She kept her eyes fixed on his, but she gave a tiny nod to the gun.
“Out of cards, huh?”
“Almost. Used most of ’em on Nyx.”
“Uh-huh.” Harmony’s other hand pointed to the semi trailer and the long smear of black blood the demon had left in her wake. “Nyx is gone.”
“Looks like.”
“And all of her men are down.”
“Looks like,” he said.
Eye to eye, footing squared, each of them weighed their options in the space of a breath. Daniel made the first move.
He flipped the pistol around, holding it by the barrel, and held out his hand. Offering it to her.
“If it’s making you anxious,” he said.
Harmony looked from him to the gun and back again.
“Keep it,” she told him. “Seeing as you’re almost out of cards and all.”
He lowered his arm.
Jessie strode up with a phone pressed to her ear. “Medical and backup is inbound. We’ve got three choppers on the way, ETA five minutes, and a trauma team at St. Vesuvius is on standby.”
“Good. We need to sanitize this scene. Let’s get a perimeter set up and see if April can requisition a county bus for set dressing. I’m thinking ‘prison transfer attacked by gang members.’”
“Works for me.” Jessie shot a look at Daniel. “What about him?”
Daniel was watching Nessa and Marie. The two women made their way across the battlefield, arm in arm, worn down but still standing.
“You can’t protect them,” he said.
“But you can?” Jessie asked.
“I’m sure you’ve got a very nice black-box facility somewhere off the grid. You can make them vanish off the face of the earth, lock them down tighter than Fort Knox, but that’ll only work for so long. They’ve got a job to do.”
“And that job is?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said, “but some big players are in motion. Bigger than you, bigger than me. You’ve felt it, haven’t you? That feeling of pressure bearing down, like a storm front closing in. Things are about to change.”
Jessie and Harmony shared a glance.
“We’ve felt it too,” Harmony said.
“Remember what I told you, about resources you don’t have? Let me handle this. You know Nyx isn’t going to give up, and once she licks her wounds she’ll be back with a vengeance. I can get these two underground before that happens. Bonus is, she and everybody with her is going to assume you took Nessa and Marie into custody. So they’ll be looking at the left hand, while I’ve got ’em tucked away safe in the right.”
“This hunt,” Harmony said. “Can you get it called off?”
“Technically, no. But the thing about infernal law is it’s made to be exploited. Full of loopholes, by design. And my crew is good at finding loopholes. While we work on that, best thing you can do is put pressure on the daylight end.”
“Alton Roth,” Harmony said.
“You got it. Killing him won’t stop the contract, but if you can tie him and his buddy Calypso up for a little bit, maybe give them some new problems to worry about, at least he won’t have time to escalate things. I imagine there’s some red tape you can sling his way.”
“My crew has a few special talents of their own.”
“On that note, I’m going to need some help from Carolyn Saunders. Don’t suppose you could cut her loose?”
“We don’t have her,” Harmony said, “but we’d love to know where she’s at. Her house was already ransacked when we got there. Looked like a kidnapping.”
“Her timing sucks.”
“We’ll keep an eye out.” Harmony pointed her finger and crooked it back and forth, drawing the space between them. “Just so you know…you and me? This isn’t finished.”
“Sure.”
“But you’re right.” She took a deep breath. “Get them where they need to go. Keep them safe. We’ll run a distraction play and cover for you as long as we can. And one more thing?”
“Name it,” Daniel said.
“It’s a big country. Lots of work on my plate, no shortage of problems to sort out. So you should go back to Las Vegas and stay there. Maybe, if you can manage that, it’ll take me a while to get around to opening your file again.”
The faint hum of helicopters sounded on the horizon, rotors chopping the cloudy sky. Harmony lowered her voice as she and Jessie walked away, but Daniel could still hear her murmur into her partner’s ear.
“He said he was my ‘nemesis,’ can you believe that?”
Jessie snickered. “I know, right? I mean, you told me he was a piece of work, but wow. ‘Nemesis.’ What an asshole.”
Daniel turned. Nessa and Marie stood beside him.
“What now?” Marie asked.
He surveyed the wreckage, cupping a hand over his forehead to cut the sun’s glare.
“Now,” he said, “we’re going to walk a couple of blocks and find a parking lot. Then I’m going to steal us a car so we don’t have to hitchhike all the way to Nevada. From there…it’s time we had that talk that I promised you back in Chicago.”
* * *
They rolled west, taking the back roads in an old dented Buick with mud-spattered plates. Daniel drove with one hand on the wheel and one eye on the rearview mirror. Marie rode in the passenger’s seat, window cracked, the mirror bag nestled safe and unseen on her lap. Nessa sat in back. The open country had a way of swallowing time, and it felt like the world had gone empty. Like there was nothing between the flat landscape and the chasm of the sky but the travelers and their wheels.
“Like I said,” he told them, “this is just what I know, and what I know isn’t much. Way back when, and I mean prehistoric way back when, somebody told a story. Maybe it was the very first one, the moment we invented the idea of telling stories. Can you imagine that moment? I mean, think about humanity. We’re storytellers at heart. It’s how we express ideas, how we spread information, it’s how we communicate.”
