by Rob Cornell
The red glow entered each of his eyes again, this time larger than before. “Don’t pussyfoot, Earl. What do you mean by trouble?”
As quickly and carefully as he could, Earl explained what had happened—Kit’s murder, Whisper’s too, and the last bit that just might anger the master more than the loss of the unicorn.
“For some reason, she took Whisper’s little computer he was using to track the girl.”
The red glow bloomed in his eyes, nearly taking over the blackness. “You dumb hick.”
His master swung an open hand and slapped Earl on the ear.
The pain was almost as loud as the ringing in his ear the strike left behind. He staggered sideways. Anger flamed inside of him. His inborn reflexes, buried deep from a lifetime of hearing it all—redneck, hick, bumpkin, white trash—took over. Earl took a swing at Dolan and caught him in the chin.
Dolan’s head snapped back, but he recovered quickly, grinning at Earl, his eyes now completely red like two matching pools of blood. “You don’t like being called dumb.”
“No, sir. Not a hick neither.”
Dolan nodded. The red in his eyes drained away and uncovered plain old eyes like a person should have. Not that Dolan—that particular insult had knocked the desire to call him Master clean out of him—was a person. He was a spirit, a wisp of his former self. And if Earl returned his own soul to the living world, Dolan couldn’t touch him. He had no power there.
“I don’t like the calculating look in your eyes, Earl. You aren’t thinking of betraying me, are you?”
Earl felt a heady bit of bravado. “I ain’t decided yet.”
Dolan clapped his hands slowly and chuckled. “Oh, that’s good. Well, before you do, let me share something with you.”
Earl stared him down. Said nothing.
“Your niece? Poor thing. Do you even know what she really was?”
“Not human. But so what?”
“When you visit me here, I can…smell her, for lack of a better word. I know exactly what she is.” He leaned forward as if he meant to conspire with Earl. “She’s a nymph. Do you know what that is? A creature that uses sexual urges to manipulate and then suck the life out of someone.”
That sounded about right to Earl. At least when it came to Momma and his stepsister. But Kit had never hurt no one before. She had the charm in her, but he liked to think he’d raised her without the monster inside.
“Basically,” Dolan continued, “your niece was the supernatural equivalent of a whore.”
Earl had never felt the explosion of hate and rage that blew through him at that moment. He growled like a grizzly and raised both fists above his head. He brought them down in an arc aimed at Dolan’s head.
But Dolan dodged the blow, then shoved Earl, who was off balance from the momentum behind his attack. Earl fell sideways, his ankles tangled. But when he fell, he didn’t hit anything, just kept falling into the eternal gray.
Dolan stood above him, looking down, as if on the edge of the cliff Earl had tumbled off of, growing smaller and smaller.
Earl closed his eyes and mouth to keep in the scream that wanted to burst from him. He wouldn’t give Dolan the satisfaction. He also concentrated on waking himself in the living world. But for some reason he couldn’t pull out of the Inbetween. Had Dolan trapped him inside? Did he have that kind of power?
Did that mean Earl was dead?
His eyes sprung open at this terrible thought—
—and the falling stopped.
He lay on his side at Dolan’s feet as if he had never fallen into the gray at all.
“I’m sorry, Earl. No disrespect to your deceased niece. I only wanted to prove a point.”
“And what’s that?”
“That, in here, I own your soul. And if I wanted, I could keep you here and feed you to one of those horrors I told you about.”
Earl got to his feet. His head swam some, but he kept steady. “Ain’t gonna be much of a help to you trapped here.”
“That’s just the thing, Earl. You haven’t been all that much of a help. You’ve fucked up everything I set in motion. It took a great deal of effort to find a unicorn. They’re rare and I’m a bit hamstrung in this”—he looked up and held his hands out at his sides—“hell.”
“Find it a bit hard to sympathize, considering how you disrespected my niece.”
