by Rhys Ford
Bullets pinged and bounced off of the drover, a piece of broken-off metal singing past my head. Malone scrambled to get to his feet, but I pushed him back down. An open shotgun shell box spilled orange cartridges over the hatch floor when I grabbed the rifle’s box. A step back sent biting pains up my back and down to my ankles, twisting my stomach around until I had to swallow back the coffee I’d drank an hour ago.
“Fucking iron rounds,” I muttered to myself. “He used the damned black dog rounds on me.”
A boom shook the air as I got the rifle loaded up and ready. There was a brief whistle, and then the hillside exploded in a shower of rocks and dirt. I couldn’t see who’d launched the round, but my guess was Sparky, especially when another short-range ball crackled over us and pummeled the spot where I’d seen the glint among the predawn-lit trees.
Dirt rained hard, splattering us, the chunks damp and ripe from the morning dew. Something struck my buckshot-filled leg, and I went down on my knees, biting back another curse for Malone’s nostrils to be infested with sucker lice. Battered by rocks and debris, the hatch door swung inward, slamming me on the side of the head and nearly taking the rifle out of my hand.
Pushing the stock against the ground, I heaved myself up, using the rifle for leverage and balance. There was some screaming, mostly coming from behind the ridge. Then the roar of a heavy engine being started up echoed down through the hills. Lodging the rifle on the hatch door, I sighted on the now smoldering tree line, catching a peek of a Jeep roof bouncing over the hill’s uneven ground. A head came into view, balding or shaved down to a dark circle near enormous ears, dancing in and out of my scope sight. I took the shot at nearly the exact same moment Sparky let loose her final volley.
The ground trembled beneath our feet, and the hillside gave, unleashing a tidal wave of boulders and broken tree trunks. I dropped the rifle and dove into the hatch. Grabbing Malone by his Ganesh-damned red shirt, I hauled him up, and the wave of rocky dirt slammed into the drover, snapping the hatch door off and taking it along for the ride. I lay there, covering Malone with my body until the grumbling earth settled, my pulse pounding away in my ears and my leg seizing up with pain from the iron-flecked embers burrowed under my skin.
We lay there in the quiet for a few minutes, and then Sparky called the all clear. Slapping Malone across the head, I got out of the hatch, leaving Malone to fend for himself. I didn’t care if he set up a taco stand in the drover’s back compartments, so long as I didn’t have to look at him for a few minutes—maybe even half a day.
“Asshole. Going to get me dead before I even leave the damned area.” My leg wasn’t good. Or at least not good enough to walk on.
Unable to walk straight, I used the side of the partially buried drover to balance on, doing short hops when the ache got too much for me to put my weight on my foot. The Landing looked more like a war zone than a refill station, and behind me, Malone groaned something about his neck and apologies.
“Kai!” Ryder shouted from the Landing’s office window. “Stay there! I’m coming!”
“Sure, you do that,” I grumbled back. “Because I’m not sure I’m going to make it to the end of the damned transport much less the fricking office.”
He moved quicker than I expected, because I took another three steps and then Ryder was on me, grabbing at my waist and lifting me up. It would have been nice to lean on him, to use his strength to ease the stress on my leg and, stupidly, even help me forget about the pain working through me, but I knew better.
I knew Ryder better.
“Let me help you, ainle,” he cajoled, sliding his arm down to the small of my back and around my hips. “Is it so hard to accept—”
Another shift in the ground and we both tensed, waiting for another avalanche to hit, but the quiver was small—very small—and we stopped our hobble to the main cinder block building to watch a man’s head, his thick, springy hair awash in flames, bounce down the hill and roll across the Landing’s side yard. The fiery head continued its merry path, disappearing from view as it tumbled off between the buildings.
“Well, at least we got one of them,” I snapped, taking another step toward the office, where Sparky was coming out of the door with a first aid kit. “And once I get all the shot out of my leg, we’re going to have a little talk with your friend Crickets.”
Ten
AS MUCH as I loved Sparky, she was the last person in the world I’d want to be lying down in front of and bent over an arm of an old beat-up sofa, stomach down with my jeans off and my teeth clenched into a pillow.
