The shrouded figure of Melly dropped into the darkness, and I fought for balance at the edge of the portal. The back legs of the couch were also over the void. The couch tipped downward and began to slide into the opening, scraping the edge of the wooden floor.
Jasmin screamed as she pitched forward. I lunged at her, throwing all my weight over the gap. I didn’t think about it; I had no plan or courage. I just moved.
The couch pitched over backward as the front legs caught on the edge of the floor. I clamped my hand on Jasmin’s wrist, my knee slamming onto the arm of the chair, my ghost knife slipping from my grasp and tumbling into the darkness.
I wish I could say I’d been graceful about it, that I’d grabbed her arm and hopped lightly to safety. But in truth I scrambled across the tumbling couch, snagging my shoe on the arm and trying desperately to throw some of my body weight onto the solid part of the floor.
It didn’t happen. The couch floated away from me as my weight pressed on it. I slammed my left hand down on the carpeted living room floor and tried to keep my left foot in the solid world, too, but it slipped free and I swung out over the void.
My hand pressed down on the floor, stopping my fall. Once my body weight dropped below the level of the room, I wasn’t falling anymore. Like the couch, I had momentum, but the void didn’t pull me downward because there was nothing to fall toward. The friction of my left hand against Vi’s carpet held me in place, and I started to pull myself back up. I glanced down at Jasmin. She stared at me with huge, terrified eyes.
Suddenly, a strange pulse pulled me downward. It wasn’t like the tug of gravity—this felt as though something huge was trying to breathe me in. My mind only had room for one gigantic thought: Hold on hold on. The pull subsided, then came back again, and again, and again, with the regularity of a beating heart. Hold on.
Something grabbed my left wrist, and I cried out in panic. I pulled myself high enough to see Maria on her knees holding my forearm like a baseball bat. For a moment I had an absurd fear that she was going to lift my hand and fling me into the void, but instead she pressed down, anchoring me in this world.
“¡Santa madre de Dios! ¿Que pasa aqui?” she shouted.
“Here!” I lifted Jasmin as high as I could.
Maria let go, snatched her granddaughter, and dragged her into the world. She pushed the little girl toward the door and, bless her, started toward me again.
“Get out of here!”
She grabbed my wrist again. “What’s happening? What’s happening?”
I glanced down and saw pale, shapeless forms swirling in the darkness below. “Get out of here and close the door behind you! Run for your lives!”
It was a ridiculous thing to say, but it worked. Maria rolled to her feet and scooped Jasmin off the floor. With both hands free, I lifted myself halfway into the room. The door slammed shut.
My ghost knife was gone. I tried to reach for it with my thoughts the way I’ve always called it back to me, but I was scrambling out of the hole in the floor, and the shapes below were getting closer, and I was frightened, and I hated myself for my fear. I couldn’t concentrate.
I’d lifted one leg out of the void and onto the solid floor when one of the sudden pulses dragged me back. They hadn’t let up the whole time, but just as I was about to be free I was hit with one so much stronger than the ones before that it nearly sucked me in.
I cursed and scrambled upward again. I had one leg out when something heavy and soft struck my trailing foot. I rolled onto the floor, outside the void, just as another, even stronger pull started. I’d made it back into the world, but I wasn’t safe.
There was a pale glob on the lower half of my left leg, like a small blanket bundled around my foot and ankle. And it was creeping upward.
I leaned over the opening into the Empty Spaces. The shapes were closer than ever now, and two were very, very close. I held my hand over the darkness and closed my eyes. There. I could feel my ghost knife in the darkness below. I called for it, desperately.
God, I had a predator on me, and it was already making the skin on my leg burn. I didn’t even have to watch it move; I could feel it.
One of the drapes rushing out of the void faltered, and a moment after that I had my spell in my hand again.
Just as I rolled away from the opening in the floor, a drape rose out of it and rushed at my face. I shut my eyes and slapped my free hand over my nose and mouth.
The predator hit me and knocked me back; my iron gate suddenly burned white hot. A sudden rush of despair sapped my strength and my thoughts became confused, but I knew it was something the drape was doing to me, and I did my best to shake it off.
