CHAPTER 5
As I ran back into the garage carrying the big med kit from the car, a cell phone began to ring. It was sitting on top of the diagnostics computer.
I grabbed for it before I could think. If I’d thought, I’d have realized that the call would probably be for the dead guy. But as I picked up the phone, I saw that the screen read Guardian
“Son of a bitch.” I couldn’t believe they had the audacity to be calling me right now. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, what with my friend bleeding to death. So I shoved the still-ringing phone in my pocket and went back to Albert. I got compression bandages on the entry and exit wound. He’d gotten hit up high on the chest, and my biggest worry was that the bullet had nicked the superior vena cava.
He was losing too much blood and I couldn’t stop it. We were in a rural area. There was no way that an ambulance would get here in time. “Come on, Al.” I wrapped my arms around him, hoisted him up, and pulled him towards the car, feet dragging. Luckily Albert wasn’t a big dude. I was actually an inch or two taller than he was and running on desperation strength.
I got him into the passenger seat, slammed the door, ran around to the driver’s side, got in, started the engine, and shot out of there so fast that the tires sprayed gravel everywhere.
“Hang on, man. I owe you that lunch.”
We’d passed the closest hospital on the way in. At regular speeds it had been twenty minutes from the garage. I floored it. I was going to try and get there in ten.
The phone I’d taken had started ringing again.
I pulled it out, put it on speaker, and dropped it on the dash so I could keep both hands on the wheel. That’s kind of necessary when you’re doing over a hundred on a twisting country road. I didn’t say anything. Apparently I didn’t need to. The African-accented voice that I’d last heard from Wynne’s mouth came on the line. “Listen carefully, Guardian.”
I was dealing with a monster that was capable of possession and projection. Usually that meant something incorporeal, and those were rather weak, but this thing didn’t strike me as weak.
“You will give me the artifact—or your child will suffer.” It went silent, and in that silence I heard a scream.
Look, there are so many things weird about being a mother that if every woman didn’t have the capacity to become one, motherhood might be considered a supernatural condition. One of those things is the ability to know our kids from a glimpse or a sound. Objectively, all babies look a lot alike, even if mine was supersized. But mothers can always tell when it’s their baby crying.
And coming through that phone was my son’s cry.
I couldn’t talk. My heart clutched. My mouth went dry.
“Now you understand that I’m telling you the truth. If you give me the Kumaresh Yar, I will return him to you unharmed. If not…I have interesting plans for your child.”
The call ended. I screamed—a prolonged primal scream.
A firefly glowed in front of my windshield briefly, then exploded on impact with green goo. I hit the windshield wipers and washer fluid. Damn things were out earlier every year. We didn’t used to get them till May.
“Julie, go back to the compound,” Albert rasped. He’d come to and had heard that phone call. “I’ll be fine. You need to save—”
“Did I ask you to talk?” I said, taking my impotent fury out on my wounded friend. “Hospital first. If you die, Albert Lee, I’ll never forgive you. I’ll go back to the other side and kill you again.”
“Okay.”
I couldn’t even risk looking at him, but he really didn’t sound good. Instead, I took out my phone. “Call Dorcas.” It rang several times and then went through to her voice mail. “Damn it.” My eyes were burning. A pickup pulled out in front of us. I had to lay on the horn and drive through the grass to keep from T-boning him. That would have extra-sucked considering I hadn’t taken the time to buckle Albert in.
“Call headquarters.” That number was for the front desk. Again, no answer. Normally that wouldn’t be too surprising. There was no Newbie class going on and most of the Hunters who normally worked at the compound were off on the siege. If any team leads needed anything important they’d call me directly. But right now, the lack of answers was terrifying.
Inside me, something was ticking like a frantic clock. You know that biological clock people talk about? It’s nothing to the mom clock that tracks every second her baby might be in danger. I was going to kill the assholes who’d taken him. I didn’t even care if this possessor was incorporeal. I’d make it a body just for the purpose of taking it apart molecule by molecule.
