Lenard touched Arne’s shoulder as though he’d just seen something they’d both been waiting for. “Hold that thought,” Arne said.
I heard a foot scuffle behind me. Arne glanced at the floor behind me. I turned, but there was no one there.
A heavy metal canister clanged near my feet and let out a wet hiss. A plume of tear gas billowed around my legs.
I turned to shout a warning to Arne, but he was no longer in his booth. I shut my mouth and clamped my hand over my nose before I caught a whiff, then soccer-kicked it toward the front door. Damn, it was hot already—I could feel the heat of it against my ankle. It struck something on the floor I couldn’t see and skittered sideways toward Rumpled Guy.
I shut my eyes just as the stinging started. Something moved very close to me, and the gunfire started.
I dropped flat onto the floor. The tattoos on my chest and the outside of my forearms are bulletproof thanks to a spell called the closed way, but my head, back, legs, and sides were completely exposed. The guns sounded very loud and very close, but nothing hit me.
I crawled blindly toward the fire exit. Sawdust stuck to my skin, and my chest felt tight. I hadn’t caught a good breath, and my oxygen was running out. Fortunately, the gunfire had already stopped. It takes very little time to empty a magazine.
I heard the sounds of clips being ejected from pistols and slammed back in. There were two gunmen, at least, and now I was sure they were close. Someone was hacking and choking on the gas, but it didn’t sound like anyone near me. Were the gunmen wearing masks?
I was sure they could see me—the gas couldn’t have been that thick—and I expected a bullet in the back. I hoped they’d have the decency to shoot at my head; at least it would be quick.
But I didn’t stop crawling, and the bullet never came. I finally made it to the wall and, reaching to my right, found the doorway. Arne was right about my sense of direction. The door was open, but I was barely across the threshold when it swung shut, slamming against my head and making me gasp.
I crawled into the alley, gagging on the wisp of tear gas I’d inhaled. I didn’t know if it was heavier than air, but I wanted to be on my feet; I stood and stumbled against a dumpster. Time to live dangerously; I opened my eyes.
Immediately, they started to burn. Tears flooded my cheeks, and I couldn’t stop coughing.
Arne and Lenard weren’t there, but Rumpled stumbled through the door just behind me. He was coughing so hard I thought he’d convulse.
My eyes were burning stronger now, as though the tears were washing the chemicals into my eyes rather than out, but he had it worse. He kept saying: “Ah, God! God!” between retches.
We were helpless. If the shooters inside the bar came out here, they could have put bullets into us without breaking stride. Of course, they could have done that inside, too.
I blinked through my tears and saw a short, slender figure knock Rumpled to the ground. A second, larger figure stepped up close to me. “Well, well,” he drawled. “If it ain’t old Ray Lilly himself. Howsdoin’, Raymond?”
“Bud?” I asked, suddenly recognizing his voice. “Someone just tried to kill Arne. I didn’t see who, though. Is he around?”
“I don’t see Arne,” Bud answered. “He musta lit out.”
Again.
I could almost hear a smile in Bud’s voice. I blinked to clear my vision, and it worked a little. The slender figure moved toward us. “He’s gone,” she said. “We should go, too.” That was Summer, another member of Arne’s crew.
Bud and Summer each grabbed one of my sleeves and steered me down the alley toward the sidewalk. I let them. While I could see—barely—I couldn’t see well enough to drive. And my tears were still flowing, my nose was running, and I was still trying to blink the pain away. If the cops found me here, they’d snatch me right off the street.
I heard Bud reassure a passing pedestrian that I’d just had my heart broken. I didn’t know where we were going. “Someone tried to kill Arne. We have to look for him.”
“Oh, we’ll look for him, all right,” Bud said.
Something was wrong. Bud and Summer were part of Arne’s crew, just like Lenard, and just like I used to be, and right now they were being too casual.
A bad feeling came over me. I turned toward Summer. She’d let her hair grow out so that it almost reached her shoulders. Her face was broad and tanned, her pale blue eyes sullen in the heat. Her sleeveless jogging shirt was damp with sweat and hung untucked over a pair of shorts with an elastic waistband. Had she been one of the shooters? She could certainly conceal a gun at her back, but a gas mask, too? I didn’t believe it.
