Pain woke me. I was lying on my stomach in a darkened room; my legs were stiff and my back felt like it had a turtle shell attached. I put my arms underneath me and raised myself slowly—I couldn’t see any people, but if Camo Pants was nearby, I wanted him to think I was fall-down weak right up to the moment I jumped him.
Unfortunately, I was weak. My back and legs hurt beyond belief. Every movement I made was like being burned all over again.
Still, I had to move. I didn’t know anything about this place except that Camo Pants had brought me here, but that was enough. I had to get out.
Most of my burns were below the knee, so I lifted my feet off the bed and did my best to roll over into a seated position.
I didn’t make a sound. It took every bit of restraint I had, but I didn’t make a single sound.
When the spots faded from my vision, I looked around. In the dim light from the window, I could see a little lamp on a table by the bed. I snapped it on. I was in a little room—a hotel room, by the look of it—with white paper on the walls, gleaming silver in the fixtures, and pale, ghostly furniture.
I wasn’t wearing a shirt. My clothes were gone and my lower legs were covered with gauze and gauze pads. Now that I was finally ready to look at my burns, they were hidden. I glanced around the room again and saw burned, ragged black cloth on the little table by the window. My pants.
My head was pounding and my mouth was parched. I peeled the edge of the gauze away from my leg just enough to peek underneath. It looked red, swollen, and wet. Had they smeared some kind of gel on me, or was that a huge blister? I hoped it was gel.
I stood. The pain was blinding. I gritted my teeth to hold back a scream and dropped back onto the bed. God, the power of it made me nauseous. What the hell had I done to myself?
I had only walked a few steps through a fire. A magic fire.
Dammit. I was out of commission. How was I supposed to help Arne and the others with these drapes on them? How was I supposed to find Wally again? How was I supposed to find out what happened to Mouse?
I put my feet on the floor. They felt swollen and the pain was agonizing, but it was only pain. Only pain. I staggered to the little table and searched my pants pockets. I found my wallet, my keys, and my ghost knife. The wallet even had my money inside. What this said about Camo Pants, I didn’t know and didn’t care.
I put my wallet in my teeth, biting down hard on it to distract myself from the pain. I slid the key ring over the little finger of my left hand and used my ghost knife to cut the corner of the table. The table leg came free, with enough of the top still attached that it made a dull wooden pick. I stared at my ghost knife for a few seconds, wondering how I was going to take it with me. Eventually, I slid it inside my wallet and put the wallet back in my mouth. It didn’t fit but I didn’t care. I just needed to get to a place where I could call an ambulance.
I used the table leg as a cane while I crossed the room, then I pushed the door open and staggered through.
It was a hotel suite, as I’d thought, and an expensive one. There was more white, silver, and platinum out here. My feet felt like they were soaking wet through the gauze, and I was sure I was seeping onto the snowy carpet.
A gleaming silver phone sat on a tiny table at the far side of the suite. My original plan had been to get out of the building to get help, but suddenly I wasn’t sure I could cross the room. My vision was swirling and my head throbbed. I nearly lost my balance, which would have gotten me off my feet, but I didn’t think I could get back up.
Then I noticed a small figure sitting at a marble-topped table in the center of the room. Its back was turned to me, and it was wrapped in black lace and hunched over like a vulture. It couldn’t have been Camo Pants, could it? He was too large for this small shape.
It didn’t matter. I couldn’t get to the phone without passing him. I hefted the table leg like a club and moved forward. The pain made it hard to think, but maybe this little person all wrapped up in black fabric was Camo after all.
It was just pain. Just pain. It made me dizzy and sick, and it clouded my vision at the edges, but I could push through it. I raised the table leg, feeling bleary and angry. I was hurting and I was ready to share that hurt.
“Ray.”
I stopped, confused, and turned toward the voice. Annalise stood beside a small desk in the corner, watching me carefully.
Annalise Powliss was my boss, a peer in the Twenty Palace Society, and she was incredibly powerful. Although she was just barely over five feet tall and as thin as a rail, she was covered with tattoos—spells—that gave her extraordinary strength and toughness. She could tear a car door off its hinges with one hand and could shrug off a bullet through the eye. I’d seen her do both.
