“Halfway across the tannery,” he said through Kamal, who’d started to bite his fingernails between sentences.
Sterling said, “Even with al our skil s combined, they’l be on us before we can move the lid and lift the tool to the top of whatever muck is stil inside the vat. Not to mention the danger we might stil be facing from the liquid itself. If it burned men fifty or sixty years ago it stil could today.”
“So we fight,” said Vayl. He gave me his slow smile. I felt my whole body respond.
Kamal sniffed. “Are you people actual y excited about this?”
Cole drew his sword. I knew the vibration that ran through him had nothing to do with fear as he and Sterling bumped fists for good luck. “It’s like asking a pro footbal player if he’s ready for the game, dude. This is what we
Since Sterling could provide air support and use the Party Line to update us on the demons’ movements, we decided to leave him on the roof. Alone. Because we stil needed Yousef to guide us to ground zero. And Kamal…
When we turned to leave him with the warlock he made a please-don’t-abandon-me sound. I stopped and looked up at Vayl, who asked, “How old are you, son?”
“Sixteen.”
So his next question was for Sterling. “Can you protect him?”
Sterling’s hair seemed to whisper spel s of its own as it brushed against his col ar with the shaking of his head. “I can’t make any guarantees. The boy should leave.”
“Yeah, and if they grab him right outside the gate and use him as a bargaining tool?” asked Cole. “What are we gonna do then?”
“We wil leave the decision to him,” Vayl said firmly. “It is his life, after al .”
Kamal slapped his hand over his chest like Vayl had threatened to carve out a piece of it. “I want to go home,” he said.
Vayl nodded. “Of course. Sterling?” He turned to the warlock. “Do you have any sort of charm this boy can carry for extra protection?”
Our warlock reached into his back pocket, pul ed out his wal et, and from it lifted a card. Kamal took it, studied it, looked up incredulously. “You want me to trust my neck to…
a library card?”
a library card?”
“It’s special,” Sterling assured him. “Just put it in your pocket and say these words as soon as you leave the building.” He whispered in Kamal’s ear. “It wil make you seem harmless to al who lay eyes on you for the fol owing five minutes.”
“That’s not long.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “For chrissake, Kamal, how long is it gonna take you to run away from here?”
“Al right.” He pocketed the card. Fol owed us downstairs.
By the time we reached the center of the tannery I figured he was shutting the door of his house behind him.
But he’d be back tomorrow. Which boggled my mind. I couldn’t imagine how anybody could work here for more than a few minutes, much less the years Yousef had obviously put in.
I crumpled the new bouquet of mint that he’d picked for me earlier and held it to my nose. It wasn’t working as wel as it had before. Maybe I was getting used to its smel . Or maybe I was just too close to the piles of animal skins, stil wearing their layers of rotting flesh and feasting insects.
Either way, the stench made me want to hurl the last thing I’d eaten into the nearest pool of bloody-looking liquid.
I decided it would help if I concentrated on holding my sword safely at my side so that neither one of its razor-sharp edges could slice into Yousef or Vayl as I fol owed them. Cole walked close behind me, hugging the wal s of the tannery’s outer edges like the rest of us while he tried not to make any noise that would attract Kyphas and her gang.
We’d come into the tannery from the north. The vat we needed was in the southeast corner. That meant a careful hike between grunge-soaked wal s and ancient pools that contained everything from lime water to pomegranate juice to watered-down pigeon dung.
What would this place have been back in the States?
Maybe a succession of clear blue pools edged by lush greenery with fountains set every twenty feet or so to draw the eye on to some new pleasure. Or maybe a fish farm, its tanks heaving with healthy bass, the purity of its H2O so closely regulated that most countries would wil ingly run it through their taps. Here the vats crammed against each other like shackled prisoners, their contents reminding me of bottomless pits. I imagined if any of us fel in we’d drift downward forever while the chemicals ate the skin off our bones until al that was left was an eternal y sinking skeleton.
Sterling’s voice yanked me back to the job. “The
“Where is the plane portal in relation to us?” Vayl asked.
“If you’re at one o’clock, it’s at four.” Yousef kept up a steady, creeping motion, though I could see him shaking as he led us toward our goal. He looked over his shoulder once, to make sure we were stil fol owing. And the gleam in his eyes told the whole story. He couldn’t have been happier if I’d just cracked a dictionary over his head.
Behind him Vayl moved with the stealth of a born predator. I would’ve complimented his skil , but
