“You speak Spanish, huh?” I asked, not very surprised, somehow.
“Spanish, French, Italian, and a smattering of German,” he said. “Also Welsh and Gaelic, though I’ve been told my accent is appalling.”
I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes.
“Of course you speak seven fucking languages,” I muttered under my breath, shaking my head. “If I live long enough, maybe I’ll learn Esperanto just to spite you.”
He ignored me in favor of directing our new friend out of the parking lot, traveling in the same direction we’d been going before. Traffic grew heavier as we approached Modesto proper, but we turned off the highway before we got into the heart of the city, entering an area that looked more rural.
I saw the substation in the distance as soon as we turned, looking oddly ominous with its towering metal lattices and the dark storm clouds looming in the background. The whole thing was surrounded by a chainlink fence that was easily twice as tall as I was, but I could make out a small outbuilding nestled to one side of the towers and cables.
Home, sweet home, I thought. I guess it’s cheaper than a motel, anyway.
Rans continued to deliver directions in Spanish, and the driver pulled onto the gravel drive leading to the locked gate.
“Deténgase aquí,” Rans said. “Nos deja salir y regresa a la gasolinera. Entonces olvida que alguna vez nos has visto o hablado.”
The driver nodded in agreement with whatever Rans had just told him and turned off the engine. The door locks popped open a second later. Rans leapt out and opened my door, holding out a hand to steady me as I hopped down to join him.
“He’s going to drive straight back to the gas station and forget he ever saw or spoke with us,” he explained.
Indeed, as soon as my door slammed shut, the SUV fired up and the driver backed onto the deserted road and sped away. I stared after him.
“I hope we don’t come to regret the lack of a vehicle,” I said, clutching my plastic bag of convenience store food.
“It will be less obvious that anyone’s hiding out here, without one,” Rans said briskly, already heading down the long driveway toward the chained double gates. “There’s a clear line of sight to a cellular tower, but if worse comes to worst and Nigellus isn’t reachable within a reasonable period of time, it’s only a mile-and-a-half or so to the nearest busy road. We can commandeer another ride if we need to.”
I shrugged, since I couldn’t exactly argue with his logic. My experience of playing a wanted fugitive only spanned a few weeks. His, by contrast, spanned centuries. As we approached the massive structures responsible for routing power to thousands of households in the city, I imagined I could feel electricity vibrating the air molecules around us. But, hey... if that invisible aura acted as Fae repellent, I was more than willing to risk an increased possibility of future brain cancer.
The chain and padlock holding the two halves of the gate closed looked pretty solid—right up until Rans grasped the padlock with both hands and ripped the shackle open. If I hadn’t seen him use that same trick on the very day I’d first met him, it would have been shocking as hell. Even knowing his strength as I did, it was still hard to reconcile what he’d just done with reality.
“No padlock is safe,” I quipped, unable to help myself. “Just take it easy on the gate hinges, all right?”
He shot me a long-suffering glance as he unwrapped the chain and swung one of the gates open wide enough for us to slip through.
“I’ll remind you that I paid handsomely for that shed door, as well as the padlock that was attached to it,” he said mildly.
“Uh-huh,” I agreed. “You sure did. Not to mention the lock you broke on the back door of my house. You’re a regular Bob Vila, you are.”
He closed the gate behind us, rewrapping the chain and hanging the padlock in its former position, twisted closed so that it would appear to be locked from a distance. We skirted around the massive rows of machinery, heading for the little prefab building that would act as our shelter until we could get hold of Nigellus for help.
Rans examined the structure’s door, trying the knob and confirming it was locked up tight.
“Hinges,” I reminded helpfully. “If that storm breaks while we’re here, I’d rather not have the door hanging off them because you broke it so we could get inside.”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” he said, and disappeared into a cloud of vapor.
For about the thousandth time in the past couple of months, I breathed through a silent, ‘How is this my life now?’ moment. The thick mist flowed across the walls of the small building, seeking. I lost sight of it as it disappeared around the back. Long seconds ticked by, and then the lock on the door clicked. It swung open, revealing Rans standing inside, looking both reassuringly solid and faintly smug.
“Ventilation holes in the soffit,” he explained. “No broken hinges needed. Happy?”
“Ecstatic,” I replied wryly, and brushed past him.
The place was a dump. A giant control board covered one wall like something out of an old sci-fi B-movie—crowded with antiquated switches, lights, and dials that I wasn’t about to get anywhere near. Aside from that, the amenities consisted of a desk and a single rolling chair, both with so much dust coating them that I couldn’t imagine they’d been touched in the last decade.
“Well,” Rans said, faux-cheerful. “This is... nice.”
“I feel like I should point out that it was your idea to come here,” I shot back.
For lack of anything better to do, I set my bag of supplies down and rolled the chair outside before beating the dust off of the cracked upholstery. The desk was too bulky to mess with moving it outside for cleaning, so I sacrificed part of a bottle
