“They’re trying to kill you, so I should stay close?” He gaped at me. “That’s terrible advice.”
“Shut up so I can think. Please.”
At least we weren’t dealing with a world-class pro. A pro wouldn’t have missed with his first shot. Then again, even a rookie could get lucky, and a bullet was just as deadly no matter who pulled the trigger.
My top priority had to be saving Gladstone’s life. If he died, all bets were—
Howard Canton’s wand tingled to life. A rippling warmth spread through my veins, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. And in an instant, I saw what I’d been missing. The common links when the wand worked—and when it didn’t.
When I fought Damien Ecko, then raided the Outfit’s fortress in the Chicago burbs, all I could think about was ending the gang war and saving my friends’ lives. After that the wand went dormant until I was defending Caitlin in the drug factory in Albuquerque. Didn’t help me against David Gosselin, but it sparked like wildfire when I was fighting to save Circe from the Enemy.
Powerful as it was, Canton’s legacy wouldn’t help me, even if my life was on the line. It only worked when I was risking my life to protect someone else.
I was a bad guy with a good guy’s wand.
“You have got,” I said out loud, “to be fucking kidding me.”
“What?”
I shook my head at Gladstone. “Get ready to run for the exit. You’re about to see something really weird, okay? Just roll with it and try not to freak out.”
“I’m already freaked out!” he shouted.
The wand dropped into my hand. I crouched, reaching for my new deck of cards, and scanned the library floor all around us. The students had cleared out. Perfect. Doing magic in public, especially in the age of cell phone cameras, is a good way to meet a bad end: the underground protects its secrets, and “I was about to be shot by a sniper” isn’t really an excuse. As it was, I’d be paying Pixie a fortune to erase the university’s security-cam footage.
I flung the cards, sending them flying, dancing in a pasteboard tornado. The wand flicked up in my other hand. The tip tracing runes, etching sigils in the air that left burning neon streaks in its wake. Now the cards burst, one becoming two, two becoming four, multiplying as they flooded the room and made a fluttering blanket between us and the glass dome. I grabbed Gladstone’s shoulder and yanked, hard.
“Go, now!” I snapped. We broke from cover and ran for the exit. A bullet cracked to my left, punching through another pane of glass and tearing a chunk out of the hardwood floor. Three seconds later, another shot landed behind us. The sniper was half-blind and firing at shadows. We burst from the reading room into the glass tunnel connecting it to the old library, and I froze in my tracks.
Our sniper wasn’t the only one who’d tracked me here. Nyx was at the end of the walkway, between us and the only way out. Snarling as she strode toward us, black leather glistening, and swinging up the mammoth barrel of a Desert Eagle. One of the biggest handguns in the world, and it looks even bigger when you’re on the wrong end of it.
Nyx was an incarnate. A demonic killing machine. I’d lose in a straight-up fight, and I’d just spent my fresh deck of cards. I didn’t think the chainmen would come after me in public like this, but as long as it looked like an act of human violence, some random shooting—
That was it. Demons were bound by the same code of silence that mortal mages were, and then some. And I already knew what trick to use, the same one I’d used against Damien Ecko.
I flipped the wand in my hand. One bone tip for illusion, one for truth, and my instincts told me which was which. One quick slash in the air, faster than her trigger finger, and Nyx’s human disguise tore away like a gossamer veil. The air boiled as she melted into a desiccated, skeletal horror. A corpse coated in insectoid chitin like plates of black armor. Her tail, segmented like a scorpion, whipped the air in confusion and rage.
“Lots of people around here, and the cops are on their way,” I said. “Anyone sees you like this, you’re in big trouble. What’s it gonna be? Take me out and expose yourself to the world, or run and hide until you figure out how to get your human face back?”
She bellowed, a strangled screeching-cat yowl, and crashed through the wall of the glass tunnel. Fleeing into the dark.
Gladstone squeezed my arm, his knuckles white. “What was that?”
“I’ll explain on the way to the airport. You got a car?”
