Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2) (12 page)

Kara was a healer. Williams was a killer and a thug. I’d worked with them both in the spring. Kara was great. Williams, the opposite. He was strong, though — one of the strongest people Cordus had. I guess that made him necessary.

As I watched, five more people joined the group — three women, a man, and a small, slender person who could’ve been either sex. I didn’t know any of them. That wasn’t surprising. Cordus’s organization had people scattered all over North America. The whole continent was his territory, except for the Florida peninsula, Mexico, and the narrow strip of the western coast, running up through Alaska.

I noticed that Yellin was holding a small canvas bag. The carven strait, I assumed. My eyes stung again. I’d been nothing but grief to the isolated stratum on the other side.

I tried to push the thought out of my mind. I’d just have to hope the tree-octopuses were strong enough to protect themselves. They’d been able to stave off my fire. That was a good sign.

Yellin shifted the bag from one hand to the other and cleared his throat.

“Very well,” he said grandly. “All is ready.”

What the hell?

I looked around. Surely he couldn’t be going with only twelve people. When Yellin said he’d assemble a “force,” I’d imagined a hundred people, or something. Twelve was not enough. And where were Okeke and Wiri? Surely the Seconds would all help with something this important.

I straightened up and headed down the stairs. I’d been going back and forth all morning about the wisdom of challenging Yellin. But this situation wasn’t workable. No way were they going without me. I had a ton of capacity. They needed the oomph.

“She’s coming,” Williams said, jerking his head in my direction. “And some from the Schooner.”

I froze as every person below looked up at me with expressions ranging from confusion to surprise to horror.

After a moment of shocked silence, Yellin launched into a screechy diatribe.

Andy’s mouth opened and then shut. I saw Gwen had a death grip on his arm.

“She’s a trainee,” Theo said angrily, his deep voice carrying over Yellin’s. “It’s too dangerous.”

Williams stared at him.

For a few seconds, the two men engaged in the silent communication of genuinely dangerous people — assessing the tactical situation and one another’s abilities and concluding, in this case, that a fight was pointless because the outcome was obvious.

Theo looked away.

No surprise there. Williams was many times stronger than Theo or Andy. Probably many times stronger than Theo
and
Andy.

Then Williams turned his attention to Yellin.

This wasn’t the silent communication of genuinely dangerous people. It was the wolf saying to the rabbit,
I’ve just eaten, but annoy me enough …

Yellin folded like tissue into quivering silence.

Williams looked up at me. “Move it, Ryder.”

Well I’ll be damned
, I thought.
Bastard stole my plan.

My general attitude was that anything Williams did was, by definition, bad. The guy was all the world’s lions and tigers and bears wrapped up with a bow. But this time it had worked in my favor. After all, he was a thousand times scarier than I was. I couldn’t have shut Yellin down with a glance.

I joined them.

Kara gave me a big grin.

At least someone was happy I was there.

I climbed into the back seat of one of the estate cars. Kara joined me. Zion got in with Gwen up front.

Once the doors were closed, Zion said, “There’s a first time for everything, eh?”

“No shit,” said Kara, apparently forgetting she and Zion were on the outs. “Mr. Yellin was afraid of him. Un-fucking-believable.”

Neither Gwen nor I said anything.

Kara and Zion shared a suspicious look.

“What do you two know about this?” Kara said.

“Nothing,” Gwen said, pulling out of the garage. “That took me by surprise.”

Kara turned to me. “Not you, though, eh?”

I squirmed. Lying wasn’t my strong suit. “I didn’t know Williams was going to do that. But I did want to come along. That’s why I was up there watching.”

“Yeah, but —”

“What did he mean about picking people up at a schooner?”

“The Blue Schooner,” Gwen said, helping me reorient the conversation. “It’s a motel in Jersey. It’s where other powers’ Nolanders stay when they visit New York.”

“Other powers’ Nolanders? I didn’t think they could come here.”

“Sure they can. Lord Cordus just wants to know who’s here and why. That said, we get more visitors from some powers than others. When there are tensions, visits generally stop.”

I knew what that meant: no visitors from Limu’s territory, just now.

“So, Nolanders who work for other powers have agreed to help us?”

“I guess.” She looked up at me in the rearview. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Well, the Thirsting Ground is dangerous times ten. We need more people, and it’s in their interest to help.”

“Yeah,” Gwen said. But she didn’t sound convinced.

Something wasn’t right. I sat there thinking about it.

“Lord Cordus has more than two hundred Nolanders, and Yellin could only rustle up twelve? And what about the Seconds? Why aren’t Okeke and Wiri coming along?”

“Okeke and Wiri are gone,” Zion said.

“Gone … as in dead?”

She studied her nails. “No, ‘gone’ as in defected.”

“Defected?”

“Lord Cordus used to have a lot more people than he does now,” Gwen said. “Both Nolanders and Seconds.” She paused, as though unwilling to continue.

A strange feeling came over me, a pervasive sense of wrongness.

“He’s never disappeared like this before,” Kara said. “People think he bit it. They’re jumping off the sinking ship, trying to make alliances with other powers.”

Gwen nodded. “There’re a lot of numbers out there that’ve been going straight to voicemail for weeks.”

I sat there, frozen. Then my head started shaking back and forth. Finally all that shaking knocked my voice loose from whatever thing in my throat had hitched it up.

“That’s not possible. Dead? No way.”

