Blair was waiting on the phone as his quarry left their parking stall. Over the phone, he could still hear keys clacking.
He didn't dare just let the masaaks wander off, so he put his own car into gear and followed discreetly. The quarry turned onto the main boulevard before his master finally said, "I don't believe that we have any operatives in that area. You think that a feral has what... co-opted one of our own?"
Blair's heart thrilled as adrenaline flooded his system. This was going to turn into a hunt!
"Yes—a young man, just a little older than a songbird."
Blair's superior breathed heavily as he considered. After a moment he said, "You're training your apprentices as hunters, are you not? Let the hunt begin."
"Let me verify: we have authorization to apprehend these two?"
"Absolutely. Do so immediately."
"And once we have them? What would you have done?"
The voice on the other end went cold. "I'll have the Dread Knights take it from there."
Olivia gripped the steering wheel. Her knuckles went white as she slid down West State, until she hit the red light at Telegraph Road. To the right was the underpass and ramp to the freeway. To the left were the guts of the city.
She took a heavy breath, as if she might hyperventilate.
"You aren't going to shoot anyone, are you?" Bron asked.
"Not if I don't have to," Olivia said.
"There's no reason for that!" Bron said, heart hammering.
Olivia glanced into the rearview mirror. "They're coming for us."
Bron glanced back. A black Mercedes Benz S600 sedan with tinted windows had pulled up behind them. Bron once had a friend who was a car geek, and Bron had learned a lot more than he wanted to know about such vehicles.
In the Mercedes, the elderly man was just pocketing his cell phone. Bron could see determination in his cold eyes.
Olivia stopped at a red light, and behind them the Mercedes lurched to a halt. Instantly, all four teens lunged out their doors, rushing toward Olivia's car.
One young man grabbed Bron's door handle and pulled, but the doors were locked. "Get out!" he shouted. Bron looked up at Riley O'Hare, face twisted in rage.
Bron heard a click, and suddenly Olivia's gun was near his face, aimed at Riley's chest.
"No!" Bron shouted, pushing Olivia's hand. The gun discharged. The sound was deafening. The window shattered. Bron saw that Olivia had missed. The bullet had gone wide and to the left.
Olivia punched the gas just as Riley reached through the window, fumbling with the door lock. He grabbed onto the door post and just clung to it.
A truck honked and swerved as Olivia raced through the red light. Riley was still grasping onto the latch. He clung and cursed as the Honda dragged him.
Riley shouted in a foreign language, perhaps Russian, and Olivia sped up as she raced a couple hundred yards, hitting the next red light just before the freeway entrance.
Cars were coming from the opposite direction. She slammed the brakes, and Riley was thrown forward, onto the pavement, where he lay groggily. He had blood on his face.
Bron suddenly remembered when they were kids at the group home, Riley eating a ton of stuffing at a Thanksgiving dinner, laughing, with his mouth full.
He'd looked so completely different from now.
What the hell is going on? Bron wondered. He glanced back. The other three teens had returned to their Mercedes, which rushed toward them.
Olivia hit her horn and sped through crossing traffic, dodging a pair of cars.
"Get those paper bags out of the glove compartment!" she shouted. There was no way that Olivia could beat the Mercedes, but she floored the gas as she sped up the freeway's on-ramp.
Bron reached in the glove compartment. There were two paper bags. He grabbed one, and spikes poked through the paper and cut into his hand. He pulled the bag out. The thing was surprisingly heavy—perhaps eight or ten pounds—and was filled with little metal spikes of some kind. Olivia rolled down her window as she took the bag. She hurled it so that it lofted over the CRV and landed on the road behind them, breaking open. Little pieces of gray metal scattered like shards of glass.
Bron heard horns blare as the Mercedes barreled onto the onramp, accelerating. With over 550 horsepower in its engine, the Mercedes streaked toward them like black lightning.
