Hellbent

by Cherie Priest

  What did Elizabeth Creed want there?

  Adrian asked it, just as I was thinking it. “What does this woman want from this place?” It surprised me, how his question had come right on the heels of my wondering. It was an obvious question, one any intelligent person might have spontaneously generated; but again I thought of the sips he’d taken, and I worried that maybe great minds don’t necessarily think alike … that maybe sometimes they’re artificially linked by a bloody cocktail.

  I swallowed and answered as if there was nothing weird about it—since there might not be, for all I knew. “Horace didn’t say.”

  “He might not know.”

  “He must not. Otherwise, he would’ve told me. Anyway, this is the place, and she’s been hanging around it.” I glanced over at the big digital numbers on the hotel clock, confirmed what I already knew, and said, “If we want to head over there tonight, we’ll need a hotel waiting for us.”

  “Us? Will I get a cut of this gig if I keep you company?”

  “Maybe if you make yourself useful,” I retorted, but it brought up a good point. “I’m not in the habit of doing these ‘retrieval’ gigs with a partner, so if you want to head out in the morning without me, there’d be no hard feelings. But since I’m already here, it’d be a little dumb for me to drive back to Seattle without checking it out.”

  “Sure, I hear what you’re saying.” He shrugged. “But it’s not like I’m doing anything important at home until Friday night. I already put in for the time off in order to come down here with you.”

  “And if you can talk me out of a cut, so much the better, eh?”

  “Right.”

  “But dude, not twenty minutes ago we were having a … discussion about me trying to keep you out of harm’s way. It’d be awfully damn inconsistent of me to say, ‘Hop in my car, baby—let’s hit the road.’ ”

  “Naw, not inconsistent. Logical!” he insisted, reaching for his suitcase. “There’s a world of difference between keeping me out of a vampire den and keeping me away from one lone crazy lady with a box of mystical peen.”

  “Okay, I can see that. But she’s not just one lone crazy lady with a box of mystical peen. She’s one lone crazy lady who successfully murdered a man and blew up his house with a box of powerful relics. And when I frame it that way, now that I think about it … no, I’m not super-comfortable with the idea of you joining me.”

  “You’re not my mother,” he groused as he began to pack. “And I’m not Domino. Think of it this way: I’m far less likely to get into trouble because the crazy-lady gig isn’t personal to me. You can grant me that much, can’t you? Even when we went after Bruner—which was completely fucking personal—I didn’t do anything to endanger either one of us. You’re not the only badass on the block, you know.”

  He had me there.

  Adrian and I had worked together just fine on a personal mission the previous year—I mean, we’d hunted down a guy and killed him together, so I knew I could trust him to pull his own weight. But this was different. This was my real job, and I’d never invited anyone to ride shotgun before.

  I had a feeling it didn’t matter. And although I could easily leave him behind … I didn’t want to. Maybe he was right, and it’d be okay. After all, this woman didn’t know anyone knew about what she’d done, much less that anyone was after her. We’d catch her off guard, steal the box of goodies, and be back home before forty-eight hours were out.

  “Fine. If you promise to stay out of the way.”

  “People who stay out of the way don’t get cuts of the profit.”

  “You never know,” I said. “In this case, I might well pay you to keep clear of the trouble. Call it personal peace-of-mind insurance.”

  He said, “Whatever,” but he was smiling.

  While the MythBusters rerun played itself out, I called around the park’s general vicinity until I found a hotel room—since we wouldn’t have time to drive back before morning. We loaded up quickly, checked out, and hit the road.

  The drive to the park took almost two hours, so by the time we pulled up, the place wasn’t just dark—it was utterly deserted, and closer to dawn than sundown. We left the Taurus outside the park’s more sensitive boundaries, since we didn’t feel like forcing past the gate or busting through any of the feeble barriers that kept cars off the historic roads after hours.

