Chapter 19
MY EYES ADJUST TOO SLOW. RED PLASTIC CUP AND RED stains on peeling gray linoleum and Veer’s fast intake of breath. Everything smells wrong, like the emergency department at the end of a long night.
The cup comes into focus first, rolling in a disconsolate half circle, painting a windshield wiper arc of red.
Then comes the withered legs encased in thick socks.
One clog still on, the other somewhere in the shadows.
The air is thick with the protein richness of crushed cartilage and the iron panic of injury.
Then all of it comes at once.
Joanne on her back on the kitchen floor, barely moving, gray hair spilling across the linoleum. My mom straddling her, mouth smeared with blood. Not the mixture of blood and vitamin C and water that’s forming a puddle on the floor near Joanne’s hand. Just blood.
Joanne’s blood.
“Holy shit,” Veer breathes, and then she’s pushed the cooler back into my arms and she’s moving, and I need to be moving too.
I’m still with it enough to shove the cooler onto the counter before I rush up behind my mom, hands under her armpits, haul her away.
Barely. I’m terrified of her and myself and of looking down at Joanne and seeing just what’s been done to her.
My mom writhes in my arms. Her bones shift under her skin.
“Call 911,” Veer barks. “First aid kit.”
She’s on her knees next to Joanne, checking her airway. My mom howls, guttural and furious. The back of her head clips my chin.
First aid kit.
I keep one arm around my mom and lunge for the cupboard under the sink.
Right next to our sharps container. My arm erupts in pinpricks of pain.
My mom’s dragged her fingernails down the length of it.
No, not fingernails. Claws. Her hands are grotesque, one moment huge and menacing as the animal inside gains the upper hand, the next collapsing back into a fistful of withered fingers.
She’s an old woman. She’s so strong. She’s screaming, or maybe I’m screaming. Maybe both.
“Under the sink,” I shout to Veer, and hope that’s enough. I need both hands and all my strength to keep hold of my mom. Her screaming mouth turns snoutlike and dripping, curved fangs sickling out of her gums, and I catch her by the neck just in time to stop her from taking a bite out of my arm.
Then I see her eyes.
Their gray depths are formless and terrified. Tears streak down her cheeks as the planes of her face shift and warp.
How can I blame her for what she’s done?
She howls again, claws erupting from her fingers, reaching for my face this time. I shove her into the bathroom and slam the door and expect her to come for me, to start battering her way through it, but it goes quiet inside.
I call 911 with slick fingers and sprint back to the kitchen for a vial from the cooler. If she attacked Joanne, it means she’s hungry. The first aid kit is scattered around Veer. She’s pulled her shirt off, pressing it to Joanne’s neck, speaking low and quiet.
“Stay with me,” I hear, and then her voice goes loud and commanding. “She good?”
No, my mom isn’t good. She hasn’t been good and she never will be, and I can’t say that now, because there’s a woman dying on my kitchen floor and Veer is the only reason she might make it to the hospital.
“Got her in the bathroom,” I tell her, which is the best I can do.
“Good.”
The dispatcher cuts in from my phone, crisp and unhurried. “911, what’s your location?”
I rap out the address as I stumble back to the bathroom. “My neighbor is here, she has some kind of neck injury. Level I. She’s bleeding a lot.”
“Can you describe what happened?”
“I don’t know. I just got back from out of town and she was…”
I don’t know how to finish the sentence. He assures me an ambulance is already on its way.
I find my mom crouched against the toilet, a shrunken version of herself with frenzied eyes, her exposed arms draped in a grotesque quilt of scratches.
Saliva froths over her lower lip, adding pinkish bubbles to the blood still streaking her chin.
But she’s not transforming anymore. She’s gotten enough control back.
“What’s happening?” she whispers. Her eyes are wide, terrified. “Is everything okay?”
I can’t tell her. I’m not going to tell her.
I rip a disposable syringe from its plastic sheath. “Give me your arm.”
