Cassie blinked at her for a minute, then asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
Helen smiled. “You remind me of the old days, what can I say?” She turned to the RV and frowned.
A voice from across the street called out. “What the hell is going on out here? Some of us have to work in the morning, Sikora, you jackass! This isn’t a campgr—”
The source of the voice stepped around the RV, took in the devastation beyond, and began to back away. “Hold on, now,” Helen pushed, and he froze. “You’re the Detective’s neighbor?”
“Yes,” he said, swallowing.
She looked into the side yard and took note of the sedan in the driveway. “Your car?”
“Yes.”
“Fetch me the keys. Now.”
His flickered back and forth between annoyed and terrified, but he scurried to obey. She continued down the front walk, then turned right and walked past the remains of the RV. She took a glance inside on the way past and decided that abandoning it was the best choice. The interior was smeared with green and black ooze. The Division M power suit had hurled the familiar with such force that it had basically disintegrated after punching through the back of the motor home.
“I never did like those nasty things,” she muttered under her breath. “But they are a bit more robust than the average person.”
Right on time, Kelsey ran up beside her, trailed by the remaining familiars. They were limping from their fight but had already begun to regenerate. The girl was splattered with blood and viscera but seemed otherwise uninjured.
Her voice verged on hysteria. “What’s the plan?” Then, realizing that Helen was not only not accompanied by Roxanne, but was moving past the vehicle they’d arrived in, she demanded, “Are you running away?”
Helen tried not to smile. “Leaving the battlefield after a victory is hardly running away, child.” She held up the grimoire. “I have what I came for. It’s time to move on.”
“Where’s Roxanne?” Her voice turned hysterical. “Do you even care that the Transformer or whatever the hell it is just turned Giselle into spaghetti sauce?”
“I never did like Giselle, much,” Helen said with a shrug. “But as the saying goes, you don’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
Kelsey stopped following, and Helen realized that she might have pushed too far. If the girl remembered that she could order the familiars to attack her before she was able to push back, she was in trouble. She stopped walking and turned around.
The roar of an approaching engine grew like a crescendo, and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end as he looked down the road and took note of the speeding Crown Victoria. There were no flashing lights mounted on it, but the thing screamed undercover cop, which in this aspect could mean only one thing—the rest of Division M was here. Saved by the bell.
“Kelsey,” Helen said sweetly. The girl turned to her, eyes wide with fear. “You’re going to stay here and fight for me, sweetie. You and the boys keep whoever is in that car occupied so that I can get away.”
The girl’s jaw dropped, but even with the talents she’d developed, she was no match for Helen’s push. The expression on her face said something different, but she replied, robotically. “Yes.”
“Good luck,” Helen said. She raised her hand to pat the younger witch on the cheek, realized bits of Giselle were stuck to it, and drew back. “Come along, Cassie.”
Tires squealed on the pavement as she reached the driver’s door of the neighbor’s sedan. He bolted out of the front door in his rush to hand the keys over. She accepted them with a smile, and muttered, “Drop dead.”
The neighbor froze for a split-second, then began to jerk. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head and blood trailed down his face from his tear ducts and nostrils before he collapsed to the driveway.
“Get in, Cassie,” Helen said. “If you’re tempted to try anything, remember what I just did.”
The girl got into the passenger seat without a word, and Helen handed the grimoire over to her as she backed out of the driveway. Shots rang out, and she winced, but none hit her vehicle. The familiars or Kelsey, it seemed, had served their final purpose. As for her, it was time to hit the road.
“I hope you like classical music,” Helen said. She put the sedan in gear, turned on the radio, and drove off into the night.
Valentine
Phoenix, Arizona—Saturday night
The first familiar wasn’t one of the smartest ones Val had ever dealt with. The thing rushed the car even before he had a chance to stop, so he jerked the wheel to one side and gunned the engine. The back tires broke free and slid, slamming the rear quarter panel into the beast and sending it flying into a random front yard.
“Hang tight, Morgan,” he said. “I need to get some mad out.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
He opened the driver’s door and stepped out. Doffing his suit coat, he remarked, “If I need to tap out, I’ll yell.”
Eliot and George lay crumpled in the road, but he didn’t have the time to check on them. The trio of approaching figures wouldn’t have normally looked like much—a couple of frat boy types, flanking a short young woman. The fact that the girl was covered in blood and cradled a ball of liquid fire in one palm was all the warning he needed that this crew was up to no good.
Most agents he knew carried only a single sidearm, often with a backup piece in an ankle holster. Val carried four—a Les Baer Premier 1911 under each arm and a pair of Colt Officer Models in a dual small-of-the-back rig. It took a lot of tailoring to keep him from clanking when he walked.
He drew his Premieres and strolled down the street as though he didn’t have a care in the world. “Beef’s not with you, Tinker Bell,” he said, scanning the neighborhood. All in all, not bad. Wrecked Suburban and an RV. Definitely fixable once Anjewierden and the rest of the local crew showed up. No neighbors seemed to be gawking, which was always made the cover story easier. “Where’s the boss bitch?”
