The Lady Vanishes (Mage)

"So where are we going again?"

Median gave me a lopsided grin over his hamburger.

"Black Rock City, Nevada."

"Yeah, but it's not on the road map..."

"That's because it's only there sometimes. When the stars are right..."

The weedy black guy called Phenex snickered, then tried to cover it up with a theatrical show of choking on a french fry. Inri, a classic hippie type with long blonde hair and a huge duffel bag full of floaty tie-dyed clothes, smiled absently and looked out the window.

"Seriously, though - it'll be fun. And it's not like you had any other plans, right?"

"Well, no -"

Inri's gaze snapped back to me, pinning me to the sticky vinyl seat.

"I'd like to hear more about how you came to be on the highway in such a state. I know; you said you're running away from your dad, but there's more, isn't there? I mean, you don't even have another change of clothes with you. What, specifically, happened to make you leave?"

And for some reason I told them. Everything I could remember, anyway - even the stuff that seemed like a bizarre nightmare. And they just sat there, not even touching their food, and nobody laughed or interrupted or said I was crazy. At the end, Phenex swore under his breath and drained his now-cold cup of coffee. Inri nodded slowly and reached across the table to rest her hand on my arm.

"Rosemary... has your father behaved strangely before this? Have he or his deacons ever harrassed people for no reason or committed other violent acts?"

"Well, he beat up this one guy in Lubbock because he said the guy had some sort of mark on him. I thought maybe it was a Satanic tattoo or something, but he'd never done anything like that before Mom left..."

"What kind of mark was it? Do you remember exactly what he said?"

"Some kind of tower... an iron tower?"

Median looked at Inri, and I got the impression that they wanted me to leave, so I went to the ladies' room for a few minutes and read the graffiti on the walls.

* * * * * * * *

"We're fucked," Median mutters.

"Not necessarily," Phenex replies. "The van's warded, so her trail will have gone cold where we picked her up."

"And by the sounds of it, his little cabal is fairly isolated. They're dangerous in their own territory, but beyond that they probably don't have contact with other, more organized Banisher groups. From what Rosemary told us, it sounds like he's an Obrimos, which means that unless he's figured out how to cultivate other arcana, he doesn't have access to anything that might lead him to her. Or us." Inri smiles at him reassuringly.

Median pulls out his calculator and starts punching in numbers furiously. There's a faint, high-pitched whine that could be mistaken by a casual observer for some mechanical problem with the air conditioner. After a few moments, he relaxes, his shoulders dropping.

"Okay. Okay - you're right. The odds are - I won't say infinitesimal, but acceptably low that he'll be able to track her. And once we hit Black Rock, there's going to be so much background noise that she'd have to be broadcasting like a goddamn radio tower to attract any sort of attention at all. And even then, it's our kind of people there."

"We're cool then?"

"Yeah, we're cool."

"I'd better go fetch her from the bathroom then."