I honestly don’t know how to explain it.
I feel like I’ve been on the verge of the ultimate déjà vu episode since I stepped foot in this motel room, the déjà vu to end all déjà vu. I don’t know if it’s just anxiety, or if my brain, augmented by the memories of my future that Vanth incidentally left behind when she tried to decapitate me, is trying to tell me something but can’t quite force the message to the surface. But I’ve never felt so close to the edge of disaster in my entire life, not even when McKinney tied me to a chair and tortured me for days on end.
Shaking my head, I cast that dread aside and reply to Cooper. I really don’t want you in the hot zone, but your choice is yours to make. My words echo a sentiment I read in a very important letter, one that taught me a very important lesson. Even so, please tell me you have some intel for me to go on. I can’t keep sitting here doing nothing. I’m slowly losing my mind. I have to work on a lead, any lead, to try and clear my name.
We agreed a couple days back that while I need to stay off the radar as much as possible, the fact I’m currently running on my own gives me more leeway to act on intel than my teammates, who’re caught up in Bollinger and Delos’ “trade deal.” They can’t openly try to exonerate me while Delos is holding their leash, courtesy of their own commissioner. But I can damn well give it a shot, and give Delos the middle finger while I’m at it. As long as I don’t get caught.
However, since I currently have no access to DSI’s databases, or the latest gossip, I need Cooper to pass me the relevant information.
After he reads my last message, he spends a few minutes intermittently typing without sending anything over. I figure he’s either looking things up on the computer or transferring over a list of notes he jotted down earlier in the day.
Finally, just as I’m getting antsy, the completed message pops up. A list of names I recognize as local ICM practitioners, plus their addresses, followed by, These are persons of interest in the ICM’s own MG investigation that Delos mentioned during a meeting with your team and Sing’s this morning. These aren’t the people they currently have in custody but the ones they were about to move on before the curse struck. It’s possible one of these people started the rumors about your involvement.
The veiled guy in the woods, maybe? I respond. He undoubtedly watched the final fight with Feldman, saw me and Lucian working together. He killed Feldman for exposing the MG, and tried to kill me too, probably for helping the “enemy vampire.” Maybe he’s trying to pin the curse on me to finish what he started.
Cooper’s ellipsis bounces up and down on the messenger screen for a minute before his next text comes through. I get it. By falsely claiming you’re in league with them, the MG has pitted you against DSI, the ICM, and the vampires. The rogues are literally tricking their enemies into doing their work for them…
Lucky Lucian and his people already pulled out of the city, huh? I send back. Not that I think Lucian would’ve believed the rumors anyway. He’s been stalking me for months and would know I’ve never met in private with any Methuselah members. But that’s not to say the rest of his new team, fresh off the boat from Europe, would give me the benefit of the doubt. If the curse hadn’t scared the vampires out of Aurora, I could’ve ended up like Mac.
A shudder runs through me as Mac’s gruesome death replays in my head for the umpteenth time, Lucian’s nonchalant taunt echoing into the dingy alley where my partner’s corpse lay bloody and broken. Better luck next time, kid.
Vampires are not the creatures to poke with a stick. I can’t get on their bad side, ever.
Not as long as I’m a fragile little human anyway.
Yeah, Cooper texts over, lucky the vampires left, but unlucky that Delos fell for such a rudimentary trap, and dragged everyone else into it. I thought he was supposed to be some kind of genius, what with his history and “skills.”
Even the smartest people can fall victim to paranoia and obsession. The MG has likely stoked both in Delos, I reply. Anyway, I’ll start looking into those practitioners ASAP. Thanks for the assist. Hopefully, this will all be over soon.
Be careful, Cal, he sends back a moment later. I’d hate to have to find a new boyfriend on short notice.
Same to you. See you later. I close the message app, then let a faint smile tilt up my lips. The moment of levity passes however, and I rise from the chair and get to work.
My disguise is stupidly simple.
