LAURA DRISCOLL DIDN’T spook easy.
She heard the noise in the back and knew it wasn’t her imagination this time. Something was loose in the container-hold of the semi—loose and moving around. “No questions asked” was one thing, but it was still her job to make sure the cargo arrived in good order. She had a reputation to uphold: that made decision-making easy. Check it out, lock it down. No excuses.
Blue eyes the colour of anti-freeze worried in the rear-view mirror.
Thin white-blonde brows frowned.
“All right,” Laura said to her reflection.
Laura pulled the semi over to the narrow shoulder of the highway, put her blinkers on, reached into the glove compartment, and checked her Sig Sauer 9 mm, taking the safety off. She was alone on the road over three hundred days a year and though she’d never fired the weapon outside a range, she’d shown it once or twice. Early on in her career, while she was still driving-truck for Corona Western, she’d had the odd run-in, and cause to show force. Once she’d bought her own rig and became an established owner-operator however, the testing of her boundaries had stopped. Guys knew how hard the life was, and if she could pull it off, then her youth, slight build, and elfin face couldn’t be held against her.
The gun was for people outside the life. People who didn’t know her accomplishments, didn’t know to respect her. Roads were full of people who didn’t respect much of anything these days.
A waning moon shone cold over the deserted stretch of highway north of Peace River. Normally, Laura would have put pylons out, but they were in the back, and that was where the noise was. Stepping down out of the cab, her boots made a solid, reassuring sound against asphalt. She held the gun in both hands, pointing the barrel down and away from the truck as she walked with measured strides to the back of the container, feeling the autumn breeze frigid upon her cheekbones.
What distinguished Laura from the competition was her engine-craft─learned from her foster dad like other kids would learn sports or yard-work─and her phenomenal driving-endurance. She’d never told anyone, but it had slowly become legend, that Laura Driscoll never slept. She’d passed every drug-test she’d ever taken too, so it wasn’t pharmaceuticals that had led to her record turn-around times. She just didn’t need sleep, not like regular folks did, and that, along with her maintenance expertise, had been her leg up. You free up all the time you waste sleeping in your life, and you can get to a place at twenty-nine that most folks don’t reach until their forties.
Laura reached up to shoot a bolt and brought her hand back on reflex. The door to the container was warm. Not boiling hot or anything, but startling, given the conditions of the night. And then, as she stared at the door, she heard a loud whump against a side panel. She took a step back, licked suddenly dry lips.
There it was all right. Proof positive. Truck wasn’t moving, so something inside had to be.
It did occur to her that there were other ways of handling the situation. She knew Constable Swartzman was maybe an hour away—she could use the radio to call the shop, and she had his personal cell as well. But that could backfire, given how lucrative the load was, and how off-book the shipping had been. She’d picked up the freight at the terminal in the Port of Los Angeles from a business-lady identifying herself as Ms. Burke. Ms. Burke had been fairly specific about the bonus structure, schedule, and the need for discretion. That was fine with Laura: wouldn’t be the first time she’d run something into or out of the oilsands that may or may not have been strictly legal. She was looking at a second truck, hiring a driver, partnering-up in a small warehouse to store parts and inventory. She wasn’t in the business of asking questions that might get in the way of her goals.
“Girl like you can make people do things,” her dad had once counselled. She’d been thirteen then, starting to get phone calls from boys. She and her pop had spent that rainy Saturday in the covered work-shed, re-engining a restored Fiero with a V8 for one of his friends. They were taking a break, sitting on lawnchairs in the open doorway to watch the water come pelting down. “You know that. You can count on that, I suppose—your call. But my job is to make sure you can do for yourself, whatever you decide.” He’d often talk about raising Laura as his “job”. He saw it as a duty to his dead wife, the woman who had taken Laura in as an infant orphan from Child Services, raising her to the age of five before the plagues swept north and made their claim. Not that Ed Driscoll hadn’t loved Laura in the way any natural father would have. But the duty to Willa was always there too.
What would you do now, Dad? Laura asked the ghost of her father’s memory. Stroke had paralyzed him when she was fourteen, and she’d spent a year taking care of him before the end. Left school, got herself legally emancipated. Took care of it all—every last problem—because she could.
She knew exactly what her old man would do.
Holding the gun in her right hand, she stepped forward, worked the eerily warm bolts to the container door with her left, and flung the door wide. She stepped back and raised the gun with elbows locked, taking grim pride in the lack of arm-shake despite the Sig’s heft.
A gust of warm air hit her face, blowing strands of blonde back from her hairline. The air was moist, salty, tropical. She recognized it from her Cozumel runs. Definitely not Canadian air.
