Vultures

by Chuck Wendig

  She envisions the next act will come quickly. He leans in as he tells her this, and she knows it’s a condescending move—he likes to be heard, to be seen, and so he gets closer to her as he does it. And when he does, she’ll wrap her hands around the neck of that bottle and smash it against his head.

  But then what?

  Miriam doesn’t need to be a psychic to know that she will have dispatched the older man only to be left with the capable cartel assassin.

  There will be a bullet. Probably several. They will kill her child and maybe her before she has a chance to do anything else.

  Her hand coils into a fist.

  That means Alejandro has to go first.

  Even as she nods along to Emerson’s words, feigning some manner of agreement, she reaches out, and she finds what she needs to find—

  A turkey vulture, circling. Riding the heat, looking for death.

  She’d rather a hawk or a falcon, but the buzzard will do. It’s a big enough bird. I’ll give you death, she thinks to the bird—a bird she knows is about to be a sacrifice. Miriam slips into its mind easily enough. She stretches out through its black feathers, its bald head, its hooked beak. Its eyes—her eyes now—look down to see the house there, bathed in the bone-white light of the nearly full moon. She angles her wings for the dive—

  Wham.

  Back in her body. Sun glare behind her eyes. Light bleeding in dull, distant fireworks. Fingers are wound around her hair at the back of her skull. She’s staring down at the counter. The tea has spilled over its rim. Her skull pounds. Alejandro stands behind her—he slammed my head into the quartz countertop, she thinks—and presses the gun to her temple.

  “I saw that,” he says, chuckling darkly. “You threw out a tether—a thread to catch something. What were you fishing for out there?” The gun barrel digs into the meat of her temple and she winces, tears at the corners of her eyes. “A bird, wasn’t it? That’s how you fucked up my car with those ugly little black bastards. You little fucking bitch.”

  Emerson clucks his tongue. “Avian control. That’s something else, isn’t it? Your powers aren’t going away, Miss Black. They’re evolving.”

  Alejandro yanks her up off the stool—she feels the cut on her side reopen. His gun presses under her chin. His face is alive with excitement; he’s into it, and she can feel his erection pressing into her leg.

  Murder gets this guy off.

  Any bullshit about patterns and tapestries and preserving some kind of balance is exactly that: bullshit.

  He’s got a fetish, and it’s exactly this.

  Emerson walks around the counter, standing on the other side of her.

  “Disappointing,” he says. “I thought we could take you in, but now I fear you’ll just be a feral housecat. Clawing up the furniture. Alejandro, you’re right; I don’t think we can really contain this one.”

  “Wait,” she pleads, “I wasn’t—”

  “Take her back downstairs. I don’t want to clean blood out of my kitchen; it’ll stain the grout.”

  Alejandro wheels her around. She grunts, lashing out with a hard kick that lands square between his legs—he cries out, shoving her forward hard enough that her ass slams against the Spanish tile.

  “Your kitchen is getting bloody,” he seethes, his once-perfect black hair gone out of place, matted now against his forehead.

  He raises the gun.

  Kssht.

  His head shakes, like he was slapped by an invisible hand.

  Blood drools down a pair of new holes in each side of his head. Some oleaginous glob trickles out the far side—a bit of brain.

  The assassin looks at her one last time, then topples backward. The gun drops from his hand. It clatters against the tile.

  Miriam’s eyes dart to see—

  —the hole in the window, cracks spider-webbing out—

  —Alejandro’s left hand shaking, flopping against the tile like a dying fish ripped from the sea and chucked into an empty cooler—

  —Emerson Caldecott, staring not at her but at the gun.

  Miriam lunges for it.

  So does he.

  Her hand gets it first, and she wrestles it from his grip—

  Realizing the weapon is lost, he backpedals as she brings the gun up. His hand fishhooks, sweeping across the white counter—

  A teacup crashes against the tile as she tracks him with the pistol.

  It’s followed by a wave of scalding hot tea—

  (a dandelion tisane)

  She cries out, pulling the trigger. The shot goes wide. Splinters of wood kick up off a mantle shelf.

