Chapter 76: Rango: "Oh, You've Got to Be Kidding Me"
Gloria came through the door like a weather system.
The backpack hit Rango in the chest. The rolling carry-on followed approximately one second later, directed with the specific accuracy of someone who had been rehearsing this throw mentally for several hours.
"I texted you my flight information last night," she said, and her voice had the particular quality of someone who had moved past shouting into something quieter and significantly more dangerous. "Gate B-fourteen. Seven forty-five AM. I stood outside baggage claim for two hours."
Rango opened his mouth.
"In November," she added.
He closed it.
He had, genuinely, not checked his phone. Between running Clary to Brooklyn, the mystery message about Azazel's location, the four hours with Splinter, and the recruitment fair from hell, his phone had been a tool for incoming information only. The idea that Gloria was landing this morning had been somewhere in the back of his mind with the status of I'll deal with that later — which was, he recognized, not his best work.
Gloria looked past him at the living room. At the assembled collection of people who were sitting in a semicircle around a whiteboard drinking coffee. At the pastry plate. At the general atmosphere of a team meeting that had been going on comfortably for some time.
Her expression moved through several things quickly.
"You were having a strategy brunch," she said.
"It's operational planning—"
"With pastries."
Rango caught her hands before she could reload. "Gloria—"
"I was standing on a curb in thirty-degree wind for two hours and you were eating croissants—"
He pulled her in, which she resisted for exactly three seconds before allowing it, and lowered his voice to something that was just for her. The room, to their credit, found things to look at. Coffee cups. The whiteboard. The middle distance.
Nick, standing near the window, listened for approximately four seconds and then leaned toward Dean with the expression of someone who couldn't help himself.
"She's not actually mad about the airport," he murmured. "She's scared he's going to disappear again. Like last time. That's what this is."
The room was, as it happened, completely quiet. Rango had been whispering. Everyone else had been doing the polite thing.
Nick's observation landed in the silence like a stone in a still pond.
Gloria went rigid.
It was the specific rigidity of someone whose interior state has just been read aloud in a room full of strangers — not wrong, which would have been manageable, but exactly right, which was much worse.
She pushed Rango back, turned a look on Nick that could have stripped paint, and walked out the front door.
Rango pointed at Nick.
Nick, to his credit, had the grace to look slightly apologetic. Slightly.
"The range," Rango said, "is something we're going to discuss later."
He went after her.
Half a block down, the neighborhood was quiet in the way of late mornings on residential streets — a dog walker, someone scraping a windshield, the distant sound of the BQE doing what it always did.
Gloria had slowed to a walk. By the time Rango fell into step beside her, the anger had metabolized into something quieter, which was actually harder to navigate.
He told her everything. The timeline moving up. Azazel already in the city. The recruitment fair. The plan taking shape.
She listened without interrupting, which was how he knew she was scared.
"If he's that powerful," she said finally, "why not just — relocate. You just got settled. You've got the brownstone, you've got something that looks like a life here. Why not—"
"Because Sam doesn't get to relocate," Rango said. "Emma doesn't. And even if they did, Azazel's been tracking the Winchester line for thirty years. He finds us eventually. I'd rather pick the ground."
She was quiet.
"And I've got actual backup this time," he said. "You saw the room. Four trained fighters who have been protecting this city since they were teenagers. A Shadowhunter who can drop a containment array on anything that walks. A kid who can compress metal with his hands. And others." He paused. "It's not just me and a shotgun."
Gloria looked sideways at him. "That Nick person needs to learn to keep his mouth shut."
"He does. I'll talk to him about operational boundaries." A beat. "The range is limited. If you stay on the other side of the room from him you should be fine."
She exhaled something that was almost a laugh. Not quite, but close.
He took her hand. She let him.
They walked back toward the house.
They could hear the argument from the front walk.
Rango opened the door to find the living room in a state of organized chaos — everyone talking at once, Ted at the whiteboard with a telescoping pointer looking like a substitute teacher who had lost the room, and the whiteboard itself covered in what appeared to be a finger-painting exercise that had gotten out of hand.
"—those aren't even walls, Ted, that's just a circle—"
"My name is Pierce, not Vomit Man, not the Vomiter, Pierce—"
"Who's cleaning up the foot soldiers? Because I came here for the main event—"
"Excuse me, kid, you want to run that back? Turtles? We are the Ninja Turtles, there is a very important word in that—"
"I'm here to place the binding array, did anyone think to assign me a position or—"
"What is the balcony?" Dean was on his feet, pointing at the whiteboard. "Where is the balcony on this floor plan, Ted, it's a solid circle—"
"Enough," Rango said.
The room settled.
He looked at the whiteboard.
He looked at it for several seconds.
"Ted," he said carefully. "What am I looking at."
Ted straightened. "The floor plan. I drew it myself — the printer's out of ink. The important thing is I understand it, and I can walk everyone through—"
"You drew a color-coded abstract expressionist painting and called it a floor plan."
"The colors have meaning—"
"Move," Rango said.
He took the marker, erased what he could, and turned to the room. "Megan. Pull up the address from the note Dean gave us. Project it on the wall."
The projection system — one of the house's more useful supernatural features — hummed to life. Megan, who had strong opinions about being useful, had clearly been waiting to be asked.
An image resolved on the wall. Satellite view, then street view. A two-story house in a quiet block — white trim, mature trees in front, the particular look of something recently renovated.
"Good," Rango said. "Okay. Now we can actually—"
He stopped.
He looked at the house.
He looked at the street it was on.
At the trees. At the front steps. At the proportions of the windows.
"Why," he said slowly, "do I know that house."
"Yeah," Dean said, from his chair, in the flat voice of someone who had already processed this and arrived somewhere bleak. "You should."
He turned a pen over in his fingers.
"That's your old address, Rango. Whoever bought the lot tore down the original structure and rebuilt. But that's the same parcel."
The room was quiet.
Rango looked at the projection.
At the house that was built on the ground where he grew up.
Where Azazel was going to be.
"Of course it is," he said, to no one in particular.
Ted wisely said nothing.
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