Magic Burns (7 page)

“Walk where I walk. Stay away from the walls. Especially if you see them get fuzzy.”

We started through the labyrinth of trailers. A long time ago the Honeycomb was a mobile park retirement community called Happy Trails or some such. It sat just under the Brown Mills Golf Course, across the Jonesboro Road. At first it had survived the magic waves pretty well, and when the cheap project apartments east of it crumbled and split, a slow but steady trickle of homeless refugees filled the mobile park. They pitched tents on the manicured lawns, bathed in the communal pool, and cooked on the outdoor grills. The cops chased out the squatters, but they just kept coming.

Then one night the magic hit especially hard, and the manufactured homes warped. Some expanded like glass bubbles, some twisted, others stuck together merging into hives. More yet divided and grew additions, and when the dust finally settled, a fifth of the inhabitants had vanished into the walls. To the Outside . Nobody could ever figure out what theOutside was, but it was definitely not anywhere in the normal world. The retirees fled, but the refugees had nowhere to go. They moved into the trailers and stayed put. Once in a while somebody would disappear, as each new magic tide twisted the Honeycomb a little more. A fun place to live if you were into that sort of thing.

“How can we find out where Esmeralda lives?” Julie puffed behind me. “I only know she lives in the Honeycomb. I don’t know where exactly.”

“You hear that whooming? The Honeycomb changes all the time so they have to have some sort of beacon. It’s probably at the entrance, which should be guarded by somebody. We’re going to go there and ask nicely where Esmeralda lived.”

“What makes you think they’ll tell us?”

“Because I’ll pay them.”

“Oh.”

And because if they don’t tell me, I will pull out my Order ID and my saber and make myself very hard to ignore.

I wasn’t wild about heading into the Honeycomb with a little girl in tow, but considering the neighborhood, she was safer with me than without me. I wondered how she got down there in the first place…

“How did you get down into the Gap?”

“We hiked from the Warren. There’s a trail.” A little light went off in her eyes. “But I probably can’t find it now. So if you send me back, I’ll just wander around without any water or food.”

Why me?

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The street turned slightly, bringing us into view of wide-open chain-link gates. Just in front of them a man in faded jeans and a leather vest worn over his bare chest sat on an overturned oil drum. An unlit cigarette drooped from his lips. To the left of him sat an old military truck, its back end pointing toward the gate. Despite rust stains and dents, the truck’s tires and canvas top looked to be in good condition.

The canvas probably hid some heavy-duty hardware, a Gatling gun or a small siege engine.

On the other side of the man sat a huge rectangular tank. Soft emerald-green algae stained the glass walls, obscuring the murky water within. A long section of metal pipe stretched from the tank and disappeared beneath the twisted remains of a trailer.

The man on the drum leveled a crossbow at me. The crossbow looked a lot like a good old-fashioned, flat-sided Flemish arbalest. The prong gleamed with the bluish-gray shade particular to steel, not the brighter, pale aluminum of cheaper bows, meaning the bow’s draw weight probably ranged to two hundred pounds. He could put a bolt into me from seventy-five yards away and he wanted me to know that.

Whoom. Whoom.

An arbalest was a decent weapon, but slow on reload.

The man eyed me. “You want something?” The cigarette remained stuck to his lower lip, moving as he spoke.

“I’m an agent of the Order investigating the disappearance of witches belonging to the Sisters of the Crow coven. I was told the head witch lived in the Honeycomb.”

“And who is that?” He pointed to Julie behind me.

“Daughter of a witch in Esmeralda’s coven. Her mom’s missing. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“No. You got an ID on you?”

I reached for the leather wallet I carried on a cord around my neck and took out my Order ID. He motioned me closer. I approached and passed it to him. He turned it over. The small rectangle of silver in the lower right corner of the card gleamed, catching a stray ray of the sun.

“Is that real silver?” he asked. The cigarette drew an elaborate pattern in the air.

“Yes.” Silver took enchantment better than most metals.

The man gave me a quick glance and rubbed at the silver through the clear plastic coating. “How much is it worth?”

Here we go. “You’re asking the wrong question.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You should be asking if your life is worth a square inch of enchanted silver.”

