Roadkill

his jaw and on his arms, but I didn’t think that’s what had done him in.

Salome sat on the dead man’s back, licking blood from her furless paw with a dried suede scrap of tongue. She spotted us, yawned, and curled up in a ball, basking with a sawmill purr in the heat of the burning Eldorado. The dirt had soaked up the blood around Branje’s head and neck. I didn’t have to lift up that head to know his throat had been ripped out.

I didn’t think the spray-bottle punishment was working as well as Goodfellow thought it was, but with Branje being responsible for toasting our ride, I gave Robin’s disciplinary methods and Salome’s hunting a pass, although it was getting embarrassing that the one with the highest body count on this job was a mummified cat. I squatted beside them, giving Salome a gingerly pat on the wrinkled bald head. “Good kitty. Nice kitty.” I scowled at the dead Rom. “I knew I should’ve cut your nose off when I had the chance.”

“Branje must have run from where the Rom RV stopped half a mile back.” We were doing the heavy lifting while Abelia was watching Judge Judy in air-conditioned comfort. Niko crouched beside me. “But why? If he were under Suyolak’s control, he would’ve let him out of the coffin before it was ever stolen. And so far Suyolak has shown no ability to control anyone. Visit you with dreams or nightmares, but actually control? A healer… even an antihealer can’t do that, can they, Jeftichew?”

Kneeling on the other side of the body, Rafferty shook his head. “No.” Okay, that was simple and to the point. “But…” Damn. Life would be so much better if the human race had never come up with the concept of “but.” It got you every damn time. Resting his hand on Branje’s singed hair, the healer’s face showed disgust in the twist of his lips and the lowering of his brows at what he felt. “This is the sickest bastard who ever roamed the face of the earth. Why they didn’t find a volcano to drag his ass to and dump him, coffin and all, into it, I’ll never goddamn know.”

“Guess all the hobbits were getting the hair on their feet permed.” I moved to the other side with him. The flames were superheating air that hadn’t been that cool to begin with.

“What did the son of a bitch do now?” Robin demanded, staying several steps away from the blackened and bloody body, preserving the condition of the only clothes he had left. The world needed saving, but so did his wardrobe. A puck had to have his priorities.

“This one. He must’ve been one of Suyolak’s regular guards.” That made sense. Branje was one of Abelia-Roo’s most trusted. “Long-term exposure. The seals didn’t have to be that weak at all. Just a pinhole of an opening and years to work.” Rafferty stood up and wiped his hand on his jeans. “Schizophrenia. Suyolak screwed with the chemistry of this guy’s brain six damn ways to Sunday. He would’ve been hearing voices, hallucinating, easy to influence, for months, maybe years. Tough guy to hold it together and keep it secret. At the end Suyolak was just one more voice in a hundred, probably telling him if he did this, he’d make all the rest go away. And this poor dead bastard was far enough gone to believe it. Not far along enough to open the coffin. He had a lifetime of knowing what that would mean, but burning a few cars to get the voices to go away, that he could do.”

“And Suyolak did keep his word, more or less. It all went away. Unfortunately, Branje went with it.” Niko slid his katana into the sheath on his back and shucked off the lightweight duster that covered it. I knew it was hot when he was admitting it.

The man had been tough. I hadn’t much liked him the first time I met him; I liked him less the second time-on this job, but he’d had a pair, and I wasn’t going to deny him that now that he was dead.

I pulled out my cell phone. No reception. Big surprise. No communication in Satan’s sweaty armpit. Niko had mentioned on the drive that it was unseasonably hot by at least thirty degrees. I never understood why people said unseasonably. Hot is hot. Cold is cold. Screwed is screwed. “Then we walk back to that bitch’s RV. It’s not much more than a mile.” Nik raised an eyebrow, and I amended, “I mean we run back to the RV. No big loss of time.” It wasn’t as if we could go back to the house and use the landline. Hey, could you send a cab, pickup truck, tractor, mule, whatever. Just look for the house with the multiple fires and dead couple inside. Can’t miss it.

We ran.

