13. Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

I t took for fucking ever to get out of Chicago. Seriously, I don’t know how they even called it all Chicago. It was like, “Oh, the city center!” and then hours’ worth of suburbs before the highway suddenly spit me out into farmland. I could smell the cow shit from here, and it was not lovely.

I would stand out like a five-alarm fire in one of these little farming towns, not that I expected the Egilsson family to be on my tail quite yet. Still, Andre was right. I needed to sleep, and that meant I needed to stop for a while. S?ren was safe in the trunk—shit, and I hated that he was stuffed back in the trunk, but there really was no good way to explain the functional equivalent of a corpse to someone if they happened to look inside.

I pulled off the highway and headed east, from a double-lane paved road to single lanes, and finally stopped beneath a cottonwood on the side of a dirt road that looked neglected. My arm ached like I’d shoved my fingers directly into the wound and rummaged around in there. I could feel my exhaustion threaten to swamp my brain, but I had a few things to do before I could recline the seat and sleep. I pulled out my phone. Marisol got the first call.

“What on earth is happening with you?” she demanded before I could say a word. “I did a card spread for you, and they were nothing but swords, everything discord and upheaval! There are news reports about a gunfight in a hotel in Chicago. Was that you?”

My heart rate picked up dramatically. “Are there any clear pictures?” One family of maniacs I could probably evade, but my chances went way down if the regular police force got involved.

“No. Not that they’re showing on the TV, at least. What did you do?”

“I got S?ren. It was just…a little more complicated than I’d imagined it would be.”

“Cillian…”

“I’m fine. We made it out okay, but the situation now is kind of hard to explain. I need some help.”

“What kind of help?”

She sounded suspicious. I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t ask for help very often, and I wasn’t gracious about it even when it was unavoidable. Andre could attest to that. Still, I didn’t have a choice.

“I need a drop bag, preferably somewhere close to…” I racked my brain for the name of the town behind me. “Bloomington? Or Normal? Or both? Somewhere in the middle of fucking Illinois.”

“You can’t just go buy new bullets like a normal person?”

“Not if my picture is possibly being circulated to cops.”

She sighed. “I’ll talk to Phin about it. You know he’s going to make me cook him corned beef and cabbage for this. I’ll never get the smell out of my curtains.”

“You two got domestic fast.”

“Well, when your only other option for meaningful human contact is an angry young man who steals your Buddhas, you learn to get by with who you’ve got.”

“Oh, right.” I’d almost forgotten the little bronze Buddha figurine I’d taken from her spare room. “Sorry about that. I should have asked.”

“They’re not just there to be decorative, Cillian, they’re protective as well. Now I have to pay Lourdes to come back and renew the spell on that room, and that’s not cheap.”

Yeah, Lourdes was good, but she didn’t do discounts. “I’ll pay you back.”

“At this rate, you’re going to owe more than you can offer,” Marisol groused. I grinned despite my discomfort.

“No one can offer as much as me.”

“Says the boy who needs my booty call to arrange a drop bag for him.”

I pinched my eyes shut. “Could you refer to him some other way, please? I don’t want to think about the two of you getting it on.”

“Prude, cielito , such a prude. Anything else?”

“Yeah, do you know if Bobby is around?”

“Honey,” she said with a sigh. “It’s still summer, which means Bobby is wandering around bare-ass naked in the desert somewhere, flirting with scorpions and chasing coyotes. He never comes in until September at the earliest.”

“Shit.” Bobby was kind of crazy, but he was also an expert in a lot of the more esoteric lore that I figured was at work here. I didn’t want to call up a Northern European specialist in case they were working with Egilsson, and while I had an almost-priest on speed dial, he also reported to a higher power I didn’t want to share with just yet.

“Why, what’s going on?”

“I’m not sure yet.” It was too soon to talk about it. I didn’t know enough. I could do some more testing on my own before I got desperate. “I’ll let you know.”

“If you say so,” she said doubtfully. “I’ll talk to Phin and let you know about the drop bag. It’ll probably be tomorrow at the earliest. Do you have a place to stay?”

I looked out the window at the layer of dull gray clouds overhead, feeling soaked in the heat of the afternoon and the stink that I was slowly becoming accustomed to. Electra’s seats were pretty comfortable, though, all things considered.