Step one, don’t shave for three days. I can’t exactly grow a lumberjack beard or anything, but since I never wear facial hair, and thus have none in any picture that has ever been taken of me, I’m surprisingly difficult to recognize with short, prickly black scruff.
Step two, wear a baseball cap. I’m not a big sports fan, and I almost never wear hats, outside of winter beanies, so anyone who knows me will subconsciously classify a dude wearing a baseball cap as not me. Of course, being detectives, they’ll probably give me a second look anyway, but that won’t matter, because I’ll also be wearing a pair of sunglasses—which is step three.
Step four is to throw on some of those ugly clothes I wasted my hard-earned cash on. I’ve got an assortment of pastel polo shirts and tan cargo shorts, the perfect clothes to disguise myself as a frat bro. And the only reason I don’t have a pair of tan flip-flops to go along with the “style” is because I can’t run in flip-flops, and if someone starts chasing me, I can’t exactly throw off my shoes and run barefoot across hot asphalt and concrete. So, white tennis shoes it is.
Once I’m fully dressed and trying not to gag at my douchey reflection in the mirror, I review the first name and address Cooper provided and mentally plot a course through town from my location. Public transit has been shut down since the city-wide quarantine was announced, and there’s very little traffic on the roads, so I’ll have to skulk around like a mugger through back alleys and side streets in order to avoid the attention of the only people still out in force: the Aurora PD, the National Guard, and DSI.
Lucky for me, I know the layout of Aurora like the back of my hand. Born and raised.
Sneaking out of the crummy motel without being seen is child’s play. There’s not a single other person hanging out in the hall or the parking lot, and the window blinds for the front office are drawn, preventing the manager from glimpsing my escape. From the parking lot, I wind around the back side of the motel and slip into a narrow street called Bluster Road, which cuts north toward a smattering of Aurora’s wealthier neighborhoods. The first wizard on the suspect list lives in one of those cozy townhouse rows right on the edge of town, surrounded by cute little parks and manmade ponds, the perfect compromise between inner-city apartment living and distant suburbia.
Well, perfect until the National Guard showed up and barricaded the city.
I’m hoping the wizard didn’t manage to sneak out during the confusion of the Guard’s arrival and DSI’s integration with the military forces to stop practitioners from fleeing using their magic. But I don’t let those hopes root too deep. MG rogues are a different kind of beast. They’re tricky, clever bastards who excel at scheming, especially when the end of that scheming inflicts damage to their enemies, no consideration for collateral damage required. If any of them knew a way to slip through the quarantine perimeter undetected, whether using an excellent veil or some other method, they exercised that knowledge to the fullest extent days ago.
Still, I have to try to find these people. The longer I sit and do nothing, the closer Delos grows to finding me, and if he gets his hands on me…Don’t think about it, Cal. Just don’t.
At the end of Bluster, I make a left, which takes me through another winding minor road that eventually joins with the main highway leading out of town. As I skulk along the sidewalk, scrutinizing every inch of my surroundings from beneath the shadow of the bill of my hat, I count on one hand the number of people out and about:
An older white woman flipping the sign for her candy shop from closed to open, as if unbothered by the
threat of disease sweeping into her store.
A young Asian man in the doorway of a tiny takeout-only Chinese place, sweeping dirt from the cracked tile floor, over the lip of the doorway, and onto the sidewalk, where the wind whips it up and carries it away.
A black woman about thirty, dressed in a long tan coat that looks more like a cowboy’s piece than a fashion statement, and sporting an afro of thick black ringlets highlighted with streaks of golden blond. She’s sitting alone at a two-person table in front of an independent coffee shop. A coffee shop that isn’t open. No lights on. No one inside.
She’s the one who doesn’t belong.
I slowly turn my head to look at her fully, at the same time she stops pretending not to look at me and shoots me a knowing smirk. She was waiting for me. Knew I’d come this way. Knew more than that. She was following me, unseen and unheard, since the moment I stepped out the motel room. She must’ve staked the place out. She’s a witch.
