Chapter One
Silas Danger hit Youngstown, Ohio, at 120 miles per hour. The shriek of the monster pursuing him curdled his blood. Would the people of the little industrial city hear it? Silas was no wizard, and he wasn’t always sure at the margins how the Seeming worked. Maybe they’d hear the noise, and take it for a jet engine. Maybe they’d sleep through it.
It was, after all, almost five o’clock in the morning. The night air was cold and damp, crashing through the open windows of the Pontiac GTO. Cold and damp were good. The cold and damp kept Silas alert.
The snarling electric guitar on the radio didn’t hurt.
No longer riding the broad, gentle curves of Interstate 80, Silas fishtailed from side to side to find his groove in the center of the street. A row of red stoplights glared at him down three long, straight lanes between shrugging brick, the gray asphalt black from the drizzle of rain. Silas ignored the lights and charged.
The snallygaster certainly would.
Silas passed a state police prowler dozing in the shadow of a gas station. He accelerated into the straightaway and grabbed the GTO’s rearview mirror. Swiveling it to get a look at the prowler, he saw his own straight blond hair, falling around his face and his temples in a ragged haircut that had already lasted him six weeks too many. He saw Betty for one second, and the look of apprehension on her face punched him in the gut. He was gonna hurt her again tonight. He hurt her all too often. If not for the sake of the snallygaster, then he’d do it for the state police. He saw the monster, and felt a moment’s lessening of the cramp that seized his bowels and his lower back; the reptilian jaws, the vast, flapping wingspan, and the writhing nest of tentacles were high in the sky and well behind him.
Silas patted the gray duffel bag sitting in the shotgun seat, felt the hard porcelain curve within resist his touch.
He found the prowler. The state policeman was swinging out in the road in Silas’s wake, lights waking up and flashing blue. It was indeed a state policeman, not the pa-troll.
Too bad. Silas would have been happy to hand the package over and be on his way. Mama was none too happy with him, and Mama could bite.
The police prowler’s tires screeched on the pavement despite the rain as the car climbed to speed. Silas opened the glove compartment and visually checked to make sure he was covered. He shoved the mummified woman’s hand out of the way. He needed to get that back to its owners, but it wasn’t gonna happen tonight, and he needed to see the other contents of the glove box. He pushed aside the expired registration and proof of insurance to find the speed loader, still holding two vials. As soon as he’d dropped off the package, Silas should find a priest who would replenish his supply of holy water.
But before he spent either of his last two shots, he’d try a more conventional approach.
Silas tapped the brake and spun the wheel. The water on the ground helped him, sending him under the next stoplight in a straight-line hydroplane even as the Pontiac’s nose swung to the right. Silas pressed the accelerator to the floor as the long sweep of the cross street opened up to him. The GTO’s tires spun in vain across the watery film for a moment and then caught, launching the car to the right.
But not in a straight line. He was arcing.
Silas missed the concrete median running down the center of this street and slid neatly into the oncoming traffic. He nearly struck the right headlight of a boxy Ford Transit shuddering to a sudden halt in the turn lane, and then his tires found full purchase and he rocketed forward.
Traffic was light, and Silas didn’t want to risk Betty’s underside on the concrete median unless he had to. Oncoming headlights notwithstanding, he stayed in the wrong lane and gave the engine gas.
In the rearview, he saw Betty’s long hair haloed around her head and the demon’s wing and shoulder. He also saw the state policeman skid to a painful stop against the high curb, and then heard the prowler’s siren.
The trooper would be calling in his plates by now. HELLFIRE wouldn’t show any ownership information, but it would turn up lots of moving violations and maybe even arrest warrants. Unfortunately, the trooper would also be calling for more troopers.
Two sedans crept forward, shoulder to shoulder and blocking both lanes. Silas braced himself to jump onto the sidewalk, but he leaned into the horn and the warning was enough. Both cars braked and dove to their left, crunching together against the median, giving Silas plenty of room to pass on the side.
The drums and bass thundered inside the car.
He wished the pa-troll had picked a less conspicuous meeting place. When Shagruk had suggested the Central Tower Building, Silas had readily agreed, because it was a building he knew how to find, without asking directions or fishing out a map. He hadn’t taken into account the possibility—in hindsight, the high likelihood—that he’d be running from the mama snallygaster at high speed when he arrived, or that the state police might also be hot on his trail.
A park might have been wiser. Or a county road out in farm country.
Silas leaped over another cross street, taking the opportunity to lurch right beneath the stoplight and get back into the proper lane.
He shouldn’t go to the Central Tower in anything like an obvious beeline. Knowing the tower was to his left, Silas turned right.
A pedestrian loomed up out of nowhere. Silas saw a disheveled necktie and a hat askew as the man wobbled from foot to foot in the middle of the street. Silas swerved and braked, managed to avoid killing the drunk.
