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For those unlucky enough to be from those mountains and also just plain unlucky, there have always been whispers. Cross Lanes, West Virginia, isn't even a town. The census just designates it as a place, which, if Jack thinks about it too hard, seems ominous, but he supposes ominous is probably the appropriate atmosphere for what he's looking to do.
There is a bar on the outskirts of Cross Lanes, a place where the unlucky can go to make a deal.
Jack trudges through the dusty gravel of the parking lot and pushes open the door to the little dive with the toe of his boot. The windows are blacked out and smoke hangs thick in the air though none of the scattered patrons seem to be nursing a ten a.m. cigarette. Neon signs throw color in all directions, if not a whole lot of light.
Jack makes his way to the bar and takes a seat atop one of the stools. Despite the worn, cracked leather, the seat seems alarmingly inviting, as though made just to keep him there a while.
"Just a sec," calls a voice from down the bar and Jack just grunts in acknowledgement, not looking up from the shiny wooden bar top.
He drums his fingers against it, not really impatient, just needing to do something with his hands. The silver of his wedding ring throws the blue and red light of a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign overhead and Jack smiles to himself—thinks of sweating cans of the stuff in the bed of his beat-up pickup—high-schoolers in love, sneaking contraband into a drive-in theater.
"What can I get you, honey?" a soft voice asks and Jack looks up to see a woman standing behind the bar expectantly. Jack hadn't given much thought to what a crossroads demon might look like except in passing—just enough to work up the resolve to face such a horror.
She's nothing like what he's imagined. Beautiful doesn't seem to do her justice, warm dark skin that glows against the white of her tank top, dark eyes and darker hair, wild with curls.
He finds himself momentarily speechless, but she just cocks a hip and waits.
"Uhh—Sorry. Little early for a drink, I think," he explains.
Her lips quirk to the side. "If I'm right about why you're here, you've got bigger fish to fry than bourbon before noon."
"Fair point," he acknowledges.
"So what'll it be, Major?"
Jack pulls back, startled. "What did you just call me?"
Her features are teasing but the words come out sincere. "Do you prefer doctor?"
"I prefer Jack,” he tells her, uneasy at the way she’s able to get him on the back foot so quickly.
"Okay then, Jack. What's your poison?"
She's convincing; he'll give her that much.
"Surprise me," he shrugs.
She reaches beneath the bar and lines up a shot glass which she fills with what he assumes is well whiskey.
He throws back the shot. It's cheap, rotgut stuff, but he's oddly soothed by it. It's a nostalgia of sorts—pain from an old wound—comforting in its familiar sting.
"Do you have a name?" he asks suspiciously.
Her smile in response is blinding. "I have a lot of them, thank you for asking—not many men do. You can call me Samira."
"Samira, then," he says with a low chuckle. Jack feels a little intoxicated in a way he can't fully blame on the liquor, and he smiles softly to himself.
"Something funny?" she prompts with a raise of an eyebrow.
"Not really, no. I just suppose if you're in sales, it helps to look like that, regardless of what it is you're selling... And what they're paying with," he explains.
Her eyes narrow, like she's trying to work out a puzzle. "That's true. But I still don't understand why it's funny."
"I just—it reminded me of work. I didn't realize even hell has pharmaceutical reps."
She laughs in return, the sound bright and clear as crystal. "You're right. That is funny. And I suppose I do sell cures of a sort," she agrees, refilling the shot glass.
"And what sort is that? The liquor or...." he trails off, suddenly remembering why he's there. It's the first time in months, maybe years that something has managed to distract him from the ache—in his leg, in his heart—for more than a moment.
"I suppose that depends on what you're looking to buy," she answers.
That sobers Jack in every sense of the word. "I want my wife back."
She hums, but says nothing, pulling a rag from the apron at her waist and wiping down the spotless bar.
After a moment, she looks up, her expression a little sad. "And you know what that costs?"
"I do," he agrees, an echo of words said long ago.
"Then I'm sorry, honey, but I can't help you," she answers, not unkindly.
He’d be lying if he said he isn't at least a little relieved to hear he’s beyond help "And why is that?"
"Have you not already bargained your soul once?" she asks in return.
"Well, damn," Jack sighs and throws back the shot in front of him.
"Quite."
