Incorruptible Page 11

  There was nobody at the pumps, but it was only a matter of moments before a mortal was drawn in. He had no time to waste on subtlety, so Michael went through the glass front door at full speed, sliptime blooming around him in stinging petals. It was easier now, with so much grace filling his marks. The counter shattered, the thing behind it gibbering as careful protections and enticements stretched and snapped under the weight of a legionnaire’s righteous rage.

  The thing dropped the phone clapped to its misshapen head, its human-seeming shell blasted away by the force of a legionnaire’s arrival. Metal filled Michael’s palm; he lunged over the counter, the blade resolving in midair, piercing the thing’s chest. He whipped it back and forth, opening the cavity, and stinking amber ichor sprayed.

  At least he had not brought Jenna into combat, even though she was at risk alone in a flimsy tin can across the freeway. Michael resolved fully out of sliptime, glass shattering, the register imploding in a mess of melted plastic and pop-fusing circuitry. Gurgling and twitching, the unclean thing waved two malformed, tentacle-fingered hands, and a bubbling laugh escaped its crooked mouth.

  “Legion,” it whisper-hissed. “We are legion too.”

  He did not bother replying. Great spiderweb-cracks bloomed over the front windows, and the neon OPEN sign buzz-blinked. The glass doors along the back wall, holding refrigerated air captive to cool overpriced drinks and perishables, had slivered into large jagged pieces.

  Michael stabbed the thing again. If he’d brought the truck to be fueled he would have noticed the corruption behind the mask and moved directly, but Jenna might have been upset to see this. It was just as well, even if he had to leave her unprotected for a few minutes.

  The unclean turned into a bubbling, slumping wreck, noisome fumes rising from its riven flesh and crunched bone. Michael exhaled, letting the rage slide away, and the marks tingled, scrambling any footage of him on the security feed. He glanced at the pumps—still deserted, he was fortunate. Perhaps the Principle, pleased he was caring for one of its bearers, was arranging things for him.

  He stopped only to find an overpriced bottle of Advil in one of the well-stocked but now jumbled aisles and put his shoulder to the locked EMPLOYEES ONLY door past the restrooms. There was nothing lurking there, but the walk-in freezer held a mortal corpse wrapped in plastic.

  Michael shook his head. There was no helping that victim. He had already left his lumina alone too long.

  Near-Death Experience

  Jenna’s silly, stupid optimism was back, probably because the headache had eased tremendously by the time Michael also returned with a bottle of ibuprofen, the food arriving at almost the same moment. She was even feeling…well, safe.

  That was the most exotic thing about this entire crazy road trip, she felt oddly protected. Which was a sure sign she wasn’t quite sane—she was homeless, almost penniless, and there were monsters chasing her, but as soon as Mike reappeared through the diner’s front door even though she hadn’t seen him in the parking lot, she realized she hadn’t even doubted he’d come back.

  It wasn’t like her to trust in someone else’s permanence like that.

  Jenna stared at rolling grassland outside the passenger window. Her heart beat, her lungs kept working, her eyes took in the scenery and she had a cup of Earl Gray from a coffee shop drive-thru cooling to a drinkable temperature. Her clothes smelled new, one of the better aromas available in the world despite the fact that the fabric was probably full of finishing chemicals. Pavement slid underneath tires checked every time they stopped for gas or otherwise—Mike even checked the oil at every fill-up, something Jenna had never thought real people did.

  He also seemed almost-happy. Or at least, more cheerful than yesterday. After a few glances in her direction, he finally spoke. “We should reach Denver tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” Long sere grass rippled, blasted by dry summer heat and not ready to green again under a flirting, unsteady rattle of sleet. Barbed wire loped alongside the freeway, strung between listing posts probably set in the ground several presidential administrations ago. The cold was following them all the way across state lines, the terrain was steadily rising, and maybe the Rockies would be difficult this time of year. “I have a question.” It was her turn to steal a glance at him, checking his expression for any sign of irritation.

  None was immediately apparent. He was just the same, big blond and almost bland, his hands surprisingly deft for their size. “You can ask anything you like.” Long-nosed and serene, freshly shaven again, he flicked the wipers on when the sleet decided to thicken.