She shrinks back, her frail arms wrapping reflexively around herself. My mouth goes ashy.
“Hey, Mom, it’s me.” I try to soften my voice, paste a smile on my face, tense my lips to keep my teeth covered. “I know you’re hungry. I just want to help.”
She nods, but when she extends her arm to me, it’s shaking.
I fill the syringe. “Make a fist for me.”
She obeys, hand nestled in my lap. The fist flops open as the barrel empties, her shoulders softening, cuts fluttering like flower petals as they begin to knit back together.
For a second, reality softens too. Maybe I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of the rain on Veer’s windshield and this is a nightmare I’ll jolt awake from, sweaty and thankful.
The door slams open hard enough to bounce off the wall.
“Ambulance is here,” Veer barks. “Want help with her?”
She’s silhouetted in the doorway, red spattering her sports bra. My mom cowers at the sight of her.
“I’ll drive her later,” I lie. Hospitals aren’t good for creatures like us. “She’s still calming down.”
“’Kay.” Veer frowns, begins to backtrack. Her eyes catch on the needle still in my hand.
I go to hide it automatically, then think better of it. “It’s not—”
“What it looks like. Yeah.” For a second, her face spasms like she’s on the verge of tears. “Is it ever?”
I start to stand, but my mom’s hand grabs me and squeezes. I can’t. She needs me.
By the time I turn back to the doorway, it’s empty, the door still swinging restless on its hinges.
I push it closed, my stomach knotted, and squeeze my mom’s hand in reply. Her eyes drift closed. I watch as tears bloom from beneath her eyelids and race each other down her cheeks.
“Me and you, Mom,” I whisper to her. “It’s just me and you.”
When the medics’ voices fade and the front door slams for the last time, I still wait ten minutes before venturing back into the kitchen.
Boots and bodies have smeared crimson tracks across the floor.
The scent of it nudges my curse awake, a hungry purr deep in its throat.
When I run the faucet, the water that comes out in demanding spurts stinks like formaldehyde.
Veer is gone. I knew she would be, packed in the ambulance with the medics—her people, safe people—but I still feel bereft, pacing the room without her.
I stack the vials from the cooler in the freezer, safe and secure this time.
It takes three rags to mop up all the blood on the floor.
Once I’ve changed into clean clothes and scrubbed any residual spatter off my arms, I toss the rags in a plastic grocery bag and take them out to the dumpster.
Horror, I remind myself as I try to brand the image of Joanne’s collapsed body into my brain. I should be feeling horror. She was good to us. Well, as good as could be expected. Did she recoil when my mom went for her throat, or did it happen so fast that she didn’t even know to react?
The dumpster slams shut, almost catching my fingers.
Horror. But it’s just a word, not a real feeling.
Here is what I actually feel: relief. It could have been so much worse.
It’s too easy to imagine—Veer opening the door, cooler in hand, met with hunger moving too fast for me to stop.
Or if we’d lingered at the gas station a few minutes longer and come back to find my mom already lost to me, no way to put her down but death. No, it was only Joanne.
What a thing to think. I’m the one with poison in my blood, not Veer.
Veer, with her bruised knees and her smell like citrus soap and longing. What, exactly, did she see? Joanne’s sprawled frame and ruined neck, sure, but how much else?
I don’t want to know. Any of it, all of it, is too much.
On my way back to the apartment, I pass another neighbor in the stairwell. A young mother and her preteen daughter, her hair in two long braids tied with gold ribbons.
“Was that the police here just now?” the mother asks. She grips a vase of fresh lilies. Her other hand is holding her daughter’s.
“I think it was an ambulance.”
She looks concerned. “Ambulance? Did someone have an accident?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Oh.” The daughter winces. I imagine her mother’s grip tightening, a handcuff she can’t unlock. “I hope everything’s okay.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
As they continue down the stairs, the daughter glances back at me, like she knows.
