Summer, page 15
“No, it’s not. We have other things on our plate right now.” He punched some buttons on the cell phone, listened for a second. Then, “Brandy, where are you? Good, good. We’ll be there in a few minutes; just trying to get through traffic.”
After he hung up, he pointed at a stop light ahead, at Mission Boulevard. “Left on Mission,” he told her.
“Okay,” she said. She really did find his diatribe intriguing. When most people talked about the differences between older days and the present, she knew, they were only basing their opinions on what they’d read or heard. He had actually lived through the whole thing, though—the settling of America, the westward expansion, the rise and fall of global powers. He was history made flesh.
But thinking about his flesh made her mind veer in other directions, and she shook her head, not wanting to let herself get distracted with thoughts of that. Plenty of time later. Right now she had to drive a car. Daniel was on the phone again, with Rebecca this time, when Kerry made the left onto Mission.
Daniel continued to direct her, and she went where he told her to—left, left, right. Through Crown Point and across the bay on a narrow bridge, then they were on wide avenues and moving fast. Past Sea World, and eventually onto I-5, heading south, but then an abrupt turn onto I-8, going east. That way was the desert and the rest of the country, eventually. Kerry found herself wondering how far they’d go today. Was the witch finally leaving San Diego behind? Part of her gloried at that idea—it would be over then, for her.
But Daniel would go too, wouldn’t he? Continuing the hunt.
At Daniel’s urging, she sped up, and soon she had the other two cars in sight. They slowed a little, letting her pass, acknowledging her and Daniel as they did so.
And then she could see Season, up ahead, cruising along in her dark green car. Daniel put a hand on Kerry’s leg and squeezed. “No closer,” he said quietly. That made sense—if she could see Season, then Season could see them. She hung back.
In the city of El Cajon, a few miles east of San Diego, the green car exited the freeway. Josh was back in front by this time. He flipped on his turn signal and followed her, and the other two cars did the same. “It’s good we have three cars to work her,” Daniel said.” She obviously left Pacific Beach the hard way to try to spot, or avoid, pursuit. I don’t think she’s seen us yet, but she still might. We’ll need to be very careful on these roads.”
El Cajon was a small city, and traffic there was nowhere near as heavy as it had been back in San Diego. All three vehicles stayed well behind Season’s. Daniel was silent now, grimly focused on the Nissan ahead of them. The three chase cars did a dance, each taking the lead for a while, then falling back to let a different one move closer—never sticking to a pattern, but changing things up each time. Now and again one would pull into a parking lot, and then out again, or stop by the side of the road, only to pull back out after the other two had passed. The last thing anyone wanted was for Season to get stuck at a light long enough for them to catch up to her, to risk stopping right next to her or being obvious about holding back.
The streets Season chose became increasingly empty. She led them away from El Cajón s small downtown area, through residential neighborhoods where the streets were lined with small cottages or faded apartment complexes in shades of salmon or aquamarine. Overgrown yards, sometimes with cars parked in them, were not uncommon here. Fences tended to be chain-link, in various states of repair. Behind some of them, dogs stood guard or lazed in the sun. Being inland and therefore farther from the coast, El Cajon was even more brutally hot than San Diego, and there weren’t many people on the streets, but Kerry spotted a few, sitting on shaded porches or walking on the sidewalks under sun hats or, in one instance, an umbrella.
“You have any idea where she’s going?” she asked Daniel.
She could see his shrug from the corner of her eye. “No clue,” he said. “Up to no good, I’m sure.”
“Doesn’t that go without saying?”
The question was answered in another couple of minutes, though. Daniels cell rang, and when he answered, Kerry could make out Brandy’s voice, which sounded agitated. Daniel listened for a moment, thanked her, and disconnected. “She’s stopping,” he told Kerry. “Brandy and Scott are driving past, Rebecca and Josh are stopping behind her.”
“What do we do?”
