Tristan Serrac couldn’t have known that Annalise was coming to kill him that day, but he was prepared for her—and for me—anyway.
Either he knew we’d come to town and were headed to his place, or he lived every day as if he knew. How he managed to slip away from us, I still don’t know. Serrac ran a private security company, and he’d seen our faces. He knew us. Still, we’d been very careful.
Maybe not careful enough.
We’d driven south out of Washington state well before sunrise, then passed through Oregon into California. Last week, Annalise had swapped her Dodge Sprinter, which had been past its prime when she put it in storage more than seven years ago, for a new—to her—2014 Ram ProMaster.
And I was behind the wheel, as always. This wasn’t Annalise’s first broken-down van, but it was the newest. So new, in fact, that it had come out a little more than five years back, while I was still trapped in the belly of a supernatural predator. I’d missed a lot of new things in those years, but I would have been perfectly happy to never have the pleasure of driving this boring white Dodge Fucking ProMaster, with the dings around the back bumper and a paint job on the front end that looked newer than the rest.
I’d had it tuned up the day before we hit the road because I didn’t like the way it rumbled, but it didn’t sound much better on the open highway. Maybe the garage had ripped us off. Maybe the problem was with the engine mounts or something else a tune-up wouldn’t check. Still, I hated it.
“This is embarrassing.”
Annalise sat slumped in the passenger seat, her tiny feet up on the dash. She’d been sitting in silence for the last three hundred miles, and as I watched, she surfaced out of her trance and turned her beady eyes to me.
“It’s embarrassing, boss,” I said again. “When I’m driving something that sounds like it’s shaking itself apart at highway speeds, people think I don’t take care of it. When I’m driving something with dings in the back bumper, they think I don’t know how to park. When they see this mismatched paint, they think I can’t tell when a sales rep is selling me a lemon—a car that’s been in a wreck. I’m the one behind the wheel. This shit reflects on me.”
With her little-girl voice, Annalise said, “Shut the fuck up, Ray. What do you care what some asshole in the next lane thinks?”
Fucking typical.
Annalise didn’t even care what the asshole in the next seat—meaning me—thought of her. If she had, the van wouldn’t be filled with her armpit stink in fucking December when it was too cold to crack a window.
And it was also typical that she didn’t understand how important the face you show to the world could be. How you looked was how people treated you.
And we looked like victims.
But we were not victims. I’d seen my boss tear off a car door and hit someone with it. I’d seen her shrug off a bullet to the face. She was a sorcerer and a peer in the Twenty Palace Society, which means she’d moved beyond worries about carjackers, cops, or other random assholes with guns.
Still.
“A ride like this makes us look like doormats. That matters, boss. How people see us matters.”
She turned away. Whatever she had to say to that, she kept it to herself. We didn’t talk again until we drove by Serrac’s house the first time.
“This fucker right here,” was all she said.
I didn’t know what I expected from a three-million-dollar house in San Jose, but this was less than that. Near the end of a cul-de-sac but cramped by houses on either side, the house didn’t leave a lot of yard in the front. The walls were white, the roof slightly peaked and covered with orange tile, and high rectangular windows made of small panes of glass. The front of the house was dominated by a huge, ugly, white garage door with slender tinted windows at the top.
The other houses on the block weren’t identical to this one, but they were all off the same style—orange slanted roofs, high narrow windows, big garage doors—and they all looked slightly bloated, like overinflated balloons. And they stood almost close enough to touch.
“Boss, does that look like a three-million-dollar house to you?”
“It’s a two-million-dollar plot of land. If he’d spent three million on a house somewhere else, he might have a security fence or something.”
I turned around in the loop at the end of the cul-de-sac, then glanced at the house again. I spotted two cameras—one covering the driveway approach and the other at the edge of the porch—but didn’t have time to look for more.
“Keep going,” Annalise said. She’d taken out her phone. “We’re going to eat first. And wait for night to fall.”
I took out my own phone and glanced at it. It was barely past 4:30 in the afternoon, and I had to drive through terrible traffic to find a gigantic parking lot with standing restaurants sprinkled across it. Annalise wanted Applebee’s, for some reason, and we sat in a back corner, ordering wings and chicken tenders through the long hours until nearly nine at night. I scrolled through my phone, because my boss had no interest in talking to me and I’d left my paperback in the van. I watched and rewatched videos of that day’s police brutality, a privately owned unmanned rocket ship breaking apart sixty seconds after liftoff, and an avalanche of clips that were stupid, funny, or both.
It was full dark when we returned to Serrac’s street, but the street lights and floodlights robbed us of any chance to move unseen. I parked in the cul-de-sac.
“Boss, there’s a footpath where a cross street should be. You should go up there and hit the house from behind while I go in through the front.”
“No,” she said. “We’re switching places this time.”
“What? Boss, I’m the wooden man. I’m supposed to be the distraction.”
Annalise pulled on her vest. During our weeks in Seattle when we were searching for Serrac’s name, she’d taken the time to replenish her spells. Now her vest bristled with colored ribbons held in place with alligator clips. At the end of each ribbon she’d inscribed a spell. “Ray, you stopped being a wooden man when we killed Roman Marchuk. You’re not a peer, either, obviously, or an investigator. We don’t have a name for the role you’re playing. Not yet. We don’t even know what your role is supposed to be. From what I’ve heard, Callin has been demanding that Isser recruit ‘his own Ray Lilly,’ so maybe that’s what this new role will be called.”
