by R. L. King
“Doesn’t matter,” Jason said, getting up. “If you know where he is now, let’s get over there and find him before he does move. It’s already getting close to six. If they start the Burn at nine, that only gives us three hours to find Al and track down the Evil.”
If the rest of the group were together, Trin knew where she’d find them. Now that the storm had finally blown itself out, it was time to get over there and find out if she could salvage this situation, or if Sam had already gotten to them in whatever new host he’d taken over. She wondered if the soldiers had already set up the last three ritual sites, or if the idiots were still waiting for her orders.
So many things that could go wrong—more now than before. She thought about stopping by Dr. Brandt’s RV—since the researcher’s Other was a soldier and not one of the group of leaders, she probably wasn’t included in whatever discussion the rest of the group might be having right now. All she cared about was making sure the ritual went off properly. Trin decided she’d better find the leaders first. Brandt would keep for now.
She pulled up her disregarding spell and set off across the playa toward her destination. She reached it a few minutes later: she half-hoped that the storm had blown away the big tent, but no, there it was, standing strong as ever. She couldn’t tell if anyone was inside, so she swapped her spell for true invisibility when she got close and crept toward the front.
They were in there, all right. Sounded like all of them. She could hear them, their voices loud and agitated. Though she couldn’t make out what they were saying, she caught her name a couple of times.
Oh, yeah. This would be fun.
Her gaze hardened. They were nothing but mundane humans. Sure, their brains were being driven by superior beings, but those superior beings didn’t have any powers or abilities that their hosts didn’t have. Like she’d told Sam, she held the cards now, if they wanted their ritual to happen.
She dropped the invisibility, put up her shield (no sense in being foolish: she knew at least a couple of them were armed with handguns and knew how to use them) and stepped boldly inside the tent.
They were all in there, sitting around a large table and facing someone Trin didn’t recognize: a tall, dreadlocked black man around forty years old. He paused in the act of saying something and settled his gaze on her. So did the rest of them.
Chaos erupted. The mob boss, looking odd in khakis instead of his usual thousand-dollar suit, had a gun in his hand and leveled at Trin so fast that it was almost impossible to follow the movement. So did the cop. Some of the others leaped to their feet while others remained where they were. All of them were yelling at once.
“Shut up!” Trin shouted. “All of you!”
They didn’t. “You’re dead, bitch,” the mob boss growled, his gun still leveled at her head. “Nobody fucks us over.”
She shook her head and raised her voice to get over the din. “You guys don’t get it, do you? You can’t get through my shields. None of you can. Fire that thing if you want it to ricochet and kill somebody—maybe somebody in another tent. You want that kind of attention, two hours before the ritual? Go ahead. I don’t give a fuck.” She looked at the black man. “Nice one, Sam. Traded up from the twerp to a real grownup, I see. Too bad your power’s in the crapper after losing another host. I’m surprised anybody’s even listening to you anymore.”
“I’ve already told them what you did,” he said evenly. “You were told not to go after Stone, and you did it anyway. And you screwed it up, too, didn’t you? I heard him nearly put you through the wall of the RV before he ran off screaming like a madman. I heard all that while you had me tied up and locked in the cargo hold. Where you left me to die.”
The others rumbled, their tones ominous, their expressions cold and merciless.
If they expected Trin to roll over and play dead, though, they were in for a surprise. She was done playing good little mage for this pathetic collection of losers. Sam might think he’d gotten the drop on her, but this was still her show. “Yeah,” she said with a shrug. “He got away. But you know what?” Her gaze swept the group, taking them all in. “I don’t give a fuck. He doesn’t matter. He’s probably dead by now anyway. But the point is—it doesn’t matter what I did. You guys want your fucking portal? You want your new soldiers to command? Because if you do, I’m the only game in town.” She held up her hands, emphasizing her glowing shield. “You can’t hurt me. There’s so much magical power flying around here that I can walk around for the rest of the fucking night with this shield up, and none of your little guns has a chance of getting through it. What do you think of that?”