The first one creeping up my leg suddenly squeezed so hard that I almost gasped in a mouthful of slime. They began to pull in opposite directions. Christ, they’re fighting over me.
I laid the edge of the ghost knife against my cheek and began to slash at the drape. It flared back, clearing a space from my mouth and nose, but I didn’t dare take a breath. Not yet. I could feel it holding on to my head and neck, burning my already tender skin.
If one broke my neck, would another opening appear in the floor?
I scraped my spell across my throat just as the predator tried to squeeze. It pulled away, releasing me, and the one on my leg began to drag me across the floor. I opened my eyes in time to see the drape float away from my face. A third came through the gap in the floor, then the gap closed. The opening to the Empty Spaces was gone.
There were still three predators in the room with me. The third one moved unsteadily. It took me a moment to realize my ghost knife had already passed through it once when I called it from the void.
I twisted onto my stomach and slashed my ghost knife through the one that had just let go of my face. I swiped through it four, five, six times, but it wasn’t dying fast enough. It retreated along the floor, too badly wounded to fly.
But the first drape around my leg was still pulling me in the other direction. I scrabbled with my elbows after the second one, then dug my untrapped foot into the carpet and launched myself after it.
I plunged the ghost knife into it. The drape tried to wrap itself around my hand, but I was already twisting and wiggling my spell, cutting it with every tiny move, and it quickly turned to sludge and died.
I spared a second to look at it closely, hoping to see a brain or an eye or some other vulnerable spot on its now visible body. I wanted a way to kill the thing in one shot, but I couldn’t see anything
I rolled onto my back. The first predator had reached higher than my mid-thigh, but the effort it had put into dragging me away from its competition had slowed its progress. Still, it was much too close to my crotch. There was no way I was going to let this damn thing crush and dissolve my nuts.
I scanned the room for the telltale shimmer of the other one, knowing that it would be invisible if it had landed on something solid.
It hadn’t. It hovered at the edges of the apartment door as though trying to figure out how to get through. I had to kill the third predator before it reached open air and a victim of its own, but first I had to give this first one something to think about. I sat up and slashed at it with my ghost knife.
But pain and panic had made me sloppy. I saw the edge of the spell cut through the thin flesh of the drape, and I saw my pants split apart, and I felt the ghost knife cut my leg.
My iron gate flared with white-hot pain—every tattooed spell on my body, even the two tiny ones on my neck that I never think about, suddenly burned as though they were made of napalm. A scream erupted from my throat.
My head was filled with roaring: Cut cut cut cut it screamed, over and over. It was a compulsion—a fury—to slash and splinter and tear and slice. The ghost knife had a desperate hunger to cut and destroy, and it ached to cut the spells on my chest, the spells Annalise had put on me.
I moved the spell toward my stomach.
A tiny voice in my head resisted. Those spells were precious. They’d saved my life many times, and I wouldn’t last long without them. The burning of my iron gate slowly brought me back to myself.
But the compulsion from the ghost knife was unbearable. It had a powerful will of its own, and it needed to destroy everything, especially the magic on my body and in the predators.
One of those predators was getting away. I turned my attention toward it, trying to turn the will of the ghost knife toward it, too. I couldn’t hold out much longer against the compulsion; I had to distract it. The spells on my body weren’t going anywhere, but that predator would escape if I didn’t destroy it first.
The ghost knife turned toward the drape. I threw it. It flashed across the room faster than I’d ever seen it move and cut through the creature.
I called it back immediately. I couldn’t deny its hunger for the predator, and now that I’d opened myself to its will, it ran wild. The spell returned to me and I threw it again. Called it back. Threw it. I struggled to my knees, scrambling clumsily toward the drape, suddenly feeling as though I was as hungry as the predator I was destroying. Called it back, threw it.
The drape collapsed onto the carpet. I grasped my spell and fell on the creature, slashing and tearing at it in a mindless frenzy. I might have screamed, but I wasn’t aware of myself at the moment, only of the growing pain of my iron gate and the ghost knife’s unbearable urge to destroy.
