I sat in the front passenger seat of the car, bored, while I waited for Jessie to find Pierce Carter in the airport. The car was another rental, pitch black with tinted windows, and I tried not to think about how Gran was going to scowl at me when she got the credit card bill. She’d given it to me to do my job, which technically I was, but I doubted racking up charges for two rentals was going to make her happy. Then again, nothing about the situation made her happy, so worrying about the credit card bill was probably borrowing tomorrow’s troubles. I tried to ignore my many discomforts. I wasn’t even close to done recovering from what the Raven’s Council had done to me. Many of those aches ran bone deep and the nightmares made it hard to get the kind of deep sleep I needed to do some serious healing. On top of that were the clothes. Despite telling myself repeatedly that the tie around my neck was not, in fact, cutting off circulation to my brain, I found myself adjusting it for the umpteenth time. The dress shirt and suit weren’t to my liking either.
I felt like someone playing at being an undertaker and not doing a good job of it. I forced my hands to sit on my legs and did breathing exercises. I had a lot of doubts about the plan, but I hadn’t come up with anything better. After a while, I figured out that the real problem was that I wasn’t doing anything. I was used to doing things, often violent things, in situations where there wasn’t enough time to do much thinking. I was comfortable with that because I’d been trained for it. If something dark and creepy leapt from the all-concealing shadows, I’d tear its damn head off without missing a beat. Sitting around and waiting for other people to make things happen wasn’t in my nature. In the end, though, Jessie had to be the one to drive because she didn’t need GPS or a map to get Carter to wherever we’d need to take him. I’d get us lost trying to escape the airport.
We’d shown up as early as we dared, so the wait took forever, but I saw it when Jessie and Carter came out of the airport. It was hard not to stare. Jessie had died her hair black and slicked it down. She’d traded up her hipster glasses for contacts and mirrored sunglasses. If I hadn’t known it was her, I’d never have given her a second glance. She looked nondescript in a professional way. Just one more driver looking to get someone to their destination before her boss started bitching. Pierce Carter was bigger than I’d imagined. He didn’t look like someone who’d ever set foot in a gym. He was muscled because biology had wired him that way. He moved with the casual grace of a natural athlete and the confidence of a billionaire who’d come up the hard way. He kept his gaze fixed forward and his eyes made me shudder. I’d looked some pretty awful things in the eyes that had more empathy and humanity in their gaze. The only time he looked anywhere but forward was when Jessie indicated the car. She opened the back door and Carter tossed an overnight bag onto the seat before he folded his huge frame into the car. I heard the trunk pop open.
I resisted an impulse to turn around and look at him. His personal presence filled the car like a fog bank rolling into shore. His eyes bored into the back of my head when he noticed me sitting there.
“Who are you?” He asked.
Even though the words were delivered in a calm, pleasant tone, I still felt like someone had walked up behind me and pressed a very sharp knife to my throat. I took one beat to calm the hell down and did my best to recall Jessie’s advice. I turned my head just enough that he might have seen a bit of cheek and nose, but not enough to look at him. I kept my tone as diffident as it might have been if I was confronted with a head of state.
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“Jerry. I’m training today,” I said, keeping it as stupidly simple as possible.
“Ah,” said Carter.
His attention slid off the back of my head as he dismissed me. I wasn’t part of the world he needed to worry about unless I did something incredibly stupid, which wasn’t in the plan. Jessie got behind the wheel and spoke without looking back.
“Destination?”
“Any hotel downtown,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she answered.
She put the vehicle in drive and navigated us toward the city. It felt like the longest drive of my life. Carter didn’t speak once the entire way. I didn’t know if he was consumed with his own thoughts or was sleeping in the back seat. I didn’t dare to turn around to find out. All I knew was that I could feel him back there, the potency of him and of his power. I was also aware of my own dawning horror. I had no idea what someone like that could do, but I was willing to bet it would be extraordinary in the most awful ways. Jessie didn’t seem to notice anything, or she was doing a hell of a good job of covering it up. She just drove the car and kept her attention on the road. Every once in a while, she’d quietly mention something that a driver might need to know, like where the cops might set up a speed trap. I wasn’t sure if she’d gleaned that information from some supernatural source or was making it up, but she delivered it in such a matter-of-fact tone that I realized I was making mental notes. Jessie knew how to sell it. By the time she pulled the car up in front of the Embassy Suites, my hands were shaking. I just wanted to get away from Carter.
Jessie got out, went around the front of the car, and opened the door for Carter. The man’s presence swept out of the car in a rush, and I stopped holding my breath as the door closed. I heard the trunk pop and then a brief exchange of words. I looked out the window and saw Jessie walking a few steps behind Carter. She pulled a wheeled case along behind her. She shot a quick glance back at the car, but it was too fast for me to read her face, especially with the sunglasses she still wore. As she vanished into the hotel, I found myself waiting, again. I figured he just wanted her to bring the bag to the front desk, so he didn’t have to bother with it while dealing with check-in. As the minutes dragged out, I got nervous. I stared at the hotel entrance willing Jessie to come back out. I grabbed the keys out of the ignition and got out of the car. At just about the exact moment that I convinced myself to go into the hotel, I heard a groaning noise that seemed to rise from the foundation of the hotel. The entire building shook and every window facing the street cracked at the same time.
I heard a series of noises from inside the hotel, like muffled explosions, followed by a lot of screaming. At first, a few people came running out the front door of the hotel. Then a steady stream of panicking people started to race out of the building like their lives depended on it. To be fair to the screaming mass of humanity pouring out of the hotel, it was even odds that they were right. There was another groan and windows in neighboring buildings cracked. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that, for reasons unknowable, Jessie and Carter were somewhere inside that building having the magical equivalent of an ultimate fighting showdown. I fought the impulse to run inside. The hotel looked to be ten or fifteen stories tall, which meant the fight would probably be long over before I found them. There was a magical draw on the environment so intense that I felt it outside. In a moment of instinct, I turned away from the hotel. A light bright enough to sear retinas washed out of the hotel and lit up the whole block. I heard screams around me from people who hadn’t looked away. The light faded and there was a pregnant pause. I hazarded a look at the hotel. For a few seconds, nothing happened, then a window on the top floor shattered and a body in a black suit hurtled toward the concrete below.