by Jamie Quaid
Leo already had part of his cop team herding tourists back to their cars as the dirt beneath our feet shook and the cracks widened in the harbor mud. The rest of his men dashed up to the industrial park to set off alarms and warn the workers to evacuate.
Taking their bodyguard status seriously, Lance and his boys grabbed a staggering Max/Dane and hurriedly hauled him toward the waiting cars. Max ordered them to get me, but I wasn’t cooperating.
I dodged the boys and ran toward a bewildered Paddy. He stood at the front of the crowd with his bicycle, trying to sort out the unscientific action in his scientific head. I dragged him in his son’s direction, and ran into the crowd, madly shouting, “Follow the cat!”
Milo had a habit of escaping unscathed and was as good a leader as any.
Intelligently, half the crowd obeyed and fled the crumbling, cracking harbor toward the safety of the pavement. The other half lingered in fascination as the hell hole belched gas, dust, and magic particles for all I knew.
Releasing Paddy now that I had him moving, I grabbed Hagatha’s elbow and forced her to hurry despite her usual dithering. Her coven ran faster.
Slowly realizing the ground was falling out from beneath their feet, the rest of our audience began running for the hills or their cars.
The field shook and groaned, but this time, no water shot into the air.
The priest prayed aloud as he ran. Dr. Voodoo shooed his scattered students off the cracking dirt and kept them on our heels. I think they were dancing with happiness as they pounded their drums and shook their maracas and lithely scrambled for safety. A real live demon razing must have added to their curriculum knowledge.
The ground continued to crack and rumble as a sea of humanity fled up Edgewater. I feared if I looked over my shoulder, I’d turn into a pillar of salt. Or run into someone.
The news crews were torn between filming imminent disaster for the noon news and getting their padded rear ends to safety. When they finally panicked at whatever they saw behind me and ran up the side streets toward town, I knew it had to be bad. Still wasn’t looking. The crashing, banging, cracking cacophony was scary enough.
I kept my eye on Milo. He maintained his pace so I could see him, but he was heading toward my office and home, exactly where I wanted to go.
Alarm sirens screamed at the plant. The gargoyles shrieked for a minute or two in accompaniment, then dropped into sullen silence. I glanced at the one on the florist’s shop, and he shrugged at me.
Professor Nganga helped me haul a huffing and puffing Agatha up the steeper part of Edgewater. The blacktop seemed to be fine, for a change. The uproar behind us was dropping from train-rushing tornado volume to the steady pounding of hurricane-sized smashing ocean waves.
Miraculously, the air held only dust and a lingering stench of sulfur—no pink particles or poisonous green gas.
MacNeill’s limo rolled to a stop beside us and the driver leaned out. “The senator said I should take you outta here. Hop in.”
I opened the door and pushed Agatha inside. I gestured to Father Morrison to join her and lifted a questioning eyebrow at the professor, but apparently thinking about his students, he shook his head. A few more of the elderly witches trampled up, and I waved them inside. It was a limo. It could hold them.
The younger witches seemed to have partnered with the voodoo students, and they were all chattering excitedly and taking pictures of the devastation with their phones. With the invulnerability of youth, they had no interest in escaping the most exciting adventure of their lives. Only the elderly understood how senselessly life ended.
I could hear the Harleys roaring off in the wake of Max/Dane and his father’s car. Nearing the crest of the hill, I was finally forced to look over my shoulder for Andre. He was walking backward, watching the destruction of the harbor.
And what a lovely obliteration my curse had caused. I watched in awe.
The entire contaminated zone—from Acme all the way down to the old chemical plant—was separating from solid ground and tumbling into the bay. I didn’t think anyone would be fishing there anytime soon. Pillars, docks, rusted smokestacks, burned-out chemical tanks, all crumpled and spilled into the water with the cracking ground. Waves lapped against the blacktop where the Dumpsters used to dance.
The garbage cans had worked their way up the alleys to avoid rusting out their bottoms.
Clouds of dust settled over the landscape, but the blue neon buildings still gleamed through the gloom.
