by LW Herndon
I passed the last one and drove parallel to the train tracks until I reached the true darkness of overpasses, drainage culverts, and backup tracks from an era long ago—the last known location of Talia’s homeless patrons.
At a cracked asphalt lot, I pulled off the main street and parked behind a dilapidated service shed. The windowless design and padlocked door’s intent was to keep repair supplies in and strays out. In truth, anything of value would have long ago disappeared.
I left my car and continued on foot in the encroaching dark. Moonlight spilled in silver columns between shadows on the concrete. Last night, the moon was full, the residual gleam available for several more nights. Not that it mattered—my eyesight worked well with or without light. That sounds like a good thing, but insanity comes quickly if you actually see the evils in front of you. I’ve seen them. My sanity was debatable, but that, too, occasionally worked in my favor.
Silence clung to the dark. No dogs barked, and no murmurs echoed from people huddled for comfort. The landscape was clear, the ground ahead dipping to culverts angled for flood control.
The very stillness would have allowed me to hear the angry shout and gunfire, but I would’ve heard it if the eleven-fifty run of the Sunset Limited screamed by on the tracks. I would have felt what precipitated the act as well.
There is a vibration to magic. It is recognizable to every person on the planet. They don’t know that’s what they’re experiencing. The high people feel during the spring, with greenery bursting and small animals out to play, the inner glow from basking before a roaring fireplace and its warm flame. All are part of the underlying layer of magic, normal, everyday semblances of the grace of living, growth, and progress. Some people can sense magic more than others, and a select few can see its essence as well as feel the influence—good magic.
The opposite of the spectrum: abnormal, true evil has its own distinction. Fortunately, most people don’t experience its contact and have no lasting intimacy with the dark presence.
I’m quite good at detecting it. On a good day, I can convince myself I don’t attract it in a like-to-like fashion.
I scrambled down the culvert—more on my ass than my feet, my speed keeping me vertical. Garish green from caged emergency lights above the culvert reflected off the scene ahead. A man poised to take on the teenager gripping a gun, stood beside a second man restraining another younger teen by the arms. The captive kid, a boy, scruffy, with long straggly hair, hung suspended from the man’s arms. Face pale, eyes sunken, his expression formed one of drugged disbelief.
While not scouts, the men’s strong, recognizable essence clogged my nasal cavities. Not more fledgling sorcerers, as their very human aura spoke to paid mercenaries.
The teenager with the gun swung toward me as the men acknowledged my presence behind her. “Stay back.”
Her stance depicted brazen courage, but the gun’s wobble revealed stark fear. The sound and recoil of her earlier shot had surprised the shit out of her and left her shaken. I gauged her hardly more than fourteen.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” I said, my hands held away from my body to reassure her. I certainly didn’t want to spend tonight digging lead out of my flesh.
The gun bobbed from the end of her stiff arm. She backed up, desperately trying to aim the weapon at me and keep track of the two men. Both now held the boy.
By my guess, she had maybe two more minutes before that gun assumed the heft of a fifty-pound barbell. Given her panic and fear, she probably didn’t know how to aim. The previous shot at least confirmed she knew how to discharge the weapon, though she would be lucky if she didn’t shoot herself.
Seeing an opportunity open, the men shifted down the culvert. They were probably heading for a location far enough away from the girl so they could launch a portal and escape. All of which would occur in the blink of an eye.
That wasn’t happening. I needed them to fail, to report back to a very frustrated sorcerer, who would circle back to track me. The best way for me to control the situation and get the answers Shalim insisted on.
The girl saw them inch backward and started to follow, her gun still trained on me. At least from her confused perspective.
I whipped past her. The gun discharged, echoing at a point far behind me. The first man pulled a small globe from his jacket and flung it to the ground at his feet. I passed close enough to see the hair in his ears before I caught his partner’s throat with my fist. Clutching the boy, I flung us both beyond the circle of the globe’s sparkling mist.
The spell engulfed both men, and they disappeared.
I rolled from the boy to fend off the flurry of hands and metal beating at my head. “Get a grip already,” I snarled.
“Get away from him.”
I grabbed the girl’s wrist and wrestled the gun from her other hand, but my efforts were less successful than calming a wild dog. Giving her a shake to jar some sense into her, rewarded me with a kick in the shins for my efforts. I flung her on the ground next to the boy and stood back, fists at my hips, ready for another assault.
She didn’t give me a second thought. Instead, she scrambled to the boy, covered him with her arms, and muttered in low, quiet tones.
“He’s not going to be responsive for a long time.”
“Shut up and leave us alone.” Her glance swept toward the gun on the ground a few feet away.
Her odds would be better without it, unless she actually tried shooting with her eyes open this time. Seemingly discarding the idea, she turned her attention to me and glared. If looks could kill, I would be tarred, feathered, and smoldering in my own brimstone.
With a deep exhale, I squatted and rested my arms on my knees, letting my hands dangle in my most unthreatening manner. “Look, I don’t have any interest in a drug addict kid or you. I just need some information.”
Another glare. This girl had anger stored up like a powder keg. “He’s not an addict.” She hissed the words and glanced at the boy. “At least he wasn’t before they started dosing him.”
