Chapter Six
Stacy Kane had slept poorly through the first half of the night. She’d tossed and turned, dreaming that she was traveling across a desert haunted by faceless creatures, carried in the belly of a demon. She had one fellow passenger on her journey, a young woman also trapped in the monster’s belly. The young woman repeatedly tried to tell Stacy something, but couldn’t make the words come out.
At some point in the wee hours, Stacy had walked outside and stood on the gravel, staring into the forest and listening to the crickets for a quarter hour with the deck clutched in her hand. After that, she’d finally fallen asleep.
Then she’d slept in. She’d awakened with light streaming in through the plastic Venetian blinds and the deck clutched to her belly. She’d showered, drunk a cup of hot black tea Father Benedict had presented her, and found Silas standing outside by the GTO, looking into the trees through his sunglasses.
The car was magical, but he hadn’t wanted to explain how.
Of course, she hadn’t wanted to explain very much to him, either.
Which one of them owed the other an explanation?
She said, “Sorry. You still willing to take me to San Francisco?”
“That’s the job,” he said. “What are you sorry for?”
“I slept in.”
He shrugged. “You needed it.”
“I was a little snippy last night.”
“So was I.”
She almost called him out for refusing to accept her apology, but thought better of it. They both climbed into the car and rolled out.
“You get the holy water?” she asked conversationally.
He nodded.
“They do you favors,” she observed. “They ever ask for favors in return?”
“From time to time,” he told her. “Not last night.”
They said almost nothing in the hours that remained of the morning. The road was clear and the sky was blue; with the windows down, a pleasant breeze filled the car at stoplights. Silas drove with his eyes fixed on the road. Stacy fiddled with the radio and was annoyed that she still found nothing but hard rock channels. She tried to sing along, but Silas didn’t seem to be in the mood to join her. She asked one or two questions designed to get Silas talking about his childhood, and failed. Men were usually so easy—you just asked them to say something about themselves, and they couldn’t help it. Most men would talk forever if you just kept asking them little prodding questions. Themselves was the favorite conversational topic of most men, by far.
Except, apparently, for Silas Danger. The more she asked about his childhood, his family, his car, and what he did for a living, the shorter his answers got, until eventually he was muttering out of the corner of his mouth in pure monosyllables. With his face hidden behind his sunglasses, he might have been walled off behind brick.
After half an hour of a particularly stubborn silence, he abruptly turned the tables and asked her about learning magic from her father. Given his own failure to share, at that point, she had no inclination to share with him, so she gave him the shortest answers she could think of until he gave up.
They listened to some New York-area three-chord heroes for a while.
Once they descended from the hills, they drove I-80 west across Pennsylvania with the windows down. Urban sprawl alternated with wooded suburbia for a couple of hours, and then both faded into a green fastness of tall, forested hills punctuated with the occasional industrial town. There was enough litter along the highway that she almost thought she would see a crying Indian.
Pittsburgh was still well out ahead of them when the traffic began to slow.
“I don’t like this,” Silas muttered, looking into his rearview mirror.
His comment wasn’t directed at Stacy, so she just looked out the window.
The traffic grew slower and slower and then ground to a halt. Silas grunted.
“Look.” Stacy pointed. “The left lanes are going a little faster.”
“They’re just consolidating.” Silas nosed Betty into a gap that actually put the car in the right-most lane. Three feet of asphalt separated them from the truck in front of them.
“Wow,” Stacy said.
“What?” he said, then sank back into moody silence.
She looked out the window. They were in thick forest and tall hills. She could see farmhouses, barns, and silos to the side of the freeway, and roads—dirt tracks but also paved country lanes—crisscrossing the area. There was no guard at the edge of the highway here, but a wide shoulder hugged the strip of asphalt, and then a steep embankment descended to a one-lane frontage road.
“Lights ahead,” she warned Silas.
The words snapped him out of his reverie. He leaned over her and peered forward.
“Accident?” he wondered.
“Gotta be,” she said. “Why else would they stop the whole freeway?”
“Hmm.”
“You’re thinking it’s something else?”
“I’m just thinking,” he said. “Look in the glove box.”
She looked. The odd clip holding six vials of water sat in the compartment, along with a pistol in a holster and the mummified hand.
“That’s the holy water Father Benedict gave you.”