  It was both good and bad that the mission San Juan Bautista is really the historic district of a town called San Juan Bautista. It’s not much of a town, and they rolled up the sidewalks at twilight except for a couple of tourist hotels and a bar or two, but it meant there was an off chance we were blocking someone’s private drive, and there was also an off chance we’d be spotted as the kind of people who “aren’t from around here.”

  I didn’t expect any trouble, though. For that matter, I didn’t really expect to find Elizabeth Creed. She might be spending her days lurking around the park, but I assumed she must be spending the night elsewhere. More than anything, the point of this trip was to see if we could get an idea of what precisely the crazy lady wanted with the place. Since we were in the neighborhood, and all.

  I’d given Adrian the rundown on keeping his head down on the way over, lecturing him (or so he accused) on things he already knew, and generally driving him nuts, I’m sure. But the closer we’d gotten to the site in question, the harder I began to second-guess bringing him along.

  And now that we’d quietly stalked past the San Juan city hall, and were working our way toward the plaza in the dark … it felt a bit real. I had actually teamed up with somebody for a case—a for-profit event that was in no way personal. This made it a first, and I couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  But it was too late to do anything about it now.

  He slinked along beside me, or behind me in my wake, and together we snuck around the mostly empty, sprawling place. Gray wood fences offset the private homes and businesses—most of them in a similar adobe or stucco style with only one or two stories—and the streets had that gritty feel that implies they aren’t fully paved, even though they are. Everything was sandy and dusty underfoot, and overhead the sky was dark and clear and speckled with stars but not much moon.

  At least if Creed tried to raise another storm, we’d have plenty of warning. I vowed to keep an eye on the sky, just in case. On a night like this, any cloud was cause for suspicion.

  It occurred to me that it was a shame we hadn’t thought to bring along night-vision goggles for Adrian.

  “Damn,” he said. “I wish I’d thought to bring my night-vision goggles.”

  I almost stopped in my tracks, but only stumbled. There he went again, reading my thoughts. Or not? Yet again, this was an example of an obvious thing, spoken aloud. It probably meant nothing.

  “If I’d known about this in time, we could’ve brought them,” I murmured softly. “But this is the price we pay for the coincidence of timing. We’re not as prepared as we’d like to be.”

  “You’re never as prepared as you’d like to be. And this place is a goddamn graveyard,” he whispered back.

  He was right. It felt deserted, and unnaturally so. “Shh, I’m listening. In case it isn’t a graveyard and we run into company.”

  He made a grumpy noise but he shut up, which was all I wanted from him anyway. Nothing about the place felt right, from the utter silence to the too-bright stars and the long, flat buildings with their shutters drawn. Some of the structures appeared to be in states of restoration; some hadn’t made it there yet, and were boarded or offset with chain-link fences. It looked like a ghost town under construction, which is exactly as weird as it sounds.

  I stopped with my back flat against the wall of a store that had been closed for decades. The stucco prickled at my shoulders, and the stored warmth of the place leached out into my back. Adrian drew up beside me, a shadow in black—silent as hell when he wasn’t talking, though he outweighed me by probably fifty pounds of muscle.

&n
bsp; “There it is.” I gestured with a nod of my head. “Across the plaza. That must be the mission itself.”

  It was a low, long building like so many of the others, and graced with a series of arches. A steeple or a bell tower or something pointed up from the far end, though I couldn’t see it well enough to tell at such a distance. The plaza was pretty freaking big, and wide open, without a shred of cover.

  Adrian made another vague “hm” noise, and this time I asked, “What?”

  “It looks familiar.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Wikipedia said that one of Hitchcock’s films was shot here.” As I made this feeble observation, I watched the mission as if it were going to do a trick. I was trying to talk myself out of the necessity of investigating it.

  “You’re probably right. Do you think we should check it out? That’s a lot of open ground around it. I haven’t seen anybody, or any cameras. Have you?”

  “No.” I hadn’t smelled any, either. Usually there’s a faint electric whiff to them, and a high-pitched hum. You know that sound when you’ve got the television on, but the volume is turned all the way down? It’s like that. It hangs out in the back of your head, not doing anything but taking up a fraction of your attention, making you aware that it’s there.

