“You’re putting a lot of faith on that woman’s shoulders.”
“You think it’s a bad idea?”
“I’ve met her,” Daniel said. “So yeah, I do.”
They stopped at a thrift store outside Omaha. The remnants of the Pallid Masque traded their garb for modern dresses and secondhand suits, while Daniel told the clerks a story about how they’d lost their luggage coming back from a renaissance fair. Then they found a burger place next to a highway rest stop, and the new arrivals got their first taste of American cuisine.
Everyone felt like getting some fresh air, so they camped out at a cluster of picnic tables under a clear, cool Nebraska sky. Marie drifted past, sucking down a Diet Coke with too much ice through a straw, taking in the swirl of conversations. At the end of one table, Hedy—transformed in a modern blouse, slacks, and a vest with bright copper buttons—was interrogating Daniel. She’d fallen in love with a vintage newsboy cap at the thrift store, and it perched on her head at a jaunty angle.
“—never heard of it, honestly,” he was saying. “These wards you’re talking about weren’t part of my training.”
“All right,” Hedy said, “cast a spell. Show me what you can do.”
He glanced over his shoulder, making sure no outsiders were in sight, and plucked his depleted deck of cards from his breast pocket. With a twirl of his fingers, the jack of hearts leaped from his palm and spun around them, shot up into the open air, and then dove down again, landing back in his hand.
“No,” Hedy said. “Cast a real spell. Something powerful.”
He blinked at her. “That…is a pretty powerful spell. I mean, that took me years to master.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Cards are pretty much my thing,” he said. “You’d be amazed what you can do with a little creativity and a deck of enchanted cards.”
“And your abilities are…below average, would you say, when it comes to this world’s magical community? Average?”
“I would not say that. Even if it was true. Which it isn’t.” He looked wounded. “I’m a pretty big deal.”
Hedy jotted some notes down on a convenience-store spiral notebook. Her pen—the first one she’d ever had that didn’t require an inkwell—rapped against the page as her brow furrowed.
“Let’s try a different tack. Have you ever seen a magician conduct a stronger-than-average ritual and experience unpleasant side effects? Loss of sanity? Physical transformations?”
“Sure. Ran up against a sorceress who was mainlining magical energy from another dimension. Ended up turning into a plant-monster covered in snakes and she declared herself a goddess. So, you know, totally loony tunes.”
“Did she survive?”
“Nah,” Daniel said. “I mean, the transformation didn’t kill her. There was a helicopter and a machine gun and a fall from a penthouse window involved. And fire. A lot of fire.”
“Of the current magical community,” Hedy asked, “are there any members who exhibit abilities far outside what you’d consider the norm?”
“Well, there’s the Mourner. You know, the woman I’m trying to deliver your buddies to, so she doesn’t skin me alive and use my skull for a decorative wine decanter. She’s pretty ancient by most accounts, and she can bend space in ways I can’t begin to figure out.”
“Fascinating. And has she exhibited any physical effects?”
“Nobody knows,” he said. “Nobody’s ever seen her face and lived to talk about it. She wears heavy veils, elbow-length gloves, floor-length gowns. Her fingers are about twice as long as they should be, though, and they wriggle like snakes. A little disconcerting when she’s holding a teacup.”
Hedy put her pen down.
“You just described a Sister of the Noose.”
“Don’t know what that is,” Daniel told her.
Hedy pushed herself up from the picnic table, tucked her pad under her arm, and tugged Marie’s sleeve.
“I need to speak with you and Mother. Alone. My initial theories seem to be panning out.”
“Is that a good thing?” Marie asked.
“It is not,” Hedy said.
Forty-Seven
Hedy, Nessa, and Marie sat in the front rows of the bus, split along the aisle and facing each other across the black rubber mat. They kept the door cracked, a thin whisper of cool air wafting in to cut the heat.
“The magicians of this world are children,” Hedy told Nessa. “Feats they consider a show of occult prowess are on par with the cantrips you taught me when I was a child.”
