I put the Ram into drive and took off with a jolt. My mind was blurry, but I was getting ahold of it. Getting ahold of the situation. Just a little concussion was all. Just a little knock. Just as long as I wasn’t throwing up everything was okay.
I was five, maybe ten minutes up the road when a song came to life in the car. It was Chris Isaak singing “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing.” It was coming from the cell phone sitting in one of the cup holders.
I answered it.
“Hey,” came a man’s voice. It was a high-pitched nasally voice. Far too high for Malcolm Bach. “How’d it go?”
“It went great, asshole,” I said. The phone went silent. “Yeah, your friend got his face blown off, so from my point of view, it went super.”
“You don’t know who you’re messing with, man.”
“Tell your boss, Malcolm, I’m coming for him.” Then I threw the cell out the window.
TWENTY-ONE
“We should call the police,” said Elise, moaning as she held her ribs on her right side, breathing shallow breaths.
“No. No police. They come in now, there’s no chance we’ll make the midnight deadline.”
She nodded and squirmed a little.
“How you holding up?” I asked.
“I think I broke a rib or two. My wrist hurts like hell. My neck and back hurt. My head hurts. I don’t remember the crash.”
“Sounds like we’re a perfect match. I’m going to drop you off at the hospital.”
“No,” she said.
“You need help,” I told her.
“I’m not going to the hospital. I’m coming with you.”
I looked over at her and we locked eyes for a moment. I nodded. “Okay, then. Your call.”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Away from the scene. There’s a car on its roof and a dead man lying in the middle of the road. They’ll be looking for this car in no time at all.”
My cell phone rang. I fished it out of my pocket. The cracks had grown but I could make out the name. “Shit. It’s Terry.” I ended the call. It immediately rang again. “They know,” I said.
“What are we going to do?” she asked, grimacing again.
“That bastard Bach took Stuart. And I know why.”
“Why?”
“Because Stuart is the only one with the encryption USB key. You told me yourself.”
“Which means Bach has the tech,” she said.
“Uh-huh. Bach stole the tech from the garage. Must have done it before the Chaun showed up.”
“Are we going after him?”
“We have to. If we don’t get it back—” The cell rang again and I ended it.
“But he has men. And guns.”
“I have a gun,” I said.
“But they have bigger guns. And there’s more of them.”
My cell rang again, and again I ended it.
“How long till midnight?” I asked.
“An hour and a half,” she said.
“Okay. We need backup.”
“But I thought you said no cops.”
“That’s right. Definitely no cops.”
“I don’t understand.”
I needed help, but I didn’t have anyone to turn to. I thought about speaking to Terry. He could help me. But what would I say to him? “Come and storm a compound with me, but we have to do it alone?” I’d known the guy forever. He’d want to help me, but he wouldn’t do it alone. He wouldn’t go for it. He wouldn’t believe me if I told him the truth, and he’d want the truth. That was for certain.
His name came up on the cell once more. I ended it. Then I turned the cell to silent.
I passed it to Elise. “Open up Gmail. There should be an email in there with a couple of addresses. We’re after the big expensive one.”
She did it, having to end three more calls, and thirty seconds later she had the address.
“It’s the one in Los Altos Hills, I’m guessing?”
“That’s the one,” I said. “I think that’s where they’re taking Stuart.”
“I don’t understand. I thought you said we needed backup.”
“We do. I go in there alone, I’m pretty sure they’ll kill me. But I can’t call anyone.” I rubbed my forehead. “I need to think.”
“What? Think about what? I don’t understand.”
“Hold on,” I said. “I’ve got an idea, but I need to think . . .”
A minute passed. Two minutes passed. I rubbed my head and thought past the searing pain and horror-filled images that threatened my train of thought. It was working. I was forming an idea. A plan.
A very bad plan.
I opened my eyes and looked at Elise, concerned.
“What is it?” she asked, suddenly worried.
“We need help,” I told her seriously. “We need the Chaun.”
I kept to the backstreets, stopping in at the Chevron in Northlake to pick up a map of the city. Then I wound the rest of the way through more backstreets and pulled up outside an old run-down house. I let the engine idle as we sat across the street from it. The place was almost derelict: overgrown lawn, peeling paint, old engine parts lying around the drive and porch. The entire house sat in a gloomy shadow. It looked abandoned and uncared for.
“Where are we?” asked Elise.
“My place,” I said quietly.
“Oh,” she said, looking over at it. “Why are we here? And what’s the map for? And tell me again why we have to bring the Chaun into this?”
“Because there’s no other way.”
I grabbed a pen and circled Malcolm Bach’s mansion address, pointing big arrows to it.
“There must be another way.”
I sighed. “I’m going to need you to drive for me. You think you can do that?”
“What for?”
“Because. The Chaun is inside my house. And it’s going to come after me.”
Her eyes widened. “What?!”
“I need backup. This is it.”
“You’re crazy,” she said. “We need to go. We need to get out of here. Right now!”
“Look, this is it. We roll the dice or we die. This is our only chance of getting out of this night alive.”
