Child of Fire (35 page)

There was another flurry of gunfire from inside the station.

I rushed to the front of the truck, but I already knew what had broken the windshield. It was Luke’s head.

Annalise had started her attack.

I couldn’t resist one more look at Luke. Thankfully, his face was not much in view, but it suddenly became indistinct. It was vanishing right before my eyes. Damn. I should have stabbed it with the letter opener.

There were more gunshots from inside the station. Ducking below the windows, I ran toward the stairs. I saw a flare of green light, and Emmett began screaming “No no no!” at the top of his lungs. I burst through the door.

The desks we had walked past on our first visit had been smashed and knocked aside. Just beside the door, a pile of scorched black bones lay on the tile floor.

Annalise stood in the center of the room, her fireman’s jacket wide open, ribbons hanging from her vest. Luke Dubois’s headless corpse lay at her feet.

But his head was starting to appear on his shoulders. His head was coming back.

“This is amazing,” Annalise said to me. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Look at the fat one.”

I looked down at Wiley again. Raw meat was growing on his bones. It was repulsive. “Jesus,” I said. “Everything about these guys makes me sick.”

“No more,” Emmett said. He stepped out of his office, a pistol at his side. The slide was back; he’d already emptied it. “Please, no more. We’ll leave town and never come back. We have money we can pay. Anything. Just let me take my brothers away from here.”

“The spell,” Annalise said. “I want it.”

“Wha … what do you mean?” Emmett said.

“Ray, do that one.” She nodded at Wiley’s corpse.

There was nothing much of him to stab with the letter opener, so I swept the ghost knife through the same place on his shoulder where Sugar had been marked with a sigil. The space where the spell would have been suddenly erupted with a jet of black steam.

Wiley’s body stopped regenerating. The gory mess inside his rib cage sagged and began to spread out across the floor. I hopped away from him.

“Oh my God, Wiley.” Emmett’s voice was small. I felt a twinge of sympathy. Then I remembered the dead woman in the morgue, and all the bodies at the hospital, and my sympathy shriveled into cold hatred. He didn’t have the right to grieve.

“You’re right, Ray,” Annalise said. “These guys are repulsive. Do the rest.”

“No!” Luke yelled. “Don’t do it!” He was alive again.

Annalise put her foot on Luke’s back, holding him down. “I already did it,” she said to him, “and I may do it again if you don’t shut up.”

I crossed the room and slipped the ghost knife through Luke’s shoulder. There was another jet of steam and Luke screamed.

Emmett let his empty pistol fall to the floor. “We did some good here, too.” His voice was feeble and small. “We protected the town, too.”

I didn’t care, and neither did Annalise. I walked toward him, being careful not to get between them. I cut his spell with the ghost knife, and he collapsed to the floor in agony. I didn’t watch this time. I walked over to Sugar.

He was lying on the floor in the middle of a spell circle. Compared with the other circles I’d seen, this one was surprisingly simple. It was not drawn or painted on the floor, it was just a hoop of silver wire. There were no other marks or designs that I could see.

Sugar was in bad shape. His arms and legs were broken, and I could see where his skull had cracked and swollen. He looked like he was in terrible pain. His shirt had been cut open, and there was a new sigil on his chest. He wasn’t healing, though. He didn’t seem to be changing at all.

That seemed important, although I wasn’t sure why.

I cut the silver hoop with the ghost knife. There was no rush of power or bolt of black steam. I moved toward Sugar and bent to cut the sigil.

“Don’t!” Emmett pleaded. “Please. He’ll die without it.”

Annalise snorted in irritation and moved her foot to Luke’s skull. Luke let out a little shriek.

“Boss, wait!” She did. I turned to Emmett. “Give me the spell, and tell me everything you know about it. Where it came from and who gave it to you. All of it.”

Emmett looked nervously toward Annalise. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out an index card inside a plastic sleeve. He held it out to me. His hand trembled.

“Toss it.” He did. I glanced at it. There was a complicated design on one side of it, and a four-line rhyming poem on the other.

“My father gave it to me.” Emmett said. “He got it from the original Cabot Hammer, the man who founded this town, a long time ago. I don’t know much more than that, except that I’m supposed to say the words while the person getting the spell sits in the hoop and looks at the other side of the card. That’s the only copy, too. My father told me to never try to copy it.

