Title: The White Horse (9/?)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Kirk, Spock, McCoy
Summary: Jim Kirk was a strange man. A silent man. No one knew much about him or, if they did, were not willing to say what they did know, especially to the town’s newest magical occupant. Not that Leonard McCoy cared. He had an old curse to track down and unravel by the year’s end. Meanwhile a killer was tracking him. AU.
Previous Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
or at AO3

What he was doing in the wood at night was a mystery. Leonard looked around, at the ground under his feet, through the trees. There was not much left alive; things were withering, dying back, in retreat for a long winter. He had a moment to think this place looked familiar, but perhaps it was the darkness that made it like any other wood he had seen.

He started to walk. An icy wind gusted past him, stirring up a great mass of leaves. As he bent sideways to shield his face, he caught a glimpse of startling green near his feet. He leaned down to see it better.

“I must wonder how far you will follow this path.”

Leonard picked up the holly leaf and turned around. “How’d you get here?” he asked, not shocked, yet uncertain why he wasn’t.

Sarek stared deeply into Leonard, asking in turn, “How did you?” With hands folded behind his back and a serene countenance, the man looked exactly as he had alive. He wore a robe of the darkest brown. The smell of earth grew strong.

“You’re dead,” Leonard said. “I killed you.”

Sarek did not react.

He tried again with “Your son—”, only to falter. The sharp points of the holly leaf dug into the flesh of his palm.

“What of Spock?” questioned Sarek.

“He’s going to kill me. I’m sorry, and he’s still going to kill me.”

The mage watched Leonard for a long moment, then held out his hand. Without knowing why, Leonard gave him the leaf. Sarek closed his fingers around it. When his hand opened again therein rested a skeleton key.

“Iron,” Sarek explained, “to keep you safe. Sometimes the small protections give us the greatest power.”

Leonard took the key. He rubbed at his burning eyes in consternation. “I don’t understand why you would help me.”

“You are helping yourself, Leonard. I only ask in return, for the sake of my son, that you do him no harm.”

“Harm?” Leonard spoke the word sharply, then added with alarm, “Wait, you can’t leave!” as Sarek stepped backward into a oddly shaped shadow, a doorway. Leonard’s hand met open air instead of a robed arm, for Sarek had become incorporeal in a matter of seconds. He stumbled, falling to his knees, the plea he issued nonsensical: “I’m not supposed to be here. How do I get out? Goddamn it, I said wait! I need to tell Spock that you’re alive!”

Sarek was gone. The trees melted. Decaying leaves curled into themselves and vanished until there was only darkness and a wind where none should be.

Wake was a command in Leonard’s ear.

He opened his eyes to find himself staring at a door, except it was not the same door through which Sarek had disappeared. It was ordinary, built from wood instead of an ink-like blackness.

It was his motel door.

Leonard felt himself come truly awake, then, and shake off the last tendrils of his dream. His knees ached, he discovered. How long had he been kneeling on the floor, his bed sheet lying in a crumpled heap beside him?

He did not know.

Leonard stayed in his crouch, racked with cold, as if a ghost had passed through him. It felt like forever until his stuttered breathing found a proper rhythm, and his muscles relaxed.

A tiny shadow fluttered against the outline of a curtain. Leonard looked up, watching it dance along an invisible path across the window until it disappeared. A moth, he named it. They were attracted to the warmth of the light fixture which hung outside. He didn’t know what spurred him to finally move, but he did and went to the window in silence to draw back the edge of the curtain.

Something white, without form, stood across the street from his room, brighter than the lamplight and the moon combined. He could not tell if it had eyes but was convinced it watched him nonetheless.

Leonard released a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding and let the curtain fall into place. Nearly a minute passed before he could raise his hand again. It shook slightly as he pulled back the curtain a second time.

Nothing there. The sidewalk was empty, barring an overturned trash bin and a few drifting leaves.

He pulled on clothes and crawled back into bed, burrowing under a scratchy blanket. For an hour he stared at various objects on the nightstand—keys, wallet, alarm—not certain if he wanted to sleep or stay awake. Eventually his body decided for him, and he fell into a dreamless repose.

Decker used to tell himself he hunted because he had to, but in truth he has always known he liked it. Enjoyed it, even.