I was just glad no dogs or kids got in my way because I wasn’t stopping for anyone.
The next call warned the hospital we were on the way—Asian male, thirties, gunshot wound to the chest—and that they’d better be ready.
“Blood type B positive,” Albert added through clenched teeth. “Heh… Be positive. Good advice.”
I told that to the hospital, hung up, then went back to trying everyone else. No one answered. Not even my home number. Neither Amanda Fuesting nor Grandpa answered the phone. Instead I got my own, annoying voice, saying, “This is the Heart of the Dixie Historical…”
I looked down at my hands, clenched and smearing blood all over the steering wheel. Right. Of course no one was there. Because when I got there, if I found anyone in the compound alive and well and my son gone, I was going to personally injure them.
I took a deep breath and remembered that Skippy’s tribe had a couple cell phones. We’d even put them on the company plan, but the orcs didn’t particularly care for the things and only used them grudgingly.
“Call village.”
It rang only twice before a voice answered, “Eh?”
This was going to be tough. Our most conversational orcs had all gone on the mission.
“This is Julie. No one is answering the phone at the compound. Is my son okay?”
There was a silence, then the orc said. “Hello, Juw-eee. I Shelly.”
I hadn’t even realized I was talking to a girl, but I knew Shelly. She was one of the younger orc females, and I could always pick her out even in disguise because she was the one with a lazy eye. She’d been learning English and was probably better with it than my mediocre Orcish. “Is Baby Ray okay?”
There was another voice talking rapidly behind her in their rumbling language. “Uh…Dorcas take baby. Great Chief call her… The Boss sick, Dorcas say. She go your house. Baby Ray go your house.”
“Okay, listen carefully, Shelly. Baby Ray is in danger. How many warriors do you have?”
“Urk great warriors! All!”
That was pride talking, not reality. Most of their experienced warriors had gone with Ed to the island. They’d only left enough to guard their village. “Yeah, okay. I need you to gather all your warriors and go to my house. Protect the baby. I’ll meet you there.”
The hospital was visible in the distance. I’d made it in eight minutes. Good thing MHI didn’t skimp on our company fleet cars. I was so desperate I thought about calling the cops—our local sheriff was read in on the supernatural; you kind of had to be when you were in charge of the county MHI had been headquartered in for the last century—but I was dealing with a monster that was organized, had a plan, and was capable of possessing people. This was way over their heads, and that thing might have my kid as a hostage.
Not to mention once the authorities got to Wynne’s garage, I’d probably be a murder suspect. I hadn’t thought of that.
I jammed on the brakes right in front of the emergency room doors. There were already doctors and nurses waiting outside. This was a quiet part of the country. They didn’t get a lot of emergency calls about incoming gunshot wounds.
Luckily there weren’t any cops here. Yet. But I wasn’t going to stick around.
“You’re going to be okay, Albert.”
“Get your kid,” he mumbled as they pulled him out of the car.
Someone was coming around to my side. Their lips were moving. Asking something about me being hurt. Why would they think that? And then I realized I was covered in Al’s blood. But it didn’t matter, because the second my friend was out of the vehicle, I was driving again. A nurse had to jump out of the way to keep from going over my hood. The passenger side door only got closed by the air flow.
And that is the last I remember of that drive. I drove as fast as I could, breaking every speed limit, and I might very well have evaded pursuit too. Nothing registered, nothing made any impression on me beyond the memory of my son crying through the phone.
I hadn’t thought about what I was going to do yet. My son was my son, but surrendering the Kumaresh Yar to an evil force meant the entire world, including my son, would be in danger. In the wrong hands, that thing was crazy dangerous. It was a time-traveling weapon of mass destruction.
No. It was a false choice, I thought as I started down the gravel road toward my house. It was a wrong choice. A stupid choice. I wasn’t going to choose. I was going to get my son back, not give them anything, and the evil assholes were going to regret the day they’d messed with my family. There’s only one thing that we Shacklefords take more seriously than killing monsters, and that’s defending our families. This was both.
