Child of Fire: A Twenty Palaces Novel Read online

  It was big. I don’t know much about wolves, but it looked much bigger than I’d have expected. Then again, when Harlan had pointed his rifle at me, it looked like a.90 caliber. Fear can do that.

  Harlan swung the rifle to his shoulder and fired. I saw the bullet chip the asphalt between the animal’s legs. The wolf bolted, running down the street and out of sight.

  Harlan worked the bolt of his rifle. I slid my hand into my pocket and took out my ghost knife.

  Harlan saw me out of the corner of his eye. He spun and slammed the butt of his rifle against my hand, smashing it against my hip. The ghost knife fell onto the street, and I staggered a few feet away from it.

  He aimed the rifle at my face. I didn’t have any tattoos to protect me there.

  “It was just a piece of paper,” I said.

  Harlan glanced at the ghost knife and confirmed that what I was saying was true. Without a word, he swung his weapon around and sighted down the street, looking for the wolf.

  I had cast the spell that created the ghost knife, and I could sense it there on the asphalt. I opened my hand and reached for it. The laminated paper flew into my hand, and in one motion, I threw it at Harlan like an oversized playing card.

  According to the spell book I’d copied it from, a ghost knife cuts “ghosts, magic, and dead things.” The wood and metal locks of the Bentons’ front door were dead things, and the ghost knife cut through them easily. It could also destroy magic spells like my tattoos or the sigil on Annalise’s scrap of wood; the results weren’t always pretty.

  But every living person has a ghost in them. At least, the spell thinks so, because when I use it on people, it passes through their bodies as though they aren’t there and cuts at their “spirit.”

  And that’s all I know about it. Even though I cast the spell myself from an old book I’d acquired under less-than-honest circumstances, and even though I’d used it a few times against people who were trying to kill me, I had no idea how it worked or what it truly did. As with so much else having to do with magic, Annalise, and her society, I was in the dark.

  The ghost knife zipped across the few feet separating us and entered Harlan’s body just below his armpit. His shirt fell open where the ghost knife sliced through it, but the laminated paper plunged into his body without leaving a visible mark. A moment later, the spell exited through the other side as if he wasn’t even there.

  Harlan sagged. His eyes dulled, and what ever was driving him to shoot up the town dwindled away. That’s what the ghost knife did; it stole away aggression and vitality for a while. The effects of the spell were temporary-at least, they seemed to be.

  Harlan lowered his rifle. I stepped toward him, ready to take the weapon away. The left side of Harlan’s rib cage burst open. I never heard the gunshot. I only saw the exit wound. Blood splattered my left hand, and I felt the bullet whiz past me.

  Harlan collapsed, falling onto his face on the street.

  I looked up and saw a cop moving toward us, his revolver pointed at Harlan. “Move away!” the cop yelled. “Move away from the body!”

  I was frozen in place. The cop pointed the gun at my face. He asked me who I was, and I told him.

  He told me to move back again. I took a step back. The cop kicked the rifle just like they do on TV. It slid away up the street.

  I heard a faint sucking noise and looked down.

  “He’s alive,” I said.

  “An ambulance is coming,” the cop said. “Don’t move.”

  The cop was in his mid-fifties, with a good bit of muscle and a little paunch. He had long, slightly graying hair, which he combed back like a European movie star. His face, though, was scarred and rounded as though it had been punched too many times. His jaw was long and heavy, and the look in his eyes was slightly feral.

  He looked down at Harlan and smiled slightly, as though the dying man was a nifty bit of entertainment.

  “Where’s that ambulance?” I asked. I couldn’t hear sirens.

  He looked at me as though he thought I might be his next fun project. “On its way, I said. Who are you again?”

  “Raymond Lilly,” I said again. “Harlan has a punctured lung. He needs help right now.”

