Pratt looked like someone had laid a burning fern leaf on his face. “What happened?”
“I’ve seen this before,” Ford said in an authoritative voice. “I spent a couple of years doing missionary work in the high places in the Congo. This man was struck by lightning.”
That startled the hell out of me. I jumped up and scanned the skies around us. I didn’t see any lights, and I didn’t hear an electric hum.
Time to get the hell out of there.
“Settle down, son,” Steve said. He shone the light in my face, blinding me. “We have a bit more jawing to do. Are you still armed?”
“I already gave you my only gun,” I said.
“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t take that at face value,” he said. “You’ve been holding out on me from the start, haven’t you? Who is this fella, and how was he really killed?”
What I needed was a time-travel spell that could send me back to the moment just before I told Steve help was coming so I could dummy-slap myself into silence. I’d wanted to give him hope, but all I’d done was make him curious.
But I sure as hell couldn’t tell him about the Twenty Palace Society. Information shared is information leaked. “I can’t answer that. I’m sorry.”
I heard Ford pull back the hammer on a gun. I turned and saw that he was pointing a snub-nosed police .38 at me.
Steve rubbed his chin and glared at me. “I’m afraid I’m not giving you any choice, son. I’ll admit that I don’t know a thing about these people.” He waved his arm toward Pratt’s corpse and the cabin behind me. “For all I know, they’re just a bunch of gangsters and crooks. But Penny is my cousin. Isabelle nursed my wife through the final stages of cancer. I was godfather to the oldest Breakley girl. Do you understand what that means in a town like this?”
I didn’t answer. He frowned at me. “Everything. That’s what it means. Now, I want to know everything you know, and if I think you’re holding back, I’m going to arrest you for murder. I’m sure I can make it stick. Do you want to talk to me here and now, or through the bars of a cell?”
“I’m not the enemy here.”
“So you say.”
Enough. I liked him, but I didn’t have time to play these games. I turned my back on him.
Ford aimed his revolver at my breastbone, the way you’re supposed to. But he was too close. “Ford, you realize that if you shoot me, the bullet will pass through and hit Steve, right?”
That startled him. He said: “Uh …,” and looked at Steve.
I rushed him, knocking the gun aside. It went off, and the shot echoed against the rocky cliffs around us like the “thunder” I’d heard earlier. I hit him once in the belly. He let out a huge oof and fell sideways into the thicket. His gun landed in the mud.
I spun around and saw Steve down on one knee, his left hand over his head like a child about to be beaten, his right fumbling at his holster. I was on him in two steps. I clamped my hand over his, trapping his weapon, and drew back a fist.
Steve flinched and bared his teeth in fear. Damn. I couldn’t throw that punch.
After a couple of seconds he realized I wasn’t going to hit him. I yanked his pistol out of his hand. He lost his balance and fell back onto the path. I took Ursula’s gun from his pocket, then turned to Ford. He was lying in the thicket, moaning and holding his belly. I picked up his gun, too.
“I’m sorry, Steve,” I said.
“Son—”
“Don’t. I’ll leave your weapons on the hood of your car.” I wanted to say more—about the risk to him and to all of Washaway if he learned too much about magic—but the words wouldn’t come together in my head. I ended up saying nothing.
I jogged back up the path and went around the cabin. There was a brick barbecue pit in the side yard and a stainless steel gas grill. Between them, I saw a tarp lying over something vaguely human-shaped. I knelt beside it and caught a whiff of an outhouse.
I lifted the tarp just enough to see that it was Frail. Blood had trickled from his mouth to his ear; he’d died on his back. On a hunch, I pulled the tarp back farther and saw what I’d expected to see: he’d been stabbed through the heart by something big, like a lightning rod.
“No one else handy, huh?” I asked him.
I left his face uncovered so Steve would notice him, then hustled to the car. I didn’t see Well-Spoken, and I didn’t see another body under a tarp. I tried to speculate who Frail had been—servant? apprentice? both?—and what he’d done, if anything, to make the old man stab him.
I set Steve’s and Ford’s weapons on the hood of the Crown Vic but slipped Ursula’s gun into my pocket. Right now, Washaway wasn’t a place for anyone to go unarmed. Using my taillights to guide me, I backed down the road.
I couldn’t return to the Sunset—even if Yin was dead, Steve and Ford knew to look for me there, and they might bring friends. I’d end up in a cell while the sapphire dog ran loose, turning people into its pets.
