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“The silver dollar was cold in his hand. It was bigger and heavier than any coins he’d used so far. He classic-palmed it, let his hand hang by his side naturally, then straightened his hand as the coin slipped down to a front-palm position. It felt natural there, held between his forefinger and his little finger by the slightest of pressure.
‘Smoothly done,’ said Wednesday.
‘I’m just learning,’ said Shadow. ‘I can do a lot of the technical stuff. The hardest part is making people look at the wrong hand.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes,’ said Shadow. ‘It’s called misdirection.’” – American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Abigail wonders what Hannibal would say if he knew where she was. She knows he doesn’t like Freddie Lounds, but surely he would approve of this, of her taking control of her own life.
This is the thing, though—Abigail is tired of Hannibal and his games, Will and his obliviousness. She loves them, but she refuses to believe that they are all she has left in this world. She doesn’t have to stay wrapped in her past and all the death she’s left behind her. Freddie has shown her that, is showing her that, as they drive west out of Baltimore.
“So, Abigail,” Wendy asks from the front seat, “where do you want to go?”
Abigail isn’t sure what she thinks of Wendy. She’s seen her a few times at the institution, when she accompanied Freddie on her visits, but Abigail doesn’t think they’ve ever been alone together. She smiles much more easily than Freddie does, but there’s something less honest about it when she smiles at Abigail.
Her smiles at Freddie are always very real.
“I’m not sure yet,” Abigail says. People don’t usually ask her what she wants to do. She’s used to just being told.
That’s why she’s going with Freddie, after all. To do something for herself.
“It’s getting dark soon anyway,” Freddie says. “We’ll stop for the night, and Abigail can decide where we’re going in the morning.”
Abigail looks out the window and watches the trees as they rush past the window. For a moment, she sees a stag between the branches. It’s gone when she blinks, and Abigail turns her face away.
All she wants to do is get away, however far she has to go.
-
The motel room that Freddie hands her the key to is clean and sparse. Abigail pulls off her scarf, watching herself in the mirror.
She turns on the TV and sits cross-legged on the bed. She almost wishes that Freddie hadn’t gotten Abigail her own room. Privacy is nice, but the room reminds her overwhelmingly of her bare room in the institution. Impersonal and endlessly changeable.
American Idol is on. Marissa had loved to watch that, although mostly to make fun of her least favorite singers. Abigail tucks her knees up to her chin, and tries to remember what it was like to watch this show with Marissa, as normal as her life has ever been.
During the commercial break, there’s a news bulletin for a missing persons case, and her own face stares back at her from the screen, pale and drawn.
She turns the TV off before they can start talking about her father.
-
In the morning, Abigail isn't any more sure of where she wants to go, but she still feels lighter than she has since her father died.
She doesn't owe anything to anyone. Freddie will take her home when Abigail asks her to and not a second before, and before that happens they can just...drift.
Abigail has never before been truly free: first she was bound by her father and then by the news and then by Hannibal Lecter, teaching her but also watching her. Freddie has given her a gift, the chance to do whatever she wants without having to justify it.
"Where do you want to go?" Freddie asks her again.
Abigail shrugs, and smiles, and unwinds her scarf from around her neck. "Let's just drive for a little while," she says. "If there's something interesting, we can stop."
And that's what they do, for the best week of Abigail's life: they drive and stop wherever they like, or pick destinations as someone thinks of them. They go to Antietam and the Edgar Allen Poe House and to odd road stops Abigail never knew existed. They even go to a vineyard where Wendy sneaks Abigail wine with a grin. It doesn't taste as good as the glasses Hannibal lets her have at dinner, but it comes with many fewer strings attached.
Freddie never tells her no, and though Wendy raises an eyebrow at her suggestions sometimes, she never complains.
Abigail wakes up every morning and doesn't know where she's going to be going to sleep that night. She smiles more than she has in years.
-
On a country road in West Virginia, surrounded by fields, Freddie decides to teach Abigail how to drive. Her father had never allowed it, before.
Wendy refuses to participate, lying stretched out in the backseat with a cigarette in her hand.
