Darkness Calls (18 page)

“You knew him well?” I heard dishes clinking ahead of us, and a door swung open, pushed by a waitress who held a tray full of pretzels.

“Not well enough,” Grant muttered, and bypassed the kitchen. There was a door at the end of the hall, but also some bathrooms on our right. I grabbed his elbow. He nodded, started to enter the men’s room—but I pulled him back at the last moment. Forced him to follow me into the ladies’ room. I was afraid to let him out of my sight.

We were alone. My stall smelled dirty, and there was no toilet paper. When I finished and came out, Grant was already at the sink, staring at his reflection in the mirror. I joined him, studying my face.

I was twenty-six years old, but for a moment I could see myself at forty. A wrinkle was starting in my upper forehead. I looked tired and dirty, my black hair tangled, greasy with stress. Shadows gathered under my eyes.

My skin had never seen the sun. Only my face had color, but that was gone now, and my pallor was sick, exhausted. Grant looked like crap, too. Gaunt and pained, a trace of grief still in his eyes. Maybe a thread more of silver in his brown hair. We were aging overnight just from the trauma of living.

I looked at both of us, together. His broad shoulders filled the reflection while I stood just slightly behind him, my cheek pressed against his arm. Our gazes met in the mirror.

“Hey, pretty lady,” Grant murmured. “Ready for the Grand Canyon yet?”

I tried to smile for him, but my mouth refused to cooperate. Grant turned, his strong arm sliding up my back, holding me close to a warm chest that smelled like cinnamon and the cedar of an old forest. I rubbed my cheek against his shirt, one hand clutching loose flannel, and listened to the rumble and pulse of his heart.

I noticed something hard beneath my cheek. Stood back, studying his neck, and saw a familiar gold chain glinting just outside the collar of his T-shirt. I reached up, fingering the soft, thick links. Grant’s hand closed around my wrist, preventing me from pulling out the pendant.

“I thought it was important to bring her necklace with me,” he said self-consciously.

I unzipped my jacket. Flashed him my mother’s knives, holstered neatly against my ribs. Jewelry or weapons, there was no difference when it came to needing the comfort of something familiar against our bodies. I understood. I was the same.

“Like two peas in a pod,” Grant murmured, and reached down to finger one of the blades. His knuckles brushed my breast, and lingered.

Behind us someone coughed. Grant flinched. I shut my jacket and turned. The woman from the bar was peering around the bathroom door, pink antennae bouncing. Her eyes were dark and serious, but her mouth quirked into a smile and in a pure Texan drawl she said, “I’ve got rooms for that. In fact, I’ve got a room just for the two of you.”

“We were sent—” I began to say, and she cut me off with a shake of her head.

“Father Frank,” she replied, smile fading. “I know. He warned me.”

“Just what did he warn you about?” Grant asked cautiously.

“Oh,” said the woman, a mysterious glint in her eyes. “Almost nothing.”

She backed out of sight, but her soft drawl floated into the bathroom. “I’m Killy, by the way. Come on, now. Got a demon coming soon.”

CHAPTER 11

K
ILLY led us through the door at the end of the hall and up a flight of narrow, creaking stairs. Her cowboy boots sounded sharp as mine, and we could have waked the dead with the racket we made climbing to the second floor. Pink panties flashed beneath her denim miniskirt. Dek and Mal angled for a better look. I slapped their heads, pushing them back into my hair. Grumbles rumbled against my ear, but they receded, warm and heavy, into the shadows of my scalp.

I managed to hold my tongue just long enough to make certain we were completely alone.

“What did you mean,” I asked, “when you said that a demon was coming soon?”

Killy made a tuneless humming sound and looked past me at Grant, who was very carefully navigating the stairs with his cane. “You need a heating pad for that, honey?”

“I believe she asked you a question,” he replied gravely, finally making it to the second floor, which was stacked with crates full of whiskey bottles and boxes of cigarettes.

