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Dedication

For Darkstar, who would have been Clayif he’d lived long enough, I just know it.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Diana M. Pho for being brilliant and to Tor.com Publishing for caring about what fiction can mean for the world.

I’d like to thank Matthew Derrick and Handsome Steve for also sticking with the nomadic thing for way too long, and I’d like to thank Ceightie for being stubborn as hell. Thanks to Riley MacLeod for advice on transmasculine representation. Thanks to Carnage House for putting up with me as I wrote. Thanks to Melissa and Wren just because. Thanks to Laurie Penny for believing in my writing more than I did. Thanks to Pablo for character inspiration. Thanks to my father, a fantastic writer, for getting me into this spec fic nonsense in the first place. Thanks to Pip and Garret for feedback, and to all my friends who helped guide this tale. Thanks to Parks Harper for telling me where my characters can get hit with what—I hope I never need to write a book again without access to his medical expertise.

More than anyone else, this book wouldn’t exist without Brian, the midwife who helped bring Uliksi into this world.

All mistakes are solely my own.

ONE

Sometimes you have to pull a knife. It’s not a good thing. I don’t enjoy it. But sometimes you just have to get a knife in your hands and make it clear which way the stabby end is pointing.

“Let me out here,” I’d said, before the knife got involved. It hadn’t been a question. Men always assume that declarative statements like that are questions.

“This is a ghost town,” he said. I hadn’t caught his name. He’d been nice enough to pick me up hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere Iowa, but he wasn’t nice enough to let me out where I wanted.

“That’s alright,” I said. “Just let me out.”

“There’ll be someplace better. A Walmart or something. I’ll let you out there.”

“Let me out here.”

“I can’t just let you out in the middle of nowhere, not by yourself. It isn’t safe.” He said it without a trace of irony. He locked the doors.

That’s when the knife got involved. I slid it out from my jeans pocket, clicked it open. Pulling a knife means going double or nothing. I was either going to get out of the situation, or the situation was about to get a lot worse.

“Jesus,” he said. He pulled over.

I unlocked my door, grabbed my pack, and hit the gravel before he came to a complete stop.

“Fucking bitch.”

I flipped off his car as he drove away, but at least he was driving away. The worst of it was, he’d probably thought he was just taking care of me. That he was a nice guy. I hoped bad things were going to happen to him, and soon.

Ten years of putting up with shit like that from drivers. It was getting old. Hell, at twenty-eight, I was getting old. Ten years ago I’d talk to drivers about anything and love them for it. I loved the nice ones for their kindness, I loved the crazies for their stories, and sure, I hated the racist pieces of shit, but if nothing else I got to feel like I had the pulse of this racist, piece-of-shit country. But a decade is an awfully long time, and whatever shine I’d found on the shit that is hitchhiking had long since faded. Still, it got me where I wanted to go.

The town’s welcome sign had been painted over. Don’t know what it used to say, but now, in clean stenciled letters, it said, FREEDOM, IOWA. CITY LIMITS. UNINCORPORATED. An entire town, abandoned by a dead economy and occupied by squatters and activists and anarchists.

It was the last place Clay had lived, the last place he’d spent much time before he’d found his way west and his hand had shown his razor the way to his throat. No warning signs, no cries for help.

I had a lot of questions. If there were answers, I might find them in Freedom, Iowa.

I shouldered my pack and clipped the waist belt shut. It had been Clay’s pack. I had his suicide note folded up in the smallest pocket. The road into town was two lanes that led away from the highway, paved with pale, patched asphalt. The trees beside it climbed toward the sky, and I walked on the double yellow with something of a spring to my step.

After a hundred yards and a couple turns, when the trees were getting thick enough to cast the whole of the road into shadow, I saw a deer on the shoulder ahead, rooting at something on the pavement. The beast was crimson red. Bloodred. I didn’t know deer even came in that color.

I crossed to the far side of the street so I wouldn’t disturb him, but I couldn’t help staring. A rabbit was dead on the ground beneath him, its belly up, its rib cage splayed open. The deer looked up at me then, his red muzzle dripping red blood.

On the right side of his head, he bore an antler. On the left side of his head, he bore two.

“Jesus,” I said.

I kept walking, because what else do you do? He watched me until I was around the next bend, and I couldn’t help feeling his gaze on my back. The only sounds in the air were birds and the faint white noise of a nearby river, and wildflowers were in bloom on the forest floor.

Another quarter mile, and I stepped out of the woods and saw the town on the far bank of a small, slow-moving river. Half a hundred houses were set into the hillside along a single winding street. A few old cars were parked along the curb and in driveways, but I couldn’t get a gauge on whether they were in use or abandoned. A two-lane bridge spanned the river. Clay had talked about the place like it was paradise.

I crossed over, pausing to look down over the guardrail at the water thirty feet below, as it tumbled and tore its way over river rock. Just at the other end of the bridge, a boarded-up gas station was covered in street art as good as any I’d seen in Oakland. It was a quarter mile farther up the hill to the first houses, and most were overgrown, more than a few with caved-in roofs. Others looked haphazardly maintained.

I walked into town, but I didn’t see any signs of life. No smoke or lights or motion. No one was out on the street or sitting on their porches. Maybe everyone had left when Clay had. Maybe the water was poisoned the same as it seemed to be in half of middle America, and seeing shit like that fucked-up mutated deer with three antlers made everyone realize it wasn’t safe to stick around.

The first five or six houses I passed were split levels, set into the hill. Welded-rebar statues populated one front lawn—a three-antlered deer amongst other woodland and farmyard animals. Even the statue seemed to bore into me with its stare, and the damn thing didn’t even have eyes.

The next house, alone on its block, was an old colonial. It was handsome, its wood siding painted dark. Its circular attic window was an eye casting its longing gaze out over the river and Iowa. I walked up the cement steps to a large wooden patio on the side of the house and peered in through the sliding door, but it was darker inside than outside and I saw only my own straggly short hair reflected in a silhouette in the glass. I sat down on the porch chair and leaned back to ponder the empty town and my lack of luck.

I had no idea how to find what I wanted to find. I’d come here because I needed motion. Without motion, there was nothing. Without motion, I was probably as dead as Clay.

I kicked back in the chair, put my feet up on the table, and looked out over the town. I’d make it my kingdom for the day, I decided, and hit the road again tomorrow. I had canned food enough to see me through at least three meals, and if I got desperate I had a jar of peanut butter somewhere in my bag that would keep me alive for days. I took out my phone and headphones, put on black metal, and dozed off.

* * *

I like the tiny little dreams I get when I sleep in the afternoon. That day, I was a very young goblin, riding this brontosaurus-like thing, and I was in love with a human boy and I was afraid he’d find out I was a goblin.

When I’m awake I’m happy sometimes, but I don’t know that I’m ever as happy awake as I am when I’m dreaming. Awake, I’ve got all this nostalgia, this feeling that I’m separated from something I can smell but can’t touch. I get these sudden, unbearable realizations that I should have been more present during all those moments in my life, that I should have taken the time to be like, “Oh shit, man, this is my life, and it’s fucking awesome sometimes.” Dreaming, I just swim in the joy and the intensity and the now-ness of life.

Late in the afternoon, I heard rustling and opened my eyes halfway. On the railing in front of me, a rabbit cleaned its paws. I watched it, drowsy. It turned toward me, and its chest was a raw red wound, its rib cage and organs gone. It smelled like death and blood, and I don’t usually smell much in my dreams. It hopped away, and I presumed it a nightmare and fell back asleep.

* * *

“Get your feet off the table.”

“What?” I asked, startled awake, ripping out my earbuds.

“Can’t have dirty boots on the table,” he said.

I got my feet back on the porch and turned around. A gangly, handsome fellow was looking at me with a brown fist on his hip and a weird sort of smile hovering on his face. His septum was pierced. One side of his head was shaved; the rest of his hair was thick black curls. His short dress was clean, faded black, stitched up in a few places with dental floss. He was heavily tattooed, mostly blackwork. Behind him, the sliding glass door was open. Obviously, I hadn’t heard him walk out.

“And who are you?” he asked.

“Danielle,” I said.

He was looking me over, his head cocked to the side, trying to make up his mind about something.

“I, uh, I didn’t know anyone lived here,” I told him.

“Well,” he said. “Someone does. There’s at least four or five spots left if you want your own place. More than that, if you know how to patch a roof.”

He stared at me as I tried to process this information.

“Oh, you’re new. Like, new new. Like, don’t know anything new.”

“I just got here,” I said. “I was thinking maybe there wasn’t anyone left.”

“I’m Vulture,” he said. “What pronouns do you prefer?”

“She,” I said.

“I use he,” he told me.

I nodded.

“Well, Danielle, I came outside because there was a strange woman sleeping on our porch. Everyone else, they’re inside, wondering who the hell you are.”

He started drumming his fingers on his chin.

“Wait, what’s your last name?”

“Cain.” It wasn’t my legal name, but it was my punk name.

“You’re Dani Cain!” His whole body loosened up and a smile exploded across his face.

“I’d rather Danielle than Dani,” I said. I hadn’t let anyone but Clay call me Dani in years.

“Clay talked about you, I don’t know, maybe every day? Come inside! Eat with us! Welcome to town!”

There’s a kind of hospitality found amongst squatters and punks that I’ll never stop appreciating. When there’s not enough to go around, that’s when people share. As far as I can tell, it’s part of why us poor get taken advantage of so much. So I met a tattooed man in a ghost town, and I followed him into his house because he knew someone I knew. Sure, I had to give it some thought, but it felt a hell of a lot safer than getting in a car with a stranger.

Outside, the house was rustic and kind of pretty. Inside, it was astounding. I’ve spent plenty of time in squats in the U.S., and I thought I knew what to expect. Most squats, they range from people - who - honest - to - god - piss - in - the - fucking - corner to kinda - normal - but - pretty - messy to artists - obviously - live - here - jesus - christ - why - is - there - a - life - sized - hippo - made - from - styrofoam - in - the - living - room. But that house was something else. It was clean, for one thing, and every wall was painted gray, black, or copper. Every fixture was gold or copper, even if half of them were spray painted that way. Mirrors were everywhere, letting daylight reach into the corners of the house.

While two full-size couches sat empty, the three people in the living room were crammed onto a love seat, lounging atop one another in that way that punks and puppies do. A man and a woman sat next to one another while another woman lay across them, tattooing the back of the man’s neck by hand with needle, thread, and ink.

“May I present to you Danielle,” Vulture said, grandly gesturing. “The Dani Cain. Danielle now though. Just walked into town for her very first time.”

“Well damn,” the tattoo recipient said, “Ms. Cain herself.”

“That’s Thursday and Doomsday sitting down proper,” Vulture said, by way of introductions. “We call them the Days. Freedom, Iowa’s only power couple. Come on, do the thing.” He clapped his hands, giddy.

“I don’t want to,” the woman said.

“We gotta do it,” the man said. He wrangled his arms free from underneath the tattooist, then held out his fists, hands together. He had the word THURSDAY tattooed on his knuckles, black against his brown skin. The woman sighed, then held out her pale hands, palms down. In the same font as Thursday’s tattoo, but clearly more faded, was the word DOOMSDAY.

“And this is Brynn,” Vulture said.

Brynn, the tattooist, looked up at me with pale gray eyes. An inch-thick black line was tattooed from the bangs of her hairline to the bridge of her nose. Which, where it met her glasses, formed a hypnotizing geometry. She had the same military-style belt I did, the same extendable baton worn in its holster on one side and pepper spray on the other that I did. Both weapons are better than a knife for self-defense. Knives are only good for threatening, not for fighting. Pepper spray can actually disable someone. A baton can beat someone near to death without cutting them.

Our eyes met. I try not to read too much into things like that, but our eyes met. After a brief moment, she went back to tattooing Thursday.

“So what brings you to this shitty little corner of the world?” Brynn asked, without diverting her attention from her work.

“It’s not shitty,” Thursday said.

“Don’t talk, your neck moves when you talk.”

“It’s kind of shitty,” Doomsday said.

By the look on his face, “not talking” was probably one of Thursday’s least favorite things.

“All done,” Brynn announced. She put the needle down next to the vial of ink on a rag on the coffee table, and turned Thursday around so everyone could see. On the back of his neck was a stylized deer’s head, three antlers sprouting from its crown and running up toward his hairline.

I was about to ask about it, but a sudden fear shut my mouth. There was something more to Freedom than I knew, and as much as I wanted to feel right at home, I didn’t.

Vulture complimented Brynn on her work and Thursday on his taste, then took a photo of the tattoo with his phone.

“Vulture, you want to help me get started on dinner?” Brynn asked. Thursday started clearing up the tattoo equipment.

“As soon as I find the right filter and post this.”

“I can help,” I said. “I like cooking.”

So I followed Brynn to the kitchen to start dinner, happy to see if making food could get my mind off the worries that raced through me. Vulture straggled behind us, tapping and swiping at his phone.

“You definitely don’t have to help cook,” Brynn said.

“I’d enjoy it,” I said. I loved cooking for groups, hated cooking for myself. If it’s just me I’ll eat fucking protein bars for dinner. Brynn turned on the lights, a series of bright LEDs wired into a wooden strip screwed into the ceiling.

“Where do you get power?” I asked.

“Solar,” Vulture said, still staring at his phone. “Don’t use it for much, just some lights and our phones.” He set his phone down on the counter and started rooting through a produce basket, procuring an onion, which he set in front of me. I started dicing it as Brynn ran outside to turn on the propane for the stove.

“Where do you get the gas?” I asked.

“We, uh,” Vulture demurred, “we buy it at Walmart. Only place to get pretty much anything within a two-hour drive.”

I almost asked them where they got money, but I figured I knew the answer: some combination of crime, seasonal labor, and working remote. Same as the rest of us travelers.

“And the water?” I asked.

“Used a water key, just turned the city water back on,” he said. “You can buy basically anything on the Internet. Got it shipped to someone in Chicago.”

Vulture had this grand way of gesturing with every word he spoke, imbuing everything around us with meaning. Brynn came back in, whistling, and swept up the diced onion into a frying pan. She was taller than me, muscled, and handsome as hell.

In any other circumstances, I’d probably be in love with both of them already. Instead, they were a mystery to me, a mystery I aimed to solve. For Clay’s sake, and for my own.

“The water’s not, like, fucked up or something, though?”

“No way, the water’s great,” Vulture said.

I opened my mouth to ask about the mutated deer, but shouting from the street cut me off. Brynn set down her spoon, Vulture set down his knife, and we all met each other’s eyes.

The shout was soon a scream. We ran for the door.

TWO

The sun sat fat and low on the western horizon, at the top of the street, and the last light of the day lent everything vivid faded colors. White lambs, dappled with red and purple wounds, paced a circle around both lanes of the street, not twenty yards from where we stood. Geese dodged in and out between them, and a regal goat oversaw the parade. Each creature had only a gaping wound where its rib cage had been, yet they lived. They opened their mouths to bellow and squawk and bleat, but their organless bodies let out only strange rasps.

