She lay tangled in the bushes by the front gate, and two LAPD uniforms struggled toward her, guns drawn. Her expression was furious and frustrated.
A cop turned toward the house, and I ducked out of sight.
Wally was gone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I ran into the kitchen. Ty, Summer, and Fidel were gone, and so was Wally. Had they carried him away? I doubted it. They wouldn’t have stuck around for the whole of that beating.
Lino Vela was still here—his bones were all over the floor. And there was his coffee thermos, and the little statue that Wally had wanted so badly. A burning piece of table lay against the wall, and there was a small fire on the wooden counter. Goose bumps ran down my back as I went near it, but it wasn’t spreading like the fire that had burned me a few days earlier. No polyester.
I picked up the statue. The urge to return it to the shelf was strong, even though the shelf didn’t exist anymore.
Someone pounded on the front door. The cops were about to bust in, and here I was standing in a ruined house beside a dead man’s bones. Even better, Lino’s gun lay in the corner.
I picked it up and fired two shots into the floor. The pounding changed to cursing and retreating voices. That may have bought me a few seconds, but when the cops came, they were going to come in force.
The compulsion to put the statue down was strong. Instead, I laid the edge of my ghost knife against the cut part of the man’s neck.
And damn if that wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. The enchantment on the statue demanded that I ignore it, but the ghost knife cut right through all that. The ghost knife wanted to cut the statue. I slid it through the metal, and the head fell, thunking to the ground.
I picked up the head—there was nothing usual about it—and set it on the counter. On the statue, there was a tiny hole on the cut stump of the neck.
It was small, less than half the size of the mouth of a soda straw. I angled it toward the window, hoping daylight might show a sliver of paper inside, and something blue spilled out.
The liquid dangled from the statue like a long, thin line of mucus. I righted the figurine and the stream zipped back up into the opening. Damn. What was that?
I grabbed Lino’s coffee thermos off the floor and spun the lid off.
The liquid poured out of the statue in a thin, milky-blue stream. I tossed the statue away, and the spell’s effects faded. The compulsion had been laid on the statue, not on this strange fluid. In fact, there was an odd feeling to the liquid—an absence, almost, as though it wasn’t really there.
Whatever. I twisted the lid on tight. Time to go.
I snatched a big bottle of corn oil off the counter and splashed it onto the floor, then onto the hall carpet. In the other room, the phone rang. I tossed the oil onto the floor beside the spreading fire. Then I grabbed an antique lantern off the floor and smashed it against the burning wood. Firelight chased me out the back door.
No one shouted, “FREEZE! POLICE!” I vaulted over the back fence into the next yard. A huge brown mastiff raised his head to look at me, then lowered it again. It was too damn hot to bark.
I ran around the side of the house and let myself through the gate onto the sidewalk. There were no cop cars racing down the block, although I could hear more approaching.
I crossed the street and walked to the corner, keeping my pace slow and steady. People were coming out of their houses, and I stood at the curb in a knot of them as a cop car went by, sirens screaming. Sweat ran down my back, and my mouth was dry.
An old lady gave me a suspicious look as I stepped off the curb—I’d taken too many punches to be truly anonymous. I crossed the street, slipping through a crowd of lookie-loos, then I got into the Hummer and drove away. I took a deep breath for what felt like the first time in hours.
If those patrol cars had gotten there a few minutes sooner, I would have been trapped. For once I’d had a bit of luck.
But something was nagging at me, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Something Arne had said? I turned my attention to other things to let my subconscious work on it. Ty, Summer, and Fidel were on the loose, and whatever was left of Wally had gotten away. I couldn’t even catch a thought, let alone predators …
In a panic, I pulled into a strip mall and parked. I threw open the back door and poked into the empty cargo space with the base of the thermos. It wasn’t empty after all; the bodies of the guards were still there. All of them, I hoped, but I couldn’t tell unless I climbed in and started moving them around with my bare hands, and I wasn’t going to do that.