“What, you think you’d know if he died?” Zion said caustically. “Because of your special bond, or something?”

“No, of course not!”

“Well, do you think the great powers can’t die? ’Cause they can.”

I realized my head was shaking again and stilled it by leaning forward and pressing it against the back of the front seat.

“You all right, Beth?” Kara said, sitting forward and putting an arm around my shoulders. “Gwen, I think she’s gonna barf.”

“I’m not sick.”

My voice sounded weird and far away. I took a deep breath and tried to draw my thoughts together.

“Look, he just can’t be dead. He’s so powerful. What could possibly kill him?”

“It might seem that way to us,” Gwen said carefully, “but there are probably a lot of things in the S-Em that are stronger than Lord Cordus. If that’s where he went, something could’ve happened.”

I tried to imagine a world populated by beings who’d make Cordus look weak. I couldn’t.

“If he stayed here, well, some of the powers holding territory in the F-Em are thought to be stronger than he is.”

“But his territory is the biggest.”

Gwen shrugged. “Yeah, I know. It’s weird. There’s gotta be a story, there.” She paused, then said softly, “I don’t think he’d abandon the organization this way by choice. Everything’s falling apart.”

The silence stretched out again.

I sat there turning the idea over in my mind.

Cordus dead
.

I started tearing up and angrily wiped my eyes. Why was I crying? He was a monster. You didn’t cry for monsters.

Especially not in front of their victims.

I glanced at Kara, expecting her to look shocked and angry. Instead she was all sympathy.

“Beth, we’re all scared. We just have to stick together. We’ll get through it.”

I nodded, letting her generous interpretation of my tears go unchallenged.

“So, if everyone else is bailing out, why are you guys still here?”

“We probably all have our own reasons,” Gwen said. “For me, it’s the place. I’m from the city, and I’ll stay here as long as I can. Some other power will take over. I’ll work for them.”

“I’m staying ’cause Williams told me to,” Kara said.

“I’m still entertaining offers,” Zion said.

We all laughed, probably a bit harder than the joke deserved. If it was a joke. With Zion, it was hard to be sure.

Well, I’d be staying too. For me, the reason was simple enough: even if I’d wanted to leave all my friends behind, I had nowhere else to go. I didn’t know any other Seconds. None that I’d want to work for, that is.

Plus, Cordus couldn’t be dead. Not really. Investigating the thing with Limu and Eye of the Heavens just had him really tied up. If the others knew about that, they wouldn’t have lost hope.

For a moment, I wanted to tell them. Then I remembered the oath I’d taken. It was a pain-of-death kind of thing.

Kara gave me a tissue, and I blew my nose.

“So who’s waiting for us at the motel?” I asked Gwen.

“Dunno. Hopefully someone with a lot of juice.”

“Or a lot of someones with a lot of juice,” Kara said.

The Blue Schooner Motel was something off a 1950s postcard: a long, one-story building with a flat roof and a massive sign topped with a sailing ship made of blue neon. A lighted placard assured passersby that the rooms were air-conditioned and contained not only color TVs but also telephones. A red “no vacancy” light glowed in the office window.

There was a building across the parking lot that might’ve once been an associated restaurant, but it looked to have gone out of business.

Surprisingly, Gwen drove past the hotel and pulled in behind the restaurant. We got out and headed for a small back door that was just visible behind a tumble of old trashcans.

“What’s this place?”

“Motel restaurant,” she said. “It’s sort of an unofficial meeting place.”

“Like neutral ground?”

“No such thing,” Williams said from right behind me.

I jumped about a mile.

Jesus, where the hell did he come from?

As I looked around, more people seemed to appear from thin air. After a few seconds, all fourteen of us were there.

Of course. The others had already arrived and put invisibility barriers around their cars.

Gwen stepped aside and let Williams lead us into the restaurant.

The back door opened onto a dark, low-ceilinged cave of a bar area. Forest-green vinyl banquettes lined the walls, and dark wooden tables filled the floor space. The walls were decorated with ship paintings and mounted fish.

Several dining rooms opened off the bar. From what I could see, the nautical theme continued throughout.

It looked like any number of old-timey Wisconsin supper clubs I’d eaten in. Smelled like them, too — like steak and blue-cheese salad dressing and slightly musty carpet. The craving for a brandy old-fashioned set in.

Gwen and Williams walked off into one of the dining rooms. Zion headed over to talk to one of the women I didn’t know. I looked at Kara. She shrugged.

We slid into a banquette in the corner.

“Do you know these people?”

“Most of them. That tall blond guy is Rudolph Tanner. He’s in charge of the northeast.”

“The way Graham was in charge of the Midwest?”

“Yeah.” Kara’s face darkened. She hated Graham. “
Ese hijo de puta
. I hope something in that isolate’s eaten him by now.”

I shivered. Quite possibly, something had. I hoped not, though. Graham was a bad guy, but I suspected he wasn’t
all
bad.

I turned my attention back to Rudolph. His expression looked unpleasant, like he’d just smelled something awful.

“His name is really Rudolph?”

“Yup, as in the red-nosed you-know-what. But don’t mess with him about it. He’s sort of an asshole.”

“How about the others?”

“Those guys are Samson and Beans. Beans is the small one. The women are Liz, Sua, and … um … Natasha, maybe? I’ve worked with Rudolph before. I’ve only met the others once, and it was a few years ago. They’re all stationed in Phoenix.”