Chapter 71
June
Beth glanced at the clock on the bedside table and swore mildly.
If she didn’t leave in the next minute, she’d miss her bus and be late for work.
Captain Forrester would cut her some slack because she’d been coming in early or working a bit late since Colin Forrester’s disappearance into Wyrd, but colleagues noticed when a cop didn’t show up on time for her shift—especially when she was still considered the newbie on a special team that made other cops uneasy.
The team that crossed the river and dealt with the Arcana was needed, but you had to be a little bit…
odd…in order to do the work and not go doolally, right?
And she didn’t need anyone whispering that Forrester was playing favorites because she was the only woman on the team—and a young woman at that.
She’d just opened her front door when her cell phone rang. Feeling rushed, she answered it without checking the identity of the caller. “Hello?”
“I need money.”
Beth felt her heart constrict. She should have known she wasn’t going to dodge these calls forever. “I don’t have any more money, Bonnie. I told you that the last time. And the time before that.”
“You do have money. And you owe me.”
“I don’t owe you anything. I gave you some of the money I received when I turned eighteen, and that’s more than you were entitled to since you were sent money every month I lived with you.”
“Barely enough.” Bonnie’s voice was low and harsh. “Barely enough for what you cost me to keep you.”
“More than enough,” Beth countered sharply. “You bought my clothes from thrift stores while you wore designer labels and left me on my own without any food in the house while you enjoyed an overnight at a casino.”
“You were strange. I had to get away from you once in a while.”
“If you’ve run out of money because you’re gambling again, that’s not my problem,” Beth said. “I haven’t lived with you for years, so you can’t use me as an excuse for your addictions.”
“I’m not addicted to anything!” Bonnie screamed.
“Religion and gambling. Don’t all the holy men you have pinned to the walls of your house have something to say about gambling?”
“Send me the money. Twenty thousand.”
“I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Then you’d better find it. If you don’t, I’ll let some people know your secret, let them know why you’re so attracted to abominations like the ones in that book you’ve kept all these years.”
Beth pressed a hand to her stomach. She knew better than to let Bonnie realize that an emotional bomb might hold a kernel of truth, but she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “What secret?”
“Send the money, or people will find out how unnatural you really are.” Bonnie ended the call.
Beth sagged against the doorframe. Bonnie couldn’t have any proof that would confirm Beth’s heritage one way or the other. Could she? No. She would have used it before now if she had anything. Unless…
I guess it’s time to cross the river and ask the Ladies Three a question.
33
The stench woke Devl from an uneasy sleep. Pushing himself upright on the bus seat, he gagged as the stench intensified. Had he shit himself? Yeah, he was pretty sure he’d filled his jeans. And…was that blood on his shirt? And why was it so fucking cold on the bus?
He remembered being given time off the bus, remembered being able to choose anyplace he wanted to visit.
And when he stepped off the bus, he walked into the kind of bar he’d fantasized about, where the rough-looking man tending bar didn’t ask his age or want any kind of ID, where there were full-on strippers and women who let you bang them against the wall and didn’t whine about a man enjoying himself without using a condom.
Even the fight where he whupped a couple of men almost twice his size was everything he could have asked for, even if he ended up busted up himself.
He remembered a sharp, sledgehammer blow to his guts, remembered hurting like he’d never hurt before. Remembered dragging himself back on the bus before he passed out.
The conductor set two large buckets of water in the aisle next to Devl’s seat. Two large plastic trash bags were draped over the seat in front of him, along with a set of clean clothes.
Devl looked at the conductor—and wondered why the mix of pity and contempt on the man’s face made him so afraid.
“Strip out of all your clothes and put them in one of the trash bags,” the conductor said.
“We’ll burn them when we reach a disposal site.
But keep your wallet or any other identification that will be useful to authorities.
Use one of the buckets of water to wash yourself.
The other bucket is to wash the seat and floor and everything else you soiled.
If two buckets of water doesn’t get rid of the stink, I’ll be back with more water.
You’ll be riding alone until you’ve cleaned up the mess you made. ”
“Can’t you close some of the windows? It’s freezing in here,” Devl whined.