Finally, the predator was dead, and my attacks against it felt empty and useless. The urge to cut was still strong, but the iron gate under my collarbone was blocking it with pain.
It would have been so easy—so easy!—to surrender to that need and slash through all the spells on my chest.
Instead, I turned to the drape on my leg. My hand trembled as I laid the edge of the spell against it. The predator wrenched at me and squeezed, but I didn’t even notice. All my perceptions had narrowed to a tunnel, with the compulsion of the ghost knife at the center and pain everywhere else. It wanted to jump out of my hand and cut me, but I held on to it like it was a rattlesnake. It slashed into the drape.
The predator recoiled, and I felt the ghost knife’s hunger for it. I couldn’t fight my own spell, so I let it pursue the drape, using all my will and strength to redirect it from my body.
The drape peeled off me, and I cut it until it died. At the end, I could barely feel the ghost knife’s compulsion anymore. The pain from my iron gate had grown large enough to fill my whole mind and will. It burned away the spell’s influence, and I was in control of myself again.
I rolled over onto my stomach, gasping for air, waiting for the pain to ease. My mouth lay open against the carpet, and I inhaled enough dust and hair to make me hack. The pain wouldn’t subside—my iron gate kept burning and growing, and I finally cried out pitifully, feeling tears running down my cheeks. Maybe it would never stop. Maybe it would go on and on until I lost my mind or ate a bullet or I really did slash it with my spell.
Then, finally, it began to subside. I struggled to my knees, not ready to stand yet. My ghost knife lay on the carpet beside me. It was mine. I’d created it. I’d used it against other people.
I shuddered. The pain from my iron gate had been so overwhelming that I thought it would destroy me, but I’d needed it to scour away the influence of the ghost knife. The spell hadn’t affected other people the way it affected me, but I had no idea why. I also didn’t have a coherent thought in my head; this was something I’d have to puzzle out later, if ever.
But my own spell had been just as hungry as the predators I fought, and by cutting myself I’d let it take control of me. I could never let that happen again. Never.
The pain wasn’t entirely gone. My face, neck, and head were burning, just as they had the first time a drape attacked me, and so was my leg. I struggled to my feet. Exhaustion made me unsteady, and my leg felt stiff and swollen. I needed to wash away the sticky acid the predators left on their victims. Maybe a shower?
I stepped onto the section of the floor that had closed over the gap, feeling miserable enough to risk my life. It felt solid—I didn’t fall through into the Empty Spaces, at least. Was it safe to bring Maria and Jasmin back into the room?
I glanced out the window. The big guy in the red shirt and camo pants was back, and he was looking right up at me. He took something long and thin from a hockey bag at his feet. One end was vaguely spear-shaped.
He lifted it to his shoulder and pointed it at me.
Oh, shit. I spun and hustled for the apartment door. It was seven or eight strides away—too far. I was never going to be able to run that far before the explosion hit. I ran anyway, because the only other option was waiting to die.
My stiff leg made me lurch across the room like a wounded drunk. I was halfway there and the explosion hadn’t come. Then I had my hand on the knob, then I was pulling the door open, knowing that would only make it easier for the flames to blast out into the hall. Then I shut the door behind me, threw my leg over the railing, and jumped toward the pool below.
The explosion, when it came, was loud but not as loud as I expected. The flames never reached me; I struck the water with a painful slap and was shocked by how cold it was.
The pain on my face and leg eased immediately, and I struck the bottom gently. For one disorienting moment, I lost my bearings, but I saw light above and struggled back to the air.
The building was burning. Fire alarms blared and doors around the complex swung open. What were all these people doing here so late in the morning? Didn’t they have jobs?
I saw Maria and Jasmin standing beneath a set of concrete stairs. They both had a shell-shocked look about them. I paddled to them and pulled myself out of the water.
“Take her out the back way,” I said, straining to keep my voice low.
Maria grabbed my hand. “What—”
“Don’t ask me questions!” I snapped at her. “It’s not the time! Take Jasmin out the back way and get her someplace public. She’s still not safe here.”
Maria snapped her mouth shut. Jasmin tugged at her arm. “Abuela, I want to go.”
