In the abrupt silence, I thought I’d gone deaf. Then I heard water dripping somewhere nearby. One beam of sunlight found us, amidst the mud and the shambles of concrete and twisted rebar. The breeze, once so punishing, flirted around us, smelling freshly scrubbed, like spring. I think somewhere, a bird was singing tentatively.

Estéban was curled around his injured arm, and I wasn’t sure he was even conscious until he moaned and mumbled something in Spanish. “Hey, kid . . . You with me?”

He said something else, something I knew wasn’t polite, but nodded, and finally raised his head. His skin was a sickly gray, his dark eyes wide and staring. I eased his hand away from his broken arm to have a look. The thick leather bracer had protected him from the ravages of fang and claw, but it was bent at a wholly unnatural angle.

“Boy, when you do it, you do it right, hey, kid?” I smiled at him, and he rallied enough to give me that “Are you nuts?” look. He was going to be okay. Getting to my feet, I decided I was going to be okay, too.

Sure, I felt like shit. Blood trickled down my stubbly cheek from a cut I didn’t remember getting. My right leg was done with me, and refused to hold my weight. I was going to have scars down my left thigh, and the small vain part of me briefly mourned the marks. Luckily, I couldn’t feel either of them, the blight- numbness extending almost all the way to my hips. The knuckles on my left hand were going to scar, too, but I flexed them and they still worked. Most important, I was alive and I had my soul. My right hand was bare of all marks.

As I glanced around the wreckage, I came to appreciate how unlikely that had been. The pillar that sheltered and protected us had been sheared off two feet above our heads. The shattered remnants were strewn about us, a jagged garden of concrete chunks and mangled rebar. Any one of those would have cracked a skull, ending all our troubles in an instant. Bless Mira and the powers that sent her to me so many years ago. “One of us is the luckiest sumbitch on the planet, Paulo—er . . . Estéban.”

A gleam atop the broken column caught my eye, and I limped closer to have a look. Perched there, sweetly as a centerpiece, were two pale white river stones, shot through with clear quartz veins. Matching nothing else in the debris around us, they lay nestled together as if placed by a careful hand. I picked them up, rolling them over between my fingers. They were warm and dry.

I’m not sure about religion, or God, or where we go when we die. But wherever it is, I think it must be a good place. And I decided Guy and Miguel were there. I pocketed the stones, to be placed in my garden. I’d take my signs where I found them.

“Be at peace, guys,” I murmured.

Estéban finally struggled to his feet and immediately blanched. “I’m going to throw up.” And he did. I think he felt better afterward. At least, he had more color to his ashen face.

“C’mon, Paulo . . . er, whatever I call you. Let’s go see what’s still standing.”

With my arm around his lanky shoulders, we hobbled out of the wreck of a parking garage, to find that Sierra Vista looked as bad as we did. The ground was littered with shards of plate glass, the storefronts gaping like toothless mouths. The cheerful neon signs were tangled in impossible ruins, if they weren’t gone altogether. Water sprayed from a fountain that no longer existed, and only one hardy sapling swayed in the spring air. One building had collapsed in on itself, and I thanked the powers that be that the tenant hadn’t moved in yet. Okay, so maybe sometimes I believe in God.

All in all, it looked like a war zone, Estéban and I being the walking wounded. I wiggled a finger through the shreds of my jeans and sighed. “Mira’s going to kill me.”

“Quién es Mira?”

“My wife. These were my good jeans.” I was probably in shock, and I’m allowed a warped sense of humor. I just chopped the head off a hellhound that was trying to eat a seventeen-year-old boy.

“Jesse? Jesse!” Funny, that didn’t sound like my wife’s voice, but sure enough, a woman was frantically calling my name. Kristyn pelted toward us, multicolored hair standing at sharp angles like a terrified hedgehog. I wasn’t even sure she’d known my real name, until that moment. “Ohmigod! Ohmigodohmigod! Did you see that?” For one horrifying moment, I thought she was going to hug me, and I braced for the excruciating pain. Instead she skidded to a halt, all but vibrating, she was so worked up, and blinked at our obviously injured state.

“Is that . . . blood?” Kristyn went as pale as Estéban and slumped toward the ground.

Somehow, I caught her with one arm. “Aw crap. C’mon, Kristyn. I can’t carry you. Don’t do this to me now.”

She whimpered, doing her best to keep on her feet, but she was now covered in the very blood that had her swooning. My day just wasn’t getting any better. It was Murphy’s Law at its finest, right here. This crap only happens to me.

I glanced at Estéban and chuckled. Then he snickered. Then we both burst out laughing. Groggy, Kristyn eyed us as if we’d finally lost it. I guess maybe we had. But under the circumstances, I think it was excusable. We laughed until our eyes watered and we were gasping for breath. We laughed so hard it hurt. We were still laughing when the ambulances started arriving.

There was a minor incident when I refused to leave until I checked on my truck. It was going heavily against me, but about the time one paramedic had a syringe full of sedative pulled out, the other one relented. I was allowed to hobble to the parking lot, leaning on Kristyn, who seemed to have recovered her moxie.

My truck was there, all beautiful in her rain-washed glory. And miracle of miracles, she was untouched (barring all previous damage, of course). In a tornado’s inexplicable way, the same forces that had trashed the shopping center had neglected the employee parking lot. All twenty or so cars sat there just as they’d been parked. I made a mental note to send Will and Marty back out to pick her up, then went along with my captors like a good boy.

Estéban and I had one brief moment alone, as the paramedics got us loaded into the same ambulance. He glanced at me, steadier now that his arm was secured to a board. “What happened to the baseball man?”

“Tell you the truth, kid? I don’t give a rat’s ass.” And that’s all I had to say about that.

23

They never found Nelson Kidd. I suppose it’s possible the tornado carried him off, and we’ll find his body years from now stuffed under some random rock by the terrible forces of nature. But I think it’s more likely he just vanished, ashamed to face what he’d done. Ivan sent word out to the other champions. He’ll never be able to pull the same stunt again.

Being the last person who saw him alive, I was of great interest to the police, no doubt aided by the almost-restraining order I had against me. Having two hundred thousand of a missing baseball player’s dollars in my bank account didn’t help, either. I spent the next two months answering questions of varying levels of accusation before a phone call from a former client (thank you, Mr. President) convinced them to look elsewhere. I heard later that his family had him declared legally dead. His grandson is now a very rich little boy.

The punch line of it all, at least to me, is that when Kidd said Verelli was tied up, he was being literal. The hotel housekeeping staff found the agent in his underwear, gagged with a sock and bound with miniblind cords. Someone managed to get a cell phone video of his “rescue,” and that ran on the Internet for weeks, Verelli being paraded before the world in his tightywhities and garters for all to see. I think I’m the only one who caught a glimpse of a black mark on the inside of his left arm. The video was poor quality, so maybe it was a shadow, or a cop’s finger, or my own vivid imagination. Or maybe Mr. Verelli was more of a believer than he let on.