“So how should I word this?” the guy asked me.
“How about ‘a brand new friend’?”
Which was what he did.
The needle immediately pointed slightly to the right of north. Toward my neighborhood, in fact.
CHAPTER 39
Back when we’d last hung out together—if you could sensibly call it that—I had gotten to drive his Porsche. And I’d enjoyed it. But we took my car this time. If Lauren was hurt in any way, we’d need a vehicle with more room than a sports model.
Before much longer, we were speeding through my neighborhood. It was pretty much like every other one I’d visited. The streetlights cast an amber glow. But again, there was far less illumination in the windows than you’d normally expect. A good few people from around here had probably gone out with the militias. We’re a hardy bunch in Northridge. But a good deal more were probably just scared, staying put and laying low, trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
The last intersection slipped by. We reached the town’s border, and drew to a halt. Kurt and I glanced at each other. We’d been in this same situation once before.
But he’s a resilient type himself, in his own unique way. Nothing ever fazes him, or genuinely slows him down.
“It looks like we’re going for a walk,” he commented. And he looked slightly intrigued by the idea of it.
We got out. In the darkness, the massed trees ahead of us looked like huge old men in shaggy coats. I recalled there was a logging trail somewhere around this region. Kurt brought the compass with him. I fished out a larger flashlight from the trunk. I had to let him lead, of course. We set off through the forest.
As soon as we crossed the town line, the usual happened. Although I’d never experienced it before at night.
Leaves crumpled under our tread, surely. But that was the only sound. The trees around us looked like merely shadows, robbed, somehow, of their reality. Nothing made the slightest noise. There was no scampering through the undergrowth. And even the moon, when glimpsed through the branches, looked paler and more distant than it previously had done. A ghostly afterimage of a mottled silver coin. It seemed to me we’d not stepped out into the real world. Just its afterthought.
“What the hell?” Kurt muttered, peering down between his hands.
At which point, I glanced over. And saw what the problem was. The needle on the compass…it had stopped pointing at anything, and was teetering around slackly on its axis. I remembered something else about Regan’s Curse. If you’re born here, then your magic doesn’t work beyond the borders either.
Which left us completely stranded. Damn! We conferred quickly, and decided there was nothing else to do but continue down the logging path. I kept on swinging the flashlight around me as we went, searching desperately for anything that might tell us where we should be headed.
Finally, I saw it. A great mass of rotted leaves had been disturbed, off to our left. Two pairs of shoes had gone right through it. Breathing heavily, we went in that direction, and were going up a slope before much longer.
And at last, we did hear a sound ahead of us. We both froze, listening carefully. What was that? It seemed to be coming from beyond the crest of the hill that we’d been climbing. And it was very muffled, no real shape to it at all.
We pushed on quickly, reaching the top and heading down the gradient on the far side. I had my gun out. My beam kept on sweeping through the big dark trunks in front of me…until it picked out something pale.
Blond hair.
Lauren had been chained by her wrists to the base of an ash tree with—presumably—her own handcuffs. And a thick hank of cloth was knotted over her mouth, gagging her.
Her arms were stretched out painfully behind her, the shoulders so tense they looked like they were going to break. She was sitting down on the leaf-strewn dirt with her knees pressed up against her face. And I thought at first she’d assumed that position out of sheer despair. Until I saw that she’d been trying to protect herself.
Her drained face came up startledly in the yellow circle that the flashlight cast, her blue eyes opaque with fright. There was a bruise on her chin, and some fresh bloody scratches on her forehead. Some creature, a night bird maybe, had been trying to attack her eyes.
She jerked and struggled violently when we first reached her. But then I took in that the beam had to be blinding her. I angled it away. She seemed to recognize me, or my silhouette at least, and stopped fighting. And we crouched down to help her. She seemed far more focused by this stage. Remained entirely still and let us work at getting her loose. Her chest was pumping like a big steam engine all the same. A lot of the moisture on her face was perspiration.
Kurt began untying the gag. I fumbled in her pockets until I found a little set of keys.
“It was Cass!” she blurted, as soon as her mouth was free. “She had gray eyes, like the others!”
Her voice sounded fuzzed up, and I wished I’d thought to bring some water.
As for what she’d said, it hurt to hear it, but I’d mostly figured that one out. I knew how strong-willed Cassie was. If she’d been turned toward her own inner demons, they were likely to be something pretty powerful and nasty.
“Some kind of animal came at me,” Lauren was explaining as I got her wrists unlocked. “And there were eyes staring at me from the undergrowth, just before you guys showed up.”
It must have been damned terrifying for her. I could scarcely believe Cassie was capable of this, whatever condition she was in. The New England woods are not a desperately risky place, but even smaller predators sense when a person is completely helpless. And they just don’t care how much they hurt you. To their minds, you’re simply food. The Cassie that I’d always known would turn her own guns on herself before subjecting anyone to that kind of pain and terror.
