Chapter 31
She should have seen it coming. Strangers didn’t show up at your door bearing blessings. They didn’t arrive in the night with gifts and apologies. Fathers didn’t materialize from the shadows to say, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.
The knife—bright, slightly curved, a wedge of moonlight in his hand. The pain—sudden but not unexpected, never unexpected. Because what else was there but pain, the steady beat of suffering, one moment to the next?
She was not a child.
She was not stupid.
She knew better.
And yet.
Some part of her had hoped. I didn’t know, he would say.
If I had known, I would have returned. But now that I’m here, I’ll make things right.
You have family, he would tell her. A half brother, aunts and uncles, a whole parade of cousins.
Let me take you to meet them. Let me take you home.
Alex had played the same games as other children.
She’d pretended to be a princess, a superhero, the daughter of a rock star.
But the secret dream lay at the end of a dirt road, a house by a lake, barbecues in the summer, music on a tinny speaker, fireflies, a cooler full of Coca-Cola.
Alex. Galaxy. They would welcome her. They would understand what she was.
They would point to another girl with dark hair, or an old man, or an auntie.
They would laugh and say, Oh yes, we all see the dead, but they don’t bother us here, not when we’re together.
She had known not to trust this man, but hope had made her slow. Hope and shame, the wanting of something you should be strong enough not to want. And now there was a knife inside her.
The tea set crashed to the parlor floor. Alex heard Dawes scream, heard Darlington shout. Dimly she realized he was the demon again, his golden horns shining. The light of the room had turned blue and Alex knew she must be ablaze with hellfire.
Her father. Her father was shoved against the parlor wall, Darlington’s massive clawed hand at his throat.
Dawes was beside her, clutching her bleeding fingers. She’d tried to stop the blade, Alex realized. Dawes had tried to block Huilca’s strike.
“Thank you,” Alex whispered.
Dawes nodded. She looked shocked, frightened, her eyes wide and wet with tears.
“Call an ambulance,” Darlington rumbled.
“Don’t,” Alex said. Her voice didn’t sound quite right. She could do better. “Don’t,” she repeated. “I’m okay.”
The knife was sticking out of the meat of her left shoulder. It felt like a spear of fire. She was a moth pinned to the page. Someone would come to press her between the covers of a book and leave her there to wither.
She blinked, forced her eyes to focus.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Are you okay, Dawes?”
Dawes nodded, but she had started to cry. “It’s not that bad.”
“This is the second time you saved my life.”
Dawes frowned. “Did I?”
She had reached out to block the blade, as if she could stop it with her hand. She had forced its momentum away from Alex’s heart.
“The tea set,” Alex said. She knew it wasn’t important, but there was something awful about the shards of cups and saucers spread like fallen petals on the floor. “Shit.”
“It’s not the good set,” Dawes said, wrapping a linen napkin around her hand. “He doesn’t get the good dishes.”
Luis Huilca’s eyes pinged back and forth between his daughter and the demon about to choke him, his expression caught between terror and disbelief.
“Don’t kill him,” Alex said.
“You’re sure?” Darlington asked, giving her father’s body a light shake. She liked the growl in his voice.
“For now.”
He eased his grip.
Huilca sucked in air, still trying to shove Darlington’s arm away. “What are you? What have you done?”
Alex tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. She made herself rise. She pulled the knife from her shoulder.
“Alex!” Dawes cried.
Blood spurted over her T-shirt.
“Fuck,” Alex gasped. “That may have been a mistake.” She felt her gorge rise, swallowed hard.
“You opened a portal,” her father was saying. “You trafficked with demons. You … What did you do?”
Alex felt a surge of anger rush through her, clearing her thoughts, bringing her body back to life with a live-wire jolt, a much-needed jump in an empty parking lot.
She made herself focus on the man before her.
“What did I do?” she mimicked, drawing closer to him, the knife held out before her like a divining rod. “I survived. Without anyone to protect me or watch out for me. Without you.”
