Annalise seized her arm and dragged her outside. “We’re getting out of here and away from this stink. Then, you’re going to call whoever you have to call to find out what the fuck Hardy is doing and how Serrac fits into it. You’re going to do that right now.”
Woo didn’t argue. We went down the front stairs and got into her car, which was a model of Audi I’d never seen before. Being stuck for seven years in the belly of a predator can leave a guy feeling out of touch. Woo had a blue compact SUV called an e-tron. It wasn’t until the engine started up that I realized I was getting my first ride in an electric vehicle. The future had appeared while I was locked away, doing other things.
Annalise took the front passenger side, so of course I had to sit in the back with the crappy headrests. Luckily, the boss pulled her seat all the way up. Lauren waved to the guard as he opened the gate, then breezed right by when he saw she wasn’t alone and yelled for her to stop.
The car smelled of curry and salad dressing, and as I shifted position, my foot bumped a piece of black luggage. It was made of soft leather and looked like the most expensive duffel bag in the world. “You taking a trip?”
Woo glanced at me in the rearview. “Constantly. Milton has me jumping on and off planes at a moment’s notice. I keep a go-bag packed at all times.”
“When was the last one?”
“Omaha, two weeks ago. Something to do with server farms, and Milton wanted to see cattle. For some reason.”
“When’s the next?”
She glanced at me again. “There won’t be a next.”
Annalise made her drive around the block and park behind our van. A huge utility truck with a crane was just pulling up behind the repair van that had arrived earlier, but it wasn’t the blue PG&E truck I was expecting. It was white instead, with a logo on the door that was too small and tasteful to read. Their headlights lit up the crowd of looky-loos in athleisure outfits who had gathered around to gawk. Woo didn’t want to switch vehicles, especially once she saw the condition of our seats, but Annalise insisted. In the end, Woo did as she was told. Family servant.
Behind the wheel again, I drove into the darkened streets, pulling over to let more repair vehicles and a couple of cop cars pass. While I did, Woo got on the phone to someone called Golnar, and we listened to half a conversation that went on for nearly five minutes. How were things? How was Takashi? Oh, that’s wonderful, really wonderful.
Eventually, she got to the point. Was Milton traveling? What about Tristan Serrac? Friend Three? And how many in his party? Okay. I’ve written that down. Thanks so much, Golnar. Let’s catch up soon. She disconnected the call and told us that no, Milton Hardy hadn’t planned an unexpected trip, but he had filed a flight plan for Friend Three to fly Tristan Serrac and a team of six men to Salzburg. It would leave tomorrow at one.
Annalise asked “Friend Three?”
“That’s a joke. The company has two jets, Friend One and Friend Two, but when we charter something from a private company, we call it Friend Three. They’ll be flying out of Watsonville for some reason, with High Blue Aviation. Look, let me off here. I have to get some things done, and you two have been making my life very complicated.”
Annalise turned toward me, and I knew why she was giving me that look. The roads outside these California estates were sidewalk-free, but I spotted a wide space between the asphalt and the scrabbly tree line and pulled over.
“Great,” Woo said with a note of irritation. “Now I can walk back to my car and—”
I threw the ghost knife at her. She yelped in surprise and flinched—her reflexes were surprisingly good. The spell passed through her forearm, then circled back to my hand.
“I… What was that? You did something…” She looked at her arm, seeing the cut in her sleeve and her unmarked skin beneath.
“It’s a card trick. Are you going to keep playing games?”
“I’m sorry” was her answer. “I wasn’t trying—sorry, actually, yes, I was trying to be rude, because sometimes rudeness is necessary in my everyday responsibilities, but I shouldn’t have said that.”
“We don’t want to wait for tomorrow. Serrac has already hurt too many people, and I want you to put me in front of him right now. Understand?”
“I do, but I can’t ask. If I dig too much, Milton will hear about it, and I might lose my job. I’m paying my parents’ mortgage.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Annalise snapped, “the guy fucking killed his kids. Why haven’t you quit already?”
I looked at my ghost knife. It could cut the aggression out of someone, but it couldn’t make them care. “Because she still doesn’t really believe he did it.”
“I’m sorry,” Woo said again. “I don’t think you did it. I really don’t. But Milton? Milton Hardy? If you really knew him, you’d know it was impossible. Something else must have happened.”
