Perigee - Chapter 19: Chapter 19

A long fall down a bottomless chasm.
Who knew how long it would take to hit the ground? The fact was, he would hit it.
Any second now, he'd hit.
Matt shot up with a fierce heat on his back—the summer night boiling him beneath the hotel's expensive duvets. "Jay? Jaylin—" He felt around the cool sheets where Jaylin had been laying hours ago, but Matt had forgotten about the shift of the mattress when he left. The cold that had overtaken his spot. He never had dreams like that—never dreams that felt so real, but he could feel the air under his arms, the swell of wind in an unending careen to the bottom of that bottomless pit.
He laid there in his cold sweat, until a sound pulsed against the glass of the balcony door. A voice, a sing-songy, chittering kind of voice. Matt moved out from under his sheets, cold hitting all the sweat-wet spots on his neck and the back of his knees. He could see Aster below, packing up the grill the witches had been cooking their meals on. Matt shoved himself into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and hastened downstairs to meet her.
She was just tying shut a bag of trash when she turned to him—her hair an undulating golden web around her bone-pale shoulders. She grinned and tiptoed to him on delicate bare feet. "You again."
"Yeah," Matt said, taking the place in. Nearly all of the tent structures and decorations from the courting ceremony had been ripped down. All that was left were scattered flowers and five small tents, congregated in a circle around a line of hanging laundry. A black dream catcher twisted about on a tent roof, dangling by the threat. "Is your cult-thing's leaving?" he asked.
The girl gave an airy laugh. "A few of us already have. I've stayed behind with Devi."
"It's gotta be two in the morning," Matt remarked. "What are you doin' up?"
Aster twirled about and all the raggedy edges of her tattered dress lifted into the air. "Insomnia," she said, collecting a plastic cup from a bush nearby. "Keeps me busy. Thought I'd get an early start cleaning."
Matt gave the back of his neck a scratch. This girl was weird. Not that he minded her, but he had no clue how Sadie held a conversation with her so easily; he felt like he was talking to a really charismatic wall. Must be a witch thing. "So, listen," he started, "is Cora still here?"
"Sadly not," said Aster. "She left with the others."
Disappointment rumbled through him and Matt groaned out the stormy feeling. "Shit, I shoulda talked to her. I knew I shoulda."
"About the dying thing?" Aster asked. She plucked up a bit of trash and added it to her bundle. "It is hard not to eavesdrop when the walls are made of canvas."
Matt cursed again. He rubbed hard at his face. "The hell do I do now?"
"Is there anything you can do?" asked Aster. "If ever you escape death, it isn't your time to die. Death will find you if he wants you."
"So you think she's right?" Matt asked. "You think it's true?"
"Twice in my life have I heard Cora's warnings. Once it was a young boy from Michigan. She told him he'd burn alive, so he avoided fire and electricity for three months. Then he died from a fever. The next was my own mother. Cora said she'd die from a heart attack."
"So what did she do?" Matt asked.
"She put her things in order," Aster said. "Then she died from a heart attack."
"So I'm dying," he concluded.
"More than likely," Aster said. "You can dance with death but you can never escape him."
Matt turned from her after that to go inside. To feel sick in the sanctity of his own room. Then Aster stopped him with a gentle, "Wait."
She ran to her tent and crawled half way in, and when she returned, it was with something heavy in her hands. Large and bound in timeworn leather. She held it out to him as she neared. "Cora wanted me to give this to Sadie."
"What is it?" Matt asked, unfolding the soft leather. Beneath it laid a sword, cut from hefty block of glittering quartz. It was like the thing was porous—like it gathered moonlight, soaked it in until it dripped with the stuff. The thought had Matt craning his head back to view that big, surreal circle in the sky. He hadn't noticed how large it was, how definite every crease and crevice looked tonight. He covered the sword with the leather wrap.
"What's it for?" Matt asked.
Aster frowned and shrugged the pale rounds of her shoulders. "Oh well, Cora didn't say. Maybe it's a gift. Just get it to her safely, will you?"
So Matt bid her goodbye, knowing he'd likely never see Aster again, and carried the heavy quartz sword up to his room. Maybe he should have been feeling more than he felt, but Matt was numb. All he could do was wonder all these terrible things. How was he going to die? What would it be like? He wondered if that hell his dad driveled on about was a real place, and would he go to hell if it was? God had to have softer expectations nowadays, right? He's gotta, Matt thought as the elevator lurched and the doors jumped open. Otherwise Heaven's gonna have a hell of a turnover rate.
