The Dark Remains (29 page)

His eyes moved to the last set of bone-paintings. Again, a chill swaddled him. One painting showed a skull that was high, delicate, and pointed, like the shell of an
egg. The eye sockets were huge and tilted, the jaw tiny. Was it a child’s skull? But it was far too large. Beneath the skull was the image of a hand. The finger bones were long, even longer than the
chin-pasi
’s, straight, and terribly slender, like the twigs of a willow. Beltan did not know what creature these bones belonged to, but one thing was certain: It was neither man nor
chin-pasi
.

A metallic
chunk
echoed on the cold air. Beltan turned his head in time to see a steel door open. A figure stepped through: small, slender. A woman. She wore some kind of breeches, like a man, and a thin white coat. Perched on her nose were a pair of spectacles like the ones Travis wore, only these had black frames instead of wire.

“Well, you’re awake,” she said with a smile.

He recognized her voice. She was one of the two shadows who had spoken over him earlier, the one called
doctor
. Hadn’t Lady Grace once used the word to describe herself? But that had been a word from her world.…

Beltan stiffened. The doctor hurried to the side of his bed. She laid a hand on his brow; it was cold. “No, don’t worry. There’s no cause for alarm. We won’t harm you, we only want to learn about you, that’s all.” She sighed. “But why am I bothering to tell you that? You can’t understand me.”

But he
could
understand her. And if they did not mean to harm him, why was he strapped down like a prisoner? He swallowed. It was hard to force the words out, but he did, one by one.

“Let … me … go.”

Beltan knew there was something strange about the words even as he uttered them. They sounded harsh and guttural, just as her words had, and not only because of his dry throat.

The woman stumbled back from the bed, mouth open, eyes wide, and reached up to keep her spectacles from tumbling off her nose. Yes, she had understood him. He strained against his bonds; the shiny material creaked. So
there was some muscle left in him yet. He spoke again through clenched teeth.

“I said … let me go.”

Fear blossomed on the woman’s face. She scrambled for a device clipped to her belt, pulled it off, and held it to her mouth. “I need security in Lab Four. Repeat, security in Lab Four. Now!”

Beltan knew what those words meant. Guards were coming. He pulled against the restraints, feeling a strength he knew he should by no right possess. Now his entire body tingled, as if he had rolled in snow. Across the room, the
chin-pasi
let out a screeching sound and beat against the walls of its cage.

The woman grabbed something from a shelf and stripped paper off of it: a kind of tube with a needle on the end. Using both hands to control her shaking, she slipped the needle into one of the tubes that led into Beltan’s arm.

Instantly the world grew hazy and dull. Once before a woman had stolen his manhood with a poison spell. Lady Kyrene. Not again.

“What have … you done to me … witch?”

His words were barely a whisper. She lowered the needle and stepped back, watching him, but he glimpsed all this as through a veil. The screaming of the
chin-pasi
faded away.

Help me, Travis
.

But he knew he didn’t manage to speak these words aloud. Instead the world went not gray but black and, after that, Beltan knew no more.

After their conversation with Deirdre Falling Hawk and Hadrian Farr at the museum, Grace and Travis kept to their musty, dilapidated room at the Blue Sky Motel, curtains drawn, waiting for the Seekers to contact them. However, by the third day, Grace was ready to break down the door and bolt, no matter if a whole army of Duratek agents was waiting with chains and shackles on the other side.

“There’s nothing on TV,” Travis said in a voice that encroached dangerously on a whine.

They had convinced the manager to replace their TV with one that worked—albeit nominally, and only so long as green was one’s favorite color since that was the only one it displayed.

Grace didn’t look up from her book of crossword puzzles. They had had this same conversation on pretty much an hourly basis. “Change to a different channel.”

“You know perfectly well there isn’t a different channel. This is the only one we get.”

“Then get a mirror and watch this one backwards.”

This won a snort. “You know, that might be an improvement. Have you seen this guy? His name is Sage Carson. He’s supposed to be some sort of televangelist, but I think he’s really a robot. His hair looks like a vinyl replica of the state of Kentucky.”

