The air was cut by a scream and then an object came hurtling toward them. It struck Aashrita’s headstone so hard that the impact broke the marker in two. The object bounced off, hit the trunk of a nearby tree, ricocheted, hit the ground, and rolled for a half dozen feet before finally coming to a rest less than three yards from where Lori stood. Steam rose from the object as if it had been exposed to superheated air. It was a head. More precisely, Goat-Eyes’. Roughly half of the head was a gleaming white skull, but the other half was more or less intact. The woman’s remaining goat eye was wide open, and for some strange reason it looked less disturbing in death than it had in life.
“We’re not,” the Driver said, his voice tired, defeated.
Another sound echoed through the cemetery then, unlike anything Lori had ever heard before. It was like the high-pitched whine of a jet engine crossed with the racheting-pounding of the world’s largest jackhammer. Lori clapped her hands to her ears to muffle the sound, but it didn’t help. The sound seemed to be coming from inside her head as much as outside. The noise even bothered the Driver. He gritted his teeth in pain and pointed to the far side of the cemetery, where the entrance to the Nightway was located. She didn’t see anything right away, but then she became aware of a crimson glow. The light grew larger, brighter, and she saw the air shimmer all around it. There was a shape within the red light, sharp and pointed. It hung high in midair, a hundred feet, maybe two hundred. It was difficult to estimate. After the experiences she’d been through in the last day, she thought she understood what it meant to feel terror, but now – looking at the tip of the Intercessor’s horn as it worked to make the entrance large enough for its titanic body to pass through – she understood she’d known jack shit about terror.
That noise…. Was it the sound of the entrance being forced open wider, or was it the voice of the Intercessor, bellowing to the world that it was coming? Maybe the sounds were one and the same, she thought.
The Driver’s lips moved, but Lori couldn’t hear him. She stepped close, lowered her head to his, and turned her right ear to his mouth.
“It’s over,” he said. He shouted these words, and she could still barely hear them. “Nothing can stop the Intercessor now.”
“I think I know what I did,” she yelled back. “It happened a week ago, but I don’t know how to fix it.”
More of the Intercessor’s horn protruded into the real world. She tried to estimate just how much. Ten feet? Twenty? Would the Intercessor have to continue slowly widening the entrance, or would there come a point where the strain would be too much and the entrance would suddenly open the rest of the way, like the lid of a jar that was stuck? You strain to open it, giving it all you have, and just when you think the goddamned thing is never going to loosen, it suddenly moves, and after that it comes off easily. She supposed she’d find out soon enough.
“Do you remember the exact time and place?” the Driver shouted.
“Yes, but like I said, it was—”
The Driver pressed the flat of his palm against her chest and shoved – hard. Lori stumbled backward, her bad knee gave out on her, and she fell….
Chapter Fifteen
And fell….
And fell….
It felt as if she dropped for hours, the world around her a hazy-gray nothing, the entire universe one vast cloud bank.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, her bare ass hit something solid. Pain jolted through her tailbone and up along her spine, and she let out a loud, “Fuck!”
A woman holding hands with a toddler boy shot her a dirty look. Lori realized her face was more or less level with the child’s, and the mother seemed to hover over them both like a giant.
“Watch your language!” The woman’s upper lip curled in distaste. “And put some clothes on, for godsakes. And why are you all wet? Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
She turned away and continued on, dragging the boy with her. He looked back at Lori, eyes wide. He mouthed a word that she thought was fuck, but he said it so softly, she wasn’t sure.
She put her hands down, felt the cold hardness of concrete. I’m sitting bare-assed on a sidewalk, she thought. Cars passed by, going in both directions. Dry cars. It wasn’t raining. It looked like it hadn’t rained in some time.
She rose to her feet. Her injured knee still hurt like a motherfucker, and now her tailbone felt as if she might’ve broken it. When she was up, she checked the leather jacket to make sure it was zipped all the way, then she tugged it down to make sure it covered as much of her nether regions as it could. That accomplished, she tried to get her bearings.
She was downtown, on the same street where she worked. Everything seemed normal. Not only wasn’t it raining, there were no Shadowkin causing havoc everywhere. If she were to go to Woodlawn Cemetery right now, would she hear that terrible sound, see the awful sight of the Intercessor’s horn forcing its way into this reality? Or would the cemetery by calm, peaceful like here?
Now that she wasn’t in immediate danger, the full impact of what had happened hit her. They were all dead – Aashrita’s parents, Melinda, Katie, Justin, Larry, Reeny, and Brian…. Grief overwhelmed her, and she felt dizzy, light-headed. She moved toward the building closest to her, one that housed a store called Fresh Air Vape. She leaned back against the wall next to the store’s entrance, fighting tears. She knew that if she allowed herself to start crying, she wouldn’t be able to stop. She’d fall to the sidewalk, put her hands to her face, and sob uncontrollably. She couldn’t afford to surrender to her grief, not yet. The Driver had sent her here for a reason, and she had to keep herself together until she—
A woman came walking down the sidewalk toward her – a woman wearing a blue smock. Her face was pale, eyes squinted almost closed to shut out the worst of the light. She swayed a bit as she walked, as if she was having difficulty with her balance. Lori recognized the woman, of course. It was her. And she knew what was wrong with her other self. She was suffering from a migraine, a bad one, and she was out of her medicine and heading to the pharmacy, desperate to get a refill on her prescription.
Somehow, the Driver had sent her back in time to last week. She’d known the members of the Cabal were powerful, and supposed if they could pull her across dimensions, they could send her back in time a week. Still, the realization of what the Driver had done was staggering, and she found herself unable to do more than stare as her other self walked past. The Lori-That-Was didn’t look in her direction, showed no sign of noticing her. No surprise, given how much pain she was in.
She watched herself go, then saw an older man step out of an alley and into the other Lori’s path. White hair, mustache, brown suit, fedora, ugly yellow tie…. She recognized him, of course – the man with the shadows in his eyes – and she knew at once that he was the reason the Driver had sent her here.
“Can I ask you a question?” the man said to her other self. When she didn’t answer, the man stepped directly in front of her and repeated his question.
“No,” Past-Lori said and continued on her way.
The man watched Lori’s other self go, his shoulders slumped in disappointment, or perhaps defeat. Other-Lori glanced back at him once, but she faced forward once more and kept walking.
Lori stepped away from the wall and hurried toward the man.
“You can ask me,” she said.
The man turned toward her, and when he saw her face, he frowned in confusion. She thought he might say something – Aren’t you the woman that just ignored me? But he didn’t. She looked into his eyes and saw darkness swimming there. An instant later, Shadowkin emerged from his body – heads, hands, moving in and out of him rapidly, as if they were trapped within him and trying desperately to free themselves. Then as quickly as it happened, it was over. The Shadowkin submerged back into the man, although she still saw the shadowy threads moving across his eyes.
The man pressed a hand to his chest.
“Do you know what I’m supposed to do with these things?” he asked.
Lori could only look at him, completely at a loss for words.
He sighed. “I didn’t think so. Thanks anyway.”
He turned away and re-entered the alley from which he’d emerged.
This was it. The moment she’d upset the Balance, the one she had to confess and atone for. And she’d just fucked it up.
She hurried into the alley after the man, gritting her teeth against the pain in her injured knee. The alley was clean for the most part, so she didn’t have to worry about cutting her bare feet, but even if the alley had been strewn with broken glass, rusty nails, and used hypodermics, she wouldn’t have hesitated to enter it.
The man was already halfway down the alley by the time she caught up to him.
