14. Tyler

The cruiser's door opens, and a single policeman steps out and makes his way towards the car. I push Kalistratos down and duck my head beneath the seat.

"God dammit, this is what I get for thinking with my dick," I hiss. "Fuck, what do we do? Wait! Your powers! Use your powers!"

"And if we encounter that shadow creature again? No, I can't use my powers now."

"You're wanted, Kalistratos," I say. "He's going to arrest us the moment he finds out who you are. And you're fucking naked!"

I catch a glimpse of the officer in the side view mirror—he's just a few feet away from the car. Then I feel Kalistratos's body pull away from me, and the first panicked thought that pops into my head is that he's going to get up and challenge the officer to a fight. I reach out to grab him and yank him back out of sight, but instead of wrapping my arms around a big hunk of Phoenikos alpha, they squeeze the fluffy feathers of an irritated chicken. We stare at each other in silence—surprise from me, embarrassment from him. And then, a knock on the window.

"Excuse me, sir?" the officer says, cupping his hand over his eyes. "Everything alright in there?"

"U-uh, yeah!" I stammer. "Just give me a second, officer."

I'm shirtless. My pants are unbuttoned. I'm holding a chicken.

I lean forward and hit the button to roll the window down a crack. The officer peeks through the glass, looking over the top of his Oakleys. Kalistratos stares at him silently.

"What're you doing here, sir?"

"Oh, I'm just cuddling my chicken, officer," I say. "It's not a euphemism, I promise. He's just a little cold."

Argh, why did I say that?!

"Uh, yeah, I can see that," the cop says. "That thing's real?"

Kalistratos lets out a loud cluck and flutters his wings. I squeeze him tight against my chest.

"Yessir," I say.

My heart is pounding, and after a silent pause that feels like an hour, the officer says, "Well, if you're going to do that, then you ought to do it somewhere else. You've turned onto a private road. Just hop back on the freeway and head south about five miles, there's a rest station there."

I exhale. "Yeah, that sounds good. I'll definitely do that."

The officer stares again, and his forehead crinkles into a frown. "Wait a second."

I tense.

"Let me see that bird," he says.

Slowly, I turn Kalistratos around in my arms.

"Yeah, I thought so," the man says. "That ain't no chicken, son. That's a cock you've got there."

"Oh," I say. "Um, thank you."

"No problem. You drive safe now."

Then the officer is gone, just about as quickly as he'd arrived. I peek over the top of the seat and see the cruiser disappearing down the road leading a billowing trail of dust. Kalistratos, back in human form, looks over the seat beside me.

"Okay," I say. "No more unnecessary stops."

He blows a fluffy feather off the top of my head. "Agreed."

We keep on the southbound freeway until the fuel refill light comes on, and I pull off for the closest gas station. I hurry inside and grab a few snacks for the rest of the trip. As I'm paying, I overhear the clerks talking about a warehouse fire near a mall in Bakerville. I don't stick around to listen to the details.

Kalistratos is waiting in the car for me, his face hidden behind sunglasses. He takes a drink of Coke and flips through the copy of Empire magazine that Jeff had left in the back seat of the car.

"Hey, sexy," I say, leaning into the open driver's window. "How much?"

"More coin than you can afford," he says. "I'm a prince, after all."

I laugh and toss the bag of snacks onto his lap as I get into the car. We're back on the highway, and halfway to the city. Kalistratos closes the magazine—it's a Star Wars retrospective issue.

"I still can't believe Darth Vader was the father of Luke Skywalker," he says.

"Blew my mind when I first saw it, too," I say.

Forty minutes later, we pass a sign marking the city limits. We're on the outskirts now, and the landscape is changing. The hills are gone, replaced with endless strip malls and apartment buildings. Kalistratos stares out the window, then tilts his neck to look up at the sky. The fluffy white clouds have turned gray. Ahead of us, I can just make out the downtown skyline sitting behind a screen of yellow smog, and there seems to be rain on the docket. I'm white-knuckling the wheel, and I can feel Kalistratos is tense, too. Both of us are thinking about that shadow monster and the way the sky changed when it appeared.

