Unburning: Chapter 54

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[CLARITY]

It’s a terrible kiss.

His nose hits mine first. Then his mouth lands half on the corner of mine and half on my chin. Everything in me wants to pull back, and I don’t, because pulling back is the one thing a girl who snuck out to meet her boyfriend wouldn’t do. So I stay where he put me, crooked, and outside the window somebody starts to laugh. I’m twisted halfway across the gearshift with one hand braced on the dash. He has the medal in his fist, and the chain is cold against my collarbone. My other hand doesn’t know where to go. His chest is right there, and it’s wet. The ink isn’t dry yet. If I put my hand on him, I’ll smear my own work, so it hangs in the air next to his shoulder like I’m about to ask a question in class.

He gets his free hand up to my jaw, mostly so my face stays turned into him and away from the window. That’s the closest either of us gets to knowing what we’re doing.

“Oh — oh, my bad,” the voice outside says, through the glass. “My bad, my bad. Okay. Okay okay okay.”

His feet go backward on the gravel. He’s still laughing.

Robin doesn’t let go. I don’t either. We stay there with our mouths more or less together while somebody I’ve never met walks backward down a county road in the dark, and I count, because I don’t know what else to do with it. I get to six.

“Give me a minute,” Robin says over his shoulder, not loud, without moving his hand.

“Take five, bro! I’m not looking. I’m looking at the road. It’s a nice road.”

Robin takes his mouth off mine. He doesn’t go far.

“It’s Ocho,” he says, very low.

The horned toad. The pot roast.

“Okay,” I say.

He gets the shirt over his head in the dark and stops with it halfway down.

“It’s wet,” he says.

“It’s dry enough. It sets fast.” I’m talking normally. I don’t know how. “Go. You said twenty to.”

He pulls the shirt down. He gets the medal back over his head, and I hear it settle. Then he has the door open, and he’s half out of the car, and he leans back in like he’s going to say something.

He doesn’t. He says, “I’ll text,” and shuts the door, and I hear two sets of feet on the gravel going away from me, and one voice still laughing, and then not even that.

I sit there with my hands on the wheel.

There isn’t anything to wait for. The only thing that could go wrong tonight was somebody from that camp finding me here, and somebody from that camp just found me here, and he’s walking back up the road telling Robin how funny it was. A car sitting dark by a fence line near midnight is a story. A car driving down a county road with its lights on is a car.

I turn the key. The Civic thinks about it and doesn’t start. I turn it again and it does, which is the deal we have.

Headlights. I pull out of the turnaround away from the corner and don’t look in the mirror, and then I’m just on the road.

My face is hot.

It comes up all at once, about a quarter mile on, when my hands stop needing to do anything. It’s my neck and my ears and my face. The sigil on my thigh goes hot right along with it, a burn like a pan handle under my jeans. I shift in the seat and it doesn’t help. I roll the window down and it doesn’t help either, but the air is good, dry and still a little warm, smelling like dust and something sweet off the oaks.

I could think about the kiss. I’m not going to.

The county road turns to pavement and the pavement turns into the on-ramp, and I get on the freeway going south behind a semi with a lot of lights on it, and I put the phone face-down on the passenger seat, and I think about October.

That was two. Renewals, since the first one at my kitchen table. Four left.

July, at home, at the table, with the lamp on and nobody’s camp to sneak out of. August. September. And the night of the sixteenth of October, the night before.

I know what the seventeenth is. I’ve known it since the morning I woke up with Caden’s arm across my stomach. The burnings start on the seventeenth. Everything after that is the part I already lived, and I don’t intend to live it again.

So. What I have.

I have Robin inside. Not inside the way he was the first time, all the way through to the clipboard and the torch, but inside the Lodge, at their camp, with Silas’s hand on his shoulder. Silas put his name on the list himself. Silas showed him things when he was a boy that he wasn’t supposed to, and then thanked him for pretending he hadn’t seen them. Silas trusts him completely. The more they trust him, the more he’ll see. That was the plan when I let him go. It’s still the plan. It works better than I wanted it to.

