10
Adrian was already hanging out in my living room when I got up the next night, on the very razor’s edge of sunset. At his side, he had a small rolling suitcase that was packed to bursting; a zip-up garment bag was slung over one arm. He was tapping one foot impatiently as I emerged from my bedroom.
“Are we doing this, or what? When does our plane leave?” he asked, beginning the trip with demands—and that didn’t bode well, but I wasn’t awake enough yet to start messing with him.
I squinted at the DVD player’s digital clock. “It leaves in another couple of hours. Hold your horses; we have plenty of time.” We had plenty of time to make the plane, anyway. I wasn’t half so confident about our arrival in Texas, but we’d have to cross that bridge when we got to it.
Ian had spent the rest of yesterday’s evening upstairs, on the phone or whatever—and I still didn’t know what he and Max had talked about, or even if he’d actually, successfully reached his “brother.” We hadn’t had a chance to regroup and share. I was just looking around for him when I realized that he was already there in the living area, only I hadn’t seen him at first. The big loud Cuban dude had commanded all my attention, drat him.
My roommate and fellow vampire said, “I don’t know how you always find flights so quickly.”
“You can get anything on the Internet. There are a couple of websites devoted to last-minute and standby stuff. It’s usually not a problem.”
“We’re going first class, aren’t we?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course we are,” I told Adrian. “I don’t do coach, and neither does my date.”
Ian’s ears perked, and his face set into a carefully neutral mask. “Your what?”
“My date. Adrian and I are hitting up a black-tie gala, something over at the Johnson Space Center, before we dash off to Atlanta. Which we are totally doing as soon as possible, don’t worry.”
“I didn’t worry until you told me not to. The space center … is this regarding the magician with the bacula?”
“Look at you, using the right word and everything.” I went back into my bedroom to withdraw one roller case that was almost too big to count as carry-on. “And all this time, I’ve been trying to come up with new puns.”
“A waste of energy, when the proper term is odd enough.”
“Fine, you pedantic old fart, you,” I teased. Then I told Adrian, “Make yourself at home. I’ll take a quick shower and get dressed.” I could’ve cornered Ian and asked for a recap, but now didn’t feel like the time—or maybe I was stalling, because I was afraid maybe he’d struck some bargain behind my back.
But surely, if he’d done something like that, he’d stop me before I had a chance to go charging into Atlanta, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t let me fling myself headlong into that kind of danger, not when all his protestations about leaving had been presented under the guise of keeping me out of danger.
This is what I told myself as I avoided him, while making loud declarations about my plans. If I didn’t give him the opportunity to stop me from heading to Georgia, he wouldn’t sneak out in the middle of the night to get himself killed in California.
A roundabout set of conclusions, I’ll grant you. But sticking my head in the sand was all I could do, so I stuck to it and made a show of busily readying myself to scoot out the door. I’d already packed—even a nice red Chanel dress that now officially qualified as “vintage,” though I’d bought it new ages before—so after my shower, all I really had to do was throw on the nearest, easiest clothes. And slip-on boots, because fuck airport security, that’s why.
I was ready to go in fifteen minutes, during which time Adrian had called a cab and it was waiting for us downstairs. We could’ve driven and left the car at the airport—but if he wanted a cab, that was fine with me. Besides, parking at SeaTac is nothing short of extortion. So in retrospect, good on Adrian for thinking of it, especially since we expected to be gone for several days at the very least.
I told Ian good-bye. He gave me a quick kiss that was sweet and warm, and it made me want to stay. But I burbled something about Atlanta again—drilling that point home. “Don’t you go anywhere until I get back,” I added. “You promise?”
“Ray—”
“Promise me, or I will freak out.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Promise. Say you’ll stay put, and say it now or so help me God—”
“All right, all right. I promise.”
Quickly, without giving him time to go into any detail, I asked, “Did you talk to Max?”
“I talked to Max, yes. Your seneschal papers ought to be in your inbox, if his bargains can be trusted.”
“Thank you, and please—be patient. Just for another couple of nights. If I can’t fix everything by then, we can talk some more. But first, be patient.”
“I already promised, Ray.”
He kissed me again, and it was a little faster—a good-bye kiss, the kind you give someone you’re trying to shove out the door. But I was glad to have it anyway, because I’d take any reassurance I could get.
Adrian watched all this with an eyebrow up and a still-tapping foot, but he could fucking wait, that was my thought on the matter.
I grabbed my case and jerked it toward my “date,” who rolled his eyes and clearly was thinking something about me being weird and pathetic. And I didn’t have to exercise any psychic powers to figure that out.
As for me and Adrian, our trip to the airport and subsequent flight to Houston were uneventful except for some truly god-awful turbulence that had my companion seeing green and excusing himself for the tin can of a restroom as soon as the seat-belt light flicked off, the poor dear.
I tried to stay cool despite the fact that the flight was a long one, and I always find long flights troublesome. Long flights, especially long flights that begin at ten in the evening, mean a somewhat narrow window of opportunity when it comes to getting indoors before sunrise. Usually this leads to a world of nervous fretting on my part, but something about having Adrian present calmed me down. I’m not sure why. It’s not as if I could fillet him and use him for a sleeping bag.
I’ll admit, by the time we were cabbing our way to the hotel, I was getting antsy. The sky was pinking, just a rosy fraction, over in the east—and that’s closer than I like to call it. I drew a pair of sunglasses out of my go-bag (which of course, I had brought with me as my second piece of “personal item” carry-on—bereft of its usual knives and weaponry) and pulled them on. It took the edge off the stinging my eyes began to feel as we waited in traffic, and the pinking spread like a puddle.
“Ow,” Adrian said quietly—a message to me, not a declaration of any distress.
It was then that I realized I’d been squeezing his leg. Hard. I’d left half-moon impressions of my fingernails along his almost-inner thigh, so really, I think he ought to receive some award for patience and trust. He should’ve said something sooner, but I guess my agitation was apparent enough that he hadn’t bothered.
By the time we were checked in and racing for the elevator, I was relieved to the point of feeling ill. I jammed my fingers against the buttons to close the doors, and when they finally did shut, I felt my first relief in hours.
“Told you we’d make it,” he said, leaning into the mirrored corner as we rose the fifteen floors to the honeymoon suite. Hey, it was all they had on such short notice.
“You were right. Everything’s fine. We’ll be sealed in a room momentarily.”
“Stop trying to convince yourself, and quit worrying. See?” He pointed at the round, lit numbers. “We’re here. Unclench, would you?”
“I’m unclenching, I’m unclenching.” And privately I thought to myself that I wouldn’t be doing this in the future if it were at all possible. Air travel used to be a much more in-and-out event, something that didn’t require two hours of lead time on either end. Henceforth, anything farther away than two or three hours by air would have to be broken up into multiple trips.
Adrian wheeled his suitcase out of the elevator ahead of me and looked back to say, “You’re thinking about taking shorter flights next time, aren’t you?”
“Shut up. You’re not my fucking ghoul.”
I pushed him aside and used my card to let us inside a blissfully dark and accommodatingly spacious hotel room with blessedly thick curtains and an air conditioner that could blow the red off an apple. I turned it down immediately and dropped my shit on the side of the bed farthest from the window.
“I don’t even get a chance to call dibs?”
“Do you burst into flames when sunlight hits you? No? Then you get the side of the bed closer to the curtains.”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way.”
One thing I hadn’t thought about: sharing a bed with Adrian. It could get weird, or it could not get weird. This was a business trip after all, and it didn’t need to go any further than that. Or that was what I told myself as he started peeling off his clothes and yanking the curtains shut.
I was tired, and cranky, and relieved to be indoors, which put the kibosh on any sweet-talking anyway. The sun came up all the way before long, and I settled in for the day, burritoing myself into a light-proof bundle facing the wall. I could feel the morning even though I couldn’t see it.
Adrian and I had done a good job of plugging the cracks before full blaze manifested, but I was still grateful for the space between the bed and the wall—where I could roll off to the floor and hide if I had to, in case that jet-powered air conditioner moved the curtains while I was sleeping.
I used to be afraid of killing people in my sleep, but that only ever happened once. My body will sometimes take measures into its own hands (or my own hands, whatever) if I’m out cold during the day and someone pokes at me with a stick … or, um, anything else, which put a damper on one or two of my relationships, early in my vampire days. Eventually I learned my lesson and quit chasing pretty mortal boys. Or anybody else.
Come to think of it, this was the first time I was sharing sleeping space with a regular old day-walker in decades.
I was sure it would be fine. Adrian was smart, and he knew the general peril—though I made a point to remind him of it before I dozed off.
“Hey Adrian?”
“Hm?” he replied from his spot by the luggage, where he was unpacking some essential item or another.
