The End and Other Beginnings Page 5

  Nearby, a pair of uptight-looking primusars draped in diamond necklaces were giving her sideways glances—not subtle when you had stalk eyes that swiveled.

  When she spotted Lacey, Atleigh grinned, and pulled herself off the pillar she had been leaning against. The two girls collided somewhere in the space between them, Atleigh’s hug “so tight the bears were jealous,” as their mom said.

  Well, she wouldn’t be saying it anymore.

  The sudden awareness of what she had lost—what they had both lost—kept hitting Lacey out of nowhere. She’d go along feeling all right, and then open a medicine cabinet and wham, her mom’s name was on the bottle of painkillers Lacey took for bad cramps sometimes. Or wham, she pulled on the black running shoes Mom had bought her for school.

  The color of Atleigh’s hair, and the creases at the corners of her eyes.

  “Wow,” Lacey said. And then, to cover it up: “Your hair’s gone.”

  “Yup,” Atleigh said. She had swallowed the giant bite of Snickers, somehow. “Supposed to be a hot summer, so I thought I’d get ahead of it.”

  Knowing Atleigh, that had nothing to do with the decision, but Lacey wasn’t going to pry.

  “I’d offer to take your bag, but I don’t want to let those military school muscles go to waste.” Atleigh grinned. “C’mon, let’s get going.”

  “How’s the car holding up?”

  “Had to sell it.”

  “What about the Jeep?”

  Atleigh snorted. “Not gonna drive that gas guzzler on a perpetual cross-country road trip. It’s parked someplace outside Lansing. You can have it when you graduate, if you want it.”

  Lacey followed Atleigh to a green Volvo with a rusty bumper. She opened the back door to throw her bag inside, and saw the urn buckled into one of the seats.

  Wham.

  “Time for one last road trip, I guess,” Atleigh remarked as she started the engine. And that was all either of them said about the catastrophic emptiness between them.

  “We are not having this conversation,” Atleigh had said to her mother, a few weeks before her passing.

  “Yes, we are,” Chloe Kent said with a grave nod. “It doesn’t have to be so hard. I want my ashes to be scattered at sea. There! That’s basically the whole conversation.”

  “No,” Atleigh said, pointing a finger at her. “Because you’re not gonna die. You’ll get old, and there’ll be some kind of life-prolonging technology that will keep you going until the two of us are both ready to go. That’s how it’s gonna work. Hear me?”

  Chloe grabbed Atleigh’s finger in her fist, and smiled.

  They were in an Applebee’s, one of the oldest surviving chain restaurants on Earth. A plate of lukewarm mozzarella sticks was between them. The chipper waitress had just come by to make sure they were all right, to which they had both responded, waspishly, at the same moment: “Fine, thanks.”

  “I don’t want tech like that,” Chloe said. She wore her hair in a braid that hung over one shoulder. She was old enough to go gray, but she hadn’t yet, and maybe she never would—Atleigh was hoping, anyway, because what happened to Chloe always ended up happening to her, in time. “When it’s my time to go, I want to go. And I want my girls to learn how to deal with it better than I dealt with losing your dad.”

  Chloe sucked down the last of her iced tea. Sweetened with half a dozen sugar packets mixed in until they dissolved through the force of Chloe’s will alone.

  “All right,” Atleigh said, a little unsteadily. Her finger was still caught in her mother’s hand. “At sea, then.”

  “And then I want you girls to take a little vacation. At least a couple days. Go sailing.”

  “Sailing?” Atleigh groaned. “What next, you want us to dress up in preppy polo shirts with the collars popped and scarves in our hair?”

  “Absolutely.” Chloe wore her most gleeful smile. “My girls, dressed like proper southern ladies. I’ll laugh at you from the beyond.”

  “My hairpin will secretly be a blade,” Atleigh said. “And the popped collar will be hiding an absurdly large throat tattoo.”

  “You don’t have a throat tattoo.”

  “I’m going to get one when you die, obviously,” Atleigh said. “Absurdly large. A heart with an arrow through it. Maybe some angel wings.”

  “Don’t you dare. No daughter of mine would ever get such a cliché tattoo.”

