“I thought you Brethren were everywhere,” Max said through gritted teeth.
“We are,” Jimmie said. “Just not all at the same time.” He glanced for an instant at Max, then back at the road. “What you said back there, in the hotel, about the universe being in trouble, what did you mean?”
“It’s kind of complicated,” Max said. “And—oh God, watch out!—shouldn’t you focus on driving right now?”
“The Three Who Are One?” Jimmie said, ignoring her as he slid the rig between a minivan and a PT Cruiser. The Cruiser honked at him and the driver flipped him off. “That’s a Wiccan reference, isn’t it? I’ve dealt with enough good and bad witches over the years to know that much, at least. He said something about the three being dead—”
“Not dead,” Max corrected, “diminished. I don’t think they can actually die. If they did, that would be the end of everything.”
“Okay, explain that,” Jimmie said, stuffing some snuff into his cheek. The Master’s bike was a dark shape about half a mile ahead. Jimmie downshifted to allow the moving puzzle pieces of the other cars on the road to drift into a new pattern that, hopefully, would provide an opening.
“The three are the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone,” Max said. “Anthropomorphized representations of cosmic forces. It was a way for early man to grasp cosmology. Many cite the Triple Goddess as the creation of Robert Graves in the early to mid twentieth century. However, as early as the first century BCE—”
“Max!” Jimmie interrupted. “Not teaching a class here, chasing bad guys. What forces does the Triple Goddess represent?”
“Right, right, sorry,” Max said. “The Maiden is the generative principles—new life, creation, renewal of a cycle, birth. The Mother is the balancing principle—stability, maturity, order, progress.”
Jimmie swerved and the whole cab rocked. Max grabbed her seat belt again and gave a frightened little squeak. The truck broke free of the bottleneck in time to see the Pagan’s bike ascending the 55A ramp. “He’s on I-20 west,” Jimmie said into his mike. “He’s hauling ass.”
“Jimmie!” Max shouted, her arms and feet locking in terror. Jimmie instantly realized that the truck in front of him had jammed on the brakes. He did the same, jerking the shotgun gearshift down. It was pure instinct; there wasn’t time for anything else. The rig groaned and shrieked to a stop, with less than an inch between its grille and the rear bumper of the truck. Past the truck, Jimmie could see a line of traffic, all stopped.
“Damn it!” Jimmie said, slapping the wheel. “We’re tied up. He’s out of sight on I-20, copy?”
Lovina’s Charger snarled past, gliding up the on-ramp’s shoulder after the Master of the Hunt at eighty miles per hour. “I’m on him,” she said over the radio.
Jimmie sighed and waited for the jam to clear. “What about the Crone?” he asked.
Max exhaled and rubbed her face. “Entropy,” she said. “The end of the cycle—closure, death. The three represent the feminine aspects of creation—in eternal opposition, and complement, to the masculine aspects, represented by Cernunnos, one of the names of the Horned God. Jimmie, if what the Pagan said is true, then the universe, at its most fundamental levels, is out of whack and is falling apart. We have to do something before it’s too late.”
“Right,” Jimmie said. “Save the universe. Got it, but first we have to merge into the damned right lane.”
Traffic on I-20 was light compared with the street, and Lovina’s Dodge slid through it like a snake gliding on water. The hum of the engine was like being in love. She was going over a hundred now, and she saw the Pagan and his motorcycle ahead in the left lane, accelerating. She did the same.
When Lovina was in Afghanistan, she met a guy everyone called Benno—she honestly couldn’t remember what his real name was. The reason Benno stuck in her head was that it was because of him that she loved so much weird-ass music. He’d play mix CDs all the damn time—back at base camp, on patrols whenever he could, and even a few times in the middle of a hot LZ, when he shouldn’t. Benno’s musical tastes were almost as wonky as the man himself, but some of them had rubbed off on Lovina, even back in the world. So now, far away from home, chasing a man she had just seen shrug off small-arms fire as if it were shower water, she had the Charger’s speakers throbbing to a mix Benno had made for her when they were both headed home. Shriekback’s “Running on the Rocks” flowed, morphed, into Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” and it made Lovina will the muscle car faster, faster, closer to the Master of the Hunt.
