I smiled back as I sniffed at the air, which was too still to catch more than a skein of Ian’s scent, but I determined it led north, back into the center of town. I filled my lungs and blew south. Then I waited.
“Your wig’s crooked,” a helpful onlooker said.
I straightened it as sound erupted behind me. Joaquin appeared seconds later, and as predicted, swung south. I raised my conduit and shot. He stepped forward, and the arrow whizzed past him. Somebody screamed. Joaquin put a hand to his ear-just clipped, dammit-and whirled my way as I raced forward. I caught him with a kick to his solar plexus, and spun to plant my right elbow in the center of his face. He went down again as hands grabbed me from behind.
Time for some girly moves. I rammed my heel into the foot of one guard, then nailed him in the temple, and when his grip slipped, spun to grasp the neck of the other. I had time to register the surprise on his face before my knee came up, his head went down, and he joined his partner in la-la land. Then, before any more backup could arrive, I ran, and this time I didn’t stop.
Dodging the sirens already screaming toward Valhalla, I abandoned the main thoroughfares for little-used roadways where rock and bramble sprouted up between potholes and busted-out streetlights. At one point, when I sensed I was getting closer to Ian, but with no clear passageway to the other side of Flamingo Road, I had to skirt two chain-link fences and run along the freeway, car horns honking as they blew by me in the opposite direction.
When I finally reached the corner of Tumaric and Pollack Street, the desperate terror infusing Ian’s pheromones was so strong I could practically see it. The olfactory trail broke off at an abandoned warehouse framed in concrete and chipped pink stucco, accessible by only one door.
“I know this place,” I whispered, circling it twice just to make sure this was it, while drawing my conduit. I’d seen it before, but more, I sensed it. A psychic smear blanketed the building like a mental chalk outline. It was thin now, the kill spot tinny with age, but the hereditary thread of the one killed here was well known to me. “Stryker.”
Was this a deliberate choice by the Tulpa? Did the location have some increased meaning or power, because Stryker died here? Or because it had been Joaquin who’d killed him? Or was it just a random building, useful because it was both central and abandoned, and nothing more nefarious than that?
I sighed. Sometimes it sucked being the new superhero on the block.
Still, super is as super does, so I kicked in the steel-plated door and ducked aside as it crashed to the ground, waiting for gunfire, booby traps, or whatever else the Tulpa had tucked in there along with Ian. The silence deafened. Not even an alarm to cut through the night. “Ian?”
Still nothing. I was sure he was in there…but if he was dead, if those leaky, fearful pheromones were phantom scents, I was going to be pissed. And heartsick. The Tulpa would know that, I thought with a sick twinge.
“Ian,” I tried again. “It’s me! Olivia!”
A scratch of movement, and if whimpers could sound hopeful, this one did. “O-Olivia?”
I sighed in relief. “Is anyone in there with you?”
“No. No, they left me alone.” His voice raised an octave. “I’ve been here for hours. Please help me.”
“I will, Ian. Just tell me…are there any alarms that you can see? Booby traps? Cages?”
“No, nothing. Just me, and I’m tied up. Please hurry.”
Well, you’d think I’d do just that, wouldn’t you? After all, I was the one who’d gotten Ian captured, kidnapped, and trussed up like a sow at the county fair. But just because it sounded like a nerdy computer geek, and smelled like one-and presumably looked like one-didn’t mean it was necessarily so. Just because he said there were no agents waiting to ensnare me didn’t mean they weren’t there.
I took a deep breath and peered through the doorway. The dim interior matched the nightscape outside, so I didn’t need time for my eyes to adjust. I stared, then stared harder, before tilting my head wonderingly. “How clever.”
Besides a cement floor, concrete walls, and a steel-beamed ceiling dotted with shattered and tilted light fixtures, the building was entirely empty. Ian sat dwarfed in a room a quarter the size of a football field, hunched in a steel chair that must have lost its comfort about half a second after he’d been tied there. They hadn’t gagged him, knowing nobody would hear his cries on a lonely night in a warehouse the city had all but forgotten. His face was tear-streaked, eyes wild as he looked at me from behind shattered glasses, and his shirt bloodied from a fat lip. And tousled wouldn’t even begin to describe his hair. I had to get him out of here before Joaquin arrived.
But first I had to make sure this was really Ian. “Name the event you were supposed to compete in this weekend.”
“You’re not Olivia,” he said slowly.
“Oh,” I unpinned the red wig from my head, tossing it in a corner as I smoothed back the wisps of blond, sweaty hair that had escaped from my bun. “See?”
He started screaming for me to get him out of there, rattling the chair’s screwed-in base with his bound hands and feet, head upturned like a baby bird’s in the nest. He had about as much chance of getting free like that as I had of being the next Mrs. Brad Pitt.
“Answer the question first,” I told him, raising my voice to be heard over the racket. “What’s the marathon called?”
He snuffled a few times, and calmed down enough to ask why.
“Because I have to make sure you are who you say you are.”
“Olivia-” he protested, and I lifted my conduit, pointing it at his forehead. He stuttered off into silence, and the smell of urine immediately joined the nervous sweat. Which answered that question.
“Sorry,” I said, tucking the weapon at the small of my back. I used the light from the horizontal windows ratcheting the roofline to guide me as I hurried toward Ian. Frankly, I was already thinking of all the ways I’d make Warren eat crow when I returned to the boneyard with the cure for the virus. I’d just decided to go easy on the old guy when the world erupted in a flash of light and I was tossed backward, sparks singeing off my skin as I landed so squarely on my ass, the concrete reverberated up my spine. There was a shimmer in the air, like water flowing between two sheets of glass, and a single rectangular panel appeared before me like it’d been conjured from nothing. Twice my height, both vertically and horizontally, I didn’t have to touch it again to know it was impenetrable. Gradually the glimmering lessened, and half a minute later it was invisible again.
But it was still there.
“Fuck,” I muttered, rubbing my ass, and that was a sincere understatement. The Tulpa’s maze was here, intact, and Ian-seemingly a mere two hundred yards away from me-was at the center of it.
“What was that?” Ian said, eyes still fixed on the spot where the wall had appeared.
“Not was. Is. That’s your cage, honey,” I said, backing up to study the layout. As much as one can study an invisible force, that is. Ian’s bindings were just for show. The real hurdle was in getting to him, and I was sure the Tulpa had gotten a charge, literally, out of my running up against his mental minefield. “So that’s his game.”
Now I was sure Joaquin had done something to piss off the Tulpa. Because dear ol’ Dad, fond of intricate puzzles and mental games, was playing with both of us. Hopefully that would unnerve Joaquin enough to have him second-guessing himself into fatal distraction. Even so, I still had to get in…and there was no telling how many electrified walls I had to touch just to find the entrance.