Damn. I raced out the door. The tree line wasn’t far, but I didn’t want to run into the woods. Not when Catherine’s car was in the other direction.
The ATV had a key in it. I grabbed a bungee cord from behind the seat and strapped the handlebars down. Then I started it up and sent it on its way.
As I came around the edge of the cottage, Ursula ran through the servant’s entrance of the house and slammed the door behind her.
I sprinted down the hill toward the house. I had nearly reached the doorway, still stupidly planning to follow her inside, when the back light turned on. She had roused the house faster than I expected.
The corner of the building was just a few yards to my right. I ran around it and ducked out of sight, staying in the muddy tracks Biker and his two killers had made.
The only tool I had was my ghost knife, but I was pretty sure I could crack a steering column with it. Unfortunately, the cars in the garage were on the other side of the house. Horace had distracted me before I could disable them, but I couldn’t get to them right now. I could have gone around the front, but if the guard at the main entrance had been replaced, that wouldn’t turn out well.
I peeked around the corner. Six Fellows streamed through the back door, each carrying a shotgun. They fanned out across the yard, one particularly fat one moving toward me. Dammit. The ATV had overturned on a tree root across the yard; hadn’t they noticed it?
I leaned away from the corner of the house. The tree line was not close enough for me to risk it, especially considering how much noise I’d make in the undergrowth. I’d end up like Biker, a rotting corpse with a bullet in my back. But there was a basement window at my feet. I dropped to my knees in the freezing mud and cut through the latch. The window opened toward me, but the gap was too narrow for me to fit through. The man with the shotgun would come around the corner at any moment. I cut both hinges and slid through the opening, pulling the frame in after me.
The basement was pitch-dark, except for the yard light shining through the narrow windows along the ceiling. I landed on something flat and solid. It didn’t tip over and crash onto the floor. I pressed the window frame in place—it was upside down and didn’t fit properly, but I tried to hold it absolutely still.
The fat man in the parka walked in front of the window. His puffy face was already red from the cold, but something in the way he scanned back and forth made me wary. He was calmer than the others. More in control.
Luckily, he was looking toward the trees opposite the house, not at his feet.
My ghost knife was in my back pocket, but I wasn’t sure it would work on him any better than it had on Ursula. Was it running out of power, or did she have a protection spell? My ghost knife didn’t feel any weaker, and it had cut the window readily enough.
Someone shouted, “There!” and the fat man trotted back toward the others. I blew out a long, relieved breath and fitted the window, carefully squeezing it into the jamb. A strong wind would knock it out again, but I planned to be long gone by then.
I climbed down to the floor. The low dresser I’d been crouching on had a white cloth draped over it. Each window was about ten feet from the next one, and by their faint rectangles I could see the shape of the room. It was obviously the size of the house above, but the weird silhouettes and broken shadows showed me it was full of clutter.
My eyes were not accustomed to the darkness, so I moved slowly, my hands guiding me around chair legs, discarded bicycles, and other junk I couldn’t identify by touch alone.
At first I intended to go to the front of the building to steal a car, but I heard shouting from the back of the house and moved toward it.
The window closest to the back entrance was blocked by a tangle of what appeared to be broken garden equipment, but the next one over had two steamer trunks stacked beneath it, along with a pile of lacy dresses. I climbed onto them, probably ruining them with my muddy clothes, and peeked out the window.
There were shoes just a few feet from me. One pair were green Chuck Taylors, soaked through by the mud. Beside those was a pair of hiking boots fresh from the sporting goods store. The third pair was the professor’s fur-trimmed leather boots. The man in the Chucks fidgeted back and forth but let himself be hemmed in by the other two. It was Kripke. It had to be.
Beyond them, I saw the two Mustaches marching across the open meadow toward the ATV. A third man was with them. He had a lean, hollow look and was dressed completely in cold-weather bicycling gear. He was another Fellow, I was sure. No one else would dress so badly.
I couldn’t hear them. I slowly, quietly unlatched the window and eased it open.
“He had a gun,” Ursula said. “He threatened to shoot me if I didn’t tell him everything I knew about Armand.” Just as she finished the sentence, she came into view, walking across the grass with Stephanie beside her, followed by the tattooed man and a frail-looking blond man I hadn’t seen before. They walked toward the professor.
