The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

  THE MORTAL SLEEP

  BOOK FOUR OF THE HOLLOW FOLK

  GREGORY ASHE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2019 Gregory Ashe

  All Rights Reserved

  I WENT RUNNING, AND I made my boyfriend run with me. Spring came late, hard, and cold, and only the stupid went out in it. But I went running. I had to, or I’d go crazy.

  The sky tumbled away in every direction, big enough to swallow me up, and the pebbled bellies of the clouds turned everything gray. We made it half a mile from Sara’s house before the rain came down, needling my face and my arms, soaking my shirt and then stinging through the luxe athletic blend hard enough to raise welts. The shirt was courtesy of Sara, who had been buying me clothes—nice clothes, expensive clothes—ever since she started fostering me. The shoes, though—well, the shoes were from Kaden. They gripped tight to the asphalt even with the rain, and a lot of the aches in my knees and ankles had gone away once I started wearing them, but none of that changed the fact that I hated the shoes.

  The shoes were a reminder. They reminded me of the day Kaden and I had been taken captive by a gang of supernaturally powered psychos. They reminded me of Babria, Lady Buckhardt and Urho Rattling Tent, War Chief of the Tribe That Walks Apart. And even though the Lady and the War Chief were in hiding, they were still out there, somewhere, and that they were coming for me. They might be taking their time. They might be hiding. But they were coming.

  But if I were honest, I hated the shoes for one simple reason: Kaden had given them to me, and my boyfriend was still in love with Kaden.

  Austin chugged alongside me. He’d cut his hair short. Preppy. Really preppy. And he’d packed on some muscle over the last few months. He wore a Vehpese High t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and his arms were red with the chill—and, just as a total side note, they were also goddamn gorgeous. He ran with me every day now; he said it was to help him keep his head on straight. I said he liked dick too much to be straight. At that point, he usually tackled me and gave me a very pointed lesson about how straight he was.

  “We don’t have to run,” he said, his breathing easy in spite of our pace. “I own a car.”

  I pushed myself a little faster, the running shoes biting the gravel.

  “Sara will buy you a car,” he called after me. “Then we really wouldn’t have to run.”

  But we ran. I had to run or I’d go crazy, go out of my mind. Chewing the wallpaper, foaming at the mouth, padded room. That kind of crazy. Because they were out there, Urho and the Lady and whatever lunatics had survived the battle at Belshazzar’s Feast. And they wanted me.

  “Slow down,” Austin huffed as he pulled up alongside me. “We’re going to be all sweaty.”

  “You’re going to be all sweaty.”

  “Your shirt is sticking to your back.”

  “Good. You like that.”

  Austin grinned. Then he snapped the elastic in my underwear and shot forward, sprinting away from me.

  “Son of a bitch,” I roared and charged after him.

  Around me, life was coming back to this tucked-away corner of Wyoming. Wildflowers bloomed at the edge of the gravel shoulder, popping up in clusters of blue and violet and yellow. Junegrass was already beginning to green, and where the topsoil thinned and hardened, dusty clumps of sage grew together. On my other side, a snow fence buttressed the road, and a few slushy patches still shone where the shadows were thick at its base. In winter, when storms swept across the plains, the snow had piled as high as the fence. Beyond the fence loomed the Bighorn Mountains, Cloud Peak eaten up by its namesake.

  I had dreamed about the mountains. About high valleys and a cabin lit against the night. I had dreamed about the clouds gobbling up the stone in huge bites. I had gone to Cloud Peak once, not physically but by projecting myself to the other side, and I had thought I would find Urho and the Lady. I found gray and black stone, steep slopes of scree and talus, and a mountain lake frozen to glass. The dreams kept coming—those were the dreams I could talk about, the ones I could tell Austin about, not the other dreams, not the ones where I had to run—and I tried to get Austin to drive me into the mountains so I could hike up there and check out the space in the real world. It was February. It was a few days after Valentine’s. And thank God I’d been a good boy at Valentine’s because I’ve never seen Austin get angrier. When we both cooled down, I realized he was right: people died hiking to Cloud Peak in the summer. In the dead of winter, with the snow drifting deeper and deeper, I was asking for a death sentence.

