“I’m not sure I can do this,” Aidan says.
We’re staring at a wall of cats too cute to kill, these adoptable creatures in cages stacked behind the glass. I set my hands into my thighs as I lean over and look at the paper tag that describes the sleeping cat, how he’s friendly and sweet. All of the cats have cute names, cute descriptions, they’re too cute to kill but I’m going to have to kill one of them if I want to find Cain.
“Yeah, I know,” I say to Aidan. “Let’s see what else they have.”
I find two ferrets, some rabbits, assorted mice and gerbils, hamsters and guinea pigs, there are lots of cute things to kill in the pet store. Aidan looks over the glass terrariums with turtles and snakes, spiders and scorpions, all the things that aren’t very cute but I still don’t really want to kill. I’m not even sure there’d be any point to this, if Cain’s even around for this to matter, because it’s just silence in my head even though he said he’d find me.
Aidan and I end up back at the wall of cats, looking them over like one is going to be less cute somehow, like this can be any less horrible than what it actually is.
“Maybe the oldest one,” I say. “Not one of the kittens, for sure.”
“Let’s ask which one of them is feeling sad,” Aidan says. “Let’s find a suicidal cat to throw under my car.”
“I don’t think you have to run it over for this to work.” I realize too late that Aidan’s being sarcastic and have to bite at my lip when he turns to look at me with an incredulous stare. I feel at the scar with my tongue and then try to straighten out my features into something of a smile. “Sorry,” I say.
He sighs and has that expression again, the one that I hate, even though I know he believes me so it’s the wrong kind of pity. He’s my best friend and wants to help, but I’m doing something crazy right now. I might not be crazy anymore now that he knows that it’s real, that I’m not making any of this up or seeing delusions, but I know Aidan thinks I’m acting crazy when he sighs again and says slowly, “Ethan, I’m not going to help you kill anything.”
“Okay. Well you don’t have to, I’ll do it. I’ll do the actual killing. It doesn’t matter which one, I guess. Let’s get that one.” I point at the friendly and sweet cat who’s asleep. He’s supposedly two years old, neutered, good with kids according to the paper tag. They’re all great according to the labels, because it isn’t like the pet store is going to advertise a bunch of asshole cats to adopt.
Aidan shakes his head. “I’m not doing this,” he says. “We’re not doing this.”
“But you’re eighteen and I’m not. I need you to fill out the paperwork,” I say. “That’s all, I’ll do the rest myself. Come on, Aidan — please?”
This has got to be the weirdest argument I have ever had with Aidan. He shakes his head again and says, “No way. Ethan, no way.”
I can see by his expression that he means it, this isn’t going to be one of those times he’ll just go along with whatever his best friend wants to do. An entire childhood of me always deciding what we’re going to do, because literally every single time I’d ask Aidan he’d just tell me he didn’t know, whatever I wanted to do was fine. Except now I don’t want to play tag with the two older boys down the street or ride our bikes to the clubhouse, we’re not little kids anymore and one of us fell off a boat in the summer before tenth grade and went crazy. I want to kill things so I can talk to them, because apparently I’m a necromancer and not crazy or maybe still acting crazy.
It’s daytime, we’re in this pet store, there’s a strip mall parking lot outside full of Mommy minivans and Executive coupes and practical hybrid cars in sleek colors and shapes. There’s too many normal things, too much of this is normal for Aidan to go along with my crazy plan to find Cain.
“Fine,” I say. I turn and look at the collars and leashes on the rack behind us, fiddle with one to make the bell on it chime. “Fine. I’ll think of something else.”
He sighs and says, “Ethan.” Aidan gets closer even though we’re already whispering. “I don’t think you should try summoning a demon anyway.”
I glance around even though the store is barely open. We sat in the parking lot waiting for it to open, and then we both agreed to wait further until we saw someone else go inside. Like it isn’t suspicious enough already that we watched the employees pull up to park and unlock the doors.
“I’m not having this conversation here,” I tell him.
“Then let’s go,” he says. Aidan grabs my hand and makes it halfway to the door before remembering to let go. I’m pretty sure the old lady at the cash register is watching us, but I don’t blame her because of the way we both almost run to the car.
