• • •
Rain soaked through her sneakers and the ankles of her jeans. She smelled ripe mulch and pulping leaves. Bare branches clawed the sky. Hands forced deep in pockets, head down, she marched through the park. Once she was out the other side she could hail a cab south, reach Perry’s storage unit before Menchú and his team. If they were telling the truth.
Of course they were, or thought they were. She’d seen that garbage thing wearing her brother’s face—or had she seen it after all?
She had. But—
The mind closes to cover even the largest wound.
If she kept walking, would she forget her brother? Or was this just the usual serving of post-traumatic stress, as memory chopped weird meat into chewable chunks? There had been a lot of weird in that house.
Either way, she had to get to Newark, fast.
“Detective Brooks!”
Liam’s voice.
“Sal,” he repeated, closer, desperate.
Keep walking, she told herself. But she’d never been good at listening to herself, especially when she made sense.
His arms were out, palms down, his eyes wide. He looked paler than usual.
“You want to tell me to trust Menchú,” she said. “That you guys know what you’re doing. You’re talking about my brother’s life.”
“I know how it feels,” he said. “I’ve been there.”
She had a good few sentences of tirade left, but that stopped her.
“I walked his road. I was a punk. I knew the truth was out there. I looked. And what I found, Sal, it got inside my head.” He took a step toward her. She didn’t retreat. Gray clouds shifted against a backdrop of gray clouds. “I lost two years to a baby version of the thing that’s in your brother now. One minute it’s February 2011, I’m using a three-year-old library management system exploit to get a sealed manuscript out of the vaults at Trinity, and then it’s October 2013, I’ve missed the World Cup, and Grace and Father M. wake me in a warehouse basement in Prague. There’s blood all over the walls, and I have wires coming out of my arms.” He pushed up the sleeve of his windbreaker and the flannel beneath. Red scars pierced his corded muscle and textured his tattoos. “I don’t know what I was doing for those two years. Nobody knows. But Grace and the Father found me, and brought me back.”
She reached for his forearm, for the scars. He pushed his sleeve back down before she could touch him.
“We care. We know what we’re doing. And your brother is in danger. If you know where he is—dealing with this yourself is crazy. Give us the information. We’ll help him. I’ll help him. But, trust me, it’s a bad idea to tackle this world alone.”
His eyes were blue, and very bright.
“He’s my brother,” she said. “I’ll save him. You can help, if you want. But he’s mine.”
“We can work with that.”
“Let’s go, then. We have a drive ahead of us.”
5.
“Newark,” Liam said, without further comment, as they crossed the Goethals Bridge.
“Perry and his friends needed cheap storage. They go through a lot of equipment, buy books by the foot at estate sales, on eBay. I didn’t know why,” Sal said, “until now.”
“You never wondered why your kid brother was laying in a lifetime supply of dead men’s books?”
“He’s done weird shit since he was a kid. Before this it was five years of collecting old gears and selling them at steampunk conventions, which was, you know, also a weird way to use his history degree. I have my life and he has his. Or did, I guess.” She counted the rounds she had left, checked that her weapon hadn’t been damaged in the fight in the house. She didn’t plan to fire it, but then, she never went in planning to fire. If she did, she’d have to.
“See, Grace? We never would have found him without her help.”
Grace shrugged and turned a page.
Menchú passed Sal a manila envelope containing another silver cross.
“I have one of those already.”
“They don’t work when they’re tarnished. Swap it out. Drop the used one in the envelope.”
She pulled the chain over her head. It felt much heavier than when she’d put it on. “It’s the cross that matters?”
“The cross guides us in our faith,” Menchú said.
“But the silver’s the pertinent bit,” Liam added. “Worked silver, the older the better. It soaks up magic, which is where the tarnish comes from. We’re still working on the why. Stings like a— Well, it stings, but that’s better than letting some bastard root around in your skull. And the Church has a lot of crosses lying around, turns out. Seal the envelope.”
