Summoning the Night (24 page)

My leg twisted painfully as I tumbled to the floor. Lon's head snapped to the side. The Lupara flew out of his hand—a deafening blast cracked the air when it hit the floor and went off accidently. The theater mirror shattered. Better it than me. The Lupara rotated near my feet like a lethal spin-the-bottle while the sharp scent of spent gunpowder blossomed.

And Frater Merrin was already racing down the steps.

I scrambled to pull myself up, afraid the vintage gun might go off again as Lon retrieved it. When I put weight on my twisted leg, pain flared. One of Lon's arms flew out and snagged me around the waist.

“You okay?”

“Goddamn knee,” I bit out, testing it again. Better this time. Nothing broken.

“Can you—”

“Yes, go,” I shouted, pushing him toward the stairs. I winced as we raced down to the altar, wondering just how fast a man in his sixties with a bad back could run. Halfway down the stairs, I got my answer. The beaded curtain swung in the distance as commotion surged behind it in the foyer.

“Call the police!” Frater Merrin cried out between heavy breaths.

Awesome. Just what we needed. We stormed through the temple and tried to catch up with him. Dear God, I was hurting. A sharp pain shot up and down my leg with every step. It was all I could do to push it out of my mind and plow forward, a few steps behind Lon.

I heard the front door crash open. He wasn't far ahead of us. A swell of angry cries rose up when we pushed through the beaded curtains and burst into the foyer. Lon flashed the Lupara and everyone backed up. Someone in the crowd echoed Merrin's instruction to call the police.

We darted out the open door and took a sharp left through the covered walkway. It was pouring rain now. I tore after Lon, nearly slamming into him when he stopped short. His torso whipped around as he quickly scanned the sidewalk behind me in disbelief.

“What?” I looked past him. No Merrin.

“What the hell?” Lon mumbled breathlessly. He turned to the street punks still huddled against the inner wall along the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes and sharing a case of Milwaukee's Beast. Only one of them was an Earthbound, a small boy with his hair dyed bright blue to match his halo, maybe sixteen. Lon singled him out, probably hoping for a little brotherly help. “Which way did he go?”

The blue-haired boy shrunk closer to the wall and shook his head nervously.

Lon repeated his demand to the rest of the punks, but was met with a sea of disinterested faces. No one said a thing.

With a growl, Lon shoved the Lupara back into his jacket and ran toward the street. I raced after him, cutting through a slippery patch of mud and dead grass. I bounded onto the cracked sidewalk half a block behind, but he wasn't running anymore, only turning around in circles, searching. Traffic raced by, splashing sheets of rainwater as we both surveyed the area. A few umbrellas danced along the sidewalk on both sides of the busy road, but no man in ritual robes.

Frater Merrin had disappeared.

Wet and miserable, we skirted around the side of the brick school trying to root out a place he might be hiding, even checking the Dumpster that the bums had been digging in earlier. It was fruitless. A man with his experience was probably well versed in concealment and warding magick. Hell, I'd figured it out on my own when I was eighteen—the spells were carved into my arm. Merrin could be standing right next to us and we wouldn't even know.

Crushing disappointment turned my limbs to cement. We were so close. We had him. The Snatcher himself. What were we going to do now? Sit out here in the rain and watch the temple in case he came back? Then again, if we left, he might. Maybe Dare could have some of his people watch it. We could stay until he sent someone.

A police siren wailed in the distance.
Shit.
Merrin had gotten his people to call the damn cops. I glanced back at the temple. Some members of the congregation were huddled beneath the overhang with the street punks, watching us. I could've cried in frustration.

“My gun has been illegally modified. I can't get caught with it,” Lon lamented in defeat. With an open palm, he swooped back the dripping strands of hair matted against his forehead and blinked away rain. He glanced down at me. “You okay?” he asked a second time.

“Just pissed.” Being outsmarted by a lunatic magician with one foot in the grave wasn't on my bucket list.

It wasn't on Lon's, either. He nodded once, sniffled, then slung his arm around my shoulders and urged me forward to the crosswalk. “Let's get back to the car and get the hell out of here.”

“We should call Dare and—”

Lon stopped midstep. His arm grew rigid on my shoulder.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“Oh . . .” He was watching a truck pull into a space across the street. “Oh,” he said again.

“Lon?”

“The U-Haul . . .”

“Yeah?” I looked again. Nothing weird about it. I couldn't make out the person in the cab and doubted Lon could, either. The side of the truck was painted with bright graphics—a golfer in Augusta.

“Golf,” he said with a dazed look as the Walk sign flashed. “Christ, Cady. I think I know where Bishop's Polaroid was taken.”

It took us half an hour to get to the Redwood Putt-Putt Golf Center, located just off an old two-lane highway that once carried a good bit of traffic south of La Sirena before a shiny new bypass funneled it to a larger interstate in the mid seventies. By 1980, all the businesses that had grown up around the old highway had gone under, including two gas stations, the Lucky Roadside Diner, Maria's Fruit Barn, and poor old Redwood Putt-Putt.

Though the rain had passed, it left behind a threatening steel-gray sky. The industrial-strength heater in Lon's SUV had mostly dried our rain-damp hair, but I still wasn't all that keen on stomping around a muddy, abandoned miniature golf course.

Lon spent most of the ride over exchanging phone calls with Dare. His cell rang one more time as we pulled in. He answered and didn't say much of anything during the brief call. And all he said to me after hanging up was, “Dare's got people watching the temple.”

Good. Maybe Merrin would be stupid enough to come back. A girl could dream.

Lon pocketed his phone and parked behind a crumbling
sky-blue wall that once hid the putt-putt course's garbage bin from street view.

