A Shot in the Dark (26 page)

Finally, in frustration, I rolled the window down and asked the next person I saw walking along.

“Oh, you want
Old
Backlick Road. That’s up toward the Peak.” The man pointed in the direction of the looming mountain in question. “You go up the highway a piece, take a left at the Git-n-Go, go a couple a miles. You’ll see a blinking yellow light—keep going straight. Then you’ll come to a T in the road. Hang a right, go about five miles, and you’ll see the sign. If it hasn’t fallen down again.”

Of course.
Old
Backlick Road. How silly of me. Lives were at stake, and the GPS wanted to quibble about the age of the freakin’ road.

What my very helpful guide neglected to tell me was that the blacktop ran out shortly after the isolated, possibly abandoned gas station. Keep in mind that I was no stranger to gravel roads—Missouri has plenty, and not far from my house—but I was driving a monster of a strange vehicle, and these particular roads had ruts that made the Grand Canyon envious. Five minutes in, and I was sure that every vertebra in my back was pulverized, and my teeth clacked together as I jounced over the road so hard that I saw stars.

Luckily, the sign for “Old” Backlick Road—which still said just BACKLICK ROAD, I might add. And what the hell kind of name is that??—had not fallen down, and with some deductive reasoning (I guessed), I took a right and headed out into what is officially known as “the boonies.”

It took me another half an hour to find what I hoped was Viljo’s place. The double-wide trailer sat off the main road (and I use the word “main” loosely) quite a ways, and the path that passed for a driveway was so overgrown, it might as well have been nonexistent. The only reason I even realized it was there was the mailbox at the corner, and the pile of FedEx boxes sitting under it. Surely, they’d be delivering out here only if someone was around to pick up the packages.

The Suburban rattled down the treelined trail until I found a very large, very angry-looking plywood penguin pointing an intimidating flipper at me. The sign around its neck said TRESPASSERS WILL BE REFORMATTED. Okay, I admit, I have no idea what the penguin had to do with anything other than being flat-out bizarre, but the menacing sign was definitely a computer reference, so I assumed I had the right place.

The double-wide trailer I found at the end of the trail could have been anyone’s trailer, really, except for the numerous phone and power lines running in through the top of it. Lines that I really should have noticed, coming off the road. Proof that humans, as a species, seldom think to look up.

I turned the diesel engine off and sat in silence for a few moments, waiting to see if anyone was going to come investigate. Truthfully, despite my rural upbringing, overly rustic places like this always make me listen warily for banjo music on the wind. The last thing I needed was to get out and find myself looking down the barrel of a shotgun.

There had been a halfhearted attempt to mow what passed for a lawn, maybe two months ago. The lawn-mower sat where it had been abandoned, tiny tendrils of vines climbing their way up the handle in slow-acting revenge.

The trailer itself was some nondescript shade of weatherworn gray. Could have been blue, in a previous life. The windows on one end of the house trailer were boarded over. The rest were heavily curtained. I watched them, to see the telltale twitch of someone watching me, but there was nothing.

I eased out of the truck, holy paintball marker in one hand, and shut the door softly behind me. In the trees around, I could hear birds chirping, and the breeze was a decidedly chilly but perfectly mundane source of my goose bumps. It took me a few moments to realize that the low throb I heard wasn’t my heartbeat, but the deep bass of some loud music, emanating from within. A piercing wail, muffled but audible, escaped through the insulated windows.
Björk. Gotta be.

I had to smirk to myself. Definitely the right place.

17

“V
iljo! Open the goddamned door!” I pounded on the door for the third time, well aware that the flimsy structure would totally cave if I decided to just kick it in. Before I could truly talk myself into that, the pounding music silenced, and I heard the sounds of someone moving around inside. “C’mon, Viljo, it’s cold out here!”

There was no peephole in the door, but someone—Viljo, I assume—had cut a small square out of the wood and positioned some kind of flap over it. That flap lifted, but there was nothing on the other side but a glass lens, staring blankly at me. I glared at the tiny technological spy. “I don’t have time for this, Vil. It’s a freakin’ emergency.”

After a moment—during which I seriously considered painting that little lens neon pink with paintballs—the flap dropped shut, and I could hear multiple locks rattling on the inside of the door. Judging from the sound of it, the door was solid metal behind the wooden exterior. Okay, maybe I
wouldn’t
have been able to kick it in. I was vaguely glad I hadn’t tried,’cause that would have just been embarrassing.

The door finally swung inward, and I peered into the darkened trailer . . . and then I looked down. “I . . . thought you’d be taller.”

The man who looked up at me was five feet tall, if he was lucky. His stringy hair was dyed matte black, and pulled back into a ragged ponytail. The sparse attempt at a mustache looked like it had been painted on with mascara, and he blinked at me behind his heavily smudged glasses. “Jesse?”

I shrugged. “Surprise.”

Viljo stepped back to allow me in, and I caught him slipping something back behind the door. A quick glance revealed a baseball bat. “Who did you think was knocking, Vil?” I felt no magic tingle as I crossed his threshold, and it made me pause for a heartbeat. Viljo’s trailer wasn’t warded. Oddly, I realized that I’d expected it to be.