Mixed in with the good summer scents—early summer flowers, a neighbor’s barbecue, a campfire farther off still—was the iron of dried blood, the rot of death. The same as the rabbit I’d thought I’d dreamt.

A fluttering, above me, caught my eye. On the power lines, hundreds of birds without rib cages—sparrows and finches, jays and pigeons—cried dry and unholy, an angry jury to the trial below. I was transfixed. I can’t say if it was magic or shock. I can’t say the two are wholly distinct. I stood on the lawn with my jaw hanging low, staring at the undead spectacle before me.

At the center, a man stood, bent over, fighting for breath. He’d been running. He’d been screaming. Hints of white hair peeked out from beneath his sweater’s hood, and he wore patched black jeans and the look of a man condemned. For a moment, I thought he was the master of those animals, some punk rock summoner. But everywhere he tried to walk, a barnyard demon blocked his path. He was trying to reach us.

“Doomsday!” he called out, his voice hoarse from screaming. “Tell Doomsday! Run!”

I started toward him. Vulture put his hand on my arm. He was filming with his phone.

“We’ve got to help,” I said.

“We can’t,” Vulture said. He was near to tears. Brynn, on my other side, was as well. They knew this man, they cared about him.

Thursday and Doomsday stepped out the front door a few moments after the rest of us, each with an identical handgun. She held hers slack at her side, a dead weight. He kept both hands on the grip, his finger near the safety.

Where the hell had I found myself?

Then I saw the deer. The bloodred deer stalked down the hill, the last remnants of the sun at his back, his three antlers in sharp silhouette. The beasts parted for their master, and the old man straightened up, turned to meet his fate.

The creature reared onto his back legs and kicked the man in the chest. His ribs broke loud like gunshot, and my ears rang from the blow. The man collapsed without a sound, and the deer reached his muzzle into his chest and tore out his heart.

If I’d had a car, I could have run. I could have been safe somewhere, anywhere. If I’d had a car. The highway was too far to run, and I had visions of that monstrous deer chasing me over the river, through the forest. Hooves in my back, antlers in my chest, my heart held aloft above my dying eyes. So I didn’t run. I stood, in company with Clay’s friends, near to paralyzed with fear.

“The sun’s almost gone,” Vulture whispered. “It’s powerless, at night.”

The beasts parted once more, and the deer walked off, down the hill, down toward the river and out of sight. The animals plodded slowly after. The birds were still, just then, and the man was still forever.

* * *

“What the ever-loving fuck?” I asked. I was sweating. We were back in the living room, but Doomsday was the only one sitting. I couldn’t figure out if I felt safer near the door and away from these people or far from it and away from the corpse that lay under a sheet on the patio.

Vulture had left with a stranger, shovels over their shoulders, to dig the man’s grave. A small crowd was gathering on the patio. Well-wishers? Investigators? The curious? No one told me, and I couldn’t figure it out.

Brynn put her hand on my shoulder blade. I recoiled from her touch.

“The creature’s name is Uliksi,” Doomsday said.

“What the ever-loving fuck?”

“You knew Clay. You knew his magic?”

“Yeah, I mean, he read tarot and shit. Sometimes he’d wave his hands around, say a couple words about chaos and endless spirits to, like, get our heads straight before we’d do something stupid or dangerous.”

“You’ve never seen one of the endless spirits?”

“No, I hadn’t seen one of the endless spirits because the endless spirits were fucking metaphors, alright?”

“They’re not,” Doomsday said.

“No shit.”

I started tapping the heel of my palm on my outer thigh, obsessively. It wasn’t a nervous habit I’d ever had before. I’d probably never been so nervous.

We’d burned the hell out of dinner, but Thursday came in with teacups on a tarnished silver platter, offered me a cup. I knocked it out of his hand. The porcelain hit the wooden floor and rolled away. If only the floor had been cement, it would have smashed like it should have.

After all these years I’d lived outside of polite society, I’d finally fallen through the looking glass.

“I know you’re freaked out,” Thursday said. “I would be too. But right now? This can’t be about you right now. We’ve got to figure some shit out.”

“No,” Doomsday said to her lover, “it’s alright. The wards will hold. The house is safe. I’m safe.”

The plush couch welcomed me into its embrace. Brynn sat next to me, and I leaned against her. I let my nervous energy flow out of me, into the ground like Clay had taught me. I let a stranger support me. The people in that house, they probably weren’t going to hurt me. That’s about all I could ever be sure of about anyone.

Doomsday met my eyes. She was a severe, powerful woman. Heavyset, commanding, and beautiful. Not without a certain warmth, a certain flicker of something caring at the edge of her eyes.

“The deer’s name is Uliksi,” she told me again. “An endless spirit. A demon. A creature of vengeance that walks these woods, swims in this river, watches this town. He’s been a guardian spirit, until tonight.”

“You worship it,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“I’d say people revere him. There’s no worship.”

“Why?”

Doomsday sipped her tea. “We summoned him to kill a man, last year on solstice. To kill a man who’d made himself king. We summoned him to keep anyone from following in that man’s footsteps.”

“Desmond,” Brynn said.

“There were about thirty people who moved here at the start,” Doomsday said. “Two years ago, in early spring. Clay was one of them. After a couple of months, when it looked like the place wasn’t about to be cleared out by cops, word went around. More of us showed up, mostly from Chicago. It was hard living, and we were cold and hungry and overworked. For some people, it was a free place to live. Other people, a place where anarchist ideals could be put into practice. Some of us came for our own reasons. It worked alright. Until Desmond.”

“Motherfucker managed to take power,” Thursday said. “No one was supposed to be able to do that. That was the whole point. But I don’t know, he got himself running the security council, then he got himself running just about everything. He did some good, scared some dudes off who were giving us shit, but he just . . . power, man. Power does fucked-up things to people. Attracts fucked-up people in the first place.”

“So you killed him?” I asked.

“No, we didn’t kill him,” Thursday said. Then he looked introspective. “Well, eventually, yeah. But only after it got all Animal Farm up in here and Desmond fucking beat this kid to death. Right there on the bridge. In front of ten people. Caved in his skull, tossed his body into the river.”

“Ben, nicest little crustlord you ever would have met,” Vulture said. He slid the door shut behind himself and started to strip off his grave-soiled clothes. “You have any idea how hard it is to get your friend’s body out of a river?”

“We didn’t know what to do,” Doomsday said. “There weren’t enough of us to kick him out—he had too much sway. We could have killed him, but it would have meant civil war.”

“We were going to leave,” Thursday said. “About half the town was going to leave. Desmond started saying shit about how we couldn’t. Like if we left we couldn’t be trusted, because we knew too much. If we left he ‘couldn’t guarantee our safety.’”

“Clay was the one who talked us out of assassination,” Doomsday said. “Thursday and I were on our way out the door, guns in hand, before the first light of the morning of summer solstice. Almost a year ago now. Clay caught up with us because he was gathering up the only people in town crazy enough to believe in his magic. Rebecca, she was the only other real witch. The man you saw die, his name was Anchor. The three of them came for me. In that early morning fog, we went down to the river, right under the bridge. We each had a role. I was the innocent; they blindfolded me. Clay and Rebecca said their piece; Anchor drew blood up from his palm, let it run into the river and onto the stone. When the solstice sun rose, it drew Uliksi into the world. A spirit that turns the predator into the prey. Uliksi hunts the vengeful, the hateful. As Clay put it, Uliksi hunts those who wield power over others.”

I wouldn’t have believed a word of what she was saying, had I heard it the night before. As she spoke, her voice fell in and out of confidence. Likely, the times she’d told the story before, it had been heroic.

“Desmond and his crew tried to interrupt us. One of his friends ripped my blindfold off just in time for me to watch Uliksi come out of the water. He staggered like a newborn colt, then looked hard at Desmond. Desmond stumbled back, tripped, and Uliksi caught him by the throat. Dragged him over to the river’s edge and held his face beneath the water. Ripped open his rib cage, tore out his heart. Desmond’s crew fucked off. Uliksi stayed.”

“Damn,” I said. Polysyllabic expression was sort of beyond me.

“So yeah, welcome to Freedom, Iowa. For the past year, we’ve had this benevolent, murderous spirit watching over us. Which is weird, but it’s gone fine.”

“Which brings us to tonight,” Thursday said.

“Which brings us to tonight,” Doomsday agreed. “The last thing Clay said to me, when I dropped him off at a truck stop about two months back, was that Uliksi would turn on his summoners. I didn’t really believe him, not until tonight.”

There was a rap on the sliding door, and I jolted. Vulture slid open the door and had a brief conversation with someone.

“They’re ready, I guess,” he reported, then slipped outside.

The Days stood up, straightened each other’s collars and hair, then went out the door.

“Well,” Brynn said, “I suppose we’re going to a funeral.”

THREE

I zipped up my hoodie when I stepped outside. It’s amazing how fast a hot June day gets chilly with the sun gone.

A hundred people or more overflowed the patio and onto the grass, bearing torches or staffs or holding empty hands at their sides. A few faces were bare; others bore ski masks or bandanna masks or homemade bird masks or bank robbing–style bright plastic animal masks. It was so quiet I could hear the toads from the river. It was so quiet I could hear the oil in the torches burning. It was so quiet I couldn’t help but mistake every shuffled foot for the lungless rasp of one of those demon creatures I knew were lurking somewhere.

None of that could shock me. Nothing could shock me.

Six ski-masked figures hoisted a pine coffin to their shoulders, because apparently I was in the kind of squatted town where people have pine coffins lying around in case someone gets murdered by the local pet demon. I recognized Doomsday by her tattooed hands—she was a pallbearer.

A hand touched the center of my back and, startled, I jumped. For a moment, all those strange, hidden faces turned to look at me, and some gazes lingered for far too long.

“Sorry,” Vulture whispered in my ear.

He was unmasked, as was Brynn. When the pallbearers left for the street and the crowd followed, those two walked with me, alongside me. Flanking me, like guards escorting a prisoner. Or, you know, like friends trying to comfort someone.

In that strange procession, I got a chance to see more of both the town and its denizens, though the landscape was masked by darkness and the people were just masked. Torchlight—and the realization that magic exists in the world—lent a beauty even to those mass-manufactured Midwest houses. Every single one might hold mysteries beyond imagining.

Most, presumably, just housed the punks and hippies and weirdos who surrounded me.

A handsome, small man in overalls and a ball cap joined us at the back of the march, and Vulture whispered an introduction. “Danielle, meet Kestrel, my partner.”

But Kestrel, after shaking my hand and holding Vulture for a moment, ducked back into the crowd. I didn’t have a chance to really get a first impression of him.

We wound our way up the hillside, past a half-collapsed school and its attendant sports field and a rusted hulk of a yellow school bus, past a burned-out post office, past a fire station that was clearly lived in. The only electric light I saw shone inside a small grocery, which was lit up by its bank of fluorescents. The place was filled with furniture, tools, and food. Well-lettered in red and yellow along the facade were the words: EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE. A folding sidewalk sign out front read: A FREE MARKET SHOULD MEAN EVERYTHING IS FREE.

We continued past, the coffin leading the way, a few of us straggling behind the crowd. Just after the market, a few abandoned lots were filled with spires and mounds and bare saplings. When the procession turned off the main road and we wound our way along plywood paths, I recognized a permaculture garden. The spires were stacked tires, presumably packed with dirt and growing potatoes. The mounds were like long barrow graves, but they were likely hugelmounds—each built around dead logs, designed to break down into raised beds for gardens. Several vegetable beds were marked off and showed a wide variety to harvest in the coming months: spinach and beans, cauliflower and spring onion, fennel and peas. The spindly young trees were newly transplanted, and likely had yet to bear fruit.

We kept walking, and as the path turned back over on itself and spiraled through the field, it left me dizzy with the fire in the air and the magic I’d seen and the strangeness of the place. The garden went on forever, I was walking forever, trying as hard as I could to keep myself grounded. Keep myself focused. The ground beneath my feet.

At last we reached the tree line. The trees were my age or younger, still threatened by their undergrowth. Between us and the forest, in the liminal space at the edge of the garden, four wooden posts marked four graves. A fifth grave sat empty.

Whispers began to break the ceremonial silence. I made my way to the grave posts, ornately carved and oiled stakes about as high as my waist with lettering running down their length. Daniel Rojas. Benjamin “Filth” Simmons. Danielle Keeler. Desmond Smith. Daniel’s name was followed by what I presumed was his name in Mayan pictographic script, Benjamin’s by Norse runes, Danielle’s by Irish ogham.

Daniel and Danielle. Half the graves in Freedom bore a version of my name. What a fun coincidence. What a great evening I was having.

A hush went over the crowd once more, and the pallbearers set the coffin upright in front of the empty grave. There was no lid, and Anchor’s naked corpse faced the crowd. Loving hands had cleaned and stitched his wounds, and while his chest was mangled and his ribs were broken, he was not so horrific to look at as I would have expected.

Four pallbearers climbed down into the grave. One masked man was tall enough that his head was still visible, but Doomsday and the others were lost to sight. The remaining pallbearers eased Anchor from the coffin and into the waiting hands of those below, and he was set gingerly into the grave. He was to be buried, naked, without chemicals or fiberglass or steel or even the pine box. But not without ceremony, not without love.

The crowd helped the four grave attendants climb out, and townspeople lined up to put handfuls of soil into the grave. Still, no word had been spoken.

Wildflowers had taken over the oldest grave, nearby.

Clay was buried somewhere outside Denver in a manicured field, adorned only with cut flowers, slowly rotting in a fiberglass box. Maybe he belonged here, where the weeds and the wild could grow over his body, where he would feed the soil that fed the people who’d known him.

Or, maybe he was better off where his mother could visit.

* * *

“Anchor named himself better than anyone I’ve ever met,” Thursday said, standing at the foot of the grave, alongside the now-empty coffin. “I know he picked the name because he’d spent so long as a sailor, but he kept us grounded into the bedrock, of both the land and our collectivist ideals. I don’t know that there’s one person here who would live in Freedom right now if it weren’t for Anchor’s work. As a mediator, a facilitator, sure. More than that, his work as a friend. No one is perfect, but as far as I can tell, Anchor got all that being imperfect out of his system when he was younger, before half of us were born. The world is darker for me, now, and it will be from now until someday when I join him buried here in black earth of Freedom.”

The masks were off, and I saw faces hung down in silent prayer.

“Anchor’s death was needless, and there’s no ignoring that. What he made, we should unmake. What he summoned, we should unsummon. We’ll get by on our own.”

Thursday shuffled back into the crowd and into Doomsday’s embrace, and he started sobbing.

