I wished the Warlock would come back soon so I could get more information about where and how he’d found the ocularis. “He said he knew when he got the stone it wasn’t for himself, but for a one-eyed girl. Is that charmy metaphor, or literal? Did he mean he got this thing twelve years ago, way before I even came here, specifically for me?”
“I’m at a loss as to what any of this might actually mean,” Pal admitted. “Did anything happen to you twelve years ago?”
“I’d have been eleven, and my mother…“ I trailed off, realizing that the Warlock found the ocularis around the time my mom had died saving me from inoperable cancer.
“Dammit dammit dammit I don’t like this fate bullshit!” I yelled, smacking the floor with my palm in fear and frustration. The impact made my knuckles ache sharply, but I didn’t care. “I don’t like predestination even as… as a concept. ‘Cause the big take-home message there is we don’t have free will and never did. It means we’re nothing but a bunch of puppets.”
“That’s an extremely negative view,” Pal protested gently. “Certain things are meant to come to pass, but not everything. Many of us see destiny as a positive guiding force in the universe, a thing to be embraced.”
“Fate, destiny, whatever… it makes us nothing better than marionettes,” I insisted. “And I don’t like getting jerked around, even for the good of the universe.”
I was silent as I considered the primary string-puller in my world. “Do you think this ocularis could have been planted here by Jordan? Could he have cast some kind of memory-change spell on the Warlock to make him believe he got the stone twelve years ago? When in reality Jordan’s men slipped the thing into his box just a couple of days ago while he was out cold? Could this thing be transmitting everything I see to Jordan’s crystal ball?”
“That’s… an exceptionally paranoid hypothesis, although I can’t immediately dismiss it,” Pal admitted. “But really, that would require an incredibly intricate set of enchantments. And why would he give you the benefit of sight through it at all, much less extrasensory views?”
“I can’t figure out why he’s done half the stuff he’s done,” I grumbled. “We never did a thing to him, ever. We don’t deserve what he’s done to us.”
A faint, cool breeze ruffled through my hair and kissed my neck and cheek.
The sight-stone is a gift for my best girl. The voice was a faint, dark whisper inside my ear, inside my head. Jordan doesn’t know its secrets.
I spun around. “Who’s there?”
“Who what?” replied Pal, looking perplexed.
“Did you hear that?” I asked, looking around the room and quickly blinking through different gemviews to try to catch a glimpse of the entity that had spoken to me. On one view, I thought I saw something like a faint violet mist fading into a skylight. It disappeared so quickly that I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t my imagination or a trick of the light.
“I didn’t hear anything. What’s the matter?” Pal asked.
“I… something just.. . crap. I don’t know. Maybe I’m hallucinating.”
“Hallucinating?” the Warlock asked from the doorway. His nose was straight and his face bruised and unbloodied; Opal had made quick work of healing him. Probably this was far from the first time someone had broken his nose. He’d changed out of his bathrobe, black jeans, and slippers and put on a dark gray T-shirt, a clean pair of olive-drab cargo pants, and a pair of black cowboy boots.
“Or not,” I said. “I just had a new invisible friend whisper sweet nothings in my ear. ‘Best girl’ my ass. Cooper gets to say that, nobody else, and that sure as hell wasn’t him.”
The Warlock was silent, looking puzzled. “I never—”
“I want this thing out of my skull,” I said firmly.
“I’m sorry I went off on you, but for all I know this thing is going to blow my head right off my shoulders in an hour. Where’s your bathroom? And I need a spoon.”
The Warlock closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He pulled a clean stainless-steel cereal spoon out of the pocket of his pants. “Please don’t do the spoon thing. That never turns out well.”
I got up and took the spoon out of his hand.
“Bathroom?”
He nodded sideways, looking deeply pained as if he wanted to refuse me but knew he’d have another fight on his hands. “To the left, on the left.”
I pushed past him, Pal padding after me. The bathroom was luxurious, bigger than the bedroom Cooper and I had shared in the apartment. I flipped on the lights above a big marble-topped vanity sink and leaned into the mirror to examine the ocularis.
