The Kawasaki shook under me as I steered it out of the breakdown and down the shallow ditch at the side of the road. Killing the engine, I stepped up onto the pavement and started jogging after the semi. It had come to a stop a quarter-mile down the road, hazard lights blinking.
Wow, what if he’d wrecked? Roxanne stayed at my side with annoying ease.
I considered the thought, then winced. I hadn’t given my plan much thought—I’d just acted on instinct. “Back wheel like that, that’s not going to happen. But that’s one of the drive wheels, so it definitely stopped him where he might have been able to keep going a bit longer if I’d taken out one of the trailer tires. Front tire? Oh, yeah. He’d have flipped.” As we came up on the back of the trailer, I lowered my voice and said, “Keep an eye on him for me, I’m going to try something.”
The light had faded from the lines inscribed in the metal of the rear doors. Up close, I could make out the fine pattern of lines, though they still blurred the closer I looked at them. Some sort of ‘nothing to see here’ spell?
Padlocks secured the covers over the door latches. I glanced over at Roxanne. She looked back and said, He’s standing there staring at the wheel and talking on a phone.
“Good.” I took a deep breath, brought my hand close to the back of the trailer, and pushed forward slowly as I used the phase spell. Down in the cavern, I’d been unable to phase through the walls. Here and now, my hand sank through without a feeling of resistance. If everything else was the same, I wouldn’t be able to come back out, but there was always the force blade option if I couldn’t find an egress. “Moment of truth,” I said, and stepped up on the trailer’s bumper before pushing the rest of my body though.
It was cold inside, and a low, subtle hum filled the air. I hadn’t realized the trailer had a refrigeration unit, but that was the only explanation for the atmosphere. I listened for a moment, straining to hear anything over the hum, but my shallow breaths were the only sound.
I pulled out my cell phone and turned on the flashlight function. Shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes stretched from floor to ceiling, held in place by yellow straps. Looking at either side of the stack, I tried to make out what lay beyond, if anything, but the boxes lined up with geometric precision. From the text printed on the containers, they held varieties of frozen vegetables. Shaking my head, I muttered, “I’m going to feel stupid if I wrecked the Jolly Green Giant delivery truck.”
Phasing out, I moved forward through the boxes. I hit open air much sooner than I’d expected—there were no more than two layers of boxes between the back of the truck and the open space. The odd, coppery scent in the air gave a hint of what I was about to see, but I never could have anticipated the horrors revealed to me as I swept the flashlight beam around the hidden compartment.
Steel tubes ran along either side of the trailer, close to the roof. Every few feet, a large metal frame shaped somewhat like a hanger hung from the horizontal support. Rather than forming a bent triangle, the twin outer legs of each hanger sprouted a sharp metal hook. A naked human corpse dangled from each, the hooks punching through the calf above the ankle.
Most of the bodies were short enough that their outstretched fingers brushed the floor. A particularly tall corpse was without a head, the stump of his neck cut shy of brushing the floor. Vomit surged in the back of my throat, but I held it back. If I started now, I didn’t think I’d be able to stop.The bodies bore few visible wounds, save for the decapitated corpse. I might have convinced myself they were sleeping if not for the light rime of frost coating each.
“Help me,” whispered a weak voice. For a moment, I wondered if it wasn’t another ghost, but just as quickly, I realized that I’d heard this voice. I stepped lightly down the center of the trailer, shying away from the dangling bodies. The hum of the refrigeration unit grew louder the closer I drew to the front. Past the last body, the steel support pipes bent and plunged toward the floor. The cage lay between the two, under the cooling duct.
The woman inside was clothed, though she shivered uncontrollably. The fine mesh of the cage was too tight for her desperate fingers to reach through, and the entire box was low and narrow enough to keep her in a semblance of a fetal position. “Help,” she repeated.
I knelt. “Hang on,” I said. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
There was a thumping noise from outside, and I remembered the spare tires slung under the trailer. The driver didn’t seem to be waiting for AAA—the clock was getting tight.