“Perhaps I should believe in the priest’s God,” the professor said thoughtfully. “It wouldn’t hurt to have all the deities on our side.”
“Yeah, I’m thinking we need all the good gods we can summon, because the bad ones are out to get us.” I watched another chunk of real estate fall into the harbor, followed by a puff of smoke.
Acme and the other plants were on a hill, far enough above the devastation for their walls to be safe. But broken pipes hung off the side of the newly formed cliff. The pump to hell wouldn’t be extracting meteorite anytime soon.
“Bye-bye, Blue,” I said mournfully. Maybe the meteorite would protect him, but without his pipes and wires, he’d have a hard time spying on the Zone again.
I didn’t intend to take credit for anything. Turning, I found my cat waiting patiently outside my office. Ned held the door open, but Milo wouldn’t enter until I did. Checking to make sure that Andre wasn’t breaking his neck walking backward, I hurried on with the professor and the students.
A crowd awaited us inside my lobby, standing around the blinking Christmas tree as if this were an office party. Katerina and Julius, looking worried, hugged me briefly, then harder when I told them Andre was right behind me. Cora and Sarah were pumping coffee from my giant urn and sharing with anyone who held out a hand. They’d gathered most of the town up here to safety with their telephone calls, so Andre had a royal audience when he finally entered.
“Think Acme is still interested in buying out the Zone now?” I called from my perch on Ned’s desk. I was still pumping adrenaline and my head hadn’t completely processed the fact that Andre had almost sold us out, then walked through hell to save me. Well, he’d been Special Forces and suicidal in his past, so there was the crazy quotient to consider . . . but we’d had amazing sex and he’d scared me shitless, and I just couldn’t handle the roiling emotions any longer.
The room got quiet as we awaited Andre’s verdict.
My mouth was gritty with dust, and I was shaking like a leaf, so I sipped coffee and pretended nonchalance. My court of law was pretty weird, but I tried to stay in command of it.
Black silk wasn’t pretty when covered in thick layers of grime. Even Andre’s glossy black hair had dulled to the gray of old age, but there was nothing old about the fire in his eyes when he reached me.
He yanked me off the desk, spilling coffee everywhere. Before an audience of all our friends and neighbors, he kissed me.
I had no clue why. I’d been pretty damned obnoxious. But it was better than being strangled. Far, far better. Confusion cast aside, I fell into the contact with great enthusiasm, wrapping my arms around his neck and digging my fingers into his filthy hair and exchanging heated breath and lots of tongue. We both stank from sweaty fear but who cared? We celebrated being alive, bodies still intact.
He yanked me closer, and I would have been climbing his legs, except loud applause broke out, and I had to shove him away.
“I take it that means it’s back to business as usual,” I said, still shivering but for a different reason as we pulled apart.
“If they don’t condemn the entire Zone,” he agreed with a shrug. “We’d better let the city inspectors verify the town is stable before we return to work.”
“So we’ll still need representation on the city council,” Katerina said, rolling up in her chair.
At Andre’s reluctant nod, his mother gestured. “Back to our petitions, children! Where’s Jane? We need a press release immediately. Ned, come
with me—” She rolled off, leading her army of adoring slaves.
Julius stopped to examine us both. “The story, please, over dinner. Shall I expect more lawsuits?”
“MacNeill,” I warned, coming back to ground with a hard thump. “And the skeletons. We should find out who went missing while working over there.”
“Not now on the skeletons,” Andre warned. “They’re buried under a ton of debris and half the harbor. And your boyfriend walked off with the evidence. Find out about MacNeill.”
Grasping that skeletons beat out civil lawsuits, Julius waited.
I called Jane in my apartment to tell her it was safe to return, then punched in Max/Dane’s number. He picked up immediately.
“Justy, why aren’t you in the damned limo? I need you and not batty witches to deal with this mess!”