  Kssht.

  The window shatters.

  The wine bottle on the counter shatters too—jumping straight up like a rabbit that just got bit in the ass by a rat. Wine splashes. Green glass crackles and rains down upon her.

  Through a blur of tea and a haze of pain, Miriam grabs a stool and hauls herself to standing, nearly slipping on wine and glass.

  But Emerson Caldecott is gone.

  Time to hunt.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  TALONS OUT

  It’s suddenly, eerily familiar.

  Winding through a rich fucker’s house, gun up and out, hunting a Caldecott through the space. Last time was Eleanor’s home—a sprawling estate where she ultimately ended the lives of Eleanor’s vicious, murderous children. The matriarch herself did not die there, no—she met her end drowning in a river, clutching Wren, trying to drown her, too. Miriam saved Wren and then was lost to the rapids. It was Louis who came up and saved them both. Louis, who died six months ago—

  At Wren’s hand.

  As she stalks through the house, past a tall white-stone fireplace that seems to go on forever, past a massive television whose curved screen is nearly as big as the wall on which it hangs, past a sleek black-stone bar and toward a back patio and deck that overlook a backlit pool and Jacuzzi, she realizes what a trail of tragedy has been left in her wake. A recursive series of repeated beats, lives saved, lives ended, vengeances and vindications visited again and again, blood for blood, eyes for eyes. Miriam, hunted. Miriam, hunting. All of it circling an invisible axis like vultures in the sky.

  The back patio is open. Night has finally sunk its fangs in. A faint breeze, oddly warm, washes into the empty room. She listens. She hears nothing. Except—

  She wheels with the pistol.

  And points it right at David Guerrero.

  His gun, too, is pointed at her.

  “Miriam,” he says, gingerly. “Put the gun down.”

  “You first.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “It’s going to have to work like that.”

  She can see him working through it. Like someone trying to calculate the amount of the tip for a dining bill. He’s trying to see if he can do it. If he can win this against her.

  If the juice, as the saying goes, is worth the squeeze.

  He does the calculus. He lowers his pistol.

  She lowers hers, too.

  “Emerson Caldecott is here somewhere. Or—” She points to the door. “Out there.”

  “Are you okay? You’re bleeding.”

  She glances down. It’s true; she is. Blood soaks her side. And then there’s the old blood, gone black and brown, that soaks the other side of her shirt. Her face tingles, too, from where the tea burned her.

  It’ll heal, she thinks. Sooner than later.

  “I’m fine. You need to find him.”

  “We will.”

  The two of them stare at each other.

  “So, what happens now?” she asks. “Am I under arrest? Should I make a run for it? Are we gonna duel it out, see who’s faster on the trigger? It’s probably you, but I’ll warn you, I’m a tricky one.”

  “I have firsthand situational awareness of your trickiness, Miriam.” He holds up both hands in a supplicating gesture. “We’re square.”

  “So, you know you just killed the Starfucker?”

 
“I am aware.”

  “Then I suspect we’ve both got some explaining to do.”

  “I suspect you’re right.”

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  SEVERANCE PACKAGE

  Something about it all makes her want a cigarette so bad, she’s ready to chew the bumper off Guerrero’s car even as she leans against it. That’s part of it: the lean. She wants to lean here, craning her head back, sucking on a cancer stick, letting it fill her lungs and saturate her with a buzz like from a hive that’s lost its queen—then she’d fill the darkness with the smoke, like a ghost at the moment it is banished from the corporeal plane.

  But she doesn’t have a cigarette.

  She can’t even go back in that house and slurp the wine off the floor.

  Best she could do is go make more tea.

  Sorry, a tisane.

  Fuck.

  She’s tired. Tired from today, and yesterday, and from all the yesterdays before it. She’s ready to have this be over. In a perfect world, she’d be out there right now with Guerrero and Anaya, searching for Emerson Caldecott. But she’s bloody and bewildered, and still reeling from all that’s happened already. And, again: she’s tired.