“I’m parked on Ellis Avenue.”
“Great,” I said, “you’re driving.”
We raced through the Regenstein Library, distant sirens screaming in fast. We couldn’t get jammed up here: if they’d take a shot at me in the middle of a university library, the chainmen wouldn’t have any problem getting at me in a holding cell. We burst out onto the campus commons, running fast, heading for cold lights along a quiet, shadowy street.
Gladstone pointed at a dented Jeep Cherokee. “This is me.”
He fumbled in his pocket while I watched the rooftops, searching for our sniper. Too many vantage points, too many perches, and I kept low by the side of the Jeep. I saw the faintest glimmer of movement, a warning that came too late, then the far-off crack of a rifle.
The bullet caught Gladstone in the throat.
He dropped to the street, convulsing, blood spurting from his neck. There were bits of his spine on the asphalt. He clutched my hand, eyes bulging, knowing he was dying and knowing there was nothing he could do about it.
The stupid bastard with the rifle had missed again. He hadn’t killed me. He’d just killed my only hope for survival.
Gladstone stopped breathing. I patted him down, grabbed his keys, and jumped behind the wheel. No time for sentiment. I left the professor dead in the street and stomped on the gas pedal, screaming down the road before the sniper could get another shot off. Two blocks away, no flashing lights in my rearview, I dug out my phone, set it on speaker, and tossed it on the passenger seat.
“Cait,” I said, “Gladstone’s dead.”
“What? What happened?”
“Two hunters attacked us at once. In public. The professor got in the way of a bullet. I’m gonna…I’m gonna figure out where he lives and check his house. Maybe there’s some records—”
“Daniel.”
“He’s probably near the university and that whole place is gonna be radioactive, but I have to try.”
“Daniel,” she said. “Listen to me. You have to get out of Chicago. Come home.”
I slammed the heel of my hand against the steering wheel. “He was proof. He was proof that Naavarasi is lying. Damn it, I have to keep trying. He had to have left something behind. He had colleagues, other people who did the dig with him. If I can track them down—”
“Naavarasi tripled the bounty.” Caitlin said. “You’ve just become the Order of Chainmen’s top-priority target. The entire order.”
I listened to the sounds of the street. The rumbling of the tires. All of a sudden I didn’t have anything to say.
“They know you’re in Chicago,” she told me. “In another hour, they’ll have every airport and railway locked down. Get out. Get out while you still can. Come home, we’ll regroup, and we’ll come up with a new plan.”
For one rosy minute, I was leaving Chicago with the proof I needed to clear my name. For one shining second, I dared to hope. Now I was headed home with nothing but bruises, pulled muscles, and another dead innocent on my conscience.
I bought the first seat on the first flight out, sitting in the concourse with my back to the wall and one eye on every new arrival. Nobody got in my way. I almost felt relieved when the plane lifted off, soaring into a midnight sky, but then I remembered there’d just be another pack of hunters waiting for me on the other end. Up in the sky I had exactly three and a half hours of peace and quiet. The second the plane touched down, it was game on, all over again.
I knew the rules. Killing Naavarasi wouldn’t stop the contract. She’d alre
ady laid her money down, and the chainmen would just keep coming at me until somebody won the grand prize. For the rest of my life.
All the same, if I had to go out, taking her with me was starting to look like a fine way to do it.
* * *
I landed at McCarran Airport a couple of hours before dawn. My ride, the rented Santa Fe, was in the parking garage. I walked fast and kept my head on a swivel. People were sparse; the tourist crowds didn’t migrate at three in the morning. In the parking garage, I only had the sounds of my footfalls for company, shoe leather slapping the oil-stained concrete. I was coming up on my car when I realized I wasn’t alone.
At first, it was a prickle at the back of my neck. A psychic stirring, like when you know someone’s staring at you but can’t spot them. Then I heard it. A giggle from the shadows. High-pitched and clownish. I peered around a parked van, looking for the source.
It was a cartoon hippopotamus.