“Something else? Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something! A black swan event that no one could have foreseen, which would ruin a good and brilliant man if people got the wrong idea. Do you think the media would dig any deeper than the surface if this came to light? Or the cops? They’d jump to the obvious conclusion like it was a winning lottery ticket, and they wouldn’t care if they were wrong. All they would care about is how big a bite they could take out of a big-time CEO, and how many people would see them do it. So, no, I don’t believe he did it. And I need to find out what really happened.”
“What the fuck.”
“I believe you mean well,” Woo said, as though we would find that reassuring, “and I’m not even remotely a fan of Tristan or his people. If you tell me they’ve done bad things—hurt people, maybe killed them—I going to believe you. Maybe he even…” She waved her whole arm toward the back of the van, and I needed a moment to realize she was suggesting Serrac had killed Milton Hardy’s family. “That’s why I got you his flight information. But I can’t go farther than that, and I certainly won’t go against—”
My phone rang. There was no name, just the caller’s number. I answered, saying, “Wrong number.”
“Ray, it’s Daria. Milton Hardy is outside. He’s just walking up and down the street like he’s trying to catch a whiff of us.”
I started the van, then turned around in my seat and looked at Lauren Woo. “Get out.” Then, into the phone, I said, “Give me your address.”
It was still the middle of the night. As soon as Woo slammed the door, I stepped on the gas and swerved into the road. In the rearview, I saw Woo pick up the pace, running for her car with her phone in hand.
“We didn’t exactly turn her to our side, did we, boss?”
“She gave us Serrac’s information. That will have to be enough. Drive.”
In California, everything is far away in the middle of the day when traffic is at its worst, but in the hours after midnight, there was an open freeway for just about every need. Daria’s sister Emily lived inland from us, in a place called Tracy, and my phone pointed me to the nearest freeway on-ramp. We had to drive south before we could turn east, exceeding the speed limit by as much as the van could handle. Which wasn’t much. I only hoped it would be enough.
“They’re too far,” I said, as I swerved into the lane for the 580. My knuckles were white against the steering wheel, and I shook them, one at a time, to try to take some of the tension out of them. “She called because she needs our help, but she’ll be cold by the time we get there.”
“Shut up,” Annalise said. “Drive.”
I did, bearing right up the ramp toward Stockton, then breezing through the traffic signal that shone eternally green through the long hours of the night.
He treated them like strangers… Lauren Woo had said.
Then I heard Milton Hardy’s voice in my head.
Human relationships are so ingrained in their psyche that they define themselves by these relationships, or by their lack.
A terrible question popped into my head. I didn’t want to ask it, but it fell out of my mouth before I could consider whether to say it aloud or now. “Boss, why would a primary—a guy who became a primary months ago and has all this power—use a bomb?”
She clenched her fists and stared down at the floorboards. If I had been her, I might have pounded the dashboard. “Shit. Shit shit shit.”
“I’ve seen spell casters fight each other,” I said. “He should have been able to mop the floor with us if he wanted. Right? I mean, my ghost knife cuts through magic and living things, but he had the power to just say no.”
“Right. But he didn’t. He used a bomb, destroying part of a project that he has dedicated years of his life to building. I thought he’d decided to sacrifice part of it to frame us as terrorists. I mean, would that help his PR? Would it make him richer if he spun it the right way? I don’t know.”
“Boss, why did we reject the idea that Hardy was not human anymore?”
“Because that shouldn’t happen to a primary. It can’t. I told you once that primaries didn’t crap out nuclear weapons, but they are still powerful in a way that goes beyond a list of discrete spells listed in a book. Understand? It’s a big-enough shock to learn that Dmitry, who was new to the society when he first joined as a secondary to another peer, could be replaced, but a predator taking out a primary just seems beyond possibility.”
“Milton Hardy talked about humanity as a ‘they.’ It was only one slip-up, but I noticed it. And Lauren Woo told us he treated everyone like a stranger when he returned to work. And that he always wears the same clothes. And… Shit. Boss, he didn’t enter the underground ark thing with us because maybe he couldn’t. Maybe the sigils he put in place when he was a primary are like kryptonite to him now, and he had to ghost through the rock and enter from the bottom.”
She rubbed her face with her hand. “If he’s a predator now, for real, he’ll have to feed. There will be a trail of bodies.”
I sighed. “Boss, it’s northern California. There are probably nine or ten different serial killers within a hundred miles of San Francisco. Minimum. And if this predator has access to Hardy’s money and Serrac’s hired psychopaths, it might have its victims delivered, like a fucking pizza. The cops might not even know.”
