by Rob Cornell
While there were a few stuffed trash bags—many split open—most of the trash was loose in the bin. Jay had explained how many departments used shoots that fed directly to the bins instead of trash cans since there were so many departments and offices and personnel all making their own trash. Because of the top secret nature of the building, they couldn’t risk hiring a full janitorial staff to collect all those wastebaskets.
Support staff like Jay and the few people running the cafeteria was kept to a minimum and housed in headquarters like the rest of the agents—and Jessie, but not for long.
Weird way to run a place. But a good way if the place wasn’t supposed to exist.
Jessie pulled off her backpack and dropped it beside her. She tied the bandana over her mouth. The worst part came next.
Since she hadn’t sunk past her knees, she would have to burrow into the junk to get low enough to stay out of sight. She even anticipated the possibility of burying herself if needed.
Vamp wings were gross too, but at the moment, man did they sound a shit ton better than this.
Digging into the trash like a gopher, Jessie managed to make a hole deep enough to take her in to her shoulders and wide enough for her to pull her backpack down with her. Before she settled in for the long haul—a literal haul—she checked her watch. She had thirty minutes before they loaded her bin into the elevator. Fifteen before Jay and his small crew came into the trash room to get the bins ready.
“Good times,” she said under her breath and eased herself into her gopher hole.
Some of the trash caved in around her. Something cold and wet and about the size of a dog pressed up against her back. She could feel her sweatshirt absorbing the wetness. The bandana didn’t do a thing to hold back the rankness surrounding her.
She was really doing this.
She wondered if it would end up worth the trouble. If she could really keep out of the Agency’s grasp. They had a far reach and a lot of resources. Even her special-ops trained dad had had a hard time keeping them off his back.
To keep her mind off her disgusting situation, Jessie closed her eyes and played scenes from Chinatown on her mind’s movie screen while listening for the sound of Jay coming in to unwittingly help her bust out of this joint.
Chapter Twenty-Two
ELKA’S HEAD THROBBED. HER eyes felt pasted shut. Her tongue was a desert rock in her mouth.
Everything spun.
Where am I?
Digging through her memory, pieces came together. The man in the plaid shirt with the fatherly smile. The cold bolt in her gut as he revealed he knew what she really was. The sound of her chair clacking against the floor. The feel of her heart pounding. And the black man with the hard chest and lilith tree arms.
The needle.
A bit of bile climbed up Elka’s throat. She tried to swallow it back, but her head was bent forward with her chin on her chest, making it difficult with her neck kinked like that. When she tried to lift her head, she only managed to loll it to one side. Then gravity fought back and her head swung back to center.
Wherever she was, something whined like an animal stuck in a steel trap. Something hunted.
She realized the sound came from her.
She was the something hunted.
Judging from the aching in her body, at least she had kept her human form. They couldn’t get to her horn yet. And if she had any say, they would have to kill her to get her to shift back.
The sound of footsteps scraping against a smooth floor approached her from behind.
She tensed, sure that what came next would hurt.
She couldn’t stop that keening sound coming from low in her throat and she hated herself for it. Only once had she felt so helpless before—trapped behind the glamour, looking out at the blue light and the blue mist dissipating in the air, taking her father with it.
A hand pressed onto Elka’s shoulder.
She flinched at the touch.
Someone hushed her. She knew it was Earl. Again, playing the father, hushing a frightened child. And despite herself, it worked.
Perhaps the man did have a touch of magic in him.
All that talk of his dream helping him find her had sounded like wacky bullshit. At least, she had wanted it to be.
Time to face reality.
She was up against real power here.
“It’s all right,” Earl said, full of warmth. “You’re all right.”
When she tried to talk back, she found her lips too numb to form words. What came out sounded like the mumbling of a homeless drunk.
What the hell had they given her?
“Don’t try to talk,” Earl said. “The horse tranquilizer is still in your system.”
Horse tranquilizer?
Had Earl been going for irony?
I’m no fucking horse, she tried to say and only slurred and spat. A string of drool hung off her chin. She could feel it as it trickled from her mouth, broke free, and landed on the back of one of her hands, which she was surprised to find casually folded in her lap.
They hadn’t restrained her.
Not that it mattered at the moment. She was drugged stupid. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Earl gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Sorry it had to go down this way. I really just wanted to have a chat with you. After all, it was you who was looking for us.”
Her pounding head let that sink in. He was right. She had put the ad in the paper. But she hadn’t bargained on a guy like Earl and his bulky friend to go ahead and take the job whether she liked it or not.
What did you expect? A friendly match up, like something from a dating site?
“I imagine you’re feeling pretty bad about now.” Earl took his hand off her shoulder. His footsteps came around to the front of Elka. She could sense his presence push in close to her. Then she felt his breath tickle her cheek. It smelled like butterscotch. “But you oughta consider yourself lucky.”
Elka grunted. It was the best scoff she could manage.
Earl chuckled. His breath’s touch moved away, and Elka couldn’t feel him so closely anymore. “Could have been worse, honest. We’re exactly the folks you need. Anyone else wouldn’t have done the trick.”
