Yeah. I might have been a mess, but I hadn’t been neglecting my workouts.
Given how often I found myself in trouble, I needed to be fit and strong, mostly because I sometimes needed to move in a hurry.
Such as when running away from an abandoned convenience store full of burning crates of unexploded dynamite.
I sprinted away from the store and into the desert. Grit and tough weeds rasped beneath my shoes, and suddenly I was clear of the Seal of Unmasking. I took a deep breath, preparing to Cloak myself once more…
A wall of hot air knocked me from my feet, and the night filled with fiery light.
An instant after that, I heard the roar of the explosion.
As it turned out, that had been a lot of dynamite.
I had gotten far enough away that none of the shrapnel caught me, but the shock wave still knocked me over. I pushed off the ground, went to one knee, and squinted, and saw the roiling fireball where the convenience store had still been. The roof and most of the walls had been blasted away, and the canopy over the gas pumps lay sprawled and twisted across the road. Just as well that the gas tanks below the store had been empty. Otherwise, the explosion might have burned down half of Red Ditch.
I cast the Cloak spell once more and stood, squinting into the fire. I didn’t see any sign of Lorenz, Erickson, and their men. Maybe they had all gone up in the explosion. Maybe they had escaped through one of Lorenz’s rift ways. Or maybe they had gotten out the front door in time, and were even now preparing to search for me.
Either way, it was past time that I was gone.
I ran back to the town proper. Once I was there, I dropped my Cloak spell, which was something or a relief, and instead used the easier Mask spell to disguise myself as another gas field worker on his way to the bars for a night of hard drinking. If Lorenz got close enough, he would be able to sense the magical power of the Masking spell, but I didn’t intend to linger in Red Ditch long.
It was time to get out of town, but I needed to do a few things first.
I returned to the Hearty Hammer Platter diner, dropped my Masking spell, and Cloaked myself instead. I made my way to the manager’s office, which was presently deserted since Erikson was either dead or fleeing for his life. I helped myself to the laptop computer on the desk, used a spell to open the safe, and took all the money inside, which amount to about three thousand dollars in small bills.
Petty robbery, I know. But this place was a front business for the Rebels, and I needed the money. As it turns out, driving around the country harassing the Rebels doesn’t pay well.
Once I had the money and the computer secure in a laptop bag, I dialed a number on the desk phone and lifted the handset to my ear.
“Citizens’ reporting line,” said a cool female voice.
Yeah, I had just called the Inquisition’s anonymous reporting number.
“Howdy,” I said. “There’s a Rebel cell operating out of Red Ditch, Wyoming. They’re using the Hearty Hammer Platter restaurant as a base, and an abandoned gas station on the edge of town, but it just burned down. They probably have a few other buildings scattered around town, so if you hurry, you might catch a few of the rats before they finish jumping ship. Have a nice day.”
I hung up and left. Once I slipped out the kitchen door of the restaurant and was out of range of the cameras, I dropped my Cloak and cast my Masking spell once more. Already I heard the wail of sirens as Red Ditch’s volunteer firefighter department kicked into motion. It was faster than I expected, but I suppose a town built near gas wells ought to have an excellent fire department.
Needless to say, it was time to get the hell out of Red Ditch.
Chapter 2: Take The Edge Off
Considering the mess I had made in Red Ditch, it was good that I hadn’t taken my van to the town.
Instead, I had parked my van at Rock Springs, Wyoming, a town of about fifteen thousand people forty miles west along Interstate 80. I had gotten to Red Ditch by “borrowing” a used car from a disreputable-looking car dealership on the outskirts of Rock Springs. It was an elderly Duluth Motors sedan with 150,000 miles on the odometer, and I hoped it wouldn’t die before I got it back to Rock Springs.
But the old car held up, and I returned the car to its slot in the dealership with no one the wiser. I had chosen to “borrow” the car from this dealership because it didn’t have any security cameras, but I nonetheless Masked myself as I walked to where I had parked my van.