“Do me a favor, huh? Remember to give me space while I’m sleeping.”
He frowned thoughtfully. “How much space? Should I just take the floor?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary. But, I don’t know. Just don’t get snuggly. I don’t have a lot of personal control when the sun’s up. I’d hate to wake up and find you smeared against the wall or something.”
“No personal control. Got it.”
I grabbed one of the small, purely ornamental pillows and chucked it at his head. “Don’t make it sound dirty. It’s not dirty, it’s dangerous.”
“Lots of dirty things are dangerous. All the best ones, I hear.”
“Shut up. Just … don’t stick your finger in my nose, and I won’t break it off. Does that sound fair?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t do that ghoul thing, it skeeves me out.”
With a twist of his mouth he changed his voice to sound like the typical lisping Hollywood Igor. “Yes, mistress.”
“I will kill you.”
“Not if I run outside.”
“I’ll kill you later,” I vowed.
Then I rolled over and conked out.
Later, as I dozed in the typical near-catatonia that engulfs me during the day, I slipped in and out of consciousness a tiny bit—rising near the surface, like a diver not quite ready to call it a swim and climb back up to the dock. And while I lurked, or lingered, or bobbed up to the edge of awareness, I sensed something large, warm, and familiar nearby. He was stretched out beside me, his breathing deep and regular, and some tiny part of my mind recognized him.
At some point I dreamed (or maybe I didn’t) that I was curled up next to him. His body was warm and firm, even through the blanket burrito in which I’d encased myself, and the softness of his breath in my hair was almost comforting.
It might’ve been the blood he’d swallowed, or it might’ve been something less concrete and obvious. He was my friend, and he was beautiful, and he was strong enough that I surely wouldn’t take off his head by accident or surprise, particularly since he knew it was a possibility and could plan against it.
(Then why was his arm wrapped around my waist? I remembered the weight of it, the way it cinched me close to his body like a roller coaster’s safety bar.)
I’ll be the first to confess that the whole thing was utterly strange, but when the sun set and I got up and around, Adrian wasn’t there and I was alone in the king-sized bed. And inexplicably, I was disappointed.
While I was still getting myself awake and oriented to being upright, he came back to the room toting more carryout for supper. Or breakfast? I didn’t know how long he’d been up.
This time, he didn’t bring any for me. I feigned disappointment, but he only chucked a french fry at me and told me to go get my own, since my head wasn’t broken anymore.
“You’re a lousy ghoul,” I accused.
“I’m a hungry date,” he corrected me. “Fancy suppers never have good food, and who knows? We might not get to eat. Creed might make a scene, and then where would I be? Starving, that’s where.”
“Starving isn’t a place,” I said down into the sink, because I was listening to him justify his failure to provide for me while I was washing my face. “And I won’t be eating anything at the supper anyway. All the more reason you should’ve brought me something.”
“I’ve seen you go for weeks without … eating.”
“I bet you could go for days,” I speculated as I toweled my cheeks off. “But you wouldn’t like it much.”
“Yeah, well, I won’t get arrested for picking up supper. You might.”
“But that’s not something that informs my spotty consumption. I’m lazy, that’s all.”
“And honest, which is something.”
“Hey, you brought a tux, right? Let me see it.”
He bobbed his head toward a clothing sleeve shaped like a tombstone, and left draped across the large seat that was under the window. “It’s over there.”
“Get it out. I want to look at it. Got to make sure we won’t clash.”
“You’re anal.”
“Very, yes.”
“What are you wearing?” he asked, and I realized I’d forgotten to play show-and-tell before we left.
“It’s hanging up in here.” I pointed at the closet. “If I’d had more time, I would’ve sent it out to be dry cleaned before heading out tonight—”
“I thought you didn’t like dry cleaners.”
“I don’t. The chemicals leave a funny taste in the back of my throat. But with vintage, sometimes it’s the only proper care alternative.” I dug it out and let him touch it, because that’s the kind of giving spirit I am.
He oohed and ahhed over it like an appreciative girlfriend, feeling the silk gently between two fingers. “It’s a shame you didn’t bring one in my size.”
“Back in the thirties, I’m pretty sure Chanel wasn’t designing for … people of your height,” I finished with mock care. He knows he’s a dude. I’m not insulting him by being aware of it.
“More’s the pity,” he said, and in those three words I heard his drag voice peek through the macho ex-SEAL persona, the barest smidge. “This is from the thirties?”
“Yeah. ’Thirty-one or ’32. I don’t remember, exactly. It’s been a long time.”
“But it was new when you bought it?”
“Uh-huh. It was a present to myself. Because sometimes, I deserve presents.”
“Damn,” he whistled. “What an opportunity.”
I went to my rolling case and started fishing around for the appropriate underthings. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, living so long, with so much money. Your closet must be loaded with vintage stuff like this. You can’t find a dress like this anymore, not for love or money,” he purred.
“Oh, that’s not entirely true. Collectors, vintage enthusiasts—they’re out there. But it’d cost you an arm and a leg, and that’s a fact. Anyway,” I said, balling up my delicates and strolling back into the bathroom for the illusion of privacy. I didn’t shut the door all the way, so we could still talk.
“Anyway what?”
“It’s not like I knew it’d be such a prize item when I first picked it up. Obviously it’s a nice dress, and I spent a pretty penny on it. But you never know what’ll turn out to be a valuable antique or a hot collector’s item. Over more than your average life span, I’ve been picking up things I liked, just because I liked them. Some of it turns out to be worthless in twenty years, and some of it quadruples in value.”
I could see him in the bathroom mirror, through the crack in the door. Technically this meant that if he gazed at the correct angle, he could see me, too—but he was absorbed in the clothing worship that somewhat characterized his alter ego.
“It’s a good thing you have such good taste, then.”
“Thanks, darling.”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” he fussed.
I poked my head around the door as I wrestled myself into a girdle. Okay, so it was Spanx, but the effect is better than the old-school wonder-garments, and even the skinniest supermodel would need a little smoothing underneath the classic Chanel lines. “I’m not being sarcastic,” I said as I shimmied into the stretchy, difficult underpants. “I’m happy to be on the receiving end of a professional lady’s style admiration.”
With a laugh, he set down the corner of fabric with which he’d been toying. “All right, I believe you. And this is lovely. One of these days, when we get back—”
He stopped because I bonked my head against the door. It was an accident, brought on by my overconfidence regarding one final hop into the other leg of the damn Spanx.
“You okay?”
“Sure,” I said, then strolled into the sleeping area looking like a fashionably swathed mummy. “Sorry, do go on.”
“You look ridiculous.”
“Give me my dress.”
Reverently he picked it up and passed it over to me, and before long I was satisfactorily sheathed for a fancy event. My hair was even doing something cute, a little flippy thing that I didn’t arrange on purpose, but it looked like I had.
“How do I look?” I asked.
“Adorable, with a dash of deadly. What about your makeup?”
“Makeup? Aw, shit.”
“No, no. I’ve got it,” he informed me. “Sit down, and I’ll tart you up.”
“Not too tarty. This is black tie, not Neighbors. Not that there’s anything wrong with Neighbors, but you know what I mean. San Francisco was costume time. This isn’t.”
He said, “Don’t worry,” and was already digging out his makeup bag. “We’ll keep it minimalist. You already have great skin; all you need is a touch of polish. Some mascara, some blush. A dab of gloss, and you’ll be golden.”
“Great,” I said, trying not to sound too dubious. It’s not that I didn’t trust his skills. It was just that I didn’t ever wear makeup. It feels weird, all that stuff all over my face.
But he did a good job. When he was finished I looked decidedly “more put together” but not a bit “draggy,” as promised, and he hadn’t even gotten a speck of powder on my collar.
Ten minutes later he was fully dressed as well, and looking mighty fine, if I might say so as a completely impartial and disinterested observer of a fine male form in a well-tailored suit. I said, “You clean up real nice.”
“Thank you. Now if this were only the sort of gig where I could get away with some false eyelashes …”
“I bet you were one hell of a prom date.”
“Never had a prom,” he said. “But it would’ve been fabulous, yes.”
“Really? No prom?” I hadn’t had one either, but it wasn’t surprising, given when I was last in school. “That’s a shame. Feel free to pretend this is the big day, if you like.”
“But I didn’t bring a corsage.”
“Screw the flowers.” I picked up my fancy-schmancy purse, a strapped jobbie that was too large to be called a clutch and a little too big to go nicely with what I was wearing. “You brought the eye makeup, which is much more useful.”
“True, true. Say, are you carrying that?”
“Yes, and hush up about it. I don’t have anything smaller and perkier or more appropriate that will hold everything I need to bring tonight. Some things just won’t fit in a tiny satin clamshell, okay?”
