Child of Fire: A Twenty Palaces Novel Read online

  The pictures showed her smiling with a group of friends. She was, if you believed the photos, a happy kid. I saw the cowlicked boy in one of the pictures and looked away.

  There was a second dresser in a corner of the room. Beside it, a mattress and box spring stood against the wall. This dresser was older and held fewer mementos. A photo on the back corner showed the same younger daughter with an older girl with the same narrow glasses and pointy chin. A sister? I liked the challenging, mischievous expression on her face.

  I noticed that there was no dust on this dresser or any of the knickknacks. Someone had been cleaning it. Could Meg have been walking past the younger daughter’s things to clean the older one’s? It seemed so. Obviously, they still remembered the older sister.

  The middle room was larger and had two beds. There was a definite clash of styles in here-the Wiggles versus Giant Japanese Robots.

  On the younger side of the room, I noticed several more empty spaces amid the clutter. The older boy’s things, however, had been torn apart. Drawers had been yanked out of the dresser and dumped on the floor. The closet had been ransacked, toys and books scattered.

  Someone had packed in a panic.

  I went back into the hall. The scorched black mark was still there. I noticed something funny about it and crouched down on the floor.

  At the edge of the streaks were a couple of smaller burns. It was like a river that had one main channel and some small channels that separated for a short while and then rejoined the main flow.

  The silver worms had made this trail. I’d suspected it, of course, from the moment I saw the trail leading out the door, but now I was sure.

  I hopped over the scorched carpet and checked out the bathroom. It was also in disarray. Toothbrushes had been scattered across the sink and floor. There were a lot of personal effects in here, from expensive salon conditioners to a paperback beside the toilet.

  The hall closet was filled with towels and cleaning supplies. Everything was neatly folded and arranged. This had obviously been passed over during the frantic packing.

  Last was the master bedroom, which looked like it had been tossed by the cops. I walked on the clothes on the floor because there was nowhere else to step. An abandoned crib at the foot of the bed was loaded with winter clothes. The end table had a pair of cheap paperbacks on it, along with a pair of alarm clocks and a pair of eyeglass cases. Behind the clocks sat a little box coated with a thin film of dust. I disturbed the dust opening the box. Inside was a pile of unused condoms.

  The Bentons had skipped town like a drug mule who had been caught dipping into the product.

  At this point, I started to feel dirty. This was too private, and there was too much grief and tragedy here. I was ashamed of the tingle of excitement I’d felt at the door.

  And yes, it made me angry. Angry at Annalise for forcing me to come on this job. Angry at Meg and Douglas for having these problems. Angry at whoever had cast the spell that had burned these three kids.

  I kicked the clothes on the floor into a pile in the corner but found only ordinary carpet underneath. No circles, sigils, or other signs of summoning magic.

  I opened the bedroom closet and dug around. If I was going to do something I hated, I was going to do it quickly. I pulled stacks of clothes out of the back of the closet and uncovered a small safe. It was locked.

  Annalise could probably tear it open, but I didn’t need her help. I took out my ghost knife and sliced off the steel hinges and the lock. The safe door fell onto the floor.

  Inside I found a long, slender box and a folder full of papers. I opened the box, revealing a diamond necklace.

  I don’t know much about jewelry, but it looked old, like necklaces I’d seen in old movies. It was probably an heirloom, and it was probably worth a lot of money, yet the Bentons had abandoned it in their rush for the county line.

  I held on to the necklace longer than was strictly necessary. I had no job and no food in my belly. My bed and board were in the hands of a woman who hated my guts and wanted me dead. It would have been easy to slip this jewelry into my pocket. I needed money of my own if I was ever going to be free, and it wasn’t like the Bentons were coming back for it.

  I put the necklace back into the box and put the box back into the safe. I didn’t think about it or try to reason it out. I just closed the box and moved on.

  The folder was full of investment papers. Douglas had a 401(k), some stocks, and a house in Poulsbo that he rented out. There was a lot of money tied up in these papers, but they’d been abandoned, too. It looked like the Bentons were too busy saving their kid to worry about their investments. I was starting to like Douglas and Meg, tire iron or not.

  Considering the find I’d made in the closet, I decided to check the closets in the bathroom and the rest of the bedrooms, too. None of them held anything of importance, and nothing otherworldly bit my arm off. I supposed I shouldn’t have worried about the danger. If there was a predator in the house, Annalise’s piece of scrap wood would have detected it.

  Whether she would have told me about it is another matter, of course.

  Once, not too long ago, I’d cast a spell from a stolen spell book to give myself a vision of a vast expanse of mist and darkness. The Empty Spaces. The Deeps.

  There I’d seen predators moving through the void: colossal serpents, huge wheels of fire, groups of tumbling boulders that sang to one another and changed direction like a flock of birds. All of them were searching for living worlds to devour.

  Then I came face-to-face with a predator that had come here, to our world. It was a parasitic bug the size of a house cat, and it had a hunger for human flesh. If I hadn’t stopped it, it would have brought the rest of the swarm here to feed like locusts.

  Before she’d discovered the truth about me, Annalise had told me a little about them. They were not demons or devils, with pitchforks and horns and contracts you sign in blood. They were simply creatures hunting for food-predators-and we were the food.

