Twenty Palaces (26 page)

I stared at it, transfixed by its eyeless face and smooth, melting form. For the first time I noticed that the red around its mouth--blood, it had to be blood--seemed to run down inside of it. I tried to puzzle out what it was, because I could not see a physical form beneath that ice--was it some kind of eel or snake?
 

I didn't know, but I could tell that it was dead, and that was good enough for me.
 

A beam fell out of the ceiling and crashed against the kitchen floor, bringing a shower of ceiling timbers with it. Both front windows shattered.
 

I suddenly realized the desk I was leaning over had an ice-coated stack of paper on the corner. My hand had been resting on it for support.
 

I smashed it, shattering the ice. The pages at the top hadn't been copied onto blue paper; they were plain white letter paper. The top page was soaked and mashed against the five or six pages beneath it, but I could still read the handwritten ink. There were a lot of nonsense words that ended in "-um" and "-us" and I guessed it was Latin.

I lifted the wet mass of paper, exposing a few copies that seemed to be complete and a spiral bound notebook, handwritten in English. There a swirly capital "N" on the cover of the notebook that matched the signature on Nettle's check. The mystery woman herself must have translated them.
 

Something above me cracked. Time to go.

I grabbed a canvas bag off the back of a chair and shoved all the pages into them, Latin, English and whatever else was there.

The way out through the kitchen was blocked, so I crept over the slushy carpet toward a large broken window at the side of the house. I didn't like moving closer to that dead predator, but the only other option was to let the house collapse on me.
 

As I crossed in front of a rocking chair and reached the window, I saw the body.
 

She'd been a big woman, I could tell that much about her. Her shoulders and arms were muscular and her hair was thick with tight brown curls, but there wasn't much more of her. Every part of her below her ribcage was gone, and the carpet around her was shiny with frozen blood.
 

Was this the woman who'd turned Wally down for a date? It seemed pretty clear to me that he summoned a predator to kill her, then killed the predator himself, but I had no idea why. Or why he hadn't just bought a gun. Maybe he thought doing this with magic would be cool. I hoped I'd get a chance to ask him about it, at knifepoint.

The building shuddered and a splintering sound echoed around me. I planted one foot on the rocking chair, knocked away a couple shards of glass with the bottom of the canvas bag, then slipped through onto the grass outside.

I was afraid that the pressure of my foot against the sill would topple the building, but it didn't happen. I sprinted away from the house, glass breaking under my foot, until I was safely away.
 

The house didn't fall. It creaked and groaned, but it held on. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out. There was no reason for me to stand here waiting for it to collapse, even though I thought
someone
ought to witness it.

It felt as though I needed to do something else, but I wasn't sure what. Carry an axe back through the window and hack that big nightmarish thing to pieces? Annalise had burned down Macy and Echo's house, but I didn't have any matches, let alone something that would burn through all the ice inside.

I knew how to set a fire as well as anyone, but so what? I wasn't an arsonist and I wasn't a surrogate Annalise. I didn't want to be her guy, rushing around the city doing her work for her.

A sudden, visceral urge to get out of town burned through me. I wanted to head south and keep going until I hit Chile. I wasn't meant for this bullshit. I wasn't supposed to be stumbling over corpses of people torn apart by magic. I hated the world behind the world and I wanted nothing to do with it.

But of course I wasn't going to do that. This urge to quit was just another enemy that had to be beaten bloody. I had a debt to repay.

I slipped through the gate and pulled it shut behind me. There was no one on the street--in fact, there were no lights on in any of the other houses. I pulled on the helmet, started the engine and sped away, the little motorcycle buzzing like a chainsaw in the quiet night.

The only problem was that I had nowhere to go. It was already late evening--soon the streets would be nearly empty, and Wally's little two-stroke bike was going to act like a neon sign that said
Hey cops, pull me over.

I didn't have the money to pay for a motel. With the money I'd taken from Wally, I could park in an all-night coffee shop, assuming I found one. That would give me a chance to read Nettle's pages.