They both hustled toward the little door on the far side of the pool, leaving me dripping water onto the pavement. People were charging around the complex, shouting at one another, demanding to know what had happened.
Me, I turned toward the front gate. I should have been exhausted, but my anger gave me a surge of energy. Someone had just fired a grenade at me, and I was going to kick his ass.
I ran out to the sidewalk. The asshole in camo pants was nowhere in sight. I looked up the street both ways; a Jeep Cherokee was driving away in one direction, a Dodge Ram truck in the other. Which one should I chase?
I had no reason to choose either, then the choice was gone. Both vehicles turned corners and vanished. Neither had been driving fast, like they would if they were fleeing the scene of a crime. Which meant the asshole could still be here.
And I was standing out in the street like a target at a gun range. I ran toward the spot where he’d stood, but I wasn’t quite sure where it was. I turned around and surveyed Violet’s burning building.
The flames were already shining through the windows of the apartment above, and the smoke was billowing out in two heavy black columns. I heard sirens in the distance, and people were rushing out of the courtyard with cats in their arms, or baby gear. One woman ran across the street toward me and set a milk crate full of paperbacks on the lawn, then sprinted back to the building.
Things would get very crowded soon. I tried to remember everything about Camo Pants that I could. I had seen the hockey bag at his feet, so I moved away from the line of parked cars. Had the telephone pole been on the right or the left? Had he stood on grass or the pavement?
I walked around the area, looking for something that looked like a clue. In Chino, I knew a guy who’d left his wallet on the front seat of a Lexus he’d jacked. Camo Pants wasn’t so considerate. I couldn’t find anything but cigarette butts and food wrappers. Maybe TV cops could spend hours going over all this trash in some lab and finger the guy, but it was useless to me. And I’d forgotten to ask where I could find Violet.
The sirens were getting closer, and that made me itch to leave the scene. But as I turned toward my car, someone behind me said: “Hey, Mr. Lilly.”
I turned slowly and saw a homeless man walking toward me. His clothes were tattered and stiff with dirt, and even at this distance I could smell a year’s worth of cheap cigarettes on him. “Hey, Mr. Lilly,” he said again, his pale blue eyes wide and blank. “Your sick friend asked me to give you this.” He held out a cellphone.
I didn’t move to take it. “Who gave it to you?”
“Come on,” he said, “he paid me ten bucks.” He sounded a little nervous, as though he’d have to give back the money if I didn’t accept it.
The phone rang.
“Who?” I asked again. I still didn’t move to take it.
“I don’t know his name, but he looks like a cancer patient or something. He said he’s your friend. Come on.”
Okay. I can come on with the best of them. I took the phone from him. He bustled away, looking relieved.
The phone was a cheap flip-closed type. It stopped ringing as the call went to voice mail. I opened it and looked at the number. It was an 818 area code, so it was coming from somewhere nearby. As expected, it started ringing again a few seconds later. I answered. “This is Ray.”
“Ray! It’s been so long. Remember me?”
“I remember you, Wally. Why don’t we get together? We can talk about old times.”
“Heh. I’m sure you’d like that, Ray, but I haven’t forgotten that you tried to kill me. I mean, some stuff is hard to remember, but not that.”
He sounded different, almost dreamy. Wally had never been the sharpest guy, but he’d never sounded like this. “I’m a different person now,” I said.
“I’ll bet. Listen, Ray, I do want to meet with you. Right now. Walk west about three blocks. There’s a little diner that serves a nice breakfast. My treat.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. “Do you think I’m stupid, Wally?”
“Not at all, buddy. I know you still want to kill me. But I haven’t forgotten what you did for me over the years. I still owe you. So we’ll meet in a public place, and you’ll give me a chance to talk for, say, sixty seconds before you try to kill me again. Okay? After that, we’ll see what happens. The place is called the Sugar Shaker.
Okay?”
“Okay.” I closed the phone and started walking west. The fire engines drove by me as I went, and I saw bystanders and lookie-loos helping tenants unload their apartments or stand guard over their stuff.
At the corner I dropped Wally’s cell into a trash can. It was painful to throw away resources, but it was Wally’s. I didn’t want any gifts from him.
