He could have finished it then, if he’d been fast enough. Just as Michael was turning, though, an inopportune tour bus docking in front of the Wisteria’s doors had begun discharging its cargo, and a group of travel-weary, excited mortals pushed through the revolving doors, chattering excitedly.
The Corruptor let out a hideous barking laugh, and the corpse behind the front desk began to twitch. It hadn’t been dead at all, just waiting in reserve.
And now the thing had several fresh mortals to infect, as well as weight of numbers to pull Michael down.
Big Fat Nothing
Jenna’s feet thudded painfully against concrete, and she tried desperately to remember where Michael had parked. It was a good thing he hadn’t let the valet take the truck; she saw a familiar yellow parking pillar, its paint chip-cracked in almost-random patterns, and let out a barking sob of relief. There was the red Dodge, the back of its familiar canopy watching her with two windows and a small door.
What if it doesn’t start?
She told the perpetually worrying part of herself to take a hike, clipped a parking pillar, glancing off as her shoulder flared with numbness, and scrambled for the driver’s side. There was only one key big enough on the ring, but her fingers were clumsy fear-sausages. She rammed the key home on the third try and heard someone swearing at a husky, monotonous clip. Pretty creatively, too, stringing together obscene syllables with furious invention.
I sound like Rach. Her friend could swear a blue streak. She was probably never going to see Rach again.
Jenna twisted the key the wrong way, let out another cry of frustration—thank God the thin metal strip didn’t snap—and turned it the opposite direction. Fluorescents overhead dimmed, fuzzing out, and she climbed into the driver’s side in a wild tangle of arms and legs.
Now all she had to do was remember how to drive. “OhGod,” she whispered, over and over, jamming the key at the ignition. The engine turned over, caught with its familiar buttery purr, and she let out another sobbing string of relieved invective.
Thank God it’s not a manual. She dropped into reverse and hit the gas, narrowly avoiding sideswiping another damn parking pillar, and stood on the brake. The jolt shook her back into sense; she fumbled for the gearshift and the little orange bar moved over to “D”. Now don’t hit anything, Jen.
She generally used public transportation; her driving was rusty at best. There was Eddie’s Camaro, of course, but he would no sooner let her behind the wheel than he would admit to any wrongdoing, especially when he was in a petulant mood. The truck handled well but it was still a barge, and she cut the turn too close as the whale-swimming vehicle slid sideways a fraction in front of the panted walkway to the lobby doors. The passenger-side mirror took a hit, dangling forlornly as she roared past a pillar, and something hit the back of the truck with a crunch.
Just keep going, he’d said. Jen was completely unaware of screaming as the back end fishtailed. The tires bit and she slewed onto the street, barely registering the giant silver bus disgorging a crowd of weary travelers in front of the Wisteria.
Boy, are they gonna get a surprise. She should stop to help, but what could she do? A big fat nothing.
As usual.
Thankfully, she didn’t hit anyone, but a glare of headlights and blaring horn told her it was close, so close. White-knuckled, staring, she jammed the accelerator down, and might have considered praying if she hadn’t been so busy. Freeway, find the freeway, got to find the fucking freeway. Which one, which way?
She didn’t care. Any direction would do, as long as it was away.
Something big thudded on top of the cab and she cried out again, the truck jumping like a live thing as the wheel twisted. She all but stood on the brake, whipping the wheel to the right, and for a long aching second the vehicle yawed as physics took down notations, peered over her glasses, and decided what to do with so many hundreds of pounds of truck moving at whatever speed on a much-mended surface street. Tires jumped the curb, pedestrians scattering, and Jen stamped on the accelerator again, pushed past terror and into the clear prickling flood of survival adrenaline soaking every tissue. Her fingers gentled, her grip almost loving on the wheel, the truck leapt off the curb back into the street, and she skidded through a yellow light, narrowly avoiding a collision with a blue semi that locked its brakes and blatted.