  Atleigh smirked.

  “Honestly,” Chloe said, turning serious again. “I don’t care what you wear, but go sailing, scatter my ashes, and remember what life is. Two days. Okay? That’s all.”

  “Okay,” Atleigh agreed. “But, you know. Try not to die.”

  “Deal.” Chloe let go of Atleigh’s finger.

  “First stop?” Lacey asked her. She was poking the keychain charm that hung from the rearview mirror. It was cheap metal, that yellow-gold color that shows up exclusively at gas stations and airport kiosks, and depicted the three fates. “Spinners,” Mom had called them, because they were passing thread to each other, one with the spindle, one measuring out the length, and the third cutting it. Birth, life, and death.

  It had hung in Mom’s car so long Lacey had stopped noticing it. It looked out of place in Atleigh’s.

  “Gotta go through Nashville. I have some things to do there while we’re in the area,” Atleigh said.

  Lacey narrowed her eyes.

  “Nashville is not ‘in the area,’” she said. “It’s hours out of our way.”

  “We’re gonna have to stay overnight someplace anyway, so does it matter whether it takes us twelve hours or seventeen?” Atleigh said, scowling a little.

  “What do you have to do in Nashville that can’t wait until after?”

  “I don’t stop needing cash just because somebody dies, okay?” Atleigh snapped. “I got a job down there. The usual thing. But I can’t lose any momentum—not without Mom’s help getting work.”

  “You have to be kidding me,” Lacey said. “This isn’t just somebody dying. This is Mom.”

  “Aw, gee, I sure am glad you reminded me, because otherwise I woulda forgot.” Atleigh was leaning hard into the mild accent they had both picked up in childhood. They had spent a lot of time in the rural parts of the Midwest then, and there was a distinct twang there that had proved unshakeable. Atleigh only twanged when she was getting really angry. “I told you, I have to do this. Okay? And since I’m the one driving—”

  “It’s not like I don’t know how to drive—”

  “And since this is my car, which I paid for with my own goddamned money while you were off with a bunch of fancy astronauts at your ritzy space academy—”

  “Oh, here we go.” Lacey rolled her eyes. “It always comes back to me going to school. What did you want me to do, stay with you forever, hunting down aliens for cash?”

  Atleigh shook her head, and went quiet.

  And it was somehow worse, because it meant that she had wanted Lacey to stay with her forever, but she just couldn’t admit it.

  They made it to Nashville that night around eight o’clock, and Atleigh went that whole way without talking to Lacey once. She only broke the silence to ask Lacey if she was hungry, and pulled into a McDonald’s. That in itself was a peace offering—McDonald’s was Lacey’s fast food of choice. Atleigh’s was Wendy’s.

  They sat on the hood of the car to eat, the same way they always did, even in the winter. Atleigh hated the way the tables inside fast food places felt—tacky, like they were never really clean. One time they had wolfed down chicken sandwiches in the middle of an Indiana snowstorm.

  “So how many are you up to this year?” Lacey asked. She figured it was a safe question. Atleigh was always ready to talk about leeches.

  “Ten,” Atleigh said. She stuffed a few fries in her mouth at once.

  “Solo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Damn. You’re a machine.”

  Atleigh grunted a little, and chewed. Under normal circumstances Lacey wou
ld already have been teasing her for rooting around in the fry container like a pig hunting for truffles, but she felt weird doing that now. And not even because of their argument, but because she had left. She had chosen something other than leeches. Other than Atleigh, and Mom, and even Dad. And it just wasn’t the same anymore.

  “Want me to look up a place for us to stay?”

  Atleigh shook her head. “I got us an Airbnb.”

  “You . . . what?”

  “You may not have realized this, Lace,” Atleigh said, stuffing her burger wrapper and empty fry container in the McDonald’s bag. “But motels . . . are gross.”

  “Yeah, I know! That’s why I always sleep on top of one of my old shirts when we stay in them,” Lacey said, hopping down from the hood. “I just didn’t think you would plan ahead.”

  “The name of the place is ‘Cozy Country Cottage,’ so don’t get too excited about it,” Atleigh said. She balled up the McDonald’s bag and tossed it in a nearby garbage can. “No place with alliteration in the title can possibly be any good.”

