by Jackie May
My Crap-pile screeches to a stop, rocking back and forth on heated suspension. When I right myself in my seat, the windshield and windows are clouded with a storm of dust and smoke, through which I can see that we’re up on the curb of an intersection of streets. Leaning out the window, I see a beautiful sight: the house next to a dirt lot, where we’d seen that first group of kids playing soccer with a flat ball. We’re just a few blocks away from the exit to this maze.
“Don’t stop,” Hillerman says, holding her head. “Go.”
Too late. I put the car in gear and press the gas, but we don’t move. The engine roars, the car shudders with the effort, but we get only spinning wheels. “Stuck!”
“We’re not stuck,” Hillerman says. “It’s the sorcerer.”
To prove her right, the back end of the car lifts a foot into the air by some unseen force. My tires spin uselessly above the ground.
“What’s doing that?” Brenner shouts.
“Magic,” Hillerman answers. “I’m looking for him.” She looks left and right, but behind her sunglasses I can clearly see that her eyes are closed.
Gunfire blazes from a house across the street, spraying the road next to us. Brenner shoves his gun out the window and blindly returns fire. Masses of people are converging on our street corner. Soon we’ll be caged in, and they’ll be too close to miss their shots.
“I’ve got him!” Hillerman announces. She’s turned so that it looks like she’s staring directly into the headrest of her seat. Staring through the headrest. “Get us going! We’ll only get a second. We need to be gone.”
Shoving into first gear, I lean on the gas. The back wheels spin.
“Ready?” she asks.
“No!” I scream, heart pounding. Down the street to my left, I’ve just seen a nightmare image. Pounding the road on all fours, spewing rabid phlegm from its snout, an enormous silver-backed wolf barrels toward us like a runaway train, and nearly as big.
“Now!” Hillerman demands.
“Not yet! Not yet!” Let it get closer. Just two more seconds!
More gunfire from across the street. Ricochets off the wheels, the bumper. Brenner opens fire again, emptying his magazine.
Hillerman pulls on her door handle. “I’m going!”
Me too. Folding forward, I reach beneath my seat to pull my compact handgun from its hiding place. I lean back, aiming with both hands, squeeze off three rounds—pop pop pop—and half a block away, the wolf does a face-plant in the middle of the street. The bullets aren’t silver, but three shots will be enough for a good nap.
As the echoes of my shots are still ringing, Hillerman throws her door open, leans out, and sends two shots up toward a roof behind us. The invisible chains holding us in place are broken. The back end of my car drops, and by the time the tires hit the ground, I’ve pushed her into third gear. We’re off like a shot. Hillerman nearly falls out of her open door, but Brenner reaches over the seat to haul her in. Houses streak past. As I swerve to miss the unconscious wolf, Hillerman leans out her window to watch it go by, then gives me a look that is indecipherable behind her shades.
“They’re still coming,” Brenner says, gaping out the back window. There are several cars chasing after us.
“This is the street,” I say, “where we came in.”
Hillerman sounds doubtful. “Are you sure?”
I take the next corner. “Yes, I’m sure! Look!” At the end of the street is a brick wall covered in graffiti. I feel like I’ve just been slapped. “No!”
“Turn around!” Hillerman orders.
“No, this is the place! This is the way we came in!”
“It’s a brick wall!”
“An illusion!” Right? Just an illusion. Like the rain inside the auto plant. Like the ten-foot demon god. Like Brenner worshipping my body on silk sheets.
I gun it, flooring the gas, 100 percent sure of my choice. Hillerman hunkers down, screaming at Brenner to get down on the floor with the clothes. As the brick wall rushes toward us, I feel 90 percent sure of my choice. At least 80 percent. The graffiti, the cracks in the wall, it looks so real! 70 percent.
Fifty-fifty!
