Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“There is a lot of traffic,” Mateo says, eyes on the red line on his screen representing the cars crawling on every side of Ulla’s white BMW they all ride in. “And an accident.”
Ophelia makes an uh-huh of humoring agreement, and Mateo clicks his phone screen off just to click it on again a few seconds later. They’re traveling the same path Quincy would probably take from the jail to Christopher’s house, though in reverse.
Why?
A vague hope that they’ll spot the other car.
And because sitting in the house doing nothing while no one calls them back hadn’t been a viable option for any of them.
If they get all the way to the jail without anyone calling them back, at least Ulla can storm in and ask questions.
She hasn’t said a word since they got into the car but is driving with an aggressiveness that should be impossible at five miles an hour.
Dark smoke appears as they crest a hill, still a dozen car lengths ahead and on the other side of the freeway.
Checking his phone again, it’s clearly the accident that’s making everything slow, and though it should cause relief—Quincy is dealing with this same traffic—it doesn’t explain no one calling back.
People think about emergencies as hectic, sped up things happening too fast to react.
Sometimes that’s true, but mostly emergencies are slow-motion avalanches of poor decisions and unnecessary actions reaching a critical mass and then tumbling down at the regrettable pace of San Francisco evening traffic.
It’s ridiculous that he’s only now realizing they’ve been in an emergency this whole time, everything falling too slowly to notice, and there’s not a damned thing he can do about it because he was always going to be too late to this.
They’re still not close enough to see it, but Mateo knows it’s them.
A sharp breath beside him as they creep closer, and Ophelia makes the same conclusion he has. “Oh no …” she whispers.
Ulla swerves and cuts across three lanes of freeway like an absolute asshole, not giving anyone any choice but to let her across, and takes the nearest off-ramp. They barrel down a few surface streets and then they’re back on the freeway in the other direction.
They edge forward for what feels like years, and finally get within eyesight of the wreck.
“Just the car,” Mateo says quickly.
Not immediately seeing a body is the only possible upside here, so he grasps for it, insides shaking.
The Mercedes is between a cop and a tow truck, resting drunkenly on its side like a giant kid got sick of playing and tossed it there.
The drag of traffic inches them closer and he sees the hood crumpled in toward the nonexistent windshield.
A white powder coats the ground and Mateo’s dimly aware it’s something to suck up the gasoline.
The scent is making him nauseous. Mixed in with the white, twinkling on the glass, neon on the edges of the broken windshield, is blood.
He can’t keep his gaze off it, and it’s upping the nausea, making his head floaty, detached.
Is that his demon thing? Or is seeing the wreck of three people he’s been spending a lot of time with—two who he cares about—getting to him?
The car’s crushed all to hell but it’s unmistakably Quincy’s.
“I’m pulling over,” Ulla says in a not entirely level voice, sliding her car unrepentantly in front of the wreck and jarring them to a stop.
Mateo cranes around and catches the cop looking less than thrilled about it, walking briskly toward her bad park job.
That pace slows when Ulla steps out. Her all-white situation and the severity with which she exists is universally arresting.
“You can’t!” Mateo hisses.
Except she can. Ignoring him and slamming the door, she approaches the cop.
They wait in the car, Mateo’s gaze slipping from the serious-faced cop again and again, to a strip mall off the freeway.
A vacuum repair shop keeps drawing his attention.
It’s weird that one should exist. Like, with everything happening—Topher and Quincy might be dead, Topher’s mom and dad might be too, and Mateo might actually be a demon now—it’s unfathomable that someone in San Francisco might need something sucked.
The thought is mildly delirious, like his mind’s trying to find a light comment to make to Ophelia but he can’t bring himself to verbalize it.
She has her cell gripped in one hand, eyes closed. Is she Watching Ulla? Did her soul float out there to have a listen? She’s probably able to do that from here. He doesn’t ask, scared of her doing it but also scared to know what’s happening.
Ulla stalks back to her car and gets in. “All that fool knew was that someone was sent to San Francisco General Hospital, in critical condition,” she snaps.
Someone isn’t three people.
He goggles at Ophelia, like she can make sense of that extremely wrong math, but she just stares at him. Missing’s almost as bad as dead when you have no clue where to look.
“It’s not one of his accidents,” Ophelia says, a combination of fury and fear warring in her eyes, but her mouth’s all pissed off. “I can see blood magic all over the car.”
Does that mean it was Christopher or Quincy? Maybe even Christopher and Quincy.
“Do we go to the hospital?” he asks, brain spinning and empty of next steps. Whoever’s at the hospital might be able to tell them what happened. Assuming whoever it is doesn’t die before they can get there.
“Are you shitting me?” Ulla says in her most irate voice yet, but she’s not talking about Mateo’s question.
