Circle of Enemies: A Twenty Palaces Novel

by Harry Connolly

I willed the spell out of my hand, imagining it zipping across my body and over my face. I felt the edge of it strike the predator several times, and the creature keened in its soundless way again. Its body peeled back where it had been cut, and the tension suddenly went out of it.

  I kicked out, rolling myself onto my knees while calling my ghost knife back to me.

  There was a sudden pressure against my ears; it was trying to get inside me by going through my eardrums. I scraped the ghost knife over one side of my head, and the creature suddenly leapt away from me.

  I gasped, taking in air. My hands and head stung all the way up into my nostrils. I opened my eyes, feeling my eyelids burning where they folded.

  The predator moved away from me, dragging parts of itself on the carpet. Instead of being a liquid shimmer, it was frayed, like torn rags blowing in the wind.

  I threw my ghost knife at it, willing it to hit the center. It did. The thing split apart, turned pallid gray, and fell to the carpet with a squerching sound. Dead.

  I felt a sudden rush of triumph and fury. I’d faced another creature from the Empty Spaces, and I’d beaten it. My mind seemed to rev into overdrive, but after a moment I realized I was just coming back to myself—the predator had tried to take my mind along with my body, but my iron gate had partly blocked it, and now I could think clearly again.

  My whole body was drenched with sweat, and I gasped in heavy, ragged breaths. Damn, my whole head was really starting to burn.

  I moved toward the bathroom. I’d definitely seen a second predator coming out of the tub, but was there a third, and a fourth? Was there a thousandth? As much as I was ready to take my victory and retreat, there was no one else here. I was the only one who could stop these predators. I had to open that bathroom door and fight.

  The knob trembled slightly as something on the other side moved against the door. I reached out just as I saw a flicker of movement near the floor.

  I jumped back. Another predator had pushed under the door, flowing through the narrow crack and protruding toward me. And I’d nearly stepped in it. I’d been so focused on the doorknob that I had missed the threat below me.

  It struck at me like a hungry snake.

  There was no time to think. I grabbed hold of the creature’s farthest end—it felt strangely like a muscle—and slashed the ghost knife through it. The predator collapsed, almost splashing onto the carpet, then vanished.

  In a panic, I fell to my knees, gouging and slashing with my spell. I’d thought it had escaped somehow, and that I’d let a predator get loose in the world. Then the strange keening returned. The thing was still below me, but it had turned invisible. I kept cutting. After several more slashes, it turned a pallid gray and died.

  Were there only two? If I opened the door, predators might flood out at me like a breaking dam. I crouched low, waiting to see if another predator would try to squeeze under, but I didn’t see anything. I swiped my ghost knife through the crack but didn’t connect with anything.

  Fine. If there were more inside, they weren’t coming out. The stinging on my face and hands had become worse—it felt like every patch of bare skin the creature had touched was coated with a film of weak acid. The pain grew and grew, and eventually I had to act, because waiting made me think about the pain too much.

  I shoved the bathroom door open, darted inside, and slammed it shut. The predators weren’t fast enough to have gotten out—at least, I hoped not. I yanked a towel off the rack and kicked it against the bottom of the door.

  In the tub, I saw only a faint bath ring. The vast, deep darkness of the Empty Spaces was gone. Good. I didn’t have a way to close a portal into another universe.

  But had more predators come through? I couldn’t see anything, but I hadn’t seen that second one after it went flat on the floor.

  I bent down and swiped my ghost knife against the floor, barely splitting the linoleum, then I did it again and again. The marks spiraled out one from another, covering the whole floor and moving up the walls and cabinets. I made long vertical slashes six inches apart, then I stepped up onto the toilet and did the same to the ceiling.

  I was especially careful with the window. I didn’t want to cut it open, in case a predator was looking for a way out. I did scrape through the wooden jamb and latch, though.

  Then I fell to my knees and opened the cabinet under the sink. I cut through all of it, including the drainpipe. There was no keening sound, and while one of these predators might have escaped down the drain, I doubted it. The space under the door was much larger than the pipe, and it would have been a struggle to squeeze through.