The glue tasted of wood pulp and horse hooves. “Any of that coffee left?” It was cold, and never had been any good, but at least it tasted like coffee. The new cross hurt when it touched the seared skin on her chest, but it felt lighter than the old one.
“Thank you for coming with us,” Menchú said. “Grace speaks highly of your courage.”
“Does she? Thanks.”
Grace didn’t look up from her book. “Just don’t get us all killed.”
“Not my plan,” Sal said. “Take the next exit.”
• • •
The storage locker complex sprawled over asphalt acres, and still they drove past it on the first try. “He’s turning us away,” Menchú said.
“At least we know he’s here.” Liam pulled a U-turn.
Sal’s cross burned. She saw, with her mind’s eye as much as with her physical ones, the We-Stor-It sign, remembered driving Perry here the first time, before he and the boys got their beater Olds. Those who don’t know how to feel around the edges of a gap might never notice gaps at all. “Now. Left.” Liam yanked the wheel and they slid down a driveway into an empty storage parking lot.
Liam parked at the end of a row of vacant spaces, and they hit pavement. Easier to say what wasn’t different about this space than what was. The character of light hadn’t changed. The colors weren’t dimmer or more vibrant. There wasn’t much noise of any sort save their footsteps, but she could still hear trucks roll down the highway in the middle distance. Nor was there any of that spatial oddness she remembered from the boys’ house. The storage units lay in long rows, all right angles and closed garage doors.
It just felt . . . less, somehow. She’d heard that cats and dogs freaked out before earthquakes and tidal waves, before sinkholes opened to swallow houses. They knew when the ground was going wrong. Maybe people had the same sense, less keen—maybe they only felt this way when the collapse was bigger, deeper, more fundamental. The world, Menchú said, was an island eaten by an ocean from beneath.
Maybe he was wrong.
It didn’t feel that way.
This was bigger than she felt, walking away from the E-Z Carpet Cleaner van in the storage parking lot beside three people she barely knew. This was bigger than any of them, but it was damn sure bigger than Detective Sally Brooks. Something that could eat the world like this, she couldn’t fight it, she couldn’t arrest it. Liam, Grace, Menchú, they all seemed to have some kind of angle on—magic. Call it by name. She’d brought them here. She could stay in the van, tell them the locker number, let them take it from here. Stay safe.
Sal laughed.
They looked at her, uncertain. Menchú especially. “Detective Brooks. If you want to wait—”
“Can’t you feel it?” she said.
He shook his head.
“Perry, or whatever’s inside him. It’s strutting. Putting on a front. Trying to scare us off. Me in particular.”
“The Hand is dangerous,” he said. “It will eat us if we give it a chance.”
“Yeah. But now, more than anything, it wants us to leave.” She bared her teeth. “Third row, fifth locker on the left. Let’s go.”
• • •
Menchú, on the approach, didn’t share her optimism. “Its hold on your brother lasts as long as the book’s open. Close it—”
&nbs
p; “With the cross. I know.”
“Don’t use the cross if it’s tarnished, and don’t touch the book with your bare hand. I’ll try first. Grace and Liam will deal with any guards.”
“It’s been awake in our world for less than a day. You think it has goons?”
“It may have turned people, like the boys in the townhouse. There must have been others here when it arrived.”
She looked back at Grace and Liam. Grace’s novel had vanished into a pocket; Liam pulled a fingerless glove onto his left hand and snapped it closed at his wrist. Grace rolled her eyes at the sound, at the glove, at Liam in general.
“Cross,” Sal said. “Don’t touch the book. Anything else?”
“It may tempt you, as you get closer, offering bargains. Don’t trust it.”
“I figured. I mean, it’s a demon.”
The door to Perry’s storage locker door was rolled down, its padlock locked. She glanced back for ideas.
Grace struck the padlock with a cinderblock, and it broke. She shrugged.
Liam closed the snap on his second glove.
Then someone tackled him from the right.