This creature was going to find out he’d picked on the wrong mother.
There were orcs—a whole bunch of them—in the back of a pickup truck in front of my house, and more of them milling around on my front porch. They weren’t masked, and they’d rolled up so fast that they’d not even bothered with their war paint. I could tell from their dejected expressions that it hadn’t gone well.
How bad was it?
I got my answer as I ran inside. There was blood splattered across my living room. Dorcas was lying on the carpet with two orc healers kneeling over her.
“Is she—?”
“Lives,” said one of the orc ladies quickly. “But much hurt.”
Then I realized that Dorcas was missing her artificial leg. It had been yanked off and was lying in the hall. From the look of it, she’d been beaten with her own leg.
I ran towards the stairs following a trail of blood droplets and stopped, aghast.
Lying there was my grandpa, in his pajamas and socks, holding an old 1911 in his one hand, the slide locked back empty, surrounded in spent brass.
“No, no, no.”
Orcs moved out of the way so I could reach him. Grandpa was dead. The Boss, Ray Shackleford the Third, was dead.
I registered several things at once. He’d been stabbed multiple times in the chest. I didn’t know with what, but there was a lot of blood. I looked around, but there weren’t any bullet holes in the walls, which meant Grandpa had hit whatever he was aiming at.
He’d been in hospice care, practically at death’s door, but when he’d heard the commotion, he’d cowboyed up one last time and gone out fighting.
Oh, Grandpa.
There wasn’t even time for my heart to break. I ran past his body and into my room. The crib was empty. I went from room to room shouting Ray’s name. There was no sign of my baby. I half expected to see Amanda, the nurse, dead somewhere too, but she wasn’t.
The orcs were looking at me, confused and sad. They tried talking to me, but I was having a hard time understanding anything. I’m a professional. I’ve been through some terrible things. I don’t panic. But this time, I was on the verge.
I couldn’t think about Ray being in danger. I had to focus on piecing together what happened so I could find him. My house had a security system. The doors were always locked. Hit a button, the armored shutters would drop, and this place was practically a vault. Only Dorcas had a key and knew the codes.
She’d taken Ray from the compound and then gotten jumped by something on the way in here. Grandpa had heard and tried to help, and it had gotten him killed. Whatever had done that had then left with my baby…
Shelly had said that Dorcas had gotten a call, something about Grandpa. They’d been friends for forty years; if she thought Grandpa was about to pass on, of course she’d come. And since Ray was her responsibility, obviously Dorcas would take Ray with her.
Damn, this thing had been organized.
That also meant there was only one possibility who could have convinced Dorcas she needed to come here.
The nurse’s room was empty too. Her things were all there. Nothing looked like it had been packed, but there was also no sign of a struggle. Had Amanda been willingly complicit…or possessed like Wynne?
I rushed back downstairs to where the orc ladies were still tending to Dorcas. With her face all bruised and bloody, she looked really messed up.
“Got hit with own foot,” explained one of the healers.
“Can she talk?”
As I knelt next to her, I saw that Dorcas’ eyes were open and for a moment had the horrible fear that she was going to be dead, but then she blinked at me, coughed—I noted that the orc had just given her something from a cup. There was a strong stink of burnt leaves coming from the tea. Dorcas gasped and said, “Goddammit, son of a bitch, no-good motherfuckers.”
When that lady got spun up, she could cuss for five minutes straight without repeating herself, so I hurried and cut her off. “Dorcas, listen to me. I need to know what happened.”
“I’m sorry, girl, I’m so sorry.” She must have been concussed, but whatever potion the orcs had given her was keeping her focused. “The nurse called, said the Boss was on his way out, asking to see his great-grandson one last time. I had to. I didn’t think—”
“I know. It’s okay. Where’s my son?”
There was a panicked look. “I don’t know.”
I shook my head, realizing that, of course, she must have been knocked out when it had left. “Ray’s been taken. Grandpa’s been killed.”