I kept the force blade short and made quick work of the side of the cage closest to me. If the blue light cutting through otherwise-solid steel impressed her, she didn’t let on. Close to shock, I thought grimly. If she’d spent much longer in here, exposure would have killed her.
Her hand was small and cold in my own as I reached out for it. She sighed a tight sob but could muster no tears. “Oh, God, I thought I was dreaming. Please help me.”
“That’s the plan.” I pulled her out and cradled in my arms. She couldn’t have been more than a few inches over five feet, and I doubted she weighed more than a hundred pounds. Much larger, and the cage would have been too small. Turning away toward the passenger side, I phased the both of us and jumped out the side of the trailer, crossing my fingers that the spell would work.
We didn’t flutter to the ground like leaves on the wind, but the impact on the scrub didn’t hurt as much as it would have had we made the jump solid. I snapped back into phase, and the woman let out an abbreviated shriek of surprise. Outside of the trailer, the desert night was practically balmy, and the warmer air felt like fire on my skin.
I heard a scrape of boots on pavement and the hammer of weight landing on the roof of the trailer.
He just jumped! Roxanne blurted.
No kidding, I thought. Turning, I looked up at the silhouette of the truck driver.
He cocked his head far beyond the norm of a human range of motion, his ear brushing the shoulder of his flannel shirt. In a liquid voice, he said, “She is to feed the Void. This is not permitted.”
I’d heard that kind of voice before, out of a traveling salesman with a dead body in his trunk. I didn’t have backup or a shotgun this time, but it was actually kind of comforting to run into something familiar, as crazy as that seemed. “Not on my watch, asshole.”
The thing on top of the trailer rocked back a step in surprise, then leaned in to study me. “Magus,” it crooned. “I know your face. You, too, will feed the Void.”
“So, quit talking and come get some, Doctor Octopus.”
Arms outstretched, the thing jumped.
One thing no one’s ever accused me of is being a slow learner. The last time I’d fought one of these things, it had gotten its hands on me and tossed me around like a rag doll. That made step one staying outside of its reach.
This was easier said than done. As I ducked to one side, its arms whipped toward me, stretching out from the cuffs of the shirt. Fingers and palm spread wide large enough to palm a basketball, it brushed my jacket.
I jerked a hand up, and with a sudden pop, the stench of burnt meat filled my nostrils. The driver landed on bent knees, pulling a tentacle arm back with a cauterized stump at the wrist.
The abandoned hand flopped around on the pavement like one of the face-huggers from the Alien movies, then dissolved into a tarry black goo that smelled about ten times as bad as the burnt flesh.
“No friends this time,” the thing gurgled. A pair of tendrils pushed through the blackened flesh at the end of its wrist, twisting around as though searching for something to strangle. “I will taste your blood, wizard.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. Whipping out my left hand, I snared the thing’s ankles with an invisible tendril of force and yanked. It stumbled and nearly toppled, but caught itself with its intact arm and used that leverage to propel itself at me.
Which is exactly what I wanted.
I went low and kept my hands clasped together, parallel to the ground. One arm
brushed my shoulder, but I spun as I ducked. Our movements combined to push its chest through my paired force blades. Ichor hissed, and some ungodly foulness spilled to the pavement as the thing howled in obvious agony.
Completing the follow through, I planted and lunged for the thing. It stood hunched over, clutching at what I assumed were what it used for intestines to keep them from spilling out on the pavement. It had nowhere to run. Given the way it and its predecessor had recovered from dismemberment, I couldn’t count on that disability to last. I hit it high, bowling it over and slamming it face-first to the pavement. This elicited another squeal of agony. Its shoulder joint rotated in ways a human body wasn’t designed to move, lengthening fingers wrapping around my left arm and beginning to squeeze.
