Annalise wanted to visit Acorn Road immediately. Rather than drive aimlessly around reading street signs, I insisted we fill the tank and ask directions. The middle-aged clerk behind the counter tried to help, but when he told me to take a right turn where the bowling alley used to be, I snatched a map off the display rack and added it to our bill.
As I filled the tank, I noticed a young mother pull in next to us, with a little girl and a little boy in the front seat beside her. Her car was full of groceries. “For God’s sake,” she said, exasperated. “Sit still for five minutes! Please? Five minutes?” I finished refueling, trying not to look at the kids. Every time I did I imagined them crowned with flames.
The streets were sprinkled with potholes and dark from burned-out streetlights. We passed a lot of battered, rundown pickups and rattletrap station wagons.
We drove by three houses having their roofs repaired and two that were being landscaped. The town looked like it had just started to pull itself out of a long decline.
It turned out that Annalise was not good with maps. She sent me in the wrong direction twice. We had a lovely but useless tour of Hammer Bay’s downtown. We drove past antique shops and small, family-owned hardware stores. There was a sign above a storefront that read THE MALLET. The newspaper box at the curb had the same name across the front.
We drove uphill. The waterfront road was on the top of a cliff that grew higher the farther south we went. There were several restaurants: pizza, diner, Mexican, Italian, Chinese, brew pub, and a couple of high-end places that had prime cliffside locations. Sadly, the sports bar was the only place that showed signs of life. A glance through the window at the big screen inside was all I needed to see that the Mariners game was on.
I had the sudden urge to pull over, but I ignored it. Baseball wasn’t part of my life anymore, and it hadn’t been for a long time. Just thinking about it reminded me of friends I’d lost and times when life seemed much simpler.
Maybe Annalise was right. Maybe I was being maudlin. What the hell, I was going to die soon, wasn’t I? I had a right.
By this time my hunger had returned with a vengeance. I slowed as we passed a Thai restaurant.
“Are you buying dinner?” I asked. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t even have a change of underwear or a toothbrush. If she was going to kill me, she could at least buy me a meal first.
“Not right now, I’m not.”
That made me hopeful.
I took the map from her. It was a cheap tourist map, covered with little icons showing the locations of local landmarks and restaurants that had paid for the privilege. Crude squiggles represented the cliff. Behind us, to the north, was the bay the town was named for. Ahead of us in the dark at the south end of town was some sort of light house, supposedly, although I couldn’t see any lights.
Acorn Road was at the northeastern end of town. We were at the southwestern end. I made note of the route we needed and started off.
So far I had not seen a single cop. That struck me as a little strange. Most small towns station at least one car near the bars. I didn’t know if they were busy with an emergency or were kicking back at a doughnut shop somewhere.
Now that she was not burdened with the map, Annalise picked up the scrap wood again and stared at it. The design churned slowly. It didn’t slow down or speed up. It didn’t change much at all. It just kept moving and moving.
What ever this meant, Annalise didn’t like it.
As I drove through the neighborhood, streetlights lit up three more black marks just like the one the gray worms had left in the gravel lot. One started at the top of a bright yellow plastic slide. Another lay across an asphalt driveway beside a skateboard and helmet. The last began next to a pile of windblown, rain-warped schoolbooks.
Not beside a riding mower. Not a Harley or a pickup. Only kids’ things.
I found the Bentons’ house and parked on the street. There were only five or six other cars on the block, and Annalise’s Sprinter stuck out like a sore thumb. I didn’t see any lights switch on or any curtains draw back. No one peeked at us. It seemed we had come to a small town where the neighbors were not particularly nosy. In other words, the Twilight Zone.
Annalise strolled up to the front door and rang the bell. When there was no answer, she rang it again. No answer. She lifted her foot to kick the door down.
“Wait,” I said. I took the ghost knife from my pocket.
The ghost knife was nothing more than a small sheet of notepaper covered first by mailing tape, then actual laminate. On one side of the paper was a sigil like the ones on Annalise’s ribbons or our tattoos. This one I had drawn myself.
It was a spell. My only one.
The ghost knife slid into the door as if the wood was only smoke. I drew the mark down through the dead-bolt latch and pushed the door open. The dark house lay waiting for me.
The first time I went to jail, it was a trip to juvie for a handgun accident that had crippled my best friend. There hadn’t been any formal charges over that, but it set a sort of precedent.