Shit. Shit. How’d did she find me? A scrying spell? A trace on a personal item?
Doesn’t matter. I’ve been found out. Now isn’t the time to think. It’s the time to run.
I peel off into the alley to my left and sprint toward the street on the opposite end. In between jumping a broken trash bag and dodging a misaligned dumpster, I shove my hands into my pockets and slip on my beggar rings, charging them with a mental whisper. The right force ring is still damaged from my previous blunder with the Wayland wizard, but I have to hope that if push comes to shove, I’ll be able to keep my rings intact long enough to evade the witch. And if all else fails, both my guns are tucked into my waistband, hidden by the hem of my pale pink polo shirt.
When I near the end of the alley, the hairs on the back of my neck rise suddenly, and for a second, I think there’s someone waiting for me out in the street. But then I hear the growling, low and rolling, followed by the unmistakable barks of two dogs, and realize the threat is racing up from behind me. I glance over my shoulder as I slip-slide toward the alley’s exit, my shoes lacking the traction of my usual work boots, skimming across a shallow, oily film on the concrete.
There’s nothing behind me—except there is. I can hear them. The dogs. I don’t understand.
And then I do.
My heart clambers up my throat at the same time my stomach tries to swallow itself, and in a blink, just as I’m sharply turning to the right to take off down the deserted sidewalk on Hanover Lane, my magic sense activates. In the narrow space of the alleyway that, to normal human eyes, is filled only with the strange, unaccountable sounds of vicious dogs on the hunt, I spy exactly what’s chasing me. Not trained police dogs, planning to take a flying leap and grab my arm, dragging me down. Not even rabid street dogs, spelled into obeying the commands of a nasty witch.
No, I’m being chased by hellhounds.
Adrenaline rides into my veins on the coattails of terror, and I run. Full speed. Heart pounding. Lungs straining. Legs laughing at the idea that I might possibly outrun the creatures hooked to my scent. In my sight, even reflected in the windows of the closed storefronts and locked-tight homes I dash by, the grotesque forms of the hounds burrow deep into my soul, dredging up that primal fear of the things that go bump in the night, the predators that swipe you up in the darkness and leave nothing behind but a spatter of blood and the message No man is safe.
In essence, they’re dogs. They have four legs. Two ears. A tail. A snout. But in detail, demonic doesn’t adequately describe them. They have no fur. Their skin is black as night, muscles bulging in all the wrong places, joints bending in ways they should not, as if the hounds have a few too many parts, like they’re filled with whatever slurry of organs and bone and gristle happened to be in a barrel of miscellaneous gore. Their eyes are redder than a born vampire’s, glowing even in the light of day, the glare made worse by the fiery aura wound tight around their bodies, rippling as they lope toward me.
I learned all about hellhounds in my DSI academy classes. How strong they are. How merciless. How they never, ever tire. How they never lose a scent. How they can hunt down anyone and anything. Rumor has it that in the days before civilization could honestly be called civilized, before the ICM had a stranglehold on magic law, practitioners with vendettas would summon hellhounds to dispose of their enemies. Afterward, no one found the bodies. There were no bodies to find.
And now, in modern-day Aurora, two hellhounds are after me.
Oh, god. I’m going to die.
Chapter Ten
The second my feet touch the ground after I hop the fence to the construction site, I know I’ve made a terrible mistake. My shoes kick up dust baked dry under the hot August sun as I race around stacks of steel beams gleaming in the midday light and bags of concrete half covered by blue tarps. A crane sits unmanned in front of the skeleton of the office building, and when I hear the hounds tear through the fence behind me, like the chain link is made of paper, I make a split-second decision to clamber onto the outrigger, run up onto the cabin, and then leap across the gap between its roof and the unfinished second floor of the building.
A well-executed somersault lands me with minimal bruising, right on the edge of the loosely secured boards that drop off steeply into a chasm of a basement below. I pretend I have a lot more balance than I do as I make my way across the boards, cutting toward the opposite end of the construction site, which abuts a stubby building whose roof is my only viable escape route. The whole time I’m running along, wobbling on the boards, listening to the barks of the hounds draw closer, all I can picture is that night when I fled from McKinney’s cabin in the woods and got chased by the Wolf and his flunkies.
