The Wild Road

by Marjorie M. Liu

  And if you lost those bricks? The woman was no shell. She had thoughts, feelings. She knew things. But her predicament was, to Lannes, the same as being born again. Forced to start anew. A babe in the woods.

  Tools lay scattered on the long table in front of him. Some resembled screwdrivers, but the shapes of their long tips ranged from needle thin to scalloped and flat as a duck’s beak. He smelled leather, paper, glue. A small refrigerator full of eggs hummed near his feet. He had been using egg whites earlier, mixed with natural chemicals, to apply gold leaf to the etchings of a special journal he was making for Frederick. The old man had written twenty novels within Lannes’ creations before sending them on to a secretary to be transcribed onto a computer. He called the journals his lucky charms.

  Lannes wondered if Frederick’s hands would let him write in this one. Likely enough, his next book would have to be of the spoken variety, recorded on tape or computer.

  He heard the old man’s footsteps and sat back, preparing himself. Frederick did not disappoint.

  “I can die happy,” said his friend upon entering the room, “now that I finally know what it feels like to harbor a criminal.” He slouched into a wooden armchair near the workbench in the study and stared at a picture of his father, a black-and-white still of a young man in a dark suit, fair hair slicked back, standing stiffly in front of a painted floral tapestry. The photo had been taken in the late 1920s in Maine. Lannes’ father had a copy in his own study.

  “She’s not a criminal,” Lannes replied, balancing the base of a screwdriver on his palm. “At least, I don’t think she is. What she said is true, I guarantee you that. Her memories are gone.”

  Frederick shook his head, looking away from his father’s picture. His fingers danced and trembled. “This is strange business, Lannes. Dare I say, even unnatural.”

  “That’s what you get for being friends with a gargoyle.”

  “Oh, the pain.” Frederick stood, and stretched. “All right, then. I will make my evening call to Sal, and then off to bed.”

  Sal. Lannes had not heard that name in some time. For some reason, it was always a minor shock for him to remember that Frederick had other friends. Human friends. Men and women Frederick had known almost as long as Lannes. He wondered, suddenly, how Frederick had coped all these years, living a double life between magic and the mundane.

  “How is Sal?” Lannes asked. “Still in the nursing home?”

  “Coma,” Frederick said, simply. “He had another stroke.”

  Lannes sat back, staring. “I’m sorry. I know you’re close.”

  “More than seventy years we’ve known each other. We might not be as close as you and I, but we are still like brothers.” Frederick suddenly seemed very small and frail, every bit his age. “I call, and the nurse supposedly holds the phone up to his ear. It’s the best I can do, at the moment.”

  “Would you like to visit him?” Lannes asked. “I’ll take you, wherever he is.”

  “Maybe. Or perhaps it is better to remember him as he was. Which was never that good, anyway.” The old man studied his slippers. “And the woman? I’m concerned with her state of mind, her circumstances notwithstanding. I’m also worried about you.”

  Lannes turned his thoughts inward, focusing on the hard sensation of the woman’s presence burning at the back of his mind. She felt like a small flame—brighter now, growing in strength. He did not know what that meant, but it was not a concern. Yet. His brothers might not feel the same way. Any kind of mental link, accidental or not, always posed a risk.

  But he knew where she was, just by thinking about it, and he found that to be an odd comfort.

  “Don’t,” Lannes said. “I can take care of myself.”

  “And I suppose you were…taking care of yourself…during that extended vacation?” Frederick’s jaw flexed, his eyes hard. “I found your parents, Lannes. I suppose they didn’t tell you that, did they? I found them after they had stopped searching for you and your brothers. We thought you were all dead.”

  Lannes closed his eyes and gripped the screwdriver between his hands. The plastic handle cracked. “You didn’t say anything.”

  “I thought you would. Eventually. But this…this woman…changes everything.”

  He felt sick. “I don’t see how.”

  “Your father said it was a trap.”