“But how do you even know it’s in there?” She looked back across the street at the gloomy wooden structure.
“I thought about its day. The fae woman told me a bit about it. That it can read minds, and that it’s awful intelligent. The Chaun’s trail of death tells me where it’s been, and now I know why. It’s searching for its baby.”
“And now it’s in your place?”
I nodded. “It started out the day killing Nicholas in the garage. Then it read his mind and, loaded with his knowledge, attempted to track down Stuart Arnold. See, Nicholas knew Stuart was spending time alone with the device. The Chaun must have suspected Stuart was the one who had taken its egg. It’s been chasing him ever since.
“Me and Malcolm’s giant goon must have arrived after the thing had already been to Stuart’s townhouse. The thing knew about the safety deposit box through Nicholas Hartmann, just like you knew about it. Maybe it assumed that Stuart was keeping the baby there as well as the backup. So luckily for me and the goon, the Chaun headed off to the pawnshop before we arrived. But when it got to the pawnshop, it read the shopkeeper’s mind and learned that Stuart had been and gone already.
“I figure its next move would have been to double back to Stuart’s place and wait for him. It’s what I would have done. But when it realized Stuart wasn’t going to show, it headed for Nicholas Hartmann’s place. Chris was in the middle of a search when it arrived. The poor bastard.
“Then the thing came for you. Unlike Chris, we got away. Then I figure it ran into a dead end. It had been to Stuart’s place, Nicholas’s, and then yours. All three of you were either dead or gone. It had no leads and it still couldn’t find its baby.
“All it had was knowledge. The fae woman told me it could read minds. It took Chris’s
head and read his mind. Chris didn’t know where the Chaun’s baby was either, but he knew other things. He knew about the San Jose Police Department. He knew about the case. He knew about me, and the Chaun knew I was with you.
“You know Stuart better than anyone. I think that’s why it was going to take your head off. So it could read your mind and hope you knew where he was hiding.”
Elise shuddered and touched her neck.
“And so the Chaun had only one option left. One place left to go . . . my place. Chris knew where I lived, and therefore so did it.”
I looked over at my house on the opposite side of the street. I pointed. “It’s in there, somewhere, waiting for me to come home.” I pictured its yellow eye in the darkness of my living room, waiting silently.
I straightened out the map. “Be ready to go,” I told her. “When I jump in, hit the gas.”
“Wait,” she said nervously. “How do you know this will work?”
“I don’t,” I said. “It might be able to read a map, it might not. It’s a gamble. From here on in, it’s all a gamble. And I’m all in.”
I reached for the door handle. “Leave your door open and get into the driver’s seat, ready to go, okay?”
Elise nodded nervously.
“All right,” I said again.
Then I moved swiftly and silently across the street and crossed my yard, half-crouching as I ran. I crept up to my door, then laid the map flat on the ground and slid it under the gap. I heard something stir in the house. A rumble. Then a growling roar.
I turned and ran as fast as my broken body would allow.
The door behind me exploded and the Chaun screamed out into the night like a sound effect from a Jurassic Park movie.
I ran across the street and dove into the passenger side of the Ram and screamed, “GO!”
Elise stomped on the gas pedal and the engine roared. But the car didn’t move. It just sat and revved and revved. The tachometer needle was jumping up and down, but the speedometer was going nowhere.
“Oh no!” cried Elise.
She was panicking.
“Go! Go! Go!” I screamed.
The Chaun was coming, tearing across the yard like a feral creature let off its chain, snarling, gathering speed.
Elise yanked the column shift into gear and the Ram bucked forward. The engine roared and the tires sizzled. Suddenly we were in a drag race against the creature from hell.
The speedometer needle was climbing.
Then the Chaun was behind us as we surged forward. The Ram’s diesel engine was roaring.
But this time we weren’t stuck in reverse gear. The gears were changing and the speedo was climbing, higher and higher.
The Chaun was running with that prehistoric gait which ignited a primal fear I didn’t know I had.
“Faster!” I was screaming.
“It won’t go any faster,” Elise was crying.
But it was working. We were gaining ground. And the Chaun was fading in the darkness.
I let out a crazed laugh. “Ha-ha!” And Elise smiled.
“Now,” I said, “let’s just hope the bastard can read a map.”
TWENTY-TWO
I took over driving from Elise and it took under twenty-five minutes on the 280 to make it to the address in Los Altos Hills. I stopped a mile out from the property and opened the old realty posting in the email Vicky had sent me. I wanted to get a better look at the property. At what I was going into.
The thing was more than a mansion, it was a damn castle. The headline read 25,000 Square Feet of Old European Decadence. Just enough for one man and his squad of goons, I thought.
It looked like a mansion fit for an Arabian king. The old castle architecture of towers, arched doors and stone walls contrasted with the palm trees surrounding the property. They were all lit up in various hues of lighting.
There were thirteen bedrooms, twelve bathrooms, a library, an office, six fountains, a saltwater pool, a chef’s kitchen, a gym, a butler’s pantry, a theater, and on and on and on it went.
