30

AND FOR MY NEXT TRICK, I WILL PULL ANOTHER PLAN OUT OF MY ASS

Three rushed and half-coherent phone calls later, to Sarah White, Ben Lafontaine, and Simon Travers respectively, and everyone but Kevin was back in the van and headed for Central Park. The knights had increased their presence there, and the park was still closed for a few hours. It seemed like as good a place as any to have my worst fears blow up in my face.

I had told everyone that Sarah White wanted to meet me there because she’d found someone who could help, which was close enough to the truth that I wasn’t likely to trip over any glaring contradictions.

“Did Sarah say what was so important?” Molly wondered from where she was sitting alone in the middle.

“She says she thinks she’s figured out a way to locate Reader X.” It was weird, dangling bait for Reader X while talking to Molly. “But she wouldn’t get too specific over the phone.”

“Of course not.” Sig lifted her own head and kissed my cheek. “Then we might know what we’re doing. But it must be dangerous or she wouldn’t have sent Kevin away.” She didn’t quite succeed in keeping it light. Sig had been a bit pale ever since I’d told her what was going on.

“I always know what I am doing,” Kasia said from the front of the van. She seemed unruffled by what she’d overheard, though she’d spent some time arguing with me at a frequency no one with normal hearing could pick up on. “The only times I have had this kind of chaos and confusion in my life were when I was working with you, Sigourney. You seem to breed it.”

What the hell was Kasia doing? Was she venting her pent-up hostility, or was she trying to take Sig’s mind off Molly before she gave away that something was up, or was Kasia giving whoever might be watching through Molly a show to keep them distracted? That was the sort of thing I would normally do if I weren’t a little distracted myself. I had a sudden memory of Kasia’s index finger stabbing the dashboard repeatedly while she said, “Poke, poke, poke.”

Sig took it reasonably well, maybe because she had more important things than Kasia on her mind. “I was at the lowest point in my life and caught between two control freaks back then,” she replied. “Those old times got really old. That’s why I don’t appreciate you showing up and trying to drag me back into them.”

Choo, who did not have enhanced hearing and was perforce clueless, turned on the radio. Some slickly produced dance song about working it cranked out of the speakers. “New York has more radio stations than Clayburg. We ought to listen to them while we got the chance.”

Kasia turned the volume down. “Appreciating things never was your strong suit, Sigourney. I know someone who saved your life. He helped you stop drinking. He trained you and gave you a purpose. And you killed him.”

The van went silent. Sig took her head off my shoulder and looked away into the warm, dark night through the window on her left. For a moment, it was like we were in a Tracy Chapman song. Then Sig began saying emotional things in an emotionless voice. “I wish I had been the one to kill Stanislav.”

“You might as well have been. You are sleeping with the man who killed him,” Kasia said. “And he killed Stanislav because of you. Betrayal does not go much deeper than that.”

“Are we there yet?” I asked plaintively.

Sig and Kasia didn’t seem to hear anyone but each other. “Stanislav betrayed me first,” Sig said. “I stayed with him a lot longer than I should have because he convinced me that it was the loyal thing to do. I was just too scared to see what was going on.”

Kasia flickered a glance over her shoulder at us. I thought about Kasia’s statement that she and Stanislav had cheated on Sig, but Sig and I hadn’t had time to talk about that, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to set off that string of firecrackers when we had bigger explosions to worry about.

On the other hand, if Kasia really was trying to keep us all distracted from thinking about what was going on with Molly too much, she was maybe doing too good a job.

“A part of me always felt like the new person I was trying to be was a fake.” Sig went on in that same bleak monotone. “Sometimes, I still feel that way. Like I’m really the person you’re trying to make me feel like right now.”

If she brought up one more person and one more verb tense, I was going to get confused, but Sig restrained herself. “I thought Stanislav really knew me. The real me. I thought if he hated me, I must be somebody who deserved it. He had to actually shoot me full of drugs and leave me and my friends as fang candy for vampires for me to admit how messed-up that was.”

“That was how we found you in the first place.” Kasia sounded thoughtful.

“That’s what Stanislav said.” Some real emotion crept back into Sig’s voice. “Since I didn’t appreciate all he’d done for me, he decided to take it all away and leave me back at square one again.”

“That does sound like him.” Kasia’s voice seemed to hold a certain grudging admiration.

“He betrayed you too, didn’t he?” Sig asked. “I didn’t see it at the time. All I could see was what a bitch you were.”

“Everyone betrays everyone sooner or later.” Which meant Kasia didn’t want to talk about herself. “We just have to decide when such things are forgivable and when they demand vengeance.”

“Okay, way to clear the air, everybody,” I said briskly. “But maybe you two should try talking to each other using cute hand puppets.”

Molly reached back around her seat and patted my knee. Was it odd that she hadn’t tried to intermediate? It was hard not to overthink everything about her.

“Why did you really come to the US, Kasia?” Sig asked. “What do you want from me?”

“I did not expect Stanislav’s death to make me feel sad, but it did,” Kasia said. “I do not like feeling sad. When the kresniks asked me to come here because one of them had seen us in a vision, it seemed like fate in more ways than one.”

