Fury of the Demon

Chapter 34

I waited until we were at least an hour out of Austin and then took an exit onto a small dark highway with a closed diner and one lone gas station. Four pumps. Grimy windows. Probably had the bathroom key attached to a hub cap. Only one car, which was likely the clerk’s since it was parked near the back of the building. It was the kind of station that no female traveling alone—especially in the middle of the night—would ever patronize except in a dire emergency.

It was perfect.

“Paul, any cameras?” I glanced in the rear view mirror as I drove past the station and saw him already typing away on his laptop.

“Hang on.” He muttered to himself for another few seconds, then looked up in triumph. “Got it. It’s an old system, so best I can do is shut it off. Should work okay.”

“You’re a god, Paul.”

He blushed and grinned. I turned around then pulled in at the front pump and shut off the engine. “I’ll go get snacks and stuff,” he announced, undoing his seat belt.

Bryce snorted. “You just want to see if they have Krunch ‘n Krackle.”

Paul laughed. “I’m addicted.” To my surprise he then looked at Mzatal. “Lord Mzatal, you wanna come with me?”

My surprise increased when a smile touched the lord’s face. “I do, Paul.”

Bemused, I watched as the pair exited the SUV and headed toward the station, Paul chattering companionably about how awesome Krunch ‘n Krackle was, and Mzatal apparently listening closely and murmuring responses. He likes Paul, I thought, pleased and weirdly relieved. Mzatal’s incredible capacity for affection and love had gone untapped and unused for far too long. Millennia. He needed friends.

I could relate, though on a much smaller scale. It was only in the past year that I’d developed an honest-to-god circle of friends. My posse. Even when things were at their shittiest, knowing these people had me in their thoughts made all the difference in the world.

I climbed out as Eilahn stopped at the pump behind us. She parked the bike, swung her leg over and shook her hair out of her helmet, then stood and preened a bit. I couldn’t blame her. If I looked that damn good on a motorcycle I’d likely do the same thing. She still rode Tessa’s bike, which I realized now probably wasn’t cut out for long highway road trips. Eilahn needed something more powerful—something fast. A sleek crotch-rocket or a model equally dangerous to mere humans. I smiled at the thought. Maybe when the FBI paid me.

Bryce came around the back of the SUV, eyes going to Eilahn for long enough to prove he was a healthy heterosexual male, but not so long as to be pervy. “I’ll pump,” he told me with an easy smile.

“I’ll watch and pay,” I replied and swiped my card on the pump, maintaining faith in Paul’s assertion that it couldn’t be tracked. My gaze went to the sight of Mzatal and Paul within the store. What would the super powerful demonic lord make of a back-country gas station? Did it have a big jar of pickled pigs feet on the counter? Or a container of boiled eggs suspended in an odd red liquid? In my entire lifetime of living in the South, I’d never been brave enough to try either staple of southern culture. I’d stick to M&Ms, thank you very much.

My musings came to a sharp halt as a vehicle pulled off the highway, and my gut did a nasty lurch at the sight of the light bar on top of the Crown Victoria.

“Shit,” Bryce murmured from beside me.

I kept the pleasant smile on my face as the cop pulled up and parked along the side of the station. Sheriff’s deputy. A sergeant, I noted as he exited his vehicle. Late thirties, tan shirt over brown trousers. Service weapon and a deceptively casual air. No gut. Fit and trim.

He gave me a polite nod and smile, then did a once-over assessment of Bryce, the SUV, and Eilahn, in a way that let me know he was more than some local yokel. This was a cop with a good eye who took his job seriously and probably had some damn good instincts. I loved his type, but damn, it was inconvenient for him to show up right now. Hell, he probably pulled in because there’s a carload of people and a motorcycle here in the middle of the night, I decided. That’s what a good cop would do, especially at a place right off the highway in the middle of nowhere with only one clerk working.

The deputy finished his assessment, gave us all another nod-smile then turned and headed toward the front door of the station.

“Shit,” I muttered. “Bryce, hang tight. I’m going to check on our two.”

His jaw tightened. “Damn it. I shouldn’t have let Paul out of my sight.”

“I’ll get them,” I said. “It’s all good.” I headed toward the door, trying to hurry without actually looking as if I was hurrying. Easy, right? Mzatal and Paul were still visible through the window. Paul was describing something, using animated gestures to emphasize his point. Mzatal actually smiled at whatever he said, and it wasn’t a polite, indulgent smile either. Mzatal didn’t do those.

