7.9
Walker finds himself suddenly in motion again, bobbing like a cork in the air. The cars around him are still bizarrely frozen, suspended in place without him having to expend any effort in wrenching them out of Hall and Oates’s grasps. Weird for sure, and definitely not something that should be happening, but at least it’s a respite from very nearly overextending his powers to a degree that has worse side effects than a nosebleed. His shoulder throbs. The bandage over his bullet wound feels damp, but nothing’s soaked through his shirt yet. Small victories.
On the roof, he can see Jenny starting to move again. It looks like she’s trying to squeeze the trigger of her sniper rifle, to shoot him out of the air while he’s distracted, but the rifle doesn’t fire.It doesn’t even flash, or make a noise to indicate that it’s broken, or out of bullets. The parking lot is still eerily soundless, so still and quiet that Walker can hear Jenny swearing under her breath, even from a few yards away.
“What’s the matter?” he asks, pulling his legs up and crossing them, sitting in midair. “You jam it?”
“Fuck off,” Jenny snaps. She stands and braces a foot on the rifle, trying to tug it out of place, and nearly falls off the roof as it refuses to budge.
We’re unfrozen, but everything else isn’t. Walker looks down below him at Hall and Oates, who are back in motion as well. Hall - the taller, redheaded one, from what Walker has gathered - looks up at him, eyebrows knitted together in confusion.
“What the fuck did you do?” he asks.
Walker shrugs. “Don’t look at me. I can do a lot of things, but I can’t freeze time.”
“Well if it wasn’t you, then who -”
Hall is interrupted by the door to Room 103 swinging open, and two people exiting into the parking lot. One of those people is a stranger, and the other is Naberius, a sight that makes Walker’s stomach drop unpleasantly. He can’t see inside the motel room, which means that anything at all could have happened to Austin and Landis in there, especially while time was momentarily paused. Naberius turning on them doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility, given his contract with Landis, but the thought that this new stranger killed them both while they weren’t looking is still pretty fair game.
Oh, we are so fucked. Walker squints at the person standing next to Naberius, trying to gauge who they are, and if they’re the one stopping time. How did they have another person with them? Where was this asshole the first time we were here? Did they know they wouldn’t be needed until now?
“Walker,” Naberius says, looking upwards. His expression is stern, but not defeated, or resigned. “You should come down. Alloces’s wards are not allowed harm you.”
“Fucking seriously?” Oates spins on his heel to look at Alloces - who Walker assumes is the person standing next to Naberius. “You could have warned us before -”
“I wasn’t aware of Naberius’s involvement with these humans,” Alloces says. There’s a clipped, exasperated edge to their voice that’s actually pretty satisfying to hear, all things considered.
“Wait,” Walker says, “explain. And then maybe I’ll come down.”
“Neither Naberius or I are particularly willing to let the humans under our protection die,” Alloces says, propping one hand on their hip and looking up at Walker over the frames of their glasses. Even more satisfyingly, they look just as annoyed as they sound. “So we’ve come to a bit of a stalemate. We thought we’d let you all join in on the parley so we can figure out what to do next.”
“Wait a second,” Jenny says. She’s standing up and away from her rifle, looking down over the edge of the roof at the two demons. “You’re saying we can’t kill them? At all?”
“We-e-ell,” Alloces says, dragging out the sound through their teeth. “Technically, you could, but you’d be getting me and yourselves in a whole mess of obnoxious political trouble. And normally one of the fastest ways to solve that is executing the humans who are involved, soooo…”
“That’s bullshit!” Oates shouts. “We already get our pay docked if we -”
Jenny gives him a withering look, and he cuts himself off. Walker raises an eyebrow in interest. If they what? If they hurt Austin? Whoever’s paying them must really not want damaged goods. I guess he’s worth more unharmed, but it’d be weird if they got a pay cut just for knocking him out, or roughing him up a little.
“Who is paying you, anyway?” Walker asks, only letting the barest hint of mild interest creep into his voice. Jenny snorts.
“That’s confidential, and you know it.”
“Yeah,” Oates says, “we don’t just run around giving out the names of our clients all willy-nilly.”
“Good way to get blacklisted in our industry,” Hall adds.
Great. They’re even more obnoxious now that they aren’t trying to kill me. Walker uncrosses his legs and begins slowly descending towards the parking lot. Somehow, Jenny beats him to it, shimmying carefully down off the roof and dropping onto the second floor landing. She takes the stairs from the second floor to the lot, probably not seeing the need for more acrobatics when an easier solution is right there. Practical as ever.
“You really expect us to just talk this out,” Walker says to Naberius, as he touches down on the ground. Naberius nods.
