A Line in the Sand Read online

  “I want to hit something,” I confessed. “I want to find the guy who did it and beat the ever living shit out of him.”

  Carl nodded, sipping the one and only beer I’d ever seen him drink. “He’ll be dealing with his own demons. I doubt there is anything you could do to him that would hurt more than his own guilt.”

  “Yeah, but it would make me feel better.”

  “No it wouldn’t.” He gave me a small, fond smile. “And it wouldn’t change anything.”

  “But it should. There should be something to do, somebody we could go to and say, ‘hey, you made a mistake, he’s a good guy, can we please have him back now?’ I mean, Kevin was going places. He was smart, and decent to people, and I’m kinda pissed off at God for just yanking him out of here before he got to do anything.” I knew I was sulking, at this point, babbling nonsense. But the part of me that felt like a petulant child had the need to be heard, that night.

  The older man outright laughed at that. “I have no doubts that you would storm the Pearly Gates themselves if you thought you were helping someone you cared about. That’s who you are.” He sighed, watching the darkness. “We can’t change what happened before, but we can change what happens next. That’s what you have to do, Jesse. You have to become that good man that you thought Kevin was destined to be. Do it for him, since he can’t anymore.”

  I snorted softly, watching my breath curl in front of my eyes. “I’m barely clinging to ‘just okay’. Good may be out of my reach, still.”

  “Try. It’s the trying that’s as important as the being.” The big man shifted in his chair, turning to look at me seriously. “And remember that there’s no one way to be good. Good can be as big as saving kids from burning buildings, or it can be as small as giving someone a smile when no one else will. The world has a shortage of good. Every little bit counts.”

  I went back to college, back to the city that seemed so very far away from where I’d started. I declared philosophy as my major, like that was somehow going to help me find some kind of sense in the senseless. I thought about what it meant to be a good man. I thought about Kevin, and Carl, and where I was and where I wanted to be.

  I found a tattoo parlor and plunked down some of my hard-earned cash to get a line of kanji tattooed down each biceps. “The way that is spoken here is not the eternal way. The name that is spoken here is not the eternal name.” The first two lines of the Tao Te Ching. I heard them in Carl’s voice, every time I saw the dark lines inked on my pale skin. There was no one way to be good. I just had to find mine.

  As the years went by, I thought about Kevin less often. Still, I would catch a glimpse of a kid down the street, sometimes, all gangly elbows and knees, and I would have a slight jolt of “hey, is that…?” It wasn’t, of course, couldn’t be, but the mind can be cruel. To this day, the sight of thick lenses on glasses just screams “Kevin” to me, though the reminder doesn’t hurt anymore.

  We were a lot alike, he and I, when you got right down to it. Two kids from small towns, skinnier than anyone had a right to be, learning to be bigger people than our bodies would reflect. On nights when I let my mind wander, I wonder if he would have been a champion, too. He could have fought with a katana, same as me. He could have found a girl, had some kids, saved the world maybe. But Kevin was gone, and that left just me, trying to do enough good for both of us combined.

  Sometimes, I still wish I’d gotten a radioactive spider instead.

  Chapter 2

  Now…

  My son was born on a Tuesday. He came into the world without extraordinary drama, and we named him William Martin for my two best friends, even if one of them was no longer speaking to me. My father, the Wild West expert who’d named his sons Jesse James and Cole Younger, immediately dubbed the baby “Billy the Kid” and no matter how Mira and I objected, the name seemed likely to stick.

  That night at the hospital, after the nurses finally let Mira sleep and the visitors had been politely hustled out, I sat in the darkness cradling that tiny new life in my arms. His head was almost completely bare under the blue knit cap they’d plopped on him, but I could already tell that what few wisps of hair he had promised to be strawberry blond just like his big sister, Annabelle. He seemed so tiny in my large hands, and I wracked my brain trying to remember if my daughter had been so small. I remembered being terrified when I first held Anna, a young father now responsible for another human being. I was still scared to death as I looked at my son, but for different reasons.

