Hellbent

by Cherie Priest

I hesitated. “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s full disclosure.”

  “Okay. Good to know.”

  Adrian was beaming at me with triumph, smugness, and something else—a faint mirroring of my hopeful desperation, I think. He knew just how hard we were bullshitting here, after all.

  But the first half of my cheery prediction went down without any aggravation. In another hour, we’d bundled up Elizabeth with her duffel bag stuffed with toiletries and what few personal items she’d had on her when I’d nabbed her. Then drove her to the airport in Adrian’s rental.

  Again, in his quest to prove he could be a useful ghoul-type assistant, Adrian had snuck out and dumped the Hummer a couple miles away—in the kind of neighborhood where it’d be stripped down to the frame within hours, or that was the plan. I didn’t have any serious fears that it’d be tracked back to us; we were on the guest list under pseudonyms, and according to the local news, the Johnson Space Center was flattened and crawling with chaos.

  At least twenty people had died in Hurricane Elizabeth, as I’d come to think of it. Another hundred had been hurt, dozens of cars had been destroyed, several buildings had been ground down to sea level, and many others had been so badly damaged that they would be covered in scaffolding for months to come.

  Something told me no one would be making too many hard-hitting inquiries into one missing vehicle. For all anyone knew, it might’ve been blown to the top of the museum roof. It sounds batty, but that’s where they found Buck Penny’s Mercedes.

  Speaking of the target himself, I didn’t know if Elizabeth had actually gotten him or not. The newspeople weren’t naming the dead until all families could be notified, and the Internet didn’t seem to know … so either the situation was messier than it sounded (making it truly epic), or someone was being very careful to keep the particulars quiet.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if Elizabeth hadn’t inadvertently damaged some national-secret-type thing that the feebs were looking to cap. If she had done so, it almost certainly hadn’t been deliberate, but that wouldn’t change anything.

  As I’d learned the hard way over the last year, there’s no reason to underestimate (a) money, or (b) the government’s capacity for persistence and secrecy.

  So whatever mayhem had occurred over on the other side of Houston, it wasn’t my problem and I couldn’t see myself getting too worked up about it. Privately, I thought it was an egregious case of overkill and lunacy, but somehow that didn’t bother me.

  Although when I thought about it too hard—and I eventually think about everything too hard—I wondered if it was a good idea to send this unstable woman into a household of people who frankly weren’t in the world’s best position to defend themselves if things were to go wacky. If Elizabeth had another “episode,” would they be able to manage her? Or in lieu of that, defend themselves?

  Dear God, what if she decided she wanted to “undo” them, or whatever? Maybe she undid her marriage, and maybe she’s got quantum magic scrambling her brain, I don’t know—but I was shipping her home to camp out with the kids.

  But shit, life is full of risks. As it turns out, so is the afterlife.

  Anyway, the kids already lived with two vampires, including one with a nasty case of post-traumatic stress disorder and an inability to see where he was throwing things. It’s not like they were living in Nerf City. One more homicidal maniac shouldn’t make much difference, or that’s what I told myself as I waved at Elizabeth from the send-off spot outside the security checkpoint.

  Soon she was gone, slipped through the scanner without a hitch, and headed toward the terminal where she’d catch her flight back to my place. My stomach felt sour, and the farther away from us she got, the less confident I became.

  I smiled at Adrian anyway.

  “What are you grinning about?” he asked, sensing that I was full of shit.

  “One thing down, one to go. We got the bones. Now we just have to get in and out of Atlanta alive, because tomorrow’s our last night to do so. The convocation goes down the night after that.”

  We already had our tickets, though our flight left an hour later—so we had time to kill before it was worth submitting ourselves to the TSA tickle.

  “I knew you’d cave,” he said to me.

  “Cave on what?”

  “Your vow that I wouldn’t come with you to Georgia.”

