Cold Spell

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Hotels are excellent places to pull over, not because we can afford a room, but because they’ve got massive parking lots. This hotel, in upper Indiana, has been repainted poorly—all around the fake shutters, you can see where the stucco was once avocado green instead of creamy white. Flannery and I sit in the back of Wallace, rear doors open, watching traffic on the interstate fly by.

“How much gas do we have left?” I ask, flipping through the last of our money.

“Half a tank,” Flannery says somberly. “Used to be able to steal it, easy. Not anymore. Had to go make everything complicated by making you pay first.”

“Wonder why they did that,” I say. When I go to tuck the money into the cookbook—we figured it’d be safest there—Flannery’s knife flips out of the sheath on my hip for the third or fourth time today.

“Stop it,” Flannery says. “You’re gonna break the blade.”

“Here,” I say, sighing. As much as I like the idea of having it, we’re probably safer if it’s with Flannery anyhow. I take the sheath off and go to hand it to her.

“Keep it,” Flannery says. “I’ve got my own.” She reaches down her shirt, between her breasts, and pulls out a knife exactly like the one I have. “Part of a set,” she says. “I don’t much care for having one in each hand, though. Makes it hard to throw a punch.”

“How long have you had that on you?”

“Never take it off,” she says, shrugging.

“So you let me break into Callum’s RV and threaten you when you were wearing a knife the whole time?” I ask, and Flannery grins.

“Aw, don’t be mad! You looked menacing!” she says when I fold my arms. “Come on. Let me show you how to use a knife, at least. It’ll help in case you need to kidnap me again.”

It takes some convincing on Flannery’s part, especially since my pride is a little wounded. But a few minutes later, we’re standing outside, shivering every time the wind gusts through. Flannery has me start a few feet away from her, my back toward the open rear doors. She removes her knife and motions for me to do the same.

“All right,” Flannery says, flipping the knife and catching it squarely in her palm. “What do you already know?”

“About knife fighting?” She nods. “Nothing.” Flannery sighs and rolls her eyes at me.

“What can you do? Run? Jump? Are you super flexible?”

I raise an eyebrow.

“Christ, Ginny. All right, here.” She reaches over and grabs my wrist, shaking it until I tense my muscles. “Hold it tight. But don’t treat it like it’s your hand or anything. Remember that it isn’t stuck in one spot. Yeah. Hold it tight but loose.”

I nod, as if I understand.

“So, the trick,” she says, “is to cut the other guy.”

“So I gathered,” I say, and she gives me an irritated look. “What? I mean, that’s pretty obvious. Isn’t there something more to it?”

“I’m getting there,” she says. “So, here. Try to cut me.”

“What? Right here?”

“What’s wrong with right here?”

“You’re afraid of getting arrested, but you want me to try to stab you in a hotel parking lot,” I point out. “What if someone sees us?”

Flannery laughs dangerously. “For starters—I’m not afraid. It’d just be an inconvenience. And secondly, you’re making excuses. Let’s do this.”

Before I can answer, she runs at me, arms out, flailing, hair streaming behind her head like a crazy person. I jump out of the way and she flies by, slamming her hands onto Wallace’s back floorboard.

“Ginny! How the fuck am I supposed to teach you if you won’t try to cut me?”

“I don’t want to hurt you!” I protest.

“You won’t, you’re not actually gonna get me!”

“What the hell? I might!” I say, indignant, though I suspect Flannery has a point. She puts her hands on her hips impatiently as I adjust, ready myself. I nod, tense; she flails at me again. Right before she reaches me, I can’t help wondering what someone looking out the hotel window will think is going on.

I lunge forward, stabbing my wrist out as if the blade is a sword. Flannery dodges it, laughs at me, and slows.

“Shut up,” I say.

She ignores me. “You’re trying to stab me. Why?”

“You told me to!”

“No, I told you to try to cut the other guy. That’s different. Don’t try to stick the other guy like a pincushion because then you’ve only got one shot—you stick out your knife, you miss, and then he guts you while you’re recovering.”

I try not to cringe but fail; Flannery, as expected, gives me an exasperated look for it.

“Instead,” she says, “just try to touch skin. Slice around, keep your arm moving, re-angle the knife. You just want to hit skin. Because… what do you do when you cut yourself?”

I frown, thinking about the many times I’ve nicked myself with a kitchen knife. “I stare at it,” I answer. “Put a hand over the spot.”