More thuds and thumps overhead. Something was on the truck, and she saw a blue freeway sign, half-blasted by flying sand and just barely readable. Thankfully it held an arrow, pointing the way she was already going.
Don’t stop, Michael had said. Drive.
So she did, flooring the accelerator again, and the engine barked once before swallowing fuel and translating it into wild acceleration. She was pressed back into the bench seat, Michael’s hollow worn in its cushioning too big for her, and her foot almost slipped free of the gas. God damn it. “Fuckitall move!” she yelled.
Rattling, bucking, she ran two red lights before the onramp to 515 South opened up on her right, and she jerked the truck aside as more thumping and thudding smashed through the canopy and into the bed.
Shit shit shit… Gasping, eyes wide with terror and every inch of her leaning forward as if to will the truck on, Jen’s breath turned to short puffs of vapor. The sudden, unnatural cold burrowed into hands, feet, heart, and she knew with miserable certainty that the thing in the bed was one of the demons; at long last they were going to get what they really wanted.
Her.
Life In Him Yet
The last corpse-mule died hard, the Corruptor spending force recklessly, but Michael had arms and legs wrapped around the bucking, heaving mortal shell and a quick movement sheared the cervical column with a greenstick snap. Rattling, bumping, swaying, cold metal under his back and the thing’s clawmarks slicing across the ancient circuitry-map on his skin, he gave an extra wrench to make sure there was no remaining avenue for the Corruptor to force growth along. Blood, already turning to thick amber ichor, sprayed in a high-tension jet; he’d almost taken the thing’s head clean off.
May the Principle receive you, he prayed for the mortal who had been eaten, but there was no time for more than the brief pained thought because the Corruptor was coalescing, stealing heat from the air to power its transition as it found all other avenues cut off. It could not infect a legionnaire unless he had fallen away from the Principle, and even then only fitfully—but it could try digging its smoky claws in and scrabbling to find purchase, tearing Legion flesh as it sought blindly for continuance.
It took shape above him, malformed smoke building an obsidian skeleton, and he untangled himself from the corpse with a violent scrabble. His fists blurred upward to break glass-crunching bones, his lips skinning back as noisome shards fell like daggers. The trick was to cause so much damage the thing could not heal itself quickly enough, draining its swelling infection from the fabric of the mortal world until it vanished in a puff of mist.
Unfortunately, with the thin metal floor under his back bucking plus the cold screaming wind tearing at anything not nailed down, not to mention bits of careening equipment knocked free by the struggle, a few of his strikes didn’t land with as much force as necessary. The thing fell upon him, its thin pointed nose-tip against his cheek and its glassy teeth snapping together as it lunged, claws sinking into his legs and arms to provide traction, attempting to open his jugular.
Michael let out a coughing roar, the wine-sweet rage of battle filling every vein to bursting, and for a moment he felt them again, the weight and bulk behind his back swelling from shoulderblade to hip, muscles twitch-working to provide motion to the two appendages lost when he arrived in this cold thankless hell of a mortal world and was set to long years of fruitless, murderous watching.
The thing howled, a spiraling falsetto drilling through eardrum and brain at the same time. Its teeth snapped like a good clean break on a billiard table, and Michael’s own fingers turned clawlike. Grace poured through him, fractionally sweeter
than the rage, and at the center of that flood was a thin thread of coolness, straight and pure. It had Jenna’s voice, sweet and soft.
Don’t forget, the Principle whispered. You fight to protect, not to conquer.
His fingertips ached as the knives flashed into being, golden circuit-chased metal stabbing and twisting, shredding the Corruptor’s bones and showering Michael with yet another crop of stinging needle-slivers. He slashed, again and again, and when the thing broke and was sucked into a screaming, dancing pinpoint, its long dying cry was another sliver, desperately seeking to lodge in a mortal ear unprotected by golden light.
