“Hell’s bells,” I said in disgust, stepping in front of him and blocking his way. “You had someone wire my car while we were inside, didn’t you?”
“What the hell are you talking about,” his mouth said automatically—but his eyes had widened when I spoke, and he seemed to visibly recoil from me, and possibly from the vehicle behind me. “You got the Heebie Jeebies now, huh?”
That’s the thing about hitting guilty people in the face with the truth. Mostly, they aren’t quite sure what to do with it. If they’re in a formal setting and they’ve had time to prepare, they’ll just deny it and try to attack you instead—but if you just give it to them out of nowhere, they aren’t usually ready for it. Tripp’s reaction showed me that I was bang on.
I hooked a hand into the collar of Tripp’s jacket and half-flung him onto the Munstermobile’s hood. He flew onto it with a yelp, most of his weight transferring to his chest and stomach. I glanced around. The street was too busy for me to get away with that kind of thing without someone calling the authorities, so I had to be quick.
“How about I give you a ride back to your car?” I asked him brightly.
“Fuck you!” Tripp responded, with his typical brilliance. He tried to push himself off my car, his face pale and panicked. “I don’t need a ride.”
“No, no trouble at all,” I told him, slapping a comradely arm around his shoulders as he rose. “You can sit right there with me while I start it.”
“Get off me!” Tripp all but shrieked, and he tried to writhe out of my grip.
I crunched my grip down on his shoulders. I’m not superhumanly strong—but I am pretty much as strong as humans get, thanks to the various deals I’ve made. Tripp was in good shape—but he just didn’t have the power he’d need to get away from me unless he got violent first. I held him fast and frog-marched him toward the passenger door.
“Okay, okay!” he said. “I paid a guy!”
I tossed Tripp into the passenger door with a snarl, hard enough to bruise. “Idiot,” I snarled. “This is a public street. You have any idea how much attention a car bomb will attract here? How many people could get hurt!? What’s your man using as his trigger?”
“How the hell should I know?” Tripp complained. “All I did was hire him!”
“Moron,” I growled. “If he’s using a damned cell phone…” I took a deep breath and pushed my emotions down. I didn’t need a spare thought accidentally hexing the bomb’s trigger and setting the damned thing off. I pointed a finger at Tripp and said, “Don’t move a muscle or so help me…”
Then I dropped down to the ground and checked under the Munstermobile, even as I felt the subtle drop in temperature and the thrill of quiet energy that told me that sundown proper had arrived.
I had to squint in the twilight under the car. Tripp’s contractor had put the device on the gas tank, with wires running to the ignition. Blasting compound, it looked like, and hooked up to a battery and a cell phone. If I started the car or, presumably, if the creator (or some innocent robocaller) placed a call, it would detonate.
I expected to hear Tripp start running at any second, but he didn’t.
“Hell’s bells,” I muttered, pulling myself back out from under the vehicle and rising. “You just don’t know when to stop digging yourself in deeper, do you—”
I paused.
Because Tripp wasn’t even looking at me.
He was staring down the dark shadows of a nearby alley. And he was breathing hard and fast, making high, whimpering sounds in his throat.
The cloying, greasy feel of black magic washed over my wizard’s senses a second later, emanating from the alley in a wave of nauseating psychic bile.
Maybe a hundred feet down the alley, something was coming toward us.
At first, I saw a couple of gleaming eyes—pretty standard, really. There was pretty much always something with gleaming eyes out in the dark. But as it passed beneath a light over a doorway, the light bulb exploded in a shower of sparks that came cascading down for several seconds.
The sparks seemed to delineate the faint shape of a massive body, passing through it entirely, but showing a translucent outline—quadruped, hunched shoulders, ponderously moving limbs. A bear? A freaking bear. Its gait shifted as it passed through the sparks, changing to a bear’s galumphing run.
The next light exploded in more sparks, this time crashing down over the bear’s massive head—and they physically bounced off the thing’s skull, clearly visible through the silvery, translucent flesh.
I recognized the skull—the one from the bookshelf in Talvi Inverno’s office.
And its glowing eyes were focused solely upon Tripp Gregory.
“Oh crap,” I muttered. “An otso.”
“W-what?” Tripp said.
“Spirit bear,” I said. “Corrupted servitor of a Lapland hag, if I’m guessing right. And it’s pissed.”