"A bad omen," Kalistratos mutters.

"Or… maybe just bad air," I say. I'm trying to reassure myself. "You know, Kalistratos… I've been thinking about this little wild goose chase we're on. What if the First, or whoever they are, is the one responsible for all of this? What if they're leading us to a trap?"

"Sometimes, to reach our goal, we must walk through the lion's den. And right now, we have no other options."

"Yeah, but when the lion is some mysterious being who can summon soul reavers and shadow monsters and transport me to a different realm, it makes things a little more difficult."

"I have to trust the Great Phoenix is looking out for us."

"I want to, I just wish I had some sign that he was. Because he's been real absent, don't you think? He could at least appear in a vision, or something and be like, ‘Hey, guys, everything is gonna be just fine.' Right?"

"You're getting cold feet."

"Mildly scared shitless," I say, staring up at the darkening sky. "How long have you been searching for his temple now?"

"Years," he says.

"And all of that time, the Great Phoenix has never given you so much as a hello?"

"If he was so easy to speak to, I wouldn't be searching so hard for his temple. Every clan has a temple that houses the spirit of their patron god. The Great Wolf, the Great Cat, and so on. Without a temple, a god has no voice. So Phoenikos have had to rely on signs. That"s all we have."

"The Phoenikos were the most powerful clan, right? So how did the Great Phoenix's temple get lost? That's what I don't understand."

He thinks about it for a moment. "I don't know the whole story. Just fragments I've pieced together. It's like the Jedi. Luke Skywalker was of their clan but didn't know it until he was told by Obi-Wan Kenobi. Their kind was lost, destroyed long before his time. Some Phoenikos may not even know they are Phoenikos. Most know nothing about our clan's time in the light. Including myself."

Rain patters across the car's windshield. I flip on the wipers, but they're old and barely do more than leave the glass a streaky mess.

"Damn," I say. "Good thing it's just drizzling."

Famous last words.

As we enter downtown and are swallowed by a crooked-toothed sprawl of high-rise buildings on either side of the freeway, sheets of heavy raindrops slam the car like bullets. I can barely see through the windshield. The red glow of the brake lights ahead of me is my only guide to the road.

I roll down the window and stick my head out into the rain. It's stupid, but it's the only way I can see where I'm going.

"Fuck this," I say, and pull off the freeway.

The rain has come so quickly and so dramatically that some people on the sidewalks have retreated beneath awnings to wait it out, while others run, using whatever they have on them as makeshift umbrellas. I'm completely soaked.

I drive us along the surface streets as far as possible. There's an accident up ahead—two cars smashed in an intersection. I take a left, nearly hitting a man sprinting across the road with a jacket held over his head, and then run into gridlock traffic. After a while, some of the cars ahead of us begin to flip U-turns to try and get out, but the opposite side of the road quickly gets blocked up too. Just a few cars ahead of us is a parking structure for a loft apartment building, and I make a snap decision.

"We'll go the rest of the way on foot. It's just a few blocks from here."

I pull around the cars in front and drive up onto the curb to get into the lot, grinding the undercarriage in the process.

"Sorry, Jeff," I say.

I find a space on the top floor and dig out a compact umbrella from the plastic storage crate Jeff keeps in the trunk. In the building across the street, I see office workers staring perplexedly out the window at the abrupt and unseasonable change in weather. The afternoon sky has now become as dark as evening, and as we reach the stairs, thunder vibrates in the distance.

We wind our way down the staircase. Water drips from the ceiling and splashes off the railing, and one of the lights buzzes and flickers out, leaving a whole section of stairs dark except for the green glow of an exit sign. Discarded mini liquor bottles and a torn condom wrapper grace the floor next to the sixth-floor door. I jog down the stairs faster. I want to be out on the street. I have a strange feeling that we're not alone here. Same damn feeling I used to get when I worked the night shift at a warehouse built right next to an old cemetery. I quit that job real fast.