A stranger went up, one of the tallest men I’d ever seen—the pallbearer who had stood head and shoulders above the edge of the grave. His arms were freckled from the sun, and torchlight glittered on the studs on his punk vest. He had an easy charm to him, the kind of easy charm that raises red flags in anyone who’s known a lot of handsome, entitled men.

“Anchor was more a father to me than my pops was,” he said, “though I guess that’s not saying too much, is it?”

A few people chuckled at that.

“But I don’t think it’s right to sugarcoat any of this. People ain’t perfect. I’m not perfect, none of you all is perfect. We do bad things. People do bad things. We do good things too, but you don’t get props for not hurting people. It’s the bad things we do that define us. I don’t know what bad thing Anchor did, but I know it was something.”

Beside me, Vulture’s jaw had dropped as far open as it could without falling right off, and he kept breathing in short little breaths like he was about to speak, about to interrupt the man. Instead, he started walking toward him.

“People ain’t perfect, but Anchor, and Clay, and Rebecca, and Doomsday, they found something that is. They pulled Uliksi right out of the river, and Uliksi knows right from wrong. Uliksi hurts predators, end of story. Hurts people who prey on people. Anchor knew that when he cut open his palm to bring an endless spirit up from the river, and we know it now. If we want to respect Anchor, then let’s respect the best thing he ever did for the world. Even if it killed him.”

Chaos reigned for a moment, as everyone jostled to replace the tall man as he left the head of the grave. An elderly Chicana woman raised her hands and let out a short, wordless shout, and order was restored. She looked at the line and pointed to Vulture as next to speak.

“A year ago there were only three people in this town who’d even heard of the endless spirits,” Vulture said. “Two of them are dead and the third one, Rebecca, she’s off living in the woods and I bet she doesn’t even know what’s happened yet. Eric Tall-As-Fuck, you’re my partner’s best friend and I’ve got nothing but respect for you and the best way I can think of to show you that respect is to tell you that you’re a terrible person and you deserve to die.”

“The hell?!” Eric Tall-As-Fuck knew how to roar.

“What, it doesn’t feel nice when someone feigns respect for you while telling you that you should be dead? Then shut the fuck up about Anchor.” Vulture then looked at the grave. “Anchor, I loved you, you’re great, and we’ll stop the evil demon that probably wasn’t an evil demon when you summoned it but maybe it was and it definitely is now and maybe you shouldn’t have summoned it.”

“What the hell is going on?” I asked Brynn.

“Everything’s about to go to shit,” she said.

She strode into the crowd to join the argument, leaving me alone at the edge of the forest.

She was right, everything went to shit.

* * *

In the end, both sides—for and against the murder of a man by an immortal deer—fell to accusing the other of disrupting the funeral, and the small faction of would-be mediators managed to interject. They proposed the problems be addressed in the morning, at a general assembly, and the town agreed.

It almost came to blows. It wouldn’t have been my fight, but I probably would have acted to protect at least Vulture and Brynn, if not the Days. I fingered the armament at my belt, glad I didn’t need to use it.

With nothing left to say, half the crowd dispersed, while some people stayed to pay their respects to Anchor. A pair of women in papier-mâché masks took turns with sledgehammers, driving a memorial stake into the earth like railroad workers setting a tie.

I didn’t notice Eric until he was right next to me, looming over me. “You must be Dani Cain,” he said.

I didn’t correct him.

“How’d you know?”

“Clay used to talk about you,” he said.

I nodded.

“Listen, Dani, you showed up on a pretty weird day. This isn’t exactly us at our best.”

He was doing that thing where he used my name in sentences to try to charm me. Since I hated the name Dani, it wasn’t working.

“Clay trusted you, so I’m going to trust you. If you want to know what’s really going on, let’s go for a walk or something.”

I looked around for Vulture and Brynn, but they were gone. Even the Days were nowhere to be seen. I could find my way back to the house, sure, but it was hard to imagine someone so callous as to leave a newcomer alone on a night like that.

On a whim, I went with him. I could always stab him if he tried anything, after all.

We stopped in at the Everything for Everyone. A few townspeople were there, filling baskets with potatoes and carrots and greens—breakfast foods, mostly. The place was a bizarre mix of grocery and thrift store, without cash registers or clerks. Near the front, a refrigerated stand held fresh bottled juice and homemade sandwiches. Someone had written, Take one if you’re hungry with Sharpie on the shelf. I took a bottle of green juice. The same person, with the same handwriting, had carved, Return me when empty, asshole into the glass.

Eric, for his part, grabbed a juice box from a stand nearby labeled, Prepackaged snacks. Please don’t hoard. Simple as that, we walked out the door. No money, no accounting, no ration cards, nothing. Trust alone. I’d found a town that worked on trust alone.

We walked another two blocks to the schoolyard, and Eric strode off toward the playground. I followed him. I didn’t open my juice because that took both hands, and I don’t follow strange men into the darkness without at least one hand free for fighting.

We sat at a picnic table, lit only by the moon, and Eric sensed my discomfort and sat several feet away on the opposite bench.

I opened the juice, and the smell of celery and apple and ginger rose up. I took a sip. It was delicious.

“You know why we get to have things like this?” he asked, poking the plastic straw into the top of his juice box.

“A combination of dumpster diving, farming, and food bank handouts?” I asked.

“Because no one has any authority over anyone else,” he said, ignoring my literal answer. “Because no one is trying to accumulate material goods, political sway, or even social capital to wield against anyone else.”

“Alright,” I said. It was, I admit, the world I wanted to see.

“People always say anarchy can’t work because you can’t trust people to rule themselves. To which I’ve always said, if people are as untrustworthy as all that, how can you trust them to rule one another? You can’t.”

I’d already figured I was older than the fellow, but I realized by just how much. It wasn’t that I disagreed with what he’d just said, but there was something in the way that he said it. Something in his tone, or his uncynical platitudes. I believed in anarchism. Eric, he Believed.

“Uliksi, we can trust Uliksi. I know this sounds crazy. But he doesn’t crave power. He doesn’t have wants or needs, he just is. He is the power of the people to strike down anyone who takes power over the defenseless. He is that power manifest, that power incarnate in flesh.”

A figure was crossing the field toward us, and I shifted in my seat so I could see it and Eric both.

“So your argument,” I said, “is that man Anchor, the one whose heart I saw ripped out of his chest, did something terrible. He had it coming.”

“Is that so hard to believe?”

It wasn’t, not really. I’d lost track of the people in my life who’d committed horrible acts. Of the people who’d stolen from the hungry and desperate. Of the men who, fine in company, were monsters to me when we were alone. Anchor, I didn’t know him at all.

“What do you think he did?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Eric said.

“I’ve got my suspicions,” the silhouette said as it approached the table. Close up, it was Kestrel—Vulture’s partner.

He sat down on my side of the bench, much closer to me than to Eric.

“Clay’s gone, been gone,” he said. “Before that, he was fighting with Anchor. They broke up on rough terms, neither one would talk about it. Anchor spent more time with the Days after that. With Doomsday. I don’t trust her.”

Kestrel lit a cigarette, took dramatic pauses to suck in smoke like he thought he was in a movie.

They were both ridiculous. Which didn’t mean they were wrong. But they were both ridiculous.

“We know Uliksi only has power when the sun’s up,” Kestrel continued. “He’s comatose or whatever at night. We also know he was summoned on summer solstice, and I’d bet Freedom, Iowa, on it that he can only be dismissed on the solstice too.”

“You think Uliksi is killing his summoners in self-defense?”

“Uliksi doesn’t act in self-defense,” Eric said.

“No,” Kestrel said, taking a drag, “I think Uliksi killed Anchor because I think Anchor and Doomsday were going to dismiss him in order to summon something worse. Something that would let them take power.”

“Alright,” I said, “why are you talking to me, then? What do you want from me?”

“I’m not going to say that I can’t think of ways you can help,” Eric said, “but I’m talking to you because I saw you talking with them, and I wanted to warn you. You’re new in town, everyone loves fresh meat. More than that, everyone knows you knew Clay. For someone who’s trying to take power, someone like Doomsday, that means you’re social capital.”

“Aren’t you Vulture’s partner?” I asked Kestrel.

“It’s been rough since Clay left,” Kestrel said. “That house cliqued up tight, got more secretive. Vulture’s been more distant. And after tonight? After tonight I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen with me and him.”

He lit a second cigarette with the end of the first one. He wasn’t smoking as an affectation, he was smoking because he was scared as hell and trying to keep his cool.

“What’s your plan?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Eric said. Then he thought that over. “No, I know what my plan is. I’m just not trying to tell you right now. I don’t know that I can trust you. But I’ll tell you what I hope happens.”

“What do you hope happens?”

“I hope everyone wakes up tomorrow morning with a clear head and we get together and realize that Uliksi is the reason we have nice things and that any talk of trying to get rid of him is bullshit. I hope that Doomsday and Rebecca leave town and never come back. And while I want those things for my own reasons, I also think they’re the only way Doomsday or Rebecca will get out of this alive.”

Tiredness came over me suddenly. All I wanted was to be in my sleeping bag somewhere, alone, with headphones on, ignoring the world.

“I hope, Dani,” Eric said, “that you’re able to convince Doomsday she should leave.”

There it was. At least it was all out on the table.

I didn’t like it. Whether he was right or he was wrong, I didn’t like him trying to use me. Or maybe Doomsday was too, and Eric was the one who was actually being up-front about it.

I’d heard enough. I got up to leave.

“My name’s Danielle.”

* * *

The walk back to the house, it was getting downright cold. A few people lingered on the street, a few people sat on stoops. The farther down the hill I got, and thereby the closer to the river, the fewer people I saw. A block from the house, I saw those devil birds on the power lines. Silent, just watching.

By the front door, I saw Thursday. Silent, just watching. The house, so invitingly gothic by the light of day when I’d just walked into town, was a monolith of black and glass and evil magic by night. Which, to be honest, I would have expected to be more attractive to me, considering my usual temperament.

“Was wondering where you’d gotten off to,” Thursday said as I mounted the steps.

“Y’all left before me.” I wasn’t looking to argue, but I was pissed.

“Went off really quick to talk some shit over,” Thursday said. “We decided someone needed to head out into the woods to Rebecca’s place, warn her about everything. Vulture went off to do that, the rest of us came back to the graveyard. You were gone by the time we got back.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was a dick move to leave you there.”

“Thanks.”

“Brynn’s still up, I think. Worried about you.”

I opened the door and walked in, following the tiny LED lamps that vaguely lit the damask wallpaper of the entry hall. In the living room, Brynn sat cross-legged, worrying her way through a cup of tea. The room was lit only by candles in jars. Squatters know candle safety.

“You leaving in the morning?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. My safety and sanity insisted I should go. My curiosity and stubbornness insisted I stick around.

“Wouldn’t blame you.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want tea?” she asked. I sat next to her on the couch, and she poured me a cup from a silver teapot.

I took it and drank some. Nettle, by the taste. Had been made at least a half an hour ago, by the tepidity. Still, the act of drinking it was enough, and I calmed down some.

“I showed up in December,” Brynn said. “I was traveling with this guy I used to date, and he’d known Ben. Said he wanted to see where they’d buried him. We didn’t know the whole story, of course. But we showed up right after a storm, got his truck stuck in the snow by the highway, hiked in. We go see Ben’s grave, and everyone is so nice to us. I think there must have been sixty people who helped dig out our truck the next day. My partner took off, I stuck around.”

“Did you know?”

“About Uliksi? No. I stuck around because look at this place. No cops, no bosses, no landlords. No poverty. No laws. Hard work and community and freedom and all that shit that we ought to have. I think it was the work part that scared my partner off. But it’s not enforced, there are a couple people who just skate by. Mostly we all figure out ways to contribute.”

“How’d you find out? About Uliksi?”

“On our way back from digging out the truck, I saw some of the geese, down by the river. People told me the whole story. It’s strange how quickly it’s normal, there being magic in the world. It’s strange how little it changes about who we are as people.”

“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t really believe her though. If magic was real, everything had changed.

“My room’s in the attic,” she said. “If you want, you could sleep next to me. Maybe cuddle. If you’d rather not, I’m good to sleep on the floor, or you could take one of the couches down here.”

“Cuddling sounds nice,” I said.

* * *

It should have been nice. The moonlight came in through the circular window, and she laid on her back as I nuzzled up with my head on her. It had been months at least since I’d been with anyone, even slept next to anyone, and my skin was alive at her touch. I could hear her steady breath, smell her pheromones. For a moment, just a short peaceful moment, I was able to revel in that simple pleasure. Then my mind went back to racing through the day.

“Why didn’t they shoot it?” I asked.

“What?” She was halfway to sleep.

“Doomsday, Thursday. Why didn’t they shoot the deer?”

“It’s immortal,” she said, like that was just a natural, logical thing.

“How does it work, then? What’s the deal?”

“It’s only active during the day. Kills predator animals by ripping out their hearts. Those stay dead. Any prey animal that dies around here, it like, raises from the dead or whatever, by, well, ripping out their hearts. Those aren’t immortal, though. A friend of mine ran over an undead goose in her truck, and it stayed dead that time.”

“That’s fucking crazy,” I said.

“Yeah,” Brynn said. “I thought the whole thing was kind of cool until tonight though.”

“I could see that.”

The conversation drifted off, because Brynn was half-asleep. I closed my eyes, but it was all too much. The town, Uliksi, Brynn. All too much to take in. My heart rate increased, my breathing got a little shallow.

“What’s wrong?” Brynn asked.

“Panic attack.”

“Are you okay?”

“Not really,” I told her, because I wasn’t.

It hit like a fever or drugs or something. A panic attack just drops you through the ice into freezing water. Even when you drag yourself out of the water, you’re left with the memory that forever and always, you’re walking on ice. It’s worse than anything. It’s worse than watching a demon eat a stranger’s heart.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Talking about it makes it worse.”

If she were someone I knew, if she were someone my body trusted, she might have been able to help a little bit. Distract me with words or touch. But she was just another alien thing in this alien world I’d landed in.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She squeezed me for a moment, then her body jerked as she fell into sleep. I wasn’t going to be joining her for a while.

After the worst of it, the paralyzing fear, passed, I slipped from the bed and down to the front porch. Thursday still stood there, just outside the door, sentinel. His pistol held in his hand.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

“Me either.” He nodded at the power lines. The ghouled birds were still there, their little chests still splayed open, their eyes boring down on us.

The fresh air wasn’t fresh enough, and I wasn’t looking for conversation. I went back inside and made my way to the attic. Brynn was sleeping in the bed, blissful. I curled up in the corner of the room, hugging my knees.

I would leave in the morning. No answers were worth this.

Slowly, over the course of another hour, I fell into a restless slumber.

FOUR

A few hours after dawn, I walked up the street with Brynn. The sentinel birds were gone, replaced with real birds that still had all their bones. Birds that sang normal bird songs. I broke open a tangerine, and I scarcely noticed the juice running thick down my hands. I scarcely noticed anything.