"I'm not going to be responsible for any damage to your car, honey," she says to Freddie on an exhale, head tipped back against the open window. "I know how you get."
Abigail isn't worried. She's careful, treating the car like a startled doe, and Freddie is a surprisingly patient teacher. She talks Abigail through a couple miles of country lane at a crawling pace. Eventually she takes back over the wheel to drive them to a motel, navigating by the voice of her iPhone's GPS. Abigail gets to remain in the front seat, though--Wendy waves her off when she tries to get in the back again, still smoking lazily.
"I'm comfortable here," she says, still lying down, legs crossed and heels propped up against the window.
Abigail is starting to think that maybe Wendy actually likes her, and it warms her all the way to the motel.
-
Dr. Lecter and Will are a family, of a sort. It's not that Abigail doesn't know that, doesn't feel that sense of belonging when she's with them. She thinks that Dr. Lecter understands her better than anyone else alive. Will tries, and he can be perceptive, but he thinks so well of Abigail sometimes that she just knows he has to be wrong. Will didn't see her kill Nicholas Boyle. He didn't help her cover it up, not at first. He thinks he wants to know her, he thinks that he does, but Abigail can feel it: there's something dark in her, the same thing that's dark in Dr. Lecter. Will doesn't know, or doesn't want to know.
Family with Dr. Lecter and Will means belonging, but it's cool and stilted, dinners with fine china that Abigail never had growing up and conversations she sometimes has to pretend to understand.
With Freddie and Wendy, it's different. They're both so warm, in a way Abigail didn't expect. They treat her like an equal and joke with her while they eat dinner at greasy diners or listen to old songs on the car radio.
They don't understand her either, of course, but Abigail thinks that maybe they'll never need to: maybe she can change, become someone else, before they get the chance to realize that Abigail is a girl to be afraid of.
-
She ruins it, of course. Abigail knows this about herself: no matter how hard she tries, she always manages to ruin everything, in the end.
After dinner one night, full of greasy food Dr. Lecter wouldn't come near, Abigail asks, "Freddie, how did you know that this is what I needed?"
"What do you mean?" Freddie asks.
"Getting out of Baltimore, getting out of that place, getting away from...everyone else, I guess. It's been nice. I just wanted to thank you. I know you guys aren't really getting anything out of this."
"We get the pleasure of your company, babydoll," Wendy says around the straw of her shake.
"I guess I just wonder what the point of this is for you," Abigail says. "Or for me. Don't get me wrong, this is great, but...you guys have jobs, don't you? You can't just drive me around forever, right?"
Wendy looks at Freddie sharply, and Freddie sets her knife and fork down carefully. Abigail feels fear begin to crawl up her throat, familiar. She tells herself she's being stupid. Freddie is nothing like her father.
She is so, so stupid to have said anything at all.
"This trip is meant to help you find yourself, Abigail," Freddie says quietly. "There's been something I've been meaning to tell you for quite a while. Why don't you drive us somewhere?" Wendy slides out of the booth silently, and Freddie begins to gather her things to follow her.
"Isn't that illegal?" Abigail asks. "I mean, I don't really have a license. And I don't know where we're going."
Freddie smiles gently at her. "Just take us wherever feels right," she says. "Follow your instincts."
Abigail follows her to the car, throat still tight with fear, but she takes her place in the driver’s seat, and puts her foot on the gas pedal. She almost forgets to turn on the headlights.
She flicks them on, looks at Freddie beside her, watches Wendy in the rearview mirror, sitting up straight for once and not sprawled across the entire backseat, and Abigail drives.
-
For the first mile or so Abigail thinks she's just humoring Freddie. She almost laughs, a few times, tries to make a joke of it: ha ha, very funny, let's go find a motel now, it's getting cold and Abigail's jacket is thin.
She's busy trying to convince herself it's a joke that she forgets to pay attention to where she's going, or to the fact that she barely knows how to drive. The darkness seems to part for her like the sea around a ship, and Abigail doesn't think about what her hands or feet are doing.