“Son of a bitch!” Dorcas started coughing and the orc gave her something else to drink, and then started smearing something all over her head. There was so much blood from Dorcas’ scalp that it was making a real mess on my carpet. “I parked out front, everything looked fine. I unlocked the door. It must’ve come out of nowhere and clocked me.”
“Tell me what happened,” I said. “Everything you remember.”
“I had Bubba in my arms, so I remember turning to protect him from the fall. I didn’t even have a chance to draw my gun. I’m slower than I used to be, but not that slow. Whatever it was, it’s fast… Did that bitch nurse set us up?”
“Maybe.” That hurt. I was furious. We’d sort of become friends while she was looking after Grandpa.
“Hang on.” Dorcas winced and closed her eyes. “Room’s spinning again.”
For you and me both.
I dealt with a lot of crises. I knew freaking out was useless, but right then I couldn’t help it. I was on the ragged edge. My kid was gone. My grandpa had been murdered. My friend had been shot. I wanted to scream at Dorcas for failing to protect my baby, but that was just stupid anger talking. Whatever this monster was, it was clever, and it must have been planning this for a long time. Wynne’s monster encounter had been a setup. The distance, the setting, it was all a perfect lure. If I hadn’t taken that bait, it would have been something else. It had watched and waited, exploiting our weaknesses. It was smart, murderous, and had my baby.
I’d lost a lot of people. I knew the grief about Grandpa would hit later. As long as I had business to focus on, I’d be fine. If I started thinking about my baby, though, I’d crack. I had to keep moving.
I went back outside. Amanda’s car was gone. Of course it was. That bitch had stolen my kid, and she had at least a forty-minute head start.
Several orc warriors were there armed with a motley assortment of guns—mostly hunting rifles and shotguns decorated with feathers and small animal bones—and contact weapons—axes, swords, and a baseball bat with nails in it.
Shelly was short, squat, and ugly, even by orc standards, so I recognized her immediately as she waddled up. She was wearing a serape and carrying a pair of six-shooters like something from a Clint Eastwood movie.
“No baby find. Who we go kill?” Shelly demanded.
“I don’t know yet.” All orcs had a gift, something that they were truly world-class amazing at. Skippy could make a helicopter do things that were supposedly impossible. In close combat, Ed was like a walking blender. “Are any of you a tracker? I think Ray was taken away in the nurse’s car. Can any of you follow Ray’s trail?”
“Shelly, shoot good,” she said apologetically. Then she turned and started shouting in Orcish. I understood about three quarters of what she said as she repeated my questions, but apparently none of them had that talent. One snapped something back. I understood the part about wargs.
“Maybe wargs track? Good nose warg.”
They were giant wolves after all. It was worth a shot. “Can you go get some?”
Shelly nodded vigorously and then took off running.
That was everything I could think of to do right then. This was a kidnapping. I had something he wanted. He’d call with instructions. I went back inside and stood there, seething and useless, still covered in my friend’s drying blood. I went into the bathroom and washed my hands. My clothes were still blood-soaked, but they could wait.
I went back upstairs to say goodbye to Grandpa. Thing was, he didn’t look upset. He even had a contented look on his torn-up face, like he’d died doing what he loved. Or maybe I was just imagining it. Going out fighting was the Shackleford way. Even though he was in pajamas and socks, he had, in fact, in every other way but the literal, died with his boots on.
Then I noticed something. While he’d been lying here, he’d scratched something into the wood with his hook. It wasn’t very clear. He’d been running out of time and blood pressure, and hadn’t been big on penmanship to begin with, but it looked like he’d tried to write A-L-U and the beginning of another letter.
Grandad must have held on, staying alive so he could leave me this message, and bled out before he was done. And I had no idea what it meant. His message was unfinished. It was a dead end.
Just then the phone I’d taken from the garage rang. I pulled it out of my pocket. Through the bloody smears on its screen I could barely read Guardian.
I answered with “You son of a bitch—”
“No time for pleasantries, Guardian. Do you hear that?”
