Zel was huddled into herself, arms wrapped round her legs as she sat on the ground. Her hat was still on her head, but the off-kilter angle of it didn’t cover a ten-mile stare that told me she was in another time, another place, when the world had started to go crazy. Now it was happening here, again.
“What the hell did we just see?” Her voice was low and garbled, so I went over to her, knowing that this was the first sign of Zel losing it. I put my hand on her shoulder, just to steady her and, underneath her shirt, I felt the heat of her skin.
Oddly, I seemed to be the calmest person round. Irony at its best.
Zel’s “hell” curse had jarred Gabriel, but he hid it well by training his gaze on the visz bank, which featured a screen that showed a clear view of the torture device Stamp’s men had set up. Maybe I was calmer than the rest because I’d only seen the tragedy from a distance. That, coupled with the peace that was still in me, probably made a difference.
“All we did was stand by while they went at him,” Gabriel said, his words barely audible.
Everyone grew quiet, even though the victim had been a demon. I wasn’t sure how we should feel about its termination. Lore had it that demons were awful news, but a possessed man had been involved in this case, and it might not have been a voluntary possession. If it wasn’t, killing him was appalling. As Gabriel had told me before, some bad guys are grouped in with the rest, even though they might not have thoroughly earned the title.
His comment still hung in me, like that body outside, swaying in the wind.
Pucci and Hana stayed away from everyone else. He was gaping in that fretful way one had when he could barely believe what he’d just seen. But that was Pucci for you.
“We can’t have demons here, anyway,” he said. “A demon! The lowest of the low—a monster that’d suck the life out of any of us.” He laughed a bit, his nerves clearly addled.
Idiot. “Now’s not the time to lose it, Pucci.”
“Then when
is
the time?” Pucci chuffed. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Mariah, but didn’t Hana and I come back here to your place in time to bear witness to . . . what the tar do they call it . . . ?”
Hana was standing next to Pucci, but there was a space between them. “An exorcism.”
As Pucci nerve-laughed again, Hana stayed silent. She was a thoughtful one, as if she might already be a step ahead of us all about how to build that bridge with Stamp she’d suggested last night. I’d wished many a time that she’d leave Pucci in the dust, but she always stuck with him. I couldn’t understand why such a smart girl stood for him unless she got something out of all his yelling and bullying. Something a little sick, if you asked me. But it wasn’t like we were a template for normalcy out here.
The oldster had bent over, resting his hands on his thighs. He’d seemed fine before, but now it looked as if reality was just hitting him. “A demon. In all my life, I’ve never seen one of ’em. I heard about ’em, but . . .”
We all just looked at each other, excluding Gabriel from what passed in our gazes. But the oldster didn’t need to say it out loud, anyway.
How was it that there’d been a demon running round the New Badlands and we hadn’t known it?
Gabriel leaned back against the ladder. “So you all had no idea it was out there.”
“No,”
we said in unison.
“You weren’t doing anything ridiculous like making sacrifices to this creature so it’d hunt away from your community?”
God-all.
The oldster looked horrified. “Are you kidding, Gabriel?”
“After what we just saw, I’m afraid not.”
Blowing out a breath, the old man stood straight. “Fair enough. But when we spoke of wild things outside at night, we never included a demon in the equation.”
Sammy asked, “What do you think brought it here?”
I had an answer. “Some sort of exodus from the hubs?”
Even while I said it, I didn’t like what it meant. If monsters started moving out to the New Badlands, this community might end up restarting the cycle of violence we’d tried to flee in the first place. To protect ourselves against this magnitude of threat, we might have to become a new version of Shredders, killing stray monsters who’d bring attention to us out here.
Monsters like Gabriel.
But there was no way I’d reveal his secret. He was worthy of my efforts, because . . .
Was it because of the peace he could give me and that was it?
Zel glanced at one of the viszes, where the remains of the demon swayed in the night.
“This isn’t justice,” she whispered, sounding far off, eons away from where any of us were right now. “Not all monsters are beyond hope. I’ve even heard of demons who could bargain for a decent cause if there was a good trade in it for them.”
I tightened my grip on Zel’s shoulder, wanting to keep her contained. She could have hair-trigger emotions, like me. Like all of us. And it would only come to harm.
Sammy ignored her comment, lowering to his haunches. Now he was belatedly spent, just like the oldster. “So Stamp got his kicks. Maybe that’s all he wanted.”
“I don’t think so,” Gabriel said. But then he didn’t seem to have any more answers than we did. Tonight he was one of us—unsure and slightly pissed off because he’d just stood there, too, letting Stamp do what he’d done. Gabriel seemed the type to have higher ideals, and here we were, dragging him down to a place where those standards couldn’t exist.
“Stamp’s gonna turn his attention back here, certainly enough,” Gabriel finally said. “You know he will.”
Suddenly I wasn’t just thinking about Stamp. I pictured the men who’d attacked my old home.
“He’s the type who likes live torture,” I found myself saying. “Mental, physical—it does something for him. Carnerotica isn’t enough because he can’t smell it or be next to it. Beings like him, they do it because it’s the only way for them to feel alive. Filling his emptiness with someone else’s pain is all that keeps him going.”
Zel spoke again in that drifting voice. “Stamp’ll get away with it, just like they all do.”
The oldster gave her a worried glance, then gestured toward the exit, where the night waited outside. “Hate to break in with this, but there’ll be carrion feeders arriving to pluck that demon’s body clean. And we all know that shades tend to think that there’s more to come, and they sometimes hide among the rocks to swoop down on anything else that comes by. We should clean up before that happens.”
