I looked at my new stump. The fingers of my left hand flexed, stretched, then made a fist. Except I didn’t have fingers on that side. My brain was giving orders to the ghost of my arm, and I could feel that ghost responding. “Losing a limb is creepy.”
Even Alexandre smirked at that. “Still,” he said. “It is infuriating to think that we had two predators so close to the First Palace.”
I cleared my throat. It still felt raw. “Imagine how you’re going to feel about the one inside the Palace.”
With a twist of my wrist, I flipped the ghost knife into the air. It struck Roman on his forehead, slicing from the front of his head to the back like it was parting his hair.
On a normal person, the spell would have passed through him without leaving a mark. That didn’t happen. Roman’s eyes rolled back and the top of his head sagged apart like wet clay. There was no brain matter to see, just an indistinct gray sludge.
The room fell silent for a moment. Everyone stared in shock. Then Roman lifted his graying hands and they began to grow, taking on a rough squarish shape, as though they were turning to stone.
Annalise leaped over the bed, an overhand right slamming into Roman’s chest and knocking him through the wall. As if they were jolted out of a trance, Callin, Pratt, and Alexandre charged through the gap after them.
“Into the corner!” I snapped. Isser grabbed Elizabeth’s elbow and dragged her toward the other side of the bed. They both got onto the floor and I kicked myself off the mattress, draping my body across theirs. I didn’t know if they had an iron gate to protect them, and it was too late to ask.
Green firelight lit the room, but the ball of fire didn’t touch us. The ground shook and the air trembled with thunderclaps. Plaster dust rained down on us. Isser and Elizabeth both cursed in terror. Pitch darkness swept over us like a heavy blanket, then withdrew. Moments repeated themselves. Shadows glowed. We went blind, then deaf, then we could see every mote of dust, hear each individual pulse all over our bodies.
When that passed, an unbearable despair swept over us, making my iron gate flare again.
“We can’t…” Isser said. He couldn’t finish his sentence, but I knew what he was trying to say. We couldn’t stay where we were. We were too close to the peers and their fight, and we were going to be destroyed.
I reached for my ghost knife and called to it. It flew straight into my hand, and I had no way to know what it cut on the way. Hopefully, no one on our side.
“We’re getting out,” I said. Holding the laminated paper by one corner, I slid it into the bedroom wall and slashed up, across, down, across.
And that was it for me. That took all the strength I had left. I rolled off the others, almost under the bed. My mattress was on fire, somehow, and the flames scorched my feet, but I didn’t have the strength for anything but my death grip on my ghost knife.
“Push!” Isser called. He and Elizabeth shoved at the clumsy square I’d cut, knocking it onto the lawn outside. The ceiling buckled above me. Plaster dust fell onto my face, then time rewound and it fell on my face again. I could suddenly smell colors, then I was floating outside my body, watching Isser and Elizabeth clear the gap in the wall.
For one terrible moment, I thought they’d run without me.
They didn’t. “Up you go, Mr. Lilly. Come on, now.” I saw the two of them drag me out of the building, then lift me up, my one arm over Isser’s shoulders and Elizabeth on the other side, squeezing my rib cage so hard I could barely breathe. My spirit—soul, whatever it was—rushed back into my body and I could see through my own eyes again.
The fight was happening on the eastern side of the house, and we’d escaped through the southern wall. Elizabeth and Isser paused and turned toward the sounds of the battle. Turning to face danger was a natural response, but natural responses like that would get us all killed. “Keep going,” I muttered. “Keep fucking going.”
They did, dragging me around the house toward the western end, where the cars were parked.
By then, the living room was fully aflame, with black smoke billowing out of the doorway. We still suffered the effects of the supernatural battle nearby—moments rewound and repeated, our bodies felt lighter than air for three seconds, we were briefly struck blind again—but the effects were weaker as we withdrew and the fight seemed to be winding down.
“Into the van,” Isser said. “I suspect we’ll be getting out of here in a hurry.”
A long black Sprinter was parked behind João’s vehicles. Elizabeth slid the side door open, revealing several rows of benches and bucket seats. They heaved me into the back. Isser got behind the wheel, while Elizabeth fetched something from the back.
The four peers came around the northern end of the house, and I couldn’t see them clearly until they were lit by firelight. Annalise supported Callin. Alexandre was carrying Pratt, whose left leg was twisted like a used pipe cleaner. They piled in through the side door, Pratt cursing like a ten-year-old gamer at every jolt and bump. Isser was starting the engine before the doors were closed. He backed us out of the drive, then hit the road. Even from my spot way in the back, I could see his white knuckles on the steering wheel, but he kept us under the speed limit.
Elizabeth handed out beef jerky, along with apologies that she didn’t have anything fresh. She promised to stop off someplace once they were safely away from the scene.
“What the bloody hell was that thing?” Pratt said through clenched teeth.
“A shapeshifter,” Callin answered. “The toughest shapeshifter I’ve ever faced.”
I turned to Annalise. “You guys destroyed it, right?” I didn’t want to leave another predator in the world like we did at Hammer Bay.
“We did,” she said. “How are you?”
I must have looked pretty bad, because I felt like I might pass out at any moment, and the arm I didn’t have ached like a motherfucker. “I’m heartbroken over all the cash we left to burn up back there.”
Elizabeth glanced at me. “The money and diamonds are in the back. I took care of that first thing, before you came around.”
“Nobody ignores the money,” Annalise said. I felt like laughing, but I didn’t have the strength.
