by Holley Trent
She shrugged and turned left onto Harrison Street. “Because that’s what I’d do, I guess. Your cousin has to know when his father is nearby, right? The same way you know when your mother is around?”
“I can’t say for sure. The magic is different for everyone. You gotta remember Uncle didn’t intend for Los Impostores to be what they are. There’s likely some interference in the magic between them. It may only go one way where Uncle knows where Necalli is, and Necalli wouldn’t recognize his father’s energy. He’s The Shadow, remember? We don’t always know he’s there.”
December tapped her fingertips on the top of the steering wheel and sputtered. “Either way, Necalli has to assume that there’s going to be retaliation coming, either from you for messing around with me and doing those drive-bys, or from one of the Foyes for all the trouble Los Impostores made with the glaring last year. He’s not going to be out in the open. He probably thinks he’s untouchable as long as his foot soldiers are out, and I’m banking on that.”
“Strip out the paranormal stuff, and this ordeal would sound like the plot of a telenovela that needs to be immediately cancelled.”
“I miss watching television,” December mused.
“Soon, Dee. We’ll lie around all day under the fan watching bad television, and not a soul will ever have to know.”
“Except Cruz.”
“Not like she’s got room to talk. She watches that high-drama mess Ma likes.”
December shuddered at the thought.
Then, she spied a familiar dark-tinted SUV illegally parked half on the sidewalk in front of the town junkyard and swung a U-turn ahead of an ice cream trunk, waving an apology when he honked his comically squeaky horn at her.
She parked behind the SUV, muttering a curse under her breath, and she and Tito didn’t speak.
He didn’t bother telling her not to get out. He had to know she wouldn’t have listened.
Besides, she already suspected they’d arrived too late.
Three of the four doors hung open as if the passengers had emerged in haste … or not emerged at all, and the electric pole that had stopped them listed dangerously sideward from its cracked center.
What in the world?
Tito got to the back right door a hair ahead of her and, holding out his arm to keep her away, muttered, “Shit.”
“What is it?”
“Just stay there.” He tugged his phone out of his shirt pocket, tapped a few times on the screen, and then said into it, “Hey, it’s Perez. I’m off-duty right now, but I didn’t want to bother putting this through dispatch. There’s a black Expedition, Arizona tags, parked on Harrison in front of the junkyard. Vehicle’s going to need to be impounded, but hold off on that. Tow driver’s gonna wonder where the coroner is, and if you wait a while, me and Welch’ll take care of the organic issue. Call the electric company and have them cut power over here. This line’s about to snap, and I don’t want anyone getting fried.”
December pulled away from the barricade Tito made with his arm, and immediately regretted looking inside.
Where the three men had been, husks remained. Hollow eyes, lipless mouths open wide in silent screams, holes up their chins and probably through the tops of their heads, but she didn’t want to look any closer to find out for sure.
Tito tugged her back, gently, and switched the phone to his other ear. “Hey, Steve? Found that SUV that’s been circling around. My uncle got to it. He’s never been good at making evidence disappear like Ma, but I guess he don’t care. Get one of the Cougars to help out, I guess. I gotta keep moving and try to catch up to my uncle. The sheriff knows I’m calling you. Department will get rid of the truck.”
After a few more rapid-fire instructions, Tito disconnected and returned the phone to his pocket.
He took December by the shoulders, turned her, and got her moving toward the car.
“How did he do that?”
“That’s what he is, Dee. All gods have a little control over life and death in different ways. Most don’t mess around with people so directly, though. Let’s keep going. Some of these guys used to come into town disguised as other kinds of shifters. He’ll probably try to root them out next.”
“Where do they hang out?” She put some pep in her step, car key at the ready. She got a feeling that Alicia was never going to believe how “productive” December’s trip to Maria had ended up being. She was going to have to drag her sister to New Mexico for a trial by fire of her own.
“We can start at the bar and then ride out to the Coyote gathering rock if we have to. I’d like to avoid that place. There’s plenty of bad blood between the Coyotes and the Cougars and I don’t want to aggravate the truce by poking around out there.”
“Got it. You know, the thought of going to the post office downtown after dark makes me break out in cold sweats, but this isn’t bad. I like this teamwork stuff.”
“I won’t bother telling you not to get too attached to it.”
“Apparently old demigods can learn new tricks, then.”
“Be nice.” He gave her directions to the local watering hole, and as she pulled into the lot, he threw himself out of the open door before she stopped and disappeared.
“Tito?” She hit the brakes hard and scanned around the lot.
Tito appeared at the right front corner of the building. She couldn’t hear him, but she could read his lips as he punched the air. “Fuck.”
She released her seatbelt and poked her head out the door.
“Too late,” he said, walking over with his phone to his ear. “Bodies are still a little warm, but he disappeared right as I got out. Yeah, Steve? Got two more. Maybe call Mason. Tell him to look for them at the side of the bar next to the fence. He must have chased them into the shadows. There’s some property damage back there I think might have occurred during the tussle. We’ll have to figure out how to pay for it.”