“So according to you, he’s never done drugs before what—tonight?”
She didn’t look up. “Three days ago. He was scared and frightened but totally clean until—” One hand swiped at a tear inching down her face.
It was a good act, but I wasn’t born yesterday. Her lying didn’t fool me or excel to the level necessary to ensure their survival either. Yeah, it’s a bitch to be young, terrified, and angry. Exhausting, too. She curled around the boy, keeping her body between him and me.
I get no thrill out of torturing others, but if I didn’t do it, Shalim would send someone else, someone less compassionate, to extract information. “So three days ago you found your friend high as a kite?”
The tense line of her back indicated she had heard, but she said nothing. Not giving a blessed inch. No big surprise.
I looked back to the boy. Dark hair, pupils completely dilated and rolled back in his head, but the shape of his brow line and the outline of the mouth were similar to the girl’s. Kids might pack together on the street, but to stick with an addict, even a young one, was a dead-end scenario. It didn’t happen. Kid gangs clustered for survival—all or nothing—unless there was a reason stronger than survival.
“Okay, you found your brother high as a kite.”
Her lips pressed into a tight line.
On the ground, a foot away, was a brown bag. Pinching the paper between my fingers, I took a sniff. Foul and not trash, the discarded drugs carried a lingering odor of Fentanyl, followed by a caustic trace of dark magic. Too odd a drug choice for a destitute street kid, though not if he’d been fed the stuff. I waved the bag back and forth and tried for secondary scents, but no lingering evidence remained for me to track.
The girl watched me in horror. She’d been afraid, but until I had picked up the bag, I don’t think it had occurred to her that there were worse things than the men who’d seized her brother.
There was always worse. She was lucky I
wasn’t it. “What I want is the guys who came for your brother.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“I find that hard to believe. Look at it this way, if I find these guys, they won’t be back for him.” I pointed at the boy.
Her momentary consideration seemed to lean in my favor. Courage mustered, she sat straighter and assessed me. Her hands still gripped the boy’s shoulders as if I could swipe him away from her—smart girl. “We would always meet up. He’s never late.”
I sat back on the cement and waited.
“He didn’t show, so I went to look.” She pushed a stray bit of dark brown hair from her face and avoided eye contact. “I found him in a little ball behind…on this street, all curled up.” Her hesitation announced the lie. Evidently, a safe haven wasn’t something she felt worth exchanging in trade for helping me find these guys. I had no doubt that from her perspective, if I didn’t find the abductors, she and her brother would still have a place to go. Not that I didn’t appreciate her viewpoint, but it didn’t work for me.
“They injected him, and he got away from them?” I let the disbelief drape thick over my words. This kid hadn’t just had a bad day and evaded his captors. He’d been soaked in the drugs for days, and with his resistance low enough the sorcerer’s men had determined the time was prime to come retrieve him.
She pursed her lips, reconsidering her previous thought process, the holes obvious.
“He was curled up at the old bus station. In the bathroom.”
I mentally ran the scenario. Roughly twelve blocks from here, long blocks, but nowhere near the old church. Safe for the kids. Not practical from an access standpoint for the sorcerer’s men.
While I wanted to assume these men rode the fault lines, because it cut down on avenues for me to search, that glowing ball of power they’d thrown said otherwise. Flashy and cool, the ball’s ultimate magic flowed from the spell’s creator, a finite commodity with repercussions.
The boy didn’t have the energy to run and the mercenaries had injected him, repeatedly, from the looks of his pallor and lethargy. His sister’s allusions aside, the boy had been a target for a while, if not a willing participant. Meaning the men had several options for entrance and egress, something discrete or worse, something random with no designated entry and exit point. Not good. It meant a lot more citizens on the streets were at higher risk for contact, because I couldn’t cover a nebulous area.
I glanced back at the girl. She’d given the second location too easily. We both knew it. “So how did they get him the second time?”
Her gaze shifted back to me, suspicion ratcheted to the max.
“I just need some answers, and then I’ll get out of your hair.” Not the truth, but then we weren’t ready for truths yet.
“Why should I tell you anything? You don’t give a shit about us. You only want your precious information; then we’re just so much garbage until those guys come back for him again.”
Eyes closed, I tried to rub away the headache that throbbed every time I looked at the hate and disgust in this girl’s eyes. “Look, I can get you guys someplace safe.”
“We don’t need your protection. We’ll be just fine once you leave.”
It didn’t say much for me that this life on the streets had more to offer than I did. I couldn’t imagine living out here, but I understood her perspective. Open streets offered freedom. Freedom from wherever I might take them and whatever bad things I might do. Freedom from paybacks. Even with the hard knocks, life on the streets was what she knew. I wasn’t. She had every reason to consider me dangerous.
What she didn’t get was that these guys were coming back—for some reason they wanted her brother. He wasn’t a snatch and grab. They had spent time trying to get him, specifically.
They would come back to take him and he would be dead soon after. So would she. I’m nobody’s keeper, but these kids needed my help, whether they wanted it or not.
“Okay, I’ll leave.”
