by Hondo Jinx
“I want what’s best for you.”
“How would you know what’s best for me?”
Brawley shrugged. “I won’t claim I do. I just don’t want to take advantage of your current, precarious situation and rope you into something you might regret down the road. You and I start running together, it’s forever. And that’s a long time, darlin.”
“I’ll be spending forever all the same, and I’d rather spend it with you than without.”
“There’s a lot of guys out in the world.”
“I don’t want them,” Callie said and leaned past him to pull another beer from the six pack. “I want you.”
“You want to know what I think you should do?” Brawley said.
Callie shook her head. “No. I don’t even want to know. But you’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?”
“I’d have to say that I can’t believe this is the best course for your life.” He tossed his empty onto the ground and grabbed the last beer and opened it and added the cap to his bulging pocket. He tossed the cardboard carrier into the flames and sat for a second, sipping the beer and watching the cardboard smoke and catch fire.
“Why don’t you like me?” Callie asked. “Is it my boobs?”
“Huh? I like you just fine, darlin.”
“I know they’re little. Not like the other girls.”
“That’s not it.”
“Is it my face? Or my hair? Or just because I’m so skinny?”
“Darlin, you’re pretty as a picture. I like you. I’m attracted to you.”
She smiled and some color came into her cheeks. “Really?”
“Really.”
She lifted the beer to her grin, and her cheeks burned bright red. “I thought you did. In the living room. I mean, it felt like something was happening. Like something was about to happen.”
“I felt the same thing,” Brawley said. “But I reckon that might have been a mistake, if we hadn’t gotten interrupted.”
She whipped her face in his direction, her amber eyes narrowed. “Why? What’s so wrong with me?”
“Darlin, there’s nothing wrong with you except maybe for one thing. Me. I might be wrong for you. All wrong. It’s something we have to figure out if you want to stay.”
“I want to stay.”
“I know. At least, I know you think you want to stay.”
“I want to stay.”
“I can help you know for sure.”
“I don’t need your help. I already know for sure.”
“No, you don’t. You couldn’t. Again, it’s not just your age. You’re scared and alone in a world you don’t understand.”
“Maybe I understand more than you think. Just because I didn’t go to school, just because my uncle kept me away from boys, it doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
Brawley shook his head, taking another drink. “Keep your claws in, darlin. Nobody’s calling you stupid. But how can you know you’re ready to hitch your wagon to a man when you haven’t ever even had a boyfriend?”
“I just know, okay? I think you’re great, all right? You’re handsome and strong and decent and brave, and I want to be with you.
“And I want to be with the girls, too. I know they don’t take me seriously. They think I’m silly. But they’re still nice to me. And they’ll see. I’m not stupid.
“This is fate. You, me, the girls. We all started out in different places, but our paths all led to the same place. You pulled me out of the water, and I saved Remi, and now we’re all together, and that’s the way I want it, because I really, really like you. I’m telling the truth.”
“I know you are, darlin. That’s the thing about being a Seeker. You always know when somebody’s telling the truth or lying, and you’re sincere as the day is long.”
“Well, what’s the problem, then? If I like you and you like me, what’s the problem? You’re making me crazy, Brawley. And if you’re a Seeker, can’t you just look in the future and see whether we’re together or not?”
“I’m not that kind of Seeker.”
“What kind are you?”
“I don’t rightly know, not yet. I seem to be good at some things. One time, I accidentally latched onto a penny and went for a crazy ride back across the lives of different people who’d touched it.”
“That must’ve been weird,” she said. Then she looked thoughtful for a second and said, “Can you do that to me?”
“What?”
“Ride me.”
Brawley grinned.
“Seek me, I mean,” she said, blushing again, “or whatever you call it.”
“I could do that. I will, if you want. But first, I want to show you the truth.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want you to see who I am, where I’ve been, where I’m headed, everything.”
“You can do that?”
“I reckon I probably could. I’m new to this. But yeah.”
She swiveled around to face him. “Do it, then. Do it to me.”
Brawley nodded and reached out and touched her cheek again. Her skin was soft and warm, and her eyes swelled at his touch. He stared into those big, amber eyes.
She fidgeted a little and blushed again and looked away.
He waited.
She looked into his eyes again.
And he let her have it.
He held the concept of himself in his mind. Who he was, where he’d been, what he’d gone through. He opened a window onto things he’d done, good and bad and otherwise.
He showed her the love he felt for his women. What he would do for them, what he expected in return.
He laid open his opinion of Callie. All of it. His desire and gratitude and the hopes he held for her. Also his concerns, which he had found so difficult to put into words. Her youth and inexperience and the troubling notion that her inexperience might make her vulnerable to him in some way she would come to regret.
Most of all, he pictured the future, the challenges they faced, the dangers, the long odds, the great black thundering heart of danger into which she would transfuse herself should she choose to graft her life to his.
Callie straightened as if she’d touched a live wire. Her eyes went impossibly wide and bright, and her little mouth fell open. With this shocked look on her face, she stared at him, through him, as he flooded her mind with a full understanding of who he was and what life alongside him would mean for her, should she choose to bond with him.
