I could see myself in the polished metal of the elevator door. I wouldn’t have shared a friend’s room number with me, either.
“Boss, why is Milton Hardy here?”
“Because we put pressure on him, so he’s moving before everything is ready, and he’s going to have to take care of some things personally.”
I searched Lauren Woo’s memories for information on Golnar’s particular mission. All I could find was that he’d treated her as if she was his own estranged daughter, and that he’d used her as a reason to be close to his old flame. There was nothing of any value there.
The elevator doors opened onto the floor we needed, showing us a long hall with blue-and-gold carpeting. Before we could step out, a man came around the far corner at a full sprint. Moving too fast, he bounced off the wall and stumbled, barely managing to keep his feet.
His eyes were wide with terror.
Then I saw a shimmer over his right shoulder, and he vanished as though someone had wrapped a blanket of invisibility over him. Just before he went, his eyes rolled back and his mouth sagged.
“Fuck.” I sprinted forward, but even moving at full speed, I couldn’t keep up with Annalise.
He’d been wearing a little uniform, like a bellhop or something, and now he’d vanished from the world. I…
Goosebumps ran down my back. I lunged forward, seizing Annalise’s elbow and pulling her back. She had the strength to body-slam me through the wall, but she still weighed as much as a human broomstick. “Boss, I know what this is.”
How did Hardy know? There were other things I needed to do, to say, to work like crazy to prevent, but I couldn’t get past this one thought. How did Hardy know about my history with these things? How did he know they had killed so many of my closest friends? The only people who could have told him were either in the society or had been banished, alive, into the Empty Spaces. Did he plan this spell to throw me off? Or—
“Ray.”
“That was one of the Wings of… Shit. I can’t remember the name. The real name. I—”
“Ray.”
Right. I turned and threw my ghost knife, letting it fly just above the floor to the space where the bellhop had fallen. To me, it looked like empty floor, but I felt the ghost knife strike the invisible predator there.
Drapes. Milton Hardy and Golnar Ghassemi had summoned drapes into the world again.
The predator responded to the cut from my spell by unleashing a loud buzzing noise, like a beehive with a mic and amp right beside it. Beneath that noise were cracks and pops, like someone was pushing through the floor into our universe.
But I wasn’t the same guy I’d been in Los Angeles all those years back. For one thing, I knew how to use my weapon.
I set the ghost knife in a tight circle, spinning like a freestanding bicycle wheel, and made it drift to the side, then away from me, to slash at the predator and its victim a dozen times in a second.
The buzzing noise faltered, and the predator lost its invisibility and immediately turned to gray sludge. Dead. I ran to the bellhop and pulled him to his feet. He looked dazed and docile, the combined effects of the drape’s ability to blank out a person’s mind and the ghost knife’s temporary destruction of aggression and anger. “I’m itchy,” he said.
“Who else did they do this to?” I asked him. One of the other doors in the hallway swung open, and a fat Asian man in a tidy navy suit poked his head out of the door. He glanced at us, then leaned back and shut his door.
“Four people, the first time,” he said. “But then they shot them, and they fell out of the world, and more came. There were maybe another dozen applicants…”
Annalise said my name again, and she was right. This guy was a distraction. “Pull the fire alarm and get out. Go!”
I ran after my boss. We turned a corner and spotted an open doorway about a third of the way down the hall, and as she sprinted toward it, Annalise tripped over something invisible.
She fell hard but not hard enough to hurt her. As she sprang to her feet again, she looked back at me, met my gaze, then pointed toward the floor.
I reached down to the spot where I thought the body might be and felt a little thrill that I’d guessed correctly. I circled around, then used my ghost knife in the same way I had around the corner. The predator triggered a loud, buzzing noise that meant it was about to flee into the Empty Spaces, but again, it died before it could escape.
But as the gray sludge ran down the body of the elderly woman on the carpet, I heard more buzzing from nearby.
Then the fire alarm went off, and I couldn’t hear anything except the ringing bell, the intermittent beep, and the cries of people in their rooms. Lights flashed in the hall, and I hurried to Annalise while she kicked in the door. She stepped inside. I was right behind her.
It was an ordinary hotel room. On the large side, maybe, with two queen beds that had been pushed together, and a little table and chairs by the window, but Hardy could have bought the entire building on a whim, but he hadn’t even sprung for a room on the top floor. It wasn’t even a corner suite.
But there he—goosebumps ran down my back—was, Milton Hardy, barefoot beside a broken window.
I hated the smug expression on his face and the nauseating lump of fear in my belly.
The buzzing sound was more intense here. I could feel it thrumming upward like a rave in the room one floor below us. I noticed a skinny teenager standing in the doorway to the bathroom. He was, maybe, three feet from Milton Hardy, and he was staring at the floor in wide-eyed terror, his shoulders hunched and his arms wrapped around himself. Hardy didn’t seem to have noticed him, but the teenager looked like he didn’t dare make a move.
Doors in the hallway behind me began to click open as guests evacuated.
I pointed at the teenager to catch his attention, then motioned toward the door. “Go.”