There was more rumbling, but the mob boss regarded her in thoughtful frustration. “Fuck if the bitch ain’t right,” he said reluctantly.
“What do you mean?” demanded the actress.
He sighed. “She’s right. We can’t kill her. And even if we could, we need her. She and Brandt are the only ones who know how to run the ritual.”
Trin nodded. At least some of them could be reasonable. She was surprised, and almost felt remorse that he would have to die with the rest of them. Almost. Because she didn’t believe for a second that he wouldn’t plug her in the back the first chance he got once the portal was up.
“You got it,” she said, glancing at her watch. “It’s after six already. I don’t know if anybody actually did anything without me telling them to, but if we don’t get the rest of the ritual circle put up by the time the Burn starts, then we’ll have fuck-all to show for all this work we’ve done. Is that what you want? Is punishing me worth that?”
“Don’t listen to her,” Sam—or whatever his host’s name was now—said. “She’s unstable. She’s insane. She doesn’t care about any of the rest of you. She’ll kill you all as soon as she gets a chance, like she killed me when I got in her way.”
“But Sam, honey,” Trin said, taking on a silky-sweet tone completely at odds with the cold glitter in her green eyes, “they’re not in my way. And they don’t need to be. We’re all after the same thing: we want the portal up and running.” She paused. “You know what? I think I just realized why you’re so pissed off at me. You thought you were in charge, didn’t you? You wanted to be the one calling the shots, and you had a little temper tantrum when you saw that people were listening to me instead of you. Because I have power, and you had the body of a ten-year-old. I can make things happen, and you needed a chaperone to get into—well, pretty much anywhere without drawing attention to yourself. That just ate at you, didn’t it, Sam?”
The others looked back and forth between the two of them, and Trin saw the beginnings of uncertainty growing in their eyes. “Listen,” she said, stalking back and forth like a lawyer giving a final appeal to a jury. “It’s almost time for everything we’ve been working for to happen. In less than three hours, our portal will be up and nobody will be able to do a damn thing about it. I need to finalize some things with Dr. Brandt, but I can’t do that while I’m standing here trying to convince you not to make a big mistake by following this guy here.” She waved dismissively at Sam. “Because,” she said, speaking slowly, spacing her words like bullets, “He. Can’t. Help. You. He can’t do anything for you. But I can.” She took a step back, encompassing all of them in her spread arms. “So who’s it gonna be, guys? Make up your mind. If you pick Sam, I’m outta here, and you can go right ahead and try to get your portal to work without me.”
“This is ridiculous,” Sam said quietly, but Trin could see the edges of panic showing around his expression. “We all agreed on the plan, and she just decided to throw that away for her personal vendetta. Which she screwed up. She doesn’t know Stone’s dead. He could be out there getting ready to stop us while we’re in here talking.”
“Maybe he is,” Trin said. “But what are you gonna do about it if they decide to go along with you? At least I’ve got a chance of dealing with him. You’ve got nothing.”
She stood in front of them, waiting and watching as unspoke
n communications passed between them. They didn’t have to talk: she could see that their minds were already mostly made up, and all that was left was the formality of voicing it.
“Okay,” the mob boss said, nodding at Trin. “Your show. You do your hocus-pocus thing and make the portal happen, and we’ll forget about the rest of it. Deal?”
Trin smiled her snake’s smile in Sam’s direction. “Deal. Glad to see there’s still some reason left around here.” She started to turn away, then stopped. “Oh. One more thing.”
Moving so fast none of them could stop her, she crossed to Sam, put a hand on his arm, and bit out a sharp word. Instantly his body went rigid and he screamed, jittering and bucking under her hand like he was being electrocuted. All around the table, the meeting participants closed their eyes, their faces going slack as they drank in Sam’s dying terror. Then, with a little sound like a fire flaring up, he turned to ash that fluttered into a little heap on the floor. A red-purple puff, small and diminished-looking, rose up. It seemed confused, disoriented; it hung there in the air for several seconds before streaking off.
