Wolves and the River of Stone (30 page)

“Sure,” Carter said as he glanced at the clock on the dashboard. He froze and then looked at Foster. “What did I just agree to?”

Foster smiled and fluttered to my shoulder.

“Never mind. Just surprise me.”

Foster grinned.

“You know, even if you’re only gone a few hours, that’s no good. We need to leave now if we’re going to get to Stones River at nightfall.” He tapped the steering wheel and said, “Meet us in Paducah. We’ll stop there for a while. Do you know where it’s at? Right on the Kentucky side of the river? It’s off of, uh, Highway 24, I think.”

“I know it,” Cara said as she swooped past me and landed on one of the van’s mirrors. “I’ll be sure we get there on time. There’s a passage near the river.”

“Good. Meet us at Denny’s.”

“A passage?” I said.

The rear door slid open to show me Zola, four werewolves, and five unhappy vampires. Actually four unhappy vampires. Sam looked just fine. I didn’t recognize the white-haired vampire in the far back, but Mary flashed me smile. Bring on the awkwardness.

“Boy, suck it up,” Zola said. “You’re taking the Warded Ways.”

I started to protest until she held out the hilt of a bladeless sword with dime-sized holes spiraling up the grip at regular intervals. I grinned and stuck the focus under my belt. “You know me too well.”

“My friend appreciated the loan very much. He’ll be sending you something in the mail.”

“Alright, but it’s really not necessary,” I said.

“Let me take your staff. You won’t need it in Chicago.”

I shrugged and pulled the staff out of the handles on the duffel bag.

“We’ll see you in a few hours.”

I nodded and handed the staff over.

“Bye, Demon!” Sam said. Aideen glided into the van, fully armored and golden in the early light. The cu siths bounded in after her and started clawing their way over vampires and werewolves to get to Sam in a chaotic mass of flailing limbs, growls, curses, and barks. Zola closed the door with a laugh. Aideen waved to us from the front window and Foster held the hilt of his sword to his forehead.

I waved back as they started to drive away, tapped the hilt in my belt, and looked at Cara. “So, we really have to take the Warded Ways?”

“Of course, Damian.”

I shivered. “Hell, is there no other way?”

Cara shook her head. “Even if you take a flight, you’re looking at four hours, with travel to the airports and back. He’ll be gone.”

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered. “If it wasn’t ... if it wasn’t for Vicky ... “

“But it is.”

I nodded once, broke the pepperbox open to be sure it was loaded, grabbed my duffel bag, and followed Cara and Foster. We walked into the back room of the shop and the fairies landed on the grandfather clock.

“We’re going through from here,” Cara said.

“Here?” I said as my eyes looked around for an invisible power source.

“Through the nexus, dumbass,” Foster said.

“The clock?”

“Of course,” Cara said. “We can open one of many ways from here, though some destinations would kill you instantly.” With her words of encouragement out of the way, she turned to Foster and said, “Do you have the bottle?”

He squeezed the leather pouch on his waist and nodded.

Cara launched herself into the air and looped around to face the clock. She held out her hands, palms flat, and made a triangle with her index fingers and thumbs. I could feel the flare of ley line energy and the electric blue glow edged its way into my sight. I didn’t know what she did, but the shimmering rainbow of an oil spill formed an oval before the clock. I stepped to the side and my eyes widened. The oval wasn’t in front of the clock, it
was
the clock.

“It’s ready,” Cara said.

Foster didn’t even hesitate. His armor rippled with color as he jumped from the top of the glowing clock and swooped back through the shimmering surface.

“You next, Damian.”

I took a deep breath and stepped into the Warded Ways.

It felt like the drop of a big roller coaster at first. My stomach rose up into my throat and my body shook as it was enveloped in the raw Fae energies. Then it started to hurt. It hurt like my feet were being pulled up into my stomach
through
my legs and my entire body was being smashed into my brain. Every pore felt warm and wet and clammy as my head ruptured and turned inside out. Then it was over in a flash of light and crunch of wet pavement. My head was a mass of pain. I managed to roll over and puke onto the ground instead of myself.

Cara came through a beat later and the shimmering glow of the portal snapped out of existence as soon as she was clear.

“Gee, and we get to do that again today.” I groaned and sat up. “Don’t you ever worry about someone coming through the other way? Showing up in your clock? Showing up in the Double D?”

Cara shook her head. “No, the nexus paths are one way. The only path in the Warded Ways that comes near your shop is down by the river.”

The L train rolled by overhead in a rumble of thunder and steel as rain began to beat against the pavement around us. I squinted my eyes while a ferocious headache fought for control of my head. It receded a minute later and I almost managed to stand up. The old black street lamps, mounted two on a pole, were cold in the shade of the elevated tracks.

“Oh god, that sucked. Where are we?”

“Van Buren and Wells. Now get up before someone notices,” Cara said.

“Are you alright?”

I looked up to find an elderly man with a crease of concern on his forehead. “Yeah, thanks. I must have tripped.”

“Okay, just wanted to be sure,” he said with a small smile.

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

The man tipped his hat and walked off beneath the rumble of another train.

“Sometimes I love Chicago,” I said. “The people up here are almost always nice.” A series of car horns blared out from the intersection. “As long as they aren’t driving,” I muttered as I rubbed my neck. “Okay, where to.”

“It’s close. Maybe two blocks. Follow us,” Foster said.

Cara and Foster took off fast and I followed after them at a jog. We left the shadow of the L and ran down Van Buren until we came to an overpass. Foster and Cara swooped over the edge and disappeared. I ran up to the guard rail and looked down. Then I cursed. I ran down the entrance ramp to the sounds of more horns and leapt the barrier where the drop was much more manageable. My knees still screamed when I hit the pavement.