Bud was the same. He had a loose T-shirt over belted shorts, and while he’d cut off his mullet, he still wore that stupid bolo tie. He could have hidden a gun at the small of his back—or maybe under his growing beer belly—but not a gas mask.
Arne had taught them better than to dump something like that right at the scene of the crime, so I figured they weren’t the shooters. Of course, they could have been lookouts or backup. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Tear gas is toxic,” Summer said. “There’s a Ralphs up the street. We’ll pick up some stuff that will help there.”
“At a supermarket?” I asked. “How do you know—” A fit of coughing cut off the rest of my question, and a rolling drop of sweat suddenly blinded my right eye.
“Are you seriously asking me how I know what to do about tear gas?” I’d forgotten that Summer’s hippie parents—her hated, hated parents—had marched in dozens of street protests over the years, and Summer herself had probably been dosed with the stuff several times.
“Then we’ll get out of here,” Bud added. “Robbie is going to want to talk to you.”
Robbie was Arne’s second-in-command, and we had always gotten along well—better, in fact, than I’d gotten along with anyone. I wanted to talk to him, too.
But first I needed to get away from Bud and Summer. Arne had said Wally King’s name, and that meant bad things were happening. He was the reason I was mixed up with the Twenty Palace Society. The spell book he’d stolen, the predators he’d summoned, and the deaths he’d caused almost two years before had ruined my life.
I needed to call the society, and I needed to do it in private. Those bastards take their secrecy seriously. And I needed my boss. I needed Annalise. I didn’t want to face Wally King without her again.
“We’re parked just up here in the lot,” Bud said as we turned a corner. I blinked my eyes clear again and saw a field of colored metal gleaming in the sun. They led me to a white pickup and let me sit on the gate.
Summer stepped away from me. “Bud, go inside and get what he needs.”
“You sure?” he asked, as though nervous about leaving her with me.
“Go.” She sounded irritated. He went.
I squinted in her direction. I wanted privacy to make my call, but she didn’t seem ready to give it to me. “I’m glad you and Bud are still together,” I said.
“We’re married now,” she answered, her voice flat.
“That’s great.” There was nowhere for the conversation to go after that, so it just sat there. Now that we had stopped moving, my eyes began to sting even more. I raised my hands to rub them but thought better of it. “I need to make a call,” I said. “In private.”
She didn’t move. “To who?”
“Nobody you know.” Since she wasn’t moving away, I hopped off the gate and walked along the side of the truck to the wall. Then I started toward the sidewalk.
She trailed behind me.
“Wait by the truck, Summer,” I said. “I’m not kidding. This is a private call.”
“You’re calling the cops, aren’t you?”
Out of reflex, I cursed at her. If that’s who she thought I was now, she couldn’t be trusted. It was the same as saying We are enemies.
My reaction must have mollified her a little. She sulkily stepped back, but not because she was afraid of me. I’d never known her to be afraid of anyone.
A young mother came toward me, navigating her baby stroller through the narrow space between the whitewashed wall and parked cars. I stepped around her, then looked toward the truck.
Summer wasn’t there. I glanced around the lot and inside the truck. Nothing. I dropped to the ground and peered under the cars. Nothing, again. She’d vanished.
I walked to the sidewalk, darting through a line of cars pulling in from the street. The store was too far for her to have gone inside, but where was she? I didn’t like that she seemed to have blinked out of existence within ten feet of me. Just like Caramella. Had she transported herself far away? Where?
Even now, as evening was coming on, the traffic noise was ever present. I stepped into a bus shelter for some relative quiet and took out my phone. It had speed-dial buttons, but none had the number I needed. That was only in my memory.
I was feeling jumpy as I dialed. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what. The phone picked up after four rings.
“Hello? This is Mariana.” She had an accent I couldn’t place, but I was never good with accents.
“This is Ray Lilly. I need my boss.”
“Mr. Lilly, this isn’t how you are supposed to make this request. What is the situation?”
I knew I was breaking the rules, but my instincts were ringing like fire alarms, and I couldn’t ignore them. “I can’t go into it on the phone.”
“Mr. Lilly,” she said in a tone that was almost scolding, “you aren’t calling from an unsecure location, I hope.”
“Considering what I’ve been seeing here, I don’t think a secure location is possible.”