  That doesn’t mean you’ll answer, or tell the truth. The reflexive thought was so natural she almost didn’t register it, a hum of distrust under every breath. At least she could thank Eddie for that particular habit, and she had so many other problems now he wasn’t even an issue. “So, if money’s not a problem and we’re going all the way to L.A., why are we driving?”

  Michael nodded slightly, as if she’d said something profound. “Flying’s kind of difficult. If the plane crashes there’s not a lot I can do on my own to help you. Trains are safer, but we’d have to leave the truck behind until someone can be dispatched to bring it over the Rockies and I want to have options.”

  “Wait a second.” Jenna turned from the window. Even the truck’s defroster worked better than it had any right to, keeping the windshield crystal clear. This guy was a whiz at mechanical stuff. “You can survive a train crash? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Oh, sure. Especially since you can choose a car that isn’t statistically likely to derail.” A small shrug, as if it was the most reasonable question in the world. “I can survive a plane crash too, but without another legionnaire or four around to take the hit, you might not. It’s an unacceptable risk.”

  That put a whole new shine on matters, so to speak. A plane crash was probably small potatoes for someone who could fight monsters, but it brought up another question. “Take the hit for me?” Is that even possible?

  In a world full of monsters and demons, what wasn’t possible? The fenceposts alongside the road kept marking off their regular intervals, the sleet kept rattling, and her heart kept going, a fist-sized chunk of muscle unconcerned about anything outside its dark, cramped home. The possibilities seemed pretty damn infinite, right now.

  “Legionnaires are tougher. We’re sent.” He paused as if he wanted to add more, shook his head slightly. The aggressive crewcut didn’t do anything for him; if he grew it out a little, he might be handsomer. “But Incorruptibles are kind of fragile. Comparatively, that is.”

  Well. She certainly felt fragile. “Okay.” The urge to pinch at the bridge of her nose like her seventh-grade English teacher was almost overwhelming. She couldn’t even remember the man’s name, just his expression at the end of a long day dealing with middle-schoolers. “Sent. From where?”

  “Elsewhere.” He hit the blinker, swinging into the left lane to pass a wallowing yellow semi hauling something refrigerated despite the cold.

  She risked pressing a little further. “Where’s elsewhere?” If the monsters are demons, what does that make you? It was ridiculous to even consider, especially with a cup of hot tea and her toes warm and dry inside new socks and creaky-new boots.

  When was the last time she’d had new clothes, not thrift-store bargains or work uniforms? Was it bad to feel like she was better off now?

  “Uh, we don’t remember, and I never asked.” He sounded honestly baffled. “Maybe an Authority knows, I don’t. They’re the ones who call new legionnaires. With your help, of course.”

  “Hang on.” What the ding-dang? It was one of Dad’s old expressions, and she almost smiled ruefully. God, she wished her parents were still here. “My help?” The idea that someone so competent and capable would need her help was outlandish at best.

  “Well, an Incorruptible’s help. Even an Authority can’t move without your consent, that’s the saying.” He hit the blinker again, swung back
to the right lane. Traffic was relatively light, strip malls blooming on either side of the freeway at odd intervals. “May I ask you a question?”

  Here it comes. Of course there was a cost for the clothes, for the road trip, for rescuing her. The odd feeling of safety vanished in a heartbeat. “Fine.”

  “Have you had a near-death experience?”

  “Other than recently? Several.” She managed to say it with a straight face, added the stinger like old pre-Eddie Jenna would have. “I mean, I’ve dated a lot.”

  That earned several single sideways glances, very blue. “Uh.” A crackling silence filled the cab.

  Jenna’s mouth twitched. He kept sneaking looks at her, and when she could stand it no longer she laughed, a soft forlorn sound. He followed suit, shaking his head and grinning, baffled but pleased. Their laughter sounded good together, she decided. If she had to be locked in a car with someone who shared her hallucinations and nightmares, he wasn’t bad.

