“What do you want me to say, Adrian? I’ve never had much ghoul interaction before, much less made one myself. I don’t know what the proportions are. There must be some formula, something to do with height and weight, I assume—something that lets people drink without crossing that line, but I don’t know what it is. Regardless, I’m virtually totally confident that the few sips you took from a wee tiny brandy glass weren’t enough to make any real changes in your body.”
“Virtually totally confident. I guess I can live with that,” he said, but I knew he was putting on a show. It’d unsettled him—as it damn well should have.
I wished there’d been another way to gracefully escape the House, but there hadn’t been, and there was no undoing it now. I’d let him drink from me. Now we had a connection—a paranormal one, whether either of us wanted to admit it or not—and only time would tell how deep it went, if it went anywhere at all.
“What … um …” He faltered his way to the question, “What’s different about ghouls, anyway? How are they ghouls, and not just … plasma enthusiasts?”
“It varies from person to person, but generally ghouls end up psychically bonded—like it’s a substance addiction—and the vampire is able to control the ghoul that way.”
“Hang on. Control the ghoul?”
“Sure. They use their mind-powers, and the link between them. Not all of them, obviously. Not everyone comes from the better-to-be-feared-than-loved school of co-dependency. I mean, I don’t think Ian was shuttling Cal around like a puppet or anything.”
“But he could have, if he’d wanted to.”
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.” I didn’t like where this was going, but it was going there anyway, so I braced myself for it.
“Does that mean you can control me now, since I drank a little of your blood?”
I threw up my hands. “No? I don’t think so? It was only a little blood, and you were a very good sport about it. I very strongly doubt I could make you do anything, okay? And keep in mind why we kept up the charade in there.”
“Hey, I like Ian just fine, but I didn’t plan to set myself up for programming!”
“Dude, I think we both know you didn’t come along on this wild carpet ride for the sake of Ian. You’re on board because you want to know what happened to your sister, and I’ll have you know, we might have gotten ourselves a lead out of this mess.”
“Wait. What?” Ah. Now I had his attention.
“You heard me. I think I might’ve scored a pass to the Atlanta House. And believe me, it wasn’t easy.”
“What does that mean? You’re going to Atlanta? You’re going to find my sister?”
“I’m going to try. And I’m also going to solve the mystery of what precisely happened to William Renner, upon pain of death. Or that was the subtext of Max’s offer.”
Then Adrian asked the thing I was most afraid he’d ask. “What about me? I’m coming with you, right?” I didn’t answer fast enough. He asked again, “Right?”
“Adrian, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? She was my sister—and I have a right to know.”
“Absolutely you do,” I agreed. “And I’ll see what I can do. But frankly, those people are crazy and I can’t guarantee your safety. Hell, I can’t guarantee my own safety.”
“I can take care of myself,” he reminded me in a too-loud voice that told me he’d be happy to demonstrate, perhaps on my battered corpse, if necessary.
I shot back, “I know you can, you idiot! If I thought you were a pretty-pretty princess who couldn’t do anything but wink and giggle, I’d have left you at home!”
By now, we were both shouting. “So why would you try to keep me out of Atlanta? It’s the one House I really want to visit, and now you want to protect me? Now you want to lock me out of this?”
“Yes, now, you asshole.” I flung one of my own shoes at him, and nearly clocked him in the ear. “There’s a better-than-fair chance that Ian’s quietly planning to run out and get himself killed, and in case you hadn’t noticed, my life isn’t exactly crawling with friends.” By the last word, I wasn’t even yelling.
I kind of felt like crying.
The only one more surprised than me was Adrian, who stared at me with my shoe in his left hand, which he’d caught before it broke the window and sailed out into the street. He opened his mouth to say something, and I opened mine to say something, too—but neither one of us had any words on deck and then, thank God, my cell phone rang.
I grabbed it like a lifeline, glared down at the display, and said “Horace” as much to myself as to Adrian.
“Who? That art guy, in New York?”
“I’m taking this,” I said as I snapped the thing open, relieved for the excuse to change topics. I turned my back to Adrian. “What?” I said into the phone.
“You told me to call you back when I had any leads. Well, I have some leads, and I still want you to go get my penis bones.”
“Awesome, because it’s not like I’m doing anything else right now,” I muttered sarcastically. I gave Adrian a wave and headed for the door. I didn’t know where I planned to wander while I talked, but I had to get out of that room.
“It is awesome, I’ll have you to know. Those things are worth—”
“A fortune, yes, you’ve mentioned.” I shut the door behind myself and stood in the hall. I picked a direction and wandered out to the lobby by the elevators, figuring that if I was quiet enough, I probably wouldn’t bother anybody.
He was quiet for a few seconds, then he asked, “Did I interrupt something?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
I sighed. “You didn’t interrupt anything interesting. I was in the middle of a conversation with a friend, but he’s an understanding friend when it comes to money.”
“I like him already.”
“Great. Now what have you got for me?” I prompted. I was still calming down from what had not, precisely, been a conversation but more like a fight. I needed something to distract me, something that was all business—because my friends were nothing but fucking trouble right now.