“Have you ever seen this man before?” Frail asked. He had a German accent, and his voice was high. Ursula shook her head. “Think carefully. You may have seen him in town or while running errands. Could he be a local?”
“No, he—” Ursula began, but Stephanie interrupted.
“Where are the goddamn guards? I hired a security team to protect the grounds. Where are they?”
“Ms. Wilbur,” Solorov said. “Shut up. We have questions to ask.”
“Don’t you tell me to shut up! I paid them. Now I find that they all ran home to their mommies! I’m going to sue them for so much money—”
“Shut up, Ms. Wilbur, or I will have you shot,” Solorov said. Stephanie gaped at her.
I heard an old man’s wheezing laughter. They stopped and glanced back as he shambled into view. He wore a bulky black coat and a black fur cap with the earflaps down, and he leaned on a gnarled black cane that had been heavily carved. A pair of black bird-watching binoculars hung around his neck. Frail rushed to him and gently took a black leather satchel from his hand.
I realized I was staring, just as the others were. There was something arresting about him, although he appeared completely ordinary in every way.
Frail walked beside the old man as though he was ready to catch him, but he continued his questioning. “Please, explain why you are so sure he is not a local.”
“It was the way he spoke,” Ursula said. Her tone was flat. “Some things he said. He said Mr. Yin didn’t have Armand anymore. He said that Armand had escaped.”
“That’s a lie,” Stephanie blurted out, apparently forgetting the professor’s threat. “I just spoke with Mr. Yin ten minutes ago, and they are en route without incident. He must have been trying to trick you.” The contempt she held for Ursula was clear.
“What did he look like?” Frail asked.
“He was a little over six feet tall. Slender and handsome with a knife scar on his cheek. He was wearing a stolen servant’s uniform. And he had tattoos on the backs of his hands.”
The old man spoke up, his voice raw and low. “What sort of tattoos?”
“Like his.” Ursula pointed at Tattoo.
They fell silent.
“What?” Stephanie asked. “What does that mean?”
The old man turned toward Frail and spoke in a soft grumble of German. Frail rushed away on an errand, then exchanged a meaningful look with Tattoo. “Professor Solorov,” the old man called. “Bring your people back to the house, please. This is something I will have to take care of, I think.”
I heard a cellphone being dialed. “Come back to the house” was all she said. I heard the phone snap shut.
Then I heard her say in a low voice: “Tell me why those tattoos might be important.”
The voice that answered was Kripke’s. “I thought you people knew—”
“I do know, Mr. Kripke. Now you have to impress me with what you know.”
“Well, the tattoos are spells. The part that shows, anyway. Most are probably protection spells.”
“So far you haven’t impressed me.”
“For instance,” Kripke continued, emphasizing the words to show his annoyance at being interrupted. “That one there, on the German muscle’s forehead, that’s the guiding hand. It’s supposed to make others feel something, depending on the little variations. A really common version makes people attracted to you. Sexually, I mean. His is a little different, but judging by how I feel every time I look at him, I suspect it’s supposed to intimidate people.”
There was a brief pause. Finally, Solorov spoke in a low, urgent, dangerous voice. “You will turn over your spell book to me, along with all copies, or I—”
“I don’t have a spell book,” Kripke snapped.
“—or I will kill you and everyone in your family. I’ll burn their houses down while they sleep at night. Do you understand me?” Her voice was urgent and, unlike the others in her group, completely free of oh boy I get to be naughty breathlessness. She was fierce and cold and sharp.
“I don’t have a spell book,” Kripke said. “I really don’t. If I did, I’d be a badass like them. I wouldn’t be letting you hold a gun on me.”
“Then where did you get this level of information? Or are you fabricating it?”
Kripke sighed. “A guy dropped by the server uninvited. He baited his way in, but before we could ban him, he offered up good information—very good.”
“What good information did he give you?”
