She stops, looks back, amusement on her face. Whispers, “I get it, you’re the big hero, but as long as I’m around you’re going to have to get used to sharing the dangerous jobs. Okay?”
I hesitate but then nod.
As she slithers toward the rear of the store, I stay as close as possible without crowding her, readying myself to spring into action at the first sign of shape shifting witches. We pass ornamental lamps and picture frames and a funky-looking chair that promises “a massage so good you’ll think you’re in Sweden!”
My heart stops when there’s a clatter off to the side, behind a row of desks. We freeze, listening, trying to pinpoint the exact source of the sound. In the silence, a high-pitched keening comes from somewhere beneath us. I jump back, but Laney just bends down and plucks a light bulb from where it rolls to a stop at her feet. Holds it up. Smiles. Points two fingers to her eyes, then at mine. Watch me. She motions to the left. Points to me. Motions to the right. Split up.
I give her a single nod to confirm my understanding of the plan.
As I duck away to the right, there’s a scrape off to the left. My eyes dart in that direction, and I see a thick shadow bolt from cover, hear the slap of feet on the tile floor. Laney rushes forward, her shotgun raised like a club, leaps, brings it down with a heavy thud!
She disappears behind one of the displays, crying out.
My body takes over and I hurdle an easy chair, slip around the corner of an aisle as easily as I used to evade would-be tacklers on the gridiron, and spring forward where…
Laney’s got the barrel of her shotgun pressed into a man’s face.
But not just any man.
My friend, the beggar.
~~~
“Who are you?” Laney demands, shoving the dark-skinned man into the area where we were sleeping. She’s still got her shotgun pointed at his face.
As usual, Trish is just staring at what’s happening, her face devoid of expression. To my surprise, Hex runs up to the man and starts licking his fingers.
“Get your dog out of the way, Rhett!” Laney shouts.
“Hex!” I command sharply, as if I’ve ever been able to control him. Hex turns in my direction, and then goes right on lapping at the beggar’s dirty hands.
“Answer my question,” Laney repeats, through gritted teeth.
“Laney,” I say evenly.
“What?” she says, keeping her eyes—and gun—trained on the man.
“He can’t speak,” I say.
“How do you know?”
“I’ve run into him before. He doesn’t have a tongue.”
The man bobs his head and, as if to demonstrate, opens his mouth and waggles the stub of a tongue he’s got left.
“Gross,” Laney says. And then: “What do we do with him?”
“For starters, don’t shoot him. He helped save our lives from the Shifters.” A thought springs to mind. “Hold on.” I move to where my backpack is stowed, unzip it, and rummage through my stuff until I find my notepad. I tear one clean page from the very back. Turning toward the man, I ask, “Can you write?”
He nods, but then cringes, his face contorted in what appears to be pain. “Are you hurt?” I ask.
Still cringing, he shakes his head. If he’s not hurt, then why does he look like someone’s driving nails into his forehead?
I rest the torn-out page on the cover of my journal and hand it to him with a pencil. “Will you answer my questions?” I ask.
“No,” Laney says. “He will answer your questions or he’ll get a face full of hot metal.”
I give Laney a sharp look, which she ignores, and then take in the man’s reaction to her directness. He just shrugs. Is that a yes?
“Who the hell are you?” Laney says, before I can ask anything.
The man glances at me, almost curiously, but I can still see a twinge of pain in his eyes. I dip my head in encouragement. He lifts the pencil, holding it awkwardly, like he hasn’t used one in a long time, and then scrawls something on the page. Holds it up. Written in shaky block letters is a name.
MARTIN.
“Good,” Laney says. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Her tone is mocking. Not helping.
I jump in before she makes things worse. “Why are you following me?” I ask.
The man purses his lips and tucks them in his mouth. Returns to the paper. I’m not, he writes.