  My shoes beat the gravel on the side of the highway, and I sucked in deep breaths of the cold, wet spring air. There was the mineral flavor of the rain, pelting my lips hard enough that they felt puffy, and the prairie grass dust and a faint smear of motor oil. Farther up, a patch of asphalt gleamed with a greasy rainbow.

  I didn’t try to catch up to Austin—not really, anyway. He had settled into a good pace twenty yards ahead, and he ran like a goddamn machine. I liked my view. I liked those shoulders that had gotten bigger over the last few months. They were a brick wall; you could balance a Prius on them. And the trim vee of his waist. And the shelf of his ass. Practically a goddamn cliff.

  He glanced back, tugging up his shirt to wipe his face, and wriggled his tush.

  “Slut.”

  “Perv.”

  But he didn’t slow down. And I didn’t try to catch up. And the goddamn showboat kept pulling up his shirt, not even pretending anymore that he was wiping his face. That boy had a killer back, and he liked showing off for my benefit.

  It’s pretty nice, having people that care about you. It’s pretty great. Sara kept me fed. She kept me in clothes. Austin was probably right: if I wanted it, I thought she’d buy me a car, or find a way to help me buy one. She talked to me, asked about my day, and she made me trim my hair, and one time she grounded me because I stayed out past curfew with Austin. And I didn’t like being grounded, not at all, but I stayed in my room because I figured I’d put her through enough. I liked having Austin drive me to school. I liked him curled up in my bed as we did homework. I liked him kissing me goodnight, a really serious goodnight, every time like he might not see me again.

  So everything was good. Everything was great. All the things that had been wrong in my life, all the things that had driven me, one day last year, to perch on the bridge over the Bighorn River, to push off so that the air whipped my legs and the water came up at me, slapped the breath from my chest and swallowed me—all those things were better. And even if there was just this little spot at the back of my head, just this little black dot, just nothing really, just a little smudge on the glass, even if that was there sometimes, everything was great.

  Maybe I had trouble sleeping some nights. Maybe, those nights, I dreamed that I was running through a trackless forest. Maybe I dreamed of something that ran behind me. Something with sharp teeth. Maybe, some nights, I didn’t run fast enough, and I woke with scratches on my back, on my neck, on my ankles. Maybe that was just imagination.

  Maybe I had trouble sleeping some nights, but everybody had trouble sleeping sometimes. Maybe, some nights, I had to get up and walk. Maybe I had to sit in the shower sometimes, the water so hot it left my skin pink and shiny, so I could breathe. Maybe I had to run every day. But those things were normal. Everybody had stuff like that. That was just how everybody felt, some days. And that thing at the back of my head, it wasn’t even that big. Mos
t days, it wasn’t even that black. More like gray. More like this gray smudge, and nobody noticed a smudge, not a little one like that when everything else was great. And it was. Everything was perfect.

  Our steady pace ate up the miles to town. Vehpese straddled the Bighorn River. The old stone bridge crossed the water; I kept my eyes fixed on it as buildings grew up around us until the city swallowed the shore and the water and the bridge. I remembered the rush of cool air in the late summer heat. The taste of blood in my mouth. The current driving me into the rocks. The way the water had been so blue at the bottom that it had been black, and that black had washed away the edges of my vision and left a perfect, blank nothingness behind it. It was all right there, right behind that glass at the back of my head—right behind that smudge. Sometimes when I got up at night, sometimes when I had to walk around the house, sometimes when I was in the shower with the water steaming against my back, I thought about how cold and clean and quiet it had been at the end. Even with all the splashing and gasping and choking, part of my brain had finally been quiet. I would think about that. I would think about how magical that quiet had been.

