by Rob Cornell
“Well, if her body were tossed in an alley, it would have been found by now. Probably they burned it or shredded and scattered it.”
Lockman snorted. “You tell Teresa that?”
“No. I told her ‘Good luck with your search,’ gave her the gear she wanted, and minded my own damn business.”
“See? How come you can never do that with me?”
Marty stood and collected their plates, easily reaching across the table to get Lockman’s. “Because you’re special.” He smirked, took the dishes and set them in the sink.
Lockman didn’t bother commenting. Nothing he could say would convince Marty that his prophecy was a load of ogre dung.
When he turned back from the sink, Marty leaned against the counter and folded his arms. “Anything else I can do for you, sir?”
“There is one thing.”
“I hope you brought your big wallet. This economy, prices have gone up.”
Marty led the way to one of the many storage units he rented around the city. He drove one of those gas-guzzler SUVs, a shade of green that nearly matched his skin, all the windows tinted. A strange mix of incognito and flash. Marty could do nothing small…except for his wife.
Before they loaded Lockman’s trunk with a choice selection of weaponry and ammunition, Marty took Lockman by the elbow. “You driving down I assume?”
“Make for an interesting day if I tried to check this stuff as baggage.”
“I can hook you up with a car, you don’t want to mess with the rental.”
Lockman thought about it. Would definitely make things easier. “How much we talking?”
“Consider it a donation to your cause.”
“That’s not like you.”
“Teresa’s good people.”
“You want to donate the weapons, too?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
Marty pulled out his keys and unlocked the storage unit next to the one Lockman had picked his gear from. He rolled the door up and the sun gleamed off the car’s platinum paint job. A sleek machine, the make and model of which Lockman had never seen. It looked like a cross between a BMW, a Corvette, and a spaceship.
“What the hell is that?”
“One of a kind. And loaded with extras.” He pointed at the windshield. “Bullet proof glass. Built in satellite communication system. GPS. All voice activated, of course. Laser cannons in the headlights.”
The expression on Lockman’s face must have been priceless. Marty pointed at him and laughed. “That was a joke, brother.”
“I feel like I’m in a fucking Bond movie.”
“Well, it don’t fly and it doesn’t have any weaponry. But it’s built like a tank. And that shiny paint? Flecks of silver in that.”
“Oh, nice.”
“Plenty of compartments to stash weapons. You get pulled over, cops can search all they want, they’ll never find a thing.”
Lockman shook his head. Unfuckingbelivable. “You sure you want me to have it?”
“It’s a damn shame sitting in here, collecting dust. Besides, I know you’ll bring it back to me.”
“I have to bring it back?”
Marty thumped Lockman’s chest with the back of a hand. “Don’t even joke. Thing cost more than Trump Tower.”
“Where do you get all this shit?”
“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you. At least, if I wanted to stay in business.”
“Yeah. Maybe I don’t want to know.”
“You don’t.”
They loaded the car, Marty showing Lockman all the compartments and how to open them. It started with Lockman having to press his thumb against a scanner while Marty entered a code on a keypad. “All the doors on this thing will only open for you now.”
Lockman got in behind the wheel, pressed his thumb against a pad in the steering wheel, and the engine came to life so quietly he wasn’t sure it had started at all. He pulled out of the storage unit while Marty watched. When he cleared the doorway, he buzzed down his window.
“I forgot,” Marty said. “It’s a hybrid. So you should get pretty sweet mileage.”
“Thanks, Marty.”
“I’m not so bad after all, am I?”
“You’re definitely full of surprises.”
The ogre grinned. “Be careful, Lockman.”
“Sure thing.”
Marty reached through the open window and put a hand on Lockman’s arm. “I’m serious. No matter what you may think, you’re not done with Gabriel.”
Lockman waved him off, but as he pulled away, he couldn’t ignore the sinkhole in his gut. God damned ogre had got him good and paranoid.
Chapter Seventeen
Standing on the shoulder of the two-lane highway with her thumb stuck out like some freaking movie cliché reminded Jessie of that time Craig had left her at the side of the road in the middle of the desert. It felt like an age ago. Back then he had scared her more than anything. What kind of guy kicked a girl in her early teens out of his car in the middle of nowhere?
Of course, he’d come back.
What if he hadn’t? What if she’d hitched a ride and made her own way back home, never to see him again? Life would sure be a lot less complicated. But the truth was Jessie and Mom were bound to get wrapped up in this crazy shit. Her mom had married a freaking werewolf after all.
Arm tired, she almost let it drop even as a car with more rust than paint tooled her way. No one was going to pick her up anyway. But the car slowed, pulled to the shoulder, and stopped about three feet from Jessie.
The crappy car all but screamed serial killer, but the woman behind the wheel looked older than Yoda, and not much taller. Her head barely poked above the dash, and with her buck teeth she looked like a gopher peeking out its hole.
The old lady honked the horn and gestured for Jessie to come over.
Jessie shrugged and jogged to the passenger side, climbed in. The air-conditioning managed to capture winter inside the car. Goosebumps popped up along her arms the moment she closed the door.