“Yeah, I’m good.”

“All right. Be safe, Cillian.”

“You too.” I hung up on her and checked my messages. One new one from my mother. I opened it up.

It was today’s horoscope. Your esoteric stars! it read. Aries: Today will be a tough balancing act as you’re caught between your aggression and your enthusiasm. Remember to bend with the winds, not resist until you break. Different situations call for different tactics, and what works well with one person may backfire with another. Be the honest and straightforward person that we all know you can be, and no matter what, go with your gut!

Ooooh…kay. Thanks, Mom, for that completely random astrological bullshit. Not that I didn’t see the purpose behind astrology. All sorts of things had power that made absolutely no fucking logical sense, and astrology was one of them. It bothered me, though, even more than tarot—at least with tarot there was an immediacy, an aspect of it that was tailored just to you. Generalized horoscopes were next to useless, the universe’s idea of shooting craps. Fucking ridiculous, and yet here was mine.

Fine. No Bobby, I could deal with that. I could deal with everything once I’d had a little time to sleep. I reclined Electra’s front seat and let the dizziness and fatigue I’d been repressing roll over me like a wave. It was an odd sensation, the feeling of turning like you were on a spit while lying still. I cracked the window to let in a little breeze, draped one of my hands over my eyes, and tried to ignore the vertigo long enough to fall asleep.

It must have worked, because the next thing I knew, it was twilight and the car was shaking. Like, literally bouncing forward and backward, rocking on its suspension like someone was jumping on the hood. Or—

Fuck, S?ren .

“I’m coming!” I called out, fumbling for the keys and almost tripping over my legs as I practically fell out of the car. “I’m coming, hang on, I’m coming!” The sound of pounding against the trunk was intense, so loud I was surprised the metal hadn’t sprung up with dents yet. “Hang on, just let me open it!” It took three tries to get the key into the lock, the car and my hand were both shaking so badly, but I managed eventually and threw the trunk open. “S?ren—”

I don’t know what hit me. It could have been feet. Maybe it was a hand—S?ren had big hands. Whatever it was, one second I was bent over the trunk, the next I was flying backward. It felt like I was airborne forever, long enough for me to catalog every purple cloud in the sky, long enough for me to feel the creak of impact in my rib cage and wonder if any of them had cracked, long enough to know that hitting the ground was going to hurt . And it did.

I hit with the back of my shoulders, just below my neck. The ground was unexpectedly yielding, but it still knocked the last of my breath out of me and left me gasping, paralyzed with pain. The gun was in the car, with my bag. The gun—fuck the gun, this was S?ren ; I wasn’t going to shoot him, but what…what…

Standing above me, S?ren was tall enough that my blurry vision couldn’t quite make out his face. I turned my head and focused on the toe of his shoe: black leather with tiny, meticulous stitching. Handmade, maybe. Definitely too nice to be edged with mud and manure. He bent down, and now I could see him. Weird, how his eyes reflected the clouds when he wasn’t even looking at them. Purple, kind of murky and dark…but he had blue eyes. I remembered he had blue eyes.

S?ren said something in, well, it had to be Icelandic, but the cadence was weird. Hardly distinguishable as words, more like he was singing it. He repeated it more insistently, and I just shook my head. It hurt to move, but I needed him to know I wasn’t his enemy. Didn’t he recognize me?

“S?r—” My voice was a thready wheeze. “S’ren.”

“ Tú veist hann ?”

“English,” I managed. “I know you—speak it, please—S?ren.”

His pale lips thinned as he stared at me. S?ren shut his dark eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, they were blue and horribly bloodshot. He stared down like he couldn’t see me, his whole body trembling like a leaf in the wind. If I thought he was hard to understand before, that was infinitely preferable to the scream of complete horror that emerged from his throat now.

“S?ren!” I reached for him, pain be damned, and he almost fell down into my arms before the scream suddenly cut off. The blue faded back to purple, he straightened up, and this time when our eyes met, it was with a new understanding on his part.

“ Framsynir ,” he murmured, and then his cold hand touched the base of my throat, just above my collar. His chill spread across me like a blanket, and I felt my heart flutter weakly for a moment before my mind just stopped trying and let me go unconscious.