“Seemed impressive to me,” Nessa said.
“Of course it did. You grew up here. ‘No magic at all’ was your baseline expectation, so when you finally experienced some for yourself, it changed everything.” She wriggled Nessa’s phone at her. “At the moment I’m pretty impressed by electric lights, horseless wagons, bacon cheeseburgers, and this game on your pocket machine where you have to make the little candies line up in a row. I expect that by this time next month I’ll be rather more jaded. I theorize that the development of magic on this world was stunted, on some level early in its history, by how…muffled it is. It isn’t altogether cut off from the Shadow In-Between, but on my world it’s everywhere. You can just reach out and taste the power. Here, it’s more like fumbling around in a dark closet, hoping to grab hold of something before you bump your nose against the wall.”
“So, smaller spells, and less energy to power them with,” Marie said. She didn’t need to be a witch to follow Hedy’s line of reasoning. “There’s nothing special protecting people from Shadow infection on our world. They just don’t get in as many situations where it’s a risk.”
Hedy nodded. “And on the rare occasions when they do, I suspect they die—or are killed by their fellow practitioners—before anyone realizes what went wrong. Given Nessa’s natural talent, it wasn’t hard for our mysterious enemy to hand her a book of high-potency techniques and zero safeguards, all but ensuring she’d become infected.”
Nessa slid back against the cheap vinyl seat. Her gaze went distant as the implication set in.
“So we’re absolutely no better off than we were on your world. There’s no special trick, no extraordinary quality to this place that wards against Shadow infection. Nothing I can use to cure myself. Magic is simply weaker here.”
“I wish that was the end of the bad news.”
“Tell me,” Nessa said.
“I’ve been looking up local herbs and flora, trying to replicate your tonic recipe. Two of the key ingredients don’t seem to exist in this world. It’s entirely possible that plants with the same properties can be found, but without a functional laboratory and time to experiment…”
“Time denied to us,” Nessa said. “How many vials of tonic do we have left?”
“I had prepared more, but when the Sisterhood attacked I only had time to shove a fistful into my satchel, and one of those broke when we crossed over—”
“How many?”
“Four.”
The number hung in the air between them. A sentence handed down with the final ring of some cosmic judge’s gavel.
“Four,” Nessa echoed. “I have four days to live.”
“You have four days before the infection resumes its course,” Hedy said. “That’s not the same thing. There’s no telling how long you’ll be able to withstand its effects.”
“And how useful will I be when my senses start fleeing me, one by one? When my mind abandons me?” She looked to Marie. “How far are we from Pyramid Lake?”
“If we drive in shifts and don’t stop for anything but gas, and if nobody gets in our way, we can make it in twenty hours.”
“So a day, more or less. Which gives us three days to rescue Carolyn, find Wisdom’s Grave, and learn the truth—the entire truth—about this eternal curse. Oh, and punish Alton Roth, hunt down whoever sent me that spell book and make them pay for what they’ve done to me, and wash our hands in the blood of anyone who g
ets in our way.”
“More or less,” Hedy agreed.
“We’ll try our best,” Marie said. She reached across the aisle and put her hand on Nessa’s knee. “And even if we don’t make it, there’s still one thing we can do.”
“Carve our mark,” Nessa said. “Leave a scar on the wheel of worlds, deeper and more terrible than the one that birthed us into existence in the first place.”
“We can make them remember our names,” Marie told her.
Nessa’s gaze flicked to the window. Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses, hard and cold, spurred by fresh determination.
“Get everyone on the bus,” she said. “Time we were on our way.”
* * *
They hugged the border between Wyoming and Colorado. The endless flat table of the American heartland shattered like stone under a giant’s fist and the shards rose up to become hills, mountains, cliffs of stone, and serpentine rivers. Barreling down a highway carved through the scrubland, speckled with sagebrush, Nessa uncorked a slim vial and tossed it back.
One dose of her tonic gone, three to go.
