Public Enemies (19 page)

“We've met before,” he said, smiling. “And I saw you recently too. Should I be hurt that you don't remember?”

I stared. Actually something about his yellow teeth
did
strike me as familiar. But I couldn't place him. His features were nondescript and his short hair offered no clues either.

“It's been a busy year. Give me a hint?” So far he wasn't showing any signs that he meant to hit me on the head.

No joke, I screamed when his face flicker-melted into that of the scary clown I'd met in Wedderburn's office and seen on New Year's Eve. Stumbling back a step, I glanced around like a tweaker making sure nobody else had seen that.
Shit.
There was a kid standing behind me, pale and trembling. His mouth opened but no sounds came out.

“Did you see…?”

God, I hate to do this.

“What?”

“That dude—”

“My bodyguard?” Which made me sound pretentious but other kids at Blackbriar had them. “What about him?”

“N-never mind.” The boy sprinted past me and practically dove into the waiting town car.

Well, there's a new phobia for him to talk about in therapy.
I just hoped they didn't put him on psychotropic meds. Wedderburn's muscle wore a smirk when I turned back to him.

“Walk with me,” he said.

“I don't think we have anything to talk about.”

“You'd be wrong. Boss says I'm supposed to stick with you, take your orders, until we bring your dad back.”

Surprised, I jerked a look at him and he seemed to be serious. “I figured he was behind this.”

After what he did to my mom.

“Nah, this is classic opposition. From gossip around the water cooler, his game with you in play was going smooth as hell. They can't let him execute.”

“I guess that doesn't mean killing people, because from what I've seen, that's fine.”

The thing laughed. “Good one. And, yeah, I mean they can't let him just power through without throwing up some blocks.”

Rage exploded behind my eyes. “You realize this is my
father
we're talking about. It may be a minor inconvenience to Wedderburn, but—”

“Settle down,” he cut in. “I don't care about your feelings or your problems but I
am
here to help you find him. Wedderburn's got feelers out, just like you have, and when he figures out where those idiots are keeping your old man, we'll move in.”

“Sounds like he's pretty sure those idiots are Dwyer & Fell.”

“Who else would it be?”

That made sense. The Harbinger had no interest in my dad; he wouldn't even protect him. And while he was plenty pissed off at me, I could reasonably clear him of that kidnapping. He made a deal with the monster, which recognized him but didn't treat him like a boss or a master or whatever.
God, this shit is confusing.

“Point. So what am I supposed to do with you?”

“Treat me like furniture. I go where you go. I'll escort you to and from school. I'm not supposed to let anyone touch you before you turn eighteen.”

“Define ‘touch.'” Did this mean I'd have a killer clown blocking me from spending time with Kian? Explaining that would probably give me an aneurysm.

“I'm muscle,” he said on a sigh. “And protection. Get it?”

For a few seconds, I considered arguing, but I'd learned my lesson about biting off more than I could chew. “I got it. So what's your name?” Kian had already told me, but I was curious what it would say.

“Buzzkill.”

Crap.
A sudden problem occurred to me. If he went into the condemned school with me, he'd recognize Raoul. Likewise, the apartment. So the situation would force me to be more of an asshole than I wanted to be to someone helping me, even if it was at Wedderburn's direction. He might still consider me an asset—it didn't seem like he'd taken losing Kian badly—but I hated him with every fiber of my being. If there was a way I could save my dad, ensure he lost all his points, and free myself from the game, that was the path I'd run down.
Headlong.
By killing my mother, he'd made sure I'd never want to hurt anyone else more. I refused to let myself imagine anything irrevocable happening to my dad because of Dwyer & Fell.

I'll save him. I have more resources now. Time to act like a jerk.

“Do what you have to. But don't expect me to make it easy for you. I don't have a spare bedroom for scary assholes, and I don't want you within fifty feet.”

“So standard restraining-order radius?” He was smiling, as if I'd delighted him with my reaction.

Yeah, he'd probably think it was weird if I
wanted
him in my house.

“That's fine.”

Taking me at my word, he fell back, trailing me from the specified distance toward the station. I used the break to text Raoul quickly, warning him we might have a situation. He responded with curt questions and I told him everything I knew. Finally, he asked,
Does Buzzkill seem suspicious?
Glancing back, I couldn't tell. Nothing he'd said or done made me think he knew about Raoul, so I typed back,
No
.

Fine. We'll have the lesson as planned. I'll use a different exit.

Raoul's risk of capture was freaking me out; my chest hurt when we got off at the stop closest to the abandoned school. The area was bad enough to unnerve a killer clown apparently because he quickened his pace, cutting the distance between us. I tried to hurry.

No luck.

Buzzkill caught up with me. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

“Training,” I said.

“At what, murder school?”

“That's very judge-y coming from you, killer clown.”

In response, he showed me his true face.

“Stop it. You wait here. I'll come out when I'm done.”

“I'm not supposed to let you out of my sight.”

“What'll you do when I go home? I already said you're not welcome.”

“That's not your problem. And Wedderburn would put me down if I let you go in there on your own.”

I had to admit, the place looked shady. The building had long since accepted its abandonment, settling comfortably into broken glass and creeping nature. Vines grew up one side of the building, and the parking lot looked more like the site of a meteor crash than a place where you could safely stash a car. Buzzkill set his jaw, his eyes yellow and scary. Even in a business suit and holding a briefcase—probably containing his implements of torture and death—he radiated a terrifying menace. It made people double-take at him because their intuition warned them of danger but their gullible human eyes interpreted the illusion he wore as normal. Harmless, even. I stifled a humorless laugh. Based on his implacable stance, I didn't foresee winning this argument.

