Smoke and Obsidian Claws

The motel sat a half mile off the interstate outside Flagstaff, twelve units in a straight line with a flickering vacancy sign and an office that smelled like boiled coffee and bleach. Rebecca Parrish paid for room seven with two twenties and a ten, folded crisp, and she counted the bills twice before sliding them across the counter because the money was running thin again and she did not know when there would be more. The clerk was a man in his sixties with a face like a closed fist and he did not ask for ID, did not ask for a credit card, just pushed a key across the laminate and went back to his television. She liked him immediately.

The room was what she expected. Mildew in the carpet, a brown water stain spreading across the ceiling like a bruise, a bedspread printed with faded geometric shapes that had been ugly when they were new and were worse now. She locked the door behind her and checked the window locks and wedged the wooden chair under the doorknob and set her switchblade on the nightstand where she could reach it without looking. Three years of running and the routine was carved into her bones, every new room the same room, every lock the same prayer she did not believe in anymore. She sat on the edge of the bed and the springs complained and she let herself breathe for the first time in six hours of driving.

The burner phone was in the inside pocket of her jacket where she kept it against her ribs. She pulled it out and dialed the only number she ever dialed and listened to it ring twice before Hannah picked up.

“It’s me,” Rebecca said.

“You made it.” Hannah’s voice was warm even through the cheap speaker, warm and tired the way she always sounded after a double shift, and Rebecca could picture her exactly where she would be, sitting at her kitchen table in Columbus with a cup of cold tea and a stack of case files she should have left at the office. “Where are you?”

“Some motel outside Flagstaff. I don’t know the name. Something with a cactus on the sign.”

“Classy.”

“Always.” Rebecca lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and the water stain stared back at her like an eye. “Tell me.”

There was a pause and she knew what was coming before Hannah said it, knew from the way the silence stretched a beat too long. Hannah was careful with her silences. She used them the way other people used warnings.

“Kevin’s been asking questions again,” Hannah said. “Couple days ago. He came by the office.”

Rebecca’s hands went cold. The phone pressed hard against her ear and she could hear her own heartbeat in the silence between Hannah’s words and she did not move, did not breathe, because if she moved she would run and there was nowhere left to run to.

“He was flashing the badge and that smile,” Hannah said. “You know the one. Told everyone he just wants to make sure you’re safe. Told my supervisor he’s worried about you, that you’ve been struggling and he’s trying to help.”

“Did they tell him anything?”

“No. I made sure of it. But he knows you’ve been in contact with me. He looked right at my desk when he said your name.”

Rebecca closed her eyes. The water stain was still there behind her eyelids, brown and spreading, and she thought about Kevin Jensen standing in Hannah’s office with his easy smile and his badge on his belt and his blue eyes that went dead cold when no one was looking. She thought about the last time she saw him, the way he had stood in her doorway and explained very calmly that she belonged to him and always would and running was just making it harder on herself. He had smiled when he said it. He always smiled.

“You need to be careful,” Hannah said. “He’s getting bolder. He used to keep it quiet and now he’s walking into offices and flashing the badge like he wants someone to notice.”

“I’m always careful.”

“I know.”

They were quiet for a moment and Rebecca listened to Hannah breathe and thought about the last time she had slept through the night without waking up to check the locks. It had been years. She could not remember what it felt like to close her eyes and not see his face.

“Call me tomorrow,” Hannah said. “Same time. I’ll let you know if anything changes.”

“Okay.”

“Rebecca?”

“Yeah.”

“Be safe.”

She hung up and put the phone on the nightstand next to the switchblade and lay there in the dark with the television off and the curtains drawn and the chair wedged under the doorknob. Outside the wind was picking up and something rattled against the window, loose and metallic, and she told herself it was just the wind but she did not believe it. She never believed it anymore.

Across the parking lot a man sat in a black truck with the engine off and the windows up and he had been sitting there since before she arrived, since before the sun dropped behind the scrub pines and the desert cold started seeping in through the glass. He was massive and still and something about the way he did not move was worse than if he were pacing, worse than if he were knocking on her door with a badge and a smile. He watched her window and he did not blink and his eyes caught what little light there was from the vacancy sign and threw it back wrong, gold where it should have been dark, slit-pupiled like something that belonged in a different kind of story entirely. He had been tracking her for three days and he would wait as long as he needed to because waiting was something he had been doing for centuries and he was very good at it.

At eleven o’clock Rebecca got up and put on her boots and checked the switchblade was in her pocket and told herself she was being paranoid about the ice situation because the ice machine was thirty feet from her door and she would be fine, she was always fine, she had been fine for three years of running and hiding and checking locks. She opened the door and stepped outside and the cold hit her hard and clean and she could see her breath in the air and she could see the black truck and she could see the man leaning against the wall by the ice machine like he had been waiting for hours, like he had known she would come out. He was taller than she had realized from the window, broader, and his black hair hung loose around a face that was handsome in a terrifying way, like a cliff edge or a storm front, and his eyes were fixed on her and they were golden and slit-pupiled and not human at all. She ran. She turned and ran and she did not get far before his hand closed around her wrist and his voice came low and rough against her ear and he said words she did not understand in a tone that made her stop fighting even before she knew why.