“I know, but—”
“No buts. I need stuff. This holds stuff. And it’s black velvet. It’s not like I’m waltzing in with a backpack made of olive drab.”
“It’s your fashion funeral.”
“You don’t really care about that. You don’t want to be seen with me, that’s all.”
“I don’t want to be seen with that bag,” he clarified. “You, I’m happy to have on an arm.”
He held out an elbow, and I took it. It felt weird, considering this was the same guy who just gave me bigger, brighter eyes with his travel stash of cosmetics, but oh well.
Downstairs, the doorman hailed us a cab and before long, we were pulling up to the Johnson Space Center, which was lit up like a Kennedy. Though it was closed to tourists or other assorted space buffs, the whole compound glowed with a thousand and one electric lights, including a few spotlights and some banners and flags that were artfully illuminated on the main building’s exterior. At first I thought it was overkill for an honorary ceremony, but then we emerged from the taxi into near silence, and I realized that this was just what the place looked like at night.
“Cool,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said also, and he paid the cabbie out of the leftovers of whatever cash he’d lifted from me earlier in the day. “You ever been here before?” he asked as the cab pulled away, leaving us there to our own devices.
“No. I’ve been to Cape Canaveral, but that was a long time ago. Have you?”
“No. So I have no idea where we’re supposed to go to get inside this thing.”
“I do,” I told him. I triumphantly held up my somewhat-too-big-bag and pulled out our printed invitation confirmations, and also a small wad of other printings … mostly the kind that gave me a good layout of the space center and its surrounding buildings. “I didn’t have time to memorize everything, so I brought everything that looked important.”
“All of it?”
“There are over a hundred structures here! I had to leave some of it back home, but everything pertinent to the building where we’ll be dining—and the half dozen buildings nearest to it—can be found in this-here wad of shit I printed out before leaving Seattle.”
“I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with you, but I bet it’s hard to pronounce when you’re drunk.”
“What’s wrong with me is that I’m an old hand at this, and I’m totally smarter than you, and that’s why I get paid the big bucks.”
“Because you’re crazy,” he concluded.
“Crazy like a fox. And that’s where we’re headed.” I indicated a big place to the right of where we’d been deposited by cab.
We began walking toward what was known only as “Building 3,” or the first employee cafeteria and store. According to the invitations, it’d been freshly remodeled—top to bottom—and this banquet was one way not just of honoring the hilariously named Buck Penny, but also of showing off the new digs.
Building 110 was the one that housed all the security, where nice young men and women in uniform checked badges and invitations, but that building wasn’t convenient to where we were headed, so the security guards had come to us. They lined up on either side of a red carpet that looked like it was made of bloody Astroturf and, with cute little flashlights in hand, they noted identification and scanned the bar codes on the announcements with weird tricorder-looking devices.
I experienced a momentary pang of nervousness, or really, I experienced a pang of mistrust wherein I strongly considered the wisdom of taking anything Horace told me as factual, complete, accurate, and capable of withstanding outside scrutiny.
The moment passed as soon as a mustachioed fellow in a beige jumpsuit covered in patches scanned my invitation and the machine spit out an approving beep. Adrian was similarly accepted, based on his equally valid (or valid enough) invitation and a fake ID I’d helped him arrange shortly after he’d shown up in Seattle. Everyone needs a good fake ID. Especially people who hang around me.
As we approached the “cafeteria” (a spurious place for a black-tie event if ever there was one), more people joined us and we began to feel less alone, visible, and conspicuous. Not many of the banqueteers were arriving via cab; most of them worked in the area or had friends who did, I assume, for most of the attendees were walking from a parking lot around the side of the building.
We got a few sidelong glances, and when I poked around with my none-too-impressive psychic senses, I mostly got the impression that people were trying to figure out what department we worked in. Fair enough. We didn’t look familiar, and for very good reason.
I also picked up a few appreciative glances. Mostly for Adrian.
I didn’t take it personally. A majority of the guys in attendance looked like the same breed you find in your average basement comic book shop, with the exception of a few astronauts. They stood out from the crowd like rock stars at … at … well, let’s not say a comic book shop. For the sake of variety, let’s say a science fiction convention. Even if they hadn’t clearly been born of superior genetic stock, the astronauts were easy to pick out.
They were the only ones with tans.
I obviously didn’t come from finely engineered astronaut stock, but Adrian looked like he might have. Even in a penguin suit, any idiot could see that he had a body like a Greek statue, and from the neck up he displayed the bone structure of an Armani model. At least one gawker (the wife of a pasty man in thick glasses) wondered if my date was perhaps the sibling of an astronaut … a good cover, and something I wished I’d thought of sooner.
That’s always the rub. When I have nothing but time to prepare, my outings run smooth as butter on silk. But when I have to do things on the fly, I miss opportunities. It would’ve been easy as hell to find a few astronauts with siblings of approximately the right age—and then cross-reference that list with people who were comfortably far away, and unlikely to crash the banquet. Anyone floating around the stratosphere in a space station, for example.
Ah, well. I filed it away as something that someday might prove useful (or not) and strolled along the walkway into the reception area—just beyond which waited the banquet hall.
Security guards came and went, chattering into headsets and tiny microphones in code that any idiot could translate, but almost no idiots paid them a lick of attention. I did, naturally, but mostly I smiled coyly (no teeth showing) and pretended to flirt with my date.
“Any sign of her?” he asked me quietly.
“Not yet.” I felt around with my mind—and since that was really what he was asking anyway, he didn’t bug me about closing my eyes and taking a deep breath. I didn’t know what I was “looking” for, exactly, but I opened myself to the possibility of menace, rage, and vengeance. Surely that was something like what she was feeling, if she intended to come to this place and tackle this guy.
Otherwise, why bother?
But no. Nothing. All I got was the swirling mass of hungry people, bored people, nervous people, proud people, curious people, and people who were freaking out a little about the prospect of public speaking. No crazy people—or more to the point, since I knew what to look for better than anyone in the world, I didn’t feel anyone’s focused, driven, laser-like concentration. So I knew she wasn’t here yet. Because when she arrived, that’s what it’d be—that’s what I’d feel. It wouldn’t be wild and mindless, or outrageous and nonsensical.
It’d be precision hatred in motion.
Yeah. I’d know it when I saw it. Felt it. Whatever.
Adrian and I were ushered to a set of seats at a round table with about a dozen other people, none of whom we knew and all of whom we actively sought to avoid from a conversational standpoint. We kept our heads close and acted like newlyweds, talking softly to each other and generally ignoring everyone else—as if no one could possibly be as fascinating as our own company.
It was rude, absolutely, but couples in a new relationship are rude beyond belief, and nobody ever throws them out of a banquet for it. Or that was my rationale.
The waiters came around asking what wine we wanted, and what our selection from the very narrow menu might be. Adrian put in a request for the prime rib with braised asparagus, and I echoed the request because it wasn’t like I gave a damn what food they put in front of me.
I did put in for a glass of their house red, though. It sounded nice. I didn’t intend to down a whole serving, given how slowly I process the stuff, but that wouldn’t stop me from giving it a taste.
The room was huge, and split into two halves with an aisle in the middle. I got the distinct impression that this was not the usual layout, but it was to be expected when a special event was on deck. Whatever usual folding or otherwise cheap tables were in use, they’d all been put away for the evening and replaced with fancier versions, covered in posh white tablecloths with expensive floral centerpieces and candles that could’ve brought the whole joint down in under an hour.
Up front there were two long tables separated by a podium—or a “lectern” as Adrian was so gauche as to correct me when I whispered something about it into his ear.
“You have to stand on a podium. A lectern is what you stand behind.”
“You’re a douche-canoe.”
“Where did you pick that one up? It’s hilarious.”
“Don’t you undercut my insult,” I joked in a soft breath, this time up against his cheek. “And I don’t know. I just heard it somewhere. I like it, don’t you? I think I’ll bust it out more often.”
“It’s rich. Alliterative. Disgusting. It’s very you.”
“Thanks,” I said, and would’ve said more but I stopped myself short and froze, with my head hung low and close to his.
He noted the change and asked, all business, “What is it?”
At the very distant edge of what I could perceive and what I couldn’t, I noticed her. Not as a spark, or a flash. Not as a swelling of emotion or maniacal havoc-wreaking, but a presence sharp and true.
“Her,” I whispered. “She’s here.”
“Where?”
“Outside.” I looked up.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Adrian swore. “Not another rooftop battle.”
“At least it isn’t raining. And no, she’s not on the roof. She’s outside, that way.” I cocked my head in the general direction of the stage—but I meant behind it, on the other side of the wall and another dozen yards into the night.
“What if she didn’t bring the bones?”
“You can bet she’s brought one.”