Callie hugged her knees to her chest and started rocking back and forth, back and forth, like a girl coming down from a crying jag.
Once he finished, she just kept staring like that and leaned back. And back. And back.
At the last second, Brawley lurched forward and caught her before she could fall off the log.
Callie jolted into wakefulness and blinked at him. Her eyes flicked back and forth in short swipes, scanning his face. She was breathing hard, bewildered.
Shit, Brawley thought. That was a mistake. I scared the hell out of her, and now she’s going to bolt and swear off the male race forever.
Callie jerked forward, threw her arms around his shoulders, and buried her head in his chest. “Oh Brawley,” her muffled voice said. “I love you. I really love you.”
And heaven help her, the words rang of truth.
“That wasn’t my intention, darlin. I just wanted you to see what you were thinking of getting yourself into.”
His flood of truth had broken a dam within her, and all the emotions it had been retaining rushed forth in a powerful wave. “I’ve loved you since the moment you saved me from the ocean. I mean that was part of it, you saving me. But since then I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you for even a second. I kept thinking about you and picturing your handsome face and remembering what it felt like being in your arms.”
“You clawed the shit out of me.”
“I’m sorry about that. I was scared.”
“That’s okay.”
She glanced quick
ly sideways, blushed, and grinned at him. “You woke something in me. I mean, ever since we met, it felt like I was in heat. That happens with cats. But I don’t mean that. I mean in my human form. Like now. Always, I mean. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Is that how you feel about me? I mean, I know you feel sort of… you know… but—”
“Hey, asshole,” a deep voice interrupted. “I heard Weasel almost whipped you. Fucking Weasel!”
Ramrod threw his head back and roared with laughter. Barbecue sauce glistened among the gray and red hairs of his bushy steel-and-copper beard.
“Heard he would’ve smashed you if you hadn’t cheated.”
“Cheated.”
“All that pansy force mage bullshit.”
Ramrod was a big dude, fat and thick, like a chunk of marbled ribeye with a bad attitude. Meanness came off him in waves like heat rising from summer blacktop.
Knots of scar tissue ran in a low mountain range across Ramrod’s bulging stomach, where an automatic weapon had ripped him open. Above these scars, a third-rate tattoo read DEATHLESS. Patches covered his leather vest, indicating rank, things he’d done for the club, and other shit Brawley didn’t care about.
Brawley’s arm crackled with telekinetic force. But remembering Braxton’s warning and advice, he didn’t rise to the bait. Besides, after all the blood and guts he’d waded through over the last few days, he didn’t feel like fighting.
“Not interested,” Brawley said.
Then a wave of sand hit him in the face.
“All right,” Brawley said, standing up. Within him, something shifted.
He stood, brushing himself off.
Chuckles rippled through the spectators.
He knew this was a ritual, knew Ramrod was supposed to fuck with him, but that was mattering less and less with each passing second.
“Aw, you don’t like getting sand kicked in your face, pussy? What you going to do about it?”
Brawley didn’t say anything. He was ready to blast the hulking sergeant-at-arms with telekinetic force.
Smiling bikers were forming a loose circle around them.
Ramrod grinned, showing a jack-o’-lantern smile where he hadn’t bothered to regrow missing teeth. “You think you can just come in here and party with the Scars? You want in the club, I’m the door. You got the balls to fight me? One on one, man to man? None of your mumbo jumbo pansy force mage bullshit. We fight like men.”
It was tempting. But really, Brawley just wanted to drink his beer and finish talking with Callie before the girls returned. “Let’s just go our separate ways, buddy.”
Ramrod laughed like Brawley had said something hilarious and glanced around to share the joke with the bystanders. Turning back to face Brawley, he reached out with one of his big, dirty hands. “How about I throw you in the lake instead?”
A .50 Desert Eagle slid past Brawley, pointing at Ramrod’s face. Callie’s eyes bulged with apprehension, but her hand was steady.
Nice, Brawley thought. The girl might be young, but she had more guts than you could hang on a fence.
Ramrod snorted. “What, you need your women to fight for you?”
“Like I said, let’s just go our separate—”
“You don’t drop that fucking pistol,” Ramrod shouted at Callie, “I’ll take it away from you and shove it up your skinny ass!”
Brawley pushed the muzzle of Callie’s pistol gently downward and leaned in to kiss her cheek. Then he held out his bottle, “Hold my beer, darlin.”
Turning back to face the hulking sergeant-at-arms, Brawley said, “I was going to let you have your fun, buddy, but you just committed the unpardonable sin. Nobody threatens my women.”
14
Cars passed sporadically along both lanes of Route 1, everyone going places, doing things, thinking. All of them leaving the past behind and driving into the future, unaware they were trapped in the present. No one would pay any attention to the panel truck parked beside the road or the short, stubby man in the bowling shirt.
The clicking in Uno’s pocket intensified, speeding up until it was almost a single note.
The power mage had been here.
Uno walked back and forth, studying the tire tracks and footprints. Some were fresh. He studied them, memorizing sizes and shapes.
