A shabby pile of rags sat up with a start, awakened by some furtive noise. Gendreau’s pearlescent blond hair flew around his head in the early-morning breeze, now gray and cottony with soot.
Under the bridge, it was still dark. The magician sat in a pebbly scree next to one of the struts, opposite the crashed Winnebago. Wind blew smoke in his face. Squeezed in his slender hands was the Osdathregar, the witch-killer dagger. She’d handed it to him before he ran after the girl.
The girl …
At the bottom of the ravine he could see the dried blood where Marina Valenzuela had fallen. A vulture perched on a rock next to it, inspecting the tacky red splatter, looking for carrion to salvage. Tuco’s grotesque lizard torso was still down there, a pile of green and black, and the vulture picked at the tangle of gore hanging out of his severed waist.
The biker gang must have taken Marina’s body.
Yellow lizard eyes stared lifelessly up at him as the carrion-eater pulled at Tuco’s guts. Gendreau hefted a baseball-sized rock and threw it. The bird took off, heavy wings beating the air.
“Ah, God. Aaahhhh.…” He sat back and pressed fists against his eyes.
Such a fucking coward.
Memories loaded into his head in chunks and starts like computer programs: the previous night’s battle, running after Carly, fleeing into the darkness.
“Wait! Come back!”
Running, the girl running, cutting through the motel pool area.
“Stop!”
Werewolves chasing them. Two. Three of the slavering, laughing, capering beasts, chasing them through the motel.
Had to hide. Carly broke for the bridge. The magician didn’t know what she had in mind—fleeting thoughts of seeking safety in the Winnebago, or perhaps some deluded need to go down into the ravine and find her mother—but he had the idea to hide under the bridge. Some part of his mind told him that it was a futile endeavor—no doubt they would find him under there—but it was the only cover he could see. He overtook her, sprinting, his Italian leather shoes clapping, outpacing her, and ran for the bridge guardrail.
“Down here!” he called to her, skidding down the wash. Rocks tumbled around him. But he was alone.
The girl did not follow.
Footsteps overhead. She had continued on, running across the bridge. He was about to shout, “Down here!” but the sound of panting and of toenails clicking across asphalt made him hold his tongue.
“No!” screamed Carly, as the wolves caught her. “NO!”
Rooted to the spot, heart pounding, shaking like a tuning fork, Gendreau prepared himself for her screams as the wolf-men shredded her, but there was only struggling and swearing.
“Let me go!” she screamed. They were carrying her away.
Panic laced his fingers behind his head, and Gendreau withdrew into the shadows under the bridge, crouching at the top of the ravine’s slope like a gargoyle, trembling, listening to his heart thunder in his chest until he was sure the werewolves had gone away, and then he cried in utter fear and shame.
Engine. Getting closer. Louder.
The magician opened his eyes. A vehicle squealed across the bridge, grumbled down the long, sandy highway, and screeched to a stop in front of the motel. The clap of a door slamming shut.
Scrambling out from under the bridge and over the edge of the ravine, the magician stood and beheld a pitiful sight: the house behind the motel was only a pile of embers, a tumble of black pikes pointing haphazardly at the gray sky. Smoke loomed over the scene like a tornado, rising into the sky, drifting into the east. In the front yard, someone was on his knees in front of a woman in a jean jacket. From here it looked like Navathe. The woman pointed a hunting rifle at his face. Navathe was wounded, holding his side, a vivid patch of blood soaking into his Batman T-shirt.
“Hey!” Gendreau shouted from the bridge.
Both man and woman looked at him. The woman swiveled and aimed the rifle down the hill, shouldering the stock. POCK! A bullet whirred in and clanged off the guardrail next to him. Gendreau screamed, ducking.
No second shot followed.
Still prostrate, he peered through his filthy hair at the top of the hill. Navathe was talking to the woman and she had lowered the rifle.
Tucking the Osdathregar into the back of his belt, Gendreau walked up the hill with his hands up, his expensive shoes digging troughs in the loose soil. Great swaths of the hillside were scorched, the grass seared and black, crunching under his shoe soles. Roasted wolf corpses littered the property, at least twenty or thirty of them, smoking in the morning air. To his horror, it smelled like pulled pork.
When he got to the top, he went straight to Navathe and held out his relic healing ring, starting on the wound in the pyromancer’s side. “Thank you so much,” said Navathe, teetering forward onto his hands in the soot and dirt.
“Thank God it’s not another gunshot wound.”
“What do you mean, magicians?” the woman asked. She looked natural running around with a hunting rifle, black-haired and plain, Latina, slim and fit, wearing all denim and sensible combat boots. She looked like a survivor from a zombie movie.
