Page 146 of Like Grim Death: Part One
Halloween is two weeks away. I can hold on until then, if we have to.
“In the meantime…” Lucifer trails off, glancing up at the ceiling, and I wonder who it is he’s thinking of. “Be careful. Even inside this house.” He reaches behind him, and it takes me a minute to realize he’s adjusting the gun in the back of his pants.
My fingers tighten around Rain. Lucifer knows how I feel about guns around him, even though I have my own in the bottom of my nightstand now, but my husband just smiles sadly at me.
“I have to go,” he says, offering no other explanation except, “It’s Sevryn’s first job.”
Briefly, I think of asking him about Liar’s Island. But the way things are between us all, the chaos happening quietly around us, I don’t speak a word about it as he heads upstairs to get theinitiate.
“Didyou know RC used to pick the craziest, most unreliable patient from the ER to do some of their worst jobs?”
I lean against the counter in the kitchen, my arms crossed, fingers drumming over my biceps. My chest is still heaving from sprintinghere,to this refurbished barn deep in the woods, not far from where I’ve spent too much time at Emily Cemetery.
Atlas sets down his keys on the gray marble island between us, the lighting dim, the sun having sunk hours ago in the sky. Despite this beinghisidea, he’s late.
I glance to my left, at the digital clock above the stainless steel stove.
It’s close to midnight, which means we have less than an hour, unless Mavy stays late, but I’m not risking amaybe.
“They had to be poor, of course,” Atlas continues, his blue-brown eyes on mine, both palms flush to the island, the muscles in his triceps flexing. He has a skeleton bandana around his neck, dressed all in black—black T-shirt, backward black hat, black sweats. “Few connections, prior arrests a plus.” He smiles fondly, like what he’s saying is a pleasant memory, but I’ve started to learn his cherubic grins flash with anything. He would smile as he stabbed you in the back, doing it in such a way you might thank him for it if only because of how pleasant he was being. “Mysteriously—using a liaison—they’d be set up with a modest home, an allowance every month for food. If they were addicts, RC would help them come off the drugs. Usually with ibogaine.” He shrugs, a bone in his neck flexing. “They invented a cover story for their new soldiers. A respectable career placement, but something lowkey, unable to be fact-checked.”
I dig my nails into my biceps, exposed from the sleeveless white shirt I’m in, tied to the side over my black leggings. The counter digs into my low back. My spine is arched so nothing touches the back of my thighs. Everything still feels tender there.
Atlas studies me a moment, his eyes dropping over my body then raking back up. “Then they gave them targets. Sometimes people to murder, objects to steal.” He raises his brows, sucking in his cheeks before he speaks again. “But when they completed their job and stopped being useful—when they started asking too many questions, now that they’re basic needs were taken care of and they could think clearly—RC would withhold their medication, drugs needed to participate in the real world. And in exchange, they’d leave them little bags of dope or crack or bottles of brandy, whatever their vice.”
I imagine my mother as the experiment. Clean and recovering and slightly bewildered about it all. Going down a bad path but unable to stop because there wasn’t another option. I briefly dream of her holding me tight, telling me she’s sorry for how she messed up my life.Ourlives. Then I picture the rug being snatched out from under her.
But I imagine something else too.Me,as the experiment. Coming from no one, with nothing. My own mental health diagnosis. The ways RC could fuck up my life.
“They didn’t want it, but the pull of addiction is fierce and the desire to slip into our old ways is strong.” Atlas lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “They’d try to tell people, of course. New friends they’d made on their road to criminal recovery. It wouldn’t matter the crimes they’d committed because they aren’t thinking straight now, so they’d blab about all of it.”
But as they suffered withdrawal from psych meds and placated it with illegal drugs, they’d grow unreliable. Shifty. Maybe stop paying any of their own bills, acting erratically around their new friends or old family members, who would’ve seen that type of behavioral pattern in the past.
My throat feels tight when I say, “But no one would believe them.”
“But no one would believe them.”Atlas repeats my revelation and I cut my eyes to his.
“Why are you telling me this?” Goosebumps dot my skin as I glance behind him into the open room we use to train. It’s dark, there’s only a couch along one charcoal wall, empty, but it suddenly feels as if someone else could be here.
I straighten against the counter, glancing toward the knife block only inches from me. My eyes find the handle of the butcher knife and I hear Atlas’s sweet laugh, twisted up in a strange evil.
“That’s how they’ll spin Samson’s death too,” Atlas says quietly, instead of answering my question. Or maybe thisisthe answer. “He never got a chance to work with them because he wasn’t low enough in society, but he posted all kinds of nonsense on social media and people really underestimate how careful they have to be with that. They’ll use anything you say of your own freewill against you, if you serve a purpose. Eventually, five years from now, maybe ten, the news will report Samson’s body was found and it looks as if he took his own life. Maybe ran afoul of some big-time dealer.”
My throat feels tight and I clench my teeth as Atlas’s eyes don’t leave mine while he stares at me.
“Not many will question it and those who do will be deemed crazy too.”
“Are they going to use me?” I blurt out, unable to stop myself. “RC? Are they going to…” I trail off, shaking my head, the ends of my braids tickling my back where the hem of my shirt hangs an inch over my leggings. “They don’t want me with Mavy?”But why would they care?They might oversee the 6, but it’s the 6 who are adopting me in. It’sLuciferwho told me the path I’d need to take. He let me know the scar on my palm—Coagula—was only the beginning. But even still, I’m doing everything they’ve asked, and Mavy and I are bound.
Atlas says nothing as I search his face. His expression is only one of mild pleasantness.
My heart beats uncomfortably fast in my chest. “Answer me.” I whisper it at first, then say it again, louder.“Answer me!”I’m at the opposite end of the island, only a couple of feet between me and Atlas, my arms still crossed like I can ward off the truth as I tip my chin up to hold his gaze. My mind races and when he doesn’t speak, I continue to. “They murdered Samson to punish you for Natalie, didn’t they? They don’t like her? But why not killher?Where is she?” I shake my head, feeling lightheaded and frantic. “You know, don’t you? Tell me where she is. Tell me if they’re going to come for me too. What do they want me to do?” My voice breaks, my throat suddenly dry. I feel as if I might leap across this counter and grab his shirt and scream at him until he tells me what I want to know because I’ve got conflicting information, what with Lucifer and Atlas’s words and—
“You haven’t figured it out yet?”
I shake my head once, a jerky motion. “If I did, I wouldn’t have asked you.”
Unnerving me, he grins, flashing green gum in his mouth. “Okay, killer, calm down.”
