Maker

Chapter: 12-2

I looked back and watched through the window as he called either a taxi or the cops.

At this point either would suffice.

It was a hot day, and I was still shivering. I sat at the corner of the building outside wondering why they didn’t they teach important things in school, like when you’re bleeding internally it’s exceedingly hard to get warm.

A woman walked out of the gas station and unceremoniously dropped a few coins on me.

“Thanks,” I said, reflexively. I sounded scared, but there was a smile on my face and I felt a rush of excitement. Old habits I guess. I huffed a laugh and got a stabbing pain in my chest. I picked up the change. It wasn’t much, seventy cents.

“One… two… three… five… seven… eleven… thirteen…” I sat there huddled in pain, calculating the prime numbers up to seventy while the suburbanites all around me filled up their tanks and headed home.

I calculated the Fibonacci sequence next, but it was too easy and it didn’t take long to get to seventy.

Calculating pi out to seventy places was working well for keeping my mind occupied. I kept losing my place and having to start over. Got up to twenty places or so before the cab came.

I snuck up from the back and got in. My pants were dry, but they still stunk like a sewer. I rolled down the back windows first thing, and answered the cabbie’s protests with forty-seven dollars, seventy cents and promises of extra money if he could just get me home.

I wasn’t used to cabs. Raleigh is not like New York with cabs everywhere. There are enough downtown, and you can always catch one at the airport, but in this city, you needed a car.

The money I took off Hawknose wasn’t enough to cover the fare and the upholstery cleaning that was undoubtedly needed. I walked into Miles’ with the cabbie waiting and aimed for upstairs.

It was a quaint scene. Miles was behind the bar, cooking as always. Almost every stool was filled with a small black child, and each was spinning to one degree or another. I waved through six iterations of “Hi Maker” before Miles turned around, serving up six plates of something fish that looked fancy.

“Damn boy! You look like hell. Where you been?”

“Had a really rough night,” I said. I wasn’t gonna say I just escaped a torture chamber in front of the kids. I hoped none of them noticed the bloody footprints.

“Well, at least you’re back. That girl’s been ornery. Even more than usual.” I didn’t have time to address Miles’ comment. He turned back to the grill and one of the kids squealed.

“Whoa! Maker did you get in a fight?!” It was Andre. He wasn’t the youngest, wasn’t the oldest, he was on the closest stool though. I didn’t have the full attention of every child in the room when I walked in. One of them screaming “fight” changed all that.

“Yup,” I said and limped towards the stairs. I was trying to get out of the room before I had to provide any more details.

“Maker got his butt kicked.” Marissa chimed in that teasing, sing-song, tone that seems exclusive to children under twelve.

I looked over my shoulder and smiled at the teasing children. “You should see the other guy.”

How I was able to summon a smile at that moment is beyond me. Maybe it was all the hoots that followed me up the stairs.

“No way Maker would lose.”

“Yeah Marissa, you’re cray?!”

“I saw Maker kill fifty Draculas all by himself!” I certainly didn’t remember that, but I guess some stories are so good they don’t have to be true.

I made it up the stairs out of breath and almost out of whatever the hell was keeping me going at the moment. Zora’s apartment was always clean, with everything in its place. Zora was even less materialistic than I was. It was easy to keep a place clean when you didn’t have anything to put in it.

Today the place was dirty. The couch was tipped over, and the table was on its side. There were clothes all over the floor and a few were bloody, burned in places, or dirty. There was blood smattered on the wall in one place and holes where the drywall had been punched through. This couldn’t be Zora’s apartment.

I still wasn’t in full control of my faculties. I stood in front of the sink staring down at a few empty potion bottles trying to figure out what they were doing there.

“What do you want, Neka?” I heard someone call from the back. The voice was raspy; it didn’t sound like Zora. Whoever it was obviously wasn’t speaking to me, but no one else lived up here. Did Miles get a new tenant? Had I walked into the right apartment? Who the hell was Neka?

The blade of a sword was against the side of my neck before I could figure out an answer to any of those questions, and I felt the disturbingly familiar feeling of blood trickling down my skin.

“Turn around. Slowly.” Well that voice at least was unmistakable, as was the sword that I could easily shave with.

“Put it down, Zora; it’s me.”

“Me who?” She growled. “You could be Maker. You could also be some vamp that Miles invited in using a glamor to f**k with me in my hour of distraughtness. As we both know, I’ve had an unconventional week, which has impaired my normally warm and inviting sense of humor. The question is not whether I’m going to kill you, it’s how slowly. If you cooperate I may find better things to spend my time on than cutting you into little pieces. Now, turn around.”