“Exactly,” Flannery says. “Cut them the tiniest bit, and you’ll almost always get a moment where they’re staring at the spot you hit, or where they have to fight one-armed, cause the other palm’s pressed against the wound.”

“And that’s when I stab them?”

Flannery studies me. “If you’ve got the stomach for it, yeah.” She lifts herself into Wallace, lunging across the floor to grab an apple she stole from a roadside stand. “There are two secrets to fighting, though—any kind of fighting,” she says as she sits back up. “The big secret and the little secret. The big one”—she pauses to stick her knife into the fruit—“is to not get in a fight to begin with.”

“Really?” I ask, alarmed to hear something like that come out of Flannery’s mouth.

She shrugs, slices off a bit of apple, and chews it noisily. “I’m assuming that what’s most important to you is surviving, right? In that case, don’t get into a fight. Bam. You survive.”

“What about when you fought for me?” I say accusingly.

“Surviving wasn’t the most important thing,” she says darkly. “And besides, that wasn’t a real fight. You think they’d have killed the Princess of Kentucky in front of her clan? Not that I couldn’t take them in a real fight, of course. Fuckers wouldn’t know what hit them—”

“What’s the little secret?” I cut her off.

Flannery cuts off another piece of the apple and studies it in her fingers for a moment. “Before you start, figure out who’s going to win.”

We make it to northern Illinois before we finally pull over in a shopping center parking lot for the night. We stop the car in the back, near a closed bookstore, and spread out on Wallace’s floor. Flannery is leaning against the rear doors, letting them press against her the same way the wall of her bedroom would have back at the camp. She’s eating from a drum of cheese puffs that she stole from a display outside a gas station.

“So, what happens when you find him? When this is all done?” Flannery asks, licking the cheese dust off her fingers.

“I… go home,” I say.

“What really happens?” Flannery says.

I look down, tucking my arms into my sweatshirt to get warmer. “I go home,” I repeat, and then continue, “but I don’t stay there. Not for long. I don’t think I could after all this.” Truthfully, it feels strange even calling Andern Street “home.” Kai was my home, him, not the building, but now even that seems strange. After all, I’ve made it this far. I’ve escaped monsters and kidnappers and been brave without him. Maybe he’s my old home, the childhood one I love, but not the one I live in anymore….

“Look how quickly we turned you into a proper Traveller.” Flannery laughs, cutting off my thoughts. “No place is your home, so every place is. So where will you go? What will you do?”

I pause for a long time. “I don’t know,” I say. “I adopted Kai’s dreams. I never really had my own.”

“And that made you happy?” Flannery asks warily.

I frown. “It did, but I’m not sure how. I guess it was enough for me, then. I still want Kai back, of course, but…” I swallow and can’t believe what I’m about to say. “I don’t think I’m afraid to be without him now.” I think I should feel guilty about thinking that, much less saying it aloud, but I just feel strangely free.

“Well,” Flannery says as she screws the lid back onto the cheese puff drum, “I for one think you’d make a stellar spy. Creeping around, car chases, hunting down monsters… if I were hiring spies, you’d get the job.”

“What about you?”

“That,” Flannery says, “is a mystery. You gotta understand, Ginny—you walk out on the Travellers, the way I’ve done, you walk out on them for good. I can never go back. But…”

“Callum.”

“Yes,” Flannery says, sighing. “And that’s my home. Those are my people. I’m supposed to lead them one day. I dunno. My mother thought I wasn’t tough enough to rule alone. I thought I’d feel free, running away. Happy. But instead I just feel like she’s right. Like I ran because I wasn’t strong enough, in the end. Forever the shit Princess of Kentucky…”

“I watched you take down a bunch of guys with your fists, Flannery. You’re plenty strong. Brigit is wrong.”

Flannery doesn’t answer, but her fingers move to a chain around her neck. It takes me a minute to realize what the necklace charm is—her wedding ring. She catches me looking and shrugs, tucking it back under her shirt. “I’ve got a question for you,” she says slowly. “You knew Wallace was a stick shift. Which means you knew you couldn’t drive it when you stole the keys.”

“That’s not a question—”

“Why’d you take the keys then?” she finishes, staring at me.

I laugh and darkly enjoy the fact that it irritates her. “Because,” I say, “I planned on making you come with me the moment you announced your engagement.”

Flannery is quiet for a long time, so long that I think she’s fallen asleep. But then she speaks, voice small. “Why?”

“Easy,” I say. “I’m going to fight werewolves, and you throw a mean punch.”

Flannery laughs. “True. And with the way you handle a knife, you’ll definitely need me.”