  Two. There had only been two. I was blearily glad that I’d turned on the air-conditioning and closed the bathroom window.

  And I couldn’t stand the burning on my skin anymore. I’d forced myself to stay and search the bathroom carefully, but the pain had become unbearable.

  I ran into the kitchen, stuck my head in the sink, and sprayed cold water into my hair. The effect was sudden and wonderful—my skin was still hurting, but the acid film dissolved and washed away on contact with the water.

  I did my hands, my neck, and my face. Finally, I got a turkey baster out of a drawer, filled it with water, and sprayed the water into my nostrils several times.

  Better. Better. I still felt the pain, but at least it wasn’t getting any worse.

  I wandered back into the bathroom. It was all ruined, of course. Melly would need a contractor to come in here to fix what I’d done, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry. The pain was still there, and my fear was too recent. I picked up a bottle of aloe gel and began dabbing the stuff onto my face. It dulled the pain even more.

  I glanced down at my sleeve. It was wet but perfectly clean. The predator had wrapped itself around my arm, but it hadn’t left a stain on my clothes.

  The predators had hurt my skin in exactly the same way that Summer’s handprint had, and Caramella’s slaps. They were hard to see, too. When they were attacking they looked a lot like heat shimmers in the air. But the predator that had squeezed under the door had gone flat and vanished. I’d looked right at it and hadn’t seen it.

  It was invisible. Just like Summer.

  Summer had to have one of these predators on her, and she must have been protected from it somehow. Well, “somehow” wasn’t really much of a mystery. Someone had cast a spell on her. She was wrapped up by a predator that wanted to devour her but couldn’t.

  The thought gave me shivers.

  My face felt a little stiff and I looked like I had a bit of sunburn, but that was all. I’d gotten off easy.

  Back in the living room, the pile of goop on the floor looked smaller. Was my mind playing a trick, or was the dead predator dissolving? I took a sock from a drawer in the bedroom and laid it beside the gray mess. Slowly, the goop receded from it. It was vanishing on its own. How considerate.

  I took a chair from the desk and sat beside it. My hands were shaking. It was strange that my hands were shaking so long after the fight. I kept control. I breathed as slowly and as evenly as I could while the predator’s corpse vanished in front of me.

  Under normal circumstances, I would have burned Melly’s house to the ground. These weren’t normal circumstances because this was Melly’s house. When she and her guy returned …

  I looked around. The faint garbage stink was still there. The place felt empty. They weren’t coming back—I knew they weren’t—and to hell with this pretty little house.

  I fetched a cotton robe, a candle, and a lighter from the bathroom, then closed all the curtains. I lit the candle and arranged it and the robe beside the edge of the couch. Then I lit the robe. The flames spread down to the throw pillows, and I knew that it would soon spread to the curtains and carpet.

  The lock on the front door was still broken. I went out the back way, walked down the block, and got into my car. I didn’t drive by Melly’s house. I wouldn’t have been able to see the flames behind the curtains, and I didn’t wan
t to try.

  Five years ago, Melly had been a good friend to me. We’d been part of the same crew, had joked and laughed together. Now, as a wooden man in the society, I was burning her house down.

  I didn’t want to think about that, but I felt like a complete bastard.

  What to do next? It was after three in the morning; the sun wouldn’t rise for hours, and I’d never be able to sleep. There was no use going to Violet’s place. If Arne had gone out looking for cars to steal, he would have already quit for the night. At best, he’d be at Long Beach, loading stolen SUVs into shipping containers. The very early morning hours were no good for boosting cars, he’d always said. No one else was on the street, and it was too easy to get noticed.

  I drove back to the Bigfoot Room. The bar was closed, of course. I parked down the block and walked by the outside. There were no bullet holes in the glass front. None of the shots had gone in that direction. I checked the top of the door; someone had already wiped the words BIGFOOT ROOM away.

  I walked around to the alley, half expecting to find stinking clouds of tear gas there, but of course there weren’t. Even the smell was gone.

