K Stewart - A Shot in the Dark

“Hm. Sveta will be last.” Time zones would dictate who called in first, and I had no idea who was where at the moment. But Sveta, the one and only female champion and poster girl for rebellion and authority issues, would most certainly drag it out as long as possible.

Viljo snorted and gave me a sly grin. “I think she will be first.”

“What do you know that I don’t, Viljo?” I was still giving him a suspicious look when the phone beside his keyboard broke into the opening riff of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.”

Viljo made a big show of picking it up to answer it and setting it to speakerphone. “Why, hello, Svetlana.”

I could hear her even with my ears half functional, swearing in her heavily accented English. “Viljo, I swear by all that is holy, if this is another of your ‘system tests’ to get me to call you, I will come there and stuff that phone up your scrawny little ass!”

The geek put his hand over the phone, giving me a grin and a shrug. “She loves me,” he mouthed. “No, my sweet Ukrainian blossom, this is actually an alert requested by one Jesse Dawson, currently occupying my ottoman. Would you like to speak to him?”

Though she didn’t say yes, he pushed the phone in my direction. I rolled my eyes and flipped the speaker off. Raising it to my ear, I caught the tail end of a mutter that sounded like, “I don’t have enough vodka to be awake this early.”

“Sveta?”

There was a bit of startled silence at the other end of the line. Then she said, “Oh! You really are there. I thought Viljo was making lines at me again.” Her accent, so similar to Ivan’s thick Ukrainian, made me smile. Man, I hoped we’d gotten to everyone in time. Ivan was getting on in years, and if a demon managed to ambush him somehow.. .

“No, it’s really me. Are you all right? Have you noticed anything strange?”

“Mmph.” That was the sound of someone struggling with a pillow. I made that same noise often. “Stranger than Viljo?”

“You haven’t been contacted for a contract? No strange creatures lurking?” What else might they do, what else? “No strange men following you?”

She was quiet for a moment. “You know… there was a man yesterday. I saw him several times throughout the day, but he seemed to be traveling with a tourist group and I thought on it no more.”

“What did he look like?”

Her patience was getting thin. I had to wonder what time it was, wherever she was. “I don’t know. Like a man. He had dark hair and nice buttocks.”

Ew. “Could he have been a priest?”

“How am I supposed to know this? He had no collar, no… what is the word?… cassock.”

She had a point. I felt stupid. “All right. Well, if you see him again today, go up and talk to him. Find out if he is one of the Order, and if he is, stick close to him. I don’t think he’ll object.”

Sveta yawned hugely, right in my ear. “As entertaining as seducing a priest might sound, is there a particular reason?” She was already drifting back to sleep, I could tell.

So I explained things to her. In graphic, smelly, oozy, Catholic-y intrigue-y detail. By the end, she was listening intently, and Viljo looked like he might puke. “If they’re coming for you too, you have to be ready.”

“ Tak. You are right. Thank you for the warning, Jesse Dawson.”

“Take care, Sveta.”

Viljo was already back on the computers, fingers flying over multiple keyboards, so I just set his phone down beside him. It rang almost immediately (a normal ring, I noted, not the special one he obviously had for Sveta), and he snatched it up without looking. “Chen.”

What followed was a rapid exchange in Chinese that totally flew over my head. Who knew the little geek spoke Chinese? I should have known, though. I mean, Viljo was GMontag, who took down the Great Firewall of China for three months, once.

I guessed Viljo was talking to Chen Li Zhao, a Chinese-born champion who typically worked his own large corner of the world. Whatever they were saying, the hyperactive geek was dead serious this time, relaying information back and forth with brisk efficiency.

As he spoke on the phone, several windows popped up on his screen, other champions logging in to Grapevine in response to his urgent text messages. Window after window after window, and Viljo’s phone kept ringing. God, how many were there? Way more than the ten or so I thought we had left. There were people on those screens I’d never seen before, faces that were totally foreign to me. Viljo knew them all, though, and I made a mental note to ask him what the hell was up with that later.

Twice, I caught a glimpse of people I recognized. Avery on one screen, in San Francisco, and another man I thought might have been Colin somebody from London.

Part of me hoped that I’d see Esteban’s face pop up, that I could find out where Mira was, make sure my family was safe. It didn’t, and even when I went out to the Suburban to get Cole’s phone, I had no luck locating anyone. As far as I knew, Kansas City had dropped off the face of the planet.

I found Cameron’s phone number on Cole’s contact list, too (because that’s how anal my little brother is), but I got nowhere with it, either. Figured. The Goody Two-shoes actually turned his phone off in the hospital.

As more and more people checked in (And why didn’t I know about this? Were we all kept in the dark this way?), Viljo became more and more absorbed in his duties, alternating between his phone and a dozen different Webcam windows on his many screens.

About the time I heard Ivan’s booming voice come through Viljo’s cell phone, I ducked out of the room, taking a short walk through the trailer to stretch my stiff muscles. Twitching one of the heavy curtains open a bit, I realized that it was getting dark outside already. I’d blown the five-hour time limit I’d given Cole, and he was going to be fretting. I’d done all I could here. I needed to get back to the guys.

“Hey, Viljo? I’m gonna take off, okay? Come lock up behind me.”

The geek emerged from his fortress of nerditude, nodding his agreement. “Ivan says you are ‘to beink careful.’ ” He mimicked the accent almost perfectly, if not the deep gravelly voice, and I chuckled.

“I’ll do my best.” I picked up my holy-loaded paintball gun, then had second thoughts and handed it to Viljo. He gave me a questioning look. “Blessed ammo. Just… in case. I noticed you don’t have wards on your doors.”

He blinked at me in nerd horror. “Do you know what that kind of spell does to sensitive server equipment?”

“Vil, I just watched you whack one with a wrench.”

“It was a highly specialized wrench.”

I showed him how to take the safety off the marker, and gave him a quick how-to in case a ball broke in the barrel. “It won’t kill most things, but it’ll make them think twice. I’ll be back to get this later, so don’t break it.”

He snorted, obviously offended by my doubts.

“Hey, Vil? Who were all those people?”

His eyes narrowed behind his glasses. “What do you mean?”

“All those champions. That’s way more than ten or twelve of us.”

The geek frowned and shook his head. “You talk to Ivan about that. He has given instructions.”

I didn’t like that answer, but knowing Viljo’s rabid devotion to our Ukrainian leader, I didn’t think I’d get any more out of him.

It was dark by the time I got on the road. I’d forgotten how far into autumn we really were. Gone were the nine p.m. sunsets, the long summer days. Winter was knocking on the door, and I had to scrape a little frost off the windshield before I could get going. I was so not dressed for an early cold snap.

Getting out of Viljo’s place was easy. Remembering which godforsaken back road led toward civilization, not so much. Twice, I got turned around in the dark, and had to backtrack, using the distant lights of Manitou Springs and the looming presence of Pikes Peak to guide me. And trust me when I say that turning a Suburban around on a narrow gravel road is not easy.