She’s got eyes on her phone and, with no explanation, dials someone.
“Where in the hell have you been?” Not really enough time for an answer.
“No. I don’t care. Where are you now?” Pause.
“Don’t move. Not a step.” She hangs up and puts the car in drive, civilly rejoins the flow of traffic for three seconds before cutting across four lanes, again, like an absolute asshole to take the nearest off-ramp.
“My twit of a sister is at the airport. I’m going to get her before she gets herself snatched up like the pigeon-brained imbecile she is. ”
Mateo rips his gaze from behind them where it had instinctively gone when Ulla peeled out next to a cop—who takes no notice.
“She’s alive?” An hour ago, that would have been the biggest news yet, but he barely cares right now.
“Wait! Let us out! Someone has to go to the hospital. We don’t know who’s there, and they might know what happened. ”
Another ill-indicated turn and Ulla pulls over at the edge of a strip mall.
“Can’t she take a car to the hospital?” Ophelia reasonably asks.
“I don’t trust her to cross a street right now,” Ulla says with heat.
“She knows something’s happening and she’s just senseless enough to make everything worse.
In the name of helping.” She pops the lock on the doors.
“Get out. Text me what you find and don’t do anything reckless. I’ll bring her to the hospital.”
Which is how they end up in front of a Country House of Waffles while one of their friends might be dying in a hospital or spirited off by an evil wizard.
Mateo gets as far as San Francisco Gen in the rideshare app before realizing that Ophelia’s rooting around in her purse with purpose. “What?” he asks.
She squats in the parking lot to upend her bag directly onto the concrete. After a brief chaos of riffling through every lipstick she’s ever owned, she finds what she’s after, stands, and thrusts a small gray piece of fabric at him.
He unfurls it. “Underwear?” he asks in slow confusion.
Not just any underwear. Topher’s underwear.
The pair he’d soaked and left with them to launder and return.
The pair Mateo had yet to return because he hadn’t worked out a good time to give a guy a single pair of underwear back.
Ophelia had seemingly just been carrying it around in case the moment presented itself.
Recognizing this doesn’t help. “What?” Mateo adds.
“I can use them to track his energy. Find out if he’s the one at the hospital or somewhere else.” Ophelia tries to snatch the underwear back, but he doesn’t let go.
“No way.” He has no intention of arguing this point. The fact that they have no idea where Topher is makes it untenable. “You could follow his energy into oblivion for all we know.” Now they’re glaring at each other, about to have a tug-o-war over Topher’s underwear.
Except when he pulls, she gasps, and he remembers her hand—burnt from dragging him away from his mother’s evil spell book when it lit him on fire. He wavers and she snatches the underwear away with a sneer.
“You’re not the only one allowed to risk themselves, you jackass,” she yells. Like, a proper yell, extremely loud in front of a breakfast place. “If he dies because you stopped me from doing something I was made to do, I’ll never forgive you.”
Mateo wilts. In the twelve years he’s known her, she’s never yelled at him.
Everything inside of him wants to yell back no.
She wasn’t made to astral project; she was forced to.
By a manipulative bunch of assholes in a cult.
Her family ran away because Ophelia was gifted, which meant the cult leaders had big, dangerous, cult-y plans for her.
But gifted or not, her connection is damaged.
The greater the distance she travels, the higher the likelihood of losing her way back to her body.
When astral projection goes wrong, it goes really wrong. See: Her entire very dead family. He spends a lot of his life thinking about walking in on her dead.
They stare at each other for a long time, her eyes wild because she’s mad and his eyes wild because he’s scared. Fear’s the only emotion properly piercing through the curtain of numbness since he untransformed.
But she’s not wrong. He could have died a half a dozen times in the past week. She’d hated it. But she hadn’t stopped him. She’d helped, even.
Which is how they end up inside a Country House of Waffles while one of their friends might be dying in a hospital or spirited off by an evil wizard.
Mateo orders coffee and says they need time to decide on food to keep the waiter away.
Ophelia slumps down in the booth, bare feet appearing on the bench beside him as she gets as close to lying down as she reasonably can in a chain restaurant while clutching underwear to her chest.
“Don’t die,” Mateo says uselessly, and she gives him a grim smile and closes her eyes.
Setting a timer for thirty minutes—arbitrarily chosen based on how much he doesn’t like her doing this—he drinks his flavorless coffee and tries not to look like a creep who is definitely intently staring at a lady passed out in front of him.
At the seventeen-minute mark the waiter’s circled enough times to be suspicious in an undefinable yet soon to be actionable way.
But Ophelia’s eyes pop open. In the terrible yellow light of the restaurant, they’re the neon blue of a highlighter.
She’s got something.