Highway to Hell

by Rosemary Clement-Moore

  Henry had pulled out the desk chair and taken a seat. He was tall, dark-haired, but it was hard to tell anything beyond that, since I hadn't seen him without his face obscured—first by Lisa's fist, and now by a wet washcloth he'd gotten from the bathroom.

  “So what's your excuse?” I asked.

  Whatever his face looked like, his voice was an impressive, deep, Vin Diesel sort of rumble. “Road trip.”

  Lisa blew out a disbelieving “Pfft,” and I figured I'd better redirect. “I'm Maggie. If you're wondering. And this is Lisa.”

  He took in Lisa's skull and crossbones pajama pants and her black tank top with. Did I ask you? emblazoned across her breasts. “I guessed that.”

  She bristled, and folded her arms pointedly. “And you are?”

  Justin made a belated introduction. “I thought you'd have figured out by now. This is my friend Henry.”

  Her mouth opened, and for a second no sound came out. “This is the future friar?”

  Henry looked her up and down. “And you're the sorceress?”

  Lisa's gray eyes narrowed dangerously, and her tone grew icy. “I prefer the term evil genius. The sorcery is incidental.”

  Too many things had besieged me at once. I hadn't even processed the dream or its ramifications or the confusion of Justin's arrival, and now there was his mystery friend to fit into my sleep-muddled head. “You told him about us?”

  Justin didn't seem to understand my consternation. “It was hard to explain the necessity for the trip without clueing him in on the particulars.”

  Lisa's lip curled. “That explains it. He came to see if you're crazy, Mags. That's true friendship for you.”

  Henry pointed to his nose. “And this is the thanks I get.”

  I couldn't deal with the battle of the best friends. The adrenaline rush of the room invasion was fading and the nightmare was catching up. I could feel a headache looming, waiting to land on me like an Acme anvil.

  “We'd better not keep Teresa waiting,” I said, rubbing my forehead with the heels of my hands.

  Lisa grabbed a jacket and slipped it on over her tank top. “I'll go. You gather up our stuff.”

  Justin stared at Henry until he got a clue. His friend made an elaborate show of checking his nose for blood, then got to his feet. “Why don't I go, too, and take care of our end of things.”

  “Nice job, Captain Subtlety,” Lisa told Justin as she slipped on her flip-flops and headed out after Henry.

  “What happened to your leg?” Justin asked the moment they were gone.

  I looked down. My ankle was a Technicolor mess of purple, green, and yellow. “It looks worse than it feels.” Which wasn't strictly the truth, but the dull throb wasn't sufficient to stand out from the barrage of other crises.

  He followed me as I went to the vanity and bundled toiletries into a clean towel. “Not really an answer to my question.”

  “I'd rather just tell the story once.” Back to my suitcase, where I dropped the bundle in and took out a pair of shorts. “Assuming you want Henry in on the discussion.”

  Justin sank onto the bed, watching me collect the rest of our stuff. “I'm confused. Maybe it's just because I haven't slept. But when you were talking the other night, asking if I'd told Henry about us—well, not about us, but about the weird stuff we've seen—I thought you were hinting that I should.”

  I stared at him stupidly while my pounding head processed his meaning. “So you told him about me and Lisa, and the demon and everything?”

  “I told him about you, your Sight, and Lisa studying magic to try and combat what we've encountered.” He leaned forward, peering closely at my face. “Is that a problem?”

  “No.” It was ironic, though, in a be-careful-what-you-wish-for way. Justin kept a lot of his past—stuff Henry knew, because he'd been there—private from me. But at least I had the weirdness. That was our thing. Now he'd told Henry, who just happened to be studying to be a priest. There are limits to my self-assurance. Forget thinking I was crazy—what if my boyfriend's best friend thought I was going to Hell?

  All of which was inconsequential next to the fact that I was sure now that we were dealing with a demon, even if I'd yet to say it aloud. The forces of darkness tend to put things into perspective, generally speaking.

  Suddenly my hands were shaking too badly to do up the zipper of my bag. Justin, observing this, took over the task. “How's your headache?”

