by Hondo Jinx
Remi sighed. “Please. It really hurts.”
The cat girl gestured toward the roadblock wreckage.
Remi stumbled in that direction, followed by the gun-toting feline. There was no use trying anything, not in her current state. She was lucky to even be alive. And she wasn’t even sure how much longer that luck would hold, given the furnace of pain blazing inside her. She had to work on this Beastie, had to win her over and get this fucking collar off. “Thanks for saving me back there.”
“I need you,” the cat girl said.
“Need me? For what?”
“You have to help me find the cowboy,” the cat girl said.
Then Remi understood. Psycho-kitty was one of Dutchman’s people. She’d backstabbed the others and taken over, wanting to kill Brawley herself.
Get in line, sister, she thought. But outwardly, she said, “I’ll do more than find him for you.” She gestured toward the bodies on the ground and the flaming wreckage of the vehicle she had loved. “None of this shit would’ve happened if it wasn’t for that son of a bitch. I’ll kill his ass for you, too.”
The cat girl snarled, and Remi turned to see the muzzle of the Desert Eagle pointed at her face. “Don’t even think about hurting him.”
Remi backed up, putting her hands in the air. “Easy there, sister. I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.”
“He’s not my friend. I owe him a favor.”
Then Remi had it, and she could’ve kicked herself for not putting two and two together more quickly. It was the pain. The pain was making her stupid. “You’re the niece.”
The cat girl looked at her warily.
“The niece of that street performer,” Remi said. She laughed. It was all so crazy, her life going out of control, morphing into an insane cartoon. “You’re the fucking cat, the one Brawley pulled from the water.”
“His name is Brawley?” the cat girl said.
Remi nodded. Even that hurt like a motherfucker. “Stupid ass name, huh?”
“Brawley,” the cat girl said, drawing it out, sounding fascinated, and Remi had a feeling this girl wanted to do more than just thank him. “Yeah, I’m the cat Brawley rescued. And now I have to warn him.”
“About?”
The cat girl gestured to the broken bodies sprawled across the carpet of brass casings glittering in the firelight of the burning cars. “Dutchman’s people.”
Remi raised a brow, glancing at the corpses. A couple of them might’ve been killed when she slammed into the Hummers. The others, though?
She recognized Dutchman’s chubby Seeker, Bostic, among the dead, his wide-open eyes glazed over and staring into the night sky as if he’d been killed by some deep secret he’d spied up there in that hazy tropical gloom.
Of course, what had really killed him was obvious. The ragged bloody gash yawned like a second mouth across his throat.
Similar wounds smiled from the throats of the other corpses. Apparently, Psycho Kitty kept her claws pretty sharp. “Warning him now strikes me as overkill,” Remi said, gesturing toward the dead. “No pun intended.”
“Dutchman isn’t finished,” Psycho Kitty said. “He still has more men, his telepath, and the one they call Uno.”
Uno, Remi thought. Dos was bad, but that motherfucker was downright Creep City, a middle-aged Cosmic assassin who dressed like the drummer from a Mexican blues band and who was said to worship gods from other realms of existence. She’d heard disturbing stories of unspeakable shit he’d done and conjured.
“Trust me,” Remi said. “Brawley—”
“Like I told you,” Psycho Kitty said, still holding the pistol on her. “I trust no one.”
Remi shrugged. “Suit yourself. But Brawley already knows. I warned him about Dutchman.”
“You saw him?” the cat girl said, a note of excitement coming into her voice. “Where is he?”
“Heading north,” Remi said. “Miami is my guess. After all, that’s ground zero for Carnals.”
“Why would he go there? I thought he was a force mage. He used telekinesis to save me, I’m sure of that. Is he a Carnal, too? My uncle never told me about power mages. I never even heard of them until yesterday.”
“Power mages aren’t like us,” Remi explained. “They can open up all of their strands.”
The amber eyes swelled with amazement. “All seven?”
“All seven,” Remi said. “All they need is a teacher from each order. Which basically means Brawley has to bang seven chicks to open his strands.”