“I understand.” She had dropped the scolding tone. “The phone GPS has given me your location. Return to that location at this time each day for the next four days.” I glanced at my watch. It was just after seven-thirty. “You will be met.”
She hung up and so did I. There was a trash receptacle right next to me, but I was supposed to ditch the phone where no one would notice. And while I couldn’t see anyone nearby …
I swept my right arm away from me and struck something invisible a foot from my elbow. It was sticky, just like Caramella’s slap. I heard a hiss and the scuffle of shoes on concrete.
I grabbed the invisible shape, shoving it toward the bench and knocking it off balance. It suddenly darkened, becoming an outline with a misty blackness inside, just like the Empty Spaces.
Damn. That’s exactly what it was. I was looking into the Empty Spaces.
I would have freaked out if I’d had the time, but the vision vanished suddenly, and I was holding Summer by the shoulders. She was staring at me with wild, dangerous eyes. “Let go of me, Ray,” she said, and grabbed my wrist with her bare hand. My skin began to itch and burn under her grip.
I pulled her to her feet and spun her around. She tried to resist—and she was strong—but she wasn’t as strong as me. I yanked a pistol out of the back of her waistband, then patted the pockets of her gym shorts. They were empty.
The urge to run was unbearable, but I knew it would be useless. They still had Bud’s truck. “Keep away, Summer.” My breath was coming in gasps. I barely recognized my own voice. “Don’t make a bigger mistake than you already have.”
I backed toward the lot, holding the gun on her. My mind was racing. There were no other pedestrians nearby, but someone in a passing car might see me and call the cops. For a moment I tried to imagine what I would say if a patrol car suddenly pulled up to the curb, but I couldn’t focus on it.
Summer stood in the bus shelter with her arms at her sides, watching me. I bolted back into the lot.
Bud was standing beside his pickup, scanning the lot for us. He had a little shopping bag in his hand. I ran toward him. Once he spotted me, he patted the truck bed.
“Back here, Ray. You’re giving off fumes. We’ll get you showered and changed as soon as we can, but first”—he held up the shopping bag—“we’ll mix these and—”
I came up next to him, and he saw the gun in my hand. “Give me the keys, Bud.”
His good-ole-boy grin twisted with disappointment. “I thought you were out of the car-stealing business.”
“Keep back. Don’t touch me. Give me the keys. I’ll drop your truck within a few blocks of the Bigfoot Room, but I’m not going anywhere with you. And don’t touch me. Get it? Don’t touch me! I’m not going anywhere with you!”
“Don’t get all wigged out, Ray. All right? Don’t. Here’s the stuff you need for your skin.” He tossed the grocery bag onto the passenger seat. “Just mix it one to one. And don’t scratch my truck.” He set his keys on the hood.
While he backed away, I picked them up. I wondered where Summer was—I should have made her come with me. I should have made her stay visible. I imagined her behind me, knife in hand. I imagined the point digging into the back of my neck or into my kidneys, and my skin prickled all over. My breath rushed in and out of me, and even though everything was different I felt that same urge to scream that I’d felt that last night in Washaway, just before the killing started. My finger tightened on the trigger.
No. No, I wasn’t going to shoot Bud. I was in control of myself. I was in control.
I climbed into the truck. Bud stood with his hands at his sides. If he’d been one of the shooters inside the Bigfoot Room, and I was ready to believe he was, he had a gun on him that I’d forgotten to take. I was screwing up, and that was going to get me killed. Either that, or I was going to have to kill him. I wasn’t ready for that. I started the engine and lurched out of the spot.
In a mild voice, Bud said: “My apartment keys are on that ring, you know.”
“Within a few blocks,” I told him, fighting the urge to flee flee flee. “You fucked up, Bud.”
“Robbie will still want to talk to you.”
“And I want to talk to him,” I said, and raced out of the lot. Summer stood by the entrance, watching me impassively. She was still there when I drove down the street.
I forced myself to take long, slow breaths. I looked down at my wrist. My skin had turned red and gotten inflamed where Summer’s little hand had touched me.
An idea occurred to me, and I lifted my arm toward the rearview mirror when I stopped at the next stoplight. My shirt was a henley, three buttons at the neck, no collar, and sleeves that reached just past my elbow. Both Summer and Bud had grabbed my arm where the sleeve covered it, but I couldn’t see any effect on my clothes. They weren’t sticky, discolored, or slowly dissolving.