She wasn’t wearing her usual gear—there was no outsized fireman’s jacket, no vest covered with alligator-clipped spells. She wore a pair of plain blue drawstring pants and a white button-down shirt. Her tattoo-covered feet were bare. I’d never seen her dressed in such flimsy clothes.
Like mine, her tattoos were spells, but hers covered her whole body from her collarbones down—I’d seen them one time after her clothes had burned on a job.
Finally her face, which was pale and delicate—almost childlike—was set in the most curious expression I’d ever seen. She had always been difficult to read, but for the first time since I’d met her, she seemed nervous.
“Ray,” she said again in her funny high voice, “that’s a peer in the society you’re threatening.”
I turned back to the shrouded figure. It had turned toward me, and I saw that it was a little old woman with olive skin and gray streaks in her hair. Her face was impassive and her eyes were dreamy.
How had I mistaken her for Camo Pants? I let the table leg fall from my hands, then immediately wished I had it back so I could lean on it again. The little old woman was a peer? If so, she was probably just as powerful as Annalise—maybe more so. Hitting her with a hunk of pine wouldn’t have done more than tear some lace.
The world began to go dark.
“Talbot!” Annalise called. Her voice seemed to come from far away. Suddenly, I felt hands lift me up and steady me. I leaned against a body—not Annalise’s, a large one—and fought my way back to consciousness.
“Hey hey now,” a man beside me said. He smelled of Old Spice and dry sweat. “You shouldn’t be out of bed yet. You ain’t ready.”
I looked up at him. He wasn’t wearing his red shirt anymore, but it was Camo Pants. I was happy to see he had a fat lip. He was holding my wallet and ghost knife; I reached for them and he let me take them.
“Get off me,” I said. “You tried to kill me.”
“Is that right? Maybe I did, although most of the guys I’ve tried to kill were wearing a keffiyeh at the time.”
“You fired a rocket at me today.” Had that happened today? I had no idea how long I’d been out.
“Guess I should apologize then. Guess I should be glad I missed.” He must have guessed wrong, because the apology never came. He led me back into the small room and eased me into the bed facedown. “My name is Talbot, by the way. I’m a wooden man, just like you. Do you want some kind of painkiller?”
“Yes.”
“No,” Annalise said from somewhere behind me, and in that moment I hated her and everything about her. “Talbot, go out to the fridge and bring the blue container.”
Talbot left the room. My face was turned toward the window. I didn’t want to look at Annalise. I was badly hurt, helpless, and ashamed of it.
“Ray, what the hell am I going to do with you?”
I almost said Put me out of my misery, but I was afraid she’d do it. “Water, boss. I need water.”
“No, you don’t.” She took my wallet and ghost knife. Damn. I thought we were past that. I didn’t have the strength to object.
The door opened again. I turned my head and saw Annalise intercept Talbot and take something from him. He left, closing the door behind him. I felt my ghost knife getting farther away from me, until I could no longer sense it through my pain and misery.
Annalise pulled up a chair and sat by the bed. She looked absurdly small, but I was glad she was nearby. She held a big plastic bowl in her lap. “You know you belong to me, right, Ray?”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “I’m your wooden man, boss.” She didn’t respond. “You’re not going to sell me, are you?”
“No, I don’t want to sell you,” she said, as if it was a legitimate possibility that didn’t interest her for the moment. “But I have changed you.”
I almost laughed. Yes, a lot about me had changed since I met her.
“Ray, you’re not paying attention.” She popped open the lid on the plastic bin and held it close to me. Inside were tiny cubes of raw, red meat. Beef, probably. They smelled like blood—I’d been cooked more than they had. The smell made me dizzy and sick.
I stared into the bin and at her. She moved them closer to my face. Carefully, I reached in and picked up one of the cubes. It was cold.
“Don’t bother chewing,” she said. “It doesn’t help. Just swallow it down.”
I put it in my mouth. It felt wrong. Wrong wrong wrong, as though it were a dog turd. I spit it into my hand.
“No, Ray. Try again.”
I didn’t like the way she was looking at me. I put the cube back in my mouth. Was it poison? No, and I knew it wasn’t. Annalise would crack my skull open or throw me through a window before she’d poison me. I tried to swallow it three times, but it wouldn’t go down. The fourth time, it finally slid down my throat.