“What if she left the rest at home?”
I’d been wondering along similar lines, but now wasn’t the time to start backtracking and overthinking things. “I don’t plan to kill her,” I murmured. “If I have to, I’ll drag the location out of her.”
“Using your …” His eyebrows wiggled, like he was trying to use his face to gesture at his own hair.
I knew what he meant. “Yeah, using those.” My psychic powers, that is.
It was mostly untrue. My powers aren’t worth a shit, in the grand scheme of useful powers. I’d get a lot more mileage out of telekinesis, or levitation. But no. I get coach-class brain waves, and that’s it. Better than nothing, but not much.
Not without divine intervention could I have wrested any information out of anybody’s head except maybe Adrian’s—and only him because he’d taken a swig out of Lake Me. Someday, we were really going to have to test the limits of that communicative ability.
But today was not that day. And I didn’t want him thinking maybe I’d smack around a woman nearing sixty, bullying her like an old-fashioned pimp. I’m not saying I’ve never roughed up a fool in the name of information-gathering, because that’d be a bald-faced lie. But I knew before it even became hypothetically in the cards that I wouldn’t do it to Creed … and not simply because I didn’t think it’d work. Don’t ask me why. Just a feeling I had. Maybe I’m psychic or something.
“Ray?”
“I have to get outside.”
“I’m coming with you,” he said.
I grabbed his hand. “No, I need to take care of this alone. I want to talk to her, crazy-bitch-to-crazy-bitch.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes,” I vowed. “Please, I don’t want to spook her, and I don’t want to hurt her if I don’t have to.”
“You’re being weird about this.”
I frowned at him, hard. “Which sets this occasion apart from all others exactly … how?”
“You’ve got me there.”
“Thank you. And now, I hope, I’ve got you here. You have your cell?”
“In my pocket.” He tapped it with his free hand. I heard the plastic case slide around in his pants, and knock against the seat.
“Good. Put it on vibrate. I’ll ping you if I need anything.”
“You’re just … leaving me here? With all these … people?”
Some of those people were now looking at us, as the conversation had gotten barely loud enough to overhear in snippets. And up front, over by the lectern, thank you very much Adrian, the show was starting to get under way—thus the sudden lack of background noise that revealed us to be obnoxious chatterers.
A spotlight was aimed at the still-vacant position of honor, but the “important” guests—or the guests who had seats up front with the honoree—were shuffling into position at their labeled place settings. The dull roar of a room full of whisperers dropped precipitously as a tall, thin man stepped up to the microphone and gave it a tap.
A squeal of feedback cut through the remainder of the noise, and only served to underscore the similar peal of energy that was raring itself up outside. Elizabeth Creed was getting closer.
“Adrian, I’m going. If you want to leave too, hit the men’s room or something. Just leave this one to me, please?”
“Men’s room it is,” he grumbled and rose with me. He made some excuses disguised as pleasantries to meet the curious questions in the eyes of our tablemates, then hustled off behind me.
He really was good at this high-society thing. Better than I would’ve expected, given his blue-collar, fighting-man background. Mostly he just kept his mouth shut, took care not to spill anything, and nodded politely when spoken to. I guess sometimes it really is that simple.
I wondered idly if he’d done any undercover work. It would explain a few things, and it would also get me fantasizing about him busting out James-Bond-like all over the place. I rather liked that thought, but I shelved it for the moment and let him accompany me from the rear, all the way to the back exit where a man in a suit and an earpiece asked if he could help us.
What he really wanted to know was, “Why are you leaving right now, when things are just getting started?”
With feigned embarrassment and in a breathy voice, I asked if he could point me toward the ladies’ room. Adrian put one arm protectively at my waist and added, “She isn’t feeling well.”
“Oh, absolutely,” said earpiece man. He indicated a corridor to our left and said, “All the way down, you’ll see the signs.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. Earpiece man was sending us in the right direction; I could feel the signal getting stronger as I tap-tap-tapped along in my not-too-high heels down the marble-floored hallway. Adrian’s footsteps were likewise noisy in my wake, which only served to remind me that he was effectively accompanying me even though I’d told him not to.
Outside the men’s room and ladies’ room was a pair of plush benches, perfectly primed for impatient husbands and boyfriends who were waiting on someone to touch up her lipstick one last time before deigning to rejoin his presence. I stopped, faced Adrian, took him by the shoulders, and shoved him down onto a seat.
Surprise registered in his eyes. I’d shoved him pretty hard. He needed a reminder that I’m the big strong mean one, and I’m in charge here. This was my job, my commission, and my crazy lady who needed to be addressed.
“You’re going to stay here and wait for me.”
Applause broke out in the big room behind us, where we should’ve been sitting at our round table surrounded by strangers.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive. This might take a few minutes, so if I were you, I’d go back inside and grab a bite to eat.”
“I already had takeout, remember?”
“Yes, but this will be better. And it’s free,” I told him, and I left him sitting there when I began my dash around the corner.
I had no clue if the hallway would eventually lead to an exit of some sort, but it was pointed the right direction, so I took it. I didn’t run into anyone coming or going, which was good, because I was really trucking—fast enough to make any passersby wonder real hard about that red streak blazing past. Even in the high heels I was making good time.
It’s hard to describe the sound of someone else’s mind. It’s not a frequency, or a cadence, or a colored light. It’s all of that and something else, too, both more distinct and less so.
But I heard Elizabeth Creed. I would’ve known her anywhere, with that demented, dazzling-bright consciousness. Something broken, but still beautiful. I can’t explain it any better than that.
I went toward it, feeling the pull of it like a leash, but I stopped when I hit a dead end with two doors. Both were offices, and the one to my right was closer to the direction I wanted, closer to Creed, so I followed her in the straightest line I could. I pushed the appropriate office door open and found it empty, cluttered, and uninteresting except for a window against its far end. Somehow, I’d made it to the exterior edge of the building—which was great, since I didn’t really want to punch a hole in a wall to let myself out.
I’m not afraid of taking the direct approach, don’t get me wrong. But even for me, making a hole through drywall, studs, and framework takes more time than oh, say, opening a window.
I didn’t break it open, though that would’ve been marginally faster. Instead I felt around its edges for any hint of a security system. Finding that it was wired into the main building’s components, I took care to unlock it properly and slide it up without too much speed or urgency. Some of these newfangled systems are very sophisticated; they can tell the difference between a window cracked for the breeze and a window flung open in an escape attempt, so I played it slow and steady. This was NASA, not the Starbucks down the street. They actually had shit in the space center that they didn’t want people looking at.
It didn’t take me more than ten seconds to suss all this out, formulate a plan, and put it into action, but it sure as hell felt like forever. I needed to be careful this time. Creed had caught me off guard in California, but she wouldn’t do it here.
Finally I got the window jacked up enough to let me out. I had to pop out a screen but it wasn’t attached to the alarms, thank God, so I bent myself over double—almost folding myself in half—to get outside into the warmish, southeast Texan air.
A breeze kicked up around me and I froze.
It might’ve been nothing, or it might’ve been the start of a Creed spell coming down the pike; either way, standing there like a pink flamingo on a lawn wasn’t going to help anything, so I roused myself, shook off my nervousness, and followed my ESP as far as it would take me.
It took me over an open field of grass, into which my heels sank like I was drilling for oil. I whipped them off, held them by jamming my wrist through the heels’ slingback straps, and carried on—hoping I was moving fast enough that surveillance equipment wouldn’t catch me, but knowing that it might regardless. With the swirly logo everywhere, stamped on everything, it was hard to forget I was at a NASA compound, and hey, this place is where they do all the wazzy tech that fires shit up into outer space. I might as well assume they had very good security.
Once I was outside, I found her signal harder to follow. I’m not sure why, but it may have had something to do with the electricity in the air—the now-all-too-familiar tang of ozone rushing up to clutter the atmosphere. And with it came humidity, swirling and lifting; I could feel the hairs on my arms rising, and I even started to sweat, which made me mad. Nobody wants to sweat in an eighty-year-old Chanel.
But there was nothing to be done about it now except find the woman who was fiddling with the weather before, heaven help me, it started to rain. My poor dress would never be the same if it got all streaky with watermarks.
There.
I felt her again, a blip on an overwrought radar in my brain.
I spun around, hunting for some sign of her, wondering where she’d gone off to so quickly—and why I’d lost her psychic trail so fast upon exiting the building. But there she was. She’d stopped moving. She had ensconced herself on a set of stairs leading up to a building covered with banners that looked designed to attract children. They announced things like SPACE CAMP and had pictures of stretchy-faced kids screaming with joy on the astronaut training simulators.
I didn’t know what number building this was, so even if I’d had time to go fluttering through all my handy-dandy printouts, it wouldn’t have done much good.
