“Find shelter,” she says, her quiet voice too confident to disobey. Hollett and I go around to the far side of the debris column, but not so far that we can’t watch her. She takes an on-guard stance with her tanto, eyes still locked on the spot on the top of the pile, then in a single whipcrack motion she cocks her right hand back and sends the tanto like a bullet into the top of the column.
The explosion is a small one, smaller than the kind my red Aegis shells produce, but it’s enough to clear out a small disk of open space at ceiling level. Through it I can see open sky, stars glittering in the night like beacons. Nariko had curled herself into a protective ball after she let fly, and she uncoils herself as the dust settles. She’s searching the floor for her knife when we join her. She finds it after a moment and tucks it into her waistband.
“Father’s gauntlet,” she says, her voice as smooth and unemotional as ever, “has never been the kind of tool I would use.”
Hollett’s examining our new exit with evident approval. “Let’s go,” he urges. He and I slog our way up to the hole while Nariko bounds past us like a mountain goat with pogo stick legs.
The land on the surface is about what I’d expected. The cold moon is curtained behind a hazy veil of dust, choking particles that look like snow drifting in the stark light. Half of the barn and the landscape surrounding it have been scraped flat and crammed into the cavern like snow being packed in a block. The rest is a small mountain on top of the hole they made, except where an expertly placed explosion cleared just enough space for us to squeeze through.
As soon as we’re above ground Hollett and Nariko send messages back to home base. They get replies almost immediately.
“Clive is sending his men to the second map point downtown,” Hollett says.
“Father is doing the same,” Nariko adds.
“Good,” I say. “Let’s beat them there.”
We run back to the van. All the cars are there except for Celeste’s Magnum.
“The tracks,” I point to the curl in the grass. “I saw them on the way in and just assumed they made off with a different truck. They left them there as a decoy.”
“It worked,” Hollett says, just as unhappy about it as I am. We reach the van, only to find that the steering column has been twisted into a metallic pretzel. Nothing’s moving this thing out of here except a tow truck.
“I’m going to make him eat that damned glove,” I growl.
Nariko glares at me with undisguised malice.
“Sorry,” I say. An idea comes into my head, and it’s not one that I like much. I hop in the van’s driver’s seat. There’s plenty of room, with the steering wheel bent around the column like wrapping paper. It only takes me a moment to confirm my fear.
“They took the notebook.” I hop out and slam the door. “All their research, all their notes. Everything Clive Reese had locked away from them, they have it now. Thanks to us.”
“You don’t think they planned this, do you?” Hollett asks.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” I snap. “I think Celeste Reese has been three steps ahead of us all this time. I think she’s a hell of a lot smarter than even her old man gave her credit for. I think she knows exactly what she’s doing, that so far everything has been working out according to her plan, and I think that it’s past time we put a stop to that.”
“Great speech, William Wallace.”
“Thanks, Huckleberry.”
It takes only a minute for us to find the keys to the big Raptor in the pocket of a dead Gamagori. I snatch them from Hollett’s hand and climb behind the wheel. He stares mutely at me for a second, then jumps in the shotgun seat while Nariko claims the rear seat for herself again. The engine growls like a dragon as I gun the truck back towards town.
Eleven
The roads whip by, but despite the fact that now I’m the one doing the driving they seem to go even slower.
“Why now?” I mutter quietly.
“What?” Hollett asks.
Like a good little boy, I keep my hands at ten and two, but my mind is a billiard ball caroming off the bumpers. “Why are Celeste and Kenta launching their attack now? Clive Reese took the binder away from her when he locked her up, but she’d dated their research as they went on. It looked like they’d finished their research before Thanksgiving, almost a month ago. They’ve only been on lockdown for two weeks, according to Calvin Reese. That means they could have done this long ago, but they didn’t. So why are they doing it now?”
“Who knows? Lunar cycle?”
“Could be, I guess. There are all kinds of ceremonies that involve the moon even when it isn’t full. Nariko, does today hold any significance for your family?”
She thinks for a moment, then shakes her head.
“Maybe it has something to do with whatever it was they dug up back there.”
“Maybe,” I agree. “I just wish we could find out what it was.” I let half of my mind watch the road while the other half recalls the room, the inscriptions on the stone-paneled walls, the hieroglyphs that coated the room and the one on the ancient coffin. It’s so familiar, something I’ve definitely come across before. Not here, not in Superstition Bay. Back before, during my time as an Envoy.
My mind races faster. I didn’t find it during an assignment. That means it was research. Back in the archives, looking at books. It wasn’t research for an assignment, otherwise it would have turned up in the field and I’d have remembered it. It was another book, not for homework, idle reading. There was a book I used to idly flip through. An old one, not that there were many new books in the Aegis archives. Stories, rumors, myths. Lost legends, some from before language. The glyph floats back into my mind.
It almost looks like…
Holy shit.
I remember it now.
Either I said some of that out loud or the look on my face must be a giveaway, because Hollett asks with some urgency, “What? What’s going on?”
“I know what this is,” I say through a triumphant smile.
“I wish I knew what you were talking about.”
