Chapter 3
She was in Penn Station, looking at a lukewarm piece of pizza she didn’t want to eat, when a wisp of a man sat down and said,
He was beautiful, in a crisp white shirt and brand-new-looking jeans, with the sort of blue eyes that made her think of glaciers.
His blond hair was so fine it was almost white, a crown of spun silver. He might’ve been an elfin prince.
She nodded. Although it gratified her to be recognized, it wasn’t the best time.
“Hey, wow! Cool,” he said. He clapped a hand to the counter. “I gotta show you something. You’re a journalist.” He dipped
his head to peer in a slim leather satchel, a sort of soft briefcase, and came up with a manila folder. “Take a look—is this
newsworthy?”
He flapped it open to show her a grainy photograph of her brother, in his jockey underwear and a canvas straitjacket, sprawled
on his side on a padded bench somewhere. His bare, too-white legs were scrawny and pimpled. His eyes were shut.
Her stomach churned, and she was overcome once again by the old clammy swimsuit sensation. She braced her palms against the
edge of the counter as if there were some danger she might slide off her stool. The elfin prince flapped the folder shut again.
“How’d you find me? I ditched my phone. There’s no way anyone could’ve followed me.”
“You called your boss from a pay phone when you got to Penn Station—Morris Shanley? We’re up on his line too, and we traced your call to here.
” He tucked the manila folder back into his soft briefcase and went on: “I know there’s an invisible mark on your chest, and I know if you touch it, you can bring an entity through into our reality to blast me right off this stool.
I’ll be honest. I don’t love the idea. But I want you to know, if that does happen—”
“You’ll kill Van.”
“No!” he said, and smiled—a generous, lovely smile. “I don’t have clearance for that! No, he’s too valuable. You both are.
We’ll just lobotomize him. The team is pretty sure we can still use him to access the entity, even if we cauterize his frontal
lobe. Speaking as someone who has read his writing, I think that would be a shame. He has such a lively, playful way of looking
at the world. I’d regret it.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Because you’d be dead,” she said.
“Good point. Donna, we could’ve tried to hit you with a needle, but this is an enclosed public place, and if it went wrong
here . . . well. It could be a whole lot worse than what happened on Garfield Place this morning. Besides, I’d like to get off on the right
foot with you, see if we can’t establish a . . . productive working relationship. Come outside with me and I’ll take you to
your brother.”
“And then what?”
“Then you give me a few weeks of your time. That’s all. We can reach out to your office, tell them your brother was injured
in the Garfield Place explosion. His injuries will require multiple surgeries, a lot of rehab, and you need some time off
to help him out.”
“A few weeks. To do what?”
“To help us understand what happened over Greenland five years ago. Something cut two F-16s in two, and we’re pretty sure
you can tell us what. Maybe we could also talk about Haruto Sagawa, who was killed at Easter the following year, in an explosion
that destroyed a four-story building and killed nearly thirty other members of Aum Shinrikyo. Or Gilberto Herrera, the Columbian
drug lord, who cooked to death along with two dozen heavily armed hard-asses in a mountain camp last Easter. Locals say he was destroyed by White Quetzalcóatl—the dragon the Aztecs worshipped.” He gave her a sidelong, comradely
smile. “We just want to understand, Donna. You can help us understand. Would you do that?”
“And then you’ll just, what, let us go?”
“Yes. Absolutely. You’ll sign an NDA with our outfit and we’ll—”
“What a crock of shit.”
“Don’t make us lobotomize Donovan. Don’t put us in a position where we might have to do the same to Allie.”
Donna felt icy and sick. “You don’t have Allison. She got away.”
“We don’t have her yet. But we will. She’s in the wind for the moment, but I think you know she’s a barely functioning alcoholic with no real gift
for survival.”
“You know who didn’t have a gift for survival? The clowns you sent after her. You’ll be scraping burnt pieces of them off
the sidewalk for days.” Her own hand had moved to the neck of her blouse. Her thumb touched the skin between her collarbones.
She could feel it now, the silky tickle of the serpent wound around her torso.
He was watching. “How many do you think will die—besides me—if you bring him through now? Here?” He cast his glance around the pizza shop, as crowded as a subway car at rush hour. “That creature wiped out three of ours
in Brooklyn, but you know what else it did? It put a mother of four through a plate-glass window. She’s dead—broken neck.
There are a dozen others in a burn ward. The entity, he’s not exactly a precision weapon, is he? What do you think it would
do if you unleashed him on Penn Station? A hundred casualties? Two hundred?” He put his hands together. “Let’s go for a ride.
There’s so much I want to learn.”
“Seems like you already know enough.”
“Hardly! Does it have a name? I’d like to talk to it—is such a thing possible without being destroyed? With your help?”
She didn’t reply. Her stomach hurt.
He slid off his stool. “Follow me or don’t. If you come with me now, we don’t have to take a hot drill to your brother’s frontal
lobe. Or you can stay right here. You’ve got a ticket for Boston, maybe we’ll catch up with you there. Or maybe later. One
way or another, you’re coming with me, Donna. The only real question is if you love your brother enough to come with me now.”