At the moment of impact, I squeeze my eyes shut and turn my face away. We hit with a crunch, and for a sickening moment I think we’re folding like a tin can against a very real and very solid brick wall. But with a metallic snap, I realize that we’ve only broken through a chain. Opening my eyes, I see that the road continues ahead of us, just as I had thought (okay, hoped) it would. The brick wall has vanished behind us, and the chasing cars hit the brakes, unwilling to pursue outside of their neighborhood.
“—shut your eyes!” Hillerman is shouting. “You shut your eyes because you only guessed! You didn’t know!”
“Oh, now you want to point fingers? You got it!” I do ninety for half a dozen blocks, running every red light, swerving in and out of traffic. I throw the car across three lanes to jump the curb into a vast parking lot in front of a grocery store, skidding to a stop in a space far from the other parked cars. “You’re gonna yell at me for taking a small chance, a very small chance that I’d screwed up, that I don’t know what the hell I know, after you took us out of my car and put us into a literal hell with absolutely zero control over living or dying?”
“I did have control! We’re alive! Here we are!”
“Because of me!”
“Right, because you can’t race and you can’t shoot! Is there anything else you want to lie about?”
“It’s called bluffing.”
Brenner suddenly screams, “Drive!”
Like an idiot, I don’t drive—not right away. First, I whirl in my seat to see what’s so urgent, and out the back window there’s a silver car twenty feet away, moving slowly, but headed straight for us. Both the driver and the passenger doors are hanging wide open, like big ears. Nobody’s in the car, but behind it I see two figures in hooded sweatshirts sprinting away.
Now I drive. Panic floods my brain, causing me to flood the gas, and the tires spin as though on ice. Too much! Ease down, ease down! Hillerman is shouting, but I can’t make out the words. The silver car is five feet away. I let up on the gas, and finally we get traction with a squelch of rubber, but I know it won’t be enough. I haven’t even shifted into second gear before the silver car detonates in a mammoth ball of fire and a hail of shrapnel. The blast carries us, lifting three of my Crap-pile’s tires completely off the ground. After a strange out-of-body moment of weightlessness, with no sound but the whistling wind, we crash into a bus shelter.
There’s a sharp ringing in my ears and a vague throb of pain in my left arm. But I’m not dead, so I throw my door open and leap from the car, ignoring the flaming debris still falling from the sky. I run past an enormous crater beneath the black, charred frame of the silver car. Through the shimmering heat of flames, I spot the two hooded runners headed straight for the grocery store entrance.
It takes me three strides to reach top speed, legs pumping, shoes pounding the pavement. After a drop dead sprint over the length of half a football field, my lungs burn, my heart burns, everything burns, but I’m closing the distance. Parked cars blur past. One of them suddenly backs out—no time to leap out of the way—I vault up to the trunk and skip off the roof. A row of abandoned shopping carts pass below me before I hit the ground directly in front of a driving car—honk!—and I swerve away, hurdle a row of square hedges, slap another cart away, and push between people exiting the store.
There’s panic inside. Half the people crowd the windows to get a look at the wreck on the far side of the parking lot. The other half are running in all directions or taking cover. One woman hurries after me with an ashen face, asking if I’m okay, is anybody else hurt? Another guy sees me and, backing away, says something about blood.
There! The two hoods rush down the length of the store, then dart into an aisle. I bolt straight ahead, a plan of attack already formulated, and not a second to hesitate. I can only guess which exit th
ey’re making for, but I haven’t got time to think of something else. This will either work, or it won’t. I’m not even sure what I’ll do if I catch them. I only know that if I lose them this time, I might never get another chance.
In as straight a line as possible, I race across the store—dodge carts, spin around people, leap over the corner of a banana display—to a back exit, burst through the swinging door, collide with a store employee, spinning me off at an angle, arms wheeling. I recover and charge through an inventory room full of boxes and shelves of canned food. Yell at the guy with the clipboard—“Move!”—vault over the crate he is unpacking, throw my body at a large door, crash into daylight—a loading dock behind the store.
