Bed hair, maybe. Or excessive flatulence.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, hauling her back onto her feet then dropping his hands.
She swayed but kept her footing. “Did you feel that?” she asked, trying to shake the cobwebs from her mind.
“Feel what?”
She swayed again, and he put a hand on her elbow. She rubbed her temple then looked up at him. “It’s like I’m still in the ritual from this morning and the ground was pulled out from under me. Something shifted. Papa Legba is still keeping watch, and he’s trying to tell me something has changed.” She didn’t understand. The loa was no longer inside her, but she’d never had a spell quite this disorienting.
“Papa who?” he asked. “Never mind. Does this have anything to do with Beep?”
Still fighting to gain her bearings, Marika looked past him to where she felt a pull of energy. A shift in the fabric of space and time. She squinted. Shook her head. Blinked, then looked again. “I’m definitely still in the veil.”
He leveled a worried expression on her. “What makes you say that?”
She pointed to a clearing a mile wide. “Because there is no way that thing is of this world.”
He glanced over his shoulder just as a creature unlike anything she’d ever seen before spotted them and started running directly in their direction. She took in its features between terrified heartbeats. An alien being at least eight feet tall, maybe nine—or twelve, come to think of it—raced toward them, eating up the ground as fast as a racehorse.
It looked like something from a comic book. Or a horror movie. Its shoulders were massive. Its head triangular with black horns like a ram’s, and rubbery spikes sprouting from between them in mohawk fashion. Though it looked like it weighed a thousand pounds and wore thick, scaly body armor, shimmering and blood-red, it moved like an Olympic sprinter. That same crimson covered the lower half of its face, a mask hiding its nose and mouth. But not its eyes. The closer it got, the more Marika could make out the emotion that seemed to radiate out of its gaze: fury.
Marika, on the other hand, couldn’t move at all. She stood pinned to the spot, her fight-or-flight response refusing to come out of sleep mode.
It was all so surreal, and she thanked the supreme being, Bondye, that the creature could not cross from its plane onto hers. Because that thing could do some serious damage if it did. Especially with the giant spear it carried. A spear… She blinked again and focused on it. A weapon drenched in blood.
“Look,” Garrett said, his tone wary, “I get that I’ll see things I probably don’t recognize, but what the fuck is that?”
Marika’s jaw dropped to the ground as one other aspect of their situation sank in. She curled her fingers into Garrett’s shirt. “I don’t think it’s dead. Or on another plane.”
The creature was close now. Perhaps only fifty yards away. Mere seconds from them at the rate it was traveling.
Garrett circled a hand around her arm and started to back up. “How do you know?”
“The dead are quiet. When they walk. When they run. They certainly don’t sound like a herd of elephants tearing up the ground as they race across it.”
“Son of a bitch.”
* * * *
Garrett’s instincts were not what they used to be. He could blame the ascending sun. Claim it blurred his vision. Or, better yet, the vomit powder, which had definitely blurred his vision. But he should have been hightailing it back to the compound the second he spotted that thing. Instead, he stood there staring like an idiot as it barreled toward them.
By the time his sanity returned, it was too late. There was no way they could outrun it.
He pushed Marika so hard that she almost fell. “Run!” he shouted, keeping his gaze on the instrument of his impending death.
Then again, maybe it just wanted to talk. If not for the fact that both it and its spear were drenched in blood, Garrett could have taken solace in that thought.
“Get to the compound!”
He tore his gaze away to search for a weapon. Anything, because he doubted his pocket knife would do any good.
The beast was close enough for him to hear its heavy breathing. He took a precious moment to turn to Marika who hadn’t moved an inch. He grabbed her roughly and shook.
“Go, damn it!” he said, shoving her in the direction of the compound again.
She cradled her bag to her chest, her eyes like saucers, and took off toward the closest outbuilding.
When the beast changed directions and began following her, Garrett stepped into its path.
It refocused on him, its eyes a sea of black, and showed no signs of slowing down. Garrett braced himself, readying for the impact. When it hit him, he felt as though he’d been ripped in half.
Pain exploded inside him, and he wondered if that was what it felt like to lay on a grenade. Later, he would register Marika’s scream, but at the moment, all he could think about were the stars circling the darkened edges of his vision, and the fact that he was going to die. He would fail his best friends. And Beep. And Zaire. And Marika.
Marika. What would that thing do to her?
He slid across what felt like a mile of terrain, through bushes and cacti as the beast once again went after the only woman Garrett had ever truly loved. With Herculean effort, he rolled out of the slide, skidded to a halt, and bolted like a sprinter from the starting blocks.
The beast was almost on Marika when Garrett rushed him from the side. He slammed his shoulder into the beast’s rib cage with every ounce of strength he had. That time, they both slid across the inhospitable terrain.
But the creature was fast. Much faster than Garrett. Before he could gain his footing, the beast had him by the throat. That was when he noticed the massive claws. Because, why not?
It lifted Garrett off the ground with ease while letting loose what he could only imagine was a battle cry.
At least in his incompetence, Garrett had accomplished one thing. He’d managed to dislodge the creature’s spear. Not that it registered until he glimpsed the long, heavy weapon out of the corner of his eye. And the woman holding it.
