Demon Road. Derek Landy
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as it was. “We must have driven more than eight hours by now, right?” she asked. “We’ve been on the road since before seven. It’s almost five now. That’s, like … ten hours.”
“It took you a disturbingly long while to add that up.”
“Whatever. So why can you only drive for eight hours?”
“On average.”
Amber sighed. “Why can you only drive for eight hours on average?”
“Because that’s my rule.”
She looked at him. “You’re not a sharer, are you? Okay, fine, let’s keep this professional. Let’s keep this employer and employee. Let’s talk about, like, the mission. What do you know about this Dacre Shanks guy?”
“Just what Edgar told us.”
“What do you think he’ll be like? Do you think he’ll be nice?”
“There are no nice serial killers.”
“Well, I know that,” said Amber, “but he’s not going to kill us on sight or anything, is he?”
“Don’t know.” Milo took a small iPad from his jacket. “Look him up.”
She grabbed it off him. “You’re allowed to have internet access, but I’m not? How is that fair?”
“Because your parents have no idea who I am, whereas they’ve undoubtedly got their eyes on your email account.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh yeah.”
She tapped on the screen for the search engine and put in Shanks’s name.
“Dacre Shanks,” she read, “the serial killer known as the Family Man. Oh God, do you know what he did? He kidnapped people that looked alike to make up a perfect family. Then he killed them all and started again. Says here he killed over three dozen people before he was shot to death, most of them in and around Springton, Wisconsin. We’re actually going to try to talk to this guy?”
“All we need him to do is give us the name of the man who cheated the Shining Demon.”
“And why should he give it to us when he didn’t give it to Edgar?”
“Because Edgar posed no threat,” Milo said. “Whereas we do.”
“Do we? He’s a serial killer who, like, came back from the grave. I know you’ve got your guns and you’re really good at being horrible to people, but do you seriously think you can threaten him?”
Milo frowned. “I’m not horrible to people.”
“Really? You really don’t think you’re horrible to people?”
“No,” he said, a little defensively. “I’m nice. Everyone says it.”
“Oh man,” said Amber. “People have lied to you. Like, a lot. But even if we could threaten him – is that a good idea, to threaten a serial killer who’s come back from the dead?”
“I’ve threatened worse.”
“Worse how?”
“Just worse.”
She sighed. “Fine. Don’t elaborate. How are we supposed to find him, anyway? What if he isn’t in Springton anymore?”
“We’ll find him,” said Milo. “We’re on the blackroads now.”
“The what?”
“Guy I knew once called them the blackroads – roads connecting points of darkness, criss-crossing America. Stay on the blackroads and you’ll eventually meet every unholy horror the country has to offer. It’s a network. Some people call it the Dark Highway, or the Demon Road. It’s never the same route twice and there are no maps to guide the way.”
“Then how do you know we’re on it?”
“I’ve travelled it before. So has this car. You get the feeling for it.”
Amber looked at him for a quiet moment. “Sometimes I think you just make stuff up.”
MILO PULLED THE CHARGER up to a pump at a truck stop and Amber was allowed out. She stepped on to the forecourt and stretched, arching her spine and feeling it crack. The afternoon wasn’t much cooler than the afternoons she’d endured in Orlando. It was hot and the sun was bright and the air was laden with moisture. A truck roared by on the road, rustling the trees on the far side and kicking up mini-tornadoes of dust that danced around Amber’s bare calves.
The place was pretty run-down. Desperate blades of grass surged from cracks in the ground like drowning men in a sea of concrete. A long building with a sagging roof and dirty windows identified itself as a Family Restaurant. The letter E was missing from the sign outside, turning EAT HERE into EAT HER. Amber turned her back on it.
Beyond the fence there was corn, miles of it, and a clump of sorry-looking forest behind the truck stop itself. An old Coca-Cola billboard was rusting and peeling on a metal strut.
“Hey,” said Milo, and she turned and he tossed her the baseball cap over the roof of the car. “Head down at all times. Just because you can’t see a CCTV camera doesn’t mean it can’t see you.”
She pulled the cap low. “You really think my parents would be able to find me here? In Florida, okay, they probably have cops and officials doing whatever they want, but we’re not in Florida anymore.”
“Your folks have been around for over a hundred years,” Milo said, sliding the nozzle in. “Let’s not underestimate how far their reach spreads.”
The gas started pumping and Amber headed round the side of the station, following the sign for the restroom. The clerk, a bored-looking guy in his fifties, didn’t even glance up as she passed his window.
The restroom was empty and relatively clean. The early evening sun came in through the three windows up near the ceiling. Amber chose the only cubicle with a toilet seat, and when she was done she washed her hands in the sink. The mirror was dirty but intact, and she took off her cap and looked at her reflection. Butterflies fluttered deep in her belly.
You just decide you want to shift, and you shift, Imelda had said. Amber decided she wanted to shift, but her body ignored her. She tried again. She tried to remember how it had happened in Imelda’s apartment, how it had happened when she’d bitten that finger off, but she couldn’t even come close to replicating those feelings.
Did she even want to? What if she shifted and she couldn’t shift back? What if she became stuck as a demon, unable to revert? No matter how much she tried to cover up, someone was bound to see, and then word would reach her parents and they’d come after her, the predators after their prey.
Amber looked into her own eyes. She hated being the prey. She commanded her body to change and this time it obeyed.
The pain blossomed and she cried out, and even as she was doing so she was watching her reflection. Her skin darkened to a glorious red in the time it would have taken her to blush. Her bones creaked and throbbed and her body lengthened – her legs, her torso, her arms. Her feet jammed tight in her sneakers. She was suddenly tall, suddenly slim. Her face was longer, her jawline defined, her cheekbones raised and sharpened. It was still her face, but her features were altered. Her lips were plumper. Her brown hair was black now, and longer, the tangles straightened.
Dizziness, an astonishing wave of vertigo, nearly took her to the ground. She gripped the edge of the sink, kept herself standing, unable and unwilling to look away from the beautiful demon in the mirror.
And she was