Three eighteen wheelers are parked side-by-side with front bumpers against the wall of the store. I jump at the wall, place a foot on it, and push off, pivoting my body up onto the hood of the diesel truck. I hop to the roof, take three long strides along the top of the box trailer, then hurl myself across to the next trailer. After two steps, I leap across to the third trailer, this time dropping my body flat, like a baseball player sliding into home plate. I hear the sound of an exit door banging open, and as I slide off the side of the trailer, the first hooded figure races below me, then the second runner flashes into view, and…
Impact.
We collide in an explosion of limbs, a human tumbleweed skipping across the pavement. I see only flashes of light and dark. I both hear and feel several slaps of skin and a hollow thump of skull. When the world stops spinning, I find soft material in my fists. A hoodie. I’ve got a hoodie in my hands. But the person who used to be in the hoodie is stumbling away, and I can’t follow. One of my arms refuses to do what I say, and one of my ankles already feels like an expanding balloon.
I see her straight, black hair, and generous female curves. Before fleeing, she looks back. It’s just a quick flash of her face, but it’s enough to know two things. First, she’s breathtakingly gorgeous, and I realize that the strong underworld current I feel from her—the same powerful current I felt on the fire escape at Dario’s—is the buzz of an exquisite glamour. Her face seems to have been inspired by the severe and exotic beauty of the Old World—maybe Italy or Portugal or Morocco. One of her eyes is light brown; the other is icy blue.
The second thing I know is that I’ve seen that face before. Last I saw her, she was half naked and screaming for her life as she fled from Dario’s apartment just as Brenner and I showed up.
Now, again, she’s gone. Fighting a wave of nausea, blinking sticky blood out of one eye, I lay my head back on cool cement and listen to her footsteps fade.
I’d never personally met Double D Director Madison West until now. With one glance, I know that she is everything that everybody says she is: polite but rigid, petite but powerful, poised but tense. Her pantsuit, while chic rather than bookish, is exactly what you’d expect a government agency director to wear, and the same goes for the perfectly formed flip of silver bangs hanging over one side of her brow. Women of her bearing belong at the White House, not Newport Prairie Mobile Home Park. I can’t decide which is more unfitting: her place standing next to the open box of beers in unit #5 of our wagon train, or me and Hillerman having a shouting match in front of her.
“You’ve been lying to us this whole time,” I accuse. “You never cared about the bomb or the murders, the case! You just wanted a shot at Arael Moaz.”
“Because Arael Moaz is the case.”
“We don’t know that. We still don’t know anything!”
“We know that he plans for the attack to happen sometime tonight before midnight.”
“Oh? Did the ghosts tell you that?”
“He told me that when he agreed—”
“—And you can see this Deep world, too?”
“—to come in at midnight.”
“What else do we not know about you?”
“Also, he didn’t kill us—”
“—Who are you? What are you?”
“—he could have, on the spot.”
“Because he’s not the killer!”
“No, because he didn’t want to alert my team before he could pull off the attack.”
“Oh yeah, because you had to check in with your super-secret code or else the Navy SEALs would break down his door. That was a bluff!”
“And it worked because he didn’t want to take the risk of screwing up this thing he’s been putting together for months.”
“Ow!” Fire shoots up my broken arm into my shoulder. A healer sits next to me at the poker table. She’s young for the job, and her long nails jab like pinpricks into my wound, but her power is undeniable. A mellow, numbing bliss chases away the fire. The bones on either side of the break pull themselves together, fitting into place.
Nick Gorgeous, cowboy hat in hand, leans against the counter next to Director West. “What’s your assessment?” he asks Hillerman.
“At some point between now and midnight,” she answers, “there will be a bombing somewhere in Detroit. I’ve already called it in. My team is assembling as we speak.”
“The bombing already happened,” I say. “To us. Did you think about that?”
“That was a bombing. Not the bombing.”
“Number one, the target could have been you all along, just like Arael said, and number two—”
“—Exactly! Like Arael said. He wants us to think the attack has already happened. He wants us to think there’s no more threat.”