A bell dinged as the deputy opened the door “Hey, Georgie,” I heard him say as he gave a nod to the clerk. “Anything happening?”

“Hey, Frank! Didja hear that Joe Johnson wrecked his—” Whatever Joe Johnson wrecked was cut off as the door closed behind the deputy. As I approached the entrance I could see Frank perfectly well, watched him do a scan-sweep of the store as he spoke to the clerk and checked the mirrors. His focus sharpened on Mzatal. And his face changed.

Mzatal abruptly lifted his gaze from Paul to the deputy, and his entire bearing transformed from the relaxed ease to Demonic Lord. The cop’s right hand went to the butt of his gun in what I knew was a purely instinctive reaction to a perceived threat.

“Lemme see your hands!” Frank shouted, eyes wide. I knew what he felt—power and menace held in tight control. And if he was even the slightest bit sensitive, Mzatal’s mojo would hit him that much harder. I barely managed to restrain myself from yanking the door open and barreling in. In this scenario, that would be a good way to get myself shot.

Paul let out a yelp and dropped the bags of Krunch ‘n Krackle in his hands, but Mzatal’s aura only grew heavier at the shouted order. The deputy’s breath quickened, and he drew his gun. His face showed his confusion as he sensed danger, even though there was nothing identifiable as a threat. I carefully pulled the door open, distantly noting that the clerk had wisely chosen to take refuge somewhere out of sight behind the counter.

Damn it. I knew the demonic lords weren’t the type to obey meekly, but surely every now and then they could unbend and cooperate a teensy bit?

Lift your hands and show him they’re empty! I mentally “shouted” at Mzatal while I kept my eyes on Frank and my own hands in very plain sight. To my undying relief Mzatal slowly lifted his hands, though he still radiated power like a nuclear reactor.

“Deputy, he’s not armed,” I said, pitching my voice low and calm but clear enough to carry. Can you please pull your damn aura in some? I thought furiously at Mzatal. “It’s okay. We’re not causing any trouble.”

Frank heard me. I knew that much by the battle between logic and gut instinct that played out on his face. His gun was out, but he hadn’t yet raised it to point at Mzatal. Thank everything for that, because I could imagine all too well what the lord’s response might have been if he’d felt threatened.

I risked a quick glance to Mzatal. “Boss . . . rein it in.” It wasn’t exactly an order. More like a Holy fucking christ, if you love me at all will you please do this tiny little goddamn thing for me? Then again, he too was operating on instinct, reacting in patterns carved by millennia of interactions with humans and other lords. “There’s no trouble here,” I repeated to the deputy. “No one is causing any problems or creating a threat. You know that, right?”

Frank’s gaze remained locked with Mzatal’s. The deputy licked his lips, drew a shaky breath. “I . . . don’t know what I know.”

Mzatal ended the stare-down and turned his eyes to me as he slowly lowered his hands and pygahed. Immediately the intense, smothering pressure of his aura diminished to its typical I-can-kill-you-anytime-I-want-and-don’t-you-forget-it level. He inclined his head slightly in my direction, and I knew he’d toned it down and stepped back from the confrontation as a concession to me.

As Mzatal looked away, Frank blinked and gave his head a slight shake. He swallowed hard, then looked down at the gun in his hand. His face paled as he hurriedly shoved it into his holster. “Jesus,” he muttered, voice cracking.

I damn near wilted in relief and went ahead and put a hand on the beef jerky display to steady myself. “Paul, go back to the car, please,” I managed. “I’ll buy your snacks.”

He gulped and obeyed with alacrity. The bell on the door dinged behind him as he did a fast-walk to the SUV.

Mzatal was not so pliant and moved toward the deputy instead of toward me and the door and the highway and away from this place and this whole situation. Shit.

“Deputy, he won’t hurt you,” I told the man, watching the struggle on his face to not step back, to not draw his gun as Mzatal closed the distance between them. This was instinct again, a big Alpha Dog putting a little yappy thing in its place, holding teeth around its neck until it shut up. “He won’t hurt you,” I repeated while I silently cursed ingrained patterns of behavior. “I swear it.”

