her injury was burning the flesh off of her.
How long would she live with the pain in her hands? Would she have to go centuries like this, devouring a side of beef every day?
If the fire was coming at her from the future as well as the past, if it was always a second or two ahead of whatever cure she administered, she might never be free of it. Unless it killed her.
Annalise cleared her throat. “I’m going to tell you a story,” she said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Okay,” I said. I kept cutting meat, although it was nearly gone now.
“A long time ago, before most of the world was writing down its history, there was a powerful sorcerer. He was a primary, a dreamer, and his power was immense. I’m not much for history, so I don’t remember his name. Let’s call him Simon.
“Simon lived on a mountainside, in a huge palace. There were fertile fields all around, and Simon had a lot of villages and farmers working the land and paying him for the privilege. He wasn’t a good man by today’s standards, but for the time I suppose he was. And he protected his people.
“On the other side of a mountain range lived another sorcerer, Thomas. He wasn’t a primary, but he still had a lot of power. And he summoned predators. Lots of them.
“At the time, the custom between sorcerers was live and let live, but Thomas was getting on Simon’s nerves. His predators were killing Simon’s villagers, turning them into vampires and other nasty shit, and stealing them away to work for him.
“Simon grew pretty annoyed, right? He sent a message to Thomas telling him to leave his lands and his people alone and get rid of his predators.
“Thomas, not surprisingly, refused. He said that he needed his predators for protection, and that he was doing nothing wrong himself. If some of his creatures roamed into Simon’s lands to feed, there was nothing he could do about it.
“However, he did offer to leave the area, if he could take a copy of Simon’s spell book with him.
“Simon immediately decided to kill Thomas.”
I realized that she had stopped eating. I kept cutting and piling the meat on the butcher paper.
“So Simon gathered up a bunch of his spells and headed out. His lands were ruined and his people scattered. When he reached the edges of his enemy’s lands, he began to fight.
“Now, Simon was powerful, but he couldn’t get through. Before he could reach Thomas’s palace, he was swarmed by predators: Floating Storms, Claw-in-Shadows, all sorts of things, not to mention his own villagers under the influence of Puppet Strings or transformed into vampires.
“He was driven back three times, each time expending more of his spells. He realized that he wasn’t going to be able to take out Thomas this way, so he went into the forest and cut down a stand of poplar trees. Then he lashed the pieces of wood together. He put a spell on them to make them walk like men and swing their arms in a feeble imitation of an attack.
“When he had made enough, he sent them against Thomas’s defenses. The predators swarmed them, destroying them wherever they found them.
“And in the confusion, Simon snuck into Thomas’s palace and faced him one to one. Thomas didn’t have a chance.”
I had finished cutting the meat. It was there for Annalise whenever she wanted it. I wiped my ghost knife against the edge of the butcher paper. It didn’t come very clean, but I didn’t care. I dropped it, still wet with raw beef, onto the table.
I didn’t look at her. I just stared at the pile of cut-up meat.
“Simon himself was never part of the Twenty Palace Society, but his student and heir was one of the founding members. And he shared the tactic of using wooden men with the rest of the peers. It’s a tactic that has continued down through the centuries.”
And that was the end.
Right about then, I thought, would have been the time for her to say,
She didn’t say any of those things. She just picked up another piece of raw beef and started chewing.
“Excuse me,” I said, and I went out of the room.
The fresh, salt air was bracing.
The worst part was that I had volunteered. I’d asked to work for her. I hadn’t understood at the time that it meant I would be a decoy, that I would be cannon fodder, but I had volunteered.
She had asked if I would be her wooden man, and I had said yes. She’d never explained what it meant. She had tricked me.
But of course, that was bullshit. I had been bluffing from the moment I met her and had pretended to know more than I did. And I had been lying to her in other ways as well, all to save my friend. If I was up to my neck, it was my own damn fault.
I was a decoy. Expendable. I had thrown my future away to save someone that I’d been forced to kill anyway. Damn.
I noticed the Escalade again, this time parked across the street. It would be harder to approach this time. I’d have to circle around two blocks to come up behind it, but what else did I have to do?
