15. Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

I t should have taken about eighteen hours to drive from Illinois to the tiny town of Santa Rosa, New Mexico, home of the Blue Hole and, occasionally, Bobby Garcia. Bobby was the man I needed to see about nature magic, so New Mexico was where we had to go. I’d trawl the whole fucking desert if I had to in order to find him. One really long day, maybe two if we were wasting time sleeping and eating, and then we’d be there.

Ha-fucking-ha.

“You should let me drive,” S?ren said after midnight, once the highway traffic had cleared a bit. We were headed south toward Missouri—it wouldn’t be long before we crossed the border and hopefully made it that much harder for Papa Egilsson and his crew of vicious offspring to find us.

“Do you know how to drive?” I asked warily.

“S?ren knows. I have familiarity with all of his skills.”

“Yeah?” I remembered playing Mario Kart with S?ren in the hotel room. He’d crashed on every other lap. “Is he any good at it?”

“He’s never harmed anyone but himself with it.”

Well, that sounded ominous. “What does that mean exactly?”

“S?ren has totaled four motor vehicles since he began driving. One was a motorcycle,” the landv?ttir added helpfully. “He broke a collarbone, two bones in his right hand, and five ribs. Overall—not all at the same time.”

“He’s a menace on the roads, then.” I glanced at S?ren. I had promised him entertainment, and if driving was something that would fulfill the requirement… “Do you know about cops?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then you know it’s important that we don’t get pulled over. We don’t want them to notice this car, we don’t want a ticket, and we don’t want to be reported. Got it?”

S?ren smiled politely. “Got it.”

Was that chill crawling down my spine a premonition, or just plain old fear? “Fine.” I pulled over onto the side of the highway. “Switch with me.” We each got out and changed sides, and I shut the passenger door with a distinct sense of foreboding. I couldn’t see my own future, and I couldn’t see S?ren’s, not with his body under the landv?ttir’s control, but that didn’t mean my talent wasn’t working. It just meant it had nothing to focus on. “Shit.”

“What?”

“This is a friend’s car. Be good to it, okay?”

“The friend who helped you capture me?” S?ren asked. “A brave man, but a foolish one.” He revved the engine, revved it hard . I pulled my seat belt on as fast as I could. “Brave because he stood by you in battle, foolish because he knows little about you and even less about me. It was foolish of him to entrust you with his vehicle.”

“I sort of made him give it to me.”

“You believe he had no choice in the matter?” I could smell burning oil, see smoke start to rise from the hood, and still S?ren didn’t let off. “That free will doesn’t exist?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Look, can you just go ?”

“Humanity is shrouded by a veil of perception,” S?ren said conversationally, as if our car wasn’t about to catch on fire. “Free will, predestination…none of it really matters to mankind. Belief is largely dependent on circumstances. You and your kind, framsynir, you cut through the veil on occasion to see more clearly, but your picture is still incomplete, influenced by your own natural solipsism. I think it would be good for you to let go of the idea that you, more than anyone else, have control of your own life.” S?ren grinned at me, teeth glowing in the moonlight. “Because it simply isn’t true, Cillian.”

The Buick Electra leapt forward with a hellish squeal, all that pent-up energy finally let loose. The tires probably left three layers of rubber on the asphalt as we peeled out, going from zero to sixty in way too short a time. And S?ren didn’t stop at sixty.

“S?ren,” I managed once my heart had settled back into my chest. “We can’t afford to get pulled over, slow down!”

“That’s a funny thing to say,” S?ren replied, still grinning as he swerved around the few other cars on the road.

“Why the fuck is it funny?”

“Because you say it as though it should mean something to me.” We surged past a BMW, whose driver looked at us like we were insane. Which, okay, was fair. “I am the object of a competition. I am a prize to be won, and just because I’m with you right now doesn’t mean I’m going to stay with you if I’m not satisfied by your performance.”

“You stayed with Egilsson for two years!”

S?ren shrugged. “His magic compelled me. If you hadn’t found this body untethered, I wouldn’t have been able to leave with you. Now that a new bargain has been struck, his hold on me is weaker, but yours isn’t strong yet. Nor will it be until you fulfill the deal.”

“So…” I saw where this was going, and I didn’t like it. “You can leave me at any time. You could run right back to him and leave me high and dry.”

“I don’t want to. I want S?ren to be happy. You would make him happy, but I will not be disrespected or judged as though I’m human.”

“You’re wearing a human body!”

S?ren shrugged. “What’s the saying? Never judge a book by its cover.”

A faint wail started up behind us. I glanced back and saw the flashing lights of a police cruiser coming up fast. “Fuck. Pull over.”

“No.” S?ren pulled the wheel back and forth, weaving us all over the road. We had to look like the drunkest car in creation. “This is fun!”

