by L. EE
“What are you doing?”
“I told you, it’s just a locating spell.”
“It doesn’t feel like a locating spell.”
Nia drew faster. “Well, it is. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the hotel is safe at the moment, so why don’t you go back to your room and keep the door closed? Once I’m done with this spell, I’ll go find the detective and bring her here. When we’re together, we can come up with a plan. It shouldn’t take…” The stream of words tripping from her lips ran dry as Arthur knelt beside her.
For a few seconds, they simply stayed like that, not moving, not speaking.
Then, in a soft voice, “That’s not a locating spell.”
Nia jerked to the side as she felt Arthur’s hand move to his pocket. The first slash of the knife missed her by less than an inch. She scrambled clumsily back until her shoulders hit the wall.
“Arthur,” she said.
For a moment, he just stared at the knife – no, the scalpel. It glinted silver in the glow of the magic light lying on the floor by the slate. Then he lifted his head slowly to look her in the face. In the dim light, his eyes look like empty holes.
He lunged.
The spell wasn’t finished, but even half-done, it was enough to throw him backwards and send the scalpel flying from his hand. Nia scurried behind the heavy oaken desk near the window, crouching with her cheek pressed against the wood as she fought to catch her breath. She knew he likely had more than one blade with him. He rarely carried fewer than three, just in case of emergency.
“There’s no point in hiding,” Arthur said in that sardonic tone he always used when he thought she was being silly. “This room isn’t that big.”
Nia put her hand in her pocket, but found it empty. She risked a glance around the desk and saw her chalk lying on the carpet beside her silver case. It was only a few feet away, but too far, much too far. She would never get to it before –
Arthur’s footsteps rasped against the carpet. He paused for a moment to crush the piece of chalk into powder with the heel of his shoe.
Damn it.
“You know this is why they let me come with you, Ni.”
The sound of his voice made Nia’s heart twist in her chest, but she forced her hands to remain steady as they felt across the floor. There had to be something she could draw with. She hardly left her bedroom in the Academy without carrying a day’s worth of chalk, pens, and pencils. Surely, something must have fallen behind the desk during their stay here. There had to be something. She slapped the carpet in frustration then froze when her fingers brushed something cold and metallic. Arthur’s razor. He had complained about not being able to find it the night before.
“They knew it would come to this. I can’t go back, Nia. I won’t.” Arthur’s voice grew softer on every word, but Nia knew he was coming closer.
Just a few seconds, she begged, dragging the razor sharply across her palm, hardly feeling the sting. I just need a few seconds.
“Do you know what it’s like, Nia?” The soft sound of a hand sliding across wood. “To watch you rise higher and higher while I have to sit down in the dirt and watch?”
Nia smeared her blood into a circle on her uninjured palm. Shut up, you filthy liar. Arthur never thought these things. Never.
“This is what the Academy wants, you know? No one likes having to listen to you.”
Shut. Up.
“I’m sorry, Nia.” Arthur whipped around the desk. Less than a heartbeat later, the scalpel drove down into her chest.
Or it would have if Nia hadn’t thrown herself forward, pressing her bloodstained hand against the bottom of Arthur’s breastbone. The scalpel scraped across her shoulder instead, drawing a stinging line down her arm. Then it fell silently to the thickly carpeted floor.
Arthur hit the ground with a thump, his hand clawing at his chest where his heart was stuttering to a stop. “I – I got you too,” he choked out.
Nia shook her head, putting her hand to the scrape on her arm, knowing it didn’t matter if the spell on her palm was spoiled now. “Not well enough, Arthur.” She knelt beside him, gently pushing his hair away from his wide terrified eyes. “I’m sorry, but this is the kindest way I know how.”
Arthur’s eyes clenched shut, fingers knotted in his shirt. “Why –”
“Because you’re not real.” Nia put her hand over Arthur’s eyes. “But I know you don’t know it, so I’m still sorry.”
Arthur-who-wasn’t-Arthur gave one last convulsive shudder and Nia pulled her hand away from his face. Even as she watched, he grew less lifelike, his features softening until he looked like a wax doll only indifferently modeled into Arthur’s likeness. The hotel room was still dark, but there was enough of glow coming from the dropped magic light for Nia to see that the walls were now smeared with blood. As she studied them, the smears curved themselves into profanities, threats, and condemnations from Arthur, her mother, anyone she had ever wronged.
Honestly, now this was just cliché. Connery must have been a devotee of the most uninspired ghost stories.
But the overarching illusion was still holding and the head was still gone, which meant there was more to be done. Nia had to find the others. Arthur had obviously taken the head, but she had no way of knowing if he had been hoping to protect it or if he was being deluded by Connery’s magic. Finding him was her first order of business. Then they both would find Gail and together, they would work toward breaking the illusion for good.
She flexed her injured hand, wincing at the pull of torn skin. Normally, she would heal her injuries before proceeding but she might need more blood later. She compromised by tearing a strip of cloth from her dressing gown and knotting it around her hand. She left the arm as it was. The sleeve of her nightgown would absorb the worst of the blood.
