My stomach suddenly felt like it was full of lead. “Really?”
“Really. And that’s not the only one.” She sighed. “The society isn’t what it used to be. Which reminds me: don’t ask Csilla any questions. Be careful around her. If she doesn’t recognize you during one of her bad moments, she might attack. You don’t want that.” Before I could respond, she asked: “How did Talbot do?”
Time to change the subject, apparently. “He’s a smacked ass. I don’t like him and I don’t want him around. He insulted the guy in that house for no reason and almost blew my chance to find out anything.”
“And you kicked him out.”
“Yeah. I was surprised he went, too. I didn’t take him for the type to knuckle under.”
“He’s not, but he’s worried about you. He knows you’re the reason he’s here, and he wants your approval.”
“Um, what’s that again, boss?”
“You, Ray. You’re a wooden man, and you’re still out here fighting.”
I looked away from her. A wooden man was a term the Twenty Palace Society used for low-powered underlings who distract the enemy while peers hit them from behind. We were supposed to have the longevity of an ice cube on a hot desert rock.
And I had volunteered for the position. I hadn’t really known what I was doing, but when do I ever? “Boss, how is this guy my fault?”
“Because you’re successful at a time when the society has been struggling. We’ve been falling behind in this fight, Ray, for a long time. You’ve given us some rare victories lately. The peers never thought they could get this sort of success from a mere wooden man, but here you are. And they want more of you.”
“And they picked Talbot? The guy’s an asshole.”
“They’re peers. What do you expect?”
True. When it came to the society, I couldn’t keep my expectations low enough. They were killers—vigilantes, really—hunting for the Wally Kings and Caramella Harrises of the world, and they didn’t care what sort of person you were. All that mattered to them were the predators; the people killed in the crossfire were acceptable losses.
Naturally, they recruited a guy willing to fire an RPG into a crowded apartment building in L.A.
“Boss, I’ve been …” I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I have nightmares. I couldn’t say it, not to her. She wasn’t here to listen to my problems.
“I know, Ray,” she said. She kept her voice low, as though afraid someone might overhear. “You have the look. You’re constantly afraid. It’s hard to control your temper. You continually think about the things you’ve done and will have to do again.”
I nodded. Annalise wasn’t nice to me all that often. I thought I should pay attention.
She studied my face, then turned away. “Lots of things in this job will kill you, not just predators, sorcerers, or mundane threats. You can win every fight and be destroyed by the victories. A guy like that doesn’t last long.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The garage smelled of damp concrete and exhaust. That was a perspective I hadn’t considered. Of course the society was full of assholes; those were the only people who could stand it.
“Did Vela say anything else important?”
“I don’t think so, boss, but there’s magic there, and I may have heard something important without realizing it.” I remembered Steve Francois saying He sounds feisty. “The guy who owns that collection, he’s not a sorcerer, is he?” Annalise snorted as though the idea was ridiculous. “Who is he?”
She gave me a measuring look. “Remember when I told you that the society used to have two original spell books but lost them? Well, Georges Francois was one of the peers who went missing with the books.”
“Meaning what?” I wasn’t sure how far I could push the brand-new Share Time aspect of our relationship, but I was going to find out.
“Eleven peers vanished overnight along with the original books. No one knows what happened to them. Most people think two of them stole the books and betrayed the other nine. Maybe they were killed and their bodies dumped somewhere. Maybe they were banished from the planet altogether. Then each of the two took a book and went into hiding.”
“But no one knows which two.”
“No one is even certain that’s what happened. It’s possible that one or more rogue sorcerers took the books and killed all eleven peers. Or that one peer killed the other ten. Or that a predator took them. Or maybe the books left our world in some way and dragged the peers away with them. No one believes that one, though, because they don’t want to.
“What we do know is this: the peers who vanished left behind odd objects and secrets—these were damn powerful sorcerers, you know—and the Francois collection is just one of them. Some people think it contains clues to the locations of the books.”
“And these would be which books?” In Washaway, I’d heard the names of a couple of these spell books, but nothing more. “The Book of Oceans, right? Because that’s your book. And the other is the Book of Grooves?”
“I cast spells out of the Mowbray Book of Oceans, yes, but the society never had the Book of Grooves. We could never find it. We had the Book of Motes.”
“Uh, Moats? Like a castle?”
“No, motes. As in And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. “Okay.”
“Like dust motes, Ray.”
“Oh. Boss, has anyone ever come across the Francois Book of Motes or something?”
She squinted up at me. “No. No one ever has. As far as anyone knows, there hasn’t been a new primary since those books vanished. In fact, there don’t seem to be any primaries left.”
“And Wally wants to be the next. Could Wally get what he wants as a primary? Could he destroy everything?”
“He’s a dipshit, Ray. Any of us could destroy everything. All it would take is a summoning spell. You don’t have to be a primary for that. That’s the whole point.”
“But he doesn’t want to kill us all with predators. He wants to be gentle. He wants to euthanize us.”
