Child of Fire (40 page)
Authors: Harry Connolly
Tags: #Magicians, #Magic, #Fantasy fiction, #Secret societies, #Paranormal, #General, #Fantasy, #Fiction, #Murderers, #Contemporary
The magazine ran dry. I was reaching for the second one when Hammer, still ducking below the dashboard, swerved across the center line. A pickup truck loaded with gardening equipment rounded the curve ahead, heading straight for him. The driver blared his horn.
The vehicles swerved away from each other. The pickup slid onto the shoulder of the road and rumbled through the gravel. Hammer overcorrected, angling across the road and over the shoulder. He hit the brakes too late and smashed into a tree.
The pickup driver slowed to a stop, and so did I. I saw Hammer’s air bag deflate back against the steering wheel. Hammer was hurt, but I knew he wasn’t out of
commission. I tossed away the empty gun and climbed from the driver’s seat.
“Did you see what happened?” the pickup driver said, not really looking at me. “He swerved right into my lane!”
He rushed toward Hammer’s car, intent on helping him. Hammer shoved open his door and stumbled out of the car. He was holding the Uzi. The pickup driver stopped suddenly about ten feet away and said something like “Whoa, friend …”
Hammer pointed the weapon at me. I fired.
He blossomed with bullet holes and fell back against the car. He lay still. The driver fled back to his truck like a perfectly sensible person.
I rushed over to Hammer and took his gun away. The bullet wounds were already healing, but slowly. Without the silver wire, the connection between the man and the predator must have been faint.
Using the ghost knife, I sliced off his clothes. I found an iron gate on his shoulder, just where it had been on Cynthia and Cabot. I cut through it, letting the black steam and gray sparks arc into the air.
There was another sigil on his stomach. It was a circle with flames at the four cardinal points and a single eye at the center. This one didn’t look like a tattoo, though. It looked, and felt, like a tumor that had grown under his skin. I slashed the ghost knife through this one, too. There were no jets of steam or sparks, but Hammer’s bullet wounds stopped sealing over.
As an experiment, I slid the corner of the ghost knife through his wrist. His skin split apart as if I was using a scalpel. He was dead.
The pickup truck raced away. I climbed into the Crown Vic and found an old leather-bound journal. It fell open to a page that read “To Call and Bind a Great Wheel, Which Will Grant You Favorable Outcomes.”
On impulse, I pulled out Charlie Three’s wallet. I found five hundred-dollar bills and ten twenties. I took them all. This had been a valuable lesson for him.
I tucked the book under my arm and went back to the van.
NINETEEN
I drove back into town. I should have dumped the van, stolen a car, and made a run for it, but I doubted I would get far. Half the town had seen me at the casino, the hospital, the police station, and during the car chase through town. The FBI or the state police were probably already looking for me.
Besides, I had no choice. Charles Hammer might have left another copy of his spell book in his tower. I had to finish Annalise’s work and burn it down.
I drove through town without incident. Traffic still seemed lighter than it had. Most of the people must have been on the north side of town, where two columns of black smoke rose toward the sky. I pulled into Hammer’s driveway without attracting any apparent attention. There were no police cars waiting for me, and no one seemed to have come to the house. The front door was still wide open.
I went inside and let myself onto the terrace. There was no lighter fluid beside the barbecue, but there was a long lighter, a bag of charcoal, and a charcoal chimney. That would do. I tore some pages off Charles’s kitchen calendar and squirted olive oil on them. Then I put the paper on the bottom of the chimney and the coals in the top.
I’d almost forgotten about the sprinklers. I followed the sprinkler pipes along the ceiling to the place where they joined the main water system beneath the kitchen sink, and turned the valve all the way off.
Then I stood and opened the fridge. I was hungry, sure, but I had another thought nagging at me.
On the bottom shelf of the fridge, Charles had left three porter house steaks. I carried them along with the lighter and chimney to the tower.
I set the lighter and chimney on the landing inside the door. Then I sprinted up the stairs with the steaks in hand.