  Someone said: “Did you get him?” I looked up and saw two more officers approaching. One bore a close resemblance to the first cop-a younger brother, I assumed. Except this new arrival hadn’t shaved in about a week and was chewing the ragged end of a burning cigar. The other cop had too much flab pressing down on his belt, and his face was red and shiny with exertion.

  “I surely did,” the older cop said.

  They stood around Harlan’s body, looking down at him as if he was about to turn into candy. I still couldn’t hear ambulance sirens. The fat one licked his lips in a way that gave me chills. None of them moved to help him.

  So I did. The three cops jumped back and trained their weapons on me, but I didn’t look at them. I laid my hand over the wound on Harlan’s back, then slid my other hand under him, searching for the exit. When I found it, I covered it with my palm. I tried to seal the wounds with my hands. Harlan seemed to be breathing a little better. Maybe it was my imagination.

  “What are you doing there, son?”

  I wasn’t sure which of them was talking to me. “Trying to save his life.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you might want to shoot him again later.”

  I heard chuckling behind me. Someone thought that was funny. Ambulance sirens came next, finally.

  Harlan tried to say something but couldn’t manage it. Kneeling in the street, I tried not to think about what I was doing. A crazy man who hadn’t bathed in weeks was bleeding all over my hands, and three cops were pointing their guns at me.

  I heard more voices. The folks in the diner had come out into the street to gawk, and the sports bar up the street was emptying, too.

  Annalise came near. “Boss,” I said, catching her attention. “I think I dropped a piece of paper around here somewhere. Would you find it? It might be our map.”

  She understood immediately. We couldn’t leave a spell lying out on the street for anyone to pick up. I could have called it to me again, but an awful lot of people were watching.

  She moved off toward the far side of the street. The older cop followed her. They talked, but I couldn’t hear them. The waitress and the mechanic were loudly telling the fat cop what I had done, and how I had almost talked Harlan into giving up his rifle. They were split over whether that meant I was brave, stupid, or both; their voices drowned out what ever the older officer was saying to Annalise.

  The ambulance finally arrived and the EMTs gently shouldered me out of the way. I scuttled toward the curb, happy to sit and watch professionals at work. A chubby little guy with too much beard taped plastic over the gunshot wound. Beside him, his lean and hairless partner snipped the finger from a latex glove and then slid a long needle through the fingertip. They rolled Harlan onto his back. The bearded guy covered the exit wound with more plastic while his partner searched Harlan’s ribs for a place to insert the needle.

  I didn’t watch. Weariness washed over me as my adrenaline ebbed. I was tempted to lie back in the street and go to sleep.

  I wondered if I was going to be sleeping in jail to night. I hoped not. It was too soon.

  The older cop with the movie-star hair and the road-house face crouched beside me. “Your, uh, companion there tells me you came out to talk old Harlan out of shooting up the town.”

  “That’s right,” I said. I wanted to stand, but I didn’t want to smear my bloody hands against the street. It was a weird impulse, but it was a day for weird.

  I glanced at the man’s badge. He was the chief of police. The name tag beneath read E. DUBOIS. This was Emmett, I guessed, who hadn’t confiscated all of Harlan’s guns.

  “Hold on there a moment,” the cop said. He stepped over and conferred with the fat cop standing just a few feet away. The fat cop walked away, and the older one
came back. “That wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do,” he said. “Why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t think about it, really,” I lied.

  “Good Samaritan?”

  I didn’t respond to that. The fat cop returned with a plastic squeeze bottle and a wad of paper towels. The bottle was labeled “waterless cleaner.” I thanked him, squeezed the bottle over my hands, and started washing the blood away. The cleaner felt like jelly and smelled like rubbing alcohol.

  “Witnesses said you’d just about talked him down when we showed up.”

  I understood where this was going. He didn’t want people saying that I’d almost handled the situation diplomatically when he’d come in with guns blazing.

  “I hadn’t talked him down from anything,” I said. “I had the impression that he was planning a suicide by cop.”

  “That’s better. Much better than a smart mouth. I didn’t much care for your remark about shooting Harlan again. I didn’t like having to shoot him.”