It winked out, the hideous scream fading into nothingness. Michael sagged on cold metal, his ribs heaving, and smelled his own copper-hot blood. Wind whooshed and rattled, pouring over him in clean, stinging waves, and he let himself close his eyes for a few bare moments. Grace stung his fingers, his toes, settled against the marks and burrowed inward. It even, for a single weightless instant, made the invisible memory of feathered things trapped underneath him flex and fill again; a sweet piercing pang went through him, crown to soles.
Then it was gone and the truck drifted to the side, running over stutter-strips cut into concrete to jar a fatigued driver back into temporary alertness. Michael lunged upward, but the driver’s correction tipped him at the wrong moment and he had to stamp, his right boot slipping then holding as his knee flexed, and the resultant thudding made the truck swerve nervously again.
She was probably terrified. There was a hole in the canopy roughly the size of his own body, and the wind of eighty miles-per snatched and fingered at every surface. He racked his brains, trying to figure out how to get into the cab without frightening her any more and possibly sending them both off the road in a tangle of metal and glass. He could, he supposed, shield her from enough of the shock to keep her alive—if he could get close enough to the driver’s seat the moment things went wrong.
The engine gulped at fuel, a subtle knocking developing in its steady cycle. Nothing to be worried about yet, the old beast had plenty of life in him yet.
I hope I do, too. He moved, slow and steady, bent almost double, until he was as close to the driver’s seat as he could get. The back of the cab was a solid wall, and he’d added the bulletproof sheet to it himself back at the warehouse. It was a shame. He was going to miss his garage, every tool neatly in its place and the big red engine-lifting hoist gleaming over its hand-dug central well.
The marks of the Corruptor’s claws were slow to close. He crouched and bled silently, alert for any sudden change in direction or speed. Could she feel his nearness? Would she know what it meant?
Michael told himself to stop wondering useless things, but more questions crowded in with the wind’s persistent belling.
The unclean lied, for amusement or to cause pain. You could not trust a single barbed word, even if dipped in honey. But why would a Corruptor bother to say something any legionnaire would never believe?
Why, in the name of the Principle, had it said…what it did?
The Legion has forsaken thee.
Capper On Everything
There are very few things more terrifying than a slope of pavement unreeling down a slight hill to rejoin the interstate while you roll to a stop somewhere vaguely southeast of Las Vegas, dust dancing in headlights and someone else’s truck with a smashed camper silent as a grave.
Whatever had been bumping around back there had gone still, and Jen’s head didn’t hurt anymore. Her shoulder did, though, badly enough that the stupid, sunny optimism she’d been fighting for years was pretty much effectively canceled. All it took to get rid of that bullshit was a demon-infested road trip, apparently.
Was there something hideous in the back of the truck, just biding its time? She had to think.
No headache was a good sign. She put the truck in park and stared at the headlights cutting a white cone in the night. She’d have to fish out the road atlas, look at where she was. The truck had three-quarters of a tank, she would have to figure out how to get more. She had her purse, and the demons could track credit cards. Her bank account might even have a freeze on it, if they thought she was dead.
L.A. was as good a destination as any. Or she could ditch the truck back in Vegas and hope to find some kind of work before the monsters hunted her down.
One problem at a time, Jen. That’s how you survived Eddie, and that’s how you’ll survive this.
She was beginning to get the sinking feeling that perhaps surviving wasn’t an option. “Okay,” she whispered, looking at her hands on the wheel. Her knuckles weren’t white anymore, but it was close. Her throat was dry as the cold, still desert sand, and her knees trembled. “Okay. First thing, Jen. What’s first?”
Well, that was simple. Finding out where she actually was and looking for her next stop. She had to unclench her fingers and look for the road atlas. It should have been on the seat near her right hip, but God only knew where it had ended up during the wild bucking ride out of the parking tower.
What was the point? They were going to hunt her down anyway. Was Michael all right? Maybe her first move should be going back and looking for him.
I’ll find you, lumina. Well, that was nice, but if he could find her, the demons could too, right? So the first thing was definitely to look at the road atlas. Still, she couldn’t just leave Michael behind in Las Vegas with a bunch of demons. And getting any further away from the city meant she could run out of gas and be stranded on the side of the freeway.