My van was in the parking lot of a grocery store about a half mile from the dealership. It was a Royal Motors Caravanserai cargo van with a dent in the fender (I had run over an anthrophage), an unappealing beige paint job, and over three hundred thousand miles on the odometer. Yet the old van kept running, which was just as well since I had been living out of it since July. I did a quick check to make sure no one had planted a bomb or a bug on the van, then I climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
You might think all this was excessive – the constant Cloaking and Masking, the swapping vehicles, the preparations, and so forth.
It wasn’t.
One screw-up, one mistake, and I would have the Inquisition on my tail. And Red Ditch might have been a screw-up.
But I was more frightened of the Rebels than the Inquisition.
I had set myself in the path of some very bad people. The Rebel leaders were the sort of men and women who would not hesitate to shoot children to intimidate or punish their enemies. If Nicholas Connor figured out who I really was, he would come after my brother and the Marneys. I had ruined my relationship with my brother and his guardians when I had lost control of myself after the Eternity Crucible, but I could at least keep them safe from the Rebels.
I was tired, and my mind was buzzing like a swarm of disgruntled bees. I wanted to lie down and sleep in a real bed.
I drove my van to a chain motel on the outskirts of town. It wasn’t fancy, but it wasn’t a dump, and more importantly, it had a gym. I Masked myself as a middle-aged traveling salesman and rented a room from the bored clerk on duty at the front desk. I dropped my bags in my room and changed into an exercise shirt, shorts, and a pair of running shoes.
That made me start to shiver. It was cold outside, but it was a pleasant 72 degrees Fahrenheit in the hotel room. Nevertheless, it made me shiver, and I still felt cold in the thin shirt and shorts. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was a side effect of the Crucible, like someone suffering accidental nerve damage after an operation.
I was so tired of being cold all the time.
But I knew a good way to warm up, and to take the edge off at the same time. I was wound up after escaping from Red Ditch, and I felt one of the black moods coming on. During one of the first nights after the Eternity Crucible, I had dealt with my emotions by getting drunk in a parking lot.
That hadn’t been a great idea.
So, I had figured out another way to take the edge off, and it involved working myself to exhaustion.
I kept my Mask in place as I went to the hotel’s gym. As you might expect from a hotel gym in rural Wyoming at two in the morning, the place was deserted, which suited me just fine. I started with strength exercises, bench presses, squats, and deadlifts, and I kept the Mask in place as I went through the movements. Once holding a Mask in place while performing strenuous exercise would have been a challenge. Now it was barely an afterthought.
I performed the exercises to exhaustion, and when I was done, my arms and shoulders and hips had the loose feeling of tired muscles. I still wasn’t done, though, and I walked to the treadmill, set it to manual, and started running.
I got to nine and a half miles before the ache in my knees and hips told me it was time to stop. I was absolutely drenched in sweat, my breathing a constant rasp, and I was starting to feel light-headed. You’re supposed to rehydrate regularly while exercising, but I hadn’t bothered.
It would defeat the point.
I wiped my sweat from the treadmill and walked back to my room
, my heart rate finally slowing. There had been a security camera in the gym, of course, and I wondered what the clerk had thought of the middle-aged salesman exercising for an hour and a half at two in the morning. I supposed it didn’t matter. Once Homeland Security and the Inquisition started investigating the explosion in Red Ditch and the anonymous report I had sent them, perhaps the clerk would remember the odd stranger, but by then I would be long gone.
Once I got back to my room, I ran a bath, as hot as I could endure. I locked the door and shut off the vent fan so the bathroom turned into a sauna, and then I dumped my sweaty clothes on the floor and slid into the tub.
It was so hot I had to grit my teeth as I sat down. I started sweating heavily, and once I had acclimated, I slumped into the water, with only my face above the surface. That was one nice thing about being short – it was easy to fit into a bathtub.
