Rauch raised his gun and fired.
Edgar’s head jerked as a bullet pierced his skull and entered his brain. The impact knocked him off balance and he fell to the ground, blood jetting from his wound. He turned to look at Lori one last time, but his eyes were already starting to glaze over, and she didn’t know if he actually saw her. Then he slumped over and fell still, mouth open, no beetles emerging from it.
“You idiot!” the Driver shouted. “He was bluffing – he didn’t have any more beetles inside him!”
“How was I supposed to know?” Rauch said. “He sounded very convincing.”
Goat-Eyes stared at Edgar’s body. The whip fell from her hand, and when it hit the ground, its flames extinguished.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she said, nearly screaming the words.
Edgar’s sudden death shocked Lori to her core. She hadn’t known the man long or well, but he’d been a friend to her, helping her when she’d most needed it, and without any concern for his own safety. Fury at the Cabal – especially Rauch – overwhelmed her, and while the three mystics argued, she started toward the Gravedigger Special. She tried to run, but her fucking knee wouldn’t allow her to do more than a sort of shuffling hobble. She expected to hear Rauch fire his gun once more, expected to feel a bullet slam into her, but he didn’t. As if from a distance, she heard him arguing with his two companions, and she prayed the three would remain distracted just a few moments more.
Her knee gave out on her before she reached the gun, but as she fell, she stretched out her right arm as far as she could. As she smacked down onto the Nightway’s cold, smooth surface, her hand came down on the Gravedigger Special. She grabbed it, rolled onto her side, aimed at Rauch, and fired.
The tooth-bullet struck Rauch in the throat, and his head jerked backward. Blood jetted from his neck slits, and when the agony contained within the tooth was released into his system, he screamed. More blood gushed from his mouth, and for an instant he looked like some kind of grisly fountain. Then his body went limp and he fell to the ground.
“Fuck you!” Lori shouted in triumph.
The Driver and Goat-Eyes gaped at their companion’s corpse, and Lori wondered if they’d ever seen one of their own die before – or if they’d even believed any of them could die until this very moment.
By her count, the Gravedigger Special had five rounds left, and she intended to use them all. She aimed at the Driver, but before she could pull the trigger, she felt a tremor shudder through the ground beneath her, far stronger than the mild vibration that constantly hummed in the Nightway’s surface. She’d lived in Ohio all her life and had never experienced an earthquake, but she knew that was exactly what was happening now.
The four vehicles – the overturned van, the Driver’s car, Rauch’s cruiser, and Goat-Eyes’ motorcycle – shook and bounced. The motorcycle fell over with a crash, and both Goat-Eyes and the Driver fell too, unable to maintain their balance.
The tremors intensified, and Lori felt the ground actually ripple beneath her, as if the Nightway momentarily became water. She heard cracking sounds like breaking ice, and she watched as fissures – some small, some large – opened in the road’s obsidian surface. She couldn’t stand, couldn’t move. All she could do was hold tight to the Gravedigger Special so she wouldn’t lose it again and let the tremors do with her what they would. She had no idea how long the quake lasted, but eventually the tremors lessened before finally ceasing altogether.
She lay still for several moments, heart pounding, body bruised and aching. Her knee still hurt like hell, but she had more important things to concern her right now. She pushed herself into a sitting position and saw that the tremors had bounced and rolled Edgar’s body, and now he lay face down, arms splayed at awkward angles. His damaged prosthesis had broken entirely off and lay some distance away, while the other was now bent at a forty-five-degree angle. As she gazed upon her friend’s corpse, she became aware of a tickling sensation on the back of her left hand. She looked down and saw a black beetle – one of Edgar’s, she presumed – crawling on her skin. Ordinarily, the sight of such an insect on her body might’ve freaked her out, but she was emotionally numb after everything that had happened in the last several minutes. So instead of shaking her hand to dislodge the beetle, she raised it to her head and tilted it to encourage the insect to crawl off. She felt it scuttle onto her head, where it nestled into her hair and fell still. Maybe one of Edgar’s friends had escaped being swallowed by the darkness inside the Driver’s head. Or maybe Edgar had had one last beetle inside him after all, and the earthquake had shaken it loose. Either way, a piece of him had survived, and she didn’t intend to leave it behind.
She looked up then, startled to see the Driver standing over her. He still had one hand pressed to his shoulder wound, but he held out his other hand, and without pausing to consider whether it was a good idea, she took it and let him help her to her feet. He winced in pain from the effort but did not cry out. Goat-Eyes walked over to join them. Her face was ashen, as if she was terrified, and the Driver didn’t look much better.
“What the hell was that?” Lori asked.
The Driver spoke first. “Edgar died before he could discover how he upset the Balance and take action to correct his mistake. And now that the Imbalance cannot be rectified by any other means––”
“The Intercessor has decided to step in,” Goat-Eyes finished. Her voice was respectful, almost worshipful, but also suffused with fear.
Lori remembered hearing that word – Intercessor – in the Vermilion Tower.
“Isn’t that your people’s god or something?” she asked.
“The Intercessor is much more than a mere god,” the Driver said. “It is the ultimate keeper of the Balance between worlds. The members of the Cabal act as its agents, but when we are unable to correct an Imbalance ourselves, the Intercessor rouses from its slumber to tend to the task itself.”
“It hasn’t woken for millennia,” Goat-Eyes said. “In all that time, we haven’t failed to fulfill our duties.”
“Until now,” Lori said.
“Yes,” the Driver said.
Lori remembered seeing the Vermilion Tower for the first time, when the Driver had brought her to it. She had been struck by the structure’s spiral, almost organic-looking, shape, and she’d imagined it as the horn of a gigantic beast whose body was almost entirely hidden beneath the ground. She realized then that her imagining had been right. The Vermilion Tower was part of the Intercessor, and the creature was now awake.
“The earthquake….”
“Was the result of the Intercessor pulling itself out of the ground,” Goat-Eyes said.
Lori thought of the Cabal members she’d seen within the tower, hundreds of them. Had any of them managed to escape before the Intercessor had begun to wake? What of those that had been caught inside? Had they been tossed around like pieces of straw in a hurricane as their god began to move? If so, how many of them had survived? Not that she gave a damn what happened to them, considering the way they treated the people they abducted.
“Why would you let it come to this?” Lori asked. “If you just handled Imbalances yourselves instead of goading us into trying to figure everything out, something like this would never happen, and the Intercessor could go on sleeping forever.”
“We are unable to directly address an Imbalance,” Goat-Eyes said.
“Why the fuck not?” Lori demanded.
“Because we don’t know what causes them!” the Driver shouted.
Lori stared at him, shocked.
He went on, speaking normally once more, although she sensed this restraint took an effort.“The Intercessor communicates with us psychically, in jumbled images that aren’t always easy to interpret. We can usually determine who has created an Imbalance, where on Earth they live, and how to find them. But we do not know what they have done specifically to upset the Balance. We only know that they have, and that only they can repair the damage that they’ve caused.”
“It is said that long ago, the Intercessor told us everything,” Goat-Eyes said. “But by knowing too much, we risked interfering too directly, which we sometimes did, making an Imbalance worse than it was originally.”
“Sounds like a fucked-up system to me,” Lori said.
“Perhaps,” the Driver admitted. “But it has served us well enough for several thousand years.”
“Until today,” Lori said.
“Yes,” the Driver agreed. “Until today.”