“Oh,” the cat girl said, seeming thoughtful. She had dropped the muzzle of the Desert Eagle a few inches.
If I was whole, Remi thought, I’d grab that thing and shove it so far up her ass it’d tickle her whiskers.
But in her current state, she’d just get herself killed. And she did not want that. She had things to live for, chief among them saving her sister and making Brawley Hayes pay for fucking her over.
Luckily, she sensed that Psycho Kitty, despite her obvious penchant for death dealing, wouldn’t just waste her on a whim. Remi just needed to lend a hand, bide her time, and avoid doing anything stupid. Because she had no doubt that the Beastie would waste her if provoked.
“But don’t take my word for it,” Remi said. “You can ask him yourself.” She flashed a smile. “Who knows? He might even be looking for a nice Beastie girl to crack his strand.”
“What?” the cat girl said, seeming flustered. “I’m not going to…”
Remi raised her hands. “That’s your little red wagon, sister. You can pull it, push it, or leave it in the ditch for all I care. But one way or the other, let’s get out of here before the fuggles show.”
The cat girl nodded. “Dutchman’s people set up road flares and signs saying the road was closed.”
“Which will work until a cop arrives,” Remi said. “Let’s get going.”
“What are you doing?”
“Have to get something,” Remi said, getting down on all fours and leaning into the wreckage of her beloved Suburban, which lay on its roof. The front end was all smashed to hell, and the rear was still burning.
Don’t blow up now, she thought.
The jagged pebbles of broken windshield hurt beneath her palms. This fucking hobble collar had turned her into a fuggle, and it sucked.
Remi coughed, reaching into the smoky gloom, patting around, pushing shit aside until she found what she was looking for. Her hand closed around it, and she pulled halfway out of the wreckage until the back of her head bumped into something hard.
“Show me your hands,” Psycho Kitty said, and Remi knew the Desert Eagle was pressed to the back of her skull. “No guns.”
“No guns,” Remi said, and folded her naked upper torso over her thighs in order to hold both arms back. “This is how we find him.”
Psycho Kitty examined the receiver unit and started asking questions. Remi explained how the old tracking system worked, noting that as a psi mage, she hadn’t had much luck with newer, more advanced technologies.
Remi glanced at the bodies and considered taking a shirt but decided against it. It was a warm night. She’d rather go topless than pull a shirt sticky with someone else’s blood over her head.
“Come,” the cat girl demanded. “We need a working vehicle.”
They walked south in silence, Psycho Kitty staying several feet behind her captive with the massive pistol pointed at Remi’s back.
Remi snagged her missing boot as they passed it, and Psycho Kitty let her stop to put in on. Just that small improvement, having a boot on both feet, made Remi feel a little better.
But when she tried to stand, she fell back down, waves of pain radiating from deep within her broken torso.
“Hey,” Remi said. “Seriously, please take this collar off. I need juice. I think I’m dying.”
“No,” the cat girl said. “First, we need a vehicle.”
“Fine,” Remi said, and stretched out a hand. “A little help here?”
; Psycho Kitty kept her distance.
“Thanks for nothing,” Remi said, and struggled to her feet in painful stages. “If I die, good luck finding Brawley on your own, Miss Kitty.”
“My name is Callie,” the cat girl said.
“I’d say it was nice to meet you,” Remi said, “but I think you’d know I was lying.”
They rounded a corner and spotted the big sign and line of red road flares guttering out on the highway ahead.
Remi limped up to the line of flares and stood behind the sign. “Here comes somebody,” she said, pointing at a set of approaching headlights. “Let’s hope it’s not a cop.”
That’s when Remi realized just how deeply fucked she was. Up to that point, she had been focused on the most primal of all concerns: survival. But thinking of law enforcement made her realize that the police would find her Suburban lying back there among the corpses and illegal weapons.
Great, just fucking great.
She imagined pulling up to her mom and dad, the whole motorcycle club straddled behind them, their idling engines growling like cruel laughter as she begged her parents to take her in again.