Sadly, as she was also the only one within thirty miles that I’d let dig ironshot out of my body, I was there, with my injured leg stretched out over an ancient couch and wishing I were anywhere else. There wasn’t enough whiskey in all of San Diego County to make it any less painful, and to make matters worse, I had Ryder and Crickets at ringside.
“Hold still, boy,” she grumbled at me, digging back down into a hole. “It went pretty deep. I’m having to chase down some of your jeans with the damned things.”
“This fricking hurts, Sparky.” I couldn’t look at Crickets. Not without wanting to murder him. “You try lying still while someone’s melon-balling your leg.”
Blood was running down my calf, hot and quick, soaking into the towels I’d tucked under my knee. The brindle bitch who’d take a bit of shrapnel across her ear licked at my face, a soft comfort between two injured veterans from the same battle. At least her war wound was justly earned. Mine was friendly fire—making me not so friendly anymore.
The stainless steel tools Sparky’d laid out on a sterile pad looked more like torture devices, but I’d been taken apart by the undisputed master of pain and agony, so the hooks, pincers, and tweezers were more flatware for a formal dinner party than anything else. Sparky wasn’t used to working on meat. Mostly everything she broke down was metal or plastic and didn’t complain when she dug in, and when someone was unfortunate enough to get shot on a run, Jonas or I were normally the ones who dealt with it.
Dempsey’d been useless. I’d sooner take five solid right hooks from Dempsey than have him dig a bullet out of me. Only thing worse than Tanic putting the iron bars in me was Dempsey trying to take them out. Luckily, Jonas had taken over then.
“Bite,” Sparky warned me, and I tasted feathers and dust as she cut deep into my skin. “Almost done, kiddo.”
“You never were a Stalker, were you, Mr. Malone?” Ryder said softly. “And that is why my Stalker is lying here injured instead of driving us to Nevada.”
There was steel in his voice, anger hammered hot and left to hang. Haughty and arrogant, Ryder’s regal bearing spoke of centuries of rule and power, a legacy of ruthlessness and manipulation normally kept gloved in a charming, velvety demeanor. The velvet lay in tatters at Malone’s feet, the edge of Ryder’s ire slicing across his throat and belly as neatly as a knife.
Malone shifted, the bar stool under him screeching on the office’s dusty floor, his eyes on everything but Ryder. He met my gaze once, didn’t like what he saw there, and let his attention wander off.
“Might as well talk to him, Malone,” Sparky warned him. “Because I’m about five minutes away from being done with picking iron shot of out Kai’s backside, and if Ryder doesn’t get his answers now, you’re not going to like how Kai’s going to get them out of you.”
My world became a sea of faded pink cabbage roses on hunter green and lots of pain. Sparky was going in deep, and my stomach churned with the taste of my own blood. I wanted to scream for her to stop pulling me open, promising her anything to make the anguish go away, but a part of me whispered, What if she doesn’t stop? What if she does to you what Tanic did? Because you trusted her.
Ryder’s hand pressed down on my back, his fingers stroking at the keloid dragon my father left there. I soaked in his vanilla and green tea scent, his sidhe blood perfuming his skin, and my lungs loosened. His strength poured into my spine, muting the spiderweb of liqu
id fire Sparky wove through my nerves. I felt better and mostly hated how much I loved having his touch on me.
“Don’t get in the way, Your Princeship,” Sparky snarled. “I’m trying to work here.”
“And I can see where Kai learned his impeccable manners,” Ryder drawled, but his fingers remained, resting on the jut of my right shoulder blade. “But as for you, Mr. Malone, I need a few answers.”
“First off, I’m not your Stalker, Ryder. You rent me. Just like everyone else.” I was going to hate myself in the morning, or perhaps even sooner, but I cleared my throat and croaked, “And you two are scaring the kid stupid. Yeah, he almost got us both killed and shot up my leg, but I’m sure he had a really good reason for lying through his teeth. Don’t you, Malone?”
“I didn’t think I’d actually… have to shoot someone.” His Adam’s apple dove when he spoke, his words crackling and sharp. “I didn’t even know you’d brought a Stalker with you. I thought he was another sidhe! Who the hell brings Kai Gracen with them to talk about a pre-Merge dig? It just all went… wrong.”