  That’s what all electronic equipment sounds like to me, but my hearing is a whole lot better than the average mortal’s.

  Still keeping my voice low, I confessed, “We ought to take a look around it, but maybe we should save it for last. It’s the centerpiece of the park, so it’d be stupid to skip it. We should check out everything, everywhere, since we have no idea what we’re looking for.”

  “Gotcha. Time to split up?”

  I almost grabbed his arm, but I caught myself in time and kept my eyes on the mission. Christ, I was clingy as of late. Undignified, that’s what it was.

  I took a deep breath and said, “Yeah, let’s split up. I’ll take the east blocks over here, you take the west blocks over there, and we’ll meet up at the mission when we’re done. Stick to the shadows, and if anyone spots you, lose them however you can. Run if you have to, but if you have to take the car, send me a text message or something so I know not to hang around—and I can find a place to hide before dawn. You got that?”

  I turned to look at him, and was both annoyed and impressed to realize that he’d jaunted off in the middle of my dissertation without me hearing him. I didn’t know how much of it he’d caught, but I’d front-loaded the bit about east blocks and west blocks, so I grumbled my frustration (quietly) and breathed “Motherfucker” as I vacated my position against the shop, or house, or whatever it’d been back in 17-when-the-hell-ever.

  I went through the blocks and dodged only three people, two of them teenagers who didn’t want to be spotted any more than I did, and one older woman who was taking out the trash behind a restaurant.

  Except for the occasional scurry of rats and cats, and the intermittent yowl of a coyote somewhere too close for civilization’s comfort, I heard nothing but the soft swish of my own steps.

  There was nobody here. Just me and Adrian and the desert, and the small things that crawl in the sand, and the owls that swoop about more silently even than me at my sneakiest.

  Except that I didn’t believe it.

  I could feel that I was wrong, even though I had nothing concrete to base it on.

  When I’d completed my rounds, discovering nothing except that this must be one boring-ass place to live, I found myself at the edge of the plaza again—this time in front of it. I crouched in the shadow of a beautiful old hacienda’s second-story wraparound porch and squinted as far as I could.

  I can’t see in perfect darkness, so thank God it wasn’t perfectly dark. It was only mostly dark, which meant I couldn’t make out much detail, but I could see the huge expanse of grass sprawling out before me, and the pale, skeletal-looking frame of the old mission at the far end of it. To my left was a white building that was closed and fenced off; it could’ve been an old-fashioned saloon made out of clapboard, but it was hard to tell at this distance.

  No hint of light peeked around its windows. No noises emanated from within. It was a shell of a place, and when I stretched out my feeble psychic senses, I was quite confident that it was as empty as it appeared. The closer building, the one I hunkered beside, was occupied—but not by anyone who was up to anything. Two children were resisting bedtime upstairs someplace, and downstairs someone was cleaning a kitchen while watching television.

  Where was Adrian? I stretched the sensation, closing my eyes. Does closing my eyes help? I don’t know. I’m not sure why I do it. I’m not sure why I leave my mouth hanging open when I put mascara on, either, but it feels like two sides of the same phenomenon. You do little things like that in order to concentrate.

  So I concentrated. And I didn’t pick him up, so either he was out of range, or my waves were failing me, either of which was fully possible. Rather than dwell on these things, I dwelled on how the hell I was going to approach the mission. If I wanted to take the long way around, there were some scraggly trees off to my right that I could hide behind. But when I judged how little cover versus how much added inconvenience that entailed, I split the difference and decided to run along the inner perimeter, and fast.

  No one would see me, even if anyone knew to look for me. At a good sprint, I can run faster than most people can detect, and faster even than many recording devices can catch. Usually I turn up as a vague streak, and only then if the frame rate is good enough.

  So I ran.

  It took a couple of seconds to cross the vast expanse, and in those couple of seconds my rudimentary psychic sense told me two things that almost slowed me down, but didn’t.