“And he thinks becoming a primary would give him the power to wipe the world clean. All these assholes are like that. They have power, but it’s never enough. If they could just find one more spell, if they could just become a quinary, a tertiary, a secondary, if they could just find the real Book of Grooves, they’re sure they could do whatever they want. All they think about is their limitations, and they’re sure they’d be able to do anything at all if they could just get a little more power.
“Except it’s bullshit. There’s never enough power, not for that kind. What’s more, primaries were damned scary, but they weren’t powerful enough to make us all extinct. It’s not like they crapped A-bombs.”
“Okay, then.” I scratched at the spells on the back of my hand. “I guess that means that Wally already has the power to kill everyone, but he wants the power to do it a certain way. So his euthanasia plan is on hold. But if he becomes a primary, he’s going to realize he’s wasting his time and fall back on option b: summoning one predator after another.”
“Except by then he’ll be really hard to kill. So let’s hope he doesn’t wise up.” She glanced at her watch. “We should get back to Csilla. We don’t want to keep her waiting. But … go easy on yourself. Okay? Remind me sometime to tell you the story of how I got into this life.”
She started toward the elevator doors, and I followed. I wanted to hear that story. I just hoped I lived long enough to have the chance.
In the room, Csilla was back in her place at the table. Talbot hovered over her, draping a shawl over her shoulders, then setting a plate of crackers and cheese before her. She was oblivious to him, staring blankly into space. Talbot smeared a blue-and-white-speckled cheese on a cracker and passed it back and forth under her nose. She didn’t react.
He dropped the cracker onto the tray in disgust
. He was trying to be a loyal flunky, but he was beneath notice.
Annalise waved him away as she sat opposite Csilla. Talbot suddenly had nothing to do, and I turned my back so he wouldn’t approach me. The suite had a balcony. I went out onto it.
A breeze off the ocean made the sun and dry heat tolerable. We were getting toward the middle of the day, but the air was actually pleasant.
Talbot ruined it by joining me. He closed the door behind him. I had the idea that he was going to tip me over the rail, and I backed away from the edge.
“Whoa,” he said. “I’m not your enemy here.”
“Okay.”
“I got off to a bad start, didn’t I?”
“Twice.”
“Yeah. Sorry about the RPG. I knew there was magic in the apartment, and I wanted to really take care of it.”
I didn’t respond to that. It would be great to have a way to destroy predators by hitting them from a safe distance, but I didn’t have a weapon that could do it. And neither did Talbot, probably. Predators were part real, part magic. Normal weapons didn’t hurt them—most of the time, anyway. Would the drapes be vulnerable to shrapnel or concussion? What about fire? It was possible, I guessed, but not likely.
Never mind that he could have killed Jasmin, Maria, or Violet. Never mind that I should be tipping him over the rail.
Talbot exhaled through pursed lips. I guess I should have responded right away. “I don’t know if an RPG would affect those predators,” I said. “I mean, we’ll never know until we try, but from what I’ve seen, most predators can only be killed with magic. Did they give you any?”
“Nope. Not a weapon, anyway. I got these, though.” He lifted his shirt and showed me a circle of tattoos on his chest centered over his heart. I didn’t recognize them, but I knew the same spells could look different depending on which spell book they came from. He dropped his shirt and looked at me. He seemed to be waiting for something.
I lifted my shirt, too. My spells were more extensive than his, but they were also darker and thicker, making my torso look like a nest of black lines. He looked down at them with a calculating expression, like a batter studying the positions of the opposing team’s fielders.
I dropped my shirt and turned away. I wished I had resisted the temptation to share my spells with him. No way was I going to show him my ghost knife.
“Hey,” he said. “A few years ago, do you know where I was?”
“No.”
“Iraq. I was serving over there. We had some real scary shit go down, stuff you don’t even want to think about. One time—Do you mind if I tell you this?”
“Go ahead.”
“One time, we had word that there was a dude with bomb-making equipment in his house. Not that he was making it himself, supposedly he let insurgents visit him for tea and explosives lessons, right? So we made a forced entry in the middle of the night, the way we do, and we’re shouting at them, scaring the crap out of them to intimidate them. Which is for their own good, really, because if they’re not intimidated, they might do something stupid, and that’ll get them killed.
“Anyway, we drag them out of their beds, and they’re screaming and pleading with us, but we have no fucking idea what they’re saying. And the mom is yelling at the kids, and it’s all the usual chaos.
“But one of the guys on my squad, a dude from Oregon named Park, was trying to control a fifteen-year-old kid, and the kid suddenly did a jumping, spinning kick at him. I saw it, and it surprised the hell out of me. Park lost his grip on his weapon—it didn’t fly up in the air like in the movies, but he did let it get out of his hands. Crazy, right?
“And see, when I come across a snobby fag like that Vela dude, who earns a living by wiggling a feather duster back and forth, I get pissed off. He’s doing nothing, and I’m out here feeling like a fucking teenage hajji in my pajamas taking on trained soldiers with nothing but moves I learned from a cabinetful of Jackie Chan DVDs.”
“Talk to Csilla about that.”
He smiled, measuring me. “You didn’t like my story, huh?”
“At least you got some Jackie Chan movies out of it, right?”
