Carlos away.
Chest heaving, I stood close to the suddenly quiescent Carlos and Purlis, keeping both in my sight, but ready to jump back between them. “We’ll take care of Limos,” I told Carlos. “Here. Soon.”
“It will not be enough,” Carlos said in a low growl, watching over my shoulder.
Purlis scrambled to his feet and started running for the door.
“I’ll take care of my father,” Quinton said, turning, raising the gun. . . .
I don’t know if he would have killed him—he looked cold enough and set upon it—but I didn’t give him the chance. I swung at Quinton, knocking the gun barrel downward.
Not my best move: The bullet ricocheted and skipped off the floor, tearing through the back of Purlis’s leg near the knee. It could just as well have gone through something fatal—or through someone more important.
Purlis crashed to the floor again, writhing and trying to crawl away. Quinton shook me off with a glare and darted toward him. Carlos started after them both but I grabbed him, anchoring myself down to the grid as hard and fast as I could, pulling the vampire with me toward the earth, toward the flow and rage of magic.
Carlos struggled a little and I thought I’d lose him, feeling my own energy draining quickly. Then he gave up and stepped away, turning his back. “Let him die, then.” The voice was as much in my head as spoken.
I pulled myself back up from the Grey and glanced toward the door. Quinton was kneeling beside his father and I could hear the conversation between them as bowing and plucking on the strings of the Grey, because my natural hearing was nothing but buzz and whine.
“You shot me.”
“I missed. I was aiming for your head.”
“I’m your father. You owe me your existence, if not your loyalty.”
“I gave you that. You pissed on it. I’m not giving you anything else. Except your life. For now.”
Quinton ripped strips off his father’s shirt and wrapped one above the gushing wound in Purlis’s left leg. He picked something up off the floor and used it as a stick to tighten the tourniquet, which he tied down with another strip of the shirt.
Quinton glared down at him. “There. Now we’re even.”
“You wouldn’t leave me here. . . .”
Quinton gave him a hard stare. “What else
“If you leave me here alone, I could die.”
Quinton scoffed at the weak bid for sympathy. “You wouldn’t die. Your underlings will come back soon enough to find you and save your rotten life. I’ll even raise your odds. I’ll carry you to the stairs. Which is more than you deserve or would have done for me.”
“Son—”
Quinton stood up and away from him. “Call me that one more time and I’ll kick you so hard, they’ll have to look for your head in Japan. You gave up the right to call me your son. You almost fed me to that thing in the box —Limos or whatever it’s called. You believe you’re a patriot and the end justifies the means. Well, justify this: I’ll see you in Europe, where you won’t be threatening my friends, or I’ll see you in hell. You choose.”
Whatever he saw in his father’s eyes convinced him of something and he stooped, picked the older man up, and carried him out of sight.
I turned back to look at Carlos, who had gone so still and quiet I was afraid he’d slipped away.
“We will find Limos,” he said. “Her shrine must be here. . . .”
“My head’s still reeling. How can she be here if she was with us earlier? And you said she’s a goddess of hunger, but a few minutes ago you said something about disease . . . ?”
“She is the goddess of famine. She brings the blight, the failure of crops, the drought, hunger everlasting. Death by starvation. Purlis brought her with him from Europe—I don’t know where he found her—and he meant to take her back when he was done here. Somewhere among all these effects is her container, her shrine. She rides Hazzard, uses her ghost to her own ends. To Purlis’s ends as long as they coincide.”
I closed my eyes, thinking, remembering. . . . “Pandora’s Box.”
I opened my eyes, sure now. Carlos quirked an eyebrow at me, but said nothing.
“Quinton told me about it. He called it ‘Pandora’s Box’—something Purlis brought here from Europe. When Quinton found it, it had dirt from the tunnel project on it, which is how I connected it to the ghosts and the PVS patients. Remember Quinton said, ‘You tried to feed me to that thing in the box’? He meant Limos’s shrine. Well, I’ll bet that’s what’s at the end of these cables.”
We looked around the room we were in first, carefully skirting Inman’s remains. I tried to follow the cables, but they ended in a coupling at the wall. Carlos followed me out and around to the previous chamber where we’d seen the body of the blue-green creature.
The box of skin and bone was still there, on its own table, surrounded by the glimmer of lives swallowed up in its folding doors. The cable ran to a plate—some kind of resonance emitter, I thought—on which the box stood. I slid the panels open and looked at the miniature shrine within and the glittering wreck of tiny figures, carved in bone and decorated with delicate gems and gold leaf, now all tossed about by the glut of suffering that had been pumped into the box through the device I’d shot in the other room.
“What do we do with it now?” I asked.
“We must entrap Limos in it and then destroy it. Otherwise she will be unbound, and while that will reduce her power, she still holds Hazzard and the tribute of souls. She would have no reason to stop her plans to ruin the Wheel, and every reason to go forward at once.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do. How are we going to catch her?”
Carlos looked amused. “I suggest we lure her to us once again through the offices of your friend Mr. Stymak.”
“Why can’t you do it?”
“This will be much more complicated than our little chat with Hazzard and her mistress. You and I must be free to act, so others will have to occupy the seance circle. We’ll need a circle of protection for them while you and I remain outside it to capture Limos and Hazzard.”
“So . . . we need sitters—at this time unknown—to be bait for Hazzard and Limos and we need a medium who doesn’t want to be associated with this for a seance we aren’t actually going to be part of. Oh, that’s going to be a piece of cake,” I added in a sarcastic tone.
Carlos laughed—damn him. “I’ll leave the arrangements to you on that score.”
TWENTY-TWO
I hadn’t liked handling the thing, but I took possession of the shrine of Limos. There really wasn’t anything else to do. Carlos had refused it, saying he had only enough darkness left to deal with Inman’s body, and I wasn’t going to stick Quinton with it. In the end, Quinton found a place for it among his many hidden stashes around town where I could leave it for a few hours in the certainty that it would be undisturbed by anyone, including his father.
Daylight had begun to creep across the sky by the time I drove Quinton home with me, since he and I had also needed to clean a few things up before any of Purlis Senior’s associates turned up for the day. I hadn’t been sure he had any, but Quinton assured me his father had flunkies who would take care of most of the mess and probably squeal to a superior at their earliest convenience that the head of the project had been shot. There wasn’t any sign of Purlis when we’d come up the stairs and at first I was worried, but Quinton had assured me his father was safely off to the University Medical Center—since it was the closest emergency room—having his leg attended to before it got worse. I wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there and I didn’t want to know, but I was pretty sure that Quinton wasn’t lying about the hospital. He’d have needed help with the body if the wretched man had gone and died, and Carlos and I had been the only people around to ask, which he hadn’t done.