The light turned green and I drove on. Could Bud turn invisible? I hadn’t seen him do it, and I hadn’t touched his skin, but something about the way he’d acted—as though he’d expected my reaction, just not so soon—made me think he could.
And Caramella. I thought she’d transported herself out of my room after that last, aborted slap, but maybe she’d hung around for a while, watching me sleep.
The idea gave me the shivers, and I almost blew through the next red light. Instead, I forced myself to calm down. Potato Face and his men hadn’t triggered this kind of response when they’d swarmed around me, but why should they? They were men. All they could do was kill me.
When the light changed, I parked the truck. I was only a block and a half away from the Bigfoot Room, and that was close enough. I didn’t like the idea of driving Bud’s truck when another drop of sweat could blind me.
I wiped my fingerprints off Summer’s gun. There was no reason to—the twisted-path spell on my chest altered the physical evidence I left behind, like fingerprints and DNA, making it impossible to pin me to a crime scene. It still felt good. Then I stuffed the weapon under the seat.
I opened the glove compartment. Sure enough, there was Summer’s purse. I flipped through it. There was no makeup—the only thing she had in common with her mother was her refusal to wear it. There was an address book and a billfold with a little cash inside. I was tempted to take the money to teach her a lesson about fooling around with magic, but I didn’t. Class hadn’t started yet.
I did take her address book. I flipped to the H and read the entry for Caramella Harris. She lived in Silver Lake.
There was only one more thing to do. I still had the cellphone the society had given me. If I turned it on and stuffed it into the back of the seat, the society would be able to locate them the same way they’d located me.
I didn’t do it. The risk that Bud or Robbie or someone else in the crew would find it and press REDIAL may have been slim, but I still wasn’t going to take the chance. Secrecy came first. I pocketed it, tossed the keys under the front seat, and picked up the grocery bag. Then I climbed out, leaving the driver’s window rolled down.
I walked back to the church and my car. There were police cars with flashing lights parked in front of the bar, and plenty of yellow tape on the sidewalk. I stopped at the corner to gawk a little; it would have looked suspicious if I hadn’t. A patrol cop looked at me, then looked away, uninterested.
I went to my car and drove away before a cop came close enough to smell the tear gas.
Summer and Caramella could turn invisible. Probably Bud could, too. I tried to figure who else should be on that list, but I didn’t know enough yet. I was sure Arne knew about it, even if he couldn’t vanish himself. I suddenly understood why there was sawdust on the floor of the Bigfoot Room.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst part was the way Summer had looked when she’d dropped her invisibility—she’d looked like a doorway into the Empty Spaces. Nearly two years earlier, when I’d first come face-to-face with predators, magic, the Twenty Palace Society, and all the rest, I’d cast a spell that let me look into the Empty Spaces.
That had only been a peek, though. I’d learned enough to scare the hell out of myself, but not much more. And it wasn’t like the society was going to explain things to me; they didn’t exactly offer night classes.
What little I understood about the Empty Spaces was this: it surrounds the world we live on and is, at the same time, beside it. It’s a void of mist and darkness, and creatures live there.
The society calls them predators, but they aren’t like the animals you find here on the earth. Coming from this other, alternate space, they have their own physics and their own biology. Some are living wheels of fire, some swarms of lights, some massive serpents in which every scale is the face of one of its meals, some schools of moving, singing boulders. When they come to our world, they are “only partly real,” as my boss once explained. They’re creatures of magic, and can be used to do all sorts of strange and dangerous things … if the summoner can control them.
So they’re out there in that vast expanse, right beside us but unable to find us. And they’re hungry. One of them, allowed to run loose on our planet, would feed and feed and feed, possibly calling more of its kind, until there was nothing left but barren rock.
The entire reason the Twenty Palace Society existed, as far as I could tell, was to search out and destroy the summoning magic that called predators to our world, along with anyone who used that magic. They also kill predators when they find them.
But a human taking on a predator is like a field mouse trying to kill a barn owl. That’s why the society uses magic of its own. They don’t call predators—summoning magic is a killing offense, even for them—but as far as I could tell, everything else was fair game. The spells tattooed on my body and the ghost knife in my pocket were prime examples of that.