He counted the hotel doors he passed until he found his own, but Matt wasn't expecting it to jerk open the moment he'd reached for the handle. For a man to block his path—shoulders nearly too broad for the doorway, and older by the looks of his strong crease-lines and jutting cheekbones. The kinda guy you'd see sipping from a mug on a country coffee commercial—all salt-and-pepper, all muscles and smile-lines.
"Human," he said, like it was a genuine question.
"Ah, sorry." Matt drew back a step. At first he'd thought maybe he had the wrong room—but the plaque was right. Must be one of Bailey's play-things. "I'll stay somewhere else."
"Don't bother," the man said, a sharp tick to his tone. "We're done here."
Then he moved past and Matt felt their shoulders swipe—a small bump, but it felt like a train collision. He waited until the man had turned down the hall to cringe and clutch the pain, then Matt stepped inside. "Jesus, you two make a perfect couple. But put a tie on the door or something, will you?" He set the sword aside, and it was like a different energy when he lifted his hand from the quartz. Like something had put a honey in his blood all that time he touched the stone.
He'd make sure to give it to Sadie later. She liked rocks.
"I'm not staying, so do what you want," Matt said. "Guy didn't have to go 'cause of me."
But Bailey was silent. And when Matt found him in the darkness, everything he wanted to say fell away and he swallowed his next breath. Something wasn't right.
Bailey wasn't right. It was like a hard ripple in the fierce brooding energy he usually put out, and all of the sudden Bailey wasn't Bailey. He was a kid in the dark, sitting against the glass door of the balcony. Matt moved closer, saw a hard swallow slip down Bailey's throat. But the boy didn't look at him. His eyes were hidden in the dark muss of his hair—his face sealed off in the shadows.
"Hey," Matt said. "You alright? Did he—did that guy do something?" He moved closer, and when he did, there was a shink, and suddenly he was gazing into his own reflection. Staring at the glisten of a metal switchblade. Bailey still wouldn't look to him, but he knew exactly where to point that blade.
"Don't touch me."
Matt stepped back and took in the sight of him. He didn't look damaged, his clothes were intact. But he sat there like he'd just been crippled by the weight of something... unbearable. Then that switchblade slipped back down and Bailey tapped it to the knee of his jeans.
"Do you still want to be bitten?" he asked.
Matt didn't truly know the answer. All he knew was that, if what Aster said was true, then it didn't matter what path he chose. He would die in the end all the same.
"Yeah," he said. "I think."
"Then we'll take your car," Bailey told him.
Matt watched, speechless as he shoved himself up from the ground. It was always weird how tall Bailey was. He probably had a good four inches on Matt and looking up to him felt shameful. And yet, somehow he was smaller tonight. Something in the way he moved, like he didn't have a grip on himself. His head was somewhere else, and wherever it was, Bailey didn't like it there.
"Wait a minute," Matt said. "You sure you're good? Who was that guy?"
"A rogue," Bailey said.
"Hold on, a what?"
He watched Bailey shove open a few drawers on his dresser, ripping a white package from the bottom of the center drawer. It'd been stuck there with Gaffer's tape—Matt could make out the black ribbons that wrapped it. Then Bailey climbed the bed and reached up with his tall body, pushing at a panel in the ceiling until it lifted inward. "Go get your car," was all he said, shoving the package inside and wiggling the panel shut again.
"We're going now?" Matt asked.
Bailey stepped from the bed and gave him a look—a dark, thorny, end-your-life kind of look.
"Wait—just give me a minute to think about it," Matt said. "This could kill me, you said so yourself and I'm not tryin' to die tonight."
"Then you should stop saying dumb shit." Bailey shed his shirt off over his head and turned to the open dresser drawers, digging through the clothing inside for a new one. Matt didn't miss the fresh bruises that inked his back. The guy had done a number on him after all. "You're not going to die," he said in a grunt, and tugged a fresh shirt down over his head. "Not from this."
"You were the one that said I could. You were the dickhead that freaked me out about it in the first place."
"You could. But you won't."
Matt wiped his hands up his face with a flurried groan. "What if I do? What if this—what if this all goes bad?"
"Then I'll take you to a hospital," said Bailey.
Matt snorted, still rubbing his face. "No you won't."
"I'll dump you at a hospital parking lot," Bailey reiterated.
"Wait a minute. Why do you want me to go so badly?"
"I don't."
"You do, but it's not because you want me to go wolf," Matt said. "Nah, you don't give a shit about me. You need something, don't you? And you don't want to go alone."
