“Thanks for making it easy for me to catch up,” the Driver said, smiling. He looked at Edgar and his smile widened. “Hello, old friend. I’m surprised to find you in Ms. Palumbo’s company. Helping her was a mistake, you know. You might have thought you’ve been evading us all these years, but we’ve always known where you were. We could’ve reclaimed you whenever we wished. We hoped that giving you a long leash might help you discover what you did to upset the Balance and how to correct it. It appears that hope was in vain, though. Pity.”
Edgar pointed at the Driver and shouted, “Eat him down to the fucking bone!”
The beetles surged toward the Driver in a large black cloud.
The Driver’s smile didn’t falter as the beetles came at him. He then did something Lori hadn’t thought possible – he opened his eyes. The patches of skin stretched tight and split apart, blood running down his cheeks like red tears. The Driver had no eyeballs in his sockets, only twin pools of darkness. The ebon substance blasted forth from the Driver’s head to engulf the beetles, and they disappeared inside it, the buzzing of their wings suddenly muffled, as if the insects still flew, only now they were very far away. The darkness rushed back inside the Driver’s head, curling into his sockets like sentient smoke. When it was back where it belonged, the skin patches resealed, became smooth and unbroken, but the blood that had fallen onto his cheeks remained there.
The beetles were gone.
Edgar stared at the Driver in shocked disbelief.
“You motherfucker!” he shouted.
Before he could react any further, another pair of headlights appeared in the distance. This vehicle, however, had flashing red-and-blue lights on top.
Rauch, Lori thought.
She heard the rumble of a motorcycle engine then, and she turned to look in the other direction and saw a single headlight approaching. Goat-Eyes, she guessed. Who else would it be?
Did the Cabal have a way to contact each other, some kind of telepathy or simply a Nightway version of cell phones? Whichever the case, she felt certain the Driver had informed his fellow mystics of their location, and they were hauling ass here as fast as they could. How many had been traveling the Nightway in search of them? Just these three? More? Would the entire fucking Cabal converge on them in the next few minutes?
Lori thrust the Gravedigger Special toward Edgar, but he didn’t take it, didn’t even seem to notice she was offering it to him. He jumped off the van, clearly intending to confront the Driver, but when he hit the ground, he cried out in pain and his right prosthesis snapped. Lori didn’t know if it broke or became unattached, but either way, Edgar fell onto his side with an oompf.
“Graceful,” the Driver said, amused.
Anger flared bright in Lori, and she raised the Gravedigger Special, pointed it at the Driver, and fired. The weapon roared and bucked in her hand, and she thought for sure that the round had gone wild. But the tooth-bullet struck the Driver on the left shoulder. He staggered backward, letting out a cry of pain that Lori found deeply satisfying.
“Son of a bitch, that hurts!”
A dark stain appeared on the shoulder of the Driver’s robe, and Lori wanted to cheer. Whatever kind of being the Driver was, he bled just like anything else when he was hurt.
She was going to take another shot – hopefully this time she’d get the bastard in the heart – but before she could squeeze the trigger, Rauch came racing toward her in his police cruiser, lights flashing and siren blaring. She realized he intended to hit the van, and she had no choice but to jump. She threw herself into the air and was on the way down when the cruiser slammed into Edgar’s van, sending both vehicles spinning.
She landed on her feet, her bad knee screaming in agony, and then she hit the ground and rolled. She came to a stop lying on her side, her hands empty. She’d lost her grip on the Gravedigger Special when she landed, and she didn’t see the weapon in her immediate vicinity. It was then that she remembered Edgar. He’d been lying on the ground too, in front of the van, when Rauch—
She pushed herself up into a sitting position, ignored the pain blazing in her knee, and frantically searched for Edgar. She feared she’d see his broken body lying near the two wrecked vehicles, but he was on his feet and very much alive. Well, on his foot. His damaged prosthesis hung from his knee at an odd angle, forcing him to hop on his other one.
He was heading for the Driver. The mystic had pressed his left hand to his shoulder wound in an attempt to slow the bleeding, but the dark stain was still spreading. His teeth were gritted, features contorted in pain, and she remembered what Edgar had told her about the Gravedigger Special’s ammunition.
It fires the teeth of people who’ve died horrible, agonizing deaths. Their suffering is distilled into the teeth, and it’s released when they hit their target.Few things can withstand a concentrated dose of another being’s pain.
She was glad the fucker was hurting. She’d make him – and the rest of the goddamned Cabal – experience all the pain in the universe if she could.
Rauch, wearing his police uniform, exited the cruiser, seemingly unhurt after ramming his vehicle into the Pest Defense van. Too bad, Lori thought.
The rumble of the motorcycle engine grew louder, and an instant later, Goat-Eyes joined the rest of them. Like the Driver, she wore her Cabal robe, and Lori wondered how she was able to drive her bike without getting the hem’s fabric caught in the back wheel. It seemed to Lori that it would take as much supernatural power as anything else the Cabal did.
Goat-Eyes pulled her motorcycle up to the Driver’s car, parked, and dismounted.
The gang’s all here, Lori thought.
Ignoring the protestations of her knee, she rose to her feet. Whatever was going to happen next, she’d be damned if she’d face it lying down.
She looked around once more for the Gravedigger Special and this time she saw it, gleaming white against the Nightway’s glossy ebon surface, ten feet to her left.
Goat-Eyes had a cord of braided leather wrapped several times around her waist. A handle protruded from the coils, and Goat-Eyes took hold of it and yanked. The cord slipped loose, and when Goat-Eyes flicked her wrist, Lori realized she was holding a whip. It cracked loudly and flames burst to life along its length. Lori had to admit the effect was impressive. Goat-Eyes kept cracking the whip as she approached, and every time she did, the flames burned higher and hotter.
Smiling in triumph, the three Cabal members closed in on Lori and Edgar. Only the Driver was unarmed, but considering what his non-eyes could do, Lori knew he didn’t need any other weapon.
“Come with us willingly, Lori,” the Driver said, hand pressed to his shoulder wound, voice tight as he fought against the agonizing pain caused by the tooth-bullet. “If you do, I promise no harm will come to Edgar. We’ll leave him here without so much as mussing a hair on his head.”
“Of course, there’s no guarantee a predator won’t get him after we depart,” Goat-Eyes said.
“But that’s not our problem,” Rauch said. “Besides, he’s a wily veteran of the Nightway. If anyone can survive its dangers on foot – literally one foot – it’s him.”
“Don’t do it,” Edgar said, wobbling as he continued to try to maintain his balance. “You can’t trust them. They’ll probably kill me as soon as they get you out of here.”
“We wouldn’t do that,” Goat-Eyes protested. “We still have need of you.”
“By need, you mean you want to take him back to the tower and torture him,” Lori said.
Goat-Eyes shrugged. “One person’s torture is another’s bliss. We do what we must to maintain the Balance.”
The trio had continued moving as they spoke, and now they were less than fifteen feet from Lori and Edgar. Lori glanced at the Gravedigger Special again, tried to calculate the odds of her being able to get hold of the gun before the Cabal members could attack. She was no great mathematician, but she figured her chances were piss-poor.
Edgar extended his hands in a warning gesture.
“Stay back! Not all of my bugs are dead. They’ve multiplied since I escaped you, and I still got a fuck-ton inside me. If you so much as take another step closer, I’ll—”