Laney takes two big strides forward and shoves the shotgun under his chin. “Listen, Stinky, Rhett says you keep showing up and there are no coincidences in this freak show of a world we’re living in, so you better tell the whole damn truth before I blow your brains straight through your scalp.” Almost as an afterthought, she glances over at Trish, a flash of regret crossing her face as she seems to realize her sister’s watching her every move.
The movement is so quick I barely see it. All that’s left is the end result: Laney’s gun twisted from her hands, spun around, and pointed back at her head. She backs away slowly, arms above her head. “Man, I’m sorry…I wasn’t actually going to—”
Hex barks, as if to say Silence!
I realize the beggar is still holding the pad in one hand while gripping the shotgun in the other. He’s much stronger than he looks, his muscles likely hidden beneath the thick folds of his brown trench coat.
“Don’t,” I say, my sword raised. “You’ll be dead before you pull the trigger.”
Nonchalantly, he flips the gun in the air, catching it by the barrel and handing it back to Laney, who looks as surprised as I feel when she accepts the weapon.
Hunching over the paper, the man writes something else, taking his time, almost child-like in the way he seems to form the big letters. Hands it over, where Laney and I huddle around it.
I’m sorry. This was a mistake. Beware the Siren.
When I look up to ask another question, the man is gone.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The road seems to shrink before us with each step, as if rolling itself up into a tight bundle, like a rug. We have less than ten miles before we reach Washington, PA, and all I want is some quiet thinking time.
Not gonna happen.
The broken iPod that is Laney asks the question I’ve been fighting for the last hour. “What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing,” I say for the tenth time.
“There has to be something,” she says. “You’re being chased by a Siren who wants you to be her sex slave and a mute homeless guy who’s a lot more talented than he appears to be, and apparently the Necros have put a bounty on your head, which—oh yeah—means that every last witch gang in America is out looking for you. Sounds like nothing to me.” Her sarcasm slaps me in the face in a way only she seems able to do.
“Not only the witch gangs,” I say. “Other witch hunters are after me, too.”
“Ha! This gets better and better,” she says. “Let me guess: The End. If I want to keep my sister safe, it seems like being near you is the last place we should be.”
I stop and whirl on her. “Then why are you still here?” I spout. “I never asked you to come with me. You tagged along, Laney. For the last two months it’s been me and Hex and we’ve been just fine. And I know—as you’ve constantly reminded me—that you and your sister have survived on your own, so why are you here?”
For a moment her face goes so red that I think she might spit in my face, or hit me, and I almost wish she would, because it would be better than what she does next. Her shoulders sag and she bites her lip and I can tell she’s fighting back tears. “I was tired of feeling alone,” she says, before stalking off.
I stand there for three minutes, watching Laney and Trish and Hex move off down the road, the only friends I have at the moment.
And then I follow them.
~~~
I can’t stand the silence anymore, so I ask, “What else has she written?”
Laney’s eyes shoot toward me, and I almost feel like I’m looking down the dark barrels of her shotgun,
something I hope I never have to experience again.
She looks away, keeps walking. “You mean Trish?” she says a minute later.
“Yeah.”
“You mean besides ‘Tall dead no’ and ‘Ads hall rise’?”
“They might not just be gibberish,” I say. “They might mean something. Like they did before. Perhaps if we can decipher them…”
“My sister isn’t some puzzle you can solve,” she says. “Not everything has an answer.”
“You said it yourself, there are no coincidences.” I might be pushing her too far, but I’m tired of the awkward silence, tired of just taking everything this screwed up world is dishing out.
She sighs and I know I’ve won.
“She’s all I’ve got,” she says. Not what I expected her to say.
“Not anymore,” I say. “Hex and I won’t abandon you. If you ever want to go your own way, you can, but it’ll always be your choice.” I don’t know why I say it and maybe it’s a lame attempt to sew our frayed friendship back together, but it feels right the moment the words roll off my lips.
Laney seems to consider that for a moment. “She’s not some freak,” she says.