Annalise cursed again, then stared through the windshield into the darkness. My own thoughts turned toward Milton Hardy again. I’d seen him on TV several times, and I knew that some of the footage—where he was seen playing with his kids or at an event with his wife—came from before their deaths and some after. I tried to pick out which showed him as a person and which were predator, and I realized I couldn’t tell. Not surprising, since even the people who spent every day with the guy couldn’t tell.
After some time, Annalise said, “I fucking hate this, Ray, and I blame you for telling me about it.”
“Only natural, boss.”
After some time, we got onto the 205. This took us directly into downtown Tracy itself, where the highway became an ordinary piece-of-shit California street, with the usual wide streets, endless parking lots, and bland tire shops.
Luckily, it was late enough that I didn’t have to worry about California dipshits who couldn’t keep their cars in a single lane, or who swerved into gaps in traffic as if each one came with a cash payout. I had time and space to pay attention to street signs and the map on my phone, which finally directed us onto a residential street. Back here, nothing moved except us.
Two rows of oaks stood between the street and sidewalk. The houses weren’t oversized McMansions, but they weren’t rundown trailers, either. They were mostly lawn with a bit of house in the center, tucked behind little fences, and they all had an unpleasant sameness to them, with their bay windows, white siding, and scorched brown grass.
The address Daria gave me was only two blocks away now. I scanned the street ahead, expecting to see the glow of a house fire or the flash of police lights. There was nothing but streetlights and darkness.
Annalise undid her seat belt and laid her hand on the door lever. She was as ready as I was to get into this fight. “Do you think they’ll be driving those big black SUVs again?” she asked.
“Probably.” I hated giving her such a half-assed answer, so I kept talking. “Normally, I’d expect them to stick with whatever bullshit makes them feel strong, but they’re overdue for a change in tactics. Assuming they know we’re coming.”
When we were a block away from the address Daria gave us, Annalise said, “Go around the block.” She opened the passenger door and got out without asking me to slow down.
I turned left at the corner. Glancing back, I saw Annalise walking slowly through the middle of the intersection, scanning the houses ahead.
The streets were empty as I rolled along. Not every window was dark, but most were, and the few lights flickered like a TV broadcast. Was it the weekend, when people could stay up all hours to watch movies or whatever? I had no idea what day of the week it was, and I didn’t care enough to look away from the road to check my phone. Not when Hardy or his hired guns might be nearby.
I turned again at the next block, then again, circling the block where Daria was waiting. As I drove straight through the next intersection I glanced through the passenger window to check on Annalise. She was standing completely still in the middle of the street, and I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary nearby.
There was nothing around me, either. At the next intersection, I turned right again, then again. Nothing and no one. My phone chimed, so I pulled up to the curb.
call her
I did. No one answered.
I wrung the steering wheel until I thought it might snap. If that motherfucker had killed Daria before we could get here, I was going to break every fucking bone in his body. Predator or not, he was going to suffer before he died.
At the next intersection, I could see Annalise again, but from the other direction. I pulled up next to her.
“Do you want me to circle around a block farther out?”
Annalise stood still, staring quietly at the darkness. “I feel watched. Do you feel watched? I’m not doing one fucking thing to check on our friend until I figure out what’s happening here.”
I parked and climbed out. There was nothing interesting on the street in either direction, and there was no breeze to rustle as much as a single leaf. I could hear intermittent traffic passing in the distance, and some asshole nearby was playing a shooter without headphones. Annalise once told me she had excellent night vision, but I didn’t. Maybe it was because she grew up in the years before electric lights. Maybe it was part of her magic. I didn’t know one way or another, but I was turning one way, then the other, pretending I could do something that she could actually do, and I felt useless.
So, I started walking in a circle, moving between the cars and across the street. I passed the address Daria gave us—she was in there, somewhere behind the darkness in those windows, but I didn’t know if she was alive or not. I couldn’t see any signs that Serrac or his people had kicked the door in, but I’d seen Milton Fucking Hardy float through solid rock, so a bunch of unbroken windows and doors gave me no comfort at all.
Nothing. I took out my phone and looked up Daria’s home address. The city listed was San Diego. I looked up her sister.
She lived in Tracy—on this block—but not at the address Daria gave us.