There was something seriously wrong here. The sword trembled at my neck, making a tiny cut into something less tiny. It dug in a few millimeters, up one, down a few. Zora could hold her sword at arm’s length and split a hair with the point. I’d seen her do it. This woman was accusing me of not being Maker, but I wasn’t sure this woman was Zora.

“First,” I said, moving around slowly, “I’m not pretty enough to be a vampire. Second, I’m broke. Third, Broc is the only one who would be stupid enough to come here wanting to kill you, and he would see using a glamor as beneath him. Now, put it down.”

The woman before me didn’t look like Zora. Her hair was in a braid with so many frizzy, loose hairs it almost wasn’t a braid anymore. Her face was frail like she hadn’t eaten, and her normally cappuccino skin was pale and filthy. Her clothes were ripped and bloody in a couple places. That was a little familiar, at least. The determined, violent eyes were the only thing I recognized.

I only saw her face for a moment before it was buried in my chest and I was a lifted a few inches in the air. I grunted with a dozen protesting wounds and fractured bones, but she didn’t put me down. She screamed in what sounded like triumph or excitement—maybe it was relief—or some combination of feelings that didn’t lend itself well to words. I was feeling something similar.

She finally broke the hug after far too long. I was still low on blood and was starting to get dizzy from all the stationary uprightness. “Been looking all over for you. You look like hell.” She said, sounding like she was holding back some tears. I rocked back and forth and held off dropping a few of my own. The laughter started on the next inhale.

“You smell like a skunk and cow manure love child.” She sniffed again, wiped at her watery eyes, and giggled. “You smell like a Nascar stadium full of roadkill and hillbilly turkey vultures next door to a turbo charged rotten spinach factory. You smell like an infected dung beetle p***s with a side order of sadness.” I smiled. It was good to be back. “No Maker, this is really bad, I need you to light a match… then set this place on fire. I mean, you smell like a barn full of lovingly cultivated animal puke.”

“I don’t discuss my barnyard activities with anyone. There’s a cab downstairs if you wouldn’t mind,” and with that, I began the slow process of limping towards her shower.

“Shower! Great idea,” she said, making her way around me to the door. “Because you smell like a rancid seaweed salad, with butthole dressing and whale s**t croutons. Hell, you smell like…” her voice faded away as she left the apartment. I leaned back against a wall just to breathe. Didn’t remember this place having that many stairs.

“Which one of you munchkins let a stinky Maker in my apartment?!” I heard Zora yell from downstairs. I didn’t hear the children respond, but I could clearly hear her. “Well, which one of you is in charge of sniffing his butt?!”

Butt humor. It always worked with small children. I finally got to the bathroom and the mirror confirmed that I did indeed look like hell. I smiled and saw a few missing teeth. Zora must’ve done all that so they didn’t worry, or she did it because it helped her get over whatever the hell that rant was about. Probably both.

I was covered in dried blood; you could see it even through the black clothing. The white shirt underneath was stained brown with dried blood in so many places I could barely see the white. My eyes were bloodshot, and my cheeks were sunken in.

I started the shower and cranked up the heat as hot as I could stand it. I didn’t disrobe and didn’t bother to wash, just curled up in the tub and let the water run over me. Dammit.

After the water warmed me up a bit, I stripped down slowly and painfully. I found an impressive number of bruises, scrapes, and places where I had been cut deep and stitched up again with some downright sloppy needlework. I remembered being stripped out of my clothes for the Executive and the Hag. Hawknose and Blackstar mostly used spells. It shouldn’t have fazed me. I’d been cut open by Tema more times than I could count.

I didn’t remember everything; only flashes. That was probably for the best. The fastest way I knew to get past anything was to keep putting myself through it.

The fetal position was nice. I could ease the pain, relive it, and watch it be washed away—all at the same time. Time to heal. A more detached part of me noted that I would never fully heal from this.

I wanted to scream, but all that came out were sobs and soft moaning. Shaking off the memories of things I only vaguely remembered. Flashes of Blackstar’s goon squad ran through my head and I flinched at each one.

I spread my hands apart. “Light.” The slight chill was welcome as I cast. My pocket of light began its slow procession back and forth between my hands, flickering as the water from the shower interfered. Left to right, inhale. Right to left, exhale.

I replayed what I remembered again and again. “Just another thing to have nightmares about. Just another thing to have nightmares about.” I chanted. I would have scars from this—lots of them.

I found more cuts that had been stitched as the hot water hit them. More bruises that were black and deep purple. More cracked and broken bones. I didn’t realize how much everything hurt until now. Until I stopped, until I wasn’t full of adrenaline from looking over my shoulder. I always felt safe in this building. I wanted to sleep, but instead just lay there letting the hot water run over me. Thinking, feeling, and wincing as I relived everything in as much vivid detail as I could summon.