“It’s too complicated to go into it now. Honest. We can review that later, if you want, but one of the things he gave us was a write-up of a couple of dozen spells and the outward glyphs that go with them. Mostly, they were protection spells like golem flesh and iron gate, but he also included odd things like the twisted path and the second word. No summoning spells. He listed the things the spells could do when they were fresh and when they weren’t.”
“Okay.”
“And everything else you have.”
Kripke sighed again. “Okay. It goes against our TOA, but okay. Another thing: I know where the security guards went. I saw Mr. Yin approach the one at the front door, the lead. Yin flashed ID and ordered them to leave. The guard called someone, and after a couple of seconds, he shrugged and ordered all his men into their Expeditions.”
“The harpy hired one of Mr. Yin’s companies to provide security?” Solorov sounded amused.
“More likely Yin found out who she hired and bought them out. He’s really, really rich.”
The old man’s assistant returned. Everyone stopped talking. He handed a metal bar to the old man, who shuffled out onto the lawn.
I wondered who had given Kripke his information. I knew the society would be interested in that. I also wondered what he’d meant when he said spells could be fresh. Until Ursula shook off the effects of my ghost knife, it hadn’t occurred to me that it might have an expiration date.
I couldn’t help but think of my boss, Annalise. She wouldn’t have hidden in a dark basement, eavesdropping. She would have bashed heads together.
Would she have killed Kripke and the professor? The Twenty Palace Society killed people who used magic. Did they kill people who were just searching for it, too?
Not that it mattered right now. I wasn’t going to kill anyone I didn’t have to, and not just on Catherine’s say-so. I did need to grab hold of Kripke, though. Like the professor, I wanted information from him.
Tattoo returned with the sour-faced old housekeeper. He held her hand as they walked across the grass. Her scowl had been replaced by an empty, dreamy smile. Someone needed to give her a coat.
Tattoo steered her onto the lawn. The old man waited at the bottom of the slope, twisted iron bar in his hand. I had a bad feeling about that damn bar. I took out my ghost knife.
The old man was about fifty feet from me. I could have thrown my ghost knife and hit him easily. It goes where I want it to go—I don’t even really need to Frisbee it, although it moves faster that way. Still, the Fellows had shotguns. And I would have bet every penny I had that the old man was a sorcerer. My little ghost knife couldn’t take out all of them, but maybe I could disrupt things and get away.
Assuming it worked on him better than it had on Ursula.
Men crowded around Solorov to ask her questions, and their legs completely blocked my view. I could hear them muttering to one another, half excited and half envious. I needed to get to another window to see what the old man was going to do. I couldn’t throw my spell without aiming it, and if I was going to stop him, I’d need to hit the bar—and him—with my first shot.
The window to my left was blocked with garden tools. The window to my right was blocked by an old couch on its end. I leaned back to see if there was a better option farther down the room.
“Christ!” one of the men outside shouted.
I turned back to the window. The men had stepped to the side, clearing my line of sight.
The old woman lay on her back in the grass. The old man had just stabbed the metal bar through her chest into the ground. He stared at a carving on the top of the bar.
“He did that right out in the open,” one of the Fellows said. “Right in front of us.”
I had expected him to consult a spell book, say a few words, maybe draw a circle. Something. But he hadn’t, and I had missed my chance. I should have just cut my way through to him, and to hell with what came of it.
Frail ran toward the house, putting a lot of distance between himself and the body. The old man only stepped back a few feet. He looked to the sky, but I couldn’t see anything up there besides night clouds and stars.
The metal bar wobbled. It was adorned with a variety of shapes, but at this distance I could only make out the one on top, a large eye.
There was a sudden flash of light. The Fellows leaped back against the building wall. A bolt of lightning had flashed out of the clear night sky and struck the trembling bar—a lightning rod, that’s what it was—engulfing the old woman in crackling light.
Her body lifted off the ground as the power poured out of the sky. The lightning—tinged with red now as though stained with blood—curled around her, shaping itself into a ball. The Fellows cursed in fear. A woman screamed—it sounded like Stephanie. I felt like screaming myself. Then the light became too bright to look at.
After a couple of seconds, the light faded enough for me to squint at it again. It had formed a sphere about three feet across. It rose into the air, drawing itself off the lightning rod as if unimpaling itself. The old woman had been reduced to blackened bones. The grass where she had lain was not even singed, although the lightning rod glowed white hot.