“Good.”
I stood up, brushed the dirt off my jeans, and advanced toward them.
The girl’s face shifted from ambivalence to terror as she clutched her brother to her chest in an absurd attempt to shield him from me. The boy made no movement or acknowledged my presence any more than he had during the conversation. He floated in his brief euphoria, his sister a solitary, defensive tiger.
“Stay away. I’ll tell you the rest. Please, just don’t hurt him.”
As I reached for the boy, she flung herself at me. I gripped her neck and squeezed, just so. She dropped like, well, like a suddenly sleeping person—my intent.
I don’t possess psychic mind control power, but I do have a good grasp of pulse points. She would wake up in a few minutes. Before I left in the car.
With the few minutes of peace and quiet, I checked the boy’s pulse, which, while very rapid, didn’t seem to put him in immediate peril. I hoisted him over my shoulder and gripped his legs, leaving me a free arm to maneuver my way out of the culvert.
I pulled the keys out of my pocket, signaled the rear door’s lock release, and placed him in the backseat. Door closed, I leaned against the car to wait.
It had been maybe seven minutes since I picked the boy up, leaving me certain his sister was awake and coming for me. I would give her two more minutes to—make that one second.
I grabbed the shovel she’d planned to bludgeon over my head, wrenched it free of her hands, and tossed it aside. Securing her by the wrists with one hand, I pulled her up on the hood of the car and held her in place with my body. She was going nowhere, and after a second, the fight subsided from her, followed by deep, gasping sobs.
I’m not a good gauge of women and crying, but based on my interactions with her so far, I would guess she was faking it. Again. “I’m going to say this once.”
The tears switched off.
“Your brother is going with me to somewhere safe. Either you get in the passenger seat like a sane adult or you can stay here, unconscious again. Your choice.”
She opened her mouth to give me a piece of her mind. I slammed my other hand down on the metal next to her head, and she jumped.
“I’m not kidding about the one chance.” I growled the words. I’d run out of patience with trying to save her from herself.
With a hard swallow, she did her best to look large and in charge, but young and lost won out. She stared at me for a full minute, her lips pressed together tight enough they almost disappeared. Then she gave one brief nod.
I glared back with what I intended as tough and dark. Not really being into adolescent torture, I backed down, pulled her off the hood, and released her wrists. I got in the driver’s side without giving her a second look and started the car. By the time I had shifted into reverse, she was beside me in the car, glancing at her brother in the backseat.
CHAPTER 7
The silence lasted for six minutes. I timed it by the clock on the dashboard.
“So where are you taking us?”
I ignored the question, not about to allow her to pull me into a debate with her about my plans. “How long have you both been on the streets?”
She crossed her arms and stared out the passenger window.
“You don’t have to tell me, but when I drop you two off, it will look a lot less suspicious if there are few particulars that aren’t just bald-faced lies.”
“Name, rank, and serial number?”
“First name would be a good start. I didn’t ask for your life story.” At her continued silence, I glanced in the rearview mirror to check on the boy. His eyes remained closed, his mouth lax and open, with a slight snore audible. The hunch of his shoulders and crook of his fingers suggested a familiarity with curling into small cramped spaces.
“I’d guess he’s ten? Eleven?”
“Twelve.”
Finally, a word. “Your name?”
In her slight pause, I felt her test a name in her mouth. The increased heart rate, the faint flush of
perspiration, all betrayed her. I watched from the corner of my eye at the next stoplight. Her fingers twitched as her gaze swung from right to left and back, and then cut to the darkness outside the window, most likely casing for danger and opportunities to flee. “Julie.”
A lie.
“If you bail from this car, I’ll find you,” I said.
Her fingers on both hands drew together, creating two frail tense claws. “You some hotshot cop?”
“I’ll track you by your smell.” She stiffened, and I winced at my lack of tact. The last thing I’d intended was adding to her adolescent insecurities. “Not street grime. Your body emits a natural signature through your pores, unique to you. It lingers wherever you breathe or on whatever you touch.”
I could almost detect her mind whirling as it ticked off options, calculated consequences, and adjusted her assessment of how dangerous I might be. “I’m not talking about the need for a shower. Your scent is beneath anything you can do to disguise it.” Not entirely true, but giving her a heads-up on camouflage wouldn’t come until we’d developed some meager pattern of trust. Even with foreknowledge, she probably couldn’t disguise herself from me.
“Great job you have, tracking people from the smell of sweat and pee.”
I turned off South Alameda and onto the freeway and drove in silence for several miles to give her some mental space. My attempt to reduce her oversensitive fear factor.
The exit, five minutes later, was chock-full of fast food huts and small-time auto part and repair shops. After a few streets, the blocks spread out, longer strip malls replaced city blocks, and sparse pockets of small, stuccoed houses appeared. The farther the distance, the more trees and houses replaced concrete and advertisements, a gentle slope heading into the foothills. The neighborhoods were old and a little sparse but well maintained.
I drove until even the small neighborhoods disappeared. Hills, horse fences, and the occasional Gas-and-Go flashed by, but nothing bright or shiny broke the moonlit countryside.