For a few minutes she searched the room for a pen, pencil, chalk, anything she could write with that didn’t involve using her own bodily fluids, but found nothing except for the chalk that not-Arthur had crushed to useless powder. Either the illusion was hiding them from her or whatever impulse had motivated Arthur to walk off with Connery’s head had also made him to steal all her writing implements.
Giving up, she tucked the razor and the dropped scalpel carefully into the belt of her dressing gown. After rubbing her tired eyes with her uninjured hand, she looked up and noticed her reflection in the mirror in the corner. It was staring back at her with a dark accusatory expression, staring at her dead-on, in fact, though she was standing at an angle to the glass.
Nia went to the mirror and turned it around, ignoring the steady distortion of her reflected features. It wasn’t real, but it was still unpleasant to look at.
Using the scalpel, she scraped a circle into the top of the desk – she would need to remember to repair the damage before they checked out – and placed her hand inside it. Instantly, the darkness drew back further. She could feel the protective magic gathering around her like a shield, repelling Connery’s influence.
Beyond the protective barrier, the room seemed to grow a fraction unfriendlier.
Nia concentrated hard on where she knew the sun should be shining through the window, and a small golden square appeared on the floor. She smiled with satisfaction. She might not be able to break the illusion completely, but she could certainly poke holes in it.
Giving the square of light one last look, she went to the door. She felt her protective spell tremble a little as she stepped into the dark hallway, but it didn’t break. In the distance, something growled, rough and deep.
“Very well, Mister Connery.” Nia touched a finger to the handle of Arthur’s razor as she set off toward the sound. “If you wish to play games, let’s play games.”
15
Gail Lin
After the incident with the phone, everything had gone fucking bananas. All the phones had started screaming at her and she’d had to run to the kitchen with her hands over her ears just to keep from going deaf. She had slammed into several t
ables on the way and by the time she had stumbled through the swinging kitchen door, she had a maplike bruise blossoming on her side and a painful scrape on one elbow. She could still hear shrieking coming from the lobby, but it was distant enough that she didn’t fear for her eardrums.
Slumping back against a counter, she tried to work out what the hell was going on. Everything had been fine at breakfast, she was sure of that. So what had happened between half-past-ten and a little past eleven that had made everyone disappear and turned the phones evil? She could only think of one answer: magic.
She wasn’t a stranger to magic that messed with her head. Connery had often used it to confuse the cops and PIs trying to raid his various strongholds around the city. The trouble with it was that even if you knew it was happening, you couldn’t tell what was real and what was just in your head. That confusion had led to more than one PI mistaking a very real lackey of Connery’s for a hallucination and getting shot for their trouble and cops blowing away their buddies because, in their eyes, said buddy had just sprouted tentacles and lots of teeth.
Maybe it was lucky she didn’t have her gun on her. Anyway, the only thing she could do was find the magicians. Nia probably had some spell that could snap everything back to normal. She glanced around to make sure nothing was sneaking up on her then –
“Gail-baby?”
No. Damn it, not one of these. She’d seen it happen to other people before. Sensible men and women who’d gone screaming off bridges after dead loved ones or broke into sobbing wrecks when they heard the whispers of magical phantoms. Gail had never been confronted with one herself, but it looked like it was finally her turn, because she knew that voice.
Dad.
Don’t look at it. Just run through the door and get back upstairs. Whatever you do, just don’t fucking look at it.
“Gail.”
She looked.
Her father gazed at her sadly. He looked almost exactly like he had in the days before his death, his skin gray and his eyes and cheeks so sunken that his skull seemed to be poking through. His ribs were clearly visible under his thin shirt. After the bad water poisoning had caused his body to purge for a week straight, there just hadn’t been enough left of him to go on living.
“Hi, Gail,” he said, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper. “How’s it going?”
“Not bad, Dad,” Gail found herself answering. “How’s it going with you?”
“Not so good these days.” It was then that Gail noticed that there was water running from her father’s mouth, eyes, ears, anywhere water could run from. It soaked his clothes and pooled in a puddle around his feet.
“Why’d you drink the water, Dad?” Gail hadn’t asked back when it happened. She’d been just barely nine and had lost her mother a year before to the fever that had devastated the wet underbelly of Gracetown. It had seemed impossible that Dad would leave her too, but then he’d broken his leg in an accident at work and their little stash of money had disappeared almost overnight. Gail had done her best, begging for food and hauling what water she could from the pumps, but then the rainy season had hit and hit hard. “I brought you as much good water as I could. Why’d you have to go and drink the bad shit?”
Dad shrugged and a wave of water rolled off of his shoulders to splash on to the floor. “I was thirsty.”
So was I. But Gail knew further conversation with this thing shaped like her dad was a waste of time. “Sorry to run out on the family reunion, Dad, but I’m on the clock.”
Keeping her eyes on the door, Gail walked past the magic pretending to be her father. Her hand was on the door when Dad said, “Leaving again, kiddo?”
“I didn’t leave the first time, Dad. That was you, remember?” She pushed the door open and stepped into the empty dining room.