He told me at my table that whoever they keep takes first oaths in the fall. He said it the way you’d say graduation. If they keep him, then in the fall he’s one of them for real, with oaths and a team, and the work stops being something men practice in a church kitchen. By the seventeenth they have the law behind them. I was there for what came after.

So if it goes the way I want, he’ll be standing right where he stood the first time, except he’ll be standing there for me. That’s the plan too. From the outside, the two plans look exactly alike.

I have the decoy, four layers fresh as of half an hour ago, and nothing at that camp has looked at it twice.

I have a circle in the desert that’s thirty-seven feet across and growing, with a ring of salt and flags around it that tells Esther and me when anybody walks up. And three queens who think somebody made it, and are waiting for that somebody to come back.

What I don’t have is longer.

I don’t know what the circle is. I don’t know if it has anything to do with October or if it’s just one more thing that’s wrong. I don’t believe in just one more thing that’s wrong.

I don’t know how to keep Esther off the list. She’s on it. And the only way I know to get somebody off a list like that is to tell them they’re on it, and I can’t tell Esther anything without telling her everything. Not yet. Not until it’s time and I know I can keep her safe, which is a sentence I said to Robin weeks ago like it had an answer in it.

And there’s the part Robin doesn’t know. The Hollowing only answers to my hands. If anything happens to me, nobody else can renew it, and on the next new moon after that, he dies. I put that in him in a parking lot when I didn’t care what it cost him. I’m a witch. I’m on the list the same as Esther, the same as everybody who’s ever sat at her table. Whatever I do in October has to keep me alive through it, or it kills him a month later.

On Sunday she’ll call at six, and ask how I am, and how Robin is, and I’ll tell her he’s fine and camp is hot. Both true.

I try to make it into a list. You put the problem on the left and what you’ll do about it on the right, and when the right side is empty, you know where you are. I go down it with my thumb tapping the wheel. Esther. The circle. The burnings. The right side stays empty, the whole way down.

Four renewals. A hundred and some days.

The phone buzzes once on the passenger seat.

I don’t pick it up. I’m doing seventy behind a semi and I’m not a person who reads texts on the freeway, even this one. It sits there face-down. I can see it out of the corner of my eye for the next half hour.

There’s a gas station off an exit with nothing else at it, lit up white in the dark. I pull in under the canopy. I don’t need gas, but I get some anyway, because I’m here, and then I go inside and use the bathroom and wash my hands. The ink on my left palm doesn’t come off. It never does.

There’s coffee on a burner by the register that’s been there since sometime yesterday. I pour a cup anyway.

The man behind the counter is older than Esther, with a name tag that says DALE and a crossword folded open next to the register. He rings up the coffee without looking at it.

“Long night?” he says.

“Long drive.”

“Where to?”

“Home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Out in the desert.”

“Honey, everything’s out in the desert.” He punches something into the register that makes it beep twice. “That’s the good kind, though. Going home.” He looks at my hand when I hand him the money, the blue-black edge of it. “You do tattoos?”

“Something like that.”

“My granddaughter wants one. I told her she can have whatever she wants when she’s paying her own rent.” He gives me my change. “Drive safe, honey.”

“You too,” I say, which doesn’t make sense, since he isn’t going anywhere, and he laughs at me, nicely, and goes back to his crossword.

In the car I drink a third of the coffee before I do anything else. It tastes like the burner. My face has finally cooled down, and the sigil is back to its usual warm.

Ocho didn’t see my face. He saw a car and a dark shape and his friend with his shirt off, and that’s the whole story he has. It’s a good story. It’s the story we built on purpose. I just didn’t think anyone would get to see it so soon.

I put the coffee in the cup holder and pick up the phone and turn it over.

Night hike’s over. Nobody found him. My partner thinks I’m hilarious. Sorry, Claire.

He’s back. He made it over before the whistle, or close enough that nobody noticed. Nobody found the man, so the night ended like any other night hike. And Ocho thinks it’s funny, which means Ocho isn’t thinking anything else.

And then sorry, where goodnight goes.

Sorry we got interrupted. That’s what it says, if anybody picks up his phone. That’s the sentence Claire gets.

I read it again.

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