31.
Jennifer stayed behind to supervise the cleanup. Officer Santiago would disappear, a new and eternal resident of the missing persons registry. I stopped at home to change my clothes; then Caitlin and I headed northwest on the 95. Her snow-white Audi roared up the open road, desert flats stretching to the rust-red mountains on the horizon, as we chased down a ghost.
“Sometimes cars just drop off the grid,” Pixie had told me. “You know, they get mothballed, rust away outside a farmhouse somewhere. Maybe, eventually, somebody comes along and restores ’em.”
“Barn finds,” I said.
“Exactly. That’s when the chain of custody gets spotty. The plates belong to a white GMC panel van, which lines up with the description you texted me. Technically, it’s not stolen, but its registration has been expired since the late nineties and there’s no record of a sale—the paper trail just ends. So my best guess is your guy found it abandoned in a garage somewhere, fixed it up, and helped himself.”
“Great, so it’s a dead end after all. Out of curiosity, who owned it?”
“Not a who, a what. It was a company van. Belonged to an outfit called the New Transitions Wellness House. Looks like they were a state-funded halfway house for ‘youths at risk,’ sort of an alternative to juvie. They got shut down after an abuse scandal—”
She said more, but I wasn’t hearing her, too lost in the warrens of my memory. I didn’t need the details. I knew that house. I used to live there.
“I don’t like this.” Caitlin lightly drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She’d said that once when I told her where we were going. And now, after I’d told her about the pre-bomb part of my day.
“I know. I run into Teddy at the same time this psycho is digging into my teenage years and throwing my past in my face? That’s too much memory lane in one place.”
“I know he’s your blood,” Caitlin said. She left the but unspoken.
She wasn’t wrong, and I was having the same suspicions. I hated this. The last thing I wanted, after a surprise reunion with my kid brother, was to think he was mixed up in this mess. All the same, I took out my phone and made some calls while she drove.
I’d already heard of Tall Pines Security; they had a solid rep, solid enough that I wouldn’t want to go up against them in the middle of a heist. That said, I poked around and made sure Mayor Seabrook had contracted the real Tall Pines. Maybe paranoid, but considering I’ve been a ComEd repairman, a Polymath Security alarm installer, and a FedEx driver on various jobs—plus another baker’s dozen of past disguises—it was worth verifying.
Next I pulled my job-recruiter routine and had a chat with the Tall Pines human-resources department. My brother was a solid employee, with the company for over a year. I was as satisfied as I was going to get, at least until I spent more one-on-one time with him.
“I hate to say it’s a coincidence,” I told her, “generally because there’s no such thing, but…it really does look like a fluke. Seabrook hired a solid security firm, no surprise there, and Teddy’s one of their reliable operators. Simple as that.”
Caitlin frowned her response. She wasn’t convinced. I don’t think I was, either, but I was working overtime to tell myself otherwise.
“All right,” she said, “leaving your brother’s reappearance out of this, we’re still heading toward a confrontation. Grimm stole that van as a direct challenge to you; he’s telling you that he knows your history. That he knows what he hopes are your weak points.”
“And he’s telling us where to meet him. I’m fine with that. If he wants a showdown this bad, he’s going to get one.”
I wasn’t taking chances. My cards nestled against my chest, my wand up my sleeve in its spring-loaded holster. I hadn’t just changed my clothes back at the apartment; I’d rounded out my arsenal. The velvet pouch of alchemist’s clay, Bentley’s gift, rode snug in my hip pocket. On the opposite side, a nine-millimeter in a shoulder holster under my linen jacket. Whatever Grimm threw at me—magic or hot lead—I was ready with a rebuttal.
“Which leaves the unanswered question,” Caitlin said.
One word: why?
We rolled into a small town northwest of Vegas just before dusk. It was a sleepy chunk of nowhere, the kind of place you’re either born in and die in, or drive through and forget. We refueled at a no-name gas station with an awning painted like a faded circus tent, then followed the back roads until we reached the end of the line.
“Are you all right?” she asked me.
The Wellness House rose up to blot the setting sun behind its Victorian-styled gables. A central tower speared the sky with a sharp, steep peak and a shattered window for a heart. The white paint was peeling from the clapboard now, and the first-floor windows lay sheathed under nailed boards and signs reading CONDEMNED BY ORDER OF THE STATE.