Whether he could speak English or not, he understood me. With a nervous glance at Hardy, he started toward the door, stepping carefully.
Shit. He was stepping around the victims of Hardy’s predators. The room must have been littered with them. And I assumed Golnar was one of them.
Suddenly, the teenager’s nose squashed flat and blood spurted over his mouth. He staggered and fell to one knee. Someone or something had struck him, and I couldn’t see it.
I threw my ghost knife, blindly hoping I could connect with the kid’s attacker. I didn’t. The buzzing grew louder. At that moment, Hardy said something in his normal tone of voice, but I couldn’t hear him. And I didn’t want to.
Annalise took one of her stolen airplane spoons from her jacket pocket. She glanced at me.
I charged, making each step I took a kind of kick, so that when I struck something on the floor—which I did, three times—I didn’t fall on my face. I called my ghost knife, and it flew into my hand.
I reached the teenager with only seven steps. He started talking to me in Spanish, but I just grabbed his hand and dragged him toward the door.
A gunshot cut through the noise. I looked back at the teenage boy and saw a huge bloody hole in his temple. His eye had burst and blood ran from his socket and…
He fell backward. My hand had opened the instant I saw that ruined face, because I’d tried to save his life and failed.
“Oh, gross!” a woman shouted from almost beside me.
With a speed born of rage and fury, I stepped forward and swept my right arm through the space in front of me. I’d planned to grab her under her ribs so I could pick her up and carry her from the room, but she was even shorter than I expected. Instead, I felt the inside crook of my elbow slip under her chin, and I had to drag her toward the door. The gun in her hand was momentarily pinned to her shoulder, and I snatched the weapon away. I couldn’t see her, but by her voice, I figured this had to be Lauren Woo’s friend Golnar.
My ears were still ringing from the gunshot, but it seemed to me that the buzzing had begun to fade. “Enough,” Hardy shouted. He was staring at the murdered boy, and the expression on his face was hard to read. He looked outraged and turned on at the same time. “That boy’s life was just wasted. He was meant to be a host for new life, but now he’s nothing. He’s… He’s meat.”
Hardy was still staring at the dead body. I wondered how long it had been since he ate and if I was about to see him grab that kid and bite into him like an apple. How long since he’d hunted a human and torn one apart?
Judging by his expression, too long.
The only way to destroy him was to hit him when he was not expecting it.
“Boss,” I said, pinning the invisible form against my side and dragging her to the door. She kicked and scratched me, demanding to be let go in the strained voice of someone who is being half-strangled.
Annalise understood. She threw the spoon into the middle of the room just as Hardy dove at the boy’s body and landed beside him. Green fire blossomed from the little piece of metal, and before the flames engulfed him—and the entire room—the emerald light lit Hardy’s face as his mouth stretched as wide as the broken window behind him.
Then the fire swept over him, and over the room, and over us, too.
The invisible figure beside me screamed. I glanced down at her, drawn to the noise as much as anything else, and I watched her invisibility burn away as the green fire destroyed the predator on her body. The iron gate Hardy gave her to protect her from the drape also kept her safe from Annalise’s spell.
As the bloom of fire withdrew, we saw Hardy floating in the middle of the room, staring down at the floor. Beneath him lay a pile of scorched bones, which was the effect Annalise’s green fire had on unprotected human flesh.
Which was when I noticed that the place was littered with scorched bones. There were two almost at my feet, and three more along the wall, and two on the bed, and…
And a hole in the world at the far end of the room.
One of the drapes had opened a hole beneath them. Where the floor had been, there was just an empty space filled with darkness. The queen bed closest to the window dropped on the far side and slid through the opening, revealing that the little chairs and table were already gone, tumbling into the Empty Spaces.
I’d faced the drapes before, and I knew what came next. One predator carries off a meal into the Empty Spaces, making an opening for more of its kind to come through. I drew back my ghost knife, but Golnar raked her nails across my face, trying to gouge out my eyes.
I threw her to the floor. She was tiny, like a twelve-year-old, although I could tell that she was at least my age. But she looked so frail that, when I punched her below her ear, I couldn’t help myself. I pulled my punch.
Annalise was not distracted. When I looked up, I saw another spoon flying through the air just as an absolute flood of drapes erupted from the hole in the floor like water from a broken fire hydrant.
Hardy screamed something—No! or Stop! or something like that—but all I could think about was that he was distracted. I threw my ghost knife at him. It passed through his heart the first time, then his head on the return. Any effect it might have had was hidden by the surge of flames, and I couldn’t try again, or Annalise’s spell would have destroyed my own.
The green fire filled the room, and while the predators couldn’t scream, I could feel their deaths as a sort of high buzzing in my thoughts. Annalise was destroying them by the dozens—no, by the hundreds—with a single spell in a confined space.
Then the flames withdrew. The opening to the Empty Spaces was gone.
I scanned the room, but I couldn’t see any little shimmers that indicated a drape was nearby. She’d done it.