“We didn’t kill people every full moon or anything. It didn’t work like that. We—”

Annalise stamped down on Luke’s skull. At the same moment, I slid the ghost knife through the sigil on Sugar’s chest. The magic rushed out of it, and his tortured breathing stopped.

Emmett’s shoulders sagged. All the fight was gone from him. “Do it. Just go ahead.”

Annalise looked me in the eyes. “Ray.”

My turn at bat. I took Cabot’s gun out of my pocket and pointed it at the back of Emmett’s head.

In the movies, you often hear actors say it’s hard to kill someone. They’ll say it’s the hardest thing in the world. Well, that’s bullshit. Prison is full of people who thought murder was some kind of achievement—I lived with some of them.

And most of those guys wish they could take it back, because the truth is, the only thing a person needs to commit murder is a moment when they don’t care about the consequences, when they don’t think about what they’re doing and what it means.

Most people spend their whole lives without thinking what it means.

I couldn’t do that. I had done too much time and had too much conscience. I’d shot my best friend when I was just a boy, and I’d hated guns ever since. I knew exactly what would happen. I knew exactly what it would mean.

I squeezed the trigger anyway.

Emmett’s corpse looked just the way I expected it to look. So did the room around me. So did Annalise.

I saw a flannel shirt hanging on a coatrack and used it to wipe down Cabot’s gun. I tossed the gun onto the floor. It thunked as it landed. I wasn’t worried about Cabot, though.

Everyone in town had seen me. There was no way I was going to avoid prison this time. I was a cop killer. He was a corrupt cop and a killer himself, but that wouldn’t matter once the manhunt began.

But what choice did I have? I couldn’t let him walk free. What if he had another copy of the spell somewhere? What if he went looking for more magic? He would just move somewhere else and start killing again.

With some difficulty, Annalise pulled a red ribbon off her vest and dropped it onto a stuffed chair. It burst into flame. She kicked over a desk, scattering a stack of papers onto the flames. The fire was already licking at the painted walls. Soon the station would be lit by orange firelight, just like the Dubois home.

I returned Annalise’s debit card. I didn’t want anything of hers, especially not her money.

“Stop moping,” she said. “You did something useful here, even if the work makes you feel dirty.”

“Let’s just go.”

I followed her toward the door. A small, framed photo hung on the wall, and while I didn’t want to look at it, I
couldn’t turn away. It showed Emmett with his arm around Charles the Third. The youngest Hammer was about thirteen and tall for his age, but he was carrying an extra hundred pounds of flab. An older man with Charles’s narrow face and unruly black hair flipped burgers on a gleaming barbecue. That must have been Charles the Second, Charles Junior.

While the fire grew behind me, I leaned close to the picture. The elder Hammer was the only one not smiling—his face was worn and sagging, his eyes rimmed with dark circles. He was a man with regrets. In the background, I could see the huge windows of an expensive modern house and a smooth, curved gray stone wall like the base of a castle.

The firelight cast flickering shadows over the photo. The flames had reached the ceiling. Annalise stood by the front door, waiting for me silently. Time to go.

We walked outside. The storm clouds had blown away, and I could see blue sky and sunshine for the first time in days.

A crowd of people stood across the street. The van was parked around the corner. We walked toward them.

“Next time, I’ll park closer.”

“Good idea. You look like a mess.”

I pulled at my shirt. It was torn, sopping wet, and it stank of gunpowder and antifreeze. “I needed more than four changes of clothes, I think.”

“I didn’t think you’d live through that many. Are you going to vomit?”

“Oh, yes,” I said to her. “But not right away, I think.”

As we neared the crowd, the cook approached me nervously. I must have been quite a sight. “What’s happening?” he asked. “What’s going on in this town?”

“The Dubois brothers killed Reverend Wilson.”

There were gasps of astonishment from the crowd.

“What?” the cook said. “You can’t be serious.”

“Go away,” I told him. We pushed through the crowd and headed up the block. No one tried to stop us. “Charles Hammer is next, right, boss?”