Annalise was still there. One look at her and I knew my idea was crazy and useless. I opened the first package and, with the ghost knife, cut a long strip from the steak. Annalise’s mouth was wide open in a frozen scream. I stuffed the piece of meat into her throat.
I did it again and again. If I was crazy, I was crazy. Maybe they would put me in a nice, uncomfortable psych ward when they finally nabbed me.
As I finished the second piece of meat, I felt something in the back of Annalise’s throat move.
She breathed on me.
She still looked dead. Her skin was charred and blackened, her face shriveled, her eyes empty sockets.
I put my hand back up to her mouth. I could swear I felt a faint breath. Unless I had lost my mind.
I cut up the third steak as quickly as I could, jamming it down her throat. When it was gone, I picked her up, getting greasy ash all over my ruined shirt, and carried her down the stairs and out of the house. I opened the back of the van and laid her down as gently as I could.
Then I ran back into the house, lit the charcoal chimney, and set it on the landing beside the stairs. Soon it would be hot enough to ignite the wood.
I ran into the kitchen and disabled the electric pilot light on the gas stove, then turned all the burners on full. In the front room, I tipped the overstuffed couch against the wall and lit a pile of magazines beneath it.
The magazines would light the couch, which would ignite the wall, which would still be burning when the gas reached it.
All of this took three minutes at most, but it seemed like forever. I finally ran back to the van and raced out of the driveway. There was always the possibility that someone would go to the house and be hurt or killed when the gas main went, but that didn’t seem likely. Hammer liked his privacy, and the town gave it to him.
I drove through town again, pulled into the supermarket lot and parked beside the Dumpster, where the van wouldn’t be visible from the road. My clothes were a mess.
People in the supermarket gave me some strange stares, but I limped as quickly as I could and paid with Hammer’s cash. I bought another leg of lamb and forty pounds of pot roast.
Once back in the van, I started the engine. I didn’t have any capacity for planning left. All I had was a buzzing, jangling urge to flee town.
I heard a loud
thoom
as I pulled out of the parking lot. A quick glance toward the water showed a heavy black cloud where Hammer’s tower was supposed to be. People around me screamed or jumped into their cars to race toward the fire.
I turned the other way and drove out of town.
Several miles down the road, I came to the same empty lot where Annalise and I had confronted the Benton family. I pulled in and parked behind the abandoned stall.
I climbed into the back. Annalise was still breathing, but more faintly than before. Feeling her breath gave me chills. It was like feeling the breath of a ghost.
I opened the first package of pot roast. Just a few days before, I would have left her to burn in the tower, or I
would have pitched her into the woods behind me and been glad to be rid of her.
Not anymore.
For the next hour, I sliced off strips of meat and fed them to her. She lived.
First, I’d like to thank Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, and all the regulars at the
Wordplayer.com
forums, most especially Bill Martell. I would never have learned how to put a story together without that site.
And thanks also go to Caitlin Blasdell and Betsy Mitchell for giving so much of their care, expertise, and precious, precious time to this book.
Finally, the largest share of my gratitude goes to my wife, MaryAnn, who believed in me when believing in me didn’t make a bit of sense. This book wouldn’t exist without her.
Here is an excerpt from
Game of Cages
, the
next book in the Twenty Palaces series
by Harry Connolly
COMING SOON
FROM DEL REY BOOKS
ONE
It was three days before Christmas, and I was not in prison. I couldn’t understand why I was free. I hadn’t hidden my face during the job in Hammer Bay. I hadn’t used a fake name. I honestly hadn’t expected to survive.
I had, though. The list of crimes I’d committed there included breaking and entering, arson, assault, and murder. And what could I have said in my defense? That the people I’d killed really deserved it?
Washington State executes criminals by lethal injection, and that first night in my own bed, I imagined I was lying on a prison cot in a room with a glass wall, a needle in my arm.