He gave the card another cursory glance. “You talk big.”

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I snapped my hand at his face. He shied back and I handed his cigarette back to him. “These things can kill you.”

He stuck the cigarette back into his mouth and returned my ID. “Name’s Custer.”

“Kate Daniels.”

The canvas shielding the truck shifted, revealing a lean Latino woman next to a black cheiroballista. Built like a giant crossbow, the cheiroballista was small but accurate and delivered with amazing power. It could put a bolt through a vehicle door at close range. The Latino woman gave me a hard stare. She had the kind of eyes one gets after life hammered out all softness.

I held her gaze. Two can play the staring game. “I’ll pay for the information.”

“Hundred.”

I passed two fifties to Custer. Bye-bye, phone bill.

“Trailer twenty-three,” she said. “The yellow one. Head left, then turn right when the path forks.”

“If I have to take anything, I’ll write a receipt.”

“That’s between you and her. We don’t want any shit from the Order.”

I held another twenty out. “Know anything about Esmeralda?”

The woman nodded. “She was power hungry. Liked to scare people. I heard she tried to enter one of the older covens, but she played the game too much and tried to take over, so they kicked her out. She’s been threatening to ‘show them all’ ever since. Last I heard she made her own coven. Don’t know how she managed that—she wasn’t well liked.”

She took the twenty and pulled the canvas closed.

Custer tossed me a ball of telephone wire.

“Use it. Stuff changes around here. We get geeks down from the University of Georgia trying to study the ‘phenomenon.’ They go in and never come out.” His eyes lit up with a wry spark. “Sometimes we hear them calling out in the walls. Looking for a way back from theOutside .”

“Ever try to find them?”

“You’re asking the wrong question,” Custer’s face split into a happy grin. The cigarette performed a pirouette. “The question you should be asking is what they look like when we do.”

Oh boy. I tossed the wire back at him. “No thanks. I could hear that damned whooming even in death.

What’s making the noise?”

Custer reached over to the tank on his left and knocked on the glass. A dark shadow flickered in the tenebrous water. Something struck the far wall with a thud, and a huge head, as wide as a dinner plate, brushed against the glass. Mottled black and slimy like a toad’s spine, it rubbed its blunt nose on the
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algae. Tiny black eyes stared dull and unseeing past me.

The head split in half revealing an enormous white mouth. The folds on the side of the head trembled, and a low sound rolled through the Honeycomb.Whoom! The creature scraped its broad nose against the glass once more and whirled, impossibly fast. I caught a glimpse of a clawed foot, a flash of a long muscled tail, and then it was gone, back into the churning water.

A Japanese salamander. Big one, as tall as Julie at least.

“Whomper,” Custer said and waved me on with a dismissive flick of his hand.

THE TWISTED PATH TOOK US DEEP INTO THE HONEYCOMB,into the maze of twisted trailers. As I passed, I sensed people beyond the windows watching me. Nobody came out to say hello.

Nobody wanted to know what my business was. I had a feeling that if I stopped and asked for directions, I’d get no answer. If someone wanted to snipe me from behind one of those misshapen funhouse-mirror windows, there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it. Julie felt it, too. She kept quiet and scurried in my footsteps, casting wary looks at the trailers.

Ahead the path ran into a tall tower of debris and split, flowing around it. The tower itself, a contorted monstrosity of trash and metal junk, rose to nearly forty feet. Near the top it tapered to a slender point merely five feet across before widening abruptly into an almost square platform. As I stopped to gape at it, two furry animals the size of a cat but equipped with long chinchilla tails and shrew snouts scuttled up the rubble and vanished in some hidey-hole.

I kept moving, my thoughts returning again and again to the hole in the ground at the Sisters’ gathering place. The pit bothered me. Any bottomless hole in the earth would bother me, especially this close to a flare. I was afraid something had come out of that hole and odds were, it wasn’t friendly.

The Sisters of the Crow had broken the first rule of witchcraft: don’t dabble. Either do it right, or don’t do it at all. Before one ever tried to cast a spell, one had to prepare for the consequences.

