28

TROUBLE AND DIM SUM

I couldn’t get ahold of Keeley immediately, but Kasia got Simon on the phone with an ease that again made me wonder what kind of deal he’d made with the kresniks before all of this started, and why he trusted her to keep an eye on us. So much bullshit, so little time. I could hear Simon assure Kasia that Templars of various job descriptions would soon be swarming all over one Robert Peet before our team could do anything useful, and he further insisted that the Templars didn’t need assistance checking out other male band members who had graduated from Prutko’s high school.

“You could help us by coming in and working with one of our crisis response teams,” Simon said. “But if Charming wants to keep looking on his own, let him. He made me a promise, and he has insane luck.”

Well, it hadn’t really been a promise.

“Good luck or bad?” Kasia asked.

“Both,” Simon said. “And I can’t tell how much of it is karma or instinct.”

Another mental flicker: Sarah insisting I had psychic leanings that I was repressing because of my Catholic upbringing. And doing a damn good job, too. I repressed the thought.

“It was the same with Sig when I worked with her.” Kasia didn’t try to sound neutral. “Perhaps it is the company he keeps.”

Kasia filled the others in on the pertinent parts of the conversation when we were back in the van, and we talked about finding a place where we could get some more coffee and figure out our next move.

“Are you sure we should stop at a public place?” The new van seat squeaked as Molly shifted nervously. “I don’t want to drag any innocent bystanders into it if we get attacked.”

“We’re the ones doing the hunting this time,” Choo said.

“Are you sure about that?” Molly asked. “Didn’t John say something about bird people following and attacking him and Kasia?”

“But no one has attacked us while we were here,” Kasia pointed out.

“Those raven things didn’t attack us until they knew we were onto them,” I said. “And there’s a lot of dark sky up there above us.”

“I could use some caffeine,” Choo put in. “And I’m driving.”

“Maybe we should compromise,” Sig said. “Let’s not go to any crowded places or busy streets. What do you think, John?”

I thought Molly had a good point. We didn’t know enough about how Reader X and his Book of Am connection worked to know what to expect. Those ravens that had manifested didn’t seem to match the other transformations. They exhibited a degree of conscious intent and calculation and control that was unsettling. Was the Book of Am really becoming increasingly sentient and beginning to cause spies and obstacles to manifest in places that might lead to it without Reader X being conscious of the process? Was Reader X slumped over the book, knocked out and dreaming all of this with his forehead pressed against the pages, or was he standing around in a bathrobe, listening to opera music and wildly waving his hands around like a mad conductor while he caused more creations to transform his past into magical monsters? Was the guy a terrorist, a master criminal, a pawn, or a schizophrenic? How much did he know about us? How much did he want to know?

“If we want to make sure we’re not being magically followed, I think we should get Kevin or Sarah to meet us someplace,” I said. “Kevin’s mojo picked up on the ravens last time.”

Which is how I wound up getting on the phone. It wasn’t a fun or friction-free conversation, because I didn’t tell Sarah about the knights’ nuclear scenario. That would have been betraying the pact I’d entered into with Simon and Ben, but Sarah could tell there were things I wasn’t telling her, because she’s as sharp and quick as a diamond-toothed chain saw blade.

“All I can tell you is that we’re dancing on a tightrope made of barbed wire stretched out over a bottomless pit,” I finally said. “There might be another war between the knights and the werewolves on top of everything else if I don’t step carefully.”

Every word of which was absolutely true. If it helped spread the idea that the knights and the wolves were preparing for a throwdown without explaining why they were preparing for one or why I wanted to spread that idea … well … was I really deceiving Sarah? Even if I was pretty sure she’d be okay with that if she understood my obligations and the stakes involved?

Sarah seemed to think so. I wound up owing her a favor.

I also wound up going to one of those mostly empty concrete stretches that stitch together the patchwork quilt of counties, districts, neighborhoods, islands, municipalities, slums, and industrial areas that form New York City. It was a poorly lit street on the edges of a neighborhood and not quite in a business area. There was virtually no visible traffic, foot or otherwise, and only two brightly lit buildings, a convenience store two blocks down, and some kind of restaurant in the middle of a small, otherwise-deserted strip mall.