The second time was when I lived in Los Angeles. I’d been working as a car thief, stealing popular models and driving them either to a chop shop or else down to the docks at Long Beach to be shipped and sold overseas. It was fun, sort of. I was in a crew of jack-offs and morons I could almost rely on, and I didn’t have to carry a gun, which was a big plus considering my history. When I was busted for a bar fight, and wouldn’t testify against the jack-offs and morons, the cops made sure I did a couple of years.
The third time was last year. That didn’t go well, in part because it was how I met and made enemies with Annalise. The cops arrested me following that fiasco, too, but after a couple of months the charges were dropped. I had a lawyer hired by the society to thank for that, along with a lot of forensic evidence that appeared to have been tampered with and/or incompetently handled.
It hadn’t been, of course, but no one in the legal system was ready to recognize the aftermath of supernatural murder. Even the lawyer the Twenty Palace Society hired thought I was being framed and tried to convince me to sue the Seattle PD.
I didn’t bother. When I’d walked out of the court house just this afternoon, Annalise was waiting for me. Now I was here in this town, and I wasn’t expecting to see the end of the week. What was the point of filing a bunch of legal papers?
The point of this digression into the not-so-distant past is that I had a history with cops and jails. I didn’t want to go back. Also, I’d never broken into someone’s house before. Not a stranger’s house, at least.
So I felt an unfamiliar chill as I pushed the Bentons’ front door open. The house was quiet. I hesitated before entering.
There’s a feeling of power that comes from invading someone’s space. I’d felt it when I’d stolen cars as part of Arne’s crew. I’d sit behind a steering wheel, beside their fast-food wrappers or what ever, and know I was taking something very personal. A simple action like readjusting the seat—
“Would you hurry up?” Annalise snapped. “I don’t want to stand here all night.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Well, don’t step in that,” she said, pointing.
There was a long black streak on the carpet that led to the door. I hopped over it into the living room. The streak led out the door and turned left toward the sea. I was glad I hadn’t stepped in it.
Annalise shut the door and surveyed the room. She laid the scrap wood against the wall. The design continued to churn.
I looked around the empty house. Could there be a predator somewhere here?
“What do we look for?” I asked.
“Start by following this snail trail to its source. I want to know what happened here and why. Look around. Be thorough. Don’t turn on the lights. And keep your ghost knife handy.”
That seemed straightforward. Annalise went into the kitchen while I knelt beside the streak.
An opening in the curtain allowed light from the street-lamps outside to shine on the carpet. I got down on my hands and knees beside it. The carpet fibers appeared to have been scorched, and although I couldn’t smell smoke, I could smell the nasty, sterile tang I’d smelled in the gravel lot.
The streak went up the stairs. So did I. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom on the upper floor. The streak led to the back room, where it ended in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a heap of scorched blankets.
There were Kim Possible posters on the wall and little pink ponies on the dresser. A third child for the Bentons. A daughter.
There was a certificate on the wall that said she’d won her sixth-grade math bee. I didn’t read it. I didn’t want to know her name.
The room was cluttered and disorganized—she wasn’t a tidy kid—but there were a couple of blank spaces. One was on the wall beside her certificates and awards. Another was a rectangular space in the center of her bureau, among the piled clothes and school papers. Everything had two or three months’ worth of dust on it.
The nightstand beside her bed was a nest of photos in cheap frames, except for a blank space at the front edge. Four or five more photos lay on the carpet beside the bed. I picked them up, wishing that Annalise had given me gloves.
Most of them featured a dark-haired girl on the verge of puberty. She was small-boned, like Meg, but she carried a lot of flab, like Douglas. She wasn’t a kid I would have noticed, but standing in her bedroom, knowing that the scorch marks on the floor probably marked the spot where she died, I felt a profound sense of loss.
The pictures showed her smiling with a group of friends. She was, if you believed the photos, a happy kid. I saw the cowlicked boy in one of the pictures and looked away.
There was a second dresser in a corner of the room. Beside it, a mattress and box spring stood against the wall. This dresser was older and held fewer mementos. A photo on the back corner showed the same younger daughter with an older girl with the same narrow glasses and pointy chin. A sister? I liked the challenging, mischievous expression on her face.
I noticed that there was no dust on this dresser or any of the knickknacks. Someone had been cleaning it. Could Meg have been walking past the younger daughter’s things to clean the older one’s? It seemed so. Obviously, they still remembered the older sister.
