The lights trickled into the space around him, swirling and swarming. Payton threw his head back and opened his mouth wide. A speck of light dove into his throat and disappeared.
This time the lights didn't drain back out into the void. They swam through the air inside the boundary around Payton, then struck the spot where the spiral line of paint connected my circle to the one in the center.
Then a stream of lights rushed along the twisting line of paint straight toward me. I was so startled that for a moment I couldn't move, and that was all the time it took them to come close.
The lights had faces. And teeth.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I rolled backward, throwing myself out of the circle. The "spirits" inside the spiral line dissolved in an upward spray of liquid light.
The floor appeared at the outer edge of the design, and the void began to recede toward the center circle. The lights still within Payton's circle rushed through the opening into the void as though fleeing a forest fire. After a few seconds, the void was gone, and so were all the lights.
Echo leaped to her feet and moved toward me. "You burning, lonely squat of shit! What have you done?"
I put my hand on the pocket with my ghost knife. If I survived her first attack, and maybe her second, I might have time to use it. "You tried to put one of those things in me!"
Suddenly, Payton screamed. He clutched his broken elbow and writhed on the floor. The flesh inside his arm shifted and realigned.
"You killed them!" Echo shouted. Her eyes were wide and her teeth bared. "You murdered them!"
Jon rushed to Payton and laid a calming hand on his shoulder. "Hold it together, big guy. I know it hurts--believe me, I know--but it won't take long."
Echo crouched low. Here she comes.
"Stop." One word from Jon was enough. She froze in place, but she still glared at me as if she wanted to tear me to pieces. "What happened, Ray?"
"She tried to cast that spell on me," I said, trying to keep my voice calm. "She tried to put one of those things inside me."
"I didn't see anything," Macy said quickly.
That was it. I'd stayed because I thought it would save my life and how stupid was that? I stood, grabbed my pack and bolted through to the kitchen just behind me.
Jon still beat me to the back door. "Ray, I'll keep them in line. Don't go."
"We're friends," I said, mimicking him as nastily as I could. "I won't force you."
"Sometimes friends fuck up."
Shit. I was suddenly warm with shame. "Who sat in the fifth spot the other times you cast the spell?"
"Ray, I can't tell you. I promised. I got my legs back and all I had to do was not spread around the name."
"Forget it."
"You know normally wouldn't hold out on you," Jon said. "But I promised."
I unzipped the bag and showed him the blue pages inside. "I already know who it was. We obviously got our spells from the same person."
"I guess we did. Look, out of the whole group, I got the cure first. That makes me alpha. I can keep everyone in line."
"Even Macy? What about her hammers?"
"That was just talk," Jon said. "Macy's a therapist. She takes care of people. She heals bodies and souls. That's her whole career. She's a good person, Ray. That hammer thing was just stress."
He hadn't seen her expression when she stood behind him with the knife, but I wasn't going to argue about his girlfriend. "Can I leave?"
Jon looked uncomfortable. "If you want to, of course, yeah. But I hope you don't. I'm so hungry I can barely think, sometimes. I need you here. Do you really want to go?"
"After that?" I said, pointing toward the other room, "more than anything." But Jon needed my help. I still hadn't told him about Annalise and Callin. Did Jon know that Callin planned to kill him and was allied with the woman who'd attacked Echo?
And whatever Macy and Echo had done, Jon wasn't to blame. He was still my friend, and had done the right thing by me at every turn. His family had practically rescued me from mine. I couldn't run out on him now.
"But I'll stick around," I said. "For a while, at least. There's a lot we need to talk about."
Jon beamed. "Perfect!" He clapped my shoulder hard.
Macy entered with a slice of cold pizza in each hand. She gave one to Jon and he bit into it greedily. "Echo and Payton went out for more food," she said. "I ordered another meat lovers'. What about him?"
She took a huge bite of the pizza. Jon talked around the food in his mouth. "He's staying to help us. When the others get back, we'll talk."
