Page 29 of The Salt-Black Tree
KEEP DRIVING
The 101 is old as American highways go, and knows the value of a little meandering. The Pacific stretched blue and innocent on Nat Drozdova’s left for a while, breathing cool salt through the driver’s side windows as the storm receded; Baby took each curve easily, gently, like a boat on calm water even though the speedometer was pegged at max and Nat suspected that wasn’t even half the story.
The first few times she met other cars on the road were nerve-wracking. The blue Mustang simply blinked past them, a slight fluttering sensation like butterfly wings filling Nat’s stomach. It was like being in Dmitri’s car, only without the devouring fear or constant sickmaking tension. It was also like being home when both Mom and Leo were out, but without the waiting for the front door to open, letting even beloved authority invade a temporary refuge.
Most of all, it was like freedom, and the only thing more intense than the intoxicating pleasure was the bald edge of fear underneath.
Nobody ever talked about how lonely absolute liberty was.
At Gaviota the highway took a sharp right-hand curve, turning inland. The smell of saline and kelp gave way to sage and creosote, sand and manzanita; clouds drifted over mellow sunshine with almost clocktick regularity as Baby flashed through small towns, past ancient signs, ditches sometimes on one side andsometimes on the other. Two lanes in either direction, a narrow meridian turning green in places where winter rains dipped into the most golden of states, and Nat found herself humming along with the radio as the road turned into a gray blur under smoothly spinning tires.
I could do this forever,she thought, and Baby seemed to agree.
The sun began to fall from its noontime height, and when she glanced in the rearview a chill slipped down Nat’s back.
It was the same feeling that pushed her past the boarded-up house at the end of the block back home, its weedy front yard full of dead rustling yellow weeds even in spring and the rotting plywood over its windows slipping drunkenly but never quite managing to fall free. Mom had always threatened to march her in there at midnight, and more than once young Nat had been forced into eating something disgustingly adult and healthy, or foregoing some childhood pleasure, because it wasn’t worth the risk.
Now she wondered what wasreallyin that malevolent, ramshackle building with its gabled roof, but she had more immediate problems.
A tiny point of crimson hung in the rearview mirror’s crystalline depths, billowing shadow dilating around its baleful gaze. The bright dot was far away, but a wire-brush of anxiety scraped Nat’s nerves.
She jammed the accelerator to the floor. Baby took a deep breath, shaking herself like a dog whose owner had just picked up a beloved ball.Finally,her engine seemed to bark, and she lunged forward. Traffic thickened as the highway jolted towards the ocean again, signs for Pismo Beach flashing past, and the crimson dot receded.
Maybe I should just keep driving.To hell with Mom, to hell with Dmitri and his stupid Heart, to hell with everything except the road and this beautiful car, shining in a mellow winter afternoon as she shot north on a road that remembered being adirt track under pilgrims’ rope sandals and the clip-clop of donkey hooves. The scavengers were chasing her, maybe the gangster god was too, but all she had to do was elude them for long enough, right?
Each mortal car or semi, van or truck she flicked past was a victory. Dima was right, the world wanted to obey. It longed to arrange itself to her pleasure, it flat-outachedjust as she’d always yearned to help her beautiful, distant, dissatisfied mother.
Oh, hell.
Nat was already pointed north, towards yet another piece of the puzzle. She could decide to stop at any moment, really.
But maybe not just yet.
Baby chuckled with glee, blinking past a lumbering red semi hauling refrigerated freight. One moment behind, the next ahead, hopskipping like a kid on the playground, the Drozdova’s chariot drew away from her pursuers, receding like a winter-hibernating creature’s dream of sunshine and plenty.
THE LARGER INSULT
His thiefways were full of burnt umber no matter the hour, a deep lungscorch of smoke echoing his fury. The sun was a hazy red disc hanging low in a dry, vaulted sky; bright spatters, near and far, echoed from the mortal world, each sending up a coil of incense vapor. Arid, stubbled fields stretched in every direction, dust blown in lazy spirals whisked to nothingness by a hot wind. Occasionally, a scarecrow or dangling gallowsdoll on a jagged, half-broken pole shifted, a limb popping up to indicate a nearby act of thievery, prayer, murder, or some other appetizing event.
If the thiefways ran through a city, buildings of every description would crowd close, jagged broken windows ready to be slipped through, doors hanging ajar, every lock burst and every piece of pavement bearing spidery cracks. Stepping sideways into this unland was easy as breathing for Dima Konets, and sometimes he let a cherished mortal worshipper catch a brief glimpse of all the blasted glory, where venomous glitters—different than the glowing, worshipful acts of stealing—were valuable things crying out to be taken. Reaching through the rotting veil and subtracting those bright items were child’s play—the best thief left no traces, because he was, strictly speaking, never there at all.
Roads here were dusty too, dirty eggshell-colored stripes holding them to their tasks. The black car, solid and real insteadof fuming-indistinct, idled easily while waiting for him to decide. His fingers tingled, his hands wrapped around the thrumming vibration of the steering yoke.
While a mortal could catch a single shuttered blink of this place with his blessing, they could not stay. Nor could a young divinity not of his kind travel this way. It was a lonely kingdom, indeed.
Those who eatclotted in another realm stacked tissue-thin next to this one, yearning in an unphysical direction after a tender morsel rapidly gaining too much strength to be easily consumed. They were now his only way of following her; the new Drozdova, in her wise innocence, had taken nothing from him.
Not even a silver cigarette lighter.
One road stretched north, vibrating between the tired, filthy whitish lines impersonating a highway’s painted borders. Another veered eastward, and at the end of it was a hospice room full of torturing mortal machines, an old divinity denied any form of graceful release. By now darling Maschenka was probably wishing for the black hand to descend, for an end to the suffering. She was hopefully writhing on a mortal bed, helpless and furious, her bloodshot, fading eyes like a woolly mammoth’s as it sank starving into hot bubbling tar.
An unfulfilled promise nagged at him.I will repay the one who took it from me. I will fill my mouth with her blood.
When the girl found all her mother’s arcana, would she bring a fist-sized, bloody diamond back to Baba de Winter? He might never see the goddamn thing again, merely sensing it behind the mirrored wall in the beldame’s office, its throbbing a faint narcotized ache.
Even holding the pulsing gem one more time might tempt him to do something… rash.
What would it be like, to see an aggressive young thief take over his realm? To witness the uncles and nephews paying court to another, maybe to see somemolodoy panksmiling a razor-sharpsmile at little dark-eyed Drozdova? To feel his essence drawn away, slowly but surely, until it was him waiting for the black hand, Dima the ruthless waiting for the scavengers to descend?