A car behind me honked, and I realized I’d been sitting at a stop sign for nearly a minute, lost in thought. I pulled through the intersection, blinking my eyes clear.
And although it had been nearly two years, I’d instantly recognized the Empty Spaces when Summer had dropped her invisibility. If she’d gotten this ability through non-summoning magic like mine, that would be bad enough. The society would want to check her out and hunt down the spell book she’d used. And … damn, I hated to think it, but they would probably kill her just to be safe.
When people learned magic was real they often became obsessed with the power it gave them, and they did dangerous things to get it, like summon predators they couldn’t control. I’d seen it more than once, and it was why I was so alarmed when Arne had said Wally King’s name. Wally hadn’t just summoned predators; he’d killed people to steal spells from them.
But were Caramella and Summer his accomplices or his victims?
In the end, that might not even matter. That vision of the Empty Spaces suggested that Summer got her power from a predator. Maybe it was inside her body like a parasite, maybe nearby, but it was connected to her somehow. I’d seen both. Maybe she didn’t know how dangerous it was, or even that it was there.
That predator, if that’s what it was, had to be destroyed. The big question was: could I destroy it, whatever it was, without killing my friends?
I kept driving west and pulled into the second park I saw. The grass was dead brown, but what did that matter to me? I carried the Ralphs grocery bag to a bench beneath a tree. There were two bottles inside: a liter bottle of water and a little blue bottle of liquid Maalox. The first thing I did was pour water over my wrist, washing away whatever acids Summer had left there. It didn’t stop hurting, but it stopped getting worse.
Then I guzzled some of the water. The heat was oppressive, and the sweat on my face made my eyes sting.
Once the water bottle had as much fluid as the Maalox did, I poured the antacid in and shook it up. It worked surprisingly well, and soon I’d rinsed off my face and hands completely.
I stood. It wasn’t enough. The faint, choking stink of tear gas still clung to my clothes, and my skin was beginning to crawl.
I used a clean shirt from my jump bag to wipe the drying Maalox from my face. The empty bottles went back into the grocery bag along with the cellphone. I wrapped them up and dumped them into the trash.
I drove back toward the freeway until I came to a Best Western half a block from an exit. The vacancy sign was lit.
My shirt still stank, but the clerk didn’t care. I don’t think she cared about anything except her air-conditioning. I rented a room on the second floor and trudged upstairs.
The room was clean and plain. I stood by the bed with the TV remote in my hand for a full two minutes and tried to convince myself to shower. The temptation to sit in front of the tube in a trance state was so strong it was like a death wish. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself watching TV while predators spread through the city, killing people. I couldn’t do that, no matter how much I wanted to rest. I carried my bag into the bathroom.
I stripped down and threw my clothes into the bottom of the tub. I had brought a small bottle of laundry detergent, and I scrubbed the sweat, stomach medicine, and tear gas by hand. The cold water felt good on my hands. Then I hung them by the window, turning off the air just below them.
Then I took a shower of my own. My skin was raw and red where Summer had touched me. I switched to cold water. It was uncomfortable, but I wanted it that way. I’d seen a predator on Summer and I’d backed off. I had to stand up and stay in the fight. I had to endure.
My clothes were not even close to dry when I finished. I took my last clean shirt, a white button-down, from the bag and put it on. Then I looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like a hungry ghost anymore, just a guy who needed a good night’s sleep. At least I had cleaned the sweat off my face. I’ve always hated the feel of dried sweat.
I got back into my car and drove to Silver Lake, giving a wide berth to the Bigfoot Room and the street where I’d parked Bud’s truck. I wasn’t ready to run into them again.
Caramella’s place was a little house, which surprised me. It had a lawn about the size of two postage stamps and a lot of Spanish stucco on the outside. As on just about every street in L.A., the houses on the block were a mishmash of styles, but hers was a basic A-frame that had been troweled over with a pueblo exterior. I took out my ghost knife.
A Corolla was parked in the driveway. There were two tall windows at the front of the house, and I nearly walked into the tiny flower garden to peep through the glass. It was just after 9 P.M., and I was planning to break and enter a friend’s house.