I had three blocks to figure out what he wanted, but I couldn’t put it together. In junior high, a couple of guys from the baseball team had picked on Wally until I told them to lay off. It wasn’t that I liked him, but I hated to see the misery they were making.
Then I’d played with a handgun, and my life changed forever. I never went back to school and didn’t hear from Wally again until just before I got out of Chino. He wrote to me, offering me a joe job at his copy shop. I tried to remember how it felt to be grateful to him, but it was too long ago. Too much had happened since.
So I wasn’t sure what Wally owed me. An apology for what happened to Jon? For the predators he’d unleashed? As far as I was concerned, all Wally King owed me was his spell book and his miserable fucking life.
The Sugar Shaker turned out to be a storefront café with a counter along the back wall and ten round tables.
I took hold of my ghost knife before I walked through the door. The spell was quiet—just a sheet of laminated paper that I could sense—as it had always been. But if it still wanted someone to cut, Wally would do just fine.
A man sitting by the wall near the newspaper rack waved to me, and it took me a moment to recognize him. It was Wally, and he looked bad. His sallow skin sagged off his body. His skull seemed slightly misshapen, and his body was a formless mass. He’d always been fat, but now he looked lumpy, as though he was riddled with tumors. He wore green sweats that needed to be thrown into a hamper, but he’d spent a long time brushing and blow-drying his hair.
There were a dozen other people inside, talking, eating breakfast, or just reading. My adrenaline was still running, and I was jumpy and pissed off. Annalise, if she were here, would have smashed in Wally’s skull and burned him down to cinders without a second thought, and she would have written off anyone killed in the crossfire as an acceptable loss. I wasn’t ready to do that. While Wally needed killing—oh, how he needed killing, no one knew that better than I did—this wasn’t the place.
Unless it had to become the place.
Wally held up his pale, flabby hands. “Sixty seconds, right?”
“You don’t deserve sixty seconds.”
“But they do.” He gestured toward the crowd around him.
“You look terrible.”
“But I feel fantastic.” He rubbed at a piece of peeling skin on the end of his ear. “Ray, I know what you want to do—it’s written all over your face and I can see it in your glow—but I’m a different person, too. If you make your move here, all these people are going to suffer.”
I stared at him, picturing him with a split skull. Could I do it quickly enough? My ghost knife felt alive in my pocket. I remembered how it had felt when it tried to control me, and the killing urge dimmed just a little.
“Can’t we just talk?” Wally asked. “Have a seat.”
I sat and placed my hands on the table. “My friend died today because of you.”
“Which one?” I nearly snatched a knife off the table and stabbed him in the eye, but he kept talking, oblivious. “Was it the cute one with the big butt? I knew we were getting close to her time. She gave you my message, right? I mean, you’re here.”
“Why, Wally? What are you trying to get out of this?”
He sighed. “I’m not much for schemes, Ray. I think you know that. Some guys can come up with complicated plans to get what they want, but I’m not like that. I need things to be simple.”
A waitress stepped up to the table. She was a tall Asian woman with a broad forehead and long, straight black hair. She did her best not to look at Wally and didn’t seem all that impressed by my soaking wet clothes. “Can I take your orders?”
“I thought this table was in the other waitress’s section,” Wally said. He sounded a little whiny about it.
“Nope, I’m your waitress,” she answered in a tone that suggested she wasn’t happy about it and didn’t want to argue.
Wally sighed again. “I’d like three hard-boiled eggs, a side of bacon, and a side of sausage. And water. Ray? It’s on me.”
“Black coffee,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t drink a drop of it. I didn’t want to accept anything from him.
The waitress hurried away. “I thought this table was in the other waitress’s section,” he told me, as though I hadn’t heard him the first time he said it. His lips were rubbery and his teeth were gray. “I’m not into Asian chicks. I know some guys are crazy for them, but I like curly hair.”
I closed my eyes. I was not going to sit here and talk about women with him. “You need things to be simple,” I prompted.
“Right. I needed invisible people for my thing, and I wanted to do it in a way to get your attention.”
“What ‘thing’ are you talking about?”