“Shit! Sparky! Leg!” My leg twitched at her next dig. Twisting my head around to avoid the dog’s furiously licking tongue, I grunted at Malone. “Did you know the guys who were shooting at us? Did Marshall piss somebody off? Or was she hiding something about Groom Lake?”
“Are you sure it’s connected to Professor Marshall?” Malone worried his teeth against his upper lip. “She was murdered… but we don’t know why.”
“It’s got to be connected to her. The guy I was trying to snag between the trees looked like the same man I’d seen driving the armed scooter, and none of us here recognized the rolling head. They had to have followed us up here somehow, because the only thing connecting you to Sparky’s is this trip,” I explained. “So we’re sniffing around something someone else doesn’t want us to find… something Marshall’s already died for. Since people don’t try to kill me unless I’m about to stumble on their take, I think someone’s hiding something and doesn’t want us to get to it.”
“My grandmother had nothing to gain by trying to kill you,” Ryder mumbled.
“Your grandmother isn’t people, Ryder,” I sneered. “And she had everything to gain. For what it’s worth, I’m a resource for you. Getting rid of me takes me off the board in that Parcheesi game you’ve got going with her. Someone wants us removed from the game, a game Marshall started. Then you went and became Player Two. Probably not what they were expecting, but if they’ve already killed Marshall for sticking her nose into things, they’re not going to look at us and say oh, sorry, you we’ll let go traipsing off into the Emerald City with your pet Stalker.”
“I only understood half of what you said to me right now.” Ryder’s fingers stilled on my shoulder. “But enough to ask Malone here about what Professor Marshall was hiding. What is it she expected to find up there? Do you know? Is the elfin Court verified, or was it merely something to lure me into funding her expedition?”
“The photos were real. I was there when the courier brought them in, and she was excited. Yes, she knew it would convince you to fund the trip. She’d been excited to go but….” He pushed his sweat-knotted fine hair from his face, stress tightening his cheeks and lips. “It was supposed to be an easy, simple trip. Nothing dangerous.”
“And the former Stalker story?” I cocked my head. “You didn’t think that was going to turn out to be dangerous?”
“That was….” He swallowed, his throat working hard. “Someone asked me if I was a Stalker because they found out I used to work at the Post. I just didn’t… deny… it because I thought it would make me look cool. You know how it is, right? I mean, okay, not you but—”
“So you did it to pick up girls? Or boys, not going to discriminate.” Sparky stopped in her excavation and looked up at Malone’s mumbled agreement. “That’s got to be the dumbest thing I’ve heard. How did you think someone wasn’t going to find out?”
“I didn’t think about it. I almost swallowed my tongue when Ryder told me who he was.” Malone gestured at me. “I should have said something then. I just didn’t know how to.”
Humans were funny things. I’d seen a few go through puberty and hit adulthood, a short sprint of bone growth, chaotic behavior, and raging hormones. I’d watched Cari learn to walk, struggle with her clairvoyance, grow breasts, and take up a gun all in the time it took me to age another minute. Both Dempsey and Sparky shrank and grayed while the lines on Jonas’s face deepened into grooves.
I’d remained the same once I’d filled out, learned how to speak and love. As old as I felt, Ryder estimated I was barely an adult now—it was hard to tell considering what Tanic’d done to me—but Malone’s struggle was a universal one, one shared among most humans I knew, and I felt it intimately.
He wanted to be… accepted. To be looked at and be regarded as a person. To matter to people around him. Where I’d just wanted to be human—to the point of getting a knife to saw my ear tips off and pulling my teeth. Ryder assured me it wouldn’t have worked. The scars on my body and notches in my ear were anomalies, aberrations brought about by Tanic’s flesh craft and spells.
Ryder didn’t seem to quite understand why that hadn’t been a reassurance.
Because His Lordship never spent any part of his life looking at himself in a mirror and wondering why about so many things reflected there.
I twisted about to look behind me. “Sparky, do you have something else we can take into Mercury Valley? Assuming the drover’s out for the count.”
“Smaller. Maybe a bit more defensible,” she mused. “Hard to sleep in, though.”
“We’ll have to deal with what we’ve got. Do you want to let these guys have whatever Marshall had tucked into her secrets, Ryder?” He’d let his hand fall away when I’d moved to talk to Sparky, but his warmth lingered. “’Cause we can just let it go.”