Regardless, I had her in my sights.
She stood with her feet planted firmly apart, braced on the middle stair in the middle of the way—as if she’d triangulated it that way on purpose. Beside her left foot was a canvas bag (which I prayed held the rest of the bones), and in her right hand something pale and white glowed. And so did her eyes.
Either she hadn’t done that before, or I hadn’t noticed it last time. Could be, this was a different spell, that’s all. What the fuck did I know about magic, anyway? Virtually nothing, that’s what.
But I knew that a schizophrenic woman with a whole lotta power was on the verge of bringing down a building (somehow) in which I had (stupidly) left one of my only friends in the world, sitting outside a ladies’ room and twiddling his thumbs. And I also knew that last time’s strategy of “confront, accuse, and attack” hadn’t gone so smashingly, so this time I was going to bring her down like an antelope. It wouldn’t be personal, and it’d go down with regret, but I’d do what I had to do, now that I knew what needed to be done.
I couldn’t tell if she’d seen me or not. She hadn’t acknowledged my presence at all, and she was preoccupied with destroying the space center, so it’s probably safe to say she had a lot on her mind and might not have been giving her surroundings her full, undivided attention. I used this to my advantage, sneaking up on her with my best burst of blinding quickness.
I swept up the steps—there were about thirty of them, tiered like a fancy old library. Then, before she’d gotten a good look at me or seen what I was up to, I zoomed up behind her, swiped the bag at her feet, and slung it over my shoulder.
I retreated to the overhang at the top of the stairs, out of her immediate reach though not, I guess, out of range of a tornado or whatever. I didn’t feel safe, but I felt like this was as good a defensive position as any. There in the shadows, I unzipped the bag and checked to make sure that yes, all was in order. It was full of penis bones.
I watched her.
At first, she didn’t notice that anything had happened. Why should she? She hadn’t seen anything, hadn’t heard anything, hadn’t expected any interruption. A chant was rising in her throat, moving incrementally from a gasp to a growl, to a normal speaking tone, and it could only get worse from there—or that’s how I looked at it.
From my position close to the entrance doors, at the very top of the stairs, I called her name. “Elizabeth Creed.”
I said it calmly, with as much authority as I could muster. I didn’t have to work too hard for it; after all, if all the bones that weren’t in her hand were in the bag, all I had to do was keep her from destroying Houston before the sun came up. Don’t ask me why, but that didn’t feel so daunting. This all sounded so much worse when I had to track her down and find her, too.
She stopped chanting, surprising us both. The glow in her hand waned ever so slightly. She turned to look for me, and then spotted me. She cleared her throat and said, “You again.”
“Me again, yes. Please—” I held out a hand to forestall whatever move or proclamation she was about to make. “I only want to talk.”
I could tell by the way her eyes narrowed that she didn’t buy it, and she knew it for a goddamn fact when she looked down and saw that her satchel was gone. It was slung over my back, so not in her direct line of sight—but the incriminating strap across my chest no doubt told her plenty.
“You want to talk?” she asked, a rhetorical uselessness if ever there was one. “Then tell me why you keep interrupting.”
Barefoot, still holding those shoes dangling from my wrist, I descended a couple of stairs—bringing myself closer, but not so close that I looked aggressive. I wasn’t trying to threaten her; like an idiot, I was trying to connect with her. “I’m not trying to stop you. I was hired to get the bones, that’s all.”
She absorbed this, considered it, and said, “I can see that you’ve got them. Mission accomplished?”
“Except for the one you’re holding, basically, yeah. It’s nothing personal. It’s only money.”
“It’s exactly the opposite of that,” she told me—in reference to her own situation, I assume. “Mistakes have to be unmade. I’m unmaking them.”
“No, not really. You’re just destroying things and places that have made you angry. That doesn’t undo them. It just makes a big mess for other people to clean up.”
“You’re wrong, but I don’t give a damn.”
“Neither do I, as far as that goes. I realize you see it differently—”
“Because I’m crazy?”
“Well, you said it so I didn’t have to. But I’m not judging.”
“How refreshing.”
“No, you don’t understand. I … I have issues, too. Not the same as yours, but bad enough that I’ve spent a lifetime—longer than that, really—listening to the same things you have, I bet.”
“You don’t know anything about me.” Calmly spoken—a declaration more than an argument.
I responded in kind. “Yes, I do—but only what I’ve seen on paper. I only know the dry details, like why you’re here—and why you want to wipe Buck Penny off the face of the earth. And let me be clear, I have no problem with that.”
Still narrow, her eyes were made sharper as her brows lowered in a frown. “Then … what are you doing here? Why are you interrupting if you’ve taken what you came for and you don’t care about me bringing down the house?”
“My friend is inside. Will you do me a favor and let me text him so he can get out? Then I won’t interfere, I swear. I’ll take these, and you can burn up that baculum, or whatever it’s called, and we’ll part friendly acquaintances, going our separate ways and nobody ever needs to speak of it again.”
Her eyes had relaxed, but somehow that only made them look keener. The madness and magic that made up her psyche … it didn’t billow around her so much as concentrate on her, like she was standing in the eye of a very tight storm. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, or even feeling. Her aura, if that’s what it could be inadequately called, gelled around her like armor.
There on the stairs, she quivered. The night shook behind her, bringing back to mind the bells in California, and I tried not to shudder. But it was there, definitely—she was doing something bad, and something odd … occupying not one place, but maybe many. She was here and not here, out of time and out of space.
But right in front of me.
I couldn’t penetrate her thoughts, not with my crappy psychic abilities. I strained to read her and failed, but I sensed she was deciding how crucial her plans for the rest of the bones might be—assuming she had such plans—and whether or not she wanted to fight me for them. While we exchanged this weird moment, I tried to shift gears and shoot a message to Adrian. It didn’t work. I could feel my projected query die out somewhere between me and the banquet hall, like I’d blown a fuse trying to read the crazy lady.
After an awkward span of seconds, she finally said, “You aren’t human.”
“I used to be.”
“But not anymore. What have you done?”
“I didn’t do anything, except fall in with the wrong crowd when I was young.”
“Are you immortal?”
“I can be killed, but I don’t know if I’ll ever die of old age.”
“That was a strangely straightforward answer, albeit a useless one.”
“Thanks.”
“And it’s only about the money?” she asked.
“I took a retrieval gig, that’s all. A friend of mine—or rather the guy who gets me most of my gigs—he wants them. They’re worth a fortune, did you know that?”
She snorted. “Of course I knew. And even if I hadn’t, I would’ve figured it out when that lying weasel on the antiques tour tried to bullshit that yokel about them.”
“Lying weasel. Yeah, that’s Horace. So I’m asking you, would it be all right if I buzzed my friend and told him to get outside before you blow the place down, or knock it down, or whatever you’re going to do?”
“It’s not the lying weasel, is it?”
“Oh Christ no. Totally different guy, I swear.”
She nodded. “All right. Go for it—since you could’ve just tackled me, bashed my brains in, and gone back inside to finish supper without a second thought. It was good of you not to.”
“Thanks,” I said, making no mention of my initial plans to bring her down like an antelope. I dug out my phone and started dialing, in case he’d pick up if it buzzed as a ring, not a message.
“But I have to wonder why you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Kill me and move along. You could have, couldn’t you? This time you had the drop on me.”
Adrian didn’t answer right away, so I took a different approach. As I fumbled to text on that stupid little keyboard, I replied, “Did I? My attempt to intercept you at the mission didn’t go so well, after all.”
“I surprised you. And you’re surprising me now.”
“Back at ya,” I told her as I hit SEND. All I’d sent was, “Outside. NOW.”
“How so?” she asked.
“I’ve never met anyone who was schizophrenic before. I didn’t know what to expect. But you don’t seem too …”
“Nuts? You’ve caught me on a good night,” she said with more gravitas than the sentence seemed to call for, but then again, what did I know of her brand of illness? Nothing but what I’d seen on television.
The woman midway down the stairs seemed pretty rational, except for her assertion that she could change the past by demolishing the present with magical dynamite. But I’ve been accused of worse.
I received a text response from Adrian. It said, “OMW” for “on my way,” and I hoped he meant “on my way really fucking fast,” because Creed’s bone-holding hand was starting to glow again.
“He’s coming,” I related his message. “Can you give him a minute? It’s a big building. I want to make sure he’s clear.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Oh no. He’s … a partner-in-crime, you could say.”
“Nice. It’s good to have partners. And don’t worry, this takes a minute to work up. I won’t bring down any wrath yet. I’m just setting up.”
I nodded hard and said, “Okay, thanks. Hey, do you mind if I ask … and I’m not trying to be rude, I just honestly want to know: What’s the rationale? You’re a smart lady; like I said, I’ve seen your paperwork. How will detonating mystic penis bones change anything about your past?”