It's the damn rain. It's not right, just like the swirl of clouds that had suddenly appeared over the mall.

Something is watching us.

The lights flicker again as we pass the fourth floor, and all of them go out, leaving nothing but the exit lights. I freeze and Kalistratos collides with my back. I nearly tumble down the stairs, but he grabs me around the waist and pulls me against his chest.

"Sorry," I say.

"No," he replies in a low voice. "I feel it, too."

Oh, God. I don't like hearing that. I just want it to be all in my head.

I slowly turn around the corner for the next floor and stare down into the dim stairwell. Kalistratos comes up beside me, takes my hand, and we finish our descent to the first floor. The exit door opens out to an uncovered alleyway, and I deploy the auto-open umbrella with a click of the handle button. I turn to Kalistratos, expecting an amazed reaction from him, but he just shrugs.

"We have skiadeion in Circeana," he says.

"We just call them umbrellas."

"Oom…brell…ahh. I'll stick with ‘skiadeion.'"

A small river flows down the center of the alley, carrying sludge and litter from the nearby dumpsters to the street. The sky flashes, and I count the seconds until the thunder rolls over us. The storm is getting worse.

I feel it before I see it. That roller coaster dip in the pit of my stomach, and the chill that goes through my body. Next to me, Kalistratos tenses into a ready stance. I reach protectively for the figurine pendant and clutch it against my chest. The rain splashes into a wide pothole, scattering the reflections of the buildings around it. Then it goes dark. It's as if the light has been sucked into its depths, like a pit of pure shadow.

"Aw, great," I say. "Not again."

The shadow monster emerges from the hole—and then I realize it's not alone. Two more of the creatures rise and crawl out of the dark spaces around the alleyway.

Kalistratos doesn't hesitate. He thrusts out his hand and a white flame erupts from his palm, filling the alley with light for a brief moment. The monsters recoil and cower, but quickly recover when the flame fizzles away beneath the pouring rain. He reaches out and grabs my hand and, with a burst of power, stops time. The raindrops slow to a stop around us, a curtain of sparkling diamonds. But the monsters aren't affected. They surge forward, tunneling through the wall of water straight for us.

"Alright, run," Kalistratos says.

The rain slams down around us again. I toss the umbrella at the monsters and we spin around and bolt for the far end of the alleyway. Kalistratos keeps a small phoenix flame burning around his hand, illuminating the space around us. The monsters writhe and glide after us, moving along the ground like fast and giant slugs. The glow of brake lights from the street traffic shines ahead of us like a beacon of hope—hope that we can somehow evade the monsters out in the open where there's more light. But then, two of them disappear, diving away into the shadows, and a curtain of blackness falls across the end of the alleyway, blocking our path. They've combined and are pouring out from the crisscross of overhanging electric wires like viscous tar. Behind us, the remaining creature approaches, reforming into a shape that almost looks like a man. It walks towards us on blobby, unstable legs.

Kalistratos grabs me and pulls me against him, holding his free hand high to shed as much light as possible. The creatures close in on us, slowly and with some hesitation, but their fear of the fire is not as strong as it was before. The cold rain slams down on us. The shadows creep forward, bodies like black holes pulling in all light, and Kalistratos's flame wavers. I can feel them reaching out, reaching for Kalistratos, reaching for the figurine around my neck. They want to take them both from me and I'm powerless to stop them.

I can't let them take them.

Suddenly, there's a blinding flash of light from behind us. It fills the alleyway and washes over us with a brilliant warmth. The shadows react, twisting and shaking violently before each bursting into a dozen fragments that flee like cockroaches into whatever dark cracks and crevices they can find.

We turn around and shield our eyes. Part of me expects to see a police cruiser blasting us with their spotlight, but this isn't just your run-of-the-mill electric light. I can feel it—this is like Kalistratos's flame. This is magic.

It fades, and my eyes adjust to the silhouette of a person holding an umbrella standing at the end of the alley.