by Rowan Casey
Before I could decide if she had genuinely vanished or snuck out, a knock rattled my front door.
I opened it to find Dav bracing an arm against the frame, leaning slightly off to the side, as though expecting I might slam the door in his face. He didn’t look any less Dav-like outside of his usual territory. His presence filled more than the doorway in that way some men have a knack for, like he created his own gravity, attracting trouble.
He peered around me and must have spotted the disarray in my living room because the frown was back.
I crossed my arms and waited. If he had come to take another verbal swing he was about to discover today was not the day to screw with me.
“I did call your cell,” he said. “You didn’t answer.”
That was because I was trying to survive a vampire attack at the time. I would tell him, just not yet. “I can bring her back,” I said, flatly. He could take it how he pleased. I was done tiptoeing around people.
A frown cast a few shadows across his face, but he didn’t blink, didn’t really react at all. “Wanna get a coffee?” he asked.
9
It felt good, felt normal, to be around the bustle and noise of normal people in a normal diner. But that feeling didn’t last. I knew it was fake. The waitresses strained smiles, the tapping fingers of the guy at the counter waiting to be served, the mother and her two kids creating mayhem by the door. None of it touched me, because I’d seen the truth in the creature Grimm had pulled from the veil and the beast that had dropped from my ceiling. I’d had my eyes opened and now I couldn’t shut them again. This world was ripe. And all those things on the other side, they were hungry to take a bite.
Dav set the coffees down and dumped enough sugar in his to hold the stir stick upright.
“I’m gonna ask you something,” he said, losing his gaze in the coffee as he stirred. “And I want you to tell me straight. I won’t ask again.”
I lifted the coffee and sipped, grateful for the normalcy in the moment. It wouldn’t last.
“Could you have saved her?”
I had asked myself the same question over and over. Had I deliberately pulled on my sister’s luck, making sure I escaped unharmed, knowing full well it would kill her? Could I have poured my luck into her in time? Maybe. I would never know.
“The small things,” I said quietly, “they’re easy to change. The roll of a dice, someone trips. A car ahead turns left, taking the wrong turn. Small accidents sometimes lead to bigger changes. Changing luck needs a type of focus. If I don’t have time to focus on where the luck is going, it breaks free and becomes chaotic. You’ve heard of the butterfly effect? One small event can have vast repercussions. Imagine that with luck. It can be difficult to focus on the details of diverting luck when you’re hurtling down a street at over 130 and a semi pulls out in front of you.” I cradled the coffee in my hands and peered into it, reliving the memory. It happened so fast, but at the same time felt as though it had taken forever. “I would never have knowingly hurt her.”
“I know.”
Those two words, coming from him, lifted two-years-worth of guilt off my shoulders. Not all of it, but some, enough to allow me to breathe a little easier. A thank you lodged in my throat. I couldn’t look at him, because if I did, those words would turn into a sob and unraveling in front of Dav was not an option.
“I didn’t think. There wasn’t time,” I whispered. “I just…”
“I get it. We all make mistakes, right? Shit happens.”
I looked up and found the expression on his face to be impossibly warm.
“I wanted to blame you,” he said, shifting forward and rubbing his hands together in thought. “Right after it happened, I did blame you. And then, a few days ago, when you showed up out of nowhere, there was a lot of shit I wanted to say, but none of it mattered anymore. The crew has missed you. I’ve missed you.”
Jesus, if he kept this up I’d be a wreck in few minutes. “They missed the uncanny run of luck, you mean?” Blinking quickly cleared some of the wetness in my eyes.
“What’s it like, the luck… I mean, what does it, ya know, look like?”
“In a large crowd, a river of gold. Just you and me, sitting here… It’s threads of light.”
Dav smiled and shook his head. He leaned back and looked around us, probably wondering if he concentrated hard enough, whether he’d see it, too. Moments passed. The type of comfortable moments that didn’t begged to be filled.
“While you were gone,” he began. “Billy was arrested for being a dick and punching out some idiot kid over…I can’t even remember. He managed to get off with a warning. Liau won’t race since the crash. Come to think of it, he may have figured you out. He was forever spouting something about his luck running out. And then there’s Alex. She hasn’t stopped racing, like she’s afraid to stop. I asked her what she’s chasing and she threw a wrench at me.”
Just hearing him talk about them warmed a cold, empty part of me I hadn’t known existed. “Not much has changed then.”
“Now you’re back, it’s almost like nothing has changed.”
I bit into my bottom lip hard enough to bruise it. “What if I can make it so that nothing did change?”
I told him everything. Grimm, my mistake at the casino that cost a man his life and the woman who brought him back. And the offer. Dav listened, like always, absorbing my words without laughing or calling me out. He’d been the first person to listen to Kari and me when we had told him the cops had it all wrong, and he’d believed us. He had never stopped listening.
When I was done, the coffee cups were empty and the baristas had turned the sign on the door to closed.
Dav hadn’t met my gaze for the last fifteen minutes. Now, he was staring out the window, his thoughts miles away.
“Well?” I asked.
“Let’s go get that bike.”