That hadn’t happened. Instead, I’d met with an attorney the society hired, kept my mouth shut, stood in at least a dozen lineups, and waited for the fingerprint and DNA analysis to come back. When it did, they let me go. Maybe I’d only dreamed about the people I’d killed.
So, months later, I was wearing my white supermarket polo shirt, stocking an endcap with gift cards for other stores. It was nearly nine at night and I had just started my shift. I liked the late shift. It gave me something to do when the restlessness became hard to take.
At the front of the store, a woman was questioning the manager, Harvey. He gestured toward me. At first, I figured her for another detective. Even though the last press release about me had stated I’d been the victim of
identity theft and the police were searching for other suspects, detectives still dropped by my work and home at random times to take another run at me. They weren’t fooled. They knew.
But she didn’t have a cop’s body language. She wore casual gray office clothes and sensible work shoes, an outfit so ordinary I barely noticed it. She moved briskly toward me, clutching a huge bag. Harvey followed.
She was tall and broad in the hips with long, delicate hands, large eyes, and a pointed chin. Her skin color suggested she had both black and white parentage, which in this country made her black, even though her coloring was pretty much brown. “You’re Ray Lilly, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Who’s asking?”
“My name is Catherine Little. I’m a friend of your mother’s.”
That last sentence hit me like a punch in the gut. The last time I’d seen my mother, I was fourteen years old and headed into juvie. She was not someone I thought about. Ever. “Who are you again?”
“I’m Catherine. I work with your mother. I’m a friend of hers. She asked me to contact you.”
“Where is she?” I peered into the parking lot, but it was pitch-dark outside.
“Okay. This is the hard part. Your mom’s in the hospital. She’s had some … issues the last few days. She asked for you.”
I laid my hand on the gift cards on the cart beside me. They toppled over, ruining the neat little stacks I’d been working with. I began to tidy them absentmindedly. “When?”
Catherine laid her hand on my elbow. “Right now,” she said. “It has to be right now.”
Something about the way she said it was off. I looked at her again. There was a look of urgency on her face,
but there was something else there, too. Something calculated.
This woman didn’t know my mother. I knew it then as clearly as if she were wearing a sandwich board sign that read I
AM LYING TO YOU
.
Her expression changed. My face must have given me away, because she didn’t look quite so sympathetic, but she still had a look of urgency. “We have to hurry,” she said.
Harvey laid his hand on my shoulder like a friendly uncle. “Ray, go get your coat. I’ll clock you out.”
I told Catherine I’d meet her out front and went into the break room. She had to be with the Twenty Palace Society; there was no one else who would want me. I had been dreading the day they would contact me again. Dreading it and wishing for it.
I grabbed my flannel jacket and hurried outside without speaking to or looking at anyone. I could feel my co-workers watching me. Just the thought of talking to Harvey—or anyone else—about my mom, even if it was just a bullshit cover story, made me want to quit on the spot.
Catherine waited behind the wheel of an Acura sedan, one of the most stolen cars in the country. I sat in the passenger seat and buckled up. She had a sweet GPS setup and some electronic equipment I didn’t recognize. I squinted at a narrow slot with a number pad on the side—I could have sworn it was a tiny fax machine. While I had been living the straight life, cars had moved on and left me behind. She pulled into the street.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That really hit you hard, didn’t it? They told me to contact you that way. I didn’t realize … Sorry.”
She seemed sincere if a little standoffish. “Who’s ‘they’?” I asked, just to be sure. “Who are you?”
“My name is Catherine. Really. ‘They’ are the Twenty Palace Society. We have an emergency and I need help. You’re the only other member in this part of the country at the moment.”
My scalp tingled. It was true.
Part of me was furious that they’d dangled my mother in front of me like bait, but at the same time, I wanted to lunge across the hand brake and hug her.
Finally. Finally! The society had come for me. It was like a jolt to the base of my spine.
Finally, something worth living for
.
“Are you okay?” she asked warily.
“I’m okay.” I did my best to keep my voice neutral but I didn’t succeed all that well. Christ, she’d even said I was a
member
of the society. I belonged. “We need to go by my place.”