The witch and her familiars stopped about thirty feet away. Behind them, a car backed into the street. Val narrowed his eyes at the blonde heads in the front seat.
“She’s running,” Tinker Bell said. “I’m supposed to slow you down. I’d really like to surrender, but I can’t do that.”
Val raised his hands and took aim at the receding silhouette of the figure in the driver’s seat. “Figured it was something like that. No worries—the spell effect will fade when she dies.”
The third familiar tackled him from the side right as he pulled the triggers, sending his shots into the sky. He rolled with the blow, letting the creature come over his hip and tumble to the ground even as he kept his feet. Rookie mistake, son. Got a little overeager. He raised his left gun and kept the trio in front covered while he emptied the mag in his right into the fallen figure. A solid hit from a car might not be enough to do the trick, but seven rounds of .45 ACP into the torso and head would. More work for the cleanup guys, spraying the green-and-black mess out of the street, but that was of little concern at the moment.
The little witch thrust her palm in his direction, and the ball of fire swelled into an eye-searing column of flame. The air crackled with eldritch energy, and he raised an impressed eyebrow. Locke had taught her charges well—a blast that powerful would leave most staggering in exhaustion. Tinker Bell looked none the worse for wear. But…
“You’ve got to do better than that, darlin’.” Val spun in the street and sidestepped, easily avoiding the stream of balefyr, though the passing heat made the skin of his cheeks tighten. He holstered the spent pistol and pulled a loaded one from behind his back along the way. Depending on how sporty things got, sometimes it was just plain faster to switch out for a loaded gun instead of taking the time to reload. He double-tapped each familiar in the chest. It wasn’t enough to take them out permanently, but it was enough to slow them down.
“I don’t want to!” The girl screamed, even as she whipped o
ut her hand to send another stream of fire in his direction. This bit of magical energy had even more energy behind it—a bit of rage and terror, perhaps—and was about as fast as a bullet, if far more visible. and shouldn’t have been humanly possible to dodge.
Val ducked and aimed in one motion. The slightest edge of the balefyr kissed the top of his right shoulder, and pain shot through him, but he ignored it for now. Light bloomed behind him as something in the line of fire blazed to life, but the entirety of his focus was on the witch before him.
He pulled the trigger on his left pistol three times in the span of a single heartbeat. Tinker Bell jerked, clutching the abrupt wounds on her chest before crumpling to the street.
The familiars forgot about their own wounds and roared in defiance at the assault on their mistress. It might have been frightening if Val hadn’t fought worse things with a hangover. He advanced on the fallen witch, littering the ground behind him with shell casings as he emptied his pistols along the way.
Somehow, in some way, the little witch still lived as he stood over her. The last two familiars lay to either side, shattered ruins. He knelt beside her even as his hands replaced emptied magazines with the volition of well-honed muscle memory.
“How—what—” She coughed up blood, choking.
It didn’t feel like justice. It felt like stomping kittens. And, somehow worse, was his overwhelming lack of satisfaction. Locke had escaped, presumably with the grimoire she’d sought, which meant that Paxton was useless as bait going forward. Val swallowed all that bile and tried to put comfort in his tone. It cost him nothing, after all.
“Nothing personal, Tinker Bell. You just caught up with the wrong crowd.”
She was fading fast. “I—”
The light in her eyes went out. He hit the slide release to chamber a round and waited a moment to see if she was going to reanimate and start gnashing her teeth.
It had been that kind of week, after all.
Behind him, the car door slammed. True to her word, Morgan had let him take care of things. In all honesty, it had been a cakewalk of the first order. Almost wish Helen had stuck around, it might have been worth the effort. “Told you, Morgan. No issue.”
“Val, we’ve still got a problem!”
Following Morgan’s pointing finger, he turned and grimaced.
Blasted by the witch’s final, desperate spell, the Sikora house blazed.
CHAPTER 28
Paxton
Phoenix, Arizona—Saturday night
With the spell Donnie and Tlaloc had laid on them broken, the surviving cultists were reduced to silent catatonia or shrieking hysterics. I had sympathy for both sides, but the weeping and wailing got to me. I felt guilty about it, but I resorted to the push to get them to shut up, en masse. Once I got that settled, I ordered the hale and hearty to help the injured follow the De La Rosas out of the chamber while I hung back with the twins. I was leery that some might be pretending to be affected, but it seemed that any immunity to my own magic had gone out the door with Tlaloc.
By the time the stragglers cleared out enough for the boys and me to make our way up and out, we emerged into deliciously fresh air and a gymnasium surrounded by police vehicles. Before making the call, the De La Rosas had cleared out of the campus and collected their bomb from the electrical substation. We took a moment to debate on the wisdom of keeping the van but decided it was better to be safe than sorry. After they got all their gear out and torched the van out in the desert, they’d take the RV back to the Sikoras. I could make my own way. If needed I could always push one of the cops for a ride, after all. Call it the mystical equivalent of an Uber.