I took another deep breath and pressed my trembling hands on the back door. Annalise wasn’t around to burn the drapes to ash, which meant I needed to find the circle Wally had used to summon them, if it still existed. If it didn’t, I didn’t know what the hell I’d do. Could I stash them somewhere until Annalise got herself released? Although I was pretty sure she had run out of green ribbons and had no idea how long it took her to make new ones.
I leaned against the bumper and wiped my face with my shirttail. God, I hated sweat on my face. And I was thirsty, too. Of course Wally had come here in August; it was like he wanted to give me extra reasons to hate him. Why couldn’t he have holed up in that cabin in the woods? The breeze was cool there.
There was a Starbucks in the shopping mall, so I ducked inside and bought a bottle of water. It cost too much, but a little sign by the fridge promised that some of the money would go to help people somewhere get something. Clean water, apparently.
I was happy to spend some money on a well or whatever. I sure as hell wasn’t doing any good as a wooden man. Wally had gotten away, and so had all the others. I went back out to the car and sat behind the wheel, drinking the cool water slowly and thinking about all the things I didn’t do to stop them. I hadn’t threatened anyone’s children or torn someone’s limbs off. I hadn’t burned an innocent man to death.
Annalise was as ruthless as ever, and remembering what she’d done to Lino and Wally made me shiver in the sweltering car. Then again, next to Csilla she was practically a hero.
Damn, I was tired. The thermos lay on the seat next to me. I unscrewed the cap. The liquid was the same milky-blue color I’d seen in the fire-lit kitchen, even though it was at the bottom of the dark thermos. It was as though it had one color, no matter what light hit it.
For a moment I was tempted to gulp it down. Wasn’t that what people did on hot summer days? I swirled it around the cup instead. Whatever this was, it had been sealed in an iron container for decades, possibly longer, and I didn’t even like to drink a Coke that had been left out open overnight.
I poured a little into my cupped hand. It pooled like mercury—although it obviously wasn’t that—but even stranger was the thin line of milky blue that connected the stuff in my hand with the stuff in the now upright thermos.
It wouldn’t be divided. It flowed like a liquid but held together. I was glad I hadn’t drunk it. I still had my ghost knife, of course, but I left it in my pocket. I suspected that using it against this “clue” was another bad idea.
Now that I was touching the stuff—looking at it, too—I could feel the weird absence of it again. It was almost as if it wasn’t really there.
Actually, that wasn’t quite right. Just as the drapes’ portals were openings to another place, this liquid looked like an intrusion from another place. It felt oddly like it was pressing against me—against everything around me.
I was getting used to receiving strange impressions from magic, but I wished I understood them better.
The tiny pool of liquid in my hand swirled and rippled. I peered closer, trying to see what was making it move. Was something alive in there, but so small that I couldn’t see it?
I should have poured it back into the thermos, but I didn’t. There was something about the way it flowed upward from my hand to the thermos and back again that captured my attention. I was entranced.
My thoughts began to run free
, growing and changing into something alien. It was as if they’d broken out of shackles that I hadn’t known were there. My mind felt huge and monstrous …
Then the world turned to darkness.
For a moment I thought I’d gone blind. A strange whistling trill of panic blasted at me from somewhere, and the weird echo it made told me I wasn’t in the Hummer anymore. I made myself still, trying to figure out what had happened. Where had that sound come from? What was I seeing?
Because I was seeing something, but I couldn’t get a mental grip on what it was. I could feel myself floating. Once, years before, I’d cast a spell that had sent me into the Empty Spaces. I’d floated then, too, but I could still see dark mist against an even darker background, huge predators gliding past, and whole worlds spinning below, obscured by darkness.
This wasn’t that. I could hear a continuous, confused trilling, and there were moving shapes nearby. I tried to reach forward with my hands, hoping to grab the steering wheel of Francois’s stupid Hummer, but there was nothing in front of me.