“If you’re not going to pull over, at least lose the cop.” I didn’t want to get into a car chase, but it didn’t look like we had much of a choice.

“Tempting, but no,” S?ren said. Suddenly he slammed on the brakes and pulled the wheel hard to the right. The Electra spun out, doing donuts down the highway. I clutched the dashboard and the edge of my seat, almost but not quite sick enough to throw up, and watched as we headed for the concrete retaining wall. Shit shit shit —

We stopped maybe two inches from the wall, facing the wrong direction. S?ren beamed at me like a mad thing. “I love driving,” he confided to me. The air turned red and blue as the cop pulled up, sirens still blaring. At least he didn’t get out with his gun pointed at us.

He’d have to come to my side of the vehicle; the driver’s side was blocked by the wall. I’d get a chance to talk to him first. A chance to manipulate him. I’d have to do it if I wanted to keep us from getting arrested, because that was what the look on the guy’s face promised.

I turned to S?ren. “Keep quiet.”

“Are you going to use your magic on him?”

He sounded way too excited about that prospect. “I’m going to have to,” I snapped. “Now shut the fuck up and let me talk.”

The cop rapped hard on my window, his flashlight illuminating the interior of the car. I rolled the window down. “Hi, Officer.”

“I assume you know just how fast you boys were going down that last stretch,” he said flatly, not looking at me but at S?ren. I needed to catch his attention.

“Yeah, sorry, my cousin’s not from here. He’s still getting the hang of driving on the right side of the road.”

“This wasn’t a traffic violation, sir. This was reckless endangerment.” He straightened up. “Both of you get out of the car.”

“Officer, if I could just—”

“Get out, turn, and face the car, hands on the hood, now!”

I sighed and glanced back at S?ren. “Stay here,” I mouthed. He nodded agreeably. Great, now he was obedient. I opened my door and got out, but instead of turning around, I held my hands up and looked the cop in the eye. “If you’d just let me explain.” We were too far apart for a good capture, but I was starting to get images now, bits and pieces of his future. Grief that big was easy to read.

His hand went to his sidearm. “Turn around!”

“Shouldn’t you be home with your mother? I get that you need to work, but leaving her with a hospice nurse the night before she dies…that’s just cruel.”

“What? She—what?” Flustered, good, I could work with that.

“Your mother. The Alzheimer’s, the hospice nurse, you bringing her to stay with you for the last few weeks of her life… What use was it if you aren’t going to stay with her?” I took a careful step closer, very conscious of the whir of cars as they passed to the left of us, slowing down to rubberneck.

“It’s the smell, isn’t it?” I said as I got a better view. “That sour, dry smell. Kind of like dust and urine mixed together. You hate it, can’t bear it, in fact. When your mom was in the nursing home, it was okay because they bathed her all the time. You could visit and she smelled fresh as a daisy, but now that’s your job and you can’t even do it. The hospice nurse is only there at night, but you’d rather let your mother lay in her own filth all day than change the pad and wipe her clean.”

“That’s…that’s not true,” the cop stuttered and then recovered. “I don’t know who you think you are, but—”

“I’m not Mary Henley’s eldest son. You are, and Mary is dying in your living room, right now. And you know the worst part? All this work you did to make her love you, years and years of it, and you were so bad at it that your mom favored Jimmy all this time. Little Jimmy, who you hate.” Oh, how he hated that favored son, favored by both parents even when he was the one who’d gone into law enforcement like their father.

“You’ll split the property on the lake, but she left him all her stocks, the ones you aren’t even supposed to know about but you do, and they’re all going to Jimmy. A year from now, he’ll be sitting pretty on vacation in Aruba, and you’ll still be plain old Officer John Henley, one step up from traffic but never the detective you thought you’d be by this time in your life. No wife, no kids, and now no parents.” I stepped close enough to whisper into his ear, “Your mother just died, Officer Henley. My condolences.”

I could hear his personal phone start to buzz somewhere on his body. I moved back as he reached for it, completely lost now, brought to the edge of his sanity by my cruelty.

“Hello?”

I didn’t want to hear the rest of the conversation. I got back into the car. “Happy now?”

S?ren wasn’t beaming anymore. Instead he leaned over and kissed my cheek, cold and tender. “You’re a worthy competitor, Cillian. Thank you.” He kissed me again. “I’ll move to the back. You can drive now.”

In front of me, Officer Henley had just sat down on the hood of his cruiser, one hand on his cell phone, the other covering his eyes as he sobbed. Worthy. I didn’t feel very worthy of anything. I wished I could make it better for him, but the longer we delayed, the likelier it was that reinforcements would show up.

I got into the driver’s seat, turned us around, and drove off into the night.