Silver and Salt(14)

“And you were the best of the worst,” he offered solemnly in the same spirit.

Maybe Scotch was fast with a knife like he said or maybe there was a tiny speck of magic left in us after all. A magic that came from finding out what a millennia of balls, duels, conniving, spying, wars, taking the throne, losing the throne, all over and over again had failed to teach us: there was no Light Fey, no Dark Fey. There was only the inevitable end, the last dancing star to burn out and vanish. It would come, sooner or later.




But as Ialach had said, we wouldn’t be alone when it did.





Eleven Years Ago




The man from the park followed me home.

It should panic you, right? The man behind you, taking a step each time you did. It should terrify you. It’s how the night terrors began of every kid, and much as I hated to admit it, I was a kid—not always, but sometimes. This time, kid or not, I knew it was how all their worst dreams bloomed into genuine damn life. Those footfalls mirrored any of those in every horror movie made. The monster behind, the scrape of the shoe against the asphalt, homing in on you and only you. That was the nightmare made into real life. But it wasn’t how my dark nighttime visions began. Not me. Mine had happened before that. Mine was reversed. My reality came first before crawling into my nightmares. The truth was in both of them, awake or asleep, but I’d been awake in the beginning—conscious and aware of the man in the park.

The son of a bitch who had started it all in bloodstained grass, wouldn’t he be surprised when it turned out….

I’d be the one to finish it.





The Man from the Park



The first time I’d seen the invisible man…

Wait, that’s pretty hilarious, huh?

Never mind. The first time I’d seen him was in the park—the first time I saw him, watched him, he hadn’t cared anything about me. He was already playing his game. There were no new players wanted or needed.

I spotted him in the overgrown empty lot six blocks from the schools, the elementary and junior high next to each other. The empty lot was part of a “green space”, f*cking hysterical, next to an abandoned dog food factory. Nothing else smells like that, coating the inside of your mouth. This one had shut down twenty years ago and it still stank. That didn’t stop most of the kids from pretending the weedy area was a park, that the yellow ragweed was flowers and that the broken and cracked concrete blocks were benches. They’d lived here long enough, they didn’t smell the factory anymore. Lucky them, because their park was on my way home, and I could smell it fine. I walked home instead of taking the bus.

I used to ride it when I was younger, but I hated it now. It was a cage full of screaming and shouting. It was too much and made me want to punch and kick until there was quiet. Niko had said it was “excessive stimulation and acted as a trigger”. I hadn’t been exactly sure of what he meant. I knew what a trigger was, but what all that noisy crap was triggering specifically other than violence or why it did, I hadn’t known. But I had known he was right, that it was too much. Just too much. After I was kicked off the bus a few times for fighting, he’d agreed walking was an improvement over punching. It was a long walk, but I didn’t mind. Anything was more peaceful than a tin can full of screaming, thrown books, and the sound/sight/smell of anger.

I’d told Niko about the smell—sweat/adrenaline/rage, how it was even worse than the noise, how it made me feel the same, only maybe more so, considering I’d tried to shove one extremely loud kid out of a bus window. It sucked that he was chunky and didn’t fit. Nik said it was hormones. The kids, they’d all grow out of it. I’d noticed he didn’t say the same about me. I hadn’t cared if the other kids grew out of it or not, as long as they weren’t around to piss me off. The walk was good, and rain or smothering heat, I didn’t mind. The bus was a frenzy on wheels, and I didn’t miss it. I called it Thunderdome from a really old movie we’d seen on TV once. Nik hadn’t known whether to laugh or admit I was right.

He did call me Mad Max for a week or so.

Normally, I didn’t stop at the park that wasn’t a park. I’d lived in big cites, tiny towns, and deep enough in the country that your only neighbors were cows, which smell more but stink less than the factory. Nope, a patch of weeds was a patch of weeds. I’d wait for the next time we were on the run from the cops and were back in the trees, the soft grass, and the stars that flowed in a river in the night sky. That was real peace…

If you didn’t notice how many more shadows there were, how many more hiding places you needed to watch. Had to watch. Would sooner stop breathing than stop watching.

But the past didn’t matter. The grass and the wide wash of light that shone above were gone, same as the deeper, darker shadows. We were in the city now, and I knew a real park, and this wasn’t one. Why bother sitting in a patch of weeds and half-dead bushes? If it was all you’d known and all you’d had, that didn’t mean it was enough. The Dairy Queen parking lot put this to shame.

Yeah, I wasn’t a fan and I never stopped, but when I saw him, the man in the park, I did. That once. I stopped the second I recognized him or what he was. He wasn’t in the shadows, but that was because he carried the shadows with him. Under a bright sun, he’d still been hard to…not see, that wasn’t quite right…but to see as more than a smudge of dried blood on an even larger smudge of rust. They weren’t the same at all. One was carelessness and rain, and one was what kept you alive. He was that, a splatter of death against the enormous rusty machine of buzzing life that was the world around him. They were the opposite, but they blended into one anyway.