There were no tattoos peeking from the cuffs of her sleeves or the collar of her shirt. She had no sigils on her clothes or the interior of the car. No visible magic. She might have had something hidden, of course. I was tempted to rummage through her pockets to search for spells.
She drove to my place without asking for my address. My hand was trembling and I gripped my leg to hide the adrenaline rush. I’d thought about the society often over the last seven months. Aside from the attorney, and a visit from an old guy with a brush mustache who’d debriefed me about Hammer Bay, I’d heard nothing from them, not even gotten a call from Annalise letting me know how she was. I had been telling myself I wanted to be cut loose. I had been telling myself I wanted to be forgotten.
But now they had come for me again and every traffic light and Christmas decoration seemed saturated with color. In fact, all my senses seemed to have been turned up to ten. I felt alive again, and I was grateful for it.
At my aunt’s house, I had Catherine drive around to the back. I climbed the stairs to my mother-in-law apartment above the garage and let myself in. I went to the bookshelf and pulled a slip of paper from between two yard-sale hardcovers. It had been sealed with mailing tape and had laminate over that. A sigil had been drawn on one side.
My ghost knife. It was the only spell I had, except for the protective tattoos on my chest and forearms. They didn’t count, though; the ghost knife was a spell I’d created myself, and I could feel it as if it were a part of me.
I slipped it into my jacket pocket and looked around. What else did I need? I had my wallet and keys and even, for the first time in my life, a credit card. Should I pack clean underwear and a change of clothes?
Catherine honked. No time for that, I guessed. I rushed into the bathroom and grabbed my toothbrush. Then I wrote a quick note to my aunt to tell her I’d be gone for a while and please not to worry. Catherine honked again before I was done. I carried it down the stairs and annoyed Catherine further by running toward the back door of the house. I stuck the note on the backside of the wreath on the screen door, rattling it in the frame.
The inner door suddenly swung inward. Aunt Theresa was there, looking up at me. “Ray?” She wore a knit cap over her wispy gray hair and a bright red and green scarf around her neck. Cold. She was always cold. It was one of the many things about her that made me worry.
“Oh! I thought this was movie night. I was leaving you a note.” She must have come to see who was honking.
She popped open the screen door and took the note with fingers bent sideways from arthritis. “Movie night is tomorrow, dear.” She opened the note and read it. The note didn’t mention my mother—that was
Catherine’s cover story, not mine, and I wasn’t going to lie to my aunt about her little sister.
I glanced at the room behind her, expecting to see Uncle Karl in his badge and blue uniform, scowling at me. He wasn’t there.
Aunt Theresa looked up at me. “Will you be back for Christmas?”
The way she said it startled me. Of course I had gifts to give her and Karl, but I hadn’t expected her to care if I … I felt like an idiot.
“I hope so,” I said, and meant it.
She shuffled forward and hugged me. I hugged her back. She knew a little about what I did. Not about the society itself, and not enough to get into trouble, but enough to worry. “Be careful.”
We let go. I backed down the stairs and hurried to Catherine’s car. I should have said something reassuring to Aunt Theresa, but it was too late now. Time to go.
I climbed into the Acura and belted up. My adrenaline was up and I couldn’t help but smile. Catherine didn’t like that smile. “Do you have everything now?”
The ghost knife in my pocket felt like a live wire. “Yep.”
She rumbled through the alley and pulled into the street. I thought it would be best to let her tell me what was going on when she was ready, but after driving in silence for four blocks, I couldn’t hold back.
“What’s the emergency?”
“Well …” she said, and then fell silent while she negotiated a busy intersection. Her body language had changed again—she was irritated. I wasn’t sure why; didn’t it make sense for me to stop at home before I went on a job?
“Well,” she said again, “earlier today we found out there’s going to be an auction. Tonight. In fact, it might be taking place right now, although I hope not. I went
an hour out of my way to pick you up, so you better be worth it.”