The thing about hunting was that the prey often times didn’t know they were being hunted. The deer went about foraging; the ducks preened their feathers while floating in the pond; the humans left their houses to go for a walk when they thought the weather was fine.

All Matt had to do was kept track of his quarry until the right moment came to strike. Hunting was simple and held very few surprises.

That was why he preferred to hunt the smarter game—the monsters. Because they were monsters, they knew they would always be hunted, that when they left disaster and tragedy in their wake someone would want them dead. So they hid in plain sight, behind innocent masks and insipid words, and made you think they were like all the others.

And sometimes, he thought, they hid so well they even fooled themselves.

He hunted one of those monsters tonight. It wasn’t quite the one he wanted, the one he needed to kill to avenge his brother’s death, but it was a kindred. When he had spotted it drifting down the street, he had recognized what was behind the pretty face, alive in the angular eyes.

The longer he followed her, the quicker she walked, moving in and out of shadows like it was her otherworld. When she suddenly dove into a side alley, Decker went after her, gun drawn and ready.

She got him from behind.

The blow made his vision white-out, but as he fell he twisted, brought the gun up and fired. The bullet passed through empty air. He hit the ground, stunned.

A knee landed in his solar plexus, pressed down until he struggled to keep air in his lungs. The gun wasn’t in his hand anymore. It was in hers, and the end of the barrel was cold against his temple.

“Hello, fucker,” the she-monster said to him. “I think you picked the wrong girl.”

Matt laughed. “I know what you are,” he sang back at her. Her long ponytail, a river of black, had fallen over her shoulder. She was pretty, so pretty, and very, very ugly inside. “I know what you are,” he said again, his laughter dying to calmer tones.

She took the gun off his temple and asked too softly, “What am I?”

He told her because she was one of those who had hidden too well and it was important she knew why she had to die. “You are a thief of souls.”

Her sharp intake of breath was her admission of guilt. Matt went for her throat with the knife he kept tucked inside the cuff of his shirt sleeve. She jerked back in time that the cut was too shallow to do the proper amount of damage. Her quick retaliation was a sign of training, he noted, as she aimed his gun at his head and fired twice in rapid succession.

Matt’s reflexes saved him. The first bullet carved through the side of his ball cap, and the second bullet ricocheted off the pavement. He brought his elbow down on her arm and knocked the firearm sideways. She gave no cry of pain when the blade of his knife buried itself between two of her ribs. He pulled the knife out to make a second strike.

A floodlight came on at the front of the alleyway. Shadows fled, hers along with his. Matt had a split second to make a decision before people followed the light; he looked into her dark eyes, and did. “Thief of souls,” he whispered, letting her go. She crumpled onto her side, the hand she pressed to her wound slick and red. Already the blood was evaporating off her fingers.

This one knew his true face now, as he knew hers. Matt hurried deeper into the alley, his cap pulled low over his face. They would meet again.

Leonard opened his eyes to the muted sound of traffic and sunlight. At first he didn’t remember being fully clothed when he went to bed, but the memory of fear came back to him. Why he had been afraid proved more elusive. Had it been the nightmare he must have had, or the thing he had tricked himself into seeing at the window?

Well, it didn’t matter now.

The bedside clock said it was already well past ten and edging toward eleven. He got up, discarded what he had slept in and showered. At odd moments, as he shaved and dressed, Leonard found himself opening and closing his right hand, agitated by a sensation that something should have been in it. The feeling finally faded once he left his motel room.

There were two things he needed right away: food and time to think. Both he sought a few blocks away at a greasy spoon diner which claimed to have the best ribeye sandwich in the state. Today Leonard was determined to indulge himself, so he ordered that ribeye sandwich with a large side of fries.

He discovered that eleven thirty wasn’t too early for lunch at all in Riverside; in a span of fifteen minutes, the diner went from three customers to a near overflow. Perhaps it was because of all the people blocking the door, milling around, and chatting loudly from all directions that Leonard didn’t see the danger coming until it was upon him. Or perhaps he had just been too invested in his ribeye sandwich and fries because it was the first non-liquid meal he had had in two days.

That, too, in the end did not matter.

“Are you hiding, or here for the pie?”

There was nowhere to run in a elbow-room-only diner. Leonard sank low into his seat and enacted the strategy of avoiding eye contact. Unfortunately his lack of acknowledgement didn’t deter the new arrival from sliding into the diner booth across from him.