As if the oldster hadn’t said a word, Zel again set her gaze on the outside visz screen, with its focus on the skeleton of the three joined poles the demon had been executed and the shell of its body twisting in another gust of wind.
“With every passing day,” she said quietly, “we good cops saw things get worse, not better. And every time we managed to put a bad guy away, a technicality would surface due to a rotten cop purposely screwing up procedure for a payoff. Or there’d be a command from the government and their corporate interests to release the criminal. After a while, there was no use in keeping on with it.”
“Zel . . .” the oldster said.
But she wasn’t listening. “The . . . time . . . came when I had to leave the hubs—”
I clamped my hand on her shoulder, and she blinked. Stiffened. Regrouped.
Then she added, “A rogue psychic—a criminal informant who set up a secret fortune-telling business in a free-housing reservation—told me to head west. That’s all he said. Out of not knowing where else to go, I did. And I found you guys.”
The oldster was looking at the ceiling, as if it were an old movie screen showing the day Zel had arrived. He was smiling slightly until her next words.
“Out here there was good. There was some bad, too, but it wasn’t beyond redeeming.” She reached up to hold my hand, and I gripped her, my throat getting choked. “I thought I’d outlive the day when I’d encounter pure evil again, and I can’t watch it grow and take over now. I won’t.” She gazed at us. “Tell me we’re going to do something about it.”
Seconds ticked by. No one volunteered. I was afraid to because of what it might bring on this time. We were already in too deep.
It was as if Zel had been drilled through with a bullet, and she slightly jerked under the impact of it. Then she wobbled to her feet, pushing her hat off her head as she wandered out of our circle. We let her be as the talk turned back to Stamp and our options. And our non-options.
The discussion grew loud and heated between the oldster and Pucci, in particular. But we didn’t get anywhere further than we’d been before.
About fifteen minutes in, Pucci said, “Maybe we should just up and go to another place before we’re taken over by people like Stamp. This area we once thought of as a sanctuary has been found, my friends. There could be more of him to come.”
A laugh chopped out of me. I didn’t mean to use it to get everyone’s attention, but that was just what it did.
I made use of it. “Hiding. Always hiding.”
Pucci shirked back, then frowned. He was the kind of man who didn’t take kindly to any female lip. Too bad.
“Mariah,” he said, “I wouldn’t be so uppity if I were you.”
I stared right back at him, and he knew he’d gone too far. I could see it in the twitch of his mouth.
On the other side of the room, I could sense Gabriel tensing. He watched Pucci closely. Was he . . . protecting me?
“Antonio,” Hana said.
She didn’t even raise her voice, but all the same, it seemed to slap Pucci.
He walked back to where Hana was standing, then leaned against the wall next to her, as if all were well. But he was grinding his teeth as he gradually slid his gaze to Hana.
A split second before Pucci raised his had with the obvious intention of grabbing her robes and bringing her face-to-face with him, Gabriel rushed over—not vampire-fast, but quick enough—and inserted his arm between them as a barrier.
Hana looked up at Gabriel with her big brown eyes, utterly calm. She wasn’t afraid, and Gabriel seemed surprised at that.
He looked straight at Pucci, and Pucci just stared right back until the oldster spoke.
“Hey,” he said. “Where’s Zel?”
We seemed to come out of the malaise that the strained moment between Gabriel, Pucci, and Hana had wrought. None of us had been paying mind to Zel. She must’ve slipped through the door, through the common area and to her domain, during the distraction.
Damn. Damn it all . . .
Chaplin, who’d remained quiet up until now, talked to me.
Check on her, Mariah!
But I’d already sprinted to the common-area tunnel door and opened it, letting Chaplin through. I ran off after him toward the common room, which was empty. Then I yanked open Zel’s unlocked door.
Her domain was empty, too.
I barreled back to my place, just as Gabriel was halfway up the ladder, obviously intending to check if Zel was outside, beyond the scope of the viszes.
I stopped him by yelling, “Gone!” while rushing toward the weapons wall.
God-all, we knew what Zel was going to do, and she needed to be stopped. If things were bad now, they’d only be worse if—
The oldster was at my side, echoing my thoughts. “You don’t think she did something foolhardy, like going off to Stamp’s with her sense of righteousness on fire.”
Gabriel jumped down from the ladder. “She wouldn’t be that careless, especially all by herself.”
I whittled my explanation to its safest, taking a double-barreled shotgun from the wall, plus a bag of ammunition. “Zel’s gone into worse situations. She was a cop, and if you saw what was on her face tonight, you know that she wasn’t about to tolerate a minute more of what she considers to be injustice. Besides, Zel . . .”
A flustered Sammy cut in, editing me. “Zel can do damage. It’s only a matter of
having
to do it. You can only push a woman like her so far, and . . . I think she lost it tonight, you guys. Really lost it.”
We were all watching each other in front of Gabriel—what was said, what was done—but he didn’t seem to notice.
“This is on
me
,” he said. “I was the one with all the talk the other night.”
The oldster walked over, clearly sensing that Gabriel wasn’t about to stand idly by. Not this time.
“We can catch up to her,” the old man said.
Pucci’s enraged voice cut in. “And what then? Goddamn it, is every one of you forgetting what the hell’s at stake? This is just what we’ve been trying to avoid!”
Gabriel flinched at the curses, but he moved toward the common-area door, anyway. The oldster was right behind him.
Sammy called, “Oldster, what are you planning—?”
The old man held up a revolver. “Here’s my strategy, and it’s enough. Io avot control of this.”
Nobody halted them as Gabriel laid his hand on the door, clearly thinking about how to proceed. Was he wondering if he should run as fast as a vampire was capable, taking the risk of exposing his monster side to whatever was out there?