“Damn straight,” he said. “The reason I tell you that story is that I’m ready to do whatever now that I’m in this society. I’ll be that hajji. I’m ready to do whatever it takes.”
“To accomplish what?”
His head quirked to one side. “To live forever, man. Well, I know it’s not forever, but it’s what, five hundred years?”
Great. Now the society wasn’t just hunting down people looking for magic and power, they were recruiting them. I took a deep breath to ease the anger building in my gut.
Talbot laughed a little at himself. “That was the wrong answer, wasn’t it?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Well, I figured the whole ‘I’m happy to be saving the world’ thing was a given. Guess not.”
I started toward the doorway. The balcony felt very cramped. “You’ll meet some of the people we’re going against, and you’ll see why it’s not a given at all.”
“Hey.” Talbot caught my elbow. “You don’t have to tell me. I was there. I saw it. Some guys, you take away all consequences, and they turn into monsters. Like being a human being is just a mask for them. I saw it.”
“I believe you.”
“Listen.” There was a hunger in his expression that I didn’t trust. “I just want you to know I’m committed. If these guys”—he tilted his head toward the inside of the suite—“do things the smart way, they’ll make you a DI, and I want you to know where I stand.”
“I don’t even know what a DI is.”
“DI? It’s a drill instructor.”
Goose bumps ran down my back. I yanked the door open and went into the hotel suite. No way was I going to teach anyone anything, least of all a roomful of Talbots. Let the society make them into a useful part of the crew—it would be easy to find people who knew more about hunting, fighting, and killing than I did. The only real difference was in what we cared most about, and I’d spent too long in prison to think I could change that part of a person.
Annalise stood across the room, holding the fancy silver phone to her ear. She held up her hand to signal for me to wait a moment. The platter in front of Csilla had a long hunk of salami on it, and I had a sudden craving for it. I cut it in half and began eating it like a bread stick.
Annalise hung up the phone. “Gear up, both of you,” she said. “The plane is prepped and ready, and we’ll have a boat waiting for us at the other end.”
“Okay. Where are we going?”
“Your friend Wally said he was skipping town, didn’t he?”
“Boss, don’t call him my friend. But yeah.”
“Well, thanks to you, we know where he’s going.” She pointed to a wallet on the corner of the marble tabletop.
I walked toward it. It was brown leather and stuffed with paper. It was also singed at the edges. I felt I should remember it, but I had no idea where it came from.
“It’s Wally King’s wallet,” Talbot said. “We took it out of your pocket when we brought you here.”
I suddenly remembered snatching it off the dresser in his room. “I forgot. I was distracted by being on fire.”
Talbot laughed. Annalise picked it up and dropped it into an envelope. “He had a punch card from a lunch cart in there. It belongs to a little place on Slostich Island. If King left town, it’s likely that he went there.”
“Boss, how big is this island? Because I never heard of it.”
“It’s in Canada,” Talbot said, as though it was something shameful.
Annalise added: “Thirteen months ago a cabin on the north end was bought by a man named Walter Roi. With a wire transfer.”
“That’s it? You have an address and a name?”
Annalise shook her head. “There isn’t time for anything else. We don’t even have time to send an investigator. We’re going to follow up on it ourselves. You kn
ow that roi is French for king, don’t you?”
I didn’t know that. Something about this felt wrong. Wally knew he was being hunted, and although the guy was no genius, he wasn’t entirely stupid, either. Was he stupid enough to use a comic-book alias?
“Gear up,” Annalise said again. My jump bag was still sitting on the floor by a bed at the Best Western, but it had nothing I needed, except maybe a toothbrush.
Someone knocked on the door and pushed it open. Talbot started talking about the drapes. He thought we should take them on first, then move on to the next target. His back was to the door and he was blocking Annalise’s view, so neither noticed the housekeeper as she entered. She looked to be middle-aged and of Southeast Asian ancestry, maybe Vietnamese.
Talbot’s voice was loud; I couldn’t hear what she said to Csilla. From her body language, she appeared to be asking if she could come in to clean up.
Csilla stood without answering and walked around the corner of the table. The maid stood politely with her hands folded in front of her. Csilla didn’t move fast, but it didn’t take more than a few seconds for her to stagger up to the woman.
In one quick move, Csilla clamped her small hand over the maid’s windpipe. The woman’s face twisted in sudden pain and shock as Csilla twisted.
“Hey!” I shouted stupidly. Talbot and Annalise turned toward the center of the room.
Csilla yanked the maid onto the floor, then took something out of her pocket with her free hand; it was small—about the size of a raspberry—but dark and shiny like a stone. She stuffed it into the maid’s gaping mouth.
I started forward, ready to throw myself at her, ready to slash into her with the ghost knife, but Annalise caught my wrist. I struggled, but she was too damn strong.
The maid bucked and her eyes rolled back. Csilla leaned down onto her, pinning her to the white carpet. A horrible wet rattle came from the maid’s throat.
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I twisted against Annalise, using my body weight to knock her off balance. She was strong as hell, but she weighed as much as a pile of brooms. I’d carry her across the room, if I had to.
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