Vicki Pettersson - Cheat the Grave

“But what if I need you again?” I meant only to think it, but somehow whispered it aloud.

Caine’s head alone swiveled, ecstasy etched on his pained, pierced brow. “All you needed from me was imparted once you walked in the door. Walk out with it, and in a way, I will too.”

He knew he’d die here, hugging the wall in this crumbling shack, another victim of Mackie’s poisonous blade.

“I’m sorry.”

“Ah but it’s such a novelty to finally be touched.” And Mackie reached the digits on his other hand. Caine gasped, sewn eyes bulging, but when he’d finally regained breath, he rubbed his cheek against the splintered wall. “Do you understand? Being untouched is the price anyone in possession of strong defenses must pay.”

I raised a brow. He was imparting a life lesson? Now?

“One should feel the pain as it comes. Losses aren’t bad things in themselves. Not as long as you remain open to new sensation. Be careful,” he said, nodding at the forgotten treasure chest, “Or your defenses might wind up being your prisons.”

I wanted to say that only someone who’d never been touched could give such advice, but his sudden cry didn’t back me up. “Thanks for the weapons anyway.”

“Oh, those aren’t from me.”

“Then who-”

But before I could wonder about Arun, or voice my new suspicions about Tekla, he gasped. Mackie’s face appeared, sliced on the diagonal between the mismatched slats, and when his gaze landed on me, he opened his jaw wide and hissed. Caine turned his head to me, face etched in an orgasm of ecstasy and pain. “Go…” he moaned.

I lunged for the door. I avoided as many of the hacked nails as I could, stepping on and snapping the ones I couldn’t, then practically threw myself down the stairwell. Mackie screamed, and his guttural war engine cries chased me into the creosote-laden, moon-hung night.

I left the destroyed Bentley in Caine’s front lot. Let the scavengers drawn by Mackie’s cries take whatever remained. It was amazing how little value there was in something worth so much money. Because sometimes, I thought with a shudder, a person would simply rather be touched.

Mackie continued to wail behind me, his rage sailing like a disease through the night. When a second, agonized voice joined his, it set off a nearby car alarm, and had a woman in the apartments I was cutting through muttering, “What the fuck?” as she peered through her steel screen door. Hastening my steps, I hoped Caine’s restraints held.

I remained in the downtown area, mostly because I had no other safe place to go. That was okay, not all of it was bad. A revitalization project had been going on for years, more successful in some areas than others, depending on whether the locals got on board. I spotted an alcove next to a loading dock amidst a crosshatching of narrow streets, where young entrepreneurs competed for the title of hip-pest local bar. I’d appreciated the friendly rivalry in the past; it was always a novel thing to enter a place absent of the Vegas shuffle, but even those were too desensitizing and busy for my needs tonight. I wouldn’t be able to avoid propositions in there, never mind attacks.

So instead of burying myself in the rich scent of smoke and warring perfume, I camped out against a cold metal door, where spent fuel, dust, and the cracked blacktop ruled the night. Were it summer, the scents would be stronger and the ground would burn my ass and palms despite the deep night. The entire city soaked up the sun’s heat like it was hoarding it, but like any good desert rat, I preferred that to the cold. The only way I could get less comfortable on this winter night, I thought bleakly as a gust of wind whipped up the street, was to slip beneath the actual loading dock next to me.

Though it might not be such a bad place to hide if Mackie got away before the sun’s rise. I bent and peered underneath. There was a frantic scuffle at my approach, but the movement was too small to be a person. A cat, I realized, as it mustered courage to bolt. Watching it streak away-thinking of Luna-I tried not to take it personally. Though it was difficult not to imagine the hard flash I’d spotted in the feline eyes as somehow knowing. Like it sensed what happened to living beings when they got too close to me.

Yet somehow the damage done to Caine had calmed me. Nobody and nothing-not even an old, powerful Seer-could stand up to that blade. So while the reminder of Luna saddened me, I was no longer consumed with fear. In fact, I was getting pretty pissed off. I’d been driven from my home, was a fugitive in my own city, and anyone who aided me ended up dead.

I was also a tad distracted. Chalk it up to fatigue-mental relief that Mackie was, literally, tied up for the night-or just plain laziness. Whatever, when the man passed by my alcove the first time, I remained seated with my back to the steel door and didn’t really note it. My mind was spinning with deepening questions about Arun Brahma, mushrooming ones about Tekla, and flashing visuals of Caine’s raptur ous death. So when the man backed up, I dismissed it as drunkenness or forgetfulness, and closed my eyes. But when he came to a stop in front of me, so close the gravel under his boots pinged off mine, I sighed and opened them again.

He was burly, wide-legged, and bald. His pocketknife swung open with a resounding click. “Give me your pocketbook, bitch.”

I reached into my handbag and pulled out the heavy iron gun. “Give me yours.”

He backpedaled, tripping once, until he’d returned to the mouth of the intersection. I shot the wall to his right, spraying red brick just because I could. I probably shouldn’t have wasted the ammo, but his holler was gratifying as he disappeared in the same direction he’d come, footsteps fading like slap shots. Survival in the land of mortals, I thought, crossing my legs as I dropped the conduit to my lap. “Like a day at the spa,” I muttered, closing my eyes.

And that’s when something changed in me. It was like a caterpillar cocooning up in a self-made shell, or a woman’s gestating body. I didn’t move at all on the outside, but inside there were subtle shifts, excess cells altering to make room for something new. I realized then it wasn’t Warren or the troop or even the Tulpa I’d been struggling against. I was simply a woman who took up arms. Even before the Zodiac troop came along, I was someone who shoved back harder when pushed. I felt the pain of all the things taken so incrementally from me, and piled them like bricks to build my defenses in this world.

I wasn’t like Caine, that was for sure. I wasn’t so un-feeling that another person’s touch was a novelty, or that it made me seek out sensation in an abnormal manner. I was a city girl who’d been attacked at a young age, who survived it only to be caught up in more violence. Yet I’d survived that too.

Time to start acting like it.

No one else stopped by, but an hour later my phone trilled next to me. I pushed to my feet like I’d been wait ing for it all along, and maybe I had. Because even before I lifted the phone to my ear, I knew who it was. And the new me, the old me, the only me, answered back. “When and where?”

The “when” was immediately. The place? A plant nursery where overzealous residents used mulch and shovels and hard labor to fight the desert’s natural inclination to starve every resource from the soil. Climate be damned, we wanted our petunias.

In the morning hours the corner adjacent the nursery was occupied by day laborers, mostly Mexican, willing to work for cash with a landscaper or resident in search of someone strong and willing to haul colored rock into pretty formations. Xeriscape was environmentally responsible, but the installation was a bitch.