Chapter One – Ryder

 

The woods and farms of southwestern Pennsylvania raced by as I cruised my old Charger down I-70 W. The stretch of road wound through the darkness as time did some of its own racing, moving me closer and closer to ten o’clock, the itching in my eyes a burning reminder of the twenty hours I’d already been awake.

Destination St. Louis, home of Full Moon Security. My employers.

Driving cross country is almost meditative. Trees whip by, your AM radio blares, and the tires hum along that same old tune. Sometimes you hit a stretch of bad road, and that hum gets interrupted by a cough as you catch a pothole, but the voice of the highway’s still always in your mind, whispering its crazed tune about freedom and the frontier.

Tonight, though? Tonight, it was too damn much to handle. The road ahead was blurring in the incandescent headlights of my car, and the trees were taking on ghostly, menacing shapes at the corners of my vision.

I almost wished they really would have been specters, though. Spirits of the wood reaching out with their twisted-into-claws branches as they tried to gather the souls of unsuspecting passersby. Tried to rip me and the other drivers on I-70 W bodily from our steel horses as we so arrogantly rushed through their ancient domain on trails made of concrete and metal.

At least that would’ve made this trip less of a waste of my goddamn time.

I’d been in Philadelphia just five or six hours prior, tramping through the ancient-seeming halls of the Masonic Temple, trying to track down an angry ghost that had shoved an innocent woman down the stairs. Three days ago, I’d found the article on a local Philly blog. After all, the anonymous calls from our secret benefactors had nearly dried up after last fall, when Carter Grant had managed to rescue the mythical phoenix from extinction.

Since rushing out to save his life, I’d had a nagging itch at the back of my mind. That I was being underutilized. That I was wasting away doing normal security jobs to pay the rent, and just keep the lights on. That I had a higher calling, out here on the road, hunting the supernatural.

Finally, I bit the bullet and took the article to my boss, Kris Cole, to try to convince her it was worth looking into. After all, what was a panther shifter with my training supposed to do, if I wasn’t hunting down the supernatural and trying to protect innocent lives? Just seemed like a waste of the good money the United States government had spent on training me.

“Well, Ryder,” she’d said, her voice deadpan and distant. “You’ve got vacation time on the books, don’t you? If it’s worth something, you’ll find it. Besides, I hear the City of Brotherly Love’s nice in March.”

I just ground my teeth and loaded up the old Charger. Headed east with my bag of goodies stowed away in the trunk.

I’d just been looking for a little encouragement, that maybe I was on the right track for hunting down something interesting for once. Kris, though, didn’t seem completely there. Seemed unwilling to give me any of the direction I was looking for from a superior. Like her mind was elsewhere, focused on something else entirely.

After a twelve-hour drive and ten surreptitious passes with my EMF reader, not to mention some strange looks from the old codger tour guide over how interested I was in Masonic history, I’d finally decided to just interview the old man to see what he knew.

And that was how I’d given the Masonic tour guide a good belly laugh. In fact, he’d laughed so hard I was worried he might break a rib at his age.

Turns out a piece of ice had somehow fallen from a fountain drink the woman had snuck in, and ended up landing beneath her heel.  He didn’t know how she’d managed to get it in her purse, but he said the cleaners had had to be called in to clean up the soda she’d left behind on the landing. Must have been so badly embarrassed about breaking the rules, that she couldn’t admit she was wrong.

Normally, I would have just stayed the night, finished out my hotel stay in Philadelphia, and taken in some of the sights. But I couldn’t. My face was too damned red at having been wrong, and I could still feel the burn even as I drove west through the Rust Belt of southern Pennsylvania.

“And do you know what’s wrong with this country?” asked the AM radio political jockey in his faux mid-western blue collar voice, a desperate attempt to trick his listeners into thinking he was just one of the guys, before pausing for seemingly dramatic effect.

“No,” I replied as I drove past a sign telling me I was about to cross over Sewickley Creek. Up ahead, I could see the bridge faintly lit by my headlights, with a seeming wall of hazy mist rising up from the water on either side. “Do tell.”

“Congress, that’s what! Constant gridlock, nothing ever getting done. Washington was built on a swamp, and those waters seem to seep up through the foundations and floorboards of our Capitol Building!”

I nodded along, even though I didn’t completely agree, as my tires thumped loudly at the crossing of the old joints onto the bridge. And I kept nodding, my eyelids suddenly heavy with the long drive.

“America needs to wake up!” the talk jock suddenly exclaimed over the radio, his voice filling my whole car like he’d stuck a bullhorn in through the passenger side window.

My eyelids snapped open like a pair of those spring-loaded blinds being retracted in an old Looney Tunes episode, just in time to see the woman standing in the middle of the highway, her complexion ghostly white and her wild hair bleached in my headlights as she and I locked eyes for a split second. She wore some kind of belle of the ball gown, the kind of thing I’d have expected to see in Gone With the Wind. Not in the middle of  I-70 W.

“Shit!” I slammed on the brakes hard, the tires screeching as they locked and sent the Charger into a skid.

She looked at me, her eyes full of burning hatred and practically afire with passionate loathing.

Frantically, I tried cutting the wheel, but I couldn’t swerve entirely out of the way.

