“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 is
n’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.
Lots of cars there?
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.”
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