Once relieved of their burden of a vanfull of nude kidnappees, Grace and Sanaa head off into the dark scary California night, guided by Sanaa’s vague sense of whatever she’s sensing with witch stuff. It’s only about ten miles to Millerton Lake but it takes them more than half an hour to get there because they don’t know that’s where they’re going until they get there. Actually, they know a little bit before they get there.
Sanaa points at a sign for the town of Friant “We must be heading for Millerton Lake.”
Grace peers at the sign “What makes you think that?”
“It’s right near here and it was used for human sacrifice in the pre-conquest era, it’s the kind of place you’d want to perform a ritual if you were trying to summon an evil spirit.”
“Human sacrifice? By whom?”
“The Aztecs.” Sanaa sees Grace’s dubious look even in the dark of the car. “The Aztecs were famous for ritual human sacrifice.”
“In California?”
Sanaa snorts “Don’t believe what you read in history class, the American education system is an abomination based on masculine Judeo-Christian patriotic hog flop. With a few exceptions, almost everything your teachers told you in class were lies designed to brainwash you into being a good consumer and reinforce patriarchal white Anglo-Saxon control structures.”
“I actually never really went to school.”
She snorts again, if anything more dismissively “And yet here you are buying into the big lie anyway, because the consistently corrupt hollow mainstream media has force fed you a narrative that keeps you in the dark about the true history, the hidden history of the Americas. At the height of the Aztec empire, it stretched all the way to the Great Lakes where they had a city even bigger than Tenochtitlan and the entire debased society was a house of cards based on dark magic and blood sacrifice.”
This doesn’t seem very plausible to Grace, and also vaguely racist, but she doesn’t say anything because she’s mildly embarrassed by her lack of education and also because she doesn’t want to get Sanaa riled up – she seemed pretty chill when they first met but as their mission is progressing, Sanaa seems to Grace to be getting increasingly unchill. At this point she reminds Grace more than a little bit of a junkie who’s waiting for a fix.
It doesn’t take long for them to pass through Friant, a spec of town of less than a thousand people, but right on the edge of town a car pulls them over. Grace thinks that it must be a sheriff or some such on account of the flashing lights which normal cars don’t have you know, but she notices that there’s no emblem or insignia on the brown and white sedan behind them. The man that gets up and walks up to them is wearing a uniform but it doesn’t seem quite right either – it’s just a little off, like it’s what you’d see in a movie that doesn’t have enough money to do it right. But Grace figures that out in the sticks maybe things are a little more relaxed – after all, she got pulled over in rural Arkansas once by a real honest deputy on a riding lawn mower.
Plus the man doesn’t appear to have a sidearm, so how much trouble could there be anyway? Now after she stops the car and a woman pulls up on the other side on a four-wheeler with a shotgun over her shoulder and a knife in her hand that appears to have a handle made out of bone, that’s when Grace gets a little worried. That part doesn’t seem like police procedure at all, even out in the country. She’s never seen anything like that on Law & Order. Then again Law & Order seldom visits rural areas.
Grace looks over at Sanaa “Friends of yours?”
Sanaa leans back in the passenger seat and closes her eyes like she’s going to take a nap “These people mean us no harm, my mentor spirit would let me know if we were in danger.”
Grace eyes the man approaching the car “How reassuring.” She peers into the night but can’t make out any of the man’s features in the gloom. “Is there something I can do for you?”
The not-sheriff speaks in a low pitched, wolfish over-exaggerated voice that sounds like maybe he’s holding some chew in his cheek “I was going to ask you the same thing. We don’t get many visitors up there at this hour, I thought you might be lost.”
Grace shakes her head “No, we’re just heading up to the lake.”
The not sheriff sniffs loudly “The lake is closed.”
“Lakes can close? I didn’t know bodies of water had hours of operation. Who’s in charge of that? Beavers?”
Grace turns at the sound of the woman’s voice on the right side of the vehicle, seeing that she has been joined by another woman on a four-wheeler who also happens to be carrying a rifle – not to mention the half dozen Irish wolfhounds that are sitting nearby obediently. Freakily so.
“He means the park is closed. We don’t want to hassle you, but we’ve had some problems up here lately. With the power outage, people have been coming up here to camp without proper supplies and ending up in some trouble. Truth be told we’re tired of pulling people out of here that think vodka and Gatorade will keep you hydrated. Is that what you and your friend are doing out here? Getting away from the city?”
Grace shakes her head “No, my friend here is a witch and I’m a magician, the real kind that does magic spells, not the Vegas kind with the big bushy eyebrows and the box with a lady in it. We’re looking for a spell we can unravel that’s part of a bigger ritual, an immortal Mexican wrestler is trying to summon a corrupt winged spirit of the night and we’re trying to stop him.”
For a long moment no one makes a sound, and then finally the not-sheriff laughs one of those 70/30 laughing/coughing laughs that elderly people and smokers (and especially elder smokers) deploy.
