A Shot in the Dark jjd-2

by K. A. Stewart

  And I was still here.

  I couldn’t find the hilt of my sword, lost somewhere in the stones, but I carried the blade with me as I slowly picked my way down the rockslide. My hands were stiff, and the cuts across my palms seeped blood every time I tried to flex my fingers. I hurt everywhere.

  I also had no idea where the hell Marty’s truck was. How far had I come in my flight through the trees? But the great thing about being on a mountain is that down is usually the direction you want to go. So I headed down, my exhausted feet stumbling more than once on the uneven terrain.

  Eventually, I found the plucky little stream again, and by following it I found the clearing in the trees where I’d first called the Yeti. Even just thinking of him brought a sour film to the back of my throat, and I wished vainly for something to drink.

  I’m not dumb enough to drink out of a mountain stream. Duh. But I could wash the blood from my hands there. For some reason, the thought of staining Marty’s truck with my blood was overwhelmingly unacceptable.

  I knelt, noting which joints ached in all the wrong places. By morning, I’d barely be able to move. I dipped my hands into the ice-cold water, letting it run over the deep cuts and numb away the pain. I examined the injuries with a curious detachment, marveling that I still had motion in my fingers at all. I’d sliced my palms up pretty good.

  Though… I gingerly wiped the caked blood off my left palm, letting the water carry away the grime, and realized that I couldn’t see a cut at all. Looking at my right, I found the same there, my palm unmarred. Where my knuckles should have been scraped and bloodied, I found unbroken skin.

  “Oh holy…” So, Cam’s coin had worked after all. I knew I couldn’t leave it there in the stream for just anyone to find. What if someone noticed this little creek suddenly had healing properties? I dug in the icy mud for a few moments, trying to find just where I’d buried the bespelled quarter, but I had no luck. Hell, I could have been yards off, in either direction. I finally had to resign myself to leaving it, and hoping that the spell would wear off before anyone noticed.

  The Suburban was right where I’d left it, when I finally managed to make my way to the right location. I threw what was left of my katana in the back, and deep down I mourned my loss. She’d been good to me. She’d been there with me since the very beginning.

  On the passenger seat, Cole’s phone glowed, indicating a missed call and a waiting message.

  “We’re fine,” were the first words out of his mouth. “Everyone’s fine, and we got Mira on the phone. She was at the amusement park. Can you believe it? Zane’s gonna be okay. Call me, big brother, soon as you get this. God, please call.”

  I would. I’d call him as soon as I got off the mountain, preferably before someone arrested me for trespassing. As soon as my hands stopped shaking. Maybe when the full-body shudders subsided. Definitely after my vision stopped being all black around the edges.

  But first, I was going to call my wife, and I didn’t even care what time it was back home.

  She was expecting me. The phone rang only once. “Jesse??”

  “Hey, baby.” I couldn’t help it. I had to smile at the sound of her voice, so thick with worry and tight with relief. “Did I wake you?”

  Of course I hadn’t woken her. She’d been pacing the floors, for the thousandth or so time, wondering if I was alive or dead, if the next phone ring was going to be that call. “Goddess, Jess. Where are you?”

  “Um… somewhere on Pikes Peak? I paid Viljo a visit. He says hey.”

  “Are you all right? Cole said you were fighting.”

  How did Cole know…? Oh yeah. The Yeti went bye-bye, and Zane’s tattoo flaked off. That’s how he knew. “Um… yeah, a little. It’s all right. I won.”

  She took a deep breath, and I could hear the squeak of our bed as she sank down onto it. “How badly are you hurt?”

  Good question. “Actually… not too bad. Gonna be a lovely shade of purple in a few hours, but nothing fatal. Nothing even debilitating.” Sore and stiff and bruised was way better than filleted and bleeding and dying. Infinitely better. Hell, compared to my usual adventures, I’d come out of this one the rosy picture of health.

  “You’re sure? You’re not… you’re not lying to make me feel better?”

  “No, baby. Promise.” Of course, I’d lied to her about other things. Omitted. Dodged. It was no wonder she thought I might be fibbing now. I deserved her doubt too much to even be hurt by it. “Physically, I’m fine. Swear.”