  Tired to the marrow. Tired to the core. Tired to the soul.

  Inside the house, other FBI agents crawl. Guerrero’s car here is no longer the only one: three others showed up. A forensics team and some other on-duty agents in the area, all sweeping the house, all looking for clues to the location of Emerson Caldecott.

  Soon, a sound: the crackle of brush. Miriam flinches with the sound of coming footsteps, because at this point, would it be a surprise to see Emerson Caldecott show up, holding a bloody knife? Or Harriet Adams, now just a gory automaton held up by stiff ligaments and rubbery tendons, shuffling her way toward Miriam with renewed murderous intent?

  But it’s no foe. It’s just David and Julie. She has a rifle slung over her shoulder—Miriam learned that it was she who shot Alejandro through the window. Sitting out here in the vineyard, parked between rows, lying on the roof of the car with the rifle out, bipod down, and scope to her eye.

  They came because of Steve Wiebe.

  Or that’s what they tell her.

  But Miriam’s been sitting here on the hood of this car, leaning and sometimes reclining against the hood, and she wonders if that really lines up.

  Time-wise, she can’t say exactly how long has passed since she got here. But was it enough time for Wiebe to get the message, to contact them, to get them here and . . . what, track the cell phone in the vines? That’s their story. But does it add up? Maybe if they’re really that good . . .

  “We didn’t find him,” Julie Anaya says.

  “But we will,” Guerrero answers hastily—whether meaning to give Miriam some comfort or to salve his own ego, she can’t say.

  Miriam tries not to twitch at the news, but she does. She tenses up, knowing that there’s a Caldecott still out there, and that he will be none too happy to have lost one from his so-called Organization—at her hand, no less. She, who killed his sister already.

  But maybe that’s a problem now for Guerrero.

  She tells him as much: “Caldecott is yours,” Miriam says, though there’s a part of her that wants, as with everything, to handle this herself. Leaving another Caldecott in the world burns her up. But she has bigger beasts to slay. “I need to call Gabby, let her know I’m okay.”

  “I already called her,” Guerrero says. “Though you should probably call her yourself, too.”

  “Thanks for saving my ass,” Miriam mutters, reluctantly, still wishing like hell she had a cigarette, because right now, she’d do a cool exhale of smoke in his direction—just to make it clear that her gratitude was disaffected, detached, with a little bit of thank you, but also fuck you in there. Instead she just has to look gracious, and really, yuck, ptoo, ew.

  “We’re sorry things went south for all of us,” Guerrero says. “You know, if you had just trusted me to begin with—”

  “Fuck you,” Miriam says. “Fuck you and your trust. You were using me. You know it and I know it. You pissed all over my trust and strung me along.”

  She can see Guerrero’s starting to get mad, and is about to issue his heady retort—

  But Julie interrupts him. “You’re right, Miriam,” Julie says. “We did not treat you like an equal partner and so, here we all are. Hoisted by our own petards, as the saying goes.” The woman forces a smile. “We’re just glad it all worked out.”

  At that, Miriam leans forward. She narrows her stare to suspicious arrow slits. “Yeaaaah. I wanted to ask you about that.”

  “Go ahead,” David says, suspiciously.

  “How did it all work out?” Before they say anything, she stands up and pushes on with the brief inquisition. “We’re in, what, Monterey? Five, six hours north of Los Angeles—assuming no traffic, which is like assuming the sun won’t rise or men won’t suddenly become shitheads. I called Wiebe, what, earlier today? It must’ve taken time for him to tell you, then for you to try to track the phone—and to get here. And it’s not like you took a helicopter because”—she gestures behind her—“this is your car, Guerrero.”

  He laughs softly. “Miriam, we’re the FBI, we are a well-oiled machine that has long been trained on maximum efficiency—”

  “Except you work out of a trailer. You’re exiles from the Bureau, more or less. But you know who is efficient?”

  They stare at her, expectantly.

  “Psychics,” she says.

  Julie and Guerrero share a look.

  “Miriam, you’re mistaken—”

  Julie interrupts him. “Just tell her.”