She grumbled something under her breath. I heard it, but didn’t understand it; it sounded like a swear-word in a foreign language. “If I can kill them hard enough, force them back far enough, they’ll die before they meet me and make trouble for me. It’s physics. I don’t expect you to understand.”
“What, like string theory or something?” I didn’t know thing one about string theory except that it’s something conspiracy nuts use to justify their wacked-out ideas.
“No, nothing like string theory,” she said contemptuously, and I feared I’d maybe undone my tentative goodwill. Fortunately, she seemed to assume I was an idiot and not malicious. “It’s a quantum thing, but experimental, too. When you work magic into the equation, things change. Things reach farther—farther backward and farther forward, too. It’s too complicated to explain to a layperson.”
I tried hard not to blurt out, “Yeah, I bet it is,” and I succeeded—barely. Instead I said, “I accept that there’s plenty out there that I don’t understand.”
“That’s downright wise of you. Where’s your friend?” The object in her palm gleamed ominously, and the air around her body hummed. I could almost see it, as if a thin sheen of black water outlined her.
“Hmm,” I said, and sent out a psychic feeler, in case it would work this time.
He responded by asking where I was.
Thrilled by this small success, I tried to tell him, but all I had was a vague direction and a building with some stairs and some banners, so I projected, Just get the hell away from that building. She’s going to bring the whole thing down, and maybe a lot of buildings around it.
“He’s coming,” I told her. “Or he’s getting out of the way, as instructed. How long will it take you to pull this off?”
“You want to watch?”
“Kind of,” I admitted. “The only magic I’ve ever seen has been the fake kind, or the very minor kind. Disappearing pennies and the like.”
“You want to sit here and watch me tear down a building with a tropical storm and its accompanying tornadoes, killing perhaps hundreds of people, just because you’ve never seen it before?”
“When you put it that way, it sounds callous,” I agreed. “But you’re the one talking about … really? A tropical storm and tornadoes?”
“I need at least one tornado, an F3 or better. A tropical storm isn’t the most precise way to go about making one, but tornadoes are a natural by-product of such things, and I think I can control one easily enough when I get it here,” she informed me matter-of-factly.
“You think? That’s kind of taking a shotgun to a game of rock, scissors, paper, isn’t it?”
“And?”
“And …” I didn’t want to make her angry. “It seems like it’d be easier to just hire someone to lure him to a secret location, then magic the fuck out of him. It’d save a lot of collateral damage, too.”
“I thought you didn’t care about the collateral damage.”
“Except for my buddy, I don’t. Actually, never mind. He’s clear.” I knew because he picked that moment to shoot me an ESP text message equivalent, telling me so. “I’m just saying. Less trouble, that’s all. Less dramatic, sure. But less effort.”
She was actually thinking about this, which I didn’t expect. “You might have a point, but it’s too late for that now. You’ve taken the rest of the bones, so this is my last shot. And I don’t have the money to pay someone to call him out for me.”
“You couldn’t save the bone for later? Lay a trap? Psych him out?”
“Not now. The bone is charged, and the storm will come when I call it. Once it’s ready, and it’s been given a command, it can’t be uncommanded. It must fulfill its spell, or else it just loses all its power, like a battery drained of life.”
“I did not know that.” I was about to ask her something else, but a new sound at the edge of my hearing—my actual hearing, not my pitiful ESP—distracted me and I asked her instead, “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” She frowned, like she thought I was messing with her.
I held up a finger. “That … it’s …”
“It’s what?”
“Electricity,” I concluded.
“A storm’s coming. Of course there’s electricity.”
“Not that kind,” I insisted. “The kind that comes from walkie-talkies, radios, cameras, and the like. Ms. Creed, I think they’re on to you.”
“Ridiculous,” she said, and the glower on her face went all the way to her skull.
“No, I’m not fucking with you—they’re coming. If you’re going to whip up a storm, you need to do it now. And I mean right now, not later now, because they’re on the way.”
“Where?”
“Coming toward us. We have to get out of here.”
“No.”
“Do you have a tornado up your sleeve, right this second?”
“No,” she replied. “It’ll be another minute or two. Someone interrupted me.”
“Can you summon one on the fly?”
“I don’t see why not. The storm is nearly here.” She looked up at the sky.
So did I. And as was becoming common when dealing with Elizabeth Creed, there were no stars at all. The wind was picking up from the south, or I thought it must be the south. Wasn’t that where the Gulf was? South, and a little to the east? The wind smelled like brine and very old things, wafting off the ocean. It also smelled like magic—a scent I was learning to separate from the ozone, gasoline, exhaust, smoke, and other odors that billow on any given current in the civilized world.
She was right. The storm was nearly here.
But so was security from Building 110.
Small cars and a pair of golf carts with flashing green lights came homing in on the bannered building with the stairs tiered like a birthday cake. Elizabeth had to have seen them; the spinning lights were shortly joined by bursts of a whining, whirring alarm. But she did nothing to indicate she noticed them, or cared about them. She raised her arms again and restarted the chant she’d been spinning when I’d wandered up to steal her bones.
“Elizabeth, we have to go.” Her name almost stuck in my mouth. I couldn’t decide whether to call her “Ms. Creed,” or “Doctor,” or “ma’am.” Simply “Elizabeth” felt too informal for a woman who, frankly, sort of awed me. But what else was there? We were pressed for time.
Her answer came in the form of an unbroken chant, a glowing bone in her hand, and a surge to the storm that was coming on shore. She had no intention of moving, running, or otherwise leaving. Slowly, she began to rise off the stairs. Not far. Only an inch or two. But she did it effortlessly, or that’s how it looked, and the shimmering darkness vibrated around her. With fleeting curiosity I wondered if my impressions hadn’t been right—if she wasn’t both here and not-here, on these steps but on some other steps, too, somewhere else.
I wondered if she could turn her head, or break the bone, or say the right string of words and simply vanish into the other place she straddled with her magic and madness.
But her storm wasn’t fast enough to outpace the security people.
One by one, like popcorn kernels, they bounced out of their cars and carts with guns brandished—or being whipped out of holsters in preparation for brandishing. These were real guns, not neutered security-guard billy clubs or Tasers.
“Elizabeth, you said you could do this on the fly.”
She nodded, but didn’t insert so much as a comma into the string of words that spilled out of her mouth.
“Good. Because we have to fly.”
The two guards who were fleetest of foot were getting near enough to fire off a shot or two, if they really wanted. And with Creed’s hands and eyes glowing LED-style, she made a tempting target. Would they shoot an apparently unarmed woman just for standing on the stairs and glowing? Maybe. They didn’t know she was holding a bone and not a weapon. I mean, it was a weapon, but no rational, right-thinking person would’ve assumed as much if he or she could see it clearly.
Over the rising weather, I heard the clicks of guns cocking and the shouts of men and women in uniforms, telling Elizabeth Creed to stand down, put her hands up, and step down quietly. None of that was going to happen.
Time stretched—an effect of the dangerous situation or perhaps the magic that filled the air, making it dense and heavy, very much like high humidity.
No one had seen me yet. I was beneath the overhang, standing in shadows. They would have had to come as close as the maniacal sorceress to detect me, and none of them were overly eager to approach her. More commands were shouted. Precious seconds ticked past—only a few of them—while I wrestled with myself over what I knew I was about to do.
It was a terrible idea. A stupid idea beyond stupid ideas. But that’d never stopped me before, and it wouldn’t this time, either.
“Fuck it,” I said.
I snapped the heels off my shoes and jammed the now-flats back on my feet, then unzipped the bag of bones and tossed my purse inside it. The purse was bigger than a clutch, yes—but not heavy enough to break anything, or so I prayed. There was no time to play gently and I figured, hey—if one or two went bust, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Right? Oh God, I hoped not.
I adjusted the bag’s strap, tightening it across my chest so as to hopefully keep it from bouncing around while I ran. Because baby, I was about to run.
Adrian? Where are you?
Parking lot behind the banquet building.
Duh, Ray.
Start one for me. I don’t care how, but get one moving. We’re about to need a getaway car.
I’ll pick something snazzy.
I didn’t care if he picked a ’72 Gremlin, so long as it ran. Well, that’s not true. I didn’t really want a Gremlin, but I’d settle for one—so long as it’d hold three people, one of whom might be joining us against her will.
I screwed my courage to the sticking place, took a ceremonial deep breath, and right as the security people were getting ready to open fire … I dashed down the stairs at my very top speed.
