I dreamed of beacon lights and a white-winged champion descending through immeasurable darkness toward a pale blue dot in the distance. And I dreamed of gifts. Three were made to the peoples of the earth from the ancient Nameless gods. The first was a dagger, so that we might smite ourselves. The second, a ring to return us to bondage. The third, their holy word. If the ancient texts were to be believed, the ring had been destroyed long ago in the conflagration that saw us break free of their dominion. The dagger was buried, unearthed, and finally swept away. After using it to kill Cerise, Etude had left it for the lady of the water, who took it somewhere it could be destroyed, which meant the last living remnant of the ancient ones on the earth was the book, the book I had read, although I did not understand the glyphs.
It’s often wondered what could be scratched on its pages, or fall darkly from the mouth of a demon, that is so evil it drives one mad—or to suicide. Since we cannot conjure such a terror even from the furthest reaches of our imagination (in which we presume all is possible), we imagine a void, a blank, or else deny the possibility and write it off to fantasy. But it is real. The reason it’s unimaginable is because your own mind conspires to keep it so. It must. To be aware of a fear is to wake it. I do not mean something as simple as spiders. The kind of fears I mean cannot be named. They are that which keeps a man in long and impenetrable melancholy, that which compels a woman to smother her children or compels anyone to vengeance and torture—all of which seem distant to us, but consider: they are daily occurrences in some part of the world. There is a reason ancient cultures long mistook derangement for demonic possession. The one is the paint and the other the artist. The evil we find in the face of a demon or on the pages of an accursed book is—simply—our own: not just our foibles and innumerable laughable failings, which we hide from the world, but our secret abominations, which we hide from ourselves.
Our true evil is that which we cannot know, for to know it is to see that we are not and never have been the people we hold ourselves out to be. In this way, it is not us that reads the accursed book but the accursed book that reads us. The reader is turned open like so many pages (which is true of every book, for with any story, it is the reader that changes, not the book). You read the black mirror and are horrified to see yourself on its pages. This is how the saintly and innocent are saved its effects, how they can read the dark tome without weeping. It’s not that the saint is sinless but that they know well their sins. They see nothing they have not already thrust into the light. The rest of us can only despair. It’s no wonder the weak go mad and fragile wish to die. It’s no wonder that, when asked, no one can put into words what the demon whispered from the shadows. To them, it is inutterable, and their teeth chatter in their own secret language, and their heart beats a devil’s quickstep, for most of us would rather die than turn to face friends and loved ones as we truly are.
Rosalía woke us well before dawn. The Pacific was still nothing but a dark expanse. The men were waiting for us on the mainland, she said. We had to leave immediately.
“Is that normal?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Sometimes. Do you have the money?”
It was most of what we had left, but in real terms, it was not very much, which made me sad—that people, even in the 21st century, still had to sacrifice so much for so little.
She counted it and set some aside. “Save this for the last men. Give the rest when we get to shore.”
Our goodbye was brief—too brief—and I hugged her, even though she did not expect it. We were put into a boat, the same boat we had ridden the night before. The sky was just beginning to lighten in the east when we made landfall at a pier made of pebbles poured into concrete. The doctor helped me up as the ocean waves pushed the boat up and down irregularly. Cerise pushed up with one foot and made the jump.
“These guys don’t look very nice,” she whispered to me at the top.
She was right. We were left in the hands of a motorcycle gang, or so the backs of their leather jackets suggested. The words “Lobos” and “Aztecos” curved around the top and bottom, respectively, of an Aztec-style image of a bloody-mouthed wolf-man in loincloth and headdress. The bikers hurried us into a detachable shipping container fixed to the back of a semi. It was well-used but empty. I turned to say goodbye to the fisherman who had carried us, the same leathery fellow from before, but he had already left, wide-eyed and silent. One particularly burly biker, with arms like bridge cables, watched from the top of the truck—a lookout, although what he was looking out for, I couldn’t say. Lightning bolts were cut into both sides of his finely manicured beard. He held a sawed-off shotgun over his shoulder. He kept turning to look down the pier. Then he did something odd. He sniffed the air.