And her parents would, of course; she had no doubt about that. But she wouldn’t exactly be the Prodigal Daughter. She’d be the girl that had run off, too good for life on the road, only to come limping back with her tail tucked between her legs.
Oh well. So be it. So fucking be it.
“I’ll hide,” Callie said. “When the car stops, tell them you had an accident and need help.”
Remi nodded. “All right. I certainly look the part.”
“Don’t try anything funny, or—”
“You’ll blow my brains out,” Remi interrupted. “I’m firmly aware of that facet of our weird-ass relationship, sister. Wish me luck.”
The approaching vehicle, a little pickup truck with a raggedy tarp strapped overtop a pile of shit in the back, rolled to a stop.
Remi limped into the open, waving her arms overhead, squinting into the bright headlights and very much aware of her nakedness.
A middle-aged guy with a salt-and-pepper beard and a dark mop of unruly hair jutting out from beneath a weather-beaten ball cap emerged from the driver’s side, his face twisted with concern.
Don’t shoot him, Remi thought, wishing she’d covered that point of the plan before leaving Callie the Psycho Kitty.
“You okay, miss?” the man called, coming around the truck.
Remi took a knee. “I’m hurt,” she said truthfully enough. “Need… hospital.”
“Sure thing,” the man said, coming toward her with a pained expression. “We’ll get you there, all right? Hey!”
“Hands in the air,” Callie said, pointing the Desert Eagle at the good Samaritan. “Sorry for the inconvenience, sir, but we need your vehicle.”
13
“I didn’t know Miami was such a shithole,” Brawley said, crawling along a street that looked like it had been peeled from a post-apocalyptic movie.
“Most of it is pretty nice,” Nina said. “Just not this part.”
Brawley kept driving. He would never live in a city, nice, shitty, or otherwise. He needed space, open air. Peace and quiet. Didn’t matter how many sports stadiums and fancy restaurants a city had. At the end of the day, everybody was still packed in like a bunch of rats.
Not that he was seeing many people now. Then again, it was four in the morning, not exactly a peak hour for foot traffic.
They were driving past a sprawling cemetery. The sky overhead was a strange purple hue shot through with writhing streaks of charcoal.
Nina said, “I’m just glad we—”
“Stop!” Sage said, pointing out her window.
Brawley slammed on the brakes and pulled to the curb.
Before they even came to a full stop, he knew what Sage had seen. His eyes looked to where she was pointing, and sure enough, he’d been right.
If he had been relying on his eyes alone, the dim light of the streetlamp, shadow dappled as it was by the swaying palm leaves, wouldn’t have illuminated the sign clearly enough.
But his Seeker sense and eyes combined forces, and there it was.
“What is it?” Nina said.
“Nightshade Lane,” Brawley and Sage answered in unison.
He killed the engine.
“Creepy,” Nina said. “It’s in a graveyard? Are you sure this is the Nightshade Lane Hazel was talking about?”
For a second, Brawley put Nina’s question to the Seeker test. Then he nodded. “Yup.”
Sage agreed. She and her mentor hadn’t known what, exactly, awaited Brawley on Nightshade Lane. They only knew that it was significant.
He felt that now, too. Felt it deep in his bones.
Seek the past to know the future, Bug Beard’s voice echoed in his head.
He opened his door and got out. This time, he carried extra mags. He’d learned his lesson at the gun shop.
Brawley crossed the sidewalk and stood before the high, wrought iron fence, much of which was covered in creeping vines.
The sky churned weirdly, infused by an otherworldly purple illumination bruised with charcoal.
For a second, he stared at the sign and the narrow lane that plunged away through the tombstones. Then he scanned the surrounding cemetery, an old graveyard falling into disrepair after years, perhaps decades, of apparent neglect. Pale, tightly packed monuments jutted crookedly up from the shadowy loam like the bones of some great and ancient beast mercifully lost to time.
“So, this is where you’re supposed to search for clues to your past?” Nina asked stepping up beside him and slipping her hand into his.
Brawley nodded.
