Obsidian Butterfly (ab-9) (13 page)

EDWARD DID TAKE ME through a drive-up window, but he didn't want to stop. He seemed anxious to get to Santa Fe. Since he was rarely anxious about anything, I didn't argue. I requested we go through a carwash while I ate my French fries and cheeseburger. He didn't say a word, just drove into one beside the highway that let us ride through in the car. When I was little, I'd loved watching the suds slide down the windows and the huge brushes roll by. It was still nifty, though not the thrill a minute it had been when I was five. But the carwash did mean that I had a clear view out all the windows. The dirty windows had made me feel ever so slightly claustrophobic. I'd finished my food before we left Albuquerque. I sipped on my soda as we drove out of town and towards the mountains. These were not the black mountains, but a different range that looked more "normal." They were jagged and rocky looking, with a string of glittering light near their base.

"What's with the light show," I asked.

"What?" Edward asked.

"The glitter, what is it?"

I felt his attention shift from the road, but he was wearing his sunglasses, and I couldn't really see his gaze shift. "Houses, the sun is hitting the windows on the houses."

"I've never seen sunlight on windows glitter like that."

"Albuquerque is at 7,000 feet. The air is thinner than you're used to. It makes light do strange things."

I stared at the sparkling windows like a line of jewels imbedded in the mountains. "It's beautiful."

He moved his whole head. This time so I knew he was really looking at it. "If you say so."

After that we stopped talking. Edward never did idle chatter, and apparently he had nothing to say. My mind was still reeling from Edward being in love, or as close as he would probably ever get. It was just too weird. I couldn't think of a single useful thing to say so I stared out the window until I thought of something worth saying. I had a feeling it was going to be a long quiet drive to Santa Fe.

The hills were very round, covered in dry brownish grass. I had the same feeling I'd had when I stepped off the plane in Albuquerque -- desolate. I'd thought the hills were close until I spotted a cow standing on one. The cow looked tiny, small enough for me to cover with two fingers held up, which meant the "hills" were really small mountains and not nearly as close as they appeared to the road. It was late afternoon or early evening depending on how you looked at it. It was still daylight, but you could feel night looming even in the brightness. The day had worn away like a piece of candy sucked too long. No matter how bright the sunshine, I could feel the darkness pressing close. Partly it was my mood -- confusion always makes me pessimistic -- but it was also an innate sense of the coming night. I was a vampire executioner, and I knew the taste of night on the breeze just as I knew the feel of dawn pressing against the darkness. There had been times when my life had depended on dawn coming. Nothing like near death experiences to hone a skill.

The sunlight had begun to fade to a soft evening gloom when I'd finally had enough of the silence. I still had nothing helpful to say about his personal life, but there was the case. I'd been asked here to help solve a crime, not to play Dear Abby, so maybe if I just concentrated on the crime, we'd be okay.

"Is there anything about the cases that you've withheld from me? Anything I'm going to be pissed that I didn't know beforehand?"

"Changing the subject?" he asked.

"I wasn't aware we were on a subject," I said.

"You know what I meant."

I sighed. "Yeah, I know what you meant." I slumped in my seat as far as the seatbelt would allow, arms crossed over my stomach. My body language was not happy, nor was I. "I don't have anything to add to the Donna situation, or nothing helpful."

"So concentrate on business," he said.

"You taught me that," I said, "you and Dolph. Keep your eye and mind on the important stuff. The important stuff is what can get you killed. Donna and her kiddies aren't a threat to life so put them on the back burner."

He smiled, his normal close-lipped, I-know-something-you-don't-know smile. It didn't always mean he knew something I didn't. Sometimes he did it just to irritate. Like now. "I thought you said you'd kill me if I didn't stop dating Donna."

I rubbed my neck against the expensive seats and tried to ease a tension that was beginning at the base of my skull. Maybe I had been invited here to play Dear Abby, at least in part. Shit.

"You were right, Edward. You can't just leave. It would screw up Becca for one thing. But you cannot keep dating Donna indefinitely. She's going to start asking for a date for the wedding, and what are you going to say?"