She desperately wanted a say in this “conversation.” Will alone would not clear her head of the drug, but if she shifted… The transformation, plus the increased metabolism of her natural form, might absorb much of the tranquilizer’s effect. Then she could run the old man through and gallop the hell out of—wherever she was.
Somehow Earl gathered what she was thinking.
“Whatever you’re fixing to try, I wouldn’t. I ain’t alone, and we have plenty of resources to keep you right where we want ya.”
She didn’t think his guess had anything to do with precognition. She had a feeling Earl had a way of reading people the same way a poker player picked out the tells of his completion. Again, she realized she wasn’t dealing with the typical rube of a mortal. In fact, he was probably right. He was exactly the kind of mortal she’d been looking for.
Elka gave a little nod. A serious accomplishment considering her condition.
“Good. Good. So hear me out.”
The sound of wood scraping against concrete echoed in the space around her. Based on that sound and the musty smell in the air, Elka guessed they had her in a basement of some kind.
The creaking in front of Elka and the soft groan from Earl let her know he was sitting in a chair a few feet from her.
“I told you about how I found you,” he said, voice as friendly as if he’d invited her over for tea instead of drugging and kidnapping her. “But my master didn’t make it clear what it is you’re fixing to do with our help. If you promise to stay still, I can have my friend Whisper here administer something to counteract the effects of the tranquilizer.”
Whisper? Weird name for a mortal. Was that the name of the black man? The name didn’t match his imposing size, but maybe it was like calling a big man Tiny, an ironic nickn
ame.
“That sound good?”
Sure thing, old man.
This time her nod came a little easier.
A second later a needle stung her in her neck and stuck there a moment while Whisper pressed down the plunger.
It took less than a minute for her heart to start racing. A hot wash ran through her blood. Her skin felt like it buzzed. The tendons in her neck pulled tight, making it hard to breathe. She was certain she was going to die.
But as quickly as these sensations invaded her body, they leaked away.
Her heartbeat regulated. Her muscles relaxed. And while her face remained flushed, her blood didn’t feel near boiling anymore.
She sucked in a deep breath and her eyes fluttered open.
She saw Earl first, sitting in a rickety wooden chair turned backward with his legs straddling the chair back and his arms resting along the top. He had his fatherly smile on full wattage.
Behind him stood the black man, who couldn’t have been Whisper since Whisper had come up behind her to put the needle in her neck.
But it was the thing behind the black man that pulled Elka’s attention past all else.
It sat against the concrete wall and stood about as tall as Elka sitting down. Bones. So many bones, all stacked like the Tinkertoys she played with as a kid, forming what was obviously an altar. The bones of a half-dozen or more mortals made up the altar. A hard crust, like mortar, held the bones in place. A skull at the top grinned like a satisfied king overlooking his domain. The king held out his arms to either side, hands open, palms up. Each held an extinguished candle, runnels of red wax hardened over its skeletal fingers.
These were the altar’s only features that resembled what the bones had originally formed. The rest of the femurs, humerus bones, ribs, and all sorts of others might as well have been slats of wood glued together like the parts in a piece of furniture.
Elka had no love of mortals, but the macabre construction before her chilled her and made her grossly aware of the shape of her own skeleton inside of her human form.
A dead, dry taste coated Elka’s tongue. Her throat closed. She shook her head and tried to squirm backward, her chair back keeping her in place.
Earl traced her line of sight. “It ain’t what you think.”
“How can it be anything else?” She didn’t recognize her own voice. It sounded faraway and weak.
She was not weak.
She gritted her teeth and forced some weight back into her words. “What kind of sick bastards are you? Butchering your own people to create…that.”
“Hey now.” Earl jerked up from his seat.
The black man crept forward, eyes as dark as a starless night.
Earl held a hand up, stopping the black man’s advance. Then he looked down at Elka with dead eyes, his fatherly charm long gone. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, darling. I’d watch what you say about our lost brothers around us.”
For the life of her, she couldn’t figure this man out. What had she expected from a zealot, though? She knew she would have to deal with slightly deranged mortals when she conceived her plan. But that was the problem. None of this had gone as planned.
She swallowed, her stomach rolling at the ashen taste in her mouth. “Look, I appreciate your answering my ad, but I don’t think this is going to work out.”
The black man crossed his thick arms and raised his chin. “Oh, it’s gonna work out just fine.”
Her gaze flicked to him, but she quickly brought it back to Earl. He was the clear leader here. He was the one she had to convince. She opened her mouth to say more.
Earl held up his hand. “We’ll have none of that talk. You need us and we need you. The way our first meeting went is unfortunate. But I think we can move past that.”
“I don’t want to move past it. I want to go home.”
“Yeah, well…” He flipped his chair around, sat down, and leaned back. The chair groaned and wobbled on its legs as if it could fall apart with the wrong move. “See, the dream I told you about? That wasn’t the only one I had last night. This other one I had had all sorts of blood in it. And a man on the floor without no head.”