  “Don’t get too self-righteous. I knew if I dangled that carrot over your head, you’d take care of my incidentals and do a decent job of it. Really, I just wanted you to get Elizabeth squared away and ditch the getaway car.”

  “I bet. You just magically planted those ideas in my brain.”

  “I didn’t say that,” I argued. “Those things needed to be done, and I couldn’t do them while I was out cold for the day. But you would’ve half-assed them or ignored them without some positive reinforcement.”

  I expected it to piss him off, but he only shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t that big a deal, and now you have to bring me along. Totally worth it.”

  “I don’t have to do anything.”

  “Yeah you do. Now you do, anyway.”

  “Whatever. What I’m saying is, don’t get too full of yourself. I could jettison you tomorrow and get a lot more work done.”

  “Not during the daytime.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said happily.

  We spent the rest of our downtime plotting in a wine bar I found, sorting out our story—nailing down our cover until he could recite everything blindfolded, backward underwater, and drunk. It was the equivalent of drilling a name, rank, and serial number into his brain, so it worked admirably.

  The tutoring (which continued all throughout our subsequent flight) might have been helped by our psychic link, which we played with a little bit—testing its abilities and limitations. We didn’t learn anything we didn’t already know, but I considered it a useful exercise all the same. In Atlanta, we’d need to feign the ability to communicate cleanly without speaking to one another; and in truth, we’d only sort of figured out the particulars of how it actually worked.

  It was rather like that old adage about a watched pot never boiling. The harder we tried, the less it worked. But on a lark, as a sudden “shout” or a thoughtless jab, it came through loud and clear.

  I strongly considered pestering him to see if I could get him interested in drinking more of my blood. Likewise, he was strongly considering asking me if I’d provide some. In the end, neither of us brought it up, having independently decided that it was more trouble than we wanted.

  All in all, he did quite well.

  I taught him everything I could remember about House rules and regulations, about the behavior expected of ghouls, and about how we’d be expected to treat each other. I also told him everything I knew about the Barringtons, which didn’t take long, because I didn’t know volumes upon volumes when it came to the House. Mostly I’d heard stories about that weird, violent, insular crew, and secondhand information is better than no information at all—but not much. Even so, I threw in every scrap of gossip I’d ever heard, on the off chance any of it proved to be true or useful. He absorbed it like an expensive paper towel.

  By the time we’d landed at Hartsfield in Georgia, he was even in the habit of cringing when I glared at him the right way.

  It unnerved me, though not in a pile-on-some-fear way. He was doing a good job—exactly what I asked of him—but it was turning him into someone else … someone I didn’t like much. Someone I didn’t have any respect for.

  This made him a good actor, and it shouldn’t have surprised me. But it did. And hearing him call me “mistress” gave me a warm, unwelcome indigestion feeling in my throat. I pretended that all of this was fine and we were unlikely to get killed within the next forty-eight hours.

  We made our hotel without much time to spare, settling into a suite that Adrian had reserved for us the night before in the big Marriott Marquis, whic
h looks sort of like the inside of a UFO as designed in the eighties.

  (It is true that I used to have a secondary safe house in Atlanta, but I lost it when I lost my last identity. That’s one of the drawbacks of doing a nuclear reset on your personhood—some of your possessions get claimed by the state, since you seem to have died and not left a will.)

  Before I was really ready to settle in, dawn was creeping up outside, flushing the far side of the curtains. I could feel it approaching, like the footsteps of someone unpleasant coming up the stairs.

  That day, my dreams were strange and unsettling.

  I didn’t remember them well when I awoke; they just stuck with me in the form of a groggy sense of nausea, and the irrational certainty that I was forgetting something important. But when sundown came a dozen hours later, it was time to get moving, dream-sickness or no.

  I got up, got myself dressed, and braced myself for the night to come.

  Adrian was ready to go by the time I was ready to open the curtains, but as I’ve mentioned before, that’s easy when you don’t have to sleep all day. I don’t know if I was supposed to be proud of him or what, but it’s not like it’s tough to outfox me when I’m out cold.