  Lannes tried not to think of it, but images flashed through his mind. His wings ached. “Wasn’t anything like this. If it was, do you think I would be helping her?”

  “I think helping others is in your nature. I doubt you can resist.”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “I worry,” said Frederick quietly. “I can’t see into her mind the way you can, but I still can’t help but wonder at the coincidence of her meeting you, of all the people in this city. You, Lannes. What are the odds?”

  Lannes opened his eyes and very carefully set down the mangled remains of the screwdriver. He could not look at his old friend. “Good night, Frederick.”

  “Lannes.”

  But Lannes said nothing. He did not want to remember. And though it was childish, he kept his head down until the old man shuffled from the room. Yet, when he was finally alone, shame crept over him. Frederick deserved better. Lannes was in no position to take for granted the concern of a friend.

  He sighed and reached for the phone. Dialed a number. His brother Charlie answered on the third ring.

  “Hey,” Lannes said, “it’s me.”

  “Better be good,” Charlie muttered hoarsely. “Three in the morning here, man.”

  A two-hour difference between Chicago and San Francisco. It was going to be dawn soon. “I have a problem.”

  Charlie said nothing for a long moment, but when he spoke, his voice sounded clearer. Like he was fully awake. Sitting up. “What happened?”

  Lannes told him. About the woman and the gun. The blood. The hole in her mind. He did not mention the link between them. There was no good reason for the omission, except that it felt personal, somehow. Intimate.

  “So?” Lannes asked, when he was done. “Verdict?”

  “I got nothing,” said Charlie. “You’re screwed.”

  “Thanks, genius.”

  “Good way to get a date.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Sorry.” His brother went silent. “I need to talk to Aggie about this.”

  Which was the reason Lannes had called Charlie instead of his other brothers. Agatha knew people. People with resources who would not look twice at a gargoyle or dismiss claims of psychic mutilation out of hand.

  Lannes had to marvel at his brother sometimes. His luck. His life. Charlie, through nothing more than an act of sheer desperation and compassion, had opened up a new world to them all—and found himself married, with a child, working now for an agency that operated out of San Francisco: a group of men and women, human and inhuman, shape-shifters, human psychics, all of whom masqueraded as little more than highly trained private detectives, mercenaries and bodyguards, simply in order to use their abilities, psychic and magical, to help others.

  Dirk & Steele. An agency that operated in public merely to maintain a guise of human normalcy. Fooling the world with the greatest trick of all—hiding in plain sight. Much like Lannes and the rest of his kind. He could never have imagined such an organization existed before Agatha had come into their lives. It was an extraordinary twist of fate. Destiny. Magic. Mysteries beyond reckoning.

  “Agatha isn’t at home?” asked Lannes.

  “Not for a bit. She was sent to Argentina. Investigating that gnome scare.”

  Lannes hesitated, trying to decide if he had heard right. “Gnomes?”

  “You know, little dudes with pointy hats? Big white beards and blue coats?”

  “That’s a commercial, Charlie.”

  “Whatever. A kid took some creepy footage down in Salta. Little guy wearing a pointed hat, moving with a weird sideways walk. People got freaked.”

 
“It’s probably just a prank.”

  “Sure. But Roland wanted it checked out. Just in case.”

  Lannes frowned, unbinding his wings with one hand. “Gnomes? Seriously?”

  “Gargoyles? Shape-shifters? My wife who can tell the future?”

  Lannes grunted, stretching his wings. “Fine. But that doesn’t help me.”

  “I’ll make some calls. In the meantime, be careful. You can’t be certain this isn’t just a ruse. Another way to…get at us. Again.”

  Lannes almost asked if he and Frederick had been talking. The possibility of a trap was impossible to forget. Pressure, those lines of fate knotting tighter: coincidence and chance, quirk and happenstance. To have been chased out of a bar by a woman just at the moment when he would witness his car stolen—a theft intended by another woman. An armed, bloody woman. A lifetime of tenuous moments bringing him here and now.

