Rob Thurman - Roadkill

Always fun hearing that. The big badasses were like that. It had been so long since they’d had an actual challenge that they’d forgotten one could exist. But in the past, we’d taken down everyone we ran up against. Sometimes it took only you and the fear of what the son of a bitch might do trumping the fear of dying. Sometimes it took a shitload of backup and weapons. Sometimes it took your entire lifetime to date. Whichever it was, Niko and I had never failed to get them in the end.

We’d also never come up against someone like Suyolak. He could kill with a thought, and guns weren’t much good if you were dead between aiming and pulling the trigger. True or not, I wasn’t going to admit it. The bastard might get my life, but he wasn’t going to get my fear. “Then let’s go show him how wrong his mummified ass is,” I said as I pulled my Eagle from the holster.

Moving again toward the spring Rafferty had-what did they call it?-“waxed poetic” about. I got the poetic part; where the wax came in had left me in the dark, and when Niko had explained it back in the homeschooling days, I would’ve zoned out immediately. How a language evolved throughout the centuries didn’t much interest me then… or now. I knew what the phrase meant and that was enough for me, although I’d guarantee Nik had smacked me in the back of the head or flicked my ear painfully at my lack of interest at the time.

As he did now. “Jesus,” I hissed in a low tone, and glared at him as he now walked silently beside me. “What was that for?” It was always for something. Niko had never outgrown the role of teacher-he never would. If we lived to be in our nineties, he’d still be force- feeding me yogurt, teaching me the new martial arts of our alien overlords, and jacking my brain directly into some long-winded documentary about the dung beetle and its place in history. On the day I was born, Nik became a big brother and until the day I died, he still would be.

“Don’t gate,” he warned me in the same near whisper, but no less authoritatively with the lack of volume, because that was Niko. Some, such as Goodfellow, radiated charisma rather like a supernova did light and deadly radiation, and some, like Nik, were that radiation. Whether it was a whisper or not, you listened. “Don’t think you can travel next to Suyolak and empty your clip into his head before he can kill you, because you can’t. Rafferty is here for a reason. Let him do what he’s meant to-heal the world of a pestilence.”

And if he can’t, I wanted to ask, but whisper or not, Rafferty would hear it. We were down to the wire now. It was time to shut up about his qualifications. Besides, if he couldn’t put down Suyolak like the rabid dog he was, traveling probably wouldn’t be an issue. Trying to shove the shredded lungs I’d coughed up into the dirt back down my throat and into my chest where they belonged might be. However, in all likelihood, traveling would be lower on the list. And weighing the risk of the Auphe in my progressing because of it would be at the very bottom.

“ Cal.”

Niko was serious most of the time, but there was serious and then there was now. I didn’t push him on it. “Okay. No traveling.” This time I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. If Suyolak was in Rafferty’s head, a whisper wasn’t going to be an effective stealth tool. I was surprised the bastard hadn’t dropped us all in the parking lot the same as he’d taken down the mass of giant trees.

“That’s because I’m still protecting you,” Rafferty said as he stopped walking. Catcher’s eyes glowed in the purple light as he looked back at us.

“Great. I’ve had Suyolak in my brain,” I complained. “I don’t want you sneaking a look too.”

“It’s no goddamn picnic for me either,” he snapped, but absently, his main focus elsewhere. “If your customers knew what you put in their beer.” Before I could protest that I only thought about it, hadn’t actually done it, he added, “There it goes.”

By “it,” he meant the spring… or now a geyser. We, including Delilah, Abelia, and her men, were standing on hardened, ridged dirt that rose slightly at a fair distance in front of us, and that’s where the show was. I smelled it before I heard it and heard it before I saw it: sulfur, then the sound of boiling… as if something as big as the ocean itself were churning, and finally the explosion of water that hit the air and kept going up. Up. Up, and holy shit. I felt like Moses at the parting of the Red Sea. No, I felt more like an Egyptian soldier just there for the paycheck, wondering where it all had gone wrong as I drank the water down. “How the hell is he doing that?” I craned my head to see the water high above us shimmering with a light that was a pale purple reflection of the sky above it.

“The bacteria in the water,” Rafferty said. “He’s agitated them to a thousand times their normal activity. That light is them dying. He turned them into… hell, stars. But microbial stars don’t live long.”

“Is he going to boil us alive, because, quite frankly, that is the one near death I’ve avoided throughout the millennia, and I’ve no particular interest in it now.” Robin had his sword out too, but for the first time it looked useless and he, thanks to those millennia of experience, was Niko’s equal in swordsmanship… if he was sober. “Although at least these wretched clothes from that equally wretched, low-fashion and inedible food store are machine washable. If I do die, at least my corpse won’t reside in shrunken, wrinkled rags.”

“No. We’re not going to be boiled alive, but you just made me wish we would be,” Rafferty growled.

Rafferty was a lightweight when it came to surviving the puck experience, but he was also right. We weren’t boiled alive. A good portion of the water splashed down about two feet from us… a generous estimate. “Cutting it a little close, isn’t he?” I said it to Nik, because when it came to healing, fine, Rafferty was our guy… Wolf… both. But when it came to logistics in a battle, I trusted my brother over anyone and everyone.

And when it came to the abrupt smell of copper and calcium and the five piles of dust that appeared on the ground behind us, it looked like I didn’t have to worry about trusting or not trusting a certain someone ever again. Abelia-Roo and her men were gone. The scent and the flicker out of the corner of my eye had me whirling around, Eagle pointed-except there was nothing for it to do. A dust buster was the only thing that would be any good now. Niko bent down and ran his fingers through one heap. The residue flew off his fingers, finer than flour dust.

“It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah all over again,” Robin said in a hushed tone, finally impressed enough to be almost quiet.

“Shit,” I repeated, without the “holy” this time. There was nothing much holy about this. She’d been a bitch from Hell, Abelia, one so full of hate and loathing that every foot she put to the earth had most likely poisoned it… with just a slower poison than Suyolak’s version. That she could be gone so quickly and quietly, without a screech or a curse, was shocking and almost unbelievable. Like someone’s snapping the fingers at a town-destroying tornado and its simply disappearing. Poof. Gone.

“I couldn’t protect everyone.”

I looked back, but Rafferty hadn’t bothered to turn around. “They were the ones that caused this clusterfuck. They’re responsible for Suyolak’s escaping that coffin. If someone had to go…” He shrugged again. He did that a lot. It was not my favorite thing, especially under deadly circumstances where I had no control. I had issues with control. We’d all seen that, but tricking myself into believing I had control was something that had saved my sanity more than once. Tricks and wire stitching us together sometimes was all you had, and I was missing it badly now.