“No,” she answered quickly. “You’re my wooden man. I’ve never had another.”
“Okay,” I said. I still didn’t know what a wooden man was. “Then what was he doing? Casing the town?”
“Pretty much,” she answered. “There aren’t enough peers in the society to check out every strange report, so we have investigators who check things out. Hammer Bay…” She trailed off. Then she ate a piece of beef. With most people, you could let the silence play out and they’d eventually feel the need to fill it. But Annalise wasn’t a people person. She was used to long silences.
“What about Hammer Bay?” I asked.
“We’ve investigated Hammer Bay before,” she said. “We never found a reason to do an action, but we’ve had people here.”
“What made you send them?”
“This time it was the success of the toy company. ‘Toy Company Breaks All the Rules to Succeed’ was the headline, I think. I have the clipping in the van.” She lifted a hunk of beef and gulped it down. “We end up investigating a lot of that sort of thing-businesses that should fail but rake in tons of money instead. People who get rich quick. People who win lotteries.”
“Lotteries? Really?”
She shrugged. “There are still a couple of luck spells floating around. They mostly don’t work anymore, but when they do a lottery is usually involved.”
A dozen questions presented themselves. Before I could choose one, she spoke up. “A hundred dollars doesn’t sound like a lot of money. How did you know?”
“Something the cook at the diner said about all the different kinds of insurance he has to carry. And the Dubois brothers didn’t buy those trucks on a small-town cop’s salary. Besides, if they extort too much, eventually someone calls the state cops or the FBI. A hundred bucks is irritating, but not enough to fight the local bullies over. And if you’re tapping twenty or thirty businesses, it adds up.”
“I guess so.”
“At Hammer Bay Toys, did you notice anything strange about the fire?” I asked.
“You mean aside from the fact that it shot out of the mouths of a bunch of middle-aged paper pushers?”
I laughed. This was practically a bonding moment. “Not just that. When the fire came near me, it felt like it had already happened. Do you know what I mean? It was like I was watching the fire right in front of my eyes, but at the same time the fire was something that had happened to me a long time ago. Kinda.”
“Like you were feeling it and remembering it at the same time,” Annalise said.
“Yes,” I said. “I felt the same thing when I was standing next to the boy, Justin. It was as though the fire was reaching around the moment I was in and coming at me from the side.”
Annalise stared at her hands and flexed them. She moved them pretty well, but she would have stopped eating if the pain was gone completely. “Not just in that moment. The fire seemed to strike at me in the past,” she said. “It might have gone back and struck when I was just a kid, before Eli, before I had any of these protections.”
I mentally filed the name Eli away. “It attacked you in the past to hurt you now? Is that even possible?”
She shrugged. “If it happened, it’s possible.”
“But then, wouldn’t you have had this pain all of your life? Wouldn’t you remember having chronic pain?”
She waved off my objections, tossed another piece of meat into her mouth, and spoke while she chewed. “I’m just guessing, but I’m not saying the fire burned me while I was a little girl at the butter churn. I’m saying it came at me from the past. Maybe the future. Not everything experiences space and time the way we do. Some predators can be pretty strange.”
“Butter churn?”
“I’m older than I look, remember?”
I remembered. She looked to be about twenty-three or twenty-four years old. “Are we talking
She shook her head and looked away. “Just keep cutting.” Her voice had a ghost of humor in it.
I wasn’t sure what exactly had changed between us, but I was glad of it. Not just because I didn’t want Annalise to kill me, although I’d be a liar if I said that didn’t matter. The truth was that I wanted her on my side. She knew more about magic than I could ever guess, and she could handle herself.
She had power. I had to admit, I was drawn to that power. It was alluring. I wanted to be next to it, maybe leech off some of it for myself.
I tried to picture us in thirty years, when I was in my late fifties, still driving her around. Would she still look like she did now? I’d probably look like her father.
Unless she did for me what ever it took to make a person stay young…
I was not going to spend my time daydreaming about something I would never get. That was poison.
And yet…
I looked at her again. She was so small. With her jacket off I could see her tattooed arms poking out of her short-sleeved shirt. They were so skinny that they made me queasy. She looked like she was wasting away. Her thin muscles rolled back and forth under her skin as she lifted a piece of beef to her mouth. Her elbows were like knots in a rope.
She had been scrawny from the first moment I saw her, but she looked worse now than ever. I wondered if