Grunting at the pain, I swept my other arm across and traced a burning line in the pavement that intersected with the beast’s neck. The grip on my bicep eased, and a leprous-scalped head rolled down into the ditch.The stench of burning tar mixed with the scent of whatever it was, and I did throw up then, spewing my dinner into the weeds at the side of the road.
You okay?
I looked up at Roxanne and nodded. “How’s the girl?”
Passed out.
“Thank God for small favors.” I climbed to my feet and jogged to the cab. The passenger door was unlocked. Pulling it open, I waited, ready for something to rush out of hiding, but the driver was alone.
It was almost absurd how normal the interior of the semi looked. He’d left the radio tuned to a classic rock station. A fountain drink from a truck stop rested in the cup holder, and air fresheners plugged into the vents lent the inside the odor of clean linen.
Finding nothing of use up front, I stepped back into the sleeper. The small bed was made with military precision, the rest of the area clean enough to have come off the showroom floor. I didn’t know what else I’d expected, given the steps the thing had taken to ensure its cargo remained secret and unnoticed.
The small refrigerator held bottles of water, and I helped myself to a couple. Back out on the pavement, I used the first to wash the foul taste out of my mouth and sipped the second more slowly.
The former hostage’s breathing was slow and even, and she didn’t stir when I picked her up again. I got her up into the passenger seat with some effort, and by the time I climbed over her and manhandled her into the sleeper, she was blinking at me with heavy eyes.
“You’re safe now,” I assured her. “Rest.”
“Okay,” she whispered, rolling onto her side. I untucked the blanket from its crisp military corners and threw it over her. She lapsed back into a deep sleep before I had her covered. The light buzz of her snores filled the cabin.
As of yet, no traffic had passed, but that wasn’t going to last forever. I hopped back down to the ground and headed back to the headless corpse. If anything, the smell had gotten worse. A puddle of black goo slowly spread around the body, which almost seemed to be deflating.Of course, I thought. The dead one in Missouri had melted, too. Whatever these things were, a forensic study of their anatomy was out of the question.
Trying to keep my shoes out of the goop, I patted down the driver’s pockets and extracted his wallet and cell phone. Pocketing the cash, I angled the driver’s license so I could read the information on it. The license bore a Phoenix address, and the bland face the driver presented matched perfectly with the name ‘Robert Page.’
After a moment of thought, I took a picture of the license with my own cell phone, wiped it down with my shirt, and stuffed it back in his pocket.
What the hell is that thing?
“I was hoping you could tell me,” I admitted. “This is the second one I’ve run into. This one said something about ‘the Void’—does that ring any bells?”
Your guess is as good as mine. Your mom wasn’t big into information sharing.
“Figures.” The driver’s cell phone didn’t have any contacts, and there was only one call in the history, outgoing to a 480 number—also Arizona. I hesitated, then hit the redial button. After three rings, the line beeped in my ear but remained otherwise silent. A voicemail box with no greeting? “Weird.” I took a picture of the number, too, then wiped the phone down. I was about to pitch it onto the driver’s body, but I wrapped my shirt around the keypad, dialed another number and hit send.
“911, what’s the nature of your emergency?”
“There’s a tractor-trailer rig broken down on I-8, west of mile marker 44,” I said slowly and clearly. “There’s a woman inside in need of help, I believe she’s a kidnap victim. But you’re going to want to check the trailer.”
“Sir, can you repeat that?”
“No,” I said. “You’ve got it on tape. I’m leaving this line open so you can trace the call, but I won’t be here.”
“Sir—” I missed anything else the dispatcher had to say as I gently placed the phone on the ground and walked back toward the Kawasaki.
Halfway between the semi and my own ride, I stopped and tried to calculate what the chances were that this was a random encounter. Yeah, Roxanne had tipped me off, sure, but I’d stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago. “You trying to tell me something?” I stared up into the sky but got no response.
