Blood at Dawn — Saturday, 16 June 1990, 10:47 PM

The Torch, Broadway Strip Gary, Indiana

The lights died at ten forty-seven. Three seconds of blackness, the jukebox cutting Bell Biv DeVoe mid-bar, and then the world came back on and the service door had four new gouges running down its inside face, deep enough to show the bright wood under the paint, spaced like fingers.

Darius saw it from the pool tables. Sable saw it from the bar. Victor saw it with the shotgun already in his hand and an expression that said forty years of service had not prepared him for this particular moment.

Darius went around. Through the front, left on Broadway, the .357 snub in his right hand inside the coat. The alley was dark the way Gary alleys are dark: completely, like the city had given up on the concept of sight lines. He rounded the corner and kicked a bottle and the sound traveled the length of the alley like an announcement.

Something moved. Twenty feet in, near the service door. The motion was wrong. Not wrong the way a drunk is wrong, or a junkie, or a man with an injury. Wrong the way a thing moves when the operator learned locomotion from a manual instead of from birth. Weight shifting in increments that skipped the steps between standing and turning.

He couldn’t see the face. Just a shape. Human-sized, maybe smaller. It had been facing the door. Now it was facing him.

“Who’s there?”

Nothing. The shape took a step. The footfall was flat, the sound of weight dropped rather than placed. One knee bent wrong for a fraction of a second, backward, like a marionette whose strings got crossed and then untangled.

The neon reached far enough to catch the face. A boy. Sixteen. Gray skin over bone. Eyes open and occupied by something that wasn’t born behind them. Mouth slightly open, lips black, wearing a t-shirt and jeans three months too dirty. Standing in the June heat without a drop of sweat.

Darius saw a sick kid. Meth, PCP, paint thinner. Gary produced all three. The .357 stayed at low ready because he was not going to shoot a teenager.

“Hey. You need help? You can’t be back here.”

The service door opened behind the boy. Bar light spilled into the alley. Victor, shotgun first, with Sable behind him.

The boy’s head turned toward the light. Toward Sable. The rotation was too fast and too far, the neck moving past where a neck should stop, another quarter-inch, the tendons visible under the gray skin like cables under canvas.

“Darius.” Sable’s voice was flat. The voice she used when the performance stopped and the survival started. “That’s not a person.”

The boy’s mouth opened. The jaw worked. Bone on bone, the cartilage long gone. Air forced through a dead throat by something that didn’t understand lungs.

“Aaah — liii — see — ahh.”

Allicia. The name pushed through a broken instrument. Three syllables that a sixteen-year-old boy’s mouth formed because the thing inside him was sent to find her and the mission survived the body’s death.

The boy looked past Sable into the bar. Scanned. Searched. Found nothing it wanted. The dead face recalculated. The interest dimmed. The body sagged, the strings loosening.

Then it turned and walked toward the dark end of the alley. The wrong gait, the knees bending badly. It reached the chain-link fence, grabbed the links with ruined fingers, and climbed it with a speed that nothing dead should have. Up and over in two seconds. Dropped into the vacant lot on the other side.

Gone.

Victor gave them the brooch. Antique metalwork, nested eyes, initials E.K. scratched into the back. Three months in the lost-and-found. Found the same week as the boy’s body in the dumpster. He told them about the morgue, the body that walked out of its drawer three days after Gary PD picked it up.

Sable held the brooch and her sharpened senses read it: centuries old, handmade, the faint trace of Kindred vitae soaked into the metal. Someone dead had owned this for a very long time.

“This is Kindred. Whoever dropped it in your alley was one of us.”

Victor wanted to tell Allicia. Darius cut him off.

“We’ll handle it. Sable’s friends with her.”

The word friends hung in the air for a moment. Sable pocketed the brooch and didn’t challenge it.

The Cutlass. Telton Cemetery. Darius drove south on Broadway past the dead storefronts and Sable sat in the passenger seat and neither of them spoke. The silence had changed shape again. Not the distance of Lake Street or the careful blankness of Elysium. The silence of two people heading toward the same thing.

Michael opened the shed door two inches. One pale eye.

“You brought someone.”

The eye moved to Sable. Three seconds.

“She’s pretty. The pretty ones are always the most trouble.”

The shed was small and full of candles and the paintings Darius had paid for with turpentine and linseed oil five months ago. Small dark canvases on the walls. One showed the cemetery from above with the headstones open and the coffins empty and something black and formless sitting in the center. Another showed The Torch at night with a shape in the alley that wasn’t a boy and wasn’t a shadow.

He’d painted it months ago. He already knew.

“The ground got sick in the winter,” Michael said. Cross-legged on the mattress, rocking. “Something came in from outside and went into the dirt. Not a vampire. Not a ghost. Ghosts are sad. This is hungry.”

He looked at Sable with the stare that went through your face and read the wall behind your skull.

“It’s looking for your friend. The quiet one. The one who doesn’t talk. I can hear it looking. Like a dog whistle. One note, all night. Her. Her. Her.”

He told them what it was. A man put it here. A father. He pushed his boy through a door and the boy became the door and the thing on the other side reached through. The boy was dead. The thing inside the boy was not.

“There’s a thing that holds it. A bag. The man made it. Hair and dirt and blood in a little bag. You break the bag, the door closes.”

Michael lay down. Pulled the blanket over his legs. The audience was over.

“Don’t let it drink her. Don’t let it get all the way through.”

The Cutlass again. Miller Beach. Darius driving fast now, the .357 on the seat between them, the brooch in Sable’s pocket, and Michael’s words in the air like a frequency neither of them could tune out.

A spirit in a dead boy, hunting Allicia, growing stronger, anchored by a bag of hair and dirt and blood somewhere in Gary. A grieving father who built a door and pushed his son through it. And somewhere between the cemetery and the lakefront, in the dead lots and abandoned factories of a city that had been dying since before either of them was born, a sixteen-year-old body was walking toward the woman who didn’t speak, saying her name through a mouth that had forgotten what mouths were for.

Darius drove. Sable watched the road. The distance between them was still there but it had a different name now. Not caution. Not performance. Not the careful width of two people who’d failed each other and hadn’t discussed it.

Purpose. The distance had become a direction. They were both pointed at the same thing, and the thing was Allicia, and whatever was coming for her would have to go through both of them to get there.

Neither of them had agreed to this. Neither of them had said the word. They didn’t need it. The car was moving. They were in it. That was enough.