do for him, he'd want the satisfaction of forcing or tricking me into healing those whip welts I'd accidentally bequeathed to him in my uniquely soothing way.
What about our beloved Ric? Irma wailed.
Snow saved him before and he will again, I told her. Ric's too vital to some part of this puzzle. Snow will save Ric and me ... us, just for my future crawling potential.
What about El Demonio and his zombie army?
That I don't know. Ric may have to settle that score all by himself.
Irma went silent as the elevator reached the main floor. Quicksilver and I picked our way through the fallen corpses of El Demonio's thugs. True, I had tricked the chupacabra into becoming my hit man, but in the ghoul-eatghoul world of the Millennium Revelation, it wasn't how you got things done, but that you did.
Outside, litter skidded across the deserted Emerald City parking lot like skeletal fingers playing the "Devil's Waltz" on an asphalt keyboard. The temperature outside at ground level, including wind chill, had dropped to a blood-freezing forty degrees.
There was no point in putting Dolly's top up.
The wind would just rip it off.
Quicksilver leaped in the front passenger seat with a shit-eating grin.
"You have been just waiting to ride shotgun again," I accused.
He showed fang.
"Riding shotgun is good for you," I told Quicksilver. "Save your footpads for later."
Dolly's engine choked for a moment, but revved high and hard when I peeled out of the lot into the dark and stormy night.
"You never knew these WTCH folk," I commented.
Quicksilver remained mum and curled his claws into the front seat upholstery. I cringed, but kept silent. My mind started toting up losses to motivate my righteous anger. Achilles. My job. My house. My history.
The streets were eerily deserted, so I ran about a dozen red lights, feeling like a ghost.
"We've got to take whoever's there down," I told Quicksilver. "They would put orphans like us up for adoption in a cage," I added, in terms he would relate to.
He growled.
"They are so wrong." I kept up a running dialogue as I pushed Dolly up to seventy-five on the abandoned city streets. Ric would be proud. "They sold out the serious profession of The News, of informing the community, for impure greed. Sheena just wanted blackmail money for giving bad weather to good people and good weather to bad people. Undead Ted was a lame tool. Literally. El Demonio could plant his shills in management and hide the fact that Wichita was becoming a drug-smuggling hub.
"Now the broadcast capabilities of WTCH-TV can multiply the powers of all the southeast Kansas weather witches. We have to cut the power to the tower. Any ideas?"
Quicksilver lifted his furred throat and howled at the three-quarter moon peeking between the gathering storm clouds.
"I'm glad we see eye-to-eye on the storm," I said. "It generates a lot of power that's not answerable to anybody but Mother Nature. Let's hope we can tap that."
By the time I cruised Dolly through the WTCH parking lot, the cloud bank had sped to meet us so fast that I could see only darkness above the tree line, and hear only the wind hissing and the lightning spitting.
Most of the cars and vans were gone. Storm-chasing, I hoped. That's what real news people would do. I was after unreal news people. Only Undead Ted's Prius and Sheena's vintage iridescent pink Geo Storm were still there.
Dolly's headlights spotted someone hunched at the driver's side of Sheena's Storm, trying to break in.
"Undead Ted." I hailed him as I pulled Dolly alongside, sandwiching his body between her hefty black side and the Storm.
"Don't call me that," he responded. "And your car is creasing my best suit."
"Where's Sheena?"
"You don't want to go in there, Delilah. Some kind of crazy feminist rave is going down. I had no idea Sheena was so invested in 'career at any price.' She's got all her gal pals doing the Macarena around a Crock-Pot in the station kitchen. When I heard their chant was calling for 'eye of Newt Gingrich' and a 'samp of vamp,' I got the hell out. I think that crazy Slo-mo Eddie is hunkered down filming it all."
Go, Eddie, go. He'd win the YouTube viral sweepstakes of the week with that footage. That would out Sheena's secret coven.
"Sheena alone has power to skew the weather," I told Undead Ted, "but not to brew up a megastorm like this."
He joined me in looking up at the roiling blue-black sky.