CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Chesa was stuck up a tree at the edge of the city park. We found her by following a trail of dumbstruck elves, faeries, and woodland sprites who were wandering the streets like small-town tourists on Ambien. She was sitting in a treehouse that had been painted to look like a faery castle, complete with cardboard tube towers and a drawbridge painted in glitter gel. When we drove up, she glared at me.
“I’m assuming this is somehow your fault, Rast,” she said as Esther and I disembarked.
“To be honest, I don’t think it is. This time,” Esther said. “All of the domains are in limbo at the moment, and I’ve got half a dozen lesser anomalies that will need to be rounded up before they make the evening news. No time to waste, Chesa. You need to come down.”
“I . . . can’t,” she said.
“Because?”
“Because I look ridiculous.” Chesa had been addressing us through the plastic-framed window of her princess castle, and I realized there was something slightly wrong with her face. Or more precisely, she looked human for the first time since we had joined Knight Watch. The slight glow to her eyes, the supernatural beauty, even the runic markings on her cheeks . . . everything that marked her as Chesa Lazaro, elven princess, rather than Chesa Lazaro, my ex-girlfriend, was gone.
“It can’t be that bad, Ches. We still need to find Matthew and Tembo,” I called up. “We’ve all seen you without your makeup on.”
“It’s a lot worse than that,” she said. But after a long second and a meaningful glare from Esther, Chesa lowered the glitter-drawbridge and dropped a rope ladder.
Even before we joined Knight Watch, Chesa looked like a cosplayer who spent more time and money on her costume than most brides did on their wedding dress. Her elven princess uniform was always on point, always perfect, always a dream away from being absolutely real. So when she crossed over into the Unreal, it wasn’t much of a leap for Chesa to start looking like an actual elf. She had been like that for so long that I had forgotten she was still just a girl under all that glamor.
That’s what bothered her. That she looked normal. Like any other twentysomething on her way to a night out with her friends, as long as her friends didn’t mind the cloak and high leather boots, or the bow strapped to her back. She looked like the girl I had first met years ago. No less lovely than the elven princess.
“What are you staring at?” she growled at me.
“A bit of history,” I said. She brushed past me and tumbled into the back seat of the tactical van, taking up the rest of the bench with her bow and quiver. I squeezed into the middle bucket seat, sword and shield and greaves and pauldrons clanking awkwardly against the seat belt. Esther got in up front and gave the driver the go signal. We roared off down the road.
“So if this isn’t Rast’s fault, what exactly is going on?” Chesa asked.
“It looks like our connection to the Unreal has been partially severed. This means a half dozen lesser realms, from personal domains to some of the more complicated demesnes of our allied anomalies, have settled back into the mundane world,” Esther said. We took a corner particularly hard, and I had to grab at the ceiling to keep from sliding onto the floor. Chesa snorted in my general direction. “In most cases that just means a collection of misplaced mythologies wandering through the real world. MA can handle those, as long as they don’t get hostile. The Anomaly Actuator gave us a fix on the three of you. But there are a lot of implications.”
“Not the least of which is that our domains are exposed,” I said. “My parents showed up at my cabin. Percy, too.”
“Percy the Zombie?” Chesa asked. “How’d he get there?”
“I don’t know, and neither did he. And then when my parents arrived he just . . . disappeared.”
“He’s been hiding out in Clarence’s domain for so long, there’s no telling what sort of connection he has to the Unreal. Was he able to help you find the Tears?” Esther asked.
I rolled my eyes and told the story: how we found the Tears and then lost them, how Percy disappeared slightly before the attack, how we lost Gregory and Bee. She already had some of this from our initial report when we requested transport back to HQ, but Esther still had questions. Was Percy in on it? (Maybe?) Did we recognize the valkyries from our time in Valhalla? (Not really, no.) Should we trust Runa Hellesdottir? (You’re asking the wrong guy.) And so forth, and so on, until she fell into a contemplative silence that only broke as we approached the site where Matthew was supposed to be.
“This is getting complicated,” she said.
“You think? We’ve lost more than half the team, our domains are shot, and the end of the world seems to be just around the corner,” I said. “Any idea what’s causing this?”
“I’m guessing something has happened to Valhalla. Knight Watch’s position in the Unreal is at least partially based on an agreement with Runa after the war. She helped us establish our domains, and we helped her secure the peace. We’ve never been friends, but we’ve certainly been allies.” Esther settled back in her chair, her eyes taking on a far away look. “We’re going to have to pay her another visit.”
“How are we supposed to do that?” I asked. “We’ve got no way of getting there without the HMS Hangnail. And I doubt that whale of yours knows how to fly.”
“That’s something you haven’t quite understood, Rast,” she said. “Every bit of the Unreal also has a mundane address. Your friend Kracek the dragon was just as much an investment banker as he was a scaled wyrm. Same with your domain. Like it or not, your dream cabin also exists on a quiet suburban street. The real world does its best to maintain the balance.”