  The idea of being tricked scared him. But so did the idea of being wrong in another way. Because if the woman was innocent in all this—and he thought she was, he truly did—then abandoning her would be the same as a slow murder. He could not do that. Not without losing a part of himself that would be impossible to regain.

  Determination was stronger than fear. He had to get this done. He had to be strong enough.

  The witch did not break me. She did not.

  Upstairs, he heard the water stop. Charlie said, “Are you there?”

  “Thinking,” Lannes muttered. “Ask around. I’ll call if anything changes.”

  He hung up on his brother’s good-bye and sat still, wracking his brain. Coming up with nothing. He was going to have to ride this through. Play the situation by ear.

  Lannes heard footsteps on the stairs. Quiet. Careful. He half-expected the woman to make a run for the front door again, but after a long minute of silence, he heard her walking down the hall toward the study.

  He said, “I’m in here.”

  The woman peered around the door. She still wore Clarissa’s old clothes, and her hair was wet. Her face was scrubbed clean and pink. She looked tired and tense, but there was a strength in her gaze that was sharper, clearer. Like she had gotten her second wind. He liked that. She was not a whiner. Not a quitter. And she had every reason to quit, based on what little he had gleaned.

  “Feel better?” he asked, still seated.

  She nodded, peering at the workshop, the glow of the antique lamps warm on her face. She carried the scent of lavender with her, and her feet, wrapped again in his big socks, flopped charmingly. The small garbage bag crammed with her old clothes swung from her hand.

  She limped near, gazed down at the table covered in tools and paper. She seemed especially fascinated with the partial cover he had been working on, which was still laid out in loose form.

  “Ulrich Schreier,” she murmured. “Your work is similar. And it looks as though you’re using the cuir-ciselé process.”

  Lannes stared, heart thudding faster. “That’s a very obscure name. And a little known technique.”

  She blinked, ripping her gaze from the table to stare at him. “Is it?”

  He forced himself to breathe and folded his wings tighter around his body. He was wishing suddenly that he had not been so quick to free them. “Schreier was a fifteenth-century Austrian artisan. Famous in his time. But usually only book-binders are familiar with his work.”

  Her cheeks flushed. “Is that what you are?”

  “It’s one of the things. I restore books. I make them, too.”

  “Useful.”

  “Not many would say so.”

  “Then they’re not readers,” she said simply and frowned again, briefly shutting her eyes. Lannes leaned back, trying not to react. Her memories might be gone, but her spirit remained. Personality, likes and dislikes. A storehouse of random information.

  “You should rest,” he said. “You can take the room you woke up in.”

  “The sun will be up soon.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I should say good-bye.”

  “Sleep first, then good-bye.”

  “What makes you think I don’t have somewhere to get to?”

  “Because you would have gotten there by now.” Lannes wanted to stand, but his wings were pressing against the worktable, and that was probably the safest place for them. “The bedroom door has a lock, too, if you’re worried.”

  The woman faltered, staring. “Why are you doing this?”

  He smiled, sadly. “The way you ask…You think I’m going to hurt you.”

  “I think you’ll want something, eventually.”

  “You’re jaded.”

  “I’m realistic.”

  “Fair enough.” Lannes tried to think of anything that would reassure her, but nothing came to mind. She had a right to be scared. He was a big man with a suspicious absence of motives.

  Lannes heard something outside the room. A click. Not from the stairs, not on the second floor, but closer. He froze, then stood so swiftly the woman backpedaled away from him. He did not try to reassure her, just walked into the hall. He tasted night on his tongue and moved faster, almost at a run, until he found himself in the foyer.

  The front door was open. Not just a crack, but thrown wide. Heat washed over his back, and he moved aside as the woman drew up beside him. She stared at the door and went very still.

  “I didn’t do that,” she whispered.

  “I know,” he breathed. “Go upstairs, second door on your right. If Freddy is there, stay with him.”