Because I am aware that getting grabbed at such a blinding run could hypothetically hurt someone (or at least mightily stun and confuse someone), I braced myself to nab Elizabeth Creed with as much support as possible. This meant that I threw my right arm behind her knees—all the better to sweep her off her feet—and my left arm behind her shoulders, so I effectively picked her up like a child in a big squeezy bear hug.
Her breath caught in her throat, and the incantation stumbled as I stumbled, too, but I crushed her against my chest and kept running. Thirty seconds earlier, I’d had time to change my mind and head in the other direction. Now people were shooting at me.
Holding her felt like holding a really high-powered sex toy cranked up to eleven. She was solid in my arms, but the darkness moved with her, and it tickled at me—sending little jolts of energy up and down my body. Panic made me contemplate my own existence. Was I in the real world? Was I somewhere else? Was I in two places at once, just like her?
This was no time for philosophy.
Bullets banged against buildings and ricocheted off the sidewalks at my feet. I took it off road, leaving the sidewalks and the brightly lit oases of NASA buildings for the quieter, darker, soft-shoed progress of the lawns. Just once I felt the sting and ping of a round snapping into the turf nearby—casting up grass, dirt, and pebbles. I wasn’t worried about any near-misses, though. If they had a trained sniper watching from wherever, that was all right with me. Let him waste his ammo. I’d be well out of his range shortly after I was out of his sight.
(Look at me, assuming masculine pronouns. I’m a shitty feminist, it’s true. But surely the sheer statistical majority of snipers are men? Does this let me off the hook?)
To her everlasting credit, Creed didn’t actually stop chanting. Her words snagged when I hit bumps, and her cadence became forced more than the easy, steady stream of syllables she’d spewed out before. Of course, she was being carried at something close to the speed of sound, so power to her for not losing her place, or however it goes when you’ve clearly memorized hundreds (thousands?) of words on a very destructive, sensitive subject like “assassinating people via hurricane.”
On and on she spoke, breathlessly, fiercely, practically in my ear.
On and on I ran, not fully certain of where I was headed, apart from “back toward the building this lady is trying to blow up, and then behind it.”
I crossed my fingers and prayed that Adrian had found a suitable getaway vehicle, and decided to assume the best, since he hadn’t offered any objection when I gave him the assignment in the first place.
Above us the sky was moving in a big black block, broken up by the shadows and outlines of clouds bigger than mountains, sailing in dark and monstrous from the Gulf. Lightning cracked among them, lacing them with light that was smothered almost instantly, as if it’d drowned in oil.
It was hard not to look, or it was hard until the rain started—and then it was hard to hold up my face because the droplets were huge, jabbing down from the hideous, plague-sick night clouds like vengeful thumbs. I blinked against them, but running as fast as I was, they only hit me harder and smacked me to the point of stinging—and to the point of wondering if one could be flayed alive by raindrops.
I clutched Elizabeth against me tightly, trying to shield her by holding her head and torso inside the hollow of my neck, and up against my breasts—taking the brunt of it if I could. In retrospect, it was her damn storm; I should’ve let her get smacked around by it for a while, but I didn’t. Even though she was larger than me, taller by a couple inches and heavier by twenty or thirty pounds, she felt fragile in my arms.
At the edge of the parking lot I stopped, stunning us both—but not stunning her so badly that she ceased her susurrus whispers, even as I set her on her feet and she swayed there, then leaned on me, then stood upright without me. Upon letting her go, I shook my hands like they’d fallen asleep, for they were racked with pins and needles. Then I stood there, shivering and clutching myself while her power gathered and her bone glowed like the moon.
After a moment, the pattern of her mumblings drew to a close and she bent forward to rest her hands on top of her knees. Her head hung down. She breathed like she was fighting the air for every lungful. I could see that she’d finished something. I could tell it from the cracking shock of light that cut the sky from horizon to horizon, and the way the wind screamed in waves that came steadier and steadier, until the whole world was a wall of billowing air that couldn’t be fought, cajoled, or reasoned with. I could see it in the way the undulating aura dissipated, and left her concretely before me without any of the distortion she’d carried with her thus far.
“Elizabeth?” I asked her, putting a hand on her shoulder.
Before she answered, a squeal of tires somewhere far away—no, somewhere very close—made a valiant effort against the buffeting wind and the persistent noise. I craned my neck and looked around, hunting for the source and hoping like hell it was Adrian, because if we hadn’t lost those security people, they could well be coming up on us. Or the cameras. Shit, there were cameras everywhere. If they had any kind of central authority, someone in Building 110 was watching every camera in every zone. They’d spot us eventually.
This wasn’t that.
My first guess was the right one: It was Adrian, screeching around a line of parked vehicles in a big-ass Hummer. “I thought they quit making those,” I said to no one, and the storm ate my observation. Who cared if it was old, new, or vintage? It was exactly the kind of vehicle someone might need to move through a hurricane, and fuck me but we needed something to move us through a hurricane.
Had Elizabeth thought that far ahead? Had she ever planned to leave in one piece, or was she expecting to sit down and die in the place where she used to work? But there I went again, trying to rationally analyze an irrational situation. Besides, I had her. I could ask her later, when we were someplace dry and unassailed by meteorological mayhem.
At the edge of the chaos, I heard people’s voices. I looked behind us, worried about more gunshots and thinking that I sure was glad some earth-hating redneck fascist had bought a war vehicle in which to tootle around southeast Texas.
No worries. Well, not the worries I expected. The security people were out there, yes—but they’d either lost interest in us, or they hadn’t figured out we were the people they’d been chasing earlier.
They were distracted by other things at the moment, namely the crowd that was leaking out of the banquet building via every door that would allow an exit. The overdressed guests were shouting to be heard over the weather commotion, and some were saying, “Bugger all this for a lark,” and heading toward the parking lot. Bowed against the wind, ducking wind-tossed debris, and in some cases holding menus over their heads for the world’s most inadequate rain protection … they pooled around the building like a bunch of morons. Who the hell leaves the shelter of a big, secure structure when a sudden storm comes galloping onshore?
But maybe they weren’t total morons. I want to think they sensed that something wasn’t right, or that they needed to escape the venue rather than hide inside it. They couldn’t have known it was the right thing to do, not on any conscious level, but instinct is funny sometimes.
So are cell phones, and iPhones, and the kinds of devices that might have told them they were being subjected to a very personal form of attack. Everyone who’d subscribed to severe weather alerts would’ve gotten a text message that something messed-up was under way.
And, I had to conclude, no one could’ve guessed how quickly it would come. I’m sure some of them assumed they could outrun it and wanted to head home to beat the rain. Even so, it all felt counterintuitive to me. Maybe that’s because I don’t know dick about hurricanes. Perhaps there’s some protocol with which I’m unfamiliar, but I doubt it. I think it was just people being people. Being clueless, and inadvertently self-destructive.
Adrian squeezed the Hummer between two cars with cheerful abandon—the kind of cheerful abandon that creates a great rending of steel and leaves paint chips and broken light covers everywhere. It put him right in front of us, though—stuck in his headlights.
Through the windshield, I could see his face. It was contorting into something like surprise, confusion, suspicion, and outright disbelief. Fair enough. I hadn’t told him I was bringing company.
No time to fight with him about it.
I dragged Elizabeth to the back passenger’s-side door, wrapped my chilly hand around the rain-soaked latch, and gave a yank that almost pulled the door off, but didn’t. It opened, and I bodily tossed my companion inside.
She didn’t put up even the slightest token of resistance. From looking at her, I assumed this was due to the fact that she was exhausted. We both appeared half drowned and run ragged, but I hadn’t been hanging around summoning the elements all evening, so between the two of us I was in better shape.
As I climbed into the passenger’s seat and whipped the door shut, I heard her say, “Ah. There it is. In time, I hope.” Then she put her head down on the seat, and exhaled with a smile that signified a job well done—or vengeance well achieved. Or that unicorns were bringing her diamond cough drops, I don’t know.
She wasn’t dead, but she was out cold.
I knew it immediately. The presence of her psyche disappeared from mine, as neatly and suddenly as if someone had flipped a switch—meaning, of course, that her aforementioned plans of controlling twisters were out the window, unless she’d somehow programmed them before passing out.
“What the hell have you done?” Adrian all but shouted at me.
“Don’t yell. I’m right here. And you—get us out of here.”
With a draw of his elbow he threw the Hummer into gear, but not without complaining. “You brought her along for the ride? Have you completely lost your mind this time?”
“I couldn’t leave her,” I countered. “People were shooting at her. And she seemed nice.”
“Nice?” He hit the gas and the wheels spun, then caught and shot us forward. The windshield wipers were banging back and forth full tilt, doing virtually nothing to clear the view but giving it the ol’ college try.
“Nice enough. I wanted to help.”
“You’re deranged.”