Morning hadn’t brought me clarity or peace of mind. But with the fog of panic cleared from my thoughts, I realized I wasn’t going to leave. Not yet. I’d never live with myself.

Brynn was relaxed, and I tried my best to mimic that. I hadn’t slept well enough or long enough. But I’d slept, and that mattered.

I tried asking about banalities.

“How does this work? You’ve got meetings every morning?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” Brynn said. “We get together, hash out the kind of stuff that needs doing. Update everyone on news. Once every couple of months, we make decisions. Mostly, we just kind of share information. And bicker.”

But it turned out I didn’t care. I should have cared. The functioning of a leaderless, informal commune on land stolen from the bank should have mattered to me a great deal.

Like I was watching the video on Vulture’s phone, I saw Anchor die, again and again. That took up way too much of my mind.

The assembly hall was the school’s auditorium. Half the building was collapsed, which didn’t really bode well for the rest, but Brynn assured me that the auditorium was, you know, more or less structurally sound.

We walked through the doors and took seats near the back. A hundred people at least were in that room, and half as many more filtered in after us. Vulture was already there—nocturnal by choice, he hadn’t slept yet and had gone out the door at dawn after stacking the table high with pancakes and taking a picture of the result for Instagram.

A middle-aged black man climbed up to the empty stage, and someone closed the doors to keep down the sounds of the kids playing tag out front.

“We’re not doing a normal meeting this morning, y’all know that, right?” He paused. No one objected. “I’ve been asked to facilitate today, because apparently I’m one of the only folks on the facilitators’ council that isn’t pissed as hell at one half of you or the other. If anyone has any objections to my process, just let me know, now or at any point.”

“You’re great, Mike!” someone shouted.

“I’m pissed at both halves!” another person chimed in.

“Last night, things got pretty heated in the graveyard,” the facilitator continued. “We buried a man a lot of us loved. A lot of us are worried about secrets that man might have been keeping, bad things he might have done. A lot of us are worried about Uliksi, about him going rogue. Most of us are worried about this fight tearing us apart. We’ve put a hell of a lot of work into Freedom, Iowa. However sure you are that your side is right, keep in mind the other side is just as sure, and both sides are so stubborn because they’re convinced their way is the only thing that can save this town. You’re fighting because you all want the same thing, you all want to save this town. That’s what I’m asking you to keep in mind as you’re thinking over what you’re going to say. I’m going to ask one person from each side to frame the debate, we’re going to hear from the room, and then we’re going to settle this reasonably and come up with a plan of action. Eric?”

Eric stood up, strode onto the stage. He was an imposing figure with his smile and his punk jacket. In a clear, loud voice, and at moderate length, he told the town that Uliksi was benevolent to those deserving of benevolence and vengeful to those who weren’t. I sympathized. I saw myself as someone who was the same.

Vulture spoke next, hopping up on stage full of his manic, nervous energy.

“We’re big kids and we can handle our own problems.” That was all he said. He hopped back down and took his seat.

The crowd erupted after that, and the facilitator did a magnificent job of keeping people focused on the issues at hand, ruthlessly cutting down ad hominem attacks and preventing the conversation from descending into a simple back and forth between two people. But it stayed a pitched debate between entrenched sides, and the core of each faction had no interest in listening.

“Can I get a quick show of hands?” the facilitator asked, after half an hour. “Just a temperature check of the room, to see what people are thinking. Raise your hand, one hand only, if you think we should give Doomsday and Rebecca our blessing to dismiss Uliksi.”

More than three-quarters of the room raised their hands. No one counted—it wasn’t a vote.

“Now, raise your hand, one hand only, if you think we shouldn’t let Doomsday and Rebecca dismiss Uliksi.”

Ten hands went up.

When they went down, Brynn rose to her feet to speak.

“There’s a part of me that just wants to agree with what some people are saying, about how great it is having Uliksi around. There’s a part of me that’s always going to be sympathetic because holy shit there’s magic here and isn’t that what we’ve always wanted, all our lives? There’s a part of me—the greater part of me, yeah—that thinks we’ve got to get rid of it because it fucking murdered someone last night. But that’s not what I’m gonna go on about right now. Instead, I want to say something about process.”

She took a deep breath. Public speaking clearly wasn’t her favorite thing.

“What are we trying to do right now? Are we trying to reach consensus about what we can do, today, as a community? Consensus decision-making isn’t supposed to be one side against the other. It’s not some masochistic form of voting in which you try to convince everyone to have the same desires and goals. It’s a tool for finding out where people agree and where people disagree, a tool for finding out what we can do together and what we can’t.”

“Do you have any suggestions about what we might be doing instead?” the facilitator asked. The man seemed to have no ego attached to his work.

“No,” Brynn admitted. “I guess, and I’m sad to say it, we’re at an impasse. We, the whole town assembly, can’t officially encourage Doomsday and Rebecca. But three-quarters of us can and will.”

Eric stood up. “That we can’t solve this here is the first thing you all have said that I agree with. Her and her lot would have us just talk, just talk and talk until it’s solstice and it’s too late to stop them. When someone’s doing something wrong, and talking won’t do any good, you don’t just keep talking it out. You fight.” He stormed out, Kestrel in his wake. Vulture watched them go, his eyes full of sorrow.

“Well,” Brynn said, as much to herself as to me, “I think I just fucked that up.”

* * *

After the assembly, Brynn and I joined a lunch queue at the Everything for Everyone and sat at a table on the patio between the store and the garden. My plate was piled high with tamales and fresh-picked salad. I could get used to this place.

Everyone was in a sort of collective daze, unable to process everything that had transpired. On edge about Uliksi, on edge about Eric, but trying their hardest to make it through the day like everything hadn’t just gone to shit.

“So is it everything you’d dreamed it would be?” Brynn asked, sweeping her arms open.

“Oh yeah. The best demon-infested town I’ve ever been to, as a matter of fact.”

Brynn put down her fork and looked me in the eyes. A family—three punks, two kids, two dogs—walked past our table, and the adults waved hello and a little kid, not more than four, darted out to wrap his arms around Brynn’s legs. She patted him on the head, and he ran back to his family.

“Here’s the thing, Ms. Cain,” Brynn said. “This place? This is the best place most of us have ever had. Even when Desmond was at his worst, he wasn’t half as bad as most cops. No one I’ve ever known has ever been as free as we are, standing here right now. That family that just walked past us? Homeless. In Chicago, they’d been homeless. We grow most of our own food, we generate our own power. We make our own rules, we ignore our own rules when we feel like we’ve got to. We are the kings of the fucking earth, in Freedom, Iowa. No evictions here.”

“You paint a pretty picture,” I said. “And I know this just sounds like I’m being all salty, but that picture don’t look like what I saw last night.”

“No,” Brynn agreed. We went back to eating. “It doesn’t look like what I saw either. If we can’t stop that thing, well, I guess we’re all going to have to run. No more Freedom.”

She took a few more bites, then put her sandwich down again.

“You know what really gets me? About Eric? Besides that we were friends. What gets me is that I don’t know what he’s going to do. I don’t know if he’s going to hurt someone. And his whole goddammed point is that he’s the one who thinks we need an outside arbiter of justice. If he hurts someone, as likely as not Uliksi will get him too.”

“How’d Daniel and Danielle die? You’ve got five graves. Uliksi kill them all?”

“Daniel fell through the roof of the school doing some repair work. No one had been here longer than a week. His family came for the funeral, then stuck around. They still live here.”

“And Danielle?”

“Overdose. No one knew her family. People tried. Vulture spent a month trying to track down her past, checked every missing person’s report. We had two suicides too. Just this spring. Lovers’ pact. Their families came for their bodies.”

“That’s a shockingly high death rate for a town of two hundred,” I said.

“It is,” Brynn said. “But it’s not because of Uliksi. He only killed Desmond, and now Anchor. That’s it. He’s never needed to kill anyone else, because no one acts up.”

“They’re too afraid.”

“People should be afraid to prey on others,” Brynn said.

She wasn’t wrong.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked.

“Doom is going through her books, trying to figure out how to dismiss Uliksi. The rest of us, we’re just trying to keep her safe a few more days until solstice. Thurs is guarding the house, Vulture’s up on the lookout rock. We should probably swap out with him, let him get to bed. We’ll talk about it all at dinner, probably, figure out the next step.”

Maybe Doomsday was doing more than researching how to dismiss Uliksi. Maybe she was researching summoning something worse. Maybe I should convince Doomsday to leave. The thought came unbidden to my mind—I had no reason to believe a word Eric had said.

“Alright.” I took the last bite of my last tamale. “Show me this lookout rock.”

We left the patio and made our way to the top of the town. A few people, I realized, were packing up into pickup trucks and station wagons and vans. They didn’t look like they were in a hurry. Just in case, you know.

We took a stone path through a yard almost entirely carpeted in flowers. The gray stone was laid artfully, the yellow and white blossoms sending up heady scents. Past the yard’s comparatively lackluster house, the path turned to dirt, with stairs reinforced by logs staked into the earth. I was proud of myself—at the top, a couple hundred feet higher, I was barely out of breath. Brynn, she was still breathing through her nose.

Vulture was up there, sitting on a finger of rock that jutted out from the cliffside that had to be the lookout rock. He was shirtless in the heat, his back covered in blackwork tattoos, wearing only blue jean short shorts. He stood and turned when he heard us. Huge on his chest, black ink against black skin, was a satanic goat’s head. At least it only had two horns. Amongst the linework was thin surgical scarring under his pectoral muscles, where his breasts had been.

“Seen anything?” I asked.

“A couple hundred people who shouldn’t be so happy, going about their lives,” Vulture said. “But everyone I’ve seen has his or her or their ribs attached to his or her or their spines, so it’s not all bad.”

“What do we do if we see anything?” I asked.

“Oh, right,” Vulture said. He unslung a hunting horn from his belt. An honest-to-god hunting horn, like the kind that comes off an animal, with the tip cut off so you can blow through it. “Blow this. Or, you know, call someone. There’s decent cell signal everywhere in town and on this side of the hill. Maybe do both. I would do both.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You’re looking for cops on the highway, large gatherings of undead animals, or I guess in this case very tall figures running around with my no-good ex-boyfriend or especially making their way toward the house.”

“Got it,” I said.

Vulture put his arm around my shoulders. “Did you floss?” he asked.

“What?”

“Flossing is super important. Some people say it’s more important than brushing your teeth. It’s easy to forget to floss at times like this, but you’ve got to live today like you’ll survive till tomorrow.”

He was being serious. Kind of scarily so.

“Yeah,” I said, “I floss.”

“Good!” Vulture said, then turned and started skipping down the hill.

* * *

“You never really answered my question last night,” Brynn said. An hour or so had gone by, and the sun was on us. She was sweating from the heat, and her odor was good. Like, animal instincts good. “What brings you here?”

“You heard what happened to Clay, right?” I asked.

“Not really,” Brynn said. “Just that he’s dead.”

It should have been easier between her and me. We both liked one another, that much was obvious. But for some reason, everything felt off, like we were actors reading from different scripts.

Still, I needed someone to talk to.

“Clay was my best friend,” I said. “About a month ago, he slit his own throat.”

“Fuck,” Brynn said. “That’s hardcore.”

“Yeah, he didn’t fuck around,” I said. “But he also taught me everything I know. About traveling, squatting, politics, all of it.”

“What happened?”

“That’s why I’m here. That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I said. “We used to travel together, starting back when I was a runaway and he was risking some serious felonies by helping me out. He wasn’t into girls, and he wouldn’t have creeped on me anyway, but I’m glad we never had to try to explain that to a judge. Our lives kept intersecting as I got older, and eventually we were some of the only dumb bastards still living out of backpacks. He hit his thirties, and I think he was kinda in a crisis for a while. Then he ended up at this place. He’d write me, say, ‘You gotta come here, Dani. It’s our dream.’ He’d say, ‘It’s the revolution, the real revolution. The one where we take power away from our oppressors, not become them ourselves.’ I was always planning on it, but always had something else going on. No, that’s not it. I always put it off because Clay, he was traveling to try to find home, I was traveling because traveling was home. He wanted something like this, I was afraid of something like this. Someplace that would lure me away from the road. I’m more afraid of growing roots than I’m afraid of anything.”

Brynn put her arm around me. I let her.

“A year ago, we fell out of touch. He didn’t get back to my texts much, didn’t call. Then he left Freedom and slashed his throat in Denver. Did it in a hotel room, on some plastic sheeting he’d pulled from the trash. He left two notes. One was for whoever found him, saying he was sorry about the mess. He left a tip. The other note had my number on it and two sentences: ‘These are the winds that cast us together, these are the winds that cast us apart. They cast as they wish, and we have naught but to follow.’”

I put my head between my knees for a moment, just a moment, took a few deep breaths.

“So yeah,” I said. “I only just left Denver like a week ago. Some of the old gang made it out for the funeral, most didn’t. I called around, reached some people, not everyone. Most people I reached had some excuse or another. Of the ten of us who were there, everyone was too drunk to process with. A few days after the funeral, it was just me and Clay’s mom, shooting the shit for a week until there was no shit left to shoot. Looking around for scraps of him, journals, notebooks, anything. There was nothing.”

“You angry at him?” Brynn asked.

“Nah,” I said. “I’m angry, but I’m not angry at him. Angry at the world, maybe. I might have shown up here looking for someone to take it out on. Find out who’s to blame.”

“You know the answer is ‘no one,’ right?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I know. But it’s something I feel like I’ve got to do. For him, and for his mom.”

I skipped a rock down the hill, listened to it hit other rocks on its way down.

“Why are you all being so nice to me?” I asked. “With everything going on?”

“Clay used to talk about you, did you know that?”

“Yeah, that’s what people have been saying.”

“He talked about you like you were one of the endless spirits yourself. You weren’t a traveler. You were the traveler, in his eyes. And . . . I can’t speak for everyone else here, but I was being nice because I thought you were cute.”

I laughed a little.

“I have this wicked crush on you,” Brynn continued, “but also I’m celibate, at least for now. So I guess I wanted to just get both of those things out there before I get too hung up on you or lead you on. Also there’s a non-zero chance we’re both going to get eaten by a demon sometime soon.”

“I haven’t let anyone in for a while,” I said, after thinking about it. “You’re a total badass and you’re a babe. I mean, you’re everything I should want. But yeah, walls. Lots of walls. I probably can’t be with anyone while I’m like this.”

“A perfect match,” she said.

“Indeed.”

“Want to keep hanging out?” she asked.

“Until we get eaten by a deer.”

FIVE

My second night in Freedom began far more somberly than my first.

It was well after dark by the time Vulture showed up with potatoes and onions and spring greens to be cooked before heading back to the lookout rock. The Days and Brynn were in the living room working through plans, which left me alone to cook.