“I’m sure we can come to a solution that -”
“They kidnapped Austin!” Walker snaps. He gestures broadly at Hall and Oates, Jenny, and even Alloces, as though he could possibly be referring to anyone else. “We don’t even know what whoever paid them was going to do with him, but I can think of about nine vastly unsavory things off the top of my head! And you want us to talk it out?”
Naberius’s expression twists into one of disgust, and he grabs Walker by the collar, lifting him a few inches off the ground. Even so, he still has to bend down slightly to look Walker in the eye.
“Would you prefer I let them kill you?” he asks. His voice is soft, conversational, almost daring Walker to answer in the affirmative.
Walker feels a chill run down his spine. He shakes his head in miniscule motions, afraid to break eye contact with Naberius. “Not really.”
“Then negotiations it is.” Naberius says, satisfied, and drops him. Walker’s shoulder twinges as he lands on his feet, and his vision nearly whites out for a moment before he blinks, hard, balling his hands into tight fists and wrenching himself back to consciousness.
“What are we even supposed to negotiate?” Hall asks, as the group begins to file back into the motel room, all very nearly trying to squeeze through the door at once. “I mean, Austin’s all we’ve got. Well, that they want, anyway.”
“Oh, there’s always something more than that,” Alloces says cheerfully. “That’s the fun of negotiations. Everyone wants something other than what they’re saying. It’s just a matter of who can find out what that is.”
Over the top of Jenny and Oates’s heads, Walker can see Landis and Austin sitting shoulder to shoulder on one of the motel beds. There’s no outward sign of injury on either of them. In fact, Austin looks more like someone who just woke up from a particularly restless nap than someone who was kidnapped off the street several hours ago. Walker lets out a breath that he didn’t even know he was holding. He still shoves through Jenny and Oates to get to the bed, but feels much less urgently about seeing Austin up close than he did just a moment ago.
“Are you okay?” he asks, once he’s close enough that no one else can eavesdrop, scanning them both for anything worrisome he may have missed. He comes up empty, though Landis’s neck is red in a particular series of blotches that almost look like fingers.
“Fine,” Landis says.
Austin ignores the question entirely, craning his neck and looking past Walker at the mercenaries.
“Listen,” he says, his voice raspy. “I don’t really feel like doing this whole parley thing. I’ll pay you double whatever you’re getting now if you just let me go.”
“Bullshit you will,” Hall says.
“With whose money?” Jenny asks.
Walker can’t help but think the same. There’s no way Austin’s job in Antlers has made him enough money to pay these mercs even a fourth of what they’re probably earning. It’s only once Austin holds up a cell phone does Walker understand where the idea is going outside of horrible bluff, and he can still feel a headache threatening to explode right out of the center of his forehead.
“Let me call my brother,” Austin says. “He’ll get you the money.”
Shockingly, no one in the mercenary group says a word. Walker had been leaning towards the idea that they had always been planning to make Jacob pay a substantial ransom for Austin, but now he’s not so sure. What the Hell are they being paid to do, then? What’s the point in keeping Austin unharmed?
Austin flips the phone open and punches a number in, mouthing the words as he dials. He holds it up to his ear and waits for a long, long moment. The motel room is silent, the tension inside it stretched as thin as a piano wire. The tinny ringing of the phone is just barely audible to Walker, one of the only people close enough to Austin to hear it. It rings once, twice, three, then four times. Then a fifth. Then a sixth.
“He’s not picking up,” Austin says irately. “He’s always at work.”
Walker takes his own phone out of his pocket, and scrolls through the contacts. He doesn’t necessarily agree with Austin’s plan, but he might as well try to help it go through. God knows what the mercenaries might decide they want after ‘more money’ turns out not to be a viable option. “I’ve got his cell. Let me try it. You try your house.”
He highlights the cell phone number under Jacob’s contact information, and hits Send. Austin irately begins to dial some other number. Jacob’s cell rings once, then again, then again. Walker’s almost declared it a lost cause when someone picks up. There’s no immediate greeting - just the sound of someone breathing heavily into the receiver.
“Hello?” a voice that almost certainly does not belong to Jacob Jones asks.
“Hello?” Walker echoes, too stunned to say anything else.
“Walker?” the person on the other line asks. “Is that you?”
“Yeah,” Walker says.
“Oh,” the person says, and Walker realizes with sudden clarity that it’s Cillian, albeit much more harried than he sounded earlier in the day. “How - how are you dealing with those mercenaries? Did you, ah, did you find out what they were in Antlers for?”
“That’s actually why I’m calling,” Walker says, shifting his weight. There’s a sudden, unpleasant feeling in the pit of his stomach as he considers what he has to say next, but he forces himself to spit it out anyway. “Can I talk to Jacob? Is he around?”
Cillian barks out a laugh. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
Walker swallows past the bile that threatens to rise in his throat. “Why not?”
“If you must know,” Cillian says, sounding very, very tired all of the sudden, “he’s in the hospital. He was stabbed.”