Mzatal paused barely within Frank’s personal space, face utterly unreadable, which was a scary-as-hell expression in its own right. He gazed down at the man for half a dozen heartbeats while the cop firmed his jaw and struggled to maintain control.

Finally Mzatal moved past the deputy, past me, and out the door.

Frank let out a ragged breath as the bell dinged behind Mzatal. His stress showed as he clenched and unclenched his hands, but he didn’t make a move to stop Mzatal from leaving. I hurried to the snack aisle, grabbed a handful of the Krunch ‘n Krackle, then ran back to the front and threw a twenty dollar bill on the counter.

“Keep the change!” I called to the still cowering clerk, then hit the door at a run. “Fucking hell,” I muttered. This whole incident stood as a stark reminder that none of the lords were tame or culturally socialized. Even with Mzatal on super-best behavior, this had been a near-disaster. It chilled me to think of an unscrupulous lord loose on Earth.

I yanked the driver’s door of the SUV open, then stopped dead. Everyone was in the vehicle and belted in, even Mzatal. Except that Mzatal was in the driver’s seat.

I spluttered something that was probably best left unsaid, then took a deep breath. “Boss? What are you doing?”

He gave me an implacable look. “Waiting for you to get into the vehicle so that we may depart.”

I shot Bryce a horrified glance. He shrugged in response and gave me a slightly pained look that clearly said, How the fuck was I supposed to stop him?

“You all need rest,” Mzatal stated. “I will drive.”

Scowling, I shut the door, ran around, and climbed into the front passenger seat. “Fine. Whatever. Let’s get the hell out of here.” I tossed the bags into the back seat for Paul, and remained tense as Mzatal started the engine and pulled away from the pump.

“Paul said the cop freaked out,” Bryce said, lingering tension in his voice. “What happened?”

“Yeah, he did!” Paul exclaimed, already typing furiously on his laptop. “We were just looking at the snacks and all of a sudden the deputy was like—” he dropped his voice to be more cop-like, “—‘lemme see your hands!’” He blew out a breath. “No reports so far. No pings.” He looked up. “What did he say after I left? Did he ID us or what?”

I shook my head. “Not that I know of unless he ran the tags. The SUV would come back to the rental, but Eilahn’s motorcycle is registered to my aunt.” I paused, giving a hard look up and down the highway as Mzatal pulled onto it and headed toward the interstate. “The cop must be sensitive,” I continued. “He really felt Mzatal’s aura.”

“Yes, he is, and he did,” Mzatal stated.

Bryce muttered something foul under his breath then glanced over at Paul. “Anything ping yet? Did he run us?”

“My connection sucks. I’m still checking.”

“Just let us know if we need to watch for anyone coming after us,” I said. Then again, what the hell could the deputy do? He’d pulled his gun for no apparent reason. He might go ahead and run the tags out of curiosity, but I couldn’t fathom him pursuing us. And unless he jotted down the tag numbers as we were leaving, he’d be out of luck since Paul had hacked the gas station’s security.

Still, I continued to check the rear view mirror obsessively. After several minutes of no blue and red flashing lights behind us, I finally turned to Mzatal.

“You’re sure you know how to drive, know the rules of the road, and what route to follow?”

“I have observed carefully.” Calm confidence radiated from him.

Rolling my eyes, I shrugged. “Eh, what’s the worst that can happen. I mean, other than death in a fiery crash.”

His mouth twitched into a smile. “Trust me.”

Apparently I didn’t have much choice. I tried to put out of my head the scene from the movie Starman, where the alien is driving and thinks that a yellow light means Go Very Fast, since he’d seen the human woman speed through a yellow.

“You do know that a yellow light means it’s about to turn red, and you have to stop, right?” I asked, just to be sure.

His only response was a low chuckle.

I allowed myself to relax as we made it to the interstate without any sign of police vehicles following us, and without any crashes, fiery or not. After about ten miles I had to admit that Mzatal knew as much about the operation of a motor vehicle and the rules of the road as the average human, and he certainly had better instincts and reflexes.

Since I still had too much adrenaline pumping through me to sleep, I snagged up one of Tracy’s spiral notebooks from the stack on the back seat and pulled a flashlight out of my bag, propped my feet on the dashboard and began to flip through. It was the notebook with no cover that had all the date and time info for the warehouse node. I’d never actually finished going through this one, since Eilahn and I had raced to the warehouse the instant we realized the “event” was that same day.