Panic spiked so hard and so fast he saw stars again.
“Hey!” Marika shouted, and she looked like a rabbit provoking a wolf. A fierce hare, but prey nonetheless.
The second the beast looked at her, she shoved the spear with a guttural grunt toward his face and then stumbled back, tripping on her bag.
It was one in a million, the jab she landed. The bloodied tip of the spear lodged in the creature’s right eye. It reared back, dropping Garrett in the process, and pulled out the weapon with a cry of pain. And anger.
Garrett dove for the spear, hoping to wrench it out of the beast’s grasp. But again, it was too fast. It swung at Garrett, its claws slicing across his back, leaving a trail of fire in their wake.
He landed on his stomach, and the beast raised the spear. Garrett would be impaled in a matter of seconds, so he did the only thing he could think of. He brought out his pocket knife and stabbed it into the top of the beast’s foot.
The spear sank into the ground next to him, grazing the skin over his ribs as the beast wailed once more. But Garrett wasn’t finished. He pulled out the knife, circled his arms around its leg, and slid the razor-sharp blade across its Achilles. This thing may be a different species, but Garrett knew enough about anatomy to know it had to have some kind of tendon to allow it to walk upright. It was almost human in structure.
It stumbled back, crying out in agony, then took off on all fours toward the ponderosas just past the wilderness trail, dragging its injured leg behind it.
“Garrett!” Marika screamed, and he could feel her hands on his shoulders.
He tried to turn over, but his back was on fire. As were his ribs. And his head. He decided to just lay on the ground awhile. He was about to tell Marika to get in his truck and get the fuck outta Dodge when he heard a male voice. Robert Davidson, Charley’s Uncle Bob.
�
�Swopes!”
He’d get her to safety.
Garrett looked up at Marika, at the wetness in her eyes and on her cheeks as she smoothed a hand down the side of his face. Then he said in a weak voice, “I think we should get married.”
Chapter Six
But did you die?
—Motivational Poster
Garrett lifted his lids slowly. Partly because it hurt to move even that much, but mostly because he could see dead people now. He had no idea what awaited him on a daily basis from that moment on. Hardly a checkmark for the pro column.
“Think he’ll live?” a male voice asked. Donovan, the leader of the pack, a.k.a. the biker club, stood to his right.
Robert, on his left, answered. “The doc says he will.”
“Doctors have been known to be wrong.”
“That’s true.” Eric, another biker, chimed in. “A doctor once told my aunt she was healthy as a horse. Would probably live forever. She died two days later.”
“What from?” Robert asked.
“Hit and run.”
“Is there a reason you guys are in my…where am I?” Garrett croaked.
“You’re in medical,” Robert said. “And yes.”
Garrett suddenly remembered the attack. “Marika?” he asked with a breathy gasp.
“She’s fine.” Donovan gestured toward a couch nearby. Marika lay sleeping, bundled in a sea of pale blue blankets.
“I guess she told you?”
“She did.” Robert’s brows slid together. “I have no idea what she described, but hell if I want it traipsing about the countryside. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find it.”
“What the fuck?” Garrett asked, his voice thick with sleep and probably lots of drugs. It would be the good shit, too. The trust Charley and Reyes left for Beep’s care could afford it.
The compound housed their own medical wing, as strange and bizarre accidents seemed to happen around them often. They had a doctor on call 24/7. One who had to be brought into the fold because of Beep’s peculiar physiology. She looked human, but there were subtle differences that set her apart from other children. Far apart. They needed someone they could trust, and Dr. Lucia Mirabal had been an old friend of Charley’s from high school. Truth be told, she hadn’t seemed all that surprised when they explained the particulars of what they would need with a personal doctor and the anomalies she would find with her primary patient.
It could’ve been her friendship with Charley growing up, or it could have been the money. Either way, the physician was thrilled. It allowed her time to volunteer at a couple of medical centers on local reservations.
“We wounded it,” Garrett said, annoyed. “It should have left a trail of blood.”
Donovan nodded. “It did. And we followed it until dark.”
Robert frowned in thought. “We had to call off the search. We can’t try to face something like that at night.”
“I understand, but we need to find it at first light.”
“Garrett,” Robert said, his face grim. “Do you think…?” He swallowed hard, and wetness formed between the man’s lids. “Did that thing take Elwyn?”
Garrett closed his eyes and bit down. A fiery pain shot through his face and jaw, but he didn’t ease up. He needed to snap out of it. “I don’t know. I just don’t think so. I could see it. Marika said it wasn’t a supernatural entity. It was as solid as you and me. Nothing, you know, took Beep. She just vanished.”
“You’re awake,” Marika said.
Garrett watched her scrap with the blankets before freeing herself and running to his side, almost knocking Donovan down in the process. Then he saw the bruise on the side of her face and wondered when that had happened.
“You’re hurt.”
She shook her head. “I’m okay. How are you? That thing almost ripped you in half.”
“Almost? I was sure it’d succeeded.”
She forced a smile and slid a hesitant hand into his.