"I don't know," he said.

"Well, neither do I, so let's talk about the case. At least with that we've got a solid direction."

"We do?" he glanced at me as he asked.

"We know we want the mutilations and murders to stop, right?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Well, that's more than we know about Donna."

"Are you saying you don't want me to stop seeing her?" he asked, and that damn smile was back. Smug, he looked smug.

"I'm saying I don't know what the hell I want you to do, let alone what you should do. So let's leave it alone until I get some brilliant idea."

"Okay," he said.

"Great," I said. "Now back to the question I asked. What haven't you told me about the crimes that you think I should know, or rather that I think I should know?"

"I don't read minds, Anita. I don't know what you'll want to know."

"Don't be coy, Edward. Just spill the beans. I don't want any more surprises on this trip, not from you."

He was quiet for so long, I thought he wasn't going to answer. So I prompted him, "Edward, I mean it."

"I'm thinking," he said. He moved in his seat, shoulders tightening and loosening as if he were trying to get rid of tension, too. I guess, even for him, this had been a stressful day. Odd to think of Edward letting anything truly stress him. I'd always thought he walked through life with the perfect Zen of the sociopath, so that nothing truly bothered him. I'd been wrong. Wrong about a lot of things.

I went back to watching the scenery. There were cows scattered close enough to the road that you could make out color and size. If it wasn't a Jersey, a Guernsey, or a Black Angus, I didn't know it. I watched the strange cows standing at impossible angles on the steep hillsides and waited for Edward to finish thinking. Twilight seemed to last a long time here, as if the light of day gave up the fight slowly, struggling to remain and keep the darkness at bay. Maybe it was just my mood, but I wasn't looking forward to darkness. It was as if I could sense something out there in those desolate hills, something waiting for the night, something that could not move during the day. It could be just my own overactive imagination, or I could be right. That was the hard part about psychic abilities: sometimes you were right, and sometimes you weren't. Sometimes your own anxiety or fear could poison your thinking and make you, almost, literally see ghosts where there were none.

There were, of course, ways to find out. "Is there a place where you can I pull over out of sight of the main road?"

He looked at me. "Why?"

"I'm ... sensing something, and I just want to make sure I'm not imagining it."

He didn't argue. When the next exit came up, he took it. We took a side road from the exit. It was dirt and gravel and full of huge dry potholes. The shocks on his Hummer took the road like silk flowing down hill, comfy. A soft roll of hills hid us from the main highway, but the road was very flat in front of us, giving a clear view of the road as it went almost straight towards a distant rise of hills. There were a handful of tiny houses on either side of the road, the major cluster some ways ahead with a small church sitting to one side by itself, as if it were part of the houses and not. The church had a steeple with a cross on top of it, and I assumed a bell inside of it. Though we were too far away to be sure. The town, if it were a town, looked down on its luck but not empty. There were people there and eyes to see us. Just our luck, the land had been so empty and the road we go down has a town.

"Stop the car," I said. We were as far from the first house as we could get without backtracking.

Edward pulled over to the side of the road. The dust rose in a cloud to either side of the car, settling over the clean paint job in a dry powder.

"You guys don't get much rain up here, do you?"

"No," he said. Anyone else would have elaborated, but not Edward. Even the weather wasn't a topic of conversation unless it affected the job.

I got out of the car and walked a little way into the dry grass. I walked until I could no longer sense Edward or the car. When I looked back, I was yards away, Edward was standing on the driver's side door, arms crossed on the roof, hat tilted back so he could watch the show. I don't think there was another person I knew who wouldn't have asked at least one question about what I was about to do. It would be interesting to see if he asked any questions afterwards.

Darkness hung like a soft silken cloth, hanging against the sky, and the living light. It was a soft comfortable twilight, an embracing dark. A breeze blew across the open land and played with my hair. Everything felt fine, good. Had I imagined? Was I letting Edward's problems get to me? Was the memory of the survivors in their air-compressed hospital room making me see shadows?