“What do you want from me?” Sig repeated.

“I do not have an evil plan,” Kasia said. “I wanted to observe you for a time and satisfy my curiosity. If you want to know the truth, I did not expect your new lover to spot me.”

“I didn’t expect him to find me, either.” For just a moment, Sig’s voice warmed.

Kasia’s voice grew chillier in response. “Be that as it may, Stanislav and I had a bond. I did not like him at the end, and I could not work with him. But there was a time when he saved me the same way he saved you. I may owe the man he used to be some gesture.”

“Even if it’s an empty one?” Molly asked.

Kasia gave an eloquent shrug. At least she didn’t trot out one of her stock responses about all gestures being empty.

I kind of understood. Stanislav had been Kasia’s family. I’ve never actually had a family myself, but I know that for some people, it goes deeper than like or dislike. Maybe even deeper than love or hate. The knights had been my closest thing to a family, and I still had ties to them even if I fought them, even if there was no logical reason behind the feeling.

Central Park covers about nine hundred acres, and it wasn’t difficult to find an off-avenue entrance with low traffic and some tree cover. We had three beings with greater-than-human strength in the van—even if that strength was only slightly greater in my case—and we were able to manually lift the van sideways over a two-and-a-half-foot-tall whitewashed retaining wall. The park is mostly flat terrain, and in theory, the van would be able to move over and through the wooded area as long as it avoided the densest patches. Simon could have easily had some of his people let us through an avenue entrance, but I didn’t want whoever might be listening through Molly to know how much the knights were involved.

Something began to manifest on the avenue behind us. I don’t know how I knew it, but the knowledge was bristling in my scalp. I looked, but the only unusual thing I saw was a small dog with no sign of an owner. It was prancing hurriedly down the sidewalk from the north. Then a large dog on the opposite side of the street appeared, trailing a leash and moving toward us from the south. Across the way, the silhouettes of two dogs moving through a side alley became visible.

I couldn’t immediately think of any fairy tales where there was some kind of Pied Piper for dogs. I also still didn’t really understand how this Reader X thing worked. Was it the book or Reader X causing these things to happen, or some kind of hive mind between the two of them? Was Reader X still feverishly researching John Dee and writing his thoughts down while some disembodied presence became more and more real, acting without his knowledge? And if Molly’s shadow really was somewhere else, taking on substance and being used to keep tabs on us, who was using it? How were the shadow and its summoner communicating?

I didn’t actually articulate all that in my head; the thoughts flitted just beneath the surface of my mind like minnows darting beneath a fast moving stream. The thoughts probably would have been forgotten, except one of them suddenly galvanized and jolted me hard. The idea of Reader X feverishly researching John Dee. The guy had to be reading a lot of John Dee if he was trying to finish Dee’s book, and not many people outside of academics and occultists did. New York had some of the best libraries in the world, and I hadn’t even thought of looking to see who was checking out John Dee–related works that you couldn’t find on the Internet. For that matter, while I was trying to research the School of Night, I’d had to jump through some hoops to join the Folger Library in Washington DC. The Folger Library was one of the best sources of historical documents from the Elizabethan era in the United States, so Reader X had probably had to become a member. Surely, Simon or one of the kajillion knights he supposedly had working this thing had covered that angle? Except Simon hadn’t researched the School of Night personally—he’d had other people doing it for him—so he might not know about the Folger. And book researchers think differently from skip tracers and bounty hunters, and Simon wasn’t telling all of his left tentacles what his right tentacles were doing. Why the hell had this idea waited to occur to me until a moment when there was absolutely nothing I could do about it?

We got in the van and drove through the park, and maybe a hundred yards in, I glanced over while Choo made a turn. To the left, I caught a glimpse through the trees, a silhouette briefly highlighted by a street lamp as it jumped over the retaining wall. Whatever the thing was, it was bigger than any of the dogs I had seen. I remembered how the trolls we’d fought had apparently been made out of the merged bodies of vagrants. Were those dogs I’d spotted meeting and converging into some rough beast? Whatever the being was, it still had four legs, but it was as high to the ground as a horse, and it didn’t have a long arching neck, either.

I’d been hoping to put a little distance between us and whatever magic was brewing back on that street, but I returned the cell phone’s battery and tried to text Simon, both to warn him of what I’d seen and tell him about the library angle. I’d already told him to have knights check the obits from Randy Prutko’s high school classes, but the library thing might be useful too, and I didn’t want it to go unexplored if I died. But of course, the phone wasn’t working. I didn’t say anything to the others. No, let’s be honest here: I didn’t say anything to Molly. One more item on the to-do list.

Make time to memorize the contents of those Nightcrawlers’ Guild books.

Tell Simon about the Folger Library connection.

Get Molly’s shadow back where it belonged.

Kill Reader X.

Change underwear.

If someone was conjuring up spies and messing with my friends just to keep me too busy to get my act together, they were doing a pretty good job of it. But if I’d made a mistake, it was too late to do anything but try to survive it.