Annalise quickly set the bin down and lunged at me. She clamped one hand over my mouth and grabbed the back of my head with the other. Her strength was enormous; she held my head in place, my mouth closed, while my guts wrenched and my body bucked. My legs scraped against the sheets, bringing out a whole new level of agony—fierce and wild and utterly in control of me. Blisters burst and flooded the gauze. The pain was so overwhelming that it felt like madness.
Eventually, whatever was happening inside me eased. My body stopped writhing and I lay on the sheets, soaked in sweat and exhausted.
Annalise had a spell on her body somewhere that healed her when she ate meat, especially meat that was raw and fresh. Not only had I seen her do it, I’d saved her life once by cramming tiny slices of raw beef down her throat.
But it hadn’t been like this. She hadn’t tried to puke up what she ate. Her body had accepted it. Mine didn’t. Mine wasn’t healing. If she’d put a spell on me like the one she had, she’d screwed it up. It didn’t work.
I lay still because I didn’t have a choice. Annalise let go of me and picked up the plastic tub again.
“No.”
“Yes, Ray. Another.”
“No. I don’t belong to you.”
“Yes, you do, Ray. You wanted to be my wooden man, so you do. You’re mine.”
She held the bin closer to my face. I swatted at it, but I was too weak to knock it away. I doubt I could have knocked it out of her grip if I’d been at full strength. “Fuck you.”
“Ray,” she said, leaning close to me. Her voice was still absurdly high, like a cartoon animal. “Ray, you gave yourself to me. You’re mine. The golem flesh spell is on you because I wanted it there; you don’t get a say. If I have to, I can break your jaw open and force this crap down your throat. Why not? Enough meat would just heal you again. Now, are you going to take it, or am I going to make you take it?”
God, I hated her. She scared the living hell out of me, and I hate to show my fear. “Boss, go fu—”
In a blink, her thumb was in my mouth. It tasted gritty—of course she hadn’t washed her hands—and she forced another cube of meat past my teeth. I tried to bite down on her, but it was like biting the tread of a tractor tire. If it hurt, she didn’t show it.
She forced that cube down my throat, then another, then another. After a while, I didn’t have the strength to buck and thrash anymore. I sprawled on the bed, sweating and miserable. When I tried to puke, Annalise clamped her hands over my mouth and nose. I choked. I shuddered. Finally, I wept like a child.
She forced it all down me. It took almost two hours, but she put the whole contents of the tub into me.
When she was done, she tossed the bin onto the carpet behind her.
“Boss,” I said weakly. I wanted to die, and I thought I could make her do it for me. “Annalise. I’m going to kill you for this.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me at all,” she said as she sat back in the chair. She took a white ribbon from her pocket and held it up. I knew what her white ribbons did, and I was hungry for it. I looked at the sigil at the bottom and fell into unconsciousness.
When I awoke, it was daylight. Annalise was sitting beside me.
And my pain was gone. I sat up and looked down at my legs. There were no bandages on them, and the skin looked pale and healthy. And hairless.
“We have clean clothes for you,” Annalise said. “Still want to kill me?”
“Boss, I …”
“Forget about it. You handled it better than I did, that first time.”
“Golem flesh?”
“I hate the name,” she said. “I don’t know who called it that, but it’s the name that stuck. Remember when I took that bullet in the eye?”
I did remember. She’d gone on talking and walking around with a huge hole in her head. My throat felt thick at the memory. I nodded.
“Well, you won’t be that tough. Not for a long time. Golem flesh takes a while to have its full effect. The spell is still changing for me, too. But here’s the deal: you need to eat meat every day. Your body will break down if you don’t. Also, you can heal injuries by eating flesh—the more recently killed, the more effective it will be. Over time—over decades, really—you’ll have less pain and less impairment from each wound. Eventually, massive injuries won’t do much more than make you look like an extra in a shitty horror movie. That’ll take a long time, but when it happens you’ll be like a person made of clay. Sort of.”
I didn’t say anything to that. My hands were resting on my bare legs, and I pinched myself. Annalise noticed.
“You aren’t dreaming. And I didn’t put this spell on you. Csilla did. I don’t have the power for it.” She took a long breath. “I called in a favor for this.”
She had put another spell on me. She’d healed me. It had been hellish, but it wasn’t as bad as skin grafts, physical therapy, and a lifetime of scars. “Boss, we have a lot to talk about.”