The memory of her body, and of the thing that killed her, flashed in my mind's eye and the motorcycle wobbled. Focus. It would have been monumentally stupid to survive so much only to smash my own brains out on the asphalt.

Once I had a place to study, I could search through Nettle's pages. What did I expect to find there beyond another copy of cure the lame? The spell to summon the ice predator? Maybe a dozen--or a hundred--other ways to destroy friends, ruin lives, and end the world? I was tempted to buy a lighter and torch the whole thing right now.
 

And at the same time, I wanted to make a special copy all for myself. Despite the tattoos, ghost knife and gloves, I was still the ninety-pound weakling in this fight. The power these pages represented was tempting. Would it give me the juice to take on Annalise? Echo? Even Callin?

No. I wasn't going to summon up more predators, no matter who was coming after me. Not after everything I'd seen.
 

But there were other reasons to make a copy. Carefully hidden, Nettle's spell book might be a useful bargaining chip if Annalise ever caught up with me.

Without realizing it, I'd ridden to the copy shop. My subconscious seemed to have decided for me. I was going to use what money I had left to copy Nettle's books, and this shop, with its damn blue pages, was the only place I could afford to have the job done.
 

It was strange to think that the shift I'd worked there had been the happiest time I'd had in years, but it had.

They'd be closing soon, and Andrea would not be glad to see me. Either I'd apologize to her or I'd tear the phone out of the wall and intimidate her. Whatever it took to keep her from calling Uncle Karl again. I'd make my copies, pay for them, then run like hell.

The door to the shop stood wide open. Someone had propped it open with a pack of expensive cream-colored letter paper. I walked inside.

Dried leaves blew across the carpet. A hard-bitten woman in a threadbare suit stood at a self-serve machine, making copies of her resume on the same cream-colored paper. She added a handful of copies to an eight-inch stack behind her. A homeless man sat on the window sill in the corner. He took a swig out of a bottle in a paper bag, then offered me a smile. Andrea and Oscar were nowhere in sight.

I approached the woman in the threadbare suit. "Where's the staff?"

The woman turned off the copier, slid her original off the glass and hefted her resumes. Her lips were pressed into a thin line and she refused to look me in the eye. "It's not my fault if there's no one here to take my money." She walked out the door.

I went behind the counter. "Hey, buddy," the drunk said. "Can you spare some change?"

There were no jobs running on the expensive copiers behind the counter. The phone was off the hook, and the drawer to the cash register was open and empty.
 

The office door was closed and locked. I stuck my hand far back into the shelf under the cash register and found the spare key.

The drunk decided to join me. He shuffled around the edge of the counter as I slipped the key into the lock and opened the office door.

We were immediately hit with the coppery smell of drying blood. The wall, carpet, and desk were streaked with brownish-red splashes.

"Holy God," the drunk said. "Jesus, show us your mercy."

I opened the door all the way, revealing a message written high on the wall in blood. It read:
For our cousin
.
 

I knew I should have just backed away. I should have turned and run out the damn door without looking back. Instead, I stepped into the room. Andrea and Oscar lay beneath the desk. Both had been slashed open and torn apart. One of Oscar's ears, ringed with piercings, lay on the desk calendar.

I staggered toward the door, feeling woozy.

"Jesus smite the devil!" the drunk said. "What happened here?"

I grabbed his grimy sleeve and pushed him aside so I could get the hell out of that room. Andrea and Oscar were dead because of me. They were dead because I had worked here for one damn day.

Jon would never have done this; Echo must have... But Echo had never met Andrea and Oscar, as far as I knew. Only Jon knew I'd worked here.
 

I closed my eyes, but I could still smell the blood. If Jon had done this, it was because of the cousin inside him. It was like a mental illness; he couldn't be held responsible. If there was some way to drive the cousin out--restore Jon to his old self--and leave him whole...

"What are we going to do?" the drunk asked.

"Do you want to talk to the cops about this?"

"Oh, Good Lord, no," the man said.

