Unbearable (7 page)

“I wouldn’t drink the water in the pool,” Nick advised. “That will likely make you sick, too, but not for the same reasons.”

At home, Nyanther used the pool at the YMCA. The pool in the hotel had a waterslide, which he had wanted to see for himself.

Tally recomposed herself. “I was thinking, this afternoon…I don’t know where it came from. Well, perhaps I do.” Her face shadowed. “I don’t have a will.”

I sat up, giving myself time to think of a reply. There were very dark, unhappy thoughts behind that statement.

“You really don’t need one while Damian and I are here, you realize?” Nick said quietly.

“I would give you everything I have,” Tally said with a shrug of her shoulders. “That’s about six hundred dollars and my mother’s best china set, that Damian doesn’t like, anyway. Riley makes a difference, though.”

“You know that this trip to find Lirgon is a fool’s errand, don’t you?” Nick said sharply.

She gave him another stiff smile. For the first time I consciously noticed how much weight she had lost lately. There were the faintest signs of dark marks under her eyes. She wasn’t sleeping, either. “I think everyone but Nyanther thinks this is a complete waste of time. It was good to get out of New York, though. Nyanther is seeing the countryside and sitting in the car all day is giving me time to think. Forcing me to think, actually. I haven’t done a lot of thinking for a long time and that’s why I haven’t thought of this until now.”

I made myself say it. “If anything happened to you, you know perfectly well that we would take care of Riley.” I hesitated. “We’ll even keep her out of the business. Have her grow up a normal human.”

“Of course you would. That’s not what I’m talking about,” Tally said with a touch of impatience. “Nick, you killed the last of the Stonebrood Clan in 1873, just over a hundred years ago. Gargoyles were taken off the official hunter list after that. Everyone thought they had gone. Then they came back.”

“They came back because Azazel resurrected them. It’s completely different,” Nick pointed out.

“Yes, I know,” she said with the same touch of asperity. “What’s to stop him doing it again?”

“You,” Nick said with icy calm. “Seven years ago. You drove an iron curtain rod into his gullet. Or so Carson told me. I wasn’t in a state to witness it, although I wish I had.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as being—I don’t know—
too
easy? It was Azazel, one of the most powerful demons known to hunters and humans, both. He’s been around since history began. And little Natalia Grey is the one who rids the world of him with a curtain rod and a sachet of salt?” She shook her head. “I might have wounded him. Badly wounded him, even. Only, what if he comes back?”

“What if he does?” I asked. “As you said, he’s lived through all of recorded time and he was doing something in all those centuries. If he does come back, he’ll go on doing whatever it is he does, which could be a long way from here.”

“I don’t have enough ego to think that he’ll come gunning for me to avenge himself,” she replied. “In the grand scheme of things, I’m a passing blip, a temporal human life that means less than nothing to him. Yet I keep reminding myself that he’s a
demon
. They don’t think like we do. They’re essentially immortal, just like you two. You’re closer to human than demons are and even I have trouble understanding the way you think, sometimes.”

“You think he’ll come back for you, anyway?” Nick asked.

“I think that if he has all of time to play with, he might find it amusing to spend a few years toying with me and mine, just because we inconvenienced him once.”

I didn’t have anything to say in response, because she was right. Demons were chancy and unpredictable. They didn’t think in human terms and because they were demons, they lacked the empathy and compassion that drove most other creatures.

Tally rethreaded her fingers together. “That’s what I was thinking about today,” she said. “About how Azazel might come back. About how, if he really wanted to mess with me, he could simply regenerate the gargoyles and make us go through this all over again.”

Even Nick had no response. We both sat there, trying to find something reassuring to say and failing.

“And then, I thought about how this whole business started,” Tally added. “It had nothing to do with me, in the beginning. It was all my father’s project, to investigate the demonic activity that later turned out to be Azazel himself reanimating gargoyles. Azazel killed my father…well, his gargoyles did, but I’m sure it was under his direction. Azazel didn’t stop there, though. He came after my father’s family. Me.”

Nick cleared his throat. “Riley,” he said simply.