I almost just turned around and walked back to the car, but I didn't. If it were my imagination, then it wouldn't hurt to check, and if it wasn't ... I turned and faced away from the car, away from the distant houses, and looked nut into the emptiness. Of course, it wasn't really empty. There was grass rustling in the wind, it sounded so dry, like corn in autumn just before it's harvested. The ground was covered in a thin layer of pale reddish-brown gravel with paler dirt showing through. The ground ran until it met the hills that continued on and on towards the darkening sky. Not empty, just lonely.

I took a deep cleansing breath, let it out and did two things at once: I dropped my shields and spread my arms wide, hands reaching. I was reaching with my hands, but it wasn't just my hands. I reached outward with that sense I have -- magic, if you like the word. I don't. I reached outward with that power that let me raise the dead and mix with werewolves. I reached outward towards that waiting presence that I'd felt, or thought I'd felt.

There, there like a fish tugging on my line. I turned to face the direction of the road. It was in that direction, going towards Santa Fe. It -- I had no better word. I felt its eagerness for the coming night and knew that it could not move in daylight. And I knew that it was large, not physically, but psychically, because we were not close to it, and yet I'd picked it up miles away. How many miles I couldn't say, but far, very far to have sensed it. It didn't feel evil. That didn't mean it wasn't evil, just that it didn't think of itself as evil. Unlike people, preternatural entities are rather proud of being evil. They embraced their malignancy because whatever this was, it wasn't human. It wasn't physical. Spirit, energy, pick a word, but it was up ahead, and it was not contained in any physical shell. It was free floating. No, not free ... Something slammed into me, not physically, but as if a psychic truck had run me down. I was on my butt in the dirt, trying to breathe, as if someone had hit me in the chest and knocked the wind out of me.

I heard Edward's running footsteps, but I couldn't seem to turn around. I was too busy relearning how to breathe.

He knelt by me, gun in hand. "What happened?" He was looking out into the thick twilight, not at me, searching, searching for the danger. His sunglasses were gone, and his face was very serious as he searched for something to shoot.

I gripped his arm, shaking my head, trying to talk. But when I finally had air enough, all I said was, "Shit, shit, shit!" It wasn't helpful, but I was scared. Most of the time when I get this scared, I get cold, shocky, but not when it's psychic shit. When something goes wrong with "magic," I never go shocky or get cold, I stay warm. If anything it's like tingling, warm, as if I'd stuck my finger in a light socket. Whatever "it" was, had sensed me and shut me down

I pulled my shields around me like clutching a coat against a blizzard, but strangely it had backed off. Though if that one swat of power was any indication, it could slice me, dice me, and serve me on toast if it wanted to. It hadn't wanted to. I was glad, thrilled, but why hadn't it hurt me worse? How had I sensed it from so far away, and how had it sensed me? Usually, my greatest talent is with the dead. Did that mean whatever "it" was, was dead, or had something to do with the dead? Or was this one of the new psychic abilities that my teacher, Marianne, had warned me might crop up. God, I hoped not. I didn't need more strange shit in my life. I had plenty.

I forced myself to stop the useless cursing, and said, "Put up the gun, Edward. I'm all right. Besides, there's nothing to shoot and nothing to see."

He put a hand under my arm and pulled me to my feet before I was ready. I'd have been very happy to stay sitting for a while. I leaned on him, and he started moving us back towards the car. I stumbled and finally had to tell him, "Stop, please."

He held me up, still searching the new dark, gun still in hand. I should have known he'd keep the gun out. It was his security blanket -- sometimes.

I could breathe again, and if Edward stopped dragging me on, I might be able to walk. The fear had faded because it was useless. I'd tried a bit of "magic," and I hadn't been good enough. I was learning ritual magic, but I was a beginner. Power isn't enough. You've got to know what to do with it, like a gun with the safety on. It makes a fine paperweight, but that's about it unless you know what to do with it.

I slid into the car, had my door closed and locked before Edward opened his door. "Tell me what happened, Anita."

I looked at him. "It would serve you right if I just looked at you and smiled."