“This is forbidden. What you did—”
“Forbidden like not lying with a witch? Or some other puritan bullshit?” The room spun and she blinked back her dizziness. “Why not get a vasectomy? Why not just keep your dick in your pants? Too busy protecting your very special bloodline?”
Darlington slammed Huilca against the wall again. “Answer.”
“I … was young. Barely older than you. I … I was irresponsible.”
“So I get to bear the burden? I get to forfeit my life because you just had to get some Valley strange?”
“Alex, you have to understand. Death would be a blessing for you. Not everyone in our order holds to the old ways. If they learned you existed and what you can do—”
“What can I do? Spell it out.”
“Wheelwalker. Daughter of darkness, wakcha. No door is closed to you.”
“And that’s a problem why?”
“Because of this!” His eyes flicked to Darlington. “Because of him! Because if the wrong person gets hold of your gift, they can access the demonic anywhere.”
“You might have a point,” Alex said, thinking of Alban Reed, of Elliot Sandow, and of Marguerite Belbalm—had she been born an abomination too?
Desdemona. Ill-starred one. She’d learned that in Girard’s lecture on Othello.
You and me both, she’d thought. Alex was starting to feel woozy.
But her wound didn’t hurt anymore. She wasn’t sure if that was bad or good.
“Maybe he has a point,” Dawes said. “Or maybe these priests and guardians just don’t like the idea of a woman having the power of their shaman, of someone who doesn’t just hold the door open but who walks through it herself.”
“We are guardians,” he insisted.
“You didn’t guard Alex,” Darlington said. “You left her to the wolves.” He paused. “Just like Lethe.”
Huilca kept his attention on Alex. “Whatever you believe, you must understand that your power makes you a target. You will be hunted for your gift. You will never be safe once people learn what you can do.”
Now Alex did laugh, and it sent a fresh wave of pain coursing through her. She thought she might throw up and that was going to be very embarrassing.
“I don’t know what safe is,” she said. “I never have. Maybe you could have taught me all about it. If you’d stuck around.”
She swallowed again and looked at her father. Whatever he saw in her face made him flinch.
She knew she was supposed to feel something for this man.
After all, blood was blood. How many TV shows had she seen, how many books had she read where a character shrugged and said of the con man, the deadbeat, the killer: But he’s my dad?
Maybe that should be important, but Alex felt nothing.
She had been born of a fleeting moment between two happy idiots, high on weed and California sunshine and the glory of being young.
Maybe her father had been trying to protect her by abandoning her mother and forcing her to forget him.
Maybe he was just another loser who made a habit of dodging unpleasant outcomes.
Alex was relieved to discover she didn’t much care.
“My mother can forgive anything,” she said. “It’s part of her whole way of moving through the world—be better than the person who wrongs you.”
“Mira has a beautiful soul. She always did. It’s what drew me to her.”
“But I’m not like her. I can hold a grudge until it squeals.” She cocked her head. “Maybe I got that from you.”
Hellfire was still racing over her body and Huilca tried to shrink away from it as she approached.
She jammed the knife into his shoulder. He screamed. Alex expected Dawes or Darlington to chastise her, but no one said a word.
“I can’t say that makes us even. But I do feel better,” she said with some surprise.
“Please,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone.”
Like the trying was what mattered. The people who did the most damage barely had to try at all. Her eyes roved over his face. She had hungered after this for so long. To find the ghost of herself in someone the way she’d never been able to see herself in Mira. It wasn’t enough.
“Please,” he repeated.
“What do you want to do?” asked Darlington.
“I want you to get every bit of useful information about Wheelwalkers and these priests you can out of him. And then—” She tapped Huilca’s forehead, leaving a bloody fingerprint there.
“Then I want you to place a prohibition on him. Make sure it goes deep, as deep as the one he put on my mother. Wipe my name and any memory of this place from his mind.”
“Alex—” Huilca began.
“My name is Galaxy,” she rasped. “The name my mother gave me.”
Then she fainted.