“It would have changed everything,” Nessa mused. “A seismic shift in our entire species.”
“And moments like that…well, they’re pure magic, in the metaphorical and literal sense. The story made a mark. Left a scar across the entire universe, a scar that couldn’t heal.”
“But what does that have to do with our curse?” Nessa asked.
Daniel’s fingers drummed on the steering wheel. He hesitated, picking his words like a doctor preparing to deliver a terminal diagnosis.
“That’s the problem. See, the story was so magical, so powerful, that the characters all became real, flesh-and-blood creations. A once-in-history fluke sparked by raw magic. An act never to be equaled or duplicated ever again.”
Marie slid deeper into her seat, as if the implication bore down on her with physical weight.
“You mean…” Her voice trailed off.
“I mean,” he said, “you aren’t two people who’ve been cursed. You aren’t people at all. You never were. You’re fictional characters.”
“I’m real.” Nessa edged forward in the back seat. Her angry fingers poked at her own arm. “I am sentient, I think, I feel, I bleed—”
“Yeah, for all everyday intents and purposes, you’re a human being. Sure. But that’s as far as it goes. When normal people die, their souls go elsewhere. You can’t. You can’t because the machinery of the universe wasn’t built for you. All you can do is recycle back into the system. Reborn, with your lines written for you, ready to act your part in the story all over again. It’s not a curse, it’s a side effect of the force that created you.”
“Meaning,” Marie said, her voice soft, “there’s no curse to break. There’s nothing to fix. This is just…what we are. And we’re stuck like this. Forever.”
“But if we could find the person who did this,” Nessa started to say.
“The storyteller? Probably some Stone Age shaman who rotted to dust a million and a half years ago. And even if they were still alive, kil
ling ’em wouldn’t change a thing.” Daniel looked over at Marie. “I’m sorry. This sucks. Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but…that’s just how it is. The story isn’t something that was inflicted on you. The story is you.”
The darkness in Nessa’s heart, carried on wings of shadow, beat against the cage of her chest. Her teeth ground as she fought a tide of frustration and panic, swallowing it all down like poison. There was supposed to be a weapon waiting for them at Wisdom’s Grave. There was supposed to be a face behind their curse, an enemy to fight and kill and triumph over.
There was supposed to be a happy ending this time.
She snatched at his words like scraps of burning paper, desperate to find some shred of hope in the cinders.
“You keep saying ‘you,’” she told him. “But back in Chicago, you said you were on the list, too. Aren’t you just like us?”
“It’s complicated. I’m technically the Thief, but not the real one. I’m in the middle of a little scrap with the Enemy, another one of the first story’s characters, and he worked up some mojo to trick the universe into treating me like the Thief. Before you get your hopes up, it’s temporary. The second I bite the bullet, the real Thief is back in the spotlight. And if he dies first and reincarnates, same situation. This is just some magical sleight of hand to help him out and screw with me in the process.”
“So it is possible to intervene,” Nessa said. “Even for a little while, the universe can be deceived.”
“Wouldn’t change what you are. You are the story. Even if you could find a way to unravel the whole thing for good, that would mean unraveling your existence right along with it.”
Nessa sank into a moody silence.
“What do we know about it?” Marie asked. “The story, I mean.”
“You sure you want to know? It’s kind of a train wreck from start to finish.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“Okay,” Daniel said, “this is all secondhand, but Carolyn’s thing—she’s the Scribe, so it’s not like she has any choice in the matter—is digging up all the first-story lore she can find. Long story short, a lot of people meet a lot of bad ends. For example, the Thief gets stabbed in the back by his lover after a big score, and the Drifter freezes to death at the side of a road. The Salesman, now here’s a fun one, he gets locked up by a tyrant and gets his hands and tongue cut off. And, well…you and Nessa burn. You already knew that part.”
Marie’s mouth hung open. “What kind of story is this?”
“Right? That’s pretty much what I said when Carolyn explained it to me. She thinks it might have been some kind of morality tale. An Aesop’s fables kind of thing, to teach people how to behave. Anyway, the whole deal wraps up when the Paladin and the Enemy square off. Whoever wins gets to decide what happens to the planet, but the bit players—like you two, and me for that matter—are dead and gone long before that happens. It can’t not happen. Think of the first story like a record player with the needle stuck in the groove, playing the same bar of music over and over again. No matter how the characters push against it, the universe will make the story play out from start to finish. It’ll alter the fabric of reality if it has to, just to put everybody in their proper places.”
“A morality tale,” Nessa echoed.
She leaned back in her seat. Her fingertips trailed the empty seat beside her as she stared out the window, drinking in the countryside. Wheat fields and clouds and nothing in between.
“A morality tale,” she said, “created to serve as a warning to the impure. And its creator—after spawning us, after condemning us to an eternal hell—simply died like any other mortal. Forgotten by history while his creations live on to suffer in perpetuity. It’s so unjust that it’s almost funny.”
Her lips curled in a fishhook smile. She giggled.
“It does raise certain moral implications, doesn’t it?”
“How do you mean?” Daniel asked.