The Pagan glanced back, and Lovina sensed his eyes on her, like a cancer creeping into her cells. He moved toward a cluster of traffic, sliding in and out between the cars, ignoring lanes and angry car horns. Lovina took to the shoulder of the highway again; the Charger shuddered and shimmied as she edged around the cluster of traffic. Gravel sprayed everywhere, and the motorists honked and flipped her off as she fishtailed the Dodge back onto the highway and around the island of cars and trucks. The Pagan did it again, threading between another mass of vehicles, ignoring the lanes and the inches that separated him from the other vehicles. The gap widened, and Lovina wished she had roller lights and a siren to get these people the hell out of her way. The Charger was a beast on the open road, and she knew she could run him to ground, but he was putting too many cars and trucks between them. She wrestled the Charger onto the edge of the road again, one of her tires almost dropping into a two-foot drainage ditch, but she jerked the wheel and managed to keep from wiping out. She was back on the road, but even more distance separated them now.
“I’m at Exit 53,” she said. “He’s about a mile ahead of me, and accelerating. He’s going to be out of sight in a second.”
“Stick with him, Lovina,” Jimmie said over the CB. “We’re on the interstate, and we’re coming up fast.”
“I’m trying to get up to him, but he’s lane-splitting,” she said. “He’s driving like a maniac—no fear of crashing, none. Damn it! He just put another half mile and another group of cars between us. Hang on a second!”
Lovina began to try the shoulder trick again, feeling her tires scrambling for traction on the greasy loose gravel that littered the edge of the road. She whipped hard right to avoid an abandoned muffler on the shoulder and then turned hard to slip back onto the road. She succeeded, but fishtailed again and had to swerve and brake to avoid being T-boned by a silver Toyota.
“Lovina? What’s happening?” Jimmie asked over the CB.
The Master of the Hunt was again in the middle of a group of cars, sliding between them. He edged closer to a compact smart car on his right, and Lovina saw him draw his nasty-looking hunting knife, its blade a glint in the late-morning sun. He brought his bike within inches of the driver’s open window; his knife arm flashed inside the car for an instant, then withdrew, and the Pagan’s motorcycle accelerated quickly away.
“Oh God, no!” Lovina shouted, downshifting and turning hard to avoid what she knew was coming. “Jimmie, he just killed someone!”
The compact veered over into the left lane. Lovina saw the driver slump like a rag doll, thrown by the inertia. The out-of-control car slid in front of a work truck. The two vehicles struck each other, the sound of metal screaming. Lovina saw the whole dance, of velocity and control, begin to fail as brake lights glared, and wheels were hastily jerked, all too late. She buried the gas pedal under her foot and weaved between the elements of the six-car pileup on instinct, slipping between the folding cages of shredding metal and the constellations of exploding glass. For an instant, the numbers on the various license plates of the crashing cars seemed hyperreal and in perfect, almost exaggerated focus. The numbers moved in front of her eyes and in her mind, unbidden, like a compulsion that could not be ignored. Her universe was the road in front of her, the Charger was her body, and she was nothing but engine and will. Then she was clear and she had no idea how she could possibly have done that. She was sweating and every muscle was tensed. She felt as if she had ove
rslept and suddenly awakened.
The Master of the Hunt was almost out of sight, gliding through another set of cars and trucks, and then clear and open highway. He accelerated to, easily, a hundred and fifty miles an hour. Almost gone.
“I’m losing him, Jimmie!” she said. “I’m losing the son of a bitch.”
There was a flash of black-and-silver on Lovina’s right, something hurtling past at dizzying speed.
“I got him,” a voice crackled over the CB. It was Heck. “Sorry I’m late.”
Heck came up on the Pagan’s right, slipping between the cars and trucks, using them as cover, drifting less than inches from paint and steel moving at a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. The Master of the Hunt spotted him just as they both cleared the traffic. Heck veered hard left and was beside the Master of the Hunt, separated by a few feet. They were on open road now, passing Exit 52, headed toward I-285.
“Let’s play, asshole,” Heck muttered. He slipped his large combat knife out of the belt sheath with his left hand and twirled it, grinning behind his demon mask. The Pagan’s reaction was hidden behind the black mirror of his helmet’s visor, but he hefted his own bone-handled hunting knife and prepared to meet Heck’s charge.
