vanishing speed

Fitz kept them all moving through the snowbound streets, stopping only once to check on the bleeder’s nose. Packing it in snow had stopped the blood loss, but the young man was disoriented from the wreck and the pain. There were other small injuries among his crew, and he stopped at a little convenience store, emerging with a bottle of water and an economy-sized bottle of painkillers. He passed them off to the short, inquisitive kid, and told him to double-dose everyone—and to keep moving.
It took them most of an hour of steady trudging through the cold to clear Bucktown and head for the South Side. A lot of people think of the South Side as a sort of economic desert crossed with a gang-warfare demilitarized zone. It isn’t like that—or at least, it isn’t like that everywhere. There are neighborhoods you don’t want to walk through wearing certain colors, or being a certain color, but they’re more exception than rule. The rest of the South Side varies pretty widely, with plenty of it zoned for industry, and Fitz and his group of battered pedestrians headed into an area on the fringe of an industrial park to a manufacturing facility that had been closed and abandoned for several years.

Ghost Story Chapter 13, Page 138


There was the sudden, burring, metallic buzz of a bell, much like you’d hear in a high school or university hallway. It echoed through the entire building.
“Time for class?” I asked.
“No. Aristedes had us set it up on a timer. Says he needed the warning for his work. It goes off about five minutes before sunrise.”
I felt my back stiffen. “Five minutes?”
Fitz shrugged. “Or seven. Or two. It’s in there somewhere.”
“Hell’s bells,” I said, turning it into a swearword. “Stu was right. Time does get away from you. Be at the guns at eleven, Fitz.”
He grunted and said, in a tired monotone, “Sure, Harvey. Whatever.”
Old books and old movies. I had to help this kid.
I turned away from him and plunged through several walls and out the side of the building, clenching my teeth over snarls of discomfort. The sky had grown almost fully light. Red was swiftly brightening to orange on the eastern horizon out over Lake Michigan. Once yellow got here, I was history.
Five minutes. Or seven. Or two. That was how long I had to find a safe spot. I consulted my mental map of Chicago, looking for the nearest probable shelter, and found the only spot I thought I could get to in a couple of minutes, Nightcrawler impersonation and all.
Maybe I could get there. And maybe it would protect me from the sunrise.
I gritted my teeth, consulted the images in my memory, and, metaphorically speaking, ran for it.
I just had to hope that it wasn’t already too late.

Ghost Story Chapter 13, Page 149-150


And maybe it would finally be useful as something other than a set piece for brooding.
I pulled Sir Stuart’s vanishing trick and realized that I couldn’t jump much farther than maybe three hundred yards at a hop. Still, I could do it a lot faster than running, and it didn’t seem to wear me out the way I would expect such a thing to do. It became an exercise like running itself—repeating the same process over and over to go from Point A to Point B.
I blinked through the front gate of Graceland, took a couple more hops, trying to find the right spot by this big Greek temple–looking mausoleum, and arrived, in a baseball player’s slide, at the gaping hole in the ground. My incorporeal body slid neatly over the white snow that ran right up to the edge of the grave, and I dropped into the cool, shady trench that had been prepared for me.
Sunlight washed over the world above a few heartbeats later. I heard it, felt it, the way I had once felt a minor earthquake through the soles of my shoes in Washington State. There was a harsh, clear, silvery note that hung in the air for a moment, like the after-tone of an enormous chime. I closed my eyes and scrunched up against the side of the grave that felt most likely to let me avoid obliteration.

Ghost Story Chapter 14, Page 154