The restaurant itself was a fast food operation set up to sell dumplings: pork dumplings, chicken dumplings, and beef dumplings to go. The only concessions to variety were two choices of soup that were basically tasty broth, and fried rice. It was a grimy little place that was almost all red counter, and everything was served in foam bowls and cups or paper plates. The place wasn’t quite as deserted as it looked, though. I could hear muted voices from a back room, mostly male. Some of the voices were angry, some excited, some exultant, but they were all speaking Chinese, a fact I was only aware of because I know some Chinese curse words. I’m pretty sure I heard the click and rattle of dice as well. I guess the high customer volume wasn’t why the place was staying open into the wee hours.

Kevin was waiting for us at one of the red tables.

“Number one son!” Molly hugged Kevin. Charlie Chan was Chinese, not Japanese, but Kevin didn’t seem to mind. I don’t know if that’s because he was too young to get the reference or because Molly is one of those people who can get away with anything. She and Kevin had spent a lot of time together in a van the last time we were in New York.

Kevin wasn’t able to reassure us or warn us about any specific spies or threats, though. When we asked him if he had any intuitions with extra cheese, he said, “I’m not a Ouija board, you know.”

“Of course not.” Molly pointed at Sig. “She’s the Ouija board. You’re the Magic 8 Ball.”

“I’m not a Magic 8 Ball either.”

Molly wasn’t having any of Kevin’s attitude. “Are you sure? Maybe I just didn’t shake you hard enough.” She grabbed Kevin by the collar and shook him back and forth with exaggerated motions until he started to laugh reluctantly.

“The reply is hazy,” Kevin told Molly. “Try again later.”

Sig intervened. “So, is no news good news, Kevin?”

He wrinkled his forehead—maybe that’s the way psychics scrunch their nose—and said, “It maybe feels like something’s missing, but I don’t know why. The last time I was with you, we were being followed. Maybe it just feels different because we’re not being followed now.”

I would have liked that better without the maybe.

The establishment sold both coffee and tea, but the coffee was burnt and the tea smelled fresh and excellent. I drank the coffee. The six of us scrunched uncomfortably around two high round red tables we’d pulled together, but the place did meet our other needs: There were no other customers in our immediate vicinity, the acoustics were horrible, and we had a clear view of an empty street. I was also at least eighty percent convinced that the expressionless young Asian man running the joint really did have limited English skills. We spoke quietly anyhow. It didn’t take long to realize that we needed more information before we could even figure out how to get more information.

I finally managed to get Keeley on the phone, though he wasn’t happy when he found out that I was requesting further data rather than providing some. “You seem to be under the impression that I am your secretary.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I’m always polite to secretaries.” I am too. Any halfway intelligent person who’s ever spent any time researching or investigating anything develops that habit pretty damned quick. After a little bit more back-and-forth of that nature, Keeley sent me a list of the high school graduates that the Templars had managed to eliminate as potential suspects so far. They were working fast. “You’d think I was asking him to invest in a Ponzi scheme,” I grumbled as I prepared to forward the list to the others. It took a little longer for me and my flip phone than it would have the average modern citizen.

“He’s under a lot of stress.” Sig was feeling charitable for some reason. “And Simon’s assistants do have a way of dying horribly.”

“You’re right,” I replied. “There’s hope.”

She punched me in the arm lightly. “That’s not what I meant.”

I finally managed to send the text, and everyone got their phones out and looked over the lists that Keeley had sent me while we waited for our dumplings to cook.

“It looks like one out of ten of the band members have died before the age of fifty,” Kevin noted. “Isn’t that number a little high for normal people?”

Molly paused to blow on her broth. “I’m not sure the people in my high school band would have counted as normal. And proud of it, too.”

“Yeah, what do you mean by normal?” Choo asked. “White people? Asian people? Middle-class people?”

Kevin sounded mildly offended when he said, “I mean people who aren’t freaks like us. But statistically, I think it holds up across the board. The last time I took a social studies class, the average life expectancy for an American black male was seventy-one years of age. The life expectancy of a white male was seven years longer. And women tended to live longer than males no matter what their ethnicity.”

“One of the rare cases of social justice,” Sig interjected.

Kevin looked at her and added, “Asian-American females had the best life expectancy of anyone in the US.”

I was too tired to dwell on all the weird friction and subtexts. “Okay, so unless somebody knows the average life expectancy of high school band members on the Lower East Side, could we just assume that what we have here is a pretty high number of deaths?”

“We should check out all of the dead people’s obits,” Sig said.

Choo nodded. “I get you. Some of ’em might have meant something to Reader X, and people who mean something to this dude have been getting the short end of the stick.”