Had they been worshipping the Goddess, an embodiment of nature, a kind of all-purpose amalgam of benevolent female deities popular with cults, little harm would have come to them. The Goddess, much like the Christian God, was too all encompassing and benign. But they had worshipped the crow, which pointed to something dark and very specific. And the more specific the god, the less wiggle room its worshippers had. It was the difference between telling a child, “Don’t do anything bad while I’m gone”

and “If you touch this vase, I will ground you for three days.”

Until I identified the crow, I had to fly blind. Unfortunately, everyone from Vikings to Apaches had a corvid in their mythology. Crows created or swallowed the world, delivered messages for a handful of gods, served as prophets, played tricks, and if they were Chinese, lived in the sun and had three legs.

Nothing at the site had pointed to any particular mythos. Not even Bran—no accent, no meaningful peculiarities in clothes, no nothing.

What I needed was a big fat clue. A mysterious note laying it all out. A deity popping out of thin air and explaining it to me. Hell, I’d settle for an annoying old lady with a knack for solving mysteries.

I actually stopped and waited for a second to see if a clue would fall out of the sky and land at my feet.

The Universe declined to oblige.

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Trailer twenty-three stood twenty yards to the left of the tower, the first story in a cluster of three trailers.

Kindly described by the woman as “yellow,” the trailer’s color matched that of cloudy overnight urine. It smelled like urine too, although I couldn’t pinpoint whether the stink came from the trailer itself or from the heaps of trash surrounding the cluster.

A series of runes in black and brown ran along the side of the trailer. On closer look, the brown was uneven and flaking off. Blood. I wondered what poor stray had to die for Esmeralda’s lovely decorative display.

A rusted metal porch that looked like it must’ve been a sewer grate in its previous life led to the front door. It buckled under my weight, but held, and I made it to the door.

“Wait, what about those?” Julie pointed at the runes.

“What about them?”

“Aren’t they magic? Mom told me Esmeralda said she had a spell on her trailer that would cut your fingers like glass.”

I sighed. “It’s a chunk of a ballad from the last page of the Codex Runicus, an ancient Nordic law document. Very famous. It says ‘I dreamt a dream last night of silk and fine fur.’ Trust me, if there was a ward on this trailer, the Honeycomb would’ve gobbled it up by now.”

I examined the lock. Nothing fancy, but I was never good at lock picking.

Footsteps. Coming toward us, three pairs. And something else. Something sending ripples through the volatile fabric of the Honeycomb’s magic. Julie felt them too and ran up the porch to me.

The footsteps drew closer. I turned slowly. Three men were approaching the trailer, the first stocky and thick across the shoulders, the other two leaner. The taller of the leaner guys carried a long chain wrapped around his arm. The other end of the chain disappeared between two trailers. All three looked suitably menacing. The chain carrier hung back, sidestepped an eddy of magic, and jerked the metal links.

A local shakedown team. Out in force, three on one, plus whatever it was on the other end of the chain.

They knew where I was headed, they knew I had money, and they knew who I worked for, otherwise there was no need for the three of them to intimidate one woman.

Thank you, Custer. I’ll remember this.

“Larry, Moe, and Curly?” I guessed.

“Shut your mouth, bitch,” the thinner man said.

“Now, now.” The thicker bravo smiled. “Let’s be polite. I’m Bryce. That over there is Mory and my buddy with the chain over there is Jeremiah. We’re just here to make sure you pay your way. Or the thing will get ugly. And nobody wants that.”

“Move on,” I said. “I already paid for the information.”

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“From where I’m standin’, you didn’t pay enough. Make it two fifty: another hundred for the entrance fee and some to us for the trouble of walking here.” Bryce put his hand on the cop baton thrust into his belt. “Don’t make this hard. You got a little girl with you. You wouldn’t want anything to happen to her.”

Julie hid behind me.

Bryce smiled like a pit bull before a fight. “The more we work, the higher the bill will run. Time to be smart about this.”

The chain trembled. An eerie metallic rustle came from behind the trailers. Jeremiah leaned back and tugged the chain. A hoarse growl answered him. The chain snapped taut and his feet slid a little.

Judging by Bryce’s eyes, they wouldn’t leave until someone bled. I still had to try. “You think you’re tough guys,” I said, moving off the porch to the ground. “I can respect that. But I do this shit for a living.