  Still, I didn’t like this tension between us. A few days before we’d been chatty and friendly as the evening got under way. Now we weren’t talking. We weren’t even making a lot of eye contact. Neither one of us was happy, and both of us were nervous. But if we could survive this together, everything could get back to normal.

  Right?

  Just this one last hurdle.

  Well, one last hurdle and then the obvious, looming hurdle of what to do about Ian and the San Francisco gang, but I couldn’t think about that yet. One horrible thing at a time, thanks.

  My partner-in-crime fussed for “breakfast,” but I urged him to stay close to the hotel. We’d picked up a rental at the airport—a 2009 Lexus; don’t ask me why Adrian had to go all high-end on us all of a sudden—but it’d been parked downstairs in the garage, and the hassle of moving it didn’t feel appealing. Five minutes on the Internet told him there was a twenty-four-hour diner three blocks away, so he hoofed it and I stayed put, wrapping up the last of those last-minute details like the obsessive nutter I am.

  I had email from Ian. If the note could be believed, he was still in Seattle. I didn’t think he’d lie, but the deeper I went down this rabbit hole, the more I learned about how little I knew—so there was always the possibility that he was humoring me, and he’d stuck out his thumb and headed down to California.

  I refused to assume the worst.

  Or rather, I quietly assumed the worst, but ignored it—focusing instead on convincing myself that everything was running According To Plan. God was in his heaven, my Ian was in Washington, and all was right with the world. All I had to do to keep it that way was stroll into the lion’s den, solve a murder, and stroll back out again without getting me or my not-a-ghoul killed.

  Easy-peasy.

  Rather than dial up Ian and run the risk of him not answering (because he was dead in a ditch someplace, or he was avoiding me, or his brother was busy burning him down to ashes), I made a phone call to Maximilian in San Francisco. Max confirmed that he’d emailed the documents to give me seneschal proxy, and they’d been accepted and acknowledged by the Barringtons. This meant they were expecting me—a prospect that should have been a relief, but wasn’t.

  This was my first and last night on the case. If I couldn’t provide results, Ian would be screwed. Even if I could provide results, he might still be screwed—but if I could make Atlanta look bad enough, the Barringtons would back off long enough to give Max some breathing room … and me time to think of a more permanent way to get Max off Ian’s case.

  At my request, Max forwarded me a copy of his email with the document attached, and after we hung up, I logged on to take a peek at it. How incongruous it felt, with its semi-archaic language and formality. Once upon a time, hundreds of years ago, such things would’ve been handwritten on parchment, sealed with wax and the ring of somebody important, and delivered in person.

  My, how things have changed.

  I, Maximilian Arnold Renner, do hereby present Raylene Pendle (who may present herself as Emily Benton)—and she shall temporarily serve as seneschal on behalf of the Renner Household in San Francisco, California. This proxy appointment is valid in the entirety of Georgia, with particular interest to the Barrington Household in Atlanta, where she should be received with hospitality and treated as a representative of the San Francisco House in all regards.

  Jesus. And that was just the beginning. I was amused to note both that his middle name was “Arnold” and that he’d looked me up by my new fake identity, Emily Benton. I hadn’t told him what it was, so he was obviously showing off. No big whoop. Having a public face that’s relatively easy to find is part of what a disposable identity is all about.

  I wasn’t worried that he’d track down my homestead and thereby his wayward brother, though. I didn’t own the building as Emily Benton. I owned it as the estate of someone named David Peterson, who had died ten years previously. In theory, David has a son named Gerald who operates the estate’s affairs. It’s a little complicated and utterly untraceable back to me—which is exactly how I like it.

  While I was hanging around wrapping up loose ends, I also called Horace.

  He answered on the first ring. “Tell me you got them this time.”

  “They’re sitting right here beside me,” I fibbed.

  “Excellent! How many did that deranged bitch burn up?”