December looked down at her buzzing phone and furrowed her brow at the odd question from her mother.
ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?
She typed back, Yes. I’m with Tito.
SO THIS ISN’T YOU?
Mama attached a picture of a hollowed-out husk of a woman who had hair like December’s and the same general build, but most certainly wasn’t her.
She typed back, No! Where is that?
ANGEL GUY FOUND YOU/ IT BY THE BEACH. PROVE TO ME YOU’RE YOU.
December sighed, tapped her chin contemplatively for a moment, and then typed, I really don’t like meringue pies. I only ever ate them because Daddy thought I did and he kept buying them.
WHAT IS GOING ON?
Tito’s uncle is cleaning up. What did Angel Guy do with the body?
MADE IT DISAPPEAR.
Good. Stay inside the house. I’ll text you later.
Tito closed his door and put his phone away again.
“Looks like your uncle made a little trip to Rhode Island.”
“Shit, that guy can move when he wants to.”
“Where’s the Coyote gathering rock? We’d better head out that way before a couple of people they think are their guys get plucked off and they suspect Mason had something to do with the attack.”
“You’ve got a scary brain, Dee.”
“Telenovelas and K-dramas. Keep a schedule like mine, and you end up watching interesting things at three in the morning.”
“Well then, I think I’ll keep my schedule the way it is. Less temptation to stare at screens at odd hours that way. Drive north.”
She drove a little faster than the speed limit, confident that if she got pulled over, Tito being in the front seat would get her excused of any charges.
“Just keep going straight until you reach the fork a couple of miles up, then turn off to the right.”
The thunder of motorcycle engines behind them made her glance into the rearview mirror at the surge of chrome and leather overtaking the car.
The riders whipped past her at breakneck speed, and seemed to be heading tow
ard the exact same juncture as them.
“Um. Do I need a weapon of some sort?”
“Finally dawning on you that you’re being hellaciously reckless with this adventuring business?”
Maybe a little.
She’d never admit that to him, though. Being slightly out of her league didn’t make her less obligated to set things right. She’d been out of her league for going on six years. “Fake it till you make it” had become her way of life, and she didn’t see a good reason to turn over a new leaf just yet.
The last of the motorcycles, totaling around ten, raced past. The rider leaned forward as jockeys did on horses, as if trying to cut down their drag and increase speed, and December found herself reflexively doing the same. Her grip was vise-tight around the steering wheel and her chin nearly touched the top.
She whipped right at the fork at a speed that nearly knocked the car off its wheels.
“If they’re rallying up like that, something’s going down,” Tito said. “Ma, you hear me?”
December slowed, squinting into the dust the bikers had kicked up, and trying to make out the shape of the rock Tito had mentioned.
“Ma?” he said into the air again.
“Maybe … I don’t know, try calling her?”
“I don’t know her number. I never call her. Don’t need to.”
“Maybe she’s busy.”
“More likely, she doesn’t think I merit a response right now. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. She might just be around folks she can’t be candid around. She looks like she’s busy with Cougar stuff.”
“What do you mean, looks like?”
“Demigod stuff. I can see her.”
“You— No.” She shook her head hard. “No. Don’t want to know any more stuff right now. Maybe if we come out of this mess without anyone losing their heart, head, any other body part, or their uncle … ” She glared at him. “You can whisper all kinds of terrifying things into my ear, and maybe I’ll even like it. Right now, I’ll just assume we’re on our own.” December parked on a narrow strip of shoulder and yanked up the emergency brake. “I’m used to that. I’ll cope.”
“You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing. If I don’t think about what might happen and if I don’t know too much, I’ll be braver. That’s how I’m able to get through work at the bar every day. If I don’t know a bunch of bikers are in town, I handle them much better at the bar than if I’m dreading them showing up.”
She pushed her door open.
He did the same. “Let’s just go with the flow, then. That’s what I normally do.”
“Good. Then we’ll get along just fine.”
They’d barely walked a hundred feet before a cluster of Coyotes broke off from the raucous gathering near the rock and circled them. The vast majority of the men were greasy as hell, had the telltale glassy eyes of excess imbibing, and looked like they’d survived the apocalypse by avoiding running water and clothes that could actually breathe. She usually only saw so much leather at work.
“Come on, Meat,” Tito said to the scowling, snarling beast standing nearest him. He put up his hands in a consoling gesture, but December was so certain that any creature capable of literally foaming at the mouth could be consoled. “Not here to start shit with you.”
“What the fuck you want, then, huh? Every time you get near one of ours, or whenever one of the Foyes pop up or one of their goddamned ranch hands, there’s a problem.”
“Think about it.” Tito nudged December a bit closer to his side. Whether the gesture was purposeful or instinctual, she didn’t know, but either way, she didn’t mind. Those guys weren’t the sorts she’d like to be alone in the room with … or even alone in forty acres of desert with.
“We’re not the ones making the trouble,” Tito said. “Folks single out your pack to hide in and run their schemes out of, because they know you have an environment that fosters that shit. I’m not here as a deputy today. I’m just looking for some folks who ain’t supposed to be here.”