“I’ve got a woman. A crazy woman.”
“Sounds like the start of a country song to me,” I said. “Did she total your truck or shoot your dog?”
“No, but she stole my box of penis bones.”
“Even worse!” I declared with mock drama. “Give me the deets.”
“The details”—he emphasized the word to be contrary, I assume—“are as follows: Her name is Elizabeth Creed and she’s crazy. Not just rhetorically crazy, but actually crazy.”
“I believe the correct term is mentally ill these days, Horace.”
“To hell with you and your correctness,” said the man who had just fleshed out my abbreviation for “details” with a neurotic’s flair. “But you can call her mentally ill if you like. She qualifies. She even has papers certifying it.”
“Was she committed or something?”
“Actually, yes,” he said. “That’s partly how I found her out, the sneaky bitch. She was in attendance at the antiques show. I’ve got her in the footage, in several places.”
“Footage? Like, she made it onto TV?”
“Briefly, in a crowd shot or two. More important, she was hovering over the exotics table, and paying an inordinate amount of attention while I was lying to Joseph Harvey. She’s practically looming behind him. Very sinister stuff. I’ll email it to you sometime. Anyway, we got her on film, and I noticed her while I was going over the Portland footage. I have access to all the extra shit—the shit we don’t bother to show, or the shit that gets cut. So I watched it. Obsessively.”
“I bet.” He was fully capable of being as obsessive as me, if he felt like it. And there was nothing like a few hundred million dollars to make him truly dedicated to a cause.
“And it wasn’t long before we singled this broad out. She even looks crazy, my God. And the cameras caught h
er talking to Bill, the ousted volunteer grip—badgering Harvey’s contact info out of him, I can only assume. Anyway, I have a friend at the FBI,” he said, which meant he was bribing someone at the FBI. “I got him to run the footage through some facial recognition software, and boom. We got a hit.”
“What are the odds?” I asked flippantly.
“Pretty good, when you used to work for the government but had a big nervous breakdown that led to your involuntary incarceration in a mental hospital. That kind of shit goes down, and people will draw up all kinds of paperwork on your ass.”
“Oh, wow. So you’re not just hyperbolizing?”
“Is that even a word?”
“It is if I say so.”
He went on. “Then I wasn’t hyperbolizing, no. She’s a full-blown paranoid schizophrenic who was once a brilliant astrophysicist working at NASA’s installation in Florida.”
“That’s … Actually, that’s kind of sad.”
“It’s very sad, if you give a shit about crazy scientists, which I don’t. I give a shit about my penis bones, which are in that woman’s hands even as we speak.”
I didn’t giggle, even though I wanted to. “All right, fine. You’ve got a name and a psychiatric report. I don’t guess you’re going to make this easy for me, and give me a location?”
His response startled me. “How fast can you get to California?”
I hedged my bets. “Depends on where in California. It’s a big state.”
“Okay, I need you in a state park.”
“Kindly be more precise,” I urged.
“The San Juan Bautista State Park.”
“What makes you think she’s there?”
He said, “Credit card activity. She arrived last night, and has been eating gas station food or Carl’s Jr. ever since. And if that doesn’t speak to her depravity, I just don’t know what does.”
“Jesus, you’re a snob.”
“What of it? Listen, this park is about a hundred miles from San Francisco. You can fly into SF and hit the road. But do it fast. I don’t know how long she plans to stay, and I don’t know where she’s going next.”
“But you can track her via credit cards? That’s very helpful and convenient, I must admit.” It was exactly the kind of thing I might’ve thought of, if I’d had any idea how to go about it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a friend at the FBI.
“Yes, I can keep an eye on her that way. But I need you to pin this bitch down fast, Ray. She’s up to something.” The ensuing silence was suspicious.
“Horace?” I pushed. “What do you mean, she’s up to something? How do you know that?”
“It’s … let’s say hypothetically possible … that she’s trying to use the bones.”
“Wait. What? Using them for magic, or for purposes inconsistent with their labeling? Because if she’s having too much fun with them, I’m not sure you want them back.”
“Stop making light of this!” he said, suddenly all sharpness and reproach. I’m not accustomed to seriousness from him, so it startled me. I was about to ask him what the big deal was when he continued. “I read about the fire that destroyed Harvey’s house—”
“After I told you about it. Nice detective work.”
“But what you didn’t tell me, I looked up. It was all over the local news—and it even made it to the conspiracy nuts on the Internet.”
“Lots of things make it to the conspiracy nuts.”
He said, “Yes, and some of those things are true. Come on—a freak storm, coming out of nowhere; lightning striking twice just to make sure the house went up in smoke …?”
“Could’ve been a coincidence,” I said. But even I didn’t believe me.
“It wasn’t a coincidence. It was her, covering her tracks. She’s using the bones to bend.”
“Bend? Are you trying to draw more penis jokes out of me? Because if you give me a few minutes, I’ll think of some. You just wait.”
“She’s bending, Ray. Bending natural forces to her nefarious whims.”
“With the bones?”
“I told you they were intended for ceremonial magic. Weren’t you listening?”