“He would be, if I knew where to find him. That’s all I’ve been doing is looking for him. He hasn’t been home or at his office since we were there last, and Karoly’s notes don’t tell me anything.”

“Are your hands any better?”

“No,” she said. “They’re worse. I expect I won’t be able to use them at all by tomorrow. They feel like they’re burning, and I can barely bend my fingers.”

We reached the van. I opened the door for her and helped her in, not bothering with the seat belt. I climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine. “We could stop off at the butcher again—”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “The last time it barely helped at all, and I don’t want to spend all day on it. It’s a waste of time.”

“And your stomach?”

“I’m starving.” She didn’t look at me. She just stared ahead. “I feel a little weak and disoriented, to tell the truth. I’m going to have to rely on you a little more than I would normally. Can I do that?”

“Yes,” I said. “I just killed a cop in cold blood for you. If that doesn’t prove I’m on your side …”

Right then I felt like vomiting. Thankfully, I hadn’t eaten in hours.

I pulled out of the parking space. I didn’t have anywhere to go, but I didn’t want to be near the scene of the fight any longer. I didn’t know where I was going, so I just drove.

Hammer Bay was pretty in the sunlight. I thought of all the people who were not going to see this sunshine, from the woman in the hospital morgue to the reverend to Sugar Dubois, and I felt a twist of cold anger. I tried to aim it at Charles Hammer, or his grandfather, or Eli Warren,
who had brought the spells to this town in the first place, but in truth, I was angry at everything, including myself. The world seemed to be full of killers and those who stood by and did nothing about them. I suddenly wished I was one of those who stood by.

“If I don’t survive,” she said, “I don’t want you to go after Charles Hammer by yourself.”

“Why not?” I sounded a little indignant, but she ignored it.

“Because he’s too big for you, and I don’t want him getting a close look at the spells you’re carrying. If things go wrong, head out of town. One of the peers will track you down and debrief you.”

“I’ll be in jail by then, right? Will the society get me out again?”

She shrugged. She was dying, and she didn’t much care whether I went to jail or not. I’d have probably felt the same way.

I drove toward Cynthia’s house, glad that it was my left calf that was throbbing, not the one I drove with. Maybe we could get Charles’s location out of her. Something was nagging at me. There was something I should have remembered but couldn’t quite recall.

“You don’t think he left Hammer Bay, do you?”

“I hope not,” Annalise said. “I don’t think so. He started this whole thing for his company and his town. I don’t think he’d cut and run.”

I nodded. Cynthia had refused to leave, too. “What about a boat or something? He’s rich enough to have one.”

“He does. Karoly’s notes told me which one. I sank it last night. He wasn’t there.”

Then I remembered. “Cabot said that Charles has been spending all his time hiding in the tower.”

“There’s a high, round room at their house.”

“That’s what I thought, too, but no dice. That’s his sister’s bedroom.”

She didn’t react to that. “Did the sister tell you where he is?”

“She wouldn’t. Not her own brother.” This was the point where I could have told Annalise about Cynthia’s iron gate, but we had more important things to discuss. “I want to ask her one more time.”

Annalise didn’t say anything after that. I wondered what she would do to force an answer out of Cynthia. Had I saved Cynthia’s life so my boss could kill her?

Then it hit me—the gray stone wall in Emmett’s photo, Cabot’s remark that Charles had been hiding in the tower …

I switched off the turn signal and kept going south.

We passed out of the business district. I looked toward the ocean and saw the sunlight sparkle on the water. It was a beautiful sight.

And there, naked in the sunlight, was the light house. Except that with no mist or fog around it, it didn’t look like a light house at all.

I pulled over and shut off the engine. “Where’s that bad map?”

We searched the glove compartment and the spaces under the seats before I remembered that I had looked at the map in Ethan’s minivan. I found it in the inside pocket of my jacket, folded up into a tiny square. I unfolded it. The light house was marked with a number four. I turned the map over and found the entry for number four.

“What’s all this about?” Annalise asked.

“A light house that isn’t a light house,” I said. “Here it is: ‘In 1949, Charles Hammer the First bought a castle in Scotland and had it shipped to Hammer Bay, where it was rebuilt stone by stone. Sixteen years later, an
earthquake toppled all but the southernmost tower, which still stands today.’”