We Are Not Good People (Ustari Cycle) (27 page)

The door fell inward when I pushed on it. Just leaned back and sent up a cloud of soot when it landed. I was glad I’d told Daryl and Ketterly to go back to Ketterly’s office and wait it out. I didn’t want strangers in Hiram’s home.

The apartment had burned for a long time. The windows were all shattered, and the weather had been getting in. The floors were a sticky mess of black mud. Wallpaper still clung to the walls, peeling slowly like dying leaves, drooping towards gravity. The whole place smelled like smoke. It was choking. Almost like a syrup diffused into the air.

“Fuck,” Mags breathed, then spasmed into coughing.

We walked through the place slowly. The kitchen was the least destroyed. The table and chairs were still there. The wall shared with the living room was blackened and bubbled, but the wall shared with the hallway outside and the exterior walls were all intact. The cabinets and appliances still sat in their usual places. The room felt dead. There was no power. It was dark. Freezing. All of Hiram’s forks still in his drawers. His dish towels folded on a shelf. Microscopic layers of Hiram himself smeared onto the walls, the floors. Microbes of him, carbonized, in the air. A film of grit lay on top of everything, damp and muddy. The chairs and table were still in the positions we’d left them in, chaotic and . . . out of place. It felt like we were walking into some sort of spell, frozen time, everything held in place. Like if I gave a chair a shove, it would remain stubbornly in place or sail off without gravity, in slow motion.

“
Fuck,
” Mags hissed.

We made for the study. Everything else had burned. There were charred fragments of things everywhere, melted globs of things. Some of the shelves still clung to the walls, unfamiliar shapes bumped along their wobbly, heat-warped lines. I stopped and looked around. All of Hiram’s shit. Every bauble he’d stolen, every carving he’d gotten in payment
for some tiny scam, every small Artifact he’d commissioned, had been destroyed. Eaten up by Cal Amir.

Who certainly had not considered for even a moment what it was he might be burning.

On the floor, I found the hard black sphere Hiram used as a worry stone. Unscathed, gleaming with the same polish, perfect and eternal. I picked it up and held it in my hand, feeling its perfection, its weight. Then I set it back on the floor carefully, in the same spot.

I stepped into the small closet office. It had been burned to ash as well, a damp mess. The carpet still clung to the floor like some sort of stubborn life form. I knelt down and tore at it, getting the soaked, sticky weave stuck to my hands, under my fingernails. My freshly cut thumb sizzled with irritation. After a few minutes, I’d revealed the top of the floor safe embedded there. No physical lock but several layers of magical Wards laid on it, including a Glamour that made anyone not aware of its exact location simply not see it.

Even as I squatted there, if I turned my head, it disappeared from my peripheral vision.

Amir hadn’t come back. I imagined after the appearance of Claire right in front of him, the adventure with the cops, and then the hurried trip south to deal with us, his original mission at Hiram’s had slid down the list of priorities.

“Mags,” I said, my voice tight and scratchy. “You ready?”

“Fuck it.”

I closed my eyes, gave him a second, and recited twenty-four more syllables. Six to deal with the Glamour, just because it was irritating me, bending the light back into its normal path; in effect, two spells existing at once, which was the oldest trick in the book. It took more blood and more words and more trouble to
remove
a spell than it did to just
negate
a spell. Four syllables for the first Ward, six for the second, and four more for the last, each group of Words appended to Hiram’s spells—which was the other trick,
altering
the existing spells instead of trying to undo them outright. Like a virus. I opened my eyes
and yanked the lid off the safe. It was fire-rated and looked to have survived in good shape. It was deep. It looked like Hiram had simply dumped things into it without any attempt at organization. There were packets of papers with spells scrawled on them in that skinny, unreadable handwriting, his personal cipher. Unmarked boxes that were heavy and warm as I pulled them out. Dozens of trinkets—charms and other Fabrications. Two thick wads of cash in rubber bands. And then, buried under the rest of the trash, the sliver of oily green stone attached to a leather strap.

“Hiram,” I muttered, “you thieving bastard.”