I slouch into the passenger seat, Aidan sets both hands on the wheel. “It’s freezing,” he says. He holds a hand to the vents to feel the air start to blow warm and then hot.
“I’d rather Cain be a cat again than inside me,” I say. “I think he’s easier to handle that way. He was mouthy but harmless enough as a cat, right? I just want to ask him some questions about Deimos, or, maybe he can keep Deimos from killing us. I don’t know.”
“Ethan.” Aidan needs a minute to compose his thoughts. He notches the air controls to turn up the defrost and then sits watching the slow melt of white into clear on the windshield.
“Ethan,” he tries again. “He’s a demon. A literal demon. I think it’s probably a really good thing that you can’t hear him anymore.”
“But you saw the cat,” I say. “Cain was the cat. And I saw him, on the Otherside, he looked totally normal. We don’t even know what makes him a demon, or what it means that he is one. Cain asked me what gods I knew. Gods, Aidan, as in plural. He asked what gods or spirits did I know — what kind of question is that? Shouldn’t he know? If he were, you know, a fire and brimstone demon in hell or something.”
Aidan closes his eyes and lifts his fingers from the steering wheel without saying anything, because this is the weirdest argument we’ve had in ten years of being best friends. He’s trying not to yell at me, because we’ve never yelled at each other, never really had many fights between us.
Finally he’s calm enough to look over at me again, mouth turned down and brows peaked with concern. “I thought you didn’t want to get involved in this stuff. Didn’t that Praxis guy make it so you couldn’t see dead people anymore?”
“Yes, no. I don’t know. Not anymore.” I kick my foot into the floor mat and gesture for Aidan to go. “Come on. Let’s just leave.”
The wipers run over the windshield a few times to clear the rest of the clingy matte cold before Aidan backs us out of the parking spot. “Well now where?” he asks. “Do you want to go home?”
“No,” I say.
Aidan drives as if we’re going somewhere anyway while we both think it over. It’s not until he says my name again that I realize he’s still on about Cain. “Ethan, necromancy and demons and – and whatever else, it’s just not something I think you want to get involved with anyway, no matter what it means.”
We’re stopped at a red light, and Aidan taps his fingers on wheel while he waits. “You said Cain made you kissed me, and you were talking to yourself – or, to him, I guess, about how you weren’t going to kill me, so, I just think — it’s a good thing you can’t hear him anymore. I mean… I’m really glad you’re not dead, but it’s for the best he’s gone now. And I definitely don’t think you should kill anything to bring him back.”
I murmur something noncommittal but not rude, because I don’t want to fight with Aidan. I lean my shoulder into the door and pull the hood up on my sweatshirt to cushion my head against the window. After a while Aidan gets tired of waiting at red lights and takes to the highway. We start a loop around the city but for once he doesn’t try to weave around all the other cars. He just sits in the far right lane and puts up with braking and slowing for everyone in his way.
Aidan turns the wheel some to start to get around a semi and has to wait instead for a motorcyclist to zoom past. I eye the flashy red sport bike and get a glimpse of a flapping blonde ponytail under the equally flashy red helmet.
“That’s a nice bike,” I say to Aidan. “Do you think my mom would ever let me get one?”
“Not for long. She would sell it or give it away to keep you from driving it,” Aidan says. “Promise you’ll let me ride it before she finds out though, if you decide to get one.”
“Sure,” I say.
He chuckles some as he switches lanes to drift past the long trailer and then the cab of the truck. He flicks on the radio and asks what I want to listen to, but I say I don’t care. I’m not trying to sit over here sulky and sullen as if we really did have a fight, it’s just that all my ideas on what to do involve death and demons. Aidan’s right not to listen to me, because I just want to listen to Cain again.
Traffic starts to clog things up more and more as we get near downtown. Coming around the curved corridor of sound-dampening wall that lines the highway we get stopped by a long snarl of red brake lights. It’s stop and go as Aidan scrolls around radio stations.
“Let’s get lunch,” Aidan says. “Where do you want to eat?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Wherever I guess.”
We pass two more exits at a slow-crawling inch. Eventually we come to a stop beneath an underpass and don’t budge for a while. I keep looking out the window at the rumbling shadow of the bridge overhead, and all I can think is what would happen if it were to suddenly collapse. I’d have so many dead bodies around me, unless I died too.