Wouldn’t that just put a capper on everything. How much worse could it—
Something drummed on her window and Jen started wildly, half-swallowing a scream and throwing herself sideways. Her foot slipped off the brake, but the truck was in park so it merely settled a fraction, pointed downhill and longing to obey gravity.
“Jen.” A familiar face streaked with blood and grime peered at her through dust-speckled glass, two fierce blue eyes in a mask of splattered, drying goo. “It’s me. It’s all right.”
OhGod. Relief crashed through her. She scrabbled at the seat belt’s release, then at the door. It opened, heavy metal swinging; she slid out, throwing her arms around his waist and hugging as hard as she could.
Michael winced but hugged her back, gently but definitely. He was tall and warm and tattered, blood-crusted flaps of his T-shirt crushed between them, and Jen swallowed tears. “Michael! Oh, my God, are you all right? I didn’t know it was you, I thought it was one of those things, and then I didn’t stop and—”
“You did right.” He rested his chin atop her head. “Exactly right, lumina. You did perfectly.”
It was good to hear, though she didn’t quite believe him. Still, with her cheek pressed close, listening to his heartbeat under the words rumbling in his chest, she felt, well…
Safe. Unreasonably, completely safe. Again.
A chilly desert night breathed around them, sand hitching a ride on dry crackling wind, and Michael took a deep shuddering breath. She hugged him again, fiercely, and realized he was battered and bloody. “Shit.” She tried to loosen her arms and step away, but he didn’t let go. “You’re hurt. We’ve got to get you…” To a hospital, she wanted to say, but that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? “…some help,” she finished.
“It’s fine,” he said into her hair. “You’re all I need, lumina.”
It was ridiculous, the way her knees went weak. It was doubly ridiculous that she couldn’t just step away, couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t silly or prim. She simply stayed still, her eyes shut tight, listening to that heartbeat, until he moved.
“Let’s get you somewhere safer,” he said, and pushed her gently back into the truck. “I’ll drive.”
Weighing Options
They were pointed southeast on 515, and Michael decided that was as good a direction as any. It was a five or six hour drive to L.A. if they swung west on 40, longer if they took the old Route 66, and he longed to go straight through without a
single stop. He thought it over while he settled into the driver’s place and Jen huddled on her half of the bench seat, shaking with exhaustion and adrenaline, a ring of white around her dark irises and her hair a wild glory.
He still felt her slenderness against him, fitted close like she belonged there, her arms resting on bruises, scrapes, and slowly seeping claw-marks. The Corruptor’s poison slowed his healing but couldn’t halt it entirely; still, he was glad of the dark so she wouldn’t see the extent of the damage. It was good to be in the cab instead of the back, and doubly good to hear her breathing, reassuring him she was alive and unwounded. She looked a hairsbreadth away from shock, but on the whole, they’d gotten off lightly. Luck or the Principle, he didn’t care as long as it kept him whole enough to fight.
“How did it find us?” she finally asked, after a few miles had unreeled under the tires. “It was stopping, right? That’s what did it. Stopping and going out walking. I shouldn’t have—”
“There’s only so long you can sit in a car without needing to stretch your legs.” The last thing he needed was his lumina blaming herself. “I should have thought that the Strip would be crawling with the unclean, there’s good prey for them there. Just bad luck, that’s all.” The almost-untruth made him nervous, but on the other hand, what other explanation was there?
The Legion has forsaken thee.
It was impossible. Unthinkable. He’d even gotten rid of the phone, but of course, news of a traveling Incorruptible would spread like wildfire, and the unclean would pass it along every likely route. It did not have to be treachery.
And yet. Why would one of the unclean use those specific words?
“The only kind of luck I have,” she muttered again. Both of them smelled of rotting ichor now, but he hadn’t had the heart to push her away when she clung to him so desperately. “No, that’s wrong. You’re good luck.”
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