He must have held the phone close to my child so I could hear his cries crystal clear. I cringed. It was his “I’m scared” scream, not just his “I’m hungry” or “I’m dirty” scream.
“You know what’s at stake. Do as I say or else.”
“Or what? My baby dies?”
The guy—well, whatever he was he sounded like a guy—on the other side, laughed as if I’d said something funny. “Is death truly the worst thing you can think of? We both know there are worse things than death. Far worse. Use your imagination.”
There was a short silence during which I did my absolute best not to use my imagination. Instead I said, “I’m listening.”
“Very well. I want you to go to your kitchen. I left something for you there.”
I went downstairs. There were bloody footprints on my otherwise clean kitchen floor. The prints were from small shoes, and the blood was from Grandpa and Dorcas. Hopefully just them, and none of it was Ray’s. Just that thought made me sick.
“I’m in the kitchen.”
“Open the first cabinet on the right.”
I did. There, atop my familiar plates was a small length of unfamiliar rope. It had that kind of fizz feeling I get from something magic. It took me only a second to figure out what it probably was. It had to be one of those transportation spells used by the Condition cultists. In fact, this entire operation was smelling more and more like the work of the Sanctified Church of the Temporary Mortal Condition, founded by the necromancer Martin Hood, and now run by his batshit-crazy daughter, Lucinda.
“I assume you know how to use the portal rope. When you place it down, it will be too small for a person to come through, but the artifact will fit.”
I was thinking frantically. Working alongside Franks, Milo had come up with a way to use the Condition’s teleportation magic against them. By using their existing, preprogrammed length of rope, he’d spliced a bunch more on, and then opened a path big enough for us to fly a helicopter through. But that had taken lots of time, and I didn’t have lots of time.
“How do I know you’ll give me my baby back when I’ve given you the artifact?”
There was hesitation. I could sense I’d taken it by surprise. It’s not that evil is stupid exactly, but every evil thing I’ve ever dealt with tends to have this unique inability to think outside its own very narrow parameters. This particular evil was used to being obeyed.
“You have no choice.”
“How do I even know he’s still alive, and you haven’t just recorded his cry?”
“You do not. Once you send the artifact through, I will pass your baby back.”
I was the company negotiator for a reason. “No. You’re not putting my kid through some evil portal. I need proof he’s alive. I need to see him in person. Then we hand off.”
“The artifact must be delivered through the portal. That is the only acceptable outcome.”
“Fine. Then agree to meet me somewhere I can see my kid in person, I’ll drop the rope and put the artifact through it, then I walk away with my kid. If I can’t see him alive and in person, then you get nothing.”
The thing was quiet for a long time as it thought over my counteroffer. “I will call in thirty minutes with a location.”
“Wait.” If I could get more time I might be able to splice the rope thing and go through with a rescue party full of orcs and guns blazing. “I need more time to retrieve it.”
“Do not lie to me. I have no idea how you managed to hide it from everyone, but I do know that the Guardian would be compelled to keep it nearby.”
Damn it. I hated when evil things were thinkers. “It’s under a magical lock. It takes time to open. I need more time.”
“You have thirty minutes.” The call ended.
I stood in my kitchen, trying to think. I was shaking so hard, I could hear my teeth chatter. It wasn’t fear, it was absolute, blinding anger that I had nowhere to put. If I could, right then, shoot all the evil bastards, my hand would be as steady as ever. But that’s not what I had to do. I had to think. There was no way I could hand the artifact over to His Evilness.
In the wrong hands, the Kumaresh Yar could literally destroy time. I knew this because my husband was one of those wrong hands, and using it once, he had erased several minutes from existence for everyone in the whole world. Not to mention that had also woken up an ancient chaos god. It was the kind of thing that powerhouses like Lord Machado, Martin Hood or, yes, even my mother, could use to accomplish all sorts of evil.