I lifted the
Udug
by the strap and leaned back on my feet, holding it up in front of me. It had the same wet look. My skin crawled. Years ago, maybe centuries ago, some Fabricator had spent a lot of blood to create it. That kind of energy was never
good
energy, and it somehow got stronger as time went on, amplified. Hiram had discussed the phenomenon with me back when he was trying to teach me. He had no explanation for it. But I’d understood immediately. There was suffering tied in to everything we did. And suffering
lingered
.

I looked around, tears stinging my eyes. There had been moments over the previous years when I’d wished for nothing more than to be free of Hiram and his stupid, claustrophobic apartment, his ridiculous stolen trinkets, his endless condescension, and his violent temper. But now I had lost it all.

I stared at the floor. I’d lost this place. It had been my home. Even after I’d left it, Mags and I had never had anywhere permanent to live. We’d roamed. We’d slept on the streets, in cars, wherever we could squat, surrounded by Normals and always on our toes not to tip our hands, not to reveal ourselves. You couldn’t rest like that. At Hiram’s house you didn’t have to pretend, and it had never stopped being my home.

I’d lost Hiram.

I’d never expected to miss the fat old asshole, but I was suddenly filled with an aching, yawning chasm of regret. I would never hear his
booming actor’s voice again. I would never watch him steal a glass figurine from a shopwindow. I would never get to tell him what a prick he could be.

I would never get to apologize to him. I would never get to show him what I was finally able to do.

I looked down at the
Udug
. And I thought I was about to lose even more.

“Mags?”

“Yeah, Lem?”

I swallowed hard. “Let’s go get a drink.”

IT WAS A DINGY
place. Filled with old men. Serious about their drinking. Mags and I found a table in the back, in the shadows. I had a double, then got another, which I let sit untouched. I dropped the
Udug
on the table between us and stared at it. It seemed to absorb all the light. It seemed to be sinking into the wood, like the necklace was the heaviest thing in the universe. Like it was bending light around it.

I didn’t feel the first drink at all. I took the second one and held it up. “To Hiram. A fucking asshole, but
our
fucking asshole.”

Mags looked miserable. He lifted his own glass. “To Hiram,” he said.

I swallowed the second drink. Felt nothing. I stared at the
Udug
. Remembered its slithery voice in the Skinny Fuck’s mind. Whispering. Maybe the worst thing I’d ever heard in my life, and that had been an
echo,
a memory from a dead man.

“Don’t do it, Lem,” Mags said.

I shook my head. “I have to. They could be starting the ritual at any moment. Might have
already
started it.” I didn’t think so, though. I thought when a spell of that magnitude started cranking, every mage in the fucking world would feel it. Hundreds of us, spread thin across the globe, stopping in our tracks and looking up.
Feeling it.
Feeling the world being murdered. “All those women. In that . . . thing Fallon built. Going to be killed. And we can’t even know where she is in the fucking queue, even if we were willing to just let a few dozen people die.”

“We have the plans to the place. We don’t need that fucking thing to tell us.”

I snorted. “What, you, me, and Daryl are going to drive up there, sneak in, and . . . what? Just fucking
imagineer
our way through?” I shook my head again. “If we had time, Mags, sure. If we knew when they were going to start the
biludha,
we could take our fucking time. But we don’t. We need to know what to do right now.”

I wanted another drink. It wouldn’t do me any good. I had a feeling I could drink a whole bottle and still sit there rock-steady sober.

I couldn’t do it alone. Alone, I had Mags and Daryl and a truck and maybe D. A. Ketterly. And maybe not Daryl and his truck, if the Charm he’d been operating under faded away. That had turned out to be the record-setting Charm of all time. I suspected it had something to do with the glyphs on Claire’s body, which Renar had said affected spells, bent them, deflected them. Poor Daryl was the recipient of an unintentionally aggressive Charm, and I was starting to wonder how much work—how much blood—it would take to set him free.

That was low on my to-do list, though. I wasn’t going to drive up to Mika Renar’s house and take on her and Cal Amir, two
enustari, without some kind of game plan.

I thought of Claire. Her legs pressed against me. The smell of soap on her skin. Pictured the cops in their car, strangled.

I thought of Renar. Her mummy body. Her beautiful Glamour. The smell of rot and time in her study.

I swept my eyes around the bar. All of these people. Me and Mags. Dead.

I thought,
They killed Hiram.