  They were drawn to certain kinds of magic the way sharks were drawn to blood. People summoned and tried to control them for all sorts of reasons-to destroy enemies, to grant power, to guard, or even just to learn the secrets of the world behind the world. That house-cat-sized predator I’d destroyed had been brought here for its supposed healing powers.

  The only thing the predators wanted was to be brought to a world where they could feed. They love to be summoned, Annalise had said, but they hate to be held in place.

  She had told me that the second predator she’d ever seen was a strange, spongy lattice that was difficult to see even under bright light. The creature was only clearly visible when it was filled with the blood it fed on.

  The man who had summoned it had killed derelicts and petty criminals for years to sustain it, prompting the press to call him “the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” and “the Torso Killer.” Annalise said she had no idea what that weird predator had done for him in return for all that blood, but she had personally burned them both to ash.

  She wouldn’t talk about the first predator she had seen.

  Any of those predators, summoned to Earth and allowed to run loose, could scour the planet of life. That was why we had come to Hammer Bay-to make sure that, what ever was happening here, it was stopped.

  I thought about that old friend of mine again, the one I’d crippled and who’d loved the Mariners. I had loved him like a brother and I’d nearly helped him-and the predator inside him-destroy the world.

  My hand fell against my jacket pocket, feeling the laminated paper inside. Of the three spells I’d cast from that stolen book, the ghost knife was the only one I still had. I had a copy of that stolen spell book hidden away, but I hadn’t decided what to do with it. There was power in it, absolutely, but spell casting was painful and dangerous, and if Annalise or one of the other peers found out that I still had it, they’d execute me on the spot. For the Twenty Palace Society, stealing magic was a capital crime.
r />   I couldn’t think of anything else to do on the second floor and went downstairs, stepping carefully around the marks on the carpet.

  There was a message on the answering machine. Since Doug and Meg didn’t seem likely to be coming back, I pushed Play. It was only thirty minutes old and was from someone named Jennifer. She sounded about fifteen. The message was for “Mom and Dad” and made clear her outrage that her parents were planning to pull her out of school-and away from all her friends in the dorm now that she’d finally made some-with only three weeks until finals. This, apparently, would ruin her chance to get into a decent college. Can anyone express contemptuous disbelief as purely and cleanly as a teenage girl? I pressed the Save button on the machine; I liked Doug and Meg too much to erase a message from their daughter.

  Annalise stood in the dark kitchen, staring out the window. Her face was utterly blank. Something about her made me give her some space.

  I looked away and noticed a crumpled sheet of paper in the corner. I picked it up but there wasn’t enough light to read it.

  Annalise glanced at me, her expression still inscrutable. I approached her and looked out the window, too.

  In the next house over, a woman sat at her kitchen table, crying over a small, framed photo. I wondered how long she’d been sitting there, and how long Annalise had stood silently in the darkness, watching.

  “What did you find?” she finally asked.

  “Douglas and Meg, who think they hadn’t been blessed with a boy until last whenever, have actually had five kids. Three boys and two girls. It sounds as if the older girl is at a boarding school somewhere. The younger girl died upstairs in her room, and the worms marked up this carpet as they made a run for the soil outside. I suspect the middle boy died in his car seat a while ago. They packed in a frantic rush, but only for the middle child. We saw what happened to him.

  “They rushed off in such a hurry that they left jewelry and financial documents in the safe upstairs. It looks like they threw a bunch of clothes and crap into their car and took off.

  “I didn’t find any evidence of a spell, or a spell book, or predators. Nothing except that scorched streak in the carpet. That…” I wasn’t sure how to continue. “Those worms that came out of the boy… those were predators, weren’t they?”

  Annalise didn’t look at me. “Did you take the jewelry?”

  “No,” I said.

  She started to pat me down. Without thinking, I drew away from her. That was a mistake.

  Annalise grabbed my upper arm and squeezed-not hard enough to break the bone, but enough to remind me she could. I held myself very still.

  I still had the ghost knife, of course, but I wasn’t confident enough to try it against her. Maybe later, though. Maybe soon.

  She searched me and I didn’t do a damn thing about it. When she was done, she went back to the window without a word. I moved next to her and stared at the woman, too. What ever Annalise was seeing, it didn’t entrance me the way it did her.

  Eventually, Annalise went upstairs to the master bedroom. I followed. She took the jewelry from the safe and laid the wood scrap against it. The sigil twisted at the same steady pace. The necklace was no more magic than anything else in the house. Annalise didn’t seem surprised.

  “So, boss,” I finally said, “do you want to see what picture she’s crying over?”

  “Yes,” she answered. Her funny little voice sounded small.

  “Does it have anything to do with the job?”

  She looked up at me. Her tiny eyes were shadowed and impossible to read. “I’ll know soon enough, won’t I?”

  I walked out the front door, up the Bentons’ walk, and down the sidewalk to the next house. The mailbox had the name FINKLER on it in gold stickers.

  I rang the front doorbell. After about three minutes-a long wait, but I knew she had to wipe away tears and check herself in a mirror-I heard her turn the knob. I stepped down her front step, giving her space and putting myself below her. I wanted to be as nonthreatening as I could.