Leonard muttered “Fuck” under his breath and shot the man his sourest look. “Are you following me?” he demanded.

Christopher Pike, county sheriff and current pain in Leonard’s ass, matched the sour look with a thin-lipped smile.

Leonard tried to catch the waitress’s eye to ask for the bill. No point in hanging around to talk when he had nothing nice to say. His mother had taught him that one thing, at least, before she passed away.

“If you leave now,” Pike said, matter-of-fact, “you’ll find a very nosy federal investigator just around the corner.”

Leonard dropped his fork. It felt into the pool of ketchup next to his fries. “What?”

Pike made no effort to hide his amusement. “You’re lucky I intervened. Your agent likes the cobb salad here. I assume you didn’t know that, because otherwise you would be incredibly stupid to be sitting in the same establishment he prefers to frequent for lunch.”

Holy shit. Leonard shoved down panic and reached for the jacket he’d tossed down on the seat.

Pike held up his hand, stalling Leonard’s haphazard escape with “Don’t worry. He’s not coming in.”

“How do you know that?” Leonard snapped, too on-edge to play at politeness.

“How do you think? I made certain he saw me in the parking lot. It seems,” the sheriff went on to say, “the two of you like your cat-and-mouse games. You’re his mouse, and he’s mine—in a manner of speaking.”

Leonard reluctantly leaned back in his seat, trying to decide if he should believe Pike or not. “We’re not allies,” he said. “Why would you help me?”

“I told you, Leonard, we can be of help to each other.”

“I didn’t agree to anything,” he reminded the man. Leonard picked up a handful of forgotten fries and went back to eating. He’d stay, for now.

“I know,” Pike said. He glanced around the diner, all-at-once seeming suspiciously relaxed, his tone of voice too casual. “To be honest,” he told McCoy, “since I gathered some idea of who you’re looking for, I have been very tempted to get rid of you.”

The food in Leonard’s mouth might as well have been ash. With difficulty he managed to swallow it. “Yeah?” he said, hoping he sounded casual too. “So what’s stopping you?”

A corner of Pike’s mouth quirked. “I’m not sure. Maybe because you haven’t done anything yet to give me reason to.”

Christopher Pike didn’t seem like the type of man who waited for a criminal to commit a crime. Leonard pushed his plate aside and laced his fingers around his mug of coffee, pretending to be unaffected by the inherent threat. Belatedly, as he watched the amusement in the other man’s eyes deepen, he recalled that Pike could probably see through pretense the way a predator could smell fear. It wasn’t a pleasant comparison.

“I might be grateful for you saving my ass just now,” Leonard said slowly, “but if this is a prelude to you stalking me or some such shit until you get an answer, you’re wasting my time and yours. I’ll make up my mind when I make up my mind, sir, and not a second sooner.”

“Fine.”

Leonard had been prepared to continue arguing, so the dismissal of the subject surprised him. “That was too easy,” he accused.

“Wasn’t it?” replied his lunch companion. A family passing by the booth caught Pike’s eye, and he raised a hand in greeting. Their small girl-child waved her lollipop at him and squealed, “Hiya, Mr. Sheriff! Hiya!” Pike’s eyes crinkled at the corners. The girl turned her attention to Leonard and stayed fixated on him for some time, even as her mother strapped her into a booster seat.

Leonard felt every inch the stranger in this atmosphere. “I didn’t think you lived here,” he said to shift the attention away from him.

“Riverside isn’t the county seat,” agreed Pike, “but I spent a majority of my childhood here. Also, I have to give speeches occasionally. People can’t help but recognize me. Goes along with the job.”

“Wonderful,” muttered Leonard, his discomfort turning into paranoia with each second that passed. The little girl had discarded her lollipop for a cup of orange juice, and she still watched him as she drank it.

“Tell me what you know about Winona,” Leonard was asked abruptly.

He took a moment to consider if he really wanted to do that.

Pike waited until a waitress, who stopped by the table to refill Leonard’s coffee and inform the sheriff that his order was almost ready, had moved out of hearing range to add, “Tell me, or don’t. Either way, when I leave here I will know what you know.”