Naturally the RV was gone. There we were in the middle of nowhere-a place where distance wasn’t measured in blocks, but acres and sometimes miles. Fields as far as the eye could see. Big Sky country. The death house had been freshly painted, clean and neat, the interior and exterior up-to-date, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been built on the bones of what had once been a much older house. Some people, rich couples tired of the city life, liked their privacy. They’d buy up old ranches and either redo or build a new house. And the thing about old ranches? They were fucking big. It had been at least twenty miles since I’d seen the last house before Suyolak’s homestead of horrors.

“I suppose we have more running to do,” Nik commented as he regarded the empty stretch of gravel, the slightest twitch of annoyance at the corner of his mouth. “We passed another house approximately twenty miles on the way. We can borrow their phone or transportation.”

“Twenty-some odd miles. You’re fucking with me, right?” I bent over and rested my hands on my knees. Half a mile normally wasn’t too bad; Niko typically had me run five miles every day. But it was scorching hot… unseasonably, of course, not to forget… and it wasn’t air we were breathing but pure pollen. I didn’t know what it was from-grass, weeds, occasional trees-I didn’t care. It was all right when cruising along in the car even with the top down, but running more than twenty miles in blistering heat while trying to keep the heart pumping with pollen instead of oxygen did not seem to put a fun time in my future. The Auphe might have had a pumped-up immune system when it came to viruses, colds, diseases of all sorts, but simple pollen? Apparently they’d sneezed their murderous asses off the same as their good old human cattle. There was no way, though, that I was going to ask Rafferty for a quick laying of the Holy Claritin on me or whatever healing equivalent he’d come up with. Branje had suffered through frigging schizophrenia. I wasn’t going to bring up snuffling, snot, and scratchy eyes after that.

“Would I do that to my only brother?” Niko asked, mock solemn. “Lie? Never.”

“Oh hell,” I replied morosely. “It’s like a frying pan out here.”

“You don’t like the heat, I’m aware. You also don’t like the cold or running or any other form of physical exercise that doesn’t involve your penis, but Suyolak set us back with one mentally deranged man. One… against the five of us. Pardon me, Salome-the six of us. Therefore we will run until we can find a car to buy, borrow, or steal, and then we will catch this monster and make him sorry he was once a cluster of cells in a woman’s womb, much less born.” He looked up at the sun. Nik wasn’t one for watches. He didn’t need one. “And we’ll do it in two hours, arriving at that house around dark.”

Two hours? A seasoned marathon runner could do it in two hours. Niko could easily. Pucks could probably do it in two hours, though I sincerely doubted Robin would want to. Wolves could do it in less than two hours. Me? An everyday runner who hated it with a passion and who did not have Nik’s Olympic potential- three hours. Three hours and that wasn’t counting puke breaks. “If you want to keep me alive so much, I don’t know why you’re trying to kill me,” I grumbled. “Why not let the furries run ahead and come back and pick us up?”

“I think the fact Rafferty would be nude while trying to negotiate for a car might be a drawback,” Goodfellow said dryly, stroking Salome who was looped around his neck. “Or, considering his personality, it might actually be a plus.”

“He could carry his clothes in his mouth,” I pointed out, reasonably, I thought. “Dress behind a clump of whatever is turning the air piss yellow.” I sneezed. “Problem solved. Or I could make a ga-” I stopped suddenly before the entire word “gate” made it out of my mouth. Niko was giving me a look and it wasn’t a good one. It reminded me that while we didn’t know where Abelia and the remaining four of her men were or what condition they were in, Suyolak was doing a nice ring around the rosy with us-the original version from the Black Death days with flowers to cover the smell of sickness, ashes from burning the corpses, and falling down because you were dead-reminding me that despite all of that, he didn’t trust my traveling and its effect on me. Even if I thought he was wrong, I listened to my brother. The fact that he’d never been wrong before made things more difficult, but I was trying my hardest.

“Okay,” I said, exhaling, “we run.”

It took three hours and ten minutes. One vomiting episode… me. One stripping off all his clothes except underwear-don’t ask; don’t tell; don’t look-and folding them over his arm so not to wrinkle or stain