“The mark in their notes, that odd symbol. It was on the grave they dug up, too. I knew I’d seen it before, but I didn’t remember where until just now.”
“Well, don’t keep us in suspense, damn it,” he snaps.
“I was going through a library back at the Adytum a few years back.”
“Where?” Nariko asks.
“The Adytum,” Hollett says. “The Aegis’ home base.”
“It was in a book about legends,” I say. “Myths. It was called a kiovore.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“A monster, an old, old mythological monster. That’s what they were looking for. That’s what they found, buried under that barn.”
“Why haven’t I heard of them?”
“Because they’re mythological, you ass. There have never been any recorded encounters with one.”
“Mythology is often…” Nariko begins, but I cut her off.
“Grounded in reality, I know. But the fact is that we’ve never actually seen one before. Not in living memory, not in recorded history. Never.”
“You look really freaked out. What did the book say about them?”
I’ve been trying to remember that for a few seconds now, but my memory’s fairly dry. “It’s been a hell of a long time. I glanced over the pages, but since they were considered to be imaginary I didn’t bother to memorize a lot about them. Roughly human-ish in shape and size, but they’re predators. Bad ones. They feed on magic, usually by draining it from the body of a magical being.”
“You mean a vampire?” Hollett almost laughs. “Ian DeLong getting unnerved by a vampire. Never thought I’d see the day.”
“They aren’t vampires, at least not like any we know. They don’t feed on blood. They actually eat magic. They feed on the energy of magical people.”
“Magic is life,” Nariko says quietly, “and life is magic.”
�
�It doesn’t feed on blood, but who knows? Maybe that’s how the common vampire legends started. Maybe it’s another species of vampire, like the Neanderthals were to ancient homo sapiens.”
“Intelligent?”
“I don’t think so, but I don’t remember exactly. I think it’s like a shark, all appetite and no brains.”
“So, what you’re saying here is that we don’t know anything about this creature apart from what it eats. How to fight it, what its weaknesses are, nothing? Not even what it looks like apart from ‘human-ish’?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe we should have picked up some garlic after all.”
“If they’re so rare as to be mythological now,” Hollett reasons, “then once upon a time someone, somewhere found a way to defeat it. That means it must have some Achilles’ heel. We just need to find out what it is.”
“Nobody defeated the dinosaurs,” Nariko says from the darkness behind me.
“Nobody buried the dinosaurs in a sealed and secret grave,” he counters.
He’s right. Knowledge has saved my life more times in the past than my magical immunity has. And while I’m not a living encyclopedia of all things mystical and magical, I do happen to know someone who is. Technically, though, I’m not sure he’s ‘living’. More than that, I’m not actually 100% sure he’s a ‘he’.
When I was given an old Aegis safe house to live out my retirement in I was surprised to find that I’d also inherited a roommate. Jamie’s a ghost, more or less. I say that because he’s done things in the past that ghosts shouldn’t be able to do, like physically touch me, and for something that’s not supposed to be able to leave my house he seems to have ready access to a lot of esoteric information. If there’s anything (excuse me, anyone) who would be able to figure out what to do with this thing, it’ll be him. I slip my phone out of my pocket and call Lisa. She answers on the first ring.
“What went wrong?”
“Why do you say that?”
“You went off to do whatever derring-do it was you had planned with Clive Reese hours ago. You said it’d take an hour or so and you’d call me when you were done. It’s been more than two hours now, so I’m guessing something went bad.”
Well, she’s always been tough to fool. “I don’t have a lot of time right now, but yes, things went bad. Are you at my place?”
“I’m on my way over now. I just left the gym.”
“When you get there, I need you to give Jamie a message for me.”
“Okay, I will. Ian, are you okay?” A trace of worry has crept into her voice.
“I’m fine. I’ll explain it all later. Tell Jamie I need to know about kiovores.” I spell the word for her. “Tell him I need everything he can find. I may be busy for a while, so I’ll call you when I get a chance, okay?”
“Okay,” she says, but her tone says, ‘if you make it through whatever it is you started unscathed you and I are going to have words’.
“I’ll see you soon,” I tell her and close the line.
“Your man does good research?” Hollett asks.
“The best.” I trust Jamie to do the leg work for me, so I give the road more of my attention. We’re back inside the town limits now, farmland having receded and given way to the suburbs. Soon the buildings will get taller and less residential. The business district, the center of the town itself, is coming up fast.
“I hope he’s fast.”
“Me, too. It’ll only take them a few short minutes to reach their second map point, and I’d like to know what’ll be waiting for us when we get there.”
“Where are they going?” Nariko’s thin whisper comes from shockingly close to my left ear. She’s leaning forward so her head is almost between ours and I never heard her move. “What is the second destination?”
“It’s a building downtown. I don’t know which one, but if the first step of their plan was to dig this thing up I don’t think we want them to get to the second step.”
“It would be best if they do not,” she says. “Stealing Father’s gauntlet. Attacking me. It is unlike Kenta to go to these lengths. He is not one to cause himself stress. I am… concerned.”