Two grisly, jacketed men hopped into the container with us and shut the door behind them. A third man locked it from the outside, then slapped the metal twice. The engine started. We wandered to the back as the truck jerked forward and drove away. There was nothing for us to sit on, so we sat on the floor. A single long fluorescent bulb at the back lighted the space, which had slim gaps in the corner of the floor where I felt a weak breeze. The two bikers with us were heavily armed—I counted three knives and four guns—and they leaned against the door, facing each other. One passed a cigarette to the other and started speaking casually in a language I definitely did not recognize. By the looks on their faces, my friends were as concerned as I was.
“Is that Spanish?” Cerise asked softly.
Doctor Alexander shook his head. “I think it’s Nahuatl,” he said, his voice low.
“Na-what?”
“Na-hua-tl. The language of the Aztecs.”
“And people still speak na-what?”
“Some. I read about it in the Times once.”
“Of course you did.”
He leaned closer. “Did you see how worried they looked?”
“I thought they were worried about the guy on the street bike,” Cerise whispered back.
“What guy on a street bike?”
“You didn’t see him? He was down at the end of the pier. He was there when we landed. He was watching us.”
The bikers were smiling and joking, also in a low voice. Every now and then, one would glance sideways to check on us.
“Maybe it’s nothing,” I said.
“Why do I sense a ‘but’ in there?” the doctor asked.
“Just be ready.”
“For?” Cerise asked.
“Anything.”
Within an hour, it was clear why the men had wanted to start early. Baja is a desert, and as the sun rose and ascended higher in the sky, it got warm and then hot and then staggeringly uncomfortable inside the giant metal can. It appeared we were crossing a vast wasteland. Noise from passing cars was rare, as were turns. But we heard the high whine of a street bike more than once. At one point it seemed to hover along the truck before falling back quickly—too quickly, as if its owner had hit the brakes suddenly. I wondered if the men in the cab had brandished a weapon as a warning against being followed.
The temperature improved considerably when the truck boarded a ferry. The semi crept forward slowly, waiting for its turn to board. Once inside the echoing hold and out of the sun, the air cooled immediately. A horn blew and I could smell the ocean. It was then that my fears were confirmed. We were not allowed to leave, even to use the restroom. Cerise was positively dancing before they threw an empty bottle at her. After we landed on the Gulf of California’s eastern shore, we suffered several more hours on a desolate highway, or so the lack of traffic noise suggested. It was around then that we heard the high whine of the bike again. It could’ve been a different bike, of course, but that seemed unlikely. But the sound eventually faded, and we made several slow turns with long gaps between, finally onto a graded dirt road and then onto an ungraded dirt track that kicked up dust and pebbles. We slowed and stopped and the rear of the truck was opened and the men hopped down.
We were in a massive, sprawling junkyard somewhere in the Sonoran Desert. There were low mountains in the distance and swirls of dust all around. The staccato of motorcycle engines filled the air, which was dry and smelled of iron: of rust and blood. Around us were mostly cars, even the empty hulk of a Model T. Speckled between the rest was any kind of machinery that could be stripped for parts: trucks, vans, and school buses; a ring of semis; two airplane chassis with detached wings; the hull of a Vietnam-era chopper; piles of hollow washers and dryers; old lawn mowers; and of course motorcycles. Some of the husks were stacked, but most just lied about. It seemed as though someone had originally tried to put like with like—most of the washers and dryers were piled together—but then gave up. Some of the cars were half-submerged in the desert. Others had dirt pushed up over them by a plow or bulldozer. Three interior fences of corrugated sheet metal snaked through the lot, each stopping at some point for no obvious reason. Through it all, a web of scraped-dirt roads wound like a maze. In fact, I think it was a maze, deliberately intended to confuse and discourage any unwanted visitors. At a nearby intersection, I saw an empty 1970s Impala whose windshield had been replaced with a welded steel plate. It was a makeshift armored crow’s nest from which gunners could launch a counterattack on any invaders—presumably the police or rival gangs.
“Jesus, it’s a fortress,” the doctor whispered.
