No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,69
quicker, I wouldn’t have gotten there in time.”
A frown pulled at the corners of her mouth. It woulda been cute any other day, but worry had claws in my guts. After a minute she got what I was thrusting at, an’ put it in plain words. “Are you suggesting I learn to fight?”
“At least a little bit, sweetheart. I know you’re a nurse to help people, but that thing wasn’t a person. I don’t wanna lose you, Annie. Let me teach you a few things.”
“And what if I get a fright at work and use some of those things on an unsuspecting patient?”
“Annie, you saw that thing. Oily black smoke an’ dead eyes. You really think you’re ever gonna mistake something like that for a patient?”
“You said the starlight demon was a beautiful woman.” She took a breath so deep it shuddered comin’ out, an’ murmured, “It’s hard to believe I’m even saying these things out loud. Gary, this isn’t real. Magic isn’t…real.”
“Ain’t it? Didn’t the saints fight dragons an’ heal people and do miracles? Didn’t Christ? I donno, Annie. Maybe it’s right there under our noses an’ we just don’t believe it. Maybe sometimes it just crops up and bites somebody on the—” I cleared my throat. “Knee. On the knee, hard enough we can’t ignore it. Maybe we just got…bit. An’ maybe it ain’t you, sweetheart. Maybe it’s me. I’m the one your pop thought he could pass his burden on to, an’ the one who killed something outta this world in Korea. Maybe you’re just getting tangled up in…me.”
Her frown came back, but then her mouth pursed like she was trying ta hide a smile. “We could spend the rest of our lives doing this, couldn’t we? Worrying about which one of us it is. Trying to take the blame, or reassure the other, or apologize.”
When she put it like that, it was kinda funny. I spread my hands. “Guess we could, yeah.”
“Maybe we should just put it behind us, then. Maybe if we’re going to keep having…unusual circumstances…crop up in our lives, maybe we should just accept them. Together,” she said with a little emphasis. “Husband and wife. Both of us doing our parts, like God intended.”
“All right, but I’m telling you if we’re gonna be ready to face whatever comes along, God intended for you to learn ta use a gun, Anne Marie Muldoon.”
She said, “Yes, dear,” so nice and sweet that even after a while, when we went back ta sleep, I still had the funny itchy feeling I’d been fleeced.
Truth was, Annie took to shooting more naturally than I had. She didn’t like pistols much, even if she saw their use, but she was a rifle sharpshooter inside’a six months. My Sarge woulda loved her, if he coulda put her on a hill with a scope. She wasn’t afraid of knives, either, though she got grim at the idea of using one. “I know what they do to bodies, Gary,” she said one evening. “I’ve helped stitch people up after knife fights.”
“We ain’t looking to fight people, doll. Not now and not ever.”
Guessed it did the trick, or she found a way not to think about it, because she got good with the knives and then found a fencing teacher. Not the showy stuff they did for sport, but a Spanish fella who followed old swordfighting techniques and taught us both how to kill things with a long blade. “Go to Pamplona,” he told me. “Run with the bulls. Fight in the ring. If you survive, you will be a man.”
“He’s man enough already,” Annie told him, an’ wouldn’t let me go even when I said it sounded kinda exciting. She gave me one of them level looks that dames do, an’ said we could discuss it when I took her to Spain. I graduated college and started playing saxophone gigs and saving up, not so I could run with the bulls, but ‘cause I figured I’d surprise her something fierce on our fifth anniversary. Lotta the gigs started late and ran later, so I got into the habit of making dinner, too, so it was something Annie didn’t have to do when she came off shift herself. Turned out I was a better cook than her, but insteada being upset by it she looked like the cat who stole the canary. Between that an’ her dab hand at fighting, all I could figure was women were mysterious creatures.