The middle room was larger and had two beds. There was a definite clash of styles in here—the Wiggles versus Giant Japanese Robots.
On the younger side of the room, I noticed several more empty spaces amid the clutter. The older boy’s things, however, had been torn apart. Drawers had been yanked out of the dresser and dumped on the floor. The closet had been ransacked, toys and books scattered.
Someone had packed in a panic.
I went back into the hall. The scorched black mark was still there. I noticed something funny about it and crouched down on the floor.
At the edge of the streaks were a couple of smaller burns. It was like a river that had one main channel and some small channels that separated for a short while and then rejoined the main flow.
The silver worms had made this trail. I’d suspected it, of course, from the moment I saw the trail leading out the door, but now I was sure.
I hopped over the scorched carpet and checked out the bathroom. It was also in disarray. Toothbrushes had been scattered across the sink and floor. There were a lot of personal effects in here, from expensive salon conditioners to a paperback beside the toilet.
The hall closet was filled with towels and cleaning supplies. Everything was neatly folded and arranged. This had obviously been passed over during the frantic packing.
Last was the master bedroom, which looked like it had been tossed by the cops. I walked on the clothes on the floor because there was nowhere else to step. An abandoned crib at the foot of the bed was loaded with winter clothes. The end table had a pair of cheap paperbacks on it, along with a pair of alarm clocks and a pair of eyeglass cases. Behind the clocks sat a little box coated with a thin film of dust. I disturbed the dust opening the box. Inside was a pile of unused condoms.
The Bentons had skipped town like a drug mule who had been caught dipping into the product.
At this point, I started to feel dirty. This was too private, and there was too much grief and tragedy here. I was ashamed of the tingle of excitement I’d felt at the door.
And yes, it made me angry. Angry at Annalise for forcing me to come on this job. Angry at Meg and Douglas for having these problems. Angry at whoever had cast the spell that had burned these three kids.
I kicked the clothes on the floor into a pile in the corner but found only ordinary carpet underneath. No circles, sigils, or other signs of summoning magic.
I opened the bedroom closet and dug around. If I was going to do something I hated, I was going to do it quickly. I pulled stacks of clothes out of the back of the closet and uncovered a small safe. It was locked.
Annalise could probably tear it open, but I didn’t need her help. I took out my ghost knife and sliced off the steel hinges and the lock. The safe door fell onto the floor.
Inside I found a long, slender box and a folder full of papers. I opened the box, revealing a diamond necklace.
I don’t know much about jewelry, but it looked old, like necklaces I’d seen in old movies. It was probably an heirloom, and it was probably worth a lot of money, yet the Bentons had abandoned it in their rush for the county line.
I held on to the necklace longer than was strictly necessary. I had no job and no food in my belly. My bed and board were in the hands of a woman who hated my guts and wanted me dead. It would have been easy to slip this jewelry into my pocket. I needed money of my own if I was ever going to be free, and it wasn’t like the Bentons were coming back for it.
I put the necklace back into the box and put the box back into the safe. I didn’t think about it or try to reason it out. I just closed the box and moved on.
The folder was full of investment papers. Douglas had a 401(k), some stocks, and a house in Poulsbo that he rented out. There was a lot of money tied up in these papers, but they’d been abandoned, too. It looked like the Bentons were too busy saving their kid to worry about their investments. I was starting to like Douglas and Meg, tire iron or not.
Considering the find I’d made in the closet, I decided to check the closets in the bathroom and the rest of the bedrooms, too. None of them held anything of importance, and nothing otherworldly bit my arm off. I supposed I shouldn’t have worried about the danger. If there was a predator in the house, Annalise’s piece of scrap wood would have detected it.
Whether she would have told me about it is another matter, of course.
Once, not too long ago, I’d cast a spell from a stolen spell book to give myself a vision of a vast expanse of mist and darkness. The Empty Spaces. The Deeps.
There I’d seen predators moving through the void: colossal serpents, huge wheels of fire, groups of tumbling boulders that sang to one another and changed direction like a flock of birds. All of them were searching for living worlds to devour.
Then I came face-to-face with a predator that had come here, to our world. It was a parasitic bug the size of a house cat, and it had a hunger for human flesh. If I hadn’t stopped it, it would have brought the rest of the swarm here to feed like locusts.