  It wasn’t a great spot, as it turned out, but Atleigh had stayed in worse. She had slept in the back of the Volvo once when she found a peephole in a motel wall. She had gotten flea bites from unwashed bedsheets, and uncovered bloodstains under motel sofas. So the smaller-and-dingier-than-advertised Cozy Country Cottage wasn’t so bad by comparison.

  Atleigh told Lacey she was going to a meeting about a bounty, and left her at the cottage to settle in on her own. Then she drove out to the ET hideout that Gelatinous Gary (her nickname for the purpuramorph she had threatened just outside Peoria) had told her about. It was even more innocuous than their usual haunts: an old house-turned-coffee-shop with creaky floors and frilly curtains on the windows.

  The young woman who smiled at her from behind the counter was flickering like a candle in the wind. Definitely digital skin, no question. She must have been newly settled, because most of them didn’t give it away so easy.

  “What can I get for you?” she said.

  “I’m looking for a leech who was in here a couple weeks ago,” Atleigh said. The young woman looked alarmed.

  “Leech?” she said. “What—”

  “Listen, Riley,” Atleigh said, eyeing the woman’s name tag. “I’m really tired, and I’m not in the mood for the whole rigamarole. I’m not here to get anyone in trouble, I just want to know about a guy.”

  Riley looked at her for a few seconds, then the friendly expression she had worn when Atleigh walked in fell away, and she crossed her arms.

  “The way Violet talked about you, I thought you’d be bigger,” Riley said.

  Atleigh registered a moment of shock that Gelatinous Gary was actually named Violet—such a lovely name for such an unlovely thing.

  “It’s the shoes,” Atleigh said dryly. Hidden under the flannel shirt she wore, pressed up against her spine, was the needleknife she would need if things went sour. And, judging by the hard look on Riley’s face, that was a distinct possibility. Whatever Riley was under that digital skin, Atleigh was pretty sure it wasn’t a purpuramorph.

  “What is it you want to know?” Riley said. One of her hands was hidden under the counter. Not a good sign. Atleigh started moving her hand back, casual-like, toward her weapon.

  “The leech was attached to the body of a middle-aged gentleman,” Atleigh said. “A scout. He goes looking for solid hosts, get it? And the others suck down on who he tells them.”

  “If I had known someone like that was in here, I would have been legally obligated to report it,” Riley said coolly. “So are you accusing me of breaking the law?”

  “Sure, but not in a mean way.” Atleigh’s voice softened. “Because you gotta get by, right? So you’ll do what you have to do, even if you don’t like it. I understand. I’ve done a lot of things I don’t like, Riley.”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” Riley said, matching Atleigh’s soft tone with one of her own. “From the look of you, girl, you’ve enjoyed every second of what you’ve done to my kind.”

  She shrugged off her skin, and what was under it was the exact same—except for the glint of silver at the back of Riley’s neck.

  Leech.

  Atleigh swore, and drew her needleknife. It was like an ice pick, but with a slimmer handle, to accommodate Atleigh’s skinny fingers. Mom had gotten it for her two years ago, for her birthday, and she had skewered more than one leech with it without hesitating.

  She swung it without hesitating now, her arm curved so she would hit the back of the neck. But Riley was fast, blocking the blow with her forearm and then grabbing at Atleigh’s wrist. Her other hand went up to Atleigh’s throat, but Atleigh had the presence of mind to block that, so they were clutched together in some kind of two-handed arm-wrestling contest, the countertop between them.

  Atleigh knew from the first moment that she wasn’t as strong as Riley—that was just something you figured out when you first came to blows with somebody. So after a second of grunting with effort, she decided her best course of action was to run like hell. She let go of Riley’s arm and twisted into the thumb part of the leech’s grip, so it would break easier.

  She got away, but only for a second. Riley hopped over the counter like she did that sort of thing professionally, and grabbed Atleigh by her shirt collar. The shirt ripped, and Atleigh spun around to try with the needleknife again, this time blindly stabbing at whatever flesh was nearest. The needleknife stuck in Riley’s wrist, and she yanked it free, watching the blood dance across the leech’s arm.