I was happy to spend some time in the kitchen. It had been a long time since I’d been surrounded by people living the way I wanted to live, and I was almost able to convince myself that things were going to be fine. I’ve got a long history of scraping together little moments of peace in the midst of hardship, and cooking is great way to do that.

I cubed the potatoes and, alongside lots of garlic and oil, set them in a pan in the oven. I went through their spice rack and realized half of what they had had been grown, dried, and chopped there in town. I let myself get lost in the smells of fresh and dried herbs.

The brussels sprouts were from the food bank, but were going to taste amazing, regardless. I cut them up, drizzled them with oil and salt, and put them in a second tray. I’ve made fancier meals in my life, but it still felt good. I set the old-fashioned kitchen timer and went to join everyone else.

“You can’t figure it out?” Brynn asked. She was pacing. She didn’t strike me as the type who worried much, but she was worried.

Even Doomsday looked paler than usual. She leaned back in her easy chair, feigning nonchalance, but her teacup trembled in her hand. “I didn’t lead the ritual. I was blindfolded. I’ve spent all day poring over my books, and there’s nothing there. Nothing.”

“Nothing about dismissing a spirit?” Brynn asked. “Or nothing about Uliksi?”

“Nothing.”

Thursday was standing, statuesque, at his partner’s side. There was certainly more to their relationship than him trying his hardest to guard her, I was sure, but times call for us to fulfill certain roles.

“Will Rebecca know how?” Brynn asked.

“I don’t think so,” Doomsday said. “Vulture went to warn her last night, and how did he put it? She’d gone paranoid, ‘jet-fuel-can’t - melt - steel - beams - level paranoid.’ Made him show her his ribs. Vulture said, and I agree, that you only get that kind of paranoid when you’ve just got no agency at all. When you wish you had control over your life but you just don’t. She and Clay planned the ritual together, I don’t know that either of them would know how to do it alone.”

“What are our options?” Brynn asked.

“If we leave town, take Rebecca with us, will it come after us?” Thursday asked.

“It probably can’t,” Doomsday said. “But it’s a moot point. I won’t leave without cleaning up my own mess.”

“Rebecca’s place is warded too?” Thursday asked. “Uliksi can’t get her? If you and Rebecca stay inside, what’s it going to do? Nothing? Attack the people close to you?”

“I have no idea,” Doomsday said. She set down her tea, untouched, then pulled her feet up onto the chair and hugged her knees.

“Where are Clay’s notebooks?” I asked.

People turned to me, realizing for the first time I was in the room.

“The only thing he liked more than the sound of his own voice was the sight of his own handwriting,” I said. “When he died, he didn’t have any of his journals on him.”

“He lived with Anchor, for a while,” Brynn said. “They broke up last winter, and Clay kind of took it badly. No one knows what they were fighting about, though. For a year and a half, they were inseparable. Then, a week of quarreling and it was over.”

“They were fighting about Uliksi,” Doomsday said. “Anchor worshipped it as it was, didn’t need to know anything more about it. Clay wanted to understand it, so he moved into the basement of that gas station, down by the bridge. Where it lives.”

“He moved in with it?” I asked.

Doomsday nodded.

“So if Clay left notebooks, they’d be there?”

Doomsday nodded.

“We have to go get them. Bring them to Rebecca.”

Doomsday was lost in thought. Slowly, she nodded.

“The deer thing,” I said, “it’s only up during the day, right? Powerless at night? I’ll go now.” When you know you’re going to do something anyway, it’s better not to overthink it. Definitely better not to let your mind linger on the cost/benefit analysis. But going to find his notebooks got me closer to solving both my problems, all at once. I could find out what happened to Clay and I could help this Rebecca person dismiss Uliksi. And hope Doomsday wasn’t going to summon something worse. Something that lived up to her name.

“I’ll take you,” Brynn said.

“I’ll lend you my gun, in case the ghouls are out,” Doomsday said. She crossed the room and went up the stairs. I didn’t want the ghouls to be out.

“Neither of you all have to do this,” Thursday said.

“Yeah we do,” Brynn said.

Doomsday came down the stairs two at a time, her hand on the banister. “It’s gone,” she said. “My gun’s gone.”

Anyone else would have asked Thursday if he’d put it away the night before, but Doomsday didn’t even entertain the possibility that her partner would have handled the firearm irresponsibly.

“Eric,” Brynn said. “During the funeral.”

“No,” Doomsday said, “we saw him the entire time. Except maybe the ten minutes we stepped away.”

“He stayed there the whole time,” I said.

“Eric wouldn’t know we had a gun. Wouldn’t know where it would be. He’s never in the house.”

“Kestrel,” I said.

“Wasn’t he at the funeral the whole time too?” Thursday asked.

I knew I was the most likely third suspect, and what I was about to tell them wasn’t going to help. “No,” I said. “Kestrel wasn’t there at the end.” I told them about meeting Eric, about our conversation in the park, about how Kestrel showed up late. He’d had plenty of time to steal the gun.

It’s not nice to rat people out like that. But it’s also not nice to steal people’s guns.

“Doom,” Thursday said, “can we keep you away from windows? Maybe take Brynn’s room?” He climbed up on the couch to lock the window. Likely, there were bars ready to go over the doors. There’s not a squatter alive who hasn’t been through their house and analyzed all the ways the police might break in. Hell, usually we’ve already broken in once ourselves.

Thursday left to secure the house against human intruders, and Doomsday made her way, defeated, up the stairs. Brynn and I stood in the living room, facing one another, getting ready to head into the night.

The kitchen timer went off. Dinner was ready.

No one was in the mood to enjoy it.

* * *

We walked down the middle of the street, and I was calmer than I thought I’d be. Probably because I had a plan. I had something I was going to do. I wore my pack, emptied but for some essentials. We had no idea how many books we’d be trying to bring with us, so the extra storage was important.

It had been dark for hours, and I scanned the power lines for those creepy ghoul birds. Either they weren’t there or I couldn’t see them.

What I did see were torches. Below us, coming up from the river, people were walking with torches. I counted a dozen specks of flame, dancing through the night. Brynn saw them too.

“Mourners,” she said. “People celebrating Uliksi.”

“What?”

“It’s a tradition,” Brynn said. “Any other night, it wouldn’t be something sinister. Hell, two days ago, I would have been with them.”

“But tonight?”

“It can’t be good.”

She led the way off the street, through a front yard sculpture garden of rusted rebar animals—Uliksi and his ghouls, I recognized now. We took shelter in an ivy-covered, roofless house, and peered back out at the street through what was left of a window in what was left of a kitchen. The torches came around the bend. Nine adults and three children bore them, each with a homemade animal mask. Goats and geese, sparrows and sheep. One of the figures stood head and shoulders above the crowd. They marched past us in silence.

When they’d turned the next bend in the road, we left our shelter and started back down the hill.

* * *

The basement door, I learned, was just off of the river, near the base of the bridge. We scrambled down a steep path, then hopped from rock to rock along the edge of the water. The trees were thick down here. The gibbous moon cast enough light that we could make our way without turning on our headlamps. A breeze brought the earthy smell of the forest, and the river was a white noise that drowned out all other ambient sound.

“What’s in it for you?” Brynn asked as she clambered over a fallen tree. “Why aren’t you just skipping town?”

For some of the last months of Clay’s life, he’d walked this path every morning and night.

“You know there’s a part of me that hates this place?” I asked.

It was rhetorical, of course, and Brynn didn’t answer.

“I’m too stubborn to give up traveling. Clay wasn’t. That same stubbornness is going to carry me through. I came here to find out what happened to him. I’m going to.”

I clambered over a fallen log, the bark digging into my hands.

“And also—and this is clearly the more important reason—could you imagine just leaving? Now? Never learning what was going to happen? The fear of missing out would rip my heart out of my chest as surely as that deer.”

Brynn laughed. I liked when she laughed. We continued on along the water, and I heard the dry heave of ghouled animals. I never would have expected that would be a sound I’d come to recognize. We crouched low, peered into the woods.

“We’re almost there,” Brynn said. She pointed. The base of the gas station went all the way down to the water, and a chain-link fence stood between us and the door, with a simple, unlocked gate. When I focused, I could just make out a dozen silhouettes between us and where we wanted to go. Goats and geese. Squirrels and sheep. In all respects but their lack of organs and ribs, they acted like every barnyard animal I’d ever met—docile, annoying, and fully aware of the sorrow and emptiness of their captive lives.

“They’re awake,” I said. “Should we go around? Go in through the front?”

Brynn shook her head. “The trapdoor to the basement is welded shut.”

“Should we, I don’t know, herd them somewhere? Get them away from the door?”

Brynn, still crouching, flicked open her extendable baton.

I sighed, then extended mine. The weight felt good in my hand. Most days, a baton made me think I could take on the world. That night, though, I wasn’t so sure it was going to be enough. I wouldn’t fight a single living goat by choice. Let alone an undead one with all its friends.

Brynn stood back up straight and walked right toward our destination.

“Always afraid, never a coward,” I mumbled to myself. My blood started racing. I stood up, tightened all the straps on my pack, and followed.

Animal eyes turned toward us with mute curiosity, which turned to malice as we tried to rush past them. A silent mess of geese got underfoot and lunged for my hands. I started swinging. It wasn’t animal abuse. They were dead already. Some of the ones I hit didn’t get up again.

Brynn was almost to the gate when the goat ran at me. Someone or something had sheared off the beast’s horns, presumably before Uliksi had stolen the creature’s rib cage. Not an easy life, or unlife or whatever. I pulled back and swung from the hip, like a one-handed batter, and hit the goat in the skull with all my strength.

I must have grown up watching too many zombie movies. Hitting that thing’s skull was like hitting a boulder, and I probably hurt my hand more than I hurt the goat. Still, the blow seemed to have stopped its charge. It was still in my way. It tried to bleat, but had no lungs.

I heard a low rumble like distant thunder and turned in time to see a demon bull crash out of the trees and barrel toward us.

“Oh fuck,” I said, or Brynn said. I started thrashing at the dumb goat in front of me with the baton. It bit my hand and I dropped the weapon. I dove over it, but my backpack destroyed my attempts at a smooth acrobatic roll and I landed on my back.

Brynn helped me to my feet, and we were through the gate. I swung it shut, dropped the latch, and was knocked off my feet as the bull slammed into the chain link. The fence post bent to a forty-five-degree angle, and the beast backed up to charge again.

I got up again, clutching my bleeding right hand, and we stumbled in through the open door to the basement and slammed it behind us as though that pitch-dark room offered us safety.

We switched on our headlamps. It was a single, large room, like any basement in any shitty house anywhere. A water heater and a furnace and pipes stood out from one wall, and a box spring and mattress lay on the floor in the near corner, with simple gray sheets and a pile of ratty old comforters. A milk crate served as a bedside table, and a short stack of books stood atop. Against the far wall, a bloodred deer with three antlers lay sleeping upon a knee-high pile of rib bones. As soon as my headlamp flashed across Uliksi, I put my hand over my light. But the demon didn’t stir. With the sun below the horizon, he likely couldn’t move at all.

Bile rose in my throat. The bones Uliksi slept on weren’t the pale white of long-dead, sun-bleached corpses. They were gray and yellow and gristly. Some of them, I surmised, were human.

“Let me see your hand,” Brynn whispered. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s fine,” I said. I hadn’t really looked to tell if that was true. But I didn’t want to look. Not until I was somewhere safe. It wasn’t bleeding horrendously. I wrapped my wounded hand with the bandanna from my back pocket, tight enough to keep pressure on the bite.

“Don’t want you turning into a weregoat or something though.” Brynn laughed. It was a nervous laugh, probably because, well, I don’t think either of us knew for certain if that was an actual possibility.

“I’ll be fine,” I whispered.

I went to the books beside Clay’s bed while Brynn stood watch. There was a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the copy I’d given him. I opened the front page, saw my own handwriting.

Clay, maybe you’ll get as much out of this as I did.

Under it, he’d written back: Danielle, I think at the end of it, you’re more Nemo than I.

It took all my presence of mind not to drop the book. Had he known I would come hunting after his ghost, and end up looking through his bedside reading? More likely, he’d just written the note absentmindedly. But for fuck’s sake, what did I know about the world anymore?

The next book was history, something about the Kronstadt rebellion—obscure Russian history, when the Bolsheviks decided to kill all the anarchist sailors. I flipped through. No notes to me, but here and there he’d highlighted passages.

Last, a spiral-bound notebook. The first couple pages were filled with some college kid’s English Literature notes. A decade back, Clay had shown me that trick. Punk’s Christmas, he called it—when the school year ended, college kids threw out everything from unopened food to art supplies to furniture to computers to, obviously, notebooks. Head on over to the dumpsters, pick up anything you need. After the rote transcription of some boring lecture in a stranger’s hand, however, I saw a page with Clay’s handwriting on it. I threw the books into my backpack.

From outside the open door, I heard birds. Dawn. Shit.

Brynn and I had the same thought at the same time, and we grabbed one another and bolted across the room to crouch behind the furnace. A row of small windows lined the top of one wall. The first hint of color and light came through them a moment later, and Uliksi stirred.

The sheer unreality of the situation took off the worst of my anxiety. Brynn held my good hand so tight it hurt almost as bad as the one the goat had bitten, and we watched Uliksi rise to face the day. For all the world, he moved like a regular deer—graceful but nervous. If he knew we were there, he made no sign. Instead, he headed for the door and was gone.

We crouched in the encroaching dawn, our hands locked together, our breathing as quiet as we could make it, for a full two minutes before we left to find Rebecca’s tree house.

SIX

A squatter’s life is ruled by darkness. Breaking into buildings, digging through trash, even just sneaking up onto rooftops to see the city—all those things are easier and safer to do after dark. But the sun was up as we marched along and then away from the river. The day before summer solstice, it was going to be up for a long while still.

I trained my eyes on the woods for movement. Walking in the forest, you don’t see most of the animals. Only once, I saw something, somewhere in the branches above us. Could have been a squirrel, or a bird. Hell, could have been a mountain lion. Better a living mountain lion than an undead squirrel.

After twenty minutes along the riverbank, it was an hour’s hike up a ravine. There was another way to Rebecca’s place, a path that ran up over the top of the hill, but it would have taken us through town. We needed to get Clay’s notes to Rebecca so she could figure out how to perform the ritual, and we couldn’t risk running into Uliksi or Eric. Brynn led us unerringly with a compass and a laminated U.S. Geological Survey map. Having a destination—Rebecca’s tree house—and an idea of how to get there were about all I had to prop up my waning courage.

While we walked, I let myself wonder more about Eric and Kestrel. They said Doomsday and the rest, they were going to summon something worse.

I’d play it by ear, I decided. Listen to Rebecca. Decide how much to trust her.

We stopped only once, to pick at the previous night’s dinner from Tupperware. Brynn had a few bottles of cold coffee, and caffeine did its best to replace the adrenaline that had been slowly draining out of my system since we’d left the basement.