The container was dark, largely empty. As her eyes adjusted, she could see the single crate she’d been carrying, sitting basically where it had been secured. In the far corner she saw the murky outline of the dolly and other pieces of equipment, also secured. She cursed herself for forgetting the flashlight in the cab, but the door was open now and some kind of line had seemingly been crossed. In the distance, she could hear a guitar riff on the radio, couldn’t place the song.
With her left hand, she tugged the step-extender down, and lunged her way up into the darkness. The smell of the ocean was unmistakable, along with hints of rotten seaweed.
She moved slowly towards the crate—a wooden box about a metre-square—and saw that the lid was off. That was weird, as she could have sworn they’d used packing-nails on it, but it was also a relief. It was an explanation. Something rational in a situation that had been threatening to slither away from her.
She didn’t fully relax until she’d got close enough to look in behind the crate. There was enough shelter there to hide someone, if someone had been there, but someone wasn’t. The box had been tied down, and the lid had come off in transit—that much made sense. The sound she’d heard when she’d stopped the truck and gotten out of the cab still remained peskily mysterious, but it was starting to seem like an anomaly, something that might safely be ignored.
She peered down into the box, frowning in the gloom. Packing straw obscured the details, but the thing appeared to be a stone statue or figurine of some kind. She could make out a misshapen, inhuman skull, slanting into a body of sluggish, repellant proportions. She was about to reach in and feel for better resolution, when a man’s voice spoke from outside, on the highway: “Miss?”
Laura whirled, raising the gun and advancing two steps. It was her instinct to advance, despite a small, reasonable impulse she had to retreat farther into the darkness of the container.
A man stood on the highway, his outline dimly visible in the taillights and moonlight. A wolf emerged from the grass behind him and curled in around his leg. Another wolf stood in the middle of the road, staring back the way the truck had come.
The man’s eyes glowed like red embers in a face otherwise obscured by darkness. “Miss,” he repeated, his accent striking Laura as being vaguely Irish, or Scottish. “Would you mind lowering your weapon?”
“I would,” Laura said. Her voice was steady, but her heart was slapping about in her chest. The wolf nearest the man had moved towards the extendible-steps: she could hear it sniffing at the metal.
“Away wi’ya,” the man said to the wolves, and they immediately responded, bounding back off the highway towards the treeline. Then to Laura, he said: “Show of good faith?”
“Who are you?” Laura demanded. At this range, she could peg his chest no problem.
“Oh,” the man smiled, his teeth shining in the darkness like moonlight off a machete. “I think you have a sense of that.”
Laura faltered for the first time. He’d said in words what she’d been suppressing since the first noise had gotten her attention.
“I’ll be in the cab,” the man said. Long black hair blew in the wind. He put hands in the pockets of a black great-coat and began walking around the truck, out of Laura’s line of sight.
Laura swallowed, listening to footsteps, hearing the door on the passenger-side open, feeling the weight of the man legging up into the cab.
Laura took one last look around, then jumped down from the container and shut the doors. Movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention and she glanced into the tree line. Multiple pairs of eyes reflected moonlight from the darkness: wolves gathering in the gloom, waiting. She’d heard a report that wolves had been making a come-back in these parts, along with cougars and other wildlife. So you guys’re probably natural at least, she thought as she headed to the front of the truck.
She took a deep breath before opening her door, trying to envision the mechanics of getting into the driver’s seat while maintaining readiness with her gun. When she was ready, she proceeded, bounding with fluid grace from one action to the next. She didn’t always move like her pops—that deliberate country-boy gait. When she was scared and acting on instinct, she moved like something else.
She’d switched the gun to her left hand, holding it across her body as she sat. She left the door open, both for the ease of exit, as well as for the fact that closing it would leave her vulnerable for a moment.
The man was playing with her radio, sorting through the stations. Up close, his hair was long and black and very coarse; his eyes did actually glow with a light of their own and his face—while human-esque—was longer and more chiselled than normal, possessing jutting cheekbones and severe angles at the brow and jaw. He settled on a pop song—Britney, Ariana, Taylor maybe—Laura didn’t know much about music. The creature smiled a sharp-toothed smile, turning to lean his back against the door.
“I’m solid enough now that you’ll do damage, if you fire that thing,” he said. “Good thing you’ve got ice-water in your veins, hey? Makes me feel safe.”
“You’re not real,” Laura said.
“Yeah, well, reality’s shifting, kiddo. Has been for a while now.”
“Why am I seeing this? You.”
“We’re family, lass. It was time.”
Laura had nothing to say. In her heart, outside of her words, she felt something true clicking into place. But just because it was true didn’t mean it was easy. “What do you mean, you’re . . . like my father?”