The other cars had already turned a corner that Kerry had not yet reached. Daniel pointed to the parking lot of a strip mall, before the corner, on the left-hand side of the street. “Pull in there,” he said. “We’ll get closer on foot.”
She did as she was directed, parking in front of a taco stand, and they both got out. Daniel kept his phone in his hand. He punched a button. “Rebecca,” he said. “Where is she?”
He frowned as he listened to her response, then he put away the phone and looked at Kerry. “There’s an herbalist around the corner,” he explained. “She’s gone in there. Picking up supplies for some kind of spell, most likely.”
Anxiety gnawed at Kerry’s stomach, as if she’d swallowed a mouse. They were close now, as close as they’d been since that night in the kitchen when Daniel was too weak to give his all. A battle might be only moments away. She wanted it, ached for an end to Daniel’s long quest. But was he strong enough now? And if he wasn’t, what then? She hardly dared to imagine. “What now? Do we just go in there after her?”
“Three reasons why we don’t do that,” Daniel said. “One, we don’t know who’s in there. An herbalist may well be a cover for a witch, maybe an ally of hers. Two, we don’t know if she spotted us and is trying to lead us into a trap. She may be watching the street right now from inside, waiting for us to make our move. Three, we don’t know the territory. We’ve had no time to plan, to scout out escape routes, to know what cover there might be. Going in there now could be suicide.”
Kerry was confused. “Then why have we followed her all this way?”
“Because we found her,” he said simply. “We’re not losing her again. That just isn’t happening.”
19
But they did.
Season stayed in the shop less than five minutes. Kerry and Daniel made their way around the corner and had taken up positions in the recessed doorway of an empty, boarded-up storefront. They could see the Civic up ahead, and Season’s Nissan, parked right in front of a shop with a green painted sign that read HERBS ’R’ us: REMEDIES AND ROMANCE, and farther ahead, Scott’s RAV4. But Season’s abrupt reappearance took them by surprise. Daniel and Kerry both had to turn away from the shop, facing into the doorway of the vacant store. They stayed there until they heard engines starting, and then the squeal of tires as Season pulled hurriedly away from the curb.
As soon as she was gone, Daniel grabbed Kerry’s hand. “Come on!” he urged. His phone rang, and he answered it as they ran for the car. “I know!” he shouted. “Stay on her!”
By the time they were back in Daniels Taurus, though, Kerry once again driving, Brandy had called to tell them that Season was gone.
She had made a quick right at the first corner, then a sudden left into an alley. Scott hadn’t wanted to be so obvious as to follow her down the alley while she was still in it, so Brandy called Rebecca, intending for that car to go straight instead of making the right. She and Scott would go past the alley and then left, and whichever way Season turned when she reached the alley’s end, one of the cars would be near by.
Except what Season did, apparently, was to go partway down the alley, then back out and go back down the original street, in the opposite direction. Both cars were more than a block away by this time, and Kerry and Daniel, who had started at a disadvantage, weren’t close enough yet to catch her.
“Do you think she saw us?” Kerry asked after Daniel explained what had happened.
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe she’s just being careful. She would know that if anyone had been following, her few minutes in the store would have given them time to catch up, maybe even lay a trap.”
“I guess it wasn’t her trap, though,” Kerry observed.
“I called it wrong,” he admitted. “Couldn’t be sure, though.”
“Better safe?”
“Exactly.”
“So what now?” she wondered.
“Back to 1-8,” he said. “As fast as you can. Let’s assume she’s heading back home, and not away from the city.” He began punching buttons on the phone. “I’ll tell the others.”
Ten minutes later, they had her again. She had taken a roundabout way back to the freeway, apparently hoping to shake anyone tailing her. Rebecca and Josh were the farthest back, and when they saw her coming up fast behind them they called the others. Daniel and Kerry pulled off the freeway all together, so she wouldn’t recognize them when she passed. The other two cars stayed on her, and Kerry just reentered at the same place, so within a very few minutes they were all behind her again. Kerry felt a powerful sense of relief, as if it was all over.