Jack nods towards the empty shot glass and Samira fills it, letting the silence hang between them.
Deep down, Jack knows he'd traded his soul a long time ago to a different kind of crossroads demon. This one was clad in camouflage, camped at a table in his high school cafeteria, selling the promise of getting out of Bumfuck, West Virginia, debt free, for the low price of enlisting. He'd paid the price, at the time thinking it more than worth having a better life to offer his then-girlfriend.
Some better life it had turned out to be. He'd been barely a month into residency when his number was called up. They needed doctors on the ground in the desert and an intern was good enough for the US Army.
He'd come back broken in more ways than just the leg he'd lost to an IED. Disillusioned with service, with the military, and with his own notions of himself as a healer. He'd tried to hold it together for his wife when he returned, but cancer took her two years after he got home, a slow painful goodbye.
Somehow, he'd known deep down that it was his fault, that he'd rung up the debt and she paid the price.
"I suppose I knew that was a possibility," he sighs after a long while, looking up at the beautiful face in front of him.
He wraps his hand around the shot glass but doesn't lift it to his lips.
"How long has she been gone?" Samira asks.
He hasn't quite worked out the outlines of her. "Don't you know?"
"Humor me," she says with a quirk of her lips.
"Fifteen years."
"So, why come and see me now?"
"I guess I had—have—stopped seeing the point. In life without her. In much of anything," he explains and the thought has him taking another drink.
She looks at him evenly. "Does there need to be a point?"
"What?"
"Does there need to be a point? Do you really need some kind of divine cosmic purpose?" she prompts, and sets down a frosty can of PBR in front of him with a wink. “Can’t you just live? Try to make life a little easier on yourself and others while you have the time?”
He pops the tab, and takes a swig without thought. "Maybe,” he considers and wonders if he’s asking for big answers to small questions or perhaps, the other way around. “Purpose would be nice, though," he muses.
"Nice is overrated."
She surprises him, bringing another shot glass to line up next to his. This time the liquid she pours into both glasses is clear. He lifts his and she clanks hers against it before throwing it back.
He does the same and winces at the taste. "Figures demons drink tequila," he says, almost fond.
"Nice is overrated," she repeats, and he tilts his head in acknowledgement.
His mind has started to go a little blurry at the edges, but he's not ready to leave. The seat really is comfortable, and while it doesn't look like he’s getting what he came for, she's better company than he's had in a long time.
He hedges. "So how would it work?"
"How would what work?"
"If I had a soul left to bargain. How would this work?" he repeats, gesturing between the two of them.
"Ahhhh." She gives him a wry smile. "Well, if you had a soul to sell me, you'd get your wife back, I suppose, for as much time as you had left."
"What does that mean? Time left? Who decides?"
"Who decides is well above my pay grade," she offers with a wink. "But if you had thirty years left to live, you'd get thirty years with her.” She tilts her head in consideration. “Or a version of her."
"And if I step outside and get hit by a bus?” he asks.
"That's not really my problem," she shrugs, and the glint in her eye has his head reeling.
"That's cold."
She points a finger to herself by way of explanation. "Demon, remember?"
He hadn't, truthfully. For a moment, he'd forgotten who she is—why he's there. The word remember spurs a thought.
"What do you mean a version of her?"
She sighs and when she answers, her tone is gentle. "Well, she won't be your wife, not as you knew her. She's been somewhere else—someone else—for a while now. You'd be pulling her back to here," she explains.
Jack has never nursed illusions of heaven. Hell, sure. The predicament he finds himself in is surely proof enough of the existence of hell, but the lapsed Catholic in him had never ventured a hope that she’s waiting for him at the pearly gates.
"Pulling her back from where?" he asks skeptically.
Samira's smirk returns with a vengeance. "That's also above my pay grade."
He rolls his eyes. He doesn't see that there's any harm in clarifying a moot point. "What do you mean she won't be my wife?"
She leans on the bar, a look on her face like she's in on a joke he isn't. "Any more than you'd be her husband."
"I don't understand."
She tilts her head, a little condescending. "Well, mortals—men especially—are kind of stupid."
Jack bites back a laugh. He's always liked women smarter than him. His wife was a real smartass; he never could get one up on her. He doesn't figure he'd be able to pull anything over on Samira either.