I floated that way for about an hour, sitting up every so often to run more hot water. Every time I did, I felt a little woozier. Finally, I felt so dizzy that I drained the tub and got out. I had to grab at the wall to keep from falling over, and I staggered to the sink and drank five or six glasses of water in rapid succession.
Then I wrapped myself in a bathrobe, tottered to the bed, buried myself under the blankets, and fell asleep.
Or passed out, one of the two.
I woke up about six or seven hours later with a full bladder, but I otherwise felt calm. I suppose exercising to exhaustion followed by dehydration isn’t the best way to deal with a hard day, but my mind was clear. Most of the time, my moods veered between furious rage, bleak depression, and sort of tired numbness, but right now I felt fine.
Well, mostly fine. I got up, shivering as I pulled off the robe and blankets. I started the coffee maker and went to deal with my full bladder. To my annoyance, the bathroom door had a mirror so you could look at yourself as you sat on the toilet. I hated when hotels did that. I didn’t like looking at my reflection. I looked…
Actually, I looked pretty good. At least below the neck. All that exercise, I suppose. Above the neck…my face was thinner and sharper than I remembered, and my eyes had a strange glitter to them, madness or exhaustion or something.
Maybe they were the eyes of a woman who had died fifty-seven thousand times.
I didn’t like looking at myself, so I stared at the ceiling instead. My mind wandered, flickering over my life before Arvalaeon and the Eternity Crucible. I hadn’t lived an easy life, but it sometimes seemed like a pleasant dream that had happened to someone else. I thought about Russell and the Marneys, and I was gripped by the overwhelming urge to visit them or to at least call Russell…
No. I was dangerous, and I had dangerous people after me. Russell and the Marneys were safer without me. It was for the best.
I finished and stood up, and my reflection in the mirror did the same. I did look good, and I was amused that even after dying fifty-seven thousand times, even after seeing my heart ripped from my chest a few thousand times, I was still vain enough to be pleased by my appearance. It was a strange, strange feeling. My mind was a hundred and eighty years old, and I had spent most of those years getting killed painfully every single day. I felt older than dirt. But my body was still twenty-two years old and in excellent physical condition, and it looked good, and that pleased me, absurd as the vanity was.
That ridiculous bit of vanity made me feel…I don’t know. Closer to human, I guess, instead of what I had become.
Pity that a murderous asshole like Nicholas Connor was the only one to ever see me undressed. (Well, and a mob of Inquisition soldiers, but let’s not count them.)
Riordan had never gotten the chance. I wished I had taken that chance with him while there had still been time.
Then I realized that thanks to the mirror, I was quite literally navel-gazing.
For God's sake! Annoyed with myself, I took a shower, since I was pretty gross from all the sweat. Then I dressed in jeans and a heavy sweater and a jacket, and I got to work.
I drank bad hotel coffee as I examined the hard drive I had taken from Lorenz’s lair, plugging it into my own heavily secured laptop and running diagnostics. As I suspected, Lorenz had been careful, and the hard drive was locked down with heavy-duty encryption. I couldn’t get anything useful out of it. Best thing to do would be to drop it in an envelope and mail it to the Inquisition.
Fortunately, Erikson hadn’t been nearly as careful with his laptop, and it was easy to remove its hard drive, plug it into my machine, and dig through his files. Most of the data on the laptop dealt with the management of the Hearty Hammer Platter – food suppliers and building inspections and maintenance bills and so on. But Erikson’s sloppiness extended to his email, and I read through his cached message. He paid way more money to various suppliers than he should have, which meant he was making secret payments to front companies. Erikson also regularly drove to Las Vegas to meet with a “restaurant supplier” there, which was probably another front company. In an hour of searching, I found a dozen good leads to continue my campaign against the Rebels.
I took a break to have some breakfast. In the Eternity Crucible, I had often been torn apart with enough force that bits of my flesh landed in my mouth as I screamed and screamed. Because of those delightful memories, I had trouble eating anything that reminded me of that, since the gag reflex kicked in. So, I had gotten really good at making smoothies, and I brought my blender with me wherever I went. This morning I used vanilla-flavored protein powder, some powdered peanut butter, dried fruit, and a whole lot of leafy vegetables.