Alexandre turned to me. By the light of a passing streetlamp, I could see half of his face had been torn off. “How did you know?”
There was no putting off this conversation. “A bunch of little things, starting with how often he fucked up. You don’t become a big shot in your field and then start making basic errors unless you’re faking it. Elizabeth, are there any peers left in the palace?”
“Yes. Herr Nordberg is there, and perhaps—”
“Yeah, okay, look, have him go with Anita to Roman’s office or his rooms or whatever.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” Pratt muttered.
“His quarters,” Elizabeth said, going pale.
“Okay. His quarters. Tell her to check the closet for a bunch of suits that are too tall for him. Like, six inches too tall. Especially a dark blue one with a pale yellow tie.”
From the front, Isser said, “Dmitry was wearing a suit like that.”
Elizabeth pressed speed dial on her phone and spoke quietly into it.
“I don’t think there was a Dmitry,” I said. “Maybe not for a long time. Look, Roman did a lot of shit to give himself away. He sabotaged the investigation into the Kiels three times. He tried to throw us off the Kiels’ trail by sending us south or west toward the ocean.”
“Predators avoid the water,” Annalise said.
“Right, so are they going to make a break for it by boat? I don’t think so. They were always going to run inland, and he should have known it. He also told Maria to stop following the Kiels once they got off the train, and he missed the fake wall in the basement. Plus, the guy was a decorated cop but he never took a second look at João, a guy who was hanging around your secret entrance? Fuck, no. That’s the real giveaway. Cops are the least trusting people in the world. They’d pat down their g
randmothers during choir practice just on general principle.”
“So, you knew he was a phony,” Alexandre said. His accent made the last word sound comical. “How did you know he was not human?”
“Where do the predators come from?”
“The Empty Spaces,” he answered.
“Elizabeth and Isser used the same phrase. So did João. But that’s not what Roman said. He called it the Deeps. The only person I ever met who called it that had a bunch of predators in him. He had to have learned it from them. Plus, he drops the from everything except that? Shit. And you know who else said it that way? Dmitry.”
I could tell they weren’t convinced, and I was running out of steam. “Look, you don’t have to believe me. Either the suits will be in his quarters or they won’t. Either Dmitry will never show up again, or he will. But I know which way I’m betting, because all of you guys have tells. Callin looks up when he hears something he likes. Annalise looks down and to the side when she gets to thinking about killing someone. Okay? Roman and Dmitry both had the same tic. This.” I pressed the tip of my right thumb against the space above my nose and stroked my eyebrow. Oddly enough, it felt comforting.
Alexandre was scowling at me. “It could be a common thing. Both were Russian.”
“Roman was supposed to be Ukrainian, but whatever. Maybe it’s a common thing from that part of the world, but I was a car thief in LA and I was a convict. I’ve met a lot of Russians, but never one who did that. Besides, Dmitry is older than Csilla, right? How did he stay lucid when she couldn’t?”
“Perhaps he…” Callin said. He couldn’t finish the sentence.
Annalise said: “Let’s wait for Anita to call back.”
Elizabeth’s phone rang ten minutes later. Anita had gone through Roman’s things and found the suits, but she didn’t know what they meant.
We did. It meant that Dmitry wasn’t coming and going mysteriously from the First Palace. He never left.
Pratt turned to Annalise. “How long have you known?”
“Since yesterday, when Ray told me his suspicions. But they were only suspicions. What do you think, Ray? Do you think Dmitry knew the society recruited Roman, then killed him before he ever walked through the front door?”
I put my head against the window. I needed sleep. “That’s how I would have done it, boss. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ate the guy Roman replaced. Once he was in place, he could squelch all the reports he wanted to protect his predator buddies.”
Annalise turned to the others. “The money for this job? It goes to Ray.” Nobody objected. She turned to me. “We’re going back to our hotel. I figure a week of steak and sashimi will make you whole again, but you aren’t going to enjoy it.”
They were all still staring at me, but I had no idea what they were thinking.
“I’ll get through. I’ll just keep thinking about all that beautiful money.”
About the Author
Child of Fire, Harry Connolly's debut novel and the first in the Twenty Palaces series, was named to Publishers Weekly's Best 100 Novels of 2009. The sequel, Game of Cages, was released in 2010 and the third book, Circle of Enemies, came out in 2011, as did a prequel (cleverly) titled Twenty Palaces.
King Khan, a pulp adventure novel based on the role-playing game Spirit of the Century, was released in 2013 by game company Evil Hat.
Later in 2013, Harry ran a Kickstarter for his apocalyptic epic fantasy trilogy, The Great Way, which was released in 2015. As stretch goals for that project, he published his pacifist urban fantasy A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark, and the short fiction collection Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy, which includes the Twenty Palaces short story “The Homemade Mask.”
Harry lives in Seattle with his beloved wife, his beloved son, and his beloved library system. You can find him online at: http://www.harryjconnolly.com
Praise for the Twenty Palaces novels:
“[Child of Fire] is excellent reading and has a lot of things I love in a book: a truly dark and sinister world, delicious tension and suspense, violence so gritty you’ll get something in your eye just reading it, and a gorgeously flawed protagonist. Take this one to the checkout counter. Seriously.” — Jim Butcher
“Connolly doesn’t shy away from tackling big philosophical issues . . . amid gory action scenes and plenty of rapid-fire sardonic dialogue.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review), on Game of Cages
“An edge-of-the-seat read! Ray Lilly is the new high-water mark of paranormal noir.” — Charles Stross
The Twisted Path, a Twenty Palaces Novella Page 8