“What’s wrong?” Cale asked as the front door closed behind him, and I pointed across the store at the clerk’s charred corpse. “Oh,shit.”
“Exactly. And I’m assumingsomeonewas pumping gas into that silver car,” I said, pointing at the parking lot through the wall of glass.
Cale followed my gaze and flinched.
“Mmmm,” Xaphan said, around a mouthful of beef jerky, the remainder of the meat strip sticking up from the center of his clenched fist. “He’s in the other restroom.”
With a groan, I raced across the floor, nearly losing my balance when my foot landed on an empty chip wrapper in the middle of isle three. Just past the door to the ladies’ room was the men’s, and I hesitated a moment before shoving the door open wide. Crossing my fingers that an irate man would start yelling at me for interrupting his dump.
But there, framed almost exactly in the center of the doorway, stood another ash-man facing the middle urinal, his charred penis still held in one hand. He hadn’t even turned to look when Xaphan entered the room. He’d never stood a chance.
“Son of abitch,” I whispered, still holding the door open.
“Any ideas?”
I spun around to find Cale peering over my shoulder, his expression grim, but unsurprised. “Just one: let’s get the hell out of here before the place fills up again. This lull can’t last much longer.”
He nodded, and we had an official plan. While Cale used the only men’s room stall—when you gotta go, you gotta go—I smashed the digital video recorder in the office, hoping the feed from the security camera wasn’t being recorded somewhere off-site. Back in the store itself, I glanced from the huge front windows to the clerk behind the counter. He was positionedrightin the middle of the last pane, where anyone walking by could glance inside and see the lump of coal which had once been a living, breathing young man.
He’d have to be moved. Or covered somehow.
“You! Get in the car, and don’t do anything,” I said, careful not to say the W-word as I pointed my index finger at the naughtiest djinni in history. “Not a thing. No burning. Not even any talking. Go!” Finished with his beef stick now, Xaphan shrugged and snatched a bag of Doritos on his way out the door.
Behind the counter, I stared at the perfect ash replica of a store clerk. Where the hell was I going to put him?
Fortunately, location turned out not to be a problem. The instant my finger touched what had once been flesh, the entire charred statue collapsed in a puff of powder-fine black cinders. It went everywhere—all over the counter, the floor, and me. Ash coated my clothes and my hands. I was fuckinginhalingthe stuff. Literally breathing in the dead.
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.
“You ready?” Cale asked, jogging down the main aisle from the bathroom. His eyes widened when he took in the missing clerk and the black soot covering me from head to toe. “What…? What…?” He didn’t seem able to articulate a question about why I was covered in powderedhuman.
I shrugged, my arms held out from my body. “He wasn’t just charred on the outside. He was burnt thefuck up.”
“Clearly.” Cale stared at me for a moment, still stunned. Then he turned, scanning the shelves behind him. He snatched something from the one on his right and tossed it toward me. “Here, we’ll take these for the road.”
I caught the white plastic bundle in one hand. It was a travel pack of wet-wipes.Better than nothing, I guess, I thought, giving in to the urge to shake myself like a wet dog. I brushed dust from my arms and legs and ran my hands through my hair, fluffing it upside down like an eighties hairspray queen. Ashes rained all around me, settling onto the floor with the remains of the incinerated clerk. And still I tasted it. Tastedhim.
As clean as I could possibly get without a shower, I stomped toward the glass door Cale held open for me. As I passed the cooler by the exit, I snagged a bottle of water and dropped a five-dollar bill in its place. Stealing from the cremated corpse seemed a bit like speaking ill of the dead, and being mostly dead myself, I was a bit sensitive to such things.
In the parking lot, I rinsed my mouth with a swig from the bottle and spit grayish water onto the pavement. Then I slid into the passenger seat and immediately ripped open the package of wet wipes, ignoring my seatbelt with reckless abandon.
“You okay?” Cale glanced at me as he shifted the car into gear.
“Peachy.” I scrubbed at my cheeks and forehead. “How ‘bout you?”
“Same.”
In the back seat, Orthus growled softly, and Xaphan crunched on his Doritos. Constantly. I could smell them, and the cheese-heavy scent did nothing to settle my stomach. As it was, I’d never be able to eat Cheetos again. Thank goodness he hadn’t grabbed a box of Twinkies…
“Why did you do that?” I demanded, twisting in my seat to glare at him as Cale merged the rental car with light highway traffic. I’d certainly left my share of bodies for the police to sort out, but they weren’t innocent bystanders. The people I killeddeservedto die, and even then, I wasn’t trigger happy.
Hell, I hadn’t killedanyof Devich’s goblin goons during our first confrontation, mostly because that would have been a waste of bullets. But also because, there was a part of me—a deep, dark, secret-Lex part that only surfaced in my dreams, and in drunken oblivion—that believed I was stuck in a quarter-millennia-old body for a reason. That if I trulydeservedan afterlife, I’d already have one.
Call me superstitious, but I wasn’t willing to do anything that might put another black mark on my permanent record, and murdering at will definitely qualified.
“Why did I do what?” Xaphan crunched into another corn chip, watching me with no sign of guilt. No indication that he understood the problem at all.
“Why did you torch those people? What on earth made you decide to fuckingcrematean innocent teenager and some poor guy who just stopped to take a piss?”
