Victories Read Free

three of them followed him in. The room behind the door matched the outside of the building: worn and shabby. There were two sagging double beds with flowered polyester bedspreads, a nightstand and a lamp, and a dresser. The mirror was cracked in one corner, and there were burns and stains on the dresser top. One of the drawer fronts was slightly askew.
    “I’m going to write a stiff letter to the Michelin people,” Loch said, walking across the room to sit down on the bed. It creaked and lurched alarmingly when he did so. “Hey,” he said, shifting sideways. He picked something up from the bedspread, and held it out so they could all see it. “Looks like we’ve come to the right place.”
    Spirit took the oak leaf from his hand. It was fresh and green, like the one they’d found in the van. “Is there anything else here?”
    “Not in this,” Addie said, quickly opening and closing the dresser drawers. “Unless there’s a secret message hidden in the menu of the Alvo Diner,” she added, waving a tattered paper menu.
    “Nothing here but a Bible,” Burke said, closing the drawer of the nightstand. “Not even a phone book.”
    “Who could there be in this entire state that anybody would want to call?” Loch asked. “So, what now?”
    “We wait,” Spirit said, pulling off her jacket and sitting down cautiously on the other bed. She’d like to kick her shoes off, but the rug didn’t look particularly clean.
    “For a while, anyway,” Burke said. He tossed his jacket on the bed, followed it with his tuxedo jacket, and sat down beside her. She leaned into him gratefully and he put his arm around her. “And this is as good a place as any to talk about what we do next.”
    “I didn’t know it was open for discussion,” Addie grumbled. She sat down on the foot of the bed Loch was on, plucking her skirts up fastidiously.
    “Everything’s negotiable,” Loch said mockingly. “First rule of business. So Mordred’s going to start a war, and we’ve been designated by Spirit’s mysterious benefactor as the people who get to stop him. This would seem a lot more stupid if Mordred didn’t have magic and can scrub the brain of anybody we tell about his nefarious plans. Of course, he could also just kill them. That’d work.”
    “Yeah, that’s the point,” Burke said. “We keep talking about ‘stopping’ Mordred and his Shadow Knights. I think it’s time to admit that ‘stop’ means ‘kill.’ Can we do that? This isn’t like the Wild Hunt, banishing demons back to Hell or sending Elves back to wherever Elves live. This is killing people, evil or not.”
    “The good of the many outweighs the good of the few?” Loch asked lightly. But he couldn’t meet Burke’s gaze. “I don’t know if I could kill someone,” he said, staring down at his hands. “Not even knowing.…” His voice trailed off.
    “I can. I can’t just sit here and say I don’t want to get my hands dirty knowing what the world will look like if they win.”
    Spirit’s stomach lurched as she spoke. The sound of her own voice frightened her—she didn’t sound like anyone she could ever have imagined being. Her heart raced even as she knew she’d meant every word. In her mind was the sound of a gunshot, and Muirin falling. To stop that from happening again? Over and over and over—to millions of people?
    She could kill.
    “Maybe there’s another way,” Burke said, hugging her against him. “But I think we should be ready.”
    “Oh, I’m ready for anything,” Addie said bitterly.
    *   *   *
    They were all too keyed-up to even think of sleeping. There was a little money left from what QUERCUS had left them for gas, so Loch went out to the soda machine and brought back Cokes. After that, there was nothing to do but wait. Everything Spirit could think of to say sounded stupid or useless when she thought about it, and apparently the others felt the same.
    What was there to talk about? Muirin was dead, Mordred’s