Chapter 21
Done Rode This Rodeo
Fobbing off suspicious cops was usually Cass’s job, or Steve’s. Looking innocent and applying a tiny amount of mental pressure was a fine art; Steve made do with bluff heartiness and the kind of radar law enforcement had for one of their own. Between the two, they generally managed all right.
Except now Steve was most likely… gone, and she was sitting in the backseat of a stolen car with bogey-hunters who talked about sealing.
Which sounded like a whole barrel of fun, to be sure.
She couldn’t decide if witnessing Nigel blush was hysterically funny or deeply disturbing.
Probably both—the whole thing was such ridiculous, cockamamie bullshit.
Usually absurdity made terror somewhat easier to deal with. Laughter was always loudest after a successful hunt; post-heist rundowns were amusing too, though not in the same way. Gallows humor was the preferred setting in bogey-hunter groups.
In the face of darkness, all you could do was keep a weapon close and crack a few jokes.
Ed eased off the gas and hit the blinker, ready to move onto the shoulder. Cass’s heart thumped against her ribs, her throat closing to a pinhole. “How?” She didn’t mean to sound snippy, but was genuinely curious how a cop could be ‘handled’ under these conditions. More sorcery, maybe?
“It depends.” Nigel still gazed out the back window, eyes slightly narrowed and his profile stern. The slight shades of expression when he focused on her had fled, and what remained was a wary, almost predatory stare, a caged wolf determined to escape even after long years of captivity.
Her hands shook. Cass noted this almost clinically, trying to keep the latte from slopping-spill or being crushed. Dumping coffee all over herself would get this traffic stop off to a roaring start, and she was in danger of crumbling half the scone into her lap as well.
The cruiser accelerated, swung out into the left lane… and whooshed past, full of its own importance. As it pulled away the siren popped on, a weirdly modulated howl sending another hard, harsh chill down her back.
Color flooded the desert, a pink haze lingering in the east.
Ed exhaled harshly. “False alarm.”
“Better than the alternative.” Nigel had turned frontwards again to watch the cruiser barrel down the highway. It nipped aside onto an exit, disappearing into the morning glare like a bad scenario, and the flow of traffic righted itself by degrees.
How many other drivers were glad to be passed by? Apoc would kiss the fingers of one hand and touch the dash, Steve would stare after the lights with a pained expression, Grik would begin attempting to guess what the call was. Bern would…
Stop it. You can’t help them now.
But what if she could? A solid night’s worth of sleep meant she had to try again wherever they settled after sundown. Maybe Bern and Apoc had already forgotten her, more concerned with their own survival. She’d vanished just like a bogey, and you learned not to hold on in their line of work.
At least now she knew what ‘sealing’ was, and good Lord, she was about to start blushing herself. None of the crew had ever acted interested in her that way, though that could have been more a function of following Bern’s lead in treating her like a slightly deranged little sister.
“All right.” Her voice shook slightly, but whose wouldn’t?
She managed to make her fingers unclench, grateful she hadn’t spilled the latte.
Something told her she was about to need every bit of caffeine she could get her hands on, at least until noon and the slow slide down to night.
“So that’s sealing, okay. What else do I need to know?
And are we going to try to find a payphone? ”
Ed coughed again, as if he had a dry muffin caught in his throat. The Chevy thankfully didn’t wander out of its lane, though. Nigel’s chin jerked aside, and he stared at her like she’d said something extraordinary.
“What?” Cass tried not to sound annoyed, a losing battle.
“You’ve kidnapped me, fine. I don’t know if any of my friends are still alive, okay.
But you also know about things you shouldn’t, and can do things you shouldn’t be able to, and if you wanted to kill me I’d be dead by now.
Maybe your ‘organization’ is good, maybe it isn’t, but I don’t have a helluva lot of choice so I should learn what I can.
Just…” She glanced nervously out the windshield again, but they were by now well past the exit the cop car had taken.