“Riley,” Tally confirmed. “
My
offspring.”

I made myself breathe. My head was thick. I needed oxygen.

“I might live to be a hundred and two,” Tally said. “And I might get hit by a bus tomorrow. I don’t know how to be anything other than a hunter, so the chances are the bus will hit me before I start going gray. Besides, this isn’t something I can put in a will, even if I had one.”

“You want us to protect Riley,” Nick said. “If Azazel ever comes back.”

“I know you will do that anyway,” Tally said. “I still want you to promise me, here and now. I want you to swear that no matter what happens, if Azazel comes back, if the clan is raised again, you will make sure that Riley survives. No matter what,” she added fiercely.

“No matter what happens,” I said. “We will.”

“Nick?”

“Of course I will. With my life, if I have to.”

Tally relaxed. This time, her smile was more natural. “Thank you.”

“You should sleep,” Nick added. “It could be a long, useless day tomorrow.”

Florida, even in January, was warm enough that we could forego our coats and parkas and not look ridiculously out of place. Even Tally stripped off her outer layer and looked up at the blue, sunny sky before dropping sunglasses into place.

Nyanther looked around curiously while unconsciously plucking at his sweater. It was the first time he had experienced southern climates and land that looked considerably different from Scotland’s misty moors and glens. He sniffed, sampling the air, which was rich with the smell of green, growing things. His old instincts were making him wary.

We had found the road-side diner that Miguel had directed us to and Miguel arrived only a few minutes later, his dilapidated Buick belching blue smoke into the air.

“You drove that from Miami?” Nick asked Miguel as he climbed out of the car.

In the last two days, Nick had become more like his old self. He even teased Nyanther about his new interest in all things technological, including thick magazines devoted to electronics that he had spent most of the journey from New York reading. Now he was giving Miguel hell about his car.

Miguel grinned unabashedly. “I paid cash for it,
amigo
. Now I owe no one. Just gas for it to run, that is all.”

“You’re not insured?” Nick asked curiously.

Miguel glanced around, checking for strangers who might be listening. He did it without turning his head. “Insurance is for those with papers, Nicholas.” He patted the hood of the DeVille. “Or those with too much money.” He waved everyone toward the diner. “Let’s eat, my rich friends!” He plucked Riley out of Tally’s arms and bounced her on his hip and up into the air over his head, laughing as much as Riley did.

Miguel ate enormously, while we all ordered coffee and watched. Even Tally declined to eat, which she had been doing more and more often lately. Finally, Miguel burped heavily and sat back with a satisfied sigh, tousled Riley’s curls and dug a crumpled map out of his jacket pocket.

We cleared the table and he spread the sheet. It was a finely detailed map of Ocala county and there were crosses in blue ink scattered over the map. This was a typical hunter tactic—track reports and sightings, group them on a map and head for ground zero, where the sightings were most heavily clustered.

Miguel pointed to the thatch of crosses to the east of Ocala itself. “Ocala National Forest,” he said. “Lots of water, lots of limestone cliffs and trees everywhere,” he added. “Just one problem.”

“Tourists,” Tally said.

Miguel pointed at her.

“Even in January?” Nick asked.

“Hey, even the
bonita
is wearing shades, man,” Miguel pointed out. “This is Florida. It don’t get cold here.”

“The numbers of people will be fewer than spring or fall, I’m sure,” Tally said. “Besides, we can’t wait. Now is as good as it gets.”

I didn’t feel any happier than Nick looked. People complicated matters. People made the work far more dangerous.

As the waitress arrived with fresh coffee, Miguel put the map away, making it look casual. He chucked Riley’s cheek and looked around the table. “I, too will be a parent in the summer.”

“That’s wonderful, Miguel,” I told him. “We didn’t know you were with anyone.”

“We got married, Thanksgiving weekend,” Miguel said, grinning broadly. He leaned forward. “Tricky, though. These days, the government wants more and more proof of who you are.”

Nick studied him soberly. “We have documentation,” he said gently.