  So she told him the truth. “I took a road trip with my mom, my last year of college.” She tested a sip of her tea. It was now perfect temperature, go figure. “San Francisco. We…there was an accident. The car burned.” Her left forearm twinged, the scar aching like it always did when she thought of that terrible day. “I got a cut up my entire arm, almost bled out next to the fire. I was trying to break the window and get my mom out.” The greasy billowing smoke, the sound of traffic roaring by, and that horrifying, hideous thing she’d seen on the hood…

  No. You didn’t see that. Don’t ever talk about it. To anyone. “It was too late,” she continued. A couple in a blue Subaru had screeched to a halt, the wife already on her cell phone with emergency services, the man bailing out to drag her away from the inferno. The guy driving the semi had an extinguisher tucked in his sleeper cab, but it was like a garden hose trying to put out a forest fire. “I was too late.”

  “Ah.” Michael nodded, as if confirming a private hypothesis. “I’m sorry.”

  “Those things…I have seen them before. In dreams. Nightmares.” Admitting it again was just as hard as the first time. She chewed at her lower lip as they passed into a fringe of suburbia, houses and a mini-mall visible over a concrete barricade; the freeway signs proclaiming a town was just off the next exit. Her throat threatened to close up; she had to whisper, barely audible over the noise of wheels on pavement and the engine forcing them forward. “Since I was a kid.”

  Surprisingly, he asked the right question. “Did one of them cause the accident?”

  Or at least, it would have been the right question if that soft, undeniable instinct didn’t keep warning her away from mentioning what she’d seen. “I…maybe. I don’t know.” As far as she would ever say, it was bad luck—which was the only kind of luck she had, really.

  Yet she hadn’t burned to a crisp with Mom. She’d almost bled to death and half her hair had been scorched off, but she hadn’t died. And sometimes, Jenna wondered why. It seemed pointless.

  Other times, she hated the very thought of her survival.

  “Don’t worry.” Mike watched the road, his jaw set. “I took care of the ones at the diner, didn’t I? You’re safe.”

  “Sure.” And maybe she even sounded like she believed him. In any case, he smiled a little, and the silence turned almost companionable instead of awkward. He turned the radio on, but only to listen to the AM weather report.

  They kept rising, adding altitude in steady increments, and maybe that was why Jenna could finally put a finger on the source of her unease. Michael had smashed his laptop and her phone, and they were driving over the Rockies late enough in the year snow was a real possibility. Maybe they weren’t as safe as he wanted her to believe.

  But that night, curled in a hotel bed, she did not dream.

  Heady Privilege

  Denver rose in the distance like a half-eaten whale from the back of a great grass sea, sharp skyscraper rib-towers piercing a mound of smog. The sleet had retreated in long streaks and thin winter sunshine fell swordlike through the fringes; the road dried in great gray scabrous patches. Michael kept his gaze trained forward.

  She seemed to find it easier to speak when he did, but each halting word turned him cold.

  “We both had bad nightmares, Mom and me.” Jenna’s voice was soft with pain. “Dad said I must’ve heard her talk about them or something.”

  The father had died when she was thirteen. Cancer, she said, but her mouth drew down and he thought it very likely that wasn’t the whole story. The mother had finished raising her, two women against the world. It was obvious the bonds were deep, and their breaking traumatic—especially the mother’s passing. An accident, a car bursting into fire—maybe diaboli involved, but she wouldn’t say more about that day, and Michael’s guts turned to sharp ice thinking of how close it must have been.

  He might never have met her, if she hadn’t survived that day.

  “Most of the time, I’m seeing something from outside.” Jenna’s knuckles were white; her hands clutching each other tightly to hide the shaking. It didn’t work, maybe because she’d crumpled the drained paper cup in her palms and the material squeaked every time she clenched. “People going about their lives, and I try to warn them. I try to scream but I can’t. Or if I can, they don’t hear me. It’s like I’m a ghost. I can see the things—those demon things—creeping up on them, and sooner or later they pounce. Then it’s horrible. Blood, guts, screaming I can hear, and I have to watch every second of it. I have to feel every second of it.”