The central yard, which we were marched into, was bounded by a high fence covered in green plywood. It was topped a thick tangle of barbed wire. At the rumble of approaching motorcycles, one of the gang scurried to open the gate, which had swung half-closed on its weight. Three motorcycles led another semi hauling a cargo container marked with the name of a junk company.
A woman yelled at us in Spanish. She wore a similar jacket to the men but with spray-painted patches of white at the shoulder, probably indicating her gender. She pushed us forward with the butt of a shotgun. At the center of the interior lot was a rocky outcrop, like a miniature mountain rising from the desert floor, which gradually sloped up to it. A high sheet-metal garage stuck out from a cave opening filled with grimy tools and lifts, like a commercial repair shop. A backhoe and a cement truck were parked next to three unmarked commercial delivery vans and several pallets of ammunition.
“Fortress,” the doctor repeated.
The gang was well-organized, that was sure. They had to be. They were outnumbered. I counted only eight men and a handful of women. There were almost certainly more inside the cave or out on the road, but they were not an army, and the absence of any dwellings suggested most of them lived with family elsewhere. This was their clubhouse and retreat, and by the age of some of the cars and machinery, particularly those at the bottoms of piles or poking up from the ground, it had been so for generations, and generations had expanded it.
Everyone was searched. The doctor’s staff was taken and thrown into the back of a pickup with the rest of the contraband, which included anything of value or use. A dusty woman with a handgun in her belt and her hair behind her ears searched me and found the coin. There was heavy scarring on her neck, as if she’d been mauled by a wild animal.
“I wouldn’t take that,” I suggested calmly.
She ignored me and put it in her pocket.
When they stepped away, the doctor whispered aloud what all of us were thinking.
“Werewolves.”
I had to admit, trafficking was the perfect job for them. It requires a loyal and disciplined team: self-policing, fiercely territorial, and distrustful of outsiders. No one would think anything odd of their odd behavior. People expect biker gangs to be secretive, nocturnal, and violent. Those they transported were a source of income as well as sustenance. A few could go missing from time to time, and so feed their dark urges, and it would never be reported. America’s zero tolerance policy ensured that those who made it across would never come forward. Nor would they be believed.
The wolves had a bigger selection than I expected. Some thirty people were brought out of the cargo container, including a couple children. Some were worried. Others looked like they’d been there before. They were led single-file to one of two white-sided delivery trucks. But we did not join them. Cerise, the doctor, and I were pulled to the side while the others were inspected like hanging sides of beef.
“What’s going on?” I demanded as I was dragged from the line.
I got a shotgun butt to the temple in reply.
“Are you okay?” The doctor stepped over to me and examined my head.
We were pushed forward again and led up the sloping desert floor to the outcrop of banded rock.
“Please tell me there’s not a full moon tonight,” Cerise whispered.
At the back of the high garage was an opening in the rock carved like a temple arch, apparently quite old. Aztec figures similar to those on the backs of the bikers’ jackets crawled, snarling, over the border from the ceiling to the floor and back down again. There was a track in the cave passage, a smooth, shallow groove worn from centuries of tread. We passed two small antechambers and climbed a set of stairs before reaching another impressive arch. Near it to one side, amid a menagerie of carved images, was a horn-faced figure nearly as tall as me. A circular depression in the stone had worn most of his chest away at the heart. The lead woman touched it quickly in reverence, and I understood why. The others did the same as we passed, and I could see it was not horns that erupted from its face but rather enormous teeth, jutting out in all directions. She was despicable, for I saw then that what appeared to be armor was actually six pairs of breasts bearing twelve erect nipples. She brandished an ax in one hand and a staff bearing three inscribed banners in the other. She was their mother-goddess, and this was her den in the earth.
There was a metal gate just inside the arch which slid upward, like the door of a chicken coop. Beyond was a large cavern carved over the eons by the weather that erupted through the jagged hole in the ceiling. The space was open to the sky like the Pantheon in Rome or the dreaming halls of the Native Americans, where the shaman’s wandering spirit floated out on its vision quest. A rock altar grew from the horribly uneven floor, off-center from the hole. The top of it had been filed flat, but other than that, it appeared carved by nature as well. There was a kind of mezzanine also, a high recession in the wall around three-fourth of the room reachable only by a single lashed-log ladder.