I dropped myself into a seat by the wall. It was mostly decorative, and therefore not very comfortable, but I felt the need to sit down. “I was listening, but I didn’t know how serious you were. For that matter, I had no idea you actually knew a damn thing about ceremonial magic. Because before, you acted like you didn’t.” And really, the thought stopped just short of horrifying me.
“I don’t practice it, but I know something about it—otherwise I wouldn’t have pegged the bones, and don’t you dare turn that into another dick joke.”
The more I thought about it, the less it would’ve surprised me to find out that he was lying, and that he had a basement shrine with wands, powders, formulas, and the occasional pentagram. Horace is all about money and power, and ceremonial magic is all about power, if not money.
I didn’t call him out on it. Instead I said, “Fine, I won’t turn that one into a joke, even though you totally set me up with that straight line. But I was under the impression that magic is an inefficient, troublesome, and mostly pointless way to be greedy. From everything I ever heard, it seems like it’d take your entire life just to learn how to levitate an egg, much less do anything really important.”
“You’re not altogether wrong, but that’s why the bones are such a big, expensive deal. In a basic sense, they’re amplifiers—they take little magic and make it into big magic. All the bang for a fraction of the effort. Practitioners euphemistically refer to it as ‘bending.’ Because you can’t break the laws of nature …”
I finished the sentiment for him. “You can only bend them.”
“Atta girl. I think she blew through one of the bones making that storm, or whatever you want to call it. Lightning struck twice because she was still getting the hang of it, not because the bones aren’t powerful enough to give her the necessary mojo. We need to get those things back, Raylene.”
“Because she’s going to destroy the world? Oh my God, Horace. Please tell me we’re not dealing with a supervillain here, because that kind of thing is so far outside my field of expertise that I’m getting a headache just thinking about it!”
He snorted. “No, Ray-baby. No one’s trying to save the world. I’m trying to save those bones! The more of them she burns up playing magic games, the fewer of them I have to sell … once you steal them back for me.”
Ah. That was more in character. “Right. Silly me, thinking there was an ounce of humanitarian spirit lurking anywhere within that black little heart of yours.”
“Silly indeed. Now get out to that park as soon as you can, and get me those fucking cock rocks.”
7
I don’t know if Horace knew where I was when he’d called, or if he just assumed I’d picked up teleporting as a special skill somewhere in my travels. Maybe he honestly thought this Elizabeth Creed would hang around these particular stomping grounds for a few days yet—though that was an assumption fraught with peril. I didn’t know what she wanted, but I didn’t really think this poor woman was out to destroy the world. You have to be crazier than just schizophrenic to have an interest in that kind of thing. Usually you have to be a religious nut, too.
I hoped she wasn’t a religious nut.
And I hoped this park was close enough for me to get this out of the way tonight, because I’d just made plans to bolt for Atlanta, hadn’t I? And when all was said and done, Ian was the greater priority. Or that’s what I told myself, as I tried to keep the needling thought of hundreds of millions of dollars out of my head.
I could use the money. We could use the money. It could make us more secure. It could keep us safe. Or as safe as any of us could reasonably expect to be.
With roundabout thinking like this, I convinced myself that the quest for Creed and the penis bones was a case that would benefit Ian as much as it’d benefit me. Call it trickle-down economics, if you must
. But money in my bank account is good for all of us—blind, beautiful, beloved companions included.
Back in the hotel room, Adrian was lying on his bed and wrestling with the remote, which also worked by arcane ritual magic, or so it appeared. He could only get the channel to turn over when he aimed it from just the right angle, to just the right spot.
“Problems?” I asked, letting the door drag slowly shut behind me.
“I think it needs new batteries.” He smacked it against the nightstand. “Oh hey, MythBusters,” he declared upon getting the channel to move another notch. “I can lie around and watch this.”
“Clearly.”
“So what was that about?”
“My case,” I told him. “The one that doesn’t involve Ian or your sister.”
“I thought you didn’t have a case.”
“Remember that penis bone thing I told you about? It might be back on. Hey, what time is it?” I asked.
“Going on one in the morning. Why? You got a hot date?”
“Hardy har har. No. And I don’t have a lot of time, either—not if I want to scratch this off the list tonight.” I dragged out my laptop and plugged it in, since the battery was getting low. “You ever hear of a place called the San Juan Bautista State Park?”
“No,” he admitted. “Why? You thinking about taking a tourist detour?”
“Yeah. Horace said it’s about a hundred miles from here.”
“And you’ll find your rod nuggets there?”
“I don’t know. But he gave me a lead on the woman who stole them. She’s a paranoid schizophrenic who used to work for NASA. Horace basically caught her on tape. And he’s been watching her credit cards—don’t ask me how; I don’t know the details. Give me a minute to boot up, and I’ll look it up. All knowledge is contained within the Internet, after all.”
Within two more minutes I had the park’s website on the screen and Adrian sitting on the bed beside me, as if we were naughty teenagers sharing a monitor full of porn. I clicked around a little and discovered that the park was a pretty place like most old missions, but I didn’t quite see the significance.
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