By the time we crawl forward again to get clear of the underpass, I’ve realized my best chance at getting a dead body is to use my own. I should probably be a lot more concerned about how easily I think about suicide, but I spent way too much time thinking it already so I just kind of feel resigned about it. Which is probably why Aidan should start making the decisions about what to do, so it’s a good thing I’m sitting over here silent and sulky as if we’ve been fighting.
Aidan has to stop again and then it’s a lot of shuffling as two police cars squeeze past. Cars stream into the resultant gap and Aidan gets aggressive at last as he cuts off a sluggish box truck and pretends not to see a jaunty yellow hatchback flashing its blinker.
I realize Aidan’s goal is the next exit, but traffic wants to go the other way. As we get closer through the dense line of everyone going the same way except us, I see the flashing swirl of blue-red emergency lights.
“Oh, there’s a wreck,” Aidan says. “Damn.”
He has a better line of sight as he waits to dive forward into a spot about to open. He’d been wedging his way into the left lane, but now he spins the wheel the other way to curve back.
“Is there an ambulance?” I ask.
“Mmm… I can’t see,” he says. He’s distracted trying to both look to answer me and to also check before switching lanes again now that he knows the exit ramp is blocked by the wreck.
I roll the seat belt strap over my arm and shoulder and slide a hand over the latch. I wait until we’re only moving by inches and then snap open the buckle. My hand fumbles over the car door when Aidan yelps and hits the gas first by instinct. We jolt forward before he brakes hard, and I get the door open amid the back-and-forth jerking.
“Ethan!” He tries to grab for me, but I’m already out of the car and dashing into traffic. I’m not sure if I really hear him shriek my name again after me or if I just know that he does.
No one wants to slam their car into a kid running across the highway, and everyone’s pouring along in a stream of slow braking anyway. I just make sure the drivers see me before darting in front of their cars, and soon as I hit the safety of the shoulder I start running.
I have no idea what I’m going to tell the police if they try talking to me. I think I just need to get near, in case there’s anyone hurt, dying — am I really doing this? Am I hoping to find someone dying? I come down from my run into a jog and then slow to a walk when I get in sight of the wreck. I didn’t have to do anything about the dead cat except stand there on the sidewalk while it got hit, but am I really hoping that this car accident has proved fatal? They’ll take the dying body to the hospital anyway, that’s what ambulances are for. Aidan was right, Cain was right, my complicated world is full of safety and rules, protocols, dead and dying people all end up in hospitals.
There’s an ambulance and police cars, orange cones and flares, a tow truck getting into position and much further ahead the long shattered skid of a beautiful red bike so I start to walk quickly again. I need to get on the other side of this police car before I can see what’s going on at the parked ambulance with silent spinning lights. I’m coming up on the backside of the crash where a bulky green pickup is swerved into the back of a utility van, and none of the accumulated unharmed bystanders interacting have long blonde hair.
I’m noticed by a police officer who starts to come toward me. Soon as she gets near I ask, “Is she okay? The motorcyclist, is she okay? My girlfriend has a bike like that, I saw and thought maybe it was her…” I stop walking and point briefly before deciding to lower my hands.
I cannot believe I just voluntarily ran toward the police after having become a quasi-runaway. I haven’t heard from my mother yet, so I’m fairly certain she hasn’t reported me missing. I’m too nice of a kid for her to think that I’m doing anything worse than ignoring her — she probably went to bed and woke up thinking I came home late and left for school early. Eventually the school’s going to notify her I skipped, and that’s when I expect my phone to start blowing up with texts and calls. When I ignore her then, that’s when she’ll file the missing person’s report.
Regardless I try to look harmless and worried — it’s a harmless enough lie to claim I recognize a motorcycle, saying it’s my girlfriend means I get to look breathless and weird. The cop doesn’t seem angry with me for being here, either, especially since I’ve stopped moving and am being cooperative. I’m definitely going to cooperate with the police. I’m a harmless bystander, concerned about my made up girlfriend, I hope I don’t sound obviously gay or anything.
The cop smiles some. She’s stockily put together with a sloped shelf of a chest and bursting hips straining under the swath of her uniform pants. She looks about my mom’s age, and the smile I get is actually pretty reassuring even if it means no one died here or is dying. I try not to be disappointed.