This was a sudden change in tone. I wondered where it had come from. “I’ll do my best,” I said, but that made her scowl and blow air out of her nose. “What’s being auctioned?”
“A predator.”
That was the answer I didn’t want to hear. Predators are weird supernatural creatures out of the Empty Spaces. I’d seen two so far, along with the pile of corpses they left behind. “Do you know what kind?”
“What kind?” She seemed to think this was an idiotic question, but I had no idea why. “No. I don’t know what kind.”
“Okay.” I was careful not to snap at her.
“Who are you?” she asked. She looked me up and down. I didn’t feel a lot of friendliness coming from her.
“I’m Ray Lilly,” I answered, keeping my tone neutral. “Remember? You just pulled me out of work.”
“I know your name,” she said, leaving out the word
dumbass
, but implying it anyway. “What were you doing at that supermarket? What are you doing in that apartment?”
“Working. Living.”
“That’s not cover for a mission? Okay. What I want to know is who you are in the society. Because you are definitely not a peer. Are you an apprentice? An ally?”
“I’m not any of those things,” I said. “I’m Annalise Powliss’ wooden man.”
She exhaled sharply, then laughed to herself a little. “For God’s sake,” she said. After a few seconds more, she pulled into a Pizza Hut parking lot. She didn’t turn off the engine. “All right,” she said, and I could tell by her tone that I wouldn’t like what she was about to say. “Somebody fucked up. You shouldn’t be here, not with me, and I shouldn’t have been sent a fucking hour out
of my way to pick up a fucking wooden man, not on a supposedly emergency job. What’s the point in having you along? I don’t need you and I don’t want you. Hell, I don’t even like looking at you, knowing what you are.
“So here’s the deal: you keep quiet and do what I say, or you get out right now. I have a long night’s work ahead of me, and I don’t need you getting in my way. So which is it going to be? Because if following orders is going to be too much for you, you need to be out of my car and have yourself a nice day.”
She stared at me, waiting for a response. It had been a while since anyone had spoken to me like that. If Catherine had been a guy …
Not that using my fists had ever turned out well for me. Old habits don’t just die hard, they make living hard, too. “You must be part of the diplomatic wing of the society.”
She sat back, rolled her eyes, and sighed. “What the hell did I do to deserve this?”
“I’ll tell you what you did,” I answered. “You talked to me like I ran over your dog. Whatever your problem is, it has nothing to do with me.”
“Oh no?” She turned the key, shutting off the engine. “Bad enough to have a peer or an ally along. Then I would spend all my time praying the collateral damage didn’t hit me. But every wooden man I’ve ever met was either a stone-skulled thug, terminally ill, or a terminally ill stone-skulled thug.” She made sure to look me straight in the eye as she said it. She had guts. I would have liked her if she wasn’t so obnoxious. “Which are you?”
“Well, I’m not terminally ill.”
She frowned. I’d lived down to her expectations. “Well that’s just dandy.”
“If you order me to get out of your car,” I said, “I’ll hop out right here. I’m not going to ride with someone
who doesn’t want me. But that’s the only way I’m getting out. When the friendly guy from the society turns up to debrief me, I’m not going to tell him I
chose
not to go. Understand?”
She turned away from me. The society had kept me out of jail, somehow. I had no idea what would happen if I refused to take a job. Would they kill me? Would they lift whatever spell kept the cops off my front door? I had exactly one person handy that I could ask, and she was trying to kick me out of her car.
Pizza delivery guys carried red cases across the lot. They didn’t seem happy about the way we were parked. I wondered how much they made a month.
“All right, then,” Catherine said, “we go on the job and you take your orders from me.”
“That ain’t going to happen, either,” I told her. As Annalise’s wooden man—I went when she said “go” and I did when she said “do”—but that didn’t mean I was going to take orders from everyone in the society. Not unless Annalise told me to. “If you have a good idea, I’ll be happy to go along with it. If not, then not. That’s the only deal you’re going to get. If that’s not good enough,
you
can explain why you gave the boot to the guy the society sent you an hour out of your way to pick up.”