“It’s notmyfault,”the woman screamed. “I didn’t tell her anything. She never found out from me.”
The woman’s voice cut off raggedly, like someone had clamped a hand over her mouth. Someone else spoke up….
The memory fritzed out into static and a dark, cold rage that hung on to something Took couldn’t see.
Clipped orders echoed up the stairs, and cars revved outside on the street. There was a plan. Took curled up in a ball on the floor and thought about if he could make it downstairs, outside, away.
A door slammed and he heard THE VOICE snap orders. He shuddered and crawled, his bones ground together like salt under his skin, back into the Box.
They hurt him to put him in the Box and sometimes they took him out of the Box and hurt him. No one ever hurt himinthe Box. It was, right then and right there, the closest thing to safety he could imagine.
“Well?” Madoc asked. “What’s your point, Bennett?”
His voice was sharp and expectant, the SSA Madoc who expected you to do your job and have the answers. The hand on the back of Took’s neck was the Madoc who’d taken him to bed, patient in his own way.
For a second he felt like an idiot as he realized that Madoc would never hurt him. Then the dark sneak of doubt crawled back in, because he’d thought the Box was safe as well, hadn’t he? Took shuddered and pushed himself away from the table as though he could shed the dread like a coat.
“When someone came to her house and killed her family, Nora didn’t run to her room or try to get out. She went to the Box. It was somewhere she thought was safe, her harbor,” Took said, his voice rough as he stalked out of the room. He didn’t really have anywhere to go, but he couldn’t stay in the room with that metal coffin anymore, not least because he had the obscure compulsion to crawl into it. “You want to know what they kept in the box? It was her.”
IT WASlight out. All the good little vampires in the world, or the half of it the sun shone on, were tucked up in their coffins. Or at least decamped back to hotel rooms and VINE offices. The only ones left in the house were Took, Pally, and the little girl.
Took stood in the silent kitchen, tipped two pills into his palm, and washed them down with whiskey. It tasted like nothing much. The back of his throat caught the burn of it, but none of the wood and rye flavor. He’d never been that much of a drinker—honesty floated to the top of a drunk’s bottle—but he missed the taste now he couldn’t indulge.
Not as much as fried chicken, though.
His mom had made terrible fried chicken. He still remembered it now—two legs of chicken charred to the color of rust and served with last night’s fries and half a can of beans, the paper plate soaked with grease and thin, orange ketchup. It had been tough as wood to chew and tasted like… hot grease, mostly.
She’d never been a good cook. Her skills lay elsewhere. In service to the Hounds.
Took tossed the rest of the whiskey back in one. Even if he couldn’t taste it, muscle memory gave him enough dutch courage to pick up his cell phone. He dialed the number from memory. Over a decade since he’d last punched that number into a phone, and his thumbs still remembered the order of numbers with no help from his conscious mind.
It rang out the first time. The second as well. Took hesitated as he got ready to press Redial, his thumb pressed against the small, rubber button. It didn’t feel right. He glanced upstairs and wondered if Pally could hear the other end of a phone conversation through the floorboards.
Took couldn’t, but he’d been spat up as much as made. There were probably plenty of things he couldn’t do that other Anakim could.
Anakim.Took wondered when he’d started to think of himself like that, even sporadically. Was it a good sign that he had started to come to terms with his situation, or was it some evidence of the corruption of the soul that the priests warned about?
Call it what you like, and God knew his mother would, but Took supposed it didn’t make any difference.
From the kitchen counter, he grabbed the stake she’d sent him—the wax-smooth wood blistered his fingertips on contact—and let himself outside. It was muggy out, and love bugs flitted aimlessly across the handkerchief-sized square of courtyard garden. At some point someone had tried their best with it, but the plants had died long ago and the pots had cracked in the weather.
It was the sort of day his mother loved. She’d strip down to shorts and a cutoff top, arms and legs tanned like teak, and drink flasks of cold tea while she gardened. Sometimes she’d even sing—the long, blessed days of summer she called it, although the tunes she sporadically visited on any listeners were always from the charts.
Took retreated to the first scrap of shadow he could find, under the overgrown bush of wisteria that hung over the fence. The sickly sweet smell of mulched flowers was heavy in the air.
He pressed Redial. It rang until he thought it was about to cut off again and he’d have to start from scratch. Just before the last ring—halfway through it, in fact—she picked it up.
“What?” she said, her voice cold with suspicion over the delay. “Who’s this.”
Took leaned back against the fence, eyes trained on the top windows of the house for any movement. He relaxed his hold on his vowels and let the northeast Cali drawl slide back into his voice.
“Hey, Mom,” he said. “It’s… Luke.”
That felt strange. He hadn’t introduced himself as that in years, not said his old name at all for months. It didn’t feel right on his tongue anymore.
Silence on the other end of the phone. Took imagined her—a lean woman with short, bobbed blonde hair and bare feet. It would only be getting light on the West Coast, but she’d have been up for hours. There’d be something on the stove in that old, copper pot she lugged from house to house, and the crossword would be done. For a sentimental moment, Took almost missed her.
“Have you called to say goodbye?” she asked.