Before she’d discovered the truth about me, Annalise had told me a little about them. They were not demons or devils, with pitchforks and horns and contracts you sign in blood. They were simply creatures hunting for food—predators—and we were the food.
They were drawn to certain kinds of magic the way sharks were drawn to blood. People summoned and tried to control them for all sorts of reasons—to destroy enemies, to grant power, to guard, or even just to learn the secrets of the world behind the world. That house-cat-sized predator I’d destroyed had been brought here for its supposed healing powers.
The only thing the predators wanted was to be brought to a world where they could feed. They love to be summoned, Annalise had said, but they hate to be held in place.
She had told me that the second predator she’d ever seen was a strange, spongy lattice that was difficult to see even under bright light. The creature was only clearly visible when it was filled with the blood it fed on.
The man who had summoned it had killed derelicts and petty criminals for years to sustain it, prompting the press to call him “the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” and “the Torso Killer.” Annalise said she had no idea what that weird predator had done for him in return for all that blood, but she had personally burned them both to ash.
She wouldn’t talk about the first predator she had seen.
Any of those predators, summoned to Earth and allowed to run loose, could scour the planet of life. That was why we had come to Hammer Bay—to make sure that, what ever was happening here, it was stopped.
I thought about that old friend of mine again, the one I’d crippled and who’d loved the Mariners. I had loved him like a brother and I’d nearly helped him—and the predator inside him—destroy the world.
My hand fell against my jacket pocket, feeling the laminated paper inside. Of the three spells I’d cast from that stolen book, the ghost knife was the only one I still had. I had a copy of that stolen spell book hidden away, but I hadn’t decided what to do with it. There was power in it, absolutely, but spell casting was painful and dangerous, and if Annalise or one of the other peers found out that I still had it, they’d execute me on the spot. For the Twenty Palace Society, stealing magic was a capital crime.
I couldn’t think of anything else to do on the second floor and went downstairs, stepping carefully around the marks on the carpet.
There was a message on the answering machine. Since Doug and Meg didn’t seem likely to be coming back, I pushed Play. It was only thirty minutes old and was from someone named Jennifer. She sounded about fifteen. The message was for “Mom and Dad” and made clear her outrage that her parents were planning to pull her out of school—and away from all her friends in the dorm now that she’d finally made some—with only three weeks until finals. This, apparently, would ruin her chance to get into a decent college. Can anyone express contemptuous disbelief as purely and cleanly as a teenage girl? I pressed the Save button on the machine; I liked Doug and Meg too much to erase a message from their daughter.
Annalise stood in the dark kitchen, staring out the window. Her face was utterly blank. Something about her made me give her some space.
I looked away and noticed a crumpled sheet of paper in the corner. I picked it up but there wasn’t enough light to read it.
Annalise glanced at me, her expression still inscrutable. I approached her and looked out the window, too.
In the next house over, a woman sat at her kitchen table, crying over a small, framed photo. I wondered how long she’d been sitting there, and how long Annalise had stood silently in the darkness, watching.
“What did you find?” she finally asked.
“Douglas and Meg, who think they hadn’t been blessed with a boy until last whenever, have actually had five kids. Three boys and two girls. It sounds as if the older girl is at a boarding school somewhere. The younger girl died upstairs in her room, and the worms marked up this carpet as they made a run for the soil outside. I suspect the middle boy died in his car seat a while ago. They packed in a frantic rush, but only for the middle child. We saw what happened to him.
“They rushed off in such a hurry that they left jewelry and financial documents in the safe upstairs. It looks like they threw a bunch of clothes and crap into their car and took off.
“I didn’t find any evidence of a spell, or a spell book, or predators. Nothing except that scorched streak in the carpet. That …” I wasn’t sure how to continue. “Those worms that came out of the boy … those were predators, weren’t they?”
Annalise didn’t look at me. “Did you take the jewelry?”
“No,” I said.
She started to pat me down. Without thinking, I drew away from her. That was a mistake.
Annalise grabbed my upper arm and squeezed—not hard enough to break the bone, but enough to remind me she could. I held myself very still.
I still had the ghost knife, of course, but I wasn’t confident enough to try it against her. Maybe later, though. Maybe soon.
She searched me and I didn’t do a damn thing about it. When she was done, she went back to the window without a word. I moved next to her and stared at the woman, too. What ever Annalise was seeing, it didn’t entrance me the way it did her.