“More like the sharp end,” I said. “Those texts we read made it sound like Anna Hogan spent a lot of time coaching our guy to hide his tracks. If he wasn’t good at it, Simon would have found him by now. I’ll bet you whatever you want that some of those names on the dead list died because they knew our guy in the present, and they died in the last year.”

Molly spoke up in a brisk, cheery voice: “Or maybe we’ll get a text in five minutes saying someone found Reader X and this is all over.”

I studied her for a moment. That voice had sounded forced, and Molly didn’t usually sound fake. She hadn’t been acting entirely present since freezing in the Spanish room back at the high school. Not that my nerves weren’t a little tight too. “Sure,” I said.

Molly stuck her tongue out at me. “Pessimist.”

“Realist,” I corrected.

“I can remember when realists didn’t talk about magic books and monsters,” Choo said. “Man, I miss that time.”

“Maybe I’m a surrealist.” The kid at the counter gave me a nod that seemed surly from the sheer lack of being anything else, and Choo and I got up to get the dumplings. Sig always does the actual looking on lookout duty because she has the best eyesight, and in this case, it paid off. She spotted something through the window and said, “Trouble.”

Three large humanoid shapes were shuffling down the middle of the dark street toward us. I couldn’t make out their features, but they looked to be somewhere around twelve to fifteen feet tall. A blue Ford Escalade passed the restaurant and drove down the street, and bizarrely, the car slowed and carefully made its way to the left, taking its time while it navigated around one of the monsters as if edging past roadkill. The Pax Arcana at work again. The couple inside the car were probably still talking about the merits of whatever place they were coming from, or arguing about a TV show, or complaining about their jobs, or discussing friends who were going to break up, hook up, or screw up.

The monstrous form paused and looked down at the car invading its space the same way I would look at a tumbleweed or a dog that didn’t smell unfriendly, but it didn’t otherwise react, and I got a better look at it in the car’s headlights. The thing was basically human except in scale, but its skin was a greenish grey and its clothes were a hodgepodge of several outfits. The thing’s feet and legs were bare, and a pair of normal-sized grey sweatpants were tied around its waist like a loincloth. Its torso was covered by three different T-shirts, although I couldn’t tell if they were sewn together or just melded, and the sleeve covering its massive right arm was made out of a medium-sized tan hoody, the hood flapping loosely, the metal seam of a zipper glinting in the headlights. Then the car went past.

Sig began moving with purpose toward the exit. She had a lot of pent-up frustration to take out on something. “Let’s go.”

Worked for me. The guy behind the counter probably wouldn’t even notice anything as long as the fighting didn’t get near him, and even if he did, I kind of doubted he would try to contact the police. I handed Molly several white, greasy bags as I went past, speaking over my shoulder and trying to sound offhand: “Don’t drop the dumplings.”

“That better not be a metaphor!” she called after me, her voice only a little shaky. I was already out the door, and I could hear the others coming close behind me. Kasia joined Sig and me, walking on my other side, and Kevin trailed us. Choo moved toward the back of his van while Molly headed for the driver’s door.

I could smell the shapes coming toward us now. We had crossed a bridge to get to the area, and these things had the distinct smell of fetid mud and a slight tang of salt permeating the odor of unwashed … something. It was human flesh, but somehow the scent was more intense than usual. I was pretty sure they had come from under the bridge. Trolls, I suppose. More specifically, trolls cobbled together from the flesh and garments of several human bodies.

Sig kicked the base of a speed limit sign to loosen the pavement’s hold over it, then pulled the metal signpost out of the ground. It sounded like rock being shredded with the world’s toughest cheese grater. As if the noise were a signal, the three trolls began picking up speed, lumbering toward us with strides that covered a lot of ground.

Kasia moved to put a parked grey Volkswagen Passat between her and the foremost troll, aiming her pistol carefully and firing three rounds into its huge, misshapen face. She shot out at least one of those bulbous eyes, and the other eye must have been blinded by sprays of blood and a loose flap of flesh, but the troll put a large forearm over its face and kept coming. Kasia jumped onto the trunk of the Passat, then ran over the top of the car before the troll could push the vehicle aside. She leaped toward the troll’s head in a front kick, but if she was counting on the troll’s impeded vision to make it helpless, she miscalculated. It reacted to the sound of her feet denting nearby metal and swung its long, heavily muscled arm outward, smashing Kasia out of the air like it was aiming for the stands. I was focused on my own problems, but I heard bones crack, and when Kasia’s body hit concrete, it sounded like it was a long ways off in the darkness.