After the Arbmunep incident, everyone else had thought the Kumaresh Yar was missing. My taking it and hiding it away had seemed like the logical choice at the time. MHI didn’t need to know about it because eventually there would be a big enough threat that someone with good intentions—like Owen—would be tempted to try and use it. And I definitely didn’t want the MCB to get it, which had turned out to be a good decision considering what a power-mad asshole Stricken had turned out to be.
So I’d stashed it and not told anyone, the whole time telling myself that it was my choice, and not that I’d been somehow compelled to protect that thing because of the Guardian’s curse. I didn’t think that the marks were messing with my mind, but magic could be weird and subtle.
Cursed obligations aside, there was no way the kidnapper would turn over my baby without at least seeing the artifact first, and bringing it out of hiding at all risked losing it. However…if I did have to turn it over, they might not be able to use it. From what I understood, it was always useful for dark magic, but it took someone special like Owen to unlock its full potential, and from everything we’d learned, someone like him—or Lord Machado—only came around once every five hundred years. Luckily, the only man in the world right now who could use the Kumaresh Yar’s full power to tear holes in space and time was a good man who wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. So I’d have to trust that this murdering, baby-kidnapping asshole would at least need a little time to figure out how to use it at all, and five centuries before they could find another special person to end the world with it.
It probably wasn’t a good idea to pull out the potential world ender, but I needed my baby back and I was on the clock. I grabbed the length of rope, shoved it in my pocket, and ran for the back door. I stopped by the tool shed to get a sledgehammer and a crowbar.
The evil dude had guessed right. I did keep the artifact nearby. In fact, it would probably have driven him insane if he’d realized how close he’d been, also how unguarded it was. Most of its protection was in misdirection and secrecy.
There is a building on the grounds of the old plantation that had been slave quarters. When I was little I’d set fire to it, but there were parts that didn’t burn.
Back then I’d been teaching myself how to make homemade explosives. In fact, it had been that same melted packing peanuts in gasoline mixture I’d later used in college on those vampires. Owen says that it’s a common mark of a future Hunter to have caused unimaginable destruction with improvised explosives while they were young and didn’t know any better.
The slave quarters didn’t have anything to do with my family. Bubba Shackleford had bought this property a long time after the Civil War. His branch of the family had always been dirt-poor farmers, treated like trash. Once monster hunting had made him wealthy, he’d returned and bought the biggest, nicest, most historically significant plantation house in his home county. According to family tradition, Bubba didn’t even like fancy things, other than guns obviously, but like a lot of men who’d grown up with nothing, spiting those who’d once looked down at him was a hell of a good motivator.
But the slave quarters had been part of the history of this place, and even the ugly parts of history shouldn’t be forgotten. All the people who wanted every reference to the bad things we’d done in the past removed were fools. They were just trying to signal that they were better than their ancestors, but in fact, we’re no different. We’ve just got hindsight and their mistakes to learn from. If we forget the atrocities of the past, we’ll repeat them in the future, just with prettier names and new justifications.
Which is why as an adult, I felt bad for burning down a historical landmark. As a kid I’d thought it was kind of awesome how the melted burning Styrofoam had stuck to everything.
There were a few things that hadn’t burned, like the really solid prison room that had served as Earl’s full-moon retreat for decades, but most of the slave quarters had been totally destroyed. Except years later, my brother Ray and I had found something while poking around in the ruins.
I had no idea what the secret chamber past the trapdoor had been used for or who had built it. The locking mechanism was intricate and well hidden. You had to push on different stones in order, like a spy movie. I’d once tried to sound Grandpa out about the secret room, without giving too much away, but he’d shown no sign that he’d known what I was talking about.
Since it was newer than the building which had burned down on top of it, it had probably been Bubba Shackleford himself who’d designed it to hide something important. Ray and I had figured with Bubba it had probably been buried treasure. Literally. But whatever had been in there was long gone by the time his great-great-grandkids broke in. When I’d checked Bubba’s writings in the archives, there was no mention of this room. And apparently Bubba had never told his son, because Earl hadn’t known about it either.