Then again, it didn’t look as if I’d missed much. More ritual configurations, some of which looked completely wrong to me. A doodle of an elephant beside another one of the weird tree sketches. A convoluted twisting sigil that didn’t seem to have any logical structure.

I began to toss it back to the stack, then stopped, flipped it open to the page that had all the dates and times for the warehouse node. My pulse did a stutter-step.

“Fucking shit!” I dropped my feet and wheeled back toward the stack. “I need the leather journal with the blue cover.”

Bryce quickly fished the correct one out of the pile and handed it to me. “What’s going on?”

“Node emissions.” I flipped through the fragile pages of the old journal as quickly as I dared. “Idris told Rasha he was following node emissions,” I said. “Tracy tracked the one at the warehouse, which is why we were there when you got shot.”

After a few seconds I found the pages I needed. “Here.” I held the journal and flashlight so they could see. “Six more lists in a really similar format to the warehouse one, so I think those might be for tracking node emissions too. Tracy’s grandparents started these lists, and then Tracy continued and added to them.”

Bryce and Paul leaned forward to peer at the odd lists. Paul frowned and opened his mouth to speak, and I jerked up a hand to stop him.

“Yes, I know there are no fucking locations for any of these,” I said. “All we have are the number series from grandma with dates from her time period, and then Tracy’s cryptic Peter-Piper-picked-a-peck-of-pickled-peppers shit along with the dates he filled in.”

Bryce’s eyes skimmed over the numbers and odd phrases and dates. “If he was tracking so meticulously, then it stands to reason the location is encoded in all of this somehow. He wouldn’t want to get mixed up and put a date and time on the wrong list.”

“Right, and he kept it coded because he didn’t want to risk anyone else finding the nodes and blocking his use.” I tapped the page. “We figure it out, and we might know where they’re going next with Idris.” Might being the operative word, I thought with a grimace. We had no way of knowing if Idris was tracking any of the same locations. Still, we had to try.

I looked back at Paul and put on an encouraging and confident smile to hide my fear that we were chasing shadows. “Okay, Wonder Boy, you up for the challenge?”

“You got numbers, I got answers,” he replied with a bright smile. “Well, y’know, probably,” he added. “I’ll do my best.”

“Your best is pretty damn awesome,” I reassured him as I handed over the journal.

Paul took it and settled in to work. I reached over and stroked Mzatal’s hair. He hadn’t said a word during all of this, but I’d felt his tension and hope for the possibilities rise right along with mine. We’re getting closer, Boss. Yes, we were chasing shadows, but they were beginning to take on more substance.

Mzatal slid a brief look to me, gave me a soft smile along with a mental caress that seemed to lift the anxiety from both of us. I closed my eyes, willed myself to relax.

Sleep slowly slides, I thought with a silent snort. Tracy didn’t have that one in any of his weird lists. Hell, I could play that silly game too. Maybe gas guzzles green for how much it cost to fill the damn tank of the SUV, and deputy debates demon for the mega-tense encounter at the gas station.

My eyes popped open. Tracy didn’t have G or D or SL alliterative sounds in any of his three-word phrases. I swung around in my seat. “Paul! The three word phrases—what letters do they start with?”

He jerked his head up. “Uh . . .” He blinked, frowned, and dropped his eyes to the journal. “Sick sirens sink, thick thread thrives, old over out, every eaglet ejects—”

Excited, I waved at him to stop. “The lists have one long phrase at the top—five or six words or so—but then how many three-word phrases are there in each one?”

Brow creased in bafflement, he quickly tallied. “Three of them have fourteen and three have fifteen.”

A giggle bubbled out of me. “And let me guess, there’s a phrase in the middle and at the end that start with N, S, E, or W, right?”

The bafflement on his face deepened to comical proportions. “Only N’s and W’s. One of each in each list. Naughty Nantucket nuns, Nancy needs nookie, woman weeds wagon—”

“It’s coordinates!” I crowed. “Latitude and longitude! The first letters of the words correspond to the first letters in the word for a number. Like ‘sick sirens sink’ is six. The exceptions are the phrases for North and West!” For longitude and latitude, the letters for direction always followed the numbers. I did a giddy little dance in my seat. “Oh, yeah, I’m awesome. Uh huh, I’m awesome. Go, Kara! Go, Kara!”