“Where ya headed, babe?” Her voice was one-hundred times bigger than her body.
Jessie blinked, mouth open. “Uh…”
“You ain’t going to catch no flies in here, so you might as well close your mouth.”
“North.”
“North where?”
Jessie realized she had no idea where she was. Only that they had traveled south. But they hadn’t gone too far. “I need to get back home. We have a cabin in the woods.”
“Going to have to narrow it down, babe.”
“Can you just start driving? I think I’ll recognize the area when we get there.”
“Why not?” The old lady put the car in gear and pulled back out on the highway. “I’m not much of a talker. You mind the radio?”
“That’s fine.”
She tuned the radio to a religious station. A priest was warning his congregation against the dangers of demons on this earth.
Jessie smirked. Father, you have no idea.
Sure enough, Jessie started recognizing landmarks about forty minutes into their drive. When she saw the Quik-Save on the corner of what qualified as downtown—a diner, a hardware store, the Quik-Save, and a blinking stoplight—she knew exactly where to go and gave the directions to her elderly driver.
“You live out there?”
Jessie watched a pair of boys both about ten sitting on the curb in front of the Quik-Save, licking at ice cream cones. Life had been normal like that for her when she was their age. Normal as it could get with a mom who had raised you alone suddenly moving in with a man Jessie barely knew. The same guy that turned out being a werewolf.
Maybe not so normal.
“Not anymore, I guess.”
The lady gave her a glance, but didn’t ask any more questions. She hadn’t been joking when she said she wasn’t much for talking. They hadn’t exchanged a word since the lady turned on the radio until now.
When they reached the drive
to the cabin, the woman stopped the car. “Oh, you got one of them long driveways might as well be its own road.”
Jessie didn’t know what to say. The woman almost sounded insulted about the driveway.
“I don’t do those. You don’t mind?”
It took a second before Jessie got what the lady meant. “Oh. Okay. I can get out here.”
The woman smiled, her yellow buck teeth sticking out proudly.
Jessie waved as the woman pulled away and got a cloud of dust from the dirt road in return. Weird lady.
The driveway ran about a quarter of a mile. Nothing major, but between the mid-afternoon humidity and the mosquitoes that harried her no matter how often she swatted, she felt as though she had slogged three miles through a swamp by the time she reached the cabin.
She gasped when it came into view.
Big ass van halfway through the front of the cabin. Pieces of wood and glass scattered everywhere. The door missing and the frame cracked on either side as if something big had forced its way through. The vampires Craig mentioned? He had said they were bigger than most he’d seen. But that big?
“Damn.”
She hadn’t expected the place to be so trashed. She had hoped to hole up here for as long as Mom didn’t realize where she’d gone. Give Mom some time to think about things, come down from her crazy. The cabin didn’t look so livable, though.
Jessie kicked at the dirt drive and stubbed her toe for the outburst. She cried out, her voice swallowed by the surrounding trees. Realizing how isolated she was, she shouted again, long and hard, like Mel Gibson in Braveheart right before charging into battle. The release helped a little. She screamed and shook her fists and stomped her feet, the frustration oozing out of her as she did.
But something curled back through her like black smoke.
An emptiness.
A hunger.
Throat dry and aching from all the shouting, Jessie crept to the front door and entered the cabin.
Chills pumped through her. The couch lay crunched under the van’s front tires. An acrid smell filled the air, part gasoline and part something she couldn’t name. The dried brownish spatters on the floor spoke of bloodshed. But whose blood? Craig had shown up at the motel bruised and plainly hurting, but not bleeding.
She supposed it didn’t matter.
She checked her bedroom, which looked the same except for the debris scattered on the floor by the door. It was warm enough outside. She could probably hole up in her room until Mom found her. Better than camping out or going back to hitchhiking.
Then she heard the rustling. Something right in her room. Under the bed.
Jessie took a slow step back, then another, easing her way toward the door. Unlike the chicks in bad slasher movies, she knew better than to investigate a strange noise. You got the fuck away.
She didn’t make it to the door. A blur of gray fur shot out from underneath the bed. Jessie’s first thought—Werewolf. She screeched and scampered backward, back thumping against the wall to one side of the door.
The thing scurried past her and out of the bedroom.
A second later her brain caught up with her eyes and processed what she’d seen. Too small for a werewolf, only a few feet long and less than that tall. Gray fur, yes, but also dark fur around the eyes like a superhero mask.
A flipping raccoon.
Heart racing, Jessie leaned her head back against the wall and laughed. Paranoid much? The adrenaline coursing through her made her shaky. She went to the bed and sat down before her legs wobbled out from under her.
That dark hunger wormed through her again.
The feeling set her teeth on edge. She clamped her jaw. What the hell was wrong with her?
She looked around her bedroom. Not much to it. The place never felt like home, only a temporary stop on the way to something better. She never bothered decorating much. Not like her old bedroom with the framed movie posters, the bookcase with the shelves sagging under the weight of her books on filmmaking and screenwriting. Her computer hooked up to her digital video equipment, set for more editing of her latest short.
Another life. Another world.
