Unearthed (49 page)

Duncan inclined his head, like he was trying to put a label on it. “Good, I guess. You got the job done.”

“My feelings are a little scattered about it,” Arch said, “but I suppose I did.”

“Still got your soul?” Duncan asked.

“You tell me,” Arch said.

“You seem the same,” Duncan said. “I’d be able to tell if you were missing any pieces—you know, inside.”

Arch blinked, but Alison beat him to asking about it. “They can do that?”

“Demons can do lots of unpleasant things,” Duncan said. “It’s best to avoid making pacts with the dealers.”

“Sounds like good advice,” Alison said, a little pointedly.

“Come on,” Arch said, clutching the vial a little loosely in his fingers. In truth, he didn’t even want to be touching the thing. He shouldered his way through the curtain into his makeshift bedroom to find Hendricks laying there, staring up with vacant eyes. Dr. Darlington seemed to be expecting his arrival, because she met his entry with a scathing look. “Doctor,” he said.

She just grunted at him and started to get to her feet slowly. She’d probably been here for eighteen hours now, hadn’t she? Taking care of one patient or another. Joints cracked as she got up, stretching her neck to either side as she did so. “Did you get it?” she asked simply.

“I got it,” Arch said and sloshed the liquid contents of the vial in a slow circle. They swirled around the glass test tube in a clockwise circle. “Did it always look like this?” He directed this toward Hendricks.

“The first time it was in a dried-out bladder,” Hendricks said, shifting painfully to get his back against the wall, propping himself up a little at a time. “The second time … I think so, maybe? I don’t remember. I was in more than a little pain at the time.”

“Sounds like a pattern with you,” Dr. Darlington said with more of her finely honed talent for sarcasm.

“You’ve got good eyes to spot that one so soon,” Hendricks said, cringing as he adjusted to sit up in bed. Arch got the feeling he would probably have a little bit of a gleam in his own eye if he hadn’t been hurting so. “Give it here, will you?”

“Just a second,” Arch said, hanging on to the infernal thing. “Have you really considered your way through this?”

“Yeah,” Hendricks said. “I’m in fucking agony, see? I take ten seconds of drink, and I’ll be worlds better in a few minutes. Otherwise I get to wait to heal, try to learn to—I dunno, re-walk with less toes, be hobbled for a good long time, possibly cost you guys the fight with this Rog whatever. Definitely considered the angles, and it’s go time, so gimme the damned vial.”

“It’s not go time yet,” Arch said. “All quiet on the southern front. You don’t have to do this.”

Hendricks gave him a pitying look. “Why wouldn’t I want to?”

“This stuff doesn’t come without a cost,” Duncan said. “You realize that, right?”

Hendricks adjusted himself and grimaced. “What do I owe you?” he asked Arch.

“Not a thing,” Arch said.

Hendricks frowned. “What did he charge you?”

“Nothing,” Arch said.

“He let you have it for free?” Hendricks asked.

After a pause, Duncan spoke. “If you’re not already terrified of taking a drink, that little dab of information should scare the shit out of you.”

“Why?” Hendricks asked. “Because someone wants me back in the fight? Remember when Spellman came to my motel just to tattle on Gideon when he was going to destroy the town? He did it because he didn’t want the town to go down and fuck up his business. If this thing Katlin Elizabeth is digging up is half as badass as Starling says, seems like it’d be more of the same.”

“How does this stuff work?” Dr. Darlington asked, staring at the vial in Arch’s hand. “I mean, on a medical basis.” She flicked her eyes at Arch. “I assume this is what you used on Erin Harris?”

“Some variation of it, yeah,” Arch said.

“It works by bending the laws of nature,” Duncan said, drawing every eye in the room toward him. “But it’s all a balancing act, because those laws can’t be simply broken. For every action taken in contravention of them, the scale has to balance somewhere else.”

“How … what?” Arch asked.

“That stuff restores human vitality,” Duncan said. “If it’s used to heal someone who’s terribly injured, it means some human somewhere was terribly injured, maybe even killed in order to produce it.”

“Wow,” Belzer said from somewhere behind the curtain. “Not exactly Fair Trade, is it?”

Duncan’s face turned annoyed. “Stop lurking, dickwad. This conversation doesn’t concern you.”

