“WE’RE MAKING LOUSY time,” Calliope said.
Vikous looked up from his breakfast and mumbled something around a mouthful of toast and scrambled eggs. He kept his hood raised in the diner, but Calliope found that she had no trouble seeing his face within its shadows anymore.
“We left my house four days ago and we haven’t gotten halfway there.”
Vikous lifted a gloved hand and extended his index finger in the air while he swallowed. “First day we got started late, then the trouble at the motel.” He extended a second finger. “Short day to get to Gerschon’s, which was sort of out of the way, but worth it.” He extended a third finger. “Then the snowstorm came on in the middle—”
“I know,” Calliope said. “I know why it happened.”
Vikous speared hash browns with one hand and grabbed packets of jelly from a dispenser on the table with the other, the former going into his mouth, the latter into a pocket. “Then what’s the problem?”
“I want this to be done; I want to get where we’re going and find out what’s going on.” Vikous gave her a look. “What?”
Vikous continued to watch her face, then set down his fork and wiped his mouth with the back of his gloved hand. “You’ve got some sort of notion that getting where we’re going will fix everything. This isn’t a fairy tale—it really couldn’t be, at least not the kind they tell little kids. There’s more to it than that.”
Calliope set down her coffee cup, hard enough to slosh some of the liquid over the edge. “Then what’s the point?”
“You tell me,” Vikous said. “You’re the one that got Gluen’s supersecret message from behind the grave.”
“I’ve told you what the message was,” Calliope said. “So maybe you could quit—” She stopped. “Tell me what you just said.”
Vikous paused. “You’re the one White sent a message to?”
Calliope shook her head. “No. You used a phrase for it.”
“Behind the—”
“Yes, that.” Calliope said. “Where did you learn it like that? It’s not behind, it’s beyond.”
Vikous shrugged, looking puzzled. “It’s how it’s said with . . . well, us, I guess . . . all of us. What difference does it make?”
“Walker. Walker said it that way.”
Vikous searched her face. “The one from back at your office?”
Calliope nodded. “You know him.”
Vikous’s mouth twisted. “Walker’s a potential problem, but I think we dodged him. I’m pretty sure those guys from the motel were sent by him, and we lost them, so he’s out of the picture.”
“Not my picture,” Calliope muttered.
Vikous raised an eyebrow, his expression wary. “I’m not following.”
“I’ve been dreaming about him.” She frowned. “I think. I don’t really remember much about the dreams, except he’s there and asking me questions.”
“Walker is?”
Calliope nodded again, her body tense for reasons she couldn’t name.
Vikous searched her face, then set down the fork and started to slide out of their booth. “We’d better get moving.”
“The number of people tangled up in this,” Vikous said, “is getting hard to keep track of.”
Calliope pulled into the passing lane for the third time in twice as many minutes. “At least you know these freaks. I’m completely lost.” She glanced at Vikous without turning her head fully. “Sorry.”
He shook his head, barely listening. He worked his unlit cigar between his fingers, but paid it no other attention. “The way I figure it, that makes at least three groups, not counting Gerschon, tied up in this.”
“He’s one of the—”
“He’s a satyr.” Vikous said, answering the question before she asked. “Was. Gave it up.”
Calliope tilted her head, something half remembered inside her knowing it was the truth. “Gave it up?”
“Some of it.” Vikous shrugged in his peculiar, hard-to-watch way. “Enough to fit in.”
“Another way to hide.”
“Not . . . no.” Vikous shifted in his seat. “What Gerschon is doing isn’t hiding as much as . . . removing just enough of himself that hiding isn’t required.”
“I like him.” Calliope felt defensive on the little hairy man’s behalf.
“I like him too,” Vikous replied, “but that’s what he did. He let some of himself go to fit in. Gluen did the same kind of thing.” His jaw muscles worked. “Walker took it a lot further.”
“And you . . .” Calliope’s voice was even, but sounded distant to her own ears. To hear Gerschon equated to the sour-faced Walker made something in her chest go cold and hard. “You hide. That’s better?”
“It’s not—” Vikous cut himself off, but Calliope could feel his glare even though she kept her eyes on the curving road. “We all pay prices. The prices Gerschon and I pay are different. Neither is better. Okay?”
“Okay.” Calliope let the hum of the tires on the highway fill the cab before changing the subject. “Three groups?”
“Three groups.”
“You don’t think there’s overlap somewhere?”
Vikous considered it, then shook his head. “No one’s reach goes that far. White’s killer would have had to plant someone ahead of time. Walker might have sent the goons at the motel, but he definitely wasn’t there, and that’s weird, because he’s the sort of guy who wants to be hands-on.”