The place was bordered by twelve-foot walls, covered in climbing ivy, making them look a thousand years old. The same ivy grew over parts of the main castle building, up and around lead-framed arched windows.
I scrolled through endless photos.
The kitchen was a commercial affair, with two stainless steel stoves, rich wooden cupboards, hanging copper pots and immense marble benches.
The saltwater pool was surrounded in palm trees and the base was tiled in a pattern which resembled a Louis Vuitton handbag. The entire thing glowed red with LEDs set in the sidewall tiles.
“Big house,” I said.
I used Google Earth to get a bird’s-eye view of the place and could see no visible gaps in the surrounding twelve-foot walls. No doubt there were security camera sentinels along the way. One of the twelve bedrooms would have been converted into a room where old meets new; castle walls covered up by big flat LED screens. Almost certainly accommodating a goon guard whose sole purpose in life was to watch static images and report if anyone jumped a fence. He probably even had assistance in the form of motion sensors.
“I’m not gonna be able to sneak in,” I said. “You spend this much on a place, you get yourself a good security system.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Elise.
I sighed and pushed my hair back. “I don’t have a choice. I need the tech and the tech is in there, with Stuart Arnold.”
I checked the time. An hour to go.
“Come on, drive me closer. Then I want you to go down the road a ways. Say a mile and half, and wait for me.”
“I should wait closer,” she said. “In case you need to run.”
“No. I don’t want you anywhere near this place. When and if the Chaun gets here, you can’t be around. If it sees you it’ll want your head. Find yourself a dark place to park, and get down and wait.”
“Until when?”
“I don’t know. Until I show up, or until midnight. Then I want you to leave.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere but here,” I said. “And no place you own. You’ll need to ditch the car and hide for a while. You got any money?”
She shook her head.
I pulled out my wallet and dug out everything I had. About two hundred in cash. “Go stay in a cheap motel for a day or two, then . . . I don’t know. You’ll have to work something out for yourself. I’m sorry, it’s the best I can do.”
She took the cash, then looked up at me. “You’ve done more than enough.”
I grabbed my revolver. Handed it to her. “You know how this works?”
She nodded. “But you need it.”
“They’re going to take it off me as soon as I walk through those gates. Best you keep it. Don’t hesitate. Aim for the chest and pull the trigger. You got me?”
She nodded.
I grabbed the door handle. She put a hand on my shoulder and I stopped, turned around. Elise was staring back at me with full copper eyes from her a petite pale face. “I don’t want you to leave,” she said quietly.
We locked eyes for a long moment.
“I have to,” I whispered, then I leaned toward her, slowly. She closed her eyes. I kissed her softly on the forehead.
She opened her eyes and I smiled at her. It was a smile that said, don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right. Then I slid out into the cold of night and limped away from the SUV, wondering if I’d ever see her again.
As I walked in the rain toward the compound, I had a sense that I was walking into the impossible. What awaited me within the walls? How many men did Bach have? They were armed, that was for certain. Would they even let me talk, or would they shoot me on sight?
I didn’t know, but now was the time to roll the dice. I had a plan. It was a very loose, vague and altogether crazy plan, but it was something.
And it rested on one badass creature from another world.
I thought over what I needed to do.
>
One, get inside the compound.
Two, find Stuart Arnold.
Three, retrieve the tech.
Four, save the world from an interdimensional war . . . with fairies.
I sighed. Well, at least it was a plan.
TWENTY-THREE
The gates were enormous things set in the twelve-foot boundary stone walls, made from cast steel, twisted to form mirroring designs. Rows of bars were set among the steelwork and ended at the top in forbidding lethal spikes.
On either side of the gates was a stone post, each with its own lantern, glowing yellow in the rain. If it weren’t for the modern camera staring down at me from atop the left stone pillar, I would have thought I was in old England. At the entrance of a castle belonging to a duke, or a count.
I waved to the camera, smiled and waited. A minute went by. Then two. Then I wondered if I had I made a mistake. Had I chosen the wrong place? Was it the condo I should have gone to in San Francisco?
Then there was the sound of a heavy-duty lock clicking against steel, and the hydraulics began whirring, pulling the gates inward. They had barely opened halfway when I made the two men in the shadows, dressed in black fatigues.
They were both holding Sig Sauer MPX submachine guns fitted with SIG-SD suppressors. A brutal firearm—reliable, customizable, and deadly accurate. And strictly for the use of law enforcement and military forces. Definitely not goons; these guys looked like trained men. Ex-soldiers, perhaps.
They were both muscular guys, but not the kind of muscles that come from standing in front of a gym mirror. They were the kind that come from serious deadlifts and other heavy compound exercises, stretching their backs, shoulders and thighs into raw strength.
There was almost nothing different between them—clones, only the guy on the left was blond and the guy on the right was completely bald. Blondy and Baldy.
I held my arms up as I entered through the gates, and both men raised their SMGs to eye level, moving back as I moved forward. These were trained men, all right, alert and ready to kill.
Beyond the Spectrum Page 13