But at least the cell would have a place to sleep. I blinked until my blurry vision cleared. The short naps I’d been getting weren’t enough. I was weary. I’d lost the support of everyone, even Steve and Catherine. I didn’t know what to do about the predator or the bidders, but there was one job I could still do.
I drove directly to Steve’s house and kicked the back door in. He would be out looking for me, of course, but I didn’t think he’d come here first. I pulled the patties out of the freezer, dropped them into a stainless steel mixing bowl, and rushed back to the car. Maybe I should have defrosted them first, but I couldn’t imagine myself standing in Steve’s kitchen, anxiously waiting for the microwave to ding.
I drove back to the cabin. Steve’s and Ford’s cars were gone. Good. I turned the Neon around so I wouldn’t have to back down the feeder road, then carried the bowl of patties into the woods.
If Pratt was anything like Annalise, he could be healed from injury by eating meat. The fresher the better, but these frozen burgers would have to do.
I knelt in the wet moss beside him and cut a thin sliver from the column of meat. It didn’t want to go down his throat, but I wiggled it in. Then I did it again and again. I had a hair-raising moment when I imagined Pratt clamping his teeth down on my fingers and swallowing them, but that was all imagination.
It didn’t do any good. He didn’t come alive. Damn. I’d seen other peers survive damage worse than this, but maybe there was some sort of magical oomph behind the floating storm’s red lightning.
And while I didn’t like Pratt, I could have used his help.
I left the last three patties defrosting in his mouth and tossed the bowl away. No other cars had come up the road to block the Neon. I drove down the hill and back onto the road.
I was alone again, and now I had no idea what I should do.
The sign for the school appeared in my headlights. On impulse, I pulled in and drove past the tiny playground. I switched off my headlights and parked behind a Dumpster.
I closed my eyes, but as tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. The smell of those dead bodies stuck with me, and my head was churning with thoughts of the sapphire dog. I leaned my head against the window and stared up at the blank night sky.
At first the sapphire dog seemed to want to get out of town, but something had changed. Esteban hadn’t tried to drive it away from Washaway; he’d been a distraction. And how many hours had it spent hiding out at the stables? If I was going to figure out where it had gone, I needed to know what had happened.
My biggest problem was that I knew so little about it. It came from another place. I couldn’t bring myself to use the word dimension or universe, even in the privacy of my own head. It was just too dorky.
Still, I’d seen that place—the Empty Spaces, as the society called it, although others called it the Deeps. It was a nothing, a void, but what did I know that could help me understand the sapphire dog?
Steve’s Crown Vic drove by and was gone. I assumed he was after me, and I wondered where he would start his search. I didn’t know a thing about Washaway except what I’d seen over the past couple of days, but if I’d been local, he would have known where to search for me. He would have gone to my home, my friends, my work, my hangouts. He would’ve had a place to start.
But I was a stranger. I didn’t have any place to go, so I could have gone anywhere.
This was the same problem I had with the sapphire dog. The big difference was that the predator had the pastor to guide him. If I knew what the predator wanted, I could figure out how the pastor would try to give it to him.
But of course I already knew what the sapphire dog wanted. It wanted what every living thing wanted: to eat. And somehow, it fed itself by making people crazy. My ghost knife cut away every part of a personality except compliance. The sapphire dog took everything but love for it.
Until the stroke hit, that is.
The darkness and the cold became too much. I closed my eyes. Just for a moment.
When I opened them again, there was light in the eastern sky. It was Christmas Eve morning.
I rubbed my face, hard, to get the sleep out. Time to move. I climbed from the car and emptied my bladder against the back of the Dumpster. The temperature had dropped below freezing overnight. I was hungry. My back and neck ached. I needed a toothbrush. Worse, the job I had come here to do was not over yet.
I rubbed my arms, trying to make myself feel warm and awake. I was alone here, an ex-con with a couple of spells, trying to find a predator before a full sorcerer did. I was completely outclassed, up to my ass in corpses, and I had no leads at all.
I couldn’t even talk to Catherine. Steve would be looking for me, and I had no way to contact her without running into Nadia and Nicholas.
Unless …
I climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. I had half a tank left, which was pretty good considering how much driving I’d done already. Then a motorcycle rumbled across the road ahead, headed toward the left. Toward the fairgrounds.