Another race, another shot of the adrenaline to the veins, but this time Dav and I were watching from the sidelines, hidden in tire smoke with our hoods pulled up, hiding our faces.
Liam and his bike showed up within minutes of the meet coming together—almost as though he knew we were ready— and just like before the crowd huddled around him with feverish need in their eyes. They were so obviously enchanted, it seemed a miracle nobody else noticed. Or perhaps that too was part of his charm.
We watched him drag race a three-second Tesla, which was one of the more unusual races I had seen, but when we tried to single out Liam afterward, he gave us the runaround and disappeared. The meet dissolved soon after that, when a cop was sighted a few blocks away.
We tried again the next meet, and the next, until I began to wonder if I had spooked him. With every meet he didn’t show at, I found myself lingering among the cars and crowds, rediscovering why I had loved racing. It wasn’t all about the races. There was so much more to it. The mods, the ingenuity, the sense of belonging. From the outside looking in, it was clear to see racing had saved Kari and me. Without it, we would both have had rap sheets, maybe even done time, considering the direction we had been heading. But at least she would still be alive.
A week later, at another meet, while Alex and me were elbow-deep in my Mitsubishi Evo’s engine and deep in a discussion about turbo lag, the familiar sound of Liam’s bike burbled through the crowd.
“Got him.” Dav’s voice came through on a small pocket radio he had given me so we didn’t get split up at meets.
I told Alex I would meet her later so we could talk more about turning my limp Evo into something with a bit more kick, and climbed into the car. She grumbled to life. It wasn’t long before Dav’s voice came through the radio again. “West on Washington Boulevard.”
I hooked the car into the asphalt and spun away from the meet, glancing at the map on my cellphone resting in the passenger seat. In less than a minute I had threaded through the traffic and turned south onto Lincoln. Liam and his bike were easy enough to spot ahead. He was cruising, not racing.
; “I see him,” I relayed back through the radio.
“Hang back. We don’t wanna spook him.”
I smiled to myself at Dav’s unnecessary concern. Tailing someone—even someone I suspected wasn’t entirely human—was easy sailing compared to my last few days.
Liam turned onto Manchester Avenue and led me on a merry little drive through LA’s residential streets. At one point I almost lost him when I got held up by a garbage truck but spotted him turning onto what looked like an old dirt track running close to LAX’s runways.
Liam opened the bike up. In a blink, he was lost in a cloud of dust. I dropped into a low gear and hauled all of the Evo’s guts up from its depths to launch me forward after him.
As soon as the dust cleared, it was clear I’d lost him. I crawled forward into an abandoned town. Empty houses gaped behind dusty yards and rusted fences.
My radio crackled. “Where are you?”
“West of LAX, near the nature reserve in some kind of empty neighborhood.”
“I know it.”
A fat airliner thundered overhead, briefly blocking out the sunlight. Its shadow raked over the abandoned lots, sending a shiver rippling through me.
“I lost him.”
“Hold on, I’m close…”
I rolled the car to a stop and squinted through the windshield. Liam had to be here. This empty block appeared to be fenced in, although the fence was breaking down in places. To get out he would have to come right by me.
The black GTR loomed in my mirrors. Dav pulled up alongside. “Which way?”
I scanned the empty houses. “He should be right up here. Split up. I’ll take this street, you take that one.”
Dav peeled off and crawled the GTR along the adjacent street, inching along the curb. I did the same on my street.
Siobhan appeared to be able to vanish at will, so maybe Liam could, too. If Grimm would damn well return my calls I would have known what the mysterious Liam was capable of. But until he did, I was on my own. No, not alone. I had Dav, at least.
“I’ve got something…” Dav’s radio crackled around the words.
“Where are you?” I tried to spot the GTR through the houses, but couldn’t see much beyond the bushes.
“On the corner by the biggest damn house here. I see tracks in the dust.” The sound of his car door closing broke off along with Dav’s signal.
A lick of cold raised the fine hairs on my arms despite the baking heat. “Wait for me.” No response came back. “Dav?” Nothing. “Damnit!”
The house was easy to spot. An old mock-colonial villa that had once probably cost more than I’d earn in my lifetime. I pulled my Evo up behind the GTR and climbed out. Sweat trickled down my cheek. No breeze, nothing to stir the air. If it hadn’t been for the nearby airport, this whole ghost town would have been near silent.
My skin crawled and my heart picked up its tempo. The isolated location. The abandoned houses. Liam’s casual pace…Something felt off.
I shielded my eyes and frowned at the big house, getting the distinct impression we were led here on purpose. I pressed the radio. “Dav?” Static blasted back.
There was a single tire track leading up the cracked driveway and into an empty garage. Boot prints followed, clearly heading inside.
I brushed my hair back from where it clung to my face and headed up the drive. Inside, shadows crowded in all the corners. Shafts of sunlight, glittering with dust, burned through the gloom. But there was no bike, and no Dav either.
“Jaz…” The radio crackled.
“Where are you?” I hissed back.
“…need to …ee this. …stairs.”
Litter and desiccated palm fronds collected on the staircase. I kicked the debris aside and was about to head up when I spotted the door hanging ajar cross the hall. To my sun-exposed eyes the room beyond appeared completely black—the type of blackness that hungered for light and swallowed it whole.