“What’s wrong with Kentucky?”

“Nothing. Except when it’s on your head.”

Grace clutched the pen in her hand. She cared for
Travis a great deal, had even risked her own life to save him, but she was going to kill him very soon. However, she would make it quick and painless. Nothing said love like a swift jab to the medulla oblongata.

Travis turned off the TV, flopped onto the other bed, and stared at Grace. “I thought you hated crossword puzzles.”

“I do. They’re a complete waste of time.”

“So would you care to explain why you’re doing an entire book of them?”

“Because right now wasting time is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing.”

He grunted at that, then leaned on an elbow and picked at a battered cardboard box of donuts. “You know, we’re not prisoners. We can leave here if we want.”

“Sure. And we’ll just tell our bulky friends outside the motel that we’re stepping out to buy them each a neck, since as far as I can tell neither of them seems to possess one.”

As promised, Farr had stationed a pair of operatives to keep watch on their room. Grace pegged them as former football players or professional wrestlers. Their expensive Italian suits strained across their shoulders, and both of them looked as if they could crush subcompact cars with their bare hands. Neither of them seemed anatomically capable of smiling.

Every few hours one of them—either Stewart or Erics, who could only be told apart because Stewart was gigantic while Erics was merely huge—knocked on the room’s door to verify that everything was all right. Grace had tried to engage them in conversation a few times, but to no avail. Evidently language skills had not been part of the job description when the Seekers hired them. A few times a day they brought food and beverages. However, Travis had made the mistake of saying they liked King Donut, and so at least twice a day that was what they got.

Holding a donut in his mouth, Travis moved to the window and peered out a narrow gap between plaid curtains. He bit off half the donut, swallowed. “They may be big, but I bet they’re slow. I say we can outrun them.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know.” Travis ran a hand over his freshly shaved head. “Aren’t you getting tired of waiting here? We could just find Beltan ourselves.”

Grace looked up at him, and he winced.

“You know, I think that evil eye of yours actually works.”

“I
am
a witch. Then again, what you’re feeling might have something to do with the fact that that’s your fourth donut in the last half hour.”

He slumped against the wall and tossed the donut into the wastebasket. “I know, Grace. I know we can’t go out. It’s just that he … I mean, they could be doing anything to him.”

Grace set down the crossword puzzle book. It was more than mere boredom eating at him, at both of them. “I’m worried about him, too, Travis. No, not worried—terrified. But the Seekers have resources far beyond our means. And as long as Duratek is looking for us, and as long as the police are looking for me, it’s not safe to go out there.”

“Maybe it’s not safe for us to look for him, Grace.” He turned his gray eyes on her—that unsettling seriousness again. “But what if it’s
right
? Both of us have … abilities that the Seekers don’t.”

Grace hugged her knees to her chest. It was true. They both had learned so much since they had last set foot on Earth. But this wasn’t Eldh, and while there were still a few shreds of magic left on this world, as far as Grace could tell they were exactly that: a thin, polluted trickle that had once been a great, primeval river. Magic was not going to help them, not here.

“I’m going to get some ice,” she said, grabbing a cracked plastic bucket from the nightstand. “We could both use a drink.”

Travis nodded. “I’ll get the bottle.”

Grace stepped onto the second-floor walkway, and the door of dented, orange-painted steel closed behind her with a heavy
chunk
. No wonder fugitives always picked motels to hide in. Metal doors.

The day had surrendered. Thick, purple air settled over the cars in the parking lot below. Above, fluorescent lights flickered spastically, filling the air with a sick light and a humming drone. A few late, lazy flies spiraled toward the glow. Somewhere out of sight children laughed, splashing in chlorine-rich water, while a woman called out in the wordless, angry, universal tongue of mothers. Motel twilight.

Bucket in hand, Grace moved along the walkway. At once she felt attention upon her, and she didn’t need to look back to know one of the Seeker operatives watched her through the tinted glass of the black sedan in the parking lot. Stewart—he usually staked out the front of the motel. Right then he was probably soiling his expensive, too-tight Armani suit and talking hotly on the radio to Erics stationed on the other side of the motel. Grace knew she wasn’t supposed to leave the room. But she was only going to the ice machine. Besides, the boys needed a little excitement once in a while.

