34

NOW LET’S SEE, WHERE DID THAT SOAP LAND …

Our little circus had broken down into a series of necessary tasks. Sarah is a good artist, and she always carries something to write on in a weird purse that looks like an oversized shaman’s pouch, so I had her draw a sketch of the man I’d seen in the vision while the memory was still fresh. There were distances to be walked so that phone calls could be made, crude splints and stretchers to be fashioned, dressings to be applied, spears to be fetched, mists to be conjured so that Fisher Kings and half-elves could get Caitlin Flint out of the park without being spotted, and so on.

At least we didn’t have to take care of all those giant wolf corpses. It was one of the plus sides to working with larger organizations—I didn’t have to do all of the cleaning up. Sig took advantage of that and cornered me, taking my hand as if she wanted to make sure I was really there. “What’s up with that picture Sarah drew? Did you find anything out about Molly?”

I squeezed her hand. “Sort of.” Over Sig’s shoulder, Ben was nodding curtly to indicate that I should follow him. “Can you wait a second so I can tell Ben and Simon at the same time? It’s complicated.”

“Sure,” Sig said. “I love waiting to find out about whether my best friend is going to live or die or not.”

“If we have anything to do with it, she’s going to live. That hasn’t changed.” I kissed her hand briefly, and then my girlfriend and I walked through fallen bodies and giant wolf corpses and the sounds of tearing meat. Sig and I have a lot of romantic moments like that. Sometimes, I wonder what Dr. Phil would have to say about our relationship. I didn’t protest when Kasia followed us. Simon had said the kresniks had sent her because of a vision of Sig and Kasia in a dark tower, and I’d just seen a dark tower. Sarah and Choo stayed behind, but only because Sarah was looking after Molly and Caitlin Flint, and Choo couldn’t put any weight on his left knee.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming to New York,” I told Ben when I caught up to him.

Another werewolf named Louis Martine, one of Ben’s higher-ups and a member of Ben’s original tribe, followed along. Louis had never liked me much, but that was fine. I didn’t have any strong feelings about him one way or the other; Louis rarely spoke, and when he did, Ben’s words came out of his mouth.

“Did you really think I’d send wolves here and stay behind while all of this was going on?” Ben asked.

That would have been the rational thing to do, maybe even the responsible thing, but werewolves aren’t like humans in all respects. I mean, werewolves are humans, but … Well, let me put it this way: A werewolf leader who sends other wolves out on the front lines and never takes any risks won’t be a werewolf leader for long. Maybe that’s a bad thing, because a lot of competent werewolf leaders get lost that way, but on the other hand, werewolf leaders don’t send their young into battle to fight for oil-field rights while they stay behind collecting campaign donations from lobbyists, either.

“I didn’t think about it at all,” I admitted. “I’ve been a little busy.”

Ben grunted. “Me too. This going to war alert status but not really going to war and still working with the knights is tricky. I’m getting so turned around, I tried to scratch my chin and wound up scratching my behind.”

We made our way through a tree line and found ourselves next to the lake when my cell phone finally came back on. “Is it okay if I include Simon in on this?”

Ben thought about that. “Do you have to?”

“I never talk to Simon unless I have to,” I said. “But this isn’t a geas thing, if that’s what you mean.”

“Answer one question first,” Ben said. “Would it help things if I killed Simon?”

Things as in dirty-bomb scenarios and species friction. “I don’t think so,” I said. “The knights’ geas is defined by how they see the world. The only way to keep them from coming up with cures that are worse than the disease is to change the way they think about things long-term. I mean, even if you could commit genocide and destroy all knights, would you? You going to kill their kids, too? And all the lay servants who aren’t geas-bound who work with them? And do you really want to live in a world without them when all is said and done? There are a lot of bad things out there. Simon is a prick, but he’s a smart prick.”

“If it comes to killing Simon, you should let me do it,” Sig said. “John and I could go on the run without dragging the Round Table into it.”

I wasn’t sure if I was worried that Sig had already been thinking along those lines, or reassured.

Ben sighed. “What a mess.”

No argument from me on that score: “I’ll brief you first if you want, but if we’re ever going to do this right, we all need to start acting like real allies.”

“Honoring a treaty with white men,” Louis said. “What could go wrong?”

Nobody commented.

“Go ahead and call him,” Ben said.

“And hurry up about it,” Sig added. “I want to hear this.”

There was an electronic series of hums and clicks as my call was transferred to Keeley. “We’re getting close to finding Reader X. Can this wait?”

“There are two copies of the Book of Am out there,” I told him. “Two Reader X’s.”

Silence. Keeley didn’t say anything. Ben and Sig and Kasia and Louis didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll go get Mr. Travers.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Simon greeted me after Keeley had arranged some kind of party line where we could all talk to each other.

“We’ve been suckered,” I said.

“Explain.”

