Mike drove way too fast. The tires hydroplaned across the surface of a black puddle and the cruiser swung around, the back end crunching into the door of a parked Mini-Cooper with bone-jarring force. Mike cursed under his breath, stamped the gas, and fought the wheel. Then an Amazon delivery truck came out of a side street, forcing Mike to jam the brakes, which sent the car into a complete three-sixty. He felt like the whole damn world was trying to prevent him from reaching the store. Mike was a man who seldom cursed, but he fired off a blue streak of particularly foul invective as he corrected again and plowed through the rain toward Boundary Street.
Beside him, Dianna was strapped in and had one hand on the inside handle above the door, the other clutched around her crystal pendant, and a foot braced on the dash. Her brown face was shocked to a butter paleness and she was saying rapid-fire prayers to spirits or gods or angels. Mike didn’t know which, but he hoped some of them were listening.
They splashed through another puddle, one that hid a pothole, and the jolt rattled Mike down to his bones. And then they rounded a corner and raced up a side street to the intersection of Main and Boundary.
Lightning flashed with showy drama, revealing a scene from one of the outer rings of hell. Motorcycles everywhere. Men with weapons crowding in through the shattered front window. More of them climbing over the fence to attack the cellar door. The flash of gunfire and the mad howls of attackers driven beyond sanity.
Mike slammed on the brakes, skidding half a block before the tires burned their way through water down to asphalt. The cruiser stopped hard and rocked on its springs.
“Get out,” Mike ordered. “Find someplace to hide. Call nine-one-one. Tell them ‘officer in need of assistance.’”
“No,” she protested.
Mike grabbed her forearm. “Listen to me: something’s going to happen right now. I don’t want you to see what I’m going to have to do here.”
He saw Dianna search his eyes and knew the moment when she saw his eyes change. Her nostrils flared as a scent filled the car—an odor that was in no way human. Something older, strange, primal. The scent of what he was beneath his skin.
“Get out,” he said, and already his voice was deeper, harsher. More of an animal growl than anything human. It was the secret he guarded so closely. One that only Crow, Val, and Jonatha knew about. It was something tied to the complexities of his parentage, tied to his survival and his shame. He cared about Dianna, even if he could never have her, and he did not want her to see this aspect of him. Not now or ever.
Dianna unclipped her seat belt, then surprised him by leaning over and kissing his cheek.
“I love you,” she said, and through his heartbreak he understood what she meant. And in her eyes he saw an understanding that ran very deep. She was psychic, after all, a sensitive, and Mike knew that on some level she understood him. It made him ache for her all the more.
Dianna jerked the handle and slipped out. He looked in the rearview and saw her duck behind a parked SUV, the phone already to her mouth.
Mike gunned the engine, spinning the wheels on the blacktop and then releasing the brake. The powerful Ford Police Interceptor shot forward, accelerating from zero to sixty in the eight seconds it took to reach Patty’s store. As the change worked its way through him, he could hear, even at that distance, the sound of an active fight inside the store, not in back. If the Cyke-Lones got in the back they’d crush all four of the people inside between a hammer and anvil. So Mike angled his car toward the bikes parked by the back fence.
His cruiser was a missile when it hit.
Two big Harleys flew into the air and the car’s grill wore a third one as it punched through the fence and smashed into the bikers in the yard.
Dianna Agbala peered over the hood of the SUV, staring in horror as Mike’s cruiser crashed through the bikes and bikers. She was a nonviolent person by nature and didn’t even like watching action movies. This … God, this was awful.
But then it got worse.
As insane as the last few days had been, as bizarre as tonight had become, those last seconds in the car with Mike had spun things up into the funnel of a tornado. She had actually seen Mike Sweeney begin to change. His eyes first, then his voice … and by the time she was getting out of the car, even the shape of his face was undergoing a fantastic metamorphosis. It was as if his bones were melting beneath his skin and re-forming into something else.
She knew what that thing was. Her insight told her, but even now, as she saw the hideous shape spring from the open cruiser door and hurl itself at the bikers, Dianna was afraid to think the word.
Because this was the world and there were no such things.
He could not be such a thing. Mike was a kind, sweet guy. A friend. A good person. However the creature that pounced on the Cyke-Lones was not any of those things. It was a beast, running on four legs, its massive muscles covered in stiff red fur, its ears raised to tufted points.
And the howl.
That awful howl of red delight.
She wanted to look away, needed to.
But that thing was still Mike Sweeney, and he was fighting to save Gayle and Patty, Monk and Crow … and maybe all of Pine Deep.
And so it would have been a failing of trust and a weakness of her belief in the Larger World to deny being a witness.