  Thing #1: Adrian was over there, someplace on the back side of the building. Or maybe it was the front side—the architecture didn’t broadcast the difference, and it looked similar from all angles. At any rate, he was on the side farthest from me, and sneaking slowly along the wall. This was excellent, for it meant that I was running right toward him, and I wouldn’t have to go hunting for him after I checked out this one last thing.

  Thing #2: Adrian wasn’t alone. Someone else was over there, inside the mission someplace—not at my partner’s side, and not stalking him or anything … but definitely within a stone’s throw of his position.

  Slightly distracted by these two revelations, I almost ran smack into the mission’s adobe exterior, but caught myself in time to keep from plowing into the wall and leaving a Raylene-shaped dent in the side. Just barely, mind you.

  I flattened myself against the wall I had so narrowly avoided puncturing with my face and scooted around the nearest corner. This put me along the short side of the building, and facing what was left of the trees that surrounded the place in that weird living fence that served as a boundary to the property. As I stood there, listening with every sense I had available to me, the little hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

  Never a good sign, that.

  I peered up at the sky, checking for sudden and improbable clouds, but saw nothing but stars—more of them than you ever see in a city, much less a city like Seattle, where the sky is so often overcast. A plane was sweeping past overhead, its red and white blinky lights revealing its southern trajectory.

  And nothing else stood out against the black.

  It didn’t mean that nothing was wrong. Something was wrong, but it wasn’t coming from above.

  In case it would work, I sent out a silent call to Adrian. Dude. Where are you?

  No one was more shocked than I was when he responded. Around back. There’s someone inside. It wasn’t a strong response—not like a shout in the ear. More like a muffled murmur. But I heard it, and I understood it.

  Hang tight. I’m on my way.

  “And you’re not my ghoul, not my ghoul, not my ghoul,” I mumbled as I hastily trucked around to Adrian’s side of the building.

  I could sense him, but I couldn’t see him. The far fa�
�ade of the mission was as pale as the front, all of it the color of desert-bleached bones in the heavy darkness. The archways appeared to go on forever, extending back to some distant vanishing point. An absurd impression, I know, but that’s how it felt. It felt like a fever dream, a hallucination, a dizzy moment brought on by a sudden feeding or too much wine.

  My ankles felt loose, like they’d rattle if I shook my feet. I looked down at them, thinking my whole body was betraying me in this weird moment, and then I realized that it wasn’t my ankles … it was the ground.

  A shock of grass and a dusting of pebbles beside my boots quavered and bounced, very slightly, as if they were set atop a speaker playing something that was heavy on the bass.

  An earthquake?

  I’d been in an earthquake or two. Nothing serious, nothing big. Seattle gets them every once in a while, being on the Pacific Rim and all, but not with much frequency or damage.

  But this didn’t feel like an earthquake.

  It wasn’t a shake. It was a vibration, coming up from a spot down deep, like the earth was humming. It set my teeth on edge. I gritted them and continued my hunt for Adrian.

  I ducked inside the nearest arch, which placed me beneath a corridor that ran the length of the place. From inside this overhang, the mission felt even more infinite, or maybe it was only the disorientation from that deep, low-level buzz. I couldn’t hear it, exactly, but I could feel it with every inch of my skin. The tiny bones in my ear jostled together, and my eyelashes itched. I wanted to scratch at myself—scratch everything, all over.

  I tamped down the urge and felt along the wall, stopping at the occasional window or doorway, all of them shut.

  I struggled to recall the rough layout. I hadn’t planned to come inside; I’d assumed it’d be shut and locked, since I was heading out here after hours. And it was, wasn’t it?

  I tried a door.

  Of course it was locked. But this did not prevent someone from being inside, any more than it was going to prevent me from getting inside, just as soon as I found Adrian and could get a better grip on the situation. I didn’t need a perfect layout of the interior in order to get cracking. I’d worked under worse circumstances.