The churning ball of burning gas and lightning hovered above the old man.
“Sweet Jesus,” someone said. “What did he do?”
I knew the answer already. He’d summoned a predator right in front of me.
I looked at my ghost knife. My spell was written on laminated paper. Even if it could kill that creature—and that was a big if—I was sure the heat and power of the thing would destroy my spell.
I wasn’t ready to do that. It was my only weapon, the only spell I’d created myself, and I didn’t have the spell book anymore.
The old man shouted something at the predator in German. “He’s telling it to search the woods around the house,” one of the Fellows said. “He’s telling it to kill everyone it finds between the house and the iron fence.”
“But what the hell is it?” Russian Accent asked.
It was Kripke who answered. “I think it’s a floating storm.”
The predator floated toward the cottage. The old man shouted at it, then shouted again, his voice more insistent and aggravated.
“He’s telling it to hunt,” Kripke said, volunteering information like a good little employee.
The floating storm did not change direction. It hovered above the spot where the thick black power cable connected to the guesthouse. Blue arcs jumped from the wires into its body. The old man shouted at it again, sounding like a grandfather trying to control a toddler from the comfort of his easy chair. The predator ignored him.
The porch light suddenly went out, and the blue arcs stopped. A couple of flickering tongues of flame appeared on the cottage roof.
Once the power was off, the floating storm glided toward the woods. The old man scowled at Tattoo, who responded in German. The old man shrugged. They both laughed and shook their heads like boys who had launched a firework in the wrong direction. The predator was out of their control, and they thought it was funny.
Tattoo walked up to the lightning rod, which had cooled to merely red hot, and grabbed it with his bare hand. Both men started toward the house.
The predator floated over the bare trees, making shadows sweep across the grass. “Professor,” one of the Fellows said, “I think we should be getting inside.”
She didn’t move. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Um, can we go now?” Kripke said. “It’s not safe to be out here.” No one moved. “Please?”
Professor Solorov sighed. “Let’s go inside and find some candles. We may be here awhile.”
They stepped back, leaving me a clear view of the predator as it moved away from the house. Had it sensed Catherine and the gunmen searching the grounds of the estate? It didn’t even have any eyes.
Catherine needed to know this thing was hunting her. She had a cell, but I didn’t know her number. I had to risk going into the woods to warn her, and I didn’t have much time.
I pushed the window closed. I heard a muffled “Hey!” Footsteps came toward me. Damn.
I backed off the steamer trunks and crouched behind a little round table that smelled of mold. A man knelt by the window and shined a flashlight inside. The light was too dim to illuminate the pitch-blackness of the basement, but it didn’t matter. I’d been spotted.
A second man knelt by the window. I heard one of them tell the other that he’d seen the window close. While I silently cursed my stupidity and impatience, they yelled for more people. I couldn’t keep hiding here. If I was going to warn Catherine, I’d have to move before they got organized.
I pivoted away from the window and bumped into something sharp and metallic. It clattered to the floor, then a stack of somethings crashed in the darkness. Not that it mattered now.
I reached the window I’d cut open and pulled it from the frame. The way looked clear. I climbed up, sticking my head and neck through.
A foot squelched in the mud nearby and I threw myself backward. A shotgun blast tore through the window frame, spraying wood splinters like shrapnel.
I fell back onto the legs of a chair, rolled to the side, and ducked behind a stack of copper pots.
Fat Guy knelt beside the open window and peered in, shotgun in hand. “I saw him,” he said to someone over his shoulder. “I didn’t get him, though.”
I had the sudden urge to leap forward and punch him in the face with every bit of strength I could muster. The son of a bitch had shot at me. I clenched my hands into fists to calm my trembling and hung back in the darkness like a coward.
Whoever he was talking to grabbed his shoulder and tried to pull him back. “The fat lady said he had a gun.”
Fat Guy shrugged the hand away. “I saw his hands. He didn’t have no gun. Get inside and get down there.”
I threw my ghost knife at him.
He must have seen movement because he threw himself back. The ghost knife struck the shotgun, shearing off the front of the barrel and the pump, too. The cut part of the weapon fell through the window into the basement.
