Dark Game (Merikh Book 1) (18 page)

“Thank you.”

I opened the door and stepped out into the already warm dawn. The highway was a brisk, twenty minute walk and I planned on hitching from there. I didn’t want to take a car and be stuck with a reminder of this magic infested town.

The sun was up and hot as I walked along the edge of the road. The highway was old, cracked, and in need of repair, but it was also the main artery for this and several other counties. There was a steady stream of cars but none of them stopped to pick me up. I made it to a fuel stop with a trucker bar a little after midday.

I was soaked with sweat and still bruised from the night before when I stepped into the cool interior of the bar, so I could understand why several of the patrons looked at me the way they did. The place was about half full, despite the time of day. I took a spot at the bar and ordered a Coke.

When Slimy Joe, the used car salesman from Midway, walked into the bar I realized that bizarre coincidences would probably rule my life now. I turned away from him so he wouldn’t see me and quickly finished my drink.

“What are you doing here?” a gruff voice from the back of the bar said.

“Whatever I want.” Slimy Joe’s voice was different, menacing and direct, looking for a fight.

He got one.

I turned to watch so I could plan my escape. I didn’t want him to see me and try to drag me into his problem. The gruff voice belonged to a cliché of a biker, wearing leather and chains and looking like he’d only just come from his last fight. I expected Joe to back away, but then I saw the look on his face.

He actually had come looking for a fight. There was mania in his eyes and his hands were curled into fists so tight he might never open them again. He sneered as the biker approached, shifted his feet to get into a more appropriate stance, and waited.

“I told you last time,” the biker said as he cleared the last of the tables between him and the car salesman.

“Who listens to you?” Joe replied. He waited a beat, just long enough for the biker to open his mouth with a retort, before leaping at him with all the elegance of a drunk squirrel.

They clashed and Joe got the upper hand. He was swinging his fists unpredictably, insanely. It would have been comical if he wasn’t landing a few to the biker’s face and drawing blood.

Another guy stood from a table near the fight, this one older, with a grey ponytail. He tried to grab Joe and got an elbow to the face for his efforts.

Two more rose, ready to join the fight as Joe took the biker to the floor and kept pummeling him, smashing his face over and over with those tight fists.

I stood as well, whether to leave or to help, I’m not sure. The bartender reached over and took hold of my arm.

“You’ll want to stay out of this,” he said when he had my attention. “This is a long time coming, and if he doesn’t learn his lesson now he never will.”

“Lesson?”

“Joe’s been coming in here forever but the last few nights he’s been picking fights. Last night we tossed him out and told him to stay tossed. He deserves this.”

I turned back to the fight and Joe was finally being dragged off the biker, who looked unconscious. The old guy with the ponytail told two others to hold Joe while he took his turn punching him. A queue was building up around him, everyone hungry for their turn to hurt someone.

The bar wasn’t far enough from Midway to escape that yellow energy every night. I could see it in their eyes, the same as the look in Brick when he’d seen Stephen at the Littleton party. This wasn’t who they were, and I was willing to bet it wasn’t going to get any better before whatever Foster had planned. If it was bad enough for someone like Slimy Joe to go picking fights in a bar he knew was filled with people who wanted to stomp on him, then things were going to get really bad when the people of Littleton struck back at Midway.

And it wasn’t my problem, so I left. I closed the door on the sounds of people beating someone to death and stepped out into the unrelenting sunlight.

It isn’t my problem, I kept telling myself as I walked away and stuck my thumb out for a ride I wasn’t going to get.

I could feel the world conspiring around me and I didn’t like it. From the moment Mouse fell, everything had either gone my way or steered me back toward Foster. Patty finding me, of course, but even my escape. What were the odds that I managed to run through the whole mansion and never run into anyone who could stop me? What were the odds that they couldn’t find me in the forest as I escaped?

The gods were playing with me and I wasn’t interested.

I walked for an hour, done with trying to hitchhike and walking with my head down to keep my face out of the sun. A car pulled over to the side behind me, and when I didn’t turn to acknowledge it, it simply followed, keeping pace with me but letting me turn in my own time.