The front tires on the Mercedes exploded, pieces of rubber flying like shrapnel. The car began to spin, then slewed off the embankment in a cloud of sand and dust. It rolled twice before settling on its hood.
Bron looked back at the flying dust, the battered vehicle, a side-mirror rolling down the on-ramp. He was scared and elated and confused, and found himself shouting inanely, "Epic failure!"
Olivia laughed in what sounded like pure relief, then punched the gas and raced ahead at eighty miles per hour until they reached the next exit. She was panting, her face stark with terror.
Bron's heart hammered, and his stomach twisted into a knot from adrenaline. His ears still rang from the gunshot.
He couldn't deny that those freaks had been chasing them. Olivia wasn't crazy. She had a right to be afraid. But pulling a gun?
"What the hell?" Bron demanded. He wasn't used to swearing in front of adults, but the situation seemed to demand it. "Who were those people?"
Olivia merely handed the gun to Bron, and nodded toward the glove compartment. He glanced down. The barrel said that it was a Glock 35, a .40 caliber. Bron didn't know much, but this looked like serious firepower. He laid it gingerly into the glove compartment, on top of the second bag of metal bits.
"Later," she said. "I'll explain later."
Blair crawled out of his overturned Mercedes, clutching at his chest. He felt a sharp and intense pain, one that nearly bowled him over, left him feeble and weak.
It's a heart attack, he thought, caused by the exhilaration. He knew that a heart attack was tricky to diagnose based on pain alone.
He worried. As a masaak, it was not wise to go to a hospital, expose himself to human doctors. With a careful examination, they'd recognize that he wasn't human.
Riley came limping up, nodded toward one of the acolytes. "I think Fields is dead."
Blair glanced back. Fields was lying on his back forty feet off the road. His eyes were fixed and staring. The boy's feet spasmed. His face was crushed and misshapen.
Blair, clenching his teeth in rage, called in his report.
"We've lost our quarry," he said.
"Lost them?"
Blair peered back. Another car pulled onto the ramp. Its tires exploded. It swerved to the left, into the median, completely blocking the road. The police would arrive soon.
"One of my apprentices was killed in the chase," Blair asserted. "And I'm not feeling well. It may be my heart."
There was a long silence. His superior would be trying to figure out how to remedy the situation.
"Take a hotel in town," his master said.
He's decided to let me die rather than letting the humans risk discovering us. If I'm to make it, I'll have to do it on my own.
He felt lost and alone, but among the Draghouls, to show weakness was worse than death. After all, everyone succumbs to death, but only cowards succumb to fear.
"Have your apprentices scour the area," his master ordered. "When you find your quarry, hobble them...."
"With pleasure," Blair said. Hobbling was a cruel thing to do. Stripping a captive of the knowledge of how to walk or crawl left prisoners as helpless as slugs, but it was effective.
They would not escape....
Olivia drove to exit four, then turned right, as if she'd head back into the mountains, to the little town of Pine Valley. Instead she turned into a crowded parking lot at a McDonald's and collapsed, resting her forehead on the steering wheel, gasping.
"You know those guys?" Bron accused.
"No," Olivia said. "I've never met them personally. But I've heard about them."
"Who are they? Wha
t have you heard?"
Bron felt desperate for answers.
Olivia picked her head up off the steering wheel and gazed into Bron's eyes steadily, as if wondering whether she could trust him to keep a secret.
"I'll tell you sometime," she promised. "Soon."
"I want to know now!" Bron demanded. He tried to reason more slowly. "In six months I'll be old enough to join the Marines. If there are dangerous cultists in town, you should tell me."
Olivia shook her head, as if she couldn't find the words. "Trust me, Bron. I just want to go home."
Her tone was pleading, but Bron didn't dare let her off the hook. He came to a decision. "I'm bailing," Bron said as he opened the car door. "I'm out of here."
He didn't know where he would go, or what he would do. He just knew that he had to force her to tell the truth.
