“So can I do the bird thing?” Frannie asked. The truck was rolling on right next to them, barely visible as a dark outline in the cloud of paper birds. “Because that would be a cool power. But I’d make puppies. Waves of little paper puppies.”
“I certainly hope not.”
“Or giraffes, because that’s easier to make with origami.”
“The focus on paper has to do with the focus of the Angel,” Emmett said. “He was dedicated to letters.”
The truck bashed into them and the birds scattered. For a moment, Frannie found herself just two panes of glass and about eight inches from the half-head of Callie, which kept pouring out origami like a Mount Vesuvius of paper crafts.
Then a horn sounded.
A high horn letting out a yodeling tune, a charge tune, and another car came into view, whipping out from behind them to create a great shadow on the other side of the demon’s truck. The birds scattered for a moment as the demon slowed to assess this newcomer. As the birds cleared, Frannie saw the driver of the new car give a little wave. “Hooky!” Frannie cried.
Hooky’s car dropped back and broke hard and he plowed into the rear of the demon’s truck, clipping the rear bumper. The truck slipped forward and bashed the back of Saul’s Studebaker, and Saul fought to keep the vehicle straight.
Now the birds started coming thicker again on the windshield, tiny beaks beating on the glass. For the first time Frannie saw it: a crack had formed.
She felt something strange at her feet and looked down to see a paper bird coming up under the dash, then another. They flew up around her legs and she swatted at them. “I think they’re coming up through the engine block,” she said.
Saul batted a couple off his cheek, one of them drawing blood. He pounded the horn three times. BLLEEEET. BLEEEEET. BLEEEEET. “Now, you sonofabitch.”
A fantastic lurch then, as metal crunched behind them and the truck flew past, grinding against them as it went. Saul yanked the wheel hard towards the passing truck and hit it hard, and for a moment Frannie got a good look at the blinking eyes of Callie, staring at the road as origami poured out of the enormous hole in her face. The demon holding Callie’s body hostage steered furiously, and then Hooky hit it again—
And it was spinning, balletic in its flying form as it stopped spinning on its wheel and flipped, tumbling off to the right. Callie’s car rolled and Saul hit his own breaks and the Studebaker screeched to a halt. He spun off the road as the birds dropped to the ground, powerless for a moment.
They approached a truck that lay on its back, a wave of origami birds flying into it like an unholy breath. Saul looked at Frannie and then grabbed the box and handed her the Blank. “Now we’re gonna take him.”
Bursting open the car door, Frannie heard Hooky running up behind her. She looked and saw that for once he was wearing shoes. “Hi, Angel,” he said to her.
“Hey, Penamue!” Saul howled as they got closer to the overturned truck. “You want this?”
The truck’s wheels were still rolling, Callie’s body with its ruined face half out of the window. She was crawling, moving oddly, as though she had multiple elbows and could find purchase in the concrete with all of them. It looked like a snake moving inside of a human body, although Frannie knew what she was looking at was the effect of thousands of tiny bits of paper, causing the body to reach, and flow, and reach, and flow, staring at them with eyes that no longer held the illusion of humanity, but now squirmed with paper.
Police sirens, then. The crowds two miles up the runway were running, and she saw a station wagon ambulance hurtling towards them.
“Quickly.” Saul set the box near Callie, who was still crawling, slowly, now quite out of the car.
“Here it is,” Frannie said. “The blank.” Frannie got around in front of Callie and held the book there. The split face moved, shifting, as though some central repository of thought still resided there. The head moved side to side, the golden hair falling lazily over the paper eyes that churned like dry noodles.
Frannie held the Blank next to the dybbuk box. “There is a trade.”
“Say the words,” Saul said.
Frannie nodded, breathed. “I command you.” She waited for the demon to stop and tilt its broken head before she went on. “So many stories, Penamue, so many lives. This is what you live for, yes? The best collection. The best of all human tales. But Penamue, you are weak now. You need a place to rest. And I can give it to you.”
The birds circled around them, clattering against one another as the wounded body of Callie struggled. Frannie heard a thought run through them all: why not take this one? That was interesting. As though part of the demon’s consciousness spread out in the birds, and so detached itself that it was capable of independent thought, even argument.
“No time,” Frannie said. “The skin you’re in is damaged. And I’d destroy you before you had the chance to get into mine. You know this is your only choice.” She held the box before her.
I command you, Penamue,
by the Lord Elohim,
by the might of the Tetragrammaton,
by the numbers 6, 12, 9 by 13, 36, 43,
I command you,
take your reward of refuge and your repose and your rest!
She was shouting now. “It is more than you deserve but we are merciful, and all things serve God. Rest!”
“Or take this,” Hooky said. Frannie looked up as she heard a click. Hooky was holding a hose with a strange nozzle on the end, a pilot light like you’d see in a furnace. The hose ran back to his car. It was a flamethrower, military style, and where he’d gotten it, she had no clue. “Where…”
“Army surplus,” Hooky said. The broken Callie head stared, and Hooky said, “the box or burn, buddy.”
The ambulance drew closer, its siren wailing. Frannie held the box closer, cracking its lid. “Now!”
The birds hissed and seemed to be arguing amongst themselves and then all at once they drew their decision to retreat. They stopped circling around the humans and formed a thick, almost liquid line, a milky snake of paper and chittering sound, flitting and flowing into the box.
All of them—and then, silence.
Saul clasped the box. He closed and turned hidden locks on the wood itself, and then they sat there as the ambulance roared up. Men ran out, shouting at the three live people and the one body and the overturned vehicle.
Frannie threw herself into Hooky’s arms and kissed him before he could respond, and then lay her head on his chest, the beads of perspiration wetting her lips.
They had captured the demon called the Book Man.
And now, in a roar, the police were coming.
Chapter 37
Frannie’s trip to the Laguna Beach Police Station afforded her an opportunity to be glad that her parents had gone to Hawaii. She stood in the corner of the station next to a metal bench not far from the open glass front, awash in light. Saul sat silently on the bench while Hooky amused himself by reading the Most Wanted signs posted near the water fountain. Across from them, next to a little window that reminded her of a bank teller’s vestibule, three police officers quietly conferred, occasionally looking back at them. She’d never been in a police station and found the whole thing kind of a drag, with linoleum floors and the kind of cheap wood paneling you saw in travel trailers. But the cops seemed bored and happy and that had to be better than what she saw on TV, where people in her position were always suddenly being punched in the stomach by grumpy officers in long coats.