But we were dealing with a Cassie that I didn’t know at all, by this stage. I kept reminding myself that.
Something else occurred to me. We were right on top of Lauren, close enough that we were touching. And an outsider, beyond our borders…?
The curse meant that we shouldn’t have been able to get anywhere near her. That was the way it worked, keeping us isolated from the normal world. So the question raised itself. Had its grip relaxed a little? Or was she becoming in some way one of us, a part of our community?
There wasn’t time for those kinds of questions, so I put the thought aside. Inspected her injuries instead. None of the gouges were particularly deep. Most of them had already stopped bleeding, dark red gummed around their edges. But they’d get infected if they were not seen to. I understood that much about animal bites.
Kurt looked rather subdued. Because—even if we got her back across the border—it’s the one thing that most adepts simply cannot do. They can transform themselves, hurl themselves across great distances. Conjure up almost anything you’d care to mention. But they can’t repair a human body. Only Lehman Willets ever managed that.
“You could take her to Raine General,” I suggested.
Which would be a very busy place right at the moment, with the night’s new battles in full swing. He pulled a face.
“Pullman Cedars would be better.”
Which was the finest private clinic in town. She deserved it, so I nodded.
Except he couldn’t even transport her the way he usually would have. That’s another thing about the curse. We had to make it the whole way back to the car, supporting her between us, before Kurt turned himself and her into blurs and whisked away.
I couldn’t see the fighting from out here, so I called Saul while I was driving back.
“Where are you now?” I asked.
There was firing and yelling, a great deal of it, going on in the background once again. And his voice was strained when he replied.
“Halfway down River Avenue!” he yelled. “And things have gotten really bad, Ross! You need to get down here, as fast as you can!”
Why me especially? I opened my
mouth to ask him, but the line went dead.
I took the next right, and started heading for West Meadow. There were no other patrol vehicles headed that way, so far as I could see. Each team had been assigned its own district and charged with the job of defending it. Which meant, whatever the people down there were facing, they were going to have to deal with it alone.
Saul had sounded more stressed than I’d heard him in a good long while. And he’d been badly stressed the whole time for the past couple of days. So he’d be grateful for an extra pair of hands, at least. I turned onto a straighter road and floored the gas.
Reached River Avenue and swung south onto it. It was appropriately named, leading the whole way down to a reed-filled bank. The Adderneck gleamed softly beyond that. There were mostly taller houses around here, old and genteel-looking, ringed with trees.
But halfway down, clusters of shots were going off. I couldn’t see what they were being aimed at, but they were all over the place, the cops and militia people swinging around wildly.
As I got closer, I could see that none of them were taking cover. And no barrier had been set up. They were standing upright, with their weapons lifted high. Shooting in the air, the whole bunch of them. So what exactly—this time—were they trying to fight off?
I skidded to a halt some thirty yards short of them. Then, ducking slightly, I got out, my revolver in my grip again. And scanned the skies, trying to see what was attacking us.
The darkness made it difficult. A few more clouds had drifted across by this hour, breaking up the constellations into scattered patches. I jerked as something shot across my field of vision. It was moving so fast I could not make out a proper shape. Just a general impression of a creature, long and dark, with hugely spread wings. It was lost behind the rooftops before I could pick out anything more. My breath hissed between my teeth, and I peered at the spot where it had vanished, waiting for it to come back.
But it had to have circled around very quickly. Because, when it came in view a second time, it was from the direction of the river. It sailed high at first, its wings making a heavy beating sound. But then it folded them partway and suddenly swooped down, the way a hawk might. The men below kept firing, but it was descending too fast.
They all had to duck as it buzzed them. And, when that happened, I heard a high-pitched wail. The back of someone’s shirt had been ripped open, and the guy was bleeding badly. He was still alive, although writhing on the ground and yelling, his friends trying to help him.
The creature soared up and was gone again in barely a second.
Keeping low, I moved in their direction, trying to catch sight of Saul. He was over by a municipal pickup truck. Was hunkered down, his own gun clasped in both fists. And his expression was desperate when he noticed I was there.
There was something strange about the look he had. He appeared to be concerned as well as scared, a strange combination under circumstances such as these. My heartbeat kept flipping over. What exactly were we facing this time?
The sound of beating wings pulled my attention over to the left. The creature had appeared again, and was landing on a tall rooftop. Its wings—I could see—were leathery and batlike. And vast, with a span of several yards. The thing had huge talons at the ends of its long legs, two pointing forward and two back. And it gripped the narrow ridge of tiles with those.
Apart from that, its shape was mostly human. It was wholly black, the way the others had been. The eyes were a glowing misty gray, of course.
But I immediately recognized the weapons hanging from its long-limbed grasp. The hairline cropped closely to the skull. That long face with its rectangular jaw.
Every ounce of strength drained from my body in an instant.
Cassie.
Or at least…what she’d become.