An honest-to-God, three-dimensional, six-foot-tall cartoon, a man’s tubby body with a leering hippo’s head and an oversized wooden mallet clutched in its stubby paws. It was a black-and-white sketch given life, flickering as it bounced up and down on absurdly flexible knees. It looked and moved like a piece of vintage cartoon art, like Mickey Mouse in his Steamboat Willie days.
“Well,” I said. “That’s new.”
The hippo giggled as it charged, the barrel-sized mallet head swinging high over its head. I threw myself back as the mallet whistled down. It crashed into the spot where I’d just been standing, crushing the stone to dust and leaving a ruptured crater in the garage floor.
31.
I rolled, landing hard on my pulled shoulder, as the hippo took another swing. The mallet pulverized the front end of a pickup truck, crushing the bumper like it was made of cardboard and blasting out a headlight.
Come on, I thought at the wand up my sleeve, I need an edge here, have to save some really important people. Doing hero stuff.
Nothing. The wand knew better. And it wasn’t going to help.
A car swung around the bend, catching us both in the wash of its headlights. I jumped to one side, taking advantage of the distraction and getting some space, while the hippo staggered back and threw one cartoon paw over its eyes. For just a second, caught by the light, its shape sizzled like an egg in a hot skillet. As the driver streaked by—I caught a glimpse of his face, equal parts confused and terrified by what he’d seen—I got an idea.
I ran for my car. My heart pounded as I threw myself behind the wheel, cranking the ignition, watching the hippo skip merrily toward me. Taking its time now, confident—and whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be aware of the “no magic in public” rule. Or it just didn’t care.
The living cartoon stood in front of the Santa Fe, raising its mallet high…and the engine rolled over, purring to life. I hit the switch for the high beams.
Bathed in stark fluorescent light, the hippo froze, transfixed and shaking. Then it exploded. Thick, translucent goo, like a bucket of mucus, splashed across the hood and windshield. The goo went everywhere, painting the concrete, spattering nearby cars, leaving no trace of the cartoon monster behind.
I slumped back in my seat, let out the breath I’d been holding, and hit the windshield wipers. They just smeared the goo around. I’d deal with it. I rolled out of the garage, headed for friendlier territory.
* * *
“So, I just got attacked by a cartoon,” I told Bentley.
He’d met me at the back door of the Scrivener’s Nook, ushering me into the darkened bookstore. As I told him my story, he grabbed a spare piece of Tupperware, ducking back into the alley to scrape off a little of the congealed goo with the edge of a business card and take a sample.
“I’ll have to run an alchemical trial,” he said, “but this looks like ectoplasm.”
“Like, from a ghost?”
He peered into the Tupperware. “Among other things. Ectoplasm is just the residue of a powerful mental projection. Willpower given motion and physical force. It looked like a cartoon, you said?”
“Yeah, but not a modern one. One of those really old black-and-white cartoons, where the animation was super simple and bouncy.”
Bentley reached under the front counter. He took out a legal pad and a pen, sliding them over to me.
“Sketch it,” he said, “as best you can. Any details you can remember. I’ll do some research and try to figure out where it originated.”
I nodded back toward the storeroom door. “Why? It’s splattered all over my hood.”
“There are two possibilities as I see it. Either the Order of Chainmen has a six-foot-tall cartoon hippopotamus on their payroll—which would make it rather hard to discreetly hunt a target—or…”
He let me finish his sentence as my stomach sank. “Or it was conjured up by some world-class psychic. The real hunter. And he’s still out there.”
“I believe you were dealing with a tulpa. An artificially created thought-form. The practitioner creates every aspect of his emissary, obsessing over it for months, years, decades if necessary, in order to bring it to life. It’s an extremely difficult technique, highly rare, and requires singular focus. More to the point, you disrupted the tulpa, but he can just recreate it and send it after you again and again until he succeeds.”
“That’s becoming a theme.” I looked to the shop windows. Daylight coming. “I gotta get out of here. It’s not safe to be around me right now.”