“I’m trying to get my hands on a puzzle.… Actually, never mind about the thing,” he said. “I blew that, anyway. This is about you now. You remember what I told you last time, right before you tried to kill me? Well, nothing has changed. Bad shit is coming, Ray. Really, really bad shit.”
“But why is this about me?”
“I owe you, for all the good things you did for me growing up.”
“That doesn’t make us friends.”
“Oh, no. I’m well aware of that. Still, you did good things for me when no one else would, not even the actual friends I had at the time. Besides, I like knowing you. It’s like being pals with Stalin’s deadliest assassin or something.”
Even I knew who Stalin was. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The Twenty Palace Society, natch. They used to be really scary, you know, back in the day. I’ve spoken to some of the people who were around back when. Everyone was terrified of them, and hid like field mice. But they lost their spell books—the original spell books—and can’t produce primaries anymore. They’ve been in decline ever since.”
I knew all this. Zahn had bragged, and Annalise confirmed, that the society had once had and had lost two of the three “original” spell books. According to Annalise, they were the source of all magic in the world, and they weren’t really books with spells written in them.
Why they were still called spell books was beyond me. I learned the names of two of them—the Book of Grooves and the Book of Oceans—during the disaster in Washaway. I had no idea where they were, and as far as I could tell, no one else did, either.
Annalise said that anyone who read them had visions. The visions turned them into a “primary”—the most powerful kind of sorcerer—and they recorded their visions by writing them out as spells in an actual book. Those secondhand spells were what everyone thought of as spell books, and they were traditionally named after the primary and the source: Smith Book of Oceans or Jones Book of Grooves.
I’d seen one of those secondary books. Well, in truth I’d stolen it. I’d cast my ghost knife out of it and nearly died in the attempt. Annalise had taken it back, but I had a copy hidden away. In fact, it was so well hidden that I hadn’t gone near it since.
When a second person laid hands on the Jones Book of Whatever, that person became a “secondary.” The third person became a “tertiary.” Every time a book of spells passed from one hand to the next, the spells became weaker, because each new person was further and further from the original vision. It didn’t take many generations for them to become useless.
That’s why sorcerers guarded their spell books so carefully, because sharing them made them decay. Unfortunately, the spells that held on to their potency the longest were summoning spells.
I knew the society was losing power as their sorcerers died and their spell books were handed down, but it didn’t really matter to me. That was long-term thinking. I was in this game for the short-term fight. I was here for this enemy, and this danger. Someone else would have to worry about the next few centuries.
Wally watched my face, waiting. For a moment, I thought he might try to sell me something.
I said: “You’re not telling me anything new.”
“You’re the first real threat they’ve been able to put into the field in decades.”
I looked away. Annalise, my boss, was ten times more dangerous than I was. She could tear my head off with one hand, and she wasn’t the most powerful member of the society by any means. I was a guppy in a shark tank. “That’s bullshit and bullshit won’t work on me.”
He laughed. “You would think so, dude, but I’m one hundred percent serious. You killed Ansel Zahn, man!” The rail-thin old woman at the next table looked up from her book at that, but Wally was oblivious. “You killed the last of the Hammers. You took out a whole swarm of cousins, too. And those were just the top-of-the-marquee names. Do you understand how badass that is?”
I glanced at the woman beside us. She watched us warily and looked about to bolt from her seat. “He’s talking about videogames,” I said. She sighed and returned to her book.
Wally grinned at me with his gray smile. “And then there are all the regular folks. I didn’t know you had it in you. I tried to get my hands on the police report—”
“Shut up.”
“No, really! I wanted to find out how many bystanders you killed in Washa—”
“Shut up.” I wanted to hit him so bad I could barely breathe, but I didn’t know what would happen to the people around me. They would be just like the people I’d killed in Washaway, innocent victims—only this time it wouldn’t be self-defense, it would be sloppiness.
Luckily, Wally wasn’t interested in pushing me. “Okay, dude. Be cool. I’m just saying it’s like I went to grade school with the Seahawks’ quarterback. People are talking about you.”
That, I didn’t like. “Tell me about the ‘thing’ Melly was supposed to help you with.”
