Gnome gave her a suspicious look. “How much is all this gonna cost me?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Gnome shrugged his heavy shoulders and put a spoonful of soup into his mouth. “This doesn’t mean you’re getting a discount.”
Audrey heaved a mock sigh. “Oh well. I guess I’ll have to ply you with sexual favors, then.”
Gnome choked on the soup. “I’m old enough to be your grandfather!”
Audrey winked at him, gathering the empty bags. “But you’re not.”
“Get out of here, you and your craziness.”
“Okay, okay, I’m going.” He was fun to tease, and she was in such a good mood.
“What is with you anyway?” he asked. “Why are you grinning?”
“I’ve got a job. With benefits.”
“Legit?”
“Yes.”
“Well, congratulations,” Gnome said. “Now go on. I’m sick of looking at your face.”
“I’ll see you later.”
She left the house and slogged her way through the mud down to her car. Gnome was a gruff old bear, but he was kind in his own way. Besides, he was the only neighbor she had within two miles. Nobody was around to help them. Either they took care of each other, or they toughed it out on their own.
Backing the Honda down the mountain in the gloom turned out to be harder than Audrey thought. She finally steered the vehicle to the fork where the narrow road leading to her place split off and took the turn. Thick roots burrowed under the road, and her Honda rolled over the bulges, careening and swaying, until it finally popped out into the clearing. On the right, the ground dropped off sharply, plunging down the side of the mountain. On the left, a squat, pale building sat in the shadow of an old spruce. It was a simple structure—a huge stone block of a roof resting on sturdy stone columns that guarded the wooden walls of the house within like the bars of a stone cage. Each three-foot-wide column bore a carving: dragons and men caught in the heat of a battle. A wide bas-relief decorated the roof as well, showing a woman in a chariot pulled by birds with snake heads. The woman gazed down on the slaughter like a goddess from Heaven.
Nobody knew who had built the ruins or why. They dotted that part of the Edge, a tower here, a temple there, gutted by time and the elements, and covered with moss. The Edgers, being poor and thrifty, knew better than to let them go to waste. They built wooden walls inside the stone frameworks, put in indoor plumbing and electricity illegally siphoned from the neighboring city or provided by generators, and moved right in. If any archaic gods took offense, they had yet to do anything about it.
Audrey parked the car under an ancient scarred maple and turned off the engine. Home, sweet home.
A ball of gray fur dropped off the maple branch and landed on her hood.
Audrey jumped in her seat. Jesus.
The raccoon danced up and down on the hood, chittering in outrage, bright eyes glowing with orange like two bloody moons.
“Ling the Merciless! You get off my car this instant!”
The raccoon spun in place, her gray fur standing on end, put her hand-paws on the windshield, and tried to bite the glass.
“What is it with you?” Audrey popped the car door open.
Ling scurried off the car and leaped into her lap, squirming and coughing. Audrey glanced up. The curtains on her kitchen window were parted slightly. A hair-thin line of bright yellow light spilled through the gap.
Somebody was in her house.
Audrey slipped from the seat, dropping Ling gently to the ground, circled the car, and opened the hatchback. A tan tarp waited inside. She jerked it aside and pulled out an Excalibur crossbow. It had set her back nine hundred bucks of hard-earned money, and it was worth every penny. Audrey cocked the crossbow and padded to the house, silent and quick. A couple of seconds, and she pressed against the wall next to the door. She tried the handle. Locked.
Who breaks into a house and locks the door?
She peeled from the wall and circled the building, moving fast on her toes. At the back, she slipped between the stone framework and the wooden wall of the house and felt around for the hidden latch. It sprang open under the pressure of her fingers. She edged the secret door open and padded inside, into the walk-in closet, and out into her bedroom. The house had only three rooms: a long, rectangular bedroom, an equally long bathroom, and the rest of it a wide-open space, most of which served as her living room and kitchen, with the stove, fridge, and counters at the north wall.
Audrey peeked out of the doorway. An older man with curly reddish brown hair stood at the kitchen stove, mixing batter in a glass bowl, his slightly stooped back turned to her.