“And his future,” Sage added, sliding up against his other side and grasping his free hand in her slender fingers.
“Not your near future, I hope,” Nina said, and gave his hand a squeeze. “I mean, not to be all obvious, but this is a fucking graveyard, cowboy.”
“Yeah,” Brawley said, seized by tremendous curiosity. Part of it was his Seeker strand, of course, but part of it was just good old-fashioned wanting to know his past, his parents, and himself. And yeah, hopefully his future. He pulled his hands free, grabbed hold of the ten-foot fence, and gave an experimental tug. He reckoned it would hold him.
He started to haul himself up, but Nina grabbed his leg. “What are you doing?”
“What’s it look like I’m doing, darlin? I’m climbing the damn fence.”
“I concur with the implications of our wife’s question,” Sage said. “We should search for a more conventional entry point into the cemetery.”
“More conventional entry point?” Nina said. “You two are crazier than shithouse rats, you know that? We don’t have time for this shit. Heaven and Hell stays open all night, but it’s four in the fucking morning. Night is almost over. Any minute now, the Carnals are going to quit partying and head home like a bunch of vampires trying to beat the sunrise. If you insist on meeting one of them, do it now, so we can peel the fuck out of Miami ASAP.”
For a second, Brawley gripped the iron fence in his fists. He wanted to go in there and see what he could see. But he knew Nina was right. “All right,” he said. “It’d probably look kind of weird, anyway, us poking around a graveyard at this hour. Let’s go.”
“Thank you,” Nina said, heading for the RV.
Sage lingered, staring longingly out into the graveyard like a Goth disguised as a librarian. “I understand your hesitation, husband. It is difficult to abandon this place.”
“Here,” Brawley said, “let me help you.” And he tugged her away from the fence to the RV, where they all climbed aboard and got rolling again.
Not even five minutes later, Sage, who was proving to be more reliable than any GPS system, told them to pull into a desolate parking lot flanked by an ugly hedge of nearly windowless concrete buildings that looked more like Soviet-era Russia than Brawley’s impression of Miami.
“We have arrived,” Sag
e said.
Brawley sensed the truth in her words, but his eyes begged to differ. From his understanding of Miami and South Beach nightclubs, he had been expecting bright lights, swaying palms, and a bunch of beautiful women in skimpy dresses packed onto the sidewalk between a line of expensive sports cars and a velvet rope manned by scowling gorillas in tight black t-shirts.
What he saw instead was a buckled parking lot empty of cars. Thistly weeds poked from cracks in the macadam. On three sides rose the concrete façade of what looked like a hurricane-proof warehouse district.
But Sage was already opening her door. “I feel strongly that we must hurry,” she said, stepping from the RV.
Brawley popped his door, and Nina slipped out behind him, muttering about Carnals.
“Are you guys sure you want to do this?” Nina whined, hustling to keep up with the long-legged Seekers as they strode toward a nondescript gray building. “Carnals are assholes. And Miami Carnals are assholes on steroids.”
“I’m sure,” Brawley said. “And stop fretting. I won’t go hitching my wagon to any old girl.”
Nina groaned. “That’s what your mouth says. Once you see these hotties all dressed up to go clubbing, we’ll see what your dick has to say.”
“Darlin,” Brawley said. “My dick is 100% satisfied with the two of you.”
“Yeah,” Nina groaned. “That’s what she said.”
“I do not believe that your attempt at humor actually makes sense as phrased,” Sage said.
“Shut it, Seeker girl,” Nina said. “I’m not doing stand-up here. I’m trying to talk some sense into our husband.”
Brawley laughed. “Finally calling me your husband, huh?”
“Blow me,” Nina growled. “Both of you are totally insane. Finding a nice Carnal girl is like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“We better start hunting, then,” Brawley said.
“You know what people never mention about finding needles in haystacks?” Nina said. “You don’t find them until they make you bleed.”
“There,” Sage said, and once again, Brawley’s sense of certainty kicked in. He followed Sage’s gaze across the street to yet another nondescript concrete building.