Nightkeepers

prayers, maybe, but he’d never pretended to be a poet. He was just a regular guy with a few upgrades.

Laying a square of parchment in the bottom of the bowl—okay, technically it was high-grade card stock from Staples, but it wasn’t the paper so much as the symbol—Strike picked up his stingray spine, braced himself, and drove it into his tongue. Pain slapped at him, then again when he ripped the spine free and blood flowed into his mouth. Shit, that hurt.

He opened his mouth, letting the blood fall into the bowl, where it soaked into the paper. Once the others had followed suit, he lit his taper, then touched it to the one held by the trainee beside him, Patience. The flame was passed from one to another, coming full circle until Red-Boar touched his lit candle to Strike’s, completing the circle.

Then, moving as one, they set the blood-soaked pages aflame and snuffed their candles as acrid smoke rose. They leaned in. Inhaled the smoke. And said in unison, ‘‘Pasaj och.’’ The world lurched and went gray-green, then solidified. And they were in. Or, rather, he was in.

Strike found himself standing in the middle of nowhere and everywhere at once, on a soft, yielding surface, with nothing but mist around him, eddying in random swirls created by an unseen wind. Either the others hadn’t made it into the barrier, or they’d landed somewhere else.

‘‘Hello?’’ He looked around wildly. ‘‘Red-Boar? Patience? Anyone?’’ His shout fell dead on the mist. There was no echo, no response.

He was alone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Leah awoke in her own attic, lying spread-eagled on the futon mattress beneath the skylight. For a second, looking up at the stars and somehow feeling them hum in her bones, she thought everything was okay, that her stomach was in knots because of a strange dream.

Then she tried to move. And couldn’t.

Fear jolted as a hazy memory returned: that of seeing Connie on her doorstep but opening her door to someone else, someone she hadn’t seen clearly. Then a flash of green, then nothing.

Heart pounding, Leah tugged at her arms and legs and found them held fast in doubled-up zip ties threaded through eyebolts sunk into the sturdy attic floorboards. She had no leverage; the plastic cut into her skin but didn’t give. She was alone, but heard the heavy tread of footsteps downstairs. She had to think. Think!

She looked around for a weapon, a plan.

The knife, she thought. She’d brought a carving knife up from the kitchen; she didn’t know why. And, wonder of wonders, it was still sitting in the bowl where she’d left it, half buried beneath a parchment diary.

But it was a good four feet away from the outstretched fingertips of her left hand. ‘‘Damn it,’’ she whispered, frustrated tears pressing in her throat. ‘‘Come on; you can do it. Get the knife.’’

She squirmed and strained, tugging against the zip ties until blood slicked her wrists and ankles. The pain hazed her vision yellow-gold, and her head pounded with what felt like a sinus headache times a million. The room spun and the golden light brightened, though it was night out and the room was lit with the single beeswax candle.

The footsteps sounded again from below, and this time they were headed her way.

Come on, come on. She reached toward the knife, fingers straining, her entire attention focused on the black resin handle.

And the knife moved.

The rational part of Leah gaped, but the rest of her, the part that belonged to the yellow-gold pressure inside her mind, kept straining, kept concentrating, panicking as the ladder leading up to the attic creaked.

Come on! she thought, only the words that formed in her head didn’t sound right, didn’t sound like English at all.

Half a second later, the knife slid out from underneath the diary and floated across the floorboards as if it were swinging on an invisible string, coming to rest against her bloodstained palm.

Impossible, she thought, even as she grabbed the knife and twisted her hand, jamming the blade beneath the zip ties and sawing frantically. That didn’t just happen. Yet somehow she had the knife.

Working fast, she cut her left hand free, then her right, and was working on her feet when the trapdoor lifted and swung all the way open, and a slightly built man appeared, wearing jeans and a cartoon-covered T-shirt, walking backward up the ladder because he was carrying something bulky in his arms. A carved wooden chest, to be exact.

The zip ties gave, and she stumbled to her feet, lunging toward the guy as he hit the top of the ladder and turned. Her brain froze at the sight of filed-sharp teeth and a hollow earplug. It looked like her ex-snitch, Itchy Pasquale, except that his eyes were a bright, luminous green. An impossible, glowing green that should’ve existed only in the movies. But though her brain cramped with horror, her body kept moving. She hit him waist-high, and her unexpected attack drove them both across the attic floor.

Cursing, Itchy dropped the carved chest and grabbed her blood-slicked wrist in a bruising grip. He twisted her arm up and back with one hand and raised his other hand to her head. The press of a gun muzzle had her stilling.

‘‘Don’t make me kill you,’’ he said, his voice rasping in her ear. ‘‘Don’t—’’

She screamed and twisted away from the gun, then reversed and slammed her knife into the side of his neck. He howled and ripped the knife free, reeling back and losing his grip on the gun.

She grabbed the weapon—a good-size Glock—and came up straight into Itchy’s fist. The punch drove her away from the trapdoor, away from freedom.

Tasting blood, she fell against the wall, dazed. Pain was a dull roar, overtaken by the command of a strange voice inside her, one that shouted, Get the chest!