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“And what’s this Old One, and a ring—”
Standing, Cross held up a hand. “I really don’t have time to explain, and, with some things, it’s just better to live in ignorance.”
Grossman followed him to the front door. “You seem to be making accusations against Marshall Hanlin,” Grossman said. “Let me tell you, even though I’m a member of a different tribe, Marshall Hanlin is a good man.”
“I’ll have to take your word on that, Doc. I just know there’s been some bad shit going on in his mission.” Cross pulled open the door. “Thanks for the phone.” Cross opened a button on his shirt, reached into the money belt and extracted a fifty.
Grossman stared at it. “I can’t . . .”
“Yeah. You can.” He pressed the bill into the doctor’s hand and pulled open the screen door. The fireflies were back, darting through the grass.
“Who are you? Really?” The man’s voice followed him into the darkness.
Cross looked back. “That goes back to your earlier question, and like that one, it’s complicated. Too complicated in the time we have.” Cross touched fingers to brow in a brief salute. “Take care, Doc.”
He was walking down the road when a wave of terror and pain washed over him. It was so unexpected that it shattered his control and he gorged on the torrent of raw emotions. He sensed another feeder also sucking at the feast. He regained control, stopped feeding, and lost all sense of the other. He kicked into a run, dust from the road spiraling up around him, came around a final turn in the road, and saw the mission on fire. There were desperate cries from the men trapped inside.
Heavy storm shutters had been closed across the windows. A large board barred the front door. Cross lifted it out of the brackets and flung it aside. He threw open the door, and a blast of heat scorched his face, singeing his mustache and hair. In the distance, he heard the hectic ringing of the bell on the fire truck. They’ll be too late, he thought. Power pulsed through him. He tried never to use it, so as not to fray and bend this world’s reality. But someone or something was feeding on this conflagration. If he could save the men trapped inside, he would deny his enemy power.
He stretched out his power, and now he sensed the tear in the world, felt the call and pull of the other multiverse. Cross ignored the siren call and instead summoned the fire. It rushed to him like an obedient dog. It filled the hall, and he formed it into a ball, keeping its heat and destructive power from the wooden walls. He walked into the charred hallway, stepping over a burned body. Not everyone would be saved. The fire followed him, a glowing balloon. Cross pushed open the set of double doors to reveal a makeshift chapel. Rows of chairs, a raised stage that held a podium and an old upright piano, a wooden cross hung high on the wall.
The rip was on the back wall. It was small; the Old One was no longer holding it fully open. Cross pushed his fingers into the wood of the wall, opened the gap a bit wider, and thrust the fire into the other dimension. Eat that, he thought, with some satisfaction.
THE BUTCHER’S BILL WASN’T TOO BAD. THERE HAD BEEN THIRTY MEN IN THE mission. Four had died; two more would not survive their burns. The rest would recover. Cross spent a tense six hours at the jail telling and retelling his carefully edited story. His New York PI license was no help, and probably a detriment, but eventually the cops decided that he couldn’t be charged with arson.
Cross hung around after he was released and managed to talk to a few of the ambulatory survivors. All had been sleeping and only a few had wakened when the fire took hold. Drugged, Cross thought, and was glad his inhuman metabolism didn’t respond to most earthly agents.
It was clearly arson. The building reeked of gasoline, and the closed storm shutters and the bar on the back door and the one Cross had removed from the front left no doubt. Now the police just needed a suspect. With Cross alibied by the doctor, the bulls cast about, and another suspect came easily to hand—the mongoloid who worked at the mission and was found sleeping in the tool shed, surrounded by empty gas cans. Of Sister Sharon and her strutting factotum, there was no sign.
Cross tried to point out that this seemed very convenient. What kind of arsonist set a fire and then went to sleep at the site of his crime? But the bulls dismissed his arguments. The suspect was retarded. Of course he’d behave stupidly. Besides, this was easy and clean. The idiot was going to fry.
