Remi’s hat dipped with a single nod. “Guess it’s up to us to apply some of our ingenuity to finding out what we need to find out. He’s never been one for holding our hands, has Grandaddy.”
Yeah, ingenuity. We were the two of us highly educated, and we now knew Grandaddy had personally directed that very specific, targeted education right from childhood, starting with Classics Illustrated, literature done comic book style, leading into the actual literary texts. After that, for me, came heavy-duty reference books on folklore, mythology, Joseph Campbell, Aleister Crowley, witchcraft, ghosts and goblins, deity pantheons, alchemy, blah blah, woof woof.
“They don’t think like us,” I muttered.
Remi glanced at me briefly, then switched his attention back to the road as rain pounded down. The wipers could barely keep up. In the distance, lightning stitched light across the sky.
“Demons,” I elaborated. “Surrogates. Even if they wear human hosts, rely on human brains—” I shifted in my seat, turning to look at Remi—“if they are agents of chaos, if they are themselves chaos incarnate, let’s say, there’s no such thing as predictability. We’ll forever be reactive rather than proactive. We’re going to be running in place a hell of a lot.”
“Can’t always predict sociopaths or psychopaths, either.” Remi hit the turn signal to slot the truck into the left-turn lane leading to the RV park, “but they’re not demons.”
“How do we know that?” I looked at his profile beneath the hat. “How do we know Bundy, Dahmer, Manson, Jim Jones . . . how do we know they weren’t demons? Lucifer’s advance guard, maybe, scattered hither and yon throughout the world. Doing their bit for the boss.”
Remi met my eyes. “Or Jack the Ripper?”
“Or Jack the Ripper.”
* * *
—
Lily let us into the belly of her beast, a motorhome echoing an eighteen-wheeler in general silhouette, though smaller, but with several half-rooms that, with a switch depressed, ground outward on a muffled whine of hydraulics, doubling its width. A pregnant house giving birth.
As she opened the door, Lily looked beyond us into the weather, red eyebrows knit. In the storm-grayed light of the day, her choppy Mohawk haircut turned deep auburn until lightning skated across the sky and painted it bright again. Then she stepped aside, made room for us by retreating into the RV.
And it struck me again, as I climbed folding steel steps and ducked inside the narrow door, how incongruous the picture: the Morrigan, right out of Irish mythology—the Goddess of Battles herself—camped out in an RV with an angry-eyed crow and a massive Irish Wolfhound as her road trip companions.
I’d studied Irish mythology on my way to a Master’s in folklore. Nothing in the pages of books prepared me for reality. Or, rather, this reality.
She stood in the center of the kitchen and looked us up and down. Remi took off his damp hat and hung it on a window valance, eyed the wolfhound lying sprawled across the sofa sleeper.
I settled hipshot against a counter and met Lily’s level look. “Grandaddy been by?”
She ignored that. “Coffee? You’re lookin’ like drowned rabbits.”
“Rats,” I corrected.
She fixed bright green eyes on me. “Rabbits drown, too.”
“Yes, ma’am, coffee’ll do us fine” Remi answered on a quick shiver, and when the dog got up and moved over on the sofa to create room, he took it. The wolfhound dropped her head onto one of Remi’s thighs with a low-rumbled sigh. A boy and his dog.
Lily’s eyes glinted as she looked at me. “Whiskey in yours, then?”
I pulled my wet t-shirt away from my chest, gripped hem and flapped the front in a wholly ineffective attempt at drying the fabric. “It’s a little too early even for me.”
“The way you’re moving, boyo, whiskey may be just what you need. Oil for rusted hinges.”
Lily knew exactly why I was moving stiffly; she’d been the one the day before to wash down road rash with rubbing alcohol when I’d have preferred the drinking kind as painkiller.
I refused whiskey, wandered toward the empty recliner, skirted my way around the big wooden perch hosting the bad-tempered crow, and eased my damp, sore self down into leather upholstery. A lap of luxury, Lily’s RV. Guess a goddess deserved it. “Grandaddy walked out in the middle of an important conversation and left us hanging. You seen him?”
