Golem in My Glovebox (26 page)

A child’s laughter echoed from inside the cave.

“She’s here,” I said.

Riley’s hand brushed my arm as I darted away. “Zoey, wait!”

The cave was dark. Of course, it was the middle of the night, and it was a cave, but it was darker than that, somehow. My phone light barely touched the blackness. I tripped over a pipe, but caught myself before I face-planted.

“Katy,” I said. “This is bullshit. I’m done playing games.”

She laughed again, chilling in a place so dark. I followed the sound. Stupid? Probably. But this was my last chance. If I could get to her, maybe I could save Rob. And then I’d make her hand over my mother. Alive.

My shoulder scraped against a wall, sticky with spider webs. I brushed them off.

“Katy. Come on. How are we supposed to be sisters if we don’t hang out?”

A child giggled, then the sound of small footsteps came from my left. I followed. Within a few minutes, I knew I was lost. I couldn’t light up enough of my path to see where I was or where I’d been.

I made a turn and found myself looking out the cave entrance.

Mina screamed, and something heavy dropped from the sky, making a loud thud a few feet in front of me.

I ran outside, praying the dark object wasn’t what I thought it was, but no gods were in the mood to listen. Rob lay on his back, eyes wide and staring at the head of a plaster and fiberglass
brontosaurus
hanging over us. His body had only fallen a single story, yet his limbs bent in odd directions, and his chest had caved in on itself. The wind—the wind
he
controlled—had crushed him before he dropped.

Rob’s broken body was the only part of the scene that actually made sense. Mina stood rigid, her hand to her forehead in a formal salute. She lifted one foot in the air, held it, then dropped it in the dirt. She repeated the action with the other foot. Her face was placid and serene. After lifting and dropping her feet a few more times, her pace increased. Soon, she moved as if she were in a production of Riverdance. Her expression never faltered, and her arm remained posed in a salute.

Alarmed, I scanned the area for Riley. Now that I had stopped my fruitless chase through the cave, I realized that Riley never would have let me go in without following me. I spun in a circle, confused. Did he follow me in and get lost?

I spotted him a few steps behind me, his phone on the ground with the flashlight shining up at his face. His face, too, was quiet and content. He squatted in the leaves, drawing spirals in the dirt with his finger, oblivious.

Katy giggled. The sound was right behind me. I spun around with my light. She wasn’t there.

Riley hummed a tuneless song.

Mina danced faster.

“Katy, stop it!” I’d have given her my disapproving schoolmarm face if I could see her. My voice was equal parts desperation and anger. “Let them go!”

The laughter was close. I smelled something fruity, like gum or little girl perfume.

When she spoke, it seemed to be right in my ear. “Make me, sister.”

I whirled to face her, but she wasn’t there.

She wasn’t anywhere.

It was then I realized what she was doing. She probably wasn’t too far away, but she wasn’t close enough for me to find in the dark. She was manipulating all of us from a distance. Riley and Mina were under her control, and she was playing with me to freak me out.

She had succeeded. But I’d had enough.

I went deep inside myself. My empathic walls were strong, and I had filters in place so a controlled amount of other people’s emotions could come through for me to read. I slammed the filters closed and took a deep, cleansing breath, drawing strength from the self-induced calm.

Riley hummed to my right, and Mina danced directly in front of me. I pressed against my barriers and expanded them, a few inches at a time, toward Riley and Mina. When it reached them, I felt her. Katy’s presence surrounded them both, a wall between my wall and them.

My plan was to push her mental circle away from them. Get her out of their heads. I knew it was possible for me to affect the emotions of other people, but what Katy was doing was so much more than that—so much worse than I ever imagined an empath was capable of doing. I had to cut her off from them.

I had to hope that I was a match for the most powerful empath in human history.

No pressure.

I nudged the barriers she’d placed around my friends. Testing. Feeling. Scanning for cracks or flaws. Brute force might be the only way in. I pulled my consciousness back and prepared to shove with all I had in me.

Something popped in my head, like a mental version of a soap bubble. Mina dropped to the ground, panting, and Riley stopped humming and drawing. They both blinked at me in the near darkness.