I heard the smack of a fist on meat before we saw him in the shadows of the overpass. It was almost a tunnel beneath Van Buren. The deeper parts were hidden from the street. I caught a glimpse of the bastard through a passage that led closer to the river. Foster’s wings flared in front of me. The seven-foot fairy punched the weasel-faced man in the throat and he made a horrible, choking sound. I could see a prostitute in the corner where the man had been beating her. The shadows moved in around us, hiding the scene completely, waiting for blood. I glanced at the prostitute again and my stomach churned. I didn’t even have to check to know she was dead. Her head hung off the threads of her neck like a dead chicken. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. More rasping sounds came from the man on the street, down on all fours, gasping for breath in a pile of refuse. He never saw us coming.

In my mind I saw his beady eyes and sweaty palms all over Vicky before he helped tear her to pieces ... and I snapped. I grabbed his hair and wrenched his head back, hammering all six barrels of my pepperbox into his eye socket in one savage motion. His body jerked and I almost lost my grip on his hair. He tried to scream. Foster punched him in the throat again, and I could hear a gristly crunch. I watched the terror wash over Elizabeth’s killer and wished I could make it last forever.

“Are we silent?” I said.

Cara nodded and flexed her fingers. I could feel the power of her working rolling across the ley lines and swelling up to soundproof our little event.

“Elizabeth sends her regards,” I snarled into his ear.

His good eye went wide and there was a brief moment of silence before his head exploded in a thunder of gore. He probably thought it was over, peace in death, but Foster pulled the cork out of the small bottle in his hand and slid the lip into the bastard’s remains. It was the sister of the bottle we’d trapped Elizabeth’s other murderer in, the last of the dark bottles Cara had made. For the second time in my life, I watched as the aura was pulled out of a body, torn away from the soul which itself was torn asunder and twisted back inside the killer’s aura. The golden and blackened mass was shredded and swirled together as the entirety of soul and aura spiraled into the dark bottle.

Foster jammed the cork home and said, “Rest in hell you piece of shit.”

I looked around at the blood and chunks strewn over the garbage pile. “Can you bury him here?” I asked.

“No,” Cara said. “There’s just too much concrete.”

“Shit, then what do we do?”

“Leave him,” Foster said. “They’ll never find a trace of evidence.” He turned to Cara and said, “Burn it.”

There was a flash of light from Cara’s hands as tiny fires took hold in the garbage. “That fire will burn flesh and bone to oblivion. No one will ever know where this man died or who he was. It is as it should be.”

I wiped as much gore off my pepperbox as I could, then started stripping out of my clothes. I had them off in seconds and tossed them into the pile of burning garbage. “And that would be why I brought a change of clothes.”

“You still have something in your hair,” Foster said.

I started to reach for it and caught myself just in time. “I’ll stop at a bathroom.”

“You didn’t need to burn your clothes,” Cara said. “When we take the next path the flesh and blood will be absorbed in the transition.”

“Now you tell me,” I muttered. “Let’s get out of here.”

I heard a grisly crack and glanced back to find Foster’s foot had completely caved in the remnants of the murderer’s head. I grimaced, but I didn’t say a word. There was
nothing
that bastard didn’t deserve.

Foster and Cara stayed in their battle forms for our walk through the city. Cara kept up a misdirection spell so no one would think twice about the blood and nuggets on my arms and in my hair. Foster’s hand alternated between flexing on his sword hilt and checking the flap on the leather pouch at his waist.

I didn’t pay much attention to how far or how long we walked, thinking instead of Vicky’s family—Elizabeth’s family—but when I looked up and found the Field Museum I said, “Shit. That was a walk.”

“We’re almost there,” Foster said. “The way is outside Adler Planetarium.”

“You know, we really need to come up here for pizza sometime.”

“Hell yes,” Foster said.

A few minutes later we were standing in front of a tall, silver spiral sculpture, a mad swirl of metal waves and clean curves. Cara ran her hand along the edges and nodded. “This is it. This trip shouldn’t be as hard on you as the trip through the Nexus.”

“Uh huh,” I said. “I’ll believe that when I’m not puking my toes out.”

Foster laughed and sailed through the shimmering portal once Cara had it open. The misdirection spell faded and two kids pointed at me.

I sighed and stepped through after Foster before anyone else noticed me. My eyes widened, or at least I think that’s what widened, when the path didn’t feel like I was being turned inside out. I barely even felt nauseous. And then I fell out the other end of the Warded Ways and performed a screaming belly flop from about twenty feet above the Ohio River.

By the time I swam to shore I was dripping water from every fiber of my being. I pulled out my pepperbox and poured water from the barrels. The focus drained through the dime-sized holes in the hilt like a water fountain. Foster and Cara were laughing so hard it didn’t look like they were breathing, just twitching.

“Well, I’m glad someone found that amusing,” I said as I ran my hand through my hair and whipped the water at the ground. “Oh, look. It’s Denny’s.” I struck out for the restaurant.

“Did you see his face? It was like AHHH!” Foster said as he widened his arms and his eyes, and moved his jaw back and forth.

“I know. It was great. It was
great!”
Cara burst into laughter again as I walked toward the restaurant’s parking lot.

I
held the door open long enough for Foster and Cara to follow me into the restaurant. It wasn’t hard to find Zola. She was pretty obvious with the cluster of werewolves and vampires around her. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the mixed up bunch. We didn’t even make it to the table before Aideen crashed into Foster and tried to hug him to death. Surprise choked my laugh into silence when I recognized Mike the Demon at the table. He looked up and a wide grin split his face.

“Well, well, if it isn’t my favorite necromancer. Where’s your water witch? It looks like she exploded all over you.”

I smiled, shook my head, and then shook Mike’s hand. “She’s not mine.”