A pleasant warmth buzzes through him, and he brooks no argument. "Sure. I'm plenty stupid. Do an old man a kindness and put it so I understand it?"
She gives him a look he can't quite parse, patient and a little indulgent. "Are you the same man you were before you lost her?"
His answer is automatic. "Not even a little bit.”
She crosses her arms and shrugs.
"Getting her back won't change that," she explains. "For better or worse, you're not the same man she was married to."
He struggles to put the words together in the right order, tequila-blurry and grappling with the divine is such an odd combination. "So I get her back but she's not my her and I'm not her me?"
Samira laughs again and Jack thinks, perhaps heretically, that the sound reminds him of church bells—the ones that rang in the square of his tiny hometown.
"More or less, yeah. That's the gist."
It's his turn to laugh. "Sounds like a shitty deal."
She leans her weight forward on the bar, close enough that her scent pervades his senses. She smells warm, hot even, but not like fire or ash. Instead, it reminds him of honeysuckle, the way it smells strongest through a weak breeze on scorching days. "It is." Her tone is conspiratorial.
He doesn't think he expected such honesty from someone like her before he realizes he's never met anyone like her. Not even close. "Do many people take it? The shitty deal?"
"I've made it thousands of times. Been making this exact deal since all of this started." He doesn't ask what this is. Above her pay grade, she'd probably say.
"Suckers," he condemns playfully.
He doesn't blame them. He thinks about the way he found her, a beautiful woman, kind enough to stay and listen a while. Kind enough to ask him questions. Time itself seems to move slowly here. Usually, slow-moving time is to be avoided, too much time with his thoughts, but instead her pace, the rhythm of this place puts him at ease.
"Every last one of them," she agrees. "So what about you, Jack? Are you a sucker?"
His brows furrow in question. "Doesn't matter. You said I'd already bargained by soul."
She looks at him, half pity, half teasing. "No. I asked if you had.” She cocks her head, “Is that the same thing? Is it my fault if you walked in here believing you were already damned?"
He realizes he's been duped in the same breath that he feels gratitude for the kindness of her gentle duplicity. His damnation has been a choice of his own making, not a cosmic bargain. Not yet at least. But the choice now seems obvious.
Her face is still close to his, like they're the only two people in the bar. Maybe they are. It's above his pay grade.
"You're telling me I got double talked?" He should be irritated by it, but he finds himself merely amused. Smart women.
She clicks her teeth and shakes her head, apologetic. "Happens to the best of them."
He learned a long time ago not to argue with women smarter than him, but he hasn't had fun like this in years. "You said you couldn't help me," he accuses.
"And I couldn't, at least, not the way you wanted. There is no back. That's why they're suckers."
He can see that now.
He narrows his eyes, suspicious, but not nearly as much as he should be. "Seems like bad business, talking suckers out of taking a rigged deal."
He takes another sip of the beer that tastes like a memory, but not a painful one anymore. From the looks of it, she knows this, too.
"Gonna pay your tab?" she asks, nodding to the beer and the empty shot glass.
"Yeah?" It comes out more question than answer and he wonders if it’s time for him to leave.
Her expression makes him consider the meaning of the word impish. Not devilish or evil, but tricky, alight with mischief and questionable intention. She shrugs, "Then the way I see it, business is just fine."
He looks at her dubiously. "That simple, huh?"
"Nothing about it is simple. Where would be the fun in that?" Her tone is teasing but he's pretty sure it's the closest to an honest answer about the divine that he's gotten since he sat down.
"And yet. You poured me a drink and talked me out of selling my soul." It isn't a question. Whatever her motivations, she'll offer them or she won't.
The flirtatious undercurrent he's gotten glimpses of surfaces, louder than before. A bat of her eyelashes, neon light reflecting off a beautifully curved collar bone. He isn't sure if she's laying it on thick or if she's just no longer competing for his attention with the grief. It's still there, always will be, but for the first time in a long while it doesn't demand his entire focus.
"It's a very nice soul. Also, you have kind, sad eyes and everyone's a sucker sooner or later."
He'd certainly been one. It leveled the playing field a little.
"Well, in that case, can I buy you a drink and we can go from there?" he offers, already guessing at her answer.
Her smile in response is luminous, human and sublime all at once.
"Sounds like a deal.”