“Okay,” I said. I kept cutting meat, although it was nearly gone now.
“A long time ago, before most of the world was writing down its history, there was a powerful sorcerer. He was a primary, a dreamer, and his power was immense. I’m not much for history, so I don’t remember his name. Let’s call him Simon.
“Simon lived on a mountainside, in a huge palace. There were fertile fields all around, and Simon had a lot of villages and farmers working the land and paying him for the privilege. He wasn’t a good man by today’s standards, but for the time I suppose he was. And he protected his people.
“On the other side of a mountain range lived another sorcerer, Thomas. He wasn’t a primary, but he still had a lot of power. And he summoned predators. Lots of them.
“At the time, the custom between sorcerers was live and let live, but Thomas was getting on Simon’s nerves. His predators were killing Simon’s villagers, turning them into vampires and other nasty shit, and stealing them away to work for him.
“Simon grew pretty annoyed, right? He sent a message to Thomas telling him to leave his lands and his people alone and get rid of his predators.
“Thomas, not surprisingly, refused. He said that he needed his predators for protection, and that he was doing nothing wrong himself. If some of his creatures roamed into Simon’s lands to feed, there was nothing he could do about it.
“However, he did offer to leave the area, if he could take a copy of Simon’s spell book with him.
“Simon immediately decided to kill Thomas.”
I realized that she had stopped eating. I kept cutting and piling the meat on the butcher paper.
“So Simon gathered up a bunch of his spells and headed out. His lands were ruined and his people scattered. When he reached the edges of his enemy’s lands, he began to fight.
“Now, Simon was powerful, but he couldn’t get through. Before he could reach Thomas’s palace, he was swarmed by predators: Floating Storms, Claw-in-Shadows, all sorts of things, not to mention his own villagers under the influence of Puppet Strings or transformed into vampires.
“He was driven back three times, each time expending more of his spells. He realized that he wasn’t going to be able to take out Thomas this way, so he went into the forest and cut down a stand of poplar trees. Then he lashed the pieces of wood together. He put a spell on them to make them walk like men and swing their arms in a feeble imitation of an attack.
“When he had made enough, he sent them against Thomas’s defenses. The predators swarmed them, destroying them wherever they found them.
“And in the confusion, Simon snuck into Thomas’s palace and faced him one to one. Thomas didn’t have a chance.”
I had finished cutting the meat. It was there for Annalise whenever she wanted it. I wiped my ghost knife against the edge of the butcher paper. It didn’t come very clean, but I didn’t care. I dropped it, still wet with raw beef, onto the table.
I didn’t look at her. I just stared at the pile of cut-up meat.
“Simon himself was never part of the Twenty Palace Society, but his student and heir was one of the founding members. And he shared the tactic of using wooden men with the rest of the peers. It’s a tactic that has continued down through the centuries.”
And that was the end.
Right about then, I thought, would have been the time for her to say, Do you understand, Ray? or I’m sorry, Ray or But it doesn’t have to be that way for you, Ray.
She didn’t say any of those things. She just picked up another piece of raw beef and started chewing.
“Excuse me,” I said, and I went out of the room.
The fresh, salt air was bracing. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I must have been an idiot not to have seen it sooner.
The worst part was that I had volunteered. I’d asked to work for her. I hadn’t understood at the time that it meant I would be a decoy, that I would be cannon fodder, but I had volunteered.
She had asked if I would be her wooden man, and I had said yes. She’d never explained what it meant. She had tricked me.
But of course, that was bullshit. I had been bluffing from the moment I met her and had pretended to know more than I did. And I had been lying to her in other ways as well, all to save my friend. If I was up to my neck, it was my own damn fault.
I was a decoy. Expendable. I had thrown my future away to save someone that I’d been forced to kill anyway. Damn.
I noticed the Escalade again, this time parked across the street. It would be harder to approach this time. I’d have to circle around two blocks to come up behind it, but what else did I have to do?
I went back into the motel room and asked Annalise if she had a second scrap of wood with a magic-finder spell on it. She took it from her satchel and handed it to me without a word.