“We have a male driver involved here,” the cop says. “Don’t worry. Your girlfriend’s fine.”
I’d only seen the ponytail and the flashy red bike, I hadn’t paid much attention to the driver. I’ve somewhat ironically used the wrong gender. I look past the cop at what of the wreck I’m close enough to see.
“Oh. Okay, thanks.” I have no idea what else to say. There’s no awkward follow up where I say that I actually meant to say boyfriend, because that would sound suspicious and probably crazy. I should consider myself lucky that I can just turn and walk away now, but I keep standing there just staring at the cop.
My phone starts to pulse with a ringtone that makes me dig it out hastily to make sure it isn’t my mother. Since it’s just Aidan I answer with, “Um, hey.”
“Ethan!” He squeaks my name with enough fear and relief that it sets my stomach into churning. I hear the whisk of cars in the background, and he shouts to make sure I’ll hear him. “Where did you go? Are you okay?”
“Um, yeah. I’m fine. I went to look at the wreck.” I turn to look at the stretch of moving cars flowing past the blocked ramp. Behind me the tow truck starts to move with a steady warning beep and the soft grinding protest of beaten together metal.
I glance back at the police officer before seeing what’ll happen if I start to shuffle down the shoulder again toward the highway. She doesn’t seem likely to stop me as I move further away. “Um, where are you?” I ask Aidan. “I’m walking back.”
“I pulled over, I’m parked on the shoulder,” Aidan says. He sounds painfully relieved. I hear the car door open and then shut, his end of the conversation gets a lot quieter. “I’ll wait for you here.”
“Okay. I’m coming back.”
“Yeah. Okay. I’ll wait here.”
It’s weird to stay on the call now that we’re done deciding what to do — usually we’d just hang up, but he doesn’t so I don’t either. We’re more inclined to text or chat online or hang out in person, neither of us likes to spend long on the phone. Most of our calls are under a minute. I know because my mother asked me about the phone bill once, when I was twelve or thirteen, back when I only ever gave her the simplest, stupidest things to worry about, and she couldn’t understand why I had pages and pages of one and two minute long calls. I started texting more after that.
“Um, do you see my car?” Aidan asks.
“Not yet.” I glance back the accident scene and don’t see the cop anymore. I walk a little quicker and then break into a soft jog. “Now I do,” I tell Aidan. “I see your car.”
“Oh, good,” he says. “Okay. Yeah, I think I see you.”
Still neither of us hangs up, so I’m jogging with the phone against my ear and must look completely ridiculous. I slow to a walk and get further away from the moving cars. Last thing I want to do is get hit. I glance over at the traffic and then get the phone shifted so it isn’t creating a blind spot.
“Do you want to get burritos for lunch?” Aidan asks. He’s turned around in the driver’s seat to watch out the back window. As I get closer to the car, I can see the worry plastered all over his face.
Even as I’m walking around the car toward the passenger side we keep the call going, so my reply of, “Sure,” makes a weird echo since I say it with the door open. I hang up, tuck the phone into my pocket and say, “Yeah. I could do burritos,” before closing the door.
Aidan hangs up as well, gets settled and buckled before turning off his hazards. He puts the car into gear and flips his blinker for the merge back onto the highway. He breaths deep and sighs, focused back on the traffic and driving but I bet he’s thinking of what he really wants to say.
I try to beat him to it like I usually can. It’s one of the reasons we have so few fights. I’m better at figuring out what Aidan needs to say before he actually has to say it, and neither of us is shy about apologizing. “Sorry. For running off like that, I’m sorry. You know, the wreck, I just thought –”
He cuts me off with a quick, “Yeah. Yeah, Ethan. I know. It’s fine.”
It doesn’t sound fine. It sounds like I scared the hell out of him, and he looks quietly pissed about it. I try again to apologize, but he cuts me off, sharper, punctuating it with a sideways glance. “It’s fine,” he insists. And then he turns mumbling as he adds, “Just — don’t do it again. We should stick together, okay?”
“Sure,” I say meekly. “Okay.”
After the stretch of a little awkward silence between us and some bland alt-rock on the radio, I lean over to spin the dial around looking for a top 40 station. Aidan gets us out of the traffic on the highway and into the calmer if no less densely packed local streets.