  I remembered the way he’d smiled at Harlan’s bleeding body and knew he was lying. “Sorry about that,” I told him. “I was all worked up with adrenaline.”

  He smiled that same smile. “Fine,” he said. “That’s just fine.”

  He asked where I was from and why I was in town, but he seemed distracted and his questions were careless. I managed to avoid saying that I’d been in jail that morning. He didn’t seem to care about me, now that I’d apologized.

  I watched the ambulance drive away. “Where are they taking him?”

  The cop eyeballed me, as if trying to decide whether answering my question would undermine his authority.

  “County hospital,” he said. “You planning to visit?”

  “Yep. I’m a Good Samaritan.”

  “Fine. That’s fine.” A brown, rusted Dodge Dart parked at the intersection, a little too close to the police car already there. A fourth cop, this one tall and slender, moved out of the shadows to intercept the driver. As he stepped into the light, I saw bright red hair on the top of his head.

  “That’s our local paperboy,” the cop said. “You better go now if you don’t want to be here all night answering his questions. But stay in Hammer Bay for a couple days, understand?”

  “I intend to.”

  Annalise stood on the sidewalk a few yards away, the broken windows of the diner behind her. Her eyes were hooded and her face expressionless.

  As I approached her, the cook stepped up to me. “You cost me a door,” he said. “Harlan busted my glass door because you wanted to be a hero. What if one of my customers had been shot, huh? What then?”

  “Don’t you pay any attention to him,” the waitress said. “Anytime you want, you come back and have another burger. On me.”

  The cook turned on her. “What about my window?”

  She told him that’s what insurance was for, and the cook grumbled that all the different kinds of insurance in this town were going to put him in the gutter.

  I edged away from them and stepped up to Annalise. I could feel the ghost knife on her somewhere. Good. I didn’t want it to fall into just anyone’s hands, and I didn’t want to stick around here any longer.

  She held out her hand. “Keys,” she said. “You’re not driving my van until you wash your hands.”

  I hesitated, hoping she would offer me the ghost knife. She didn’t. I could feel that it was nearby, probably right in her pocket. I wondered how long she was going to keep it, because I sure couldn’t take it from her. I dug the keys from my pocket and gave them to her.

  There was a change in the noise behind me. I turned back toward the crime scene.

  New people had arrived, and Emmett Dubois was speaking with them. They were four men: one was very tall, very lean, and somewhere in his late fifties; beside him was a younger man, also tall, also lean, with a thick head of dark hair. Another was a short man with a shaved head, and the last was a fat man with long, graying hair. Dubois’s body language had altered. He didn’t look imposing. I only caught a glimpse of them before they moved out of view behind a parked van.

  Then I felt a twinge under my right collarbone. There was no wave of force this time, but I knew what that twinge meant. Another kid had caught fire somewhere.

  One of the men talking to Emmett Dubois fell to the ground and flailed around. My view was partly blocked by the wheels and fender of the van, but I could see he was having a seizure. It was the tall young one with the dark hair.

  Dubois bent down to him. “Medic!” he shouted, his voice worried.

  “Let’s go,” Annalise said.

  “Look,” I told her. “At the same time that I felt the-”

  “I know. Let’s move.”

  She dragged me toward the van and drove away from the scene. I glanced back and saw the little reporter trying to climb back into the Dart. The officer was blocking his way.

  “Well?” Annalise said as we pulled into the street. There was very little traffic. Men walked down the street, guns in their hands. They didn’t look like citizens protecting their own. They swaggered and looked bored.

  I told Annalise what I’d learned from Harlan. I mentioned that he had a black mark on the floor of his home, too. Annalise asked a lot of questions I couldn’t answer, like where he lived and how old his kids had been. She didn’t like that I hadn’t gotten those answers, and his punctured lung wasn’t a good enough excuse.

  I knew she was just riding me, so I let it pass. I was too tired to be angry anyway.