Despite the night around them and the unpaved roads Abigail soon finds them on, the ride is much smoother than her earlier halting attempts.
Freddie doesn’t speak, which is odd, and neither does Wendy, which is odder. Abigail has found that Wendy is the type to fill silences when she finds them. It's comforting. Abigail wishes she would say something now, anything, to fill up the empty space in the car, but she doesn't, and Abigail can't find the words herself.
She keeps driving, until the headlights stop sweeping over empty gravel roads and fall over a run-down looking house, eerie in the artificial light.
Abigail turns off the engine and leaves the lights on. The silence is so thick now she feels like she might choke on it if she opens her mouth.
She gets out of the car and walks towards the house, not stopping to see if Freddie or Wendy are following her. The door is hanging off its hinges at an angle, and a part of Abigail knows what she will find inside before she walks in.
She pushes past the door with shaking hands anyway, and for a moment, she thinks she’s standing in her old kitchen back in Baltimore, thinks she can see her mother bleeding out on the floor and her father in the corner riddled with gunshot wounds. Abigail blinks once and her visions clears, and the bodies on the floor aren’t her parents anymore—it’s two strangers, a man and a woman, and there is blood slick all over the tiles.
She’s not like Will, but she can still see what happened. The woman stabbed the man and he fought back, clawed at her face, and somewhere along the line he must have grabbed the knife because now they’re both lying dead on the floor. The knife lies on the counter, gleaming and sharp.
"No," Abigail says, staring around the house in horror. There is blood pooling near her feet, and she takes an unsteady step back. She feels herself run into something solid, and whirls around to face Freddie Lounds, who is giving her a sympathetic smile.
“There’s something I need to tell you, Abigail,” she says, and Abigail wants to scream at her, wants to run from the house and get back in the car and drive as far away from all this blood and death as she can.
She’s beginning to realize, though, that maybe she’s never going to be able to get away from it after all, so instead she stays in the kitchen of a house full of death that she found without thinking, and listens to Freddie Lounds tell her about the gods.
“I think you probably already knew that something wasn’t quite right about Hannibal Lecter,” Freddie prods, after she’s—explained. Explained that she isn’t human, and neither are Hannibal and Will, and she hasn’t said it yet but Abigail knows that her name is the next on that list.
Abigail doesn’t deny it. “Not Will, though,” she says. Will killed her father and has nightmares and is kind of fucked up in every way that matters, but he takes her fishing and buys her books and thinks better of her than she deserves. He’s the closest thing Abigail thinks she’s ever had to what a normal father is supposed to be like.
She has always known, deep down, what Hannibal is. Will was always different, except now Freddie is telling her that he’s not.
Freddie purses her lips. “Will would like to believe he’s above the rest of us,” she says, sounding like she thinks that if anyone should believe that, it should be her.
“Us,” Abigail says numbly. Freddie smiles.
“Yes, Abigail,” she says. “You figured it out, right? When you stopped thinking about it, when you stopped trying—you led us here.” She gestures to the room around them.
Abigail looks down, feels her hands ball into fists. “So I’m—what? I lead people to death?”
“You have to admit, Abigail,” Freddie says. “It does explain a lot about your life.”
That stings. Abigail shakes her head, and looks back up to face Freddie. "No,” she says. “You're wrong."
Freddie sighs, looking so concerned, looking so much like she actually cares about Abigail's wellbeing. Like she isn't lying to her at all.
Like she hasn't just been playing Abigail this whole time, letting her pretend like she could ever actually be free.
“I want to offer you something, Abigail,” Freddie says. “A chance to get away from all this.” It’s like she’s reading Abigail’s mind, and for all Abigail knows, maybe she is, maybe she can do that.
“I already ran away with you, and all that did was make everything worse. This isn’t getting away, Freddie. I just want to go to school like everyone else, and not be—”
“Be what you are? You can’t run from yourself, Abigail.”
“So what do you want me to do, then?”
“I want you to come with me, and get away from Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. They aren’t good for you,” Freddie says.
“And you are? What good have you done me?”