There’s a stark difference between now and then that sticks out to me: Werewolves are people who can transform into animals. Hellhounds are simply demonic dogs from the Eververse. Werewolves can reason. Hellhounds cannot. Werewolves can choose not to kill you. Hellhounds act on their master’s orders. So if the witch in the cowboy coat gave them the kill command, and I get caught in a fight like the one I had with McKinney, my bloody body parts are going to end up scattered all over the ground.
Christ, where’s owl man when I need him?
The unfinished floor suddenly jostles wildly, and I have to dive to the right so I don’t tumble over into the basement. My knees connect with the floor hard enough to elicit a pained grunt, but I clamp down on the reaction and spin around, one knee grounded, fists raised, just as the hellhound who leaped up a whole story lunges for my throat.
Lightning arcs through the air from my electricity ring and slams into the hound’s meaty chest. The hound flies backward, over the edge of the building, and smacks into the boom of the crane with a resounding clang. Electricity crackles through the metal, discharged from the hound’s seared skin, as the beast bounces off the boom and crumples onto the outrigger beneath. It lies there for a moment, breathing heavily and whimpering, before it struggles to retake its feet.
I don’t wait around for it to recover.
And neither does the other hound.
From the darkness of the basement abyss, the remaining hound flings itself onto the second floor and crashes to a stop against a pile of cinderblocks off to one side. Shaking off the hit, it rakes its claws against the floor and locks its crazed eyes on me, then barrels forward. I swivel around to blast it away like I did its friend, only to feel the telltale tingle in my fingers that indicates my rings are irreparably cracked because I overloaded them—yet again. Fuck!
I yank one of my handguns out of my waistband, flick off the safety, and fire two shots, one of which nails the charging hound right between the eyes. The beast loses its footing and careens toward me, and I have no choice but to roll toward the edge of the boards to avoid being caught in the cascade. The hound misses me by inches and crashes head first into a steel support beam. It drops to the floor, still twitching.
Not stupid enough to think I’ve defeated either hound, I scramble around on my shaking legs and make to mad-dash onto the r
oof of the adjacent building.
And that’s when the force wave hits me in the back.
Now, I know the cowboy witch doesn’t mean to knock my ass into the basement and nearly kill me in the process—she means to knock me forward, onto my face, breaking my nose and jarring my jaw and cracking a couple teeth—but because I’m so close to the edge of the unfinished floor, and because the force spell she throws at me isn’t perfectly aligned with my spine, I’m yanked slightly to the left. And my foot slips off the last board. And I lose my balance. And I flail my way over the edge of the abyss. And I scream like a frightened child as I fall into the darkness.
The descent is short. My right leg rams a large metallic object, wheeling me around in a tight circle a moment before I come into contact with the ground. My back meets dry earth in an impact that knocks the air out of my lungs and leaves me choking and coughing and gasping. My head whips back against a thin, narrow board, snapping it in half; my scalp tears, and hot blood weeps into the dirt. Bright white stars consume my vision, and I nearly go under, but then my sight flickers back in, and I find myself staring up at the rectangle of light that marks the unfinished half of the flooring. Dazed, I let my limbs lie limp in the cool, loose earth, and slowly count the number of forming bruises underneath my skin.
“Shit!” echoes into the basement from above me, and a dark silhouette peers down from the first floor. “Hey, you aren’t dead, are you?” asks the female voice.
The cowboy witch.
You have to get away, screams my brain, before she takes you to Delos! But my body won’t respond to any commands. I can’t sit up, much less run, and fighting an ICM witch alone is a laughable suggestion. The shock of the fall cracked at least three ribs, and the growing concussion will not be kind in the coming days. I should be heading to the DSI infirmary right now.
Doom Sayer (City of Crows Book 4) Page 11