We can’t stay here. After ambulances come law enforcement, and after that come too many questions we can’t answer. The surest way to survive is to leave first. Just the two of us against the world. Just me and my mom’s failing mind.
Tears prick at the back of my throat. I thought I hated Vegas, thought I hated the neon Post-its and my teenage bedspread. It’s been a shit life, but it’s been mine. Ours, mine and my mom’s. But what’s my life been but an exercise in sorting out what matters, and learning to abandon the rest?
I don’t even consider the possibility that my mom’s killed someone.
What that might mean for the odds of them coming after us, what that might mean if we’re caught, how that might change things between us.
It’s one of the things that doesn’t matter.
Better to hit the road and keep going until we can’t anymore.
Maybe Arizona. I’ve never been to Arizona.
Back in the bathroom, my mom is still huddled against the toilet, eyes half-closed.
Dispatch probably already put a call through to LVMPD.
They’ll be on the way soon, full of a different, worse kind of hunger than ours.
I explain it all to my mom, what’s coming and what we have to do before it gets here, but I’m not sure she hears me.
“I want to take a bath,” she mumbles. Her voice is syrupy.
She says it like she needs this, and I don’t have it in me to deny her one last luxury before we return to our old life, our sad, lonely road life.
“Okay.” I step over her and reach for the faucet. Hot water slops over my fingers. “It’ll be ready in a few minutes. I’ll pack our bags while you’re in.”
When I was little, when we had the luxury of a bathtub in whatever month-to-month place my mom got, she’d run me a bath every Sunday.
Bubble bath and everything, and she’d perch on the side of the tub and wash my hair as I babbled about school and friends and whatever else it is kids get excited about.
Those were good times. At least, at first. Then we stayed too long in Colorado, and her fingers grew possessive on my scalp.
“How was school?” she’d demand. “Who are your friends? What do their parents do?” Nails biting into the skin behind my ears. “Do you like them more than me? Would you rather I never existed?” And I’d thrust my inadequate hands into hers, swearing over and over again I loved her best.
“I know,” she’d relent, eventually. “You’re my angel. No one understands me like you do, Ellis.”
“And,” she’d add, eyes glassy with warning, “no one ever will.”
As her bloody clothes pool on the bath mat, I murmur, “Let me wash your hair, Mom.”
Maybe it’s a plea for forgiveness. Maybe I want to remind her where we started. Maybe I want to remind myself that we’ve done this before, and that we can do it again.
Maybe it doesn’t matter why. Just that I want to do it for her, and she lets me.
I massage the shampoo into a lavender-scented slick in my hands.
Her hair is getting thinner. She’s thinner too, skin folding around birdlike bones that look like they’re one bad fall away from snapping.
Her joints are purple and swollen, small cuts like wailing mouths kaleidoscoping out around each one.
“What happened, Mom?” I try to say it softly.
She sighs, eyes closed, and my heart sinks, thinking that’s all the answer I’ll get. Then, hoarsely: “He came.”
“Who came?” I ask automatically. But I already know. I drop my voice to a whisper. “The flayed man.”
She grunts assent. “He’s going to eat me alive.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
Her smile is a fault line. “You don’t have a choice. He’s coming.”
She’s only saying it because she lost control, because the story goes that once you transform, even for an instant, he’ll catch your scent.
But Brian didn’t mention that in his version, and anyway, she just feels guilty.
She knows, somewhere, that all of this is her fault.
At least, that’s what I tell myself. I don’t have time for fear. I have an apartment to pack up.
I grab my mom’s hand out of the soapy water and squeeze hard. “Feel that?”
She nods. Her skin radiates warmth from the hot water. Her fingers squeeze me back.
“I’m here. Is the flayed man here?”
Her smile cracks at the edges, and she shakes her head.
“That’s right. I’m real, and he’s not.” I take a deep breath through my nose. If I breathe through my mouth, my voice will shake. “I’ve got you.”
I don’t care if it’s a lie.