I called the ghost knife and it zipped through the open window into my hand. It still worked on dead things, at least.
Fat Guy held up half of his weapon. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“What could have done that?”
“I don’t know, but I will soon. Gimme your shotgun.”
The other Fellow didn’t like that suggestion, and both men moved away from the window to talk about it. The other man eventually agreed to stand guard.
I inched forward, peering around the edge of the window jamb. The Fellow stood about ten feet away, the shotgun against his shoulder as though he was about to shoot skeet. He was the one dressed in biking clothes.
“Hey in there!” he yelled. “Come out with your hands up, and I won’t shoot.”
He snapped the barrel of the gun to the right, then left, looking very trigger-happy. I didn’t want to throw my ghost knife directly into the path of a blast of buckshot. I moved toward the front of the house. The garage offered more cover, but it was too far away. Had they posted a new guard at the front door? I’d have to risk it.
Heavy footsteps clomped overhead. The Fellows were coming—with guns—and I didn’t have time to wait around. My only real hope was that they were all coming after me, leaving the area outside unguarded.
I banged my head against something that made a solid wooden thunk. I laid my hands on it—it was smooth and curved, but I had no idea what it was. What I could tell was that it completely blocked the path. I had to turn back.
Footsteps stumbled down the stairs somewhere to my left. By the echo, I judged they were coming from the center of the room.
I crept back the way I’d come, keeping low so they wouldn’t spot my silhouette against a window.
One of them said something in another language. Russian, maybe. Another answered: “Just one, I think. A guy.” The Russian-speaker answered. He didn’t sound confident. Someone flicked a light switch several times. Nothing happened.
Damn. I wished I could pinpoint where they were.
“I don’t like it down here,” another one said. The Russian-speaker said something that seemed like agreement. “I mean, what was that thing outside? We didn’t try to buy something like that, did we?”
“Shut up, Gregor,” another said. I recognized his voice. It was Fat Guy. “You’re gonna talk yourself out of the Fellowship.”
“I’m just saying,” Gregor continued, ignoring the other man’s advice. “You saw that old woman die. You saw her spirit, or whatever that was, float away into the woods. What if it comes for us? Are we supposed to use shotguns against it?”
“Then let’s find this guy,” a new voice said, “so we can go home.”
They were spooked. I just wished they’d been spooked by me. I sure as hell didn’t want to fight all of these guys. One at a time, without guns, was bad enough, but like this it was too chancy.
Then I had an idea. I threw the ghost knife into the darkness.
I waited, feeling it move away from me. No effect. The Russian-speaker was talking, and the others were listening quietly. I called it back and threw it again in a slightly different direction.
This time I was rewarded by a loud crash across the room. The spell had cut part of an unsteady stack somewhere.
“Christ!” Gregor shouted. There was a barrage of gunfire. I dropped to the ground, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t aimed at me. After a few seconds, the shooting stopped. I called my ghost knife back, my ears still ringing.
“Goddammit!” Fat Guy yelled. “I’m standing right here!”
The trigger-happy one was breathing hard. So was I. The ghost knife settled into my hand.
“Reload that weapon,” Fat Guy said. “And if you shoot one of us, I’m going to kill you and your mother, too. Get me?”
“Sorry,” Gregor mumbled.
I slowly got to my knees. My shoe scuffed against the floor, but the Fellows were breathing too hard to hear it.
“We should fan out,” Russian Accent said.
“We’re not fucking fanning out. Not with this crew. I’d prolly bump an old mirror, and Gregor here would empty a clip of soft-points into me. Stick together and cover each other.”
One of them flicked on a flashlight, and I knew just where they were. I sidestepped to get a clear shot.
“What do you think is down here?” Gregor asked.
I threw the ghost knife at them. Please work. Please.
One of the men screamed. It gave me chills—he sounded like I’d cut off a body part. I heard someone fall and a clatter of breaking glass. The flashlight beam swerved around and pointed at the floor. Shapes moved in the light.
“It touched me!” Gregor screamed, his voice stripped of all courage and dignity. “It touched my soul! Don’t let it happen again! Please, God, don’t let it happen again.”