She would know that posture anywhere.
Audrey raised her crossbow and took a step into the living room.
The man reached for a bag of flour sitting on the counter. Audrey squeezed the trigger. The string snapped with a satisfying twang. The bolt punched through the bag inches from the man’s fingers.
The man turned and grinned at her, his blue eyes sparking. She knew the smile, too. It was his con smile.
“Hi, munchkin.”
Audrey let her crossbow point to the floor. “Hi, Dad.”
“A good shot.” Seamus Callahan bent down, looking at the shaft protruding from the bag of flour. “I’d say you killed it. Bull’s-eye.”
Audrey set the crossbow down and crossed her arms. Inside her, a tiny pissed-off voice barked, Get out, get out, get out . . . He was in her house, and she had to clench her fingers on her arms just to keep herself from attacking him and pushing him out.
But she was Seamus’s daughter, and twenty-three years of grifting made her voice calm and light. “How did you find me?”
“I have my ways.” Seamus opened the bag and poured some flour into the batter. “I’m making my patented silver-dollar pancakes. You remember those, don’t you?”
“Sure, Dad. I remember.” He was in her kitchen, touching her things. She would bleach it all after he was gone.
Ling slipped from the back door, scurried around her feet, and showed Seamus her teeth.
“Your little critter doesn’t like me much,” he said, pouring the batter into a sizzling pan.
“She has good instincts.”
Seamus looked up at her, blue eyes like two flax petals under bushy red eyebrows. “There is no need for that.”
Screw it. “What do you want?”
Seamus spread his arms, a spatula in his right hand. “My daughter disappears for four years, doesn’t tell me where she is going, doesn’t call, doesn’t write. What, I don’t have a right to be concerned? All we had was a little note.”
Yeah, right. “The note said, ‘Don’t look for me.’ That was a clue.”
“Your mom is worried, kiddo. We were all worried.”
Get out, get out, get out. “What do you want?”
Seamus heaved a sigh. “Can we not have a meal like a normal family?”
“What do you want, Dad?”
“I have a job in West Egypt.”
In the Weird. The worlds of the Weird and the Broken had similar geography, but their histories had gone entirely different ways. In the world without magic, the huge peninsula protruding from the southeastern end of the continent was known as Florida. In the Weird, it was West Egypt, the Alligator to the Cobra and the Hawk of the triple Egyptian crown.
“It won’t take but a week. A good solid payoff.”
“Not interested.”
He sighed again. “I didn’t want to bring this up. It’s about your brother.”
Of course. Why would it ever be about anybody else?
Seamus leaned forward. “There is a facility in California—”
She raised her hands. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“It’s beautiful. It’s like a resort.” He reached into his jacket. “Look at the pictures. These doctors, they’re the best. All we have to do is pull off this one heist, and we can get him in there. I’d do it myself, b
ut it’s a three-person job.”
“No.”
Seamus turned off the stove and shoved the pan aside onto a cold burner. “He is your brother. He loves you, Audrey. We haven’t asked anything of you for three years.”
“He is an addict, Dad. An addict. How many times has he been through rehab? It was eighteen when I left; what’s the number now?”
“Audrey . . .”
It was too late. She’d started, and she couldn’t stop. “He’s had therapy, he’s had interventions, he’s had doctors and counselors and rehabs, and it hasn’t made a damn bit of difference. Do you know why? Because Alex likes being an addict. He has no interest in getting better. He is a dirty lowlife junkie. And you enable him at every turn.”
“Audrey!”
“What was the one rule you taught me, Dad? The one rule that we never, ever break? You don’t steal from family. He stole Mom’s wedding ring and pawned it. He stole from you, he stole from me, he ruined my childhood. All of it going right up his nose or in his mouth. The man never met a drug he didn’t like. He doesn’t want to get better, and why should he? Mommy and Daddy will always be there to steal him more pills and pick him up off the street. He gets his drugs and all that attention. Hell, why should he quit?”
