The problem with stakeouts was that they suck. They’re boring and annoying and, if you have to do it in the middle of the day, on a suburban street in a very recognisable behemoth, without snacks, it’s all that and more.
I couldn’t just sit outside Carver’s waiting for him to show up. Not with nosy neighbours and curious cars slowing to get a better look at the Monster Mobile. Most especially not with the world’s unholiest dog—I mean, it looked like it popped right out of William Hurt’s chest, a Shih Tzu-thing that was all black, fur, nose and eyes, so it was just this terrorising streak of darkness, its only distinguishing feature a row of tiny, white teeth jutting out from its lower mandible like the picket fence on Hell—racing around a front yard, yapping frantically for its master. Who was probably Lucifer.
So I had to keep moving. Driving around the block; parking the Tyrannosaurus prado and taking a stroll; climbing a tree a block over and doing the whole cup your hands around your eyes as if you’re holding binoculars thing. None of it was excessively cool, and neither did it net me much in the way of psycho sorcerers. There was no activity around Carver’s house for hours.
Then I felt it.
I was crouched in someone’s shrub, across the road and down a couple of houses, waiting while the postie chugged up and down the street. The prickle of active sorcery crawled across my skin like a dozen pixies wearing electrified footy cleats. It wasn’t as bad as it had been in the past, probably because I was having a lot of trouble feeling anything, but as dull and indistinct as it was, I knew what it meant.
Somehow, Carver had got past me. He was home.
Forgoing stealth, I sprang out of the shrub, startling the Devil Dog into another bout of hysteria. Before it could open a portal to its home dimension, I raced across the road and hurdled the fence into Carver’s yard. Movement down the side of the house caught my eye and I veered that way, skidding around the corner and under the carport.
Just in time to see the rogue sorcerer clear the back fence like a springbok on ’roids. By the time I reached the fence, he was gone. Still, I hauled myself up and—
Crash!
Blinding light flared and it felt as if the whole world contracted around me for a second. A fist crushing tight and then letting go. I dropped in a boneless heap to the ground. Before any of my systems came completely online again, I felt it. The acid-tingle of sorcery about to happen, then the prickling of every hair on my body, accompanied by a distinctly unsettling buzz.
I curled up, arms over my head protectively.
Lightning crashed down again, striking the ground about ten yards away. The crack of thunder was so loud it was like the world splitting in two.
Then silence, but for the slamming of my heart in my chest.
It started again, the tingle, soon to be followed by the static build up and the buzzing.
“Stop!” I shouted, surging to my feet. “Quit it, Dev!”
And thankfully, it did stop.
It was another couple of minutes before I managed to stagger to my feet. In the corner of the yard was a burnt patch of grass, steaming in the hot afternoon sunlight. My body still felt charged from the bolts, thrumming with an excess of energy, even as my ears kept ringing with the echoes of the thunder.
“Bloody sorcerers,” I muttered, shaking my head, trying to clear it of the rattle and hum.
“Holy shit. Did that lightning hit right there?”
I couldn’t even be bothered turning toward the breathless voice behind me. Just waved over my shoulder at the shocked neighbour and stalked into the house. The backdoor swung open with the barest touch, the lock broken. Had Dev broken in? How had he learned Carver was the rogue? If I discovered he’d been holding out on me…
Dev was slumped in the first room I found off the main corridor. There was no furniture except for a busted old folding chair, a few plastic ties scattered amongst the debris. The sorcerer looked wrecked, dazed and exhausted, but he managed a half smile, half grimace when he saw me in the doorway.
“That was quick,” he slurred.
I crouched in front of him, automatically checking for injuries. “I was staking out the house. The rogue lives here, but I guess you figured that out.”
Batting away my hands, Dev winced. “Yeah, it was made rather clear to me. How long have I been here?”
“We lost track of you yesterday, after we dropped you at your hotel.”
“That was yesterday? Okay, so I only lost a day.”