“This conversation doesn’t concern most of you in the fucking room,” Hendricks said. “I don’t remember putting my health decisions before a goddamned committee.”

“We’re worried about you,” Alison said gently. “If Duncan says this stuff is shit—”

“It’s not shit,” Duncan said, “it’s just … layered with complication. This Spellman, whoever he is, is making stuff that’s outside the range of magics that the Office of Occultic Concordance deals with. He’s … power on a level we don’t see. That means that whatever is in that vial,” he pointed to the glowing blue liquid, “can have consequences I can’t come close to predicting. Maybe no humans were harmed in the making of it. Maybe lots were. But there is some sort of effect required, some cost paid for the healing of your body, and whatever it is could come down the pike later, or not at all.”

“Great,” Hendricks said, shaking his head, rolling his eyes. “Let’s give this a roll, huh?” He put out his hand to Arch. “Please.”

“Your life, cowboy,” Arch said, and put the vial carefully into his outstretched hand. “I’d be real careful with that decision if I were you, though.” He started back toward the curtain.

“Arch,” Hendricks said, a little more muted. “Thank you,” he said when Arch turned around. Arch just shook his head, knowing very well that the cowboy wouldn’t exercise any more care in the use of that vial than he had in getting the injury that required it to begin with.

Kitty was about damned tired of following the Rog’tausch. It was past sundown, Rousseau was creeping the car along at a few miles an hour when they hit a road, and driving like mad in a quick circle-round to get eyes on him when he went through the hills and meadows. Which he was doing quite a bit, given the area. The Rog’tausch stubbornly hewed to a fixed path, straight ahead through fences, trees, even a telephone pole that she’d watched him uproot and heave a hundred feet into the air in a display of strength that included a fearsome bellow.

Kitty yawned. They were parked on the side of a straightaway, some bum fucking Egypt road that looked out over a pine forest. She could hear the Rog’tausch working his way through the woods, refusing to yield to trees. She could see the tops of them falling in the distance, a hundred feet or so inside the treeline, dropping away as the dumb fuck destroyed the bottom of their trunks.

What a waste of time.

Of course, he was too big for the car now, or she’d have told him to get in. He’d probably crossed a few miles by now, but it had taken hours and hours. The sun was heading below the horizon, and the clock on the dash told her it was after nine p.m. After a lifetime of work to get to this moment, she’d achieved the pinnacle, the culmination of a quest, and her reward was … more waiting.

What a load of bullshit.

“Looks like he’s coming closer to the road,” Bardsley said in the front seat. He still had some enthusiasm for this, but it seemed to be fading rapidly as the hours wore on.

“Yes, it’s a real joy watching him work so hard to travel as the crow flies, while he can’t fucking fly,” Kitty said, staring at her fingernails. She’d never gotten much into the idea of manicures since her fingernails didn’t really grow unless she wanted them to, but after spending a few hours staring at said nails, she was exploring all sorts of possibilities she hadn’t considered before.

“Still a few miles from the center of town,” Rousseau told her, completely unfucking helpful.

“I know that, you stupid shit,” she threw back at him. “Do you not think I’m counting the hours, the miles? It’s not like town is necessarily even his final fucking destination, did you think of that? We could be following him for days. Days. Who knows where it is, after all? It could be a hundred miles away from here, given my fucking luck.”

“He’s out the other side,” Rousseau said, starting the car. He put the pedal down as soon as he got it in gear, and they lurched forward at a sprint, the headlights springing on as they went. These back roads were so damned abandoned that they’d seen maybe twenty cars since midday. Maybe.

Kitty left the window down, let it blow her hair. Even with the wind, it was stifling, this stupid game of expecting the Rog’tausch to grow a brain and stop picking fights with inanimate objects that were no threat to him. Every time he stopped to smash, it took him precious seconds that added up to minutes and hours.

She was tired of watching them tick by while waiting to get what she wanted.

Rousseau took them around a tight turn and the headlights fell across the Rog’tausch, illuminating him. His head snapped around to look at them as Rousseau took the car to a stop.

Kitty stuck her head out the window. “Can you speed this up a little?” She even asked nice, didn’t call him a fucking lump of shit or anything else.