“You know him.” It wasn’t a question, but Calliope felt unexpectedly tense, waiting for his reply.
Vikous’s expression soured further. “I do, and that’s not great news.”
Calliope considered mentioning Faegos, trying to explain his involvement without mentioning the diner or the deal she had made with him. She shoved the idea away. “I just want to figure out what happened to Joshua. He said—” She swallowed. Her mouth was dry. “Or why. He told me what happened, I guess, but not why.”
Vikous did not ask for more. “If we keep going and nothing gets any worse than it is, we should be fine. Nothing’s come apart yet.”
Calliope thought of the encounter with Faegos and shook her head a bare fraction of an inch—almost a warding gesture. “Sounds good,” she said.
Vikous glanced at her, then settled his head back, a slight crease in his brow. He said nothing, but in Calliope’s relatively brief experience, his silence was usually significant.
“What?” she asked.
He looked at her, frowning. “ ’Scuse me?”
“What’s the look for?”
“What look?” He gestured at the front window. “I was looking at the road.”
She worked her jaw. “You had a look.”
“I did not—” He stopped himself and turned back to the road. Calliope let the silence build up, a trick she had taught herself in the last few years. It didn’t come naturally to her, but she’d met very few people who could leave a conversation unfinished when faced with a long stretch of—
“I was expecting another round of questions,” Vikous said. He looked at her, wearing a vaguely irritated expression. “I say something like ‘as long as things don’t get worse, things probably won’t get worse,’ and I kind of expect you’re going to bust me on it. You didn’t. It caught my attention.”
Calliope smirked, shaking her head. “I’d just been thinking that the fact that you hadn’t said anything probably meant something.”
Vikous grunted. “Apparently we’re both more interesting when we aren’t talking.”
Calliope’s mouth quirked. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone’s told me that.”
“Likewise.” Vikous leaned his head to the side, stretching his neck. “I don’t mind the questions, though, just so you know.”
“Really?” Calliope cocked an eyebrow.
Vikous made a sour face. “I can’t always explain everything, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t good questions.”
“I’m supposed to be good at that,” Calliope said. “Detective agency.”
“Sure.” He frowned. “Actually, I’ve got a question about that.”
Calliope kept her hands loose on the wheel and her tone light. “Why a crappy skip trace agency?”
Vikous rocked his head back and forth. “Sure, if you want to put it that way.” He made a gesture with the hand resting on the door’s armrest. “I’ve heard you sing, so you can’t tell me that chasing down bail jumpers and taking pictures of cheating husbands is the thing you do best.”
“It’s not,” Calliope said. “But sometimes you can be really good at something and still not be able to do it very well, you know?”
Vikous looked at her, his expression made even more blank by his shining black eyes.
Calliope sighed. “Being a good singer doesn’t actually mean I’m very good at being in a band.”
“Ahh,” Vikous leaned back in his seat. “Yeah. Okay.” He smirked.
Calliope scowled at him, sidelong. “What?”
He shook his head, as though it wasn’t important enough to repeat. “Just wondering if you were McCartney or Lennon.”
She considered that, watching the dotted lines of the highway slip past. “Buddy Holly,” she finally said. Her voice was soft, nearly lost in the noise of the road.
“Ahh.” Vikous paused, as though choosing his next words carefully. “So no Nick and Nora Charles fantasies behind the White Agency, then?”
“What?” Calliope shot him a look. “Josh and I weren’t together when he started the agency.”
Vikous frowned. “I didn’t—”
“It was his idea,” Calliope continued, speaking over him. “I had to get my cert as we went. Took more than a year. It wasn’t fun.”
“Whoa, hey.” Vikous raised his gloved hands. “Sorry, I didn’t—”
“Just . . . you know what?” Calliope cut in. “Let’s not. Okay?”
“Okay.” Vikous settled back in his seat. A few seconds later, he murmured, “You just ask good questions, is all I meant to say.”
The road rolled by beneath them, filling the small cab with its drone. Vikous almost didn’t hear Calliope’s quiet “Thanks.”
“It’s always how I thought Weathertop would look,” Calliope said. They had emerged from the mountains and were driving north along I-25. Vikous didn’t need to ask what she was talking about. A monolithic slab of native stone jutted out of the tall hill that rose just to the east of its namesake city of Castle Rock. It had loomed ahead of them for the last twenty minutes of their approach, drawing attention with a casual authority.
“You’ve been through here before?” Vikous said.
“I drove back home to visit my sister a couple times,” Calliope said. “Then I came to my senses.”
“You flew after that?”
