loll his head over, give me his crooked smile, pat my arm, and say,
Don't worry, babe, you're always gonna be my heroin.

I wasn't proud of what I had done. Not at all. I hurt, and I saw a way out of it and, at the time, couldn't see anything besides that. It only lasted a few months. I got Thom to NA before I parted ways with him, but it was still shitty of me.

Shittiest thing I've ever done in a long list of shitty things.

Terrible person.

Don't judge me.

In the mirror, Daniel smiled softly. I cut my eyes back to the road.

Pay attention, or you'll kill us all.

Flexing my fingers on the steering wheel made the Mark on my hand sore. I adjusted in my seat, moving my kidney off the piece of broken seat plastic that jabbed me when I slouched. Outside the car my neighborhood fell away, streets opening to the rest of the city. Soon I'd have to turn off or run out of road.

“Where are we going?”

“We will be seeing someone who can give us direction.”

“Direction? I could use some, unless you want me to turn the Kwikie Mart at the end of this road into a drive-through.”

The Man in Black reached into his coat with his red right hand, the crimson of it slipping obscenely into the inky folds. His arm slid deep, deeper than it should have been able to, disappearing into the leathery darkness. I watched from the corner of my eye as I drove.

Where is his sword?

It wasn't in the car. I hadn't seen it since the foyer of the townhouse. Had he left it there? Would my roommates find it in the mess of gore and blood of the dead skinhounds? Shasta would freak
out
in the morning. They all would. If they woke up at all. The Man in Black had said he'd placed a spell to keep them asleep. What if he wasn't telling the truth?

What was I thinking? What if he
was
telling the truth?

What kind of insanity had taken me tonight?

Panic rose in my chest. I clamped down on it.

I could only do what I could do in this moment. I would deal with this right now and deal with that when it came.

The Man in Black felt around the depths of the coat, too-sharp teeth biting his lower lip. He smiled as he found whatever he'd been looking for and began to pull his arm out. The smile scraped the points of his teeth over the thin skin of his lip. Black blood trickled from a dozen pinpricks. It pooled along the bottom edge of his lip, quivering as it thickened, hanging, threatening to drip. His tongue darted out, sweeping across and scooping up the droplet. The tongue was too long, scabrous, and red like a boiled lobster.

The sight of it ran a chill up my spine.

His hand slid out of the coat. Held delicately between his fingers was a tiny white object. The fluted ends gently curved to a narrow center. He studied it for a moment, turning it carefully in front of him. My scalp began to prickle, hot and itchy under my hair.

The light ahead switched from yellow to red.

I coasted the Honda to a stop. “What's that?”

He didn't answer.

Raw red fingers flicked the tiny object into the air with a gentle spin. His other hand plucked it before it began to fall. I watched in dread and fascination. I didn't see his red right hand snake toward me until it snatched a hair from my head with a sharp, sudden shock.

“Ow! What the hell!?”

The Man in Black didn't answer. He held the single hair between his fingertips. It was short and dark, curling on itself in twists. My hair is a complete pain in the ass. Tight, dark curls that I can never straighten or even really brush. Even more so since I had cut it short—short enough that it couldn't be grabbed, couldn't be used against me.

As I watched, he placed my hair inside his mouth, holding fast to the end of it. Closing his lips around it, his jaw worked for a brief second. He pulled, drawing it slowly between his lips.

It came out straight as a needle.

He jerked his chin, pointing forward with the fingers not being used to hold my hair.

“Drive, Acolyte.”

I looked up. The light had turned green. Shifting and punching my foot down, I accelerated, still watching him from the corner of my eye, my scalp still itching with some weird feeling from the thing in his hands. He took my chaos god spit–stiffened hair and laid it against the small white object. Holding it in place with his thumb, he wound the hair like piece of wire.

A low noise filled the car, harsh and guttural, banging against my eardrums. The Man in Black began to chant under his breath. The air in the car grew thick, cloying, and oppressive, heavy with the scent of rotten honey.

It made the energy, the magick, inside me boil and the hair on my arms rise.

A glance in the mirror showed Daniel leaning back, his eyes closed, a smile on his face as if he were listening to Mozart instead of the whine of my car and the bickering between me and the chaos god in the seat beside me.

“Turn left.”

The Man in Black held the hair in his fingertips, suspending the fluted piece of ivory in the air. It leaned left as if the whole world had tilted on its axis.

I turned where he indicated, holding the steering wheel tightly to keep my hands from jittering. The Mark on my palm hurt. “What's that thing?”

“It is a compass. It will lead us to the one who can reveal the hiding places of the gods.”

The wheel spun in my hands. “Okay, it's a compass, but what's it made from besides my hair?”

He stared at the piece of ivory. Now it dangled forward, against gravity.

“It is the finger bone of a murdered child.”

I hit the brakes.

The Honda jerked, black smoke ribboning from under the car as retreaded tires screamed in protest. Daniel slammed into my seatback with a grunt.

Nyarlathotep scowled. “Why are you stopping?”

Disgust rolled inside me. My mouth twisted with it. “
What
did you say that is?”

“It is the finger bone of a murdered child.”

“If you want me to drive, you need to explain to me why you have that thing!” My voice turned shrill, tilting into a higher pitch, brittle with anger at each word. This was too much. The face of every child I knew flashed through my mind. My younger brother; my niece, Sara; my nephew, Rolf; the kids I used to teach when I worked at a daycare. This was over the edge of what I could handle.

“Calm yourself, Acolyte. It was not a child you knew.”

Daniel pulled himself up by the back of my seat. He touched my shoulder. “Hey, Charlie. It's okay, it's all right.”

“It's not
all right
.” I jerked his hand off my shoulder. “You have no idea how not
all right
it is right now.”

“Drive.” The Man in Black pointed across the front of the car. His voice burned with heat. “That way.”

“No. That's it.” I pounded the steering wheel. “That. Is. It. No more! That thing is too much. You show up, you kill some stuff, you drag me into this freak show of a night. My ear is messed up. He's”—I indicated Daniel in the backseat with a wave of my hand—“acting like a zombie. You do all this
weird,
black magick shit, and so far I've been here going along with it. But that”—I jabbed my finger toward the dangling fingerbone—“
that
is
too much
!”

My fist smashed into the steering wheel. Pain sliced through my hand, running along the symbol incised there. I welcomed it, pulled it into myself.

Bring the pain.

It was sharp, and bright, and clean inside my mind, cutting through all the confusion. A lifeline in the whirling, swirling storm-tossed sea. Everything started to crash around me, pushed over the tipping point by the finger bone, the tiny, delicate finger bone of a murdered child. Logically, I knew I didn't know the child, didn't know how old the bone might be. It might have been a hundred years old, and it didn't truly matter anymore.

The thought that it might not matter sent a spike of guilt through me.

Lights flashed into the interior of the car as a van topped the hill behind us. I didn't move, didn't reach for the button in the center of the dash to spark the yellow hazard lights.

Let them hit us. At least it would stop this crazy night.

The car shook as the van whipped around us, its horn blaring. I flipped a middle finger at them even though they couldn't see it, anger boiling over inside. They rode their horn until they disappeared over the hill ahead of us on the road.

Nyarlathotep shifted in his seat.

“Tonight is about saving your kind from extinction. The longer you delay us, the less likely that becomes possible.”

I shook my head, not looking at him. “You are
not
the good guy. Don't play that card with me.”