But what commanded your eye was the crouched figure carved out of the far wall. It was ten feet at least. Where the carving at the door was female, the statue was definitely male. His organ was not only displayed but erect. Teeth jutted from his face as well, like horns, but in five pairs instead of the mother’s three. Around his bare feet were all the usual accompaniments: dried flowers, spent candles, incense ash, a ceremonial bowl, and blood. It stained his mouth and the floor underneath. The altar was drenched.
Lycanthropy as an illness and a curse wasn’t known in the New World until the arrival of the Spanish. (Vampirism, on the other hand, seems to have been known everywhere.) Whether the founders of that temple had been trying to organize a resistance or had merely sought refuge there, I couldn’t say, but I could easily believe it was several centuries old and that the pack had occupied it continuously, which explained the junkyard at least: the accumulated detritus of centuries. I suspected that if we could lift the cars and washing machines, we would find crumbled evidence of Spanish carriages, bridles and horse bones, and other objects much older still.
Two low cages were cut into the room, one on each side. A beaten man, a rival gang member by the looks of his clothes, was slumped against the wall inside the first. We were pushed under the second, and the wrought iron gate swung down and was locked to the stone floor.
We watched our jailers leave.
“What’s happening?” Cerise asked. “Why were we separated?”
Her hushed voice echoed incoherently in the cavern, as if the ghosts of the place were mocking her.
“It seems there’s a bounty on our head.”
The sun got low and stars appeared. We could see them through the great irregular hole in the cave.
“Look,” Cerise said, lying on her back. She pointed. “A shooting star. We should make a wish.”
But there was only one wish to make. I’m sure we all did.
The gate opened and the werewolves’ contraband was delivered by pickup truck, which backed into the cavern-room slowly and dumped its contents on the floor. After it departed, two women climbed the ladder to the second level, which was little more than a precarious slope, while the others handed the hoard up to be placed around the chamber. I think they intended to thank their horn-faced god for the bounty. The three of us watched as the doctor’s staff was lifted and leaned against the rock.
Shouts.
People were being led into the temple against their will. Their voices echoed off the rock. The rival gang member in the barred cage was roused. Our gate was opened as well, and our white-and-brown bearded jailer grabbed Cerise by the neck and pulled her backward out of the cage. We held onto her, all of us screaming, but it was no use. He was too strong. He pulled her free with a jerk and the cage was slammed in our faces. I saw her eyes as she was dragged away. I reached through the bars.
“Cerise!”
She was terrified, but not for herself—or not only. “Don’t let it win,” she said.
I nodded. The doctor only bowed his head.
The victims were chained to the altar. There were fewer of them than there were wolves. Except for Cerise, they were all men. As the lone woman, I suspected she was a prize for the lower-status males, those who were unpaired and wanted the glory of conquest to improve their rank. The first man to find her would undoubtedly rape her while clinging to her throat with his teeth. If she were lucky, she would die quickly. If she were unlucky, another wolf would discover them before the first had finished, and they would quarrel, and she would suffer the indignity multiple times. If she were very unlucky, she would survive the attack and be brought into the pack.
The older and higher-status males, or those who already had a mate, along with the unpaired women, would fight for the rest. On the numbers, several would necessarily go without a kill, which I’m sure brought shame.
The wolves circled their prey, sniffing—catching their scents, deciding which trail they would follow. Then at once they started chanting in Nahuatl, invoking their gods and elders. The rival biker was draped over the altar and a knife driven into his heart as easily as a butchered chicken. He was bled unceremoniously into the bowl. I watched steam rise from it as the last of his warmth escaped into the night with his soul. Rituals were made. Then the prisoners were loosed. They hesitated at first, unsure of the rules of the chase. Would running bring swifter reprisal? Cerise looked to me, as if judging in that moment whether or not she had a chance to free us.
“Run!” I screamed.