He waited, standing beside her. His eyes were so blue, they didn’t look real.
When she didn’t move, he nodded reluctantly, as if they had agreed to disagree, and began to squeeze through the crowd to the concourse.
He was almost to the marble-floored hall when he paused to look back.
This time she stood up. She left her untouched pizza behind.
“At least tell me your name,” she said.
“Valentine,” he said. “Joe Valentine.”
She shot him a sharp look. “That isn’t your real name.”
“No. In the old stories—in folk tales—it’s important never to tell a faery your true name, lest she use it against you. I
think there’s only two ways you can turn the creature against me: if you touch the mark on your chest or if you have my name.”
Men fell into step behind them. One of them, a big slab of a guy with a Tom Selleck mustache and legs as thick as telephone
poles, lifted the lapel of his ill-fitting sports coat and murmured something into a mic clipped there. The other had the
compact, muscly build of an Olympic swimmer and kept his black hair slicked back like Michael Corleone in the second Godfather film. As they strode along, this second man was always casting his gaze about, scanning the concourse for interference, for
problems.
“Who are you with? CIA?” Donna asked. “NSA?”
“Oh, no! We’re a private contractor, although we do quite a bit of work for Uncle Sam. In the federal budget, we’re sometimes
listed as technical support. Mr. Francis is with one of your national acronyms, but even I don’t know which one.” Nodding
at fat Tom Selleck. Donna was surprised, had assumed he was just muscle.
“Which team do you play for?” she asked Mr. Francis. “The Democrats or the Republicans?”
“Neither,” Francis said, looking bored. “I sell the peanuts. Democrats, Republicans, they both smile when they see me coming.
Everyone likes a bag of hot peanuts.”
“Not everyone,” Donna said. “I’m allergic, so you might wanna keep your nuts well out of reach.”
Mr. Francis laughed, a low rumble of amusement. “Noted.”
Then they were on the street and she thought, Now, NOW, but Valentine took her right hand in his, while Mr. Francis put his arm through her left.
“Think about your brother, Donna,” said Joe Valentine. “Maybe you don’t care if a couple dozen people die on Seventh Avenue
today, but you can’t destroy me without destroying Van.”
A single hard fleck of snow whirled down out of the impossibly blue sky and caught in one of Donna’s eyelashes. She glanced
around, couldn’t figure out where it had come from. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. When she looked back, a nondescript battered
green van pulled to the curb, a few yards ahead of them, and suddenly it was hard for her to breathe. Something pinched in
her chest and her knees went weak. This was worse than the clammy swimsuit sensation, this was like a hand on her throat,
applying pressure to her windpipe. She stopped moving for a moment, actually pushed her heels into the ground, and the elf-prince
glanced around in surprise. She made a little sound, not quite the word no.
The van, she thought, it’s THE VAN. She had promised herself she would never willingly get in THE VAN. She had kept that promise for nearly two decades—a wordless
promise, an oath that went deeper than words. She couldn’t move forward.
“Do you have something to knock me out?” she asked. She could barely make a sound.
Francis looked at her with what she thought was genuine sympathy. “Do you need something?”
“Yes, please,” she heard herself say. Even as she said it, she was trying to push back with her heels. Not even for Van could
she get in THE VAN.
Francis looked past Donna to Valentine, and the elfin prince nodded. Valentine said, “You’re going to feel a pinch in your
neck,” as a cold needle pierced the side of her throat, a sharp twinge of cold and pain.
“Breathe,” Francis said. “Just breathe.”
He let go of her arm and she found she couldn’t lift it. It was like her left sleeve was empty, like the arm had been amputated.
Valentine tugged a BlackBerry out of his pocket and began to type on it.
“New world record,” Francis said to him, speaking across her.
“What?” Valentine asked.
“Longest I’ve ever seen you go without using that thing.”
“There’s a reason they call them CrackBerries,” Valentine said, both of them talking as if she wasn’t there.
“You don’t know how great it is to get emails sent right to your pocket.
I love the future. And you know the best thing about it?
There’s always more ahead of you. I mean, maybe not for her, but for us. ”
“Hey,” Francis said. “Can that, doc. She’s still conscious.”
“Nah,” Valentine said. “Look at her. She can’t even keep her head up.”
It was true. Her head kept sinking on her neck and it took a conscious effort to jerk it upright.
The rear doors to the battered, unmarked green van opened onto an awful darkness. A big twentysomething in a polo shirt and
dad jeans reached out for her with both arms. Donna tried to push herself away and found her feet were dragging across the
concrete.
Valentine and Francis lifted her over the bumper. Francis said, “Up you go,” as if he were lifting a small girl, his own daughter
perhaps, into the seat of a swing. And then they were pressing her into THE VAN, right there on Seventh Avenue, people walking
every which way but no one paying the slightest attention. The twentysomething in the polo shirt took her by the arms. The
doors slammed behind her and the darkness slammed in around her.