The shapes moved away, and I realized I was perceiving them with senses that were completely new. It was as though I was seeing and feeling them at once, and not just the edges, either. I almost laughed, and the trilling suddenly changed.
The noise was coming from me; with a sudden, dreamlike certainty, I understood that it was an expression of my own thoughts—my confusion, analysis, and emotional responses. I was broadcasting like a radio tower.
I forced myself to be silent, which wasn’t easy. My “arms” wavered in front of me like the tails of kites, if kite tails had large hooks on their ends. The other shapes had long arms with hooks for hands, but they kept them around their middles.
The shapes were round and soft, and they floated by without paying me much notice. Only one, darker and more dense than the others, approached me. It trilled a greeting, and hearing its voice was like thinking its thoughts. I knew my vision had changed, but obviously my hearing had as well.
It was surprisingly easy to send a greeting in return; I only had to think it without trying to hold it back. The sound left me and became a thought in the other creature’s head.
I was dreaming, obviously. Only a dream—and a fucked-up one at that—would have this kind of absurd certainty.
The dark, dense creature opposite me thought a warning into me, letting me know that calling someone unreal or absurd was a serious insult. I sent back an apology.
It moved away from me, trilling a burst of notes that told me it was my host and I should stay close. I complied without hesitation. Having someone else’s words appear in my mind as though they were my own thoughts made for a damn compelling request. After a moment of trying out my new body, I floated in its trail.
I was getting used to my new perceptions. I sensed that my host was dark and dense because he was scarred. I realized, with the sudden certainty that you get in a dream, that he’d fought in a war. My host had hooked arms, too, but only six of them. I had nine. I felt a twinge of envy at that, but it felt like someone else’s emotion and I held it in.
I willed my arms to wrap around my midsection the way my host wrapped his, tucking them in place. It was probably bad manners to walk around with sharp blades at the ready, like walking through a shopping mall with a bowie knife in your hand. Other creatures like us floated by, trilling conversations about math that I couldn’t understand.
A sudden stabbing pain in my guts startled me. Was I sick? I slowed down. My host matched my new pace and played a short melody of sympathy. I knew immediately that this body was dying, and it was impossible to tell the difference between my host’s pity and self-pity.
What kind of screwed-up dream turned other people’s opinion of you into your own thoughts? I didn’t want to be here anymore. Maybe it would be better to wake up in the Hummer now.
We quickly reached a narrow opening in the ground. To my dream senses it was as impenetrable as any well or cave. My host told me to enter. Before I realized that it had been his thought, not mine, I was too close. Suction caught hold of me and dragged me inside, into the darkness.
Then I popped out like a kid at the bottom of a slide. I scuffed along the gritty stone floor and painfully managed to rise into the air again. My host popped out of the tube behind me with more grace. I felt clumsy and vulnerable, and that made me angry.
My host asked if I was well, and I snapped back that I was fine. It wasn’t offended. Maybe that’s what it meant for one of these creatures to go to war; it’d had other people’s dying thoughts in its head without dying itself.
It led me down a tunnel into a room as large as a tennis court. I stopped just inside the entrance at the top of a long slope. Indirect “light” shone through gaps in the wall, but the room was dim to my dream senses.
Then other creatures like me entered the room, although the dim light made them little more than silhouettes. They filed in from somewhere, casually falling into ranks like soldiers.
God, it was so much like the food bank in Washaway that I couldn’t breathe. My dream body wanted to broadcast my panic but held it in. I’d had dozens of nightmares about the pets—no, people—I killed in Washaway, but none of them had been like this. This was too much. I backed toward the entrance.
One of the creatures moved toward me just the way the pets had, and I lost control.
The hooks around my torso untwined, and a loud trill whistled out of me. I knew I was beaming fear, fury, and the memory of what I’d done in Washaway directly into the minds of the creatures below me. I backed away from them, holding my “arms” out like a cobra’s hood to warn them away.