“I love coffee,” she said, smiling. “I know it’s banal to say. I know I’m addicted. I know everyone loves it. I don’t care. There’s only a small handful of things in this world that make me happy, and coffee is one of them.”

“What’s another?” I asked. We were both slightly delirious.

She thought about it for a while. “Shit like ‘feeling useful’ or ‘not paying rent,’ right? But I’ll stick with weaknesses. Romance novels. I fucking love trashy romance. The straighter the better. The worse the politics, the better. I’ll just eat that shit up.”

“That’s awesome,” I said.

“Your turn,” she said. We capped the coffee, started back up the ravine.

“I want to say ‘horizons,’ because as often as not, the chance to get over the closest one is what gets me up in the morning. But you told me about romance novels, so I’ll do you one better. Fan fiction. Erotic, queer fan fiction. I don’t even care what fandom. Give me someone getting it on with a werewolf or a seahorse-unicorn or whatever and I’ll be happy.”

“Really?”

“I read it on my phone,” I said.

“You know I’m going to have to make fun of you about this, right?”

“You won’t be the first one,” I said.

“I’m going to make fun of you about it, but I still want you to read me some of it aloud.”

“As soon as we get back to phone signal,” I promised.

God, my wiring was all kinds of fucked up. For the rest of the hike, going crazy from lack of sleep, I was happier than I’d been in months.

The tree house was a beautiful little witch shack held a full thirty feet aloft between four narrow pines. Its siding had been blowtorched to black during the finishing process, and there was one porch on the side of the house and another on the roof. The windows were mix-matched and erratically placed. A rope-and-wood ladder dangled down, inviting us up. A black stovepipe thrust out and up from the side, and on the east slope of the hill like that I knew it got a full view of dawn. I was in love.

“Rebecca!” Brynn had her tattooed hands up over her mouth to project her voice. “Rebecca!”

“Maybe she’s in town?” I asked, after another few fruitless minutes.

“You heard Vulture. She’s not going anywhere for a while. There’s a ward stone, there. Keeps Uliksi out.” Brynn pointed to a single white stone, the size of my head, a circle subtly etched into its face. “Not sure why the ladder is down, though.”

She tested the ladder. It held her weight, so she made her way up. I followed.

The house was even more gorgeous up close. Rebecca had done an amazing job, down to details like filigree carved into the door frame and an ouroboros painted on the door.

Brynn knocked. No answer.

“Rebecca!” she shouted.

“I don’t think she’s here,” I said, pointing to a padlock that held the door shut.

“Shit!” Brynn said, stomping her foot on the porch and shaking the trees we were attached to. She went to the nearest window, peered in. She fell back, trembling. If it weren’t for the railing she might have fallen off the porch.

I looked. The sun lit the floor in big squares where it came in through the windows, and in one of those squares was a dead woman. She lay on her side with her eyes open, her mouth open. She was so small, almost childlike, but I could see in the lines on her face she’d lived at least a decade longer than me.

I knew the hard way that when faced with a corpse, it’s up to the person who didn’t know the now-dead person to handle things. Clay had done it for me, once, when we found Agnes OD’d. I’d done it for him, a year later, when it’d been Sammy with his guts on the wrong side of a knife wound.

“Can you pick the lock?” Brynn asked. “Clay always said you were good at shit like that.”

“Probably,” I said. I pulled a screwdriver from my pack, a large Phillips head with a rubber grip. I took my shirt off, wrapped it around my good hand, and jabbed at the corner of the window to break the glass. It broke with that strange thud that surprises me every time. Nothing like the sound you hear in movies. You’ve got to break glass against glass to get a noise like that.

I reached through and unlocked the window. Opened it, stepped inside. Brynn came in directly after. Some people respond to crisis by shutting down or running. Some people respond to crisis emotionally, which is probably the healthiest way. Myself, I handled crisis by shoving fear and sadness and worry down as far in my gut as I could. It’s never nice when all that nasty shit comes up as trauma later, but the practice has kept me alive.

Brynn, she was made of the same stuff as me, maybe sterner. She went directly to the corpse, started searching her friend for wounds.

They weren’t hard to find. Four bullet holes marked her sleeveless white blouse. All were on her torso—two on her chest, one near her hip, one in between.

“Do you know anything about forensics?” Brynn asked.

“No,” I said.

“Neither do I. But I know enough about shooting to tell you that’s a pretty fuck-off bad shot grouping.”

While Brynn saw to Rebecca, I scoured the rest of the one-room shack. A mattress lay on the floor in the corner. A bookshelf was filled to overfull with dried and tinctured herbs in jars and dropper bottles. Plantain and ragwort and feverfew, plus flowers and leaves I couldn’t recognize, hung drying from lines stretched across the space. The wood-burning stove was cold. Since it was June, that didn’t tell me much.

An antique desk—the only piece of furniture in the room not hand-built from scrap lumber—took up most of one wall, under a bank of windows. A ladder led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Something like a dozen well-carved wooden figurines of deer littered the desktop, each no larger than my palm. They were stained bloodred. A piece of cardboard ripped from a case of beer served as a cutting mat and a staining mat, it looked like, with silhouettes of dark stain and gathered chips of wood. The carving tools themselves were scattered all over the floor.

Rebecca’s corpse was close to where I stood. My mind wouldn’t forget that fact for long enough to concentrate on anything else.

Bullet holes pierced the plywood along the back wall. “The bullets went out the back,” I said, running my fingers along the splintered wood.

“Who the fuck?” Brynn said.

“Eric,” I said.

“We don’t know that.”

“Yeah we do,” I said. “Who the hell else? Kestrel, maybe. But I bet it was Eric.”

Brynn closed Rebecca’s eyes, then kept searching the body. “She has a knife in her hand. A carving knife.”

Tears welled up, catching me by surprise. Here was a woman, cut down by a man afraid of her power. She’d fought back, knife versus gun.

“I never got to meet her,” I said. “I’ve got the feeling I really missed out.”

“Yeah,” Brynn said.

“I want to kill him,” I said. It was true. A simple thing. A clear epiphany. I wanted to kill Eric for killing this woman. Even though it could have been Kestrel. I wanted to kill Eric for killing her.

“Uliksi might do it for you,” Brynn said.

“Imagine his thinking,” I said. “He’s got to have thought this through. Killing Rebecca means saving Uliksi, means he’s doomed himself to be killed by Uliksi. Imagine being so sure of the righteousness of your cause that you’re willing to sacrifice your own ideals to achieve them.”

“Every politician ever,” Brynn said. “Every authoritarian communist.”

“He killed her in cold blood,” I said. I couldn’t think straight. “He killed her.”

She came up and wrapped her arms around me, and I buried my head in her chest and my anger turned into something like sorrow. I cried. Standing over the body of her friend, she supported me.

“We’ve got to get back,” I said, pulling away.

I stepped out of the tree house. The air outside was fresh, cleansing. Brynn joined me, and I went to the ladder and looked down.

Uliksi stood silent, staring up at us from the ground.

* * *

There was a hammock on the porch on the roof. Thick cotton rope held our weight and our feet dangled over the edge like we were teenagers on a date instead of squatters hiding from a demon and a corpse.

“It can’t stay there all day,” I said.

“I had a friend in town, about six months back. You know how you think you know somebody and then they just do something awful? Beat their partner, abuse someone, something like that?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So this guy I lived with, my friend Greg. I liked him alright. He was friendly, hardworking. Really polite. His partner, Sam, no one liked her. She used to throw shit-fits at general assembly, hoard booze from the Everything for Everyone, that kind of thing. She worked hard too, I guess, but I don’t know, she just rubbed everyone the wrong way. She and Greg had been together maybe three months, when one night they were drunk and he raped her. I don’t know if he thought he raped her, but that never really matters. She didn’t want to have sex with him that night, but he did it anyway.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t matter what he thinks about it.”

“The next day, the very next day, before she’s even told anyone, Greg walks outside our house and there’s Uliksi, just standing on the porch. Just looking at him. He goes the fuck back inside and he waits. Uliksi’s out there, not moving, until sunset. The rest of us come and go, but that fucking deer was just waiting for him, watching him.”

“What happened?”

“As soon as night fell, Sam drove him up to Minneapolis. Kicked him out of the car and said if she ever saw him again she’d kill him herself.”

I whistled.

“Moral of the story is that Uliksi most definitely can stay there all day.”

“We’re not predators,” I said.

“No, but we’re hunting for a way to dismiss it, aren’t we?”

“I can see why you all kind of like having it around, though, with a story like that.”

“I’m not going to tell you it hasn’t been nice,” Brynn said. “Up until the point where it wasn’t.”

“I’m always so quick to resort to violence,” I said. “I’m not ashamed of that. I think it’s necessary sometimes. But damn, it’d be nice to be able to just quit violence cold turkey. Let a spell take care of it for me.”

“There’s no magic bullet though,” Brynn said.

“Never was, never will be,” I agreed.

It should have been a beautiful day. It was warm enough that the breeze felt good, but not hot enough to be uncomfortable.

“Fuck,” I said, “how’re we going to dismiss it now?”

“I guess it’s up to Doomsday.”

“Yeah.”

We were halfway up to the canopy, and I could see forest and river and prairie in the distance. More herbs hung drying all around us, and their scents combined to be just short of overwhelming. More important, Brynn sat next to me, all worked up to sweating from everything, and her smell was overwhelming.

She had her arm around the small of my waist, mine was around her back.

“Let me see your hand,” she said.

“No, it’s fine.” The bandanna was still wrapped tight around the wound. My palm still hurt, but I wasn’t ready to look at it. There was an awful lot of shit going on just then that I wasn’t ready to let myself think too much about.

“God, I wish you’d shown up a month ago or something,” Brynn said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’d be nice to get to know you proper,” Brynn said. “Instead of like this.”

“You don’t like demon-hunting with me?” I asked.

Brynn giggled. I looked at her, and she must have gotten self-conscious about giggling, because she started giggling harder, covering her face and laughing. She fell onto her side in the hammock, and I had my arms around her, and I started laughing too.

“What a fucking day,” I said.

“What a fucking day,” she agreed.

* * *

We both fell asleep like that, curled up on the hammock. I dreamt about jail.

A few hours later, I broke out of dream jail by waking up, but I was still trapped. I peered over the edge of the tree house roof, and Uliksi peered right back at me. The bull was beside him. That woke me up all the way, and I looked to the trees around me.

Squirrels and birds, all undead, sat silent on the branches not ten feet from my head. All staring at me with their glossy eyes. Like as not, they’d been there for hours already, and they didn’t seem to want to attack me. Just watch me. Just bore into me.

Brynn was snoring, her head craned back. I trusted her, I realized. Everything around me was terrifying, and none of it made sense. But Brynn seemed to accept it, and I was learning to accept her. Freedom ran on trust. I needed to trust someone.

I flipped through Clay’s notebook. His handwriting only graced twelve pages. On each he’d written the same single line:

The only way out is through.

The last page had another line, underneath the first:

What hand dare seize the fire?

He’d always been saying shit like that. When you needed advice, he was always there, saying something needlessly cryptic but reasonably wise. I wish he’d listened to his own advice, though. I wish he’d kept going. I wish he’d found his way through.

Sitting there then, with the sun dappled through the leaves and needles of the forest, I tried to piece out what had happened to him.

At his funeral, I’d thought he’d given up because there wasn’t any future in riding the rails. But that wasn’t it. It couldn’t be it. That was me seeing more of me in him than there really was. Motherfucker had spent fifteen years looking for the hobo utopia, the big rock candy mountain, until he just gave up and made the place. Then he’d defended it, with the witchcraft he knew. Then he’d run away. Then he’d done Uliksi’s work all on his own and ended his own life. Why?

Maybe because he’d been exiled from paradise by a beast of his own making. Because he’d decided Freedom was home, and he couldn’t come back. That’s what having a home will do to you. Maybe.

I dropped the notebook onto the hammock. Brynn woke up.

“‘The only way out is through,”” I said.

“Pardon?”

I showed Brynn the pages.

“We did all this, and we’ve got nothing. Nothing from Clay, nothing from Rebecca, and we can’t get home to warn anyone there’s a killer on the loose.”

“That’s funny,” Brynn said. “That’s not the quote.”

“Quote?”

“‘He says the best way out is always through. / And I agree to that, or in so far / As that I can see no way out but through—’ It’s from a Robert Frost poem. ‘A Servant to Servants.’”

“It’s a true statement I guess,” I said. “But doesn’t do us any good.”

“He got the other one closer. ‘What the hand dare seize the fire?’ ‘The Tyger,’ by William Blake.”

“That line mean anything to you?” I asked.

“Hell, it means even less than the Robert Frost.”

“Clay moved into the gas station because he was studying Uliksi, right? Trying to learn how to dismiss it?”

“Yeah.”

“And the only thing he wrote down,” I said, “in all that time, was some misquoted poetry.”

“I guess.”

“Here, come downstairs with me.”

I went to the hatch in the roof, opened it, and climbed down the ladder. The house stank of death, leaving us gagging, and I opened all the windows that could be opened. We tried our best not to stare at the dead woman on the floor. For a few hours more, we just had to keep ourselves from thinking too hard about her.

“These,” I said, pointing to the twelve deer figurines on the desk. “What do you make of these?”

“She was obsessed,” Brynn said. “Half the town is obsessed though.” She held up her hand, showing me her Uliksi tattoo.

I picked up one of the red figures and, on a whim, lined it up to the dark outlines of stain on the cardboard that marked where it’d been painted. I did the same with the rest, a sort of simple jigsaw puzzle. They formed a circle, each facing clockwise. The figure at one o’clock was on its side, and the figure at twelve stood over it, its mouth down by the other’s ribs. Like it was killing it. Like it was eating its heart.

“I don’t know what it means,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence though, Clay writing twelve pages and Rebecca carving twelve figurines.”

“No, I don’t suppose it is.”

“Oh,” I said. “Twelve pages. Twelve figures. Twelve months. Solstice to solstice. It’s just telling us our only chance is tomorrow. Which we already knew.”

“Which we already knew,” she agreed.

“Hooray.”

SEVEN

For an hour at least, Brynn cried in the hammock about the death of her friend as I tried to comfort her. The sun set behind the hill after an interminable day, and Uliksi ran off into the gloaming, his guardian bull keeping pace alongside. The birds remained, watching us with their dead eyes, but they made no move to follow us as we went down the ladder and headed for town. We were hungry and thirsty, and there weren’t really words left for us to say.

By the time we made it as far as the lookout rock, it was full dark and every light in town was on. The streets below us were swarming with a commotion of lanterns, headlamps, and torches. Brynn broke into a run, and I went after her down the hill, taking the steps two at a time.

The first house we reached was a run-down split level. A pickup truck was idling out front, and a family was loading bags and boxes onto its bed.

“What’s going on?” Brynn asked.