Turning and looking back at the slowly-dissolving corpse at the side of the road, I realized that I'd been going about this the wrong way. I wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I was the one out here taking care of the dirty work. Division M thought I was the bad guy? I didn’t see them out on the road taking care of any half-squid serial killers. You’re a damn hero. Start acting like one.
I pulled my own phone out and hit the call button. Karen picked up on the second ring, a worried note in her voice. “Are you all right? Where are you?”
“A little less then halfway,” I said. “But I’m turning back.”
“What? What are you talking about, Paxton?” At this point, I didn’t even care that she’d used my name. Let them trace the call. This time, I was coming to them.
“I’m not leaving my friends behind.” I swallowed and said, “Carlos wouldn’t do that to me, and I’m not going to do that to him. Get me Gordo’s number. I need to ask him a couple of questions.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Paxton—Wednesday morning
Phoenix, Arizona
I hadn’t slept, but I was too wired to, anyway.
Gordo hadn’t wanted to give me what I was looking for, but after ten minutes of back and forth, he seemed to realize that I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
Which is why, a few minutes after eight in the morning, I leaned back and stared up at the Bank of America Tower in downtown Phoenix. The former SEAL hadn’t known much, but he’d heard enough scuttlebutt to fill me in. Division M was a top-secret subsidiary of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—along with magic, I supposed—that took the lead on threats above and beyond the capabilities of more conventional agencies.
Considering what Mother had brought to bear at Kent’s house, that made sense, and it added up with what Puck had told me back in Virginia. Leave it to me to run afoul of the real-life equivalent of the X-Files.
Roxanne blurred out the front of the office tower and took a seat next to me on the bus stop bench. “Well?”
I couldn’t get very far past the reception desk—it was like the trailer. Which, I guess, answers the question, doesn’t it?
“Yup,” I said. Standing, I headed for the door.
Are you sure about this?
“No,” I admitted. “But I’ve got a hunch that this is the right move.”
Following your gut doesn’t seem like a particularly sensible way to live your life, Roxanne pointed out. I stepped through the spinning door and headed for the elevator banks with a nod to the security guard. I’d kept the Bluetooth in so I could speak, but it had become a habit at this point.
“What have you got to worry about?” I said. “It’s not like you can get hurt.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth I winced at how mean I sounded, particularly considering it wasn’t entirely the truth. I decided not to mention the Edimmu and its propensity for consuming the energy of ghosts. With luck, neither of us would run into one of those.
Yeah, well, if something happens to you, who am I supposed to talk to? No one else can even see me.
I didn’t have much of a response to that observation, so I settled for, “Good point.”
I rode the elevator in silence—a half-dozen men and women in business attire had joined us from the ground floor. Headset or not, the quarters were close enough to persuade me to keep my mouth shut. Some of the tension must have translated to my face because Roxanne didn’t push things by making comments or funny expressions as she had in the past.
The ATF’s floor was our first stop, and I squeezed my way out into the vestibule with murmured apologies. My fellow passengers were too engrossed in their phones or newspapers to pay much attention, and I took a moment to study my surroundings as they went on their way.
Another pair of elevators occupied the wall in front of me, while a blank door with an ‘employees only’ placard sat to the left. The glass doors to the right opened into a small waiting room with another ‘employees only’ door behind the broad reception desk.
“Here we go,” I said, and pulled open the door.
The woman sitting behind the desk looked a bit older than me and wore a severe business suit. She cocked her head, an expression containing zero patience on her face as she sized me up. “Can I help you with something, sir?”
“I’m here to see someone,” I explained. I leaned on the desk long enough to receive a frown and a raised eyebrow, then straightened.
“And that is whom, exactly?”
“Agent Valentine.”
The hard cast to her expression slipped the smallest bit, revealing something close to worry or fear. She rolled away from the desk by the barest amount, and I had visions of her reaching for a hidden weapon with one hand. I put on my friendliest smile right as she spoke. “I see. And do you have an appointment, Mister ...?”
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