She ignored him. “Someone took a sledgehammer to you, right?”

Grant stopped moving, and leaned hard on his cane; his gaze speculative and dangerous. “You’re nice at heart, but don’t push it.”

Killy held up her hands. “Fine. But the offer still stands. You’ve only been able to walk for, what? A little over a year now? Bet you ache fierce.”

“Demons,” I said, stepping in front of Grant. Unsettled that she knew so much about him. Ill at ease about quite a few things.

Killy’s lips thinned, and she walked backward to a nearby door, reaching for the handle. “It’s a convenient word. Covers a lot of bases.”

Inside was a bedroom. Nothing fancy. Just a mattress on the tile floor, with folded blankets stacked on top. One large window, hidden behind a partially drawn curtain. Low ceilings. Dirty white walls, holding in the strong scent of some acrid cleaning product that was not quite strong enough to hide an old odor of vomit.

Killy said, “Sometimes I let people sleep it off up here. Don’t worry. I use bleach to clean up after them.”

“I couldn’t give a shit,” I replied. “Who are you, and why do you know so much?”

She gave me a long, steady look, and it was her eyes, I realized then, that did the most to offset her appearance: large, heavy-lidded, and hazel. It was hard to hold that gaze, like I was exposing part of myself, and it occurred to me that I just might be. It was not such a hard concept to grasp, not after everything I knew about the world.

I could hear Jack’s voice rumbling.
Tricks can happen, my dear, quirks of birth. Those who were given gifts long ago still pass them on to their descendents, in blood.

A faint smile touched Killy’s mouth, but it did not reach her eyes. Grant laid his hand on my shoulder, drawing me away from her—and I watched the woman’s smile fade when she looked deep into his face. I saw the color drain ever so subtly from her cheeks, and her eyes narrowed, growing colder.

“I know what you do,” she said softly. “Don’t try it with me.”

“Then stop,” he replied, something deadly in his voice. “Stop looking.”

A tremor raced through her, but she recovered instantly, shrugging, looking away from me. “Nothing to see, anyway. She’s got a mind like a steel trap.”

“And me?” Grant asked dangerously.

“You’re on the Internet,” Killy replied, and smiled coldly. “I did some research when Father Frank gave me your names.”

She yanked off the headband and tossed it on the bed. “He said to hide you, so that’s what I’m doing. Stay or not, but I’ll do my best. I owe the man.”

“And this . . . demon?”

“He’s coming,” she said, and shivered. “I can feel it. Someone is coming.”

Killy turned abruptly and opened the door. I went after her, but she dodged my outstretched hand, and paused in the hall to look back at us. “Stay here. But if things get hairy, go out the window. There are stairs just beneath it.”

She slammed the door in my face. I stood looking at it, then glanced over my shoulder at Grant.

“She has an interesting aura,” he said, somewhat mildly. “It’s . . . active.”

I raised my brow. “How active?”

“It stretches from her. Surrounds people. I saw it happen in the bar, but it didn’t make sense until she started talking to us. She can read minds. Some, anyway.”

“Psychic,” I muttered. “Damn.”

Grant very carefully lowered himself upon the mattress. Dek and Mal poked free of my hair, and the rest of the boys pushed aside the curtains covering the window. Zee hopped to the floor on light feet, claws flexing. Raw and Aaz grabbed the curtains and swung down like little Tarzans. All of them looked at me, waiting for an answer I did not have. I did not know what to do except keep moving. We had to keep moving. Someplace safer than here, which was too close to the church, Cribari, too much shit. Where and how, that was the problem. Where and how.

You know how.
If I could make it work. If I could do it without ending up inside a brick wall, or in the wrong time.

I began to strip off my right glove and knelt by Grant. “Your leg?”

He winced, rubbing his calf. “Nothing to complain about.”

“Tough man,” I said. “I’ll be sure to ignore the girly tears once they start.”

He began to smile, glanced down at my hand, and froze. I looked, and did the same.

