Detonation Boulevard

  Detonation Boulevard

  The Wisdom’s Grave Trilogy, Book Two

  by Craig Schaefer

  Copyright © 2018 by Craig Schaefer.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover Design by James T. Egan of Bookfly Design LLC.

  Author Photo ©2014 by Karen Forsythe Photography

  Craig Schaefer / Detonation Boulevard

  ISBN 978-1-944806-12-5

  Contents

  Prologue

  Act I

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Act II

  Interlude

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Interlude

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Interlude

  Fifty-Three

  Afterword

  Also by Craig Schaefer

  Prologue

  When Carolyn Saunders was a little girl, just old enough to notice everything around her, just young enough not to understand, she watched a television show that gave her nightmares. Detectives had left a criminal handcuffed and alone in an interrogation room, where he suffered an asthma attack. Wrists bound, inhaler taken away, he collapsed against the stainless-steel table and wheezed for air. His face turned puffy and red under the stark eye of a single overhead light. He died in agony. She saw his face again that night, and every night for weeks. She dreamed of the hot brick walls of the room closing in around her, the oxygen squeezing from her tiny lungs, like her head was a few inches beneath the water and she could see the air above her but she couldn’t reach it.

  Decades later, flipping channels, she happened across the same show. She was amazed by how much she’d gotten wrong. The show was a comedy, the asthma attack was played for dubious laughs, and the gruesome death she was so sure she remembered was more like twenty seconds of mild discomfort. She’d even misremembered the minor details. Instead of a bilious green, the brick walls of the cramped interrogation room on TV were painted eggshell white.

  That was the detail that struck her now, as she sat with her hands cuffed under the glow of a single dangling bulb. The walls were the exact shade of pea-soup green from her childhood nightmares. She wasn’t sure what impressed her more: that her captors had plucked an image from her sleeping brain and built a perfect replica to torment her with, or that they’d gone to all that trouble just for her.

  A glass sat at her left hand. Water, with a miserly chunk of shriveled lemon. The stone floor thrummed under her feet, the far-off hum of massive engines roaring to life, and the lemon surfed on erratic ripples. She took a sip. Her throat was sandpaper-dry from talking.

  “Happy now?” her interrogator asked.

  He was a bald and hook-nosed man in a black turtleneck, openly wearing a calfskin shoulder holster. His gun was a vintage Luger. Carolyn wasn’t a gun person—she wrote fantasy novels for a living—but everybody knew what that long and thin-nosed pistol looked like: it was the weapon favored by every Nazi in the movies. That detail, too, she suspected was a deliberate affectation.

  “I’d be happier if I was home in bed, curled up with a good book.”

  He sat across from her and spread his hands, taking in the room. Drawing her eye to the green paint.

  “Are we not gracious hosts? You’re wearing on our patience, Ms. Saunders. We brought you here to answer one very specific, very simple question, and you’ve spent the last two hours talking about everything but.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out in a tired sigh. “Because you have to know where they came from. The forces that shaped them, the decisions they made—”

  “I realize you generally write about wizards and dragons and unicorns”—he wriggled his fingers at her, mocking—“but we brought you here to solve a murder.”

  He laid his hands flat on the table.

  “God is dead,” he told her. “Vanessa Roth and Marie Reinhart are responsible. We want to know how.”

  She sipped her water. Making him wait for it.

  “You’re one of those people who reads the last chapter first, aren’t you?” She stared at him over the rim of her glass. “All right. Back to the story of the Witch and her Knight. When last we left them, Nessa and Marie were on the run. Fugitives, wanted for the murder of Nessa’s husband. At this point they had learned of the curse they were under: they were doomed to an endless cycle of death and reincarnation, across countless parallel worlds. They meet, they fall in love, and they die, only to be reborn with their memories burned away.”

  “But they didn’t know why,” he said.

  “Not yet, no. Marie had abandoned her badge and her loyalty to the law, reunited with her liege after a lifetime of searching. She found the true source of her power as a knight, pledging her life to her lover’s service.”

  The interrogator snorted. Carolyn tilted her head.

  “You don’t approve?” she asked.

  “It’s absurd. Power—real power—comes from dominating others. Taking what you want and making them serve you. The Roth woman, at least, I can understand.”

  “I very much doubt that you can,” Carolyn said. “If you did, we wouldn’t be in this situation. But as for Nessa, her husband’s treason—his failed attempt to poison her, then gaslight her into committing suicide—pushed her over the edge. Past the brink, down in the dark abyss of her heart, she found herself. Her true nature. And she embraced it.”

