Annalise pulled him closer, and Grant cried out in pain. “Did they move up the departure time? Change the flight plan?”
Grant’s eyes were almost bulging out of his head. “No. I have the work order from last week. We got the plane ready and it departed on time, just before five A.M.”
Annalise looked at me. I said, “She lied to us.”
“We’re killing her, too.”
Grant had a moment of panic. “Whoa, hold on! I—” Annalise shook him and he stopped talking.
I lowered my voice to take hold of his attention. “Who was on board?”
“I don’t know,” Grant pleaded. “I don’t! I really don’t. God, they never let the mechanics know who’s flying where. Too much corporate espionage. Too many death threats.”
“But you know where it’s going.”
He nodded. “Salzburg.”
Annalise shoved him to the ground. “We’re not done with you yet.” Grant started vigorously rubbing the spot where she’d held him, but he didn’t try to stand.
Annalise made a call and stepped away. I moved close enough to hear her over the sound of a landing jet, but only barely. “I need a peer, possibly two peers, to meet a flight that’s already en route to Salzburg. It’s likely that there are multiple predators on board, and likely that they are traveling there to seed more of their kind in—”
Shit. I stopped paying attention to her and turned back to Grant. He was looking around and touching the phone-shaped bulge in his coveralls.
“Hey,” I said, “you seem like a regular guy with a regular job. That’s why I haven’t taken your wallet and snapped a picture of your home address. Yet. You might work for some of the worst people in the world, but I hope you’re not lying for them, trying to cover up the murders they commit.”
He was suddenly very still. “Murders?”
“Why do you think we’re here? To steal tiny bottles from the minibar? Look. There’s a Friend Three, right? That suggests there’s a Friend Two and a Friend One. Is that correct?”
He nodded. “Friend One is a Dassaul—”
I waved at him to shut up. “Grant, I’m not here to shop. I’m here to find out about Milton Hardy’s planes and where they might be going. Where are they right now, when do they leave, and where are they going? Get me that information, and you’ll never see me, or one of my friends, walk into your bedroom in the middle of the night with a gas can and blowtorch.”
“Okay okay.” Grant managed to sit up straight against the door and cringe at the same time. “I have to make a call to find all of that out, okay?”
“Go ahead.”
He took out his phone and opened it. “God, who are you people?”
“What have we said or done to make you think you should ask that question?”
I sat beside him and listened to both sides of the call. Grant reached out to someone named Joachim, saying he’d been told they need all hands on deck for one of the other FriendShip jets. One or Two? Grant wasn’t sure.
They laughed together over the shitty communication at their company, then Joachim explained that Friend One was fueling up now, and they expected it to take off on time, once the last passengers arrived. It was Friend Two that had the problem. The diagnostic computer was throwing out an error code for the hydraulics, but they couldn’t find the problem. They were still trying to work out if the problem was with the software or the plane itself. Joachim said he was going through the software personally, in a tone of voice that suggested he would be insulted if Grant offered to take over for him.
“Hey, just trying to do what I’m told. Is this the plane that’s heading for New York?”
“New York? No, it’s Johannesburg. Don’t ask me where that is or why anyone would want to go there.”
I nudged Grant, and he pushed his luck. “Wait, so, the other plane is headed for New York? I was told—”
“Doesn’t matter what you were told, buddy. Look, I have to get back to it if I want to keep my job. Let’s get together for another movie marathon, hey? It’s your turn to pick.”
That was the end of the call, and the end of Annalise’s call as well. She disconnected and stalked back toward us. She looked pissed. “Okay. Someone will be there to meet that plane. What the fuck have you two been doing?”
“There are two others, boss, both flying out of…”
“San Jose International,” Grant said.
“And they’re leaving today. One is heading for Johannesburg, which I’m pretty sure is in Norway or Denmark or somewhere.”
“South Africa,” Grant said. “That’s a country.”
“Ha ha. Very funny. We didn’t get a destination for the other jet, so maybe we should head over there and ask.”
Annalise nodded, then she bent down to Grant, grabbed him by his belt and the back of his neck, then lifted him off the ground. Her hand on his neck held him steady for a moment—a moment he spent frozen still, his mouth gaping—then set him on his feet.
“What am I going to see if we go inside? Hardy’s other jets, the ones you said were in San Jose?”
“No, no! It’s an empty hangar. Look.”
He fumbled with his keys and opened the door for us. Annalise shoved him inside and I followed them both.
The hangar looked like every jet hangar I’d ever seen on TV, just without the jet. It smelled like scorched asphalt and oil changes, and there were tools and machinery neatly arranged along the walls. Grant’s coworkers, assuming he had them, were long gone.
That he’s about to summon a bunch of predators into the world, and he wants to set aside his own food supply.
We’d been pulled out to Tracy to save Daria’s life and kill Hardy, a job that was only half-done. Then we’d been tricked into running to Watsonville for a plane that was already gone. The urgency of this mission felt like a heavy weight pushing us down hill, but our momentum kept turning away to secondary problems. We needed to find these jets and deal with them. Right now.
“Boss,” I said, and Annalise understood. She started toward the exit.