  “And not physically?”

  Ah, that was the question. For days, I’d buried my fear, crammed it down deep where no one else could see. I’d been running on adrenaline and instinct for three straight days now, wrapping myself in it like armor. But all of that was gradually washing away as I sat here, leaving me with nothing but belated terror. I rested my forehead on my knees when my vision started to swim again, my blood pressure humming in my ears. “It was him. It was the one in my dreams. He came back.” God… he came back. And if he could come back once, he could come back again. That certain knowledge sent shudders through my body so hard I almost dropped the phone. “Are you all right there? You and the kids? Nothing weird?”

  Handless had been near Ivan. Which meant the Yeti had. It wasn’t unthinkable that he’d been near my wife and daughter too. Esteban.

  Mira was exasperated when she answered. “We’re fine. It’s you I’m worried about. Do you need help? I can call Ivan, or Avery, or… Someone can come get you.”

  “No, I’ll be fine. I’m gonna… just sit here a bit and catch my breath. Then I’m gonna go hook up with the guys again. We’ll be home either late today or tomorrow, okay?”

  “You call. You call every time you guys stop for something, all right? I want to know that you’re coming home.”

  “I always come home, baby.” Oops. There’s that lie again. “Hey, I hear you got Zane all patched up.”

  “Oh, yeah. Cameron seems to have some basic magical ability. Enough that it worked. You’re going to have to explain all that to me when you get home.” She didn’t want to talk about Cam and Zane, I could tell that much. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked one more time. “Jess, if you need help…”

  “Baby, I’m fine. And you should get some sleep. Anna’s gonna drag you out of bed in a couple hours whether you want to or not. I’ll see you both soon.”

  She heaved a heavy sigh. “I… Be careful, please. Come home.”

  “I will. Love you, baby.”

  “I love you too, Jess.”

  I hung up the phone and tried to muster the energy to get to my feet. The sun rose while I sat on the ground leaning on Marty’s dented fender. It lit the world in shades of fire. It was beautiful.

  20

  There was a variety of interesting headlines in several news-type publications in the days and weeks following my pseudovacation.

  The first one made national news, all the way from Fort Collins, Colorado. Apparently, an oxygen tank exploded in a storage room at the local hospital, damaging a hallway and causing the evacuation of the entire facility. Everyone was so thankful that it wasn’t a tank in a patient’s room, and that the injuries were minimal. No one could figure out just why the tank exploded, or what it was doing in the storage room where it didn’t belong. Investigations were ongoing.

  It took Cole a week (and most of a six-pack) to tell me what really happened.

  “You’re going to think I’m insane, big brother,” he mentioned quietly one night. “Absolutely out of my ever-loving mind.”

  The Yeti had walked right into the ER in his human guise, like he owned the place. At his heels were two of his minions, scuttling along like the good little pets they were.

  “It was like nobody saw them. Like they couldn’t see them.” Cole shook his head. “Why could we see them, and no one else?”

  “People see what they want to see. You guys kinda had it crammed down your throat.” Really, I had no idea what I was talking
about. Philosophy I could explain. Mystic shit, not so much. Despite my eerily accurate dream, I was not a magic user. I knew this. I believed this. So what the hell had happened to me up there?

  “Anyway… I saw him come in, before they saw me, and I yanked the curtains shut around Zane’s bed.”

  They’d retreated out the backside of the ER, into the maintenance hallways of the hospital, wheeling Zane’s bed between them. Duke padded along silently, like he understood the risk they were taking.

  Why no one stopped them, I don’t think any of us will ever know. At Will’s direction, they turned away from the patient room elevators and toward the operating rooms. There was only one way in or out down there, to keep it sterile, and Will figured there’d be fewer innocents present so late at night.

  They might have gotten away clean, if the bed’s wheel hadn’t gotten caught on a sharp corner, jostling it. In his pained delirium, Zane moaned.

  Demons track by sound, or so Axel said. I think he must have been telling the truth, because all it took was that moan, several hallways distant, to alert the Yeti and his zombie pets.