The wrinkles on Bentley’s forehead got deeper. He was worried about me, and he couldn’t do anything to help. I knew the feeling.
“Where will you go?” he asked.
“I’m dead on my feet,” I said. “I’m aching, I’m hungry, I need a shower, and if I don’t get at least a couple hours of sleep, I won’t be able to think straight. I’m going home.”
* * *
I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to face Circe. Didn’t want to confess how I’d let us both down.
The television was on. Some morning news broadcast. Circe sat perched on the sofa’s edge, half watching the show, half typing on my laptop. From the clutter of empty boxes and torn wrappers along the kitchen counter, she’d been plowing through the groceries.
“Oh, hey, help yourself to my stuff,” I told her. I was too tired to put any snark into my voice. Now that I was back, safe as I could be behind locked doors and a string of magical wards, the last dregs of adrenaline in my system petered out and left me running on fumes.
“I required access to the Internet,” she said, typing up a storm. “How fared the hunt?”
I slumped onto the sofa alongside her. My head lolled back. I left it that way.
“I fucked up. Had my hands on a guy who could prove Naavarasi’s lying about you and he just…slipped away. Idiot with a rifle took the wrong shot, got him in the neck. Anyway, I made it out of Chicago one step ahead of every bounty hunter in hell. And now they know I’m back.”
“What will you do?” she asked.
I didn’t have an answer for that. I stared up at the ceiling. The talking head on the news was going on about some kind of scandal in the FBI, but it didn’t get all the way through my ears. There was too much in my head to fit more words inside. My mind was a swirling soup of half-baked ideas, impossible plans, sparks of hope that sputtered and died.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Circe stopped typing. She turned her head, staring at me.
“I’m supposed to be the guy with the plan,” I said. “The trickster who always pulls something from his sleeve, some big surprise to save the day at the last minute. Problem is, Naavarasi’s a better trickster than me. I underestimated her. For way too damn long, we all underestimated her, and now…now I don’t know. I don’t see a way to win this.”
“I’ll go,” Circe said.
I lifted my head, meeting her gaze. “Go?”
“To her. I’ll surrender myself. She’ll have to call off the hunt then.”
�
��Do you understand what you’re saying? Whatever the Enemy was trying to do to you, that thing with the blood, Naavarasi’s probably got something just as nasty in mind.”
“And I will submit,” Circe replied.
“No.” I sat up straight. “No, you won’t. This fight isn’t over.”
She frowned at me. “But…you said you can’t win.”
I looked for a way to voice the feelings raging in my heart. The words I found didn’t belong to me, but I could use them all the same.
“My buddy Paolo, he got hurt, hurt bad, not too long ago. He’s alive, but he’s gonna be struggling the rest of his life just to get back to anything close to normal. He told me, anything worth having is worth fighting for. His art. My life. Your freedom.”
“But you can’t win.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I told her. “Anything worth having is worth fighting for. And the more you want it, the more you have to fight. That’s what makes us human.”
I pushed myself to my feet, one knee screaming in protest. A fresh lance of pain twinged along my shoulder.
“Don’t count me out,” I said. “I might have one or two surprises left. For now I need a shower and some shut-eye, so I can get my head together. I want you to promise me something. Promise me you’ll stay here.”
“You don’t know what my word is worth, or if it’s worth anything at all,” she said.
“Nope. Promise me anyway. We fight until the last round. No surrender.”
She stared at me, her deep, soft eyes unblinking. Then she nodded.
“No surrender,” she said.
I stood under the shower jet and let the hot water pound against my back for a while. Then I crawled into bed, dragged the covers over my head, and set the alarm for sunset. When I made my next move, whatever it was, I’d do it under cover of darkness.
That was the plan, anyway. A trilling echo dragged me out of a dreamless sleep. Groggy, I reached for my phone. It was 3:17 in the afternoon.
“Jen?” I croaked, finding my voice. “What’s up?”
Double or Nothing (Daniel Faust Book 7) Page 20