“Just none of that sealing stuff. I’m not that kind of girl. ”
Nigel looked about to speak, but Ed beat him to the punch. “Sometimes it’s not that simple, ma’am.”
Another tense, awkward silence full of tires humming against pavement, the engine singing along. Machines didn’t care about right or wrong, and neither did bogeys. The first kept working so long as the parts were all in order.
The second simply ate whatever they could catch.
Cass’s stomach turned over, hard, but she forced herself to take a mouthful of coffee, staring at Nigel.
At least he looked faintly ashamed. “It might become necessary,” he said, quietly. “If it’s a choice between your survival and—”
“No.” She considered chucking both scone and cup at him, wrenching open the door, and tumbling out higgledy-piggledy at seventy per—if she could get her seatbelt undone in time. I’m not overreacting. Am I?
“Very well.” A flicker of something in those pale eyes—was it shame? Or was she imagining things? “We will do our best, Cass. So long as we are allowed to.”
I guess now I know where you stand. Just when she thought she finally had a handle on the situation, something else came along to bite her.
So long as they were ‘allowed to’? What kind of a threat was that?
“Sir.” Ed apparently had something to add. “We can’t keep—”
Nigel’s profile was a statue’s, blue eyes focusing far beyond the windshield. “We do not take the easy route, Edward.” Whatever that meant, it put an end to further conversation pretty effectively.
Cass focused on eating and getting down what coffee she could. Even if she was nauseated, getting calories and caffeine on board was the best possible tactic, because she’d decided.
No matter how good these guys were at fighting bogeys, she wasn’t going to stick around. The question of whether or not she could escape was a good one.
At least she now knew the consequences for attempting flight. It was just another risk she’d have to run.
* * *
Cass suspected they’d done rode this rodeo before, as Grik might say.
Nigel and Ed seemed to think of escape attempts before she even realized they were possible—for example, she couldn’t slip out the back door of a gas station just off a lonely stretch of I-84, because where would she run to?
Not to mention the fact that Ed checked the bathroom before she was allowed to go in and piddle, probably making sure there were no windows.
He waited just outside, too, arms crossed, leaning against the wall like he had all the time in the world.
Whatever the middle-aged man in a fraying polyester vest behind the counter thought about this occurrence was beside the point, since that employee didn’t look up from what was apparently a highly absorbing magazine—a hunting-and-fishing number instead of a skin mag, chalk one up for surprise.
He seemed to not notice Ed and Cass at all despite the automatic door opening and giving a mellow electronic chime; maybe it was more of their ‘sorcery’.
She was tempted to lift a candy bar or two just to prove a point, an operation Bern and Steve frowned upon but Grik considered a game with its own rules and Apoc a side benefit of living outside the law.
Trille would simply sigh whenever shoplifting was mentioned, pointing out that it was probably more dangerous than a bank heist, and stupid besides.
The scenery was pretty, at least. Dry hills, air vibrating with heat making the distant horizon shimmer, human occupation clinging to valleys, sluggish brown trickles of low creeks feeding threads of dusty green, orchards watered by giant skeletal sprinklers.
Where human beings didn’t drag the water, sagebrush and other low scrub crouched on sandy soil, clinging fiercely to every scrap of moisture.
High hills drew themselves up a bit taller with each mile.
Cass was already heartily tired of fast food but not yet willing to settle for gas station nachos, and had she felt more charitable she might have suggested stopping at a larger town’s grocery store for a cooler and some fit-to-eat roadtrip munchies.
The guys didn’t seem overly interested in food, though, and she wondered if that was another questionable benefit to that strange, vivid red mark.
Now she was doubting her own damn eyes, because all this was even more insane than nightmare bogeys and her freakish talents. Carrying around guns and a sword, not eating, talking about mad gods and sealing…
Nigel tried a few times to draw her into more discussion, but Cass turned away to stare out the window or closed her eyes, sagging in the seat and doing her deep breathing.