Lily made coffee, poured mugs full, handed them around. “I have not. But he’s a busy man, is Jubal Tanner. You’re not his only ‘grandkids.’”
“Women are dying,” Remi told her flat out. “He took the only real clue we had and walked away with it. Another woman’s dead, or at risk to be killed. Supposin’ it’s the latter, we need to find her first.”
The Morrigan was barefoot, wore tight threadbare jeans and a green tank top. Celtic silver coiled around her upper arms above rich, multicolored sleeve tattoos inked into bared fair skin. Lily shrugged, settled herself into a swivel chair, drank coffee, made no further comment as she eyed me over the mug.
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but the rain abruptly ratcheted up into waterfall-level noise. The power of it, the roar of hard-driving water against thin steel overhead, reminded me dramatically that we weren’t inside a truly sound structure. I mean, the RV was huge and heavy, but it still stood on wheels, not a cement foundation.
The wolfhound lifted her head sharply. Hackles rose as she emitted a low growl, then she slid off the couch and stood stiff-legged, head slung low as she glared at the door.
The rain stopped abruptly, as if someone turned off the spigot. Lightning lit up the world. A massive crack of thunder sounded directly overhead. Upon the perch next to me, the crow mantled, then about shattered my eardrums with its frantic noise right beside my skull. I shot up from the chair and was in the kitchen before I even realized it.
I felt it come up through the floor of the motorhome, through the thick soles of my bike boots, and recognized the rising power, the promise of violence. I’d felt it before, back home. The RV swayed atop its wheels. Coffee in my mug sloshed. Remi lifted his high in the air as he rose so the contents wouldn’t spill into his lap.
Lily frowned briefly, looked fixedly at the dog. Her sister, she’d called her, one of the threefold unity. “Macha?”
The world around us shuddered.
“Nemain!” Lily said sharply as the crow shrieked, and the dog curled lips back from her teeth. Everything in the motorhome rattled. Loose items on the countertop slid right off, hit the tile floor.
And then the noise, the shivering of the motorhome, subsided into a suddenly rainless day, into a silence so absolute it felt surreal.
“Earthquake,” I said.
Remi, bending to rescue his fallen hat from the floor, stared at me, brows rising. “In Arizona?”
“I don’t know if Arizona is subject to earthquakes or not,” I placed my half-drunk coffee in the sink, “but I do know that was an earthquake. We’ve had some in Oregon. Several faults run through the state.”
Frowning, Remi yanked his phone from a pocket, probably planning to track down confirmation if any was to be had so soon.
I looked at Lily. “It was earthquakes that started all this, wasn’t it? The demon infestation?”
“Hell vents.” She stood up, set her mug upon the counter, began to pick up items that had hit the floor. “Or so Jubal told me.”
A cold grue ran down my spine. I swore, moved past her at speed and went right out the door. I one-footed it on my way down, then hit the ground with both boots and stopped short.
The old campground wound through big pines, many RVs screened by vegetation. I heard calls and shouts echoing, though none sounded frightened. What I heard was sharp, startled disbelief, and an underlying kid-level excitement.
Remi came down the steps. “I got nothin’ so far on any earthquake—”
I was impatient, terse. “It was.”
“—but you’re hackled up like that wolfhound bitch,” Remi said. “What’re you sensing?”
I lifted a spread-fingered hand to silence him, and he got the message.
Scent came first. Pines. Vegetation. Wet stone, soaked earth. Damp, dead campfires. No more rain fell, as if driven away by a force more powerful, but the clouds remained, low and malignant. All around me trees and shrubs shed leftover rain into puddles, into rivulets running swift against the ground, drummed uneven percussion on motorhome roofs.
Lightning struck close and low, disappearing behind trees high on the mountain. Thunder followed directly, but the long rumble of it attenuated, died out.
Standing very still, I let the noise of the place, even the shouts and shrieks of overexcited kids, wash away from me.
Lightning flashed, but this time I heard no thunder on its tail. In its place I heard the beat of my heart, heard it slowing, slowing. Heard myself pull in a breath to fill lungs and belly.