“Not exactly. It’s not family in the human sense. After all, you’re making me as much as I made you. I could maybe say you’re my mother, but that wouldn’t be exactly right either. Part of me is in you though. You’re in between, kiddo. Makes you special. Useful.”
Laura narrowed her eyes, thinking things through. “What am I carrying?”
“Hey, I thought we agreed no questions asked?” The man had been replaced by Ms. Burke, sitting there in her power skirt-suit and heels, snooty rectangular glasses, and pixie-cut hair. The transformation was so sudden, Laura almost fired her gun on reflex.
The man was back, smiling his smile. “But if you’re going to ask, I guess that’s the right question, all right.”
“What is it?”
“Something old that’s new again. Something very, very old, whose time has come.”
“You paid me in real money.”
“Aye. The electronic age—ain’t it a miracle? Makes things a lot easier. Just one part of the reason things’re happening now, and not before.”
“Can’t be good, what you’re up to.”
“Can’t be good, can’t be bad, can’t be stopped. You signed a contract, honey. Whatever you think of me, I know you’ll honour that.”
Laura crimped her lips. He had her there.
“Look,” the creature said, changing gears. Laura thought of down-shifting as his face took on a less ironic, more contemplative aspect. “We’ve a few hours together. You’ve got a delivery to make. I’m not going to hurt you—quite the opposite actually. Why don’t we get a move on? Get to know one another? What do you say?”
Laura stared at the man for a moment, taking him in. It was a look she didn’t use often, because she knew it made people uncomfortable, but she gave it to him full bore. She couldn’t know it herself, but the look was like the look of wolves: dispassionate, alien, predatory. She found that people didn’t like to lie to her under that gaze; found they tended to fidget, and give away more than they intended. The man in her cab didn’t fidget, didn’t seem uncomfortable, and he clearly knew what she was up to. He returned her stare with a knowing look, letting her take in whatever she needed to take in.
Laura got the sense that he could hurt her if it came down to it, but that he’d had the drop on her before, and could’ve made his move then. She got the sense that he was getting more and more real the more she talked to him. Maybe without her, he’d be all air, and shadow. Maybe he needed her, and while that didn’t mean she could trust him, it meant that their relationship was grounded in something. Something she could understand.
She made up her mind the way she always did: suddenly, and decisively. She closed her door, then reached across to the glove compartment, putting the gun away right in front of him.
The man watched her and nodded in acknowledgement of the new bargain struck.
BECAUSE THIS IS where the action is, honey—the energy. The oilsands. The blood of Tiamat—the great cosmic dragon herself─in the very soil. Here’s where we come through.
IT’S BEEN A long time coming. Since Greek fire, and the petro-sorcery that protected Byzantine ships from their own conflagrations. The energy of the dragon echoing in the roar of the combustion engine. Panzers rushing across steppe. Nagasaki searing. All of it a symphony, for those who can hear. Ask me, Standard Oil splitting into the seven sister companies was a little on the nose, what with Tiamat’s own body forming the heavens and earth and all. But that’s part of her charm—the irony. E pluribus unum—out of many, one. The calculus: differentiation and integration. I mean, really—how could anyone miss the signs?
BRITNEY SPEARS? HER songs are our anthems, baby. Where you hear “Toxic”, I hear a triumphal Roman fanfare. I see torches in the night; I smell the pyres.
THEY’D ARRIVED AT daybreak, the sun turning low-lying clouds into thick clots of blood thanks to the late-season forest fires farther north. She’d been given GPS coordinates, not an address: the place was only accessible at all because of an old trunk road built by some oil company, some years ago, for some reason.
To the naked, human eye, it looked like a junkyard. Maybe an abandoned work-site. There were the remains of a corrugated metal shed and some wooden outbuildings. There were the skeletons of old pick-ups, and cable-spools; old railway ties and tractor gears. Everything was rusted and breaking down under the elements. To the human eye, a junkyard: to the eye that could see, a cemetery. Hallowed ground.
“You gonna help me with this?” Laura had asked, working the dolly in underneath the crate; backing the load gingerly out of the container.
The man had grinned, shrugged. His face had changed over the course of the trip—becoming less elongated and angular. Becoming more human. He’d watched her as she lowered the heavy stone idol down the ramp, offering helpful supervision.
She might not have been as strong as some men, but she never pulled muscles, or needed a chiropractor and could work all day long. Worked out in her favour, over the long haul.
RAIN PELTED DOWN, which was odd for September up here. You’d get snow or drizzle this time of year, but this was a good heavy rain; the big raindrops of May arriving in fall. Still cold, but not as cold as it should be. Almost tropical at times: the wind would shift, carrying with it the inexplicable scent of papaya and rot.