"If you stay with them, you'll never be more than this," Freddie says. "There's going to be a war, unless something happens to stop it. Lose you, and Hannibal might also lose Will, and the both of you could stop him." Her face turns sympathetic. "I don't want to fight, Abigail."
“What do you mean, a war?”
“There are gods like Hannibal and Will and yourself, who have existed for centuries and have almost faded into obscurity, and there are gods like me, who are just rising into our power.” Freddie’s mouth twists. “We haven’t been getting along very well recently. There’s only so much power in this world to go around, you see. Your kind have been trying to take more than their fair share. I don’t want to fight, but I want what is mine, and I’m willing to fight for it.”
“I don’t care about that,” says Abigail. “I don’t care about fighting in a war about something I don’t think I even really believe.”
“Don’t say things like that lightly, Abigail,” says Freddie. “Belief is a powerful thing.”
Abigail very suddenly can't do this anymore. She grabs the knife on the counter without consciously making the decision to do it. "Stop," she says, voice shaking and hands steady. "Please just stop, Freddie, let's go back to the hotel and forget any of this ever happened."
"How well has forgetting been going for you lately, exactly?" Freddie asks, as biting and cold as Abigail almost forgot she could be. She doesn't look at all afraid, and for a moment Abigail hates her more than anything, more than her father, more than Hannibal and his lies or Will and how he doesn't understand anything at all.
A moment is all it takes. Abigail doesn't think about anything, as she steps forward, and before she has time to blink, the knife in her hand is buried in Freddie's stomach, once, twice, three times. Freddie gasps, and then coughs, and her knees give out from under her.
The knife already had blood on it, and now there's blood all over Abigail's hand, and Abigail steps back, and back again, and when she steps in the congealing blood by the anonymous man's corpse, she falls.
The knife clatters to the tile floor. It's very loud. Abigail can feel blood seeping into her jeans, and can't bring herself to move.
Freddie is on her knees across from her on the kitchen floor. She's not bothering to put her hands over her stomach. She raises her eyes to look at Abigail, and she smiles. "I was right about you," she says. Her voice sounds wretched, she sounds like a woman who's just been stabbed in the stomach, but there's something satisfied about it all the same. Freddie Lounds loves nothing more than being proven right.
Her arms buckle under her and she falls. Abigail doesn’t think she's dead yet, but she's getting there.
"No you're not," Abigail says, speaking to a woman she's not sure can even hear her. "Death doesn't follow me."
"No," says a voice from the front door, behind Abigail. "You bring it."
Abigail can't stand up, or turn, or even speak, so she closes her eyes and says nothing as Wendy walks to stand beside her.
"I told her this was a bad idea, you know," Wendy says conversationally. When Abigail forces herself to look up, she's not looking at Abigail or at Freddie. She's staring at the ceiling, fingers empty and twitching. "She lies to me a lot, but she tells me enough. It's not like I'm stupid, you know?"
The only thing Abigail can think to say is an apology, so she stays silent.
"Get out," Wendy says after a few moments pass.
"Wendy," Abigail says. "I--"
"I said get out," Wendy says again, still not looking at her or at Freddie. "I'll deal with you in a minute."
Abigail stands and goes, dripping blood from her jeans. She collapses again on the porch, and she starts gasping, unable to get enough air in her lungs no matter how hard she tries.
She squeezes her eyes shut. Two people in the world cared about her as who she thought she was, and she killed one of them and the other one is going to hate her for it.
Not that Freddie ever believed that she existed as just a normal girl, not really. But up until now she was willing to pretend, just like Abigail was willing to pretend that there wasn't something sick and twisted inside herself, and now Abigail will never get that illusion again.
Abigail doesn't know how long it is before the front door bangs shut and Wendy steps out. She settles down beside Abigail, ignoring the blood, and lights up a cigarette.
Her eyes are red, but her face is dry.
"Let me guess," she says. "You're real sorry."
"I don't know what's happening to me," Abigail says. She stares at her hands. "I don't know why everything always turns out like this."
"Freddie thought she could change your path," Wendy says. "Redirect your purpose, some bullshit like that." She closes her eyes and takes another drag, breathing the smoke out slowly. "She always liked to bite off more than she could chew."
