Chapter 7: The Leash and the Night
The leash was thick, black, oiled leather, cold as a dead man’s wrist. Santanico buckled it around Spot’s neck herself, her fingers brushing his sticky skin. The click of the brass clasp was the loudest sound in the quiet bar.
“Walk,” she said, not a command but a simple expectation, as if speaking to an inanimate object that happened to have legs.
She led him through the wreckage of the main room, past the shattered tables and the dark, sticky patches on the floor that would never come out. Razor held the reinforced door open, his face a mask of indifference. The desert night rushed in, a vast, cold exhalation that made Spot shiver instantly. It was clean, a terrifying kind of clean, scoured with sagebrush and emptiness.
His bare feet hit the dirt, still warm from the day’s sun, the grains sharp against his soles. The moon wasn’t full, but it was bright and orange, hanging low and swollen, painting the world in monochrome copper and deep shadow.She didn’t walk fast.She strolled. The leash hung slack between them, a fifteen-foot promise of control. The only sounds were the crunch of their footsteps and the faint, distant chorus of coyotes, their yips and howls splicing the silence like needles.
She led him past the stained wall of the bar, around the side where the dumpsters sat silent, towards the back.He knew where they were going before he saw it. A low mound of disturbed earth, slightly paler than the surrounding ground.The pit.She stopped ten feet from its edge. The smell was fainter now, buried under lime and a foot of dirt, but it was there—a sweet, ghostly hint of ending. She turned, the leash going taut with a soft jangle.She looked at him, then at the mound, then back at him.
“Kneel,” she said.He dropped, the dirt gritting into his knees.
She wound the leash around her hand, shortening it link by link until his face was level with her hip. She gave a swift, brutal yank. The collar dug into the bruised flesh of his throat, cutting off his air. He gagged, hands flying up instinctively to claw at the leather before forcing them back down to his sides.His vision sparkled at the edges.
“This,” she said, her voice conversational, almost warm, “is your kingdom now, Spot.” She yanked again, a punctuation. He saw stars.“A little graveyard you dug with your own hands. Tell me…” She leaned down, her dark hair falling around her face like a curtain. “Does it smell like home?”
He sucked in a ragged, whistling breath when she let the tension ease for a second. “Yes,” he croaked. “Yes, my queen.”
“Louder.” Her voice lost its warmth, becoming the desert wind itself—sharp, impersonal. “I want the coyotes to hear. I want the things that burrow under the sand to know exactly what kind of pathetic thing I own.”
He dragged in more air, filling his lungs until they ached. He tilted his head back and screamed it at the orange moon. “YES, MY QUEEN!” The words ripped out of him, raw and cracking, echoing flatly against the distant hills. The coyotes, as if answering, sent up a new, frenzied chorus.
Santanico laughed, a sound of pure delight.She released the leash entirely, letting him collapse forward onto his hands, coughing. She stepped around him, her boot heels sinking into the soft dirt of the mound. She walked atop the buried dead, a casual conqueror surveying her territory.Then she was behind him. He felt her shadow fall over him before her boot planted firmly between his shoulder blades, a steady, immense pressure. She leaned her weight into it, grinding his chest down into the dirt, his face turning to the side.
“You’re my little grave-digger, aren’t you?” Her voice was a low purr above him.“My loyal, slobbering undertaker. Say it.”
The pressure increased.A rib creaked.He spat out a mouthful of dust. “I’m your grave-digger.Your undertaker.Your filth.”
The pressure vanished. He lay there, gasping, embedded in the earth.Her foot nudged his hip.“Good. Now crawl.Kiss the dirt where your brother lies. Kiss it, and thank me for letting you live while he rots.”
He didn’t hesitate. There was no brother in that pit, not by blood, but he knew who she meant.The one who had been his anchor. The one he’d let die first. He dragged himself forward on his elbows, a shuddering insect, until he was over the freshest part of the mound.He lowered his face. The soil was cold now, gritty.He pressed his cracked lips to it. A fine powder of lime coated his tongue, chemical and bitter. Beneath that, a deep, damp coolness, and the faintest, final hint of something once alive.He closed his eyes.
“Thank you,” he whispered into the earth, the words meant for the dirt, for the bones, for her. “Thank you for letting me live.”
Silence stretched.The coyotes had gone quiet. He heard the soft shift of sand as she walked around him.He stayed prone, his cheek against the grave.
He heard the crunch of her steps stop beside his head.A shadow fell over his closed eyes.He waited.
A warm trickle, sudden and fragrant, hit his temple, then his cheekbone. It pooled in the hollow of his eye socket.Tequila.The good stuff, from her glass inside. She was pissing on him. It was hot, a shocking contrast to the cold ground, and it flowed steadily, soaking his hair, running into his ear, dripping off his jaw onto the grave beneath him.He held still.He breathed through his mouth.The stream stopped. She adjusted her clothing, the sound small and ordinary in the vast night.