And nothing else for a long moment, then, time like caramel and cooling wax, nothing but Digger sobbing incoherent threats and curses, and the sound of Spyder’s Toyota, the flight of the shrikes, fading into the distance.
“Jesus,” whispered Mort, and Daria realized that she’d been holding her breath, breathed out and inhaled deeply, and the air tasted like car exhaust and spilled whiskey.
The sound that tore itself from Spyder’s mouth dragged Robin immediately back down to the dreams, the creeping things that had followed her back from the peyote, up from the pit of Spyder’s basement. The angry screech of denied retribution, raging shadows and nightshade teeth, and she covered her ears, squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting any more of this, not understanding how everything had gone so wrong so fast.
“Open your door, Byron,” Walter said. “We gotta help her.” And when Byron didn’t move, didn’t say a word, Walter kicked the back of his seat. “I said open the goddamn door!”
Robin was busy trying to make safe pictures in the imperfect darkness behind her eyelids, trying not to believe that one of those Neanderthal fucks was the same Tony Falleta that she’d happily let maul and screw her once upon a time, the same asshole that had tried to rape her the night Spyder and Byron and Walter had taken her home with them. She tried to see herself back inside Dr. Jekyll’s, making fun of the wannabes and them not even bright enough to know. Still sitting safe in Spyder’s arms, two hits of ecstasy burning in her brain. Back in Spyder’s bedroom, the silent, watchful tanks and web-painted windows safe as a church, and their flesh bleeding sweat and reassurance and the smells of sex.
“Byron, open the fucking door!”
The words that Spyder knew that had made sense of all her terrors, whispered like a private talisman in her ear, and the warm tangle of sheets and fuzzy blankets.
“Open the fucking door!”
“Don’t you see it?” and Byron had sounded so small and alone, so far away, that she’d had to open her eyes.
“Can’t you see?”
And she did see it, the blackness unfolding itself from inside Spyder like her body was only a shoddy cocoon, the needle-tipped legs opening, stretching wide as the night, wide as the boundless emptiness that Robin had summoned to poison them all.
And then she saw the gun in Tony’s shaking, coward’s hand, and Byron started the car.
The scream from the parking lot had left a gooseflesh rash on Niki’s arms and Theo was swearing, trying to get the van to start. Keith had left the van idling, but Theo had killed the motor when she’d shifted out of neutral and had forgotten to keep her foot pressed firmly on the clutch.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck…” She turned the key and the van jerked and sputtered and was quiet again.
“I think you flooded it,” Niki said, sounding almost as useless as she felt, looking past Theo, through the driver’s-side window. She followed the silver arc of the baseball bat in Keith’s hands, that strange scythe, and the big redneck kneeled at his feet.
“It’s not flooded. It’s just a worthless piece of shit,” and that time it turned over, half-hearted piston taunt, and almost caught.
But then the brown car jumped, seemed to spring forward like a hungry, pouncing animal, and the white-haired girl tumbled into the windshield. The front bumper caught the only one of the rednecks still standing, knocking him down, as the car swerved past the triad of Stiff Kitten. Halfway across the parking lot, the white-haired girl lost her grip on the hood or windshield and was tossed off, rag doll rolled a few feet and lay very still.
Niki gasped, grabbed Theo’s arm; for a second she was sure the Toyota was going to plow straight into the van, but at the last possible moment the driver cut the wheel sharply to the left and the car squealed past, only inches to spare, vanished up Morris in a fog of its own exhaust. As they had passed, she’d caught a hurried glimpse of the faces inside, fear rigid and gaudy as cheap Halloween masks.
And then the van made a painful grinding sound deep in its internal-combustion belly, backfired again, and rattled violently to life. Theo cursed and wrenched the gear shift into first, bumped over the curb and into the parking lot. Another three seconds, and they were pulling up alongside Mort and Daria.
“Thank god for the cavalry,” Mort said, closing his knife and putting it into his back pocket. “Better late than never.”
Keith was squatted down beside the guy the car had clipped, prodded him with one end of the bat.
“Is he dead?” Mort asked, and Keith shook his head, “Nah. He’s breathing,” and he looked back at the first guy he’d put down, still sitting on his butt, holding his ribs. “Better call your buddies here an ambulance,” and he picked up the revolver, flipped open the chamber and dumped the bullets out into his palm. He threw the gun into the tall weeds by the railroad tracks and pocketed the five cartridges.
“What about Spyder?” Daria asked, sliding the van’s side door open as Niki climbed down from the passenger seat.
Spyder was lying on her back a few feet away, eyes open, staring blankly up at the clouds. Keith walked over and waved a hand in front of her face.
“Hey. Spyder. Are you dead?” he said, and Niki saw the white-haired girl’s lips move, but couldn’t make out what she said.
“Spyder says she ain’t dead yet, Dar,” Keith said.
Spyder tried to sit up, and Keith helped her to her feet. Niki ran over to them, gladly seizing any chance to do something besides stand around gawking; she slipped one arm around Spyder and helped her towards the van.
“I can walk,” Spyder said, but Niki helped her anyway.
“C’mon, guys. Move your pokey butts,” Theo yelled. “I think Bert called the cops,” and immediately she was answered by the not-distant-enough wail of sirens.
“I’m just surprised you didn’t do it for him,” Mort said, climbing into the cab beside her.
“It’s snowing,” Spyder said as Niki guided her past the pug snout of the van, and she looked up into the city-bright sky, felt the snow an instant before she saw it, huge sticky flakes spiraling lazily down like Walt Disney fairies.
Spyder opened her mouth, bloodsmear-ringed like smudged lipstick or the candy-apple halo around a little girl’s mouth, and caught a single flake on her outstretched tongue. It lingered there a moment, ice-water crystal on pink flesh, before it melted and Spyder swallowed what was left.
And Niki shivered as something warm and sharp passed through her, there and gone again almost before she even had time to recognize it, something she hadn’t felt since the last time she’d seen Danny Boudreaux in the French Quarter, five months and a thousand years before. And they stood there, her and the white-haired girl, in the space between the beams of the van’s headlights, watching the snow fall, until Theo finally honked the horn.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1.
B yron was driving like an idiot, ignoring red lights and stop signs. From the backseat, Walter was cursing him, cursing himself for not having forced Byron to let him out of the car, for not having done something to help Spyder.
“She’s dead,” he said, finality and icing despair. “Yeah, god, you know she’s dead. You killed her, Byron. You fucking killed Spyder.”
The porcelain boy he’d been making out with sat very quiet, wide scared eyes, waiting to see exactly what he’d gotten himself into and how he was going to get himself back out again. Robin kept her eyes off the road, watched the beautiful, frightened boy reflected in her outside mirror, his black Betty Page wig and magenta lips. And the snow, falling down on them like manna.