CHAPTER 40
That moment of recognition seemed to hang on the air for the longest while, like a massive echo that kept resounding through the dark. It could only have been a few seconds in reality, but seemed to last a whole lot more than that. I don’t think I moved during that period, or even blinked.
Considering what had happened to Lauren—well—I should have been expecting something like this. But I still couldn’t quite believe what was in front of me.
Except that—in a strange and awful way—I could.
Don’t get me wrong. Next to my missing family, Cassie is the most important person to me in this whole peculiar little world of ours. She cares about people, and has limitless courage and strength with which to back that up. She doesn’t merely feel, in other words. She does something about it. And I’ve lost track of the number of times she’s saved my hide, not to mention dozens of other people’s. I’d always been able to rely on her.
But there’s been a savage darkness in her for a long while now, ever since her children disappeared. A brooding anger, and a restlessness that nothing seems to satiate. The world was never right for her, after that happened. And she reacts to it angrily sometimes.
It had come spilling out, becoming physical. Just like it had in all the other townsfolk who had turned. Except that this time, it was happening to someone that I genuinely cared about.
The house below her appeared to have been abandoned. It was just a lifeless silhouette that she seemed to sprout out of the top of, an extension of its shadowy mass. I watched her hunker down slightly, her wings folding behind her with a papery rustling noise. Had her mouth come open slightly? I thought that I could make out the jagged glint of teeth.
Several of the militia guys began shooting at her again, hoping they’d have more success now that she was not a moving target. And I have to admit, something in me wanted to yell, “Cut that out!”
I stayed put and watched, though, seeing what would happen next. I didn’t think that their bullets would hurt her. And it turned out I was right about that.
Except it wasn’t quite like with the other creatures. The shots didn’t ricochet off her or pass through her darkened frame. It was hard to tell precisely in the poor illumination, but they seemed to change direction slightly, skimming off around her.
She’d despised magic for a good long while, the same way I did. But now, she seemed to have acquired some powers of her own.
I heard her let out a furious hiss. Insensate. The kind of noise an animal in a trap might make. And then the weapons at her sides both started lifting.
Which was when I got another shock. I’d thought that she’d been simply holding them. But as the moonlight caught their edges…could that possibly be right?
The carbine and shotgun seemed to be growing directly out of the ends of her arms. There was no sign of her hands. I couldn’t even see how that was possible. What the hell had she been turned into?
It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, but I fought to keep a level head. Tried to assess the situation clearly. As she brought her firearms to bear, I saw the danger we were in. There were people scattered right across this street, most of them out in the open. And I knew what a dead shot she was. If they stayed there, they were in real trouble.
“Everyone take cover!” I started yelling.
Hobart, thank God, did the same. A sudden urgency infected the people in my line of vision. And the next instant, they were running for the nearest piece of cover, diving out of sight.
I knew the Mossberg and the Heckler & Koch could both punch holes through my Cadillac like butter. So I turned around on my heels and sprinted, heading for the side wall of the big house nearest me.
As I ran, I could hear gunfire breaking out. The thud of the pump-action, and then distinctive whizzing noises as some carbine slugs went by. Something hot whirred past my cheek.
When I finally found a place to shelter, my heart was thumping furiously, my chest rasping like a barrel organ. Cass had nearly shot me once before, but this was different. Wilder. Less discriminate. I took a few seconds to compose myself, then looked back out, expecting the worst.
My own car had barel
y been touched. But most of the vehicles further up the street were shot to pieces. Windshields had been turned to glistening fragments. Doors had been blown right off their hinges. Several hoods and trunks were open, and gas was spilling out across the blacktop.
Although there were no dead bodies that I could see, I couldn’t be certain, without leaning further out. But everyone seemed to have gotten to safety. Except…how much longer would that last? The saboted slugs in the Mossberg could shoot straight through ordinary brick, I reminded myself uncomfortably.
But this lack of casualties…I thought it over as best I could, and it didn’t tally. A terrific shot like Cass? There should have been at least a couple of corpses lying out there.
So, bearing that in mind, I stared at her again.
She was standing at full height, an arrogant, aloof figure against the purple-black of the sky behind her. Smoke was drifting from the muzzles of her guns. I couldn’t tell what the expression on her face was—probably there was none, only that dark oval. But the set of her body was imperious and proud.
I thought I understood what she was up to, at that point. She’d merely been showing us who was in charge. Exerting her authority rather than trying to kill anyone. The real fireworks were still to come.
Her huge wings came back open, with a massive rushing noise. They started beating slowly at first, and then churned faster. And she lifted herself off the roof again.
She hung suspended for a couple of seconds, and then swooped down to the middle of the street, and landed there.
Her claws made an abrupt, harsh rattling as she hit the pavement, the kind of sound that had a dreadful impact to it, practically making me flinch. She was balancing on the talons easily enough, like she had always owned a pair. She paused, then swung from side to side, her weapons at the ready. Everyone still partially in view shrank back when she did that.
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