He must have struck oil then, because Bailey looked to him again with that cold, hard, kill-you expression and gave him a shove. "Go get your fucking car."
Without another dispute, Matt did. And by the time he'd pulled up to the fountain, Bailey was waiting—long and gangling as he was, slumped over the fountain's edge with that bored way about him. Matt could only wonder what it was that had changed when he found him curled against the glass of the balcony.
Bailey said nothing as he climbed into the Wrangler, but handed Matt an address, scribbled down on a sheet of paper. It was a ten minute drive—maybe less with no one on the roads at a hush 3 AM. Matt was thankful for the short commute; Bailey brought a tense air with him wherever he went, and those ten minutes felt like agony.
The address led him to a building that looked something like a renovated warehouse, with bleary green lights that shown from the metal plates in the front. They were designed that way, it seemed. To take the shape of two narrow feline eyes.
Apart from those lights, there were no signs or banners to show them where they were, but there were plenty of people; folks strewn out front around a trashcan fire, drinking and laughing and tossing things into the flames.
Matt parked beside a beaten down Toyota and Bailey gave his door a shove. "Stay here," he said. And he drifted by the men at the fire. Moved fast with those spider-legs. Fast and silent like a fox. And then he was gone, into the building with the glaring green eyes.
For reasons he couldn't explain, Matt pushed his door open and followed.
There were leers as he passed by that trash fire. Curious eyes and crooked smiles that made his skin crawl and his heart beat heavy. He half-expected those men to rise from their seats and chase after him with bats and crowbars. But they let him pass in peace.
Stepping inside of the place was like walking into a hotbox. Matt was girdled by a cloud of cheap marijuana and he waved the stink of it away, slipping past the smokers for a hopeful drink of air somewhere in the haze. But they weren't the only ones smoking, and a dense fog of it had risen to the ceiling—blearing the lights above in a thick film.
The place was large—large enough for a bar, twelve booths, and four pool tables where men whipped billiard balls across green baize. The sound of their collision clapped through Matt, and he tried not to jump each time the cue ball struck. But it wasn't long at all before he was drawn away from the tables and to the women lounging on the edge of the bar, pouring drinks and sizing him up with their eyes and their sharp, kittenish smiles. On the far end, a clump of young men sat on leather sofas—one watching him with a stilted jaw, until his attention was physically pulled away by the demanding hand of the man beside him.
On the stools, a woman slid her hands down the back of another girl's low-cut jeans. At the pool table, a man in a wifebeater had bent forward to teach a woman to shoot. There was no space between his hips and her ass for misunderstandings. To the left of them, two men kissed much too roughly beside a neon sign—one more bearded than the other, catching Matt's eyes as his partner moved his affections to the cartilage of his ear.
It was a place of sex and smoke, but not shame. And though Matt had already seen too much in his short time here, he hadn't seen Bailey. Not until he heard a glass shatter.
And there Bailey was, standing nose to nose with a man two inches taller than himself. He was a pirate and a linebacker in one; a terrifying juggernaut of a guy, marked in mangled flecks of scarred skin and a wearing patch over one eye—or the lack thereof.
Bailey had been the one to knock the glass to the floor, Matt could tell by the way he presented himself. Unapologetic.
"I already fucking told you," Bailey said. "Stop sending Gannon. I didn't take your goddamn money."
There were eyes on them already. All of the attention that had been on Matt shifted now, to Bailey and the hulking beast.
"It's always you, pup. You're always taking something. And it makes me angry, you know." That building of a man moved closer, close enough that Bailey shuffled back a step to keep his bearings. "Makes me real mad. Makes me want to take back what was mine."
Bailey had his hands around the neck of a beer bottle. Matt didn't see it until it was cracking against the man's skull. It was a hard blow, one that sent him reeling back. And the glass bits shimmered in the skin of his scalp, a streak of blood sliding down his temple. Then he had Bailey by the throat, pinned down on the edge of a table. Matt could hear the fleshy sounds of his fists, one after another, pelting skin and bone—knocking blood from Bailey's mouth.
He'd learned defense tactics from his dad, but those things worked on men your own size. Not oxen like this. Not men with boulders for fists. Goddammit, on any other occasion, he would have loved to see Bailey get his ass kicked. But Matt couldn't stand this. He watched the blood shoot across the table top, checkering the leather booth seat. This wasn't one of those occasions. This guy would kill him.
Matt ran, between tables, lunging over chairs. He threw himself at the stranger's back, arms around his neck, crushing that tree-trunk of a windpipe with all he had in him.