“There,” she said, satisfied. The power of Sam’s new host’s death added to her already ley line-magnified supply, and the Other inside her purred as its own hunger was sated by the fear. “A little something for you, a little something for me. And now I’d better go talk to Brandt. Somebody make sure the soldiers get those last three circle points set up where I told them as soon as it’s dark, and report back when they’re in place. Then all we do is wait.”
Paul sat by the stranger’s bed when he began to moan softly, his head thrashing back and forth on the pillow.
“Hey, friend,” he said softly, putting a hand on the man’s arm. “You back with us?”
The man’s eyes opened, bloodshot, pain-darkened, and full of unutterable exhaustion. He blinked a few times, trying to focus on Paul’s face, but the mindless terror he’d exhibited every other time he’d briefly awakened was nowhere in evidence. “Where—” he rasped, then dissolved into a coughing fit.
“Hey, hey, hold on. Let me get you some water.” Paul got up, fetched a water bottle on a nearby table, and brought it back. “Slow and easy—you haven’t had much to drink all day. Need to take it slow, okay?”
The man nodded. Paul had to help him sit up a little, but he held the bottle with shaking hands and drank in slow sips. The coughing abated. “Thank you…” he whispered.
“No problem, dude. You had us pretty scared today. You were trippin’ hard.” He glanced up to see Raina coming in, and mouthed He’s awake to her.
She hurried over and pulled up another stool next to Paul’s. “Hi,” she said to the stranger. “Good to see you back. I’m Raina. This is Paul. We’ve been looking after you.”
For a moment he looked confused, and then it appeared things were coming back to him. “What—time is it?” he asked. “What day?” His voice was still weak and raspy.
“It’s a little after seven,” Raina said. “On Saturday. You’ve been here all day—can you tell us what happened to you? Did someone give you drugs? Did you take them yourself? What’s your name, by the way? I’m sure your friends are worried about you.”
The stranger paused for a long time, and Raina and Paul could almost see the wheels in his brain turning as they worked through the questions and tried to formulate adequate answers. “Name is…Stone,” he said. “Alastair…Stone. And—yes. Someone drugged me. How did I…get here?”
“You just ran into the middle of our camp last night,” Paul said. “Screamin’ your head off like you were scared shitless. Looked like a real bad trip.”
Stone contemplated that. He looked at Paul, then at Raina. “Thank you…” he said. “Thank you for helping me.” He tried to sit up more, but couldn’t quite manage it yet.
“Stay there,” Raina said, getting up. “You’ve barely had anything to drink and nothing to eat all day. Let me get you some soup. How do you feel?”
“Tired. Sore. But…I think I’ll be all right. Whatever the drug was, I think it’s mostly worn off.”
“Well, that’s good. You stay here with Paul, and I’ll bring you something back.” She hurried out of the tent.
Paul studied Stone. “So—somebody stuck you in the back and gave you dope? That’s not cool, man. You should have a talk with them.”
Stone closed his eyes for a moment, his expression hardening. “Yes,” he whispered. “I intend to do exactly that.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Saturday, early evening
“There,” Verity said, pointing at a ragtag-looking camp full of patched tents and old vehicles. “That’s where he is.”
Jason tilted his head and frowned. “That sure doesn’t look like the Evil, does it? Looks like a bunch of hippies.” And in fact, several bearded, scruffy men and long-haired women in wraparound skirts and dusty Birkenstocks milled around a central firepit area, eating and chatting. Most of them fit the classic stereotype and were well into middle age, and all the women he could see were of a far more “bohemian” type than Stone tended to be attracted to, so that shot Jason’s theory that the mage had found himself a hookup. “You sure?”
“Yeah,” she said, moving closer. “C’mon. Sharra, can you hang back and keep an eye out in case they try anything?”
“Sure.”