I hadn’t done anything yet.

In the distance, a car door slammed, and an engine kicked into life. Katy—and whatever adult she had with her to drive—was leaving. The driver honked twice, and the sound of the car faded as it drove off.

“Zoey?” Riley said. “What just happened?”

Mina tried to speak, but nothing came out but a dry cough.

“She let you go,” I whispered. “She had you, but she let you go.” I didn’t know what it meant. No. I did know what it meant. Katy was showing me what she could do. And she was letting me know that the game was still on, and that she could do worse than she already had.

“Oh, my goddess, she crushed him.” Mina said in a raspy voice. She crawled to Rob’s side. “Rob, I’m so sorry.” Her eyes filled with unshed tears, but she pulled herself erect. “You find this bitch and you take her out, Zoey. Rob didn’t deserve this.”

Her hands flitted over him, adjusting his shirt, laying his hands over his chest in a more natural position. Closing his eyes. Tidying his hair and straightening his legs. Mina was tough. I could tell—hell, I could feel—how much she hurt, both emotionally and physically. But she refused to collapse. She kept control of herself.

From the shadows, James appeared and knelt next to her. “I’ll see that he’s taken care of.”

Mina nodded. “Thank you.”

Riley came closer and put a hand on her shoulder. “I need you to move back a bit, please. It was a hard, sudden death. He’s having trouble moving on.”

“What?” She looked up at Riley, confused and alarmed. “What are you going to do?”

“I need to help him. I need to do my job.”

Ever since the Collector had shown up and increased my difficulty level of dealing with the Hidden world, my reaper boyfriend had been mostly reassigned to protect me. He continued to wear the reaper ring and held all its powers, but he didn’t get text messages to pick up stuck souls anymore. In an emergency, he could help the dead, though.

This was an emergency.

Riley bent over the body, his face solemn. He gave James the side-eye, and the shadowman took a step away to give the reaper room to work.

Rob’s mouth was closed, and Riley gently pulled the jaw open with one hand. On Riley’s other hand, the black stone in his ring came alive with a thousand stars. He held it over Rob’s mouth and tugged.

A grayish cloud with silver sparkles in its depths eased from the dead man’s lips. I swallowed hard. The last time I’d seen Riley do this, it had been for my friend Iris, the skunk-ape. The soul cloud had taken Iris’s form for a moment, and he had grinned at me and given me a thumbs-up.

Rob didn’t do that. His soul remained an abstract shape, elongating as it exited the shell that had carried it for forty-some-odd years, thinning as it drew into the stone, then turning into nothing but a wisp before fully entering the ring.

I wasn’t sure of the full mechanics of it, but from time to time, when they’d gathered enough souls, reapers took their stones to a depository and emptied the souls into it. From there, the souls passed on to their next destination. Riley once told me heaven and hell didn’t have much to do with it. Everybody went to the same place. What happened after that, nobody knew. We’d each have to die to find out for ourselves.

Riley straightened and nodded to James.

I moved to Mina’s side and touched her hand. “You okay?”

She nodded. “I hadn’t spoken to him in years before this. I thought...I thought we’d have time to catch up. Time gets away from us.”

I thought about Sara, left behind to deal with the terrible memories I’d hoped would never return to her. She needed me, and I couldn’t be there. I thought of Maurice, trying to piece together a broken childhood relationship without my help. And there was my own relationship with Riley, strained because we didn’t have time for each other.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

James had returned to the body after Riley was finished. “Hey, does this mean anything to any of you?”

We gathered around him and shined our lights on him. Dawn had begun to creep into the sky, but it was still difficult to see clearly.

Rob’s shirt had a buttoned breast pocket, which James had opened to inspect. He drew a long black cord from it and found a key attached. Along with the key was a photograph of a small cottage.

No unsettling poem accompanied the objects, but on the back of the photo was scrawled in blue crayon “Home Sweet Home.”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t know what this is. Can you make out a house address on it? Anything?”

“Let me see,” Riley said. He took the photo and gave it a long look, then shifted his gaze to me. “I know this house, Zoey.”