  “The Owl,” her interrogator said. “But you already told me about—”

  “Indeed. With a prodigy’s aptitude for witchcraft and a taste for cruelty. She set out to punish everyone who had conspired against her, leaving quite the trail of bodies in her wake. And she was just getting warmed up. A warning from one of her previous incarnations gave her and Marie a quest: to find Wisdom’s Grave, the wellspring of magic. If there was any weapon powerful enough to break their curse, that’s where they would find it.”

  “But they had no idea where to start looking. And again, you already—”

  “No,” Carolyn said. “And time wasn’t on their side. Beyond the police hunting for them, as well as the agents of a secretive—and highly illegal—government black-ops program, Nessa’s father-in-law had sworn vengeance for the death of his son. A contract, circulated from coast to coast, put a bounty on their heads. And the h
unters it attracted were…not human.”

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Meaning?”

  “This.” He waved his hand at her. “Repeating yourself. You literally told me all of this ten minutes ago, before I went to get the water you asked for.”

  “When I’m writing a sequel,” Carolyn said, “I like to start with a recap of important events. It’s considerate to the audience.”

  “Your only audience is me.”

  The corner of her mouth twitched, offering the faintest ghost of a smile.

  “Are you sure?” she asked him.

  He picked up his pencil and rapped it against a yellow legal pad. He had the bitter, screwed-tight face of a man who held a royal flush and still felt like he was losing the game.

  “Let me repeat myself, then,” he said. “One word of a lie, one single word, and we’ll know. At which point this discussion will move to a much less pleasant room, a few doors down the hall. We built it just for you.”

  Her smile faded and her lips went tight. She reached deep for a little bravado to get her through this ordeal, feeling the razor-wire tightrope under her feet.

  “Let me guess,” Carolyn said. “Room 101 at the Ministry of Love? Steel walls and a wire cage with rats in it?”

  “No.” The corners of his eyes crinkled. “The bedroom of your uncle’s summer house, in Michigan.”

  She tried to inhale. The air wouldn’t come. An invisible fist squeezed her lungs, strangling her from the inside. Her hands clenched, wrists straining against her cuffs, and she closed her eyes as she fought to breathe.

  When she found her voice again, the best she could manage was a whisper. “Bastard.”

  “Now that we’ve established things can only get worse from here,” he said, “continue the story.”

  She inhaled for a count of four. Exhaled for a count of four. She opened her eyes and fixed him with a gaze made of cold steel.

  “Once upon a time,” she said, “a wicked witch and her loyal knight set out upon a quest. But Wisdom’s Grave eluded them, so they started in the only place they could think of. Just south of the kingdom of New York City, in a humble village along the windswept coast…”

  Act I

  Foxes and Hounds

  One

  We have allies among the dead, Nessa thought.

  The stolen Hyundai rattled as they turned onto a highway off-ramp, the wheel tight in Marie’s hands. They’d been driving for an hour and she’d spent most of it with her eyes on the rearview mirror. Nessa sat in dour silence and contemplated their ghostly accomplices.

  She knew she was being melodramatic. There was no reason to think they were being guided by literal spirits. All the same, they weren’t alone. She cast a glance to the back seat, where her black mirror—the wooden frame engraved with astronomical signs and sigils of Renaissance alchemy—lay wrapped in an old, fuzzy blanket. Someone had sent it to her just in time to relay the most important message of her and Marie’s lives. A message from a previous incarnation of herself, warning them that they were fated to die.

  Then there was her grimoire. She remembered spotting it in a used bookstore in SoHo. The cover had been propped at the perfect angle for the faded gold leaf of the title, Games for the Cunning, to catch the light and dazzle her eyes. Deliberately, she knew now. When she finally completed the spell of initiation—ritually murdering the embodiment of all she was and all she hated inside of herself—the encoded pages of the book transformed before her eyes. Welcome, Nessa, the book read, I knew you would succeed.

  Don’t look so surprised. I wrote this book just for you!

  We will meet when the time is right.

  Now would be good, Nessa thought. Someone out there wanted them to succeed, just not enough to show their face. An invisible presence, pulling strings from a safe distance.

  If there was one thing Nessa despised, it was being treated like a puppet. Her husband and her doctor had learned that the hard way. So had twenty or so of her husband’s murderous friends. When Nessa closed her eyes, she smelled the odor of spilled blood and terror sweat wafting across the ruins of the Vandemere Zoo. She could hear the fading echoes of the carnage, the agonized screams of the dying.

