Summer Sons(34)
“Of course. He shouldn’t have touched you,” Eddie said.
How come, he hadn’t asked.
The night it really happened, Eddie had rolled over and gone to sleep, leaving Andrew to his curious lightness. He hadn’t reached out to pinch his bottom lip between sharp fingernails as the shadowed room dropped abruptly to blackness, whispering in a ghoulish voice that hissed like static, “You’re not his.”
* * *
“Shit shit shit,” Riley yelped, frantic.
Andrew groaned. Vertigo punched through his sternum as he shifted. His hand thumped into the metal railing under the front seat and pain burst up his arm. The intrusive cold blanketing him from thighs to throat failed to register through his confused delirium until Riley slammed on the brakes, almost rolling him off his seat. His eyes popped open. The moonlight streaming through the windows revealed nothing out of the ordinary, but he felt a physical pressure creep up over his ribs in the shape of wide palms, disturbing the pattern of wrinkles on his shirt. His breath tripped over itself, bubbling panic. A lone cicada shrieked outside. Riley scrabbled noisily with his seat belt and the door, the car pulled over halfway onto the grassy shoulder.
The death-chill felt almost good for a second, cupping the side of his face over the swelling split skin, before it seared like an ice cube sticking to a wound. A strangled grunt punched from beneath his diaphragm. The suggestion of the revenant’s hand passed over his nose and philtrum and fat bottom lip, burning despite its immateriality, sucking and gripping where real skin would’ve slipped on spit and blood. An atmospheric pop cracked in his ears, his brain, as the crusted remains of his blood absorbed into the nothingness, an offering lapped up by the ragged corpse-boned thing straddling him. His revenant settled heavier and hungrier, gaining an outline like exposed film. Andrew stopped breathing as it leaned in, its spine bending where spines had no joint or hinge, rot-stench breath gusting into his partially open mouth.
Riley fell out of the front seat in his haste to escape, tangled in his belt. Andrew stared past the haunt at his own bare ankles sticking out the far window, his shoes speckled with brown-red fluids, the old-growth forest and craggy sheet rock exposed by the highway cut into the hill. Roots tumbled from trees down the exposed stone. He stayed limp as the creature leaned in for another taste.
The door behind his head opened and rough hands hooked under his armpits. The revenant hesitated. Andrew struggled and twitched, kicking weakly as Riley dragged him out of the car, legs sliding through the specter’s body with horrible resistance. His tailbone smacked the hot asphalt. Humid summer air slapped his freezing skin, and he grunted again.
“Jesus Christ, shut up,” Riley gasped out.
“What the fuck,” he groaned.
“Out of the road, get out of the road,” Riley said, and the pair of them stagger-flopped to the grassy berm together.
The car dinged, doors hanging open, taillights casting a red glow. Andrew rolled onto his front and panted, shaking, his forehead on his own wrist. His heaving breath calmed in degrees as Riley’s died down, an increment at a time. As the dregs of his dream faded, the bitter urge to allow the connection with his dead thing banked to a smolder, though the sensation it left behind after consuming part of him still vibrated through his cells—almost a communion.
“You knew. How’d you know?” Andrew said. His dry tongue felt twice its normal size.
“If you’d been willing to talk about it before now, you stupid little shit, you’d already have an answer,” Riley barked at him.
“Fuck you.”
Riley laughed in a staccato burst, almost a hiccup. “No, fuck yourself.”
Another car roared past their sloppily parked vehicle without stopping to check on them, blue-tinged headlights blinding Andrew briefly. Wind whipped his hair around his face, clumped and damp with indeterminate fluids. The Mazda continued to ding, inviting them to return to its grasp. No unsettling shade lingered; it had disappeared as soon as it was interrupted. The first time he’d shed enough blood to take, there it was, ready and ravenous.
“Get up.” A fist in the back of his shirt helped him to his hands and knees before Riley’s shoulder dug into his ribs to haul him to his feet. “Passenger seat, in.”
Riley pushed the door shut and Andrew slumped against it, elbow out the window. The metal edge bit into his tricep. The other doors slammed twice in quick succession. The interior of the little tuner was as mundane and oven-warm as it had been at the start of the evening. Riley put the car back in gear and pulled onto the road.
After a few miles passed in pensive quiet he said, “It’s hard to miss the whole malevolent haunting thing. For a guy like me, at least.”
“Never met someone else who could tell before,” Andrew admitted, out of his head enough to be honest.
“It never occurred to you to ask why Ed brought me in on his research, huh?” Riley said.
Andrew tilted his head on his arm, seeking a position that didn’t push his teeth into his wounds or put pressure on his cheekbone. The rush of air through the windows covered up his grunt of frustration. When Andrew didn’t ask for clarification, Riley went silent again, but his wire-strung tension remained. They might be fighting, but Andrew’s thoughts weren’t organized enough to follow the thread of the argument. Noise and the absence of noise, but no structure. Clarity dissolved into chemical disorientation as he slipped away.