“No, you need a doctor for Mikey and your PR person to deal with the explosion at Acme and a board meeting to put someone else in charge besides daddy dearest. And while you have him with you, you’d best start talking to Paddy for a change and pass the board meeting on to him while you quietly disappear into your mansion and have a fundraiser complete with nuns. If the media captured any photos of you with a voodoo priest, you’ll never survive Christmas.”
His sigh was loud and expletive laden. When he calmed down, he asked wearily, “Where are you? Is everyone okay?”
“I’m in my office and my partner is gearing up to sue anyone who moves and his wife is petitioning for a seat on the council and you’d just better lay real low. We have no idea what the damages are. Gloria’s trust fund might be better put to work repairing . . .” I looked for a proper PC description of blowing up hell. “Repairing the Zone’s infrastructure after today’s devastating collapse of Civil War tunnels.”
“Right.” I could almost see him pinching the bridge of his nose as he adjusted his thinking. “Mikey is raving. We’re at the psych unit now. Want to tell me what really happened?”
“You think I have a clue?” Shrugging at Julius and Andre, I took the phone to my office and closed the door to continue this conversation. “I think he was possessed. I can make up theories all day long, but if Gloria opened a hole to hell in her basement—and demons or whatever creepiness you want to believe infected her—then there’s some chance the same thing happened to Mikey.”
“But Gloria’s dead and Mikey isn’t. Not that I want him dead, but if he was responsible for those two skeletons . . .”
“No way of knowing that,” I warned. “And how much do we lay on demons? We don’t know if he’s just plain nuts, or if Dane or Gloria shoved a couple of workmen down a hole. Or that two guys didn’t die from messing with the meteorite, as Mikey seemed to believe. Let the legal system do its job. You walked away with the evidence. Any ID there?”
Max/Dane hesitated as if he’d forgotten and was digging about in his pockets. “They may once have been plasticized ID cards of some sort,” he said, apparently finding them. “They’re little more than illegible dust now.”
“The skeletons just got blown to hell. Without them, we have no legal or scientific evidence to stand on. I believe in the meteorite. I believe Paddy and the scientists have found a new element inside that meteorite. I believe two people died, probably a decade ago, while messing with the meteorite. Those are the only real pieces of the puzzle that exist. All the rest . . . science fiction fantasy.”
What, you want me to have a U.S. Senator tell the world that we exorcised a demon from MacNeill’s soul and sent it back to hell, maybe with the help of voodoo priests and witches? And in gratitude, Saturn sank a meteorite at my request? Who do you think would end up in the psych ward then?
“Fantasy, right,” the good senator said with resignation. “I’ll just think in terms of disaster emergency teams and go from there. I’ll get people down to inspect the damage.”
“You’re a smart man, Maxie, a lot smarter than Dane. You can go far if you just let go of the fantasy.” I snuggled the phone next to my ear, knowing this was as close to a senator as I would get once we got past this bump in the road. I liked Max a lot, but his interests were now on the side of the establishment, which was too close to his cousin Dane for my comfort. He needed a wife raised for his senatorial lifestyle, and that ain’t me, babe. “Let me know how MacNeill fares and if there’s anything else I need to do.”
“You have to start meeting and greeting power mongers if you’re to be the Zone’s attorney,” the good senator declared. “Find your little black dress. The limo will pick you up Saturday night.”
He hung up. Damn the man, no matter how I tried to brush him off, he refused to go. Like me, Max was a persistent mosquito. I’d have to find him a better target.
I returned to Andre and Julius, who solicitously steered me toward home and a shower without questioning me about my senatorial connection and his demented relation. Julius was kind like that. Andre asked if he could join me in the shower.
I almost said yes—until I remembered the tablet with Themis’s warning.
Virgin babies, scary stuff. Not going there.
I took the stairs to my apartment with only my cat on my heels.
A piece of plaster with charcoal scratching lay on the carpeted hall in front of my door. I almost closed my eyes and walked over it, I was that drained.
But curiosity won out. I picked it up and carried it inside. While Milo licked himself clean in the window, I turned on a light and studied the chicken scratching.
You need a friend, aziz. I’m sending one. She is not as strong as you, but she is wise. The world is changing, and I cannot help.