I held it up to the light by the window. It flared, all of the designs freezing in place and turning silver. Then it returned to its normal shade of black, with the designs slowly turning.
I touched the wood to the tattoos on the back of my hand. Annalise’s magic made it glow with silver light, but after it acclimated to my touch, it returned to its normal slow churning. No powerful magic was close to us right now.
I picked up my ghost knife, rinsed it clean in the bathroom sink, and slipped it into my pocket.
I left Annalise in my room. I didn’t have a way out the back, but I bet I could go through the manager’s office to a back door, then an alley, then I could try to come up behind the Escalade again. This time I’d get close enough to check it for magic. If Charles Hammer was watching us, I suspected he’d make the scrap of wood pop like a string of firecrackers again.
I walked slowly toward the office, wondering what I could offer Annalise to get her to release me from my promise. If I took out Charles Hammer by myself, or found a permanent cure for her hands, or pieced together the whole story of what was happening in Hammer Bay, maybe she would let me go home, or promote me to tin man or something.
That pointless line of thought was interrupted by a white cargo van that rumbled into the parking lot. It was a Dodge, and it looked remarkably like Annalise’s, except that it was newer and had a pair of battered ladders lashed to the top. The back door opened.
Floyd’s fireplug friend crouched there. He pointed a snub-nosed .38 revolver at me. “Hey, there, jackrabbit,” he said. “This one is loaded.”
Two more guys crouched in the back of the van. My mind registered that they were there, but I couldn’t look away from that damn gun.
“Your gun is drunk?” I said. My voice sounded much more calm than I felt.
“Get in. Someone wants to meet you.”
I climbed into the van. They slammed the doors and my brain kicked in. They were all wearing construction boots. I looked directly at the fireplug. “Georgie,” I said, “if Henstrick wanted to talk to me, she should have called. I would have liked a visit.”
“Know my name, do you?” Georgie said. He smiled. “But you don’t know everything.”
The van bounced out of the parking lot. I glanced at the two other guys. Both held mean-looking hunting knives. If I knew everything, I wouldn’t be in the back of this van.
“Get his wallet,” Georgie said.
One of the other two, a trim ex-Marine type with dark bags under his eyes, placed the edge of his knife against the side of my neck. The third man sat well back out of everyone’s way. The ex-Marine yanked my wallet out of my pocket.
“Raymond Milman Lilly,” he read. “And here’s Floyd’s thirty bucks.” He took the money out of my wallet and stuffed it into his breast pocket.
“Floyd is my bud,” Georgie said. “I didn’t like the way you left him.”
“Really? Then why did you turn and walk away when I was beating his ass?”
Georgie didn’t take my bait. “Conditions were unfavorable at the time. I like them better now.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
The ex-Marine pulled the wood scrap out from my jacket pocket. We all looked at it. The design turned as slowly as ever. There was nothing magical about these fellows.
They stared, entranced. I tensed to spring at Georgie, but he sensed it, raised the gun, and leveled it at my face. “Be still,” he said quietly.
“Whoa,” the third man said, still entranced by the wood scrap. “That’s cool.”
The ex-Marine rubbed his finger along the design and yanked it back. “Tingles,” he said. “How does it do that?”
“Trade secret,” I told him. “We’re trying to convince Hammer Bay Toys to manufacture and market them under their banner.”
The ex-Marine shrugged and set it down next to me, apparently forgetting that I was being held at gunpoint. He pressed the blade more tightly against my neck as he jammed his hand into my jacket pockets.
“How we doing back there?” the driver called.
“We’re fine,” Georgie answered. “How far are we?”
“Halfway,” the driver said. He turned sharply to the right. The ex-Marine lost his balance and his blade bit into my neck.
“Watch what you’re doing,” I snapped at him. He pulled the knife away slightly. I felt a thin trickle of blood on my collar, but I knew it wasn’t serious.