  “I don’t know. You never said how many she started with. But there are nine unmolested, so to speak.”

  “Nine?” he shouted in my ear.

  Innocently I asked, “What? Were you expecting more than that?”

  “There should’ve been at least fifteen or sixteen. How … how the hell? What the fuck was she doing to burn through so many of them?”

  “I have no idea. Practicing?”

  “Practicing?” He shut up, but only for a conversational beat. “Hypothetically possible, but I doubt it. You don’t just fiddle with those things. They require an expert hand, and people who aren’t experts tend to blow themselves up in the learning process.”

  “That sounds counterproductive. From a Darwinian standpoint, I mean. How do you get to be an expert if studying to become an expert is fatal?”

  “It’s not always fatal. But it’s a messy enough learning process that not everyone survives it, that’s all I’m saying. Maybe she was up to some mayhem off the grid,” he pondered.

  I let him go right on pondering. “It’s not like we were watching her every move. Chasing her down with credit card receipts is like playing connect-the-dots. There’s a lot of blank space in between.”

  “True, true. But fuck me, only nine of them left?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Hm. Well, it’s still a lot of money.”

  “And there’s no sense crying over spilled … what? Millions?”

  “It depends on which ones she used. Can you look through them and tell me?”

  “Seriously? You just now asked me to identify penis bones for you?”

  He sighed heavily. “Raylene, they were marked, remember? Little dick-tags? You can read, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Hang on.”

  I went to the edge of the bed and dug out the bones. I unrolled them from their bubble strip as if they were makeup tools in a pouch, and I squinted at the tiny handwritten labels that had been Scotch-taped to the ends.

  “Holy shit, whoever wrote these things had terrible handwriting. Um, I see two lycanthropes, a djinn—seriously? A genie weenie?—a centaur, a …” I sounded out the word, “cockatrice? I don’t even know what that is.”

  “Chicken–lizard hybrid.”

  I almost accused him of shitting me, but restrained myself. “Right. One chicken–lizard hybrid, plus, let me see,” I muttered. “One gnome, or
I think that’s what it says. One … I can’t tell what this one says.” I turned it over in my hand, attempting to guess the size of whatever creature once sported it in a dangling fashion.

  “Spell it.”

  “S … e … s … q … u … a … c.”

  He thought about it momentarily, then said, “Bigfoot.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No bullshit, Bigfoot. That’s the old Indian word for them.”

  “I guess it kind of looks like Sasquatch.”

  “No coincidence, there,” he told me. “Now. Go on. What else?”

  “Bunyip?” I confessed, “I don’t know what that is, either.”

  “Australian beastie. It’s a lake monster that looks like a walrus crossed with a horse.”

  “Now you’re just making things up.”

  “No, I’m not. And what’s the last one?”

  “Last one?” For a minute, I almost contradicted him like a dumbass, having forgotten I was holding a few of these things in reserve. I chose one at random. “Incubus.”

  “Incubus?” His voice pitched higher. “Oh good, that’s a good one. Those boners get lots of use, so they store up massive amounts of magic.”

  “That’s so Freudian, I barely know where to begin.”

  “Then don’t bother. I’m writing these down, you know,” he informed me.

  I had a split second of panic, trying to remember what I’d said. Quickly I retrieved the rattling bones and stuck the promised items aside, leaving whatever remained in the duffel bag for Elizabeth’s future use. I hoped I’d left her some good ones, but I had no way of knowing—and I briefly considered kicking myself for not asking her about them before I’d sent her on her way.

  Nothing to be done about it now.

  Horace was quiet, but not for long. “I wonder which ones she used.”

  I told him the truth. “I have no idea.”

  “You are useless to me,” he sulked.

  “I love you too, dickhead.”

  “Fuck off, darling. At least you got most of them.” Another diva sigh. “It’ll still be enough, one way or another.”

  “Enough to what? Buy your own private island?”