“I see you’re still a bastard,” Leonard remarked, then sighed through his nose. “I know she’s dead. The information wasn’t easy to find until I wasn’t looking for it.”

That’s partly why he was here, burning up an hour or two over a meal he couldn’t really afford. It had felt like a punch to the gut to find out the woman was six feet under. He had no doubt it was true; local gossip was often more factual than what was written in the newspaper. Now, though, Leonard was almost afraid to go looking for the son, so terribly afraid of meeting that final dead-end to his search for answers.

“What else?”

“I don’t know. A kid. She had a sick kid, and she was buried as a Kirk.”

Chris nodded, no longer amused. “She was a Davis first.”

Leonard closed his eyes, what he didn’t put together before hitting him like ton of bricks. “Then you know, don’t you? About why I came here?”

“Like you said,” the sheriff said softly, “information is easy to find once you aren’t looking for it. Your daughter is dying, and you believe magic is killing her.”

Leonard opened his eyes to glare at Pike, angry for no explainable reason.

Pike met the glare evenly. “What I don’t understand, Mr. McCoy, is why you think a water demon is the cause of her suffering.”

He started to say That’s none of your business but held back. “It’s complicated.”

“It has to be,” the man agreed and in the next instant turned to smile at the approaching waitress. He laid a hand on the plastic bag she placed on the table. “Thank you, Margaret Lynn. Give my compliments to the chef.”

The waitress teased, “You haven’t even tried it yet. How do you know it’s good?”

“It always is.”

She laughed and left after slipping Leonard’s bill under the cream dispenser for his coffee.

Leonard rubbed a hand over his face, weary all of a sudden. “Listen,” he said, “I know this isn’t the last time you’ll tail me somewhere. Just… give me a couple of days to come up with my next move.” He reached for the clip of cash in his back pocket. “And thanks for Spock.”

Pike leaned forward on his elbows, adamant as he insisted, “Leonard, neither of us have a couple of days to waste. Once the agent finds you, you’re done. You’ll be useless to me. So get off your ass and go find Kirk. I’ll make it easy for you.” And with that, the man slid a piece of paper across the table. An address was written on it.

Leonard stared at it; he stared at the paper until a tiny spark inside him burst into a flame, and then a fire.

“Useless… to you? To you?” Leonard’s hands clenched into fists. “You think I give two fucks about you? I’m here for a little girl who was told she might as well start praying to God to go to heaven because her chances of survival are slim-to-none! Anything I do, or don’t do, will be for her.” After he had hissed that last part, he stood up and seriously contemplated if throwing the rest of his coffee in Pike’s face was worth the arrest that would surely follow.

Pike grabbed Leonard’s wrist and jerked him back into the booth without an apology. “I don’t doubt your motives or purpose, but things aren’t always so black-and-white. Winona Davis was trying to save her child too, and now she’s dead.”

“What?”

The sheriff added nothing else but stared hard at Leonard.

Leonard sucked in air and forced himself to calm down, to consider what Pike was trying to tell him without saying it outright. He didn’t want to care, but… He recalled something he had read. “You mean her death wasn’t…”

“Suicide?” Pike finished grimly. “No.”

Leonard crossed his arms, thinking about that small insight. Shit if this, his life, wasn’t turning into one giant murder mystery! “Natural causes?”

“No.”

Leonard pursed his mouth, not liking the options left. He concluded, “I still have to talk to the kid.”

Pike picked up the plastic bag and stood. “I want you to talk to him. We wouldn’t be having this conversation otherwise.” Then the man paused, gaze considering. “I suppose I should give you fair warning about the boy so you don’t go in blind.”

Leonard snorted. “Really, you mean there was a chance he could have been normal despite the fact he survived a ritualistic drowning and somebody murdering his mother?”

Pike stared at Leonard until Leonard swallowed the rest of his sarcasm and muttered an apology. Then the sheriff transferred his bag to his right hand and tucked the left into his jacket pocket. He turned away from the table.

Confused, Leonard said, “Wait, what’s the warning?”

Pike walked away.

When the man reached the exit to the diner, a chill crept down Leonard’s spine. On the heels of it came a flash of an image, like a photograph overlaying what was in front of him—something he could see, except was not seeing in the truest sense of the word. There was a woman slumped forward, not in the booth but somewhere else, inside the interior of a car. Her forehead, Leonard realized, was resting against a steering wheel. Long, loose blonde hair hid her face but the bloody strands were telling. Upon Leonard’s next inhale, his brain told him he smelled rotting flesh.