“Sorry,” the ex-Marine said. He pulled out my ghost knife and held it up. Everyone looked at it. It was just a sheet of notepaper covered with mailing tape and laminated. I could sense the power there, but none of them appeared to.
“What’s this?” Georgie asked.
I held up my hand. “It’s just a piece of paper,” I said. “Toss it here.”
I reached for the spell and called it to me. It shot out of the ex-Marine’s hand, passing through a couple of his fingers on the way. As always, it passed through his living flesh as though he was not there.
The knife moved away from my throat. The ghost knife had done its work on the ex-Marine. I caught the spell and immediately threw it.
Georgie was taken by surprise, but not by much. The ghost knife went right where I wanted it to go, cutting through the top of his trigger assembly just as he began to squeeze it. The gun didn’t go off, and a second later I heard the trigger clatter against the floor of the van.
In the time it took the broken trigger to fall, I called the spell back to me and slashed it through Georgie’s leg. It cut a long slit in his pant leg, but the cut through his leg was bloodless.
I turned toward the ex-Marine. He was slumped and sagging, all the vitality drained out of him. For safety’s sake, I slid the ghost knife through his arm one more time. It never seemed to matter where the ghost knife struck a living person—it always had the same effect.
Georgie and the ex-Marine slid to the floor as though they were fainting. The third man lunged at me, his hunting knife aimed at my throat.
I threw the ghost knife at him and batted at the knife with the protected part of my forearm. The spell disappeared into his chest. The strength went out of him, but there was still a lot of momentum behind that knife. I mistimed my block and felt the tip of the blade slice my unprotected upper arm.
The third man fell against me. I reached for the ghost knife again. If the spell went through the wall of a moving vehicle, I could be a block away from it very, very quickly. I wasn’t about to leave my only real weapon behind.
“What the hell?” the driver said. I closed my eyes.
The ghost knife flew back into the van, cutting a slit in the wall and letting in a sliver of light.
The van swerved to the right and lurched to a stop. The third man fell on top of me, knocking me to the floor. I was pinned beneath him.
The driver climbed from his seat. I heard him open the glove compartment. I didn’t try to free myself. I didn’t have time. I switched the ghost knife from my pinned left arm to my free right arm. The driver turned toward me, gun in hand. It was another .38.
If I hadn’t been lying under one of his friends, he would have had plenty of time to shoot me. We were at point-blank range, but he didn’t have a clear shot. I threw my spell at him.
He tried to slap the ghost knife away but missed it. It entered just above his navel, and as soon as it disappeared I reached for it again. The spell boomeranged back to me, passing through the driver a second time. He collapsed.
I caught it. I’d never tried that trick before. I liked it.
I shoved the man off me and struggled to my knees. All four were still awake, but they were bleary-eyed and listless. I took both knives, Georgie’s revolver, and the driver’s, too. Both guns were identical to the one I’d taken from Floyd outside the bar. Maybe the construction workers in Hammer Bay bought in bulk.
Georgie looked up at me with glazed, pleasant eyes. “Sorry about the way I treated you,” he said. “I don’t know why I was so rude.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. The ghost knife didn’t just take away their strength, it also cut out a person’s rage and aggression. Temporarily.
I checked the cuts on my neck and left biceps. The one on my neck was barely a scratch. It had already stopped bleeding. The one on my arm would need a couple of stitches and had come way too close to my brachial artery.
I took their wallets. The four of them had a grand total of thirty-seven dollars on them. That’s how it goes in the age of the debit card. I also took back the money Floyd “paid” me. I didn’t bother with the IDs this time.
“All right, you clowns,” I said to them. They all stared up at me with wet, docile eyes. I aimed the .38 at them. “Get on your knees beside the side door.”
They did.
“Put your hands flat on the floor. Get them next to each other.”
They pushed and nudged against one another, trying to position themselves.
“I’m sorry about all this,” the ex-Marine said. “We were just—”
“Shut up,” I said. I slid the ghost knife into my pocket and picked up the disabled revolver. I slid the cylinder release forward and dropped the rounds onto the floor. Then I picked up Annalise’s scrap of wood and put it in my pocket. “Where are the keys?”
