I didn’t have time for fairytales. I had a demon gate to close.
Thunder rolled, and the lights in the house sputtered and died.
“Do you know where it is?” I was out the door and in the garage. Sirens wailed in the distance. The power outage was widespread. All the houses on the block were dark, and the streetlights were out too.
The garage door wouldn’t rise with the electric motor. I started toward the override cord, but Bathin jogged past me. “I got it. Get in the car.”
I corrected course and slid into the driver’s seat, starting the car almost before I got the door closed.
Death was in the passenger seat, looking wholly unconcerned.
“You know this is part of your job now,” I said.
“And that is?”
“Protecting Ordinary.”
“Yes, Myra Reed,” he said patiently. “I am aware. Shall I turn on the lights and siren?” He studied the instrument panel in the dash, looking like a starving kid who had just been given keys to the bakery.
Sometimes I forgot how much all the details of living—the little ordinary things—were still new and exciting to him.
“Not until we hit the main road. We don’t want to scare the neighbors to dea…”
“Death?” he suggested when my voice faded. “No, we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
The humor was so dry, it could have soaked up the Nile in a nanosecond.
Bathin opened the back door and dropped down into place behind Than.
“Go,” he said. “It’s south.”
The radio filled with Jean, Hatter, Shoe, and Kelby checking in. So far we had a car accident—the lights were out and someone had slammed into oncoming traffic—but no fatalities.
I gunned it out of the garage and onto the street, headed toward the main road. It was still early enough there shouldn’t be too much traffic, but with so many people in town, and the parade almost ready to go, I decided to use a side street instead of the main drag to swing south.
“Tell Jean I’m headed south,” I said to Than. He operated the radio as if he’d been doing it for years. But still, his other fingers poised over the siren and light buttons, at the ready.
The moment I turned onto the side street instead of onto the main road, he made a little moue of disappointment and folded his hands on his lap again.
“Don’t pout,” I said. “There’s plenty of time for flash and bang. River?” I threw over my shoulder to Bathin.
“I think so.” He had planted one hand on the door to counter-balance the turns I was whipping through. The other hand gripped at his chest like he was in pain.
Come to think of it, his color was off.
“Are you having a heart attack?” I asked, too loud in the confines of the car. That was the last thing I needed to deal with. If a demondiedand still possessed my sister’s soul, what happened to her then?
“I don’t have a heart, remember?” He tried to deliver that with his usual smirk, but did not stick the landing. “When we get there, to the vortex, I need you to let me handle it. Handle whatever we find.”
“No.”
He shook his head and stared out the window.
And that was strange, him not pushing back, not fighting me. All my internal alarms went off. “How bad is it?”
“Bring your gun. And any other weapon you have.”
“I brought Death,” I said.