I thought,
They
will kill me.

I reached for the
Udug.
Mags snapped out his arm and grabbed my wrist. Held it there, an inch above the table.

“Let me,” he said. “Lem, I’ll do it. Tell you what it says.”

For a second, I wanted to hug the stupid bastard. I wanted to bundle him up in my coat like a shivering puppy and put him on a
fucking bus to somewhere else with a note pinned to his coat asking someone to take him in and feed him. I pictured a Pitr Mags with the stone’s dry, toneless voice burrowing inside his brain, and wanted to burst into tears. And panic.

I snaked my other hand around. “Can’t let you do that, hoss,” I said, and picked up the
Udug
. Wrapped my hands around it and closed my eyes.

The voice started whispering in my head. Midsentence, as if it had never stopped.

22.
ENEMIES AT THE GATE FOLLOWED
you kill you out of sight leave get out upstairs fire escape rusted it will hold go now go now go now behind the bar clipped is a shotgun it will misfire she is terrified of death of what awaits her of the darkness she wears the red dress in order to

I dropped the
Udug
with a wince. The voice was exactly like I’d heard it in the Skinny Fuck’s memories, except clear. Perfect. Like a snake had wriggled into my brain and lay against my eardrum. It had no tone. No inflection. It spoke continuously, without pause, without breath. It was like having someone whispering wetly in your ear. I looked at Mags. His face was a mask of concern. As if I were engulfed in flames only he could see. The voice was like listening to cancer, but I
wanted
to listen again. I picked up the leather strap instead and held the
Udug
so it dangled between us. I got to my feet. “We need to go.”

“You okay, Lem?” he said, scrambling up after me. “What’d it
say
?”

I forced a smile. Mags needed petting. “I’m fine,” I said. “Listen—as long as I don’t overdo it, it’s fine, okay? That guy, he had this thing with him for a long fucking time. Forever. Had it against his skin constantly. I won’t do that, okay?”

He nodded slowly, eyes wide. I had to manage Mags. He would
think tackling me and knocking the
Udug
out the window would be
helping
me.

“Upstairs,” I said, gesturing at the dim rear of the bar, where a slender chain stretched across a narrow set of stairs. A sign was attached to the chain:
EMPLOYEES ONLY
.

He followed me towards it. We moved at a normal pace: no rush, no hesitation. People picked up on the unusual. On the sudden, on the overly careful. When walking brazenly into an area you were clearly not supposed to be, the best way to do it was to act like you owned the place.

“Why?” he asked.

“We were followed. Someone means us harm.”

And he accepted that. I added that to my thought catalog of Mags’s talents: He could just accept things. It was a more powerful skill than you might expect.

I stepped over the chain and started up the stairs without looking back. The gloom closed over me immediately. I heard Mags making a mess of it, getting tangled in the chain. Then the moan of the old steps under his weight. Then someone down below, shouting, surprised. I started to run.

At the top of the stairs was a door. It was unlocked, and I stepped through it into a small, crowded office. Two windows behind the desk. I jumped up on top of the desk and then down onto the floor behind it. Moving fast, I pushed the bottom sash of the left window up. Leaned down and through and pulled myself out onto the rusted, vibrating fire escape. Stood aside to let Mags join me. Voices behind us. The landing shimmied and bucked under our weight. I leaned out over the railing. Scanned the alley up and down. Didn’t see anything.

“Come on.”

I started down. Halfway to the street, I began calculating the drop because the fire escape was shaking so badly, rusty flakes raining down on us. My hands turned orange. Down on the damp blacktop of the alley, I had a flashback. Watching the cops drive away from Hiram’s.
The brake lights. Amir, Claire. Mags’s stupid fucking bird Glamour, lighting the place up for one crucial second.

I moved my hand along the leather strap, worrying it until the
Udug
was in my grasp again.

left not the street they wait are patient back door of restaurant always open the dishwasher sells pills lovely pills many colors sells them out the back door for cash for blow jobs for favors owed the cooks spit in the big bowl of fried rice constantly a joke she sees the red dress in her dreams she sees what she thinks of as hell she has no regret but fears fears fears the other thinks of you she wants you to rescue her and thinks how she will reward you you must avoid the church you must not