I kept low, creeping my way from divider to divider, ears perked, checking every angle. High above my head, starlight streamed down through long glass skylights, while electric lights made to look like Victorian-style gas lamps cast a cold, soft glow across the pristine hardwood floor. I heard David and the twins just up ahead, around the next bend.
“And this is my pride and joy,” he told them. “The world’s largest collection of Houdini memorabilia. This tank is the original water-torture escape, first used in 1914—”
A clanging noise, like someone pounding his fist against sheet metal, echoed across the factory floor.
“What’s this?” Justine asked.
“Another classic escape. Houdini would climb into this iron milk jug, and his assistant would padlock the lid from the outside. They’d put a sheet over the jug, and five minutes later, he’d emerge—free as a bird, with the padlocks magically undone.”
“I bet you can’t do that trick,” Juliette chirped.
I headed in the other direction, prowling the galleries for any mention of Howard Canton’s name. Then I found it. A tiny nook lit by footlights, and a faded poster of Canton the Magnificent. He’d been painted in a dramatic pose, waving his bone-tipped wand and an open hand at a hovering, sleeping woman, as if commanding her to rise. “SEE the Unthinkable!” the poster proclaimed in a lurid font. “WITNESS the Miracles and Mysteries of Magic from Seven Continents!”
Beside the frame, resting on a mahogany plinth and posed to catch the light, rested the only other piece of Canton memorabilia: a black top hat, identical to the one he wore on his poster.
“Nice hat,” I murmured, gently lifting it by the silky brim. “Not sure I’d pay a million bucks for it, but—”
My fingertips tingled on the brim, feeling a shiver of long-dormant magic, and my eyes slipped out of focus. In my second sight, layered upon the blurry world like a transparent film, the hat glowed a soft, pulsing violet. Runes, carved of shimmering gold, rippled around it like a spool of ticker tape before vanishing with a crackling hiss. I wasn’t sure if they were a warning or a welcome. I held the hat gingerly, like it was a vial of nitroglycerin, and traced my steps backward to find the twins.
I heard metallic echoes and muffled shouts. When I rounded the bend, Justine and Juliette were alone, casting disparaging glances at a four-foot-tall iron jug. The lid of the jug, clamped down under three heavy padlocks, thumped relentlessly.
“I knew he couldn’t do the trick,” Juliette said.
“Magic is boring,” Justine said. “Can we leave now?”
The lights died, fizzing out as the factory plunged into darkness. Someone had killed the power, and it wasn’t us.
“Yes. Yes, we can,” I said, navigating by murky starlight from the glass skylights. I led the way toward the museum door—then froze, ducking around a divider and pulling the twins with me.
Ms. Fleiss’s high heels clicked on the polished wood. She was wrapped in a floor-length trench coat, purple leather glistening like snakeskin, her eyes hidden behind onyx-dark glasses. She wasn’t alone. A four-man squad in black balaclavas and urban camouflage spread out behind her, flashlights flashing on the muzzles of their sleek submachine guns.
I’d been prepared for an encounter with the Thief. Hoping for one, honestly. A run-in with Fleiss and a heavily armed hit squad wasn’t a risk I’d planned for. I sprinted back to the Houdini exhibit as quietly as I could and put my face against the edge of the iron jug’s lid as it thumped and rattled.
“David,” I hissed, “David, shut up. Stop making noise.”
His eyes squinted at me through the narrow crack. “Daniel?”
“Listen, you’re being robbed.”
“No shit I’m being robbed! By you!”
“No, not by—” I paused. “Well, okay, you are being robbed by me, but there’s also some very nasty people here with some very big guns. So please, for your own sake, stay down and keep quiet.”
“When I get out of here,” he snarled, “I’m gonna kick your ass.”
“Just do it quietly. Shh.”
I slipped away from the exhibit, meeting up with the twins, the three of us staying just ahead of the encroaching bootsteps and sweeping lights. On my left side, Juliette’s eyes rippled, spidery black veins rising like the curves of a tribal tattoo along her neck and one shoulder. On my right, Justine flashed rotten, jagged fangs, bouncing with anticipation.
