Good doesn’t always look like how you imagine it. Sometimes it cusses and wears a leather jacket and motorcycle boots and chain-smokes. Sometimes it deals a little on the side. Sometimes it kills.
This isn’t Tusk’s first life. And it isn’t Sarin’s either. She keeps coming back, over the years, the centuries, like a trick candle flaring back to life. She isn’t sure what to call herself. Custodian or guardian or soldier. “I guess I’m like a bad cop. And a bad cop’s better than no cop, right?” She likes to think of herself as anti-heroic, but Juniper knows better. She fights the dark. She takes an interest in the larger metro, but she can only claim the east side of Portland as her territory. There is a balance to the world—of light and dark, right and wrong, good and evil, yin and yang, up and down, spicy and sweet, Sonny and Cher, however you want to think about it. And she operates by a more simplified, elemental version of any religious doctrine: “Any time things get too dark, the world goes blind.” This she says with a spark of her Zippo.
There are others like her, Juniper included. Everybody’s met a few of them. Those who claim to hear voices or see things no one else can, who follow hunches and suffer from vivid dreams. They’ll burn sage and talk about your aura and claim a ghost visited them during the night. Whatever you want to call them—touched, sensitive, prescient, special—they are tapped into a higher frequency than the rest of the population. Dogs have a sense of smell ten thousand times more powerful than a human’s. Some insects can sense radiation, and some birds can see temperature. The rare person is similarly heightened. Usually their awareness develops with the onset of puberty, as if some new antennae grew along with their body hair. The severe cases tend to claim a territory and occasionally fight to maintain their control of it.
“The best way to think of it,” Sarin once told him, “is like a spectrum. I’m high on it, you’re low on it, but we’re both on it. And when you’re on it, you make a choice as to which side you’re going to soldier for.”
The men Sarin killed that day in the warehouse, they didn’t just want the east side for drugs. They wanted it for the dark. There was a time when Juniper would have rolled his eyes at this, but he was willing to believe anything at that point. Getting a black, squiggling ball of cancer ripped out of your chest and seeing three people crumble to ash will do that to you.
He is enlisted in Sarin’s fight. He owes her. Downtown Portland isn’t her turf. It belongs to Babs. Here Juniper keeps a low profile as Sarin’s eyes and ears on this west side of the river. He has his own life—his own quieter way of fighting the dark, devoting himself to the shelter—but his work there occasionally entangles with his obligations to Sarin. Such as the time when the Portland homeless began to disappear. Because Jeremy Tusk was killing them.
Back then Tusk taught as a lecturer at Portland State, the same place he had earned his PhD in philosophy, but he was terminated midway through that spring semester when he stopped showing up for class. He had presented at several conferences on Carl Jung, and his dissertation concerned occultist pathology. It was never clear whether Tusk chose his apartment at the Rue or the Rue chose him. His research consumed him, and he maxed out his credit cards buying rare books, some inked in blood and bound in human flesh. These were his tutorials as he performed rituals—with red candles and black eggs and moonstones and goat’s blood—one of which called from the other side a dark force that would empower him. It worked, but not in the way he expected. A demon inhabited him. His body became its puppet. And it was hungry. Feeding on the homeless and prostitutes, the disenfranchised, the invisibles, those who would not be missed.
Except by Juniper and Sarin. This was their vocation—the poor, the weak, the sick—and when several of Juniper’s clients vanished, he started asking questions. First to the police, who said, “Maybe they went to California. Shouldn’t you be happy? Isn’t that your goal? Reduce the needy?” Juniper then turned to the streets, offering cigarettes, beer, egg sandwiches for information. There were rumors of a shadow man. Someone who came out at night to hunt. Every shelter was full every evening, and those who were turned away might not make it to morning. That’s what his clients said. And this shadow man left his mark—a red right hand—on sidewalks, buildings, windows all throughout Portland, claiming it, like a dog pissing on posts.
So Juniper patrolled the streets, checking in on encampments in Forest Park, beneath the Burnside Bridge, the abandoned Victorian on Sauvie Island, offering up snacks and toilet kits, the occasional six-pack of beer, asking if anybody had seen anything. While Sarin spent those same nights curled up in alleys, doorways, pretending herself to be a victim. Waiting.
And then Tusk came. She was curled up on a bench in a tree-studded park walled in by high-rises. It was 3 a.m. The city was dark except for the intermittent streetlamp, and silent except for a low-grade hum rising off the semis on the freeway. He walked past her several times, circling experimentally, before pausing a few feet away.
She watched him through her eyelashes, feigning sleep. He wore loose-fitting khakis and a billowing dress shirt that could not hide how dumpy he was. In his hand he gripped a sawed-off baseball bat as long as a forearm. He hadn’t cut his hair in a long time and kept the greasy strands of it parted in the middle and tucked behind his ears. She knew him by the shadow he cast. It did not match his body. The head like a Halloween gourd—the back hunched—the arms long and hooked, and the fingers the same.
She was tucked into a sleeping bag the color of a dried-up tongue. One of her arms reached inside it, where she kept a long blade made of silver. Tusk breathed through his mouth. Took a step closer. She thought she might smell him. An oniony sweat.
“You,” he finally said. “You’re the one who thinks this city is yours.”
The sleeping bag was unzipped, and she threw it off easily to slash at him as he lunged for her. He shrieked—like some nightmare bird—and retreated a few steps. One of his fingers dangled by a stubborn ligament, and the open knuckle pumped blood. He smiled through the pain. “I can’t wait to take a bite out of you.”
“Come and get it,” she said.
His voice did not match his body, too low and guttural and big-tongued, a beast’s. “I’m not alone you know. I’ve been busy. Gathering shadows.”