He was two feet away, his outstretched hand grasping for me, when the door sealed shut. I heard his body slam against the sealed door, jolting the cage. The elevator gave a little shiver. Then it whirred, beginning its ascent.
I took a deep, shuddering breath. I tapped my earpiece a few times, trying to reconnect. As I got closer to the surface, reception came back in a burst of sound.
“—going in there,” Caitlin was saying, her voice tight. “He’s been out of contact for half an hour. Something’s wrong.”
“Everybody,” I said, “get out now. Scrub it. Jennifer, wait thirty seconds and blow the generators, backups too, then leave. I’ll make my own way out.”
“Dan?” Jennifer asked. “What’s goin’ on?”
“They’re here. Fleiss and the Enemy.”
“Damn that Naavarasi,” Caitlin snarled.
“I don’t think she knew. We just picked the wrong night to show up.” I looked to the dagger in my hand. Or the right one. “Anyway, we can’t fight this guy and we don’t want him following us—cover your tracks and get out any way you can. Don’t worry about me.”
The elevator chimed again, rattling to a stop. I was halfway through Drake’s mansion when the power died, lights flickering and going dark. I navigated by memory and raced through the silent halls, back to the service entrance.
Outside was pandemonium. The horses, spirit-maddened by Margaux’s ritual, had burst from their corral and were running wild through the compound. Their hooves kicked up dust as they whinnied and foamed at the mouths. Flashlights strobed in all directions while the panicked guards tried to stop them. More guards boiled from the darkened bunkhouses, shouting, racing for the utility sheds and the main house.
Hooves pounded my way. The horse, a majestic golden palomino, drew up short. Caitlin sat astride it. She stroked its ivory mane, soothing the horse, and shook her head at me.
“As if I’d leave you behind. Get on.”
I slipped the knife into my belt, snug against the loops, and held Caitlin’s hips. The palomino exploded into a gallop, leaning into a turn as we raced through the heart of the compound. A security guard jumped out of our way, throwing himself to the dirt and rolling. Another was too slow and went down under a flurry of hooves. Up ahead the ranch gate loomed tall. And locked up tight.
“Cait,” I said, clinging tight, “it’s too high. We can’t jump that.”
“Shouldn’t have to. Jennifer?”
“Coming in hot,” she said over the earpiece. “That thing we didn’t wanna do if we didn’t have to? I’m doin’ it.”
Headlights flared as our SUV careened toward the driftwood gate from outside, Jennifer behind the wheel with her foot heavy on the gas. The gate crashed open and debris flew in a storm of splintered wood. She stomped on the brakes, the SUV screeching to a halt, washing the compound in the light of its high beams. We went wide and rode around the side of the car. While we swung down from the palomino’s back, Corman leaned out the passenger-side window with a pistol in his fist. He laid down a stream of fire, forcing guards to dive for cover while Caitlin and I climbed in back.
“Jammed,” Corman grunted. “Stupid piece of—we ready? Everybody in?”
I slammed the door shut. “We’re in. Let’s go!”
Jennifer threw the SUV into reverse. Wisps of smoke drifted from the battered hood as she drove backward then spun the wheel into a squealing hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. We shot off along the access road, leaving Eastern Pines in our dust.
“Did we get the knife?” Pixie asked.
We got it, all right. My fingers traced the blade, snug in my belt loop.
I had an enemy—the Enemy—who could rewrite history with a touch of his hand. A dagger with a living person trapped inside of it. And a stage magician’s wand that could teach me occult secrets, but only when it felt inclined.
What I had was a giant mess on my hands. And it was about to get a lot worse. Because no matter what I’d said, no matter what I owed her, there was no way in hell I was giving the dagger to Naavarasi.
21.
The lights of Austin blazed outside the penthouse windows, with dawn coming fast. A silver slice of crescent moon was sinking on the horizon and I wanted to be gone before it was. We’d buried our masks and gloves in a shallow hole about a quarter mile from the interstate. The bag of guns had gone into a second pit after we scrubbed and stripped each piece. We weren’t worried about getting our deposit back from the dealer.