They were side by side, less than a foot apart, both traveling over two hundred miles an hour, both bikes shuddering with each flaw in the highway. The Huntsman flashed out with his blade, still wet with the dead driver’s blood, toward Heck’s throat. Heck parried it, and the two riders parted a few feet, only to swerve closer again for another pass. Heck slashed down, toward the madman’s shoulder, and found the Pagan’s blade blocking his own.
The two riders pushed against each other, then swerved hard apart to avoid a massive swarm of merging and jockeying vehicles that suddenly appeared on the highway as they reached the concrete octopus of the I-285 intersection. For several long seconds, both huntsman and outlaw biker did nothing but struggle to maintain speed and avoid crashes. A symphony of horns surrounded them. Heck struggled to maintain control; at this speed, every motion was exaggerated and any mistake was fatal. Then, as the traffic finally thinned, they were back together, grappling, blades flashing, sparking, with the force and speed of each strike. Their arms, their knives, moved almost as fast as their bikes were hurtling down the highway, blurring, showering sparks. Both bikes were pushing well past their limits, whining and shaking. Another flurry of strikes, each parried and returned, steel biting steel, again and again.
The Pagan lifted his leg off the peg, driving a powerful kick into Heck’s side. Heck felt sharp pain blossom in his chest, and felt more than heard a sickening crunch as the steel-toed boot connected. Almost without thinking, he jabbed with his clenched knife hand, striking a jarring blow to the Huntsman’s helmeted head. The black visor shattered, and he felt soft flesh and hard bone yield under his leather-gloved fist. Both bikes—both men, extensions of their machines—veered away and nearly wiped out from the force of their traded blows. Heck grabbed both handles, his knife still clutched. He glanced over at the Pagan. The killer’s face was now partly exposed beneath the shattered visor, and Heck saw alien yellow-green eyes, almost glowing, full of hate, glaring at him. The Master of the Hunt’s nose slowly reset itself, shifting back to its original shape, and the small cuts near his eyes sealed and vanished, like the bruises under his eyes. The Pagan pointed his knife at Heck, and Heck returned the salute with a wave, and the British two-finger salute that was the equivalent of a middle finger.
There was the bellow of a semi’s horn, and both riders glanced back. Jimmie’s rig and Lovina’s Charger were coming up fast on the two riders.
Heck saw worry, maybe even fear, for just a second in the unearthly eyes, then the Master of the Hunt slipped his knife away and accelerated even more, his bike making a sick whine with the exertion. Heck holstered his blade and hunkered down on the pegs to push his own bike to its very last ounce of horsepower.
There were a couple of miles of clear highway ahead. The chase had already taken the hunted and the hunters out to where I-20 crosses the Chattahoochee River, near Six Flags. Heck was closing, less than half a mile between them, as the bikes crossed the river and continued heading west. Heck felt a strange sensation in his belly and spine, as he had just before the Huntsman kicked in Mark Stolar’s hotel-room door—a feeling of fundamental wrongness, as if the air itself had become unbreathable, and gravity were cutting in and out. It was a quick sensation, in the blink of an eye, but Heck’s instincts screamed, and he became very aware, very on edge. Something was wrong.
The road, the space in front of the Master of the Hunt, began to pucker, stretching inward toward an unseen point, as if the three-dimensional reality there were being sucked into a funnel, narrowed and compressed to a vanishing point. Even the sound, the howling tunnel of the road at two hundred-plus miles an hour, was distorting along with the space in front of the Pagan. Stolar had said something about “teleporting,” and, as Heck watched the surreal landscape ahead of him, he suddenly recalled the dead man’s words.
“No, no, no!” Heck shouted. “Fucking, no!”
The Pagan and his bike began to stretch, to elongate, as they were pulled into the narrowing, invisible vortex, as if the light painting them were being pulled into an impossibly small pinhole, along with the matter that composed the rider and his machine.
Heck bellowed in rage and tried to force his throttle farther forward, but it had nowhere else to go. “No, you don’t, you son of a bitch!” he screamed. “You come back here!”
Lovina, Jimmie, and Max saw the phenomenon, too, as the killer began to vanish before their eyes.
“Aw, shit!” Jimmie said. “Not this. It figures.”