She did, and the others followed, out the temple arch and down the stairs and into the junkyard, whose maze they would have to navigate in the dark. No one said it, but I suspect that if any of them made it out, they would be free, and the desert would take them—part of the ancient bargain that kept that place, called La Zona del Silencio by the locals, hidden from the world.
Our jailer, who was older than the others—an ousted alpha, perhaps—stood on the sloped floor of the mezzanine and lowered the gate over the temple arch with a crank. Dried herbs were added to the ceremonial bowl, and those around the altar drank from it in order of seniority. One by one, the change took them. It was not a full moon that night. The contents of the bowl induced it, and we watched in awe. While not as dramatic as what one sees in movies—the gang did not sprout fangs or a coat of fur—it was all the more remarkable for being real. They ripped their clothes. Torsos were revealed, men’s and women’s both. There was shaking and snarling and a general engorgement of blood, as if pumped into them. All of the men had erections. I saw the women’s breasts swell, and their muscles as well. I suspected all of them then had the strength to rip my limbs from my body. They certainly tried. They smelled us and growled and came at the wrought iron cage with fury. It shook with a clatter and dust fell from the hinges, but it held, and a moment later, the main gate was lifted open and the wolves bounded into the night, sniffing the ground and howling, leaving only the elderly male on the mezzanine.
“Call your staff,” I whispered. I could still see it in the dim light.
“What?”
“Quickly,” I urged. “While there is only the one. We won’t get another chance. Call your staff.”
But the doctor was only confused.
“Surely you realize you were meant to draw it. A pure steel rod tipped in a diamond point? What better symbol of truth is there—that which you have spent your whole life seeking? You didn’t find it by accident. Of that I am sure. Call it to you.”
“How?”
“I don’t know! You’re the mage.”
The old guard turned his eyes to us but then looked away. He was making his way across the slope to the ladder, a walk that required some concentration.
“Trust your instincts,” I said.
It was Wilm who taught me that a wizard’s familiar chooses him but that his staff must be found. It was a coming together, he said, like a pair of magnets. Each moved when the other was near. Wilm had found his in the cloak room at the Vienna opera, where he had retired with a married countess fifteen years his senior. It was a dapper gentleman’s cane, and it fell and nearly tripped him.
Something very similar happened in the cave. As the old wolf climbed carefully down the ladder, he knocked a hubcap, which rolled and hit the propped staff just hard enough to make it slip off the sloped ledge to the uneven floor below, taking several cell phones with it. It bounced with a clang and rolled toward us. It hit the wrought iron bars and the doctor pulled it in. He brought the point down hard on the lock. Not the bolt, which was heavy. Rather, he struck the pin around which it pivoted. Just as in the prison, the diamond bit snapped the metal. But it took a few moments of jiggling to work the bolt loose, by which time the guard had made it down the ladder and to us. We swung the gate out, but he stopped it. He was strong, but there were two of us. We propped the gate with our backs while we grabbed the man’s feet and pulled him down.
The biker had a bowie knife on his belt, which I took as he threw the doctor off him. But he wasn’t afraid of it. He came for me, which is what I wanted. I tumbled away and lifted the cage as the doctor rammed the biker with the point of the staff, forcing him into the cage, which fell shut. I jammed it with the knife. His burly, tattooed arms were too big to reach through the curved bars, and when he realized it, he rattled the gate in a rage, cursing us in Nahuatl.
We ran outside. Just past the high garage, the gang’s bikes had been washed and gassed and lined neatly in a row under a translucent green roof that protected them from the sun.
“I’ll find her,” I said. “Knock this over.” I pointed to the lean-to. “And find us transportation.” I started running. “We’ll never make it out of the desert on foot!”
“How will I find you?” he called.
“We’ll make noise!”
“But won’t they find you?”
But I was gone. My feet hit the soft, dry dirt in heavy thuds as I ran into the junkyard maze. Cerise was smart enough to know there was no point in hiding, not from creatures that can track by scent, which suggested she would’ve run straight for the front. But after a minute or more, I began to doubt myself and stopped. Cars were piled all around me.
“She could be anywhere,” I breathed.
I spun around, looking for any kind of clue, but there was nothing.
A scream.
