“What about the smell?” I hiss. Through all of this I haven’t lost my grip on my knife handle. Don’t ask me how; my wrist feels like the bones are going to separate in about ten seconds, and I’ve been pulled off my seat so that I’m hovering over the stick shift. I throw the car into neutral with my hip (should have done that earlier) and pull my blade out fast.
What happens next is kind of a surprise: the skin comes back onto the hitchhiker’s face, and the green comes back into his eyes. He’s just a kid, staring at my knife. I get the car back under control and hit the brakes.
The jolt from the stop makes him blink. He looks at me.
“I worked all summer for this money,” he says softly. “My girl will kill me if I lose it.”
My heart is pounding from the effort of controlling the lurching car. I don’t want to say anything. I just want to get it over with. But instead I hear my voice.
“Your girl will forgive you. I promise.” The knife, my father’s athame, is light in my hand.
“I don’t want to do this again,” the hitchhiker whispers.
“This is the last time,” I say, and then I strike, drawing the blade across his throat, opening a yawning black line. The hitchhiker’s fingers come up to his neck. They try to press the skin back together, but something as dark and thick as oil floods out of the wound and covers him, bleeding not only down over his vintage-era jacket but also up over his face and eyes, into his hair. The hitchhiker doesn’t scream as he shrivels, but maybe he can’t: his throat was cut and the black fluid has worked its way into his mouth. In less than a minute he’s gone, leaving not a trace behind.
I pass my hand over the seat. It’s dry. Then I get out of the car and do a walk-around as best I can in the dark, looking for scratches. The tire tread is still smoking and melted. I can hear Mr. Dean’s teeth grinding. I’m leaving town in three days, and now I’ll be spending at least one of them putting on a new set of Goodyears. Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn’t take the car back until the new tires are on.
CHAPTER TWO
It’s after midnight when I park the Rally Sport in our driveway. Mr. Dean’s probably still up, wiry and full of black coffee as he is, watching me cruise carefully down the street. But he doesn’t expect the car back until morning. If I get up early enough, I can take it down to the shop and replace the tires before he knows any different.
As the headlights cut through the yard and splash onto the face of the house, I see two green dots: the eyes of my mom’s cat. When I get to the front door, it’s gone from the window. It’ll tell her that I’m home. Tybalt is the cat’s name. It’s an unruly thing, and it doesn’t much care for me. I don’t care much for it either. It has a weird habit of pulling all the hair off its tail, leaving little tufts of black all over the house. But my mom likes to have a cat around. Like most children, they can see and hear things that are already dead. A handy trick, when you live with us.
I go inside, take my shoes off, and climb the stairs by two. I’m dying for a shower — want to get that mossy, rotten feeling off my wrist and shoulder. And I want to check my dad’s athame and rinse off whatever black stuff might be on the edge.
At the top of the stairs, I stumble against a box and say, “Shit!” a little too loudly. I should know better. My life is lived in a maze of packed boxes. My mom and I are professional packers; we don’t mess around with castoff cardboard from the grocery or liquor stores. We have high-grade, industrial-strength, reinforced boxes with permanent labels. Even in the dark I can see that I just tripped over the Kitchen Utensils (2).
I tiptoe into the bathroom and pull my knife out of my leather backpack. After I finished off the hitchhiker I wrapped it up in a black velvet cloth, but not neatly. I was in a hurry. I didn’t want to be on the road anymore, or anywhere near the bridge. Seeing the hitchhiker disintegrate didn’t scare me. I’ve seen worse. But it isn’t the kind of thing you get used to.
“Cas?”
I look up into the mirror and see the sleepy reflection of my mom, holding the black cat in her arms. I put the athame down on the counter.
“Hey, Mom. Sorry to wake you.”
“You know I like to be up when you come in anyway. You should always wake me, so I can sleep.”
I don’t tell her how dumb that sounds; I just turn on the faucet and start to run the blade under the cold water.
“I’ll do it,” she says, and touches my arm. Then of course she grabs my wrist, because she can see the bruises that are starting to purple up all along my forearm.
I expect her to say something motherly; I expect her to quack around like a worried duck for a few minutes and go to the kitchen to get ice and a wet towel, even though the bruises are by no means the worst mark I’ve ever gotten. But this time she doesn’t. Maybe because it’s late, and she’s tired. Or maybe because after three years she’s finally starting to figure out that I’m not going to quit.
“Give it to me,” she says, and I do, because I’ve gotten the worst of the black stuff off already. She takes it and leaves. I know that she’s off to do what she does every time, which is to boil the blade and then stab it into a big jar of salt, where it will sit under the light of the moon for three days. When she takes it out she’ll wipe it down with cinnamon oil and call it good as new.
She used to do the same thing for my dad. He’d come home from killing something that was already dead and she’d kiss him on the cheek and take away the athame, as casually as any wife might carry in a briefcase. He and I used to stare at the thing while it sat in its jar of salt, our arms crossed over our chests, conveying to each other that we both thought it was ridiculous. It always seemed to me like an exercise in make-believe. Like it was Excalibur in the rock.
But my dad let her do it. He knew what he was getting into when he met and married her, a pretty, auburn- haired Wiccan girl with a strand of white flowers braided around her neck. He’d lied back then and called himself Wiccan too, for lack of a better word. But really, Dad wasn’t much of anything.
He just loved the legends. He loved a good story, tales about the world that made it seem cooler than it really was. He went crazy over Greek mythology, which is where I got my name.
They compromised on it, because my mom loved Shakespeare, and I ended up called Theseus Cassio. Theseus for the slayer of the Minotaur, and Cassio for Othello’s doomed lieutenant. I think it sounds straight-up stupid. Theseus Cassio Lowood. Everyone just calls me Cas. I suppose I should be glad — my dad also loved Norse mythology, so I might have wound up being called Thor, which would have been basically unbearable.
I exhale and look in the mirror. There are no marks on my face, or on my gray dress button-up, just like there were no marks on the Rally Sport’s upholstery (thank god). I look ridiculous. I’m in slacks and sleeves like I’m out on a big date, because that’s what I told Mr. Dean I needed the car for. When I left the house tonight my hair was combed back, and there was a little bit of gel in it, but after that fucking kerfuffle it’s hanging across my forehead in dark streaks.
“You should hurry up and get to bed, sweetheart. It’s late and we’ve got more packing to do.”
My mom is done with the knife. She’s floated back up against the doorjamb and her black cat is twisting around her ankles like a bored fish around a plastic castle.
“I just want to jump in the shower,” I say. She sighs and turns away.
“You did get him, didn’t you?” she says over her shoulder, almost like an afterthought.
“Yeah. I got him.”
She smiles at me. Her mouth looks sad and wistful. “It was close this time. You thought you’d have him finished before the end of July. Now it’s August.”
“He was a tougher hunt,” I say, pulling a towel down off the shelf. I don’t think she’s going to say anything else, but she stops and turns back.
“Would you have stayed here, if you hadn’t gotten him? Would you have pushed her back?”
I only think for a few seconds, just a natural pause in the conversation, because I knew the answer before she finished asking the question.
“No.”
As my mom leaves, I drop the bomb. “Hey, can I borrow some cash for a new set of tires?”
