Reckoning (21 page)

Thank God I hadn’t been stupid enough to park the Jeep in the hotel lot. I still had a couple of bad moments getting to the side street I’d left it on. I kept jumping at shadows. Can you blame me?

The rain started just after I threw the duffel in, hard quartersized drops thudding into dirt and concrete. More lightning played in the billowing clouds like huge veined hands.

I was getting awful tired of thunder. But at least there was nothing unnatural about this storm. My left hand hurt like hell—I wrapped it up in a chunk of fast-food napkins. I didn’t smell blood, but it was weeping, and it burned like I’d held it in boiling water for a while.

And I’d only touched that hex for less than a second. What would it have done if it hit me? For a couple seconds I braced my forehead on the steering wheel while my ribs heaved with deep ragged gasps.

But Dad’s voice inside my head was pitiless.
Move it along, honey. You ain’t out of the woods yet
.

I flipped the wipers on and got out of there. Seven and a half hours later I was in Houston. But by then things had already gone even further to hell.

Finding the Houston
Schola wasn’t hard. I mean, yeah, I stopped on the outskirts of the city and bought a map, a bag of peppermints, some boiled peanuts, and some dental floss, and made a quick and dirty pendulum from a wrapped peppermint and the floss while I munched the peanuts and drank some warm Yoo-Hoo. The pendulum gave me the general location—a wedge of the northern part of the city, a slice of expensive real estate if the tingle in my good right-hand fingers told me anything. Close enough, and I was sure I could find it from there.

As it was, I could. But it was a matter of getting close enough and following the sirens while a column of black smoke billowed up. Traffic was snarled, and we slowed to a crawl. As a result, I got a good eyeful.

The good news was that the Houston Schola was kind of still there.

The bad news? Was the
kind of
. If by
kind of
you mean “shells of charred and smoking buildings arranged around a scorched quad
that might have been pretty gardens if someone hadn’t taken a flamethrower to them.” Emergency personnel were still swarming, and black smoke hung everywhere.

The Jeep crept through heat shimmering up from the pavement and the traffic snarl created by a bunch of what Dad would call lookie-lous, cars slowing down to gawk.

I stared. Little crackling strands of red and blue hexing crawled over every surface. The knots that had held them fast while they did their dirty work were unraveling, and I could almost
see
how they did it, how they pulled the two strands together and made them work. Gran had never told me about anything like the red strands, and if I just knew a little bit more about the Maharaj I could probably take a stab at untangling it. Or even duplicating the effect.

The
touch
hurt whenever the red strands got too close, like sunshine on already-burned skin. My left hand throbbed, blistered and raw. I’d disinfected it and wrapped it in gauze, and the rawness didn’t look to be spreading. It was only my left hand; I’d deal.

The main building of the Schola here had actually faced a city street without a lawn and a wall. Its long colonnaded front now looked like a bomb had gone off. Even the wall enclosing the rest of the property was scarred and pulled down in places. There were other buildings, but they were all smoking and laid waste too. At least, all the ones I could see.

“Goddamn,” I whispered, under Jerry Lee Lewis on the radio making his way through
High School Confidential
.

Dad had always made a face when I turned that song up. The sound track of my childhood is the oldies stations you can get all over America. No matter where you land, Casey Kasem is rockin’ ’em up and countin’ ’em down. He’s a cottage industry. Long live rock’n’roll.

I was almost past the Schola. Traffic was horrible. I had half a tank of gas and I had to think.

It took me an hour to get to the freeway. Heatshimmer bounced off the pavement, Houston like a big dozing concrete animal ready for another long guzzle at the oil teat. The
touch
jumped like a nervous animal, my brain stroking at the problem of the red and blue threads.

What am I gonna do now?

I stopped outside the city limits for gas and a load of road food. A couple hot dogs, more Yoo-Hoo—this time it was cold—more peanuts, and a couple Tiger Tails. I never liked them, but Dad did, and I put them on the counter before I thought about it. I had to use a basket to carry everything; my left hand was swelling something fierce.

The tired old woman running the register didn’t even blink, just subtracted the total from the leftover of the mildew-smelling fifty I’d given her for the Jeep’s gas and handed me my change, blinking at the television, blaring some talk show, set further down the counter in a nest of Slim Jim cartons.

I found myself thinking of where Christophe would expect me to go so we could meet up, if he’d survived the rooftop. But it was idiotic to expect him to come riding in to save me, even though it was nice when it happened. I told myself several variants of this as I got in the Jeep; the engine turned over softly. Whoever’d had this car had taken care of it. It was holding up just fine.

Not like me. I was two steps from meltdown.

People were
dead
because of me. Not just the guy I’d hit with his own hex. There was also Piggy Eyes Lyle. Had he survived what I’d done to him?

I was a risk to everyone. I was a goddamn plague.

And Graves and Christophe . . . Jesus. Shanks and Dibs would take care of Graves. Ash too. They would take him out to their people and see if he could be reclaimed. They’d probably have a better idea of how to do it than I ever did. I didn’t even know
what
I’d done to Ash to un-Break him. Maybe he’d just done it himself.

If Christophe had survived, he was probably tracking me. But.

There were a whole lot of
buts
flying around.

What if . . . just what if, mind you, a hypothetical…

What if Christophe or Graves—or both of them, let’s talk worst case—what if they were . . . dead?

There it was, the thing I’d been trying not to think. You can’t ever run away from a thought like that. It always finds a way to slip the knife in before you can get far enough. It plays with you like a cat with a mouse, letting you run just so far before it claws you but good.

The Maharaj were seriously bad news. From what it looked like, they could throw hexes even Gran would’ve had a hard time with. Poison and sorcery, and they were backing up Sergej and his vampires. I might have a chance of hiding from the suckers
or
from the
djinni
-children, but both? That was a whole different ball of nasty wax.