It was Tattoo. He was watching something mounted on his handlebars. If I wanted another shot at him, now was the time. This time I’d twist him until all his bones were broken.
And I just happened to be sitting in a car.
I drove to the mouth of the driveway. I was about to turn to follow him when a line of ten or twelve trucks and vans cruised by.
I cursed at them and wrung the steering wheel. The last pickup went by with a bed full of poinsettias, and I pulled out after it.
To me, the line of cars seemed as slow as a parade. I tried to peer around them, but I couldn’t see the front vehicle, let alone Tattoo. Eventually, they all pulled into the fairgrounds. Had Tattoo pulled ahead and vanished around the next turn of the road, or was he in the fairgrounds?
I turned with the other vehicles and followed them in.
They drove to a low corner of the parking lot and onto the field. None got stuck in the mud, but it was a near thing for a couple of them. I parked at the edge of the grass and looked out over the grounds. People rushed around, setting up stalls in the early light. They were already selling things—Christmas ornaments, tiny jars of what looked like preserves, warm clothing, Yule logs, and model train kits.
The pickup with the poinsettias pulled up beside a tent, and a woman with long gray hair began carrying the plants inside. Three men followed her in with a big gas heater.
The snow machine was silent, and the ground beside the field house was coated with snow. I wondered what would happen if I ran out there and jumped around in it.
The people were smiling. There were no cards, no happy greetings, but I did see them shaking hands and hugging one another. Washaway, their community, had gone through a tough couple of days, but these folks were determined to keep going—to celebrate. If the hugs seemed to be more out of consolation than joy, and if a couple of the people wiped gloved hands across their cheeks while they spoke, that just showed their strength and connection to one another.
And I hadn’t gotten inside any of it.
I didn’t see Tattoo anywhere nearby, so I didn’t belong here. I backed out of my spot and took the side road to the church. It was closed up tight, and the windows in Dolan’s house were dark. The upstairs front window was still open. The pastor had not come back here.
I drove toward town. The sky was finally bright enough that I could turn off my headlights. I would be easily recognizable in the Neon, but short of stealing a new car there was nothing I could do about it.
In town no one stopped me, and I didn’t come across any roadblocks. I drove by the Sunset B and B and pulled into a little gravel road. There was a space on the far side of a stand of trees, and I parked there. It didn’t hide the Neon all that well, but it was better than parking on the street.
I ducked between the trees. The Sunset was encircled by a neatly mowed lawn, but beyond that was a fringe of heavy underbrush. I pushed through it, little chips of ice breaking off the branches and melting against my clothes, until I reached the back of the building. Damn, it was cold.
The closest ground-floor window—in the kitchen—had a light in it, but all the windows in the upper floor were still dark. After a little figuring, I decided my room was the one on the far left. Catherine should be there; I hoped she was.
Movement in the lighted downstairs window made me duck low. Nadia entered the room with a bag of flour in her arms. She looked at the window, and for a moment I thought she was looking straight at me. Then she tucked some stray hairs behind her ears, and I realized that she was looking at her reflection.
She sighed, took a bowl from a high shelf, and moved away.
I breathed a sigh of relief and crept, shivering, along the edge of the property. I couldn’t find a stone to throw at the window, but I did find a small piece of bark. That would do.
As I drew my arm back to throw it, the kitchen window darkened. I ducked low again, but it wasn’t Nadia blocking the light. It was an irregular spatter of red fluid.
Blood. There was blood on the window.
I threw the wood chip at Catherine’s window and ran to the building. I couldn’t see into the kitchen, but I could see shadows moving back and forth on the grass. I couldn’t tell how many people were making those shapes, but it was more than one.
The upstairs window opened. “Catherine!” I hissed.
She stuck her head out and looked down. “Ray, what the—”
“Enemy in the building,” I said. Maybe that wasn’t the best way to say it, but her expression showed she understood. She leaned back and, after a few seconds, stuck her head out again.
“Get up here!” She tossed a heavy quilt out the window, letting it hang down to me.
At least the effects of the ghost knife had worn off. Was it because the spell wore off after a while, or did sleeping reset her personality? “Is that a joke? Come down before you get killed.”
“Ray,” she said, her voice harsh. “Get your skinny ass up here.”
Fine. I stepped away from the building, took two running steps, and jumped up. I set my foot against the windowsill and grabbed hold of the quilt.
