“A secret door on the third floor?” His indignation was clearly feigned: “What rot!”
Eve just smiled tightly until he caught on, at which point he flushed silently and glanced aside.
“Ball, court, your side of the net.” She slid the USB stick across the table towards him. After a moment he palmed it. “I don’t know when you broke in there or why, I probably don’t want to know, but that’s where the treasure hunt starts.”
“This stinks,” he warned her.
She nodded. “It reminds me of Father. ‘In magic, there are no coincidences.’” Her smile slipped. “Tell your crew, I can guarantee no pursuit—the other bids have been terminated, the trail dead-ends here. No thugs with guns will come after you, but I do need that manuscript, and there’s another sixty thousand in it for you.” Eve paused. “No, fuck that shit. He’s not watching and you’re fam, right? Get me the manuscript and I’ll round it up to a quarter million, total. I’m pretty sure I can fly it under the radar. If necessary I’ll hit my own savings. But do yourself a favor and do not under any circumstances look past the title page, ’kay? Or even handle the book yourself. Treat it like radioactive waste and let someone else pick up the lethal dose. Because it’s the kind of book that Dad taught us about, rather than the kind he taught us from: it’s the kind that eats people.”
When Imp got home he found Doc and Game Boy in the back engaged in a Warcraft nostalgia tour, but no sign of the Deliverator. A miasma of burned toast filled the kitchen. Charcoal briquettes that had once been crumpets sat forgotten atop the overflowing compost bin.
“I’ve been to see my sister again,” he announced to the backs of their heads, “and she upped her offer. She also said the guys with guns are out of the picture. But I still think we should turn her down.” Then he chucked the USB stick at the back of Game Boy’s head.
Game Boy reached out and snagged it without looking, then brought his hand back down to the keyboard in time to do something unspeakable to a green-haired minotaur with unfeasibly large jubblies who was wielding a glowing purple labrys the size of the Empire State Building. Moments later he slid the stick into a spare port on his gaming rig. “Get the healer,” he chanted in the voice of Elmer Fudd.
Imp winced: “Dude, that’s not how you sing Wagner,” he began, then something explosively pyrotechnic lit up the battlefield that spanned the row of monitors.
Doc waved his fists in the air, and disconnected. “You distracted me!” he accused.
“Then you’re too easily distracted.”
Imp watched Game Boy play on for a few minutes.
“What’s she offering now?” Doc asked cautiously.
“A quarter million if we complete the job.” Imp shoved his hands in his pockets. “But I don’t like it.”
Game Boy broke off his song to ask, “What of?” just as Doc said, “You’re right, that’s too fucking much. There’s something wrong with it.”
Imp took a deep breath and nodded. “Evie got hold of the map. Guess where it starts?” His index finger circled in the air, pointed inexorably towards the ceiling.
“Well fuuuuu…”
Doc’s frustration finally got Game Boy’s undivided attention. He logged out, then spun his chair around. “How much money did you say again?”
“A quarter of a million, minus the forty thou we already got paid.” A tinkling of tiny bells rattled through the room, tinny as the one-bit sound chip in a novelty greeting card. Imp shrugged. “But the map starts on the top floor, at the door to nowhere. And it’s old. Like, old enough it probably dates to when my family lived here. Do I have to tell you how scary that is? I don’t believe in coincidences, GeeBee. And Eve, she said don’t, whatever you do, try to read the book.”
“Why ever not?” asked Doc.
“Because it’s a fucking spell book,” Imp finally snapped. “I know one when I smell one, I learned that much from my dad.” He paused. “It’s why I don’t have a family.”
“What about your sister—”
But Imp was already shaking his head. “Evie is—” He hesitated to say dead inside, but the more he thought about it the more it felt right. He wasn’t sure the sister he remembered growing up with was even in there any more, screaming wordlessly behind the glossy lacquered mask she wore all the time now. Eve had been all right when she was young, but after things went bad she’d turned hard. Not just hard: she’d turned to stone, made of herself a ferocious engine of destruction warped in widdershins coils opposed to Imp’s clockwise rebellion. Their paths might cross twice in a turn but their directions couldn’t be more different. “She went wrong,” he said, then stopped, leaving the final words unspoken: after Mum.
“Not seeing it,” said Doc, even as Game Boy burst out with “A spell book! Cool!”
Oh Jesus, Imp thought, rolling his eyes, spare me. “It’s not cool,” he snapped. “If you think it’s cool you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. If you mess with it you will die in agony, slowly. It’s the sort of thing that puts ideas into your head, ideas like corpse-worms and glowing phosphorescent hagfish, chewing their way through your dreams as they core out your soul.”
“Is that why you were looking at all those old tomes in the library?” Game Boy asked cheekily.
“Oh for—” Imp sat down heavily. “It wasn’t in the library,” he said. “I’d have felt it. Spell books, there’s a kind of weight to them, like you’re reading your own execution notice, or a dead god’s last will and testament.” Books bound in human skin and written in a formal propositional calculus where each axiom was a closure wrapped around eternal damnation. “Big sis’s boss is paying for a retrieval, and he’s paying large, which means it’s rare and dangerous.”
Which meant it wasn’t a fake-out,