  Ahead, the town came closer. By now, Vehpese didn’t feel strange anymore. The move from Oklahoma had been hard for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons was just how different Vehpese had been. It was small. It wasn’t just another suburb curled up around a city. It wasn’t street after street of McDonald’s and Applebee's and Home Depot and Pottery Barn. Not that a lack of chain stores made it better; that’s not even close to what I’m trying to say.

  It was old. That’s one thing I had noticed when I first came here. Everything recent had been built in the seventies when the mines in the Bighorns were just getting started and a lot of money was coming into town. And the color scheme was old too. A lot of faded pastels. A lot of yellow. A lot of tan. And it was poor; that was the other thing. A lot of that money from the mines had gone into tattoo parlors and carry-out pizza and payday loan joints. Sure, there was more. Sure, there was a nice, updated section of town along the river. But the strip mall we were running past seemed to sum up the real essence of Vehpese: paint chipping off cinderblock, a vape store called Smoke Em If You Got Em, two nail salons—Emperor’s Nails with the closed sign twisted against the door; Thai Nails with a neon hand flashing fingers, 1-2-3-4-5—and a personal tax business with a Lady Liberty costume hanging limply in the front window, like somebody had strung her up and left her as a warning.

  Garry’s (two R’s, God and Garry only knew why) Greasy Spoon had only a handful of cars on its cracked asphalt lot. I recognized the yellow Camaro, the mammoth Silverado, and the brown Ford sedan. The other two were F-150s. This was, after all, truck country. The Greasy Spoon’s chrome-and-red exterior, like something that had outlived the sock hop and the poodle skirt, had dulled with sun and years. The red was almost pink. The chrome always looked cloudy like someone had just breathed on it.

  Austin slowed to a walk and paced a circle. Plucking at the sleeveless tee, he gestured to his pits. “Told you.”

  “You’re hot.”

  “I’m hot.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Rain continued to needle me; I shook my head. “I’m not standing out here just to cool down.”

  “We could have driven.”

  Looping arms around his neck, I walked him backward toward the Greasy Spoon. Nose to nose, I said, “We could have driven.”

  “Yeah. And then we wouldn’t be stinky when we ate with our friends.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And we’d be dry.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And warm.”

  His back bumped the glass.

  “I thought we already established this: you’re hot.”

  He opened his mouth to say something else, and I kissed him. Firmly.

  When I pulled back, his eyes had narrowed.

  “Are we in a fight?” I asked, my eyebrows going up.

  A smile crooked the corner of his mouth. He slapped my ass like he was beating hell out of an old rug, and then he slipped out of my arms and sprinted into the diner.

  Asshole. He was just one big beautiful asshole some days.

  Inside, Becca, Kaden, and Jake already had a booth. Becca and Jake took one side; Kaden took the other, and I had to swallow a growl when Austin slid in next to him. Kaden, the little motherfucker, hooked Austin around the neck and pulled him in for a hug. Because he knew. He knew Austin still had his first little gayboy crush on him. He knew, the little fucker, and he did stuff like this, and then his eyes met mine, and he tried to look innocent as a newborn babe, and I was having fuck-all of it.

  “You have a car,” Jake said. “It’s a little pansy thing—”

  “Hey,” Austin said, squirming out of the hug and darting a single, evaluating glance at me. It was just a hug, I told myself. They’re friends, lifelong friends, and it was just a hug. I hoped all of that was perfectly visible on my face. Austin’s attention flicked back to his little brother. “It can go faster than that beast you drive around.”

  “—but it can get you to town.”

  “Maybe we wanted to run.”

  “And get wet?” Becca said.

  “And get sweaty?” Kaden said, pretending to wave away BO.

  “It’s nice weather—”

  “Aunt Sara would buy him a car,” Jake said. “You know she would.”

  “We just wanted to go for a run.”

  “Fuck all of you,” I said. “Stop picking on him.”