I crossed the street to the other side, keeping my back to Daria’s supposed location. Her sister’s house—Emily, her name was Emily—was in front of me and two houses over. The yard was fenced with chain link that was only three feet high, and her yard was brown and scrabbly from the drought.
Emily’s house was a little smaller than the ones around it, with a single story, a protruding arched roof over the front door, and a flat roof over the big bay window beside it. All the curtains were drawn.
But through the cracks in the curtains I could see that every light was burning.
“What are you thinking?” Annalise said as she came up beside me.
“I remembered the app our friends put on my phone to help us look up people and addresses. That’s Emily’s house right there.”
“Emily?”
“Daria’s sister, remember? The one from the hospital.”
“I guess I remember her. If I have to. Think they’re inside there, dead?”
Christ. How could she casually blurt out things that I didn’t even want to think about? “What I think is that I’m going to find out.”
The front gate opened with a squeak loud enough to wake the whole block, but I didn’t look around to check for silhouettes in windows. Act shifty, and people treat you like you’re shifty. It was a miracle no one had called the cops by now. The front walk was made of flat stones that looked uniformly dark in the starlight and dim glow from the house. There was a little wooden porch to step onto once we reached the door, and I took a moment to test the knob. Locked. The ghost knife fixed that. We went inside.
The interior of the house looked like an Ikea showroom at the end of a busy shopping day, but there was nothing that worried me except that everything was white, black, or some version of gray. My stupid brain wondered if it was possible that Hardy, whatever kind of predator he had become, absorbed colors now, but then I saw an oversized Harry Potter sleeping bag crumbled beside the sofa, with splashes of yellow and red.
I took a deep breath, trying to settle my thoughts. I needed to be able to tell the difference between an actual threat and boring taste in furniture, or I was going to be unable to protect myself when the real danger came.
There was no smell of death, but maybe there wouldn’t be if the bodies were fresh. I started moving through the house, and Annalise came with me. No sense in splitting up when there was just a living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom. All were empty. We couldn’t find any sign of a fight.
Would Hardy have killed them both and taken the bodies away? Or hidden them in a closet? He hadn’t done that with his wife and kids.
But if Serrac had sent a team of mercenaries into the house, they might have disappeared Daria and her sister like a fucking hit squad, so no one would ever know they were there.
There was nothing unusual in the closets, either. My dread that Daria had been murdered and her body dumped in the ocean was at war with the idea that every room that didn’t have her bloody corpse in it was a hopeful sign.
Annalise found the back door unlocked, and the back light was off. Emily’s side and front yards were decently large for a little home in a place like Tracy, but the backyard was tiny. A row of hedges and a miniature picket fence, put up by the neighbor on the adjoining property, was the only thing separating her dried-up lawn from theirs. The house on the other side of that fence was completely dark.
“Daria said Hardy was stalking the street in front of the house, and that he had people with him. If she called from here, they…” I went into the living room and picked up the Harry Potter sleeping bag. The phone the society gave her fell onto the couch cushion. “Okay. They called for help from here, then sent the address where they were planning to hide out, which is across the street. It probably belongs to a friend who entrusted Emily with a key. They couldn’t have gone directly there, so they went out the back and maybe circled around? If they were smart—and Daria is—they would have hidden out somewhere far away before returning here.”
Unless they got caught, in which case their bodies might be lying in the shadowy corner of a nearby yard, just waiting to be found in the morning. Or they would be completely disappeared, never to be heard from again.
“Boss, Hardy fucked off to someplace else, so let’s go knock on that door. Then we’ll know if he left because he killed our friends or he wanted to search for them someplace else.”
The front door hadn’t closed all the way, and it opened silently when we went outside. I was about to step down onto the front walk when Milton Hardy suddenly appeared at the edge of the porch. He became visible in a sudden flash, like a magic trick.
“Hello again,” he said in his weird, flat voice.
I had enough time to feel a jolt of shock and fear, then the barest surge of anger—not even half a second—before Annalise said, “How? Hardy was a primary.” Hardy quirked his head in confusion. “He had one of the original spell books.”
Understanding softened his expression. “Yes, he had deep knowledge and awareness, but he died anyway. He could have destroyed me easily, but he hesitated. I did not.”
The predator curled his right hand into a fist.
Two shots rang out, almost at the same moment, and something ruffled the shirt over my heart.
Hardy sighed. “I told them to go for the head.”