Wild Night Road(21)

“Something wrong?” Tasha asked.
Lilith turned her back on the feather.  “No. Let’s get this over with so you can get your friend back to the hotel.”
When she heard the first shriek, Lilith didn’t think it was anything unusual.
That was the problem living and working in a tourist town. You got used to people acting in ways that would get them locked up if they did the same thing back home. They indulged in all kinds of stupid shit and thought nothing of it, like they’d passed into some kind of no-consequences zone the minute they loaded their suitcases into the SUV and pulled out of the driveway.
Then there were the teens who thronged the boardwalk along the beach. There were always loud and traveled in packs.
But they didn’t fly.
A huge shadow swooped over Tasha’s head like a giant bird dive-bombing a picnic table. She stopped and looked up, one hand raised protectively over her face. “What was that?”
Another shriek echoed from above. Tasha jumped and stumbled backward a few steps. Lilith’s heart banged in her chest.
“You heard that, right?” Lilith asked.
“They probably heard it in Portland.” Tasha’s voice was calm, but her eyes were wide, and she’d gone pale.
“Not everyone.” Lilith gestured at the crowd clustered outside the theatre. It was a couple of blocks away and on the other side of the wide main drag, but clearly visible. A throng stood about chatting and waiting for the doors to open. The shrieks had been as loud as the weekly tsunami-warning siren. No way the moviegoers would have failed to hear it. They might not have been alarmed, thinking it a test, but they would have looked up. They would have done something. They wouldn’t just stand there ignoring it…
Or would they?
Fear closed down over Lilith. Her vision zoomed small until the movie marquee lights flashed like an orange beacon.
Two more shrieks pierced the night. Tasha clapped her hands over her ears. Still, Lilith’s gaze trained on the movie crowd, who did not move. In fact, they’d totally stilled. Like God had pressed pause on the remote, and the whole world stopped.
Apprehension clogged Lilith’s throat, and a kind of fear she hadn’t felt in years roiled deep in her gut. It was a level of terror that went with howls in the night. Whatever these sounds were, they did not come from werewolves. She struggled to think, but it was like her brain was moving through molasses.
Fighting for words, Lilith finally said, “We need to get off the street.” She was certain her voice had come out distorted, like a recording slowed to half-speed.
Tasha whirled, as if unaffected by the malaise swamping Lilith, and started back toward the parking lot.
With effort, Lilith punched through the fog that seemed to surround her. “Whoa, wrong way.”
“No, I’ve got to get back to Erin.”
“She’s inside the car. She’ll be fine.” With any luck, that would be the truth.
Lilith shook herself, thinking furiously.
They were only five blocks from Chill. Five blocks away from a secure location where she’d pre-installed wards that could be activated with a word. She gave Tasha a shove more to prove to herself that she could than anything else. “We’ve got to move.”
Tasha tottered a few steps on her stilettos before halting to hop out of them and thread the skinny ankle straps through her fingers. Fear made Lilith’s heart pound harder, faster. The strange slowdown had lifted and things moved faster now.
As if reality had turned into roller coaster ride and there was nothing she could do but hang on.
She wanted to scream. It was all she could do to not scream at Tasha to leave the damned shoes and run. Run and scream because they were in danger. Run because something was wrong. Time had gone wrong, and the sounds scared her, sounds ripped out of some abyss of evil that should have been sealed, and if she didn’t know what it was, if a witch didn’t know what it was, then it was bad, really, really bad and maybe screaming was all she could do and maybe she was going to scream because it was building in her throat and all she had to do was open her mouth and let it rip and then—
“I want the blonde.”
Lilith froze. The bell jar of quiet and stillness descended again, but this time it shut her off from the rest of the world.
The voice was almost male, reedy and sounded like it had been blown through a hollow tube. It came from a shadow that looked like clumps of used steel wool stretched thin and then clumped together with dabs of foamy soap and burned bits from the bottom of a fry pan. It smelled of rotting garbage left in the sun. Behind her, Lilith thought she heard Tasha gag.
A second one descended. Lilith backed up a step, pushing Tasha, as well. It was larger than the first, and topped ten feet in length. The marquee bulbs from the theatre up the street shone through the murky bulk.