“Was he lying?” I said as we exited the SUV.

Lon hit the alarm button on his key chain. “Who?”

“Frater Merrin.” I trailed Lon around the backside of the building as he inspected a chain-link fence threaded with green plastic privacy slats that surrounded the property. “Was he lying when he was blabbering about everything being pointless because ‘he' would just try ‘it' again? Could you hear his emotions?”

Lon stopped at a locked double gate and bent to inspect it. “I read him. He wasn't lying.”

“Then maybe he's not the Snatcher. Maybe it's someone else entirely.”

“He definitely made it sound like someone else is involved, but he's not innocent, or he wouldn't have run from us.”

True. “He said ‘thirty years are nothing to him.' Thirty years isn't nothing.”

Lon poked at the gate's lock and verbalized my thoughts before I could. “Unless you're an Æthyric being with a long life span.”

“Exactly. I smell a rat. Or a demon. No offense.”

“None taken.” Lon reached inside his jean jacket pockets and retrieved gloves. “You got yours?” He nodded at my hands.

No fingerprints, right. I dug out my gloves and continued thinking out loud. “Merrin's a magician. Merrin summons demons. What are the odds that Merrin made some sort of deal with one thirty years ago?” Lon didn't answer. He was busy inspecting the fence. “Are you listening to me?”

“Always.” The corners of his mouth briefly tilted up into
a gentle smile before he shook the fence several times. “A deal with an Æthyric demon usually means that the magician gets something out of it.”

“So now we have two parties exchanging favors, and one of those favors involves kidnapping young teenagers. Was the bargain unfulfilled thirty years ago, and he's back to collect on it? Did Merrin try to worm his way out of a contract? And which one of them wanted the children and why?”

“Excellent questions. The only thing we know is that Merrin was snatching some of the children and biting them—or at least Cindy Brolin, anyway. Stay here.” He trekked back to where we started, then returned with a dented metal garbage can and settled it upside down in the mud against the shorter fence near the gate. He placed a foot on top and tested his weight.

“O-o-oh, no,” I said. “We are
not
climbing this fence.”

“See where the top is bent? This isn't uncharted territory. We'll be fine.”

“Just because someone else has done it doesn't mean we need to!”

“I'm the one with the shitty back—what are you worried about?” He picked up a damp cardboard box, shook it off, and broke it down.

“I . . .”

“Yes?” He cocked a brow in amusement then draped the flattened cardboard over the top of the fence.

“Can't you just shoot the lock off or something?”

“That only works in the movies. I'll go first.” He balanced on the creaky garbage can, stuck a toe in one of the links, and pulled himself up, hesitating before going over the top.

“Be careful,” I warned. “There are a few parts of you that are important to me. Please don't crush them.”

“I'll let you check for damage once I'm over.” And with a grunt he kicked a leg up and jumped over to the other side, making a sploshy noise when his feet hit the ground.

“You okay?” I called out.

“Right as rain. Come on, girl.”

Following his method, I climbed the fence. But when I threw my leg over, my body froze up, midstraddle.

“Other leg now,” Lon coaxed. “You can do it.”

“I don't think I can.”

“Well, then. Let me just find a long stick and prod you back over. You can wait in the car.”

I grumbled under my breath. Once I got the leg over, I clung to the top of the fence, trying to get my shoe into one of the links. Then I felt his hands on my hips.

“Drop down. I've got you.”

Not much of a choice there. My arms were starting to shake from holding myself up. I lowered myself down a few inches. He snaked a steely arm around my waist, so I let go and he caught me, setting me down on my feet.

“Would you like to check my parts now?” he asked, smugly holding his jacket open.

“Oww.” I bent over and rubbed the heel of my hand over my jean zipper, wincing. “Maybe you should check mine instead. I need some fence-jumping lessons.”

His lower lip pouted sarcastically. He slipped a gloved hand between my legs and pressed a finger into the bump in my jeans where all the seams converged. “Where? Here?”

“I'm not sure.” I fought back a breathless laugh. “Keep it up and I'll tell you.”

He patted me appreciatively, then pulled my coat back into place. “We can continue that later. Let's do this before it starts raining again.”

We trudged through a marshy maze of tangled undergrowth, fallen trees, and broken branches and emerged in a graveyard of dismantled course obstacles. An immobilized windmill sat on its side, tethered to the ground by vines. Just past it, a dinosaur was broken into ten sections of sun-faded, molded metal.

Tiers of synthetic putting greens lay just ahead of us, most of them choked with real weeds growing between the seams of plastic grass. A few others were flooded. All of it was sad and silent—no children, no cars passing in the distance.

“When I was a kid, my dad and I came here,” Lon said. “Used to be an A&W next door. We'd get root beer floats after we played.” A nostalgic smile lightened his face. “He'd always let me win.”

“Do you miss him?” I asked, trying not to think of my own parents.

“Sometimes,” he admitted at length. “Jupe was just a kid when he died. I wish he'd lived long enough to see him grow up. He was better at expressing his feelings than I am.”

I was surprised to hear him admit this. “If you ask me, what you
do
is more important than what you
say
.” Had I understood this a few years ago, my life might've been different. My parents lied to my face my whole life, then ditched me before I'd finished high school. I couldn't imagine Lon forcing Jupe to live on his own at seventeen—no matter the circumstances, not in a million years. “Besides, it's not like Jupe needs a role model for expressing himself. He's expressive enough for both of you.”

He squinted down at me and suppressed a smile. “Maybe you're right.”

We meandered past a gigantic Mother Hubbard shoe on hole twelve and a morbid decapitated crocodile on the tenth
hole. The missing head was three holes down, its too-wide eyes mocking us atop the bank of a pinball obstacle.