“I stopped going at all.” She turned her attention back to the massive hill. “The last time I came through here was with Josh, sightseeing.” She paused. “Stalling, really. We were going to stop and hike up to the top, but they’ve got all kinds of . . .” She shook her head. “It wasn’t something we could set up in an afternoon.”
“Why not set it up on the way out and do it on the way back?” Vikous scanned the hill that dominated the skyline, almost as if he was looking for something in particular. When Calliope didn’t reply, he turned toward her.
“We didn’t feel like it on the way back.” Her eyes drifted down to the dashboard dials and displays. “I’m going to stop for gas and get something to eat.”
Vikous nodded and pulled up his hood.
While Vikous filled up the Jeep, Calliope went in to the station to pick up something that passed for food. Neither cared for eating while they drove and both preferred (if that was the word for it) meals in diners, where the quality of the cook could be determined by the number of professional truck drivers sitting inside. But a sense of urgency had grown between them, hour by hour, and Vikous didn’t stop her when she went inside.
She emerged from the station with a flimsy bag in one hand and a cardboard tray holding two massive plastic soda cups in the other. Vikous didn’t acknowledge her return; when she went around to his side of the Jeep, his attention was focused beyond the silent pump to the highway exit visible down the street. “What’s going on?” she asked.
For several moments, Vikous didn’t reply. Calliope pulled her coat more tightly around her against the cold. “Something’s here,” he finally said.
The statement chilled Calliope more than the mountain air. “Do you . . . who? Was it waiting for us?”
Vikous’s hood moved back and forth. “I don’t think so. I think they’ve been following us.”
Calliope frowned. “For how long? I thought you could tell when—”
“Maybe since we got back on the interstate, which I’m suddenly thinking might have been a mistake. I can’t tell, though. Someone’s been shielding them.” His eyes narrowed. “They aren’t now.”
Calliope didn’t ask why; that was one of the million-dollar questions to which they never seemed to have the answer. She could come up with a number of reasons herself, all equally likely and none of them comforting. “Can we keep going? Lose them going through Denver or taking back roads?”
Another head shake. “Not being found is one thing; losing them is something else entirely. Besides”—he glanced up at the mountains that crowded in at the town from the west—“I don’t think they’re going to wait around after it gets dark.”
“So tell me you have a plan.”
Vikous turned toward her. She could see him wink within the depths of his hood. “Let’s eat, and you can tell me what kind of problems you had when you tried to do that hike with White.”
Dusk comes early to a town that lies directly against the eastern face of a mountain range. By four thirty in the afternoon, the streetlights were already brightening. Atop the rocky slab that gave the town its name, the lights of several radio towers winked in the gathering dark like sentries.
Calliope and Vikous climbed the steep incline of the hill from which the massive stone formation rose up, pulling themselves along in places with handfuls of chaparral that dotted the rugged slope.
“Tell me again,” Calliope said as she pushed herself along, “why we’re doing this?” The cold night air burrowed into her lungs. The region was only a few spring thunderstorms away from officially being a desert—throw in the fact that they were right alongside a mountain range, at night, in the first part of November, and Calliope was certain that she was, at that moment, as cold as she had been in the last ten years. She hadn’t missed the sensation.
“We need to . . . lose . . . whoever’s following us,” Vikous said between breaths. Calliope was perversely glad that, uncomfortable as she was, she wasn’t the one suffering the most from the climb. “That means . . . need to . . . jump.”
“Jump?” Calliope’s gaze traveled up the nearly vertical cracked stone face that rose above them. “I don’t think I want to lose them that bad.”
Vikous could barely get enough air to chuckle. “Not that kind of jump. We need to find a way . . .” He shook his head. “Ask me once we get to the top and I’ve had a chance to puke.”
Calliope nodded and kept going.
The ground was loose and almost sandy near the base of the rock itself. Vikous sat on a flat stone, his hood up and his head lowered between his knees, his breath hard but steady. His hands were tucked into his midsection, and in the dark of the new moon his silhouette looked like nothing so much as a nesting bird.
With skis tied to its feet, Calliope thought. Aloud, she said, “You ready to go, iron man?”
Vikous made a deep grating noise in his throat that made Calliope cringe, then spat noisily. “Oh yeah.” He spoke directly to the ground. “I’m fantastic. Top of the world. Kill me when all this is done.” He leaned back and tilted his parti-colored face toward the clouded sky, inhaling shallowly through his nose. “I’m really too old for this crap.”
“Move now, bitch later,” Calliope said. “I’m freezing.”
Vikous threw her a glare that almost seemed to warm the air around her, but he got up. “You sure you’re ready for the next bit?”
“I don’t know. Where are we going?” Calliope’s tone was clipped, reflecting the tension she felt whenever their trip took a stranger turn. So far, those twists had not been in their favor.
