25.
I came into the nearby town over fields and uneven ground on a downhill approach. The field of stars above had dimmed its majesty the closer I got. It didn’t look like a particularly big town, but it was big enough to contain probably five thousand people or so. Maybe more, for all I knew; it was tough to judge from this perspective.
It was quiet, a few lights on in scattered houses visible from where I was. Not a shop or store with them on, though, at least not that I could see. It was the dead of night, and this place was heavy on the “dead” part of that. A dog barked in the distance, the lone sentry awake around here.
I decided that walking through town was my easiest bet, just strolling in like I owned the place. From my perspective on the hill, I couldn’t tell much about the town, but I was either looking for a rail depot where I could hitch a ride south or else a car I could steal in order to head that way myself. The second option was somewhat more suspect at this point because I would be driving in the middle of the night on unfamiliar roads.
But if this town wasn’t big enough to justify a rail station…well, I couldn’t exactly wait around until daybreak for the bus.
Dawn was, fortunately, still hours off in my calculation. That lone dog barking in the distance lent a spooky aura to this little hamlet. My footsteps as I skipped the last fence on a pasture and hit a road heading into town sounded incredibly loud to me, like a rocket re-entering the atmosphere and making a couple sonic booms in the process. It was, obviously, not that loud, but it sure felt like it to someone like me, sensitive to the slightest sound.
I started my casual walk along the road. My sodden Stranglers t-shirt was stiff from the seawater, and my stolen, way-too-long pants were hanging awkwardly on my frame. My boots, which I’d stolen from the cop I’d mugged yesterday morning, fit surprisingly well, for which I was thankful. There’d be nothing worse than looking terrible and having ill-fitting shoes.
I only hoped that the bedraggled look I now wore like a vagabond could be passed off as the UK version of a hipster rather than something more sinister. Because the only person probably awake in this town was a local cop on night duty, and flagging their attention would tend to be somewhat bad for my health. And my plans.
The street I was on was residential, but it fed into a more main street. I passed quaint little houses with a 1950s look to them, a kind of post-war, we’re-at-peace, chicken-in-every-pot vibe to them. It was the UK version of what I saw in Minneapolis in the sections bordering the first-ring suburbs, or in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in the parts just radiating out from the downtown. I’d seen houses like them in a hundred cities in the US, and London, now that I thought about it, and even though the style was different, the feel was the same: like someone had come in and tried to create the 1950’s feeling of home. They looked cozy. I think they might have hit the mark.
Or maybe it was just because they reminded me of my house before it had burned down.
I hit a main avenue that fed farther into the town, a few commercial buildings popping up down the way. This was going to be a long, uninterrupted walk down this street, and I was starting to feel just a little nervous about it. In the distance, I could see a lone car making its way toward me, gradually.
My breath caught in my throat. If it was a cop…
Hell, if it was a person who had a brain in their head…
They were going to pass right by me, and in the process their lights would illuminate me for a few seconds. When that happened, I’d need to shield my face while playing that I’d been blinded by the light, or that it at least was uncomfortable, without making myself look too suspicious. That was a pretty tight rope to walk, but it was what I had to do.
I was drawing some pretty ragged breaths, maybe even holding them. My heart rate spiked, thumping in my chest. The car’s headlights reflected a bright glare off a storefront two blocks away.
It was drawing closer.
I looked down, and my heart jumped in my chest again. “Bedraggled” didn’t fully cover my present look; it was obvious these clothes didn’t quite fit me. I only hoped that kids in Scotland—what? I’m kind of a kid, still—wore really baggy clothes sometimes. And had long, stringy, completely disastrous hair. Because I was rocking that look, too.
At least…I hoped the kind that would be out walking and causing absolutely no trouble at three in the morning would be dressed in baggy clothes. Because otherwise, I was about to tip someone’s suspicions hard.
I tried to steady my breathing, but I couldn’t. This was going to be a moment of truth, and I didn’t know if I could handle the truth. It wasn’t like I could carjack them either, because unless I took this person hostage, it wouldn’t be safe to use their car to get to York.
This was what my life had been reduced to: vetoing carjacking someone because it would alert the cops to my movements.
I never thought I’d say this self-pitying thing, but…FML.
Readying a hand to hold it up to block my face and eyes from the bright lights approaching slowly, I kept my steady pace. My boots clicked along the sidewalk as I headed toward the main street—high street, I guess they called them over here. I waited for the trouble that could come soon, imagining the squeal of tires as this car pulled over, and turned out to be cops.
But they signaled a left turn a block ahead, and I was left on the empty street, my heart still thundering in my chest.
