“Maybe now that they’re motivated to come after us,” Izzie suggested, “they started probing the neighborhood’s defenses for weak spots. Looking for places that they could tolerate passing through, threading their way through the gaps until they reached that spot.”
Patrick stood in the center of the room, arms crossed over his chest, his brow knit.
“If anything had happened to any of you—” his gaze darted over to Joyce “—it would have been my fault. All of the things my great-uncle taught me, and I forgot the one thing that might have mattered the most.”
“Don’t . . .” Joyce croaked a little, wincing, then took a sip of water. “Don’t beat yourself up. We all survived.”
Patrick slowly loosened his arms, letting them fall to his sides, his expression softening.
“Joyce, I just . . .”
She managed an abbreviated shake of her head.
“It could have been much worse,” she said. “We’re all still here to talk about it. So there’s no point in wasting any more time with self-recrimination. We need to figure out what to do next.”
Izzie pulled out her phone, and after powering it up swiped through the photos that she had taken in the alley before the attack.
“We need to make more of these, for one thing,” she said, holding the phone up to show the others the images of markings on the screen. Then she gestured to the supplies piled on the coffee table. “Might as well get started.”
“What about the marks out there that are covered up?” Daphne asked.
“I can clear off the ones in the alley tomorrow,” Patrick answered, and went to sit on the couch beside Joyce. “And after that . . . ? I don’t know, maybe I can get some of the students I teach at Powell Middle School to take care of the rest. Call it a ‘cultural enrichment activity’ or something like that, give them some extra credit.”
“What, you aren’t going to pay them?” Izzie said, unable to resist a sly smile. “Too cheap to kick in a quarter a piece?”
“Pretty sure the rates have gone up since I was a kid.” The corners of Patrick’s mouth tugged slightly upwards in a weary grin. “But I’ll break open the piggy bank if I have to.”
“Would probably be handy to have some more weaponized silver,” Daphne said. “I mean, did you see the way that guy reacted to that scalpel?”
Joyce was taking a long sip of water, and seemed to be recovering somewhat from the ordeal. She lowered the glass, holding in her lap.
“The blots on the face began to diminish immediately after Izzie inserted the blade.” Joyce paused, and then turned to Izzie. “Was that roughly the same rate of change that you saw with Martin Price the other day?”
Izzie couldn’t help shivering at the memory of it. The dead man, skin all but completely covered in ink-black blots, advancing on her even after taking multiple bullets to the chest and a shotgun blast to the knee, not to mention the fall from the third story window onto pavement. Only when she had bashed his neck with a battering ram repeatedly until his head was severed from his body had he finally stopped moving, and the blots had vanished in a matter of eyeblinks.
“Yeah,” Izzie answered, nodding. “Petty much exactly.”
“Then it must be just like we theorized this morning.” Joyce sat forward, an expression of intense concentration on her face. “The Ink, or loa, or whatever you want to call it . . . when the host is rendered unusable, in this case due to the introduction of silver, it pulls back out of the body and into the higher dimension.” She glanced in Izzie’s direction. “From ana to kata, or from in to out, or however you want to describe it.”
She was thoughtful for a moment, and then deflated slightly.
“Damn, I really loved that scalpel, though,” Joyce added. “First the boots, now this? This is really not turning out to be my week, you guys.”
Izzie chewed at her lower lip, mulling over what she was about to suggest, thinking over the ramifications. When Joyce had first produced the scalpel, it had occurred to Izzie that there was another silver blade that they might make use of, but she couldn’t help feeling like even the idea of it was too morbid to consider.
“Why silver, though?” Daphne asked, before Izzie had worked up the nerve to say what she was thinking. “That’s werewolf rules again, right? But what’s so special about silver that it causes them to react like that?”
“Mmm.” Joyce pulled out her phone and, after bringing up a browser window, began typing with her thumbs. “Let me see . . .” she said in a low voice, and then sank deep into an online search.
Patrick stood up from the couch and walked over to Izzie’s chair.
“Can I see that?” he asked, indicating the phone in her lap.
She thumbed the power button and handed it over.
“Okay,” Patrick said after studying the images of the spiraling marks for a moment. “Let’s see what we can do with this.”
Then he turned and knelt down beside the coffee table, and began to pick through the bits of metal and wood that Izzie and Daphne had brought.
“Here’s something,” Joyce said, eyes still on the screen of her own phone. “Silver has the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of all metals, and the lowest contact resistance.” She looked up and glanced around the room at the others. “Perhaps that’s a factor?”’
Izzie and Daphne exchanged a glance, and then shared a shrug. It seemed as good an answer as any.
“Speaking of electrical,” Patrick said, picking up a round wooden disc about the size of his palm, “I wish I’d thought to take the Taser out there