Across the road was a strip mall. Had the power mage gone inside?
Perhaps.
But Uno did not wish to render another subject.
A steady stream of customers entered and exited the store. People wanting candy and greeting cards and hydrogen peroxide. People buying food and shitting, people being born and dying.
Uno shook his head.
Forget them. Forget them all.
He hoped to find what he needed here in this rutted turnoff and get on the road. Eventually, he would learn the power mage’s exact location. And then…
Click-click-click.
Uno withdrew the warm little ball from his pocket. The tracker’s flesh was fever-hot and slick with a greasy perspiration that matted the sparse and wiry fur to its trembling, bony body.
Click-click-click-click.
Uno crouched down and opened his hand. For a few seconds, the thing remained still, a baseball-sized sphere of gray flesh with knobby bones poking out here and there among the dark hairs.
The tracker went silent. Clicked. Went silent again.
Then moving slowly, the tracker unfurled its body and stepped from Uno’s palm onto the ground, a four-legged beast with skinny shanks and a wasp waist and a relatively thick chest, its body type reminding Uno of a miniaturized poodle. The head, however, looked nothing like a dog’s.
The head looked like a bruise-colored paint roller with a deep nap. Here and there from the tubular head jutted a profusion of stubby gray appendages like furry pipe cleaners. The tip of each appendage sprouted a cluster of the whiskery hairs that vibrated like so many seismograph needles. All along the tracker’s body and head, angry little blisters oozed a grayish seepage that smelled like fresh buttermilk. At the center of each oozing bump, a little mouthlike aperture dilated briefly open, closed, reopened, closed again.
A car passed.
Once the vehicle rounded the corner, Uno could hear the tracker sniffing. The tubular head swung low, brushing wiry hairs across a large footprint that looked to have been made by a pointy-toed cowboy boot, size twelve or thirteen.
The demon skittered abruptly sideways like a crab.
Trembling, the thing reached with one clawed foot and scraped at the mud until a coppery disk popped free.
A penny, Uno realized, crouching down. A 1929 wheat penny.
A mouthlike hole opened at the end of the tracker’s tubular head. The slimy, quivering body contracted once, twice, three times. With a squishing sound like someone squeezing a rubber glove full of jelly, the tracker vomited a wobbling mound of milky gray mucus onto the old coin.
The tracker whined, lowered its head, and brushed the mess with its whiskery hairs.
Then it sucked all the vomit back into the hole from which it had spewed.
By the time Uno had crouched to scoop up the strange creature, the tracker had already started clicking again.
“Yes,” Uno said. “Show me the way. Show me the way, and we will hasten the Deposed Lord’s return.”
Uno was strong now. Stronger than ever before, thanks to the favor of the Deposed Lord, who was delivering a constant flow of force through the gate Uno had opened within his body.
Remembering his master’s promises, savoring them, Uno pocketed the little demon, climbed aboard the panel truck, and started the engine again.
Across the street, a woman stood just outside the pharmacy, smoking a cigarette and staring thoughtfully up into the dark sky. But even as Uno stared in that direction, his vision blurred, and he was seeing a place.
Not the place. Not yet. But an important place nonetheless, a steppingstone that would carry him closer to the power mage.
He pulled onto the road, the general direction strong in him.
The tracker’s clicking grew faster as Uno entered a trailer park and faster still as he bounced along rutted lanes. Finally, he pulled up behind a line of vehicles parked in front of a dilapidated mobile home, before which several thugs lounged around a firepit, drinking beer and smoking weed and trying to act hard.
Click-click-click-click.
Uno turned off the truck and pocketed the keys and got out. He took one step toward the lawn party, but the tracker stopped clicking and whined plaintively. Uno stepped into the lane, facing the trailer on the other side, where a little white dog stood beside a rickety porch, barking.
The tracker started clicking happily.
Uno took another step, but the thugs started calling to him, asking him who he was, what the fuck he was doing, and did they say he could park that piece of shit truck there?
Uno stood there, studying the trailer. There were two cars in the driveway, a beater and a nondescript sedan, dark in color.
By the intense whining intermingling with the tracker’s clicking, Uno judged that the trailer across the road was very important.
The sedan was just generic enough, however, to suggest the presence of police or government agents. The FPI, maybe, or the Order.
Who? How many?
Whatever the case, they merely represented an annoyance. Not long ago, he would have avoided such a situation. But now, with everything coming together…
“What are you, deaf?” someone shouted, and a hand shoved Uno’s shoulder from behind.
“You will serve me,” Uno said.
Another shove. “The fuck you say?”
“Look at his hands,” another voice said. “Motherfucker’s throwing signs.”
Mumbling in a language much older than all of humanity, Uno turned.
15
Brawley ducked, and Ramrod’s boot blurred overhead.
On all sides, Scars screamed for blood. The bikers formed a makeshift ring roughly twenty feet by twenty feet on the beach near the bonfire.
Brawley slipped away, moving laterally through the sand, ignoring the demands that he stand and fight.
To hell with that. This big son of a bitch hit like a fucking mule kick.