Bentley Little - The Summoning

"He's dead," Woods announced behind her, and for a second she thought he meant the cup hugirngsi, but then she realized he was talking about Rich. A twisting hurt ripped through her, and she wished the cup hugirngsi was alive so she could kill it again.

Had it ever been alive?

She turned toward her grandmother, threw her arms around the old woman.

She felt exhausted all of a sudden, and she needed someone to hold on to. She was dimly aware that the moment's connection the two of them had shared was gone, but she didn't really care. Tears were streaming from her eyes, coursing down her cheeks, but she was not crying. Not yet.

There was movement around her, but she seemed not to know what it was and not to care, the actions of her companions now trivial and irrelevant to her. Her grand mother pulled away from her, touched her cheek, then bent down to pick up her spear.

There was nothing left of the cup hugrngsi now but the empty formless hull of its body, and her grandmother began speaking quietly to herself in that unfamiliar dialect as she moved next to it. Pushing up the sleeves of her blouse, the old woman wrapped the leathery skin and its irregular tufts of blood-soaked albino hair around her spear until it resembled a bulging, soggy, rolled-up carpet. She held the wrapped skin in front of her, lifting it as though it weighed nothing, and Sue followed her through the chamber's narrow doorway and down the rounded runnel the way they'd come.

The others were not following, and Sue did not know what they were doing, but right now that didn't matter.

It was over.

It was done.

She followed her grandmother up the ladder and into the church. The black walls and painted windows seemed glaringly bright after the darkness underground, and the afternoon sunlight streaming through the still-open doors was painful in its intensity.

Unfazed, unhesitating, her grandmother walked through the doorway and, with a grunt and a push, threw the skin and the spear outside, into the sunlight. The skin unfurled a bit and lay on the cement for a moment before it started to hiss and steam. The long tufts of hair blackened withered; the skin began to bubble. A moment later, there was nothing left but a pool of sticky pinkish liquid on the top of the church steps.

Both she and her grandmother were sweating and soaked with still-wet blood. They looked like monsters themselves, but for the first time in a long while, Sue felt good. It would not last long, she knew. The horrors would catch up with her ore quickly than she wanted or probably could handle, but for now she felt fine. She reached out, grabbed her grandmother's frail, wrinkled hand, and the two of them walked outside, into the fresh air, into the desert sunshine.

Robert carried his brother's body out of the chamber, out of the tunnel, out of the church. Rich was soaked and sticky with blood, and it was impossible to remove the agonized expression that had cemented itself onto his dying face, but there was no way in hell that he was going to leave his brother alone down here for even one second. He thought of ordering Woods and Rossiter to carry up Connie's and Anna's bodies as well--or what was left of them---but decided that he could not do that. He would come back for them himself.

Both Woods and Buford offered to help him carry Rich, but though the offers were heartfelt, and his brother's body grew heavy almost immediately after picking it up, he had to turn them down. He did need some help on the ladder, and Woods stood below, pushing up, while Robert pulled from above, but once on the surface he again lifted Rich himself and carried him outside, where he finally placed him carefully on the sidewalk.

Rich.

He realized as he looked down at his brother's silently screaming face that he had no family left. Rich had been it. After all the years, after all they'd been through together after all the times they'd fought, after all the times they'd been there for each other, how could it end like this? Rich's death had not even been heroic. It had been a mistake.

Something he should have been able to prevent. Schizophrenically, he wanted to call Rich and tell him to grab his camera, get over here, and take some pictures, though he was staring down at Rich's dead body this very moment.

He wanted to cry but knew he could not.

The state police had arrived en masse and had already led away much of Wheeler's congregation. Those who hadn't been arrested yet stood or sat on the ground, staring at nothing, faces blank.

Chief Simmons ran over to meet him, as did Steve, Stu, and Ben. He turned away from them, looking back into the church, not ready to face them yet, not ready to ex plain what had happened, not ready to make decisions or give orders. There was going to be one major cleanup here. There were a lot of bodies to be brought out from underneath the church. Maybe the state police could call in extra men. Maybe Rossiter could get some FBI agents to help.

The town was still crawling with press and the media, and he knew that there was no way publicity could be voided. What would this news do when it got out, when the whole story was told? What impact would it have? Would it change opinions and perceptions? Would people be looking behind every corner for supernatural beings, jumping at every shadow in fear of vampires? Or would the story of the cup hugirngsi be told, ignored, then for gotten? The latter, he suspected. How many tragedies happened each year? Plane crashes, earthquakes, fires? And how many of them did people remember after a day or two? What specifics from past disasters had been retained in the national consciousness?

Very few.

The general public had a short memory.

This, too, would pass. None of them would ever forget it, none of the people in Rio Verde, none of the people who had been here today, but to the world at large, this would be just another one of today's sound bites, as ephemeral as yesterday's news.

But this was different, he told himself. This was big. The existence of vampires, of the supernatural, had been proved. Evil had been fought and conquered.

It wasn't different, though. He knew that. Television trivialized, articles distanced. In a week, Rio Verde would be the subject of monologue jokes and tabloid shows.

"Are you okay?" Simmons asked, running up to him, He nodded, turned toward his men. He didn't have a family anymore, but he still had a town, battered and bruised though it was, and he had never in his life been so glad to see anyone as the men standing before him now. He and the other six Rich

--had only been down there for an hour or so, maybe less, but it felt as though they'd been gone forever, and the faces of his officers looked welcome as hell to him right now. "Get--" he started to say, but his voice choked. He looked down at his brother, and in the short space between Rich's Levi's and tennis shoes, he saw that his brother had put on mismatched socks. One brown, one blue.

""Get--" he started to say again.

And he began to cry.

In her dream she was suffocating, not able to breathe, though there was nothing obstructing her mouth or nostrils. She was in a green room with green furniture, lying on a green antique fainting couch, and blood covered the floor to the depth of several inches, moving in currents, lapping in waves at the feet of the couch, the tables the chairs. She was on the couch with Rich, and he was kissing her between the legs, only she kept trying to push him away because she was having her period, and her grandmother was tap dancing in the blood and singing "Singin' in the Rain" in Cantonese.

She awoke feeling tired and sore and. emotionally wrung out. Through her window, she could see that the sun had been up for some time, that it was probably close to noon.

Today was Rich's funeral, she realized.