The trick was to make it thick enough that I had to eat it with a spoon.
I flipped on the TV as I ate breakfast and drank more bad hotel coffee. I found a local news station from Cheyenne and watched the biggest story of the day, which was the unexpected explosions in the town of Red Ditch. The talking head on the TV (blond, blue-eyed, and teeth as white as blank paper) assured the viewers that the incident had been a gas explosion and that Homeland Security had the situation under control.
Gas explosion. Right. Well, the Inquisition was good at covering things up, and when it couldn’t cover something up, it made sure to present the situation in the best possible light for the High Queen. The whole situation in Milwaukee with Sergei Rogomil had nearly been a disaster, but for weeks after I killed him, the TV shows and the Internet had been filled with stories celebrating our victory over the Archons.
Disgusted, I shut off the TV, and started making myself a second smoothie. I hadn’t eaten much of anything yesterday. Once I was done with breakfast, I decided to head for Las Vegas to follow up the leads from Erikson’s computer. I still had to steal two more things for Nicholas Connor thanks to Lord Morvilind’s deal with the Forerunner, but until Nicholas summoned me, I was going to continue to harass the Rebels…
My phone rang.
I blinked in surprise and looked at where my phone sat on the desk next to my portable blender. It was a standard-issue smartphone (albeit with some security modifications I had added), one churned out by the millions by an electronics manufacturer in Texas. It wasn’t a very good phone, but I had destroyed my main phone in a fit of temper last year, and I had been using this phone ever since.
Except nobody ever called me.
For a wild instant, I wondered if it was Russell or the Marneys or Riordan, if they had tracked me down…
I put the childish fantasy aside. They wouldn’t have been able to find me. Lord Morvilind? No, I hadn’t given him this number. And if Lord Morvilind wanted to summon me, he wouldn’t bother with a phone call. He would use that nasty pain-inducing summons spell until I called his butler Rusk.
And I had only given this number to one person in the world.
“Shit,” I said. I felt a strong urge to disconnect the call, but Nicholas would only keep calling until I picked up.
I hit the connect button and lifted the phone to my ear.
“Hello, Nicholas,” I said.
There was a
pause, and then my murderous ex-boyfriend’s voice filled my ear. He had a nice voice, calm and deep and commanding. Nicholas was smart, strong, and handsome, and unlike some to whom God had given brains and good looks, he didn’t coast on them. He worked as hard as anyone I ever met.
All he lacked was any trace of a conscience.
“Katrina Stoker,” said Nicholas. “I am very surprised to hear that you are still alive.”
“Why?” I said. “Did your best to kill me, I assume?”
“Not at all,” said Nicholas. His amusement sounded genuine. “If I had done my best to kill you, Kat, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. How are your husband and son? Healthy, I hope?”
Yeah. That wasn’t creepy or a veiled threat or anything. I had told Nicholas I was married with a son, which turned out to be a good idea since all his threats had been directed at my imaginary family.
“I just told my son he couldn’t have cake for dinner,” I said. “He threw an epic tantrum. He had the same expression you did when I didn’t come back with that briefcase the first time.”
“Indeed?” said Nicholas. “Are you sure he isn’t mine?”
Damn it. I had walked into that one.
“We were always quite careful, of course,” said Nicholas, his amusement increasing, “but I imagine your husband would be distressed to learn that he was raising another man’s child.”
“I am entirely certain,” I said, “that he’s not yours.”
I was certain of that because he didn’t exist. You know how all your teachers and pastors told you that honesty is better than lying? I bet they didn’t mention that honesty is a lot less work than lying. I also bet honest people don’t exchange insults over the phone with a homicidal ex-boyfriend about a child that doesn’t actually exist.
Cloak Games: Hammer Break Page 3