  “We tried to stay ahead of them, but the kid was half awake by that point, and kept hollering. They came right to us. We could hear their claws, scrabbling on the floor tiles.”

  They weren’t going to reach the operating suites in time, so the guys crammed the bed into the nearest storage room they could find and barricaded the door with whatever they could get their hands on. They combined what little weaponry they had left-Cole’s gun with two bullets, and one hopper full of blessed paintballs-and prepared to make their stand.

  “He knocked on the door. Just tap tap tap, all polite like.” Cole shook his head. “Cameron kept insisting that he couldn’t hurt us, wasn’t allowed to, and all I could do was look at Zane in that bed and think that Cameron was either crazy or stupid.”

  There were things Cole didn’t say. Things that I maybe made up in my own head, but I could picture how it went so clearly. Oscar’s hand, pressed so tightly over his son’s mouth, trying to stifle the boy’s cries. Will, pawing through the shelves of supplies to see if there was something, any thing there they could use. Marty with the loaded paintball gun, just waiting for the door to come flying open.

  “He said, ‘I’ll give you two minutes to decide what to do with the boy, and then I’ll send my pets in to retrieve him.’” My brother blinked a bit. “He really thought we’d give the kid up to save our own skins. What kind of person does that?”

  “He’s not a person, little brother. He’s about the furthest thing from it.”

  The Yeti didn’t give them two minutes. Almost immediately, they heard the ceiling tiles in the hallway go crashing down, and the minions were in the drop ceiling above them. The brackets that held the fiberboard tiles dipped and swayed dangerously, even the zombies’ slight weight too much for the light support system.

  “If they came through the ceiling, we were gonna be trapped in close quarters with them. But if we opened the door, the demon was gonna get Zane.” Cole drained what was left of his beer and reached for another. “I took aim at the ceiling, thinking maybe I could shoot through the tiles and at least cripple them. We could let Duke finish them on the ground or something.”

  This was the part of the story where, unbeknownst to anyone at the hospital, I came in. There was a sudden silence above them, and out in the hallway, the Yeti chuckled. “I have been called away on unexpected business, gentlemen. I’ll leave my pets here for your amusement.” And just like that, poof, he was gone.

  Of course, the guys had no way of knowing he’d really disappeared. They didn’t know I’d just shouted out a name I’d sworn never to say, that I was about to fight for my life on a mountain far to the south. They did know, however, that the creatures in the ceiling paused for long moments, then exited the way they’d come in, tiles crashing to the floor out in the hallway. They heard the claws clacking on the floor, hurrying away.

  I suppose it’s possible the creatures remembered the guys. Maybe what little intelligence they had left recalled that tangling with my buddies meant excruciating, horrific pain. More likely, they just smelled the blood down in the OR and decided it was Zombie-Starbucks. Either way, once the Yeti wasn’t there to boss them around, the two minions went scampering off into the hospital.

  My brother knew they couldn’t let those things go running off willy-nilly into the general populace. At the very least, having half-rotting animated corpses in the OR was so not sterile. I mean, there isn’t enough hand sanitizer in the world to cover that mess.

  So Cole left Marty and Duke to stand guard over everyone else, and went chasing off into the hallways alone, armed with two bullets. Yeah, I know. He’s growing up to be just like me. Ain’t I proud?

  “I chased them almost all the way to the surgery suites, but I didn’t realize until we were almost there that there was actually an operation taking place. I could hear the beeping machines, and people’s voices.” He paused there for a long time. “I knew I was gonna die, y’know. Knew I couldn’t take them out with two shots, and it didn’t matter. I had to stop them no matter what. Had to keep them from hurting anyone else.”

  He fired after those fleeing abominations, one bullet sending one of them cartwheeling into the wall. It didn’t kill it, though, and they both turned on my brother, hissing as they bounded down the hallway toward him. With one bullet, he faced them both down and silently said his good-byes.