She gave me a quick nod and stood briskly from her chair. “Your new clothes are on the table. Put them on and come out to debrief us.”
They were white briefs, faded blue jeans, a green T-shirt, and white socks and sneakers. The briefs would cramp my style, but what the hell. Beside them was a brand-new cellphone. Annalise hadn’t said it was mine, but she hadn’t said it wasn’t. I slipped it into the pocket of my new jeans; if she didn’t want me to take things, she was going to have to put them away.
My room had a little bathroom, so I went inside for some water. I thought I really ought to be shaking and unsteady, but I felt strong. I felt like a man who’d slept. I touched my bare face and leg; it felt like skin, not clay. For now.
There was a drinking glass on the sink, and when I unwrapped it, I realized it was made of actual glass, not plastic. I filled it, drained it, and filled it again.
In the mirror, I found the new mark on my ribs under my left arm. It was in black, like my others, and the swoops and curls suggested images of …
I looked away. It was dangerous to study magic too closely.
My face was covered with dry sweat, so I brought my new clothes into the bathroom and took a quick shower.
When I finally went out to the main room, Annalise, Talbot, and the old woman in the black shawl were sitting at the table under the chandelier. They were serving themselves from a platter of bacon, hard-boiled eggs, sausage patties, fried potatoes, and toast. No one spoke to me as I approached the table and began to serve myself, too.
“Thank you, Csilla,” I said to the old woman.
She looked up at me with a vague expression. “You’d better be worth it.”
Worth what? I didn’t know what it had cost her to cast the spell on me, and I squelched the urge to ask. She had already started staring dreamily at an empty spot on the wall. I sat, cut a small piece of bacon, and put it into my mouth. I didn’t vomit or have a seizure. The flavor seemed muted, but I didn’t have the urge to spit it out.
While I chewed, I tried to decide what to tell Annalise and the other peer. I knew them well enough to know what would happen if I told them about the drapes. It’d be like putting out a contract on Arne and the others.
But what could I leave out? It wasn’t just that Annalise would kill me if I tried to shield another friend—she would, but that wasn’t the important part. The important part was that protecting my friends would almost certainly unleash more predators on the world.
And there was the thought that had been lurking in my mind ever since Melly was carried away. Luther had been lying at the bottom of the tub in his house the whole time I’d been there, and when he died, his drape carried him away and two more came through.
That had to have been what happened, because that’s what happened to Melly. The only difference was that three drapes had come through when she died. Did that mean four would come through when the next one died? Five for the one after that?
I tried to do some quick math, but the others were staring at me and the numbers jumbled in my head. Damn. I’d been lucky that the first two victims had died indoors and close to me. If Summer, Ty, or one of the others keeled over in a subway station, or outside a Starbucks, the drapes would be free to hunt in secret. In no time, people would vanish by the thousands until the whole world was empty.
My friends were important to me, but were they more important than the survival of every living thing on the planet?
I told Annalise, Csilla, and Talbot everything. I didn’t sugarcoat it, and I didn’t hold back any names. I even told them about the Bugatti, Wardell, and Steve Francois.
While I spoke, Annalise stared at me the way a cat stares at a mouse hole. Talbot kept eating; he was paying careful attention, but he was trying to be casual about it. Csilla stared off into space and didn’t seem to know I was there.
When I was done, I realized I still didn’t have my ghost knife. I asked for it. Annalise nodded at Talbot, and he resentfully fetched it for me.
“These ‘drapes’ are minor stuff,” Annalise said.
I was startled. “What do you mean, boss?”
“The big question is this: Why is your old buddy Wally King making operatives in L.A.?”
It was hard to imagine Arne or Fidel as an operative of Wally’s, but they owed him, and he could collect at any time.
“He’s trying to end the world,” I said.
“Seriously?” Talbot said, a crooked, swollen-lipped smirk on his face. “I’m sitting here squirting ketchup on home fries, and we’re talking about a guy who wants to destroy the world?”
“He thinks it’s a mercy killing,” I said. “He thinks something worse is going to happen to us. He thinks the whole world is going to be—” Talbot was still smirking. “Is this funny to you?”