Hollett doesn’t say anything, but his brow furrows a bit and a muscle twitches in his cheek. He’s worried. They both are, but neither will admit it. I am, too, but not necessarily about the same things they are.
I’m not confident in their ability to back me up. Hollett will handle himself professionally, I’m confident of that, but everyone else involved in this mess is family. Dysfunctional, but still family. There are too many brothers, sisters, cousins and so forth on both sides. When family fights family there’s usually pulled punches, or punches thrown too hard in the wrong direction, and tonight with tensions running as high as they are between the Reese and Gamagori families that may end up with deaths. With both families in such close proximity in such a volatile situation it’s increasingly likely that what’s coming up will not be a confrontation, but a conflagration.
I’m going to have to call in my own backup, someone powerful enough to hold their own but who’s not emotionally or financially obligated to anyone else in the picture. Unfortunately, there’s only one person I can think of that fits the needs of the situation, though I realize that there’s a very distinct possibility that I may be trying to put out a fire by smothering it in gunpowder. Almost against my better judgment I pull my cell phone out and click it on. Hollett looks at me with a question in his eyes.
“Don’t ask,” I tell him. “This is going to be the most awkward phone call I’ve ever made.”
Twelve
As we get toward the center of town I’m forced to slow the Raptor. It’s almost nine o’clock and with the scattering moonlight the chill night air feels as oppressive as an iron weight. Most of the streets are appropriately deserted, but as we get closer to the map point we start noticing a thickening crowd of pedestrians and vehicles, all going in the same direction we are.
“We’re almost there,” Hollett says.
“How do you know?”
He points off into the distance, past the crowding sidewalks. A couple of blocks ahead the darkness, already partially broken by glowing oversized Christmas ornaments hanging from the street lights, is being overthrown by flickering red and blue lights. A lot of them. Enough to make me think that half of the SBPD must have beaten us there.
“The kids made good time.”
“Looks that way,” I say. “Any word from your people?”
“No,” Nariko says. Hollett just shakes his head.
“Hopefully your people are smart enough to hang back and not make trouble for themselves,” I say, “but call them just to be sure. If there’s trouble, tell them to ask specifically for Detective Adam Farelli. Not his partner, Matthiassen. Specifically, Adam Farelli.”
“Who is that?” Nariko asks.
“A local cop. Human, but a good guy. He’s clued in to the nightlife here in town.”
“How do you know he’s there?”
“I’m pretty sure he’s got a minor magical talent that he’s not even aware of. He always seems to show up at supernatural crime scenes. Unless I miss my guess, that’s what’s waiting for us up there.”
A moment later there’s no doubt. The road is blocked off by blue-and-white SBPD cars, light bars searing everyone’s eyes, and the cops lowest on the seniority totem pole are directing traffic into what I’m sure is a torturous detour through the town’s infamously narrow streets. We pull the truck into the parking lot of a Wendy’s, and from there we’re able to get a good look at Celeste and Kenta’s destination.
I see now what building it is, and the sight of it makes me draw in a breath.
“Problem?” Hollett asks.
“There will be. Come on.” I kill the engine and get out.
It’s a jewelry store, or at least it used to be. Now it’s an elegant, whitewashed cement building with a tastefully decorated lobby that looks like a bomb went off inside it. There’s
rubble all over the place and the plate glass half-wall that makes up the street side of the building has been pulverized into glittery bits that glint like holiday snow in the patrol car’s red-and-blue strobe lights.
We start making our way towards the fringe of the crowd of gawkers that come with every crime scene. I recognize Reese and Gamagori goons in scattered knots throughout the crowd. They look edgy and pumped up, exactly the wrong emotions to be riding right now. I lead Hollett and Nariko through the civilians, bypassing the families.
“I’ll do the talking,” I say.
“You’re not the boss, DeLong.” Hollett says.
“Listen, Hollett, number one, I know these people, which brings us to number two: this is my goddamn town, and that does in fact make me the boss. This is no committee. You’re just tourists here. If they’re in there, then the three of us work together. If it’s just talking, then it’s just me. Got it?”
Hollett and Nariko nod silently, but for the first time I think I see the faintest glimmer of an amused smile on the corner of her mouth. Then again, it might have just been the shifting light.
There’s another reason I want to be the speaker here, and why I don’t want anyone talking to anyone other than Adam. The police force here in Superstition Bay has always had its share of Grey members. It’s just the law of averages that a town with such a disproportionately large population of magic users and magical beings would have a disproportionately large percentage of them on the force. But more than that, lately the percentage has been on the rise and not in such a way that makes me comfortable. From what I’ve heard, about forty percent of the force now has a magical component. Most of them are werewolves.
And I hate werewolves.
I lead the two enforcers towards the nearest cop, standing rigidly behind the wooden sawhorse barricades that fill in the gaps between patrol cars. I don’t recognize him, but I’m sure the department is proud of him. He looks like somebody somewhere is always proud of him. His uniform is crisp, his hat at the perfect angle, his nametag (Officer Blanchard) is gleaming. Even his deep olive skin looks flawless. I shoulder my way through the last few stubborn bystanders until I’m in front of him.
No More Devils: A Visit to Superstition Bay Page 10