  Riley screamed her rage, and punched Atleigh right in the face. Atleigh stumbled back, blinded for a second by pain, and struggled toward the door. But Riley was on top of her again, tackling her so they both fell on the creaky floor. Atleigh elbowed and scratched, mostly hitting nothing, and Riley was on top of her, her arm a bar across Atleigh’s throat and her hands grabbing at the needleknife.

  Atleigh did the only thing she could think of: she threw the needleknife behind her, so it was out of arm’s reach for both of them. Riley let up, and sprung like a cat toward the weapon, giving Atleigh room to run. She made a break for it, eyes on the back door. A couple of steps into her getaway, she felt heat on her side, a cut from the needleknife.

  It was good she hadn’t told Lacey where she was really going, Atleigh thought. Now Lacey wouldn’t have to find her body. Atleigh had found Mom’s, and she wouldn’t have wished that on anyone.

  Only the killing blow didn’t come. Atleigh was down, on her hands and knees, clutching at the wound in her side. She turned to see someone else bringing a blade down on Riley’s spine, chopping the leech attached to her neck in half. Clean. Nice, sharp knife. Silvery blood oozed from the cleaved thing, and Riley fell.

  Standing over the body, wearing all black except for those stupid polka-dot laces he always insisted on, was a young man. Eighteen, or nineteen, maybe. She had asked, once, and he didn’t know. His ancestry was at least half Korean—he didn’t know how much, either—and he was smirking at her.

  Eon was his name.

  “Don’t give me that look,” she said, collapsing to the ground with her hand against her side. Her entire body felt like it was on fire. “I was totally handling it.”

  “Oh yeah, I can see that,” he said. He was cleaning his weapon with a handkerchief. He had an endless supply of handkerchiefs, all of them black cotton. “How’s that wound?”

  “Shallow,” she said. “Her left hook was worse.”

  He sheathed the blade and bent to pick up her weapon, still half-clutched in Riley’s hand.

  “You gotta end it,” Atleigh said, nodding to Riley. The woman’s eyes were still open, her chest still rising and falling. He had killed the leech attached to her body, but he hadn’t killed the body. He never did.

  “I always want to believe they’ll come back,” he said, shaking his head. He bent over Riley’s host and—shifting so Atleigh would be shielded from the sight—stuck her with the needleknife. Atleigh kne
w where it went—in the meaty part of the shoulder and down, into the heart.

  By the time he turned back to her, the weapon was clean, and his smirk was back.

  “So are you stalking me, or what?” Atleigh grunted, panting.

  “I followed up on some intel and it led me here, same as you,” Eon said. “Fireman, or bridal?”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to pick you up, and we’re going to get the hell out of here before either more leeches or clandestine-government types with debriefing obligations show up,” he said. “We can call it in later. So do you want me to pick you up fireman style, or bridal style?”

  “I can’t actually decide what’s more humiliating,” she said. She thought of Eon holding her over his shoulder, his hand right at the top of her thigh and his face next to her ass, and cringed.

  “Bridal, go for bridal.”

  The door hit the wall of the Cozy Country Cottage, and Lacey lurched to her feet, grabbed a knife from the butcher block on the counter, and held it at the ready.

  “The family resemblance is uncanny,” the man holding Atleigh against his chest said, drily. Lacey saw blood streaking her sister’s side, and lowered her knife.

  “What happened?” she said.

  “Got in a fight I couldn’t win,” Atleigh said. She sounded steady enough. Lacey moved a wilting houseplant off the kitchen island, clearing a space for the man to set Atleigh down. She wasn’t eager to search the Airbnb’s cupboards for first aid, so she went out to the car instead, casting a backward glance at the man lowering her sister to the countertop.

  The first-aid kit was in the trunk, where it always was. Lacey jogged a little to get back to the house faster. The man seemed to know Atleigh—and since when did Atleigh know tall, handsome men?—but it didn’t hurt to be careful.

  “Lace, this is Eon,” Atleigh said when she got back into the kitchen. The man—Eon—was lifting the hem of Atleigh’s shirt. And as Lacey watched . . . he flickered.