“Never can be too sure. Immigration could come calling at any time.” And he was gonna take a bat to them? Remind me not to spook the little geek.

Viljo glanced around his dimly lit abode, and frowned. “Please excuse the mess. I do not get visitors, often.” It went without saying that he preferred it that way.

The place really was a disaster. The one trash can I could see was overflowing with empty energy drinks, and there was a stack of pizza boxes as high as the kitchen counter. I think there was a couch against the far wall, but it was covered in what looked to be a pile of black T-shirts. The single lamp in the corner was smothered by yet another black T-shirt thrown carelessly across the shade, and I moved to whip it off, thinking “fire hazard!”

Of course, a fire might have been appreciated. It was freezing ass cold in the trailer. I mean, it was colder inside than out, and my breath frosted in front of me. “Air conditioner works.”

“The cold is good for the servers.” He spent a few moments locking the door securely behind me. “You said this is an emergency? What kind of emer—?” His eyes lit on the tattoo on my arm. “Oh. That kind. I thought you were on vacation.”

“So did I.” I looked for a place to sit, then decided it was more sanitary to stand. I did set my paintball marker down, fully expecting it to be swallowed by the T-shirt monster breeding on the sofa. “Have you heard anything weird over Grapevine? Anyone missed checking in or anything?”

He snorted. “Over the last three days? No. Though I have been unable to contact Father Gregory, as you asked me to.”

That didn’t surprise me. The knights knew what was going down already, they didn’t feel the need to keep in touch. “We need to send out an alert, get everyone on the phone or the computer or whatever. Everyone needs to check in.”

“Why?”

“Because they really are out to get us.” I put a hand on his thin shoulder and turned him toward the back of the trailer (where I presumed his computers were) before he could ask any more questions. I wasn’t sure I had answers anyway.

The rear half of the double-wide was taken up entirely with servers and computers and monitors and wires and . . . I counted ten screens before I gave up, and made it only halfway around the room. There were no lights beyond the flickering of multiple monitors and the glow from at least seven computer towers, each in its own violently bright color.

The temperature was noticeably warmer in there, due to all the active machines, I guess, and I came to appreciate Viljo’s cranked up AC.

The geek planted himself in a chair and rattled something off on a few different keyboards. Instantly, the monitors went from their swirling idle phases to windows that seemed to open up into different locations in cyberspace. Viljo didn’t think I saw him shut down the porn windows, and I smirked to myself.

“So, should I tell everyone why I am blowing up their phones, or is it to be a surprise?” Once he focused on that monitor, his eyes never wavered from it. I was left talking to the back of his head.

“It’s possible that the demons have put a hit out on us.” I scratched at the black marks on my arm absently. “One had a trap waiting for me up at the cabin.” A trap that he’d had to have put in place months ago. Chilling, really, when you think about it. I suppose immortal creatures really aren’t constrained by things like “time.”

Viljo’s fingers paused on the keys. “That is . . . not possible. The contracts . . .”

“They’ve found a way around it.” I finally spotted a footstool, buried under a stack of gaming magazines. Shoving the pile off onto the floor, I dragged the stool over so I could have a seat next to Viljo. “We have to warn everyone to watch their backs.”

In a few keyboard taps and a half dozen clicks of the mouse, Viljo had the message winging across the ether. “Should we warn the Order, also?”

“No.” And if the bastards had warned us in the first place, God knows how much of the last few days could have been prevented. I added that to my mental list of “things to punch Cam in the face for.”

“Okay then. Alert sent. When Ivan calls, you get to talk to him.” Viljo rocked his chair back, folding his hands over his stomach. Images and screens kept flickering up and down over his monitors, almost like the network had a mind of its own.

One Web site caught my eye, and I leaned forward to see better. “What’s that?”

Even in the darkened room, I caught his blush. “Just . . . something I have been working on.”

“So you’ve sold your soul, now what?” I read off the screen. “You made . . . a self-help Web site. For people who’ve sold their souls.”

“It just started out as a way to tweak my Web design skills. Practice, you know?” His hand twitched at the mouse, obviously dying to minimize the window to keep me from looking at it. “Then I started getting hits, and . . . well, most people treat it as a joke. Something funny. I added a contact address, though. In case anyone really wants to contact a champion.”

“Any takers?”

“Not yet.” Finally, he clicked the window closed, to keep me from prying. “But I am getting over two hundred thousand hits a day. Word-of-mouth traffic has been huge.” He brought something else up on the screen, some kind of log detailing who viewed the site and from where. “Ivan thinks it is a brilliant idea.”

Of course he would. I suppose I could see the value. For every thousand people who thought it was a joke, there was that one person, alone and scared, who might reach out. It could be helpful. “Keep me posted on how it goes.”

We kind of ran out of things to talk about, then. Outside of demon slaying, we really didn’t have a lot in common. After a few moments of awkward silence, Viljo looked at me. “Want to wager on who calls in first?”

“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.”