“Why else would you want an invisible person? I wanted to steal something that’s moderately well guarded.”
“A puzzle,” I prompted. He smiled and shrugged. “But you couldn’t get it.” His gaze became a little distracted, as if I was boring him. Either he didn’t want to talk about it or there wasn’t anything to say. “You’re TheLastKing,’ right? That was you last Christmas in Washaway, right?”
He focused on me. I had his attention again. “I was never in Washaway.”
“But you were the one feeding information to …” The faces of dead people came back to my memory, and I stopped talking. I couldn’t say the names of those dead men out loud.
Wally held up his hand, his thumb and index finger almost touching. “Teeny, teeny bits of information, but it was enough to get them running out there with their checkbooks and shotguns. They didn’t matter, though. Not really. They were in the way.”
“Wally, tell me about the thing you’re planning. What part did Caramella have in it?”
He laughed. “Forget about the thing. I wish I could. Anyway, she already did her part.”
“You …” I’d almost said killed her, but the woman with the book was still too close. “The drape already took her, and it almost got me, too.”
“That’s the risk we face when we call these things,” Wally said, absentmindedly touching a lump on his chin. “But wait, what did you call it?”
I shrugged, feeling vaguely embarrassed. “I had to call them something, so I’ve been thinking of them as drapes.”
“Hah! In the book, they’re called Wings of Air and Hunger, but I like your name better. Less ridiculous.”
The word book pushed one of my buttons. “Wally, I want you to turn over your spell book and all copies—”
“Ray! I can’t believe you’d try that shit with me.”
“Excuse me,” the waitress said. She set a plate in front of Wally and a cup in front of me. “You can’t use that language in here. If you do it again, you’ll have to leave.”
Wally beamed up at her with his sickly face. It was a nasty smile. “I hear you.”
She left. Wally picked up a hard-boiled egg and popped it into his mouth—he didn’t even peel the shell off first—then gulped it down like a snake. “Ray,” he said, as he cut his sausage patties in quarters and stacked them. “Don’t try that ‘turn over your books’ crap with me, okay? It’s insulting. First of all, I’m not one of the power-crazy jagoffs you’re used to dealing with. I’m trying to do some good here.”
“Tell that to Caramella.”
“And her boyfriend, too, probably.” He looked at his watch. “Should have happened for him first. And the rest of them soon enough. But I’m sorry about that. Seriously. I know that drapes are painful, and I’m not looking to cause a lot of pain.”
I laughed at him. He shrugged and looked sheepish. I said: “They’re bringing more of their kind.”
Wally stabbed the stack of sausages with his fork, stuck them into his mouth, and swallowed them all without chewing. I wondered how his throat could squeeze them all down. “Good thing I brought you and your buddies down to take care of it, then.”
“I’m going to take care of you, too.”
The lumps on Wally’s face suddenly shifted position, as though something under his skin was moving around. His body hunched up, bulking around his neck and shoulders.
“Whoa,” he said. “Hold on, let me deal with something.” He closed his eyes and took deep breaths as though fighting the urge to puke. After a few seconds, he smiled again. “My passengers didn’t like that you said that. Don’t, okay? It’d be embarrassing to call you here under a white flag and break the truce myself.”
“Christ, Wally. You have predators inside you.”
“Oh, yeah, Ray. You’d be surprised by how many. I’m a different thing than you’re used to facing. Man, the whole world looks different to me now. Literally. Did you know that some outsiders don’t use light to see? Now I’m sharing that gift, too, and it’s wild.”
“You’re carrying predators for their abilities? Are you fucked in the head? What could be worth that?”
“Oh, well, they let me fly like Superman, and I can hork Chubby Hubby ice cream through my nostrils. Right? Dude. Come on. You expect me to just tell you? We’re not exactly pals—for now, anyway—so I’m not going to tell you everything I can, you know, do. That would be showing my hand.”
“Showing your … Have you looked in a mirror lately? You look like you’re dying right in front of me.”
“Looks bad, feels good; that’s what I say.”
“Christ. You’re so fucking stupid.”