Cross tried to just shrug, find a train schedule, and head to Chicago, but the prayers, beliefs, and actions that had split him off from the creature that had become Jaweh and Allah, and the Jesus of the Crusades and the Inquisition, left him unable to walk away. Do-gooding was a damn nuisance, but it was burned into his deepest fibers, and it couldn’t be resisted.
He went back to the smoking ruins of the mission and searched the shed. The gas cans had been removed, and the dirt floor was scuffed with the prints of the cops’ shoes, and drag marks where they had rousted the mongoloid. Various tools were suspended from hooks set into the gray wood walls. There was a small table with smaller hand tools and jars filled with nails, screws, and nuts.
On a bench beneath the table, Cross discovered a mug still half-filled with a dark liquid capped with a lighter skein. He sniffed. Cocoa. It looked like the idiot had been saving half for later. He searched further and found another footprint that hadn’t been obliterated by the bulls. Squatting down, he studied the toe print, and the divot left by a high heel.
He pulled out the bench, sat down, and contemplated the situation. Sharon had encouraged him to touch the ring. She had gone to the hobo jungle and brought the men back to the mission. Needing bodies for the sacrifice? She had sent Cross away even though she knew full well he hadn’t started that fight. And she had been in the tool shed. To deliver the cocoa? And the men sleeping in the mission had been drugged. Why not the mongoloid too?
Cross had assumed that Sharon was a victim of her husband’s sorcery. Now a new, darker theory arose—that Sharon had summoned the Old One. To prove that, Cross needed to find the woman, and he had a pretty good idea where she was headed. But first he had to clear the idiot. Only one question remained; had the cocoa also been laced? He knew a doctor who could provide the answer.
Dr. Grossman came through. The cocoa had been doctored with a sedative. Enough to “put down a horse,” in Grossman’s words. The word of the doctor was enough to get the mongoloid released. Knowing that the mansized child would starve without care, Cross gave the doctor a couple of hundred dollars and asked him to “hire” the man. Then he bought a train ticket in Tulsa and headed for Chicago. He had considered finding an airfield and chartering a plane, but the train took longer, giving him more time to rest and prepare for the coming battle.
The blasted fields of Kansas rolled past the train’s windows. They should have been high with wheat, but years of drought had reduced once-verdant farmland to a desert. Cross watched windblown dust heading east, as dark as storm clouds. The dust engulfed the train, turning the sun into a red cinder and day into eerie twilight.
It was a good thing he didn’t believe in omens.
CHICAGO WAS FILLED WITH POLITICIANS, WHICH MEANT IT WAS FILLED with hookers. Barely disguised speakeasies did a riotous business, and jazz and dance music filled the night. Cross walked down Madison Street toward the Chicago Stadium. It was the largest indoor arena in the world, and the massive redbrick structure reminded Cross of a glowering toad squatting on the landscape. Delegates streamed toward the doors, ready to hear another round of speeches in support of the three leading candidates—Al Smith, John Garner, and Franklin Roosevelt.
The people glittered from the magic that flowed in their veins, but he had yet to spot the Roman fountain that marked Sharon Hanlin. He had come straight from the station to the stadium, thinking that he might just spot her in the crowd and do . . .
What?
Remove the ring, for starters. Figure out what it trapped, because it sure as hell wasn’t her.
And how are you gonna do that? It knocked you on your ass the one time you tried.
He decided to abandon the haphazard search and report to Conoscenza. Cross waved down a taxi and told the driver to take him to the Palmer House. He wasn’t sure how Conoscenza had managed it, but he had booked a room in the ritzy hotel. The lobby was cavernous and dominated by a ceiling mural depicting scenes from Greek mythology. Cross glanced up and found himself staring at Zeus. A real son of a bitch, that one. It wasn’t until he had met Conoscenza that Cross discovered what had happened to the Old One. A paladin recruited by Prometheus (yet another of Conoscenza’s identities) had taken down the god.
