Chapter 37 Rotten Tooth
Rotten Tooth
It was Bernadotte she thought of—Frank in that shitty dive bar near Nogales, gazing wearily up from a booth in the back as Cass and Jimmy Heckover stopped at the end of the table.
Heck’s crew had been wiped out by a nest of those vegetable-fungal spiders, his survival a freak of chance plus Cass’s desperate improvisational driving as the things boiled out of the derelict warehouse hot on his limping trail, and he was looking to retire from the bogey-hunting game.
Maybe he’d even made it out, retired to the Keys like he was always bitching about, she didn’t know.
But Frank Bernadotte had listened to Heck vouch for a slip of a young woman, clutching a backpack of all she’d managed to salvage from juvie and street living, and finally Bern had sighed, spreading his hard, capable hands.
Fine, fine. Sit down, buy me a pitcher, and I’ll let you tell me what the lady can do.
All the hunters she’d known—men with haunted eyes, tough-as-leather women twice as feral than their brothers—were dead and gone now. If only Cass had figured out how to use her freakish gifts better, some of them might have made it.
The thing fighting her for Edward was old and venomous, not to mention cunning.
It sensed despair and clawed at her afresh, smokelike knives passing right through her unphysical self since she didn’t understand enough to fear them.
She only realized the attack when a spear of loathing transfixed her, the memory of Trille’s wide wondering eyes as life ran out of the wound in his abdomen.
Dead, murdered, wormfood. Because of her.
Bern. Apoc. Trille. Grik. Steve. Only the last in a long line, names whispered or groaned when the survivors limped back to camp, and her own furious guilt for not using her stupid, useless, bizarre little talents better. Now two more names were going to be added.
Ed. Nigel.
The last one hurt, a fresh wound spraying bright red arterial fluid, and a deep instinct realized it wasn’t her emotion, it was an infection from the thing yanking Ed further away, sawing at her grip on the poor guy.
Oh no you don’t, she thought, deliriously, and bit down with teeth she had not known she possessed.
Bern again, teaching her to make a triangle, sight a .38, and squeeze the trigger. Good girl. You’ll get over the flinching. Now, tell me about this pendulum thingie—you think you could use it to find, say, a good bank to knock over?
Her parents were gone, locked in a tiny box where all the most painful memories lived. But Bern had been the father of her adult self, teaching her to survive, gruffly affectionate in hidden doses, always on her to stop kicking herself.
So you can’t work fuckin’ miracles. What can you do?
Sometimes, all it took was turning a problem over for a solution to appear.
Like Apoc glaring at an engine part while he rotated it in deft dirty hands, daring the chunk of machinery, wiring, or anything else to give him more trouble—or Steve, muttering while he worked out how to grab a few more weeks’ worth of supplies for their constant, losing war against the monsters.
Cass set her mental feet, lips skinning back from her teeth, and battered at the inimical thing fighting for possession of a struggling, flickering soul. Ed was close to giving up altogether; his agony rolled up her arms, jolted in her shoulders, detonated in her swollen, aching head.
I know it hurts. I’m so sorry.
A gush of magma, a snap like a rotten tooth pulled from a bleeding hole, and for a dizzying second she thought she’d won.
The realization—no, she’d just torn something out of an already suffering soldier, slamming a door on something that howled with one misshapen foot caught just over the threshold, and Ed would very likely bleed to death from shock—followed like thunder after lightning, and some part of her wondered if she’d ever see rain again as she jammed her mental hands into Edward’s suffering, attempting to stem the tide.
It yielded, soft as cotton candy, and she was once again jolted, the impact nearly knocking her off physical feet. The flow of force to Nigel stuttered; it was like trying to juggle, something she’d never been good at despite all Sam and Dean’s patient lessons.
Instead of pushing with one hand and pulling with the other, both now drew from her, a flood of that strange warm rainbow-edged light. A cheated, deadly scream drilled past her eardrums, all the more painful for being entirely nonphysical.
She couldn’t shut the door entirely. Some part of her recognized the impossibility even as the tiny splinter-limb of a mad god retreated, stung, into the howling void beyond; a tiny gap had to remain, or Ed’s body couldn’t pull through enough force to sustain itself. But the thing beyond stopped yanking.
She’d won the tug-of-war, for whatever that was worth. But if she’d learned anything hunting bogeys, it was that victory had a cost.
Always.
Snap. Cass was knocked sprawling, very nearly going ass-first between two railroad ties. Her teeth clicked together hard, her chin stung, and she thrashed, fetching up against something hard and cold.
An iron rail. If not for that, she’d have rolled right off the bridge.
The noise was incredible. Shots, shouts, ringing steel; she blinked blankly at the smoke-dulled stars canted across her vision because she lay twisted, wondering why cold white spears of light were shooting earthward.
Was it a hallucination, some new kind of bogey attack?
And the rhythmic thopping sounds were strange, too.
The lines to both Nigel and Ed were open, but she had nothing left to give.
Scraping the bottom of an empty well, thirst rasping all the way from her sand-dry mouth to her navel, she heard a harsh cawing scream and knew it was her own.
Cass scrabbled, weak as a kitten, because no matter what the weird lights and sounds were, she had to get up.
Her work wasn’t done yet. They still needed her.