  And that broke the rest of them up into laughter. Even Kaden, that little shit, who elbowed Austin and grinned that huge, perfect grin and was probably giving Austin a boner the size of King Kong’s.

  We ordered. We ate. It was a school night, and it got dark early, and the rain licked the windows all night in long black tongues. But nobody wanted to go. Becca pulled out a laptop—a very fancy, very new laptop, which told me her freelance work was going well—and started on her homework. Kaden dug out his AP Psych textbook and a fat green Sharpie and started underlining. Jake slipped out of the booth, squeezed my shoulder, and cuffed Austin lightly on the back of the head before heading out to see Temple Mae.

  Austin and I hadn’t brought homework, but that didn’t make much of a difference; Austin and Kaden were taking the same psych class, and so Austin just crowded closer to Kaden. They talked in low voices as they flipped pages. Their heads bumped once, and Kaden laughed, and Austin shoved him and said he’d done it on purpose. And he had. I chewed through Austin’s leftover sausage biscuit and watched. Kaden had done it on purpose. And it had been fucking cute. And he was such a cocktease I wanted to crack his head against the window.

  Watching them, the way my boyfriend crowded up against his first crush, the way his face lit up when Kaden talked, the way he seemed tuned to some radio wave that I couldn’t pick up—every signal, every shift, every breath Kaden made—I couldn’t help but count the seats. I couldn’t help but think that we were four. With Jake, we’d been five. Temple Mae never came; I didn’t think she ever would. But there were seats for six. And we could have had six. Six. One last person who should have been there.

  I didn’t let myself think about Emmett Bradley. I never thought about him, really. I’d trained myself not to. I saw him at school, sure. He held court on the opposite side of the cafeteria. He passed me in the hall, moving like magma. His eyes never touched me. They never came anywhere near me. I’d vanished from Emmett’s world. Or, more accurately, I’d been cut out of it. And he’d been the one holding the scissors. So, in turn, I’d cut him out.

  And I never thought about him anymore, not ever. I never thought about his short dark hair. I never thought about the rich dark brown of his eyes. I never thought about the way he felt against me, I never thought about how he kissed me, I never thought about how broken he was, or how much he needed me, or how I was the only one who s
eemed to see past the bullshit he threw up for everyone else. I never thought about it anymore. I didn’t let myself think about him.

  Six seats. There should have been six of us.

  Austin bumped me, and I shot out of my thoughts so hard that my knee clunked against the table.

  “Come on, sleepy. Let’s go.”

  “I’m not sleepy.”

  “You were on another planet then. Let’s go.”

  Becca was packing up her computer; Kaden shoved the psych textbook into his bag.

  “You guys don’t want to keep working?” I asked. “Just keep working. I’m fine.”

  “You’re practically drooling,” Becca said. “You’re comatose.” She tucked her arm under the laptop bag’s straps and patted my cheek. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Come on,” Austin said, butting me gently with his head. “Or am I carrying you?”

  “You?”

  He grinned and butted me again.

  “With those twinkie arms?”

  “Twinkie arms, huh?”

  “Like a toothpick.”

  “You think my arms are small. Like a toothpick.”

  “I’m surprised I didn’t have to hold the fork for you.”

  With speed that took my breath away, Austin slid one arm under my legs, snugged the other around my shoulders, and heaved me out of the seat. He came with me, stumbling once, and then we were free of the booth. He grunted, hefted me like he was testing my weight, and slung me over his shoulder.

  “Put me down for God’s sake.”

  Austin chucked a twenty on the table and marched me toward the front door. Becca, lingering at the entrance, rolled her eyes. I glanced around, my face burning. Two old men sat over identical plates of chicken-fried steak. One of them saluted me with his coffee. Our waitress, who had to be as old as the diner, clapped her hands and cooed. Behind the enormous griddle, the short-order cook scrubbed at his hairnet and looked like someone had whacked him on the back of the head.