  “What about you?”

  “Go,” he muttered. “Just go.”

  She went, hobbling as fast as she could. Lannes glided toward the front door, listening hard. Hearing nothing but the wind. He stretched out his senses, feeling for the passage of another, the passage of a stranger.

  All he found on the front steps was a piece of paper weighed down with a rock. He did not need to pick it up to read its message. The letters were large, bold, and in black.

  FIND ORWELL PRICE, he read.

  And at the bottom, RUN.

  Chapter Five

  The lights were off in Frederick’s room when the woman knocked and entered. She heard a man’s voice reciting from a book. Frederick, stretched on the bed and illuminated by light from the hall, immediately sat up and turned on a bedside lamp. He clapped his hands and the audio shut off.

  “What do you want?” he asked, with such tension that the woman realized with utter certainty that he did not trust her—that he might even be afraid of her. This was such a bizarre relief, such a pure gasp of normal, she had to lean against the door to catch her breath. Maybe no one here wanted to hurt her, after all. Maybe, just maybe, she had found herself a real, honest Good Samaritan.

  “Lannes told me to come up here,” she whispered. “Someone might have broken in.”

  The old man threw back his covers and rolled out of bed. He moved with enviable grace. “He’s down there now?”

  “He said to wait here.”

  Frederick gave her a sharp look and swept past. “Do you listen to everything strangers tell you?”

  “Apparently not,” she muttered, and followed him. Not far, though. Lannes was already running up the stairs. His mouth was set in a grim line, and his eyes held a look that made the woman feel as though she were seeing dead bodies all over again. Something terrible, awful. Horrific.

  “Pack a bag,” Lannes said to Frederick. “I’m taking you to a hotel.”

  The old man froze. “Excuse me?”

  “A bag. Anything you need. Five minutes.” He pushed Frederick toward his room and flipped on the overhead light, glancing back at the woman. “You and I need to talk.”

  Her feet throbbed. So did her heart. “What happened?”

  Lannes pulled a crumpled note from his pocket and showed it to her. Her knees buckled. Lannes caught her arm. She began to lean against him and he pushed her firmly toward the wall.

  “I don’t know what that means,” she murmured,
pain threading through her skull.

  “I think the meaning is self-explanatory,” he replied tersely. “Do you know this name?”

  “No.” She pushed herself toward the stairs, desperate. “I should go. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  He moved fast for a man his size, and blocked her path. His eyes were intense, searching. She wanted to hit him, to scream in his face, but her throat felt too full for words, and her hands, curled into fists, dug against her stomach. She was trying to hold in her fear.

  “This message was not just for you,” he said quietly.

  “You’re wrong,” she told him, hoarse. “You don’t understand. I was left a similar note. Earlier.”

  “Run,” he breathed, as though the word meant something to him beyond the note in his hand.

  “Run,” she agreed. “But just me. Not you. I don’t know anything about finding a man.”

  He leaned in. “Who would do this? Do you have any idea?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “What don’t you remember?”

  “Everything,” she whispered, horrified at herself. “Just that I woke up in a hotel room, and there was smoke, and bodies—”

  Her voice crumpled. So did her face, tears breaking free. She tried to speak again, but all that came out was a hoarse cracking sound, and she sagged against the wall, bent over her stomach, hands pressed against her mouth. Fighting herself. Fighting grief. Ashamed for not being stronger.

  Lannes crouched, keeping his distance. The woman could not meet his eyes. She was too afraid of what she would see. Disbelief. Suspicion. She expected him to call her a liar. Or worse.

  But all he whispered was, “It’ll be all right. I believe you.”

  She shook her head, squeezing shut her eyes. Wishing she were alone. Grateful she was not. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know anything.”

  “You know Ulrich Schreier,” he murmured, leaning closer. “You know Superman, and you know Chicago. You like books. And you are very stubborn. That’s something. That’s a great deal.”