“No no!” he said, smiling wide enough to show teeth. “It’s just …”
“I know.” Talbot didn’t have to say it. He felt like a hero, fighting to save the world, and he loved it.
“There is a dream in my eye,” Csilla suddenly said. “I see strangers and darkness and a thought as large as the universe.”
After a moment of awkward silence, Annalise said: “We know what he wants. Why does he think he can make it happen here, in Los Angeles?”
“I pressed him to find out what he was doing, but …” What was I supposed to say? He started calling me a rock star and I got distracted? “I’m sorry. I was focused on the predators. All he told me is that he needed people to get a puzzle. He had a simple plan to steal it, but he blew it.”
Annalise put down her fork. “He had a simple plan?”
“He’s not a smart guy, boss. I don’t think he could plan a meal, let alone an elaborate crime.”
“Have you seen this?” Talbot asked between bites of toast. He slid a newspaper across the table toward me. At the top was a notice about security preparations for the president to speak at the L.A. Convention Center about renewable energy or something. But below that was a follow-up article on the movie star break-in. Ms. Egan-Jade’s spokesperson said the actress was going to sell her house without returning to it. She’d also set aside a trust fund for the murdered housecleaner’s children. Apparently, the woman had died. To Egan-Jade’s credit, she also blasted unnamed media personalities who had expressed relief that “only” a housekeeper had been killed.
I liked her just for that. At the bottom of the article, it stated that police had no leads but were investigating puzzling aspects of the case.
I glanced up at the others. They were watching me, waiting impatiently for me to finish. “Puzzling aspects?” I asked.
Csilla narrowed her eyes. “So many dreams that they come to life. Puzzling.” I couldn’t tell if she was responding to me or not.
Talbot smiled. If it stretched and hurt his fat lip, he didn’t show it. “See, that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s surprisingly hard to get information out of the cops in this town. Easy to get them to crack you on the head with a stick, but hard to get them to take a bribe.” He spoke like he was giving a performance, and he was so snide about it that I wanted to punch him again.
“We are beautiful children swimming in the belly of the great fish,” Csilla said.
“I found out some interesting things, though,” Talbot continued. I glanced at Annalise; she watched Talbot carefully, absorbed by what he was saying. Not two years ago, she had refused to tell me anything about the job we were on, and now I was allowed to sit at the grown-up table for the grown-up talk. It was a big change, and it felt good. Talbot kept talking: “For instance, Ms. Egan-Jade’s home had a state-of-the-art security system. Cameras everywhere, and even a guard with a twelve-gauge to look over things. The cameras were running, too. The cops have a digital video of the break-in.”
“Who did it?” I asked.
“Nobody,” he said, and he smiled as though he was pleased with himself. “I’ve seen the video. The lock on the front gate breaks apart and swings open a few feet, but no one is there. When the guard shows up to check it out, he collapses from no apparent cause. It was an hour before the cops found him, stretched out in some bushes. He’s in a coma now. Brain damage. They don’t think he’ll wake up, and you don’t hear anyone talking about him on the news, or his kids, but hey, he’s just a white male.
“Anyway, the cops don’t have a recording of the attack, but it’s not the only one. There have been several different break-ins around the city—women’s homes, banks, jewelry stores, all sorts of places.”
“Where? Do you have a map or something?”
Talbot snorted. “No. I don’t have pushpins, either. But some of them take place at different locations at pretty much the same time, so we know it’s more than one of your friends doing it. The cops think someone has a new, superfast version of Photoshop, and the burglars are bringing a laptop to erase themselves from the video files, somehow. There were two break-ins last night, in fact. A jewelry store and a convent. Two women were killed.”
I nodded. Was this Wally’s plan? To create people who could break in anywhere, stir up the cops with these crimes, and … And what? What would he get out of that?
Nothing. Wally wasn’t the type to create chaos. Events were hard enough to predict under normal circumstances, and I couldn’t imagine him drawing more danger to himself.
But he had brought me down to L.A., knowing I wanted to kill him. Caramella had said she was doing a favor by visiting me, and Arne said favors were what Wally expected in return for his “super powers.” Wally wanted me and the Twenty Palace Society to take care of the drapes, yeah, and the drapes allowed people to break in anywhere without getting caught, but what if Wally expected to be long gone by the time we got here?
“Where was the first break-in?” I asked.