The driver spoke up. “In the ignition.”
“What were you guys supposed to do with me?”
“Bring you to the Curl Club,” the driver answered, “so Phyllis could talk to you.”
“Phyllis?”
“Phyllis Henstrick. She runs the place, and Henstrick Construction.”
“Why does she want to talk to me?”
“She didn’t say,” the driver answered. He crouched beside the others like a little lamb. All of them stared at the barrel of the pistol in my hand. They couldn’t look away.
“I think,” Georgie said, “that it had to do with a rumor she heard about Charles Hammer sending jobs overseas.”
Of course, I thought. “Okay, boys,” I said to them. My voice was low. “Live or die?”
Georgie understood right away. “Live,” he said. The others agreed.
“Fine,” I told them. “I’m only going to be in town for a couple of days, I hope, and I don’t want to see any of you again. So I’m going to take out some insurance. Hold still. If any of you yank your hands away, I’m going to assume that means you’ve changed your answer.” I turned the revolver around and held it like a club.
“Please,” the ex-Marine said. “Please don’t.”
“It’s gonna hurt,” I said, letting some of my anger show, “but not as bad as a bullet in the guts.”
I slammed the butt of the revolver onto the backs of their hands, aiming for the knuckle of their index fingers.
It wasn’t the smartest move, but the smartest move would have been to kill them all. I didn’t want them shooting at me from a moving vehicle tomorrow. I had to take them out of the game somehow, and I had to teach them, and whoever pulled their strings, not to mess with me. Breaking their hands was gentle compared with what I should have done.
They cursed and whimpered like scolded boys. When it was done, I slid open the side door.
“School’s out for the day,” I said, and kicked Georgie through the open door.
He tumbled out onto the curb, and the other three scrambled after him on their knees and elbows. They crouched on the sidewalk, blinking in the drizzle, holding their arms across their chests just as I had outside Sara’s bar. I slammed the door shut.
The keys were, in fact, in the ignition. I laid the guns in my lap, started the van, and pulled into traffic.
At the first red light, I picked up the driver’s revolver. I took out my ghost knife and cut off the hammer, then sliced through the cylinder. I tossed it into the back of the van. Georgie’s gun was already ruined.
I have my reasons for not liking guns.
On impulse, I opened the glove compartment and peeked inside. My curiosity was rewarded with an envelope filled with five $50 bills.
Things were looking up.
My arm was bleeding pretty freely. It was annoying and I’d need to have it taken care of. I took the tourist map from my inside jacket pocket and consulted it. Looking around the neighborhood, I oriented myself to the two main roads in town. The hospital was behind me and to the east. I turned at a corner, then did it again.
I was a couple of blocks from the hospital when I saw a McDonald’s. Half an omelet and toast hadn’t held me, so I pulled into the drive-through. If I was going to wait in an emergency room, I might as well have lunch with me.
And wooden men don’t have to worry about cholesterol.
I ordered the biggest, sloppiest burger they had, along with fries and a milk shake. In for a penny, in for a pound. As I pulled up to the pickup window, a pretty teenage girl with a splatter of pimples over her face leaned out the window.
“Hi, Uncle Ethan!” she said.
Then she saw my face. Her mouth dropped open, but she didn’t say a word. “Hello yourself,” I said. I paid her with Georgie’s money. She gave me the food.
“That looks like my uncle’s van,” she said.
“Really? Weird,” I said to her. I set the bag of food on the seat next to me and drove to the emergency room.
To my surprise, there were no other patients. To my further surprise, I didn’t need stitches. The doctor cleaned the wound, glued it shut, and packed a bandage against it. It cost me three hundred dollars. Luckily, I hadn’t bought two milk shakes. Uncle Ethan paid my bill for me, leaving about six dollars in my pocket. Easy come …
I thanked the emergency room staff and walked toward the exit to check on the van. Through the glass doors, I saw the Escalade slowly cruising through the parking lot. I stepped away from the glass. The SUV circled Uncle Ethan’s van, then drove around the building.