“I don’t need your sympathy, Earl. I need your loyalty. But now I can’t trust you. You said yourself, you might betray me if I let you leave. Where does that leave me?”
Earl’s gut churned like butter, but he wore a strong face. He realized how tired he was of worshiping this man. This shadow of a man. He felt like a kid who had caught the mall Santa tip back a shot of whiskey. Illusions destroyed. “I ain’t gonna beg, if that’s what you want.”
Dolan’s eyes widened over a thin-lipped smile. He snapped his fingers. “You know what? I have a great idea.” He poked a finger in the middle of Earl’s chest. “How about you continue to do your part, and I keep from haunting your sleep with constant nightmares?”
Earl lifted his chin. He knew Dolan could probably do it. After all, he had found Earl, chosen him, and spoke to him through dreams for the past year. “The whole reason you started communicating with me is ’cause we have the same goal. We want to bring on the Dawn. That ain’t changed for me, and I know it sure ain’t changed with you. So how about we call truce and move on with business.”
Dolan winked. “Good choice.” He sidled up to Earl and put an arm across his shoulders. “Now, why don’t you round up our two lady friends, and we can get me a new body.”
“How? I don’t even know where to look for the unicorn lady. And she’s got the only way for us to find the other girl.”
Dolan slid his hand up to the back of Earl’s neck and kneaded it like a clumsy masseuse. “It’ll be hard for you, but I’ll bet the uni left some residue on your niece’s body. A hair, or maybe a little dust from her horn. Collect it.”
“Then what?”
“Then you make a sacrifice. You possess limited magical sensitivity, so it’s going to have to be a big one. One that’s going to hurt almost as much as losing your dear niece.” Dolan used the hand on the back of Earl’s neck to turn his head so they faced each other, eye to eye. “You think you can do that?”
If it meant getting his hands on Kit’s murderer, he could. Then, when Dolan had what he needed from her, Earl would kill the bitch.
“One more thing,” Dolan said. “I’m not the only soul in the Inbetween interested in the Chosen One’s fate. But she must be mine.” His nostrils flared as he took a deep breath. “Time is of the essence.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
IT’S GOING TO HAVE to be a big one.
One that’s going to hurt almost as much as losing your dear niece.
In the darkness, Earl stood by the bunk where his closest thing to a best friend lay snoring softly. Art’s rugged face with his deep set eyes were near invisible, until Earl’s eyes adjusted to the dark.
Earl had used a mini MagLite to guide his way into the large main room. He had walked as quietly as he could across the expanse from the corridor to the lines of bunks on the far side. But halfway there he had cut the light to keep from waking the remaining three men in his crew. Enough light from the corridor cut the darkness a fraction so that Earl could find his way.
He had already lost so many.
Now this.
Earl drew his bowie from the sheath on his belt. The blade against the leather made a sound like a sigh. Barely audible. But Art’s snoring stopped suddenly.
Frozen with the knife held blade down in his right hand, Earl watched his friend’s eyes, expecting to see them open. And then he would have to explain why he stood there with a knife.
But Art didn’t stir. His breath regulated, then his snoring started again.
Earl raised the knife, planning to stab into the heart, make Art’s death as quick as possible.
He hesitated.
I can’t do this. There has to be someone else.
But neither Tony nor Laz would do. He didn’t care about them. Not like he did Art. As Dolan had said, the sacrifice Earl made had to be big. He could think of one no larger than this. The death of the last person he truly cared about.
“Do it.”
Earl started.
He hadn’t noticed that Art’s snoring had stopped again. And while he still lay with his eyes closed, his gravelly voice was unmistakable.
Earl opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t know what to say.
“It’s all right, Earl. Do it.”
“But I… You have to understand, Art. It kills me to be here like this, but Dolan said—“
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Art said. He had yet to open his eyes, as if he were talking in his sleep. “I trust you. I know you don’t have any other choice.”
Earl felt like he might sink through the floor. Tears blurred his vision, thickening the darkness. “I can’t do it.”