I hated that, although I didn’t know why. “You’re the boss. If you say switch places, we switch.”
We stepped out of the van. Annalise slung her firefighter’s jacket over her vest and zipped up the front. It hung down to her knees. That, along with her nearly shaved red hair and clunky boots, made her look like a homeless kid.
She broke right along the sidewalk, heading toward the front walk of Serrac’s house. I went left, cutting across the grass to the footpath.
Which was nice, actually. At first, I thought it was odd that a neighborhood would turn a sensible grid into a series of dead-end streets, but the footpath that connected all these little cul-de-sacs felt unexpectedly luxurious, like I was visiting a country estate.
Even now, a little after nine, there were others out on the paths. An Asian couple in expensive running gear, complete with headlamps, jogged uphill without looking at me. Coming downhill was a middle-aged white woman holding a tiny corgi on a leash. Her other hand was covered by a plastic dog shit bag.
Then I was even with the back of the houses. Serrac’s was second from the end, and there was a narrow path between the cedar fence around his neighbor’s backyard and the concrete wall that supported the houses uphill from them on the next block. I started down it.
“Hello!” a woman’s voice called from behind me. “Looking for something?”
I turned. It was the lady with the corgi, and she already had her phone out, snapping a picture of me the moment my face was visible. Annoying. Her expression suggested that she was being pleasant and polite, but only by force of will. Her corgi slowly trotted around her, wrapping the leash around her legs.
“Yes,” I said, trying to be heard without shouting. “My friend’s pet. Poor thing escaped from its cage and it might get hurt out here.”
“Oooo,” she said without altering her false politeness. “What sort of pet? Is it a hamster or—”
“Boa constrictor,” as I turned away again. There was a cry of alarm from behind me. “Only an eight-footer,” I said over my shoulder. Not that I knew the first thing about big snakes. “Not a threat to people, but if someone else finds it first, they may shoot it out of fear. Let me know if you see it!”
And I was off down the path, hoping the delay hadn’t left Annalise hanging. I didn’t want that woman calling the cops before I’d even reached the back door of Serrac’s place. I didn’t care if she showed that photo around—I was on the twisted path, after all—but these missions for the society were supposed to be secret. No cops allowed.
I picked up the pace. The cedar fence came to an end, switching to a trellis laced with some kind of thorny plant. I thought it might be roses, but today was New Year’s Eve, so there were no flowers to check. Not that I knew anything about gardening.
A thorn pierced the ring finger of my right hand as I boosted myself over, and at the same moment I felt the pain, a shotgun blast sounded at the front of the house.
The trellis warped and cracked as I climbed, but it didn’t break. As I came over the top, a security light shone directly into my eyes. Landing on my back and rolling across the grass, I quickly scanned the space around me. Plush outdoor chairs with all-weather covers were placed around a fire pit on one side of the yard, and a brick pizza oven and grill sat on the other. I saw no one.
Then I looked at the sliding glass door. The rooms inside were lit only by the glow of expensive gadgets. Serrac’s face, visible only by the indirect shine of the security light, appeared suddenly, moving toward the glass. He looked at me without expression. For a moment, he looked like a mask hanging in a darkened shop window.
He bolted to my right as I scrambled to my feet. A moment later, my ghost knife was in my hand.
It was the only spell I had left that I had cast myself, and I’d drawn it on a small sheet of notepaper no bigger than my palm. Since then, I’d stiffened the paper with laminate and a couple of layers of clear mailing tape that had begun to turn yellow at the edges. Not that a little wear and tear would have any effect on the spell itself. The ghost knife cut through ghosts, magic, and dead things, which meant it sliced inanimate objects like a sharp knife through warm butter, it destroyed magic spells by splitting the sigils apart, and it passed through living things without leaving a visible mark, although it changed them in other ways.
I slid the ghost knife through the metal jamb where the sliding glass door handle met the frame. The door slid open easily, and a small piece of metal—part of the latch, I assumed, cut free by my spell—clattered against the tile floor.
After having the security light burning into my eyes, the room was darker than I expected. As I followed Serrac, I stumbled over something I couldn’t see, which meant I was off-balance and entirely unprepared to be slammed against the wall by a linebacker-sized someone.
Not that I could see him. I just felt his size and strength drive the breath out of me. Fireworks swirled in my field of vision.
He stepped back. I tried to stay on my feet and failed. Fuck. A shotgun racked, and this guy—whoever he was, I hadn’t even looked at him yet—began to shout at me to stay down and show my hands. My head was still swimming, despite the protective spells that had been put on me, and when I tried to get onto my hands and knees, he kicked me, knocking me onto my back.
I got a good look at him as he shouted that he had the legal right to shoot me. He was well over six feet and jacked like a bodybuilder, although he had the milky paleness of a guy who got all his fitness indoors. His black hair was shaved high and tight, and his black shirt was at least a size too small. This asshole wanted everyone to see how much time he spent at the gym.
“Stay down!” he kept shouting. Then he noticed the ghost knife in my hand and aimed the shotgun at it. Before he could yell at me to drop it, I flicked it toward him.
It passed through his ankle. It split his bootlaces and created a perfect, nearly vertical slot in the cuff of his pant, but it passed through his skin without leaving a trace.
I expected the linebacker to suddenly relax and then apologize for knocking me on my ass. That’s the effect the ghost knife usually had.
Instead, he pointed his weapon at my heart and shot me in the chest.