I ran around a bend and caught the sound of struggles. I took a wrong turn and had to double-back at a dead end, but I found her. She was on her back fending off a male wolf with no shirt. I grabbed a hunk of loose metal like a club and tried knocking him off her, but he was in a frenzy and nearly oblivious to my attack. Cerise was bleeding. In his frantic desire to remove her jeans, he’d slashed her across the abdomen. I struck him again on the head and he swatted me away. I flew back five feet and hit the dirt hard enough to twist my shoulder and knock the wind from my lungs. I had trouble getting to my feet. I was fighting the muscles of my trunk, which had seized like a vise.
Cerise screamed. It was primal. I couldn’t watch.
A street bike whined as it flew over my head. Red plastic gas tanks were lashed to both sides, but when it crashed, there was a loud noise and nothing else. The wolf stood and grunted in alarm, his face twisted bestially. The bike the engine slowed and the tires spun idly. I had hoped the distraction would give Cerise a moment to run, but she was hurt and could only roll limply to one side and crawl. But the wolf didn’t care. I think he smelled the gasoline then. The tanks hadn’t been meant to explode on impact. They had been left open and so had made a trail. A line of fire burst over the hulk behind me and across the ground to the bike, which erupted violently, knocking the wolf back. I thought that would be the end of it, but even after the blast, he still managed to get to his feet before me.
“Shit!”
He thought I was the attacker and bounded right for me.
A young man in skinny jeans dropped to the ground. He wore navy Converse and a white hoodie under a colorful silk jersey jacket. I couldn’t see his face. His hood was up. Stitched into the back of his jacket was a rainbow dragon and burning phoenix intertwined. He was lean and agile and approached the biker calmly as he pushed up his sleeves. But he was surprised by the wolf’s speed. The biker ran forward and grabbed the young man’s arm. I expected the wolf to throw him down and rip him apart in seconds.
Instead, there was a sizzle.
The biker screamed. It started like an animal squeal but ended like a man’s. The werewolf pulled away and looked at his red, swollen hand, then at the skin of the intruder’s forearm. Wrapped around his wrist were Buddhist prayer beads. The young man shook his hand and the beads fell loose. A tiny Buddha dangled, reclined in prayer, one hand raised in the symbol of love. The young man was not a priest. He was more like a monk. He had been trained since childhood by a wushu sage. He twirled the beads in the air so they wrapped around his fingers like brass knuckles.
The wolf growled and bounded forward, but the intruder stepped to the side, swung a leg around, and caught the biker’s arm in the crook of his ankle. With a rotating flip, the young man twisted the biker’s arm back and kicked him across the face with his other foot, knocking him to the ground. The wolf tried to sweep the young man’s legs as he came down, but he was blocked by a foot. Standing on one leg, the young man used that same foot to block another punch and then to kick the wolf in the face. But it was little more than an annoyance, and the shirtless biker, muscles engorged, launched himself up again. The young man punched in defense. He swung his arm around, and the beads struck the werewolf squarely in the chest. I didn’t see where it would do much to stop him, but to my surprise, the biker’s body recoiled as if struck by 10,000 volts. He smashed into a hulk of a conversion van, denting the side, before falling to the dust.
The young man looked down at the beads in shock—but only for a moment. Cerise was on her feet and she ran to him.
They hugged.
Then she pulled from the embrace and hit him and yelled in Chinese—for a moment anyway, until she clutched her side and collapsed. The young man pulled off his hood, and I saw the warm face of Cerise’s better half, as serene as the Buddha around his wrist. He looked so young to me, but then so did she.
“Kai! What are you doing here?” she demanded in English.
He shrugged. “Last time you went to New York you came back in a pot. I knew I couldn’t stop you. So I followed.”
“But... how did you find us?”
“Dude, it’s the craziest thing—”
“Tell us later,” I said, pulling them both to cover.
The wolves were in frenzy, but some of them would have heard the explosion. As if on cue, another biker bounded down the scraped-dirt lane on all fours. This one was a female.
“Run!” I said.
Cerise was hurt and traveled slowly, but it was the maze that beat us. We turned right and saw another wolf dismembering a man, pulling flesh from his chest by the teeth. He looked up with a bloody growl, and we ran the other way—right into a corrugated metal fence. A dead end.
