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“Whatever you think is going to happen—” Theo began.
The man with the bat stepped forward and swung.
11
The bat moved so fast it cut the air, the sound raw and shredded.
Theo stumbled back. Too slow, his brain said. Too slow. The bat missed him, but only barely. The whiff of it passing felt like someone’s hot breath on his cheek.
Auggie shouted something, and a door slammed shut, and then the car alarm went off.
Out of the corner of his eye, Theo saw the men in masks—a rat and a werewolf—moving in. The rat went for the passenger door, while the werewolf, knife spinning like a carny doing a trick, came at Theo from the side. That was an old move, older than humans, ganging up, taking turns. It was going to be a dogfight, Theo realized. And the old part of him, the part that had fought on a hundred different nights, in a hundred different bars, with broken bottles and pool cues and chains and fists—the old part of him raised its head, sniffed the air. The old part of him, a far-off part of Theo, wanted to fuck around.
The one with the bat came again, but it was a feint, and Theo knew it. At the last moment, Theo turned toward the werewolf. The knife solidified, became the tip of a spear made out of the werewolf’s extended arm. The stab fell short of Theo. When he pulled back for another thrust, Theo stepped in. He closed the distance between them and punched the werewolf in the throat. The feel of the rubberized mask collapsing under the blow was strange. The secondary sensation, of muscle and cartilage compressing, was not. The werewolf gagged and hacked, falling backward, and the knife clattered against the asphalt.
Auggie was still shouting, and now Lana was crying and screaming, the sound distant and low. Some of that was the glass and steel surrounding her. Some of that was the thunder in Theo’s ears. He ducked to recover the fallen knife, and some combination of senses—the feel of displaced air, the hum of movement—alerted him. At the edge of his field of vision, the baseball bat came toward him.
Theo moved back, but not fast enough. The blow caught him on the shoulder, and it was like someone had shoved his arm into a bucket of ice. There was a faint, buzzing discomfort almost like a vibration, and then numbness. That’s not good, a part of his brain registered. The werewolf was still on his hands and knees, vomit burbling out of the openings in the mask, and the knife was still there, a little lick of light. The one in the ski mask stepped forward again, and Theo moved back. His ass connected with the Audi’s side panel. Lana was still screaming. There was a noise like a bag of sand hitting the ground, and Theo realized that had been Auggie.
Favoring his arm, Theo slid along the back panel. The one in the ski mask followed, matching Theo’s pace. The bat came up again, the way they taught you to hold it playing baseball. That said something, but Theo’s brain was too scrambled to make sense of it. All he knew, in that fuck-around part of himself that was awake and hurting and vibrantly alive, was it was a stupid way to hold a bat in a fight. You were trying to clobber somebody, beat their brains out; you weren’t trying to hit a knuckleball.
Risking a glance, Theo checked on Auggie. That awful sound of something hitting the ground had made Theo expect the worse, but Auggie was standing. It looked like the Audi was doing some of the work to hold him up, but he was standing. Blood stained one sleeve, and under the soft brown of his skin, he was pale. He had his fists up; he’d taken a lot of kickboxing classes, and dragged Theo to one or two of them, and Theo recognized the pose.
The sound of a step clipping the asphalt made Theo turn. The man in the ski mask tried to take Theo’s block off with a giant swing, and Theo dodged. The bat hit the Audi, and there was a popping noise as the side panel flexed. Theo repeated his maneuver from earlier, closing with the man. He cut the distance between them to less than a foot, putting size and speed behind the elbow he threw.
But the man with the ski mask was smarter than his friend—or maybe all that mattered was that he was bigger. He took the elbow center mass, and then he clubbed Theo on the side of the head with one big fist. The first blow rocked Theo to the side, but it didn’t take him down. The second one came in just as fast, and he hit the asphalt.
From a long way off, Lana was still screaming, and then the thud of something striking flesh came, and Auggie whimpered.
Theo tried to get up. A sneaker came out of the darkness, and then Theo’s mouth was full of blood, and he was down again, staring up at the purpling sky. A flock of birds, small in the distance, drew a dark vee like two brush strokes.
The man in the ski mask crouched next to Theo. He rested the end of the bat on Theo’s chest and said in a too-deep voice, “Stop asking questions.”
The birds had grown in Theo’s vision. They were spreading their wings, taking up the whole sky now like ink bleeding across a page. That was why, at first, he thought it was a dream.
“Hey, ass-breath.”
For a moment, Theo was sure he had blood on his brain, because that sounded like North.
“I don’t think you should say ass-breath.” And that was definitely Shaw. “It’s not polite.”
“Who cares if it’s polite? He’s a fuckwhistle. If he’s got ass breath, I’m going to call him ass-breath.”
“Well, right, I understand. But it might be a little bit, well, homophobic.”
“It’s not.”
“But it might be.”
“It’s not.”
“I don’t want to get into the weeds about this, but let’s say, you know, he enjoys getting his salad tossed. Maybe it’s with a man. Maybe he’s a dark, mysterious man with raven-black eyebrows and—”
“It doesn’t matter if he likes somebody eating his ass. I’m not talking about that.”
“You’re kind of referring to it.”
Some of the darkness in Theo’s vision folded again. The birds—if there ever had been any—had flown on. The asphalt was warm under his head, and the blood in his mouth made him want to be sick. He could see, now, that the man in the mask had gotten to his feet again.