"Why not right now? I'll tell you and you can tell them."
Macy shook her head. Jon swallowed and said: "I might forget something. Or something might get changed in the telling. Or they might have questions I can't answer. Besides, they're family. It's not right that we should know something they don't."
I looked at them, hoping they were joking. They weren't. They seriously didn't want to know something the others didn't. It was a strange kind of loyalty, and it didn't make any sense.
"The woman who attacked--" I said, forging ahead anyway.
"Later, later. I need to look at these." Jon snatched the blue pages out of my backpack and walked into the other room so fast that he was already gone by the time I could react.
Macy stepped toward me. I had the urge to step back but I didn't. Her knife lay on the counter; Macy put her hand on it and slid it into the sink.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have threatened you. I know what I did was wrong, but I did it for a good reason. I never... I didn't mean to..." She raised the pizza to her mouth but the smell seemed to upset her and tossed it into the trash. She blinked slowly, her head sagging as though she couldn't organize her own thoughts.
"I've hated violence my whole life," she said. "My father was stabbed to death coming out of a bar. My third stepfather once beat my mom so bad that she bled out of her ears. I've always hated it, always did what I could to help people who had been victims of it."
She took a deep shuddering sigh. "But today, when the stress was intense, I...."
She didn't seem to know what to say next. After a short while, she said: "I'm sorry I forced you to do what I wanted. I've always tried to be a better person than that. So, I'm sorry. Anyway, I wouldn't have done anything to you that we couldn't undo right away."
I didn't answer. It seemed to me that her cure was worse than anything she could have done to me, including kill me, but there was no point in arguing. She didn't matter. I was here for Jon.
Judging by her expression, I didn't give her the response she was expecting. She moved away. I followed her into the dining room. Jon wasn't around.
But there was the sheet of blue paper sitting on the sideboard; it was different from mine because it had been folded small to fit into someone's pocket, then unfolded again. I wanted to look at it to see if it would match any of the handwriting in the book I'd stolen from Callin, just to make sure.
Macy's back was turned as she headed toward the front room. I picked up the paper.
Macy froze in place and tilted her head like a dog that heard a familiar sound. I didn't have time to pocket the sheet of paper and her body language suggested that she was about to turn around. With a flick of my wrist, I tossed it behind the sideboard.
She turned and studied my face. I tried to look nonchalant but I knew I wasn't doing a great job. She sniffed as though she could smell my fear. "Is there a problem?"
"You can't blame me for keeping a safe distance," I said. She blinked at that, and then moved toward the porch. I followed.
We found Jon squatting on the couch, his shoes squarely on the seat cushions. He was hunched over a slice of cheese pizza, gnawing and tearing at it without satisfaction.
The stack of blue pages sat on the floor, apparently forgotten. I picked them up.
"Get down off there!" Macy said. She swatted Jon with a little square pillow. "Or at least take your shoes off."
&n
bsp; Jon climbed down, still chewing madly. He didn't speak or stop eating. Macy opened the top pizza box, found it empty, then shoved it into a corner with a bunch of others. She opened two more before she found a cold slice with grease congealed on the top.
"Do you want some?" Jon said. "It's terrible."
I hadn't eaten anything except Hank's muffins for most of the day, but seeing Jon and Macy hunched over their greasy food made my stomach twinge. "Pass."
"I don't blame you," Jon said. "This is the worst pizza I've ever had in my life." He took another gigantic bite. His eyes were hooded and distant. He and Macy wandered into the empty dining room and stood beside the design, chewing blankly.
For a moment, I thought they might do more magic, but no. They had simply moved close to the design the way bored people stand in front of a TV without really watching--it seemed to comfort them as they chewed and gulped.
I glanced at the sideboard, knowing I couldn't retrieve the page with the "healing" spell while they were standing there. Maybe, while we waited for Echo and Payton, I should take another look at the pages I'd taken from Callin. Now that I'd seen Macy and Echo cast the spell, something new might jump out at me. "Is there a quiet place I could rest?"