  She opened the door without undoing a lock. I’d have placed her in her mid-forties, although she could have been older. She had grim lines around her mouth and eyes, and her face was puffy.

  As I looked at her, her expression changed. The traces of sorrow vanished. Within a few seconds, she was as pleasant as if she had just been watching a dull sitcom. “Yes?” she said.

  I wanted to tell her to lock her doors. What if some ex-con came by with some song-and-dance story? Instead I said: “I’ve been trying to reach the Benton family next door? I’m a day early? No one seems to be answering, though?” I let my voice rise at the end of each sentence, turning everything I said into a question.

  “I saw them loading up their car. It looked like they were taking a trip.”

  “Really? They were expecting me. Aunt Meg was going to help me find a job.”

  “At the toy plant?”

  “She didn’t say. I guess so.”

  “And she’s your aunt?” She looked at me carefully, measuring me.

  “We haven’t met. Our family is pretty spread out. I’m still not sure what I should call her. ‘Mrs. Benton’ sounds so formal, but I’m not comfortable yet calling her ‘aunt’ when we haven’t even met.” I kept vamping, wondering how much time Annalise would need.

  “When you see her,” Ms. Finkler interrupted, “ask her what she wants to be called. People should let people pick their own names.”

  “Welp, that makes a lot of sense.”

  “But they went on some kind of trip. You say you’re early?”

  “Only by a day.”

  “They looked like they were going to be gone longer than that. I don’t know what to tell you. But if you want a job, you should go to the toy plant tomorrow. They’re always hiring lately.” She looked me up and down. “Wear something decent.”

  I smiled at her. It took an effort. “Thanks. I appreciate the advice.”

  “You’re welcome.” She closed the door.

  I walked back to the van and climbed behind the wheel. Annalise hadn’t told me where to meet her, but I hoped she knew better than to think I was going back to the Bentons’ house. I drove around the corner, parked beside the alley, and waited.

  The streetlight was overhead. I took the piece of paper I’d found on the floor of the living room and held it up to the light. It read:

  I’m putting this where you will find it. This is the only way we can talk about the truth. Every time I try to talk to you…

  We need to get away from here before we lose Justin and Sammy, too. I sent a postcard to my sister asking her to invite us for a visit. I told her to make it seem like an emergency. When she calls, let’s run and never come back.

  I’m terrified and I don’t know what to do. When I’m alone, I remember them just for a couple of minutes at a time. Do you remember them, too, in the middle of the night when no one else is around?

  I miss them terribly. I don’t know what’s happening. I just want to get away. I don’t think I’m crazy. Am I crazy?

  I love you.

  That was it. The note was unsigned, but it looked like a woman’s handwriting.

  They’d lost three of their kids, and while I didn’t have kids of my own, a lifetime of Hollywood movies had convinced me it was the worst thing that could happen. Except they only knew it had happened in odd, lonely moments.

  Why the Bentons? Who had targeted their kids, and why?

  The passenger door swung open. Annalise climbed in.

  “Everything go okay?” I asked.

  “I’m hungry. Let’s find someplace to eat.”

  I started the van. “What did you find out?” She didn’t answer. I drove toward downtown.

  Her silence annoyed me, but then I had a scary thought. What if I hadn’t distracted Ms. Finkler for long enough? What if she’d caught Annalise in her kitchen?

  Annalise had spells that could deal with people without taking their lives-I’d seen them in actio
n-but she didn’t always use them. She hadn’t been all that concerned about catching Meg and Douglas in her green flame. They had survived only because I had knocked them back.

  Annalise only cared about one thing: she searched for people who cast magic spells, especially those that summoned predators, and she killed them. Nothing else mattered to her. Certainly not innocent bystanders. They were expendable.

  And, to tell the truth, I’d seen a little bit of her world, and I understood her. I’d seen what predators could do. With their appetites, they could devour every living thing on the planet.

  Maybe we needed people like Annalise-people who were willing to do what ever it took to protect us. Without her, and others like her, maybe we wouldn’t even be here now.

  But I really hoped she hadn’t killed that sad woman.

  Annalise held the scrap wood in her hands, staring at the designs as if they were tea leaves. What ever she could read there, it was pissing her off.

  I turned into the business district and pulled into the parking lot of a Thai restaurant. I didn’t know how good it would be, but pad thai wasn’t rocket science and I’d been craving it for months. They didn’t exactly let you order in from a jail cell.

  “What are we doing here?” Annalise asked.

  “Grub.”

  “I don’t eat this. Find a place that serves burgers or steaks.”

  I sighed to let her know how disappointed I was and found a diner just a block farther down the road. As we entered, Annalise placed the scrap wood on the door-jamb. As far as I could tell, the designs continued to churn slowly, without any change. We went inside and found a booth.

  By the clock above the counter it was nearly eleven. We’d had a busy day.

  There were three or four other customers. All of them thought we were worth a good, long look. I couldn’t blame them. Annalise was quite a sight in her oversized firefighter’s jacket, tattoos, and clipped red hair. Standing next to her, I looked almost reputable.