“Jaywalker!” Silas shouted.
The drunk hollered something back in a vaguely amiable tone.
Ahead, flashing blue.
Silas turned left. The various changes of direction had drained his speed to sixty, which made the turn a piece of cake. He didn’t want to keep outrunning the troopers, though—eventually the net would close in and they’d find him, since he couldn’t leave Youngstown until he’d delivered the bag.
He needed to be sneaky, and quick.
Ahead on the left, a boxy delivery truck with barber dairies stenciled on the side ambled toward him. Silas finally bit the bullet and took the median. He angled his approach and he gunned the engine to go wheel-first and jump over without scraping the underside of the car, then turned sharply.
The back of the car fishtailed in a wide arc. Looking in the mirror to be certain he didn’t hit the curb, Silas saw Betty’s wide eyes and the flash of onyx talons. For the millionth time, he cursed under his breath.
Then he slid the car up alongside the dairy truck and slowed, hiding himself between the truck and the darkened businesses lining the sidewalk.
A man in a gray uniform leaned out the shotgun-seat window of the truck to glare at Silas, but the vehicle kept trundling forward. Silas grinned and put a shushing finger to his lips. The dairyman shook his head, but said nothing. Three state police prowlers rocketed past on the other side of the street, lights flashing.
Silas stayed in the shadow of the delivery truck for a block. The man in the shotgun seat watched him with a scowl on his face the entire time. At the second cross street, in a puddle of warm yellow light, Silas waved and turned right. He had gambled they wouldn’t rat him out, and it had paid off; between Watergate, the MK Ultra disclosures, and a general disregard for the “Man,” most working-class people would cut you a break if you were just reasonable in how much you broke the law.
The snallygaster swooped down upon him.
The creature’s head, long neck, and forelegs looked like they belonged on a reptile. More specifically, they resembled the body parts of a dragon, but a dragon made out of Silly Putty. Long and snakelike, the neck was coiled up like a lasso on a saddlehorn as the snallygaster flew. It ended in a skull covered in scales and shaped like a horse’s head, but with a mouth bristling with daggerlike teeth. The front legs of the snallygaster looked like the arms of a Tyrannosaurus rex—stubby and ineffective. Her hind legs, on the other hand, were long and powerful, with sharp claws.
Behind the shoulders, the snallygaster looked like a bird. She plummeted toward Silas on wings so wide they seemed with their tips to brush the buildings lining both sides of the street. The reptile parts of the creature were a glossy gray, but her feathers were bright blue and green, and her birdlike legs were orange and scabby. A long tail like a snake’s whipped out behind her, snapping from side to side.
Silas wasn’t sure quite where the tentacles were attached to the snallygaster’s body. They seemed to be all over, so the beast flew in a cloud of ropy, reaching limbs.
The snallygaster shrieked and extended her claws.
Silas cursed and swerved. The snallygaster struck the side of the GTO and Silas gripped the wheel, struggling to keep Betty from crashing into a lamppost and a blue mailbox. The Pontiac spun around and shuddered to a halt so that Silas was facing the Barber Dairies truck as the snallygaster crashed through it, obliterating the center third of the vehicle in an explosion of milk. The back third of the truck spun like a top on one of its corners, and the front third careened across the intersection and crashed to a halt in a green newspaper stand. The scowling dairyman scrambled from the wrecked vehicle and dove for cover in a narrow alley. The truck’s driver ran down the street in the opposite direction, a bouncing smudge of gray.
The snallygaster snapped her wings, sloughing off a shower of milk, and leaped upward.
Silas, parked in the middle of two lanes bounded by a sidewalk and a concrete median, shifted into reverse and stepped on the gas.
He lost sight of the snallygaster.
“I’m sorry, Betty,” he murmured.
He knew it was only his imagination, but he thought he heard her whimper.
He wanted to wait, wanted to put off the torture as long as he could, but the snallygaster wasn’t gonna delay. She also wasn’t gonna warn him. The speedometer hit fifteen miles per hour, then twenty.
To turn now would be to slow down.
Silas grabbed the speed loader from the glove compartment and shook out one of the tubes. It was sealed shut with a long cork; that was by design, allowing Silas to grab the cork with his teeth. He drew the cork out, spat it into the legroom of the shotgun seat, and reached down between the seats. He knew where the stain was by feel, and didn’t have to look.
The speedometer hit twenty-five miles per hour. It wasn’t enough.
“Hang on, St. Christopher,” he muttered.
Then he poured the contents of the vial onto the GTO’s carpet, right onto the stain.
The unholy shriek of damnation filled his ears. The car leaped backward in a hot frenzy. Flames from the exhaust bent forward, licking past Silas’s open window. The speedometer needle jumped to fifty, then sixty-five.