Vikous’s expression was unreadable. “Someplace else,” he replied, picking up a small, sharp stone and walking up to a deeply shadowed crevice in the stone. He glanced back and Calliope moved to join him as he bent and drew a line in the sandy dirt that stretched from one side of the crevice to the other then, standing, simply stepped over the line and into the shadows beyond. He vanished utterly into the darkness.
Calliope watched the crevice for movement but saw nothing. “What the hell,” she muttered, then stepped over the line.
“Borders are important,” Vikous said in the close darkness. “If you can’t find one, make one.”
In the face of the stone wall in front of them stood a small iron door, limned all around its edge by a flickering light whose source had to lie somewhere behind it.
Calliope looked back to where she’d just been standing and gasped aloud. Down the slope of the hill they had just climbed, the lights of the city had vanished.
Not really, said a small voice in the back of Calliope’s head. There’s just a lot less of them.
“What . . . ?” Calliope’s voice trailed off, robbed of all forward momentum. It felt to her as if every time she got used to the way things worked, someone dropped the ground out from under her.
“Welcome to the Hidden Lands.” Vikous banged on the door.
The portal swung open almost immediately, spilling torchlight into the crevice. A squat, bowlegged figure peered up at Vikous’s face without surprise, although his bloodshot eyes widened almost comically when he turned to Calliope. “Oy now, what’s this?” the thing nearly shouted, turning back to Vikous. “We don’ like yur kind aroun’ anysight, an’ these”—he jerked his bare, misshapen head toward Calliope—“r’ fur other things.” A dim spark of intelligence flared in the depths of his muddy eyes. “Or didjya bring us a pressent, paint face?”
Calliope knew exactly what a goblin looked like now. She also knew why they had been forced to hide; she wanted to beat this one bloody already. It was instinctual—a long-forgotten imprint flaring back into life. “Okay, Vikous,” she said, “every time you take me to meet someone new I want to kick their ass into their throat. It’s getting old.” The goblin snarled.
Vikous glanced over his shoulder at Calliope and stepped directly in front of the twisted guard. “I am Vikous,” Calliope heard him say in what she had dubbed his on-the-job voice. “I seek audience.”
The goblin frowned, obviously puzzled by the shift in mood. “Err . . . what’s she got to do widdit?”
“I am her guide,” Vikous replied in the same tone. The guard’s eyes twitched in surprise to Calliope, then back to Vikous. He pulled himself more erect, which almost seemed painful.
“Err . . . awright.” He frowned in thought again. Finally: “Err . . . what’s yer purpose of . . .” He squinted. “Whattayer here for?”
“Trade,” Vikous said without hesitation.
The goblin snorted. “Aww, yer shoulda said ’at from the firs’ bit.” He glanced at Calliope and cleared his throat. “I mean, err . . . come on in and be welcome in the Keep a’ the King.”
It’s not Weathertop, Calliope thought. It’s Goblintown.
They followed the bobbing gait of the goblin as it descended into the hill. Its skin was a mottled gray-green that hung in wrinkled folds from its twisted, rawboned frame.
“Nice friends you’ve got here,” Calliope murmured. “What are we trading for?”
“Travel,” Vikous said. “Their king can arrange to get us farther into the Hidden Lands. If we can arrange to do it quietly, we’ll lose the guys following us.”
“And we’re going to offer what for this?”
Vikous glanced at their guide. “These guys like to have bits of human culture. It doesn’t even really matter if what you have is valuable, they’re like pack rats.”
In the shadowy light of the torch, Calliope’s eyes widened as one tiny piece of the puzzle her life had become dropped into place. “Oh.”
Vikous glanced at her. “What?”
“That’s why you’ve been grabbing all those jelly packs at the restaurants. You must have been planning for this for a while.”
“Umm . . .” Vikous frowned, shaking his head. “No, I just really like jelly.”
Calliope blinked. “Oh, sure. That makes . . . sense.” She scanned the walls as she tried to recover her train of thought. You can deal with magic and monsters, she thought, but petty shoplifting leaves you speechless? Come on. She cleared her throat. “What . . . what were you going to use for—” She paused, looking at Vikous, whose face had twisted into an expression she could not interpret in the near-dark. “What’s wrong?”
Vikous shook his head, obviously struggling with some internal conflict. Suddenly, with a shock of expelled air, he burst into a low chuckle. Calliope stared at him. “You were joking?” she said.
He nodded, still laughing. The goblin glanced over his shoulder. “Oy, shut yer soup-hole.”
Calliope ignored him. “The jelly is for the trade?”
Again, Vikous nodded.