  Not all mortals were psychic, but every Incorruptible had more-than-mortal talents. It was very likely she had somehow pierced the veil of sleep and seen the unclean about their murderous business. Michael kept his expression carefully neutral. “That sounds awful.”

  “You think?” An uneasy laugh rattled out of her, and her hands tightened afresh. She’d finished her tea long ago; it was about time for a stop. “Is that normal, do you think? Do you have them? The dreams?”

  “We don’t need a lot of sleep, but yeah, we dream.” Flying, winging through knots of similarly winged enemies, sword and shield and whip singing of destruction, the fury of righteous murder staining armor, hands, heart…oh, yes, he dreamed. Any living creature had to, or be driven insane. “Sometimes they’re bad dreams, too.” Dreams of defeat were the worst, holding the line with his brothers and knowing all was lost but they had to stand. Victory was better, and he’d had those dreams with increasing frequency before finding her.

  Perhaps he had sensed an Incorruptible’s approach, and just been too stupid to realize it.

  “This is crazy.” She freed her hands from each other and played with the paper tag of the teabag, folding it with slim, sensitive fingers. Her restlessness matched his own. “The whole thing.”

  “Yeah. The songs all say most Incorruptibles have a hard time with it, at the beginning.” Then there were the laments, the loneliness of those set apart and longing to make the broken whole receiving only pain and terror for their kindness.

  For some reason, that caught her interest. “There are songs?”

  “Yeah, plenty of Incorruptibles write music.” The dark-eyed lumino who brought Michael through had been a composer; he seemed to remember the plucking of a gittern and the man’s voice wandering through a soft Provençal melody before Montségur fell. So long ago, trudging wearily through the years to end up here. “Legionnaires, though—we just sing.”

  “Like choirs?” Jenna had turned slightly, all her attention on him, and the sudden soft bath of warm, forgiving grace threatened to turn his arms and legs to molten iron.

  “Chants, more like.” It would be terrible if we couldn’t sing. Michael suppressed a shudder at the thought. The city in the distance didn’t seem to be getting any closer no matter how long they drove. “They help us remember, especially if we’re alone. Legionnaires might twist away from the Principle if they forget.”

  “Forget what?” She opened her hands, seeming almost surprised to find the
crushed remains of a paper cup.

  “Anything important, but mostly good behavior.” He checked the blind spot and swung out to pass an arthritic brown station wagon driven by a clean-shaven, middle-aged cowboy whose mouth moved like clockwork, maybe singing along with the radio or cursing other drivers. “There’s rules.”

  “What are the rules?” They drove through a band of sunshine, and her hair glowed with honey highlights.

  He ticked them off in sequence, lifting a finger slightly from the wheel for each one. “Protect the Incorruptible. Kill the diaboli. Keep unstained and untwisted.”

  A long pause—did she expect a longer series of objectives? Those few were more than enough.

  Finally, she spoke. “That’s a big list.”

  Michael glanced sideways and found out she was smiling. It was a small, restrained curve of her lips, but it was genuine, and beautiful to see, especially under the gilding of sunlight. “Simple, but not easy. That’s one of the sayings.”

  “You guys have sayings and songs.” She leaned forward, stuffing the crumpled cup in the litter bag hanging from the open, bone-clean ashtray. “And you also hide, right? Why don’t you tell people what’s going on? I mean, normal people.”

  Sooner or later, every Incorruptible asked. It was only natural. “Mortals don’t want to know.” Which was also natural, though Michael privately thought the Principle could have arranged things a little better. Still, secrecy kept its bearers safe, and he was just a simple grunt. Certainly his own tiny intellect wasn’t fit to provide a solution if the Principle itself had already decided a different one was acceptable.

  “Mortals. Okay.” Jenna laced her fingers together, crossed her legs, and rested her hands on her slim knee. She still looked like a college student, maybe on a winter break trip. “So, uh…I’m human, right? I mean, I have to be. I was born.”

  “Incorruptibles are born, not made.” Mortal, yet more. He didn’t know the finer points. An Authority could probably explain it to her, once they reached the Eyrie. “That’s another saying.”