  “I don’t know what happened next, Jess. I mean, I can tell you what I think I saw, but…”

  From behind him, a searing white light lit up the hallway, bright enough to blind him even with his back to it. He dropped to his knees, hands slapped over his eyes in agony, and the Yeti’s pets shrieked in their death throes. The light eclipsed everything, its brilliance so great that Cole couldn’t make out the pattern of the floor tiles, even with his nose pressed against them. When he was finally able to raise his head, there were only ashes in the hallway, drifting along in the breeze from the air vents.

  “And what do you think it was?” I had an idea. I’d sent them help, after all.

  “Honestly?” I waited while he mentally talked his next words over with his beer. “I will swear to you, Jesse. Swear until my dying day. I swear, in that hallway, I saw an angel.”

  I didn’t believe in angels. Demons, yes. One demon in particular. Axel had come through for me, and it didn’t seem important to tell my brother the truth. He’d be happier, believing in angels. We finished our beers, and neither of us has spoken of it since. That’s how we roll, my brother and I.

  The next headline that caught my eye, though it never progressed past a local piece in Fort Collins, was the story of a teenager bitten by a rabid badger while on a family camping trip.

  You heard me. Somehow, some genius looked at the human bite marks on Zane’s arm and decided that it looked like a badger. Trust me when I say that badger bites don’t even remotely resemble human. (I Googled it.) I had to wonder if that was some deep conspiracy cover-up, or just the human penchant for explaining the unexplainable, no matter how ridiculous.

  Zane was expected to make a full recovery. The guys got Mira on the phone with Cam, and together, the two of them magicked up a cure. The last I heard, he’s had a full round of rabies vaccinations, and he’s going to have to do some physical therapy to regain full use of the arm, due to muscle damage. It’s been a while since I got an update, though. Oscar made it very plain that he doesn’t want us (me) anywhere near his son, despite the fact that I saved the kid’s soul.

  I don’t honestly care so much for my own sake, but I feel bad for Marty. The Quinns were longtime family friends of his, and it’s my fault he’s lost them now.

  I haven’t seen Marty in a few weeks either. He says I’m supposed to stay away while he works on this new sword he’s started constructing for me. I can’t tell if he’s pissed or not. Guys, we don’t typically sit around and talk out our feelings and stuff. Eventuall
y, I’ll head over to his house with a case of beer, and he’ll either punch me, or he won’t. Then we’ll both know.

  It’s not like he doesn’t have every right to be ticked. Stuff could have gone real wrong up there. Stuff did go real wrong up there. It would have been real easy for Mel to be a widow and a single mom, all in a split second. That’s not the life she married for. Marty either. So… how do you blame the guy if he’s a little skittish now?

  At least I’ve still got Will. I mean, Will is Will. He takes whatever I throw at him, and he keeps on ticking, and cracking really bad jokes. I don’t know what I’d do without Will, and it’s more than his ability to tie a mean tourniquet. I have realized that I never gave him enough credit. He’s good people.

  The last headline made me laugh, and then glance around sheepishly. It was a little blurb on the cover page of one of those supermarket tabloids. You know the ones. BIGFOOT AND SWAMP CREATURE ELOPE! Those kinds of stories.

  Only this one was about claims that there was a miracle stream flowing down Pikes Peak. The creek wasn’t always there, but when it appeared, it had healing qualities. Obviously, someone had stumbled across my little blessed stream after I’d left. Part of me hoped that anyone who could find it would find the cures to their health woes. The rest of me was pretty sure I was gonna get my butt kicked for violating some esoteric magic law I didn’t even know about. Surely, leaving magic stuff lying around can’t be proper spell-casting etiquette.

  When Cameron showed up on my doorstep, I was pretty sure that was what he’d come to talk about. I was wrong.

  Thankfully, my girls weren’t home and Esteban was out on a date. I led Cam through the house and into the backyard. Call me paranoid, but I had no idea what was coming and I didn’t feel like being confined.

  “I owe you an apology,” the priest began before I was ready, and the unexpected sentiment brought me up short. Cameron examined the stone chess pieces on my patio table-recently retrieved from storage-as he spoke. “I wasn’t honest with you, or your friends. To say that I was only following orders is not a defense.”