Instead, I pocketed the ghost knife and rang the doorbell.
No one answered. I fidgeted a little, then rang it again. Again there was no answer. My Escort was parked at the curb, but the idea of driving away felt like defeat. Where would I go after this? I didn’t know where Caramella worked. I didn’t know where she hung out. A detective might have started walking around the neighborhood, asking about her at every diner, deli, and bar, but I wasn’t a detective. I was a criminal.
I took out my ghost knife and slid it through the lock. The front door opened easily, and I let myself in, pushing the door closed behind me.
The house looked even smaller on the inside, but it was nicely furnished. Everything I owned had come out of a yard sale, but Melly’s tables and chairs were new if not fancy. The plaid couch and recliner matched the curtains, and there were tiny white throw pillows everywhere. A pair of lamps on either side of the couch threw a pale blue light around the room, and the ceiling light in the bathroom was on.
But while the room looked tidy and homey, it was sweltering hot and stank of garbage. The smell made my eyes water. It wasn’t a dead body, I didn’t think. I’d smelled bodies before.
It felt strange to stand in Melly’s empty house, but what the hell. She had walked into mine without knocking.
First, I wandered around the room. I was concerned that the garbage smell would hide the stink of a dead body, but I didn’t find one behind the furniture and there were no blood splashes against the walls. The bedroom was empty—the bed was neatly made, in fact, and the little desk in the corner was tidy.
Then I went into the bathroom. The medicine cabinet was standing open. I pushed it closed, getting a glimpse of the dark circles under my eyes. The shower curtain was drawn, and a couple of the rings had been pulled free. I peeked through the gap into the tub. I couldn’t see anything in the bottom of the tub, not even droplets of water.
I went back to the living room and noticed a mail slot just beside the front door. Below it there was a small wicker basket full of mail. It looked like a couple of days’ worth, but I couldn’t tell exactly. I fanned through it and saw that most of it was addressed to Luther Olive.
There was a list of phone numbers on a notepad by the phone. I picked up the receiver and dialed the one at the top, labeled work. The woman who answered announced that it was a hospice-care facility, but she wouldn’t answer any questions about Caramella and she wouldn’t transfer me to her voice mail. I left my real name and a fake call-back number and hung up.
Finally, I went into the kitchen. There was a pink ceramic bowl full of rotting chicken on the counter, but most of the stink was coming from the open garbage can. I looked around without touching anything, then went back into the living room.
I was alone and it was obvious that I was the first person to stand in this room for a couple of days. I picked up a framed photo on the end table.
It was a picture of two faces close together. One was Melly and she was laughing. She looked older than I remembered, and more beautiful. She had little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and seeing her openmouthed smile brought back the memory of her laugh.
The man laughing with her, his cheek pressed against hers, was a black man with a short haircut, a scar below his eye, and a crooked nose. He had a beefy, solid look about him—the kind of muscular guy who would get fat at the first sign of comfort. He also gave the impression of puppy-dog earnestness, as though he was eager to please out of habit. That must have been Luther.
I liked the friendly roughneck look of him, and I was a little jealous, too. Not because I wanted Caramella—we hadn’t had that sort of relationship—but because he had happiness and love and a home. I hoped I would be able to save whatever he and Melly had.
There were other pictures on the mantel, and I studied them one by one. Here were pictures of Melly and her guy with her mom and sister in a lush forest somewhere. Next was an old bridal picture of a black couple, both looking heavenward. Next was a picture of Luther with Ty, Lenard, and Arne. They were all smiling. Most of the rest were Melly and her guy at various events—parties, picnics, carousels. The last showed Melly and Violet laughing while they baked Christmas cookies. I was surprised to see them together. They hadn’t been close when I was around, but apparently things had changed.
Suddenly, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I rushed into the kitchen, dumped the rotting chicken, bowl and all, into the trash can, then carried the garbage out the back door.
There was a plastic bin in the little backyard. I upended the trash can into it, letting a plume of stink blow over me. I tossed the can onto the parched lawn and went inside, leaving the back door open. I went to the bathroom and threw open the window, then opened the bedroom and living room windows. A mild crosscurrent blew across me. It wasn’t enough to clear the stink, but it was better than the stale, oppressive heat.
Then I got to work.