The vision vanished, leaving him queasy.

Pike’s hand rested gently against the diner door. He himself stood woodenly, silent.

“What’s the warning?” Leonard whispered. He knew it wouldn’t matter if Pike could hear the words over the noisy lunch crowd.

The answer, when it came, was barely obtrusive for all that it was another man’s thought in Leonard’s head. The thought read: The son may be the mother’s killer.

Pike walked out of the diner, then, leaving Leonard frozen in his seat long after the man’s departure.

Sixteen years ago, Jim’s entire life changed during the month of September. He didn’t know if it was due to his PTSD that he came to loathe the very word of this particular month. Sometimes he thought the feeling had nothing to do with him at all, that it was part of that which had been haunting him since he was eleven. The thing grew more… antsy in September, like an electric buzz constantly moving across his skin. Often, it drove him to do strange things.

Tonight he was painting whorls along the bottom of the wall outside the kitchen with a bottle of partially dried acrylic he’d found in a closet. His cat, Jinx, watched him from his perch on the back of a kitchen chair. Jim didn’t doubt that Jinx knew his owner was crazy. They had lived together for a few years, after all.

He talked to the cat whenever he surfaced from his absorption with his artwork, figuring since Jinx didn’t understand if he was speaking English or gibberish, his chatter didn’t matter. Having a voice made him feel human.

“Mom would kill me if she was here to see this,” he said, “but whatever. This is my house now. I can do what I want, can’t I?” He pulled away blue-stained fingertips from the wall and wiped them idly on his pants, looking at one particularly crooked whorl. “What the fuck is that?”

Jinx shifted on the top bar of the chair, tail twitching.

Jim rubbed his knuckles against his cheekbone in thought. “Maybe it’s a hex,” he guessed. “Maybe I’m hexing my house.” Then his eyes caught the edge of the whorl, and he knew it wasn’t done. He leaned forward, dipping his fingers into the blue paint so he could finish it.

Time became meaningless for a while. At some point, Jinx might have twined around his back and tried to climb into his lap for petting, but Jim had no patience for interruptions—until, that is, the doorbell broke into his concentration and caused him to smear his latest chain of circles.

“Motherfucker,” he snarled, knowing instinctively he had ruined the whole thing, and launched himself off the floor to kill whoever had the audacity to be at his front door.

The interloper did not flinch when Jim—wild-eyed, teeth bared, and covered in blue paint nearly up to his elbows—threw open the door like he was ready to attack. “Jim,” the man greeted. He walked right past Jim into the house.

“Shit,” Jim muttered, his grip on the doorframe dropping away in resignation. He shut the door and turned around to watch his visitor pause by the wall which looked like a toddler had finger-painted all over it and peruse it before moving on. “Shit,” he said again, then fell silent as he habitually did when among other people.

Seconds later, a call of “Food!” came from the kitchen, pitched as though Jim was expected to come running. It kind of pissed Jim off to realize he was already halfway across the living room like a salivating dog before his brain caught up with his body. Jinx appeared out of nowhere and dashed into the kitchen ahead of him. Jim purposefully slowed his pace so it might seem like he was obeying the summons only because he had nothing else to do.

As Jim entered the kitchen, the houseguest took in Jim’s wary expression but only remarked, “You need to wash your hands.”

This guy was more insane than he was, Jim had decided long ago. Since Winona’s passing, Christopher Pike made a point of stopping by the house every couple of weeks. Jim had tried ignoring him, locking him out, had even punched him once. Afterwards, the fool had rubbed at the bruise blossoming on his jaw and inquired if Jim felt better. In those few words, he had somehow managed to make Jim feel regret for the violent outburst—and to this day Jim still did not appreciate that.

He wasn’t stupid. He knew Pike had had a thing for his mom. He just didn’t get why the guy continued to make a nuisance of himself now that she was dead. He didn’t need a caretaker. He was an adult who went to work, paid bills and—

“So, want to tell me why you’re ruining perfectly good wallpaper?”