Calliope turned away from him. “Asshole,” she said, the sting of the words stolen away by Vikous’s redoubled laughter.
“I . . . I just . . .” Vikous gasped out. “I just . . . really like jelly.” His words dissolved into another laughing fit. Calliope elbowed him in the ribs to no effect; he was still chuckling quietly to himself when they arrived in the main cavern of the goblin king.
So, Calliope thought as she blinked back tears, this is what being buried in a giant cat box is like.
“Reminds me of your pepper spray,” Vikous murmured, his laughter all but faded away. Calliope could only nod; she didn’t want to risk taking the deeper breath that speech would require. There were few torches burning in the room; the light, such that it was, seemed to come from clumps of glowing matter that had been smeared in strange patterns on the walls and floor.
The goblin they had followed was taking a great deal of pleasure in his suddenly increased importance. Leading them across the center of the nestlike cavern, he announced their arrival by banging on whatever bit of metal or hard plastic could be made to clash or thump and calling out “vis’tors, vis’tors, vis’tors” at the top of his cracked voice. By the time they had crossed a quarter of the cavern, others had begun to stir, which only seemed to make the stench worse.
Their escort led Vikous and Calliope up to a recessed alcove in the far wall of the cavern into which a threadbare recliner had been jammed. An almost childlike goblin perched in the large chair, its sticklike legs jutting straight out from the front edge of the seat cushion. A tin crown smeared with filth tipped precariously on its head. It . . . he, rather, Calliope amended, was quite clearly naked except for the crown, and licked his lips lasciviously as they approached.
“Shek,” the crowned goblin said in a high and surprisingly clear voice.
“Vis’t— ehh, yes, m’lord?” Shek managed a clumsy bow.
“Shut it,” the king said.
Shek opened his mouth to speak but, at a glance from his liege, clearly thought better of it. The king turned back to Vikous and Calliope. “You have come to trade, flatfeet?” the king asked Vikous.
Vikous executed a stage bow, flamboyant and graceful while simultaneously foolish. “Indeed, king of the earth kin. We seek to travel farther into the Hidden Lands to which your home is a noble gateway.” He raised his face to meet the shrunken monarch’s gaze. “We also desire secrecy, which all know only the earth lords truly master.” He bowed to the throne again.
The emaciated thing atop the chair dipped its head, its eyes half lidded. Calliope couldn’t decide if he was trying to look wisely thoughtful or regally bored. “What do you bring in trade?” he asked.
Vikous swung his right hand low, bringing it up the left side of his body and across his face. As he did, packets of Smuckers and Knott’s Berry Farm jelly tumbled from the hidden space behind his fingers and dropped into his waiting left hand. The crowd pressed in around them made appreciative noises. “Foodstuffs from the lands beyond,” he said, his voice brazen and set to carry. “Reflections of the rainbow, fuel for your finest forges, fit only for a king and his most loyal followers.”
The king nodded, a sad parody of a potentate in his flabby and wrinkled nudity. He fixed his eyes upon Vikous. “Truly, the jester’s talents are not exaggerated.” His oil-slick eyes flicked to Calliope, then back to Vikous as he licked his lips. “No,” he said. His high voice somehow carried the length of the cavern.
Vikous froze, caught halfway through an acknowledging bow. “No, Highness?” He straightened and raised an eyebrow, motioning with one hand to stop a movement that Calliope hadn’t realized she was about to make. “If I may presume to ask, why do you decline?”
“I think I can answer that, Vikous,” said a voice behind them. “First, though, I’d like you to secure Ms. Jenkins for me.”
Calliope spun to face the speaker, already recognizing the voice. A few dozen feet away, Special Agent Walker’s sharp, saturnine expression seemed to glow softly in the place’s pale luminescence. Anger overwhelmed her surprise. “Unless you bribed these guys to help you, Walker, I think the only thing that’s going to happen right now is a righteous ass-kicking.”
Walker smiled, and Calliope remembered again how much that smile had bothered her. He opened his mouth to speak, shook his head, and pulled a gun from inside his coat.
Why am I on the ground? Who tripped me?
Calliope was having trouble breathing. She tried to get up but couldn’t quite get her balance to shift forward. She looked up and saw that Vikous was standing over her, tried to tell him to help her, but couldn’t get the words out. She tried rolling over, but her right arm wouldn’t work.
He used a spell on me, Vikous, like that one you did on Lauren. Help me.
“You didn’t have to shoot her,” she heard Vikous say to someone past her line of sight. Calliope couldn’t remember to whom he was talking, which was strange, because it seemed like it should be important.
He shot me? I thought . . .
And then she didn’t think anything at all.