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“Kara! Thank god,” he said, agitated. “You all right? Is Vince?” The connection warbled and clicked, but I could make out his words. “I haven’t been able to get through to anyone.”
“I’m okay. So is Pellini. Cory evacuated the station.” I paused. “It’s a mess down here.”
“I should’ve been there.” Whatever else he said was lost in a burst of crackling in the connection.
“Where’d you go?”
“My mom called from a phone booth,” he said, voice thin and stressed. “Begged me to come for her. Told me she was at Mighty Mort’s, and I had to be there in ten minutes.”
The truck stop was a good five miles away. With or without permission, she’d called to make sure her son was out of the danger zone. “She wasn’t there?”
“No! She left a note in the phone booth. Said she and my dad were okay.” Anger and frustration and exhaustion laced his voice. “They knew, but—”
Poor guy. “Boudreaux?” Nothing. “Boudreaux?” No signal either. Arcane residue interference. At this rate it would end up with its own acronym. Sorry, honey. Couldn’t call to tell you I’d be late. ARI is bad tonight.
I hiked myself onto the hood of a puke green Buick that sported four flat tires and watched emergency crews work with amazing efficiency around me. There were pockets of confusion and misdirection, but that was to be expected when dealing with the inconceivable. As far as I could tell, the workers were all locals from Beaulac and St. Long parish. Made me proud to be a native. They’d done plenty of training, but I doubted if more than a handful had ever worked a mass casualty incident.
Doubt surged through me. Should I have let Cory try to arrest Katashi and his people? If he’d intervened, would disaster have been averted, or would Cory be dead now?
No. I could play the What If game until the end of time, but it wouldn’t change a damn thing. I’d made a decision based on available information. I never could have guessed how high the stakes truly were.
My attention drifted to the triage crews as they moved through the area with rolls of colored tape clipped to their belts. I didn’t envy them. They had to make hard life and death decisions to prioritize the use of available resources.
Green tags were easy. Ambulatory. Those victims could walk themselves to the designated field treatment area.
Yellow. Delayed treatment. That was for victims who couldn’t walk out on their own but didn’t need immediate emergency care. Serious but not life-threatening, such as a broken leg.
The assignment of Red and Black tags was where it got hard. Red meant top priority needing immediate emergency care. Salvageable given the resources available. Black meant lowest priority. For deceased, a black tag was a no-brainer. A lowest priority black tag on a live victim was another matter. The victim was alive but, in the judgment of the emergency worker and an impartial algorithm, too injured to survive given the available personnel and equipment.
I watched as a crew member crouched by Jerry Steiner’s body, checked to see if he was breathing, then placed a strip of black and white striped tape on his shoulder before striding off to check the next victim. “Buh-bye, asshole,” I muttered.
A familiar voice cut through other racket. Marco Knight. “I’m fine! Leave me alone.”
What the hell was he doing here? His clairvoyance must not have warned him of a Giant Arcane Disaster. I pushed off the car and ran out into the street to see the NOPD detective, pale with concrete dust, sitting on a hunk of granite that used to be part of the City Hall façade. A first responder wrapped a red strip around his wrist and trotted away. Blood matted Knight’s hair and darkened the side of his face. He tried to stand, but swayed and sat again.
“Marco, you need to stay put,” I told him.
“I’m fine. Shit.” Knight struggled to fix his gaze on me. “Kara? It’s time. The place I took Pellini. The place I showed you by Ruthie’s Smoothies. It’s time.”
“Something’s happening there?” Fucking hell, like we didn’t have enough to deal with already.
“Right now.” He grabbed my wrist, and his eyes went wide and wild. “Now!”
“All right,” I said and patted his hand. “As soon as we can—”
Naus
ea struck, accompanied by a freaky low-level buzz in my bones. In the parking lot, Idris tumbled to his side and curled in a fetal position while Bryce doubled over. A few emergency workers staggered or puked or clutched their bellies. Pellini stood straight and alert as if listening for a sound as quiet as the whisper of butterfly wings.
Right before I was first summoned to the demon realm, an arcane gate destabilized, causing ten minutes of headaches, nausea, or vertigo for anyone in Beaulac with even a touch of arcane talent. Clearly something similarly big was happening at Ruthie’s—and Pellini with his Kadir imprint didn’t seem to be affected. Can’t we get a break for five lousy minutes?
The nausea stopped as if a switch had been thrown. The buzzing in my bones remained, but retreated to the edge of perception within seconds.
Knight used his grip on my wrist to haul himself upright but collapsed to the pavement before he could fully straighten. I knelt beside him, only now seeing that his right foot was twisted at an unnatural angle. “Don’t move,” I ordered and cast a frantic look around for anyone. “I’m going to get help.”
His fingers dug into my wrist. “The twelfth,” he gasped with an edge of desperation. “The twelfth!”
My heart thudded. “Is something about to happen with the sigil?” I groped my lower back with my free hand. Unremarkable. I hadn’t felt anything with the sigil since the bean tapped it.