  I said: “Sorry I didn’t get killed.”

  “There’s always next time,” she said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Annalise drove around until we found a motel. She had to circle the block twice before she turned down the right street, but we got there eventually.

  It was a small place, one story, just a parking lot ringed by rooms, all their doors facing inward.

  My shirt was speckled with blood and my jacket had greasy black smears down the back. Annalise made me wait in the van while she rented our rooms. While I sat, I saw that one of the rooms had a black streak on the front walk. It came from under the door, turned forty-five degrees to cross the pavement, and disappeared at the muddy lot.

  That was interesting. Going that direction, the worms had to travel farther before they could tunnel into the earth than if they’d gone straight-at least ten feet farther. Were they being drawn toward something in the west? Maybe it was the Pacific.

  Annalise emerged with the room keys. Thankfully, I didn’t have the room with the black streak. “Clean up,” she said. “We’re getting an early start tomorrow.”

  She went into her room and I went into mine next door. I stripped off my clothes in the bathroom and examined them in the bright lights by the sink. My jacket, shirt, and pants were nasty. I needed a laundromat and some industrial detergent. I wasn’t going to get them. I took the clothes into the shower, washed off the waterless cleaner and blood, then scrubbed at every spot of blood on my clothes I could find. The blood was still wet, and the clothes came clean fairly well. I tried not to think about what sort of diseases Harlan might have had. I just wanted to be clean.

  Eventually, I ran out of steam. I hung the clothes on chairs by the heater and turned it on low. Then I fell onto the polyester bedcovers and disappeared into dreamless slumber.

  It seemed like an instant later that Annalise thumped on my door, hitting it hard enough to rattle it in the jamb. I climbed out of bed, wrapped a blanket around me, and opened the door.

  She had changed her clothes, switching her fireman’s jacket for simple brown leather. Her pants were black and her shirt a white button-down that looked a size too big for her. Her boots had been exchanged for simple black leather walking shoes.

  She barely glanced at me. “Get dressed. We have a lot to do today.” She tossed the keys to me.

  My clothes were still wet, but they were all I had. There were traces of Harlan’s blood that I had missed the night before. Damn.
I put the nasty clothes on my clean body and went out to the van. I left the jacket in the garbage.

  It was just after 7 A.M. The sky was gray, and there was a steady drizzle. I was hungry but I couldn’t picture myself sitting at a restaurant with wet, bloody clothes. I just drove, hoping to find a drive-through somewhere.

  Instead, Annalise had me turn into a side street beside an outdoorsman’s store. Aside from the diner, which had cardboard taped over the broken windows, it was the only place open at this hour.

  Annalise led me inside and bought me new clothes. They weren’t fancy-four pairs of jeans, four black long-sleeved pullover shirts, four pairs of white socks, one pair of black hiking boots, one windbreaker with a zip-out lining.

  The clerk held open a trash bag and I threw in all my old things, including my sneakers, which were rimmed with Harlan’s blood. I hadn’t even noticed. He threw all that old stuff away, and I walked out in new clean clothes.

  It felt good. I wondered if the four pairs of clothes meant she expected me to live another four days.

  Next, we stopped off for breakfast. We chose a different diner this time. Annalise ordered very rare steak with eggs and a side of ham. The waitress looked dubious, but Annalise packed all of it away.

  Her tattoos were visible above the open collar of her shirt and at the edges of her sleeves. They looked like mine, which meant they were made with a paintbrush and a spell, not a needle and ink. They were just as permanent, though.

  I didn’t know who had given them to Annalise, but I wondered if she’d been conscious for it. I’d been awake for part of my own tattooing, and the pain had been worse than anything I’d ever experienced in my life, with the exception of casting my ghost knife spell.

  I absentmindedly touched the spot below my right collarbone where I’d been feeling twinges for the last few hours. My fingertips registered the touch of normal flesh, but my chest registered nothing at all. The parts of my body marked with spells couldn’t feel a thing.