The burn-scarred skin around my eye and on my cheek had thickened and darkened. Patches of the fine gray scales had begun to sprout in places. I poked at my scars; they weren’t nearly as sensitive as they’d been that morning.
Pal clambered up the handles of the vanity’s drawers onto the chilly gray stone of the counter. “You’re not planning to do what I think you are planning to do, are you?”
“Yes, I am.” I raised the gleaming spoon to the ocularis, trying to decide if I should scoop in from the side or from the top.
“But the Warlock said it’s connected itself to your muscles and nerves—”
“All the more reason I should take it out now before it does anything else to my body,” I replied, deciding to go in from the top.
I pressed the bowl of the spoon against the round front of the ocularis and slid it up under my eyelid. My probe was met with a sharp jolt of blue pain that took my breath away. I pressed my face against the countertop, hoping the cold marble would soothe my inflamed nerves. Stone squeaked against stone.
“Damn,” I gasped.
“Seriously, don’t try that again,” the Warlock said from the doorway. “In one dream you put yourself in a coma trying to dig out the stone. In another you bleed to death.”
“Bleed to death? How?” I stood up, frowning at him. “There aren’t any major arteries—”
“Dammit, I should not have to talk you out of sticking a spoon in your eye!” The Warlock threw his hands up in exasperation. “I am telling you to leave it alone.”
“But where did it come from?” I pressed.
“I picked it up in an antiquities shop in London. The proprietor, a personal friend of mine, told me it’s originally from Egypt, probably made in 200 BC. I have no reason to disbelieve her. And I have no reason to believe the stone will hurt you.”
“But—”
“Stop with the ‘buts,’ okay? You’ll need the sight through that thing to stay alive where you’re going. Are you listening to me? You need that stone in your head, so leave it alone.”
“Why do I need this thing so badly?”
He sighed as if he were trying to explain income taxes to a grumpy fifteen-year-old fry cook. “Hells aren’t realms of the flesh. They’re spiritual. Magical. They’ll overwhelm and deceive your senses if you don’t have magical help. We can usually ignore our ears, but seldom our eyes. If you can’t see through whatever illusions Cooper’s hell is going to throw your way, you’ll be trapped. And then you’ll die in there. So will my brother.”
“I’d heed his advice,” Pal said. “I, too, have lingering doubts about the true nature of the ocularis. But I must agree it would be far more dangerous to venture into any hell without it. And it seems unlikely you can remove it without seriously hurting yourself.”
I tossed the spoon into the sink and took a deep breath to calm myself. “Okay. Fine. What now?”
“Opal told me she’s almost done with the engine. Apparently the Einhorn was just what she needed,” the Warlock replied. “Did you still want a helmet?”
“Yes, definitely,” I said.
“Okay, follow me.”
He led me back down the hall to another closet, a narrow room filled from floor to ceiling with wooden racks of hats, caps, and helmets from different eras. This room had mundane incandescent track lighting and beige carpeting. The Warlock reached onto one o
f the racks and pulled off a gleaming round bronze helmet.
The helmet had a half-circle dome with a quilted leather lining affixed by wrought-iron rivets to the rim. A one-piece soft leather neck/cheek protector was riveted to the lining on the rear half of the helmet. A buckled leather chin strap was riveted to the base of the ear sections. The helmet occupied stylistic space somewhere between something a medieval foot soldier and a 1940s motorcycle bandit might have worn.
“This doesn’t have a sizing charm, but by my eye it ought to fit. What it does have is a charm to nullify poisonous gases and provide oxygen in dead air. It won’t let you breathe underwater, but it would help in a sand-or ash-storm… unless the hell Cooper’s in squelches magic. But that’s a risk with anything I could give you. No matter what—” He rapped on the crown with his knuckles. “—it’ll stop a pretty good whack with a bat or sword, and it’ll bounce a bullet.”
I took the helmet from him and put it on my head. It was a little loose and smelled like stale hair spray, but I deemed it a fit. “Hey, thanks, I think this’ll work fine.”