She rounded a corner and found the ice machine lurking in a dim alcove, gurgling and rattling like an old man in a rusted iron lung. Grace positioned the bucket and pushed the lever. After several minutes and an inordinate amount of raucous groaning, the bucket had collected exactly six milky ice cubes. Good enough. Gripping the bucket to her chest, Grace headed back along the walkway.

The sounds of splashing had ceased. The pool was closed, the mother victorious, the children dragged back
inside, roughly toweled, set down on vibrating beds to eat hamburgers from a paper bag and watch TV. Traffic whirred beyond the motel’s overgrown privacy fence, and a crescent moon glowed like a half-shut eye.

Grace turned the corner, and the back of her neck prickled: the sensation of being watched again. She glanced down at the parking lot—

—and her forehead tightened in a frown. It was nearly dark now, but in the light drizzled by a single streetlamp she could see that the door of the black sedan hung open. So Stewart hadn’t been content to just sit and watch her. An indignation rose within her. Didn’t they know what she had been through, what she had survived? Who were they to watch her like this?

By force of will, her anger cooled.
They’re just doing their jobs, Grace. Why don’t you make it a little easier for them by getting back to your room?

Cinder-block walls and painted doors slipped by.

She was nearly there when she heard it: a low, snuffling-grunting sound. It reminded her of a dog, its nose stuck in something ripe. The sound emanated from the mouth of a dim passage that cut through this block of rooms, leading to a set of stairs on the back side of the motel. She paused before the opening, peered inside.

The first thing she saw were the shoes, toes up, their polished leather outlines glowing in the green light of an
EXIT
sign. They were large shoes, expensive-looking. She cocked her head, trying to understand what it was she was seeing. Then the fluorescent bulb overhead let out a staccato burst of light, and in the momentary strobe Grace saw everything.

The Seeker operative—Stewart, given his size—lay on his back, big hands splayed against the cement. A pool of blood slowly crept outward, and something spindly and hairy crouched over him, eating loudly out of the wet pit where his face had been.

A foul scent washed over Grace, metallic but sweet.
The ice bucket slipped from numb fingers and clattered to the walkway. One cube slid toward the creature, coming to a rest next to its long foot. It let out a snort and looked up, its short, wrinkled muzzle dripping. Bits of tissue flecked the matted black hair that covered its torso. For a moment Grace gazed into pale eyes that were far too large for the low, pointed head into which they were set. Then the thing blinked—a dull expression, sated—and bent back over its prey, cradling the dead man’s head in long, curving arms as it feasted.

Doors blurred past Grace with horrible slowness as she ran—three, four, five. Her fingers fumbled against the knob, then she was inside. She pulled the door shut, scrabbled like an animal for the dead bolt, slid it into place, then stumbled back. The edge of the bed caught her behind the knees, and she fell onto it.

Travis stepped from the bathroom, two chipped glasses in his hands, each filled halfway with scotch. “Did you get the ice?”

She looked up at him, licked her lips. “I think we’re in trouble.”

He stared at her. Then he set down the glasses, moved to the window, peered out.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” Her hands twisted the cigarette-burned bedspread into knots. “There’s something out there. A thing. It’s … it’s eating Stewart.”

He turned around, the blood draining from his face. “Did you say
eating
him?”

Grace gave a stiff nod.

“Shit, that’s bad.”

That was an understatement on any world. He moved to the bed, sat, and put his arm around her. It was stronger than she would have guessed, harder.

“What is it, Grace? What’s out there?”

It was difficult to breathe. She forced herself to fill her lungs slowly, knowing she was hyperventilating. Adrenaline buzzed in her brain, screaming at her in an ancient, wordless tongue to flee. But there was nowhere to go.
Be a scientist, Grace. Don’t feel—just describe
.

“I don’t know what it was. It was big, almost as big as me. Thin, elongated limbs, and fur. No, not fur—hair. Long, black hair on its body.”