To think she’d almost been ready to start trusting these guys. Was she getting Stockholm syndrome—no, Trille said that was a myth, that some psychologist had invented it just to get back at a woman who wouldn’t play along.
Thinking about their medic—about any of the crew—made her chest ache. Actually physical hurt, especially when she could almost hear the medic’s voice. Box breathing. Four in, four hold, four out. That’s the ticket. There’s good research about this—they even teach it to soldiers.
Grik concurred, and it was funny how veterinarian and veteran got along. They razzed each other unmercifully, sure, and the prank wars were nonstop. But it was always Grik making sure Trille had what he needed and cautioning the medic to stay nearby during drills—I’ll look after you, Doc.
In the end, though, it hadn’t mattered.
That was the trouble with driving long distances. It gave you too much goddamn time to think.
“Here.” Nigel was holding something out—napkins from lunch, reeking of hot tallow and fried potato. “You’re, ah, leaking a bit.”
Of course I’m crying. Everyone I’ve ever cared about is dead. She took the napkin but didn’t use it, wadding the paper up hard in her damp palm. Let these men see her cry, it didn’t matter. They probably didn’t care at all—but if they felt a twinge, good.
They had discussed driving all night, but Ed pulled over frequently for rest stops, small town business loops and gas stations. They weren’t making good time at all.
Cass wondered about that. Bernadotte was a great believer in driving until the trip was ding-dang done, despite the state of anyone’s bladder; she missed the RV’s relative comfort.
Consequently, what should have taken them a few direct hours stretched cat-and-mouse through a long, increasingly tense afternoon, threading between two national forests, glowering mountains now rising to either side.
Dusk found them just over the Idaho border, the big tan SUV still happily humming along despite all the circuitousness, and a few terse sentences solved the mystery—her kidnappers were wary of ‘the god’s human hands’ watching all routes east, attempting to avoid any notice by county sheriffs, Highway Patrol, even certain trucking lines whose drivers apparently watched for things the big kahuna might be interested in.
Cass curled further and further inside herself, counted her breaths, and finally slipped into a thin troubled doze as stars began to glimmer, then burn in a desert night.
* * *
…rotten-cheese moon leered over dry rustling hills. Shadows moved downslope, twitch-twisting, their eyes bright red coins and crimson gems jangling on their collars. Cold air hurt to breathe, and she slipped away from that place, into a more familiar landscape.
The moon was the same—big, yellow, and crack-glazed, which was wrong.
No, there were two moons, a waning sliver plus an interloper pulsing like a swollen heart.
That strange saclike monstrosity peered through the darkness, a few beams of cold white light from the earth’s actual satellite stabbing at its diseased lens.
Still, the jaundiced imposter could focus to see two creatures huddling in an abandoned building, listening to the sweet sickening music of terrible, skirling cries.
She knew that sound. Bogeys, hunting.
“It’s spreading,” Bern said, and winced as he peeled a stiffened flap of denim away from his lower leg.
The wound was black under the uncertain, jittering beam of Apoc’s flashlight.
Both men were filthy and drawn, the younger man’s hair standing up wildly and Bern’s cheeks hollow under a thick scruff of stubble. “Leave me a single bullet and—”
“Fuck that,” Apoc said, almost gently. “Cass’d never forgive me if I left you, old man.”
“You think she made it? That fuckin’ motel—”
“If she did, she’s counting on us.” Apoc glanced over his shoulder as a fresh wave of shrill cries rose, almost as if he could hear them. “You got anything?”
“Not even a shitty hallucination.”
I’m here, Cass tried to say. I can see you.
Apoc shivered. Bern looked up, sudden hope brightening his graven face, but a low moaning in the distance became a shriek.
The yellow not-moon intensified, swords of its solid rotten glow spinning like propellor blades; the screaming became a hurricane, her dream-self a leaf borne on a foul burning-cold tide.
Behind the noise, the whirling, the hideous stench was a skinny, capering being in a yellow robe, its claws opening and closing as it screamed with jolly, genial, completely unhinged laughter.