“Hey now,” Wally said. He didn’t seem offended at all. “I have power, Ray. Not Ansel Zahn levels, but I don’t have to take the risks his type takes, either. All I had to do was put a protective spell on myself—a permanent one—and summon a couple something-somethings into myself. I keep them fed, and they share their little tricks with me.”
My hand twitched as I resisted the urge to grab my ghost knife and start cutting. It could destroy the mark that protected Wally from his predators—wherever it was—turning them loose on him.
Except that was absolutely forbidden. No one in the Twenty Palace Society was allowed to feed a predator, ever. When I killed Wally, I was going to have to do it some other way.
He kept talking, oblivious. “Ray, I’m sure you could find a way to kill me if you really tried, but it would not be easy. Then, if you survived, you’d have my little buddies to deal with. But you shouldn’t try. You want to know why?” He gestured toward his face and neck. “Because I’m making sacrifices to do some good here.”
“You’re trying to kill everybody.”
“Everybody dies anyway, Ray. I’ve seen it. If things keep going the way they are, what happened to Caramella will look like passing peacefully in your sleep. And you know what? Drapes and cousins and sapphire dogs—that shit is really painful and scary for people. But I’m not about that. Just because I plan to euthanize the world doesn’t mean I want to be a dick about it. My plan is supposed to make things easier. Make it, you know, quick and painless.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” I said.
“Too late. I already decided. Ray, do you want to know why the outsiders are so anxious to get here, to our world? Do you know why they’re desperate to escape the Deeps?”
“What outsiders are you talking about?”
Wally touched a lump on his face. “The society calls them predators, which is correct but doesn’t really describe everything they are, and calls their home the Empty Spaces, which is a pretty stupid name for a place that’s so full of weirdness. Ray, do you know why they want to get here so badly?”
I didn’t like being instructed by Wally, but no one else ever wanted to explain things to me. Certainly not Annalise. “Tell me.”
“Because there’s no death there. I’m serious. The Deeps are teeming with outsiders, but they can’t feed on each other because they can’t kill and eat each other, because nothing there can die. So they’re stuck out there, desperate and starving. You think what happened to your friend was bad? She probably had a couple days of pain before she died. Maybe less. The outsiders hurt for decades—centuries, maybe—waiting for a chance to feed again.”
“And you want to help them to a snack.”
He sagged and looked disappointed. “No, Ray. I’m trying to save everyone from …” He stopped and looked around the room. The woman with the book had left, and no one had taken her place. In fact, the diner was only half as full as it was when I entered.
Wally sighed again. “Never mind. I had to try, okay? I owed you that. I know the Twenty Palace Society has brainwashed you, but I still think of you as the guy who stood between me and Rocky Downing at the edge of the basketball court. I know you have your heart in the right place, you just need to get your head there, too. Keep your eyes open, Ray. That’s all I’m saying. You can’t trust those society people. And you may decide soon that you want to stand between me and the bullies again.”
Wally swallowed the remaining two eggs, again without peeling them. Then he folded his soggy bacon, speared it with his fork, and gulped it down, too.
“Don’t get up,” he said as he stood. “I’m serious. You’re a great guy, but the truce only lasts while we’re here. I’m skipping town now anyway, so you should deal with the, uh, drapes. We’ll see each other again.” He laid a couple of bills on the table. It was more than enough to cover the check. “And I wish Curly-Head had waited on us. That was supposed to be part of the plan.”
Damn. He was leaving, and I hadn’t gotten anything truly useful out of him. “Wally, at least tell me how to stop the drapes.”
He snorted. “Is that how you’ve been doing it? Please please tell me what to do? Come on, I want to see some of your mad skills.”
I stood out of my chair and turned toward him. He stepped back, looking up at me in surprise and delight as though I was a plot twist in an exciting TV show. I reached into my pocket for my ghost knife.
But Wally had already placed his fingers in his mouth. He pulled out something small, wet, and red as blood. It was round like a Ping-Pong ball and gleamed like metal. Then it unfolded legs as long and slender as needles.
Wally tossed it over the counter into the kitchen. “Choices, choices,” he said and took one step backward. He passed through the wall like a phantom.