“Which means Valhalla isn’t a beer hall up in the clouds?” Chesa asked. “It’s down here?”
“It is both a beer hall in the clouds as well as . . . well, you’ll see soon enough,” Esther said with a smirk. “Unreal and Mundane mingle together, and Unreal things impact the real world. Which is why our job is so important. Can’t let the mundanes know what’s going on, and can’t let the myths take advantage of their powers.”
“Huh,” I said, thinking back to my various encounters with the Unreal. “So where’s Saint Matthew’s domain? If I live in suburbia, and Chesa hides out in a park”—that earned me a solid punch in the shoulder, which didn’t matter because I was still in armor—“where does a saint take a break?”
“A church, you’d think,” Chesa said.
“And you’d be wrong,” Esther said, just as the tactical van screeched to a halt.
Chesa might have been wrong, but she wasn’t far wrong. We had pulled up in front of a small industrial building on the murky border between the suburbs and the city proper. Warehouses and barbed wire fences stretched in both directions, but this small building had a garden beside its cracked concrete parking lot, and a stone archway in front of the door that looked like it belonged in an English garden. A chipped wooden sign over the door read St. Matthew’s Refuge and depicted two angels lifting a miserable-looking figure up into the heavens. A small group of unkempt men milled around in front of the door, smoking aggressively and casting furtive looks in our direction.
“He’s a little on point with that sign,” I said. Esther kicked open her door and hopped out. I looked at the unwashed masses swirling between us and the door. “Hey, do you think it’s safe out there? Those guys look a little rough.”
“Classic suburban insecurity,” Esther said, then marched toward the building. I hurriedly got out of the van and started to follow her. Chesa grabbed my shoulder.
“I’m . . . gonna stay here,” she said.”With the car. To make sure it’s safe.”
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”
It didn’t take me long to figure out this was a homeless shelter. The men, once I got closer, didn’t seem that dangerous. If anything, they looked curious, even nervous. I suppose they didn’t get many visits from men in armor. They gave us a wide berth, then closed in behind us and followed us to the doors. But they didn’t come inside, just stared through the filmy glass windows on the doors.
“So a homeless shelter?” I asked. “Was he a priest, or a parishioner?”
“Matthew was a man who wanted to do as much as he could with his life. To do the greatest good for his community. In his case, that meant Knight Watch.” She checked in at a small window, probably happy to fill out even that minimum of paperwork, then led me through a winding maze of hallways and heavy wooden doors. “And he does a lot of good for these people. They probably don’t even know how much good. Most of the time you guys are chilling in your domain, he’s here, doing the work.”
“Huh. He always seemed kind of like a stoner to me.”
“High on joy,” she answered. “Joy and the angels.”
We found Matthew in the kitchen, preparing some kind of thick stew. The smell of it hit me right in the stomach, and I was reminded that I hadn’t really had a chance to recuperate in my domain, or eat any of the marvelous soup that was eternally bubbling there. Matthew was completely in his element. His usual jeans and white blazer were covered in a stained gray apron, and he worked with the dedication of a zealot. The sheen of sweat on his brow could have been glowing, in the right light, if you squinted. At his side worked two slight, older women, their soft gray hair and heavily wrinkled faces as placid as a child’s doll. They moved with unnatural grace, but were also a little disconcerting to look at, as though they weren’t attached to the ground.
When we walked in, Matthew barely glanced at us before going back to his work.
“I was hoping I’d have a little longer before you guys showed up,” he said. “Big crowd tonight.”
“The girls can take care of it,” Esther said.
“Yeah, I know. But I like to help when I can.”
“No good helping here if the world ends,” I said.
“The world is always ending,” Matthew answered. But he set aside his spoon and balled up the apron, tossing them on the stainless steel counter. “Might be the last time I get to do this.”
“Might be,” Esther agreed. “But let’s see what we can do about making sure you come back here in one piece. Do you have any idea where Tembo is?”
“In the back. He’s banged up pretty bad, and I’m not getting enough juice out of this place to do the miracle thing.” He glanced at Esther. “It’s pretty bad out there, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad. I’ll get a van to come by and move him to HQ. Mundane Actual can take care of him from here. But we’re going after Valhalla, and we’re going to need our priest.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I know.”
Matthew exchanged a quick word with the ladies, then followed us back to the van. The crowd at the door knew him, and he knew them. He stopped to talk to each man, asking a question or telling a joke, until the unruly mob that had made me nervous coming in was transformed into a crowd of smiling, laughing men. We ended up having to drag Matthew away.
“What was that all about?” Chesa asked as we got into the van.
“Just doing what I can to help out,” Matthew said. “So, what’s the plan? We’re really going back to—”
“Valhalla,” Esther said.
“And how do we get there without—”
“You’ll see,” Esther said.