Lovina had the same strange sensation come over her as when she had threaded the car crash—a sense of hyperawareness. She focused intently on the Pagan, on his bike. She was gaining, and she knew that she could overtake him, knew it. “You’re not getting away,” she said quietly as she focused on the Pagan. Her voice didn’t sound right to her own ears. “Not from me.” The cluster of highway signs off to the side of I-20, the metal tree of plaques, each bearing numbered routes and interstates, sprang into diamond-clear focus for her. Each number, each sequence of numbers, glowed in her perception and burned themselves into her brain. The Pagan was at the end of a shimmering, streaking tunnel—a shower of photons now. The world was gone, only the tunnel of light, only the Road, made up of iridescent fire, and the numbers—slithering, shifting, adding, multiplying, dividing in her mind, enveloping Lovina’s thoughts, becoming Lovina’s thoughts. Each number, each sequence softly clicking into inevitable place, into the only possible place it could go—pattern, motion, sequence, velocity … click, click, click, click, like tumblers.
Equation solved; solution found.
Heck slid to a stop on the highway, his bike skidding sideways as he did. The Master of the Hunt vanished into nothing, with a whoosh of air rushing to fill the vacuum. Lovina’s Charger roared past Heck, and the biker watched in amazement as her car folded up, in defiance of space and dimension, as the Huntsman had, and then vanished with an identical gasp of air. Lovina was gone.
“What the hell just happened?” Heck shouted.
SEVENTEEN
“10-44”
“Why?” Ava asked Agnes, almost pleading. “Why won’t you help me get Cole and Lexi back?” They were in the backyard of Agnes’s mansion, sitting in lawn chairs under a sun-faded tin awning. Agnes had made iced tea for the two of them. Across the yard were two graves: Julia’s, covered in grass and wildflowers, and Alana’s, only a day old. Ava’s back still ached from digging her friend’s resting place. The blisters on her hands from the shovel were still raw.
“My dear,” Agnes said, “you simply don’t understand the way things work here. It’s not that easy.” The old woman looked across the yard. A flock of Mississippi kites were splashing in Agnes’s birdbath. She sipped her tea, the ice tinkling in the glass, and smiled slightly. “I�
�m glad Julia isn’t alone out here anymore. She has someone to keep her company. That’s lovely.”
Ava stopped in mid-sip as she took her tea and looked at the smiling wisp of an old woman who had saved her life. This woman whom the hulking Scode brothers seemed to fear and cursed, whom the faceless woman behind the locked door—the one who had refused to let Ava and her friends in—had spoken of with reverence, as a protector. What had the woman and the Scodes called Agnes? The Crone?
“Look,” Ava said, “I’m scared of that motorcycle guy, too—he grew fucking horns! I get it, but somebody has got to stop him. He’s got to be behind the shadow people, too.”
“Oh, yes, dear,” Agnes said, still watching the birds. “They are the children of the entity he serves, parts of the entity he serves—I’m afraid I’m not completely sure how that all works myself.”
“Well, what do you know?” Ava asked. “What is he? What do you mean ‘he serves some entity’? Entity? What does that even mean?”
“As I said, it’s not easy to understand,” Agnes said. “Some of what I know is from the books in the basement of this house. Other pieces come from the original citizens of the Four Houses—families, like the Scodes, that he trapped here when he gained control over the town, and whom he won’t allow to leave or release. He’s trapped them here, poor souls, and a few of the old-timers recall when he was just an odd, quiet boy, before he became something other, and much less than human.
“And some of what I know … some of it is hard for me to disclose to you, my dear, for I fear you will doubt my sanity.”
Ava laughed and shook her head. “Whatever,” she said. “In this fucked-up burg, you seem like one of the sanest people here. Try me, Agnes.”
“I dreamed of this place—this house, the house Dennis and I now live in—I dreamed about it many times as a young girl,” Agnes said. “The dreams were different. Dennis was in many of them long before I ever met him. That was one of the ways I knew he was the one for me. There was a young girl, very sad, haunted, that I would dream of being here, being hunted by hounds. She always cut her own throat at the end, but we had many, many lovely talks. I always tried to stop her. She said she was going to get help for us. I saw knights in this house, oddly dressed, and they talked like Yanks, but their hearts were noble. They died in fire trying to defeat your motorcycle rider—he was the Black Knight. I didn’t know his name then.
The Brotherhood of the Wheel Page 28