"I guess there's not going to be a war now," Abigail says.
Wendy snorts. "You think you killed her?" she demands. "You think someone like that goes down with nothing but a knife wound?"
"No one could survive that," Abigail says.
"No one human," Wendy says. "Freddie's about as human as you. She'll be back. In the meantime, you can go back to Will Graham and his creepy boyfriend." She throws something into Abigail's lap. It's Freddie's phone. Abigail stares at it, and then looks up at Wendy.
"Call them," she says. "I'm not fucking driving you anywhere."
Abigail can feel herself start to cry again, and she hates it. She closes her eyes and says, voice small, "I wanted you to like me."
"I wanted an adventure," Wendy says. "Sometimes you get what you want. Sometimes you don't. Either way, you probably won't be happy about it." She stands, drops the butt of her cigarette and grinds it out under her boot.
"What's going to happen?" Abigail asks.
"That depends on Freddie, and whatever your camp decides to do next. Who knows? Maybe soon enough we'll get to see a god actually die." She smiles, more like Freddie than herself. "If I've got anything to say about it, it won't be her."
Wendy walks back to the car and drives away without another word. Abigail watches the headlights recede, leaving her adrift in the darkness with nothing but the porch light.
Abigail wipes the blood on her hands off on the parts of her jeans that aren’t already soaking in it, and dials Dr. Lecter's number.
-
It's Will who comes for her, after what must have been hours of driving in the night.
He takes everything in, the house and the blood dried on Abigail's clothing and skin, and he kneels down next to her and wraps her in a hug. Abigail rests her face against his jacket and wishes she deserved this.
"I was worried about you," Will says, voice rough. "Do you think you can tell me what happened, Abigail?"
Abigail closes her eyes and shakes her head against Will's shoulder. She doesn't say anything.
"I'm going to have to look inside the house, Abigail," says Will. He speaks gently, like she's a startled animal, like she's fragile.
"I can't go back in there," Abigail says, voice breaking. "I--I can't, Will, please don't make me."
"I won't, okay? Just sit out here and wait for me to come back." He squeezes her once more before he gets up, and he leaves her alone on the porch again.
He's only gone for about five minutes. Abigail wonders if he'll just leave her here when he sees what's inside.
"I didn't kill those people," she says when she hears Will shut the door behind him. "Those strangers, they were here when we got here."
"I know," says Will. "I could tell."
Abigail doesn’t ask how. She's never seen Will do what he does at crime scenes. She's not sure she ever wants to see it. It's the trick that led him to her father, and in the back of her mind she's always thought it would be what ended up leading him to her.
"And Freddie Lounds?" Will asks, tone even, when Abigail doesn't say anything. Abigail can't bear to look up and see his face.
"That was me," she says, voice quiet and broken in the dark. "I didn't mean to. It was like with Nicholas Boyle, I just--it was over before I knew what was happening and she was bleeding so much--"
"I'm not mad at you, Abigail," Will says, cutting her off. His voice is harder than Abigail has ever heard it. "Freddie Lounds got what was coming to her."
"You don't believe that," Abigail says, finally looking up. "She didn't--she didn't deserve to die."
"Abigail, she kidnapped you."
"I went with her!" Abigail snaps. "She asked and I said yes. She was--before this, she was nice to me. You can't blame her for my mistakes."
"And why did she ask you to come with her, Abigail?"
Abigail hugs her knees and shakes her head.
"She told you, didn't she? About what we are?"
Abigail nods. Will sits down next to her, and she sags against him, suddenly exhausted. "She said I bring death wherever I go. I lead people into it. Like a ferryman. She was right, wasn't she?"
Will sighs. "We can be more than our fates, Abigail. We don't have to be trapped by what we are."
"Are you?" she asks.
"I don't know," Will says. "I never wanted this, any more than you did. I'm still trying to figure it out."
"Freddie said there was a war coming. She wanted me to--I don't know, to fight. On her side, against Hannibal."
"And me?"
"She thought if I came with her that you would too."