Red spray paint defaced the once-grim sign out front, a childish scrawl that proclaimed FOCK YOU. The misspelling gave the defiant statement more power somehow. Maybe it was hidden in the faint smile it brought to my lips. There was a reason I usually resorted to a wisecrack in moments like this. I carried two weapons up my sleeve when it came to fighting fear: laughter and anger.
I had a feeling I was going to need both. For now the house sat dormant, rusting in its sleep, like an elderly tiger that might spring awake to claw and bite at any moment. Caitlin stared at me, waiting for an answer to her question.
“It’s just a building,” I said and got out of the car.
We circled the property on foot. No sign of the panel van, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t inside, waiting. All the doors were secure, fixed with extra padlocks on the outside, and the windows were boarded up tight.
“This one,” Caitlin said. She had been appraising the windows with an architect’s eye and singled out one for her personal attention. She hooked her fingers around a board and heaved. Nails popped free from the groaning wood one by one, until a board wriggled loose. She tossed it aside, letting it clatter to the dirt at her back, and reached for the next in line.
Eventually she cleared an opening big enough for us to invade. The window beneath the boards was long broken, nothing left but a ring of jagged glass teeth. I broke out the shards with the butt of my pistol one by one. I wasn’t worried about the noise; if the cambion was inside, waiting for us, he already knew we were here.
I pulled myself over the window frame. My feet touched down on rough floorboards, coated in twenty years of dust and neglect. I gazed across an old industrial kitchen and memories flooded in. In my mind’s eye the stark overhead lights—shattered and dead now—were buzzing and bright. The chipped particleboard counter, host to cobwebs and mummified flies, was lined with corroded, moldy cans of bulk-bought green beans and generic potted meat.
We both took out our phones and turned them into flashlights, with the outside light fading fast. Once we left the open window behind, there would be no light at all beyond what we brought in with us.
I stood still for a moment, ears perked, listening to anything the Wellness House wanted to say. It kept its secrets. Nothing stirred in the bottomless gloom, not even the rats.
We weren’t its only recent visitors, though. As we walked along a narrow corridor, my phone’s beam trailed across smears of dust on the floor. There were footprints, signs of shuffling, dragging.
“He’s been here,” I said.
I poked my head into a half-open doorway while I tried to get my bearings. It was strange returning after so many years; some halls I knew by heart, down to the detail of the striped wallpaper or a particular crack in the baseboards, and others seemed utterly alien to me. My memory had reshaped and twisted this place, altered it under the weight of over two decades of nightmares, and being confronted with concrete reality again was jarring. We passed a dorm room I knew—absolutely knew—was on the second floor, not the first. I expected a pair of bathroom doors on the left wall, and they were actually on the right.
I pushed open another door and froze.
“Pet?” Caitlin asked. She looked between my face and the cramped room, barely big enough for the wire-frame bed inside and its rotting, yellowed mattress. And the old, dangling hospital-grade restraints with their white buckled straps.
“You know those cigarette burns on my back?” I asked her.
I went inside. I had to. I don’t know why. Some bone-deep command pulled me over the threshold, to stare at my teenage ghost on the mattress.
“This is the ‘segregation and discipline’ hall,” I told her. “Six rooms, all just like this, but…it was this room. Once a week, twice sometimes. This was where they put me.”
Caitlin put her hand on my shoulder. She didn’t speak, letting me process whatever I needed to. I think she wanted me to know I wasn’t alone.
“The abuse that got this place shut down,” I said, “it wasn’t…deliberate, if that makes sense. It was born out of neglect. They had too few doctors, too many kids—the state funding paid them by the head, so they packed us in like sardines. Their solution was to hire minimum-wage ‘orderlies’ with no training, most of them barely a year or two older than we were. Kids watching kids. And when kids get frustrated, they lash out.”
“That doesn’t excuse what happened to you,” Caitlin said. Her voice was barely a whisper.
“No. It doesn’t.”
I didn’t have anything else to say. There was nothing else to see. We backed out of the room and kept moving.
We climbed a wide staircase, the runner rotted to scraps of vaguely floral fabric. A musty odor, like old books and mothballs, hung in the air and tickled the back of my throat. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. A hunch pushed my footsteps, or maybe I was just feeling masochistic and wanted to wallow in the bad old days.
No. Something was significant about this place, outside my own checkered past. Grimm had taken the Wellness House van—and I assumed he’d would have had to put some elbow grease into making it run, after it had been sitting under a tarp or something for twenty years—and gotten his plates caught on camera. He wanted me to see it, wanted me to follow him here.
So where was he?
I strobed my light across an open doorway. I didn’t find the cambion, but I found his lair.