Which, of course, it isn’t, she thought. It hasn’t even really begun.
Forty minutes later, having gone back into Pacific Beach through La Jolla—prompting Daniel to point out that she hadn’t taken a direct route anywhere—Season was back on Emerald, with Josh and Rebecca not far behind. She made a right on Everts, and pulled into the driveway of a small clapboard bungalow, at the corner of the alley that ran up the block between Emerald and Felspar—Pacific Beach’s east-west streets being named after minerals. This time, Rebecca and Josh drove past, and the other two cars stopped a block away.
“Isn’t that more or less where you picked her up in the first place?” Daniel asked when they called in the report. He listened, nodding, then said, “Okay, sit tight. We’re on the way.” He made another quick call, telling Brandy and Scott to stay where they were, motor running, just in case. Then he turned to Kerry.
“Okay, drive past the house. Not too fast, not too slow. Just like you’re out for a drive with no special destination in mind.”
“But won’t she see us?” Kerry wondered.
“She might,” Daniel said. “If she’s looking. Chance we have to take. I need to check out her place.”
He sounded a bit too casual about it for her tastes, but Kerry did as she was told. She pulled away from the curb and drove at a slow, steady speed past the bungalow. Its exterior walls were painted white, with brown trim. A front porch seemed to sag under the weight of an old overstaffed chair that had suffered the elements for too long. A screen door was closed, but the heavier door behind that stood open. It looked like the kind of place a college student might live in, Kerry thought, or a young professional still a long way from her potential earning plateau. Not one of the world’s most powerful witches. She wasn’t sure where the Season of her imagination might live—a gingerbread house or a crumbling castle surrounded by thorn trees, maybe. The yard of this cottage was dried out, mostly dirt with a few hardy weeds, but no thorn trees. The only thing she saw that suggested Season at all was over the door, where a small bundle of greenery had been tacked.
“Is that a charm of some kind?” Kerry asked. “Above the door?”
“Keeps us out,” Daniel explained. “It’s a ward”
“Really?” Kerry couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice. “That little bunch of leaves can keep you out of a place?”
“Its not just the leaves,” he said. They had passed the house now, but he kept looking at it until he couldn’t see it anymore. “It’s what they represent, how she prepared them, and the way she put them up. Those leaves, properly prepared and blessed, have the power of the trees behind them. Strong enough to stand through the ages, limber enough to survive wind, structured to use rain instead of being worn away by it. With her help, the power of the trees is transferred to the bundle, and then applied to the whole house. I could no more walk in there right now than I could step through a redwood tree.”
“Somehow I didn’t think a little thing like that would be beyond your abilities,” Kerry said, mostly joking.
But Daniel took it seriously. “I didn’t say it was,” he rejoined. “It just takes some preparation.”
Rebecca, Josh, Brandy, and Scott were assigned to keep an eye on the bungalow while that preparation took place. Kerry drove Daniel back to their apartment, way down in Imperial Beach, phone on his lap the whole way in case they called to say she was on the move again. But the phone remained quiet.
Kerry was uneasy about leaving the others behind. The fact that they didn’t call was no consolation—what if Season had somehow caught them unaware and done the same to them that she’d done to Mace? She could have called them, but that could be the same as demonstrating a lack of trust in them. She would have felt much better if Daniel had been able to stay close. But that wasn’t an option, he assured her. He had work to do, work that couldn’t be done until he knew just what they were up against.
The first thing he did when they got into the apartment was to borrow her laptop, plug it into the phone line, and get on the Internet. There he went to a Web site that provided satellite views of any address in hundreds of cities, and called up the location of Season’s bungalow. “The photos aren’t all that current,” he said. “But they don’t have to be. I just want to see the area, not try to spot her through the roof or anything.”