“Great,” he said, scratching his beard. “There’s something else I wanted you to take a look at while you’re up here.”
“What?” I asked.
The Warlock reached up onto another shelf and pulled down what looked like an old hatbox. When he took off the lid, I saw that the box contained a pearly glass ball about the size of a grapefruit nestled in a bed of old-fashioned paper Easter grass. Something about it made my ocularis itch.
“You probably haven’t seen one of these before,” he said, lifting the glass ball. “It’s an odeiette. They were popular with wealthy Talents up until the late 1800’s, when everybody started going to the movies instead.”
“It’s making my ocularis tweak out a little,” I said. The itching was getting worse.
“Well, that’s good, actually, ‘cause that means maybe I didn’t get ripped off when I bought it. The guy told me that the visualization enchantment got screwed up, but you could still see into it if you have ghostsight or some other kind of clairvoyance Which I don’t have, but who am I to turn down a good deal on a real antique?”
He held the ball out to me. “Blink through and tell me if you see anything.”
I took the ball from him and took a look inside. On one of the middle gemviews, the glass cleared and I could see two striped ginger kittens playing: wrestling on a patch of green grass, leaping at a blue butterfly, over and over, tirelessly cute. I realized that I could hear them mock-growling and mewing as they tussled. Apparently the ocularis was sending more than just visual information to my brain.
“It’s kittens playing,” I told him as I passed the ball back to him. The ocularis had stopped itching. Evidently the irritation was some kind of built-in alert for whatever kind of vision I’d just had, and once seen, it went away.
“Oh good,” he said. “It’s something nice. The guy said it was cats but that could mean almost anything.”
Something nice. I squinted at the ball. “What’s in that thing, exactly?”
“Kitten spirits. Ghosts under glass.”
I was starting to feel a bit creeped out. “How did they make it?”
“Well, in the early days odeiettes were used as duppy jars by spiritualists… they’d just sort of hunt around for loose spirits, capture them, and use these glass balls to observe them. Nobody but hardcore collectors wanted those; wraiths and poltergeists aren’t a happy bunch, so generally you’d just see the person inside endlessly screaming—”
“Person? They put people in these?”
“Well, yeah, it was mostly all people at first, but the necromancers who made ‘em started looking for scenes that might be a bit more, you know, fun to watch. So they’d set up scenes with animals or slaves fighting, or having sex, or playing, and when everybody involved was really getting into it, the necromancer would flash-kill the participants and scoop their spirits into the glass and voila!. Portable entertainment. These things were like the video iPods of the Victorian era.”
I stared at the pearly glass, feeling my stomach tighten. “That’s horrible.” b
“But it means you can see ghost loops through that stone eye. And that’s pretty sweet,” he said.
I wasn’t going to be sidetracked “It’s horrible and just plain Wrong.”
The Warlock shrugged. “It was a different era. The kittens in this thing would have probably ended up in a sack at the bottom of a river if they hadn’t ended up in here. They Wouldn’t have even been aware of their own deaths, if that makes you feel better about it.”
“How do you free spirits from these things?”
“Just break the glass, usually,” he replied.
“Then break it. Let them go.”
“But this is an antique_”
“I’ll pay you whatever for it! Seriously, it’s wrong. Let them go.”
The Warlock gave me a look of consternation, then shrugged and sighed. “Fine, if it’ll make you happy. But for the record, you owe me a thousand bucks.”
He pulled a folding knife out of his pocket and rapped the glass sharply with it. The glass cracked, and I saw two small glowing wisps and a third, much tinier wisp escape and disappear into the air.
“Satisfied?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Well then. I’m pretty sure Opal’s done with the truck by now. So if you need to get another snack, grab a bottle of pop, use the facilities, get your sling back on, or anything like that, go for it,” the Warlock said. “And then we can head downstairs and get this show on the road.”
chapter eighteen
The Road to Hell
When Pal and I got down to the garage, we found Opal loading an arsenal of a dozen-odd grenades and a couple of wands and pistols into a box on the floor of the passenger side of the Land Rover.