With trepidation, I glanced at my tablet on the table. It could wait until after I’d showered. I needed to be prepared before I discovered what Themis’s idea of a friend might be.
***
Over dinner at the Montoyas, Andre and I attempted to describe what we’d discovered under the harbor grounds—without explaining the supernatural. Even we didn’t entirely understand hell holes and demonic possession. We could just hope that the sinking of the meteorite had ended that episode of Zone history.
“Will Acme be able to remain open?” Katerina asked. “They’re still making other chemicals, aren’t they?”
“We don’t know how much of the element they’ve stored,” Andre warned. “Paddy needs to pay more attention to business.”
That was an old argument, and I let my mind drift back to the latest message I’d found waiting on my tablet—a Christmas card from Fat Chick saying she’d be in Baltimore over the holiday and asking if we could meet.
Fat Chick ran the Saturn’s Daughters website. Themis had sent me the gift of a lifetime—a friend. I was both excited and terrified.
“We should have a Christmas party at the shelter!” Katerina was saying excitedly when I tuned back in. “It will be a wonderful way to bring the community together!”
Because so many of us had nowhere else to go. I brightened as the idea took root. “I can go shopping for the kids!” For something better than painted garden gnomes—another ugly blot on my escutcheon.
Plotting something pleasant for a change lifted my mood considerably. Who could worry about buried space aliens and meteorites churning up the harbor and armed garden gnomes while planning Santa Claus and candy canes?
Finally, I’d have a real Christmas!
Thirty-three
Leibowitz refused to wear the Santa suit again, but Lieutenant Leo made a far more intelligent jolly old fellow. Schwartz handed out candy canes and new coats to one and all and didn’t stomp off muttering when a toddler peed on the velvet suit.
“Leo’s too good for us,” Cora muttered, sipping the punch and wearing an elf costume. “He took the night shift all week so the guys with kids could have time off.”
“Then he’s flying down to visit his mother in Florida,” I reminded her. “He’s just normal. People like that exist. We just tend to forget it.”
“For good reason,” she grumbled, nodding at a kh
aki-costumed group in the corner of the festive lobby of the homeless shelter. “What are MSI’s Nazis doing here besides frightening babies?”
I grinned and opened my box of elf hats. I was wearing reindeer antlers and a red nose. The spirit of Christmas should be on all of us. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
The uniformed security guards looked a little terrified at my approach—probably a lingering subconscious memory linking me to their time in concrete. This time, I wasn’t making the mistake of letting my victims wander off and build up a hate against me. I’d made it my task to reform them—just a little. A little human compassion never hurt anyone.
I smiled and offered the box of red and green felt. “Join the party, gentlemen! There’s enough punch and cookies for all.”
They looked leery, then glanced to their fearless leader. Graham Young was dressed in a monk’s brown homespun as he handed out gifts at Santa’s feet. They hadn’t been able to keep him in the psych ward just because he now thought he was a saint. Little kids clambered all over him, and he hadn’t smacked one yet—close enough to sainthood, I supposed. I’d have to keep an eye on him too.
His security team reluctantly donned their caps. Cora tucked candy canes in their pockets. We swept away, stifling our giggles.
“I’m going to miss the weirdness,” Cora admitted. “Where else could an arrogant CEO be turned into a gnome and then into the patron saint of the homeless?”
“We don’t know that the Weird is gone,” I warned. “Never get too confident.” But I stopped to admire our handiwork anyway. With all the gifts handed out, Graham Young was climbing to his feet and talking to our eminent Do-Gooder, Rob Hanks. “I think Andre has agreed to sell the insurance building to the DG’s, and it’s Young’s money financing the sale and renovations. Makes me believe in miracles again.”
Or pink particles. If only Paddy could corner the market on Good!
Tim wandered up festooned in Christmas wreaths and ribbons but wearing clothes that fit and didn’t scream pink—which clashed with red ribbons apparently. “Ned’s dipping spiders in frosting again. He said he’s taking them to some friends of his in jail. I thought he was one of the good guys.”