Page 8 of The Salt-Black Tree
“Maybe.” Dmitri didn’t glance at what she was holding, but maybe he didn’t need to. “That’s a grail.”
Get the fuck out.“Like the Holy Grail?” A deep swimming sense of unreality poured through Nat. The mug cast dappled reflections on the roof, and if it bothered the gangster to have a bright light in the car while driving at night, he made no sign. “But that’s… I mean, Jesus…”Oh boy. Oh holy what the fuck.
“That cross-hanging mama’s boy love to get his hands on it, I bet. Little drink from that give even a rube something nice. But I tell you this,devotchka,nobody but me allowed to steal from you.” He nodded, the corners of his mouth turning down and his eyes sparking like the motorcycle-horse’s for a moment. A bright point of crimson, visible and just as quickly extinguished, leaving a faint tracer in its wake. “Nobody but Konets, and you can take that to bank.”
Gee, that’s awful nice.“It was my mother’s, right?”
“Smells like you. Yours now.” He sucked on the cigarette again, then tossed its pinched, spent end through the slightly open window. How he could smell anything with the amount of smoking he did was beyond her. The orange-glowing dot vanished into the night, and another soft load of snow smacked across the windshield a moment later. His grin widened, teeth glinting. “Your mama buried it somewhere rubes and even most ofuscan’t get to, just to keep it away from you. Every one of us got our arcana,zaika moya,like my sharp shiny friends. The Drozdova got a Cup, a Knife, and something she keep secret.”
The Knife was in Nat’s backpack too, in a wooden box with almost-invisible joins.Something she keep secret—well, MariaDrozdova kept allkindsof secrets, and so did her daughter. In that one small way, they were alike. “Is your car an arcana?”
“No, this beast my chariot, see?” Dmitri dug in his breast pocket, pulling out yet another crumpled cigarette pack. This one was white with red lettering she couldn’t quite make out. He shook up a coffin-nail with his left hand and paused, frowning at the road before them. “Your mama had a nice one. Old days, the cats used to pull it. Now, though… Got to admit, I wondered why you weren’t drivin’.”
Mom’s old black car, faithfully nursed along by Leo, would fly apart at freeway speeds. Even with the snow coming down in sheets the highway in front of them was relatively clear, feathery dry white whipping across it like the broom behind her mother’s kitchen door, kept for clearing the back porch. Maria insisted all sweeping be done a certain way, hard and fast until Nat’s arms ached.
She stared at the mug’s glow, running a fingertip along its rim. “Her car’s pretty old.”
The first unicorn mug—bought with scrupulously saved chore money from the pittance Leo argued Mom into granting her daughter—had broken while being washed, or so Maria said. Dishes broke, it was no big deal.
Nat had still cried. The loss was still sharp, in the way only old childhood hurts could be. Now she wondered.
About all sorts of things.
“Butyounot old.” The gangster lifted the pack to his mouth, pulled out the cigarette standing to attention, and stuffed the white-and-red box back into his jacket without looking. “Getting stronger all the time.”
I hope so.Was he actually trying to be helpful? It sounded like it, but of course, that was probably a trap. “Thank you. For telling me.”
“Pozhaluysta.Now put thing away,vesna moya. I’m driving.”
She plunged the mug back into her bag, rewrapping it by touch—the last thing she needed was Dmitri seeing her single pair of clean panties. She hugged her bag close while they drove, and the silence between them was new. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, but it wasn’t combative or charged, either. It was just… quiet.
Which was great, because she had thinking to do, even if she’d rather not. Still, her hands were finally warming up and she sagged in the seat, staring at the brushed-clean pavement under the headlights, anemic yellow dashes in the middle of the highway melting into a single line because they were traveling faster than anyone normal—anymortal—could on a night like this.
MORE THAN ONE PATH
Half a continent away from her stupid, stumbling daughter, a divinity lay in the borderland between dream and waking, listening to snow-choked silence outside the Laurelgrove Hospice’s disinfectant-reeking hallways. This city took pride in never sleeping, but even the far-off mutter of traffic was muted under a blanket of soft, killing white.
It was a winter very like the old country’s, and Maria Drozdova suspected a certain grandmother was piqued.
The hospice room was ugly, its functional bed uncomfortable. The nurses were slatterns and the shouting, jovial doctors not even worthy of a literary skewering, let alone a physical one. The pink upholstery, the stench of Lysol and bleach, the lack of proper black bread or good soup, the absence of sweet hot coffee and the buzzing of fluorescents—oh, it could have been a version of mortal hell, and even the armfuls of dying flowers brought in by reluctant visitors or the straggling, half-dead houseplants at the nursing stations could not soften its hideousness.
Many had made the mistake of thinking Winter’s tender green granddaughter could be trapped or insulted. More often than not the beautiful Drozdova laughed, miring pursuers or other transgressors in thick black mud. Sometimes she settled upon a handy, sun-dried boulder to watch, gaze alight and pretty chin resting on one soft hand, while they struggled and sank. Some begged for mercy, others railed furiously. Thrashing onlysped the process; some of the trapped slowed, attempting to treat a divinity’s displeasure as mere quicksand and reach solid ground.
Finally, the glutinous semiearth closed over their heads, and she feasted upon their despair and suffocation.
It was a novelty for her own body to become a sucking hole, one Maria despised even as it fascinated. The deep, tearing pain in her chest—what the mortal doctors, with their utter lack of imagination or sensitivity, called a cancer—provided snippets of sharp inimical strength at random intervals, burning even as she grasped them. Even her stubborn refusal to give in had its limits, though she had not reached them yet.
The plastic tube in her throat was an annoyance; she had raged at Leo until twilight unconsciousness swallowed her, then surfaced to find herself stuffed like a solstice goose. Fortunately, the more her body transformed to a merely mortal shell, the more efficacious were the mortal treatments; they were unwitting allies, and as soon as she regained her proper place she would reward them according to their deserts.
A tiny gleam, thread-thin, showed between her eyelids; her lashes were scant and graying now like the rest of her hair. Not too long ago, a wrench like a tooth pulled from its socket told her the maggot-child had retrieved a second arcana—it had been so long since Maria held her beautiful golden cup, tracing its jewels with a loving fingertip, calling forth whatever she desired from its depths. She longed to do so again, and longed to unleash the Knife upon those who had used her temporary misfortune to insult or pettifog her.
First, she had decided, would be her once-husband. Did he not understand her fading meant his own? He had betrayed her for the parasite wrenched free of her bowels, the selfish, grasping child who had the temerity to drain her mother’s strength. Then Maria could attend to the rest at her leisure.
The shadows thickened, their edges turning sharp. One ofMaria’s paper-skinned hands, lying discarded on a rough hospital blanket, twitched. No, the scavengers would not approach her yet. First they would eat the vulnerable new incarnation, the tender green shoot.
Two mortal decades had dragged by as she carefully pruned the child, watering only enough to allow some growth, forcing the stem into a tortured shape, waiting for the proper time. The slinking, sniveling little brat couldn’t even bloom correctly, but it didn’t matter.
Maria had more than one plan. If the pale, polluted copy failed to outrunthose who eat,some numinous force would return to her original—enough to stave off the scavengers until Baba, eager to reacquire what her darling Masha had stolen, could be persuaded to trade some surety for the Dead God’s Heart. Even with all three arcana in her grubby grasp, the child still had to endure the final trial. Ruthlessly compressed and ridiculed enough to stay tractable, creeping, frightened Natchenka was unready for the burden of divinity.