Jason allowed himself to be dragged forward toward the hippies’ camp, focusing on providing a visual deterrent to anybody making any threatening moves on Verity.
The group around the campfire all looked up as they approached. “Hey, friends,” one man greeted, raising a hand. He wore cutoff denim shorts and a faded gray T-shirt with a picture of a marijuana leaf and the word LEGALIZE in big green letters. “You hungry? We have plenty to share. Join us.” The others smiled and nodded, indicating a big pot of something simmering over the fire.
“Thanks,” Verity said, returning the wave. “But we’re looking for a friend who might be here. We’re wondering if you might have seen him. Tall guy, thin, mid-thirties?”
Jason noticed she didn’t describe any features of Stone’s illusionary disguise.
Two of the hippies exchanged guarded glances, and then a large woman with long, gray-streaked hair approached them. “Who are you?” she asked, and Jason immediately detected an odd overtone to her question.
“We’re friends of his,” he said. “He left our camp before the dust storm hit, and didn’t come back after it was over. We were getting worried about him.”
“Yeah,” Verity said, nodding. “We’re asking around to see if anyone’s seen him.”
Jason met her eyes. “You have, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, and the odd tone was still in her voice.
“Is he here?” Verity asked, sweeping her gaze around the camp as if she expected to see Stone sitting at the campfire. “Is he okay?”
“Why would you think he isn’t okay?” the woman asked. She appeared to be studying both Jason and Verity carefully.
“Listen. I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Jason said, frustrated at the runaround, “but if he’s here, please tell him we’re here. What’s going on, anyway?”
The woman studied him a moment longer. “What’s going on,” she said, “is I want to make sure you’re not a danger to him before I let you see him.”
“Danger?” Verity sputtered, eyes blazing. “We’re his friends! We’re worried about him. Is he in some kind of trouble?”
The woman didn’t flinch under Verity’s verbal assault. Her eyes remained calm, but her face showed a hardness at odds with her soft, earth-mother exterior. “He might be,” she said. “He came to our camp last night, in bad shape. He was in the middle of some kind of really bad drug trip. We’ve been looking after him all day since we couldn’t get out during the storm.”
Verity and Jason exchanged looks of shock. “What?” Jason demanded.
“Drug trip?” Verity added.
“Al doesn’t do drugs,” Jason growled
. “What the hell is going on? Where is he?” He started to move past the woman.
She held up a hand to stop him, and behind her, a couple of the burly bearded men half-rose in their seats. “Hold on,” she said calmly. “Before I let you see him, I want you to answer a question: Did you do this to him? Or maybe one of your other friends? Maybe as some kind of joke? Because he didn’t do it to himself. The injection site is on his back, up on his shoulder blade. Somebody else did this to him. I want to make sure I don’t hand him over to whoever that was.”
If Verity and Jason had been shocked before, they were nearly floored now. They both stared at her, eyes wide and fearful. “Somebody—drugged him?” Jason said in a low, dangerous voice.
The woman nodded. “I’m Raina, by the way. And I believe you that you don’t know anything about this. I’m a decent judge of people, though I don’t have to be to tell that either you two are the best actors I’ve ever seen, or you’re as shocked by this as I am. Come on—I’ll take you to him.”
They followed her past the group around the campfire, toward one of the painted tents. Verity looked at Jason and whispered, “Evil did this?”
He shrugged. He couldn’t imagine who else it could have been, but if it was the Evil, why hadn’t they simply killed Stone? None of this made a damn bit of sense.
Raina shoved aside the tent flap, went inside, and then moved aside to let them through. “Your friends are here,” she announced. “I’m not sure how they found you, but they’re here.”
Jason went in first, and stopped dead. Stone lay on a cot, dressed in nothing but a pair of shorts. He looked dead pale, his eyes sunken into deep hollows, his hair stuck to his head instead of poking out in its usual untidy spikes. His eyes widened as he saw who had arrived, and relief flitted across his face. “Jason.”