I tried not to think about the fact that I was relying on the ability more and more, and that I’d become far less reluctant to use it people that didn’t pose a direct threat. That sort of introspection could come later.
Evan and Ethan were pint-sized celebrities as I led them to a waiting ambulance. The paramedics doted over them, and the cops that weren’t involved in corralling the former cultists exulted over their rescue. It was a simple matter for me to slip aside, though Evan gave me a bit of a look as I stepped away from the growing crowd. I made a point to stay in his line of sight, and he relaxed, accepting the paramedic’s medical exam with a contented smile as I leaned against the side of the gym. My legs ached from the climb and ascent, and my back was sore from where I’d hit the altar, but after the beating I’d taken last week I had no complaints.
I didn’t know how many cops Donnie and Tlaloc had co-opted, but with their influence gone, Phoenix’s finest seemed a lot more interested in cleaning up the conspiracy. And, thankfully, they weren’t all that interested in a white-haired fellow standing off to the side in a filthy Phoenix PD windbreaker.
One cop separated himself from the crowd and joined me against the wall. In retrospect, I guess I should have expected the visit, but it was still jarring to see my dad in a SWAT uniform.
Last week he’d shown up in a vision of a movie theater. Stepping out into the real world like this seemed a much more profound step. I tried not to reflect too much on whether he was actually there or a hallucination. Life’s simpler when you’re not questioning your own sanity.
“A well-fought victory, Pax.”
It seemed rude to mouth off to my dad when I’d been graced with the privilege of speaking with him twice after he’d died, now, but something in his tone set me off. I thought about the heaps of ash and bone in the chamber below, and the cultists who were still too shell-shocked at their experience to do anything more than sit and rock back and forth. “This is a win? I hate to see what a loss looks like.”
Dad nodded toward the line of men and women as the cops led them, handcuffed, to the waiting vans. A literal fleet of ambulances had already taken away the more badly injured ones. “There is a Godly prison ministry in this city. The possibility that one or more of them might find redemption is so high as to be a certainty as you would understand it.”
“Great. So they get a pass for killing people and feeding them to some ancient Aztec god? For trying to kill little kids?” The thing that I let get away, the little voice in the back of my head not-so-helpfully chimed in.
“It may have called itself a god but it was nothing of the sort. In truth, it was not dissimilar to the beast the Lord struck down in Wisconsin.” Dad folded his arms across his chest. “A tribe long lost to time built the chambers below and trapped it inside when Tlaloc’s appetite threatened to consume the peoples of most of what you call North and South America. It was, in truth, as much a prisoner as those boys you rescued, but for thousands of years. When he discovered it, Donald Thibodeau entered into a pact to provide it long-denied sustenance in exchange for knowledge and power.” He smiled. “When you told Tlaloc that you’d broken the magical barrier keeping it confined, it fled.”
And here I thought it was my boss Gandalf impression. “So, the whole Aztec god thing was what, PR?” Something about Dad’s manner of speaking was off. I was starting to wonder if I was wrong to take him at face value. Right now, hallucination and visiting angel were running neck and neck.
“Even monsters understand the power in propaganda. Then and now.”
“So, what, however many people died terrified and screaming and I’m supposed to pump my fist in celebration that their killers find a way to forgive themselves? That’s a bunch of bullshit.”
“Take care with your tone, boy!” Dad’s face shifted, becoming something at once terrible and beautiful; a fearsome marble statute. Then, as though realizing his—its?— mistake, it returned to normal. Quieter now, he said, “All things serve the will of God.”
“You’re not my dad.”
His voice sounded almost embarrassed. “No, I am not. You can consider me a . . . messenger. The face you see—that’s something you gave me. Few can look upon my true form.”
“What, you lied to me?”
Faux Dad frowned. “I have told you no lies. Consider my words. I am in
capable of false witness. The mask I wear is the lie you told yourself. If you wish to strip it away, I suppose that is within your ability.”
I winced at the implied threat. “No, I’m good. So why are you here?”
“To aid and comfort the afflicted.”
“Great. Give me some aid. Tell me where Tlaloc’s run off to and how to kill it.”
“That’s not your path, Paxton. The creature has fled to distant shores. Consider it a task for another day, and a duty that might not even be left to you—the future is murky in that regard.”
“The future.” I’d considered time travel when I pored through the grimoire after I first discovered it. As best I could tell, that sort of thing was a no-no even with magic. The universe gives you one chance to get things right, and if you drop the ball, them’s the breaks, kid.
Faux Dad smiled with a corner of his mouth. “Despite your gift of free will, you humans are remarkably predictable. Those of you who are not are truly a treasure to behold.” He nodded after a police van as it pulled away with a load of prisoners. “Even those such as them.”
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