  That put a smile on her face.

  Marie’s gaze flicked to the rearview. An SUV was coming up behind them fast and she shifted lanes to let it pass.

  “We need to get rid of this car,” she said.

  “I’m entertaining all suggestions.”

  “About a year ago,” Marie said, “Tony and I were part of a temporary task force, cleaning up a ring of chop shops in the city. A lot of the info we got we ended up passing to the authorities in Jersey, because the trail of parts pointed across the state line. I remember a couple of the dealers on the suspect list. One’s in Asbury Park, not too far from where I grew up, so I know the lay of the land there. Thought we might go see a man about a new set of wheels.”

  Nessa eyed her, curious. “Are you comfortable with that?”

  “What part of it?”

  “Dealing with criminals.”

  She didn’t answer right away. Marie’s hands held tight on the wheel and she stared straight ahead, into the gray distance. Last night’s storm was at their back, the horizon black and roiling like a razor line of smoke.

  “I’m not a cop anymore.”

  “I know,” Nessa said. “I’m asking how you feel about that.”

  She heard a twinge of uncertainty in her own voice. Realizing, as she spoke the words, what she was really worried about. Marie had sacrificed everything—her career, her safety, her old life—to flee at Nessa’s side. Less than twelve hours ago she’d been abducted, tortured, hunted for sport, beaten, and brutalized. Anyone would have second thoughts after that.

  Anyone might leave after that.

  Marie reached over and placed her hand, warm and firm, over Nessa’s. She gave a little squeeze.

  “I’m right where I want to be,” she said, answering the real question. Nessa sank into a warm bath of reassurance.

  “How do you do that?” she asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Know exactly what I need,” Nessa said.

  Marie turned her head toward Nessa. The purple splotch of a bruise glistened on her jaw. She was stiff when she moved, probably from the tape wound tight around her ribs. Still, she wore a faint smile, and she offered Nessa a wink.

  “Centuries of practice,” she said.

  Asbury Park squatted on the Jersey Shore. It was a summer town. Summer people came, and summer people went, and the rest of the year the town sat and waited and rusted away. This was a slate-sky day in early spring, and the empty boardwalk sliced out across the choppy waters of the ocean like a border wall, separating the salty gray air from the depths below. Hotels lined the coast. Some stood tall but dark and silent. A couple teetered on broken foundations, their faces caved in by the wake of Superstorm Sandy and now, years later, left abandoned to the mercies of the ocean winds and the beach rats.

  A sign by the road read We Are Stronger Than The Storm. Marie checked the street signs, flicked the turn signal, and headed west.

  * * *

  The used-car lot bordered an abandoned fairground on the outskirts of the city. The wind caught an empty bag of potato chips and sent it rolling across broken asphalt like an urban tumbleweed. A plastic marquee out front promised deals with no money down and U Could Drive Away 2Day!

  Marie wasn’t so sure. She and Nessa stood in a wasteland of cars one step removed from a junkyard, and she’d have been amazed if half of them could make it down the block before they choked and died. The sole salesman—and, she guessed, proprietor—poked his head out of the combination office-garage and looked amazed to see real, living people on his lot, with cash on hand and looking to buy.

  Some cash, anyway. Before their flight from the city, Nessa had hit a string of ATMs and pulled out all the money she could on her and her husband’s debit cards. They had about fifteen
hundred dollars. Neither she nor Marie could show their faces in a bank or buy anything with a credit card, not while they were wanted for murder, so they’d just have to make it work.

  The car dealer was a poppet of a man, short and wide with flappy arms and a glistening bald head, and it took Marie about thirty seconds to get on his level. She knew the language of the streets, the cadence of the black market. She just never thought she’d be sinking down in it, like one of the criminals she used to hunt.

  “You come highly recommended by a gentleman in Jersey City,” she told him. “Name’s fuzzy—I don’t remember names too well, like I won’t remember yours when we leave—but it started with a B, ended in an I.”

  “I believe I know that name,” he said, sizing her and Nessa up. “And if I were to call that man and ask him about you?”

  “He’d say he never heard of us,” Marie replied. She didn’t elaborate. He could draw whatever conclusions he wanted.

  “See, that’s the sorta thing that might make me nervous.”

  “Then you should make us happy,” Nessa said, “so we go away and you never have to see us again.”

  He sized up the Hyundai, doing a quick walk-around. Then he told Marie to pull it into the garage. They talked while he plucked out a pocket tool and unscrewed the plates. The word stolen was never spoken out loud.