It was rude of him, yes, but I didn’t press it. I grabbed the seat belt instead and strapped myself down. I’d never been inside a Hummer before, so the buckles, braces, and Oh-Shit bars were in an unfamiliar formation. Struggling with the buckle, I got myself fastened into position just in time for Adrian to hop the curb and take us bouncing across the flooding prairies of neatly mowed grass that lay in strips among the compound’s structures.
“Where are we going?” he asked me. “And what did she mean?”
“As far away from here as we can get. Inland, whichever direction that is. And what do you mean, what did she mean?”
“Inland? That’s the best you’ve got?”
Conveniently enough, there was a compass built in a bubble on the dash. It said we were going south, which wasn’t good. “North, then. North or west. Look.” I poked the bubble, and the small globe within it swayed. “Turn around.”
“Ha.”
Behind us, the fastest of the vehicle-owning engineers had made it to their chariots, and the parking lot was clotting with a honking knot of fender-benders. “We need a detour. And just before she conked out back there, she said It’s here, and in time, or something like that. What’s here?”
I craned around to see into the back. Adrian took a sharp left turn and Elizabeth Creed rolled off the seat, down onto the floorboards.
My bad. I should’ve strapped her in, but at the time it hadn’t seemed like the most efficient use of those scrambling moments. She was probably better off down there anyway. She didn’t have as much room to toss about and get herself hurt. But she wasn’t really the focus of my attention now. After making note of her position, the only thing I could see was the back windshield.
Or that’s not quite what I mean. I looked toward the windshield and saw nothing but a sheet of black. At first I thought it was a ludicrous tint job, the kind that douchebags sometimes get when they want to pretend like they’re drug dealers. But no, it was not a tint. Just the sky, which was falling down.
“Adrian …”
“I’m going as fast as I can!”
The Hummer scuttled over the curbs and over the grass at a speed so uncomfortable that every bump felt like someone punching me in the tailbone.
“Get us away from the banquet hall. Or the cafeteria—whatever that was.”
“I’m. Working. On. It.” He informed me through gritted teeth.
Something huge and round smacked loudly against the front windshield, breaking off one of the wipers in a violent, smashing twist. Lightning told me it was a stop sign. The brief blip of illumination also told me that it’d cracked the windshield, but the structural integrity held.
We weren’t driving anymore; we were wading through the fiercely blowing litter of the entire NASA compound, all of it being hurled via winds traveling so fast I shuddered to speculate. Rocks, leaves, a bicycle, and a single cell phone kamikazed the Hummer en masse. We bullied onward, despite the fact that we couldn’t see where we were headed, and if it weren’t for the bumbling bubble compass, we would’ve no doubt driven around in circles.
“Shit,” Adrian declared. “Shit shit shit shit shit.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“This place is a goddamn maze!”
“I have maps!” I remembered.
“Fat lot of good they’re doing in your bag, there.”
“Give me a second, would you?”
I unzipped the sodden duffel and retrieved my bag, which was not quite soaked through. That damn duffel was “water-resistant” at best.
It dawned on me that I should pray I hadn’t broken any of the bones, but right then and there it seemed like a minor hypothetical calamity compared with being trapped in a space compound while a hurricane and all its attendant twisters came barreling toward us.
“Got ’em,” I announced, and I flipped through the damp sheets in a frantic hunt for the pertinent schematics. “We need a point of reference.” Gaining one was easier said than done, since water cascaded over every window, and on the other side of the water was nothing but mobile darkness incoming. “Forgive me, but I think I have to roll down a window.”
“No.”
“Yes. Can’t see anything with it up. My apologies, but here I go.” I pressed my first two fingers down on the window button like I was taking its pulse. The sheet of tempered glass went skootching jerkily down until I was on the receiving end of a downright biblical facial.
I squinted against the water and leaned my head out as far as I could—then unbuckled my seat belt so I could climb up on the window and sit on it Dukes-of-Hazzard-style because, son of a bitch, if we didn’t find our way out of this rat trap soon we were all going to fucking drown … or possibly be picked up and chucked into a wall by that giant tornado behind us.
It was my turn to say, “Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit!”
“Do you see anything to guide us?”
“Yes!” I screamed back inside the cabin. “A tornado! A big black one!”
“And that’s going to guide us how?”
“We’re going to get as far away from it as we can, as fast as we can!” I wiped a sopping curtain of hair out of my face and threw my head left and right, hunting for anything of use. But it was so hard to see, even for a monster like me, and it was so hard to look away from the tornado.
It’s not like she hadn’t warned me.
The woman said she was bringing a tornado, and by God, she’d brought a tornado. Say what you will about her mind or her methods, but hot damn. That’s follow-through.
Off in the distance I saw a huge banner waving—the kind of vinyl sheet that’s easily the size of a house, flapping from one corner and being on the very verge of ripping loose. A lightning strike landed way too close, causing Adrian to jerk the wheel and nearly fling me out of the open window … but it also gave me the short clarity to see that the banner advertised a new exhibit in the space museum. Something about the progression of flight suits from the sixties to the present.
Okay. Space museum.
I lunged back inside the Hummer and sat wetly on my maps, which were now absolutely dripping. That didn’t stop me. They were still readable. I pulled them out from under my butt and ran a finger along the pages until I found the museum building—only to learn that it wasn’t one structure, but several. Regardless, they were close enough together to give me an idea where we were. This idea, combined with the tempest-tossed compass, sufficed to show me the way.
I force-rolled the window back up—an exercise in futility tantamount to closing the barn door after the barn has burned down.
“We’re about to hit a cross street,” I said, pointing pointlessly up ahead, as if he could see what I was trying to indicate. “Take a right, and the road ought to go straight for a few blocks.”
Adrian discovered this cross street by virtue of plowing over the YIELD sign. Its red-and-white design mocked us from the windshield until it slid slowly off the side and stuck corner-down into the street. It didn’t stay there long. The wind grabbed it and threw it like a discus, surely beheading or otherwise belimbing anyone unfortunate enough to get in its way.
“Yes,” I said, gesticulating wildly. “This way! Now at the next … it’s not an intersection, I don’t think. It’s a roundabout. Take it far enough around so that you’re going straight.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!”
“Yes it does! Just pretend it’s not a roundabout, and you’re going straight! Or shit, just do what I tell you!”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
I growled, “You’re the one who wants to play ghoul. Here! Yes! Go right—go around to the right, I mean.”
He did, and I looked behind us only to see that the tornado had not gotten any farther away, and if anything it looked bigger, meaner, and closer. That might’ve been my imagination, but I didn’t think so.
“Here,” I said, punching him in the right arm. “Here, right here. Now veer off to the right again—see? It’s like there was no circle in the middle and you just went straight.”
“Roundabouts are fucking retarded.”
“No doubt.”
“Now where?” he asked, straining to see through the insufficiently cleared glass.
“Straight, until the road dead-ends in a T,” I said, consulting my notes. I consulted them fast. They were falling apart in my hands. “Then go left, and we ought to be home free.”
“Ought to be?”
“Let it never be said that I made promises I can’t keep.”
“Sometimes I hate you. A little.”
“Back at you, gorgeous,” I said, giving up on the maps. I wadded up what was left and chucked the clumps of disintegrating paper into the backseat before I remembered Creed was there. Upon checking her status and noting that it was unchanged, I decided that it didn’t matter if she played host to some enormous map spitballs. This was all her fault anyway.
The Hummer heaved and jumped one more curve—a big one, and I had no idea if it’d been on the map or not—but suddenly we were on something that drove like a regular road. Beneath the tires, regular asphalt crunched, not the poured cement of driveways and compound paths; and within the sheets of water slicing down through the headlights I could see streaks of yellow.
Adrian saw them, too. He said, “Lane markers.”
“Is this the interstate?”
“No, we haven’t gone that far. But I’ll take it.”
“I don’t see any other cars,” I said with the first wisps of optimism I’d felt in an hour.
“Me either. It might just be a service road, or a local route. Who cares? It’s empty, it’s straight, and it’s pointing us away from the tornado. Right? I don’t see it.” He sat up to look into the rearview mirror.
I turned around and said, “I see it, but it’s not getting any closer. I think we’re leaving it behind.”
“Jesus be praised,” he said under his breath.
“I wouldn’t go that far. I think it stopped on top of the cafeteria. That’s why it’s not coming toward us anymore. It’s busy tearing shit up back there.”
“Just doing its job,” he said, and gave the Hummer more gas than was probably safe—given that we were headed top speed down a two-lane road, in the dark, in the absolutely-not-fucking-around rain, with only one working windshield wiper. But we rolled like hell now that we weren’t scaling curbs, medians, and signs at every turn.
Every tick of every yellow stripe took us farther away from the Johnson Space Center, and away from the storm.