The brute beneath him struggled, digging at the arms around his throat. But Matt squeezed tighter, and when he couldn't pry him off, the man slammed him back against the wall and Matt felt the wood jab into his spine. A second time and his skull was rattling. A third and he had no more grip. He fell from the man's back—to the filthy cement floor. But only for a moment before he felt a fist in his hair, dragging him up to his feet.
"Well shit," the man said—a bit winded, at most. "Who brought this in here?"
"We aren't supposed to play with those, Rico." That kittenish woman said from the bar. "Queeny might have a feeling or two."
The sarcasm in her voice made something sick rot in Matt's stomach. He tried to fight the grip, but the fist on his scalp went tighter.
"It's perigee," the Rico man said. "Let's have a bit of fun."
Then there was that slink. Matt heard it before he saw the blade, pressed sharp against Rico's throat. Bailey was over his shoulder—bleeding from his nose, his mouth—a bit of skin missing from his cheekbone.
"I didn't come here to take your shit, Rico."
"Are you sure?" Rico said, the knife jouncing against his throat with every word. "Seemed you missed me."
Bailey's voice went deeper. "We came to see Violet."
"Oh?" a voice said from across the room. It hurt Matt to look her way, but he managed to catch a glimpse of her, rising from a booth in the corner. "He came to see me, that makes him my guest." The man's grip lessened enough that Matt could make out the black leather on this woman's legs—a shirt that shredded over her bust and saved nothing for the imagination—down to the piercings beneath the paper-thin cotton. Her hair was not black, but the color of a raven. That slight shimmering blue that shown brighter when she walked the floor beneath the chandelier lighting.
"Did you not hear me?" she asked. "Drop it, Rico."
Slowly, but begrudgingly, Matt felt those fingers relax. They let go and he slumped to the floor, next to spatters of Bailey's blood. The woman didn't give him the time of day. She opened a door and curled a finger their way. "Follow me."
No one dared to touch them after that.
The room Violet led them to seemed to be a private den, made for gambling. There were three separate tables in the windowless room. Only one was occupied. It was at another that Violet sat. Matt pulled up a chair across from her, but Bailey stayed standing—still and silent, though his presence was a looming thing at Matt's side.
"I'm assuming—because you are a human and you are here—that you know of the wolves," she said.
Matt gave a steady nod.
"And the only human that knew of the wolves and is still stupid enough to step foot in the den, would be a human who wants to be turned."
"Want is a strong word," Matt said.
The woman held out a hand. "Spare me the details. Fifty dollars is my charge."
Matt felt his jaw fall. "Fifty bucks? Seriously?"
"Nothing in this world comes for free. Certainly not something that could get me barred for life, like turning a human. Fifty, not a penny less."
To Matt's dismay, he had the cash and he knew it. He fished his wallet from his pocket and pulled three twenties from the fold. And as the woman took the bills, she took his wrist too—jerked him across the table so hard, Matt had to stand from his chair to save his ribs the suffrage. She ran her fingers down his forearm, tapping his skin, searching for the veins.
"You've come to the right place," she said. "I've got a good bite." Then she leaned in and Matt felt her lips on his forearm. When she opened her jaw, he caught the shimmer of her sizable canines—and for a moment, he swore they were growing. Unsheathing from her gums like the fangs of a snake. He ripped his hand away.
"Does it have to be there?" He didn't want the others to know. That was the last thing he needed—Jaylin chiding him about how painful his first chrysalis would be. Tisper, beating him with a magazine for taking such a risk. Sadie would be the worst of it. Sadie had hands just made for slapping. They'd all chew him to bits, and that wass if he even survived the night.
The woman eyed him slowly and shook her head. "I suppose it doesn't matter where."
"Then can you..." Matt shrugged. "Could you do it somewhere I can hide it?"
She bat her lashes, mirth in that slight lift of her lips. "Fine. Take it off."
So Matt pulled his shirt off over his head and sat back down in his seat. He watched her rise, admiring that faint sheen of blue in her hair—the bold red of her lips. He could feel her like a breeze as she rounded the table, as she stood there behind him, gripping the back of his chair. He almost preferred Bailey's presence.
"It should take less than a month," she said, and Matt jumped as he felt her hand on his shoulder. "Calm down sweetheart. You're making this too fun for me."
And then he felt her lips once again—floating, grazing the skin as they searched for just the right spot. He felt her breath hot on exhale as she cracked opened her jaws.
And the pain he felt next was far worse than anything Matt had ever imagined.