Swallowing through a tight throat, Jo had to clear her voice before she could speak. Twice.
“What am I going to go through?” she asked hoarsely.
In addition to righteous styling, a fine sound system, and plenty of fucking torque, one of the benefits of the Audi R8 performance coupe was its all-wheel drive. There was also plenty of rubber available for grip on its racing tires, and good braking if you got a little overexcited with the pedal on the right.
Unfortunately, when it came to four-wheeling it through a forest, the car had one great rate limiter.
The thing had the ground clearance of wall-to-wall carpeting.
As a result, as Butch drove the supercar behind the box van, he was fifty-fifty on whether or not he was going to have to give up the ghost and hoof it the rest of the way.
The Tomb was located quite a distance from the Brotherhood mansion, its hidden location born courtesy of a thin fissure in the mountain’s granite and quartz superstructure, one that happened to widen into a huge subterranean cave. From what Butch had been told, the site had been in use way before Darius had built the big house, the underground space serving as the sanctum sanctorum of the Brotherhood. Not only were all the lesser jars that had ever been collected stored in its ante-hall, but deep in its stony belly, inductions and sacred rituals had been hosted for a couple of centuries, all with the Tomb’s special brand of torch-lit, yup-this-some-vampire-shit-right-here.
The R8 gave up the effort about a quarter mile from the site. Or rather, Butch decided that he could run faster than he was going, and given V’s little sojourn in Lassiter’s bubble of happiness, it was better to stop rolling the dice on that front spoiler: He didn’t want to have to explain how he’d peeled the thing like a grape. And besides, he’d made it a good mile farther than he’d thought he would.
Putting the engine in park, he killed the growl and got out, leaving the fob in the slot by the gearshift.
No reason to think the car was going to be five-fingered out here. Not only was the mountain a hard climb, that hard-core, permanent mhis obscured everything in the landscape, making it impossible for anyone or anything who was not supposed to be here . . . to be, well, here.
Which was why Wrath had voted yes for proposition privacy. The great Blind King hadn’t liked the idea of bringing the enemy to the Tomb any better than Butch or anybody else did. But he’d seen the logic, and made the right choice.
Falling into a jog, Butch scanned the pine trees as he weaved around boulders that reminded him of adult teeth breaking through in a child’s mouth. There wasn’t much underbrush. The mountain, like all of the Adirondack range, was more rock than soil, the topography carved by the advance and retreat of glaciers that had briefly considered a zip code relocation during the Pleistocene epoch.
This, by the way, was all according to V. Who liked to use big fancy words like “Pleistocene epoch” for “Ice Age” (not the movie.)
And so, yes, now, some eleven thousand years later, Butch was here, running over a spongy mattress of fallen pine needles, hell-bent on welcoming the enemy into the most sacred place the Brotherhood had.
He must be crazy.
The plan had seemed very reasonable when he’d been out at that battle site, vulnerable to humans and the Omega alike. But like a lot of decisions made quickly under pressure, when you got to the consequences part of your bright idea, you ended up with a case of the re-think wobbles. Except it was too late now, and the facts remained the same. Unlike the mhis that V threw up from time to time downtown, the shit that blanketed this elevated acreage was impenetrable and permanent.
Sharpie vs. your generic magic marker.
Red wine as opposed to spilled seltzer.
A house, not a lean-to . . .
As he caught up to the box van, Butch wound down his Top 50 list of endurance metaphors. They weren’t really making him feel much better about this, anyway. Besides, destination reached. No more hypotheticals.
Rhage got out from behind the wheel of the stink-mobile, bent over, and braced his hands on his thighs. Between slow, deep draws of fresh air, he said, “Fuck those Febreze commercials. There is no nose blind for that shit.”