“If you’re here, then you have to. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“Too much dying, Art. There’s just been too much damn dying.”
“We set out to bring on the Dawn, no matter what we had to suffer.” Finally, Art opened his eyes. He looked so deeply into Earl, Earl felt like he could feel his friend in his mind. “Do what you have to do, Earl. Bring on the Dawn.”
Earl licked his lips. His knife hand trembled as he centered the tip of the blade over Art’s breast bone. “I’m so sorry, my friend.”
“Don’t be,” Art said. “I’m proud of you. I know you’ll save the world.”
After two more breaths of hesitation, Earl drove the knife into Art’s heart.
Art grunted, writhed for a moment, arching his back, then fell still.
And silent.
No more snoring.
No more Art.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
AFTER A FIVE-HOUR DRIVE in a stolen Civic. A night in a cheap motel that smelled of rotten apples and disinfectant. A sleepless eight hours staring between whatever played on the TV with the cracked screen and Whisper’s little laptop he used to track the girl, but which remained as silent as when she had first taken it from the pasty bastard.
She’s off the grid again, all right? Disappeared right into that same spot in Indiana.
Whisper’s last words right before Elka shifted, reared back, and came down on his head, crushing his skull.
After all of that, Elka finally got lucky.
The twittering roused her from sleep. At some point she had dozed in the motel room’s chair with the greasy cushion while she sat at the dresser, the laptop in front of her. She blinked away the sleep and saw her reflection staring back at her in the dresser’s smeared mirror. Never in her life had she looked so ragged. Her hair had knots that needed to be brushed out. The circles under her eyes were so dark she looked like an overzealous goth.
Sort of like the girl you’re after, only not so overdone.
The chirruping came from the computer. The screen displayed a map that looked a lot like the kind you could get directions from on the Internet. Just like in movies and TV shows, a red blip traveled along a road on the map.
Elka sat up straight. Her back cracked. The muscles just above her hips and on one side of her neck ached. One arm had fallen asleep while it had dangled over the armrest. The prickles ran from her elbow to her fingertips. If not for that, she wouldn’t have known she had an arm just by feel, it was so numb.
She used the pad on the computer to work the pointer on screen, zooming out to find her own position in relation to the moving blinker. Whisper had done a good job of narrowing the girl’s approximate location. She was only about five miles from the motel, though she was gaining distance quickly.
Elka shot out of the chair, ignoring her aches and her still unusable arm, slapped the laptop shut, and ran for the door.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
NO PRISON UNIFORM. A CLEAN pair of jeans and a black Nirvana T-shirt. No gross garbage smell. Her boots had had it between the trash bin and the river. But she wore a new pair of Chuck Taylors that felt like she had already broken them in, they fit her so well. She had wondered when she first put them on if the Agency had used some kind of mojo to make them feel that way. Or maybe they had a department of comfy clothes where the agents’ sole purpose was softening up new shoes, boots, and skinny jeans before assigning them to other Agency employees.
Felt nice having her sense of humor back, even if she told most of her jokes in her head.
She sat in the middle bench seat of a Ford Explorer which, with its beige paint job, looked like a soccer mom’s grocery getter from the outside. It pretty much looked that way on the inside too. No heavy armored truck with built-in gun rack. No black-clad agents sporting automatic weapons and semiauto sidearms with the occasional hand grenade thrown in.
Just Agent Ree, sitting in the third row behind her, a female agent behind the wheel, and another dude riding shotgun. They all wore civilian clothes, business casual. Polos and khakis for the boys. A coral blouse and pencil skirt for the lady.
The four of them would have almost looked normal if the pair up front hadn’t looked so uncomfortable out of uniform.
Ree, on the other hand, wore his civies well. He filled out his shirt real nice. If he wasn’t twenty years older than her and a complete betraying asshole, she probably wouldn’t have minded a little inter-agency romance.