“—And second, those two at the grocery store weren’t demons. They were fey, just like Henry Stadther said.”
“So what? Demons can’t employ faeries? Arael has werewolves, he has sorcerers, he has who-knows-what-else.”
I shove the card table away. “You’re impossible. It’s just that you’re right, that’s all, isn’t it? You’re right, and there’s no other option. You already decided the outcome before you even came here, didn’t you? Arael didn’t kill us when he could have, but oh, because of this or that. So then he does try to kill us five minutes later? Oh, because of this or that!”
Hillerman presses her bookish glasses up the bridge of her nose. The shades are now stowed beneath the sweatshirt that once again covers her tattoos and cleavage. Back to librarian mode. “And now you don’t know what to think, do you? That’s exactly what he wants.”
I might have been able to stay with the grown-ups for the rest of the meeting had I not stood up, fists balled, and leaned toward Hillerman. Nick’s had enough—or maybe he got a look from Director West. He shepherds me toward the door, but I double back, shouting at Hillerman with accusations that only circle around to the same old arguments. Nick hooks an arm around my waist and drags me, kicking and screaming, outside. Half my pack is there, milling about the fire. They all pretend not to be watching. Except for Mom, of course. She might as well be chomping on movie theatre popcorn.
I turn to face Nick, only because that puts my back to the crowd. At least he’ll assume my face is red from anger and not embarrassment.
“Hey, you may be right, Shayne,” he says, “but she had to press Arael. If it’s not him, no harm no foul, but if it is him—”
“—No harm no foul? How about us dead!”
“—but if it is him, he can’t go through with it now that he knows we’re watching. A precautionary measure, that’s all, and maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but what else can we do? It’s not like Arael Moaz is going to give up and confess.”
“Unless we kidnap him and read his mind, right?”
“Oh, that. You said so yourself, it was a bluff.”
“Was it, though? How do we know the feds don’t have a vampire on their side? She had the wording down. ‘Forced to give up all memory assets,’ she said, like she’s reading him his rights.”
“It wouldn’t matter. They’ve got no jurisdiction.”
“But with demons—”
He gives one emphatic shake of his head. “Even with demons. Washington comes in, yeah, they want to st
ick their noses in it, okay, but at the end of the day we control the case. We do the talking.”
“But she kept talking about ex…” I can’t remember the fancy word now, so I just say, “Swooping in and grabbing him.”
“Extradite? Not gonna happen.”
“If they say it’s a terrorist act, or whatever, then it goes to Homeland Security—”
He puts both his hands up, as though calming an upset child. “We already covered this with the Director. She said we’re willing to cooperate on this case, but—”
“To Agent Hillerman?”
“Yes, to Agent Hillerman. West made it very clear that we’ll continue to cooperate with the task force on this case, and they can even lead out, but only on the condition that—”
“We get the dirt bags.”
“That’s right. Arael Moaz—or whoever it turns out to be when we nail them—they get turned over to Double D, no exceptions.”
“Who agreed to that? Hillerman?”
“Hillerman.”
“We can’t go over her head? Who’s her boss? Who tells her what to do?”
“Maybe nobody. I know it ain’t us.”
“Okay, but why aren’t we talking about her? Stadther thought she was a vampire, I feel dominance in her, and she can see stuff from this Deep place, or whatever the hell—”
“It’s the fetish,” he says.
“The what?”
“That necklace she wears, with the teeth.”
“Okay.”
“It’s a fetish. You heard of Zuni fetishes?”
“What the hell?”
“No, I’m not talking about fetish, like a guy wants to have sex with your feet. A fetish is a talisman, basically. Native Americans like the Zuni, they’d make these little figurines of an animal, say a bear or a coyote, and they’d do some ritual that supposedly gave the little statue the life force of that animal. So you wear this little figurine of a bear around your neck, and that gives you the strength of a bear, like that.”