“I never said—”
“I know it’s weird that she doesn’t speak anymore and writes in the air and does that freaky staring thing…”
“Like she’s doing right now?” I interject. Trish watches us curiously, a thin smile on her lips.
“Yes,” Laney says. “She never did that before…before my parents died.”
“She never did anything strange?” I ask.
“Kids do lots of strange things,” Laney says, “but nothing out of the ordinary. It’s like something snapped in her when she—” She stops suddenly, her lips clamping shut so tightly that her top and bottom teeth clack off of each other.
“When she what?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer.
“Laney?” I say.
She won’t answer, even when I ask the question another half-dozen times. Now it’s me who’s being the nosy pest.
I give up as we pass the Welcome to Washington sign, the W smudged out by what appear to be ashy fingerprints. Ashington. Scorched beneath are big black letters: PYROS RULE.
Washington, Pennsylvania has been taken by the Pyros.
Her lips a thin line, Laney fires me a look, but then trudges past the sign, holding her sister’s hand so tightly her knuckles turn white.
~~~
Curling fingers of smoke drift skyward in the distance. Splotches of bright blue and green stand out amongst the darkening landscape, almost like strange flowers in full bloom. Not flowers; magical fire. Welcome to Ashington.
As slinking shadows slide over me, throwing rocks and sticks around my feet, I grab Laney’s other hand. “We’ll find a detour around the town,” I say.
She looks up at me, then down at our locked hands. “No,” she says. “I want to see it.”
I frown. “Bad idea. Pyros are pretty badass, especially in large groups. I’m all for poking a sleeping bear if it’s absolutely necessary, but…”
Laney stops abruptly, so I do, too. Then I realize: Laney only stopped because Trish did. Continuing to grip her sister’s hand, Trish begins writing in the air with the other one. Rapt, Laney and I stare at her finger moving gracefully in the moonlight.
“A,” we say at the same time as Trish connects the upside-down V with a crossing line. I go silent, letting Laney verbalize her sister’s message. “L. L. G. O. N. E.”
“All gone,” I say, when Trish’s hand drops back to her side.
“The Pyros,” Laney says. “They were here, but they’re not anymore.”
When did Laney start believing in her sister’s messages? I don’t ask, because I think I know: She’s always believed in them, even if she didn’t want to.
“I don’t know…” I say, not because I don’t believe Trish, or Laney’s interpretation of her words, but because I know what Mr. Jackson would advise. Don’t pick a fight you can’t win. Avoid large groups of witches.
Hex paws at my leg, whining. C’mon, he seems to say.
“If this goes all wrong, it’s on me,” Laney says. “My responsibility.” Her blue eyes are sparkling, prettier under the starlight than I’ve ever seen them.
“Okay,” I say. What I don’t say is that we’ll all be dead if it goes wrong, so responsibility won’t matter one darn bit.
~~~
The warmth of the burning buildings is almost a relief after the cold rain of yesterday, but even that is dying. On the face, it appears Trish was right. The Pyros are gone, probably recently, leaving the fires to burn themselves out.
We stay low, below the thickness of the dark smog that clouds an otherwise clear night sky. Hex bounds ahead, as if to prove that his low stature has its advantages. He turns and looks back, barks once. Slow pokes, he seems to say, a gleam in his dark eyes.
We pass a McDonald’s, the golden arches mostly consumed by flames, the green roof caved in, glowing blue with still-hot embers. “I guess the Pyros are joining the fight against childhood obesity,” Laney says, making an unexpected joke.
I force out a laugh, although I know Laney’s overcompensating for whatever contradicting emotions are pouring through her.
They were holding fire in their hands. Not red and orange, but blue and green. Balls of fire.
They were going to burn us to death.