“Well, if I was created to be the archetype of the wicked witch, if I was written to exist as a terrible warning…well, then. Clearly I have no control over my destiny and therefore must surrender to all of my natural impulses, no matter how cruel. It’s only logical.”
Her anger, boiling like black tar in the pit of her heart, ran cold. A sense of certainty fell upon her, more certain than she’d ever been in her entire life.
“And you’d best hope we do find a way to change the story for good,” she told him.
He cast a nervous glance at the rearview, meeting her gaze in the reflection. “Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because if Marie and I are truly condemned to burn,” Nessa replied, “I’m taking the entire universe with us.”
The car fell silent.
They chewed up another hour’s worth of miles. The odometer rolled up while the gas dwindled down. The sign at the side of the road read Welcome to Iowa.
“The Mourner might be able to help,” Daniel said. “She’s tricky, but she knows things. And if we’re lucky, one of my people will sniff out where Carolyn went. I’m just repeating stuff she told me; I’d like a real expert on the case.”
“She was working on something big,” Marie said. “From her notes, it looked like she was talking to somebody on a parallel world, passing information back and forth, but we couldn’t figure out why. Would she be looking for a way to break the cycle, like us?”
“If anyone could do it, it’s her. I mean, what else can I say about Carolyn Saunders? She’s not just the world’s leading authority on the first story—any world’s leading authority—she’s pretty much the modern Shakespeare.”
Interlude
“That,” the interrogator said, “is the first lie you’ve spoken since you sat down.”
Carolyn tried to spread her hands. The chain between the cuffs jerked them short. She gave him a wan smile.
“All right, that’s not exactly what he said,” she told him. “It was more to the effect that I was a perpetual pain in his ass, but I figured a little white lie wouldn’t hurt.”
“Would you like to know just how incorrect you are?”
“Oh, relax,” she said. “This was a bit of much-needed calibration.”
The interrogator squinted at her. His pencil rapped against the legal pad.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we’ve now established two important facts. I know that you weren’t bluffing—that you can, in fact, determine when I’m lying. And you know, because you’ve finally had a lie to contrast it with, that every word I’ve spoken up until now has been the gospel truth.”
He stared across the table at her. The pencil rapped against the pad. Finally, as if coming to some unspoken decision, he relented.
“No more lies.”
Carolyn held up her open palms.
“As you wish,” she said. “But while we’re taking a little break, I’d like to make a request.”
He gestured to her glass. The withered scrap of lemon floated near the bottom, coasting on a half-inch of stagnant water.
“You haven’t finished your drink yet. I’m not bringing you another one.”
“Not that,” Carolyn said. “Him. You said the King of Rust is on board. I’ve never met a king—of the human or alien varieties—and I’d love to make his acquaintance.”
The interrogator glanced to one side, weighing his decision.
“Maybe. Not now. Once you’ve provided more useful intelligence.” He pointed the tip of his pencil at her. “Continue the story. And I remind you: no more lies.”
Thirty-One
“We should make a detour,” Nessa said.
They’d switched at a rest stop half an hour earlier. Marie drove, Daniel rode shotgun, and Nessa still reclined in the back seat. They’d passed signs for Andalusia, Fairport, Muscatine—and the last one snared her attention like it was lit with neon and a spotlight.
“We should not make a detour,” Daniel said. “The Mourner wants you two in Nevada, pronto. And I like breathing, so we should d
o what she says.”
Nessa ignored him. “Marie, look. Muscatine. Remember?”
She did. “The Coastland Galleria.”
“You know,” Daniel said, “I enjoy a little retail therapy myself now and then, but this isn’t the time for it.”
“Carolyn’s notes,” Marie explained. “She was making a list of places where reality seemed to be going thin, places where she might be able to get back in touch with her friend on the other side. She was trying to arrange an expedition to Coastland when she was taken.”
Nessa rubbed her chin. She leaned forward in her seat, energized for the first time in miles. “Or maybe she did go, and her house was ransacked in her absence. After all, we found signs of a search, not necessarily signs of a struggle.”
Marie flicked her turn signal.
“We’re going,” she said, as if daring Daniel to argue. “It’s only twenty minutes out of our way. Even if we come up empty and there’s nothing to find, it’ll be worth it just to know for certain.”
It turned out to be closer to forty minutes, after following a tangle of side streets and then an access road that pointed straight out of Muscatine like an arrow. Coastland had fallen prey to the passing of time, the slow decline of the mega-mall, and developers who anticipated growth that never came to be. The outskirts of its territory were marked by half-built developments, model homes with broken windows, and weed-choked lots next to billboards showing happy suburban families.
And at the heart of the blighted growth, the Coastland Galleria. The mall stood majestic and silent, encircled by a vast and nearly empty parking lot. The sun was setting now, the sky going azure beyond the granite facade, but the big-box signs—Sears, Macy’s, a dirty white J.C. Penney—didn’t light up to meet the dusk. Only a fraction of the parking lot lamps, the ones closest to the mall entrances, bothered to ignite. The others sported broken, burned-out bulbs or empty sockets, dangling cold over the wasteland of concrete bumpers and faded yellow lines.
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