The hood of the Charger slammed into her with a sickening crunch of human on Detroit steel, rolling her up and over onto the windshield. As she passed up and over the window, her long flowing hair splayed out around her face like Medusa on a bad day, we continued to lock eyes. I could feel that flaming anger within her as she stared through me with her achingly blue eyes. Anger strong enough to make the forges of Hell seem like a walk through a Canadian winter. Anger at the whole world, at those she’d thought had wronged her.

I gasped as I came to, my head snapping up, my heart pounding, the hair on the back of my neck standing at attention like they’d spent ten weeks in basic. The tires thumped as I finished crossing over the bridge and put Sewickley Creek in my rearview, my right foot still on the accelerator like it had never budged.

“Jesus Christ,” I breathed. “What the fuck was that?”

The AM radio jockey continued his rant. “What America needs is a return to the principles of our foun—”

I snapped off the radio, killing his speech. I put both hands back on the steering wheel and took a series of deep breaths as I pulled the car off onto the interstate’s shoulder, bringing it to a stop. I closed my eyes for a moment, tried to convince my heart to just slow down for even a moment. Even behind my shut eyelids, though, I saw the woman’s face. Saw the lack of fear, or of surprise. Just…hatred. One hundred percent pure rage. The likes of which I’d never experienced before in my life.

A car raced by me, its taillights coming on for a moment as it slowed down, but quickly picked up speed again as the driver realized my car wasn’t broken down.

I’d been in combat before. A tour each in Afghanistan and Iraq as a Marine, so I’d had my share of adrenaline rides. Roadside explosions from IEDs, nighttime raids on insurgents, firefights that seemed to last for days, or weeks even, with the Taliban. After that, when I’d joined a government organization hunting down supernatural threats to national security, I’d fought vampires and demons around the world, even brought down an apocalypse cult in South America when they’d taken over an ancient, hidden Mayan city.

Wanna know why 2012 wasn’t the end of the world? Well, that’s classified.

But you’re welcome, all the same.

This, though? I might have just hit an innocent woman on a dark highway, all because my eyes had decided to droop at the wrong time and place. Given a choice, I’d rather have gone off the road and hit a tree instead. At least it would have just been me, then!

Hands shaking, I turned off the engine. I checked the side mirror to make sure no more cars were coming. Satisfied I was in the clear, I reached over with my right hand to open the car door and let myself out. I swallowed hard as I looked back down the highway. I’d come to a stop maybe a hundred and fifty feet past the bridge, and I began to jog back up the shoulder towards it.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I cursed, my eyes taking in the road ahead. “Goddammit.”

As a panther shifter, my night vision was great, better than that of any human I’d ever met. Eyes peeled for signs of the woman, I closed the distance and came to a stop on my side of the bridge.

I blinked hard as I stood there, dumbfounded.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

I blinked again as I looked around my side of the freeway, tried to find any evidence of the woman I’d just hit. Sniffed the air to see if I could smell her blood with my extra-sensitive senses. All I got, though, was a nose full of spring-time creek water. Of budding trees in the woods, of a young doe somewhere farther southwest of me.

“What the hell?” I asked, still frantically looking for a sign of the woman whom I’d likely just killed.

Had it just been a dream, though? Just my mind wandering off while I drove, shutting down for a moment from exhaustion?

But I felt fine. Felt perfectly awake.

My heart began to slow, my breath began to come back down, and suddenly my body tired. The exhaustion crept into my limbs like a ton of cinder blocks chaining themselves to my arms and legs.

Or did I?

I groaned as I sat back on the concrete barrier and wiped a hand down my face, the rush of the adrenaline quickly fading away till it was nothing but a memory. “Ryder Williams,” I whispered to myself and the side of the road, “you need to get some goddamn sleep. Or some fucking coffee, at least. Shit, you should just get a drink.”

I eased myself up from the bridge’s barrier and stomped back to my car, a slow, methodical walk this time as I dragged my heavy combat boots, and my sorry ass, every step of the way. I checked again for cars on that lonely stretch of highway and climbed back into the Charger. I started up the engine again, sent it roaring to life, and flicked on my headlights. I might be able to see in the dark, but the state troopers probably wouldn’t believe I could. And, with what I had in the car, I didn’t exactly relish the idea of getting pulled over by one of them. Ex-military or not, I was going to raise some eyebrows if they got into the trunk.

Up ahead, through the hazy Pennsylvania night, I could just barely make out another sign, its metal face painted green with white lettering.

Camelot.

Next exit.

“Camelot it is,” I said to my car’s empty interior as I put my boot on the gas and pulled out onto the highway, my hand still shaking as I shifted up into second, third, and finally fourth gear.

Still, though, as I pulled off I-70 W onto the marked exit ramp, that woman’s eyes appeared before mine. That ice blue that seemed to look right through me, that burning flame of rage that seemed to consume the world around it.

As I followed the signs for Camelot north into the hills of Pennsylvania, my hand still trembling on the steering wheel, I knew I needed two things. The first was a good night’s sleep. And the second was a stiff drink.

And I definitely didn’t need them in that order.

But, when I saw the lights illuminating the town, and the variety of wild costumes all the people packed into the cars next to me were wearing, I began to wonder if I was going to get either of those.

“What the hell?” I asked my empty interior as I peered out at all the people surrounding me. At the sexy witches and comic book characters. At the men dressed as vampires and Star Wars heroes and villains.

It looked like Halloween in the town of Camelot.

And it was still only March.

“Seriously, what the hell?”