Two men dressed in black appeared at the far end of the block, rounding the corner and walking toward us. They were too far away to see clearly, but from their size and the way they walked I recognized them right away: Tomo and Big Joe. I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t. Their appearance had the inevitability of clockwork. Maddening, infuriating clockwork.
“Shit,” I said, stopping.
Bethany and Thornton stopped, too. “What is it?” she asked.
“We’re being followed.”
“What?” Bethany looked up and down the street, but she didn’t know what to look for, not the way I did.
There was no way to retreat with Underwood in the car behind us, and no way forward with his two enforcers heading our way. I hoped Tomo and Big Joe hadn’t seen me yet, but that was unlikely. They were professionals. They knew exactly who they were looking for. Probably, they’d spotted me the moment they turned the corner. We had to get off the street. I needed someplace close to duck into. I glanced around desperately and spotted an auto body shop twenty feet away, its retractable garage door open to reveal an enclosed workspace that stretched deep into the building. I took Bethany and Thornton by the arm and pushed them toward the shop. “This way. Quickly.”
“Trent, who’s following us?” Bethany demanded.
“Someone dangerous,” I said. “Now move.”
Inside, the auto body shop was wide enough to hold three cars side by side, though there was only one there at the moment, its hood up and its deconstructed engine exposed like entrails. Next to it, a young man in his early twenties sat on a folding metal chair, eating his lunch out of a Chinese restaurant’s Styrofoam container. It wasn’t the perfect hiding place, it would have been better if no one saw us at all, but it would have to do. We were running out of time.
The young man looked up from his meal as we entered the auto body shop, noisily sucking a lo mein noodle into his mouth. He was scrawny, with an unruly mess of dirty-blond hair and a sleeve of tattoos down each arm. His ears were pierced with open metal spools that stretched his earlobes into big fleshy hoops. The patch on his shirt was embroidered with the name Chaz. We only had his attention for a moment before he dismissed us by looking down at his noodles again. “If you need your car worked on, come back in half an hour. Everyone’s out to lunch.”
“Is there a back door to this place?” I asked
That caught his attention. He looked up again, confused. “Huh?”
“A back door, Chaz,” I repeated, annoyed. I scanned the shop. It was small and cluttered. I didn’t see any doors in back. “Or how about another room, the office, anything that’s away from the street?”
He put his Styrofoam container on the floor under his chair and stood up slowly. “Who are you? What are you talking about?”
We were getting nowhere fast. I glanced through the open garage door at the sidewalk outside. How far away were Tomo and Big Joe now? What about Underwood? I waved Bethany and Thornton to the back of the shop, and they retreated to the far wall. It would have to be enough.
“Sorry, Chaz, but if you know what’s good for you, you’re going to have to go.” I nodded toward the open door. “Trust me, in a couple of minutes you’re going to wish you weren’t here anyway.”
“The fuck are you talking about?” Chaz demanded. His confusion was making him angry. He puffed up his chest like a frog trying to look bigger than it was. “You think you’re gonna rob this place? Well, think again, motherfucker!” He started to reach for a metal lug wrench sitting on the car engine.
I didn’t have time for this. I got to him before he reached the lug wrench. I hooked two fingers through the large, stretched hoop of his earlobe and pulled, dragging him toward the doorway.
“Ow! Ow! What the fuck, man?”
I pushed him out onto the sidewalk. “If you want to keep living, Chaz, you’ll walk away from here and won’t stop until you hit the river.”
“Yo, back it the fuck up!” he raged, rubbing his sore ear. “You pull that shit again and I’ll beat your punk ass down!” It was empty bluster, I could tell from the way he tilted on his feet, ready to move away from me, not toward me. I’d spooked him. Now he was more bark than bite.
“Chaz,” I said calmly, making sure to call him by his name again. It was an old con-man trick, or so I’d been told. Keep using the mark’s name and they lower their guard. “Chaz, I don’t have time to tell you how much danger you’re in. You just need to run.” I pulled the gun halfway out of my coat pocket, just enough to give him a peek at it. “So run.”
He stared at the gun. Apparently that was all he needed to finally send him sprinting down the sidewalk.
There was a key box on the wall next to the doorway, the key still in it. I turned the key, and the garage door motor on the ceiling groaned to life. The door rolled down and hit the sidewalk with a solid, comforting clang.
“Tell me what’s going on,” Bethany demanded. “Who’s out there?”
“How many are there?” Thornton asked.
I walked toward the back of the auto body shop, where they were waiting. “Bethany, I’m going to need you to give me the box.”
“Forget it. I already told you I’m not letting this thing out of my sight again,” she said. “What’s this about? What’s happening?”
“We don’t have a lot of time,” I said. “The people who are coming are much, much worse than you can imagine. They’re going to take the box from you by force if they have the chance. But if you give it to me, I can do something about it.”
“Who are they? How do you know them?”
“Bethany—”
“Damn it, Trent, tell me what’s going on!”
A tension headache stabbed my temples like a knife. Why did she have to be so damn infuriating? We didn’t have time for this. It wouldn’t take long for Tomo and Big Joe to figure out where we were. That was their job, what they were good at. They hunted people on Underwood’s orders, and when they found them, they did terrible things to them. “Just give me the damn box,” I said, and tried to grab it out of her hand.
She jumped back, dropping the box on the floor behind her. In a flash, the Endymion wand shot out of her sleeve and into her hand. At the same time, instinctively, I pulled my gun out of my coat. We stood in a silent standoff for a moment, Bethany aiming her wand at me, me aiming my gun at her.
Thornton’s eyes went wide. “Whoa, whoa, what the hell?”
I ignored him. “Drop the wand, Bethany.”
“Sooner or later I’m going to have to trust you again. That’s what you said,” she said bitterly. “I should have trusted my instincts. It was no accident you were at that warehouse.”
“Guys, come on,” Thornton pleaded. “We’re on the same side, here.”
“No, we’re not,” Bethany said. “It was all a lie, wasn’t it, Trent? You were after the box all along.”
Thornton turned to me, shocked. “Is that true?”
I swallowed. It went down like broken glass. “Yes,” I said, “but it’s not the whole—”
Bethany snapped her wrist. A jagged, white arc of energy burst out of the Endymion wand’s tip and instantly struck my forehead. It felt like a slight electric shock, the kind you get when you touch metal on a cold day, and then … nothing happened.
“The sleep spell won’t work on me,” I said. “I don’t sleep.”
Her face fell. I expected anger, or defiance, but mostly what I saw was disappointment. Somehow that was worse. It stung me deep in my chest. I clamped down on it, forced myself to stay cold and focused. I’d gotten pretty good at that over the past year, so how come it was so damn hard to do now?
She lowered the wand and let it fall to the floor. “Why are you doing this?”