I turned away from the doors and hustled through the hospital, moving as fast as I could without attracting attention. I had planned to visit Harlan Semple while I was here. That would have to wait.
I passed bare corridors with no doors. For a moment I felt lost, then I burst through some double doors and found myself in a storage room filled with plastic tubes in plastic bags, and IV stands. Feeling relieved, I broke into a sprint, running to the loading dock I knew had to be at the end of the hall.
There was a small panel van backed against the loading dock, and an eighteen-wheeler backing up beside it. A man in jeans and a polo shirt called out to me, telling me I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I jumped off the loading dock and ran to the street beyond.
I reached the sidewalk. The street was nearly empty, and the Escalade was nowhere in sight. I was standing at the exit of the parking lot. Nothing there, either.
Wait. There it was. The Escalade pulled into view, then stopped, as if the driver was looking around. I ducked behind a tall hedge, bumping against the stop sign that controlled traffic entering the road.
The vehicle turned toward the exit and puttered toward the spot where I was hiding. I watched it through a break in the bushes, trying to get a glimpse of the driver. I couldn’t. The overcast clouds reflected off the windshield, blocking my view. Still, I was sure it was Charles Hammer in there.
The Escalade pulled a little past the stop sign and paused on the sidewalk. I knew the driver would be watching the traffic to the left, so I stepped from my hiding spot, yanked open the passenger door, and hopped into the seat.
The driver cried out in a high-pitched voice, and for a second, I thought Charles Hammer looked much shorter behind the wheel than he had in his offices.
Of course, it wasn’t Charles behind the wheel. It was a well-dressed, dark-haired woman. She had broad, even, lovely features, hair that reached just below her ears. Her legs were thick with well-toned muscle. She looked to be about thirty.
And I had just jumped into her car like a carjacker.
“Oh!” she cried. “Oh, I … um …”
“Is there something you wanted to talk to me about?” I asked her.
She glanced at the cell phone holstered beside her car radio. “Do you want to call the police?” I asked. “Go ahead. I think that’s a terrific idea.”
“Look,” she said, shrinking fearfully against the door, her hand inching toward the door release. “I’m sorry about following you around. You met with my brother, and—”
“Who’s your brother?”
“Charles Hammer. At Hammer Bay Toys.” I nodded. I could see the resemblance. “I wanted to talk to you—”
“Then why did you pull away when I approached you the first time?”
“I wasn’t sure then. I just decided this morning.”
She’d laid her hand on the door release, looking like she was ready to throw herself out of the car at any moment. I noticed a diamond tennis bracelet on her wrist. It was tasteful and worth more than Uncle Ethan’s van. When she grimaced, I saw that her teeth were as white as pearls.
“What ever,” I said. I felt sour. I didn’t want to terrify some woman. I didn’t like the way she was looking at me. “Whoever you are, stop following me around. I don’t like it.”
I opened the door and slid out of the vehicle.
“Wait!” she called. I waited for her, both of my feet on the concrete and my hand on the door, ready to slam it shut.
“I’m sorry. I really do want to talk to you. I think you can help me. Would you meet me at this address in an hour?”
She held out a business card. I didn’t take it. There was no point in getting distracted in my search for Charles Hammer.
Unless she was willing to help me.
“Please?”
I shrugged and took the card. She thanked me and apologized again. I shut the door. She pulled away.
I looked at the card. It read Cynthia Hammer. Below that was an address on Hammer Street. That was the right last name. I turned and walked back to the parking lot.
The fright I had given Cynthia Hammer had taken all the fun out of being a bastard. I returned to Uncle Ethan’s van and tossed the keys on the floor by the brake pedal. I was tempted to wipe it down for fingerprints, but I noticed drops of blood on the driver’s-side door and decided not to bother. Uncle Ethan, Georgie, and their two buddies should be turning up soon to have their hands worked on. They might as well find their ride waiting for them, even if they couldn’t drive it home.