Sig ripped the flat, painted sheet metal off her signpost and tossed the small square aside like a Frisbee. She caught the advance of the troll charging her by thrusting the signpost up under its breastbone. The troll impaled itself but kept moving down and forward. Large grey-green hands with fingers the size of bratwursts grabbed Sig’s shoulders as the troll forced itself down the length of the sign and over her. Sig anchored the bottom of the sign post against the ground like a pike and dropped to her back, curling her legs up to get her feet between herself and the descending mass, her body scrunching up like an accordion.

I saw the problem when I feinted right and darted left as soon as my troll committed itself to a lunge that its own gigantic mass wouldn’t let it pull out of. My shoulders were roughly at the level of the thing’s hips, and as I passed the troll’s left leg, I barely had to bend to slash an Achilles tendon with my knife. One Achilles tendon. The thing had several. I could see them pulled taut beneath its skin, cables straining beneath a sheet of leathery lime flesh.

These things really were multiple bodies hastily crammed into one organism. Sig had probably stabbed her troll through its heart, but if what I was seeing was any indication, it might have several. Likewise, Kasia had probably put a bullet in her troll’s brain, but only one of them.

It took my troll longer than me to halt and change directions, the same way it takes a truck longer than a car to hit the brakes. By the time it lurched to a slightly off-balance stop, I was already charging it from behind, catching its rear end with my shoulder while it was still leaning forward and teetering on the balls of its feet. The troll went sprawling, and I ran down its descending back, hacking with my knife and severing at least one spinal cord in the deep valley between its shoulder blades and the base of its neck. When the troll tilted and lifted its right arm to throw me off, it was a relatively weak gesture, but “relatively” means that I only went rolling six feet to the side instead of twelve.

I came to a crouch and was almost flattened by the troll that Sig had finally managed to kick off her. I slammed my knife into an eardrum the size of a mouse hole, but it was pure reflex. I had to throw myself backward in an ungainly sprawl to avoid getting grabbed.

At least the troll that had knocked Kasia aside wasn’t jumping in to stomp me to death. Kevin had turned the damn thing into a candelabra. The monster’s hands, head, and crotch were on fire, and Kevin was dancing back and waving his burning beechwood cane while the thing stampeded blindly around him. Some twenty yards away, Choo was firing paintballs full of gasoline at the troll to fuel the fire. There were several bigger guns lying in the back of the van that he could have chosen, but Choo wasn’t about to go spraying rounds into open civilization in the dark. He didn’t have to. When all of the tiny streams of gasoline leaking down the troll’s body connected and made contact with flame, the thing went up in a funeral pyre.

I had made some smartass crack while Choo was patiently using a hypodermic needle to alternately drain and fill paintballs with gasoline slightly watered down with holy water. I couldn’t remember what I had said exactly, but I was pretty sure Choo was going to remind me later.

Sig’s troll quit groping backward and sat up, and Sig stepped forward and swung the gore-covered signpost that was still in her fists two-handed, smacking her improvised club off his skull. The troll fell back. Sig did not. Her next swing was downward, still aimed at the troll’s head. However many brains it had, they were all going to get sloshed around and scrambled until it passed out.

My troll was propping itself up on one arm and dragging itself to its feet to face me when Kasia leaped onto its back from behind. I could tell she was hurt—her expression was as much agony as anger—but her fangs were bared and she was tearing at the troll’s throat like a wolverine while she held on. Only one of the troll’s arms was working, and the thing was visibly weakening while blood spurted from its neck, a leak in a very large water hose with more than one pump. The troll went back down to its knees and never stood up again.

Kevin and Choo’s troll was still and imitating a roasted marshmallow. When I looked at Sig, her troll was lying flat on the ground, and she was trying to tear its head off by using the signpost as a crowbar. I felt kind of redundant, but that was okay. I could get used to it.

The real problem was that our current van didn’t have enough room in the back for transporting the bodies. I began to walk away from the carnage, looking for a manhole lid or a Dumpster, any place where we could stash the corpses until the Templars could send a cleanup crew along. Molly had started the van and turned it around by this point, probably so that she could use it to ram one of the trolls if needed, and she was sticking her head out of the driver’s window. “Is everything okay?” she called out.

“We’re all good,” I said.

“Speak for yourself,” Molly told me. “I think I dropped some dumplings.”