“If we’re lucky they’ll send us to prison,” Brynn said. “I’ve got a feeling, though, that this is some X-Files shit and they’ll just quietly make it so you and I were never born.”
“Who would have figured? Mulder and Scully are the bad guys after all.”
I thought it over for a while.
“If we can see them, they’re not after us,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Feds don’t show up looking obviously like feds unless they’re there to scare you, not arrest you.”
“It’s the mortar shell you don’t hear coming that kills you?” Brynn asked.
“Yeah.”
“Hope there aren’t more mortar shells around.”
The crying from the living room faded into silence.
“I like you,” Brynn said. “We don’t get to choose how we die, only how we live, and I like you and I’m glad I got to know you.”
“I like you too.”
“You know what Heather and I talked about last night so late?” Brynn asked.
“What’s that?”
“You. Well. Me, but me as relates to you. I told her how I felt about you, how I wasn’t sure what to do. She told me . . . I’m going to get the exact words wrong, which is going to drive me fucking crazy because it was one of the last things she ever got to say. She told me that it’s okay to let yourself love someone, but that letting yourself love someone is like letting someone have the keys to your control room, so you can share the responsibility of running yourself with someone else. It’s worth doing, and people will get in there and pull the wrong levers but that’s just the risk you gotta take.”
“I like that,” I said. “What was with the ouroboros?”
“New start,” Brynn said. She choked up a little on her words. “She wanted a snake that eats its own tail to remind herself that things go in cycles. That it’s never too late for a new start.”
There wasn’t anything to say to that.
There’s always time for a new start, until one day there isn’t.
Holding one another, trying not to think about the world outside that bedroom, we slowly let sleep come for us.
FIVE
“Rise and shine!”
It was still dark out. Midsummer, that far north . . . if it was still dark out, then whoever the fuck thought it was time to get up was wrong.
“Isola’s on the move, and Mr. Magic Death Door Man just left his house in his truck.”
It was Thursday banging on the door, being wrong.
“Give us a fucking minute.”
“You’ve got thirty seconds. Meet us at the bookmobile.”
Another beautiful day in the demon hunter business.
“Is there coffee?” Brynn asked. She was already standing, pulling on her work pants and buckling her belt.
“No,” Thursday shouted back.
Brynn was handsome. I knew that already. I mean, I’d had a weird sort of crush on her since I first met her. But it kind of just hit me again, watching her pull the shirt over her muscled torso.
Maybe I was delirious, thinking about that instead of what needed thinking.
Maybe I’d rather be delirious.
* * *
Thursday drove, conspicuously fast in the predawn light, taking turns far too quickly for a clunky old bookmobile van.
Doomsday had stayed at the library to keep Vasilis from doing something stupid. Brynn was sitting shotgun, and I was in the back with the books. Shelves lined the walls, with webbing straps holding in the mysteries and romances and sci-fi. Like how you batten things down on a ship. Which was good, even though we totally weren’t going to flip over. Definitely not.
I wasn’t strapped down myself, though. I was sprawled out on a beanbag, trying and failing to find things to hold onto every time we took a corner while I also tried to keep my wounded shoulder safe. From my vantage, I couldn’t see out the window. All I saw were the brief flashes of streetlights and headlights that fought against all that darkness.
Not half a minute later, we stopped. The side of the van slid open, and Vulture hopped in. He was panting, holding his side.
“Graveyard,” he said. “She’s at the graveyard. Take this road another mile and turn right on the first road after you see some tombstones.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I saw Isola leave her house,” he said. “So I followed.”
“And that warranted waking us up?”
“Mr. Miller left his house shortly after,” Vulture said. “Dressed all in camo with a duffel bag.”
“Okay that warrants waking us up.”
“Wait,” Brynn said. “They live on opposite ends of town. How’d you see them both?”
“I set up a camera outside Mr. Miller’s house,” Vulture said.
“What?”
“Yeah, you just take an old phone and set it up as a surveillance camera. I set it to stream video to my main phone video whenever I asked or it detected motion. Then I went to go watch Isola’s place myself.”
We must have gone that mile at a breathtaking speed, because Thursday yelled “Turn!” just as he jerked the wheel and sent those of us in back sliding into one another.
The books held.
Of all the ways to die, I think being pummeled to death by trashy hetero romance novels might be the worst. Or best. Either way, it didn’t turn out to be my fate.
We screeched to a stop, which slammed us forward, and Thursday killed the engine. I opened the side door and stumbled out, desperate to stand on solid ground.
At the other end of the short gravel parking lot, a 1950s pickup truck sat empty.
“We should split up,” Thursday said. “Find her faster.”
“Oh,” Vulture said, pulling out his phone. “I know where she is. Or at least her bicycle.”
He opened an app called “Find My Phone” and a map filled the screen, with a dot representing us and a dot representing, presumably, some third phone he’d hidden on Isola’s bicycle.
“Where do you get that many phones?” I asked.
“I steal them from people,” Vulture said.
The graveyard was surprisingly large for such a small town, and like the town itself it looked like it had seen better days. Most of