I turned to Grant, and the expression on my face must have told him what I was going to say. “I never met you,” he blurted out, “and you were never here.” I jogged after my boss.
“How are you holding up?” she asked.
“I’m tired,” I said, truthfully. “How long have we been awake?”
“Too long.” She didn’t sound tired. I knew she needed sleep, though, just like anyone, so I had to assume she was exhausted and refused to show it. I decided to be just like her.
“Let’s get this bullshit with the planes handled. Our first priority has to be stopping these predators. Then we can rest up and take on Hardy again.”
“And Serrac,” I said. “I didn’t get a count of how many people we faced outside of Daria’s place. If some of the cousins got away—”
“We’ll do what we have to do. What we always do.”
The trip from the hangar to the fence line seemed longer than the trip from the fence line to the hangar, even at a quick jog. Maybe the difference was that we now knew we were behind schedule instead of ahead of it.
I’d expected Hardy to be a powerful enemy. We knew he’d acquired an original spell book and become a primary, but I’d expected him to be a human being. I’d expected—hoped, really—that we wouldn’t need violence to deal with him. I’d hoped we could parley.
That’s what the meeting in that underground theater was supposed to be. Hardy would tell us his bullshit. We would tell him ours. After a little back-and-forth, we’d work shit out.
And what I’d really wanted, which I didn’t have the nerve to admit to anyone, including myself, was that we could recruit him. Make him a peer. God knows we needed them.
But Milton Hardy wasn’t a primary anymore. He was a thing from outside our world, and he’d come here to feed on us. I couldn’t negotiate with a shark that smelled blood in the water, whether it understood me or not.
And while this new version of Hardy didn’t have access to his spells—which was an assumption I made because he hadn’t used any against us—he did have everything else that Hardy had accumulated over his long, stupid life. He had money and influence. He had thousands of assholes who would do anything to help him out, and not all of them were actually on the payroll. Many seemed to be ordinary people with a FriendShip account and a hard-on for anyone richer or more powerful than them. They were nothing more than ordinary dipshits with a reflexive need to defend the rich.
This predator could ship off its underlings anywhere in the world, and they would do anything for him, including starting a new invasion from the Empty Spaces.
Shit.
This fight felt overwhelming in ways none of our previous jobs never had.
We climbed into the van and drove off, heading for the 101. But before we reached the highway, we had to drive through a long, winding two-lane road, which was the perfect place for me to let my thoughts churn.
It wasn’t just that we’d spent days at the mercy of a smear campaign that we were unable to cut off. Hardy himself—our enemy—promised to do it as an olive branch so he could lure us into a trap. If he wanted, he could turn that harassment back on with a phone call. He could probably triple it, too.
And it made me sick to my stomach to think about the cousins we had faced just a few hours back. When I faced them before—during the absolute clusterfuck that brought me into the society—they were summoned out of the Empty Spaces with an enchanted circle that sat four people around the edges and one in the center.
That meant five people could be turned into predators at a time, and I suspected that was some sort of maximum, because if cousins could have summoned fifty or five hundred at a time, they would have. They wanted all of their kind to be pulled from the Empty Spaces, slipped into human bodies, and then start tearing people apart for their raw, bloody meat.
Last night, I’d killed four.
Was the fifth Serrac himself? Or possibly one of the two snipers? I ran through the possibilities again, knowing the snipers might have swapped weapons and died on Emily’s lawn, or they might have retreated when things went wrong for their pals. Or maybe they didn’t know anything about summoning spells and predators. Maybe they’d just been ordered to take positions and shoot targets.
That meant the fifth cousin could be someone we hadn’t met yet.
Or maybe there was no fifth. Maybe Hardy sat in one of those spaces on the circle so he could cast the summoning spell, and the cousins didn’t have the power to take over another predator.
That assumed they’d only used the summoning circle once. And I had no reason to make that assumption.
Here I was, with my boss, chasing an enemy who had sent one jet to someplace in Europe, a second to South Africa, and a third to who-the-fuck-knows-where. What were they going to do in these places? Summon more cousins?
The urgency of this situation was still driving me forward, and I had to fight the urge to stamp on the gas. I could feel the desperation growing inside me.
But Annalise would pull this out, and I would help her. That’s what we did.
We finally merged onto the 101, then the 87, and early-morning traffic trapped us in the outside lane and slowed us to a crawl. I could have gone faster on a bicycle, but we had no choice. We had to grit our teeth through yet another delay.
Annalise turned to me, and for a moment I thought she was going to say some shit like Hurry the fuck up, Ray, or Why did you take us this way, you fucking moron, and I realized that if she did that to me, in this moment, with these thoughts in my head, I was I was going to absolutely lose my shit. I was going to tell her to fuck all the way off at the top of my lungs and maybe set the fucking van on fire right here on the highway.
But what she actually said was “You’re not usually this quiet, Ray.”
I took a deep breath. “Boss… Annalise, do you trust me?”