  The security light above the bar’s back door gave me enough light to look around, but first I waved my arms and kicked my feet along the walls in case an invisible person was standing there. I didn’t find any.

  The fire exit had a half dozen bullet holes punched through it. My eyes had been closed for most of the gunfire, but it appeared that the bullets had gone in one direction—toward Arne.

  Then I noticed my name. I stepped closer to the door and saw that someone had written my name in black Sharpie. It read: RAY LOVES TO HANG AT THE QUILL AND TYRANT ANY TIME OF DAY OR NIGHT.

  I touched the ink; it wasn’t wet. It could have been graffiti written by a disgruntled customer, but the way it was phrased made me think it was a message for me, in case I came back. Arne would never have been sloppy enough to leave a message right where the cops would see it, but maybe Bud or Robbie would.

  I returned to my car. I knew people could look up addresses with their computers or with more expensive phones than the one I’d thrown away, but I was going to have to make do with the yellow pages.

  I went back to my motel room and looked up the Quill and Tyrant. The address was in North Hollywood; I had to drive back the way I’d just come.

  The Quill was just a door in a cinder-block box, and of course the lights were out. It was after 5 A.M. I went up to the door anyway and looked through the window. Everything was pitch-black inside, except for one lone beer sign.

  When I turned around, there was a cop car at the curb, with a cop inside it asking me what I thought I was doing. I told him I’d lost my credit card and started looking around on the sidewalk. He grunted, looked me over once, and drove away without wishing me luck.

  When he’d turned the corner, I walked around the building to the back. There was a dumpster back there along with a row of recycling bins. Behind that, by the cellar door, was a heavily tattooed Mexican man with a crooked nose and full beard. He was smoking a reefer, and he had a .45 S&W in his lap. He looked so stoned he was nearly comatose. “You got lost,” he said.

  “I’m looking for Robbie. Is this the right place?”

  He laid his hand on his weapon. “Ain’t no Robbie here.”

  “My mistake,” I said, and started to leave.

  “Hey! I didn’t say you could go. Who’re you?”

  I turned back and looked him in the eye. It had been a couple years since I left prison and this life behind me, but I knew better than to show fear or try to make friends. “I’m Ray,” I said, keeping my voice flat.

  He pursed his lips in a parody of thought. He really was amazingly stoned. I wondered, briefly, if I could rush him if I had to. “Ray Lilly?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Well, you should have said so. Go ahead down. Fidel is waiting for you.”

  Fidel? I didn’t know anyone named Fidel. But Stoned had waved at the cellar door, so I stepped toward it and lifted it open.

  Light and music came through the opening, but no voices. I walked down the stairs, letting the door fall closed behind me. There were two more young guys on my left, both tattooed and bearded like Stoned. Bud and Summer sat on a low couch on my right. Robbie stood at the far end of the room with a very short, very muscular man with a shaved head. He was covered with jailhouse tattoos, including one along the side of his neck that said THUG in Gothic letters.

  And everyone was watching me.

  Robbie smiled. “Ray! You got my message.”

  He didn’t walk toward me, so I walked toward him. “Good to see you again, Robbie.”

  His smile faltered a little. “That ain’t my name anymore, dude. It never was. It’s Fidel Robles.”

  “Really?” I said. “All those years we knew each other and you never told me your real name?”

  He shrugged and smiled more broadly. His teeth were straight and white, his face full. He looked healthier than anyone in the crew, myself included. “I used to be embarrassed, man. My parents named me after an enemy of America! Oh no! The shame!” He laughed, and I laughed with him. “Then one day I realized I had brown skin just like Castro, and a nasty habit of taking things from rich people. Then I realized, hey, I’m an enemy of America, too. And proud of it.”

  I laughed and held out my hand. “It’s good to see you again, Fidel.”

  He glanced down at my hand but didn’t take it. His expression told me that he thought it was a test he didn’t want to take, which it was. “I know you know,” he said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I let my hand and my smile drop. “We gotta talk about this,” I said.