There seems to be no rhyme or reason to which buildings the Pyros set on fire, unless, of course, Laney was right and they’re trying to make a political statement to a country that no longer has politics. Regardless, the common theme is that the fires are dying out, which is strange in and of itself, because according to everything Mr. Jackson taught me, magical flames don’t die easily. Either the Pyros have to snuff them out or someone’s got to extinguish them.
“Weird,” I murmur.
“What?” Laney says.
“Uh, nothing.” No need to get Laney worried about something that might mean nothing.
And then I see it. A noxious brew of horror and disgust rises up in my chest, but I choke it down, try to control it, even as I step in front of Laney and Trish, trying to shield their view. Of course, that only makes them try harder to see around me. “Outta the way,” Laney says, pushing past me.
“Ahhh, sick!” Laney exclaims, seeing what I saw.
Hex is sniffing around the pile of corpses, as if it’s nothing more than a bed of roses. Are they…human? It hits me.
“I think those are the Pyros,” I murmur softly, almost reverently. Any witch hunter that could take down an entire gang of Pyros deserves some level of respect. Unless it was another witch gang that did it…
“What?” Laney says. “You don’t think the Pyros killed anybody?” There’s an edge to her voice that’s becoming all too familiar.
“That’s not what I said. I’m sure the Pyros killed many humans, probably hundreds of survivors just to take over this town. But I don’t think these are human bodies. They’re dead Pyros…that’s why the fires are dying, because the Pyros that set them are dead. And think about it. Any humans killed by Pyros would have been burned to nothing more than ash.”
Laney chews on her lips, fingering her shotgun. “Well, any enemy of the Pyros is a friend to me,” she says. “I’d like to find them and say thank you.”
“Funny you should say that,” an electronic voice blares. Instinctively, I duck, as if the sound might carry something sharp and deadly.
Laney ducks, too, although Trish remains standing completely upright, staring at one of the buildings, one that’s relatively unscathed. Hex barks twice and then goes back to sniffing at the dead witches.
“Who the hell was that?” Laney asks, but I’m already smiling, because there’s only one person I know in this new world who would set up a microphone and speaker in a town half-burned to the ground.
“Tillman Huckle,” I say.
Chapter Thirty
Trish is alre
ady heading toward the building when I take off after her, loping toward it with long, practiced strides. Hex lets out a woof! and gives chase.
Behind me, Laney says, “Stop and tell me who Tillman Huckle is or I’ll shoot you in the back, Rhett Carter!”
“Do what you gotta do!” I shout back over my shoulder, but I’m not stopping, because I haven’t seen Tillman Huckle in weeks and it’s not every day you get the chance to catch up with one of the few friends you’ve got left in the world.
I pass Trish’s shorter legs and only just arrive at the building entrance a split-second after Hex, who appears out of thin air, startling me. “Do you really have to do that?” I say, glaring at my dog. He smiles back, his pink tongue dripping droplets of drool at my feet.
I put a hand on the doorknob, but something stops me from opening it. What if I’m mistaken? What if it’s not my old friend, Tillman Huckle, the young, entrepreneurial magical weapons dealer? Absently, my fingertips graze over the magged-up throwing stars in my belt. How many times have they saved my life? Countless. And all because Tillman Huckle was willing to accept instant noodles as payment for something far more valuable.
I flinch again as I realize Trish is by my side, tugging on my arm. She’s nodding vehemently, pointing at the door. I hope she’s right and I’m not walking into a trap.
“Follow me quietly,” I say to anyone who might be listening, jiggling the doorknob. It’s locked.
I take a step back, considering.
BOOM!
I leap away as the doorknob shatters, along with a six-inch hole in the wood around where it used to be. Laney’s foot flies past me, kicking the door inward with a resounding thud that reverberates off the walls.
“I said ‘quietly,’” I say.
“It worked, didn’t it?” she says, rolling her eyes.
“And woke up half the town,” I say.
“There’s probably only one person—besides us—in the town, so that’s not really possible,” she says.
“Touché,” I say, stepping past her and inside.