"Yoga room would be the best thing," Macy said.
Jon swallowed the last bite and said: "My thoughts exactly."
He led me up the stairs. There were four doors in the hallway, one of which Jon said was the bathroom. He took me into the room at the back.
It was spare and nearly empty. Foam rubber mats covered part of the floor. In the corner, tiny dumb bells lay piled one on the other the way empty pizza boxes were piled up downstairs. Pictures clipped from magazines had been taped to the walls; all showed women in extremely difficult yoga poses. Any one of them would have eased my long prison nights.
"Will this be okay?" Jon asked.
"Great."
"Okay then." Jon hesitated at the doorway. "I just want to say thanks, buddy. And don't worry. It'll all be cool."
I nodded at him and he left. I sat by the window and watched light from the setting sun reflect off the polished hardwood floor. I was glad I wouldn't have to touch the light switch; I didn't want to touch anything here.
If Jon would only listen to my story, I'd at least feel like we were getting somewhere. I could get away from him and figure out what to do next. But Jon wasn't worried about what I needed or where I needed to go. He had his own agenda.
I sat on one of the foam pads, finding it surprisingly soft. I laid the pages in the sunlight. Echo and Payton would be back soon with more food, and I could explain the situation to all of them while they stuffed their faces.
I turned over the first of the blue pages and saw a spell I'd seen earlier that day. To Look Into the Empty Spaces and See the Great Predators. Below the title were the words Your enemies are near. You will watch them as a ghost, as they are ghosts to you.
Design number two was a straight line with a simple curl at the left end. It looked like an easy spell, and I certainly had enemies. If I cast this spell, maybe I'd know where to find Callin and Annalise.
I had a quick mental image of the two of them staking out this house like a pair of cops. It made me uneasy, just as it made me uneasy to think what Jon and the other would do if they knew where to find Annalise. I couldn't picture Macy sneaking out a side door and vanishing into the night the way I would. She'd want to murder them both, and that would make me an accessory.
On the windowsill was a notepad and pencil. Someone had scrawled a list of exercises: weights and sets and reps. I flipped to an empty page at the back, turned it over and sat again.
I practiced the second design quickly. It was easy. Then I studied the first design, the one with "for the mind" written beneath it.
Nearly concentric circles, the smaller covered with crooked lines. A pair of weird squiggles.
The squiggles could be empty eyes. The sphere appeared to have crooked lines across its face. Were those continents? Was this a planet? Two circles could be the world behind the world.
The image in my mind glowed silver, slammed together and erupted with power. I immediately began to draw the simple second design, waiting for the fire to hit. It never did. This time the concentric circles became a deep tunnel, and I fell through a long, black tunnel into darkness.
I was weightless. There was no floor beneath me and there was no sunlight, no window, no yoga mat. I was floating in darkness.
I tried to touch my chest but my hand passed through it as though I was made of shadow. There was darkness all around me but no stars, just faintly-lit mists swirling in the distance.
I looked up. The planet Earth slowly rotated far above me. It was also shrouded in darkness and mist.
Oh, shit. I was dead. I had killed himself--turned myself into a ghost--because I just had to fool around with one more spell. I wasn't even sure how it had happened, of if the "how" even mattered.
"So long," I said to the Earth. It looked far away, only about the size of my fist. "It wasn't fun while it lasted." My voice sounded hollow in the darkness.
A sudden, oppressive pressure came over me. It felt as though something was rolling across me, like the mind of God had taken notice of me, and this incredible will was squeezing every thought every living thing was having everywhere into my mind at once. Then the feeling passed, and I was myself again, stunned and disoriented.
I had the odd sensation that something was moving behind me and I turned to look.
