“You’re a good man, Waldo. I like you. I respect you. I think you’ll figure it out.”
A long silence followed.
“Andi’s waiting on me to eat,” he said. “I’d better get going.”
“Okay,” Karrin said. “Thank you again.”
“I . . . Yeah, sure.”
Footsteps. The front door opened and closed. A car started up and then drove away.
I sat up in bed, and fumbled until I found Karrin’s bedside lamp with my right hand. The light hurt my eyes. My head felt funny—probably the result of being bounced off of walls. I’d lost my shirt, again. Butters had added some more bandages and the sharp scent of more antibiotics to my collection of medical trophies. My arm had been bandaged again, inside its aluminum brace, and the brace was held in a sling tied around my neck.
I got out of bed and wobbled for a minute and then shambled across the floor to the bedroom door. Karrin opened it just as I got there, and stood looking up at me, her expression worried.
“God, you are turning into a monster,” she said. “A mummy. One bit at a time.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Ish.”
She pursed her lips and shook her head. “How much of that did you hear?”
“Everything after his usual ‘I’m not really a physician’ disclaimer.”
Her mouth twitched. “He’s just . . . He’s worried, that’s all.”
“I get it,” I said. “I think you handled it right.”
That drew a sparkle from her eyes. “I know I did.”
“Batman?” I asked.
“He’s been . . .” She folded her arms. “You-ing, I suppose. With you gone from the city and Molly gone, the streets haven’t been getting any safer. Marcone’s crowd have taken up the fight against the Fomor, whenever their territory is threatened, but their protection costs. Not everyone can afford it.”
I grimaced. “Dammit,” I muttered. “Damn Mab. I could have been back here months and months ago.”
“Waldo does what he can. And because he has the skull, that’s more than most.”
“Bob was never meant to be used in the field,” I said. “He’s a valuable resource—until he attracts attention to himself. Once he’s been identified, he can be countered or stolen, and then the bad guys get that much stronger. It’s why I tried not to take him out of the lab.”
“The Fomor started taking children last Halloween,” Karrin said simply. “Six-year-olds. Right off the streets.”
I grimaced and looked down from her steady gaze.
“We’ll sort something out,” Karrin said. “You hungry?”
“Starving,” I said.
“Come on.”
I followed her to the kitchen. She took a pair of Pizza ’Spress pizzas from the oven, where she’d had them staying warm. They had almost settled onto the table before I started eating, ravenous. The pizza was my favorite. Not good, but my favorite, because it had been the only pizza I could afford for a long, long time, and I was used to it. Heavy on the sauce, light on the cheese, and the meat was just hinted at, but the crust was thick and hot and flaky and filled with delicious things that murdered you slowly.
“Present for you,” Karrin said.
“Mmmmnghf?” I asked.
She plopped a file folder down on the table beside me and said, “From Paranoid Gary the Paranetizen.”
I swallowed a mouthful and delayed getting another long enough to ask, “The one who found the deal with the boats last year? Crazy-but-not-wrong guy?”
“That’s him,” she said.
“Huh,” I said, chewing. I opened the folder and started flipping through printed pages of fuzzy images.
“Those are from Iran,” Karrin said. “Gary says that they show a functioning nuclear power plant.”
The images were obviously of some sort of installation, but I couldn’t tell anything beyond that. “Thought they had big old towers.”
“He says they’re buried in that hill behind the building,” Karrin said. “Check out the last few images.”
On the last pages of the folder, things in the installation had changed. Columns of black, greasy smoke rolled out from multiple buildings. In another image, the bodies of soldiers lay on the ground. And in the last image, up on the hillside, which was wreathed in white mist, or maybe steam . . .
Three figures faced one another. One was a large man dressed in a long overcoat and wielding a slightly curved sword in one hand, an old cavalry saber. He carried what might have been a sawed-off shotgun in the other. His skin was dark, and though his head hadn’t been shaved like that the last time I’d seen him, it could really have been only one person.