A white woman in her midthirties set down a laundry bag full of clothes and put her hands to her head to rub her temples. “Brynn, where’ve you been?”

“Out in the woods. What’s going on?”

“We’re leaving,” she said. “Everyone’s leaving. The cops are on their way.”

“What?”

“That punk kid, Eric, the tall one. He said he went into town to cool off. Says he saw more cops in the parking lot at Walmart than he could count. The manager at the food bank, that old guy with the ponytail, the one who likes us. He told Eric the cops are setting up to raid.”

“He’s lying,” I said.

“What?” The woman looked at me for the first time.

“He’s fucking lying,” I said. I looked at Brynn. “He’s just trying to get everyone panicked. So that we leave Doomsday alone.”

“I don’t know,” Brynn said.

The next house down was overgrown and covered in graffiti. Vulture and a stranger were walking out of it, each with a sack of concrete over their shoulder.

Brynn and I saw them and started running.

“Brynn! Danielle!” Vulture loped over like he wasn’t holding fifty pounds. “You’re alright!”

“What the fuck?” Brynn asked.

“The cops—” Vulture started.

“We heard,” Brynn said.

“Who’s watching Doomsday?” I asked.

“Thursday is,” Vulture said. “The rest of us are getting ready. Where’s Rebecca?”

“She’s dead,” I said. Doomsday might end up that way too, and soon. She was the only one left who could dismiss Uliksi, and Eric knew it. Brynn stayed behind to help Vulture, but I ran down the hill.

Barricades of lumber, brick, and trash blocked the street at every bend, with only small gaps still open to let through the vehicles of those who sought escape. Lengths of rebar thrust forth from anchors long ago embedded in the concrete. Freedom, Iowa, had been preparing for this night since its first day. There was a fire in the air, a certain spark that’s only found in the otherworldly calm of conflict.

But it was all wrong. It was all a distraction. The cops weren’t coming. I was sure of it. I ran downhill, my feet slapping on the pavement. I ran past anxious people, excited people, terrified people. I wasn’t any of those things. I was furious.

The largest mass of lights and people was by the bridge, the most logical choke point. Probably, people there were getting ready to delay the police long enough for Doomsday’s ritual and for everyone else to escape through the woods. That’s how I would have planned it.

I reached the block with Doomsday’s house, but the place was unlit. It looked abandoned.

No, not abandoned. A hooded figure crouched over in the side yard. The ward stone. Whoever it was, they were pulling up the ward stone.

My fast-beating heart, my ragged breath, and the rhythm of my feet were all I could hear. My legs burned and ached. I could feel my pulse in my wounded hand. My lungs had long since given up complaint. Anger alone fueled my body.

“Hey!” I shouted, which was all I could get out between my failing breaths. “Hey!”

The figure stood up just as I started up the embankment. They turned toward me, a crowbar in one hand. You shouldn’t fuck with someone who has a crowbar. I launched myself toward them, a desperate tackle.

The crowbar struck my left shoulder. I was lucky, I suppose, since likely as not they’d aimed for my head. The claw of it split my skin and sent blood into the air. My antagonist went down, me on top. I spun around behind them, got their neck in the crook of my right arm, and applied pressure. A sleeper hold, choking off the blood to their brain. Useful self-defense for someone as small as me. They fell unconscious.

It wasn’t Eric. It was Kestrel.

The white ward stone lay cracked, open to a black geode. The house was no longer protected.

“Shit.” I stood up. He wouldn’t be out for long, just ten seconds or so. I needed something to tie him up with.

The world exploded. Sort of. It felt like it at the time. It was a gunshot, really, but it was louder than noises have any right to be, and the bullet crashed into the wall of the house not two feet from my head.

“Get down!” I heard. I didn’t register the command, though, so I didn’t follow it.

Another shot, this time from behind me. Gunshots are kind of like a nonverbal way of communicating “get down,” and after that second shot, I listened. I dropped down next to Kestrel. If he was conscious, he wasn’t showing it.

I might have killed him.

I’d never killed anyone before.

It turned out that I didn’t very much like the thought of having killed someone. It bothered me more than I’d expected.

Then a rapid back-and-forth of bullets, and I saw the squat figure of Thursday on the porch, calmly firing in a two-handed grip. A figure ran off toward the tree line. A tall figure. An Eric Tall-As-Fuck figure, more accurately, his punk-rock spikes gleaming in the muzzle flash as he fired wildly behind himself.

I staggered to my feet to go after him. Then my brain turned itself back on, and I dropped to the ground again because there might be bullets up there and because I’d just taken the pointy end of a crowbar to my central mass, so what the fuck did my body know about still working?

“Uliksi is the revolution.” It was Kestrel talking, his mouth right next to my head. “Uliksi is the lamb that will slaughter the lion. Doomsday is going to end it. Doomsday is going to end the revolution.”

At least I hadn’t killed him.

I was going to add it to my bucket list. Right next to “Visit Antarctica” and “Torch something evil” was going to be “Make it through the whole of my life without killing anyone.”

“You’re a fucking wannabe,” he whispered conspiratorially, like he was imparting the wisdom of ages. “You act like you’re a revolutionary, but you’re a fucking poser.”

On the other hand, maybe it would have been okay if I’d killed him. It wasn’t like I was probably going to make it to Antarctica, either.

I staggered to my feet, then almost fell back over when the report of a pistol exploded in my ear. Thursday was next to me, his arm around my back, supporting me. “Get inside,” Thursday said. “Jesus, Danielle, get the fuck in the house.”

Kestrel was gone. I saw him running after Eric. What kind of asshole calls someone a poser?

* * *

“No one’s answering,” Doomsday said. All of her composure had been stripped away by days of stress and fear. Her hair was a wild tangle, and she clutched her phone in a shaking fist. She hadn’t taken it well when I’d told her what Kestrel had done to the ward stone. She’d taken it even worse when I told her what had happened to Rebecca.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub, in my sports bra, while Thursday cleaned the wound on my shoulder.

“They’re mixing and pouring cement,” Thursday said. “Would you answer your phone while you’re mixing and pouring cement?”

“Yes,” Doomsday snapped. “I’d answer my goddammed phone.”

“This is pretty bad, Dani,” Thursday said, trying to mop at the blood that dribbled down my chest.

“Danielle,” I said. “For fuck’s sake my name is Danielle.”

“Like, I can clean it out, and if you want I’ve got a sewing needle. I’ve never given no one stitches. Never even read a book about it. The basic idea seems kind of simple, right?”

Clay could stitch a wound.

“I mean, you’re not, like, bleeding out or something. I think. I’m at least as worried about the blunt trauma as the cut.”

“Your confidence is really inspiring,” I said.

“Yeah, never signed up to be a doctor. I’m just doing what needs doing, okay?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Your hand alright?”

I still had the bandanna tied tight around my right hand. The pain was a dull throb, but nothing compared to how bad my left shoulder hurt.

“It’s fine.”

“Come on, come on,” Doomsday said, praying to the room with her phone to her ear.

“You ever read The Man Who Was Thursday?” Thursday asked.

“What?”

“I’m trying this bedside manner thing. You’re looking pretty pale, even for you. I’m trying to keep you thinking about something else.”

“No, I’ve never read it.”

“It’s where I got my name,” Thursday said. “It was written about anarchists, like a hundred years ago. There are these seven anarchist leaders, each named after a day of the week. And Thursday, well, the first Thursday, he’s the only one of them who, as it turns out, wasn’t a cop the whole time. You know how the first Thursday gets it in the end? Well, actually, the beginning?”

“How?” I asked.

“He’s so committed to his ideals of anti-oppression that he refuses to drink milk. But since he’s, you know, British, he has to drink something white I guess in his tea or whatever, so he drinks powdered chalk all the time, and one day it kills him.”

“Huh,” I said.

“No, seriously, it’s hilarious. That shit was making fun of vegans before vegan was a word.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Anyway, Doomsday named me after that book. She told me I was the only person in the world she knew wasn’t a cop. Undercovers, right, they’re lying anyway, so they’ll swear up and down that they’re God’s gift to revolutionary politics. Me, I was really set on this ‘no politics’ thing for a long-ass time. Now I’m a damn third-generation Central American leftist, and I didn’t even want to be a leftist at all. Guess my dad would be proud.”

“Alright.”

“Hey, look at that, the bleeding stopped,” he said.

I smiled.

“No, now it’s started again. Shit. Don’t smile.”

The bathtub was slowly filling with bloody toilet paper.

“God. God. God fucking . . .” Doomsday put her phone down carefully on the porcelain sink, barely containing her rage. “Clay’s dead. Anchor’s dead. Rebecca’s dead.”

“You’re not dead, and you’re not going to be dead,” Thursday said.

“The wards are down. I don’t know how to dismiss Uliksi. And now? Now the fucking cops are coming.”

“The cops aren’t coming,” I said. “Eric, he just said that to stir up the town. You’ve been here for two years. The cops aren’t coming tonight. If they were evicting us, you’d have heard about it before tonight. Probably been warned to clear out. Not unless the cops were serving a warrant for something serious.”

Thursday and Doomsday looked at one another.

“Someone’s got a warrant,” I said.

“Kestrel knew,” Doomsday said.

“Yeah, Kestrel would have known,” Thursday agreed.

“Knew what?”

“The cops are coming for Doomsday,” Thursday said.

“What?”

“I used to live in Alaska,” Doomsday said. “I was married for fifteen years. It was good for a while. But I couldn’t get pregnant, and my husband got worse and worse. I shot him. He deserved it. It wasn’t self-defense, not in the immediate sense, not in the way I could have proved in court.”

“Jesus,” I said.

Doomsday took a deep breath. “Neighbors heard the shots, I guess. Sheriffs showed up. I tried to talk to them. Tried to make them understand. They didn’t understand.”

“Damn,” I said. “You shot them too.”

“I wasn’t going to prison,” Doomsday said. “Not for that motherfucker.”

“Okay, so maybe cops are coming,” I said.

“Kestrel must have snitched me out. I never would have thought.”

“Fucking hell,” Thursday said. “It’s almost like you can’t summon otherworldly beings into existence, let them loose on your enemies, and set up a culture of worship around them without people getting all crazy.”

“You were in favor of summoning him,” Doomsday said.

“I know,” Thursday said. “Hell, I’m still glad we did it. It was worth a shot.”

“I’ve got until dawn to figure out how to unsummon him,” Doomsday said.

“‘What hand dare seize the fire?’” I said.

“Pardon?”

I told them what I’d learned from Clay’s notebook, which wasn’t much.

Doomsday put her hands to her temples. “I think you read the signs right, Clay’s misquoted poetry and Rebecca’s figurines. Solstice to solstice. But how? How do we dismiss him? And with the police there, as likely as not.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, “the cops. If Uliksi is around cops . . .”

“He’ll slaughter them,” Doomsday said. “And everyone who’s ever lived here will wind up running or in prison.”

“I don’t want to be on the run,” I said.

“No one does,” Doomsday said.

“Then what’s the plan?” I asked.

“We somehow get everyone out before the cops show up, somehow unsummon Uliksi before the river runs red, and somehow evade the remaining police.”

“Somehow,” Thursday added.

“All the while avoiding Eric and Kestrel.”

“I would go with stop more than avoid,” Thursday said. “But yeah.”

“What was the line?” Doomsday asked suddenly. “‘What hand dare seize the fire?’”

I nodded.

Doomsday got a glint in her eye I’d never seen before. It was frightening. “Maybe Uliksi took down Anchor for the same reason I took down those sheriffs. Self-defense. Maybe we summoners can control him. Maybe I can turn him on Eric. Hell, after that . . . when we summoned him in the first place, we named these hills, this river, as his territory. If I can renew the summoning, I can name a whole lot more than that. I can name the world.”

“‘The only way out is through’?” Thursday asked.

“‘What hand dare seize the fire,’” Doomsday agreed.

“No,” I said. I didn’t want to fight with them. I just wanted to go home. If only I had a home.

“What?”

“I’ve been through way too much shit for you to switch sides on me now,” I said. “And I know what the other side looks like. Eric, Kestrel, all of them. They say they want to make the world better, but they’re just supplanting one authority for another and they’ll fucking murder anyone who tries to stop them, because that’s what power does to people. I believe in a messy, imperfect world where we just, collectively or individually, figure things out. So no, I’m not going to let you switch sides.”

“Then what do we do?”

“I don’t fucking know,” I said. “We’ll figure something out.”

Brynn and Vulture came in, slamming the door behind them and startling all of us. Brynn took the gun from Thursday, knelt with one knee on the dining room chair, and started reloading the mag.

“How many bullets do you think Eric shot?” I asked. “Four in Rebecca, and it had to be at least three more outside the house. How many can its mag hold?”

“Can’t think like that,” Brynn said. “Bullet counting is some next-level shit. You see someone with a gun, it’s loaded. Same as you treat your own gun like it’s loaded even when it’s not.”

“Still,” I said.

“Still nothing, Danielle. You see a gun, it’s got a bullet in it ready to shoot.”

Vulture, for his part, took over treating my shoulder. “You want stitches?” he asked.

“What are my options?”

“I can stitch you up, and I’ll probably do a decent job but not a great job. I can not stitch you up, maybe hit it with butterfly bandages and splint your shoulder to keep you from moving it and reopening the wound. Or you do what you should do, which is get someone to take you out of here, get you to an emergency room.”

“What would you do?” I asked.

He bit his lip. “If I were you, just come to town chasing after your old friend’s ghost? I’d use the excuse to cut out. You’re not in any shape to stand behind a barricade, you’re not in any shape to go to jail. There’s no shame in leaving now.”

He was right, of course. I was a liability. Still, just leaving? After all of that?

“But what I’d do if I were me,” Vulture continued, “is stick around and see what goes down.”

I watched Brynn through the open bathroom door as she loaded an extra mag. Dozens of cops were en route. A demon slept nearby. I’d seen two corpses already, and the wards were down. I’d already been bitten by an undead goat, crowbarred by a fanatic, and shot at by an asshole.

“Fuck it,” I said. “I’ll go down fighting.”

Vulture put his fingers to his lips and hopped with joy. Then he took out his phone, took a photo of my wound.

“I’ve always wanted to stitch someone up,” he said. “I’ll do a before and after for Instagram.”

* * *

It turned out he’d done it plenty of times on dogs, as part of an animal rescue operation in New Orleans. I was long past the point of nervousness, regardless, but he did a fine job.

“You alright about Kestrel?” I asked, as he was fussing with the last stitch.

“Well, I thought I loved him. But I don’t anymore.”

“As easy as that?”

“As simple as that. Not easy.”

He didn’t want to talk about it, and I realized I shouldn’t risk upsetting a man who was in the process of reassembling my body with needle and thread. When he was done with my shoulder, he unwrapped the bandanna around my bitten hand. I don’t know what I’d expected—maybe blood, maybe open wounds or teeth marks. Instead, my skin was whole, already healed. But my hand was mottled with the pale gray of overcooked steak, not the white of scar or the pink of new skin. It hurt like it was still healing, though, and I had the sudden fear that the pain would never stop.