Utah brought more hills and rolling plains. The bus rolled through Norman Rockwell towns and across wide empty vistas like a vision of the American frontier. The salt flats echoed old dreams, old promises, passed down through the generations.
“Once upon a time,” Nessa mused, staring out the window as the endless landscapes drifted by, “people would sacrifice everything for a shot at going west. They’d abandon their homes, their careers, their families…all for the scant hope of striking gold.”
Marie sat beside her, nestled close. She put her arm around Nessa’s shoulder.
“People do crazy things sometimes,” Marie said.
Nevada brought sand, and jagged mountains rising proud in the distance, eroded by wind and time. The afternoon heat turned the school bus into an oven, and even with every window down and the tiny fan on the driver’s perch whining at top speed, all the passengers could do was sit there and bake in their own sweat.
The sun started its merciful descent, dragging the temperature down with it, as they closed in on the southern edge of Pyramid Lake. Reservation land, empty and barren as far as the eye could see, painted with long shadows under a cloudless azure sky.
Daniel called back from the driver’s seat. “Any idea where, exactly, this place is supposed to be? I doubt there’s going to be a road sign pointing to the sinister secret weird-science base.”
They rolled into Nixon, a postage stamp of a town, with a scattering of houses around a tribal fish hatchery and a Paiute historical museum. Nessa pointed the way off the beaten path, toward a general store that stood at the end of an old dirt road. The rough-hewn timbers and hickory porch made Marie wonder if old prospectors had come this way once, stocking up before setting out in search of gold. A faded tin sign in the window advertised Orange Nehi soda, pulling them a little farther into the modern world. Just not too far.
The bus idled outside while Nessa and Marie went in. Remaindered and off-brand products lined the dusty shelves, like a dollar store at the farthest edge of the earth. Chips with dodgy mascots, snack cakes made of pure industrial chemicals, small bags of cookies labeled Not for Individual Sale. The man behind the counter had a broad, shovel-flat face and ashen hair tied back in a ponytail.
“Big bus,” he said, nodding to the window. “Y’all with a church group?”
“Something like that,” Nessa said.
He checked their hands like he was hunting for Bibles.
“Missionaries?” he asked.
“Something like that.” Nessa stepped up to the counter with Marie at her shoulder. “But we’re not looking to spread any good news. Seen anything…unusual around the lake these last few weeks?”
“Unusual? It’s Pyramid Lake, lady. I grew up a quarter mile from here. Trust me, it’s never usual. If we don’t have divers and fishermen going missing every spring, we’ve got campers running out of here spooked, claiming they heard ghost babies crying under the water.”
“You believe that?” Marie asked him.
“I believe that drinking and scuba diving is a bad combination. And drinking mixed with old campfire stories makes tourists stupid. I’ve been boating and swimming in that lake my whole life. Never got grabbed by a ghost baby once.” He gave her a broken-toothed smile. “Maybe they just don’t like outsiders.”
“We’re looking for some outsiders ourselves,” Marie said. “They probably rolled in heavy. Trucks, maybe construction equipment. They’ve been making themselves at home somewhere along the shoreline. And I’m just guessing, but I’d bet they’re not making anybody—especially not the local residents—feel welcome.”
His smile faded. He studied Marie and Nessa with new eyes.
“They got permits. Greased the right palms, made the right friends. We’re not supposed to talk about it. They’re good for the local economy, or so I’m told.”
“Sounds about as real as the ghost babies,” Marie said.
“Neither one’s putting anything in my wallet. You got business with those folks?”
“We’re actually with the Environmental Protection Agency,” Nessa said. “We’re deeply concerned about the impact these people are having on the local ecosystem. They’ve been ignoring our strongly worded letters and phone calls, so we’re just going to have to shut them down for good.”
“Huh.” The corners of his eyes crinkled as he pointed to the store windows. “Well, if that’s so, you’ll want to head up the road that way for about two, three miles. You’ll come to a barbed-wire fence and a gate across the road. If you’re inclined to ignore that fence and that gate, and if you turn left from there and follow the shoreline, I imagine you’ll find what you’re looking for. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
“Thanks,” Marie said.