When he had zoomed in as far as he was able to online, he gazed at the image for a while. It lost clarity as it got closer, Kerry noted. And they didn’t have a printer, so all he could do, she figured, was to look at it on the screen. But he asked her to find a piece of blank paper, and she rummaged through her belongings until she did, a brief letter from her aunt Betty, written on only one side of the page. Daniel spread the paper out flat on the tabletop and then put his hands on the computer screen. He spoke a couple of words in a language that Kerry didn’t know, and then touched the paper.
As if it had run through a color laser printer—or as if by magic, more accurately, Kerry thought—the image that had appeared on screen transferred to the paper. But looking at it more closely, she realized that it was much more distinct now, that somehow in transferring it, Daniel sharpened it. Now it could have been a photo taken from a few hundred feet up, if that, showing the bungalow, its yard, and the houses and streets around it in crisp detail.
She was astonished. “If you could patent that, you could give Microsoft a run for its money.”
Daniel shook his head. “Witches have gone up against Bill Gates before. He still wins. We’re not all-powerful, you know.”
He turned back to the image he’d made, and studied it. A couple of times he pointed out features to Kerry—the way the fence at the back of her place was leaning in one spot, suggesting weak support posts there; the fact that a neighbor’s house behind hers was unfenced so that there was access to Emerald through that property. He traced his finger across the picture like a general planning a military campaign, which Kerry figured wasn’t too far from the truth. For the most part, though, he was silent, working through details in his head without sharing them. Kerry knew that if he wanted to share, he would, and that quiet contemplation was probably more important right now.
When he finished with the picture, he excused himself and went into the room he shared with Josh. “I’ll be in here for about twenty minutes,” he said. “Don’t come in, no matter what you might see or hear. I’ll be fine. What I’m going to do isn’t dangerous, but it’s necessary, and it might sound unpleasant from the outside.”
He gave Kerry a last kiss and closed the door. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and stood by the open front window, grateful for whatever breeze slipped through. The apartment was just small enough to be stuffy on these hot days, and though they got a decent cross breeze at night, during the day the air outside wasn’t much of a relief. I always heard San Diego was supposed to have perfect weather, she thought. She had found out, though, that while it was mostly pleasant, it was far from perfect. She’d learned about June gloom, during which the beaches stayed socked in by overcast skies most of the day, so travelers who had come from far away for the fabled southern California coastline were disappointed by gray, cool days. July had been about as good as it gets, with warm, sunny weather all the time. Even August had started nice, but these last few days had reminded her that San Diego is essentially a desert, albeit one close to the ocean. She hadn’t seen a drop of precipitation all summer, which cemented that impression.
Musing on the climate was just one way she tried to ignore the sounds that issued from Daniel’s room. The first noises she heard were just strange—deep-sounding bells, like cowbells or heavy wind chimes, with a low moaning sound twining through them. But the sounds quickly became more disturbing—the moan less like wind, more like human voices, then turning to a keening wail, a mourning sound. When Daniel’s voice entered the chorus, in evident agony, Kerry started to rush for the door. Remembering his warning, she kept herself from throwing it open, but it took every ounce of will power. She went back to the window.
When he screamed again, she turned away and crossed to the bathroom, running water full force in the sink, wetting a washcloth and laying it over her face. She pressed the corners against her ears, trying to keep all noise out, to amplify the blood she could hear in her own head, drowning out everything else.
Finally he emerged. He looked like he’d been through hell. His cheeks were drawn and pale, with red splotches on them. His eyes were glassy and unfocused. It looked like he might have blow-dried his hair in a wind tunnel. Kerry went to him and grabbed his hands, which were clammy “Are you okay, Daniel? What happened in there?”
“I’m fine,” he replied. His voice was a dry rasp that sounded like it reached her from some faraway place.
“But … what … ?” She didn’t even know how to finish the question. It was obvious to her that she needed to know more about this whole business before she would know what to ask. He tugged absently at his hands, and Kerry released them.