“Shit!” A large man lay on top of him, meaty fingers pushing toward his throat. Before Sal could react Grace was there—she grabbed the man’s We-Stor-It uniform polo shirt and threw him back with a twist of her hips. The uniformed puppet pushed himself upright—eyes wide and black from edge to edge—a foot taller than Grace, easy. She kicked him in the knee, struck him in the temple with an elbow, and he went down. Black tears left dark lines down his cheeks.
“Shit,” Sal said in a different tone of voice than Liam had used.
Other figures emerged from the alleys between the storage units—men and women in uniform, a family of three with the daughter in pigtails. Sal felt that she should have seen them approaching. Of course, Menchú should have seen the driveway before it was time to turn. Grace spun, trying to face all directions at once. Liam pushed himself to his feet.
Menchú turned to her. “Still think it’s scared?”
Sal could have answered. Instead, she opened the door.
Candlelight flickered behind layers of fake Victorian furniture and chemical glassware, disused futons and piles of books—leather bindings and paperbacks, journals and diaries and dime-store lesbian detective novels. And there, at the far end of a narrow path through junky cast-off dreams of mystic grandeur, behind a semicircle of open books, stood Perry.
Well. Not stood. Floated.
“Sal,” he said, or the thing inside him said, and smiled, and his teeth were points and there was no tongue in the pit of his mouth. “An unexpected pleasure.”
She should have waited for Menchú. He’d done this before. But this was her brother. So she ran into the gap.
Which turned out to be for the best, because when a puppet jumped her from a gap in the boxes, Menchú was there to pull it (her, she corrected herself, these things could wake up, probably) off her back. Of course, the puppet then grabbed a chair and struck him in the head, but he seemed more staggered than hurt.
Sal marched toward the thing that wore her brother. “I bet,” she said. “That’s why you tried to keep me away. Perry, if you’re still in there, I’m trying to help you.”
That smile didn’t waver. The books’ pages turned of their own accord. He raised one hand and a shadowy headwind blasted her. The soles of her shoes left black streaks on the concrete floor. “What did they tell you, Sal? That this wasn’t me? Is that the lie they spun?”
“My brother wouldn’t do this.”
“Are you sure? If your brother had the power we have now—”
“We?” she said.
“Oh, fine. Spoil my fun. How can you tell the difference, anyway?”
“My brother has a tongue.”
“I can make a tongue, if you’d rather.” Fire licked his teeth. “This is your brother’s body, and I have his brain right here—who’s to say I’m not him, just with the power he always wanted? I can rifle through his memories, every dirty thought, desire, each terror and suppressed impulse. Delicious and nutritious. Would you like to know how many times he wanted to kill you? How many times he hated you?” He turned ten pages of the leftmost book forward, then flipped three pages back, an unpracticed chef working an unfamiliar recipe.
She forced herself toward him, step by step. The cross froze and tore her skin. Burn victims flashed through her memory: charcoaled edges of flesh and white bone showing. “He didn’t do any of that. Those thoughts don’t matter.”
“But they do! You feared an unjust world, and so you became a cop. That’s what he thinks. He feared being powerless, so he sought power, which led him to me. That’s your lovely little weakness, you humans—you’re so blissfully susceptible to destiny.”
The shadow-wind reached gale force. Somewhere behind her Grace and Liam and Father Menchú fought for their lives, for her, for Perry.
“What do you want with this?”
“What does anyone want?” Perry said. “A future. Futures taste grand. And you people have built so many of them for yourselves, like ice cream flavors. A hundred years back you expected more of the same forever, until maybe some god scooped his favorites off to play in a cut-rate Heaven. Bland. Tasteless. But now—starscapes and apocalypses, gray goo and futuristic despotism, oil crises and pandemic collapses, floods and robots and monsters, oh my! Fresh universes of fear. Your brother’s spinning them by the billions inside me. You could join him. Suffer through a few million hells for me and I’ll give you a paradise none can match.”