Now Jessie had some idea of how Craig must have felt out in Los Angeles. One year in a false life, away from all that she loved, was hard enough. She couldn’t imagine fifteen.
A whisper tickled her ear.
Jessie started. A new wave of adrenaline gushed through her limbs and into her gut.
More whispers, the words mixed with a dozen different voices.
She couldn’t make anything out. But where was it coming from? Outside? She checked the window. Closed. Besides, it felt like the whispers came from just beside her. She swore she could even feel breath puffing against her ear.
She shivered. Shot off the bed.
The whispers grew louder, yet she still couldn’t make out any words. Then she felt the tugging. Not physical. But a draw, an instinctive urge to move. At first she tried to fight it. She thought about Ryan, how the specter had possessed him.
Am I possessed?
She raised a hand before her eyes and squeezed it into a fist. Her will had made that movement. She couldn’t be possessed. But why that pull?
The whispers stopped.
The resulting silence startled Jessie. She turned in a slow circle, scanned the floor, the walls, the furniture. Not sure what she was looking for. Not sure of much of anything at the moment.
She heard a low hum, like something mechanical running in the distance. The sound soothed her somehow. Her muscles relaxed. She could take a deep breath and let it out without shuddering. Much better than those creepy-ass whispers.
No longer afraid, she followed the pull out of the bedroom, through the living room, into the kitchen. The humming grew louder when she stepped out onto the porch. Stripes of electricity ran across her arm, each band corresponding to one of the cuts she’d made there.
She understood.
Magic.
What had Craig called her? A sensitive? Well, she sure as shit was sensing something.
She smiled. God, damn, she knew she had it all along. Mom and Craig were scared. They wanted Jessie to think she didn’t have this connection to something bigger. To hold her back. But they couldn’t anymore. Her sensitivity had grown too strong to hide. And now she stood at the precipice of something huge. A watershed.
Standing on the back porch, Jessie took a deep breath through her nose. The moist and minty scent of the forest filled her nostrils. Her stomach buzzed like a beehive. She stepped off the porch and followed the pull.
The humming reached a deafening level, blocking out the sounds of the birds in the trees, the wind through the leaves, the whirr of insects circling her head.
She stopped and looked toward her feet. A smooth, football-sized stone lay on the ground before her. The hum seemed to emanate from the stone. She crouched and touched the stone’s cold surface.
Not the stone.
She lifted the stone and tossed it aside.
The dark circle of soil beneath the stone teemed with insects. Little beetles, centipedes, and spiders all scattered at the sudden exposure to the light. But they didn’t go far before skittering back, as if drawn to this spot the same as Jessie.
A part of her recoiled at the nest of bugs even as she reached down and pushed her fingers into the soil. A centipede crawled up her wrist. A black spider ran over her knuckles. Her skin felt as thought it was shrinking against the bones. Still, she shoved her hand deeper into the soil, scooped a handful, and tossed it away. A knot of earthworms squiggled in the hole she had dug. More of them poked out from the clod of dirt she had thrown aside.
All these critters drawn to this one spot. Something had to lie buried below. Something important. Something powerful.
She stood and jogged back to the cabin, the whole time feeling as though an elastic band pulled across her chest, urging her back to the spot. She retrieved a spade from the wooden box built into the porch where Craig store
d his axe and some other tools he used around the cabin.
Then she was crouched at the spot again, no memory of her walk back. Her head swam. The moment reminded her of that time she and Ryan had raided his mother’s liquor cabinet and she drank so much she blacked out. Really stupid. She never drank like that again. She did not like having a piece of her life clipped away like a strip of film from a movie reel.
The hum soothed her. Made her forget her worries. Beckoned for her to dig.
She jammed the spade into the earth and dug.
The legion of bugs skittered about at the invasion, but they refused to abandon the spot. They crawled up the spade’s handle, between Jessie’s fingers, over her arm. Or they scurried into the hole as anxious as Jessie to get to whatever slept below.
About a foot down the tip of the spade clinked against something metal.
Jessie set the spade aside and used both hands to clear the last of the dirt.
Her heart felt like it stopped beating for an instant. Her hands, teeming with insects, trembled.
A bronze cube with ornate carvings on its surface sat in the pocket of earth she had made.
The memory artifact.
The hum blasted in her ears, no longer comforting, but oppressive.
Impossible. Craig had destroyed the artifact. He had said so.
He also said you didn’t have any magical power.
Another lie. He hadn’t destroyed the artifact that had nearly cost all of them their lives. He buried it. Saving it. For what?
You need to bury it again, put the stone back, and run the fuck away from here.
“I can’t,” she whispered and didn’t recognize her own voice. Instead, she reached into the hole and pulled the cube out.
Her fingertips tingled at the touch.
The humming pulsed so hard in her ears she felt her head might implode at any minute. Then the electric bands across the cuts in her arm turned into searing lightening. The cuts split open and blood ran thick down her arm. Droplets pattered on the ground. The pain cried so hard the edges of her vision turned dark. Her head spun. She clenched her teeth and willed herself not to pass out.
The whispers returned, even over the humming. They came from the cube.