  “I agree.” Robbie waved toward the room. It was just basement storage—a couple of stools with torn seat covers in the corner, a massive beer fridge against one wall, with stacks of whiskey crates beside it. There was a tatty carpet on the far side of the room, and a yard-sale couch set on it. Bud and Summer were all alone over there. “Humble beginnings, huh? But we’re tired of being humble. We’re ready to move into the big time.”

  Arne had looked at me with resentment and anger. But Robbie looked ready to thank me. “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “I got a super power! Want to hear my origin story? It’s pretty fucked up.”

  “Actually, I do. I really, really do.”

  “That’s cool, Ray, but later. I need something from you first. Okay? We got more important things to talk about. What did Arne say when he called you back to L.A.?”

  “It wasn’t Arne,” I told him. His smile became a little strained, as though he didn’t believe me. “It was Caramella. She said she was in trouble.”

  “Come on, Ray. Are you kidding me?”

  “Of course not. Caramella came to see me in Seattle. She said everyone was in trouble and that it was all my fault.”

  “Well, she was wrong. I’m not sure I’ll ever be in trouble again.” He rubbed his chin, thinking of a new way to come at me. “Ray, you know that Arne was never really your friend.”

  “I know it.” Robbie had been the closest thing I had to a friend. Still, though: only the closest thing. “And you were his second-in-command.”

  “Yeah, but he trusted you. He always thought you were smart.”

  “And he kept food in our bellies and games in the PlayStation. So why aren’t you with him anymore?”

  “I already told you, dude. We’re through playing it safe. No more stealing cars, no more tiny payouts. We jumped the fence. No one can touch us now, so we’re moving up.”

  “To what?”

  “Anything we want! If I want to rob a bank, I can do it. If I want to kill a guy—even the best-protected guy in the world—I can do that, too. How much you want to pay me to kill the royal family in England? I could fly over there and fly back in a couple days and the job would be done. Me, I’d have the money in my Swiss bank account.”

  I s
tared at him, trying to decide if he was joking. I was pretty sure everything Robbie knew about being an international hit man came from the movies.

  “You don’t look all that convinced, Ray.”

  “Can I hear that origin story now?”

  “Don’t you get it? You could be in with us. I’m going to take my cousins over to see your boy later, and you could come with us.”

  “Wally King isn’t my boy.”

  “Oh yeah? He told us he was your friend.”

  I couldn’t talk for a moment because my jaw wouldn’t unclench. Wally had murdered a woman to steal spells from her. He’d claimed to be able to cure any disease or injury, when all he could really do was implant predators into people—including the oldest friend I had in the world. He’d turned my friend Jon into a monster, and God help me, when Annalise came to put a stop to it, I’d fought her.

  And now he was telling people we were friends? “Rob—I mean, Fidel, the last time I saw Wally I tried to kill him.” And I’d try again, as soon as I could.

  “Does he know about that? ’Cause he’s still talking about you like you’re his bestest pal.”

  “Can I hear that origin story now?”

  He sighed, sounding a little irritated, then turned into a silhouette. I caught a brief glimpse of the Empty Spaces, and he vanished. I held myself completely still, listening. What the hell should I do?

  Before I could come up with a good idea, he suddenly reappeared in the same spot, but now he was pointing a gun at my face.

  I jumped back and ducked low, my heart pounding. The door was too far for me to run to with a gun on me, and there were too many of them for me to start swinging. I had to fight an overwhelming urge to attack! attack!

  Fidel laughed and his cousins laughed with him. Summer and Bud watched me quietly from the couch, their expressions closed. The laughter made me furious, made me want to blow myself up like a bomb, but I swallowed it. It was time to stop thinking of him as Robbie, the guy who could never beat me at Mortal Kombat but always made me laugh. This was someone else.

  The jeering laughs slowly died down. Fidel seemed sorry they had to end. “Damn, Ray. Living easy up in Seattle has made you soft. You’re jumpy. I was just showing you my new piece. It’s a SIG Sauer, just like those Blackwater guys in Iraq use.” He slid his gun into the waistband of his pants. “But I’m not sure you can really appreciate it from all the way down there.”