Miguel shook his head. “No,
amigo
. You just
think
you do. These days, one sheet doesn’t cut it. They want two or three and they have to have a photo. Use to be, you could use someone’s birth certificate to get a social security number, or a social security number you lifted from some poor sap to get a job. It don’t work that way now.”

Nick didn’t answer. Because he had been prudent with money throughout his life, the need to get a job or account for himself in any official capacity had never been a great priority. Neither had it been critical for me. Basic IDs were easy to come by, but even we had found it more cumbersome over the last decade or so. Oscar, who had been a lawyer, had often nagged us about setting up more fool-proof identities, for the same reasons that Miguel was expounding now.

“It’s the computers,” Nyanther said suddenly. “The government uses them to cross-check. If something doesn’t match across all the departments, it flags attention.”

I knew very little about computers, except that they were big, expensive and only the government and multi-nationals could afford to use them. “They would use computers to hunt down illegals?” I asked, amused. “Isn’t that like swatting a fly with an atomic warhead?”

Miguel sighed and sat back. He’d given up.

Nyanther was the one to answer. “
Everything
will be run by computers, sooner or later,” he said. “No one will use actual money anymore. There will be computers in every store that take your details and take the money straight out of your bank account. I was reading about it on the way down.”

We were all staring at him in amazement. I tried to imagine what it would be like to stand in front of a big tin computer silo at the bodega on the corner of our block and couldn’t do it.

“Not use money?” Tally said dryly. “Impossible.”

“Paper money,” Nyanther insisted. “Coins you can touch. It won’t disappear overnight but eventually, we’ll use computers more than we use cash.” He glanced around casually. There wasn’t anyone very close because it was still mid-afternoon. “Miguel is right. Once computers start talking to each other and cross-checking everything, if your driver’s license doesn’t have the name on it that the computer says it should, people will start asking questions. It will get harder and harder to prove you’re a legitimate human.”

That Nyanther, who had been tipped into the twentieth century less than a year ago, was the one telling us this was ironic. Perhaps it was
because
he had just arrived here among all the fantastic and mind-bending things like airplanes and central heating and flushing toilets, that considering an impossible-to-imagine future came easier to him.

Tally got to her feet and bent to unstrap Riley from the high chair. “People will always need money,” she said flatly. “It’s the only fair medium of exchange.”

She was impatient to begin and coaxed all of us back out to the cars. It was a simple thirty minute drive out to the forest and I relaxed a degree or two when we saw very few cars on the highway.

The parking lot was similarly unpopulated. There were three other cars, all parked at the end closest to where the trails started. Nick automatically picked a bay as far away from the other cars as possible, which put us close to the entrance. Miguel pulled up next to him and he hauled yet another map out of his pocket. This one was a map of the park itself, with the trails and facilities outlined clearly.

There was a single trail running right down through the center of the park. Miguel pointed to it. “That’s the Florida Trail. Goes from one end of the state to the other. We’re here.” He pointed to the Juniper Springs Recreational Centre. Then he scored a cross in red pencil, just north of where the main trail did a big kink around something that wasn’t marked on the map. “There. Off the main trail, right among the big cliffs.”

“Sounds promising,” Nyanther said. He looked at Nick. “Still think this is a bear?”

“They do.” Nick nodded to where the trail began. There were placards nailed to trees warning people of bears in the area and suggesting they avoid leaving the trail for any reason and to carry pepper spray and bells with them.

Miguel snorted. “It’s January, man. All the bears are asleep.”

I think even I jumped in surprise. I had forgotten that bears hibernate, too. That made a difference. A
big
difference.

“It’s a couple of miles to get there,” Miguel added. He looked at Tally. “Maybe someone should stay back here with the little one?”

I kept my mouth shut. On any other day I would have volunteered. I was the default caregiver because Nick and Tally were uniquely talented and the only ones who could do this. Only, I’d promised to help Tally any in way I could to find Valdeg and Lirgon and now I had even more reason to want this whole gargoyle business finished, done and over with. I wanted Nick undistracted and guilt-free. I wanted him back.

Nyanther shifted uneasily. “I suppose….” he began.