Will says nothing. Abigail wonders if he would have. She wonders if Will himself even knows.
"Wendy said--she said that Freddie wasn't really dead."
"I think that Freddie Lounds, the woman we know, is dead," Will says slowly. "What she represents won't die anytime soon. Freddie was--more than herself, the same way you and I and Hannibal are all--something else. Freddie was the news and the tabloids and the internet, and those things aren't so easy to kill."
Abigail wonders what part of Freddie she did kill. There was something of her there that won't be anymore, because Abigail took it away, because that's what she does: take people away.
"Let's go home," she says, and she lets Will help her stand up and lead her to the car.
She needs to talk to Hannibal.
-
"You knew," Abigail says, sitting on the counter in the kitchen while Hannibal cooks her what he called, with a sardonic smile, her "welcome home meal". Will is at Wolf Trap with his dogs and his other life.
Hannibal looks at the knife and not at her, slicing up heart. "You will have to be more specific, Ms. Hobbs."
"You knew I would go with her. You knew she would tell me and you knew I would kill her."
Hannibal smiles. "Much as I would like to believe it, I am not omniscient. I knew it the moment you took Ms. Lounds' life, because I always know when a person is deprived of their life."
"Will didn't seem very upset about what I did," Abigail says. "He hated what I did to Nicholas, but he didn't care about this."
"Will hated Freddie Lounds," says Hannibal. "He's often thought of killing her himself, although he would never do it--believe me, I have tried. Coaxing him to murder is more difficult than it would seem."
"If you'd wanted to stop Freddie from taking me, you could have."
Hannibal stands and sets down his knife. "I believe our Will is going to be home soon," he says. "Why don't you go set the table?"
Abigail knows when a conversation isn’t getting her anywhere, so she does.
-
They sit together in the kitchen, all three of them, with wine in glasses that none of them are drinking and empty plates in front of them.
"You will fight, then?" Hannibal asks Will.
Will closes his eyes. "Yeah," he says, because if he didn’t hate Freddie Lounds and everything to do with her before, he certainly does now. "If it comes to that, I'll fight." He starts collecting plates, and goes to the kitchen alone to wash them.
Abigail looks at Hannibal. "Will it?" she asks. "Come to a fight?"
"I should hope not," Hannibal says. "But your fortuitous elimination of Ms. Lounds will not banish her forever, I'm afraid, and she does not like our kind very much."
Abigail swallows and fists her hand in her napkin, but she refuses to look down. "Freddie doesn't want a fight," she says. "She said she just...wanted what was hers."
"I'm sure she will feel the same way when she surfaces," Hannibal says, an eyebrow raised.
"How much of this did you plan?" Abigail demands again.
"As much as I planned your murder of Nicholas Boyle," Hannibal replies evenly. "Events have a way of arranging themselves."
"You want there to be a war."
"All I really needed was the possibility of one, although I am not precisely opposed to the event," Hannibal says. "Will is the sort who needs to have something to fight for."
"Something to protect," says Abigail.
"Just so," says Hannibal.
"It's not like he was going to leave."
"I like to be sure about the important things,” says Hannibal. “You, of course, do not require such a deception. You are a survivor; you fight for nothing more than yourself."
"You're wrong," says Abigail.
Hannibal stands, and shrugs. "You are an intelligent young woman, Ms. Hobbs. Why don't you go help Will with the washing up?"
Abigail does, drying the dishes Will washes, and she does not tell him that Hannibal is lying to him. He probably already knows, deep down. He isn’t stupid.
She thinks of Will teaching her how to make fishing flies and Hannibal showing her to how to butcher a chicken, and then she thinks of Wendy, chain smoking cigarettes alone on the porch. Her certainty that Freddie would come back, and that when she came back, she would come back to her.
Hannibal is wrong. Abigail fights for more than herself.
Wars can be stopped. And there are other ways to keep a family together than death.
Maybe Freddie was right. Maybe she can be more than she is.
Will hands her a knife to dry, and Abigail smiles up at him. “Thanks,” she says, and she thinks that maybe she can learn to lead people away from death instead of towards it.