Eventually, Annalise went upstairs to the master bedroom. I followed. She took the jewelry from the safe and laid the wood scrap against it. The sigil twisted at the same steady pace. The necklace was no more magic than anything else in the house. Annalise didn’t seem surprised.
“So, boss,” I finally said, “do you want to see what picture she’s crying over?”
“Yes,” she answered. Her funny little voice sounded small.
“Does it have anything to do with the job?”
She looked up at me. Her tiny eyes were shadowed and impossible to read. “I’ll know soon enough, won’t I?”
I walked out the front door, up the Bentons’ walk, and down the sidewalk to the next house. The mailbox had the name FINKLER on it in gold stickers.
I rang the front doorbell. After about three minutes—a long wait, but I knew she had to wipe away tears and check herself in a mirror—I heard her turn the knob. I stepped down her front step, giving her space and putting myself below her. I wanted to be as nonthreatening as I could.
She opened the door without undoing a lock. I’d have placed her in her mid-forties, although she could have been older. She had grim lines around her mouth and eyes, and her face was puffy.
As I looked at her, her expression changed. The traces of sorrow vanished. Within a few seconds, she was as pleasant as if she had just been watching a dull sitcom. “Yes?” she said.
I wanted to tell her to lock her doors. What if some ex-con came by with some song-and-dance story? Instead I said: “I’ve been trying to reach the Benton family next door? I’m a day early? No one seems to be answering, though?” I let my voice rise at the end of each sentence, turning everything I said into a question.
“I saw them loading up their car. It looked like they were taking a trip.”
“Really? They were expecting me. Aunt Meg was going to help me find a job.”
“At the toy plant?”
“She didn’t say. I guess so.”
“And she’s your aunt?” She looked at me carefully, measuring me.
“We haven’t met. Our family is pretty spread out. I’m still not sure what I should call her. ‘Mrs. Benton’ sounds so formal, but I’m not comfortable yet calling her ‘aunt’ when we haven’t even met.” I kept vamping, wondering how much time Annalise would need.
“When you see her,” Ms. Finkler interrupted, “ask her what she wants to be called. People should let people pick their own names.”
“Welp, that makes a lot of sense.”
“But they went on some kind of trip. You say you’re early?”
“Only by a day.”
“They looked like they were going to be gone longer than that. I don’t know what to tell you. But if you want a job, you should go to the toy plant tomorrow. They’re always hiring lately.” She looked me up and down. “Wear something decent.”
I smiled at her. It took an effort. “Thanks. I appreciate the advice.”
“You’re welcome.” She closed the door.
I walked back to the van and climbed behind the wheel. Annalise hadn’t told me where to meet her, but I hoped she knew better than to think I was going back to the Bentons’ house. I drove around the corner, parked beside the alley, and waited.
The streetlight was overhead. I took the piece of paper I’d found on the floor of the living room and held it up to the light. It read:
I’m putting this where you will find it. This is the only way we can talk about the truth. Every time I try to talk to you …
We need to get away from here before we lose Justin and Sammy, too. I sent a postcard to my sister asking her to invite us for a visit. I told her to make it seem like an emergency. When she calls, let’s run and never come back.
I’m terrified and I don’t know what to do. When I’m alone, I remember them just for a couple of minutes at a time. Do you remember them, too, in the middle of the night when no one else is around?
I miss them terribly. I don’t know what’s happening. I just want to get away. I don’t think I’m crazy. Am I crazy?
I love you.
That was it. The note was unsigned, but it looked like a woman’s handwriting.
They’d lost three of their kids, and while I didn’t have kids of my own, a lifetime of Hollywood movies had convinced me it was the worst thing that could happen. Except they only knew it had happened in odd, lonely moments.
Why the Bentons? Who had targeted their kids, and why?
The passenger door swung open. Annalise climbed in.
“Everything go okay?” I asked.
“I’m hungry. Let’s find someplace to eat.”
I started the van. “What did you find out?” She didn’t answer. I drove toward downtown.
Her silence annoyed me, but then I had a scary thought. What if I hadn’t distracted Ms. Finkler for long enough? What if she’d caught Annalise in her kitchen?
Annalise had spells that could deal with people without taking their lives—I’d seen them in action—but she didn’t always use them. She hadn’t been all that concerned about catching Meg and Douglas in her green flame. They had survived only because I had knocked them back.