“The answer to that should be pretty obvious by now, but yeah, I do.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. We’ve talked about this in the past, and you’ve always told me to fuck off, but this time I think we really do need help.” I told her my thoughts on the cousins, and the snipers, and the planes. I mentioned that we had been tied up with one thing or another for days, hitting delay after delay, and that if we needed to take on all these different enemies, in so many different places, with so many resources that the society simply couldn’t match, we were going to fail.
This time, Annalise didn’t tell me to fuck off. She was thoughtful for a minute, then said, “I’m one of the weaker peers in the society, you know.”
“I know.” What had she once told me the society was? Unequal peers.
“Asking for help would just confirm that the others were right all along,” Annalise said, “that Eli was wrong to put these spells on me. Even after decades of hard work, they still think I’m not in their league. They still think I don’t fucking belong. And none of that shit would matter except that they could expel me.”
“Shit.” That hadn’t occurred to me, but it should have. Of course the Twenty Palace Society could kick people out. Every group could.
“That would turn me into an ally at best, and I’d lose the support of the society for… everything. Expenses, legal troubles, travel, all that shit. I wouldn’t stop fighting predators, but I’d have no support at all, and believe me, that might sound like it would be a cool tv show or something, but in real life it would be impossible.”
“You’ve been posting wins lately, boss.” When we’d traveled to the First Palace back in 2012, the society and their people didn’t believe Annalise and I were doing so well. They thought we were lying about the jobs we went on. We proved them wrong.
“With you, yeah. I have two advantages over those assholes. First, I carry a lot of spells when I go into a fight. Most of them can’t be bothered to really stock up on magic in their downtime.”
I’d cast a few spells in my time, including the ghost knife sitting in my back pocket right now. It was an incredibly painful thing to do, like setting yourself on fire. “Fuck them.”
“Second, I have you and your way of cutting through the bullshit. I’m not sure why, but you can see things as they really are, and you can work out the truth from the least little bit of evidence. You help me get right at the source of the danger. Plus, you do your share of cleaning up these fucked-up messes.”
“That’s what I’m here for.” Traffic loosened up for the usual mysterious reasons, and I was given space to press the accelerator.
“Which means the other peers are giving you the credit. Assholes like them formed their ideas of the proper roles for men and women back when people rode around in horse-drawn carriages and shot each other with flintlock pistols, and they’re powerful enough that they don’t have to update their fucking world view.”
She sighed, and it was the weariest sound I’d ever heard in my life. I kept my mouth shut, waiting for her to finish.
“So, Ray, the reason I have never agreed to ask for help is that it might cost me everything and get me flushed out of the Twenty Palaces toilet into the ordinary world. That last time the cousins were here, Callin showed up to babysit me, and what did he do? Fuck-all. When we went to Washaway to deal with Ansel Zahn and the sapphire dog, Pratt breezed in like King Shit and got himself laid out within, what, a day? You hated his guts, but you took the trouble to save him. I can promise he wouldn’t do the same for either of us.
“My point is that the peers have power but don’t know what to do with it. Most of the time, they do nothing, and the rest of the time, they blunder into shit unprepared. So, for-fucking-give me if I sound like I’m blowing my own horn, but the society needs me. It needs us, and it needs to trust us. It’s ludicrous that we have to call them for help, because they suck. What we really need is to call us for help. More of us.”
She was right. Of course she was right.
She sighed again. “Still. As much as I hate to say it, we don’t have many options, not when the threats are so spread out. You’re right. It’s time we brought in more people.”
Up ahead was the turn-off to the airport. I forced my way into another traffic jam, inching up the ramp toward the feeder road. The delay was excruciating, and I watched every jet that took off, wondering if Milton Hardy was already on it.
Annalise was on the phone, making arrangements with the society to put a team of investigators on Serrac’s people to make a list of people who might have a predator in them. She told them about Hardy, his planes, his Ark, his so-called “Originals,” and his dead family. She also asked for another peer to come clean up the cousins.
She hung up. “They’re sending Elias Diding to clean up Serrac’s mess, but he has to fly out of Tel Aviv, so it’ll take some time. The investigators will be on the job within the hour.”
I nodded and kept quiet. Tel Aviv was too far. I should have asked her to do this earlier, but we’d spent days feeling like we were either faced with petty, irritating bullshit or were on the edge of ending this mission.
And everything kept going wrong.
We could still pull out a win, though. I was sure of it. We could still track down the assholes who needed killing and make that killing happen.
Eventually, we made our way up the ramp. There was a traffic light, but it was practically useless, since other cars—and three different charter tour buses—stood motionless in the center of the intersection through three turnings of the light.
I was wringing the steering wheel again, trying to turn all these other vehicles into puffs of smoke through force of will alone. Finally, something up ahead loosened up and the bus actually moved out of the intersection onto the feeder road to the airport. Someone in the Audi in the lane beside me let out a huge, bellowing Hoo-fucking-ray! and I felt oddly comforted by the voice of my new best friend.
Then, as the bus fully left the intersection—but still stopped in the lane beyond—a line of black SUVs caught my eye. There were three of them, and they were pulling into a space, bumper to bumper, right behind that bus.
Whoever was inside was heading for the airport too.