"Wait!" Olivia focused on him. "Haven't you ever wondered who you were?" she asked. "Haven't you ever wondered why your mother abandoned you?"
Her words stopped him, yanked him as surely as if they were a chain around his neck. He felt like a child, again, a toddler whose world was defined by a dog collar and a length of rope.
He turned to her slowly, unbelieving. "You know?"
"I know," she whispered as if her heart would break. "I swear to god I know."
"Tell me," he said, settling back.
"I can't," she said. "Not yet. I'm not allowed to tell you."
"Is Mr. Bell behind this?" Bron demanded.
"No, he doesn't know anything," Olivia said. She held her arm next to his. "Do you see the color of our skin, the similarities in our hair, the shapes of our eyes? I can't tell you exactly who you are, but I know what you are."
"I'm listening," Bron said, and unexpectedly, his voice cracked. His eyes stung. "Tell me. Please."
"I'll make a phone call, as soon as we get home. By law, I can't tell you. But there's someone who can. I was going to call anyway, once I realized the truth, to get the process started."
"How long will it take?" Bron asked.
"A week, maybe two," Olivia said. "I can't be sure."
Bron leaned back in his seat and drew a long breath. He tried to block out his excitement, cast away all hope, until he felt comfortably numb.
"Make the call now," he dared her. He didn't think she'd do it.
Olivia studied him, pulled out her cell phone, and punched in a number. "Father Leery?" she asked.
Bron could hear a voice on the other end, solemn and grave. "Yes?"
"This is Olivia. I have a problem. I found a songbird."
"Oh... bloody... hell! A nightingale?"
"Yes," Olivia said.
"Black or white?"
"Black."
"Oh ...bloody ...hell!"
"There's more," Olivia said. "We went to a store. The enemy spotted him. We got away, just barely."
Bron had to lean close in order to hear the priest. "Enemies? How many?"
"Five. A master hunter, I think, and four acolytes."
"They'll be after you," Father Leery warned.
"I don't know what to do," Olivia said. "I'm thinking we should leave town...."
"That's just what they'll expect," Father Leery said. "They'll be watching the freeways for suspicious activity."
"So what should I do?"
"You live what, forty miles out of the city? Go home, Olivia. Go home and hide. I'll see if I can handle this."
"There's another thing," Olivia said. "Our songbird, the boy, wants to know what's going on."
"He needs to know," the priest said, "but you can't tell him. The law protects him as much as it does us."
"He needs to know soon" Olivia urged.
"I'll alert the Weigher of Lost Souls," the priest said, and the phone clicked off.
Olivia sat for a moment, breathing hard.
"He sounds as crazy as you," Bron said.
She grinned. "We're not crazy, Bron. We're in more trouble than you can imagine. There are good reasons for our laws, profound and important reasons. You're special. You don't know how special yet. But your world is about to grow very large indeed."
Bron studied her, made his decision. He wanted to know now, but he knew that he wouldn't get that. Still, he knew that if he put it off indefinitely, Olivia might hold out on him. "Two weeks," he agreed. "I'll give you two weeks."
Olivia smiled a terse grin, appraised Bron's broken window, and shook her head regretfully. There was a bit of jagged glass edging up near Bron, and she leaned forward, hit it with her fist, breaking it off. Now the window looked as if it were rolled down instead of as if it had been shot out.
She checked behind to make sure that they weren't being followed, then eased back onto the road and drove slowly through Saint George, heading out through the desert into the mountains.
"Bron," Olivia said when she'd settled down a bit. "You mustn't ever tell anyone what just happened. If this gets into the news, or even if the police hear about it, those people will hunt us down. You can count on it. Promise that you won't tell anyone. Not the police, not social services, not even Mike!"
Bron weighed the alternatives. "Are you sure that we shouldn't go to the police?"
"Very sure," Olivia said. "The police aren't equipped to handle people like these." She seemed convinced that she was being honest.