“Just because you’re alone doesn’t mean the bus doesn’t have other passengers. They don’t want to be around you—and most of them don’t mind the cold.” The conductor turned away.
Devl started to cry. “I don’t want to be here. I wanna go home.” That was something he wanted with everything in him. “I wanna go home!”
The conductor turned back and stared at him with cold eyes.
“We gave you a chance to leave the bus and go anywhere you wanted to go. We gave you the chance to go home, but you chose to go to a place where you could drink and fuck and fight. Where you could indulge yourself in a bar that exactly matched where you wanted to be.”
“I didn’t know it was my only chance to go home! I didn’t know!”
The conductor didn’t speak for a long moment.
Then, quietly, he said, “Maybe it was your destiny to die in a bar fight far from the place you called home. Maybe you just met your fate sooner rather than later. Either way, it’s been decided to reduce your time on the bus.
The next time you leave, you’ll be close enough to where you came from that someone will know how to find your people. ”
“I don’t…I don’t understand.”
That pitying look again. “You managed to drag yourself back on the bus before you died. If you hadn’t, you would have been stripped of any useful possessions and buried in an unmarked grave so that no one in that bar would be blamed for killing you.
Now you’re riding with us as a true ghost, your spirit tethered to flesh only as long as you remain on the bus.
If you truly want to get home, you won’t try to leave. ”
The conductor vanished.
Devl stripped out of his soiled clothes. He stared at the wound in his belly—and remembered the man ramming the sharp edges of a broken bottle into his gut and twisting the bottle to cause the most damage.
Death wound. He’d stumbled out of the bar and stumbled onto the bus, vaguely wondering why no one had pursued him, why no one seemed to notice the bus sitting there with its door open.
No one had noticed because the bus wasn’t meant for them. They weren’t ghosts. Not yet anyway.
Devl cleaned himself up, then cleaned up the seats and the floor before putting on the clothes that had been left for him.
At some point, the buckets of dirty water and the garbage bags filled with his clothes and the soiled rags disappeared. At some point, windows on the bus began to close as the stench of death faded.
But Devl still felt cold—cold as the grave, his grandma used to say—and he wondered if he would ever feel warm again.
34
Sheina Kali wasn’t surprised to find the note on the kitchen table.
Yaron’s obsession with seeing the “truth” about Wyrd had grown over the past few months.
It was only her constant reminders that if he went exploring before he handed in final grades and left his students hanging, he could kiss the job at Jackson University goodbye—and most likely his career as well.
His verbal abuse had gone from nasty to savage, mostly because he knew she was right, and her being right messed with his plans.
In the end, he finished up the school year and handed in his grades for one simple reason: he couldn’t find anyone who was willing to take him across the river to any spot on Wyrd that wasn’t one of the two places permitted by the Arcana—namely, Destiny Bay or Destiny Park.
Even the couple of men who said they were willing to drop him off anywhere he wanted—for a few thousand dollars paid up front—weren’t willing to hang around for a few hours while he explored, and said flat out that if he caused any kind of fuss while he was there and had the Arcana paying attention to the shore, they weren’t going to risk their lives or their boats to return and pick him up.
But Yaron must have found someone, because he’d left a three-word note: I have to. As if that said anything, justified everything.
Couldn’t he have spent a few more moments to add I’m sorry? Or I love you? Maybe that wasn’t true anymore. Maybe she was just useful to him for the extra income, for taking care of the house chores, for sex. Maybe she was the only one who still thought love mattered.
She didn’t know the man who rang the doorbell later that evening, who sounded so apologetic as he explained that he worked at the university and had a boat, and had reluctantly agreed to take Yaron across the river.
Yaron had promised to be gone two hours at the most, and he had waited for three hours.
Then he began to draw too much attention and got nervous, so he returned to the marina—and now he was here because Yaron was still across the river, and he hoped Yaron would find his way home soon.
She thanked the man for telling her and closed the door. But was she closing the door to her house, the door to her heart, or the door to her life as she’d known it?