“He’s my child,” Seamus said.
“And what am I, Dad? Chopped liver?”
“Look at you!” Seamus raised his arms. “Look, look—you have a nice house, your fridge is full. You don’t need any help.”
She stared at him.
“Alex is sick. It’s an illness. He can’t help himself.”
“Bullshit! He doesn’t want to help himself.”
“He’ll die.”
“Good.”
Seamus slapped the counter. “You take that back, Audrey!”
She took a deep breath. “No.”
“Fine.” He leaned back. “Fine. You live happily in your nice house. Play with your pet. Buy nice things. You do all that while your brother is dying.”
She laughed. “Guilt, Dad? Wait, I’ll show you guilt.”
She stomped to a bookshelf, pulled out a photo album, and slapped it open on the counter in front of him. In the picture, her sixteen-year-old self stared out from a mangled face. Her left eye had swollen shut into a puffy black sack. Dry tracks of blood stained her cheeks, stretching from half a dozen cuts. Her nose was a misshapen bulge. “What is this? Do you remember this?”
Seamus grimaced.
“What, nothing to say? Let me help: this is when my sweet brother traded me to his dealer for some meth. I had to give him all of the money I had on me and the gold chain grandma gave me, and I had to break into a rival drug dealer’s lab and steal his stash so I wouldn’t be raped. I had to break into a gang house, Dad. If I got caught, they would’ve killed me in a blink—if I was lucky. And Cory, the dealer? He used me for a punching bag after. He threw me on the ground, and he kicked me in the face and in my stomach until he got tired. I had to beg—beg!—him to let me go. Look at my face. It was two days before my seventeenth birthday. And what did you do, Dad?”
She let it hang. Seamus looked at the window.
“You did nothing. Because I don’t matter.”
“Audrey, don’t say that. Of course you matter. And I spoke to Alex about it.”
She gave him a bitter smile. “Yes. I’ve heard. You told him that if something happened to me, the whole family would suffer because nobody would be left to steal.”
“I said it in a way he would understand: if something happened to you, there would be no more drugs.”
“Because it’s all he cares about.” Audrey sighed. “I left four years ago. I didn’t cover my tracks—I just ran clear across the bloody continent to the other side. I would’ve gone to the moon if I could have, but I would’ve still left you a nice trail to follow because I kept hoping that one day my parents would wake up and realize they had a daughter. It took you this long to find me because you didn’t look until you needed me. I spent years stealing and grifting, so you could put him into one rehab after another. I’m done with you. Don’t come here. Don’t ask me for any favors. It’s over.”
“This will be the last time,” he said quietly. “If you won’t do it for me, do it for your mother. You know that if Alex dies, it will kill her. I swear, this is the very last time. I wouldn’t be here if I had any choice, Audrey. Just look at the pictures of the job.” He pushed some photographs to her across the table.
She glanced down. The first two shots showed some sort of resort. On the third, a white pyramid rose, its golden top gleaming in the sun. A stylized bull carved from reddish stone polished to a gleam stood before the pyramid. “The Pyramid of Ptah? Are you out of your mind? You want me to go into the Weird and steal something from a pyramid?”
“It can be done.”
“People who rob the pyramids in West Egypt die, Dad.”
“Please, Audrey. Don’t make me beg. Do you want me to get down on my knees? Fine, I can do that.”
He would never leave her alone. If she did this job, he’d be back in six months with another and tell her that it would be “the very last time.” She had to find a way to end it now and end it so that he wouldn’t return.
Audrey leaned forward. “I’ll give you a choice. I’ll do the job with you, but from that point on we’re strangers. You don’t have a daughter anymore, and I don’t have a father or a mother. If you show up on my land again, I’ll shoot you. I’m dead serious, Dad. I will put a bolt through you. Or you can walk away now and keep me as your daughter. Pick. Him or me.”
Seamus looked at the image of her bruised face in the photo album.
She waited. Deep inside her, a little girl listened quietly, hoping for the answer that the adult in her knew wouldn’t come.