They fell into a panic, crowding toward the exits and trilling in fear.
My host came toward me and, over the blare of panic and confusion, unleashed a single blast of noise. It was almost above my range of hearing, and it turned my mind into a still, dark nothingness.
I awoke in the same alien body, feeling myself being pulled down the hall. I felt the gritty stone floor and suddenly knew that this wasn’t a dream—it wasn’t a vision. I was here, somehow, in this body and in this place. The liquid I’d found in that statue had transported me here, and …
My host loomed above me. It placed a single barb on the center of my body and at the same moment made a sound like a soothing, sustained note. It was telling me I had nothing to fear, unless I lashed out. I understood and was still.
Then it asked for the story at the source of my fear, and the tones it used were impossible to resist. I answered, and the sounds that came out of me told everything—every nuance—in a startlingly short time. It felt like opening up my mind.
My host kept putting questions into me, and I kept responding. I couldn’t hold back. These creatures didn’t seem to understand secrets, and they certainly didn’t understand shame.
It stole my entire life story within ten minutes, maybe less. I tried to make it stop, but it pressed its long spike a little harder against my flesh and urged me on. It couldn’t understand that it was taking something from me.
Then it promised to “fix” me.
It told me that I could keep my memory of the pets—of the people I’d killed, but it was going to erase the awful feelings that came with it. It couldn’t grasp why humans felt guilt or shame, and it was certain I’d be better off without it.
The Twenty Palace Society would make me its new poster boy.
No, I told it. No. I was a human being and I didn’t want to be changed into something else.
It said I was too damaged to make this choice for myself.
I swung one of my hooked arms at it, aiming for its center. I knew my attack was feeble, but I didn’t expect to kill the creature. I expected the creature to kill me.
And that’s what it did. There was a sudden sharp pain as the hook went in, then I was back inside the Hummer, staring down at the milky-blue liquid in my hand.
I carefully poured the liquid into the thermos and twisted the lid back on. I set the
thermos into the cup holder. Spilling any of it would be a terrible thing. Terrible.
Then I began to scream.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I didn’t scream for long. For one thing, it didn’t make me feel better, not even a little bit. For another, it was a waste of time. I had predators in the back of my car. I didn’t have time to freak out.
I looked over at the thermos on the seat next to me. What the hell had just happened?
There was a sudden knock on my window. A chubby guy with a thick Vandyke was standing by my door.
The windows on the Hummer were electric, and I didn’t want to fumble with the controls trying to lower them—that would be a sure sign that the vehicle wasn’t mine. I opened the door a crack.
“Hey, man,” he said. “You okay?”
And here I thought nobody in L.A. cared. “No,” I answered. “I just got fired.”
“Oh. Um …”
“Thanks for asking.”
He accepted that and, his good deed accomplished, walked away. I was going to have to be more careful where I had my meltdowns.
I put my hand on the key in the ignition, then put it back into my lap. Where was I going to go? I had no plan, and no idea where to find Wally, Arne, or the others. I picked up the thermos again.
The liquid inside had sent me to some other place. Not the Empty Spaces, though—there was no air, no stone chambers, no caves there. It was all mists and nothingness. Another planet? This planet in the distant past or far future? I had no way to know for sure. What I did know is that those creatures were going to put thoughts into my head.
I have the Book of Oceans. The realization hit me like a medicine ball in the gut. The statue wasn’t a clue; it was a container. Every sorcerer and wannabe sorcerer in the world was looking for this, and 98 percent of them would be willing to nuke the city and sift the ashes for it.
Annalise wanted it most of all. The Twenty Palace Society was fading without its spell books; it was losing ground against sorcerers who summoned predators. If Annalise got her hands on this, she’d share it with the other peers. She’d share it with Csilla.
Circle of Enemies: A Twenty Palaces Novel Page 25