“What’s up?” I asked.
Opal straightened, squinting at my sling. “You weren’t a lefty, were you?”
“No, I’m right-handed… what’s all that?”
“Insurance,” Opal said. “Warlock knows what everything is. You just gotta throw straight and hard as you can.”
“Okay..
The Warlock came around the back of the Land Rover. “You get something to drink upstairs?”
“Just water,” I replied. “My stomach’s feeling a little touchy.”
“Well, I got some ginger ale in a cooler in the back, in case you feel like something later.”
“This’ll take, what, about an hour to drive out there?” I asked.
“Traffic’s heavy on Fridays, so call it an hour and a half, provided we don’t run into trouble,” the Warlock replied.
“That’s all I got,” Opal said as she put a small string of what looked like firecrackers in the floorboard box, then turned to the Warlock, her face a tight mask of dismay. “Don’t go. Please?”
“Baby, you know I have to. I’m sorry,” he replied. Looking like she was going to start crying, Opal grabbed him by the back of the head and pulled his face down toward hers. They kissed so deeply I felt myself start blushing. When they came up for air, Opal released him and backed away, her arms crossed.
“Get the hell out of here,” Opal said softly, staring at her boots. “Don’t get killed.”
“You heard the lady,” the Warlock said to me. “Let’s get going.”
I nodded toward the Land Rover. “What’s the plan to get that out of here, again?”
“Well, I’m all for doing this as quickly as possible,” the Warlock replied. “Driving it will obviously be a problem once we’re immaterial, so I figure we can both take our potions and go through the barrier on foot. And then once we’ve rematerialized, Opal can put the Rover in neutral and roll it out onto the street, and I can hop in, grab the wheel, brake, and then you can get in, and we’re on our way.”
“Urn,” I said. “Isn’t that overly complicated? Not to mention dangerous?”
“Not really,” the Warlock said. “It wo
n’t be going more than five or ten miles per hour when it clears the barrier, and if we wedge the door open—”
“But it’s the middle of rush hour. And what about all that?” I pointed at the box of stuff Opal had loaded. “Most of that’s magical, right? Won’t that trip whatever sensory alarms are in the sphere?”
“Uh.” Judging from the expression on his face, I guessed the Warlock hadn’t considered that problem.
“She has a point,” Opal said.
“Seriously, just let me shrink the Rover down and put it in my pack.. . we can walk it out of here and find someplace where we can expand it without any random people seeing us.”
“But it’ll get bounced around—all the ice and drinks’ll spill out of the cooler,” the Warlock protested.
I looked at him and cocked my head. “Surely you have some duct tape or bungee cords around here?”
“What about the engine?” he asked. “The gas’ll slosh everywhere inside it. It’s gonna get flooded, and we won’t be able to start it.”
“Won’t,” Opal said. “Figured it might end up ass-over-kettle. Charmed it so the fluids’ll stay put.”
“Okay, then?” I asked.
The Warlock shrugged. “I guess so.”
The Warlock, Pal, and I resolidified in the alley across the street from the bar.
“Urg. Dematerialization’s just as nasty as I remembered,” the Warlock said after he finished heaving near a pile of milk crates. “That potion could have stood a few more hours’ brewing, I think.”
“Gimme a break, it was my first time making it.” I shrugged off my knapsack and set it on the pavement. I took off my helmet and awkwardly strapped it one-handed to the side of the bag. Pal wobbled over to me and crawled up my jeans and shirt to my shoulder.
“You guys keep an eye out for pedestrians and cars.” I pulled the miniaturized Land Rover out of the zippered main compartment of my bag and set it on the pavement.
I felt Pal stiffen, his claws scratching against the dragonskin.
“Oh dear. Cold and Fear” the ferret said.
“What?” Still kneeling, I turned my head in the direction Pal was staring. Two men in dark suits stood in the entrance of the alleyway, both holding pistols. They were fifteen or sixteen yards away.
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