As kids, having a secret clubhouse like that is kind of amazing. Ray had thought it was dorky, and he’d thought he was too mature to crawl around narrow muddy tunnels, but he’d sworn to never tell anybody what we’d found. I’d stashed my diary in there, because that’s the kind of thing teenage girls do. Except now that Ray was long dead and I’d found something far more important to hide, I’d put that secret chamber to better use.
Beneath the trapdoor was a narrow hole, like an old well, stone-lined, with iron rivets stuck into the stones which could be used to climb down. At the bottom was a tunnel which had been a lot easier to navigate when I was a kid. Now, it took getting on all fours, and then squeezing past a half-moon opening on the wall. I crawled along with my flashlight in one hand. It looked so rough and small that I suspected anyone who got this far would think it was just an opening to an old cistern or well, and would turn back. The whole place smelled musty. The air was humid. It felt like if you kept going you were going to get stuck, and die trapped down here.
But that was just to set the ambiance. Once you squeezed past the half-moon opening, there was an actual stairwell. Each step was of a different height, as if the people who’d built it had either not cared the least bit how it looked or had used the materials at hand without any thought. My flashlight illuminated the signs I’d posted all over the walls, signs that read KEEP OUT and TURN BACK and skulls and crossbones and DANGER HIGH EXPLOSIVES, that sort of thing.
Not that I’d normally warn people they were about to step on a land mine, but I was afraid that Owen or someone else—Owen had a talent for finding things no one wanted found or blundering into places no one wanted him to go—would come in here without the slightest notion of what it was. So I’d taken precautions.
I now disarmed the precautions as I went, avoiding the spring-loaded spikes and being careful not to pull the trip wires that would set off the silver-loaded claymore mines. I wasn’t joking when I said I really did not want this thing to fall into hostile hands.
Then it occurred to me that I might be putting it directly into hostile hands, and I shuddered. Hopefully not, but if I did, only for a very short time. A very short time. Certainly too short for them to get up to anything interesting with it.
After getting past the booby traps, I unlocked the heavy wooden door at the bottom of the stairs. The door looked positively medieval. I’d replaced the Bubba Shackleford-era locks with some new ones, mechanical and electronic. Then I had to disarm the second layer of booby traps. No, you don’t need to know what they are because I might need to use them again. It took me a little while and quite a bit of concentration. If I’d forgotten any of them, I’d get killed, and then Ray would be on his own.
The room was relatively small, probably only large enough for Bubba’s treasure chests or whatever it was he’d hidden down here. The walls and floor were made of big stones mortared together. I had a few things left out in the open, and I’d made sure some of them were valuable enough that if someone did manage to get in, they’d think that was what all the booby traps were trying to protect. But the real prize was under the floor.
I’d tried to destroy this damned thing. A bullet had chipped it once a long time ago, but it must have wanted that little piece to break off to go and cause mischief, because bullets sure hadn’t worked when I’d tried again, including some really big ones. I’d tried melting it, crushing it in a hydraulic press, acid, and a plasma torch. I’d even thought about going old-school and throwing it in an active volcano, but then it would probably send out a signal and some kind of fire demon would find it.
Evil has a way of attracting evil, which was why I’d put the artifact in a lead cube with an outer one of cold iron. I figured that would stop it from sending out any negative waves. Then I’d buried that, mixed up a few buckets of cement, and put that on top so that even if someone did find this place, they might not know they were walking on top of it. I had done what I had to do to keep psychos like the Condition or my evil vampire mom from sniffing it out. Now I had to get it out before my baby ran out of time.
I set down my flashlight, pried up one of the floor stones with the crowbar, and then went to work with the sledgehammer. I took out my anger and frustration on the cement. Pretty soon sweat was running down my face and dripping inside my glasses. The labor made my muscles ache. I’d been on soft mommy duty for too long, so blisters formed on my hands.
Once the concrete was smashed, I hooked the iron box with the crowbar and dragged it out. It weighed a ton. I thought I was going to pop a blood vessel, but you know there is some truth in those old wives’ tales about desperate moms being strong enough to lift a car off their baby. I started smashing open the nested boxes.