A plane rumbled above, sending tremors through the house and its foundation.
I touched the door, inched closer and gave it a gentle push. A puff of air drifted out, bringing with it the same musty, dank odor I’d smelled on the creature I’d killed in my apartment.
Dav’s figure cut out some of the dark where he stood a few feet inside the room. He stared at the wall, an muddle of expressions on his face.
“Dav, what the—”
The wall moved.
Or, at least, the thick layer of darkness coating it did. It wasn’t one thing, but many, many things, all pushed up against the other. The blanket of dark rolled as my mind tried to comprehend what I was seeing. Long limbs, curled claws, smooth hairless faces: Oh, shit! Many, many, baobhan sith. The walls breathed with them, and above, right over our heads, more clung there, too, clamped close to the ceiling.
My heart hammered too loud in my ears. Just one of those things had almost introduced me to my own insides. There had to be fifty or more huddled around us.
Dav, wide-eyed, turned his head to me. “Have you ever seen—”
I nodded sharply, cutting him off, and jerked my head toward the door, mouthing, “now.”
A hiss sounded, deep and consistent, like leaking gas. More joined it, rising up, and the walls rippled.
“C’mon!” I held the door open, letting light to pour in and the things exploded off the walls in one thick, reaching wave. Dav burst though the doorway. The swarm of baobhan poured forward, red eyes aglow, clawed-fingers spread. He didn’t see them, but I did.
I slammed the door and dashed back down the hallway, following Dav out into LA’s relentless sunlight. The baobhan didn’t follow, and once again the house was silent behind us.
What if there were hundreds in there, what if all these houses had them?
“Let’s get out of here.” Dav climbed into his car and spun away from the curb, disappearing in a cloud of baked dust.
I followed close behind, dialing Grimm’s number.
He didn’t answer.
10
“What the actual fuck?”
It’s one thing to be told there are monsters and another to see them for yourself.
Dav hadn’t said much since returning to his shop. Dav had marched through the crew as though they didn’t exist, and jogged up the stairs to his apartment above the workshop. I figured I’d follow, mostly to avoid the questions on everyone’s lips, but also because this wasn’t the sort of thing you dealt with alone. I’d tried.
“Holy shit, Jaz!” he said now. “We should burn that place to the ground.”
“We should,” I agreed.
Considering the neatness of the shop downstairs, Dav’s apartment was a sprawling two-roomed, high ceiling loft space scattered with all manner of debris from Dav’s life. The kitchen table currently sported a chunk of turbo, and across the living area by one of the vast windows he’d parked a bike and thrown a sheet over it. The large windows and exposed beams gave Dav’s apartment a sense of space, when in fact it wasn’t much bigger than my place. Kari had once joked about this place being the Church of Davin, where his flock congregated before every race.
“He led us there,” Dav was saying, He’d stopped pacing and was leaning against the back of his couch. With his arms crossed, he tapped his fingers on his biceps. “The sonofabitch led us right to their front door.”
I stayed quiet, having already come to the same conclusion.
A phone was ringing in the shop below. A few beats later, the ringing stopped and Cate’s voice sailed through the closed apartment door.
“The bike vanished,” I said, drifting about the apartment, rediscovering memories everywhere. Kari and me sitting by the windows, beers in hand, discussing last night’s race. Dav and Kari sprawled on the couch, gloriously high while our crew dove into the cake someone had brought for Liau’s birthday.
“We lost it,” Dav grumbled.
“No, I’m not making any more excuses. I’m calling it as I see it. It went into that garage and it vanished.”
>
“So does he have something to do with those things?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But I don’t think so. He seems different. Still wrong, but in a less obviously monstrous way.” I told Dav about the baobhan in my apartment and how sunlight had devoured it. If one of those things had come for me, there was every chance they might come for Dav, too.
He was moving again, striding about his apartment as though he had a destination in mind, and then he turned and paced to the windows. There, he leaned against the wall and glared down at the intersection feeding traffic through the streets. His brushed a thumb across his lips in thought. “He said you had to win the bike, right?”
“Right.”
“So we do that. Get the bike. Hand it over to Siobhan. Kari’s back and the bike and the bahn-van-shee things are Siobhan’s problem. Everything else goes away?”
I wasn’t sure about the ‘everything else goes away’ part. Grimm seemed to think waking the knights was a one-time event and hadn’t said anything about normal service resuming once all this was over. But that was my problem, not Dav’s. He just wanted Kari back. “Sure. But I have to beat Liam in a race first.”
Dav’s cheek twitched. I recognized the narrowing of his eyes and knew he wouldn’t stop until this was done. His determination made him a formidable opponent, as I had found out not long after we’d met. I’d never beaten him. After the first few tries, I’d backed off before one of us got killed. Back then, Dav had wanted the win more than I did.
He turned his head and frowned at the covered bike in the corner. “You can beat him.” When his gaze found me again his eyes had darkened. He pushed off the wall, strode to the bike and yanked off the sheet. Clouds of dust rolled into the air.