“Yeah, but if this is the police, they’re not going to give me any grief about holy water.”
“They might think it’s drugs.”
“No, they won’t. And if they did, they’d test it and realize their mistake. I’m worried about the pistol.”
“You don’t have a Pennsylvania license?”
“I don’t have many current licenses of any kind,” Silas said. “My licenses tend to expire, and I’m on the move too much to renew anything. No return address.”
“So forget about the pistol,” Stacy said. “If they simply ask to see your license and registration for the car, we’re in trouble.”
“Yes. Or if they run the plates. But still, hand me the pistol.”
She handed him the gun. He scooted forward in the seat to tuck the pistol in his belt, behind his back and under his leather jacket.
“State trooper coming this way,” she told him.
“Relax,” he said, “but don’t smile too much. We’re stuck in traffic, so we’re supposed to look a little irritated.”
“It will be a huge acting stretch, but I’ll try.”
The trooper ambled toward them from the west. He moseyed alongside the stopped traffic, looking in the cars and occasionally stopping to talk briefly with a driver. He wore a gray shirt and a black tie and a flat, wide-brimmed hat, the crown of which had four large dimples. He was a thickly muscled man with short-cropped brown hair, and he kept his thumbs tucked into his belt, right hand never very far from his pistol.
The trooper stepped to the shotgun-side window of the pickup truck in front of them and talked to the occupants.
“Silas,” Stacy whispered. “Is this guy a troll?”
“How would I know?” Silas shrugged.
“You can’t see through the Seeming?”
“Pretty sure I already told you I can’t. Why?” Silas’s head snapped up. “Are you saying you think the pa-troll has some reason to be interested in us? Did you offend the troll community somehow?”
“The gargoyles wanted the deck,” Stacy said. “Why wouldn’t the trolls want it, too?”
She pushed the box underneath her seat, just before the trooper turned and sauntered toward them.
He stood at the window, rested his left hand on the roof, and leaned down to see inside. Looking them each in the eye in turn, he smiled.
“Officer,” Silas said.
“Just checking to make sure everyone’s okay,” the trooper said.
“No heart attacks or babies being delivered here,” Stacy told him. How could she know if this trooper was a troll? Was it something she should ask? He looked fine. He smelled fine, too, with a nice, fruity cologne. Or was the cologne smell part of the Seeming?
The trooper chuckled. “No one late for work and feeling anxious? No one needs to use the bathroom?”
“We have plenty of time,” Silas said. “Just out enjoying a drive.”
“With a car like this, on a fine spring day?” The trooper whistled. “I’d be out enjoying a drive, myself. Maybe a picnic?”
“Maybe,” Silas allowed. “What’s the holdup in traffic? Accident?”
“Bridge out.” The trooper laughed. “Would you believe it, weather this nice? But a state engineer was out looking at it this morning and spotted a problem. So we have to funnel the westbound and eastbound traffic all along the eastbound bridge. And we’re alternating, so there’s a bit of a backlog.”
Silas nodded.
“Listen.” The policeman leaned in confidentially. “We’re not offering this to everyone, but I like your car and I wish I was on a picnic with you. There’s another bridge. You want to cut down your wait, I could put the lights on and lead you away from the traffic and down to the other bridge.”
“Toll bridge, I assume?” Silas asked.
The trooper grinned. “Well, look, if we save you a little time, we wouldn’t mind a contribution to the retirement fund.”
All the talk of tolls and bridges did nothing to ease Stacy’s suspicions. Trying not to squint, she took a close look at the name tag pinned to the flap of the trooper’s right breast pocket.
It said johnson.
That didn’t sound like a troll name.
“Officer Johnson,” she said, “I wonder if you could do me a small favor.”
“We’re here to serve the public,” he said amiably.
“My boyfriend here says he filled the tires,” she continued, “but it feels to me like we’re riding a little low. Especially in the back right, to my eye.”
“You want me to check your tire pressure?” the trooper asked.
“I hear it affects gas mileage,” she said. “And the cost of oil is up these days. All those crazy sheiks, what are they up to, you know? And this is a fine automobile, but it does consume a lot of gas. Would you mind very much? Just give the tires a quick eyeball, tell me what you think?”
Stacy didn’t think of herself as a woman who tried to use seduction to get her way. On the other hand, she wasn’t entirely opposed to it either, so she gave the policemen her most winning smile, trying very hard not to imagine him as a troll.