I spun around and yelled at the car. “I know what you’re doing here and I’m not interested.”

The woman behind the wheel of the beat-up station wagon, a middle-aged woman with librarian glasses, just watched me and kept quiet. I turned and stomped away, but her tires crunching over the gravel behind me was a taunt and I didn’t last long.

“Whatever you want, I’m not interested.” I rounded on the driver’s side and waited for her to roll the window down. It was an old manual winder and it took her a while, but the calm look on her face never slipped and her eyes never left mine.

“You have to go back,” she said, but it wasn’t her voice. It was something pretending to be her, acting like a person. Even her accent was subtly wrong.

“Are you Wanehl?”

“No. I’m something else.”

“What?” I was scared of this being in human clothing and I didn’t know why. She had done nothing to intimidate me, and yet I had to force myself to step forward and face her.

“I am something greater, and I need you to stop being a petulant child.”

“Bite me.”

“One of your late friend Angelica’s favorite things to say.” The woman gave a sour little smile. “Go back to Midway and I will give her back to you.”

“What?” I’d met a god – Claire – and I was pretty sure this woman wasn’t one. Or if she was she was more alien, more powerful… Just more.

“I will fetch her soul from the nether and put her back together. I will ensure she lives a long and healthy life and never wants for anything ever again. I will reward her for your actions.”

“What are you?”

“More than you can comprehend, and I need you to complete your task.”

“You’ll bring her back and let us leave?”

“I’m sorry, but it is unlikely you will survive, Merikh.” The woman didn’t sound sorry. “But I will make sure Angelica does.”

I swallowed hard to get rid of the bitter taste in my mouth. “Why can’t you just take care of it yourself? If you can bring people back from the dead, you can do anything.”

“Almost.” She sighed, shook her head. “You’re scared.”

“I’m tired of—”

“You’re scared and you want to run away without Mouse to help you. You’re the same scared little boy who couldn’t face his responsibility to the clan and faked his own death to escape. You’re frightened because this is something you might fail at.”

“I fail plenty.”

“You wanted to run as soon as Trevor Foster used magic, and you’ve wanted to run every second since.” Coming from this woman, the words were a scolding from an adult to a child. “Only Mouse kept you from doing so, and now I offer you the chance to get her back and you cower away.”

This being had a point, but I thought she was laying it on a little thick. “Do you watch me in the shower, too, or just when I’m out with friends?”

“You can leave,” she said, ignoring me. “And you may even get to enjoy your life, though I doubt it. If you do, keep in mind what I’ve offered you. Ponder what you’ve given up for your cowardice.”

The being within her had grown bored with me, it seemed. I could see the moment it left her; one second she was calm and distant, the next she was looking out the window at the stranger who had her on the side of the road.

She screamed, predictably, and put her foot flat on the accelerator. I was showered with gravel and dirt and left to bake in the sun.

I wanted to keep going. Midway was a darkness at my back and I couldn’t face it again. Magic had killed Mouse’s husband and it had killed Mouse. It was their fate and perhaps I needed to accept it.

Which is something the cowardly me would say. The brave me, the one who was in business with Mouse, would laugh at the first one and tell him what an idiot he was being.

I shook my head, to clear the cobwebs and to shake off the dust, and turned back toward the bar. A moment later an air-conditioned SUV with a blank-faced man behind the wheel pulled up and unlocked the door.

“My own chauffeur,” I said as I climbed into the cold, dark interior. “You shouldn’t have.”

“You have very little time to come up with a plan. Your recalcitrance has probably lost you your victory.”

“I don’t know what recalcitrance means,” I said, relaxing into the soft leather seat and closing my eyes. “Just take me home, Jeeves.”

The journey wouldn’t be long and I didn’t have time to chat with the mysterious power behind the SUV guy’s face. I had to work out how I was going to take out a man who’d beaten me every time we faced each other. I had to work out how I was going to stop a town from imploding. And I had to do it without Mouse.