“You killed them,” Hardy said. “Living beings, with thoughts and feelings of their own. They didn’t deserve to be burned alive. They didn’t do anything wrong. They were just hungry. Starving!”
“I had plans,” Golnar said. Obviously, I should have hit her harder. “I had so many things I wanted to do. So many wrong things that I could set right without anyone ever seeing me coming. But you two—”
She lunged upward at the gun in my hand, which I’d forgotten I was holding. She didn’t have the strength to take it, even by surprise.
Annalise kicked her, once, almost casually, and crushed her rib cage on her left side. Blood spurted out of her mouth. She looked up at me in amazement, then died.
“Shut up,” Annalise said to her. Then she turned to Hardy. “You shut up too. This world is off-limits. When your kind come here, they die.”
Annalise had another spoon in her hand, but she didn’t throw it. Hardy had shaken off both her green flame and, once again, my ghost knife. He was passing through our world, untouched by it. Our magic couldn’t destroy him, our walls couldn’t keep him out, and our…
I realized that he kept glancing down at Golnar’s body with the same fascination he’d shown for that teenager. Some predators needed a living victim, because they devour the mind along with the flesh, but Hardy really seemed to want that dead body. Maybe her thoughts and memories persisted for a short while after—
No. The reason didn’t matter. Hardy was hungry, and assholes made mistakes when they were hungry.
“You want this?” I asked.
Hardy floated in the middle of the room. He couldn’t make himself look away from Golnar’s body. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“I don’t, but I always hated being hungry.” I turned to Annalise. “Boss, why don’t we… She’s already dead, right? If he eats this one, that’s one living person he won’t eat.”
“He’s right,” Hardy said. “And I know her. I prefer that. It’s better for me if I know them first.”
The look Annalise gave me was murderous. “Ray, you know—”
“I know the rules, boss. But look at the situation. A peace offering might be the best thing right now.”
“It would,” Hardy said, floating near us like a hungry ghost. “I know you doubted me in the past, but our goals really do align.” He couldn’t look away from the corpse.
“I told you before we should listen to him.” Annalise’s eyes narrowed at that lie. “Let’s take a chance. Please. Right toward the mouth.”
She hesitated for a second, but only a second. Then she reached down with her left hand, took hold of Golnar’s belt, and heaved her body into the air.
Hardy dropped so his feet were on the floor, and he reached for the body. When she blocked his view of me, I threw my ghost knife one last time.
Just as my spell entered Golnar’s back, Hardy seized her body. An instant later, it cut through Hardy’s chest.
He split apart like a bursting balloon, but there was absolutely no sound. Golnar’s body dropped straight down, but there was nothing to see on the other side of her except a few clouds of billowing white smoke that passed through the walls as though they weren’t there.
We’d killed him, and his passing hadn’t even made a sound.
My knees suddenly wobbled and I had to steady myself against the wall. The predator that replaced Milton Hardy—the enemy who’d been kicking our ass for more than a week—was finally finished.
We’d won.
I knew we could pull it off, but I wasn’t sure we would. After so many wrong turns, false leads, and setbacks—after so much damage—we’d finally tracked him down and put an end to him.
Exhaustion washed over me. We’d spent months hunting this asshole, and that came right on the heels of seven years spent trapped inside the Show. If not for the bodies strewn around the room, I might have stretched out on that bed and fallen asleep in an instant.
But we still had to get away from all these dead people. We had to get back to the plane, get back home, and go our separate ways. Elias Diding ought to be in San Jose by now, hunting cousins.
For me, I needed time away from everything. I needed a break from Annalise, from desperation, from pain, from hurting people, from… all of this.
And I was finally going to get it.
Annalise laid her hand on my elbow. I nodded to her that I was all right. She didn’t say anything, but her expression made me feel wary. Fuck. I wanted to be done with feeling wary.
She hurried to the broken window. I followed, calling my ghost knife back into my hand.
There was the usual network of roads and small buildings below. Off to my right was a glass-and-steel skyscraper that looked out of touch in the faux Europe before me. Everything looked normal, with normal traffic, normal pedestrians, and—
“Shit,” Annalise said. She pointed at the rooftop just below us.
There was a dark circle there, and even at this distance I could see shimmering movement, like water in a clear stream. People nearby were running in every direction.
Then one of them vanished.
At that moment, I saw another circle open in the middle of a street. A car couldn’t stop in time and toppled out of our world. Then were was more shimmering, more running, and more people disappearing.
Then I saw another mob of people running for their lives, but I couldn’t see what they were running from.
Four people, the first time, the bellhop had said. But was that the first time? Had Hardy been summoning predators all afternoon?
That had to be it. There were drapes out in the streets, killing people, and we couldn’t hunt them down because they were invisible—invisible and airborne—and they were spreading out.
“We failed,” Annalise said. “There’s no hiding this. No disguising it. We killed Hardy and his people, but we didn’t get here soon enough.”
She rubbed her face. All the relief I’d been feeling drained out of me, and nothing took its place. Annalise looked at me. “We have an uncontrolled predator invasion. The whole world just changed.”