I searched the house from top to bottom, taking special care to put things back where they belonged. I was careful out of respect for Caramella more than a desire to trick her, although if she never found out I’d broken in, I’d be happy.
I was looking for spell books, of course. Barring that, I wanted to find single spells, either instructions for casting them or a spell itself—a sigil drawn, carved, or stitched onto another object. If I couldn’t find that, I hoped to find something to tell me where to look for Caramella next. An open phone book with a secluded Big Bear resort circled in red ink, maybe. I wasn’t that lucky.
I searched every drawer, beneath every cushion, inside the pocket of every jacket and pair of pants. I opened every box and chest, looked inside every lamp, and ran my hand along the underside of every piece of furniture. I even unscrewed the grates over the air vents for their central heating. Nothing.
Caramella had a laptop on a tiny sewing desk in her room, but I hadn’t done more than search around it so far. I didn’t have a computer of my own, and I didn’t know much about them.
I opened it and it came to life. I was surprised that it was sitting there, already turned on. Had Caramella been here recently, using it? She could have come and gone invisibly, of course. In fact, she could have followed me around the house while I searched it.
I felt a surge of anxiety as that thought grew larger in my mind, but I took several deep breaths. No one was there. Not with that garbage smell. No one was there.
Once the computer had fully come to life again, it began to download four days’ worth of emails. It had been sitting there, switched on, for several days, and no one had used it recently.
I read the five dozen new emails as well as a couple of days’ worth of old ones. Most were useless: supposedly funny stories about squabbling married couples, ads for natural Viagra, and attempts to organize a group of friends for a Friday movie date.
Only in the last day’s messages did I notice anything unusual. Her mother had sent a note asking where she was, and telling her to please call. She had similar notes from her supervisor and co-worker, and from Arne.
I tried to find out more, but everything I did on her computer caused something inexplicable to happen, so I closed it.
I went back into the living room and looked at the clock. It had been just over two hours since I’d snuck in, and I had nothing to show for my time. Predators were on the loose, and I had no idea what to do next. Tomorrow at seven-thirty I’d go back to Ralphs and hope to meet Annalise, but until then I had nothing.
But there was nothing left to do here. If I went back to my motel, I could have another shower and sleep—maybe—but I would have run out of options. There was nowhere else for me to go but back to Arne, and I wasn’t ready for that yet. I needed to talk to Caramella first.
So I stood there, my indecision making the choice for me. Finally, I decided I might as well wait. I wanted to talk to her, and I was more likely to find her here than at my motel.
I dug out the remote and turned on the local news, hoping there would be a segment about a mysterious invisible assailant, but I was out of luck there, too. The first segment covered the president’s plan to visit L.A.
Then the newscasters switched to extended reports of a break-in at a movie star’s Beverly Hills home. Her name was Ellen Egan-Jade; she’d been in Minnesota filming her latest romantic thriller, but her live-in housekeeper had been beaten, raped, and left for dead. The only thing the asshole took was her Oscar. The cops didn’t have any leads.
There was a pizza box with three slices of pepperoni in the fridge. The house didn’t smell so bad anymore—or maybe I’d gotten used to it—so I took the pizza into the living room to eat at the coffee table. It was dry and tight, like jerky.
The announcer started speculating what would have happened if the actress had been home at the time of the break-in, while they showed pictures of her beautiful face. The whole thing made me feel a little sick, so I turned it off and ate in silence.
After finishing the pizza, I leaned back on the couch. My eyes started to fall closed, so I jumped up and walked around. I peeked out the front window, then the back. No one was in sight.
The heat and food were making me drowsy. I shut the front and back doors and propped a chair under each knob. I shut all the windows and turned the thermostat to eighty-five. Cool air hissed into the room. That would help with the heat. I just needed to keep myself awake.
I paced until I grew tired, then sat on the couch with my arms folded. Just as I told myself I could stay up as late as I needed to, I nodded off.
I dreamed I was standing on a ship on a stormy sea. Everything below deck had been taken over by a huge beehive—the buzzing was incredibly loud—and waves against the wooden hull were making it groan and crack.
Then I realized I was sleeping and that the sounds were coming from outside my dream. I snapped awake in a living room full of noise. I jolted to my feet, looking around.
The buzzing, cracking sounds were coming from the bathroom.