“Perry,” she said. So close now, but with every step the wind grew twice as strong. And she heard whispers, too, whispers that were colors, voices like claws in her belly. The cross wormed into her, the cross pierced her, the cross wriggled into her heart. “Perry, wake up. This thing needs you afraid. Listen to me. It’s your sister, it’s Sal, I’m outside your fucking door and I need you and you better open up right now or so help me God—”
Perry’s eyes opened. The real ones, the brown that matched her own. John Cusack version 1.7. Real tears ran down his cheeks. Then he crumpled, clutching his face. The voice that wasn’t his screamed words she couldn’t hear. The shadow-wind stopped. She knelt before the books, before the Book, the Liber Manus. Seconds, maybe, no more. She pulled the cross from around her neck. She’d lifted bodies that weighed less. Her arms trembled.
The cross was black. A smooth tarnish covered every surface, even the chain. She scraped it frantically with her fingernail but couldn’t mar the matte.
Fuck.
No silver around. Nothing like silver. Battered paperbacks, that was all.
And Perry was recovering. No. She recognized that body language—the straighter shoulders, the deeper breathing, that was the Hand reasserting control.
Behind her, Menchú fell.
It took the Hand time to learn her brother. If it jumped into her, Menchú and Grace and Liam—and, hell, Perry—would have a few critical seconds to close the book. And if it jumped into her, it would let Perry go.
Perry wanted to kill her, the Hand said. Well, fine. She’d wanted to kill him, too.
What else were siblings for?
The Hand-in-Perry straightened and smiled its sharp-toothed smile with the tongue of flame behind. She tackled the Liber Manus, slammed it shut, and flung it from her like a poisonous snake she’d caught by the neck.
The sinkhole feeling, the brink of catastrophe, the incipient collapse—stopped.
The world blinked.
Sal was still Sal. She was so shocked she almost didn’t notice when Perry began to fall.
She caught him before he hit the floor. “Perry. Come on, Perry, wake up.”
No answer. He breathed deep, and his teeth were back to normal, and there was a tongue in his mouth again, but his eyes were closed. She slapped him. No answer. Shook him. “Perry!” Nothing.
Menchú set his hand on her shoulder. He looked blurred. She blinked, and h
e grew edges.
“It’s okay,” she said. “We won.”
6.
Emotions take up space, which is why all priests, from bearskin-kilted Wotanites down to modern Xenuphiles, make such a fuss over architecture. Rooms shape the feelings within. Parallax crushes impressions of size: high ceilings and pointed arches hold more heaven than the sky itself. Close chambers fit cozy emotions, or stifling ones. A dense nest will accommodate sweaty sex and a mushroom-assisted voyage to the outer spheres. But don’t whisper to your lover in a cathedral. Don’t look for Wotan in a closet.
Don’t hope to feel any way but forlorn by a hospital bed.
Sal stood by Perry’s side, and listened to heartbeat beeps through a cruddy speaker.
“This is the first time I’ve seen him in anything but a T-shirt,” she said. “The first time since we were kids.”
“I’m sorry,” Menchú said from the door.
She turned from the bedside. She hadn’t when she’d heard him approach. Only knew it was him from reflections. “He could wake up any day.”
“Yes.”
“Or the Hand might have dragged him along with it. Back out there. Into the ocean.”
“Maybe.”
“We could open the book.”
“And the Hand would come out again. Now we have the Liber Manus in custody, we can keep it closed. Keep the world safe. That storage locker was a treasure trove—Perry and his friends collected several copies of dangerous texts. We have those, too, now. And the world’s safe for the moment. That’s what winning looks like.”
“We can’t fight these things at all?”
“We can keep them out,” Menchú said. “But there are more all the time. More this year than last. More this century than the one before.”
“Are all of them that bad?”
“Not all that . . . hungry. We found a pair of wings that would let you fly if you put them on. A well that answers questions.”
“Have you found one that brings back souls?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Before you ask—”
“You don’t know what I’m going to say yet.”
Bookburners: Season One Volume One Page 4