“Imagine you’re some higher-up in the School of Night,” I said. “You’re trying to break into the Templar Archives, and a chance to steal a book that warps reality falls right into your lap.”

“Could we just skip the sales pitch?”

“No. Pretend you’re that higher-up in the School of Night. Your problem is,” I said, “nobody knows exactly how the book works. The book may be some kind of demon that possesses the reader, or it might be a highly addictive drug. All anybody really knows is that the book is supposed to have its own agenda and that it causes magic creatures to start appearing out of the reader’s imagination. Are you going to read that book?”

“Probably not,” Simon said. “I’m going to test it first.”

“Sure,” I said. “But you can’t use rats or rabbits or monkeys for this. The test subject has to be able to read.”

A pause. Then Ben said, “So, if you’re a bad guy, you have someone else read the book for you. Someone you have control over.”

“Normally, sure,” I said. “But there are problems there, too. The Book of Am was discovered when the School of Night was trying to infiltrate the Templar Archives. We didn’t even know the School of Night existed, and they were doing everything they could to keep it that way. The last thing they wanted was to have magical creatures start appearing in Boston and sending up signal flags that something huge was going on.”

“The book transforms people and places the reader knows, too,” Sig said. “You wouldn’t want to give it to anyone who knew you or anything you cared about, because that reader might wind up turning you into something just because they know you. You might wind up getting turned into leprechauns or snails.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“You’re saying they set up the man we’ve been calling Reader X,” Simon said. “Anna Hogan made him think he was going to be the father of a new age, but he’s really a fall guy.”

“I think Anna Hogan seduced him as part of a cover story the School of Night created,” I said. “They began sending Reader X a partial manuscript, a page at a time, long-distance, as a way of controlling the terms of the experiment. The School of Night wanted to observe the gradual effects the book had on Reader X and what effects Reader X had on the book. They wanted to develop strategies for controlling the process. But if Reader X kicked up a hell of a fuss while he was being their crash test dummy, it was a bonus. The School of Night would get to study how the Knights Templar responded to magical manifestations appearing out of nowhere, and they’d also get to see how we’d try to track down the persons responsible. You know … for when they were ready to make their own move on a big scale.”

“It was a test run in a lot of ways,” Ben said.

“That’s why the School of Night has been trying so hard to spy on us?” Sig asked.

Simon was following right along. Hell, as devious as his mind was, he might have been getting ahead of us. “And they keep turning up because the School of Night wants to keep us convinced that they’re still looking for the book too. That’s assuming you’re right. Where are you getting all of this from, Charming?”

I wasn’t inclined to get too specific about me dream walking. “We found someone who knew how to trace the psychic connection between Molly and her shadow back through the School of Night’s wards and magical defenses. The guy who used a book to create Molly’s shadow is older than our Reader X would be, and he’s in a skyscraper in Detroit.”

Apparently, Keeley was listening in too. “That’s all? You derived all of the rest of it from that?”

“It’s a lot of guesswork,” I admitted. “For example, I don’t know if the School of Night has a completed copy of the Book of Am or not. Maybe I really killed Anna Hogan before she finished copying the book, or maybe I just killed her before she was done feeding Reader X a page at a time. I don’t know if Anna Hogan knew Reader X from before, or how she picked him. But I’ll bet I’ve got the gist of it.”

“You said this man was in a skyscraper,” Kasia pointed out. “And the kresniks had a vision of Sigourney and me in a tower.”

I didn’t much like that. “Yeah.”

“The School of Night has mostly been working from a distance,” Simon mused. “Except for one skinwalker, they’ve been using mercenaries and drones and creatures that were magically summoned.”

“Those creatures are another thing,” I said. “All along, I’ve been having a hard time seeing a connection between these fantasy role-playing creatures that Reader X has been conjuring up, and the classical story creatures that have been spying on us. One Reader X seemed to be some random dude on a magical power acid trip using the Book of Am as his own personal therapy session. The other Reader X seemed to think in terms of traditional fables and fairy tales and seemed to know what was going on. The second Reader X also seemed to have more control over his creations and was focused on monitoring our progress. I was even wondering if the book itself was operating apart from its reader, but it makes more sense if there really are two readers.”

Simon got to the point: “Can you identify this skyscraper?”

“Give me a good computer and a phone line to someone who knows Detroit,” I said. “It won’t take long.”

“A few things still don’t fit,” Sig said. “The last few fairy-tale creatures weren’t just trying to spy on us. They were trying to kill us. That’s what really gave Molly away.”

“Yeah, they started trying to kill us when we started getting close to finding Reader X.” I remembered what Aubrey had told me. “I don’t know if the School of Night planned it this way or not, but having the knights tear New York City apart looking for the book has been paying off for them. The knights have been acting like thugs, and they’re pissing off a lot of the supernatural species that the School of Night likes to recruit. I think the School of Night wants to keep our Reader X in play for as long as possible.”

“About that …” Simon said.