Paul’s eyes widened. “Degrees, minutes, seconds.” His face split into a grin, and then his fingers flew over his keyboard. “The first list, the one with ‘Cowboy creek crevice creates confusion’ at the top . . .” His eyes flicked between the journal and the laptop. “Thirsty thieves thrive, forlorn foxes fold, finicky fire fizzles, sick sirens sink, zygote zucchini zings, eat ears early, night noise nears. So that would be thirty-four degrees, fifty-six minutes, zero-eight seconds, North.”

“Well?” I demanded. “Where is it?”

He shot me a withering look. “Hang on, lemme get the longitude.” He mumbled to himself while I jiggled impatiently, and Bryce looked on in bemusement.

“Got it,” Paul finally announced. “‘Cowboy creek crevice creates confusion’ is a location near the town of Rock Creek in the Texas panhandle.”

A smug smile spread across my face. “The titles are clues and hints for Tracy so he knew which list was for which node without having to look up the coordinates each time he tracked an emission, but the cryptic phrases kept it from being obvious to anyone who didn’t know the code.” A thought abruptly speared its way to the surface, and I sucked in a sharp breath. “What about the dates? Was there something at that Cowboy Creek node in the last few days?”

Paul nodded. “A couple of days ago.”

I bit down on a shriek of delight. “That’s when we had video of him getting off a plane not far from Amarillo in the goddamn Texas panhandle!”

Bryce straightened. “Hot fucking damn,” he murmured. “We might be able to anticipate where they’re going next.”

“Right, though now we have to hope to hell that Tracy knew about the same nodes that Katashi and his crew are checking.” I wagged my hands at Paul and the journal. “Work, Wonder Boy. Work!”

Paul grinned and quickly sank into processing the data. I faced forward again and tried to chill while he worked, but could only fidget.

“Whoa,” he said a few minutes later.

I twisted around in the seat. “What is it?”

“Here’s what we have.” He tapped a few more times. “The ‘Mountains mean multiple mergers’ one works out to near Basalt, Colorado. ‘Ashes are always around’ is about seventy-five miles outside of Austin. And ‘Wet wilderness wonder waxes’ is in Oregon. ‘Weird wondrous wares waver wildly’ is the warehouse. But the last one . . .” He blew out a breath. “‘Boss-boy breaks boss’s balls,’ is smack dab in the middle of the Farouche Plantation.”

Adrenaline surged through me even as Mzatal’s aura flared. “Let me see the journal,” I said and practically snatched it as Paul held it out. I quickly skimmed the dates. There were only three—one from over a year ago and one more than a year away. But the third set my heart pounding. “There’s one in three days.” I heard the tremble in my voice and didn’t care. “Idris will be there. I know he’ll be there.”

“And we will retrieve him.” Mzatal stated with dark determination. He’d made the same claim about me once and followed through against impossible odds.

“Damn straight,” I said. We had yet to come up with even the slightest inkling of a plan, but I had the ultimate faith that we would.

With the rush of excitement over, we fell into a comfortable silence. I mentally brainstormed various plans with myself, each more outlandish than the last, and finally decided to stop before I thought too seriously about the one where we all swooped in on hang-gliders.

I glanced toward a low snore to see Bryce with his head tipped back and his mouth open. Paul remained head down, his entire focus on his laptop, face weirdly lit by the screen. I relaxed in my seat and finally let myself think about the encounter with Rasha. The visit had unsettled me on numerous levels, and not all related to Idris and Amber. Rasha had been summoning for almost fifty years, living a life of careful isolation to keep it secret. Paul’s information showed that she’d married at eighteen and had a set of twins a few years later. Her husband had been killed in the Suez crisis, and at some point in all of that she’d become a summoner. And for what? To end up old and alone, used by others who sought power? She barely even saw her family. The most she could do was surround herself with pictures of them.

Propping my feet on the dashboard again, I watched the moon flicker through the trees that lined the interstate. I understood being so lonely that summoning a demon for a game of chess was a reasonable choice. I’d been there before. I wasn’t there anymore, but what about in thirty years? Fifty?

Mzatal reached over and took my hand. “I will not abandon you, beloved,” he said softly.

Tears pricked my eyes. I gave his hand a light squeeze. “Thanks, Boss.”

I drifted off to sleep with my hand in his.