The snallygaster slammed to the asphalt, just out of reach of the GTO. Her talons ripped chunks from the street and hurled them in all directions. Her tentacles thrashed about, shattering all the windows of a van parked at the curb. She lunged forward, neck uncoiling like a Slinky, and tried to bite the GTO. Her enormous jaws snapped shut just inches short.
Silas spun the wheel as he entered the intersection. The spiritual thrust that pushed the car into overdrive wouldn’t last forever, especially with him spinning the wheel and braking, but he had maybe a minute of kick in the engine. Underneath the stoplight, he spun, decelerating sharply. Horns honked, and a pickup truck swerved to miss him, and then he was shifting from reverse directly into third gear.
No point starting in first with the nitrous on. Black stinking smoke billowed as the tires reversed, screaming against the concrete.
Silas looked right out the GTO’s open window as he stepped on the accelerator. The snallygaster was rising and launching herself into the air, and then Silas slammed forward at forty miles per hour and he lost sight of the monster behind the burning rubber cloud.
Time to go to the Central Tower Building. If the pa-troll wasn’t there to meet him, Silas had half a mind to throw the duffel out the window without stopping.
He forced himself not to look in the rearview mirror.
Silas accelerated to a hundred fifty, then decelerated sharply to turn. He took a couple of quick unnecessary turns to throw the snallygaster off the trail, unsure if that was even possible. Was she following him by smell? By some other sense?
But surely, she was following the duffel, so this was about to become Shagruk’s problem, in any case.
He finally put himself on a straightaway and jammed ahead, reaching one hundred eighty miles per hour before the vial’s effect gave out, and then he braked to a hard stop, to the side of but also one car length ahead of a state police prowler parked on the curb in front of the Central Tower Building.
The echoes of the screams he couldn’t hear rattled in Silas’s head.
Another delivery truck shuffled past in its morning route. Silas figured it was an hour to dawn. He looked into the rearview mirror.
The prowler belonged to the pa-troll. He could see Shagruk now, stepping out of the car in all his burly, shaggy, scabby, flaking glory. The troll wore the uniform of the state police, but when the Seeming was stripped away, he looked like a jaundiced, snaggle-toothed monster with skin problems and a bad attitude.
Shagruk leaned into the Pontiac’s window. His shoulders barely fit and his horns touched the ceiling. He smelled like burnt onions and old meat. “I gotta admit, Sy, I didn’t think you’d be able to do it. Snallies are mean.”
“You know, they have products that might help you,” Silas said. “Have you considered Selsun Blue? Maybe…fill a whole tub full of it and take a bath? Maybe fill a swimming pool, invite the family over?”
“Smart-ass.”
Silas carefully avoided looking at Betty and definitely did not shed any tears.
Shagruk reached into the car and put a hand on the duffel. Silas grabbed the troll’s hand to stop him, feeling the horny calluses on his knuckles.
“You gonna pay for that?” Silas asked.
The troll tossed a bundle into the seat beside the duffel. Silas unrolled a long leather sheet until he saw rows of tiny square writing with curled flourishes at the corners of the characters.
“You read that stuff?” Shagruk asked him.
“Can’t say I do. Can we hurry this up?”
“What’s your rush?” Shagruk narrowed his eyes. “You got somewhere to be?”
“None of your business,” Silas said. “Leave the duffel bag. And do it quick. Mama’s coming, and she’s not happy.”
“I didn’t know you were Jewish, Sy.” Shagruk unzipped the duffel and took out its contents, a single, enormous egg. The egg was gray, with blue and green metallic streaks, and it was twice the size of Silas’s head.
“And I didn’t know you liked omelets.”
“We’re omnivores.” Shagruk grinned, revealing a disordered row of razor-sharp teeth. “Human children are just one of the things we eat.”
“If I didn’t know you were kidding, I’d have to kick your ass.”
“You’d try.”
“The snallygaster’s making kind of a mess,” Silas said. “Smashed up a couple of trucks.”
“The newspapers’ll call it a microburst,” Shagruk rumbled. “Miniature tornado hit Youngstown in the middle of the night. Insurance’ll pay for everything.”
Silas nodded. That was probably true, and a good thing. Silas had a couple hundred bucks tucked into the GTO’s ashtray for a rainy day, but that wouldn’t come close to paying for all the damage that had been done this evening.
The snallygaster shrieked from a few blocks away.
“Wait,” Shagruk said. “You led it right to us?”
“I told you I needed to hurry.”
“Jerk.” Shagruk spun about, watching the roiling sky.
An enraged snallygaster shriek echoed from the face of the Central Tower Building. Wind fanned down about them, blowing trash in every direction and whipping Silas’s hair.
Silas said, “Best of luck.”
“You son of a bitch, Sy!” growled Shagruk, shaking his gnarled fist.
Silas Danger shifted into first and stepped on the gas. Mama was the pa-troll’s problem now.