“Just what I said, lady,” said Navathe. “Unnngh! Magicians, as in, people that do magic.”
“That what you’re doing?” she asked, gesturing with her elbow. “Magic?”
Hummingbirds of red light flickered between the curandero’s ring and the claw marks in Navathe’s side. As they watched, the ragged skin slowly knitted itself together. “That’s what I do, ma’am,” said Gendreau. “I do magic.”
A ringtone cut through the morning, startling all three of them with a tiny voice yelling in Spanish. Still staring at the two men in suspicion, the woman tucked the rifle into her armpit and took out a cell phone, answering it in the same language, and giving the two men a suspicious sidelong look as she did so.
“Andy,” said Navathe.
“What?”
Navathe rubbed his face exasperatedly and hesitated, as if the words were cold, hard diamonds embedded deep into the coal of his mind and he had to chip them free. “I don’t think she made it.” All of his cheeky confidence had fled, and his hands shook. “She was in the house when it came down.”
No need to ask who “she” was, the she in the house.
Gendreau’s face and hands went cold, and his guts turned to water, his heart becoming heavy stone and sinking into his bowels. He stood up without saying a word and walked on numb stilts toward the tumble of still-smoking ruins.
Most of the front porch had survived the fire, except for a trail of black going up the front steps. The roof had collapsed, though, dropping a pile of embers on top of it.
Burnt paint and filth made a foul horror of the air. The only sounds were the subtle crackle of hidden fires, the hollow breath of the wind, and his shoes in the dirt. Gendreau stumbled around the side of the house, trying to find entry through the debris. The house had fallen in, creating what looked like the remains of a gigantic campfire, a pile of gothic black spikes. “She’s a demon, she’s a demon,” he muttered endlessly to himself, eyes searching the black angles of the house. “She’s a demon, she’s a demon. Of course she survived. They live in fire, don’t they? They’re filled with fire. They’re all about fire. Fire is all they know, right?”
The back wall of the kitchen was mostly intact—an eight-foot shark’s tooth of clapboard—but had fallen in, creating a sort of archway where he crawled through on his hands and knees onto a mangled treasure map of linoleum.
To his right, a slope of blackened wood planks led up to empty space where the second floor had been. Gendreau peered through a gap by the fridge and saw where the living room ceiling had collapsed into the basement. “Robin?” he asked, or at least he tried. His voice caught in his throat. Standing in the destroyed kitchen, clutching the Osdathregar against his chest, he tried again. “Robin? Are you in here?” His chest seized in a hot, hard anguish as his eyes darted over the ruins. “Come on, Miss Martine, Robin, you’re okay. You’ve got to be. You’ve got to be.”
Navathe slipped under the kitchen wall. “Hey,” he said gently.
“What?”
The pyromancer pointed at the bottom of the pile of wood where the ceiling had caved in on the cellar stairs. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t have to.
Pins and needles raced up and down Gendreau’s body and he turned away, pacing in what was left of the kitchen. A sob forced its way out of the pit of his stomach. A carbonized hand protruded from underneath the fallen ceiling, gnarled into a black, claw-like fist.
Tucking the dagger behind his belt again, the curandero reluctantly joined Navathe as he started trying to lift it off of the hand’s owner, and together they hauled the burned wood up, dumping ashes all over the floor, and turned it aside with a crash. Smoke and soot roiled up as it broke. Underneath was a figure coiled into a fetal position, a charcoal ghost.
Faint orange light traced veins across her embrous skin where tissue still smoldered inside. Her teeth were white pearls in a black mouth.
Tears streamed out of Gendreau’s eyes. “No, no, no, no, no.”
“I’m so sorry, mate,” mumbled Navathe.
All they could do was stare in despair and disbelief. “I don’t know, I just don’t, how could this happen?” Gendreau raked his arm across his face to wipe away the tears and left a war-paint stripe of gray. “I don’t know how demons work, but damn. Damn, man. How could this be? I don’t get it.” His brain was a tangle of disconnected thoughts, all fighting for attention. “She grew her fucking arm back. This shouldn’t have been—”
His hands started to hurt. Gendreau looked down.
“Ow.” The silver Osdathregar in his fists. “Ow! Shit!” Getting hot, as if it had been heated over a fire. In seconds, the heat was unbearable. He fumbled the dagger on the floor.
Thin blue smoke—like the oil smoke coming out of a model train’s smokestack—whispered up from the linoleum underneath it, as if it were eating a hole through.
“What in the world?” asked Navathe.
Crack.
Navathe twitched and took a step backward. “Oh, my, God. Oh my sweet Jesus God, Andy.”
The corpse moved.