James Baldwin - Stained Glass

Zane grunted, rumbling a little in his throat. “Were there messages left at this guy’s house?”

“Yes.” I closed my eyes, recalling the image. When I lay a hand on Binah’s back, it returned vividly. She went still under my fingers as I pet her. “The number thirteen. Two interlocked rings, each with eight marks. The last message was Biblical, so I’m inclined to say 2-16 rather than, say, ‘eighteen’. Thirteen… the thirteenth book of the Bible is 1 Chronicles. New Testament is 1 Thessalonians. Neither of those bring up any strong memories for me… nothing worth leaving a message about.”

“Thirteen’s a gang number. But… Bible content. Four, maybe?”

“Book four is Numbers. Again, nothing especially arresting or descriptive.”

Zane pursed his lips. “What about the letter M? Thirteenth letter of the alphabet.”

M, maybe. M for Mark, or M for Matthew? There were at least five Books that started with that letter. “It could be. I usually have a good memory for these sorts of things, but after tonight… I’ll have to hunt through it when we get back. I’m sure we can find a copy of the Bible somewhere.”

“Yeah.” Zane’s heavy brow furrowed. In the darkness, he looked like a statue at the wheel. “Man. I hope Mason’s okay. If he and the two oldest Elders of the city can’t take on whatever’s there, we sure as hell can’t.”

I sighed. “I’ve known many strong men – and several strong women – who simply ran out of luck.”

“Maybe. Or he’s hunkered down in the forest,” Zane said. “I mean, he’s a goddamned tiger.”

“Is that the gang motto?” I arched an eyebrow. “’We’re the goddamned Tigers?”

“No. As in, he’s literally a white tiger. Weighs like one and a half thousand pounds.” Zane shook his head, and slowed, scanning the trailheads. Jenner ripped past us, turning her head to look, and then waved Zane on as she took a right onto an off-road track.

I stiffened up in my seat as Binah yawned and then stood up with her paws on the dash, fixing ahead on nothing. “I thought it was a faux-pas to reveal someone’s… other form.”

“Secrecy is what got us all into this mess. I don’t think I really care about it anymore.” Zane pulled onto the track, lighting up the way ahead as Jenner slowed down on the slippery track. “Not when people’s lives are at stake. The Fires guys think the Ka is this big holy secret. The Crew are just private about changing, for the most part. But I mean, we call ourselves the Big Cat Crew and don’t worry about it too much.”

Binah looked up at me meaningfully. I could see her in the headlamp shining in through our rear window, though it was pitch dark outside. When our eyes met, I felt something… synapse. A brief connection, a kind of primitive understanding. She had sensed something, transferring her sense of the world to me, even though I had no magical sense of smell of my own. “There’s something out there.”

“What?” Zane carefully steered us around a sharp turn. It felt like we were going downhill.

“I don’t know.” I pulled my flashlight and ritual knife, the engraved one. Using magical objects without being able to do magic was probably not effective, but the grooves held the tea tree oil better than my other knife. “She feels it.”

“Binah?” Zane rubbed the back of his head. “All-Seeing Eye Cat, right?”

“It’s true.” I wound down the window, shining the light out, and sniffed deeply of the cold, damp air.

Ahead of us, Jenner tapped her brake light. She pulled over to the side of the road, leaving her bike running and the headlight on, and waved us down.

We were coming up on a clearing, with a small, sparse meadow in an area of fallen logs. I saw something with an odd shape looming in the shadows of the trees, and my hand tensed on the knife hilt as we pulled up behind her. Zane turned his headlights up, and they lit on the half-hidden form of a white Jeep parked just outside the treeline.

Jenner broke into a run as she pulled her helmet off and threw it heedlessly behind her on her way to the half-seen car. Now that we were stationary, I could make out shapes that were closer by. There was a square block of concrete, strangely enough, and a narrow trail through the grass and fallen logs that led down a small ridge into the forest below.

“Wait! Jenner!” Zane called out, jogging off after her.

But she didn’t wait for us. She fled into the darkness, boots scuffing on the ground, and cried out when she reached the bottom of the trail.

Our flashlight beams swung crazily as we ran to catch up, until light caught the gleam of chrome on the ground. It was Mason’s bike. The huge machine was toppled on its side in the mud, a helmet resting on its crown some distance away. Things had tumbled out of the leather satchels on the sides. Gloves, a wallet, plastic bags.

“Something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong.” Jenner went to her knees beside the bike, hands hovering over the engine, the exhaust pipes, the leather of the seat. “Mason would never leave his bike like this. Never .”

“Okay, it’s okay, Jen… look, we’ll go find him.” Duke came up beside her, rubbing her armored shoulder. She brushed him off and got to her feet. Her eyes were hard, her face taut with feral anger.

Binah arched against my head, regarding the fallen hulk warily. I was with her. The air smelled cold, but the usual comforting, earthy aroma of forest loam seemed faded and dreary. With the smattering of rain, this place should have smelled like petrichor and pine, but it simply didn’t smell of much at all.

While the three shifters picked over the bike, I set Binah on the ground and moved apart from them to search the area nearby. She ran ahead of me with a chirrup, bold as brass. There were boot prints, clear patches slushed out of the dewy grass, which lead down a narrow rut into the gully beyond the clearing. My cat trotted off to the left; I followed her with the flashlight beam, briefly losing her until she meowed, and I lit on her rubbing herself against the roots of a tree bulging out from the side of a dug-out hill. A round concrete frame was mounted into the scalloped side, a huge pipe-shaped entryway with an open door. The fetid smell of death blew out on a warm breeze.

“Hey.” I called back up to them. “You should come and see this.”

“What?” Duke called back.

“There’s a bunker.” I took a little tube of Vicks from my jacket pocket, squeezed some out onto my fingers, and rubbed it under my nose. “And it smells like something died in there.”

That got their attention. I had only just put the menthol rub away by the time the three of them came skittering down the path.

“Jesus Christ,” Duke said. “That stinks.”

I took the lead, knife held at the ready. The stench that hung thick in the air beyond the threshold was not as bad as the smell at Falkovich’s house. It was the characteristic latrine-and-stale-ground-beef smell of a relatively fresh corpse. The entry tunnel led in and down, and the air became exponentially less pleasant the further we went. I heard someone choke behind me, and turned to see Duke dash out the door to vomit noisily into the grass.

“Get out of the way, Rex!” Jenner shoved up behind me. “That’s my old man in there!”

“Please… hold on.” I was scanning the walls and ceiling, moving forward with cautious attention. “It could be trapped.”

“Fuck traps!” Jenner snarled and seized the back of my jacket, jerking me off-balance. I was so tired that she’d pushed me aside by the time I got my guard up, and could do nothing but watch her stalk off into the bunker ahead of me. The entry wasn’t wide enough for the two of us to move side by side, so I followed up with my flashlight pointed at her back like a weapon.