I walked around to the front of the hospital into the reception area. The very polite matron working there told me that visiting hours had just started. It was one in the afternoon. When I admitted that I was a friend of Harlan’s, not a family member, she told me I would need permission from the family to visit.
She called a volunteer over and spoke to her in low tones. The volunteer then said, “Follow me, sir,” in a shy voice. She led me to the elevator.
The inside of the elevator was stainless steel polished as bright as a mirror. I saw my dirty, rumpled pants and bloody, torn shirt. I didn’t like the way I looked.
The elevator doors opened, and the volunteer led me down a quiet hall to a little waiting area. Shireen sat alone, reading a tattered copy of Redbook. She was wearing a WSU Cougar sweatshirt.
The volunteer spoke to her in a voice barely louder than a whisper. “This gentleman would like to visit Harlan. Would that be all right?”
“Yes,” Shireen said. She turned to me. “Maybe he’ll talk to you. I’m his only family in the entire world, and he treats me like an enemy.”
The volunteer had already started back toward the elevator. Shireen returned to her magazine. “Which room?” I asked.
She tossed her magazine onto the vinyl couch with an irritated sigh. “This way,” she said.
She opened the door and stepped into Harlan’s room. I heard a rasping voice before I saw him. He said, “Out,” in a raw, strained voice.
“Someone is here to visit you,” Shireen said. “Try to show him more courtesy than you’ve shown me.”
Harlan lay in the bed. He had tubes in his nose, his arms, and his chest. He looked smaller, than I remembered him, but everyone looked smaller lying in a hospital bed. Everyone looked smaller without a gun, too.
Shireen pushed by me and shut the door behind her. I pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed.
Harlan looked pale and exhausted. He might have been getting good care, but no one was going to make him live if he didn’t want to.
“Having a bad week?” I asked. Harlan made a wheezing sound that might have been laughter. He winced in pain. “Sorry, man,” I said. “No more jokes. I promise.”
He settled down. I went to the foot of his bed. There was a chart hanging there, just like they show on TV, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
“How you doing?” Harlan rasped.
“How am I doing with my …” I almost said investigation, but that’s a cop’s word. I didn’t want to say it. “I’m further along,” I said, “but this town is a mess. And it’s scary. But I’ve got nothing to lose.”
And that was true. Harlan and I were both pretty close to death. Despite his injuries, I figured it was even money to see which of us would live longer.
“How long ago did this start?” I asked. “The kids, I mean.”
Harlan held up his hand in a peace sign. Two.
“Two months?” I asked. He frowned. “Two years?!” He relaxed. I’d gotten it right.
Two years. Christ.
“Did something else happen around then? Something that seemed strange or …” Harlan’s eyes grew dim. He was exhausted, and I had pushed him far enough. “Relax, dude,” I said. “And hold on. I’m going to need to ask you more questions when you’re better. I need your help, okay?”
He nodded faintly. I didn’t really think he could help me much more, but I wanted to give him a reason to hold on. I stood and left him lying there, alone. I heard him struggling to breathe.
Shireen had company with her in the waiting room. Standing beside her was a short, fat man in a stained polo shirt and brown shorts that reached just below his hairy knees. He held a tape recorder in his hand. I disliked him on sight.
“Come on, Shireen,” he said, his voice an annoying whine. “I’m going to find out …” Shireen’s face was set in a scowl. She was not about to answer anyone’s questions.
He glanced over at me, and his face lit up. He turned to me. “Hey! I’ve been trying to catch up with you for two days. I’m Peter Lemly with The Mallet. What’s your connection with Harlan Semple? Is it true that you’ve come to town to outsource some of the Hammer Bay manufacturing jobs?”
I stared at him. He stared back, holding the tape recorder out. I leaned toward the microphone and said, very clearly, “You’re just about as wide as you are tall, aren’t you?”
He yanked back the recorder, but he didn’t turn it off. He looked flustered and aggravated. “I know who you are,” he said, trying to make it sound like a threat.
