As unarmed Fixers ran around to hide behind the truck, Bunny laid his combat shotgun on the ridgetop and opened fire.

A bird drone soared past him and buzzed one of the sentries, who spun and fired at it, but in doing so came out from the cover of the open truck door. Magpie and Mother Mercy both hit him, and the man seemed to become a cloud of red mist.

“Hoo-fucking-ah,” laughed Bunny as he poured fire down the hill.

CHAPTER 161

EAST TEXAS CONVENTION CENTER

LABORDE, TEXAS

It was drizzling when I pulled into the parking lot for the convention center. There was a sea of cars, with perhaps a bias toward pickup trucks of every make, model, color, and condition. Not particularly surprising in the South. A whole roped-off area for black SUVs, too, and lots of cops on foot and motor patrol. No hordes of Fixers in evidence, but I hadn’t really expected any. On the way there, I’d gotten a call from Church informing me that Top had discovered the real target—the Going Viral charity fundraiser back in Lauder-damn-dale, where I’d just left.

Ah well. Maybe I didn’t need another gun battle, you know? My nerves were totally shot, and I hadn’t slept in two days. I was, at least, a freshly washed zombie.

Checking this place out was the tactical equivalent of dotting the last i.

Then what?

Home.

To Junie, who was at FreeTech in San Diego.

Home, maybe for good.

The Darkness in my head was quiet. Was it gone? Had Church’s revelation that Nicodemus was working mojo on me somehow broken the spell? I looked around for night birds, but if they were there, then the rain hid them. Or maybe they were off scaring the piss out of some other poor schlump. It didn’t exactly make me weep with longing that they weren’t here.

Oh yeah, and fuck Nicodemus. Maybe Church didn’t do the job right. Maybe the old stories are true, and you have to drive a stake through his black heart. No, that doesn’t mean I think he’s a vampire. It just occurs to me that a sharpened piece of lumber through the ticker tends to do the trick. I’m not above beheading, either. There’s a reason those have been fan favorites for a long while. Just saying.

In a weird way, it almost made me smile. I was legitimately considering the possibility that supernatural evil existed and that I was a victim of a real-world magic spell. It is to laugh. The world, it seemed, was even crazier than I was, and that was not a low bar.