Tall, Dark and Hairy (The Necro-Files Book 3) Page 6

  I smiled because that was sweet and because even though he was famous and must’ve had girls throwing themselves at him, he was still shy and decent. That deserved a kiss, so I gave him one. From then on, we were cool. Which was cool.

  * * *

  After we ate, we went back to the venue and watched other bands with Quasi and C Note. Bevan and a couple roadies joined us. Shizknit proper wasn’t playing for a couple days.

  Quasi invited me to go for a hike in the mountains nearby, which was the best idea I’d ever heard, since we’d been eating all this southern cooking and I felt sluggish from the starch and fat. Quasi drove Emily’s car for a good half hour until we reached an empty parking lot beside a lake. Aside from the parking lot, this was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen in real life. The water stretched out far into the distance and was ringed by mountains all around. Fog settled onto the massive peaks and there was so much verdant foliage—trees everywhere, covering the mountains. I expected hobbits to pop out at some point. We climbed out on stiff legs and started down a trail.

  “We’ve got to watch out for bears.” Quasi pointed to a tree whose bark had been shredded off. “Bear sign.”

  That stopped me. “Seriously? I’m not about to get eaten by no bear.”

  “It’s OK. They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  He smiled and kept going. It was him and me and C Note and Emily. We’d split up into couples to walk. After a mile, it felt like we’d descended into some secluded tropical rainforest, even though we were on a marked trail (which is how I knew we’d gone a mile). I couldn’t hear the traffic or any manmade noise. Quasi moved ahead of C Note because he said Emily was too loud.

  “Scaring off all the animals,” he said.

  “Good,” I said.

  We kept ahead of them until we couldn’t hear them anymore. We settled into quiet until I heard an intense clatter that sounded like a bear rumbling toward us.

  “What’s that?” I asked, trying not to lose it.

  “A squirrel.” Quasi pointed the little fuzzy-tailed rat out to me.

  A little while later, something barked at us.

  “What’s that? Are there monkeys out here?” I wanted to jump into his arms like some fifties housewife, which isn’t particularly dignified, I’ll admit.

  “It’s another squirrel. They get territorial and bark at you if they think you’re on their turf. You really are a city girl, aren’t you?”

  It was my turn to shrug.

  There was something about the woods that made me not want to talk or even breathe loudly. A kind of reverence leaked from the leaves and ground and permeated everything. It was enough just to walk and experience it. As long as no bears tried to eat me.

  Another mile passed. It was so peaceful and serene I didn’t even notice how far we’d come until we saw another mile marker sign.

  We came around a curve, and just ahead a group of birds I’d never seen before were rooting at the ground. Quasi shushed me, but they saw us and ran off.

  “Turkey hens,” he said.

  “Like Thanksgiving turkeys?”

  “Yeah.”

  A half mile past that, we flushed a deer, as he called it. We saw it a little behind us in the woods and left the trail to get a better look. We were able to get about ten feet from it, creeping like I imagined prehistoric hunters must’ve, except we didn’t have spears, before we spooked it. It ran into the woods, but then reappeared a moment later, wild-eyed, and careened past us toward the lake.

  “That’s odd,” Quasi said. “Maybe it caught a whiff of C Note and Emily. They should be coming up behind us any minute.”

  “Or a bear,” I said.

  I don’t know why he chuckled at that, but it made me want to hit him. We kept going back on the trail, even though I started thinking we might want to turn around.

  “Aren’t you concerned about that?” I asked.

  “Well, whatever it is, it’s between us and the car, so we might as well keep going.”

  “You’re not very good at the whole making people feel better thing.”

  Things were quiet, which made me feel good until I realized something.

  “Quasi,” I said. “What happened to all the squirrels?”

  He shrugged.

  “This whole walk there have been squirrels all over, rooting through the leaves and scaring the shit out of me. Now, there’s nothing.” I paused. “And I don’t hear any birds, either.”

  He looked around trying to find an answer, but before he could, we came around another curve and a bigfoot stepped out of the woods. Up close, during the day, and not stoned, I was able to see how close to human, but not human, it was. Its face was more like an orangutan’s than a person’s, with a dished midface (meaning it was kind of flat like you could set a dish on it—thank you anthropology class), a flat, wide nose, and a thick brow. It was tall—taller than a person, tall as a basketball player, but thick and wide-shouldered—and standing upright. And hairy, which I could tell because it was naked. It turned and looked at us.

  “Shit.” Quasi looked around like he was trying to find a cop to signal. “OK. Be calm.”

  “That’s not a bear.” I squeezed his hand.

  “No. No it’s not.” He shook his head, his eyes wide.

  He was clearly one step from losing it, and I was about a half jig myself. We backed up a few paces and had turned to run when another bigfoot emerged behind us.

  Quasi froze. “OK, we could break for the water. It’s not that far. We might make it.”

  He turned to watch the first one farther up the trail, while I watched the one between us and the car. They hadn’t done anything menacing yet. “Then what?”

  “Then we hope they can’t swim.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very good plan.”