Annalise only cared about one thing: she searched for people who cast magic spells, especially those that summoned predators, and she killed them. Nothing else mattered to her. Certainly not innocent bystanders. They were expendable.
And, to tell the truth, I’d seen a little bit of her world, and I understood her. I’d seen what predators could do. With their appetites, they could devour every living thing on the planet.
Maybe we needed people like Annalise—people who were willing to do what ever it took to protect us. Without her, and others like her, maybe we wouldn’t even be here now.
But I really hoped she hadn’t killed that sad woman.
Annalise held the scrap wood in her hands, staring at the designs as if they were tea leaves. What ever she could read there, it was pissing her off.
I turned into the business district and pulled into the parking lot of a Thai restaurant. I didn’t know how good it would be, but pad thai wasn’t rocket science and I’d been craving it for months. They didn’t exactly let you order in from a jail cell.
“What are we doing here?” Annalise asked.
“Grub.”
“I don’t eat this. Find a place that serves burgers or steaks.”
I sighed to let her know how disappointed I was and found a diner just a block farther down the road. As we entered, Annalise placed the scrap wood on the door-jamb. As far as I could tell, the designs continued to churn slowly, without any change. We went inside and found a booth.
By the clock above the counter it was nearly eleven. We’d had a busy day.
There were three or four other customers. All of them thought we were worth a good, long look. I couldn’t blame them. Annalise was quite a sight in her oversized firefighter’s jacket, tattoos, and clipped red hair. Standing next to her, I looked almost reputable.
The waitress came to our table. “New in town?” she asked. Annalise grunted.
“Just drove in,” I said. I smiled politely, knowing what some waitstaff do to the food when they don’t like a customer.
“Looking for work at the plant, I guess?”
“They really need people, huh?”
“Sure do,” she said. She took our order. Annalise asked for iced tea and a grilled steak. When she was told they were out, she ordered a cheeseburger with bacon. It sounded so good I ordered the same thing but with a cola. Maybe the sugar would keep me awake.
As the waitress started to turn away, Annalise grabbed her hand. The waitress tried to wrench herself free but couldn’t break Annalise’s grip.
Annalise laid the scrap wood on the woman’s wrist, then let her go. The waitress quickly retreated behind the counter.
Great. I hoped I wouldn’t be eating her spit later.
Annalise stared out the window. She looked distinctly unhappy.
I smiled. “Nice little town, huh?”
“I’ve been to some that were nicer. Smaller, too.”
Annalise abruptly stood and moved toward the counter. The other customers had turned back to their own conversations, but one of the men at the counter tapped his companion. They watched her approach. Both were in their fifties and wore blue overalls smeared with machine oil.
“Excuse me,” she said to them. She laid the wood against the first man’s arm, then the second’s. She moved to a booth in the corner and the last of the diner’s customers: a pair of ladies who must have been in their seventies.
“Excuse me,” Annalise said again. She laid the block against one woman’s shoulder. After a second, she moved to the next.
The second woman flinched. “I don’t—”
“It’s all right,” Annalise said, and laid the wood against the woman’s arm. After a moment, she started back toward our table.
The first mechanic caught her eye as she passed. “If you’re looking for something radioactive, honey, you put your hand on the wrong body part.”
His buddy chuckled. Annalise walked by without comment. As she settled back into her seat, the waitress returned. She didn’t seem terribly happy with us. “If you keep bothering other customers, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Annalise didn’t acknowledge her. “Understood,” I said.
The woman moved away from the table while keeping a wary eye on us. I wondered how long it would take for word about us to spread around town.
“I expected you to keep a lower profile,” I said.
Again Annalise didn’t acknowledge the remark.
“What’s the matter? Turn off your emotion chip?”
She stared at me as though she was imagining me dead.
I’ve seen that look before, but it’s not something I’ve ever gotten used to.
I settled back in my seat and was silent. Annalise didn’t need to talk to me. I was going to be dead soon.
I remembered the way the boy had split apart into a mass of worms and my stomach flip-flopped. Why had I ordered a cheeseburger with the works?
I didn’t have the guts to keep pestering her. The peers of the Twenty Palace Society might have forbidden her to kill me, but I had no idea how or if they would enforce that rule. I knew very little about her society except that, like Annalise, they were sorcerers. Like Annalise, they killed predators and people who toyed with magic. Like Annalise, they hunted for copies of spell books.