Silas harrumphed.
“Of course, miss.”
Officer Johnson extracted himself from the GTO window and moseyed toward the back corner of the car. Stacy grabbed the rearview mirror.
“Hey!” Silas snapped.
Stacy swiveled the mirror. She paused halfway and swung it back. Had she seen a woman’s face? A woman with a wing and talons? But when she pivoted the mirror around, searching the inside of the car, the woman was gone.
Silas had said the car had supernatural powers. And he said he had seen trolls in the rearview mirror before.
“Silas…” she said.
“Is he a troll?” Silas whispered.
Stacy regained her focus. She aimed the mirror at the back right. Officer Johnson was crouched beside the wheel, and only his hat and right shoulder were visible. She resisted the urge to turn around and look with her natural eyes.
“I can’t tell yet. What do we do if he is?”
“We don’t follow him off into the woods for his special secret bridge crossing, that’s for sure.” Silas gripped the wheel with his left hand, knuckles white. His right hand rode at his hip, ready to dive for his pistol.
“Looks good to me.” Johnson stood. “Now I think you’re gonna need to come with me.”
In the mirror, he still wore the gray shirt, black tie, and dimpled hat. But he was nearly a foot taller, and the fabric of his shirt strained not to burst around his chest and shoulders. The skin of his neck and face was yellowish-orange and hung off in large flakes. His ragged lips looked as if they were bleeding from being sliced by his own long tusks and razor-sharp teeth. His narrow, squinting eyes hid beneath a swollen, crusty brow. Downturned ears like the ears of a beagle, but tattered, hung down the sides of his swollen skull.
“Holy…” she murmured.
“Yeah, they’re ugly,” Silas said.
“Are you going to shoot him?” she whispered.
“No, but we can’t let him hold us here any longer. Get your seat belt on.” Silas looked up and down the stopped freeway traffic, then took a deep breath. He put both hands on the steering wheel. “Don’t worry this won’t hurt him. But we’ve gotta go.”
“What? Why?” Stacy fumbled with the seat belt until she heard a click.
The troll walked between the GTO and a Cadillac behind them. Silas shifted into reverse and slammed the car backward, pinning the troll.
The troll bellowed. Stacy screamed. Silas cranked the wheel hard right, shifted into first, and slammed into the pickup truck. Officer Johnson flopped forward, no longer pinched between two automobiles, and fell onto Betty’s trunk. He slapped at his holster, trying to draw a gun.
Shouting and the honking of horns rose from the cars around them.
Silas lunged backward again. Johnson hit the Cadillac and was flung sideways. His motion was stopped by the fact that one of his legs was pinched between the Cadillac and the GTO again.
He pulled out his pistol.
Silas cranked the wheel, shifted into first, and stepped on the gas. This time, there was enough room between the Pontiac and the truck, and the GTO charged forward onto the shoulder.
“Get down!” Silas shouted.
Stacy shrank in her seat, one hand on the dashboard and the other gripping the shoulder belt to try to stabilize herself. She bounced and slid left anyway, and then she heard the cracking of a gun fired several times.
Silas whipped the Pontiac around, turning at a sharp angle even as the car plunged down the embankment. Stacy was certain they would roll, but Silas held the wheel like a climber gripping the face of El Capitán. Sweat burst from his forehead, and the veins in his temples bulged, and somehow, as if by force of will, the car stayed on its wheels. Loose black dirt and bits of gravel sprayed up into the car through the windows and struck Stacy in the face.
Silas fishtailed back left.
And then right again.
And then the tires struck something solid. Screeching, they dragged the Pontiac forward. Stacy looked back to see Officer Johnson sprinting down the hill after them.
“He’s gaining!” she shouted. “How are his legs not snapped in half?”
She wanted to grab the rearview mirror, but Silas commandeered it, spinning it back to look at the pursuing trooper. Stacy hunkered behind the top of the seat as she watched the policeman run and then leap.
But Silas accelerated at the last second and the car sped forward, out of the officer’s grasp. Johnson tumbled to a stop along the asphalt of the frontage road and then dragged himself to his feet. As the Pontiac sped away, he turned to wait.
State police cars were driving back along the shoulder of the highway in pursuit.
The highway pa-troll was coming after them.