“So does she.” I jerked my thumb at Shireen. “Now why don’t you go away so I can express my sympathies in private.”
“Are you a friend of the family, then?”
“Nope. Never met any of them before two days ago.”
“What about the jobs at the toy factory?” he asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The rumor would work for us while it was a rumor. As soon as it appeared somewhere official, Able Katz could refute it and it would lose some of its power.
“Actually, I think you do. I’m the only media this town has, and I’m not going to be pushed around. I’m going to get some answers myself.” He turned to Shireen. “Do you hear what I’m saying? I’m going to find out.”
“I’m not going to talk to you, Peter.” She wouldn’t look at him. “I’m never going to talk to you. Now, excuse me, I think my visit is over.”
She turned to leave. Peter started to follow her, but I stepped in his path.
“The lady wants to leave,” I said. “Leave her be.”
“So macho,” he sneered. “So chivalrous. You have no idea who you’re protecting.”
“What story are you following?” If he had said missing children, I would have swallowed my bile and bought him a drink. With my last six bucks.
“Town corruption,” he said.
“You’re after …” I let the sentence trail off. Lemly was eager to finish it for me.
“The Dubois brothers. And the mayor, too, if he’s involved. And the town council. The whole town knows what’s going on, but no one will stand up to Emmett Dubois. Except me.”
“Good luck with that.” Shireen had already entered the elevator at the end of the hall. The doors closed over her unhappy face. I turned away from my companion.
“Wait!” He grabbed my elbow. “What are you doing in town? What have you come here to do?”
“Good luck with your story,” I said. “I hope you don’t get anyone killed.”
I turned my back on him and walked toward the elevator. He followed me, peppering me with questions. He wasn’t very good at it.
The elevator opened again. I stepped inside and shoved Peter away from me. He didn’t fall, but he did keep his distance while the doors closed.
I rode down the elevator, thinking about my own behavior in the last hour. I’d driven around in a stolen van, jumped into an SUV and menaced a woman, and shoved a guy in a hospital hallway.
I’d never been this reckless and aggressive, even back when I was part of Arne’s crew. I knew the cause of it, of course. I was a dead man. I had agreed to be cannon fodder for Annalise’s war. Despite her recent gestures of friendship, she had promised to see me dead, and it felt very, very close.
I laid my head against the cool stainless steel wall of the elevator. The best I could hope for was that I would be there when Annalise took down Charlie Three. I wanted to see her put an end to that bastard and avenge those children.
I didn’t know when and how she would make her next move. Could she take out Charlie Three alone, injured as she was? What if she failed?
That pleasant thought was interrupted by the elevator doors opening. I walked into the lobby and asked the woman at the reception desk for directions to Hammer Street.
I got them. Of course Hammer Street wasn’t on my tourist map, but it was near the toy factory, on the inland side of the plant, about as far south as the light house.
I left Ethan’s van where it was. Then I headed out onto the sidewalk, oriented myself, and started walking.
What I should have done was call Annalise. My destination was an address on Hammer Street—it could very well have been Charles’s home. If I found him there, it would be best if she was with me. But she hadn’t given me her cell phone number and I didn’t want the motel manager to share my message with Emmett Dubois.
If Charles Hammer the Third really was at this address, was I going to kill him? Could I do it? It made me a little sick inside to think it, but I suspected the answer was yes.
Considering.
An even bigger question was whether Hammer would stay dead. That I didn’t want to think about too much. I would take my shot at him, if I got one. If it didn’t turn out well …
I really didn’t want to think about that.
Of course, I wasn’t exactly conducting myself like a sensible hitman. I’d just asked a hospital receptionist for directions to the victim’s street, for God’s sake.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to kill Charles Hammer. Maybe I could find a better way.
I heard the sound of children screaming.
There was a long stretch of green grass on the corner ahead of me. Before I realized what I was doing, I was running toward it, ghost knife in hand.
Kids scattered in every direction, running off a junior-sized basketball court. On the asphalt, I could see a four-foot-high plume of fire with a little figure inside.