  He runs his fingers through his hair, then sighs.

  “The day you stole Lukauskis’s name from my computer, I was . . . incensed, honestly. I felt betrayed. That was real. And what Julie did was real too. She stopped me, as you well remember. Because Julie has a gift—”

  “Clairsentience,” Miriam says. “I saw it on the list, but I confess, I don’t know what the fuck it means.”

  Julie shrugs. “I don’t know what it means either. My ability is not so clear-cut. I have instincts. I call them gut checks. I receive . . . flashes; they don’t tell me anything, really. They’re not epiphanies with information; they’re just feelings. So, I act on them.”

  “I’ve learned to listen to her feelings,” Guerrero says. “And when she said to let you go, I regrettably did. But that night, I couldn’t sleep—I wrestled with why I should’ve let you go and why I should let you stay gone. And I realized it: you’re like me. You said I’m an exile. You’re an exile too. Like it or not, who we are puts us outside the margin. But you working for me brought you in, and it . . . hamstrung you. Hobbled you like a captive. You needed to be out here in the world to do your magic. And you did. You did it. You found the killer. And you led us to him.”

  Miriam forces a bitter smile. “Cool story, bro. Still doesn’t explain how you got here.” She takes a step closer to Guerrero and in a smaller, steelier voice says, “What’s your power, Guerrero?”

  He hesitates.

  “You weren’t on the list. I didn’t see how you categorized yourself.”

  But finally, he says:

  “Officially? It’s categorized as biokinetic psychic-focused psychometry.”

  “Speak human, please.”

  “It means I can find people. Particularly other psychics.”

  She crosses her arms over her chest. “So, go back out there and find Emerson Fucking Caldecott, David. Why are we just standing here?”

  “I can only find those I’ve met.”

  “Shit.” She blinks. “Wait, so you’ve been able to find me this whole time?” And suddenly, it makes sense. “You knew where I was. You knew what I was doing. You believed I’d go after Taylor Bowman and the Starfucker on my own, and when I did, you’d go where I went. You’re telling me I was fucking bait.”

  “Not bait,” Julie says.

  “Think o
f us,” David says, “as wolves following the trail of a fellow wolf. Maybe a lone wolf, but still a wolf. You have a track record, and a good one, of finding these monsters. We knew to rely on that.”

  “Jesus.” Miriam rubs her eyes. Her side begins to itch intensely all of a sudden: she knows the injury is on the mend underneath the blood-soaked bandage. And, on cue, the baby kicks too. “So where does this leave us?”

  “As I said, we’re square. Your record is clear. You’re of course free to continue to work with us. Even as a consultant. You wouldn’t need to come in every day, you’d just be on call—”

  “No,” she says abruptly. Too abruptly, probably. “I’m a feral cat, and I don’t do well with being kept. I’d love to be domesticated, but I’ve been out here in the wild too long, Guerrero.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So, that means, for the record, there’s no money, no healthcare, nothing like that.”

  “After six months, that’s correct.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “There’s a severance package, obviously. You work for the government, and we take care of our own. You’ll get a small stipend, weekly, and six months of COBRA healthcare coverage. Plus your apartment. After that, you are entirely on your own.”

  In more ways than you know, Guerrero.

  “We’re not square, though,” she says with no small bitterness. “Not for one hot fuck of a second. You owe me. I have the name: Abraham Lukauskis. Now I need—”

  “You want to know where he is.”

  “Damn right I do.”

  And then he tells her.

  “Holy shit,” she says, because that’s not what she expected.

  PART NINE

  * * *

  BLACK STAR CANYON

  SIXTY-NINE

  THE DISRUPTION

  The next day, Guerrero drops Miriam off at their condo, where Gabby awaits. Soon as Miriam walks in the door, their reunion is cataclysmic. They embrace each other with sudden ferocity, like a pair of tidal waves crashing together, like one tectonic plate crushing into the next, like two hawks slamming into one another with talons intertwined as they tumble fruitlessly and happily toward the surface of the Earth.