Upon the mountain, within regimented parallel lines of young oaks in the midst of towering Ponderosa pines and huge, lichen-sheathed granite boulders, with Grandaddy standing watch and a stranger in a cowboy hat bearing witness, I remembered sensing the deep peace of the San Francisco Peaks. Sacred to the Navajo and Hopi peoples, the former volcano bore only the soothing colors of the earth, the subtle blue-green sheen of abalone in tribute to its Navajo name: Abalone Shell Mountain. Home to Hopi katsinam, known more familiarly as kachinas. I’d felt a deep sense of harmony, of unity, that day, upon the mountain. The peace of the earth.
But now? The earth wasn’t peaceful. It was other.
It needed proper greeting, the other earth, so I might learn its temper. Grandaddy had taught me that. With courtesy and quietude, I reached out to it.
I invited it to come, and come it did.
No grace. No grace in it at all.
“Koyaanisqatsi,” I gasped.
And began to cough. To choke.
I wavered on my feet, went down onto one knee even as Remi reached out to grab an arm. I heard him say my name twice, then again even more urgently; felt the firmness of his grip upon my upper arm, fingers and thumb like a vise, and a strong upward pressure as if he would lift me.
But I couldn’t rise, even with his hand on my arm urging me to do so. I kept coughing, bent forward now. One knee and the toe of my boot took my weight until I added a hand, a stiffened arm, to prop myself up. I felt wet gravel beneath my palm, and the wicking of dampness up through the fibers of my jeans as I knelt. I thought my lungs might climb my throat and surge out of my mouth like a river in spate.
“Koyaanisqatsi,” I repeated, in between painful, involuntary spasms of throat and diaphragm.
Remi was now trying to drag me up. “But what does that mean?”
The coughing was abating, thank God, though my chest felt heavy, my throat raw. “Life out of balance,” I answered hoarsely. “It’s Hopi, it’s a Native American concept.”
“Well, I think that may well be true,” Remi said, “Based on what we’ve—”
But he broke it off, turned his bare, unhatted head to stare at the mountain, a burn-scarred, stony bulk screened by the pines of the campground.
The hand on my bicep squeezed even harder for just a moment, and then he released the grip on my upper arm altogether, turned away from me to the mountain. He took long strides away from me.
And then he began to run.
CHAPTER SEVEN
What the—?
Startled, still trying to regain my breath and clear my throat, I watched the cowboy unaccountably head off at a run into shadowed, screening trees with no word of warning or intent. I shouted his name hoarsely, thrust myself from knee to feet and absently slapped a wet, sandy hand against my jeans. I took a stride after him as he disappeared into the trees, then swung back hastily toward the motorhome.
We both had knives on us, but I had no gun; it was in my bedroom back at the Zoo, where I’d left it after a quick shower. New heavenly conscript or not, I had never carried a gun but the once, when I killed a man, and now, as a felon, it was illegal to do so. So that was my mindset. Carrying a gun full time wasn’t pure reflex yet; it had not occurred to me to slip into the shoulder rig and safe the Taurus home in the holster before heading to Lily’s. We were simply to talk.
I was clueless as to whether Remi had his gun in addition to his Bowie and throwing knives. He wore his short-barreled Taurus Judge in a belt holster, less obvious than a shoulder holster setup with multiple straps. I took one step toward the RV, found Lily was waiting on the top step with an arm outstretched. In her hand was a revolver offered sideways on the flat, barrel pointed away from us both.
I took it without a word, automatically registered the weight, the make and model: S&W 686, almost three pounds of steel, a .357 Magnum with a six-inch barrel. Pretty damn powerful.
Before I could turn back and take off at a run, as I intended, Lily came swiftly down the remaining two steps, grabbed my wrist and gripped firmly with both hands. It literally stopped my breath. In the power of that grip I felt the other in her. She was the Morrigan, green eyes ablaze and fixed on my own. More goddess than woman in that moment, borrowed body or no.
“Open the cylinder,” Lily said tersely, clamping down on my wrist harder than ever, “now, or before you shoot. Blow on those bullets, boyo. If it’s a demon he’s gone after, the rounds need to be breath-blessed by a heaven-born soul in order to kill a surrogate. Remember this.”
