Back outside as we walked to the car, my neighbour came out of her house, quivering, phone in hand. I nearly ran over to steady her. “Mrs. Li,” I said. “It’s all right, it’s all over.”
“Nick! What happened?” she gasped. “The noise...”
“Um,” I said. “Break-in. We... already called the cops.” She was pretty old, there was no way the word ‘monster’ would be uttered anywhere near her. Second death of the day, two too many. She clung to her doorjamb, staring at the smashed window, the scratches on the tree, the siding, the doors...
“Who broke in? They could break in here!” she said. “Where are the babies? Nick! Come back here!”
I slung my bag into the car. Johnny got in next to me, the bag between us like a chaperone. I glanced up front to the driver: not someone I knew, a heavy, silver-haired older guy, the back of his neck crisscrossed with wrinkles, smelling powerfully of cologne. A bodyguard? No, not after all this time; she hated bodyguards. Rutger was enough, she always told me. Even just the sight of his big body, the shoulders that seemed like they couldn’t fit through a doorway.
Where had the bastard gone? He had vanished like a ghost, taking the people I loved with him. Vanished all. Like ghosts.
“Do you think I’m gonna need this extremely illegal passport?”
“Mm. Not sure.”
She wasn’t even listening. She was looking out the window at the long sunset, grey and pink, sparks of gold. You could barely tell the sun was going down except for the slow diminishing of the light. Where it would normally sit on the horizon was merely a brighter westerly glow than the rest of the sky. Her familiar profile was outlined in the last of it, amber and violet, like a salute to her beauty, a hat tipped to it. But if we failed, everything beautiful in the world would die, not just her.
“Look,” she said softly. “Whatever’s happening, it’s already affecting the light. See that? The books say it starts at the shoulders of the day. Dusk and dawn. And They’re gathering around us too. Getting ready.”
“Where—”
“I mean, gathering around the world. The planet. Those northern lights we saw the other day, we shouldn’t have seen those. I knew right away something was wrong. There hasn’t been enough solar wind activity to cause that. But magic in transition seems to cause a kind of similar ionizing effect.”
She slumped, forehead against the glass. “They know. They know something’s coming.”
“Well, we know too.”
“Knowing isn’t enough. We’ll never know as much as They do.”
I thought: but someone has to fight Them, all the same, even if no one knows how. In the books, in the movies, someone always has to fight back. Not to end up in the stories later, not to be rewarded with fame and praise and book deals. They just knew someone had to fight.
Had to.
CHAPTER NINE
BACK AT HER house, it was clear that she’d already begun to pull out the big guns, cranked Prodigy Mode to 11. Burning time, I thought. Every flat surface in the Baskerville room, her biggest library, was covered in printouts and photocopies, maps taped to the walls where she’d run out of space at the plastic tables. All five computers and both fax machines were on, singing a quiet chorale of uninterrupted chiming beeps. The heat from their monitors and processors turned it into a dry sauna.
I put my bag on the couch and slumped down, sinking into the dark leather till I was almost folded in half, hearing springs crunch.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Buy a new couch.”
“If we survive, I’ll take you couch shopping.”
“Are They gonna get in here, too?” I said. “Mostly, I’m too tired to care right now, but I just need a yes or a no.”
“They will if they want. But I hope we won’t be here much longer. I’m close to figuring out what we’ve got to do. Here, I got you a cell phone. I already put my number in it.”
I accepted the silver scarab reverently, flipping it open—a huge full colour screen, almost two inches across. No signal down here though, under the concrete and the metal and the earth. In my pocket it felt heavy, reassuring. It was obviously one of her cast-offs, but I felt better having it.
“What are you doing there?” I said, pointing at the humming monitors and piles of papers.
“Half of it is a half-assed research plan,” she said, handing