“What makes you think they’re here?”
“Because they’ve been in your pack before and you didn’t know, and they could just as easily be there again.”
“Who?” A shorter Coyote—one standing close enough to December that she could smell the liquor on his breath—snapped his fingers at Tito for an immediate response.
Tito rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to Meat.
“You talkin’ ’bout those weirdoes who turned up last year and made all that trouble at the Double B? Ain’t no way they could be in here. We’d know. We haven’t added anyone to our pack in a year.”
“They learn from their mistakes. They don’t need to join up as newbies. They can just replace a couple of guys you already recognize.”
“No way, man.”
“You sure? Any of your guys been acting weird lately?”
The nearby crowd surged backward, and there was shouting—female and male—and not the sounds of a riot, but of fear.
December tugged on Tito’s sleeve. “What’s happening? I can’t see.”
The schism that had been holding December and Tito back from the larger group gave up on their guard work to rejoin the pack, and Tito took that opportunity to force his way through the crowd, gripping December’s hand tightly behind him.
People got out of the way for him, probably because they didn’t want to get close anymore.
They didn’t want what had happened to those bodies on the ground to happen to them.
There was one, already covered by a thin layer of desert dust, dead on his belly, face to the ground.
A husk.
“That’s their alpha,” Tito said, gently nudging the body over with the toe of his boot. “Or someone who looks like him, anyway.”
The other body didn’t seem to have been there that long.
“Just fell over right then,” someone shouted, proving December’s speculation. “What the fuck is happening? I’m getting the hell out of here.”
Apparently, many agreed. For whatever reason they’d been called to the rock, they were abandoning their meeting. They scattered into the dusty wind toward their bikes and cars, a few more dropping one by one as they ran.
“Uncle!” Tito shouted.
He looked around frantically, but there was nothing to see. His Uncle Shadow wasn’t going to step out of the crowd in a bright green shirt and wave his arms to be spotted. He thought he had a job to do.
Making sense of what was happening was hard enough with all the screaming and running, and trying was pointless, anyway.
December screamed, “Stop!”
A few did.
“Just stop. There’s nothing to be afraid of. If you’re who you’re supposed to be, nothing is going to happen to you.”
“Stop doing this,” a woman behind the rock whimpered.
“We’re not doing this. This is a god doing cleanup.”
Tito’s gaze honed in on a few people still running, but not toward vehicles—more deeply into the desert.
He took off after them without a word, vanishing from sight like the wind, leaving December to her task.
Her anger at being abandoned was short-lived. There was too much happening all at once, and he’d made a quick decision. She wouldn’t have been able to keep up with him, but was going to try as soon as she could. She wasn’t great at fighting, but someone needed to be watching his back. She was better than nothing.
“Whose god?” a man asked. “Ours?”
“I don’t know anything about your god,” she said. “I don’t know much about this world at all, but I’m doing the best I can to catch up.”
“The only times they ever show up is when we’ve done something real good or real bad.”
“This isn’t about you, but maybe Tito’s right. Maybe you fostered an environment where people who are real bad like to hang out. I know what that’s like. I work at a bar that used
to have a bad reputation for biker brawls. Things are better now, but not everyone has gotten word that we’ve changed. Sometimes we have problems.”
A few people started heading back toward the rock, probably aware that they couldn’t outrun The Shadow if he really wanted them, and probably knowing on some level that they hadn’t done anything to deserve the fate of those creatures on the ground.
“They started going away,” the woman behind the rock said.
“Who did?”
“Some of the Coyotes. After Jill left last year, others started to go, too. Anyplace but here. Maybe you’re right. We didn’t used to be like this. I mean, we were bad, but not like this.”
December caught of glimpse of Tito’s tan shirt in the distance, before he started running in a different direction, and then vanished.
Where are you, Shadow?
She dragged her tongue across her lips and turned her attention to the captive audience in front of her. They were looking at her like she was the last hamburger on an otherwise vegetarian buffet.
Oh, hell.
“Where’s our alpha?” someone asked.
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“How do we know if that guy on the ground wasn’t really him all along?”
“Again, I don’t know. You should know your packmates well enough to tell who’s yours and who isn’t.”
December suspected that wasn’t necessarily the case judging by the way they all hung their heads and avoided each other’s gazes.
“We could have had people here for years who weren’t ours,” the lady behind the rock said.
“You can’t blame yourself. The culture isn’t just one person’s fault.”
“You sure?” The lady came out, dressed pretty tamely in comparison to her peers, in faded jeans and a Maria Middle School Band Boosters T-shirt. With her short, funky hair and streaky blue eyeshadow, she looked like some kid’s favorite aunt who couldn’t quite get her act together.
“What does it say about me that I wouldn’t be able to tell if that guy”—she pointed to the remains of the maybe-alpha—“was a Coyote? I was supposed to know.”
“Why you? Why just you?”
The lady waved her arms demonstrably around the group. “This is mine. This was supposed to be my domain. Some bored god gives his creatures to his kids, and he gives the biggest mess of them all to the child who has no power whatsoever.”