“Fuck!”
Kai pushed Cerise into a hulk of a Toyota and shut the windowless door. He took a stance and, holding up his beaded fist, swiped the dirt with the tip of his shoe. The male wolf reached us first and they fought. The female leapt over them a moment after, bouncing off the roof of Cerise’s car and landing on two feet before me. I recognized her. It was the woman who had searched us that afternoon and taken the doctor’s staff. She didn’t hesitate, but came right for me—just as one of the delivery vans crashed through the fence, striking her as it grounded to a halt in a cloud of dust. The woman was thrown back and impaled on a piece of metal that bent out from a car. It entered under one armpit and exited under the other, skewering her.
As I approached, I could see she was still breathing, albeit barely. I pulled the coin from her jeans pocket. I held it up.
“It’s bad luck to steal the currency of fate.”
“Get in!” Doctor Alexander called from the cab of the vehicle.
But it was too late. We had made too much noise. Kai punched his adversary into the ground, where he lay crumpled, one arm bent over his back, as the entire pack descended on us. They leapt one by one to the tops of the stacks around us, howling to each other. The man with the lightning bolts shaved into his beard dropped to the ground. He was shirtless as well. The blood covering his mouth ran down his chest. He had already made at least one kill. I suspected he was the alpha. He saw the two members of his pack just killed and leaned back into a mournful howl. The others joined.
Kai didn’t hesitate. He ran and slid on his knees across the dirt and punched the alpha in the groin with his beaded fist. There was an audible pop as the alpha’s howl ended in a powerful yelp. The beast-man looked down, eyes wide, face frozen in shock, even as he fell back to the earth.
The pack ceased all noise. After a moment, a cricket resumed. No one moved. Kai had killed the alpha. He’d launched the man’s genitals into his abdominal cavity like shrapnel. If Kai had been a wolf, he would’ve been the pack’s new leader. But he wasn’t, and in that moment, with their minds still frenzied and half-animal, none of them were sure who to follow or what to do.
“GO!” I yelled.
We climbed into the truck. The others were closer and made it in a flash, but I was pulled down by powerful hands. I was helpless on the ground, about to be mauled, when my attacker was jumped by another wolf. Rivalry had begun. Whoever stopped us might make claim to being the new alpha, and every attempt was met by a challenge.
I leapt up and clung to the van’s heavy side view mirror. “Drive!”
The engine roared, the gears shrieked once, and we lurched forward. Kai helped me into the cab. Once crammed inside with the others, the doctor wove around a bend and crashed through the corrugated fence, beyond which was open desert.
“Were you bitten?” I asked Cerise.
“No.”
“Are you sure?” I leaned over her husband to feel her, and she grimaced in pain.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” The doctor pushed me back. “We need to get her to a hospital.”
“We don’t have time. We need to keep moving.”
“Getting across the border isn’t going to do anyone any good if we all die along the way,” he argued. “You can’t tell me that what waits for us isn’t ten times worse than this. We have to be ready.”
“Won’t they just follow us?” Kai asked.
“I disabled their bikes,” the doctor said with a smile. “Should buy us enough time to make it to the next town.”
My fists were clenched. “I know you mean well, Doctor, but this is always what happens. The book is always somewhere good men and angels fear to tread. That’s part of the binding that protects it! It’s always somewhere dangerous. In a cavern. In a tomb. In a war zone. It’s always somewhere reasonable people are careful to go. They always need a plan. Or supplies. Or a hospital. Or whatever. And while they dither about, it moves again. God, we’ve been here so many times! I have been right here, having this exact conversation, more times than I can count.”
“We don’t even know that it’s there,” the doctor objected.
“And waiting won’t reveal it! Do you remember the labyrinth that trapped you? Do you remember how long it took you to get out?”
The doctor didn’t answer.
“And what happened? We were too late! We don’t have the luxury of gathering all the answers, of figuring everything out. We have to act. Now. With whatever we have. With whatever we lose. We’re not more than seven hundred miles from the mine. If we keep moving, we can be there by sundown, and then whatever happens, happens. I will go by myself if I have to.”