Especially since I had no safe place left to run to. California, yeah . . . but Remy and his team were human hunters. They cleaned out sucker nests, sure, working the edges. Could they go up against Sergej? The name sent a glass spike of pain through my temples.

No way.

Was it even faintly responsible to bring trouble to their door? Was it what Dad would’ve done?

California was never anything but a pipe dream. You knew it. You knew some damn thing would happen, and you’d bring danger
to someone’s door. Dad would kick your ass for leading Sergej right to your fellow hunters
. My heart hurt, a piercing, stabbing pain. I’d been dragging Ash and Graves along because I’d been hoping Remy would be able to tell me what to do with both of them.

Way to go, Dru
.

I shook my head, dropped the Jeep into gear, and headed back for the freeway.

It occurred to me then, something I should have thought of already. Atlanta. The rocket launcher and the helicopter. Maybe the Maharaj were just that good, maybe the Order had slipped up—I mean, a helicopter on a roof isn’t exactly
subtle
, you know?

But there was also the possibility that someone had sold us out. Again.

The Jeep’s interior filled with the soft sound of wingbeats under the radio playing Creedence Clearwater Revival. There was a bad moon rising, and she was me.

Gran’s owl didn’t show. It was just softly audible, the wingbeats keeping time with my frantic pulse.

I hit the freeway and just headed north. I had to decide what to do, and I had to keep moving while I did it.

Except in the end, it didn’t matter.

The outskirts of Dallas are not a good place to get caught by the cops. I was going the speed limit, but the red and blue lit up like Christmas in my rearview and I had to make a decision: gun it or pull over?

For a few seconds I thought he was just going to go past me, on a call somewhere else. But no dice. I pulled over, edging as far onto the shoulder as I could, and he followed. Small rocks scattered on
the shoulder crunched under our tires, and he was going to run the plate number soon and find out this car was hot as hell.

Great. I added everything up—the
malaika
still strapped to my back, the gun I wore, the gear in the back, the cash, the two sets of fake ID—and subtracted the cost of having to lose the cops, ditch this car, and steal another one.

It wasn’t even a contest. I waited for the cruiser’s driver’s door to open. Light traffic, dusk had already eaten the sunlight, and it was muggy and hot as hell. I was gonna miss this Jeep.

The
touch
resonated inside my head like a plucked string. As soon as the door opened, I turned the wheel and stomped the gas. I could almost hear Johnny Law cussing as he piled into his car again.

The Jeep swerved out three lanes; I corrected and drifted back. The
touch
sparked, I jammed the pedal to the floor and the
aspect
woke, my fangs tingling as they lengthened, scraping against my lower lip. A bolt of pain went up my left arm, I was squeezing the wheel
hard
with both hands. Red and blue lit up my rearview and the siren whooped on.

Dad would’ve just
killed
me. Sure, he’d taught me how to get wheels if I needed them—but it’s always a fool’s game, because getting in a chase is one of the stupidest things you can do. The cops have
radios
. And
computers
. And a whole
hell
of a lot of know-how when it comes to outsmarting dumb criminal drivers.

But I wasn’t a criminal. And I couldn’t risk losing all my gear and being in a cell when the vampires or the funky sorcerers showed up. I just
couldn’t
. So it was this, or nothing.

My head rang and Gran’s owl exploded into being right above the Jeep’s hood. Feathers puffed, torn away in the slipstream. I actually jumped and let out a shriek, and the Jeep swerved crazily. Years
of Dad teaching “self-defensive drivin’” kicked in. The
worst
thing you can do in a situation like that is overcorrect and turn your car into a flying pancake.

The owl jetted forward, and the Jeep leapt to catch up. The engine thrummed, the tires actually lifted off the pavement when we breasted a short rise, and if I had to do something I was going to have to do it quick before Johnny Law got on the radio and reinforcements showed up to box me in.

Ditching the Jeep
was a little easier than I’d expected. It was a good car, but two of her tires were busted and she was making a wheezing noise by the time I killed the lights and scrambled for the backseat. I kicked the rear passenger door open, bailed out with the duffel, and was on the roof of a nearby abandoned warehouse by the time the chopper found the car again, its bright white beam stabbing down like a shot from an alien abduction film. They’d get my prints, probably, but I couldn’t do anything to help
that
. The empty ammo boxes in the back next to the can of gas would perplex them a bit, too.

And there went the Tiger Tails, too.
Dammit
.

I shrank into the shadow of a big silver HVAC unit. It wasn’t humanly possible to get up here, so the cops should ignore it. I’d gone straight up the side of the building like I was a fish being reeled in, the
aspect
smoothing down over my body like hot oil and my wrists aching as my claws sank into the lip of the roof, my arm tensing to pull me and the duffel over. My left palm was a searscorch of pain, but that didn’t slow me down.

Landing with jarring force, sneakers skidding, and I’d actually crashed into the vent and stayed there. I almost didn’t think to twitch the duffel back out of sight against my feet, everything in me rabbit-jumping as if I still had to run.

Don’t be stupid now. Be smart. Be
still.

My pulse dropped now that I was reasonably safe. It was
hot
, an oppressive wet blanket full of smog-taste and the reek of cooling pavement. More sirens bayed in the distance as more cop cars arrived, bouncing over the train tracks and sending up spumes of oily dust. I kept my eye on the chopper, though, lighting up the fenced railyard next to the warehouse. It was a good guess—through the busted-out parts of the chain-link fencing and among the confusion of the yard and the scrubby kudzu and trash wood was pretty much the only way to run with a hope of losing them.