Page 9
CHAPTER 9
Breaking the wall turned out to be less of an issue than the trolls chasing after me. After scrambling over the rubble I’d made, I sprinted across the lot and yanked open the pickup truck’s rear cab door. “Uh guys? We have a problem.”
“Is it an Adam Vex and the seven dwarves chasing him kinda problem?” Zee said, spotting the problem through the windshield, charging fast toward us.
“Uh, there’s nine,” I panted from the back seat. “And they’re trolls, Zee, not dwarves.”
“Fuck, right. Wow, they look angry. Like cute angry yard ornaments.”
“With guns,” Victor added.
“Uh, guys, actually, that’s not our problem.”
“It looks rather like a problem,” Victor said, eyeing the incoming trolls.
The lead troll pulled a gun and fired at the truck. A neat little hole appeared in the windshield.
“Yikes!” Zee squeaked. “Drive, vampire! Like your fangs depend on it.”
Victor gunned the truck’s rattling engine and lurched us out onto the road. But the mafia trolls changed direction, heading for their much faster and shinier trucks.
“Can’t you eat them?” Zee asked me. He glanced behind me, through the back window.
“Not near the gas station, unless you enjoy out of control explosions?”
“Okay, so... we lure them away,” he thought aloud. “Back out into the leech-infested neverglades and you can eat ’em there? They look crunchy.”
“I would suggest that eating every problem we encounter is not going to help when we plead our innocence to Agent Leomaris regarding the unfortunate trail of murders we’ve already left behind.”
“Alleged murders,” I added for clarity.
“Some folks were definitely murdered,” Zee also added, for even more clarity.
I eyed the string of trucks in the side mirror. Their high beams latched on and lit us up. “This Skrinde guy really wants our attention. Maybe we should trying talking to him?”
Victor’s side-eye suggested he perhaps wasn’t too keen on that idea. “Talk to the drug lord whose son I killed?”
“By accident.”
“I doubt he’ll be concerned with whether it was an accident or not.”
We didn’t have many options. “We talk, or we murder all these guys too, I guess. Because they don’t look like they’re going to stop anytime soon.”
“They started it,” Zee said.
“Did you at least call Leomaris while inside the diner?” Victor asked, skidding the truck off the main road, onto a dirt track that hopefully led somewhere remote so I could get my dragon on without too many witnesses. I still planned to try and talk us out of this, but eating them all was a strong—and let’s face it, likely—Plan B.
“Uh, well, that’s the real problem I mentioned. So um... there’s another Adam.”
The truck hit a rut in the road and rattled us in the cab like peas in a can. Victor wrestled the wheel, but eventually wrangled the truck back under control, bouncing it through and around potholes.
“Apologies. I became momentarily distracted by the terrain. Adam, repeat your statement,” Victor asked.
“Yeah, so, there’s another Adam at home. A me, but also not me.”
“That doesn’t make sense, my dear.”
“I know. ... but I saw him on the TV. He looks like me, talks like me.”
“Cosplay?” Zee suggested. We’d seen some convincing Adams at the Stephanie Hotel’s LARP weekend.
“No, I don’t think so. A real, actual Adam Vex.”
“What the fucking fuck?”
“That’s what I thought... Or you know, sorta.”
“The loup-garou,” Victor said, then looked at me in the rearview mirror. “She’s not dead.”
“Yeah... I figured it was her too.”
“How can she not be dead?” Zee exclaimed. “She fell all the fuckin’ way down that cliff.”
“Shapeshifter.” Victor’s face gathered all the shadows, making his dark eyes shine.
Zee huffed a laugh. “So she just sprouted wings and fuckin’ flew away?”
“Exactly.”
“Wait... She could do that? Shouldn’t you have planned for that, Your Highness?”
“I was aware it was possible, but it did not occur to me that in her final moments she’d have the wherewithal to shift. I assumed she had plummeted to her death.”
“You assumed ? You do know assumed makes an ass outtah you and me, right?”
“We all thought that,” I said, and scowled over my shoulder at Zee. Zee rolled his eyes and flopped back in the seat. Facing Victor again, I could see the frustration on his face. “It’s alright, it’s not your—alligator!”
The truck’s lights highlighted the track ahead, and the biggest alligator I’d ever seen. Which wasn’t saying much as I’d only ever seen one, but this one was real big, and in the middle of the road.
Victor yanked the wheel, veering the truck wildly left. Headlights lit up a swathe of trees we were definitely about to crash into. The truck’s nose dropped, we plowed down a bank, and dove into the swathe of black swamp. The windshield exploded. Water and glass surged in, and swirled around us, quickly rising. My legs were soon underwater, then my waist.
Zee poofed . Gone for a second.
The water surged higher, slurping up my chest.
Victor turned in the driver’s seat, reaching for me.
Zee tugged open the door and yanked me out.
“Wait!” I spluttered. Victor... What about Victor? It all happened at once—so much, so fast. Water bubbled and snarled, as though boiling around the truck, sucking it under.
I swam away from the splashing, groaning, glugging noises, and clambered up a bank. “Victor?—”
The truck vanished below the water with a final glug, and so did Zee.
A few seconds later, Zee reappeared next to Victor, who looked like one of those fancy dogs with long hair you see prancing around posh dog shows... that had been thrown into a swamp. He spluttered, and waded over, face peppered with weeds.
Oh dear... Vacations were definitely not our thing.
“I quit,” Zee said, flopping onto the bank. “I hate this place. I’m done. If there’s a fuckin’ bloodsucking leech anywhere on my glorious body, imma cry. And nobody wants to fuckin’ see that.”
A rattle of metal had all three of us peering up the bank toward the road, where the high beams from the fancy trucks highlighted a line of trolls pointing guns down at us.
Chatty troll smirked. “Mr. Skrinde would like a conversation.”