  I squinted at him. “Is it that obvious?”

  He took me by the shoulders and steered me to a seat on the edge of the bed. “That must have been some dream.”

  “Yeah.” I wasn't ready to go into detail just yet. “How's your headache?”

  “I'll live.” His smile was sheepish. “If I did have delusions of riding to your rescue, shining armor or whatever, that piece of slapstick put an end to it.”

  I grinned a little, reading more into the admission than just his embarrassment. He'd totally been doing the dauntless hero thing in his head.

  I'd jab a sharp stick in my eye before I'd admit this to Lisa, but the white knight thing didn't bother me that much. Like she always said, Justin was Lawful Good. A paladin. It was his nature to try to protect me when my own crusader nature made me rush in where maybe I shouldn't.

  “I have a confession, too,” I said, swinging my legs across his lap and pointing to my bruises. “I got that doing what I promised you I was too smart to do.”

  His fingers were warm as he laid them gently on my multicolored ankle. “I didn't need any psychic powers to know that. Does it have anything to do with the nightmare?”

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “We have a lot to catch up on.”

  He set my feet back on the ground, stood up, and offered me a hand. “Well, let's find Lisa and Henry and get going.”

  I accepted his help up off the bed; the pounding in my head made it hard to see straight. “They may have canceled each other out, like matter and antimatter.”

  Justin picked up my backpack and suitcase. “In that case, we'll just look for the smoking crater.”

  The last thing I grabbed was the denim shirt from the back of the desk chair, throwing it over my T-shirt, since the predawn air would be cold. As soon as I did, the throbbing in my skull disappeared. The tension evaporated from my neck and shoulders as if someone had lifted a weight off them.

  It was the same feeling I'd gotten from the charm bags, which were still wrapped up, safely insulated, inside the dresser. Whoever had made the charms had made this shirt. I was going to figure out who that was—and not just to thank them.

  At the moment, though, I had to admit I was pretty darn grateful.

  18

  Our new room looked pretty much exactly like the old room, except in mirror image and with a door still on its hinges. It occupied the upstairs west corner, and Teresa had put the guys in the downstairs east corner. Hardly subtle.

  The four of us dumped our stuff in our respective quarters and reconvened in Lisa's and my room to catch each other up. The guys' story was short: insane decision to come down and help us look for el chupacabra, standby flight to San Antonio, rental car down to the middle of nowhere.

  For our part, I recapped the accident, the reports of dead livestock, the bogus bones in the two-headed snake museum, and ended with the stakeout with Dave. Justin prompted me for details while Henry listened silently, his chair tipped back on two legs, his arms folded across his chest.

  When I finished, Henry said, “Okay, let me see if I've got this straight. The village people think that an urban legend is killing their livestock, and you all believe it because Maggie has … a feeling?”

  Lisa, who had spent the last three days being the skeptic, was now the first to jump to my defense. “If you're coming in at intermission, you're just going to have to take some things on faith.”

  Henry raised a brow at her phrasing. “As strange as it seems, I'm just playing devil's advocate. You're asking me to believe a lot, with no actual proof.”
/>
  Justin nudged me. He was sitting on the corner of my bed, since there was only one chair. “Show him your ankle, Maggie.”

  I got up and propped my foot on the edge of the desk, displaying my war wounds. Henry grimaced in sympathy. “Ouch.” Then he peered closer, giving me a view of his profile. He missed tall, dark, and handsome by a nose—an impressively Roman nose that owed nothing to Lisa's fist. When he looked up at me in surprise, the blue of his eyes was startling, an odd match with the rough angles of his face. “It looks like a handprint, but the fingers are too long and thin.”

  Justin nodded. “Whatever grabbed her had opposable thumbs. So unless there's a five-foot-tall carnivorous raccoon out there, I think this counts as tangible evidence.”

  “Fine. But evidence of what?”

  The three of them looked at me, and I delayed the inevitable by digging under the stack of library books for my spiral pad of notes. “The way we figured, it could be two things. One: a rare, reclusive creature that has come near civilization because of the drought.”