I felt a tremendous relief. My ghost knife still worked. I wondered if Ursula had some sort of special protection against it.
“What happened?” the new voice said. He sounded spooked. The Russian-speaker answered him in the same confused, frightened tone.
I called the ghost knife to me. One of the men screamed, “Look out!” then the spell returned to my hand.
“It came from over there!” Fat Guy said, and then a volley of gunshots rang out, all facing away from me. I dropped low anyway. The floor was concrete and the walls were cinder block; I didn’t want to be killed by a ricochet.
The shooting stopped after a couple of seconds. One of them let out a high, quavering whine, like a fan belt about to give. “Dammit,” Fat Guy said. “Gimme a clip. Somebody gimme a clip.”
But it was too late for that. Their morale had been broken. There was a cascade of stomping footsteps as they fought one another up the stairs. No one wanted to be the last to get out of the darkness.
I crouched in the dark, listening. The basement was quiet, but I could hear footsteps above me, shuffling around. I felt a little smug. Those guys had been afraid of me—well, they’d been afraid of what they’d imagined was in the darkness.
There was probably a lesson in that, but whatever. Someone was moving toward the front of the house, so I headed toward the garage. I still needed to find Catherine. I held my hands in front of me as I went. Although I had to backtrack out of a couple of dead ends, I didn’t run into anything dangerous.
The windows on the garage side of the house were about fifteen feet away when a metal shelving unit toppled onto me.
I raised my arm to shield my face, feeling for a moment that the whole building was falling onto me. Something slid off the shelf, bounced off my forehead, and shattered at my feet. I fell back against a second metal shelf, and the two frames closed on my head. I cried out as I scraped myself free.
“Got you!” someone said. It was Fat Guy again.
The shelves struck something and stopped falling. I slid close to the floor where the gap between them was widest.
A sharp pain in my knee froze me in place as a huge shadow moved toward me, black against not-quite-as-black. I’d knelt on something, but I’d worry about that later.
I could hear him breathing through his mouth. He had emptied his gun and asked for a clip. Had he gotten one before his buddies ran upstairs? I lunged for him, hoping to end this quickly. Trickery wasn’t going to help me now.
I threw a punch at the general area where his head should have been, holding back a bit in case I missed and struck a piece of furniture. I connected. Lucky.
He took the blow in stride and grabbed my collar. Like a lot of big, slow, tough guys, he wanted to grapple. My shirt rippled. He’d hit me on the protective tattoos on my chest where I couldn’t feel it.
Now I knew exactly where he was. I hit him with a right to the side of his jaw and, when he staggered, a left to his temple.
My left hand—which had never fully recovered from an old gunshot injury—throbbed, but the strength went out of Fat Guy. He rolled and fell flat on his back. I heard flimsy metal clatter around him in the dark.
I knelt and patted him down. He carried his wallet in his breast pocket. I took it. I also took his handgun from his shoulder holster and, after checking that the slide was back, pitched it into the darkness.
It only took another minute or so to reach the windows on the garage side of the building. I peeked outside. No one in sight.
By the light of the window, I searched Fat Guy’s wallet. He was from Chicago and had two hundred dollars in twenties. How considerate of him. I took the cash and tossed his wallet into the clutter.
I cut a window out of the frame and pulled it free as quietly as I could. Cold, clean air rushed in. I boosted myself up and squeezed my shoulders through the gap.
A familiar voice said something in German. Tattoo was standing by the corner where he could watch this side of the house and the front. He began to stroll casually toward me.
I squirmed through the window and scrambled to my feet. He was smiling and his limbs swung loose. He said something else, sounding almost friendly, and gave a pointed glance at my stomach.
I absentmindedly wiped my hand down the front of my shirt. There was a long slash in the cloth, starting beside my solar plexus and going down and to the left.
Damn. Fat Guy hadn’t punched me in the gut. He’d had a knife and I never knew it. The Fellows had been frightened of what they couldn’t see, but I’d nearly been killed by the same thing.
Tattoo was just a few paces away from me now. He was smiling like a guy who was going to walk all over me and enjoy the hell out of it.