A massive thing passed by. It was close, only a few dozen yards away, and it was as long as ten aircraft carriers. Its hide was dark and splotchy, with patches of hair and weird, random stripes of black and red.
Oh, Christ, it was some kind of animal, fully alive and swimming through the void. I peered at it, trying to make sense of the patterns on its skin as it sped by. Then I saw them: Weird alien faces were embedded in the hide, and they looked like they were screaming.
The thing passed by and I watched its stumpy legs and scraggly dragon's tail recede into the distance. I was glad I hadn't seen its head. I didn't want to know what that thing had for a head.
In the distance, I saw wheels of fire rolling through the darkness. Then a group of boulders tumbled below me, and just as I realized the eerie singing was coming from them, they changed direction like a flock of birds.
I'm in hell, I thought. I died and now I'm in hell. I'm surrounded by demons and I'm in hell.
A cluster of glowing eel-like creatures approached from beneath my feet, growing larger and brighter with each second. There were no landmarks, and every time I thought they were almost upon me, I realized they were larger and farther away than I'd thought. Hundreds of them.
Then they finally swarmed around me, each as large as a school bus and each with hungry, gaping beaks and wide, searching eyes.
They swam right by as though I wasn't there.
They couldn't see me. If they had, one of them could have turned its head slightly and bitten me in half.
"Watch them as a ghost," I said aloud, testing my hollow voice again.
Maybe I wasn't dead. Maybe the spell had sent me into this void, these "Empty Spaces." I was on the other side of the so-called healing spell Macy and Payton and Jon had cast. This was where the cousins came from, although I didn't see any blue lights or fat worms with wings and spiny legs nearby.
I looked up at the Earth again. The school of eels passed it as though they couldn't see it, either.
Beyond the Earth, and in several other directions, I could see more worlds rolling through the mists. All were obscured and the creatures passed them by. Were the planets camouflaged the way I was, or was there something about the mists that diverted the creatures' attention? Or maybe they could see the worlds but didn't care.
There was a flash of silver light to the left. I glanced over and saw a glowing sigil shining in the darkness. It was a little like the spell Jon had used to summon the cousins, and it had appeared on the
surface of a little purple planet shrouded in mist. The sigil burned like a flare.
The eels sped by me, swimming for the glowing sigil. The tumbling boulders changed course and headed straight for the planet. They plunged toward it, then began moving around it in swarms.
I willed myself to be closer and I was. The planet seemed to be growing darker and more of the eels were dropping to the surface. A sound seemed to flow out of the world below like a ripple in a pond, even though I knew it wasn't really a sound I was hearing. But somehow I knew people below were screaming. They were dying in pain and despair, and those emotions echoed out into the void. The little planet grew slightly darker.
Three wheels of fire rolled out of a cloud of mist, drawn by the strange sound. Now that they were close, I saw eyes within the flames. They struck, cutting through the world like buzzsaws. The planet began to burn.
A swarm of tumbling boulders slammed themselves against the world. Their eerie, joyful song halted as they destroyed themselves, but huge sprays of debris were thrown clear of the planet, and each one sang a new song.
The eerie screams finally died away. The purple world blackened and as life left it, I could see it vanishing, as though it would fall out of the Empty Spaces once it was devoid of life.
I'd just seen an entire world consumed and destroyed. These creatures weren't ignoring the worlds around them, they were searching for them, looking for their next meal. And the only way they'd find it was if someone sent up a call for them.
I glanced back at the Earth. A tiny sigil erupted on its face, glowing bright silver. A reddish bolt shot toward it, then the sigil faded. I didn't see the world grow dark and I didn't hear screaming. That time.
My pencil snapped.
I stared down at the broken pencil in my hand. I suddenly felt very heavy and real. I was made of flesh again. The floor was solid and the room was dim.
I was in the yoga room. The sun had gone down while I'd been in the Empty Spaces and the only light came from a shaft of moonlight that fell into the corner.
Twenty Palaces: A Prequel Page 11