“How are we gonna get across the border?” he asked. “None of us have passports or identification. And once they figure out we escaped, their agents will be waiting at all the checkpoints, no?”
He was right.
“Then we go through the desert,” I said.
“And the border patrol? They have drones, you know. And we don’t know the way.”
“Then we’ll figure it out.”
“How?”
“I’m in,” Cerise said, clutching her side.
Kai grabbed her hand in support.
I sighed at the reminder of her wound. “There must be something here to stop the bleeding,” I said, searching the cab.
We found an oil rag in the glove compartment, along with the remnants of someone’s lunch. There was an apple and a bag of plantains and some kind of tortilla that was now an awful shade of green. We did what we could to clean and bandage Cerise. Her husband sacrificed his hoodie, and she finished the water. The dawn rose and we realized we had been driving northeast. We adjusted course, but bad news came quick. After a few hours of driving, we ran out of gas. The truck was old, and the fuel gauge had gotten stuck at an eighth of a tank. I closed my eyes in frustration as we sputtered to a stop in the middle of nowhere. From hundreds of miles away, the book was working its dark magic.
We got out and the doctor immediately took my arm.
“Can I talk to you?” he said to me in a low growl.
We walked over gravel and dirt to a cluster of sharp-branched bushes where the others couldn’t hear us.
“We don’t have time to argue,” I said. “We have—”
“She’s pregnant,” he accused.
I breathed in deep. “I know.”
He made a disgusted face. “You knew?”
“Not until Everthorn. You were under a spell—”
“And you still took her on this—”
“Yes!” I widened my eyes at him. “I did.”
“Look.” He raised a hand. “I realize it’s none of my business. But maybe this isn’t a good—”
“Doctor.” I gripped his arm and pulled him further back. He was speaking too loudly. “Why do you think she’s here? Why do you think she left her husband and came all the way from Hong Kong? On a whim? For the fun? To imperil her child? She wants to know what kind of world her baby will grow up in. And she wants some say in what kind of world that will be. Surely you, as a father, can appreciate that.”
I looked back. Kai was helping his wife to the shade of the truck. By the worried, sheepish look on her face, she had discerned what the doctor and I were talking about. Kai was excitedly telling her his story, and I could just make out the distant words:
“But then I ran out of money. New York is expensive, man. I didn’t want to go home without you, so I changed my ticket to San Fran and stayed with my cousin. Remember Dan? I was at his place when you called. We owe him a new bike, by the way.”
Bike, I thought. Gas tanks.
“This van was meant for the crossing,” I told the doctor.
He looked at me.
“Spare tanks,” we said together.
We found them strapped under carriage in the back, four large reservoirs—enough to get us across the Rio Grande for sure, after which we’d have to find a way to fill the tank again, at least twice, if we were to make it all the way to the mine.
“We still don’t know the way,” the doctor reminded me as we emptied the second tank into the truck.
It was a fair point. We were in the middle of nowhere, a dry gully between a pair of bluffs.
“Those bikers are gonna get here eventually, aren’t they?” Kai asked. “I mean, they’re not just gonna let us go.”
“At least we’ll see them coming,” the doctor mused. “There’s nothing here.”
He looked around, and I joined him. He was right. From our vantage, we could see for several dozen miles or more in every direction. I was scanning the dry earth for a trail or road of some kind when my eyes caught a tiny speck of a shape.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“What?”
“There.” I pointed.
The doctor squinted at the horizon. The others saw us looking and stood. Kai helped Cerise to her feet. With rest, a little food and water, and a bandage, she was looking considerably less pale.
Kai raised a flat hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. “What is that?”
Whatever it was, it was small—and getting closer. We all watched in silence as a low, gray shape emerged from the shimmer of heat. It stopped a quarter mile from us and stood.
The doctor stepped forward. “Is that—”
“A coyote,” I said.
It wasn’t moving. It just stood there. Watching. Waiting.
“Do you think it’s hungry?” Cerise asked.
“No,” I said. “I think it’s waiting to show us the way.”