“Gail, honey.” The whisper was oddly distorted now, like her father was speaking through a mouth full of water, which Gail supposed he was.
“Bye, Dad.” She walked forward, making her way to the stairs.
Behind her she heard a loud splash, then several plates and glasses falling off of tables with strangely muffled crashes.
What – ? She turned just in time to be engulfed by a roaring wave, a wave that twisted itself into a horrific parody of her father’s smile before it crashed down on her.
16
Gail Lin
The water burned like acid where it touched her skin. It forced its way into her mouth and down her throat like million squirming worms. Twisting over on to her belly, she spat out a mouthful, clawing at it with her fingers when it tried to crawl back past her teeth. Closing her eyes tight against the torrent, she dragged herself across the floor, grabbing on to table legs and shoving past chairs. Despite her effort, the water leaked past her eyelids, first stinging then burning. Blinded, she could only hope that she was moving in the right direction.
“Where are you going, Gail-baby,” the water burbled as it smashed over her head.
Gail’s lungs were screaming for air and every inch of her skin felt like it had been flayed by a hot knife. Soon she would have no choice but to breathe and the water would shove inside, choking the life out of her even as it poison filled her blood. So she did the only thing she could under such circumstances.
She crawled faster.
Just as she was sure she was going to have to breathe even if it meant drowning, her hands found the first step. She dragged herself up hand over hand, her knees slipping on the wet wood. Up, she thought through the stabbing in her chest, up, up, up.
Then, as if she had crossed some invisible threshold, the water slid away, rolling back down the stairs like a retreating tide. Unable to hold her breath for another second, Gail collapsed on the steps, gasping. Her skin burned where the water had touched her, but the sheer relief of having air in her lungs overrode the pain.
As her heart slowly stopped slamming against her ribs, she heard a voice whispering, “Gail, Gail, Gail,” from the bottom of the stairs.
Growling under her breath, she forced herself up onto her knees and then her feet, all without looking behind her. “Shut the fuck up,” she spat. “You are not my dad and you don’t scare me, Connery.”
The voice kept whispering, but Gail wasn’t listening. She stomped up the stairs, counting each step to distract herself from any other magical bullshit.
She stopped counting when she reached forty-five. That was way too many steps. There wasn’t enough space for that many steps between the lobby and the second floor. But all she could do was keep climbing.
So up she went. Up and up and up until her knees ached and she was almost as winded as when the water had tried to drown her. Finally, she stopped, her hand braced against the wall. Clearly this wasn’t working. Maybe she had to go through the lobby. She wasn’t sure how she would get past the evil water, but maybe if she grabbed a table cloth, she could absorb it to death.
But that was probably just what Connery wanted her to do. She wouldn’t fall into another trap. Annoyed at herself for even considering it, she continued upwards –
And walked directly into a wall.
For a second, she could only stagger as painful bursts of white exploded behind her eyes. After making sure her nose wasn’t broken, she set her hand against the new wall and ran it slowly from top to bottom, left to right. As far as she could tell, it was completely solid, made of the same wood paneling as the other walls in the hotel. All in all, a perfectly ordinary wall – except for the fact that it hadn’t been there a second ago.
But that didn’t make any goddamn sense. Walls didn’t move and stairs didn’t go on indefinitely.
Well, maybe in evil enchanted hotels they do. What would you know about it, Lin? It’s not like you’re an Illuminator. Why did you take this case in the first place, you idiot?
Somehow, in that complete darkness, every hateful thought in Gail’s head was magnified. Each doubt became a screaming voice and she was tempted to sink to her knees and slam her head against the floor
until it stopped.
“Goddamn this place,” she said in a whisper, then, “Goddamn this place!” when her voice seemed to make the darkness retreat a little. I’m not going to let you scare me, Connery. Then she repeated the words out loud, making sure the hotel heard them. This place might kill her, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to bully her. First plan of action: find Nia Graves. The Illuminator had to have some magic to combat this spell.
And since it looked like the only way she could go was down, down she would go.
17
Nia Graves
The trouble with illusion-veiled buildings was that even after they had ceased to be frightening, they were still incredibly difficult to navigate. It had taken Nia more than seven attempts to reach the lobby and when she finally arrived, she found it distressingly empty.
“Arthur? Detective Lin? Is anyone here? Please answer if you can hear me!”
No one answered, but if she strained her ears, she thought she could hear… footsteps? Yes, footsteps descending the stairs, but they sounded so distant, much more distant than the stairs should have permitted.
“Aha!” Hurrying over to the stairs, Nia pulled the razor from her belt and gently reopened the wound on her hand. She dabbed blood in a circle on the bannister, ignoring whatever was making that hideous choking noise behind her. Spells for creating labyrinths were complex, but thankfully the spells for breaking them were much simpler. A circle, a few lines, and the world changed just slightly, like the wind switching directions.
Nia had no time to step back before Gail barreled over the last stair. The detective crashed into her, knocking her to the floor, while Gail caught herself on the edge of the reception desk.