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I hit the mute button as the coverage switched to a smaller scale incursion in Jakarta, where the Indonesian Army with no DIRT backup fired grenades to try to dislodge savik from the fissure. “Shit! Bryce, contact DIRT HQ and tell them to get word to Jakarta to stop firing grenades into the rift.” The locals were doing what made sense to them, but they were only going to make the rifts bigger. We needed liaisons in all the local militaries, but there was never enough personnel, never enough training, never enough time.
Bryce retreated to the living room to make the call. I sagged back into my chair. “At least we still have a world.” I sighed. “Even if it is getting demon smacked.”
“We’re going to need a lot more cookies,” Pellini muttered.
As I snorted in amusement, my phone rang. Detective Marco Knight of the NOPD. So much for the rift in New Orleans being just a rift.
“Hey, Marco,” I said. “Lemme guess, you have a bunch of demonic arrivals?”
“Huh? No. No demons. At least not with me.” The connection hissed and crackled from the ever-present arcane interference. “I, uh, had a feeling I needed to go out to Audubon Park.”
“No kidding?” I kept my tone light. Knight got hunches about stuff that usually turned out to be important, but he seldom enjoyed the results of his talent. “Did you find a pot of gold?”
“No gold, but about a minute after I got here, a guy appeared out of thin air. He’s stretched out on the grass naked as a jaybird. White male, olive complexion, black hair, dark eyes. Looks like he’s in his twenties.”
I massaged my temples. When it rained it poured. “Has he said anything to you? Like where he came from and how he got there?”
“Yeah, he muttered something I couldn’t understand except for Kara clear as day, then he passed out. Hang on, I’m sending you a pic of his face.” He made a frustrated noise. “I know I should call it in to NOPD dispatch and Fed Central, but I just . . .”
“No, I get it,” I said. He’d had a feeling. And I’d learned to trust Marco’s feelings. I peered at the picture, but nothing clicked. Hard to tell much with the potency distortion. “I hate to do this, but is there any way you can bring him here?”
“I was afraid you’d say that.” He let out a sigh. “Sure, I’ll do that. DIRT has the roads blocked off between here and the station anyway.”
“Thanks. I’ll save some cookies for you.”
“That’s more like it.”
Chapter 10
I wanted to nap. Holy cripes, did I ever want to nap, especially considering that I’d been called out at around five a.m. this morning. But there was shit I needed to do before I could rest. Hell, there was always shit that I needed to do, but some needed doing more than others.
A call to Idris went to his voicemail, which I totally expected considering I’d just watched him battle demons live. I left a quick message on the order of, “Saw you on TV. Looking sharp, and I want to know how you did that thing with the slingshot. Pellini cheered when you cleared the gun jam. Bad news is that rakkuhr is leaking through ground zero and the rifts, and it might be causing mutations. Call me when you get a chance.”
That done, I called DIRT HQ to report the locations of the various new rifts I’d spotted from the nexus. I was often able to give DIRT a head start by seeing disturbances in the flows before a rift actually formed, but this time, it was too little, too late. After that, I sent an email to the other DIRT arcane specialists telling them about the rakkuhr. Though I didn’t want to cause a panic by letting the general populace find out about an invisible magic mist that could mutate them, keeping this all to myself was impossible since the arcane users would see the rakkuhr for themselves. Besides, I wasn’t the only arcane user in the world who might be able to come up with an answer. Of course that meant I had to officially include the Feds in the loop, since I had absolutely zero doubt they were monitoring all of my communications. I therefore shot off a carefully worded email to the various powers-that-be to whom I supposedly reported.
My final task was to call Dr. Patel and the CDC to let them know what I’d discovered. Or I thought it was my final task. The instant I hung up, my phone rang from a number that had only called me twice before.
Gulping, I answered, “Good afternoon, Madam President,” and then spent a solid quarter hour telling the President of the frickin’ United States what I knew and didn’t know, and yes ma’am I completely agree that this would cause a huge panic if it got out, etc.
By the time I hung up I was so exhausted and wrung out that it took me several seconds to realize Jill was speaking to me in her mother hen naggy tone.
I blinked at her. “Huh?”
“Eat something that’s not cookie-shaped before you fall over,” she ordered, pushing me to sit at the kitchen table. In front of me was a bowl of gumbo. I didn’t think I had enough energy to even pick up the spoon, but after the first few bites, my body agreed that the whole fueling up thing was a darn good idea, and by the bottom of the bowl I had my second wind.
Good timing, since the gate guard radioed to let me know Knight had arrived with the mystery dude.
His car crunched to a stop in front of the house a minute later. I went out onto the porch and gave him a weary smile as he got out. He’d suffered a nasty ankle break in the valve explosion, so I was pleased to see that he’d graduated to an air cast.
“Thanks for doing this, Marco,” I said as I came down the steps. “Is he conscious?”
“No, thank god,” he said fervently. “The whole way here I kept muttering don’t wake up, don’t wake up. I could picture him coming to and freaking out, and then I’d get busted for not reporting it.”
Knight was risking his career by not following proper procedure—possibly even risking his freedom, given the current state of affairs. I owed him. “If this guy was saying my name, I don’t want Xharbek getting his hands on him.” I filled Knight in about my encounter with fake-Zack at the command center, then added a quick rundown on Cory’s situation and the plague victims.
“This is all so crazy. But for what it’s worth, I got nothing as far as intuition about my passenger.” His expression briefly shadowed. He didn’t like talking about his clairvoyance. “Anyway, come see your boy.”
Lying across the backseat was an unconscious man wrapped in a blanket, belted down with all three sets of seatbelts. I leaned in to take a look at his face then jerked back so quickly I cracked my head on the edge of the door frame. “Shit!” Heart pounding, I rubbed my head while I struggled to comprehend what I’d seen.
