So there I stood, tasting bird shit and spoiled meat on my tongue while Dempsey kept the Nova idling, waiting for me to go into the hills and grab a couple of fiery chicklets so we could pay for a few hundred bags of tacos and elote.
“You going to get those chickens? Or are we going to head back down to Jonas’s?” His cigar flared up, a red dot on the semishadowed interior. “Because gas is wasting here, boy.”
“Then turn the car off.” I swallowed my unsaid words of worry when the red slipped from his face, leaving behind a gray, pasty stain on his flesh. “And pass me the tongs and asbestos bags. Sooner I get this done, the sooner I get some food in me. Just like the good old days when you were trying to get me to stop shitting in your sleeping bag.”
Dempsey turned the car off, but the look on his face went from menacing to almost apologetic. He mumbled something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, so I leaned against the passenger-side door frame and stuck my head through the open window.
That was a mistake, because I couldn’t hear him any better and I now had a mouthful of cigar smoke. After coughing slightly to clear my nose a bit, I said, “What was that?”
“We kind of don’t have any tongs,” he repeated a little bit louder, narrowing his eyes at me as if challenging me to give him a hard time.
Since I’d given him a hard time for quite a few years, I was about to change my tune. Sucking at my left canine—a habit I knew pissed him off—I asked around my tongue, “Weren’t you in charge of equipment for this run? Where the hell are the tongs?”
“Razor lost them. He had a fight with a salamander down in Calexico. Might have even been Carlsbad.” Dempsey gave me a nonchalant shrug and scratched at the hardscrabble beard scruff creeping down his neck. “Guess it doesn’t matter where, because we don’t have them.”
“How the hell am I supposed to catch these things without asbestos tongs?” Leaning harder on one of the Brents’ many ’77 Novas only dug the window rubber into my forearms, but the slight pain reminded me I shouldn’t kill my mentor. If there was one thing he’d pounded into my head time and time again, it was that you didn’t go on a run without proper equipment. “These things literally shoot fire out of their asses. Last time I looked, I was pretty fucking flammable.”
“Najiri gave me these.” He twisted around and dug out a plastic bag from behind the passenger seat. Once he pulled it free, Dempsey offered it up to me as if it were a pack of smokes and a couple of beers he was giving me for Christmas. “They should work out the same.”
I snatched the plastic bag from his hand and opened it up, then looked inside. I then closed it and couldn’t quite stop the growl crawling up my throat when I strangled my words through my clenched teeth. “These are fucking oven mitts.”
“See?” Dempsey shot back, mashing more spit into his cigar end. “They should work good enough. You might get a little singed, but you’ve had worse.”
There wasn’t enough air in San Diego County for me to suck down to clear out the heat in my lungs. Opening the bag again didn’t change what was inside of it. They were still floral oven mitts—big orange chrysanthemum blossoms on an ivory background with ruffles around the edges for decoration. I knew those mitts well. They’d been hanging on the Watts family kitchen wall for as long as I could remember—a gift from an aunt somewhere in Florida. Nobody ever used them because they were light on batting and couldn’t even provide enough insulation for a boiled egg.
I would’ve been better off using the plastic bag they’d come in.
“Screw it. Pop the hatch, old man,” I muttered at him, tossing the oven mitts back into the car. “Cari has to have something in the back I can use.”
Cari had shit in the hatch of the Nova. I know. I spent a good five minutes digging through what little crap there was besides the spare tire and slammed the hatch down, tired and sweaty from digging around. Dempsey was chuckling when I came back to the front, his gnarled hand tightly gripping the potholders as he held them up for me to take through the passenger window.
“Go to hell,” I muttered, snatching them from his clenched fingers. “When we get back, I’m going to make tongs out of Razor’s ribs.”
“You go right ahead and do that, kid,” Dempsey gleefully shot back. “I’ll even help hold him down for you.”
THE HILLSIDE was rich with manzanita, California lilac, sage, and chamise, fragrant with their dry, dusty perfumes. There were a few large trees poking up out of the rocks, their twisted branches thick with scraggly pine needles, blue-gray bottle brushes scraping back and forth in the light wind. Outcroppings of lava jutted out from the canyon floor, the slopes dotted with bristles of black hematite flashing in the sunlight. There was movement among the vegetation—small flutters of wings and raspy serpentine shadows working through the tall grasses. None of that interested me. I was there for bigger prey, stupidly armed with only a pair of floral holders and my lack of common sense.
Working through the brush was fairly easy. I had a lighter step than any human, but gravity works the same on any species. All I had to do was make sure that wherever I put my foot down was solid, and the going was pretty easy. There were a couple of places where the sandy loam shifted beneath me, but nothing to send me tumbling ass backward across the strips of sharp pumice folded into the hillside’s landscape. I’d never seen the place when it was either pure Earth or pure Underhill. I couldn’t even tell anyone if I’d been born before or after the Merge. All signs point to before, but my dearly beloved father jacked up my genetics and growth so much there was no telling how old I was or even how long I would live.
But then I made my life as a Stalker for SoCalGov, and if there was one thing that could be said about any Stalker, it was that our life expectancy was about as long as a monarch butterfly. We weren’t known for dying in bed with our boots on. I’d lost count of how many times I recognized a name listed on the Dead Wall at the Post where we picked up our bounties and contracts. It surprised the hell out of me that Dempsey hadn’t bought it more than a few times in the past, but the old man had more lives than the proverbial cat, even though a knee injury had taken him out of the life.
Having him on the run with me was like old times, especially since I was the one doing the hunting and he was still sitting back in the car.
“Here, chickie-chickie,” I muttered mostly to myself. “Come to Oppa.”
I reached the section where the hillside was mostly lava, exactly the environment for the creature I was hunting for. The crenulation was deeper here—folds and ripples of broken-glass-edged rock throwing both sparkles and odd shadows about, making it difficult to read the lay of the land. It might have looked like small hillocks dotting the slope, but I knew better. There were deep crevices and caves with the occasional tumble of rocks from a collapsed tunnel just to keep a guy on his toes. The lava fields along the coast were riddled with different dragons, a holdover from their original hunting grounds in the Underhill. But while the grasslands belonged to mostly Earthly creatures, the canyons along the inner corridor were now home to nesting Underhill birds and relatively safe from predators due to the nature of their roosts—a fireproof sanctuary—which comes in very handy if you are a fire hen or phoenix.