Bottom line, I couldn't leave him out here and risk him trailing me. If Raoul got caught, I'd never forgive myself, to say nothing of Kian. Maybe Raoul and I could train at home, if we moved all the furniture out of the living room. Not ideal but better than the alternative.

“Fine. I'll reschedule.”

Turning, I ran toward the station over uneven, broken sidewalk. When I got some distance, I sent Raoul an
abort
message. If I'd known Buzzkill would refuse to honor the promise he made, I would've canceled at school. Then it occurred to me how stupid it was to expect
anything
from a killer clown. His existence was so bizarre and creepy that I had no words, so I kept staring at him as he followed me from a distance.

When we stopped at the station, I had to ask, “Okay, so what's your story?”

“Look it up. You're supposed to be smart, right?”

That ended all conversation between us. Yet he was with me through the transfers, keeping watch from the other side of the train and making commuters nervous. He stalked me all the way back to my apartment, and weirdly, since I knew he had orders from Wedderburn to protect me, I felt a little safer. Buzzkill said nothing when I hurried into my apartment.

Be careful coming in,
I texted to Raoul.
We're under surveillance.
For his sake, I hoped the artifact he'd stolen when he vanished was completely foolproof. I checked everywhere, though I couldn't have said what I was looking for. In my dad's room, I lost it for a few seconds after drawing in a deep breath scented with his shaving lotion. Tears sprang to my eyes. Usually he kept the door shut but now there was no reason not to look.

I stilled, staring at the bed. My mom's side was carefully made, pillows in place, while the covers on his side were bunched and rumpled; it was like he didn't feel comfortable sprawling because he'd been sharing a bed for so long. More than anything, it drove home how broken he was without her, how much he missed her. Even I hadn't realized how important she was until it was too late to say so.

My dad had left notes scattered on the bedside table. I sat down on the mattress to flip through them. The equations made sense but it was hard to envision how to build something like this. Beyond a theoretical sense, the biggest problem with time travel was getting humans to survive it. Subatomic particles could slip through but a whole person? Given current understanding of physics, a team of scientists in China had gone so far as to say time travel was impossible. Not that their findings impacted my mom and dad's work.

Mine now, if the fucking game has anything to say about it.

The worst part was, part of me felt like I owed it to my parents to finish what they'd started, if I could. But that move seemed too much like accepting my fate and I'd already vowed not to go gentle into that good night. It would be way better if I could find the exclusion to the rule, some way that ended with me besting these creatures.

At the moment, I wasn't hopeful.

I flipped to some of my dad's nontheoretical notes, which read like his half of a conversation he wanted to have with my mother.
About timelines? It's better to think of them as alternate worlds. Because I can't accept time as a straight line, simple forward and back. It's more like skipping forward to glimpse one possible future or back to what might've happened in one version of reality. And, no, I don't believe in fixed points in time, much as I love
Doctor Who.
I theorize it's possible to create a new wrinkle anywhere, especially when you incorporate the issue of space-time, and time as distance.

Moreover, time is relative, right? So there's no way to be sure what time stream you're in when you skip. It's more like ripples on a pond. So bearing that in mind, we were talking about temporal echoes…
That was where the entry stopped, probably because my mom wasn't around to interject thoughts and kick around hypotheses like they always did. My heart hurt.

Leaving the research, I went into my room and got out my laptop. This wasn't remotely the most important thing on my to-do list, but sometimes you needed a quick sense of accomplishment in order to tackle the hard stuff. I input “Buzzkill killer clown” in the search engine and came up with a stream of results. Picking one at random brought me an urban legend site, not surprisingly, as he didn't feel like an old god. He even talked like an Internet meme.

Charles Edward Macy was born in the forties to itinerant carnival workers, exact DOB unknown. He trained under the clowns in the big-top show until he was eighteen. For unknown reasons they expelled him from the group and he struck out on his own, settling in the Miami area in the early sixties. By 1970, he was a fixture at children's parties, performing a small magic show and making balloon animals. But Macy had a secret. The clown beloved by children as Dr. Smiles had a dark side, as his community would eventually discover.

In 1978, the party stopped forever when Sheriff Will Gladstone made a grisly discovery—seventeen bodies were buried beneath Macy's garage. In the subsequent media circus, the murderer was nicknamed Buzzkill and his trial had to be moved out of county due to his notoriety. Eventually he was convicted of these heinous crimes and given the death penalty. In 1986, after numerous appeals, he went to the electric chair. According to witnesses on site, the current malfunctioned and it took three tries to kill him. After the second flip of the switch, Macy choked out, “You'll never be rid of me. Your children will never be safe.”

Incredulous, I stared at the page. “Seriously? That's like three stories, merged into one. Freddy Krueger, something by Wes Craven, and John Wayne Gacy.”

But apparently enough kids had read this and passed it on as gospel since the eighties for there to be a real, undying Buzzkill in the world, working for Wedderburn. Who was currently watching my house.
Holy shit. That's … sobering.
Pity panged through me. This creature was evil and monstrous because we made him that way; it wasn't like he got to pick his origin story. Yet he still scared the crap out of me. His bloodlust was real and so was the danger.

Half an hour later, Raoul slipped into the apartment. I studied him to make sure he was safe. “How did you get by Buzzkill?”

“It's not as much of a problem as you seem to think. But your texts sounded like you were about to have a panic attack.”

“What…?” I spluttered.

“The artifact prevents magical tracking, yeah. But it's also got a cloaking feature. I wouldn't have risked stealing it if it couldn't withstand scrutiny.”

“Explain more.”

He lifted what looked like a simple religious medallion. “How does that appear to you?”

Confused, I told him.

“That's because something like this is common and wouldn't draw your eye. The actual necklace is considerably more remarkable. The amulet does the same thing with me.”