“Open the door behind me. Get in the back.”
Brown’s lower lip trembled. “You’re not going to…kill me…are you?”
Raymond forced another of those fake smiles, hoping this one would be more convincing than the last. “Of course not. I just need to talk to you. I need your help, Brown. I’m not here to commit a crime. I’m here to stop one.”
Brown still didn’t look convinced, but he was too frightened to do anything other than what he’d been told. Raymond tracked him with the barrel of the Glock as he reached for the door behind Raymond, opened it, and slung his considerable weight inside. The Jaguar bounced slightly as his butt hit the seat.
Raymond twisted in his seat and aimed the gun through the gap between the front seats. “Close that door.”
Brown stared at the gun. The door stayed open. He looked at Raymond. “You can’t stop her.”
Raymond sighed.
Until now he’d harbored a small shred of hope. Hope that he could convince Brown of the threat facing Rockville’s students. That he could talk the man into helping him put a stop to it. But she’d gotten to him first, and probably long ago. It was a smart move on her part. Probably every member of the security staff had been corrupted. It would make things harder than he’d already expected.
“I’m sorry, Brown.”
He leaned through the gap between the seats and plunged the Glock’s barrel deep into the man’s big belly. Terror spurred Brown into action. A meaty fist arced toward Raymond’s head, made contact with his jaw at the same instant his finger squeezed the trigger. The blow sent him crashing against the dashboard. His head wobbled and the gun slipped from his fingers, landing on the Mossberg box. Everything went gray for a few moments. Panic gripped him when everything snapped back into focus.
He groped for the fallen Glock.
He had to stop Brown before he could raise the alarm.
But Brown wasn’t going anywhere. He was dead, his body slumped forward on the backseat. Blood leaked from the hole in his gut. Raymond glanced around, expecting to see other members of the security staff bearing down on the Jag. But there was no one in sight. He hoped Brown’s soft belly had muffled the sound of the blast. Maybe it had. His ears were ringing, but that could be attributed to having his bell rung by Carter Brown as the man’s last mortal act.
A renewed sense of urgency got him moving again.
He could hear the seconds ticking away in his head again, loud and resonant like the ticking of an old grandfather clock.
He reached between the seats and shoved Brown’s corpse aside, then crawled into the back and pulled the door shut. He didn’t spare the body a glance as he returned to the front seat. Three people had died today at his hands, either directly or, in the case of Cindy Wells, indirectly.
He chose to think of these deaths as necessary sacrifices.
God’s way of steeling him for the greater violence to come.
He started the Jaguar, put the car in gear, and headed toward the other side of the school.
It was 12:30.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
It was 12:45.
Or maybe 12:49.
The Camry’s digital dashboard clock made it difficult to tell. One of the little LED filaments had given up the ghost some time ago. Five could be nine nine. Eight could be six. Numbers like three or four weren’t a problem. It was easy to connect the digital dots, so to speak. But with the problem numbers the only thing you could do was wait another minute to see which way the little glowing bars would rearrange themselves. The necessary time passed while the others piled into the Camry.
Jake watched the clock as he put the car in gear and backed out of Stu Walker’s driveway.
The clock moved forward a minute.
12:50.
Damn.
Jake changed gears again and hit the gas. The Camry sped down the narrow residential street. But this was not a time for caution. The situation was urgent. This he’d realized after only a few additional minutes of conversation with the kids back in Stu’s kitchen.
They were with him now, bunched together in the back.
Jordan, Kelsey, and Will.
Kristen sat next to him, riding shotgun. He almost laughed at that. He wished she did have a shotgun nestled in her lap. Their only weapons were handguns. The Glocks the boys were carrying and Stu’s.38. Kristen had retrieved it from a closet shelf in Stu’s bedroom. It looked like a cannon clutched in Kristen’s smallish hands. Looking at her, he wished again she’d stayed behind, but she’d been adamant about accompanying him, and there’d been no time to argue.
He slowed down at a three-way stop. A quick scan in either direction revealed no oncoming traffic, so he executed a quick right turn without coming to a full stop.
He straightened the car out and looked at the clock again.
12:51.
That sense of urgency intensified. Time seemed to be moving faster. He imagined the hands of a clock moving in a fast-forward circle, minutes falling away like seconds. No. Faster. Like tiny fractions of a second. The thought roused the paranoiac within him. He’d seen things that challenged his concepts of reality. He thought again of Lamia and what these kids swore she could do. Things he no longer had any reason to doubt. And if she could do those things, was it possible that she could speed up time, or at least somehow alter the way they perceived the passage of time?
No.
He was willing to believe a lot. She was a demon. Okay. She had powers. The ability to bend people to her will by reaching into their minds. She was strong. Powerful. Almost inconceivably ancient. But even a demon would not have the power to alter the rules of time and space. He had to calm down and concentrate on the reality of the situation. Focus on what he knew and what he could do. A surrender to irrational panic would only serve to further Lamia’s goals.
He made another hairpin turn and checked the rearview mirror. The kids looked as if they were nearly as afraid of his daredevil driving as they were of the demon. Their faces were ashen, their eyes wide. Jordan sat between the boys. Her hands clutched the edge of the seat between her legs. She was holding on for dear life. And she looked not at all like a person capable of levitating a human being merely by concentrating.
“Kelsey!”
The taller of the two boys flinched at the sound of his name. He looked at Jake’s reflected eyes. “Yeah?”
“Tell me again about your idea.”
“I’m not sure it’ll work. It was just something I read in a book on ancient mythology. Could be just a lot of ancient bullshit.”
They were out of Washington Heights now and headed down a wider avenue. Traffic heading into town was thicker than he would have imagined for this time of day and so he was forced to slow down. He resisted the almost overpowering temptation to weave recklessly through the tiny gaps in traffic. With his luck, they’d sideswipe an SUV or Hummer and crash, go down in an inglorious blaze. Or worse, a cop would try to pull them over. He shuddered at the possibility. There were so many ways an encounter with the police could lead to unmitigated disaster. He had two armed fugitives in his car. He could be arrested as an accomplice or accessory. Or the cop might turn out to be loyal to Lamia. Guns would be drawn. There would be shooting. Death. Maybe even his own.
Shit.
He glanced at the rearview mirror again. “That might be true, Kelsey. But we’re gonna have to roll the dice here. We’re damn near out of time and options. So tell us again what the book said.”
Kelsey shifted in his seat and shot an uncertain glance at Will. “The book says you can’t kill a demon. They’re immortal. There’s nothing we can do about that.” He paused as he glanced at Will again. The other boy nodded and Kelsey continued: “The only way to get rid of the bitch is a banishment spell. It would expel her from the mortal realm. Maybe send her to hell or some other dimension, fuck, I don’t know. The book wasn’t real clear on that part.”