But why would they want us? he wondered. A more pressing concern struck him. "What about our license plates? They had to have gotten a good look!"
"If they check the plates," Olivia said, "they'll find that the plates are registered to another car. I've been afraid that something like this would happen. So the plates are stolen. I've got my real ones in the barn. We can switch them out in the morning."
Bron's head did a little flip. Certainly witnesses in other cars had seen the altercation, but what would they have seen? A bunch of freaks attacking Olivia's car? Anyone in their right minds would have been writing down the license plate number to the Mercedes, not to the Honda.
With Olivia's tinted windows, no one would have gotten a description of Bron or Olivia.
"So what's in the paper bags," Bron asked, "the things that you threw on the road?"
Olivia shook her head, as if to clear it. "They're called caltrops. A thousand years ago, in the midst of the Crusades, peasants were often forced to fight mounted Arabs armed with scimitars. So during the night before a battle, they would take pieces of metal welded together and armed with barbed spikes, and hide them in the grass on the battlefield. When the cavalry charged, the warhorses would step on them and ruin their hooves. They were called 'cavalry traps,' but the name got shortened to caltrops. They work well on tires, too."
For a long moment, Bron thought about this. You couldn't just go down and buy caltrops at Home Depot. You probably couldn't buy them anywhere. Olivia had either made them herself, or had them made.
And she kept a loaded pistol in her car, a big heavy one.
What kind of person did that?
She obviously wasn't your average mousy little school teacher.
Olivia was so rattled that she didn't speak at all anymore. Instead she followed Highway 18 past a small, perfectly conical volcano near the town of Diamond Valley, then past two more volcanoes and the towns of Dammeron and Veyo, until they turned off the highway,
following signs that directed them toward Pine Valley.
The ringing in Bron's ears faded and his heart slowed to a steady thump. He decided that maybe Olivia knew what she was doing. He'd just have to pretend that this was "life—as usual."
He settled back, determined to remain calm.
"What are you going to tell Mike when he sees the window?" Bron asked.
"We'll say that we went to the store, and someone broke into the car—maybe a burglar, even though nothing got stolen."
It sounded believable.
"Do you lie to Mike a lot?"
Olivia flinched, as if Bron's words were a slap in the face.
"Not if I can help it," she said.
"I love Mike. He's a good man. I'm sorry that he wasn't able to come meet you today. But there are some things that he doesn't know about. Some things that he'd never understand."
"He's not like ...us?"
Olivia smiled secretively. "He's not like anyone."
Bron decided to let the matter go, for now.
"You live way out here?" Bron asked. In the middle of nowhere?
"It's quiet, and pretty," Olivia said.
Bron didn't think it was pretty. The only vegetation had been sagebrush until they turned onto a smaller road. Big trees that looked like pines, except that the bark had a yellowish cast to it, backed some houses on the turn. Then they drove through a dense forest of juniper trees, with their sharp scent and tiny blue berries.
It wasn't pretty, Bron decided. It was remote, so removed from civilization that Bron suspected Olivia was in hiding.
He felt nervous about that, and about her husband Mike, who had not bothered to come meet him.
A dozen miles down the road, the car dropped into a small valley where a silver stream wound through emerald fields. A tiny town grew in the shade of a few pine trees on the far side of the valley. The town was dominated by a picturesque old church painted such a bright white that it was like a pearl lying upon green velvet.
Pine Valley didn't have more than a hundred homes, Bron guessed. The car reached the first and only intersection, then turned left and headed farther up into the hills.
"We live in this little town?" Bron asked. He'd never lived in the country before.
"Actually, we don't live in town," Olivia said. "We live outside of it." Her voice sounded more normal now, and her color had returned. She glanced back over her shoulder, searching the road behind. No cars were following.
She drove through town, past a couple of rustic restaurants decorated in western motifs. The homes were eccentric. A sagging pioneer log cabin crouched next to a modern mansion, followed by a vacation home from the 1980s.
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