“Party time now?” she asked me.
I waved my hand, sharp. “Not looking for a fight here. Let’s slip around them and get out quietly.”
We crept from divider to divider, exhibit to exhibit, staying low. On the other side of a display, a wall of faded iron keys and padlocks, I heard one of the gunmen speak.
“It’s not here, ma’am.”
“It’s here,” Fleiss replied. “I know it is. I feel it. Keep looking. And take the poster. He’ll want that too.”
We had almost made it, ten feet from the door, when a flashlight swung around and strobed across my face. I was blind, hot diamonds in my eyes, and one of the twins hauled me to the floor a split second before the submachine gun unleashed a three-round burst. Bullets tore into a display case, and a cascade of broken glass and vintage iron keys went raining to the floor in a musical clatter.
I rolled left, came up in a crouch, and reached for my cards. Four aces spread in my fingertips like a brace of throwing knives as boots rushed our way. Justine hit the first gunman in a running tackle, the two of them rolling across the hardwood, her shark teeth clamping down on his throat until his strangled scream ended in the crunch of cartilage. Juliette took the high ground, leaping on top of the nearest divider. She ran along it, arms out to her sides, and dove like a hawk to bowl over another two hitters. The fourth gunman came from the other direction, his muzzle sweeping my way and pinning me in the flashlight’s glare. I whipped all four cards toward him. The flashlight shattered and died. He died with it, slamming against the wall and slumping to the floor, his eyes rolling back as blood dripped from the neck of his balaclava.
Ms. Fleiss stepped around the corner, casual as a Sunday stroll. Her brows furrowed.
“You,” she said, “are a deviation from the plan. You should have died in Eisenberg.”
“Sorry. Dying’s not something I’m good at.”
“We’ll have to work harder.”
“Not tonight,” I said. “You know, I’m glad you’re here, come to think of it. You can deliver a message to your boss for me.”
“Which is?”
I flicked a card from my deck and sent it flying, a magic-charged hornet with a killing sting.
She caught it.
Fleiss plucked the card out of the air like it had been moving in slow motion. It twisted in her fingers—then melted, turning black and withering until all that remained was a tiny lump of congealed rot. She tossed it to the floor, her lip curling in mild disdain.
“I have walked upon worlds,” she said, her tone conversational, “where children wielded greater magic than this. And I have stood proudly at my lord’s side while he ate those worlds. Still, credit where credit is due, by local standards you’re not entirely untalented. I’m sure you’re quite proud of your little tricks. Would you like to see one of mine?”
Her jaw snapped. Distending, bone and muscle tearing then reknitting as her skull buckled, stretching backward, like an Easter Island idol. Her glasses fused with her flesh, giving her eyes of obsidian that reflected my horrified face in stereo. Her arms drooped from the sleeves of her coat, stretching inhumanly long, bending with a crack as each arm sprouted a second elbow, then a third, her elongated limbs wriggling like fleshy centipedes. Her fingernails fell out. They tumbled to the floor around her feet, and in their place, black iron claws forced their way out of her bloody fingertips one jutting inch at a time.
I watched, petrified. All I could manage was a whisper: “What are you?”
Her spine buckled as her legs grew and widened. The hunc
hbacked creature towered over me, leering, her head bobbing on a boneless, rubbery neck.
“Some call me the Mother of Nightmares,” she hissed. “Now, I’m curious. Let’s find out what you’re afraid of.”
She thundered toward me like a stampeding rhino and clamped her clawed hands on the sides of my head, her onyx-eyed face dropping nose to nose with mine. I could feel her now, a cold wet oil torrent trying to force its way into my mind. She inhaled my breath, tasting it, licking her cracked lips while I fought a psychic war. Fleiss hammered against my mental defenses like a hurricane on a sheet-metal shack, my walls slowly caving, about to give and let the torrent in.