“I can’t risk that.” Ryder shook his head. “We’ll have to get there first.”
“The university would love anything we bring back.” Malone shifted again on his seat. “Um… you bring back.”
“Do you want to come?” I caught his attention with my question, and Malone jerked his gaze toward me.
“I haven’t said I was willing to take him with us,” Ryder interjected.
“Once again, Your Worshipfulness, you forget the rules of the contract.” As hard as it was to look intimidating and official while lying down on a floral couch and getting my face bathed by a dog of indeterminate origins, I gave it my best shot. “While we’re on or planning a job, I’m in charge. You have no say in things. Remember that.”
“You just say that because you like bossing me around.” He sighed. “Admit it.”
“I totally admit it, but if Malone here wants in, I say we take him. He’s the only Marshall substitute we’ve got.” Nodding at Malone, I asked. “Do you want in?”
“Yes,” he answered before I even had time to finish my question. “I swear to God, I’ll do anything you want me to do.”
“Just do what I tell you and don’t question me. Not like His Lordship here. Just one thing, what’s your real name?”
“Robbie,” he replied with a slight frown. “Why?”
“So I know what to scream at you before I shoot you for not doing what I tell you to do,” I replied. “Because I’m sure as hell not calling you Crickets.”
BY THE time we hit the pass to Temecula, I’d worked out most of the kinks in my relationship with the squat behemoth Sparky saddled us with. The square, clunky beast was a bitch and a half to turn on tight corners, but like the drover, it came packed with a powerful engine, solar panels to charge its fuel cells, and best of all, a pop-up telescoping turret on the former-HETS flat roof. Sparky’d modified the M911 Heavy Equipment Transporter, a chunky eight-wheeled tow used to haul tanks, into an inelegant powerhouse with a modified armored back shell for storage and fold-down bunks. With the cab elongated to seat four, it was functional and utilitarian.
But it did the trick, and when a rhinoceros challenged the front end in San Marcos, the transport took the hit, shook it off, and kept going as if nothing happened.
My two passengers, however, didn’t fare as well.
Malone was still talking about it, and Ryder sported a bit of green around his cheeks.
“Did you see the size of it?” Malone squeaked from his perch on the backseat. “Thank Odin this thing’s lifted up, or we’d have bought it for sure.”
“Day’s young, Robbie,” I muttered. “Lots of time left for buying it.”
“Bit… bumpier than in the Mustang, isn’t it?” Ryder’s teeth chattered a bit when we hit a patch of crackled asphalt.
“Mustang wouldn’t be good for a run like this. It’s built for speed, not endurance. Where we’re going, there’s no roads.” I ducked my head down to peer out of the windshield. “I’d like to get us someplace we can stop for the night.”
“A campground?” Malone asked.
I shook my head, nearly in time with the truck’s rattling suspension. “Nah, there’s motor inns along the 15 stretch. I’ll bunk down in the back of Bertie—”
“Why do you feel the need to name all of the vehicles you drive?” Ryder grabbed at the dashboard when the road dipped. “Watch the—did you not see that—what was that?”
“Pink faerie armadillo,” I replied. “They used to be smaller. Like… cat-sized.”
The sidhe gave me a long, steady glare. “That was a lot larger than a cat, Kai.”
“Which is why I saw it. It’s hard to miss a six-foot-long, carnation-pink, frilly mound moving across the road, Ryder,” I countered. “Now will you let me drive?”
It was late afternoon, the golden sun slithering down the peaks a few miles from Rainbow. The grasses were heavy at the tips, bowing down with the weight of their seeded heads. The freeway broke into a stretch of old a‘a fields, the road slicing through the crumbling, ropy lava in long, sweeping curves. Piles of hammered down chunks dotted the sides of the two-lane road, debris left behind when the military rebuilt the roads following the Merge. Nothing was left of the communities along the San Marcos corridor, and only a few structures remained standing in Escondido, outliers at the edge of a city sucked down into Underhill if it survived at all. The Wild Animal Park remained mostly intact, bolstered by the sudden appearance of a freshwater lake and underground rivers breaking up to the surface.