  With the room illuminated only by the glow of the TV near the ceiling, it was easy to see the lines of white filigree as they crept down my hands to my fingertips. The souls riding in my skin ventured out to cautiously investigate this new curiosity. My sleeping son didn’t stir, and I knew they weren’t going to hurt him, so I allowed it. Even if one of the nurses had walked in at that moment, odds were they wouldn’t be able to see anything unusual.

  Those souls, two hundred and seventy-five sparks of life, didn’t belong to me. Sure, we’d been sharing the same body for months, though it seemed like much longer. I’d inherited them from their previous…owner? Host? Vessel? But they weren’t mine, and that meant that they could be taken from me. I was carrying the spiritual equivalent of a nuclear bomb, and there were many less than noble creatures in the world who wanted that power.

  The bad guys were coming for me. I knew that as certainly as I knew the sun would come up in a few hours. They were taking their sweet time about it, obviously, but demons were, for all intents and purposes, immortal. They didn’t usually get in a big hurry about things.

  To put it in perspective, their leader, a fallen angel currently going by the name of Reina, had been waiting a literal millennium for her chance. What was a couple of more months or even years in the face of that?

  Reina would come for me and these souls, and this late night moment with my newborn son might be all I’d get. I rocked the reclining chair back, lay the baby on my chest so he could hear my heart beating, and closed my eyes. The souls would wake me if something happened.

  Only once during that night did they stir as the smell of cloves tickled my senses. I opened my eyes a crack to see Mira awake and watching us. With my magic-enhanced vision, I could see the tiny golden threads of magic drifting out from her fingers, wafting across the room on a non-existent breeze to weave a delicate gossamer blanket around the sleeping infant on my chest.

  She was beautiful, my wife. From the first moment I’d laid eyes on her, with her wealth of dark curly hair and startlingly green eyes, I’d been lost, utterly and entirely. And then, I got the joy of realizing she was kind, and intelligent, and funny, and… In all the years we’d been together, I’d only grown more amazed that someone like her would pick a scrub like me.

  It was only after I learned about demons, after I learned about all the terrible things that went bump in the night, that I also learned her magic was real. Some genetic quirk in the population, some unused part of our brains, I never knew why some people had the talent and some didn’t. But a select few – I wasn’t one of them – could draw upon the power of their own souls to work wonders, and my wife was one of them. Mira wasn’t the strongest practitioner I’d ever seen, but she had a combination of power and precision that made her formidable. It was accurate to say that she’d kept me alive through sheer willpower, over the past few years.

  While she was pregnant, Mira had been unable to cast the simplest spell, for fear of it harming our unborn child. Now, with the baby safely in the world, she whispered things I couldn’t hear, and the room filled with the warm and soothing scents of her magic. The souls in my skin tingled and squirmed at the sensation, but even they seemed to know that this magic, this spell, was welcomed. I dozed again, for what was probably going to be the last peaceful night I’d have for a while.

  The next few months went by in a kind of pleasant daze. We adjusted well to the new member of the family, and Billy turned out to be a very easy baby. Sure, he woke
in the night like any infant, but between Mira and I, and the two bodyguards who still shared a roof with us, someone was always there to offer a bottle or midnight diaper change.

  I will admit, the first time I woke to find Sveta singing softly to my son in Ukrainian, I was a little nervous. Sveta had the hollow-eyed look of someone who had seen combat and the scars to prove she’d survived it. After sleeping in just her T-shirt and underwear, we’d all gotten a good look at the marks that marred the smooth skin of her arms, traced patterns down her legs, carved a path across her ribs. Along with the physical wounds came the invisible ones, the touches on the mind that would never quite heal. I had it, Estéban had it, my brother had it. PTSD was just a fact of our lives. I couldn’t say how much she might have changed since taking on the champion role, but she wasn’t exactly known for her stability after.