Then she staggered back with a frustrated bellow as Justine hit her with a spinning kick, her foot slamming into the creature’s bloated, rubbery gut. I felt her power recede as her hands ripped away, freeing me from my paralysis. I jogged backward, firing off card after card, shouting for the twins to run to the car. Fleiss batted the cards away as fast as I could hurl them. They weren’t hurting her, but now she was a rhino in a cloud of stinging gnats, more focused on protecting herself than coming after me. I kept up the onslaught until my shoulder bumped the door. Then I turned and ran.
The car was out front, the twins already inside and waiting for me. A frustrated shriek tore the air at my back as I jumped behind the wheel, throwing the car into gear and stomping the gas. We squealed out of the parking lot, lurching over a pothole as we swerved onto the street.
“What was that?” Justine asked, sitting in the passenger seat.
“Something…I don’t know. Not from this planet, I don’t think. Not from anything like this planet. Hold on, I’m getting us out of here.”
I turned left at the first intersection. Up ahead, a dangling and lonely light above a four-way junction flickered from red to green. I kept our speed up, coasting on through.
Then came the blare of a horn and the wash of headlights as a dump truck screamed through the red light, coming in from the side, and smashed into us at full throttle.
22.
Blood-streaked glass tumbled past me in slow motion. I saw the impact, the aftermath, timed to each jackhammer beat of my heart. The passenger-side door buckled, broken metal impaling Justine, the window glass slicing her face to ribbons as her spine shattered. Juliette wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. The collision threw her as the tiny car rolled, and I heard her neck snap as the impact folded her like a broken doll. The pavement shot up to greet me and—
—I was running from the museum, the car waiting outside and ready to go. Fleiss’s angry bellow split the air behind me. I jumped into the driver’s seat and hit the gas.
“What was that?” Justine asked, sitting in the passenger seat.
“I don’t—” I paused, shaking my head. “Wait. Hold on, this isn’t right.”
I came to the first intersection. Left—no. Left was wrong. Bad choice. I turned right.
I coasted through the next intersection, green lights all the way to safety. Then came the scream of the air horn as the dump truck T-boned us, turning the world into bloody glass and a wash of white-hot agony. I watched Justine die, then Juliette, sharing the rolling, crumpled steel with their mutilated bodies. I blacked out—
—I ran from the museum, the car waiting outside, ready to go.
“What was that?” Justine asked, sitting in the passenger seat.
I slammed on the brakes.
The car’s engine hummed as we stood at the first intersection. I held the steering wheel in a death grip, staring straight ahead. Juliette bounced in the seat behind me, craning her neck to look behind us.
“Come on,” she said, “what are you waiting for? That thing will catch us if we don’t move!”
“There’s no right choice,” I murmured to myself. “Whichever direction I pick, it’s the wrong one.”
“You have to decide,” Justine told me.
Not Justine anymore.
Coop sat in the passenger seat. My old buddy, the best safecracker west of the Rockies, looking just the way he did the last time I saw him. Dead, shot in the heart, with his eyes glassy white and his mouth sewn shut with mortician’s thread. The thread ripped as he forced his jaw open, the skin of his lips tearing and oozing trickles of blood down his chin.
“You have to decide, Dan.”
“What happened to you in Chicago was my fault,” I told him. “Every time I try to make a play for something better in my life, every time I reach for a big score, I make the wrong choice. I skip away free, and it’s the people I care about who take the hit.”
In the backseat, Spengler leaned forward. I hadn’t seen the big man since the day he died screaming on his living room floor, tortured and killed by Lauren Carmichael’s followers. One shattered arm flopped onto my shoulder, his guts spilling out over his lap.
“You’re not wrong, you know,” he told me with a jovial smile.
I stood on an empty plain. Cracked, dry earth under my feet, a rumbling storm on the horizon staining the sky black. Corpses littered the ground, the aftermath of a battle.