I knew Catherine hadn’t had time to tie it to something solid—and how would you tie off a quilt, anyway?—so I expected it to come loose and drop me back onto the lawn. That didn’t happen. I began pulling myself up hand over hand.
Suddenly, the quilt began to draw back through the window as though pulled by a winch. I was so startled I nearly let go. Instead, as I came to the open window, I let go of the cloth and grabbed hold of the sill.
“Christ, what the hell was that?”
Catherine stepped out of the darkness and pulled the sleeve of my jacket. It didn’t help, but the thought was nice. I hauled myself through the opening, flopping into the dark room with all the grace of a drunk sneaking into his house.
“Come on,” I said, as I got to my feet. “Let’s get out of here.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the quilt flutter onto the bed. I shouted in surprise and spun around. Another figure stood in the darkness well away from the window. A jumble of thoughts rushed through my head. At first I thought Catherine had brought a guy to her room, then, seeing how small the figure was, I assumed it was a boy, which would have been a screwed-up thing to go to jail for, and last night she’d been under the influence of my ghost knife, so that would have been another awful thing I was responsible for.
The figure spoke. “Ray, what the hell have you been doing here?” I knew that high, deadpan voice. The lamp snapped on.
“Boss!” I said, much too loudly. It was Annalise, the peer in the Twenty Palace Society who had bulletproofed my chest and arms, and who had led me through the whole mess in Hammer Bay.
I almost hugged her, but her ribs-backward, shoulders-forward body language made it clear she didn’t want to be touched. I stopped myself after an impulsive step forward and let my hands drop to my sides.
“Boss, I’ve been screwing everything up from moment one.”
Catherine started to protest, but then she noticed the ghost of a smile on Annalise’s face.
Annalise moved toward the door and listened. She looked just the same as when I’d first met her—her dark red hair was clipped so short you couldn’t grab a strand between thumb and forefinger, and she wore a new pair of black, steel-toed boots and a new firefighter’s jacket. Her pale face was small and delicate. Black tattooed lines just like mine peeked out from the collar and sleeves of her shirt.
She looked to be about twenty-two years old, but she’d already lived longer than most people do, and the things she’d seen had made her hard and dangerous. One look into her eyes could tell you that.
That absurd little voice of hers sounded loud in the room. “Someone was killed downstairs, you said?” She glanced down at a scrap of lumber in her hand.
“Yeah, Nadia, the owner, I think. I couldn’t see how. Just … blood. Is that why you guys were sitting in the dark?”
“No,” Catherine said. “I was debriefing her, and we didn’t want anyone to know I was up. Don’t worry, Ray, you didn’t interrupt anything.”
I felt my face grow warm, and Catherine smirked at me. I said: “You’re pretty comfortable, considering.”
“I can’t help it. It’s a tremendous relief to have a peer right here with us. I feel safe for the first time in days.”
Downstairs, something fell over with a muffled thump. “Okay,” Annalise said. Her expression was serious. It was always serious. “You don’t know who’s in the building?”
I didn’t answer right away. It could have been Tattoo, but I thought I’d have heard his Megamoto. Then I remembered the missing third Mercedes at the red cabin. “Whoever it is, they’re working for the old man. He’s the only one left. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the last of Yin’s guys with a new boss.”
Before the room fell into darkness again, I stepped closer and confirmed what I already expected: the scrap of wood had a spell drawn on it. It was a glyph that wriggled like a nest of snakes when certain kinds of magic were nearby.
It was dead still.
She tossed the scrap of lumber at me. I caught it. The sigil flashed silver as it reacted to the magic Annalise had put on me. On the other side of the door, we could hear the floorboards creaking.
Annalise said: “Look after yourselves.” Then she yanked open the door and stepped into the hall.
Immediately, I heard a sound like a series of low sneezes. Something invisible tugged at Annalise’s clothes. Someone was using silencers. She raised her arm to cover her eyes and charged forward.
“Stay low,” I said to Catherine. “Count to thirty, and then follow Annalise out of the building.”
I swung my leg out the window into cold morning air. Then I lowered myself as far as I could and dropped onto the grass. I didn’t break my leg, and no one shot me. So far, so good.
I sprinted around the side of the building. The gun in my pocket bounced against my hip; I’d forgotten about it again. I could have used it against the gunmen inside, but Annalise could handle them better than I could. Killing people was her calling in life.