  But I watched them that night and saw a gentleness in the cold woman that I’d only glimpsed once before. On a recent trip to Mexico, I’d been soothed to sleep one night by the scarred warrior singing a soft lullaby to a group of adolescent boys. I’d crossed it off as an oddity at the time, but now I realized that Sveta genuinely liked children. And they liked her, apparently. My son gazed intently at her face as she sang, as if he understood every word. Who knows? Maybe he did. Maybe babies aren’t limited to just one language until we teach them to be.

  I turned to sneak back to my room and nearly walked into Estéban. My protégé-turned-bodyguard offered me a small smile, and we both returned to our rooms. We didn’t worry about Sveta and the baby after that.

  Life was working, for a change, and I did my best not to dwell on the moment when it would stop working. Anna took to being a big sister like a duck to water, doting on “her Billy” and scolding us when we didn’t care for him just so. Even our big lummox of an English mastiff, Chunk, seemed to understand that he was large enough to hurt the tiny baby, and while he would curl up at the edge of the blanket when we laid Billy on the floor, he never tried to get close, never got too rowdy.

  I still had nightmares, of course, but I was getting better at coming out of them without rousing the entire household. The tunnel dream returned time and time again, where I would step from a mysterious opening into a flat empty area. Some kind of arena, I’d decided, and far across the dirt expanse, I would search to see if the dark figure was standing there. Sometimes he was, sometimes he wasn’t. Then the dream would hiccup, and I’d be back in the tunnel, stepping out all over again. Frustrating, yes, but not frightening.

  Mira started back at her shop, Seventh Sense, part time. The store was a labor of love for her, carrying new age and occult supplies for the greater Kansas City area, and she hated to be away from it for very long. I returned to my job at It, selling band T-shirts, ripped jeans, and over-sized piercing accessories to the masses. I was often accompanied by Estéban who decided to pick up a few hours himself. I couldn’t begrudge him that, a kid needs spending cash. On the days he didn’t work with me, Sveta would lurk nearby, but it increasingly seemed like a waste of time. Things were good. Things were real good. It couldn’t last.

  “Hey, Old Dude!” I glanced up from restocking the juniors t-shirt rack in time to see something small rocketing at my head. Without thought, I snatched it out of the air, revealing a soft foam novelty football. Raising a brow, I looked at my assailant across the store.

  Kaden, a gangly teen with a shock of bleach blond hair crowning his otherwise brunet head, gave me a grin. I rolled my eyes and threw the missile back at him, smirking when he nearly fumbled and dropped it. “Cat-like reflexes, son!” Behind me, Estéban snorted, so I turned to glare up at him, too. “And where were you, Mister Bodyguard?”

  The young man shook his head, gazing down at me from atop the high ladder where he was precariously changing light bulbs. “If a foam football takes you out, you deserved it.”

  “If I see that football fly through the air one more time, it’s going up someone’s ass!” Kristyn, my green-haired-for-today boss, fixed us all with the Look of Doom™ from her place behind the cash wrap. We all pretended to be suitably chastised, and Kaden dumped the offending weapon back into the bin with the rest of its cronies.

  Kristyn wasn’t really mad, of course, and we would probably last about half an hour before we found some other irritating way of spending our time. The store was overstaffed for the minimal customer traffic we were having, and it left us with nothing to do but busy work. Not that I minded. Work was work, and it kept my mind off other things. The younger dudes, though, it took more to occupy them. Estéban wasn’t so bad anymore, his time training with me instilling a modicum of discipline, but Kaden was new, and young, and like a puppy, prone to chewing on things when he was bored. And I fully admit, I instigated about half of it. I mean sure, I had quite soundly aged out of Its target demographic, but at heart, I would never grow up. I mean, I was wearing a shirt that said “0 Days Without an Accident.”

  As I turned to resume my task, a subtle vibration came from my back pocket. Glancing to make sure Kaden wasn’t looking, I slipped my cell out to see who was calling. We weren’t technically supposed to have our phones on the floor, but as the only other person who had been at the store as long as Kristyn, and having a history of emergency calls I couldn’t miss, my boss elected to overlook the rule so long as I didn’t flaunt it in front of the kids.