It was about then I noticed his irises, contracted to pinpoints. “You high?”
Dev flopped about, trying to stand, I suppose. “The rogue gave me a natural high. Sent my brain chemistry all catty whompus. To stop me from thinkin’ enough to cast.”
I could hazard a guess at ‘catty whompus’ from context. “And yet you did.”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus, mate. That’s hard core. All right, can you walk?”
Between us, we got Dev roughly upright. His arm slung over my shoulders, he stumbled along.
“How’d you get here?” I asked, steering the Good Ship Randy outside.
“Rogue. Caught me at the cemetery. I saw you go into the water off the ferry, but before I could do anythin’ to help you, he had me.”
I considered the idea Dev had been planning on helping me while we snail-paced it around the house. It didn’t exactly fit with my impression of his lone gun persona. Maybe Erin had been right, damn her, and it was just my alpha-tude getting in the way.
At the front of the house, I realised the car was a couple of blocks over. Carting Dev the entire way wasn’t a pleasant thought. Neither was leaving him here, not exactly defenceless but not really in fighting trim, either. Not with the possibility of the rogue lurking around. Resigned to hoofing it to the car with Hop Along in tow, I angled across the road, forgetting until the last moment about Devil Dog.
It skulked out of hiding, eyed us—or at least I assumed it did as the only noticeable feature on its face was the row of jutting teeth, which, like the eyes of a good portrait, followed our progress past the front of its domain—and naturally, waited until the vast majority of the danger had passed before launching an attack.
“Ugly little critter,” Dev muttered as we left it behind.
I laughed. And it felt genuine. Like that first day, when there were moments Dev and I landed on the same planet and got along. It left a tiny warm spot in my chest. A lonely, forlorn little spot sure, but there all the same. The cold hold of the creeping stone through my body retreated marginally.
“Let me know if you need to stop,” I told Dev, and not just because my paramedic training insisted.
“Feeling better already.” He even took some of his weight off me to prove it. “Just being out of there is enough to make me feel 100 percent better.” His tone was thick with meaning.
I let it go for half a block, then asked, quietly, “What happened?”
He knew I didn’t mean here. We were at the end of the block before he answered.
“Friedrich, the fire sorcerer. He wanted somethin’ we had. My sister and I.” He snorted. “The spell I’m here after, actually. He offered all sorts of things in exchange for it. Power. Prestige. Money. So much money. But Lana wouldn’t sell it. It was too dangerous in the wrong hands and Friedrich’s were most definitely the wrong hands. So he stole it.”
“Bastard.”
Dev snorted. “Didn’t do him any good. Lana had, I don’t know, encrypted it or somethin’. He couldn’t cast it. That should have been an end to it, but Lana insisted on getting it back. She was going to go with or without me. So I went with her. He caught us. I was locked up in the basement with Friedrich’s apprentice.” He shrugged a shoulder to indicate his back. “I spent months in hospital because of her. Three operations to graft skin over the burns she gave me.”
“You escaped?”
“No. I was let go. While I was held downstairs, Lana was upstairs, with Friedrich.”
My jaw clenched as all sorts of scenarios went through my head. If the apprentice was willing to burn a man, what was the master capable of?
“I don’t know what he did to her,” Dev continued, speaking like he couldn’t stop now, as if he’d finally lanced the infection and was expelling the rottenness. “But he turned her. Forced her into decipherin’ the spell for him, but it still didn’t work. He couldn’t cast it. So he took his frustration out on my sister. I was let go a day later, dumped on a street in L.A. Aurum came to me in hospital. Told me they’d found Lana’s body.”
Somewhere deep inside me, the berserker rolled in muted rage. “Tell me Aurum took care of that prick.”
“There was no proof.” Dev straightened even further, using only one of my shoulders for support now. “Only my word and I have no real clout with the Council. I’m just a contractor, no one they have any reason to trust.”