Up in the penthouse, Pixie was breaking down her drone, packing pieces into a foam-lined case. Jennifer paced in front of the windows. Caitlin was on the phone with the airline and trying to get our tickets bumped to an earlier flight. As early as possible. Bentley, Corman, and Margaux were doing a quick cleanup job on the room, checking every nook and cranny to make sure we weren’t leaving anything questionable behind. Shopping bags, loose receipts, anything that could tie us in any way to the raid on Eastern Pines—it all had to go.
I set the knife on the table. Now every eye in the room was on me. Caitlin finished her call and hung up the phone.
“This…is a lot to unpack,” I told them.
“You saw him,” Bentley said. “Didn’t you?”
“The Enemy. And he’s…” I shook my head, searching for words. “To say he’s dangerous is like saying a nuclear bomb is dangerous. True, but it understates the situation by a mile or two. I’ll start from the beginning. I made my way into the main house and found Cameron Drake—”
“Who?” Pixie asked.
I furrowed my brow at her. “Cameron Drake? The person we were going to rescue?”
A lot of confused faces. I looked around the room.
“Okay, everybody who remembers Cameron Drake, raise your hand.”
Jennifer and Caitlin raised their hands. The others just offered blank stares.
“Everybody who was on the scene,” I murmured. Everybody who had been close to the house, inside the fence when the Enemy murdered Drake, knew who I was talking about. For everyone else…
“Try this,” I said. “Pixie, look up who owns Eastern Pines Ranch.”
She hunched over her laptop, typing fast. Jennifer came over and pitched her voice low, leaning close to my ear.
“Dan? Why does half the room have amnesia all of a sudden?”
“You remember how the Enemy tossed me into prison, and everybody ‘remembered’ a trial and a conviction that never actually happened? I got another look at what he’s capable of tonight, up close and personal.”
“I noticed Drake ain’t with you.”
“He’s not anywhere,” I said. And I was pretty sure if I dug into the microfiche for a newspaper in Derry, Pennsylvania, about twentysomething years ago, I’d find an article about a young boy being hit by a train.
“These records are…weird,” Pixie said. “Fragmented, contradictory. Even in the county registry, it’s like nobody knows who owns the place.”
The Enemy’s touch could scorch someone from history, but it didn’t burn clean. More like a hack job, a tornado of raw chaos searing the fabric of time and leaving the universe struggling to put itself back together.
I turned my back to the table as I gazed across the room.
“That’s because, believe it or not, the guy who owns the place doesn’t exist anymore. He was murdered retroactively. The Enemy put his hand on him and rewrote his life’s story right in front of me. A few hours ago, he was a thirtysomething lottery winner. Now, he died when he was twelve years old, and half of you don’t remember that we stood in this very room and talked about him yesterday.”
Pixie slumped in her chair and shut her laptop. “Murder by time travel. That’s weirder than usual.”
“It gets weirder,” I said. “The dagger—the Enemy called it a ‘Cutting Knife’—was more than a piece of cutlery. He was doing this ritual, some kind of sacrifice to—”
Everyone was staring. Not at me. Past me. I turned around.
The woman in the
ivory tunic perched on the table. Her gown was still spattered with Cameron Drake’s blood, but less of it now, as if the linen was slowly mending itself. I blinked at her. She blinked back, wide-eyed and curious.
“Right,” I said to the room. “Also, the knife is a person.”
“Does the…person,” Caitlin said, staring, “have a name?”
“Circe.” She spoke haltingly, tapping her chest. “I. Circe.”
I looked to her. “So, um, at the risk of being rude, what are you?”
She shrugged. “Circe.”
“Not helpful,” Jennifer muttered.
“Turns out, whatever our new friend is, Ms. Fleiss is one, too.” I glanced back at Circe. “Do you know her? Fleiss?”
Circe’s amber eyes darkened. She crossed her arms over her chest, cradling herself tight.