  “And you're ruling that out,” Lisa confirmed.

  “Right. It moved way too fast for anything natural.” I drew a line diagonally across that column. “Two: a supernatural creature. Like Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness monster. Maybe there really is a goat sucker.”

  Justin shook his head. “How could something exist without leaving behind any evidence besides a couple of footprints?”

  “Maybe some magic keeps the monster from being photographed or documented?” I suggested.

  “Even after death?” Justin asked. “Nothing in the fossil record?”

  “If it's supernatural,” said Lisa, “maybe it doesn't die.”

  “Everything with a body dies.”

  Henry listened with a bemused expression. “So, Justin. You don't believe in Bigfoot, but you believe in spirits-angels and demons and psychic girlfriends?”

  Justin smiled ruefully, as if realizing it didn't make sense. “Because they shouldn't be proven, but are. At least to me.”

  Lisa had that debate-team look in her eye. “But Thomas Aquinas says that God can be proven by reason.”

  “But not by physical evidence,” said Justin. “And also, that's God, not angels. And definitely not el chupacabra.”

  I pressed my hands to my aching head. “Focus, you guys!

  We don't have time to argue about the number of angels on the head of a pin. Let's come back from the theoretical extreme, okay?”

  After a startled moment, Justin cleared his throat in apology. “Sure, Maggie.”

  I flipped my notebook to a blank page and sat down cross-legged on the bed. “The problem is, there are a lot of factors. There's the chupacabra.” I wrote it down and circled it. “There's Doña Isabel, who is a Seer, and some kind of guardian of the land. And there's someone else we don't know about yet. A bruja.”

  “A witch?” Justin looked over my shoulder as I circled each word on the page. “That's a lot going on in one place. No wonder you're having such a hard time figuring it out.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I connected the dots into a triangle on the paper. “The problem is, I don't know how they all link together.”

  Lisa contemplated the page as well. “You're sure Doña Isabel isn't the bruja? Even if she never leaves the ranch property, she could have had someone here in town put those charm bags in our rooms.”

  “Charm bags?” asked Henry, sounding as if that was one blithe magical reference too many.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Check under your bed before you go to sleep.”

  “It's not her,” I said, before things could get off track again. “The two protections—the one on the room and the psychic fence around the ranch—feel different.” I struggled for a comparison. “It's like the difference between a folk song and Handel's Messiah.”

  Justin had picked up the pamphlet on the Velasquez ranch and was thumbing through it. “Doña Isabel is this guy Zeke's grandmother?”

  “Yeah. Matriarch of the ranch. The whole county, basically. Way powerful.”

  “What's with the holy cows?” Henry pointed to the sepia photo on the front cover. “Why do those cattle have a patriarchal cross on their backsides?”

  “That's the Velasquez brand,” I said. “The double-armed cross.”

  Justin read from the first page. “ ‘Raphael Velasquez chose it to honor the French Oblate missionaries who rode from ranch to ranch to deliver the sacrament and the Word.’ ” He looked up. “There's a job for you, Henry. Put your polo pony to good use.”

  Lisa swiveled to stare at Henry. “Polo pony?”

  “Let's focus, people.” I jumped up to think on my feet. “We need to figure this out. We've got until sundown. That's it.”

  “So this thing can't come out until night?” Justin asked.

  “It's photosensitive. That's how the camera flash saved me.”

  He watched me pace the tiny space between the beds. “Is it intelligent?”

  “The thing in the pasture seemed more instinct than intellect. But it's not neutral, it's not just a hungry animal. It's Evil.” My mind went again to my dream and I wrapped my arms around myself, unable to stop a chill. “It doesn't just eat to survive. It wants to kill, to consume. In my dream I saw—” I broke off and rubbed my eyes with my hands. “There was blood, and it was soaking into the ground and somehow making this thing more solid. More real.”

  Silence met my words, thick and heavy. Henry spoke first, and actually sounded shaken. “No wonder you were screaming.”