“So,” Eric said from the edge of the bed, “when are you two getting hitched?”
Garrett stilled. Well, stilled more. Then he shot a look of horror at Marika when the memory of what he’d said to her returned.
Eric chuckled, as did Michael, the third member of the now very small biker club, who stood leaning against the doorframe to the room, clearly too cool to come in and express concern like the rest of them.
Michael was the epitome of calm reserve, a trait Garrett would have loved right about now because he suddenly remembered proposing to Marika. A woman he’d sworn he would never marry.
The comment caught her off guard. She studied him, both embarrassed and shocked at the question if her expression were any indication. When he looked away, suddenly self-conscious, she cleared her throat and took back her hand.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said to Eric. “Garrett was joking. We do it all the time.”
“Right.” Eric pressed his mouth together and stepped away from the bed, but Garrett got the feeling he was disappointed. Oddly enough, he was fine with that. Eric could kiss his ass.
To put an end to the awkward moment, a female voice yelled from the hall. “Oh, my God!”
He grinned and watched as Robert’s wife—and Charley’s best friend—Cookie Kowalski-Davidson, rushed into the room, carrying two cups of coffee. She drank a lot of coffee.
She pawned both of them off on her husband and draped herself over Garrett, being careful not to actually touch him. But she did kiss his cheek. And his temple. And his forehead. Then back to his cheek.
“Damn, Robert,” Michael said. “Aren’t you keeping your girl satisfied?”
She straightened, her thick black hair a mess atop her pretty head as she glared at him—though Garrett doubted she was very serious.
He’d seen her serious side. He’d seen what Charley’s disappearance had done to her. She fought hard to hide it, but no one could hide that kind of pain.
“You shush,” she said, shaking a finger at him. “I have a bone to pick with you.”
“Shit.” Michael almost straightened. Then he relaxed again. “What’d I do now?”
“Two words: brand-freaking-new Harley.”
“Technically, that’s four.” When she glowered at him, he raised his hands in surrender. “Hey, it’s not my fault transportation came with the gig. Check the contract.”
“There’s a contract?” Eric asked, crestfallen. “You got a contract?”
The Elwyn Loehr Foundation took care of everyone on Team Beep. Charley and Reyes had set everything up as though they’d expected to leave. Some took more advantage of that fact than others, though Michael had never been one of them. He must’ve really needed a new bike. Garrett wouldn’t fault him for that.
Marika spoke softly, and he could tell she wasn’t sure where she fit in. “Maybe we should get back to the problem at hand.”
They all turned to her.
“She’s right,” Cookie said, taking one of the cups of coffee and moving back so they formed a circle around his bed. “I’ve been doing some research. Which is your department.” She chided him with another glare. “I just can’t find anything on the creature that attacked you.”
Pride swelled inside Garrett. “You consulted the books?”
The books was code for the dozens and dozens of manuscripts and letters he’d been combing through for years, searching for any mention of the demon uprising to come. Anything that could help Beep in her fight.
“Oh, goodness no,” she said, appalled. “The internet. For any sightings or lore.”
He almost laughed and thought better of it. “And?”
“Like I said, nothing. Well, nothing recent. There were a couple of ancient references, but I consigned those to the same level of lore as mermaids and Big Foot.”
“Right. What about you?” he asked Marika, but only because she seemed lost in thought. Judging by the lines between her brows, it wasn’t a good thought.
She bit her lower lip, then
said, “Something changed, Garrett.”
He gave her his full attention.
“Something shifted right before we saw the creature. Like in the universe. Something—”
“Opened up?” Robert asked.
She frowned at him. “Opened up?”
“It’s like you told us,” he explained. “That thing is not of this world.”
Garrett struggled to wrap his head around Robert’s meaning. “So, by opened up, do you mean a portal?”
Cookie breathed in a small gasp.
“Do you disagree?” Robert asked Garrett.
He shook his head, then winced with the effort. Then flinched again from the effort it took to wince. It was a vicious cycle. “I don’t disagree, and it could make sense. Since I can’t—correction, couldn’t—see into the celestial realm, I suppose a portal could’ve opened up.”
“Oh, please, no,” Cookie said. Robert led her to a chair and helped her to sit down.
“We aren’t certain, gorgeous,” he said, calming one of the few people on Earth that Garrett had ever truly loved. Cookie was the most genuine person he’d ever met, and he would give his left kidney just to ease her concerns. “It’s just a theory.”
“One that fits,” Garrett offered thoughtfully. “But did Marika tell you about the dead guy on the trail?”
“Departed man,” she corrected. “And yes, I did.”
“He was standing at the exact spot where Beep vanished.”
“It could mean something,” Robert said. “I just don’t know what.”
Cookie pressed a hand over her heart, her face the picture of agony. “A portal,” she whispered.
Robert rubbed her shoulder. Cookie clearly knew what that meant.
“My only other theory has been shot to hell,” Robert said.
Garrett raised a brow. “Which was?”
“That Elwyn suddenly learned to dematerialize. If that’s the case, she could’ve rematerialized anywhere on Earth. But according to Marika, she isn’t on Earth. She’s not even on this plane. Which would support the portal theory.”
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