“Not her real name. He made her…” She shook her head, struggling for words. “Forget. Made a hole, inside her. Filled it with him.”
“Was that what he was trying to do to you?” I asked. “Make you forget, like her?”
Circe’s head bobbed. Margaux stepped forward, her face grave.
“Danny,” she said, “you know what’s right. You know what you gotta do here.”
“I know. When Naavarasi wanted me to steal a relic for her, that was one thing. I’m not giving her a person.”
Caitlin stroked her chin with her fingertips, pacing. “And now we know. The recourse to a culture and a noble title she despises, the insistence on protocol. It was all done in case we learned the truth before handing the knife over to her.”
“Well,” I said, “I see we’re back to the ‘Naavarasi can go pound sand’ option. I’ll buy her a box of chocolates at the airport and send it to her with a sympathy card.”
“Pause a moment and think twice. You agreed to this specific boon, under the dictates of the Cold Peace. She will escalate matters. It’s likely to become a diplomatic incident between our courts.”
“And I’m sorry, Cait, I really am. I know this is gonna make your job a little harder for a while. I’m nobody to claim the moral high ground—I’ll make money selling anything that falls off the back of a truck—but I’ve got to draw a line somewhere. Circe isn’t a thing to be sold; she’s a person. We’re talking about slavery. And I’m not doing it.”
“This is going to be a political nightmare. There may be a prior claim involved as well, if she really was Naavarasi’s.” Caitlin looked to Circe. “Do you know that name? Naavarasi? Did you belong to her once?”
The woman in white squinted at her, not understanding. “Circe belongs to Circe.”
“Absolute political nightmare. This couldn’t be more inconvenient.”
Margaux glared at her. “Caitlin? Do something for me.”
“What’s that?”
Margaux stepped toward her, hands on her hips.
“I understand, no matter how you look on the outside, you aren’t human. That you come from a place where things are done differently. But do me this little favor. Before you say one more word about how inconvenient it is that we aren’t gonna turn in a fugitive slave? Try to remember that I’m Haitian. And watch your damn mouth.”
Caitlin’s eyes flared, glitters of angry gold sparkling behind her irises. Then the glitters faded. She bit her bottom lip and nodded.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I deserved that. I will…make an effort to be more thoughtful in the future.”
I sensed a but coming and waited. She didn’t say another word.
“First things first,” I said. “Regardless of what Naavarasi wants, the Enemy definitely wants Circe back. And me. And he’s, like, here in Texas. So we need to not be in Texas. Circe, you wanna come with us? We’ll do everything we can to keep you safe, I promise.”
She poked my arm. As her finger touched my sleeve, it ignited a stinging snap of static electricity.
“With you,” she said.
“Great. I hate to ask this, but I’m gonna need you to change back into a knife for a few hours. You can’t get on an airplane without ID, and something tells me you don’t have a driver’s license.”
She tilted her head. “Air…plane?”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “This is gonna be fun.”
* * *
We made it to the airport without incident—and I hoped without a tail, though we doubled back four or five times on our way there. We turned in the SUV, attendants staring in sheer dismay at the crumpled hood.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jennifer told them. “I paid for the insurance.”
As we walked away, she leaned in close and whispered, “Under a fake name, with a stolen credit card.”
“That’s my girl.”
Circe, back in her knife form, took a ride in our checked baggage. Pixie had carved out a bit of extra foam in her drone case to keep her nice and snug. Then we mustered in the Delta terminal, twenty minutes to boarding. I kept an eye on the concourse, half expecting the Enemy to come at us in public, in broad daylight and in front of a half dozen cameras. A move like that would break every rule of the occult underground, but I wasn’t sure if he cared.
Caitlin and Margaux were over by the tall windows, having a private conversation in low voices. From the looks on their faces, it was serious but not painful. Margaux put a gentle hand on Caitlin’s arm. Caitlin nodded.
