SESSION 5THE DRIVE-IN AND THE CHAINED WOLF

You left the hospital with sirens behind you and a body in the van. Janine — cold, silent, supposedly finished — had come apart from you at the morgue, and none of you were ready for what happened next.

She sat up.

Not alive. Not quite gone, either. Whatever Paulie's fox-fire did to her corpse in the chaos of the escape didn't let go clean — some part of her soul is still tangled in her own body, soaked through, dazed, mostly just wanting her shoes back. She doesn't scare easy anymore. She doesn't scare at all. Sleepers look right through her — their eyes just slide off, like she isn't worth the effort of seeing. Little Sherm sees her fine. So do you. You dressed her up — army surplus, a lavender wig, somebody's old sequins — and started calling her “totally not dead Janine,” because gallows humor is the only kind that fits. Papa Legba, when Johnson finally asked him straight, said what's burning in her is vengeance. He wouldn't say at who. He said he could be wrong. He usually isn't.

Back at the bar, the afternoon went sideways in a different way. Susan wanted the paperwork on that silo — the one from Pete's disks, the one nobody's supposed to know is there — and borrowed Billie's incense to chase the vision herself. She burned too hot. The whole bar went under with her: you, Little Sherm, two Avon ladies named — with love — Statler and Waldorf, and Janine, dripping, into a soft-focus dream of the archive that never was, everybody young and tan and safe. In that dream, a photocopier that shouldn't exist handed Susan exactly what she went looking for: the silo belongs, on paper, to something called the Willow Grove Civil Defense Annex, signed over by a man named Grant Malcor. There were blueprints too — for a mansion, built on top of whatever's actually down there. The dream started to fray the second Johnson's skepticism touched it. You let it go. Statler and Waldorf haven't been quite the same since.

Then the tube came — not at the office this time, but here, under the bar, like the Order knows exactly where to find you now. The message was short and it used a word it's never used before:

Gatekeepers. Your employer knows they exist. Your employer is warning you off them. That's new, and it isn't comforting.

So you went to Willowgrove. Picked up Billie and a duffel bag of guns on the way, dressed Janine for public consumption, and drove into a suburb that's too clean, too quiet, and tilts — you'd swear it tilts — just slightly downhill away from the city, like it doesn't want you leaving. On Outlook Boulevard you watched four men in suits hose an eye off a wall — the same eye that's been showing up in Pete's old research, the same question underneath it: are all your eyes open? Some kids on skateboards had painted it. Johnson ran them down through the shadows and got a name for the source: something they call Spider Hamlet. Nobody's explained that yet.

That's when the chain rattled.

Fenrir — Loki's son, wearing a Legendary weight nobody in this crew is built to argue with — bound to a chain that has no visible end in either direction. Neither the ritual knife nor a shotgun blast made a dent in it. He didn't want to fight you. He wanted you to listen. The ones scrubbing the graffiti, the ones who built this whole rigged, tilted street — and the city itself — he called them the Gatekeepers. And then he told you the thing that actually scared him: stay away from a woman in a red hood. He didn't explain that either. He just made sure you understood he meant it, and then he walked you — chain and all, as far as the chain allows — to somewhere safer.

The drive-in. The last one standing anywhere near here.

Owned, as it turns out, by Pete.

Run day to day by a man named Sammy — Mountain Dew, vodka, strong opinions about the Star Wars re-releases, and a gift for pulling things halfway out of a movie screen that has nothing to do with special effects. Years back he caught something real on camera — lights over Willowgrove, the genuine article — and the Gatekeepers took the film and the camera both. He thinks it's still in there. He confirmed what you'd started to suspect: that crash site sits under the Mayor's mansion. The mayor is Grant Malcor. Same name as the silo. Same ground, wearing two different signatures.

And somewhere in that conversation, Johnson felt Papa Legba lean in close and say the quiet part out loud: someone is pulling strings.

You already knew that. You'd been saying it for weeks without daring to name it. So Susan asked the notepad straight out — who's doing this to us — and got back something you're still turning over: your adversary is fate, her status, and a low heart.

Three doors were sitting in front of you when the night ended. The silo. The mansion. The magic shop on Outlook where somebody swears they've seen Pete recently. Susan wanted the silo, hard — said every detour so far has been fate steering you away from the real target, and she's not wrong that it's felt that way.

You never voted.

That's where it stands.