  The bigfoots each stood in the center of the trail on either side of us. They seemed relaxed—their mouths were closed, and they weren’t waving their arms around. They looked like they had all the time in the world and weren’t going anywhere. They also didn’t really look like they were about to eat us.

  I stepped up to the one in front of us.

  “What are you doing?” Quasi hissed.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Daisy.”

  The bigfoot looked past me. I followed his gaze to see him lock eyes with the one behind us. An image popped into my mind of me and Quasi, swimming, and the bigfoots swimming right after us.

  A cold shiver rippled down my back. “They can read minds.”

  “What?” Quasi said.

  Even though they weren’t actively attacking us, that image of them swimming after us wasn’t the friendliest message. I held up my hands, which made the bigfoot step back, so I lowered them again.

  “We don’t mean you any harm.” I smiled with my lips closed because I knew dogs sometimes saw bared teeth as a threat. Thank you, TV.

  An image of the scene from the night before entered my head. The wizards or whoever they were—who resembled homeless people more than anything, which immediately made me think of this group of wizard-like people called the Council—appeared in my head, shooting fireballs. There were three of them.

  I didn’t recognize them as the Council members I’d met, but I wasn’t exactly drinking buddies with any of the Council. I didn’t know a ton about them, other than they were the keepers of arcane wisdom, and they lived like homeless people so normies would ignore them. From the image—from the bigfoots—I felt great fear and a pressure in my head, like a headache but different. It didn’t hurt quite as much.

  It didn’t hurt me, at least. Quasi doubled over and fell to his knees. He grunted and clutched his head in his hands.

  “They’re trying to tell us something,” I said. “Telepathically.”

  “Hurts,” Quasi said.

  The image stopped. There was a palpable feeling of fear in the air. I heard a whoosh and one of the wizards/maybe Counci
l stepped out of the woods.

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  The bigfoots both freaked out. Their eyes went big, they bared their teeth, and they started motioning with their arms. The bigfoot behind us ran closer and grabbed Quasi. They both vanished. The one that had been in front stepped toward me and reached out, but another wizard appeared and shot some kind of light at him. He disappeared.

  “Quasi?” I called.

  Three more wizards stepped out of the trees. They didn’t look like wizards, I should say, as in, they didn’t have robes and staffs and British accents. One of them did have a tremendously long beard that reached down to his chest. The other two both were scruffy. One of them had that permanent five-o’clock shadow look, which is a sure sign of a psychopath. They wore jeans and T-shirts that seemed a little too small. They resembled versions of the wacky friend on a sitcom—a little pudgy and uncomfortable, kind of odd-looking, but not, you know, malformed or anything.

  “Daisy Janney?” Chest-Beard said.

  I sighed. “Yeah, sure.”

  A bag covered my head and everything after that was annoying and stinky.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Really stinky. I’m pretty sure they stuffed a fast-food bag over my head, which is just demeaning. There was no teleportation for us. We walked what felt like another couple miles, with my doggies barking—since all the walking I’d been doing was catching up to me—off the trail. I could tell because we crunched over twigs and leaves and branches smacked the bag and every other part of me. Worst. Date. Ever.

  After sixty-grabillion miles, we walked into what I thought was a house or some building because the sound changed. They pulled the bag off, and I realized I was in a cave.

  “You know, I’m a city girl, so you didn’t need the bag. It’s not like I have any idea where I was to begin with.”

  There was no answer, and it occurred to me I could see the guys. I moved closer to a wall with some kind of glowing moss that lit up the cavern. They had me backed close to the wall anyway and were in between me and the rest of the cave, so any sort of exit was closed off.

  “Cool,” I said. “Did you guys make this?”

  “Come with us.” Chest-Beard tried to push me forward.

  “No.”

  That stopped them.

  “What?” Chest-Beard scrunched up his face to look all mean.

  “Why should I come with you? You just shoved a Burger King bag on my head and kidnapped me.”

  Chest-Beard got serious. “Because we saved your life.”

  I crossed my arms. “Did you?”

  They looked at each other, then at me. “Yeah?” another one said.

  “Listen, Tweedledee, how do I know you’re the good guys?”

  There was some serious lag before he answered. “’Cause we’re human?”

  I laughed a good long while at that, prompting them to exchange some more worried looks. I examined the moss again.

  “Try again. How do I know you’re the good guys? I saw you last night fighting with those bigfoots or whatever they’re called. It looked like you were the ones attacking the campsite and they were defending it.”

  Their stance was less aggressive, though at the same time they looked more annoyed. “They took your friend,” Chest-Beard said.

  “Maybe they were trying to save him. I mean, you took me. You put a bag over my head. How do I know you aren’t planning on doing something bad?”

  “OK.” Chest-Beard held up his hands. “We’re sorry about the bag. We just had to make sure we could trust you. This is a secret place.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, looking around.

  “So will you please come with us?” Chest-Beard managed a smile.

  I gave him my best I’m on to you, youngster look. “I know people. Powerful people. People with guns, and shit that makes guns look silly.”

  “We know who you are, Daisy Janney.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just smiled and clapped my hands together. “Let’s go, then.”