I found a patch of open chairs, sat down, and took out my phone. I was saving my call to Naavarasi for later. Putting off the inevitable argument, but mostly I just wanted to get clear of one problem before inviting another to my doorstep. Instead, I called a new friend. Semi-friend.
“Speak of the devil,” Carolyn Saunders said. “I was just writing about you.”
“You got my attention with your last book. You don’t need to do that again.”
Carolyn—the Scribe, another victim damned to endless reincarnations as part of the same cosmic story that spawned the Enemy—had reached out to me the only way she could. Through the pages of a fantasy novel, The Killing Floor, with a fictionalized account of my time in Eisenberg Correctional. It had come to my attention courtesy of an anonymous email from “a friend.”
Neither of us had any idea who sent it.
“Well, that’s the thing. Turns out ‘Donatello Faustus’ was such a popular character, my readers are pretty much demanding a spin-off series. The first book involves a war between thieves’ guilds in the City of Burning Lights. After faking his death, Faustus is being blackmailed by a member of the city watch—”
“Damn it, Carolyn, you’re just writing down stuff that actually happened. To me. That’s shitty storytelling. Have some self-respect.”
“I write pulp fiction for a living, it’s eight in the morning, and I’ve just started my second mug of Irish coffee. After lunch I switch to straight bourbon. If you’re looking for self-respect, you’re in the wrong place.”
“I am in the wrong place. Austin. I know this, because I just met the Enemy face-to-face.”
I heard her mug rattle against her desk.
“You met him? And you walked away in one piece?”
“Ran away, honestly, and it was a close call. Listen, he revealed part of his game plan. We’ve gotta find the Paladin, fast. Before he does.”
I gave her the Cliffs Notes version. I heard her keyboard clicking, typing away as I told her about the vault under Eastern Pines.
“Cutting Knives,” she echoed. “I’ve heard the phrase before, I’m just not certain where. So that’s why Fleiss is so devoted to him. He corrupted her somehow. Brainwashed her.”
“And he was about to do the same thing to Circe. I’ve seen Fleiss in action, and I have to assume Circe can do everything Fleiss can. One of those things on his side is bad enough.”
“What’s been done could possibly be undone. I’ll be conducting some research. And I agree, finding the Paladin is our top priority.”
“You’ve gotta level with me,” I said. “Things are moving fast here, and I’m about to navigate one
hell of a minefield. Until we figure out how to get this whammy off me, I’ve been drafted into the story. I’m the Thief. You need to tell me the original ending. How does the Thief die?”
“As I said, it’s not likely to—”
“Please. I can’t protect myself if I don’t know what to watch for.”
She sighed. “As you wish. According to the story, the Thief pulls off the most dangerous robbery of his life. As he’s celebrating, safe and at home, his lover—the only person in the world he absolutely trusts—stabs him in the back. She murders him for the treasure.”
I gazed across the concourse. Caitlin, still talking to Margaux, caught my eye. She gave me a wink and a smile.
“Great,” I said, sagging into my chair.
“There are variations, of course. The story never repeats itself in exactly the same way.”
“Got it. Thanks. I’ll call you if I learn anything else. And please, do me a favor? Stop putting real occult-underground shit in your books. You’re gonna get yourself in trouble. Or you’re gonna get me in trouble.”
“Come on,” she said. “You didn’t like anything in my last book?”
I took a deep breath. Had to give her something.
“I liked the bit where Faustus slept with the two leather-clad vampire vixens. That was okay.”
“I’ll make a fan out of you yet.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but see? That was one of the parts that didn’t happen in real life. Fiction. Try writing it sometime.”
“It could happen.”
“Vampires aren’t real. Goodbye, Carolyn.”
I hung up. Caitlin drifted over to me.
“Good talk?” I asked her.
“Good talk.” Her placid smile broke like a cloud, turning stormy. “Are you all right, pet? You seem disturbed.”
I shrugged. “It’s been a disturbing day.”
“Fair enough.” She pointed to the line gathering by the boarding-ramp door. “Looks like they’re about to let us on the plane. Shall we?”
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