“Fucking bastard,” I hissed, meaning Aurum. For being an all-powerful, grand vampire Primal, he certainly acted like a useless, hand-wringing politician.
Dev sighed. “There was nothin’ they could do.”
“It didn’t stop you, though, did it.”
“No. I went back, on my own. Friedrich’s dead. Now I just have to get the spell back and it’ll be over.”
“You got the man who killed your sister, and yet you’re still going after a spell that doesn’t work?” Except I was starting to think it did work. Carver had somehow managed to cast it. The monkeys, Tanqueray, me. We were all proof of that.
“It’s too dangerous,” Dev insisted. “If someone ever found a way to cast it…”
The way his voice trailed off didn’t fill me with any confidence, but I asked regardless. “If it was cast, could it be reversed?”
“No. Once a spell is cast, it’s imprinted directly into the sorcerer’s brain. Nothin’ short of a stroke or aneurism will change that.”
“Shit, no. I don’t mean that sort of casting.” Stupid sorcery being different to how movies said it worked. “If the sorcerer… uses it on someone. Can that be reversed?”
Dev scowled. Maybe I was making him think too hard.
“Not really. At its most basic level, sorcery is about changin’ things. I take gaseous nitrogen and change it into its solid form. Or I can flip a positive charge into a negative one, to create lightning. With the stolen spell, it’s that sort of manipulation, but on a much larger scale.”
“Yeah,” I grumbled as we turned the corner to where I’d left Car Kong. “Turning flesh into—”
“Stone monkey.”
“Exactly,” I said a second before Dev ground to a stop, his hand clamping down on my shoulder. “Hey? What’s—”
“Stone monkey!”
For the second time that day… no, wait, third time, there was a loud crash.
Jerking around, I stared in the direction of Dev’s stunned gaze.
“Oh fucking no you didn’t!” I shouted.
A couple of houses down the street, a giant stone monkey ripped a door off Roberts’ Prado and smashed it into the other door. A second grey-splotched creature bounced up and down on the roof like Marcel getting ready to launch. The top of the car already looked like a sagging trampoline, the windscreen shattered, pebbles of safety glass strewn all across the street and footpath. With a final bounce, the big monkey on the roof jumped up and landed, crunch, on the bonnet. The entire front end of the 4WD crumpled inward. With obscene chitters, the ensorcelled monkeys… played. It was the only word to describe their gleeful jumps and slaps and tail swishes that punched right through the shell of the vehicle.
I was racing toward it before reason could stop me. One hand raised, telekinesis building in my chest, I snarled, preparing to smash these things to gravel.
Something hard hooked in my left side and yanked. I spun around, involuntarily, loosing balance. In the split second before I crashed to the bitumen, I saw nothing. As in, there was nothing pulling me back, nothing had hold of me. But my left arm was wrenched around again and I tumbled down, going arse over head. Between the shock and anger, I felt the sharp touch of sorcery and a moment later, a spike of pain drove through my head.
When the pain let me go, the first thing I noticed was that I was wet. The second was the fact I was sprawled on steaming bitumen.
“Hawkins?”
Tentatively, I raised my head. So far, it responded to my commands and I found Dev. He was in the gutter, looking like he’d just crumpled up there. He was wet, too, and panting. Some of the moisture on his face might have been sweat.
“What happened?” I asked, testing my left arm.
“The rogue,” he said plainly. “He was directing the monkeys.” There was a bit of wonder in his tone.
Welcome to the world of the whacky.
“I drew up as much water as I could,” Dev continued. “To soak the monkeys, then freeze them. But the rogue sent them away before I could. He’s gone, too.” With a shake of his head, he repeated, “Stone monkeys.” Dev looked beyond me and frowned. “He managed to cast the spell.”
“Yeah, I was getting around to telling you.” I rolled over. Things a bit further afield came into focus. Like the thrashed Prado. It was going to take God’s own panel beater to fix this one. “Fuck.”
Roberts really was going to kill me.