My skin went cold. I knew what he was going to say. I hadn’t been there, but he had. “We’re going to New Hampshire, aren’t we?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. This is a picture of your mother’s house.”

Chapter Nineteen

Mina and James stayed behind to take care of the body. As it was, Mina was out of her territory and had to get back soon, and neither of them ran the O.G.R.E. squad team where we were going.

We ran for the car, not worried about security cameras or stealth this time. If it brought the police out, James could handle it. I was so tired I could cry, but the clock was ticking. The only Aegis left was my mother. I had to get to her in time. I was horrified that I’d been unable to stop a single murder, even when I got there before it happened.

I refused to let that happen with my mother.

I took the wheel first, too wired to sleep, but knowing I’d probably be ready to pass out by the time we had to stop for gas. After driving all day and seeing so much happen, we had another twelve hours or more before we could stop. And it wasn’t likely we’d have time to sleep before we had to deal with Katy.

When we got in the car, Gris was outside his compartment, waiting.

“I’m so sorry. I should have gone with you. I was too worried about being a liability. I should have been where I could help you, not locked inside the car.” He paced across the dashboard, hands on his hips, berating himself. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

I rubbed my burning eyes and started the engine. “What could you have done to help, exactly?”

“I could have helped you search for her, for starters. I could have held the flashlight. I could have gotten a license plate number, at least!”

Riley frowned. “Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Did you get a license plate number? Zoey said she heard the car drive off.”

“Of course not! They were parked all the way at the other end of the lot. I couldn’t see it from here.”

“They?” I quirked an eyebrow at him. “Who was she with?”

“She came out of the bushes by herself, but there was an older couple waiting for her. Her grandparents, maybe?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, chewing my lip. “She’s a hundred and seven. She doesn’t have parents, let alone grandparents.” I said. “Every time I’ve seen her, she’s been with different adults. Did you get a good look at her, Gris?”

“It was dark, but I’ve got good eyes. I saw her.”

“Did she have blond, curly hair with ribbons tied up in bows? Maybe about six years old?”

He brightened. “Yes, that’s exactly what she looked like.”

Riley shifted toward me in his seat. “That’s who you saw at the cave?”

I nodded. “And at the other locations. We all saw that family at the Cadillac Ranch.”

He was quiet, thinking about it. “So, she—what?—just picks up a new family and makes them do what she wants until she’s done with them?”

I nodded. “I think so, yeah.”

The three of us sat there in silence for a moment with the car running.

Riley finally spoke up. “The car they were driving went north?”

Gris nodded. “Yes.”

“They aren’t that far ahead.” Riley said. “We should get going.”

“First, could we...” Gris trailed off and looked at me.

I knew what he wanted, and my stomach knotted. But it wasn’t my decision. If Gris wanted to risk it, I had to help him. “It should only take a minute. Are you sure?”

“I want to help. If breaking the connection kills me, at least I can’t do any harm to anyone else.”

“Alright.” I inhaled a slow calm breath, held it, then let it out. Opening my filters wider, I sent out a tendril of myself toward Gris. His campfire burned with a steady heat, but that thin connecting cord that led back to Bernice fed outward. I ran metaphysical fingers over the string, feeling for a thinner spot where it wouldn’t be so difficult to break. Following it toward his center, I found it looped around him with a simple knot. I held my breath and tugged it loose.

The thread floated free then disappeared into the darkness, as if it were reeled in by a fisherman.

Gris’s campfire dwindled, and I feared it would go out entirely. I stretched my mind toward it, thinking I might be able prod it back to life. Before I could touch it, the fire flared and grew to twice the size it had been. The heat pulsed, and when I gazed into the center of his life force, I saw a smiling Gris standing in a field. And next to him, I saw myself.

I returned to myself, sitting in the dark car with the engine running, to find Gris with that same smile. “We did it,” I whispered. My throat felt constricted, and I realized my face was wet with tears.

Gris placed his hand against his chest. “I’m alive.” He seemed surprised. “And I really am my own man, now.” He paused, his face sad. “And I really have no mother.”