“Happy hunting.”
Forty-Eight
Marie lay flat on her belly on an outcropping of rust-red rock. The rough stone, like pumice, rubbed against her chin as she trench-crawled to the edge.
The bus was a quarter mile behind her, abandoned at the side of an access road with its lights out and its nose pointed back toward Nixon, in case they needed a quick getaway. A polite fiction. Everybody knew the stakes tonight. Retreat wasn’t an option.
Talon Worldwide had made camp on the shore, half Boy Scout jamboree, half occupying army from a science fiction dystopia. Their tents were geodesic domes, military-olive plastic with spines of blackened steel. Standing lights pushed the shadows from the lake’s edge. Their neon-blue beams painted jagged pathways between the domes, a maze without a Minotaur.
Or maybe they were just in the middle of importing one. A transparent walkway jutted out over the lake, its glass underbelly licked by dark waters, ending in a broad flat disk about fifteen feet across. And at its heart, the shimmering arch of an interdimensional doorway stood open and abandoned. Off to one side, the control console—looking like a DJ booth as envisioned by Dr. Frankenstein—hummed erratically. It spat stray sparks onto the glass floor, where they flickered and died like ashes from a cigarette.
A couple of delivery trucks, branded with a stylized interlocking TW, slumbered side by side with their engines cold. No drivers. Marie frowned, taking in the entire camp with a slow sweep of her gaze from left to right and back again.
There. Movement down below. A pair of guards on patrol, walking slow and stiff-backed in their urban camo uniforms, stout bullpup rifles dangling from shoulder straps. Still, not enough for a camp this size. Another man emerged from the olive plastic flap of a dome tent, carrying a paltry meal on a plastic tray. A sandwich on white bread, an apple, and a single-serving carton of milk. Marie tracked him with her gaze, all the way to the shore’s edge.
A transparent cube stood on the sand, about the size of a prison cell, with see-through walls and a stark overhead light. The only accommodations were a chemical toilet, a thin cot, and a folding card table with a laptop computer. Caro
lyn Saunders paced back and forth inside the cell, stalking like a caged panther. She whirled as the guard approached with his tray. He slid open a translucent bolthole in the cell door and passed it through. Marie strained, trying to hear, but Carolyn’s words didn’t carry all the way to the bluff.
Her middle finger translated just fine. So did the carton of milk as it exploded against the wall of the cell. Carolyn stomped off with the rest of her tray, sat on the edge of her cot, and jammed the sandwich into her mouth.
Nessa slithered along the rock, nestling at Marie’s side. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s all wrong,” Marie whispered. She pointed, drawing battle lines with her fingertip. “Three—no, there’s another—four men down there, covering the entire camp. No sign of Ezra, either. They opened a gateway, out on the water, but nobody’s manning the console. Where is everybody?”
“Inside the domes? Sleeping?”
“It’s not that late,” Marie said. “And if they’re awake, you’d think we’d hear voices from inside. Smell somebody cooking, maybe. All I smell is diesel fumes. And nothing explains that open gateway.”
“Not the sort of thing one leaves unattended, no.”
Nessa nodded down the bluff, toward the transparent cell on the shore.
“Assuming that’s not one-way glass, we do have a witness who can tell us what happened here.”
They inched back from the ledge and regrouped with the others, huddling just out of sight.
“We’re well past the point of pretending Ezra is a friend,” Nessa said. “He’s imprisoned Carolyn, and it stands to reason he’d do the same to us. His entire line about how she’s happy to be working with him was a bold-faced lie.”
“And his men?” Hedy asked.
“If they aren’t our friends, they’re our enemies. And what do we do to our enemies, Hedy?”
The women locked eyes. Hedy nodded, resolute. She looked to Gazelle.
“Stay here with the rest of the coven, and guard the bus. We may need to leave in a hurry.”
Detonation Boulevard Page 33