I ran into the street and sprinted toward the park. A hugely fat woman rushed toward the child, screaming. Then the flames sputtered out and the figure inside fell to pieces onto the asphalt.
I felt the twinge against my iron gate.
The fat woman stopped running. The few remaining children that hadn’t disappeared also stopped. Parents began to call their kids back to the playground.
I reached the court. The fat woman turned and started walking back to the bench where the other parents were sitting. I was alone at the foul line.
As I’d seen with Justin Benton, this child had broken down into a mass of fat, silvery worms. They crawled across the asphalt court, shiny and revolting. Where they touched the ground, they left a trail of black soot.
I had no rational reason for what I did next. All I knew was that I had to destroy as many of those creatures as I could.
I swung the ghost knife at the trailing worms. Ordinarily, the mark would not hurt living things, but I suspected these were predators—creatures from the Empty Spaces, partly physical and partly magical. And the ghost knife cuts magic.
My spell slashed through the hindmost worm. There was a second’s delay, then the worm split open and burst into flame.
I watched as the tiny creature was consumed by fire. Good. They could be destroyed.
I swung my ghost knife at another. Just before I made contact, a tiny cut appeared on its back and a tongue of flame erupted from it. I changed the direction of my attack just in time to avoid the fire, and my altered swing touched the worm in just the right spot to create the tiny cut I’d already seen.
I drew back from the fire. Damn. That time the wound had appeared before the ghost knife had connected. That meant something, I knew, but with my blood pounding in my ears, I couldn’t work it out.
Both worms were still burning. I moved toward the side of the wriggling mass, striking at the tiny creatures at the edges. They flared and burned as I nicked them, but the flames never grew strong enough to combust the others. Maybe this spirit fire, as Annalise called it, didn’t burn that way. It didn’t matter. I crouched beside the mass, striking here and there, moving along its bulk away from the flames.
When the entire side was ablaze, I moved across the front, careful to avoid the tiny creatures as they crept forward. I imagined one of them leaping at me, burning me the way Annalise had been burned, but I kept up my attack.
Within seconds, the entire front of the mass was blazing. I began to work my way down the other side. The worms I had cut burned in the black streak behind the rest, and the creatures at the front crawled through the pyre of the others without apparent harm.
I crouched low and kept close, inflicting tiny nicks on the worms, watching for times when the little creatures flared up from my attacks before the attacks had actually landed.
We had gone ten feet. Then fifteen. Then twenty. Eventually, I stopped circling the mass. The spirit fire burned so fiercely at the edges and tail end that I couldn’t get a clear shot there. I hopped to the front of the mass, dropping to my hands and knees directly in its path.
I struck at the worms as they tumbled through the wall of flames at the front. I backed away. I was destroying the creatures, but the mass was still advancing. I couldn’t stop it.
My feet touched grass. There were many fewer worms than there had been, maybe only 10 percent of the original mass, but I wasn’t going to get them all. I cursed at them, swore at them as I killed them. Eventually, I had backed all the way onto the grass, and the first of the worms tumbled off the asphalt. Fewer than a dozen hit the soil and started tunneling, but that was still too many.
I jumped to my feet and rushed back onto the court. The worms had vanished beneath the earth, and I didn’t like the idea that they might tunnel up from beneath me.
I looked at my ghost knife. There was no residue on it, no blood, no black soot, nothing. It was as clean as the day I’d made it. I slipped it into my pocket.
A long skipping rope lay on the basketball court with a discarded baseball cap beside it. The cap was lavender. It had been a little girl this time.
I looked at the streak. The northern edge of the court was not ten feet from the spot where the fire had started, but the worms had turned toward the southwest. They’d gone a long way, exposed to danger, to head in that direction.
I turned and looked along the path of the black streak. It pointed in the general direction of the Hammer Bay Toys plant. It headed toward Charles Hammer the Third.
At that moment, killing Charles Hammer seemed like the most important and most natural thing in the world.