Page 7 of The Salt-Black Tree
There was no possibility of direct answers. Leo had dirt in his mouth, Mom wasn’t exactly honest by any stretch of the imagination, Baba de Winter had her own agenda, Ranger had put her on that murderous motorcycle-horse, and despite any short-term kindness he displayed the gangster in the driver’s seat was going to kill her if he could get his hands on what Mom had stolen. She didn’t know enough about other divinities to guess who would help her or who wanted to eat her, and none of her work friends… good God, she didn’t even have a job now.
Wait—arethere any good gods?There was Nurse Candy, but she was back in New York. And even she asked about the Heart first.
Casually, of course. But she’d still asked.
It all added up to Nat being confused, utterly alone, and not quite sure of her own sanity. As usual, and as always. She stared at the snowy road, headlights glaring through curtains of shifting snow. No lights in the oncoming lane, and no ruby brake-glow before them either.
Who would be stupid—or desperate—enough to drive tonight? Only a god of gangsters, apparently. The storm whirled on either side, white flakes vanishing into darkness. If she opened the door and tumbled out, would she survive the fall?
Was it worth the attempt? Were those mouthless black-paper cutouts draped with floating cheesecloth-veils lurking in the ditches, or out in the fields beyond the ubiquitous three strands of barbwire keeping the highway channeled like an obedient canal?
Stick on the straight and narrow,some of the sisters at school had said more than once.Strait is the gate.
Well, if this was the primrose path to hell, it was nowhere near as pleasant as advertised.
A gust of snow smacked the windshield. For a moment, the image of a face—burning dark eyes, a long sharp nose, thin-lipped mouth, and a pointed chin—stared at Nat before Dmitri hissed and the wiper on the passenger side scraped it away.
The sibilant out-breath resolved into words. “See?” The gangster took another deep pull off his glow-tipped cigarette. “Baba watching. Very, very interested in my littledevotchka.”
Great.Nat wished she could pull her jean-clad knees up and hug them. Making herself as small as possible seemed like a wonderful idea at the moment. “Is that a good thing?”
“Could be.” Did he have to sound so blasted cheerful? “Tonight she keeps the hungry things away. Ranger probably out too, doing what he can. Drozdova has a few friends in the world.”
What a great piece of news. If I can trust you saying it.
That probably wasn’t fair. Dmitri was honest about wanting to kill her, and had even attempted, in his weird way, to give Nat a lesson in using a divinity’s… powers.
Next I’ll get a cape and spandex.It was exotic to think of having some kind of power, let alone freezing a street’s worth of cars in a weird time-bubble, or turning on a jukebox just by staring and wishing.
What else could she do? Why hadn’t Mom taught heranything?
“I want to know something,” Nat heard herself say. Asking a gangster with violently poor impulse control who had a vested interest in murdering her probably wasn’t a good move.
Still, what—and who—else did she have?
“Mh.” He stared at the road, his fingertips on the yoke, barely even pretending to steer. For all that, the car’s voice changed, its thrum settling a few notes deeper still. “Dima thinks you want to know a whole lot,devotchka. We got time.”
Maybe he even meant to sound comforting. Nat’s hands weren’t quite shaking, but they were cold even with the car’s heater doing its best.
At least it didn’t smell like sand and spice. If she saidtake me back to the Well,would he know what she was talking about? Probably.
So she unzipped the top of her faithful schoolbag, dug in its interior—maybe she should have packed more than a change of clothes, a spiral-bound notebook, all her remaining cash, plus some toiletries—and extracted the unicorn mug.
It gleamed softly in the shadowed interior, its gilt taking on the mellow radiance of actual gold. It was probably a trick of the dimness, but it still looked realer-than-real. Like the Well itself, the tree, the big black horse—or like Dima, like Mom before she got sick, like Baba de Winter.
Was Nat looking that vital, that alive, thatrealtoo? Would she just have to stay the maximum distance from Mom so she didn’t drain off the power, the divinity?
Put that way, it didn’t sound so bad.
“You gonna ask what that is?” Dmitri blew twin jets of smoke through his nose; the vapor curled dragonlike before slithering towards the window and vanishing out into howling snowstorm. “Man oh man, your mama really told you nothing. Makes you wonder, don’t it.”
No, I don’t wonder.There was knowing other people lied like it was breathing, which Nat had always figured was just the way the world worked. Then there was keeping quiet about talking cats, singing mushrooms, and all the other crazy stuff she’d seen since childhood, which was self-defense. There was lying to other people, which was what the sisters at school called a sin but if it was the only way to survive, why would any reasonable person refrain?
Then there was lying to yourself. Another thing people did with apparent ease, but didshewant to?
“You’re probably going to try to steal it, huh.” Nat weighed the mug, wondering at its glow, its pleasing heft, its sense of utter and unassailable rightness. Its weight sent deep happy warmthup her arms, and golden coruscations trembled just under her skin, breaking free with pleasant tingles.
Was she going to turn into a holy nightlight, like a plastic Mary with a bulb behind? Her mother didn’t glow at random moments, even when her quick, volcanic temper was triggered.
