turned her back on Billy and walked away, up a quiet side street lined on either side by low block houses with tar-shingled roofs that wouldn’t last a third of a Minnesota winter.
They didn’t have to.
Mahasti moved through the night as if she were following a scent, head tilted to one side or the other, nostrils flaring, the indrawn air hissing through her arched, constricted throat.
Billy came up behind her. “You smell anything?”
She shot him with a look. “Your fucking menthol Camels.”
He smiled. She jerked her chin at the gravel side drive that gave access to the gate into the backyard of Spike’s. “I’m taking that one. You better go roll a wino or something.”
“Bitch,” he said without heat. “I’ll wait at the front door, then.”
He spun on the scarred ball of his cowboy boot. He was lean, not too tall, stalking down the street as if the ghosts of his spurs should be jingling. The black duster flared behind him like a mourning peacock’s tail, but for once he hadn’t shot the collar. A strip of brown skin with all the blood red dropped out showed between his coarse black hair and the plaid band of his cowboy shirt. Even as short as that, the hair was too straight to show any kind of curl.
She sighed and shook her head and turned away.
“Tucson was fucking prettier.” Mahasti could bitch all she wanted. There was no one to hear.
The houses here had block walls around the back, water-fat stretches of grass in the front. The newer neighborhoods might be xeriscaped, but in the nineteen-forties a nice lawn was a man’s God-given American right, and no mere inconvenience like the hottest desert in North America was going to stop him from having one. She walked up a cement sidewalk between stubby California fan palms on the street side and fruitless mulberry in the yards, still pausing every few feet to cast left and right and sniff the air.
She finished her stroll around the block and found herself back at Spike’s Tattoo. A sunbeat gray house, paint peeling on the south side, it wore its untrimmed pomegranate hedge like a madman’s fishy beard. The side door sunk, uninviting, between shaggy columns of leaves and branches. A rust-stained motorboat, vinyl canopy tattered, blocked the black steel gate that guarded the passage between the side drive and the back yard.
Mahasti, who’d been sticking to the outside sidewalks on the block she was walking, looked both ways down the street and crossed, fetching up in the streetlight shadow of one of those stubby palms. She eyed the house as she walked into the side yard. It eyed her back—rheumy, snaggled, discontented.
She looked away. Then she stepped out of her squishy plastic shoes (“What will they think of next?” Billy had said, when she’d pulled them from a dead girl’s feet outside of Winnemucca) and lofted from ground to boat-deck to balanced atop the eight-foot gate in a fluid pair of leaps, pausing only for a moment to let her vulture shadow fall into the gravel of the yard.
She spread her arms and stepped down lightly, stony gravel silent under her brown bare foot, the canopy of her hair trailing like a comet tail before swinging forward heavily and cloaking her crouched body to the ankles. It could trap no warmth against her, but it whisked roughly on the denim of her jeans.
Hair, it turned out, actually did keep growing after you were dead.
She tilted her head back, sniffing again, eyes closed to savor. When she smiled, it showed white, even, perfectly human teeth. When she uncoiled and glided forward it was one motion, smooth as any dancer. “Everything we need.”
There was a dog in the yard, stretched out slumbering on a pallet made of heaped carpet squares. The third security window—long, narrow, and a foot over her head—she tried with palms pressed flat against the glass slid open left to right. There were no screens.
Hands on the window ledge, she chinned herself. In a cloak of red-black hair robbed of color by the darkness, she slid inside.
It was a cold space of tile illuminated by a yellow nightlight: the bathroom. Mahasti’s bare dead feet were too dry to stick to the linoleum, her movements too light to echo. The door to the hall stood ajar. She slipped sideways through it without touching and paused just outside. The rasp of human breathing, human heartbeat, was stentorian. Their scent saturated the place.
Three. Infant, woman, and man.
Mahasti slithered