We passed the bar. An ambulance was outside with its lights flashing. One of the paramedics was wheeling an unconscious, bruised and beaten Joe into the back.

It was going to be an interesting night.

Chapter 16

The SUV guy spun his tires when he pulled away. Whatever had been poorly concealed beneath his skin was gone. He was confused, and he took it out on me by yelling and threatening to call the cops if I didn’t get out.

Patty was still sitting on Claire’s couch, but the waitress-god had gone to work. When I knocked, it took Patty a minute before she opened the door.

“You’re back?” she said, angry at me.

I could understand why. I nodded and she stepped aside with an exaggerated flourish. I entered and took a seat on the couch. I waited while she got control of herself enough to look at me without sneering.

“So what changed your mind?”

“You alright?”

“No, Mark. Or Merikh, or whatever. I’m not.” She paced as she spoke, burning off excess energy. “I’m constantly ready to kill someone, and I just found out the world is a really weird place. I’m stuck here because I’m too afraid I might punch someone if I go home or to work, and I can’t tell anyone because they’ll lock me up if they hear the story.”

“So, not great then?”

She sat heavily beside me. “Just peachy.”

“Look on the bright side: you know more about the world than anyone you grew up with. You know some of the big secrets now.”

“I really want to punch you right now.” Her arms were crossed but I could see them twitching. It was fight or flight and it was washing through her constantly.

“You can, if it’ll help. I should heal before I have to do anything important.”

“I’m tempted to jump you and do nasty things until the diner chick gets back.”

“That I’ll have to decline,” I said.

She looked at me with wild eyes. “Pity.”

Claire called and told me she knew I was back and she was on her way. Patty and I sat and talked for an hour, with me answering her questions as best I could – and being completely honest, which was novel for me – and asking her questions about how she was feeling.

My guess at what was going on inside her was simple. Whatever that yellow energy was, it was stimulating her amygdala and causing her to release adrenaline and noradrenaline constantly. It was keeping her at the edge of lashing out unconsciously, and it was getting worse. If I had to come up with a timeline for when it would get to the point where she could no longer control herself, I would have guessed a few hours.

Which I already knew, because that was when Claire said Foster was going to complete whatever he was planning.

By the time Claire arrived, Patty and I were done talking. She was pissed that I kept asking her questions, yet had no patience for my answers. She blanked when I told her about the thing possessing random motorists, not even caring when I said it could bring people back from the dead.

What I’m saying is, it was great when Claire walking in because at least that gave me someone to talk to who wasn’t crazy. Or, at least, was less crazy.

“I don’t know what that could have been,” she said when I finished telling her about my day. “It’s not one of us, anyway. We only get to choose when we die, and it sounds like this thing could hop around as much as it liked.”

“A ghost?” I tried.

“No such thing.” She looked at me like I’d suggested the Easter Bunny. “The bigger question is what could bring Mouse back from the nether.”

“I’m guessing that’s really difficult.”

“Any of us could, but it’s not easy. Some of the altered history remnants could, given ideal circumstances.”

“You’ll have to explain that.”

“Some other time. The sun is on its way to the horizon and we don’t have the hours it would take. What’s your plan?”

“Simple,” I said, my sigh giving away my actual thoughts. “I have to convince Littleton that their hyped up aggression isn’t something they want to give into. Assuming they calm down, I can move on to Foster, which is easy.”

She waited for my brilliant plan. Patty was barely paying attention to the conversation and even she looked intrigued.

“I lure him out of his house and shoot him from very far away.” It was Mouse’s plan, really, but it was the best I could do. If I had to face him again, I was sure it would go as well as every other time.

“You’ll need him in town,” Patty said. “Somewhere with buildings and a good line of sight.”

“You’ve done this before?” I said. I ignored the flash of irritation that crossed her face.

“I’ve played games. I know how it works.”

“Fair enough, and you’re right.” I turned to Claire, who was sitting at the kitchen counter. “Will he come if you call him?”