  * * *

  Everything was gray and damp. We walked—well I trudged—deeper into the cave, through a normal-looking bit, and then a narrow opening that frankly scared the bejesus out of me, and emerged into a chamber that opened up like an underground amphitheater. It was part of the cave, but they’d modified it to be like a building, though it still stank of mildew. There were shelves and apparatus attached to the walls. They led me to the back of the cave, where I found someone I recognized.

  “Fucking Caroline,” I said. “If you’re here to deliver another edict or to try to kill another friend, I’m not interested.”

  She was dirty looking, ragged and unkempt just like the last time I’d seen her, taking this pass unnoticed as a homeless person milieu to new depths. But it looked less theatrical and more real this time. She wore a tattered straw hat that someone a hundred years ago would’ve worn to protect them from the sun, which made no sense because we were underground. Or maybe it wasn’t really a hat, and her hair was just so damned dirty it looked like a hat. It was kind of dim in there.

  The last time I’d met Caroline, the leader of the Council, was when she stalked me while I was trying to help my vampire friend Polidori. She’d been hell-bent on letting my friend Magnus die after a half-assed trial, which I couldn’t help but think was part of some other, larger Council plot, and now she was apparently controlling the assholes who’d just kidnapped me, so she wasn’t my favorite person.

  She gave me a crazy little shaky bow. “Kill your friend? You’re misremembering things, Daisy. I warned you about the assassin who planned to kill Polidori, and I was a part of the body that meted out justice to him. I’m your friend.”

  “Warned. Right.” I was pretty sure she’d been in it with the assassin, but I didn’t have any proof. “So what are you doing here? Going to see some bands play? Summering in this palatial mansion?” I indicated the dank interior of the cave.

  “I’m here to warn you again and to make you an offer.” She smiled. “Ain’t I a peach?”

  I put my head in my hands. “Every fucking time I try to do something, you fucking assholes…” I sighed. “OK. I’ll bite. Warn me about what?” Even though I didn’t much like the Council, in that we’re a mysterious society that might potentially kill me kind of way, I knew better than to ignore a warning from them.

  “The beasts you refer to as bigfoots—”

  “See, there’s my question,” I said. “Is it bigfoots or bigfeet?”

  She laughed, which made me hate her less but also scared me. “Whichever you like.”

  “You’re much less twitchy these days,” I said because I didn’t like not hating her. “Change meds or what?”

  That quieted her. “They appear docile, but they’re dangerous.”

  “They can read minds,” I said.

  “Yep. And they can use what they read against you.”

  “Can they, like, control minds? Can they make you think you’re living in the matrix?”

  She waved away my question with a pissed-off look on her face, so score one for me.

  “They are the lowest order of humanoids. They appear like some long-lost ancestor, but they’re not. They evolved independently from giant apes. They’re nothing but filthy animals.”

  “Wait, so you guys didn’t make them?”

  She shook her head, off guard for a moment.

  “So they really exist? I mean, if you didn’t make them, then they’re real. I mean, like they evolved. That’s pretty cool.”

  She sighed. “You’re an idiot.”

  I held up a finger. “Hey, don’t get personal.”

  She clapped her hands together and smiled as if she were my great aunt about to whisk me away to some magical adventure. It made me not believe anything she ever said ever.

  “I’m trying to tell you that you can’t trust them.” She was oblivious to the irony of this statement.

  “Why?”

  “Because their motivations a
re not the same as yours.”

  “No, I mean why are you telling me? But that’s interesting. So they don’t want to lie on the couch eating Chex Mix and watching Babylon 5 all day?”

  She closed one eye and squinted at me, which made her look like a bulldog. I guess she was going for a serious look. “The desires of men are alien to them, and vice versa.”

  “OK. So why’d they abscond with Quasi?” I paused. “And how’d they do that? They teleported, right?”

  “That’s how they’ve survived all this time without being truly discovered. They’re relegated to myths and legends because no one has managed to capture one alive. Until now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She gave me that bulldog squint again and hobbled to the back of the cave with that jerky little dance of hers that made her look like a crazy person or perhaps a great dancer. I wondered if it was really the way she walked or if she’d been pretending to walk crazy for so long it had become real.

  I followed her because I guess that’s what you do. She led me back into a narrower cave with iron bars stuck in the ceiling and floor like in a jail cell. The fluorescent moss was growing here, as well, so I could see inside the cell. At first, it appeared empty, but on closer examination, I saw something in the back, something big and dark.

  “You captured one.”

  “We did.”

  There was a smugness, a pride in her voice that made me decide I would help it escape. I don’t pretend this was a rational decision, and for all I know, it deserved to be locked up, but not by these assholes. She was telling me bigfoots were dangerous, but Nathan said they weren’t. And even though he could be an asshole, he was my asshole, so to speak.

  “Why hasn’t it teleported out?” I asked.

  “We think it has to know where it’s going to be able to teleport. That’s one of the reasons we brought you in blindfolded. You don’t know the way out of this cave. So it can’t read your thoughts and use them to escape.”

  “So you were brought in blindfolded?”