  Seeing that it was Mira, I swiped to answer automatically. “Hey, darlin’.”

  “Hey, sweetheart. You have a minute to talk?”

  I glanced around the store, seeing a distinct lack of customers, and shrugged. “Sure, what’s up?” Estéban mouthed “tell her I said hi” at me as I made my way back to the break room. “Kid says hi.”

  “Tell him I said hi, too.” In the background, I could hear my daughter’s voice chattering away, punctuated occasionally by Sveta’s quieter tones. “Listen, I was talking to Dee today about my hours at the shop.”

  I perched my butt on the corner of our decrepit card table and nodded, like she could actually see me. “You wanting to go back full time?”

  Mira sighed quietly. “I…yeah, I do. I think I’m ready. But I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about it. We don’t really have enough to put both kids in daycare, and I wasn’t sure…”

  “Mir, we will make it work. Okay? If you’re ready to go back to the shop full time, I’ll talk to Kristyn about reworking my hours here, and maybe we can get away with daycare only a couple days a week.”

  “Are y—” Whatever Mira was about to ask was cut off as our infant son let out a piercing howl in the background. “What the hell?” Simultaneously, the deep roaring bark of our Mastiff rang through the phone line.

  I frowned. “Everything okay there?”

  “Not sure. Gimme a second.” She carried the phone with her as she walked through the house, the sounds getting louder. The baby crying, the dog baying, and Sveta cursing not so softly in her native language.

  “Mira?”

  “What do you want?” The question wasn’t directed at me, and I instantly recognized the sound of fury in my wife’s voice. “You’re not welcome here! Get out!”

  “Mira! What’s going on?” Either she didn’t hear me, or she had to ignore me to deal with whatever was happening at the house.

  For a heartbeat, I thought I heard the sound of a muffled male voice under all the cacophony. The next sound was exploding glass, and Mira’s phone went dead. Instantly, the souls in my skin surged to the surface, alarmed by my sudden adrenaline rush. I dialed her back, and it went straight to voice mail. I didn’t try a second time.

  “Kid, we gotta move!” I dashed through the store without even saying goodbye to Kristyn, barely noticing the sound of Estéban’s boots hitting the ground running behind me.

  Piling into my ancient Mazda pickup truck, I threw the phone at the kid. “Keep dialing Mira, let me know if she picks up.” He set about his task without question, and held on for dear life as I peeled rubber out of the parking lot.
r />   It was a fifteen minute drive from Sierra Vista Mall to my home, and we made it in nine, breaking multiple traffic regulations and several laws of physics. I didn’t even bother with the driveway, plowing to a halt in my own front yard and catching my sword as Estéban retrieved it from behind the seat. I could already see the line of smoke rising from the open front door, and my heart nearly stopped.

  “Mira!” With the kid on my heels, I bolted through the front door, the jamb of it charred black and smoking mournfully. The door itself wasn’t just open, it had been blasted off the hinges, and was currently in a pile of kindling in my kitchen floor. Only then did I realize that there had been no tingle of magic as I crossed the threshold of my house. The wards were down. “MIRA!”

  Nothing. No response. The only sound I could hear was my own heartbeat thundering in my ears and Estéban’s ragged breathing behind me. No voices, no dog, just dead silence.

  “Sweep the house.” I was amazed that I even came up with words, let alone coherent ones.

  Estéban moved past me into the kitchen, his own stained machete in hand, and his boots crunched on broken glass. The sliding glass door in the kitchen had been destroyed, though it looked like more glass had gone out than come in. Turning, I started down the long hallway.

  The first room to my left was Estéban’s, and it was dark and empty, not a thing out of place. Even the computer, glowing cheerfully, was still in sleep mode. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t been enough to jostle the machine. The bathroom was likewise vacant, and I swallowed a half-ton rock in my throat as my steps took me toward Anna’s room.