He rose, hesitated, then said, “Surely the crosser won’t linger there with all the others dead save one.”
“It is not very bright. Like you, it doubts the Xuandon can be killed.”
He accepted this rebuke with a duck of his head.
“If it survives long enough to realize its error, it will not be able to cross where it had planned, so will not arrive where we expected. Transit in and out of that realm is tricky and I won’t be able to monitor the little crosser’s path. Two of the realms it must pass through to reach Earth are closed to me.” Another sigh. “One of the things I look forward to learning once I have the Codex is how it was able to cross from that realm directly to Earth. That should be impossible.”
“Will you know where the crosser arrives, once it does?”
“I will know the nearest node. I should be able to locate the beacon itself shortly after that, assuming it has not become activated. If that happens, it may be able to hide itself from me, at least for a time.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Do you mean that hiding is one of the beacon’s innate properties, or that it will decide to hide?”
“It is a complex artifact which has resided in that realm for a long time. It is undoubtedly alive, and probably possesses some degree of sentience. Given the paranoia of its maker, it will have ways to hide. Not that it could do so, not from me, if we were in the same realm. That, alas, will not be the case.”
“Then I’ll need to get in touch with the squad who was supposed to meet the crosser, let them know they have to be ready to travel at a moment’s notice. Should I go myself, once we know where? Amanda and I could return to Boston after—”
“I will postpone that decision until I know more. The time of the crosser’s arrival is as uncertain as the location. I am fairly sure it didn’t arrive at a time previous to now, but cannot say at which future moment it will reach your realm. I would prefer for you to complete your task here before—” She broke off. Erect young shoulders went rigid. Brown eyes flashed yellow. And stayed yellow.
Friar didn’t move. He might have stopped breathing.
After a few seconds, the rigidity eased and the eyes were brown once more. She didn’t clench her fists or give any obvious show of anger, yet somehow radiated fury. “Unfortunate,” she said in a flat voice.
“Mistress, what has happened?”
“The crosser was wounded by that cursed fool of a Xuandon—a totally unnecessary swipe of his tail in reaction to being wounded. The crosser has finally fled the realm, but—ah, the Xuandon is down now.” Satisfaction mellowed her voice. “A messy death, but he deserves it.”
Friar waited. When she said nothing more, he asked, “And the crosser?”
“Is not here yet. When it arrives, I will let you know which node it uses. In the meantime, remain here but move up your timetable for dosing the FBI agent. Oh, and Robert?”
“Yes?”
“Once Amanda and I have finished instructing the agent, take Amanda to the New England Aquarium.” She smiled a mother’s indulgent smile. “She’ll enjoy the penguins, and I think she deserves a treat, don’t you?”
? ? ?
A nature preserve near San Francisco, California
Seven days and nineteen hours before Lily and company left for hell
Ed Minsky did not care for exercise, but he’d made the mistake of telling his wife what the doctor said at his last checkup. Not that he’d had a lot of choice. That woman could get a Mafia don to confess. So here he was, huffing and puffing along a damn nature trail. He hated running. He hated nature. He—
What the fuck was that?
A flash of pink, bright pink, in those bushes halfway down the slope. It had moved.
He stopped. Stared. And thought of the hot pink sweatshirt his neighbor’s little girl loved so much. The one with a glittery cat on it. The kid wore that thing when it was eighty degrees outside.
Nothing in nature was that shade of pink. He started down the scrubby slope.
Ed might hate running and nature, but he wasn’t a clumsy man. His profession demanded a certain level of agility. He made it down to the bushes where he’d glimpsed that flash of pink with no worse injury than a scratch from a stupid damn bush with thorns an inch long. The bushes that were his goal were not equipped with armament, thank God, but they were thick. He could see bits of pink through the leaves, but not what they belonged to. “Sweetie?” he said in the voice he used with cats and kids. “You hurt?”
No answer. She’d moved earlier, though, hadn’t she? God, he hoped he wasn’t about to find a tiny little body. Heart pounding, he circled the bushes, looking for a way in. And found it, along with a trail of drying blood leading in. “Oh, hell.”
The entry to the shrubby cave was sized for a kid, not a grown man. He had to crawl and still got stabbed and scratched by limbs and twigs and it was a good thing he’d didn’t have to go far, because . . . “What the fuck?”
For a second he thought he’d climbed down here to rescue a stuffed toy. It was all that pink fur. Nothing real, nothing living, had fur that color. Plus it had a tail, bushy like a fox’s. It was about the size of a fox, too, but it was emphatically not a fox—too chubby, wrong head, wrong . . . everything. It lay curled up in a ball, the bushy pink tail wrapped around it as if for warmth.
The fur didn’t cover the face—a black-skinned face with all the smushed-in cute of a Pomeranian. The huge, dark eyes in that cute little face blinked up at him.
“Son of a bitch,” he said reverently. He hadn’t seen any of the creatures that had been swept into Earth during the Turning, but he’d heard of them, seen a few photos. This must be one of them—a creature from another realm. And then, with emphasis: “Son of a bitch!”
It wasn’t just a creature. It had hands. The palms were hairless and black to match the face, and the thumb was in the wrong place, but otherwise they looked almost human. Especially since one of those small hands was gripping a small knife.
The other hand held something, too. Held it out to him. Gingerly he took it.
It was a little silver disk. There was writing on it, but it was weird writing. Some other kind of alphabet, he guessed. Why did—
It peeped at him in a squeaky voice. His ears heard “Meep-ha” or something like that. His mind heard “Translation charm.”
“Whoa.” He almost dropped the disk. That was so weird.
Meep-re-hi. “I am dying.”
And at last he noticed how wet the ground was beneath the not-a-fox. Wet with blood. He couldn’t see where it was coming from—maybe the fluffy tail hid the wound?—but that was a lot of blood for such a small body to lose. “Shit,” he said sympathetically. The knife had persuaded him the not-a-fox was an adult, so he didn’t feel all wrenched about its upcoming demise, but he did sympathize. After a moment he offered, “I could get help.”
Mreep-meep-meep. “No time. We make deal.”
“What kind of deal?”