  I smiled ruefully, appreciating the sympathy, even if he didn't believe my dream meant anything.

  Lisa broke in. “Am I the only one who noticed that Maggie just called this thing Evil? Otherworldly, destructive-for-the-hell-of-it-type Evil?”

  “I just always assumed it was,” said Justin. “We haven't encountered anything supernatural that wasn't.”

  “Hello.” I pointed to my freakish brain. “I resent that. And so does my tea-leaf-reading granny. Lisa might have something to say about it, too.”

  Lisa leaned against the wall, deliberately indolent. “Evil geniuses make it a policy never to apologize or explain.”

  Justin rubbed his face, looking fatigued. “What's the next step, Maggie?”

  “I need to speak to Doña Isabel. She knows a lot more than she's telling.” I stretched my arms over my head and tried not to groan. Everything ached. “Lisa, what's Zeke's plan for the day?”

  She checked the clock on the nightstand. “He's supervising the roundup. They were going to start as soon as it was light. In fact, Zeke will be picking me up any minute now. I said I'd help however I could.”

  I glanced at the window, where gray light edged the floral curtains. “It's dawn now. The Duck will be open, and I can get some coffee, then head out to the Big House. The guys can get some rest, and we can all meet up later.”

  Justin's hand on my arm stopped me before I got any momentum. “One more thing.” His backpack lay on the floor near him. He pulled it over with his foot, and took out a small notebook. “I searched for info on previous animal attacks, like you asked. Livestock getting killed by wild animals wasn't uncommon until all the apex predators got driven off and hunted to extinction.”

  His dedication was admirable, but he looked half dead with fatigue. “Can't this wait until you've gotten a couple of hours of sleep?”

  “No, we need to talk about it before we do anything else.” He flipped open the notepad. “So to narrow things down, I looked for anything in Velasquez County that happened around a drought. Two events stood out. One was an anecdotal story from the eighteen hundreds, about the ground getting so dry that cracks opened up large enough to swallow whole cows.”

  I sat on the edge of my bed, thinking about my dream, about sinking into the ground and the monster crawling out. “Okay. What's the other one?”

  “The last thing I found was in the nineteen fifties. Also a drought. Also mutilated cattle, blamed on a c
ougar. But it stood out to me because a cowboy died.”

  “The fifties?” Doña Isabel would have been at the ranch then. She'd have been about the age she appeared in my visions. “Did it say where this happened, exactly?”

  “No.” He pulled a folded map out of the notebook. “I planned to plot all the past and present incidents and see if there was a pattern. But I couldn't narrow down any locations.”

  “I know how we can find out.” I stood up purposefully. “Meet me in the Duck in fifteen minutes. It's time to turn the inquisition around.”

  If anyone knew the chupacabra's social schedule, it was Teresa. And if her memory didn't go back that far, I was betting the Old Guys' did.

  19

  I entered the Duck alone, having hurried to dress and get there before the guys. The bar seemed almost deserted, especially after the crowd the night before. There were only three Old Guys at their table. Hector, as I'd hoped, was drying mugs behind the counter, and I headed his way.

  Teresa intercepted me en route, one hand on her hip, the other holding a pot of coffee. “There better not be any hanky-panky going on, little missy.”

  “Hanky-panky?” I warily eyed the steaming pot and didn't try to go around her.

  She gave me a death-ray glare and flipped a dish towel over her shoulder. “I know what you kids get up to on spring break, but this is a respectable place.”

  One of the Old Guys called from their table. “Give her a break, Teresa. That girl shot your chupacabra.”

  “Hmph.” She pressed her lips together and went to fill their mugs. “El chupacabra is not so easily killed.”

  I continued to the bar. Hector had coffee waiting for me, a pitcher of cream beside it. “Heard you had some gentleman callers this morning.”

  “It was an exciting night all around.” I climbed onto a stool and put his folded denim shirt on the counter. “You probably heard all about that, too.”

  “Yeah.” He wiped the spotless bar. “Dave's headed home from the hospital already. Carl went to go pick him up.”