Part of me wondered if I was going to die of a heart attack before anything bad actually happened to me. I almost stopped right there, to lean against a storefront and breathe. I’d been pursued for a while now, but what Rose had done in tapping out my powers…
Well, she’d made my flight more of an actual run, one I had to undertake because I couldn’t really stand and fight anymore. And she’d cut off my best avenue of retreat in the process, the ability to just fly off when things didn’t go my way.
Now I was stuck fleeing on foot anytime things went bad, like some street criminal in the US. I mean, one that could run faster than a car moving at low speed, but still…not optimal.
My nerves were still jangling, the lit street lamps providing an orangey-yellow light for me to walk by, but those tangled thoughts in my head cried out that maybe I couldn’t do it this way; that maybe taking the direct approach had been…well, dumb.
I was breathing loud and hard, again, and I didn’t think it was going to stop anytime soon. I’d been through battles, through a war with people trying to exterminate my kind. But sneaking through a Scottish town in the wee hours of the morning while a seemingly unstoppable succubus and Police Scotland chased me?
I might have finally found the thing that did my poor little heart in.
There was an alley up ahead, and I looked down it as I passed. It was confined, only ten feet wide or so, and seemed to come to a dead end at a fence. I ducked inside and found a good, thick shadow midway down, and crouched within its depths, sheltered next to an abandoned cardboard box that was filled with recyclables someone had apparently failed to get to the bin.
Sitting there in the darkness, my heart beat like a bass drum. I squatted down, closing my eyes, putting my back against the brick wall. “It’s okay,” I said to myself, wondering what the hell was wrong with me. I felt so damned weak in that moment, and it pissed me off.
For years now I’d been the most powerful being on the planet. Not invincible, as much as I sometimes wanted to believe I was, but strong. I had powers no one else could claim, or at least in combinations no one else could.
Even without those—without the souls that came with them—I was still an indefinably bad badass. I’d killed a lot of people, almost all of whom had totally deserved it, and all of whom had at least kindasorta had it coming. I clenched a fist and held it tight against my chest, feeling my heartbeat ripple through the muscle in my hand.
Sitting in the darkness of that alley, I discovered a little truth about myself that I hadn’t really realized until that moment. I’d gotten pretty damned arrogant about how good I was. I’d even bragged that no one could stop me, something I’d stopped saying after I’d taken a bullet to the head in a bank in Florida a few months ago, but which sentiment still sort of rested somewhere in my heart—this youthful feeling that I was, in fact, untouchable, that no one could beat me because no one could fight harder than me, was stronger than me, was as damned unyielding and indefatigable as I was.
Man. Did I let that arrogance get out of control or what?
It was bad enough that I’d somehow thought I was invincible, but now that those powers, those souls, were gone? The empty hole they left behind, the abilities that I really could have used right now? It was almost like fear was rushing in like a tide into a hole in the beach, filling it and replacing the courage and power that I’d had before.
My hand was shaking, even though it was clenched.
I’d heard somewhere once that fear of loss was a more powerful motivator than the idea of gain. I believed it now, because since I’d lost what I’d had—my power, my souls—I was running harder, trying harder, more willing to cross lines, maybe, than I had been before. If Rose sent a meta against me right now that had some enviable power, I might even have felt compelled to drain them dry and take their abilities, try and turn them against her.
“Shit,” I whispered. I didn’t even want to contemplate that.
I stood, still in shadow. My breathing had slowed slightly, but not by much. There was a definite tightness in my chest, and I didn’t care for it at all. Part of me wanted to curl back up, to just sit there in the darkness and pretend I was trapped on all sides by metal rather than get up and get moving, trying to find my way to York.
It was really, really hard to get moving.
It was almost like there really was an invisible box around me. I breathed as slow and steady as I could, comparatively. “We’re going to make it out of this,” I said, wondering why I was saying “we” when I was plainly alone for the first time in years. “I’m going to get you all back,” I said, answering my own question. “I will find a way.”
I pushed off the brick wall behind me, and stepped out of the shadows. I wasn’t going to wait here all night. I needed to move under the cover of darkness, because this was who I was now. For the time being, anyway. I started to step toward the mouth of the alley—
And engine noise stopped me. I froze, just a step or two out of the shadows, and a light ran along the side of the building opposite me in the alley. It didn’t look like normal headlights, though I could hear the car. It felt more like…
A car cruised past the mouth of the alley, and as the headlamps passed the open aperture, that light didn’t stop moving down the alley walls. There was another light source coming from behind the headlamps, and it only took me a second—a second too long—to realize what it was.
A spotlight mounted on the driver’s side mirror.
It shone down the alley and lit me up. I put my hand over my face like I’d planned, but I knew how I suspicious I must look, hanging about in small-town Scotland in an alley in the middle of the night.
A car door opened, and I stayed frozen.
Who had spotlights mounted on their car mirrors?
Cops.
I’d been found.