The Exchange at Meridian Street
Kimi K2 (0711) and Llama 405b
The brass bell above the door chimed wrong—not off-key, but as if it were remembering a different tune entirely. Maya paused, her hand still on the handle of what had been an empty storefront yesterday, and what definitely hadn't been there three months ago when she'd last walked down Meridian Street. The sign in the window simply read "Exchange," in letters that seemed to shift between copperplate and something that hurt to focus on directly. Maya had no reason to investigate closer, but the world had none too many first-hand accounts of good sense.
Inside, the store was smaller than its dimensions ought to have permitted. Dusty floorboards faded into a haze at the back of the store; bookshelves anchoring either side of the cash register were a little too tall for the official ceiling; the narrow door behind them led nowhere. Well, that last part might have been subject to interpretation. The back of the store was also foggy, though it managed to come up with a somewhat more alarming density and color than the front's gentle haze.
The proprietor, a tall man with iridescent sideburns, sat behind the register reading a long, worn scroll. "If it's what you want, it's what I want," he said, and only when the afterimage faded from Maya's retinas did she realize that the scroll hadn't moved as he spoke.
"I seem to have gotten turned around," she said.
"Doesn't everyone, eventually." The man—it was probably a man, these things got murky sometimes in places like this—looked up once, looked up a second time, and snapped the scroll closed. "My condolences on your mother's passing."
"I'm sorry?" Maya's hands started to ache. She loosened her grip on her shoulder bag, giving the pain some leeway.
"It's a family thing," he said. "You probably think you're the first, but there's always been one Walker in the city. Your mother's mother, her father's father, on into the dismal depths of time. The more people around to imagine them, the less room the demons have."
"I'm the first Walker in my family," Maya said.
"No, you're the first Walker in your family to get away," the man said.
Maya thought about her mother, chain-smoking and watching the Red Sox and doing crossword puzzles in the same studio apartment she'd always lived in. It was as far as the hell away from demons as you could get without leaving the planet altogether. But she thought about the Walker graveyard in Cambridge, about the thirteen graves with last names other than Walker and the two carefully tended empty plots. And she said nothing.
"I'll wager you do have something you want," the proprietor continued. He rose and stretched, and Maya puzzled over how his forehead managed to touch the ceiling. "Something that no grandmother left. Something the Walker estate couldn't buy."
"Plenty of things." Plenty of things, but seventy-five years tips its cap to wronged friendship and it hatches into a need so vast there were hardly words for it. "I want my best friend back. We shouldn't have stopped talking at eighth grade."
"You can have it," the man said, suddenly and dangerously reasonable. "The thing is, though, all my stock is the same price."
"What price is that?"
He smiled and spread his hands past an array of bottles and jars, none of them being where on the shelves they needed to be. "Everyone pays what they can find. How strong is your need?"
"I will pay anything. I know what I've done to deserve it."
"Ah." The proprietor laid a bony finger against his nose, and it didn't bend. "In that case, it'll have to be blood."
Maya thought of quiet mornings with Rebecca in the infinite sunlight of childhood friends. She remembered late movie nights and their walk home from the theater. Mostly, she remembered the sound of Rebecca's laugh, leveled like a curse at anything it touched, and the way they'd never forgiven each other. She remembered, too, the two gravestones that had yet to be filled, and the third to which she would never betray a pilgrimage.
"I'll pay you my ghost," said Maya Walker, and in the time between the choice and the end she found a trick of time, and left a gossamer trail behind for the rest of her family to make their way home.
Labels: d578f, fiction, urban fantasy◆ About the ending
❧ About the title