Then I remembered the rest of my situation, and honestly my hand didn’t seem like the worst of my problems.

Vulture tied a spare T-shirt around my arm as a sling and chastised me not to move my arm, and I stood up. As a group, we made our way out the front door, heading for the bridge and the relative safety of the crowd.

The moon hung heavy and low on the horizon, and I focused on my breathing. Reminded myself just how tough I was. How not close to panic I was.

We hadn’t made it halfway down the block when cop cars poured out of the woods in a cacophony of red and blue light. The crowd on the bridge overturned a school bus, and it began.

EIGHT

Police raids are always at like 4 a.m. or some shit. Always after the witching hour, when they think everyone’s not only asleep but going to be groggy as hell when they wake up. It’s honestly pretty smart. There were a couple hours of night left, but only a couple hours. None of us were sleeping.

We’d had enough warning that most of the town had cleared out. The fifteen or so who remained were there for the same purpose we were: to keep Doomsday safe long enough for her ritual, whatever it was going to be. Safe from the police, safe from Eric.

Most of us were veterans of riots and demonstrations across the country. It wasn’t going to be a morning of civil disobedience, however. The police were there in force to arrest a cop killer, and we had no way of knowing if they’d come in with less-lethal weapons like pepper spray or just come in guns drawn.

The police were massed up on the far side of the bridge. Dozens of cruisers, four vans, two SWAT Humvees, and a prison bus. It wouldn’t have been enough to handcuff and drag off everyone in town, but it was more than enough to mass arrest those of us who remained. Their preparedness to arrest us was, bizarrely, comforting.

They were stopped in their tracks, though, by the overturned school bus. You can block a hell of a lot of road with fifteen tons of yellow steel, and there was something beautiful about watching the military-style police vehicles emasculated by something designed to get kids to school.

Brynn helped me get a black T-shirt tied over my face as a mask, then donned her own. The police had cameras, and it wouldn’t do much good to escape now only to be arrested later. Still, with everything that had happened, I couldn’t bring myself to believe it mattered. I had no real expectation of surviving the coming day.

We made it to the bridge just as the police rammed the bus. The steel of the Humvee struck the steel of the bus struck the steel of the guardrail, and the whole bridge shook from the impact. Townspeople lined up to push broken-down vehicles up against the back of the bus. A band’s touring van—replete with black metal stickers—joined a DIY ice cream truck and a box truck as reinforcements. We set the brakes and slashed the tires.

The police backed up to ram again.

Again.

With each impact, I prayed our side had been smart enough to drain the bus’s fuel tank.

They gave up on ramming, leaving us with a moment’s calm, presumably while they awaited further orders.

We crowded around Doomsday. I’d never realized she was so short, not until she was masked and hiding. Most people had their attention on the bus on the bridge and the police gathered on the far bank, but my friends looked elsewhere. They looked at the woods, at the street, at the masked figures gathered around. They watched for hands that might reach for waistbands.

As unpleasant as it was to have the massed power of the state waiting to take us into custody, waiting for comrades to betray us was worse. The woods were inviting. I could make my way over the hill, and by daylight I might be out of range of police blockades and Uliksi’s wrath alike. Travelers, they say, watch out for themselves. The situation was hopeless. No reason for us all to go down.

Brynn found my hand with hers, and her strength made its way into me.

Collective safety, sometimes, trumps personal safety. Friends who aren’t willing to fight alongside one another aren’t friends.

Ten long minutes later, a helmeted cop stuck his head over the top of the bus. Then another. Things were about to get worse.

A masked figure threw the first stone. Her aim was true, and the cop dropped down from the edge of the bus. More rocks followed, a hailstorm to keep them at bay. They were too armored for us to hurt, but hurting them wasn’t the point. The point was to drive them back.

Tear gas canisters arced through the sky, and people with work gloves threw them back or tossed them down to the river.

Then flash bangs. You never get used to flash bangs.

It could have been one, it could have been several. A blinding flash of light that stops your vision like a stuttering film that holds too long on a single frame. By the time I regained my senses, several cops had made it to the roof of the bus. Two had riot guns aimed at us. One had his pistol drawn.

More tear gas rained down, and the poisonous smoke was soon indistinguishable from the morning fog. Visibility dropped to only a dozen yards. Only enough to see the bridge and the bus. The forest behind us was scarcely a silhouette. The cars on the far bank were invisible but for the red and blue light that lit up the air. It wouldn’t be long before dawn.

“If I were Eric,” I told Doomsday.

“I’d come now, with the fog and the gas. I know.”

Five cops were atop the bus, and enough guns were drawn that some of the fight went out of us. Next to me, Thursday was sweating with fear. Both his hands were in the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie, holding the gun. He wanted to use it. He knew he shouldn’t.

I was living a nightmare.

“When Uliksi comes,” Doomsday said, “I need three of you.”

“I’m standing guard,” Thursday said.

Which left Vulture, Brynn, and me.

A public address system on the Humvee began an announcement. I scarcely registered it. Something about being under arrest. Something about our hands in the air.

“Eric says he doesn’t want to hurt you.”

I whirled at the voice. A masked figure stood a few feet from us. He must have come from the woods. Kestrel.

Vulture put his body between Doomsday and his so-recently ex-lover. “What the fuck do you want?”

“Look, just, drop this. Drop all of this. Let Uliksi be.”

I heard Brynn’s baton flick open, saw it flash through the air as she put all her not-inconsiderable weight into the blow. I saw Kestrel’s face twist to the side, his body soon to follow. He didn’t fall, so she shoved him. He dropped.

“You told the cops about Doomsday. You beat Danielle with a crowbar. You think we’ll listen to you? Do you know who the fuck we are? Do you?”

“Drop it!” A policeman atop the bus aimed his handgun directly toward us. Twenty yards through fog, if he fired, there was no telling whom he’d hit.

Brynn dropped her baton. It clattered to the pavement not six inches from Kestrel’s face, and the shiny black steel glittered in the morning light.

The morning light.

The small crew of us met each other’s eyes, and we waited, breathless. Doomsday put her cold hand in mine. I took Brynn’s, and she took Vulture’s, and we were a circle.

Uliksi crawled out of the river to the bank, then leapt thirty feet to the bridge. A policeman atop the bus dropped his riot gun, and it clattered. No one spoke a word. Only the sound of idling police vehicles fought against the subtle roar of the river.

Uliksi bounded atop the bus, began weaving his way through the five cops, eyeing them.

“Stop,” an officer commanded, as though he were speaking to a person.

Uliksi lowered his head, three horns facing the man. He edged forward. The cop planted his feet, but the antlers pushed him back, back toward the edge of the bus.

“Stop!” the officer shouted. He fired.

Time froze. We froze with it, but Uliksi kept moving. The officer tipped over, collapsing atop the bus, and the demon punctured the man’s chest with his antlers. Time returned just as his death cries shattered the air.

Another officer opened fire. His gun exploded in his hand, and his face went up in a flash of fire, searing his flesh to the bone. He collapsed, never to rise.

I threw up. Fear? Revulsion? I don’t know. But the contents of my stomach were out on the ground. I wasn’t the only one.

Uliksi turned toward the police, raised his front hooves, and slammed them down on the steel of the bus. Like startled birds, the police scattered to the woods, away from the river and away from our town, leaving their cruisers and compatriots behind. More of Uliksi’s magic.

The wounded officer on the bus continued to cry out, sobbing. He kept crying until Uliksi pried open his ribs and masticated his organs.

I couldn’t wish that on a soul, no matter how much I despised them.

Doomsday started chanting, too low under her breath for me to follow.

“Doomsday!” The voice came from town, and it was angry.

Eric approached, unmasked and seemingly unarmed. He strode up like he owned the place, like everything was going according to plan. Never mind the corpses.

Thursday turned, and his hand started out of his pocket.

“Don’t,” Doomsday said, dropping the ritual. “He’s goading you. Uliksi is watching.”

“Doomsday, you pretentious fuck, you don’t have an ounce of magical power in your body.”

Thursday was twitching.

I looked over my shoulder—Uliksi was staring, intently. Whatever we were going to do, we had to do it soon. We had to do it now. As soon as Eric was done trying to wield Uliksi like a weapon, the demon was going to turn on Doomsday. Who knew what would happen from there.

Eric was trying to wield Uliksi like a weapon.

It came over me in a flash.

“Oh, fuck this,” I said. I dropped out of the circle and went to Thursday. I reached into his pocket, took out the gun, and pointed it at Eric.

Uliksi bounded down from the bus and was halfway between us.

Eric, a grin across his face, raised his hands in surrender.

Uliksi looked at me, looked at Eric.

“Don’t hurt me, Dani,” Eric said, in a mocking tone.

Uliksi charged Eric. The beast took the young man by the throat and dragged him, thrashing, down to the river. He didn’t scream. As soon as his face touched the water, he stopped struggling. As soon as he shot Rebecca, he must have known how he would meet his end. He tried to meet it with dignity. We watched from the bridge, all of us strangely calm, as Uliksi drowned him in the waters.

After Eric was dead, Uliksi let go of his throat and the body lay half in the river and half on the rocks. The water’s slow current tugged at him, gave him a strange semblance of life and motion.

Uliksi stepped gingerly over the corpse to stand knee-deep in the water. He cast a long look back at us. I can’t pretend to read a deer’s expressions, and even less so a demon’s, but for once the beast’s eyes seemed passive. They didn’t pry into my soul anymore. They didn’t read my thoughts and desires.

He stepped deeper into the river, until the water was at his neck. He ducked his head under, and he was gone.

Thursday took the gun out of my shaking hand, and everyone turned their gaze from the river to me.

“We thought he was hunting his summoners to save his own skin,” I said. “He wasn’t. He was hunting his summoners because his summoners were predators. Hands that dared to seize the fire. He attacked Eric, not me, because Eric was goading us to attack. Eric was trying to use him as a weapon. Uliksi knew that Anchor, Rebecca, and Clay used it as a weapon. Clay ran when he figured that out. Then he killed himself, because he knew Uliksi was right to be after him. I don’t know how many times he and I had talked about it. The revolution is about taking power away from the oppressors, not becoming them ourselves. Or in this case, not crowning an endless spirit as king. I thought Clay had killed himself because he couldn’t come back to Freedom. That wasn’t it at all. Clay killed himself because he recognized the full weight of what he’d done to the world.”

“I was the innocent summoner,” Doomsday said. “Uliksi didn’t kill me because I was the innocent summoner.”

“And you don’t need to go out like Clay, either,” Thursday said.

“Is Uliksi gone, then?” Vulture asked.

“On the twelfth page, ‘What hand dare seize the fire?’” Doomsday said. “On solstice. Today. Eric tried to use him today. Solstice thins the veil between worlds. Being used like a weapon today, it was enough to convince Uliksi to depart, since departure was an option.”

I nodded. “That’s what Clay was trying to tell us.”

The world was quiet there in the morning as people limped to their feet. The sirens still flashed, though no cops remained to drive the cars.

Birdsong came, though, after some time, and the sun began to burn off the fog.

* * *

“What will you do now?” I asked Doomsday. Five of us were crowded into a booth at a diner in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota. Next to me, Brynn was cleaning her nails with a folding knife. Across from us, Doomsday and Thursday sipped black tea, their faces deadpan. Vulture sat with his legs astride a backward chair and he was grinning like the sun had never been brighter.

“I don’t know,” Doomsday said. “Find somewhere else, I suppose.”

“You guys, you guys.” Vulture tilted his chair dangerously forward to lean in toward us conspiratorially. “I was thinking, Clay and Rebecca can’t have been the only ones who knew magic like that, right? Uliksi can’t be the only endless spirit out there. So I was just checking my phone in the car, right, because Doomsday told me I wasn’t allowed to post any pictures that were going to incriminate us to Instagram so I had to waste my time some other way. And there’s this forum I found where people track things like Uliksi, and most of it’s bullshit but I don’t know, some of it’s probably not. Like, there’s this private club in Oregon and every couple of years local kids try to sneak in, but most of them go missing and some of them just go crazy, telling everyone about a bear without any skin. And there’s a coal mine in West Virginia where translucent dogs have been attacking activists and this bank in Canada that’s being guarded by a headless man, and . . . and . . .”

He was actually hyperventilating. He waved his hands up and down, unable to control his joy.

“And we could be demon hunters?” I asked.

Coordinated, the Days reached down and sipped their tea. Brynn folded shut her knife and put it on the table.

“Yeah,” Brynn said, “alright.”

“Of course,” Doomsday said.

Thursday nodded.

I put my hand, still mottled with a lifeless gray though no longer painful, in the center of the table. The rest put theirs on mine. Vulture took a picture with his phone.

“You can’t be serious,” Doomsday said to him. “We’re wanted. We shouldn’t even be talking about this here, let alone taking pictures.”

“It’s for Instagram though.”

She glared.

“Fine. I’ll delete it. Jesus fucking Christ.” He was still grinning.

The server brought our hash browns and refilled my coffee, and I swirled the thick black stuff of life around the mug as I sorted out my thoughts.

“Looks like we’re all outlaws now,” I said. “The police will be back, and they’ll be investigating the hell out of Freedom, Iowa.”

“It’s not so bad as you’d think,” Doomsday said. She pulled her hand off the stack, and the rest of us followed suit.

“Oh?”

“No matter who you are, you go through your life, every day of your life, sure that one day you’ll die. One day, the light will be gone from your world and the grave awaits. Right?”

“Well, I don’t think about it as often as that,” I lied. I looked at each of my new friends in turn. The Days, stern and serious. Brynn, as walled off as me, a slight smile on her lips. Vulture, who clearly wasn’t happy about being awake while the sun was up and just as clearly had as much energy as the rest of us combined. It felt good to cast my lot with them. It felt good even to have friends to cast my lot in with.

“One day you’ll die. One day you’ll be in prison.” Doomsday’s face was impassive as always, but I was learning to read its warmth. “Today, though, today you’re alive. Today you’re free.”

About the Author

MARGARET KILLJOY is an author and anarchist with a long history of itinerancy who currently calls Appalachia home. When she’s not writing, she can be found organizing to end hierarchy, crafting, or complaining about being old despite not being old at all. Her most recent book is the utopian A Country of Ghosts. She blogs at www.birdsbeforethestorm.net and says things @magpiekilljoy on twitter.

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Copyright Page

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE LAMB WILL SLAUGHTER THE LION

Copyright © 2017 by Margaret Killjoy

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Mark Smith

Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill

Edited by Diana Pho

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ISBN 978-0-7653-9735-5 (ebook)

ISBN 978-0-7653-9736-2 (trade paperback)

First Edition: August 2017

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