Jim glared. Pike said shit like that as if he believed Jim would give him an answer. The only difference was that Jim didn’t think the guy said it out of spite the way other people usually did. Jim’s thoughts flashed back to the memory of his public embarrassment, courtesy of his supervisor, and he felt the urge to hurt someone all over again.

Pike paused with his hand in the silverware drawer to give Jim a sharp, speculative look. “Anything going on I need to know about? People treating you decent at work?”

Jim backed up, unnerved for the umpteenth time since he had met Pike that the man could read him so well. He shrugged and turned away.

“Hands,” Jim’s self-appointed keeper reminded him.

Whatever, Jim thought, flippant, but he grudgingly sought out the bathroom. Nosy bastard or not, Pike had brought two plates of the weekend lunch special from Jim’s favorite diner. There was no point in wasting good food just because the company sucked.

He heard the crazy guy in his kitchen laugh out loud. Jim shut the bathroom door firmly so he didn’t have to listen it if it continued; he was convinced it was him Christopher Pike was laughing at.

It took a good five minutes to scrub the acrylic off his arms, and after that Jim sat down on the edge of the tub and waited another five minutes just because he could. It shouldn’t have surprised him when Pike rapped on the bathroom door with a warning.

“Quit brooding, Kirk, or I’ll feed your half to the cat.”

Jim jerked open the bathroom door to stare the man down. Why? he thought fiercely, hating that he could not make his demand aloud and be understood. Why the hell do you keep coming back?

Pike dropped a hand to his shoulder and squeezed it. “You can stop hating me anytime now. I know we’re not friends, and I know we’re not family, but that doesn’t make us enemies.”

Jim grunted and fixed his gaze on a spot upon the opposite wall, both mollified and displeased. At least Pike was straightforward with him most of the time. Jim guessed that had to count for something.

The hand on Jim’s shoulder tightened and propelled him down the hallway.

“C’mon, time to eat. I have twenty minutes left to spare.”

Jim let Pike march him back to the kitchen, all too aware of the other reason (although Pike’s tenacity was a fairly chief one) that he had to endure these visits. Christopher Pike might not be family or friend but he was the law within the county lines. If Jim didn’t pretend to be respectful of that, then he was screwed. From first glance at Chris, Jim had simply known it to be true.

But why, oh why, had the sheriff of all people decided to waste time on a mentally unhinged mute?

Jim came out of his thoughts in time to hear Pike say, “After you finish your plate, you can clean up that mess you made on the wall.” Jim looked at the wall in question and, to his surprise, saw it the way Pike did, all mystery behind it gone. Somebody had made a mess, a scribble-scratch of looping circles and wavy edges. It was chaotic, pointless.

Why had he done that? Like so many times before, Jim honestly did not know. A tiny flare of panic came to life inside him. His palms started to sweat.

The hand on his shoulder slid up to the back of his neck. “It’s okay, son,” Pike said, his voice a calm counterpoint to the state of Jim’s mind. “It’s nothing. Clean it up, then forget about it.”

Jim nodded. Clean it up, and forget. Yes, he would do exactly that. He put his back to the ugly marks on the wall, determined not to give it any more of his attention.

“Now eat,” Pike commanded.

Jim obediently went to the kitchen table and sat down. He lifted a spoon. After sitting down across from him, Pike gave Jim an encouraging smile. They ate their lunch in silence. Jinx staked out the leftovers on the table until Pike forced the cat into retreat. Jim surreptitiously dropped some of his ham under the table because he knew Jinx would find it later.

By the time Pike left the house, Jim was surprised, like always, to find he felt immeasurably steadier. He spent the remainder of his afternoon scrubbing at the blue wall stains. Eventually, inevitably, they disappeared and Jim was free of them.

The next day he woke up out of a nightmare. By mid-morning he was drawing again, this time with a marker set, the first thing that had come to hand. He left the walls alone because the walls no longer held power (it had been stripped out of them); instead he traced and re-traced the same bizarre patterns across the wood flooring, half-mad and vaguely, just vaguely desperate to stop.

Next Part

Related Posts:

• The White Horse (18/18) – from May 12, 2014
• The White Horse (17/18) – from May 10, 2014
• The White Horse (16/18) – from May 10, 2014
• The White Horse (15/16) – from April 4, 2014
• The White Horse (14/16) – from March 7, 2014