One thing I did know: as powerful as Annalise was, she was one of the weaker peers in her society. It was a scary thought.
Our drinks arrived, then our burgers. Despite my queasiness, I tore into my food, my body’s needs taking over. All my concerns about dead children and murderous sorcerers receded just far enough for me to fuel up.
Spit or no spit, the eating was good. I could see that Annalise was enjoying it, too.
“So,” I said between bites, “do you think the Benton family was targeted specifically?”
Annalise looked at me like I was a bug that needed squashing. She took another bite of her burger and kept chewing.
“I found a slip of paper on the floor of their living room,” I said. I took another bite of food, making her wait for the rest. Eventually, I said: “They could remember their kids when they were alone. They could see their kids’ things and remember what happened to them. It was only when they were with other people that the memories were wiped away.”
Annalise took another bite. I set my burger on the plate and leaned toward her.
“Is that what you found in Finklers’ kitchen? A photo of her with her kids? Or maybe her grandkids? Was that why you were so entranced by her? A mother all alone, grieving over her children?”
Annalise became very still. She stared at me with all the warm gentility of a shark.
“I’m not trying to push your buttons,” I lied, “but I can be useful. I want to help.”
“I don’t need your help,” she said.
“If I’m going to be dead soon, it won’t matter if you answer my questions.”
“I don’t want your help.”
“I work for you,” I said. “Your peers in the society, whoever they are and what ever that is, put me here to help you.”
“You agreed to be my wooden man,” she said. Her tone was even and low. “You lied to me and betrayed me. I attacked a peer because of you, and the closest friend I have ever had in my long life is dead. Because of you.”
“I’m sorry about Irena,” I said. “I liked—”
“I don’t want to hear you talk about her. At all. If you say her name to me again, I will splinter every bone in your body, peers or no peers. Am I clear?”
At that moment, before I even realized it was possible, I stopped caring what she would do.
I’d spent the whole day in the van with Annalise, knowing she would eventually kill me. Before that, I’d sat in a jail cell for months waiting for someone in the society to collect my head.
People become accustomed to their circumstances. It was one of the many unpleasant truths I learned in prison. We can’t be afraid all the time; our bodies can’t sustain it.
I was getting used to Annalise’s hatred and to my quite sensible fear of her. What I was not getting used to was my own ignorance. I didn’t like stumbling around in the dark. I didn’t even know what a “wooden man” was. I was pretty sure it involved more than just driving around.
So, against all common sense, I pressed on. “The way you’ve been frowning at your scrap of wood makes me think the Bentons were not specifically targeted. The design on that scrap moves when magic is nearby, right? And does other stuff when predators are close, right?
“But you’ve been frowning at it wherever we go. I think it’s telling you the whole town is enchanted. It’s picking up a lot of background static but not directing you to the source. Maybe those two mechanics have lost their kids, too. Maybe that waitress cries herself to sleep at night, thinking about the son who never came home from school.”
Annalise sighed. “I usually drive around until the spell registers magic, then I home in on foot.”
“What does it mean that the magic is so spread out?” I tried to keep my voice reasonable and calm. Professionalism breeds professionalism.
Annalise sopped up some ketchup with a fry. “It means I don’t know what to do next.”
The window beside us shattered. I covered my head as shards of glass rained over me. Annalise turned toward the window, her hand reaching under her jacket.
Broken glass covered my half-eaten burger. Ruined.
I turned my attention to Annalise. She was standing beside the broken window, staring into the street.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Him,” she said.
I looked into the dark street. I couldn’t see anyone, but I heard a voice.
“Where are my daughters?” a man shouted. “Who stole my little girls from me?”
Then I saw him. He was tall and stooped, with lank hair hanging past his shoulders and a bare scalp on top. He was so skinny he looked like his skin had been shrink-wrapped around his bones.
And he was carrying a rifle.
It looked like a bolt-action hunting rifle, but he was all the way across the street just beyond the glow of a streetlight, so I couldn’t be sure.
“Who took my daughters?” he shouted. A man and woman bolted from the cover of a parked car, sprinting for the corner. I clenched my teeth as the tall man noticed them. He aimed the rifle at them but didn’t fire. The couple reached the corner and safety.
“Where are they?” he shouted again. “Who stole my little girls from me?”
“He remembers,” I said to Annalise. “Just like we do. How can he remember his kids?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Go ask him.”