For the second time today, Earl turned Elka’s insides to ice. How could he possibly know so much about her? From his dreams? Really? What kind of power did this man have to receive such information so casually while sleeping? From the sounds of it, he didn’t offer any kind of blood sacrifice to accomplish his nightly premonitions…only…
Her gaze moved to the bone altar.
“Your brothers,” she whispered.
Earl cupped a hand behind his ear. “How’s that?”
She nodded toward the altar. “That’s where you get your power from. Their remains.”
“I don’t always understand what my master has me do, but I reckon you’re right. The sacrifices they made for the cause is what makes our continued efforts all the more successful.”
That was the second time he mentioned this so-called master. Maybe there was something else behind Earl’s power.
“That’s how you know about Kenny.” She was talking to herself, barely aware she spoke aloud.
“Kenny the fella without the head?”
She nodded.
“You sure did a number on him. Mind if I ask you why?”
She frowned. “Let’s just say he deserved it and leave it at that.”
“Fair enough. Fair enough. But you understand I have that ace in the hole, right? I know whatcha did and I can let the good folks of the Chicago PD know all about it too. Even leave an anonymous tip telling where the killer’s apartment is.”
For as down home and folksy as Earl acted, he sure as hell knew how to put the screws to someone. “So you answer my ad by abducting me and threatening to throw me to the police if I don’t play along? Here I thought I was the one looking for help.”
Earl put his smile back on, but it had started to wear thin. It would take a lot more than an Andy Griffith, aw shucks act to fool Elka again.
He waved a hand. “Don’t think of it that way. We’re going to help you. Don’t you worry about that. We’re going to help each other, that’s all.”
“What do you want?”
The black man curled his lip as if he caught a whiff of something rank. A shuffling came from behind her. Elka could feel the tension coalesce around her as if the planet had taken on a little more gravity.
Only Earl didn’t seem to notice at all. He leaned forward and put a hand on her knee. “We want exactly what you advertised for. We want to wake up the world, bring on the Dawn of the Magical Age.”
Elka looked around her—at the rotted rafters and rusted pipes above her head, the dirty concrete floor under her feet, the bone altar, the cracks in the walls surrounded by water stains. The faint smell of decomposition, like a garden gone to seed, seemed to seep from those cracks, nature trying to break its way inside. The damp air made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
This did not look like the home to a group of revolutionaries. But a girl looking for some mortal zealots to help her kill the so-called Chosen One couldn’t be choosey. This would have to work. Didn’t look like she had much choice anyway.
“Okay,” she said. “But that isn’t what I want. I want something more.”
Earl’s smile cracked open to show his teeth. One of his front teeth stood out from the others, its tip black, a dead tooth in an otherwise pristine smile. “Oh, yeah. I know all about that.”
Of course he did. Elka had a feeling she would have to get used to Earl knowing more than she felt comfortable with.
“My master told me what you want,” Earl said. “And we’re fixing to help you along.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
JESSIE WAITED. AS MUCH AS her skin crawled and the moist stink choked her, she waited.
The thump of her bin hitting the ground after the crane lifted it off the trailer and dropped it by the landfill had shaken loose the last of her nerves. Much
longer buried under the trash and she would snap, or die from holding her breath too long.
The signal she’d been waiting for finally came—the sound of the truck pulling away.
She shoved her arms up and pushed away the garbage over her head. The air surrounding the landfill carried the worst smell Jessie had ever encountered, and some of the things she had had to Return smelled like farts in flesh form, so she knew nasty scents damn well.
Despite the overwhelming stench, the open air on her face felt like an ocean breeze compared to the stagnant hole she had sunk herself into.
She winnowed her way up, clawing at trash that kept giving way under her hands. It seemed to take an hour to make her way out and to the edge of the bin, having to crawl on all fours to distribute her weight and keep her from sinking. The sun baked the binful of garbage like a putrid quiche, turning the trash soft and more difficult to move through.
Her sweatshirt clung to her skin, wet and warm. Sweat drew lines down her face. The humidity cut short any relief Jessie felt from coming out into the open.
When she gripped the bin’s edge, the metal burned through the gloves on her hand like a hot stove.
She yanked her hand back. “Jesus, mother fuck, shit, damn.”
Nothing could go easy for her today.
But she didn’t have any choice. If she wanted out of this filthy kitchen, she would have to stand the heat.
She propped herself up on her knees, sinking in about four inches. Sticky moisture bled through her jeans. She felt like she was kneeling in syrup, only it smelled like shit—and a whole bunch of other nastiness.
Gritting her teeth, she swung her backpack off and tossed it to the ground. She rested her forearms on the lip of the bin. Her sweatshirt did a slightly better job of insulating her against the heat. Putting her weight down on her arms, she shimmied her knees in underneath her. Then she twisted her hips and swung a leg over.
The heated metal did not feel so good as she straddled the edge of the bin. Some parts of the body were not meant to handle that kind of heat.