“Is it this shopping center?” he asks. He slows down but hesitates over his blinker as we creep nearer the turn-in for the parking lot.
“Um, dunno. I’ll look.” I pull out my phone and then I hear this small, faint, barely-there voice that I’m probably imagining because it is just almost nothing.
Abel?
“Cain?”
I whisper, but it doesn’t matter when Aidan’s right here in the car with me and I’ve just sat upright like a dog hearing someone at the door. Aidan looks over at me, but my attention’s wholly focused on this otherworldly hush of the demon who found me at last.
Hey, sweetheart. Miss me?
I’m reminded of when he was trying to find me on the Otherside, how he sounded so raw and ragged. Cain sounds even worse now, I can barely hear him, he sounds battered and hurt even though that seems impossible. He’s just a voice — but not a voice inside me, I realize.
“Where are you?”
Stuck in a dead body. You’re a shitty necromancer.
“How are you stuck?”
Can’t move. I told you to keep it clean.
“But I didn’t kill anyone,” I say. “I – I didn’t kill anyone. Where are you?”
What part of stuck in a dead body didn’t make sense to you, princess? Does it sound like I know more than that? You’re the fucking necromancer, you stupid piece of shit, stop asking me questions and fix this.
I cannot believe how awful he sounds. I don’t mean what he’s saying is awful, I mean the harsh pant of each hard-fought sarcastic word. Cain sounds like he’s in agony. I blundered my way into a huge mess by running toward the accident scene and then immediately running away again. I have no idea how to help Cain. I have no idea what I’ve done but clearly I’ve done something, and I have no clue how to fix it without asking Cain a lot more questions.
It’s only when Aidan says my name that I remember he’s even in the car. He’s got me held by the shoulders actually, the car’s parked, he’s crawled halfway across the console to grab me. I turn my head some to look sideways out the window at the shopping center.
“Ethan,” he says. It’s that tone that tells me he’s been trying to get my attention for a couple snaps of my name already before resorting to shaking me like this. He does it again, digs his fingers into my arm and shakes me. “Ethan, look at me.”
“It’s fine,” I say to Aidan. “I’m fine.” I lift my arms to try breaking his grip, but Aidan doesn’t let go. I see he’s locked the car doors, although that won’t keep me from simply yanking the lock open before jumping out again if I want. Not that I want to, and the more Aidan tightens his hold on me the less I try getting him to let go.
“Are you talking to yourself, or is it Cain?” he demands. He looks terrified.
“Cain,” I say.
What?
It sounds like a groan, pained to the point of losing the heavy drip of sarcasm. I draw in a long, shaky breath and try to smile reassuringly against the weight of Aidan’s stare. “Nothing, not you. I meant — I’m not possessed this time. Cain’s not inside me. I’m not sure where he is, neither is he, but he’s not here. He’s not me.”
Who are you talking to?
“My friend, he knows about you. We were about to get lunch.”
“Ethan.” Aidan’s fingers dig into my arms. “Ethan, please, stop it. Stop talking to him.”
“He hears me just if I say something. There’s not … like a special way to talk to him or anything.”
I squirm and push gently enough about it that Aidan lets me go, he trusts that I’ll cooperate. He slowly sinks toward his side of the car again, still staring with such a look of horror and fear that I start to feel horrified and scared.
“I need to go back to the wreck,” I say. “I think – I think I put Cain into that motorcyclist’s body on accident. We need to see if the body’s still there or if it already went to the hospital.”
Are you being serious right now, Abel?
Aidan’s expression says something similar, except he jams the keys back into the ignition and churns into life the purr and rumble of the old battered sedan. I see Aidan shudder and swallow. His hands grip the steering wheel with his foot still on the brake even though the car’s in gear. My fingers itch to reach for the seat buckle, the door handle, but I just promised I wouldn’t go running off again without Aidan. He looks ready to refuse though. I bet he’s thinking about that cat we both saw get hit by a car, that half-flat dead cat’s body that Cain made run around, and how I’m asking him to help me get a human body up and running around just the same. At least I didn’t make him help me kill anything.
“Okay,” Aidan says finally. He eases the car into motion. “Okay, let’s do this.”