“You could stay,” the man said. He really had changed by this time. He’d aged maybe—the long, lupine lines of his face had contracted into something that was merely “seasoned” rather than grotesque. His hair was greying at the edges, and he’d grown a salt-and-pepper stubble-beard. His eyes still glowed in shadow, but in full light, they looked normal. Deep-set and penetrating, but normal. Human.
She looked out at the rain—listened to the noise of it, like someone throwing handfuls of stones at the metal. She knew what he was offering.
The more real he seemed, the more dreamlike she felt her own perceptions becoming. They’d set the idol up deep within the shed, placing it on a concrete block foundation. There was already a stone altar in place, brought out of Asia via the ivory-smuggling trails of East Africa, apparently. It was like pieces of a cosmic puzzle, each put in place by some unwitting pawn hired by a mirage, paid in crypto-currency. And it was humid in the shed, like the botanical house at the zoo that housed all the exotic plants. The air was heavy, and time seemed strange: wherever Laura looked, it felt like the first time she’d seen that part of the shed.
“You don’t have to,” the man continued, “but you could.”
“I know,” Laura said. “It’s tempting.”
“But what? You don’t know if it’s real yet?”
“No. I know it’s real.”
“What then?”
She turned her gaze from the rain. “You’re going to be hurting people.”
“I’ll be hurting them anyway. It’s just what’s going to happen. A great and terrible burning.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t think that’s for me.”
“Kind of compartmentalizing, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I am. I know I haven’t given you your money back. Call me a hypocrite.”
“We all draw our own lines. That’s probably something you got from Ed.”
“Yep.”
“It’s surprising to us, you know. How much of a difference that man made to you. In you. How much pull he had.”
“He’s my dad. I mean . . . whatever I am, that’s gotta be part of it.”
“Sure.”
They both turned their attention back to the rain for a while. It would burst and back off, but to Laura’s ears, it seemed as though it might be letting up.
“Listen,” he said when he mistook her restlessness for a readiness to leave. “You can always come back here, if you have to. We don’t want you to feel like you have to choose. Things get hard out there, things don’t go the way you planned . . . you’ve got a home here.”
She looked at him, and nodded, knowing that when she looked at him with real attention, it gave him strength, made him solid. When he looked at her in turn, she didn’t know what she got out of it, but it was something.
She could feel herself becoming under his gaze.
“You know what you don’t get about my dad?”
“I guess by definition the answer there would be ‘no’.”
“My mom.”
“Okay, crypto-girl: go on.”
“She was an academic—quantum physicist. Worked as a freelance data-scientist.”
“With Ed Driscoll? That’s some odd couple.”
“On the surface maybe. But Ed had a way about him—he grounded people, centred them. I always imagine her gravitating towards him because of that. The weight of him.”
“Fascinating stuff. Mortals!”
“She didn’t just adopt me by accident. She predicted me, searched me out. Selecting me collapsed my wave function, located me on purpose. Averaged me in. She saw the signs; she heard the music. She died young, but Dad knew the purpose, did the best he could to anchor me in the world.”
The man frowned for the first time, mind racing to fill in the gaps in Laura’s story. His mind raced, but she was already at the finish line.
“They saw you coming,” Laura said as she withdrew the ancient African knife she’d obtained from another demon on another run, the hieroglyphs on the blade glowing a pale lunar blue. “And I’ve been waiting.”
THEY’LL BE DRAWN to you, honey—they’ll need you. They’ll need to be seen by you. You’re a strange attractor, Lor: embrace it.
MOST FOLKS’ ROOT cellars were filled with roots, preserves, storage─and Laura’s was too. But there were also boxes of her mother’s old books and notes; laptops and thumbdrives and external hard drives. Feynman diagrams incorporating unlikely vertices; equations that may as well have been incantations. And there were the objects accumulating on shelves now—statues and masks and talismans from all parts of the globe that made their way to Alberta by some force not unlike gravity. The new one—the hideous, misshapen, tentacled affair─had been too heavy to do anything other than place in a dark corner and put a blanket over. Laura wondered at the confluence of dark energies radiating out from the accumulated artefacts; thought of fission reactors and critical masses. The seething will of the dragon sullen in the dark. Super novae waiting to explode.
She thought it might be dangerous concentrating the items here, but she also thought it was too late to worry about, or change now.
Demon money was stupid-good, and it accelerated her time-table. She had the down payment for the second truck, and had an option on a third, if a nearby oilfield liquidation went her way. She was building the company her father had told her would be necessary, not just as a source of self-sufficient income, but as a bulwark against extra-dimensional incursion. Her mother had had the math, her father the practical, mundane solutions for occult problems. It had fallen to Laura to execute.
She felt the memory of her foster parents like a physical weight, like a force that made her human. She wasn’t in-between as the demon had said. She’d made her choice, and the choosing had made her in return.