I could move again, and I jerked free of her grip. Something in me was anxious beyond description, something oddly like some kind of weird-ass spiritual stress nausea, because it wasn’t physical. My gut was tying itself into knots, but I did not feel like vomiting.
I left her then, spun away and ran hard. Not just because I wanted to chase Remi as a natural reaction to a friend potentially running into danger. But because I had to.
Because the tsunami of primogenitura, the stewardship of older alpha to younger beta implanted during the spark of my birth, awakened and confirmed when Remi and I gripped hands, rings touching, as instructed by Grandaddy but a few nights before, rose up within me and demanded it.
* * *
—
Despite my experience with revolvers, running through the forest and up a mountain, especially at high altitude, while opening a cylinder and blowing on six exposed primers was not recommended in any gun owner’s manual, and I was a little concerned not about the possibility of a misfire, but that I might mistakenly depress the cylinder release and dump the bullets altogether. Then I’d have nothing to breathe on, or bleed on, and I’d be fucked. Possibly Remi, too. So the bullets stayed put for now.
Blowing on bullets, making holy water out of our spit . . . a summary of my new life as a heaven-sent pest control man. And since what came out of a dead surrogate inhabiting a ghost’s body—or whatever that bizarre corporeality of it was—were hell-whelped fugly cockroach-like remains, it was a most appropriate job title.
“Remi!” I shouted, and it echoed back at me amidst dripping pines, oaks, aspens. “Dammit. Remi!”
Behind me I heard children shrieking in the RV campground, but recognized the tone as play, not fear or panic. Probably still enthralled with the whole concept of an earthquake on an otherwise wet and boring morning. High-pitched voices faded as I hit the first incline of the mountain’s shoulder. I was not yet acclimated to seven-thousand-plus feet of elevation, and I felt the altitude as I clambered up the slope.
Pine needles are slick in any condition. Wet, worse yet. My biker boots had thick grippy waffle soles with decent traction, and I was planting a good 185-190 pounds into the ground through my legs, but slick deadfall offered very little stability. I slipped and slid, swore, kept climbing.
If I thought about it, wracked my brain
about it, I had no clue where Remi was going. I was totally at sea. But so long as I focused instead on footing and trying to steady my breath, just let myself think about other things, I felt an almost physical certainty where he was, lodestone to North Pole.
Demon. Had to be.
My gift was to sense places, to feel the good as well as the taint of demonic presence. Remi’s was to recognize the demon in a body, be it human, animal, ghost—hell, whatever. His new-kindled ability was a step slower to come than mine, but was clearly gaining ground. He could also sense the angel in what otherwise seemed human; it was Remi who’d recognized that Shemyazaz was not a demon despite his fearsome appearance, but a fallen Grigori damned by Lucifer himself.
Though it could be Remi was going after Shemyazaz and not a demon at all; maybe he sensed threat in a half-crazed son of heaven. Who knew what Shemyazaz might do? He claimed he’d been inadvertently thrown back into our world when the hell vents opened, and now that he was stuck here, back on an earth he’d walked millennia ago, he was wholly dedicated to killing the devil. But trust the ruined angel?
Grandaddy would say no. Grandaddy had.
“Remi . . . come on, man—slow the hell down! We’ll take it out together!”
And that was all I had breath for, still climbing, still sliding and slipping, tripping, trying for traction even as wet leaves and needles slid away beneath my boot soles, and trees dumped small burdens of leftover rainwater as I passed beneath. The lower portion of my jeans were wet, growing heavy, and my t-shirt now was completely soaked, slick against my skin. The warmth of a summer day was not in evidence, though I, Oregon-born, would never call this cold, or even chilly. But clammy-cool, yes.
Trees thinned. Conifers now, juniper, and thickets of quaking aspen with lime-green leaves fluttering against white trunks with their black “eyes,” striated with dark bars like knife cuts. Still the day was dim behind sullen clouds. I was aware of distant lighting, distant thunder, and prayed it all remained so. Standing high upon a mountain in the midst of an electrical storm was dramatic, maybe, certainly cinematic, but not necessarily compatible with human life.
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