“Sanya,” I said.
The world’s only Knight of the Cross was standing across from two blurry figures. Both were in motion, as if charging toward him. One was approximately the same size and shape as a large gorilla. The other was covered in a thick layer of feathers that gave an otherwise humanoid shape an odd, shaggy appearance.
“Magog and Shaggy Feathers,” I muttered. “Hell’s bells, those Coins are slippery. When were these taken?”
“Less than six hours ago,” Karrin said, “according to Paranoid Gary. The Denarians are up to something.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Deirdre said that Tessa was supposed to be in Iran. That makes sense.”
“In what way does that make sense?”
“Nicodemus wants to pull a job over here,” I said. “He knows there’s only one Knight running around. So he sends Tessa and her crew to the other side of the world to stir up major-league trouble. Let’s say Gary’s right, and Iran has a nuclear reactor running. And something goes horribly wrong with it. You’ve got an instant regional and international crisis. Of course a Knight gets sent to deal with it—where he can’t get to Chicago, or at least not in time to do any good.”
Karrin took that in silently, and I went back to eating. “So you’re saying, we’re on our own.”
“And the bad guys keep stacking up higher and higher,” I said.
“The Genoskwa, you mean,” Karrin said.
“Yeah.”
She shuddered. “That thing . . . seriously, a Bigfoot?”
“Some kind of mutant serial killer Bigfoot, maybe,” I said. “Not like one of the regular Forest People at all.”
“I can’t believe it,” Karrin said.
“It’s no weirder than any number of—”
“Not that,” she said. “I can’t believe you met a Bigfoot and you never told me about it. I mean, they’re famous.”
“They’re kind of a private bunch,” I said. “Did a few jobs for one, a few years back, named River Shoulders. Liked him. Kept my mouth shut.”
She nodded understanding. Then she got up and left the kitchen, and came back a moment later with her rocket launcher and an oversized pistol case. She set the rocket launcher down and said, “This will take out something Bigfoot-sized, no problem.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again. “Yeah,” I admitted. “Okay.”
She gave me a nod that did not, quite, include the phrase “I told you so.” “I like to be sure I’ve got enough firepower to cover any given situation.” She put the case on the table and slid it over to me. “And this is for you.”
I took the case and opened it a little awkwardly, using mostly one hand. In it was a stubby-looking pistol that had been built with a whole hell of a lot of metal, to the point where it somehow reminded me of a steroid-using weight lifter’s gargoylish build. The damned thing could have been mounted on a small armored vehicle turret. There were a number of rounds stored with it, each the size of my thumb.
“What the hell is this?” I asked, beaming.
“Smith and Wesson five hundred,” she said. “Short barrel, but that round is made for taking on big game. Big, Grey, and Ugly come
s at you to make another friendly point, I want you to give him a four-hundred-grain bullet-point reply.”
I whistled, hefting the gun and admiring the sheer mass of it. “I’ve got one broken wrist already, and you give me this?”
“Ride the recoil, Nancy,” she said. “You can handle it.” She reached out and put her hand on the fingers of my left hand, protruding from the sling. “We’ll handle it. We’ll get this thing with Nicodemus done, and get that parasite out of your head. You’ll see.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve got a problem there.”
“What’s that?”
“We can’t kill the parasite,” I said. “We have to save it.”
Karrin gave me a flat look and, after a brief pause, said, “What?”
“We, uh . . . Look, it’s not what I thought it was. My condition isn’t what we thought it was, either.”
She eyed me carefully. “No? Then what is your condition, exactly?”
I told her.
* * *
“Come on,” I said. “Get up.”
She sat on the floor, rocking back and forth helplessly with laughter. Her plate with its slice of pizza had landed beside her when she’d fallen out of her chair a few minutes before, and hadn’t moved.
“Stop it,” she gasped. “Stop making me laugh.”