Bentley. Corman. Jennifer. Mama Margaux. Pixie. Caitlin. My family of choice, my circle of trust. All of them laid out in a ring around me. Brutalized and broken. All of them with their dead eyes wide open, staring at me in silent accusation.
“This is what happens,” I said to myself. “It’s better not to try. Better to stay where I am. Tread water. I can tread water forever.”
Lightning crackled in the distance. A peal of thunder echoed from the gathering clouds, growing higher in pitch, sounding more and more like a—
Voice. A hand shaking my shoulder.
“Come on, Danny!” Justine shouted in my ear. My stomach lurched as the world swung back into focus. Fleiss was down on the museum floor, knocked flat and dazed, slowly pushing herself back to her feet. Juliette grunted as she hauled down one of the display partitions, sending it crashing onto the creature’s head and burying her under cracked wood and vintage art. As Fleiss clawed her way from the rubble, Justine snatched up one of the fallen gunmen’s weapons and let it rip, emptying the magazine into Fleiss’s gut. Black ichor spattered and the creature staggered back with her face twisted in fury. I followed Justine’s lead, grabbing the fallen top hat in one hand and a submachine gun in the other. I took aim and hit Fleiss with short, tight bursts, concentrating my fire. She flailed her arms, bellowing. Then she turned, her dagger-like claws ripping at the open air beside her.
She tore a hole in the world.
Reality frayed, splitting aside to reveal a gaping, howling void. An endless and starless night. Fleiss curled her hand around the edges of the tear, forcing it wider. As the faint scent of roses drifted through the museum, the creature turned my way and spoke a single word.
“Soon.”
Fleiss dove through the hole and it whipped shut at her back, vanishing in a heartbeat.
Justine stumbled beside me, panting for breath. “What,” she said, “was that?”
“A problem,” I told her.
* * *
The car wasn’t waiting right out front this time. It was exactly where I’d parked it, out on the street, just up the block. I set Canton’s hat in the backseat, resting atop a pile of submachine guns. The twins wanted the firepower, and I didn’t ask why.
I came to the first intersection in the road, and stopped.
“Light’s green,” Juliette told me.
Freed from Fleiss’s grip, her torrent of visions felt like a vivid dream now. I wasn’t afraid that I was still in her grasp. I just wanted to understand what I’d seen. She’d sent me on a roller-coaster ride straight to the core of my own battered mind, and I’d found fear, all right. Not fear of death, or things that go bump in the night. Fear of failure and the fallout. I’d always seen life as one long, running gamble: you rolled the dice every time you got out of bed and anted up with every decision you made. Normally, I did okay.
Then I’d laid all my chips on the wrong bet, and Coop and his nep
hew paid the price. Just like I’d been too slow when I went up against Lauren Carmichael, made the wrong play, and watched Spengler die right next to me. Something had gone out of me over the last few months. Not a quick snuff of the flame, but a slow, chilling frost that settled into my bones and made the easy way look like the only way.
Easier not to take care of myself and get back on my own two feet, letting what should have been a short-term stay turn into permanent couch surfing at Bentley and Corman’s place. Easier to stand on the sidelines while Jennifer did all the work of forging the New Commission by herself, and easier not to reach for something bigger than I’d ever had by taking my seat at the table. Easier to obsess about the Enemy, a hazy and far-off fight, than to roll up my sleeves, take down Ecko, and clean up my own backyard.
No more.
I had a choice to make, here and now. Keep going the way I’d been going, the safe and easy road all the way to the grave, or step up and face my fears head-on.
“I’m turning here,” I said out loud.
“Fine.” Juliette waved a confused hand at me. “Do it. Nobody’s stopping you.”
I stepped on the gas.
“You’re goddamn right,” I told her.
I hadn’t lost everything in Eisenberg. I’d been given a gift. A brand-new start. My old life was dead, and I was a phoenix rising from the ashes, with the chance to do anything, be anything. The man with the Cheshire smile hadn’t broken me. He’d done me a favor.
Someday I’d get the opportunity to pay him back. I’d write my thank-you note on a bullet.
The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6) Page 14