When they were finally opened, the thing inside—the thing I’d taken such trouble to protect—was just sitting there, looking innocent. It really didn’t seem like much, just a hunk of stone, old and dusty, about the size of a deck of cards with slightly ragged edges.
It was so much more than that. It was a weapon created by beings beyond our understanding, from another dimension or before time or who the hell knows, and left here to really mess us up.
The power of this thing had also given me back my life… I realized that I’d unconsciously moved one hand to the black marks on my neck, and then I quickly snatched my hand away. It had changed me in ways that I couldn’t even begin to understand, except that those changes had saved my life from mortal wounds a couple of times now. But I wasn’t about to thank it. Everything supernatural came with a price. I was sure it would make me pay with interest.
During my pregnancy, we’d been deathly afraid that the artifact would change little Ray, make him into something not human. That hadn’t happened but—but now it might cost me little Ray himself.
With shaking hands, I got the artifact out. It felt like a boring old chunk of stone. As usual, nothing weird happened when I touched it. I wasn’t one of those special people who could use it to blow up the world. I was just the poor sap who’d been drafted to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. I checked the time. He would be calling me back soon.
Now that it was physically in my possession, my mind recoiled even harder at the idea of giving it away. I wondered how much of that feeling was me, and how much of it was the curse that had made me responsible for it. I took a deep, shaky breath. Spell or no spell, first I’d take care of my family. After that…I’d do what I could to keep the artifact safe.
As I turned to leave, my flashlight beam fell on something I’d almost forgotten. In a corner of the room there was a big stainless steel container which glimmered under the light. It had been a right pain to get that container down here just because of the size. It had warning stickers on it, but unlike my booby trap signs, these were from the factory: DANGER, MEDICAL WASTE, and DANGER, LIQUID NITROGEN
I’d written a letter explaining everything to Owen or Earl, or whoever survived me and eventually found this place, because if they opened the container and saw what was inside they would be really confused. The Kumaresh Yar wasn’t the only thing I’d smuggled back from New Zealand. The envelope containing that letter was in front of the container and labeled READ THIS
It gave me an idea. I was probably going to have to drop the artifact through the portal rope to who knows where before I could get my baby. The kidnapper was sure to be jamming things like tracking devices, so I could be sending the thing off to Antarctica for all I knew. Once it went through that rope I’d never find it…but the thing in the container on the other hand… The kidnapper would be on the lookout for electronic tracking devices, not biological ones.
It was an idea so crazy it might just work. Or it might turn out horribly. But I was desperate and running out of time. So I unscrewed the cap. Normally you had to top this stuff off every so often, but I’d paid a whole lot of money to an elf to stick a rune on the lid to ensure endless cold. There was a hiss and a bunch of white vapor as the freezing liquid nitrogen hit the atmosphere. Then I dumped the contents on the floor.
It was a frozen black blob, only about the size of a hamster. Almost immediately, I started having doubts about the wisdom of this.
As the nitrogen evaporated in tendrils around the blob, all I could think was that he was dead or, if not dead, completely ineffective. He’d still been alive when I’d frozen him. Or at least, the tiny, partially-burned-to-ash piece of him I’d found stuck in my body armor had been alive. I think it had even tried to communicate…right before I’d dunked him in liquid nitrogen. Where was the—limited—intelligence of an amorphic creature housed? And if it was a matter of mass, would this little lump be literally brainless?
The blob didn’t move for a minute, and I didn’t have minutes to spare. Okay, so that plan was a dud. I needed to get outside because I doubted I would get a cell phone signal down here. The fact that tears were stinging in my eyes was just a sign of how many shocks I’d withstood recently. I was certainly not crying for a servant of the Old Ones, even one who’d been a childhood friend.
I was just about to turn away when the blob wiggled a bit. From the little black lump a tendril extruded, a baby-blue eyeball appeared on the end of it, and the blob asked me a question with a tiny little squeak of a voice.
“Cuddle Bunny?”