"Me, neither." I pressed my knuckle on the phone cradle to bring the dial tone back, then used the same knuckle to dial 911.
 

I hustled toward the front door before the call connected. The old drunk followed.

This time there were no cops to read my license plate as I pulled away. Not that it mattered. It was getting close to eleven, and I needed to settle in someplace that was secluded and had a light to read by. I ran through all the homes, apartments, and other spaces I'd been to since I got to town, but they had all been compromised or destroyed. No one had even
talked
about a place, except...

And then I thought of the perfect spot.
 

#

A light rain had begun to fall. I circled the baseball field once, looking out for a bunch of teenagers sneaking beers or a homeless guy rolled up in a sleeping bag. Luckily, it was empty. I rode across left field and parked behind a Dumpster. It wasn't completely hidden, but it was good enough.

The dugout was just a few feet away. This was the field where Jon and I had played together as kids. His house was not six blocks from here. At the batting cages, Echo had told me that Jon had brought her and the others out to the field near his house to knock a ball around, and I knew immediately that this was the one. He and I had spent hours here; of course he'd come back as soon as he could.
 

I jammed the helmet under the mesh net and went into the dugout. The shelter was built with cinderblocks that had been painted blue, and while there was a streetlight to read by, I was protected from the rain and prying eyes. If it had walls to keep out the wind, a leather couch and a hot shower, I'd have been ecstatic.

I took the pages from the canvas bag and separated the English translations from the non-English ones. Presumably, I was looking at Latin but beyond
E Pluribus Unum
and
habeas corpus
I had no real way to tell.

That left the three copies in English, plus the spiral notebook they'd been photocopied from, plus Wally's copy. Each was about four times as thick as Callin's spell book. I took a deep breath and held the book under the light.

My hands were shaking. Wally had read these pages and had turned into... Whatever he was now. Nuts. A killer. And they had done the same thing to the person he took them from, if he could be believed.

Well, fuck him. Nothing in here was going to get to me. I had work to do.

The first page was a solid block of text. I scanned it, confirmed that it wasn't a spell or instructions for undoing a spell--just a self-important introduction--then moved on.

I turned the next page, and the next. Wally had called this the "secret history of the world" or something, but that didn't interest me. I didn't need to know about the whole world, and I didn't want to know. All I cared about was the one thing in front of me: how to save my friend. Once that was done, maybe I'd read the pages, or walk into a police station, or jump off the Aurora Bridge, or hijack a plane to Cuba. I couldn't even imagine it, because I couldn't see that far ahead.

But what I did know was that I was never going to be a seat-belt person. Never. I'd never have a steady job, a smart wife or a couple of kids. I'd gone too far.
 

I kept paging through the stack, passing maps, glancing at disturbing sketches in the margins, skimming the cramped handwriting. Finally, I reached the spells.
 

I laid my hand over the designs as I studied them. Cure the lame wasn't the first spell, but it was near the front. I kept going, carefully not thinking about what each spell did and whether it looked like something I could cast on my own. When I reached the end, I hadn't found what I was looking for.

I did the same thing with the second copy, then the third. Nothing. I took out the copy Wally left for me and the spiral notebook, then compared it to the other three, going page by page. With the exception of the page Echo took, all were identical.

I didn't curse. I didn't shout. I didn't tear the pages apart and throw them on the ground. Instead I carefully turned back to the beginning of the book and began skimming more carefully, searching for references to spell casting--how to undo them, how to find other spell books, anything. I still couldn't find what I was looking for.

Finally, I knelt on the concrete and laid out the three Latin copies of the book with one of the English versions. I flipped through them, comparing the margin illustrations and glyphs. I didn't do more than glance at them, careful not to trigger one when I was not ready. If I could find a page where the Latin and English didn't match, I'd check it somehow, to see if it told me how to reverse a spell. Maybe I'd go back to the University; they had to have a teacher there who could translate Latin. A professor of Latin? I had no idea how it worked, but I could find out.