Viljo…
“Oh holy fuck.” I scrambled up out of the hard plastic chair, sending it across the sterile tile floor with an obnoxious screech. “Marty, I need your keys! Cole, can I steal your phone? I need the
GPS.”
Marty handed over his keys, but not without looking to my brother for confirmation first. That hurt a bit. Hurt even more when Cole held his phone just out of my reach. “Where are you going?”
“Can’t tell you, but I’ll be back in like five hours.” Hopefully. “If you guys manage to get Mira on the phone, have her call me on yours.”
“Why the hell can’t you tell me?” Unspoken in Cole’s question was the fact that, after all of this, I was keeping even more secrets? Really?
But what I’d managed to remember, slow study that I was, was that Viljo, dear, geeky Viljo, lived near Pikes Peak. Pikes Peak, which was barely two hours from where I stood at that very moment. And at all costs, no one else could know where the uber-dork was, ’cause if they found him, they’d find Grapevine. And then they’d find all of Ivan’s champions, if they didn’t already know.
“Because anything I tell you, someone can take from you, probably involving horrific torture and a lovely vacation somewhere very hot. Glare at me all you want, little brother, but I’m not budging on this one.” The whole champion game had changed in the last year. I felt this to the core of my being. We-all of us champions-had tried to pretend like it hadn’t, tried to go on with business as usual. But it was the thing we never talked about, the demonic elephant in the room. Somehow, we puny humans had stumbled into something much bigger, and even if I didn’t know what it was yet, I could feel it looming near, like a rabbit in a hawk’s shadow. We had to take precautions, things we’d never dreamed of before. We had to cover our asses, which meant first and foremost protecting Grapevine.
Finally, Cole handed over his phone, but he wasn’t happy about it. I figured I was in for a lecture later.
I delayed my trip long enough that my buddies could grab their packs for anything essential. Pulling Cole aside one last time, I told him, “If anything goes wrong, do not let that big furry son of a bitch touch Zane. If he touches the kid, he’ll turn him into one of those things. At all costs, he can’t take the kid.” Cole nodded like he understood, and I took off, paintball marker in the seat beside me, aired up and loaded with holy ammo.
Driving Marty’s Suburban was like maneuvering a garbage barge after driving my little Mazda pickup, but I’d manage. I knew Viljo’s address, since we’d mailed him Mira’s dead computer earlier this summer, and I plugged that into Cole’s phone and pointed myself south.
The problem with long drives is that it gives the mind too much time to wander. Mine, of course, kept going back to the Yeti, and I scratched at the black marks on my skin a few times. It didn’t itch, really. It burned like hell, sinking in, but that passed quickly. Mostly, it was just the knowledge that it was there, y’know?
I made myself look straight ahead, trying to be a conscientious driver and all, but there was that insidious voice in the back of my head, the one that was whispering all the horrible crap that was going to happen to me. Pretty sure that going into a battle fully expecting to lose was a bad thing.
But I knew damn well that the last time I’d faced him, I’d been only lucky.
That wasn’t entirely true. I mean, I had skill, even back then. No brains, that’s for damn sure, but I could swing a blade. If I hadn’t been good, he’d have ripped me in half before I’d taken two steps.
The kicker was, that thing that cornered us up at the cabin, that wasn’t what I’d fought, last time. He was… bigger. Stronger. Just
… more. He couldn’t have handled his little zombie army, back then. Couldn’t have stood up to Axel, even if I had no idea who and what Axel really was. The Yeti was a thug, then, not a master.
Still, I’d been lucky.
It was my second challenge, ever. A local television reporter that Cole had known. Sold his soul for his fifteen minutes in the TV spotlight, I guess. He was dying, when Cole brought him to me. He actually passed away a few months after the fight.
At that point, I hadn’t asked Marty to make my armor yet, so it was just me and my sword, and balls the size of boulders. I really thought I was hot shit.
Will had been there, the first time I ever asked him for help. I didn’t expect to need it. My first challenge had gone so smoothly. My second one… did not. If he hadn’t been there afterward to duct tape my guts in, I’d have bled out on the spot. Lucky, see?
I guess it could have been worse. I mean, I held my own for about half an hour before I realized the Yeti was just toying with me. Like a cat batting a mouse around. I imagine I had amused him greatly. Scrawny little human darting around with his big flashy sword. I’d scored a couple of hits on him, blight trickling out, but nothing big enough to take him down, nothing crippling enough to finish it. I figure he’d let me have those strikes, just to see what I was made of.
The moment he decided he was bored, it was all over. Even as huge as he was, he moved faster than anything I’d ever dreamed of. This vicious flurry of claws, flying at my face, at anything I couldn’t defend with a single blade. I clearly remembered the last feint, flowing into a block for a strike that wasn’t coming, and knowing, knowing, I’d been had.
He picked me up like a bowling ball, sinking his claws into my ribs. Some act of divine providence kept my sword in my hand, and I forced myself to open my eyes when I felt his fetid breath on my face. He sniffed at me, and obviously found me wanting. Those jaws, bristling with fangs the length of my head, opened up, and that’s when I opened his throat. I let him hold me up, feeling my own weight fracturing my ribs on his claws, and slashed the big furry neck almost to the spine.
I was covered in blight, freezing and numb, and I remembered hitting the ground. At that point, I didn’t really care. It was warm there, lying in a pool of my own blood, and the stars were very bright that night. I remembered being vaguely annoyed at Will for blocking my view at one point. And then I didn’t know anything until weeks later, when I woke up in some ICU with more tubes and monitors than NASA.
You can understand why I wasn’t anxious to use that particular strategy again. Not like it was an option. The Yeti would never let me get that close again, never pause to gloat. He was going to rip me into tiny Jesse kibbles and that would be the end of that.
The scars down my ribs itched too, again more a product of my mind than any actual physical cause. There were details about that long-ago fight I was pretty sure I had wrong, things I’d blocked out, or forgotten or whatever. But what my waking mind couldn’t remember, my sleeping mind did. I’d dreamt of the Yeti ever since, and every single time, he killed me with little to no effort.
Contemplation of my own impending doom got me as far as Denver, where I was forced to stop for fuel and something that vaguely resembled a cheeseburger. By the time I got the big truck full, I’d promised myself that I’d find something else to think about for the remainder of the trip, even if I had to resort to singing show tunes. Luckily, I found a radio station that played classic rock, turned it up to a level even I could hear with my damaged eardrums, and I was on the road again.
Another hour saw me in Manitou Springs, ready to crush Cole’s phone into tiny electron particles. Yes, I understand that GPS systems are only as good as the data that’s been entered into them, but when it kept telling me that Viljo lived in a Taco Shack, I was pretty sure it was wrong. I mean, it would be brilliant, not having to leave the house for food and such (if Taco Shack counted as food, which was debatable), but I didn’t think even Viljo was that much of a shut-in.