“I’ll see you at the end of the road tomorrow at seven,” he said, and walked out the door.
The disappointment gripped her so tightly, it hurt. For a few short, pain-filled breaths she just stood there, then she grabbed the pan, burned pancakes and all, burst out the back door, and hurled it over the cliff.
ONE
KALDAR Mar stepped back and critically surveyed the vast three-dimensional map of the Western Continent. It spread on the wall of the private conference room, a jeweled masterpiece of magic and semiprecious stones. Forests of malachite and jade flowed into plains of aventurine and peridot. The plains gave rise to mountains of brown opals with ridges of banded agates and tiger eye, topped by the snowy peaks of moonstone and jasper.
Beautiful. A completely useless waste of money, but beautiful. If it somehow could be stolen . . . you’d need a handcart to transport it and some tools to carve it to pieces. Hmm, also a noise dampener would work wonders here, and this being the Weird, he could probably find someone willing to risk creating a soundproof sigil for the right price. Steal a custodian’s uniform, get in, cut the map, wrap each piece in a tarp, load them on the handcart, and push the whole thing right out the front door, while looking disgruntled. Less than twenty minutes for the whole job if the cutter was powerful enough. The map would feed the entire Mar family for a year or more.
Well, what was left of the family.
Kaldar’s memory overlaid the familiar patterns of states over the map, ignoring the borders of the Weird’s nations. Adrianglia took up a big chunk of the Eastern seaboard, stretching in a long vertical ribbon. In the Broken, it would have consumed most of the states from New York and southern Quebec to Georgia and a small chunk of Alabama. Below it, West Egypt occupied Florida and spread down into Cuba. To the left of Adrianglia, the vast Dukedom of Louisiana mushroomed upward, containing all of Louisiana and a chunk of Alabama in the south, rising to swallow Mississippi and Texarcana, and ending with the coast of the Great Lakes. Beyond that, smaller nations fought it out: the Republic of Texas, the Northern Vast, the Democracy of California . . .
Kaldar had grown up on the fringes of this world, in the Edge, a narrow strip of land between the complex magic of the W
eird and the technological superiority of the Broken. Most of his life was spent in the Mire, an enormous swamp, cut off from the rest of the Edge by impassable terrain. The Dukedom of Louisiana dumped its exiles there and killed them when they tried to reenter the Weird. His only escape had been through the Broken. He traveled back and forth, smuggling goods, lying, cheating, making as much money as was humanly possible and dragging it back to the family.
Kaldar stared at the map. Each country had an enemy. Each was knee deep in conflict. But the only war he cared about was happening right in the middle, between the Dukedom of Louisiana and Adrianglia. It was a very quiet, vicious war, fought in secrecy by spies, with no rules and no mercy. On the Adrianglian side, the espionage and its consequences were handled by the Mirror. He supposed if they were in the Broken, the Mirror would be the equivalent of the CIA or FBI, or perhaps both. On the Dukedom of Louisiana’s side, the covert war was the province of the secret service known as the Hand. He had watched from the sidelines for years as the two organizations clashed, but watching wasn’t enough anymore.
First, the Mirror woke him up at ten till five, and now he spent fifteen minutes waiting. Puzzling.
The heavy wooden door swung open soundlessly, and a woman entered the room. She was short, with a sparse, compact body, wrapped in an expensive blue gown embroidered with silver thread. Kaldar priced the dress out of habit. About five gold doubloons in the Weird, probably a grand and a half or two in the Broken. Expensive and obviously custom tailored. The blue fabric perfectly complemented her skin, the color of hazelnut shells. The dress was meant to communicate power and authority, but she hardly needed it. She moved as if she owned the air he breathed.
Nancy Virai. The head of the Mirror. They had never met—he had not been given that honor, poor Edge rat that he was—but she hardly needed an introduction.
He’d spent the last two years doing small assignments, challenging but nothing of great importance. Nothing that would warrant the attention of Lady Virai. Anticipation shot through Kaldar. Something big waited at the end of this conversation.
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