A needle-thin line of quicksilver stretched from my finger armor across the back of my hand—attached to an equally thin metallic band now encircling my wrist. I flexed my hand, and the metal moved fluidly with my skin, as though organic, embedded down to the bone.

I had been wearing my glove the entire time. Never suspected.

“Maxine,” Grant said.

“My other plan for getting to China fell through,” I whispered, finding it difficult to speak. “I used this to get here. It was an accident.”

“It
grew
.”

“That happens. You remember.”

I
remembered. I remembered the Wasteland, entombed in darkness, caught in the endless river that would have ended my life had the boys not kept me alive. I had found a corpse in that place. A body covered in armor, bearing a sword. A sword that had inexplicably transformed into a small ring upon my finger.

The corpse had been my ancestor. Another Hunter, thrown into the Wasteland. She had died there. The ring had been hers. Now it was mine. Before being transported to China, I had already used it several times—been flung back into time—and that was enough to make the ring grow over my entire finger. Not every use of the ring made a transformation happen, but once was enough.

And now, this.

I was suddenly beginning to think that the armor covering my ancestor’s bones had not been there entirely by choice.

“This is a problem,” Grant said, as though reading my mind.

I curled my hand into a fist. “We have bigger problems.”

“Maxine,” Zee rasped, tapping the tile floor with his claws. “Gotta go.”

Below us, I heard screams.

TROUBLE follows us,
my mother once said.

“Stay with Grant,” I said to Raw and Aaz. “Protect him.”

“Maxine,” Grant argued, struggling to stand from the mattress. I left him there, slamming the door behind me. Running down the stairs, taking them two at a time. I slowed down at the bottom, just before I entered the hall to the bar. I listened hard, heart pounding.

No more screams. Above me I heard a clicking sound. Grant, moving fast. Zee slipped from the shadows.

“Blood spilled,” he said.

“How many bad guys?”

“Not the numbers,” replied the little demon. “Just quality.”

I gritted my teeth, reaching inside my jacket for a blade. Not that plain steel had ever helped much, but it made me feel better. The metal was cold against my fingers. I had forgotten my right glove upstairs.

I pushed open the door and entered the hall. Saw nothing. Heard nothing except a faint crunching sound that flashed me back to Jack and the forest and made my stomach hurt with fear. I swallowed it down, sweating, and crept forward. Zee kept pace, while Dek and Mal uncoiled, rising from my hair until I felt like Medusa with a heart full of stone.

The sounds of chewing got louder, maybe because everything else was so damn quiet. I reached the end of the hall and peered inside the bar.

I saw blood. Slick on the tables, spattering the walls in red splashes that looked like paint had been flung and heaved from cans and brushes. Bodies sprawled on the floor, crimson puddles expanding from wounds I could not see, and some that were plain: craters in heads, cracks in chests, as though sharp teeth and axes had been at work. Fast. So fast eyes were open, staring.

Crunch. Some jaw working hard. I turned, searching out that sound, heart beating so rapidly it was difficult to breathe.

A man sat at a table, his back turned to me. Short. Fat. Bulging from a wrinkled tan suit that fit so poorly I could see every excess roll in his round shoulders. He was eating from a bowl of pretzels. A dead woman slumped beside him. Half her head was missing, and the blood still trickled from her wound, pooling on the table. I watched the man dip his pretzels in her blood, then eat them.

Killy sat on his other side. She was still alive. Staring at him with absolute horror, so frozen and pale I wondered if her heart would give out, if her mind would make her faint simply to save her from dying out of fright. She looked ready to die.

The man paused in his chewing. “My Lady. So good of you to join us. And you, as well, Hound.”

Zee snarled. Not at the man. He stared at the front door of the bar, and I discovered three slender bodies deep in the shadows, standing so still I had not noticed them. Even when I did, it was difficult to see much. All three stood close together, shoulders rounded, hunched tight as though sharing warmth. Tall. Pale. Clothed in simple black. Watching me.