The mission was local. Easy. They traveled down a road that looked a lot like all the roads beyond the circumference of the Agency’s land. Suburban. Lots of malls and movie theaters. Familiar ground. Just like the kind of place Jessie had grown up in.
“You good?” Ree asked from the back.
Jessie gazed out the SUV’s tinted window to her right, at the small cemetery tucked in among the overwhelming suburbia. A little bit of dark in a whole world of ignorant light.
Sometimes Jessie sympathized with the nut jobs like Dolan who wanted to show humankind all the creeps and crawls of the supernatural world. They could use a good scare, see the world for what it really was, not their dull fantasies.
Of course, that defeated the whole purpose of the Agency and even the Return. Because the truth was, if everyone knew about the darkness, it would do more than frighten, it would turn them all mad.
They couldn’t handle it.
And they shouldn’t have to.
“I’m fine,” Jessie said. “I’m actually looking forward to this.”
“I know the feeling.”
Jessie twisted in her seat so she could see him. “Really?”
He shrugged. “Not Returning. But I get how it feels to be away from what you’re meant to do.”
“And what were you meant to do?”
He pressed his lips together. He looked away. Shrugged again. “I’m a soldier.”
“So you’re meant to kill.”
His gaze snapped back to her. “There’s more to being a soldier than killing. I’m out to protect people. People who can’t protect themselves.”
Jessie straightened in her seat, looked forward out the windshield between the agents’ heads silhouetted against the sunshine pouring in. “Does that include tranquilizing them and locking them up?” she said. “For their own good, of course.”
“You’re not going to let that go, huh?”
“Would you?”
The car fell silent.
It grew awkward.
“Can you turn on the radio?” she asked the two up front.
“Sorry,” the agent riding shotgun said. “Can’t afford the distraction. Not with people out there after you.”
Right. Because listening to the radio made the difference between life and death. It’s not like she had asked him to turn on some Justin Bieber, for Christ’s sake. But she let it go. When it came to arguing with agents, Jessie had learned to pick her battles.
“Hey, Price,” the woman behind t
he wheel said to her companion. “You notice that green Civic?”
Agent Price glanced in the side mirror. “I was hoping it was a coincidence.”
Jessie straightened. “What’s up?”
“Maybe nothing,” Price said, but he adjusted the side-view mirror while he stared into it. “I can see in the vehicle. It’s a single female behind the wheel.”
“Could be someone ducked behind the seats,” Ree said.
Jessie turned around and found him turned in his own seat to look out the back window.
“Or a fucking bomb in the trunk,” Price added. “Some of these whack jobs are crazier than suicide bombers who think they got a harem waiting for them on the other side.”
The driver said, “Let’s take a detour to make sure.”
At the next light they pulled into the left turn lane.
Jessie watched out the back with Ree as the Civic pulled up right behind them.
“She’s not very stealthy, is she?” Jessie asked.
“Definitely an amateur,” the driver said as she made the left.
The Civic followed close behind.
“And definitely tailing us,” Ree said.
Jessie felt a tickle low in her belly. “What do we do?”
“No worries,” the driver said. “I can shake her.”
The roar of a strained engine jerked on Jessie’s attention. She saw the familiar black van charge up behind the Civic, no sign of stopping.
The van crashed into the back of the Civic and the Civic plowed into the back of their Explorer.
Then the Explorer careened out of control, into oncoming traffic.
Chapter Forty
ELKA’S HEAD SNAPPED BACK on impact. Then the SUV in front of her seemed to grow. When she crashed into it, she flung forward, seat belt cutting across her chest, pressing the air out of her lungs. Both of her car’s front and back windows blew apart into gummy shards.
The SUV sailed forward while Elka came to an abrupt halt. It arched across the street and into the left lane. A second later, a shiny black pickup coming in the opposite direction slammed into the SUV. The SUV’s back end swung and then it came to a stop along with the pickup.