The Rog’tausch turned its head back to its original path, and Kitty dropped back into her seat. “It’s like I might as well not even be its master, for fuck’s sake.”

“Ruh roh,” Rousseau said.

“What the hell does that mean?” Kitty asked, sitting forward again.

“Looks like things are about to get interesting,” Rousseau said, pointing out the front windshield past Bardsley. Kitty followed the extension of his finger and squinted to see the Rog’tausch trotting toward a flat, open stretch of ground at the far end of the road, where sat—

Oh.

There was a house, a little one-story block home that looked white in the faint glow of the headlights. The Rog’tausch headed straight toward it like a guided missile at a trot. The car rolled on its shocks, a side-to-side motion caused by the earth trembling under the weight and force of the Rog’tausch’s movement.

“This is going to be spectacular,” Bardsley said, fixed on the house.

“Mm,” Kitty said, in mild agreement. Anything to break the monotony.

The Rog’tausch hit the brick wall and shattered through with a crash that echoed into the night. It sounded a little to Kitty like a wrecking ball taking out a building, which, when she thought about it as her shell’s ear tubes interpreted the reverberation in the form of a ringing, was almost what happened.

A cloud of dust issued forth from the hole in the house, and wood from the roof started to tumble from the eaves. As the sound cleared, Kitty could hear frantic screams from somewhere in the distance, the wailing of some stupid local who lived there. The sound grew in pitch and intensity until a snapping, popping noise came from somewhere inside, and something was tossed out onto the lawn. Kitty squinted; what she could see of it was about the size of a soccer ball and stained with red smears.

“Mmm,” she said in mild satisfaction. “That’s better than nothing, I guess.”

Lauren stood watching Hendricks as he waited for Alison Stan and Duncan the demon to get the hell out of his small square of the house. He watched the curtain resentfully as they both made their exit, seemingly with things unsaid. Lauren understood that; it seemed like it might be some heavy shit they were dealing with.

What she didn’t get was Hendricks’s reaction to any of this. He could have been holding death in his hand, and he seemed to give zero fucks about that. She tried to figure out how best to broach the subject without closing him up, but couldn’t come up with an in, so she asked something else instead. “What’s up with the hat?”

“Sorry, what?” Hendricks looked up at her like he’d heard her wrong.

“The hat,” Lauren said. “You wear a cowboy hat, boots, a black coat, like you’re ready for a cattle drive. That’s not normal.”

“Not here, maybe,” Hendricks said.

“Not anywhere outside the wild west, circa 1880,” Lauren said. “It’s kind of an anachronism in modern society.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Hendricks said, “it’s probably still good for Texas, Montana, Wyoming—”

“Some places there, maybe,” Lauren said. “Like, for people who actually work on horses. But you’re from Wisconsin. You grow up on a farm?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “In town, actually.”

“So … why the hat?” Lauren asked, leaning her back against the wall. She’d been up against it so much today it was starting to feel painfully normal, and in the worst way. She’d sweated quite a bit and just felt gross.

Hendricks seemed to think over whether to answer flippantly, but when he finally did answer, it sounded serious. “My wife gave it to me.”

“Oh?” Lauren asked. “I, uh … didn’t know you were married.”

“She’s dead,” Hendricks said bluntly. “Been dead for about five years. She gave me the hat before she died, though. Said what I was doing at the time was like—you know what, it doesn’t matter.” He lowered his face. “It was a … private kind of joke between us, anyway. She gave me the boots, the hat, the coat. It was her way of being funny when she saw me on a leave.”

“Must have been some joke,” Lauren said, “since you’re still wearing that stuff religiously like half a decade later.”

“Well,” Hendricks said, “she gave it to me the night she died.” He watched her, like he was gauging her reaction. For her part, Lauren felt a little twist at the revelation. It wasn’t like she hadn’t considered her way through the possibility his wife was dead, after all—to be so young, though, divorce seemed like it might have been the more likely of the two ways they’d have separated.

“That explains why you’re still wearing it, I guess,” Lauren said. “She get killed by demons?”

Hendricks blinked at her. “Did someone tell you that?”

“Just a guess,” Lauren said, “based on the things you’re holding tight to. Killing demons, wearing your hat and whatnot. I hate to reduce a person down to their obvious habits, but …”