Child of Fire

jewelry into my pocket. I needed money of my own if I was ever going to be free, and it wasn’t like the Bentons were coming back for it.

I put the necklace back into the box and put the box back into the safe. I didn’t think about it or try to reason it out. I just closed the box and moved on.

The folder was full of investment papers. Douglas had a 401(k), some stocks, and a house in Poulsbo that he rented out. There was a lot of money tied up in these papers, but they’d been abandoned, too. It looked like the Bentons were too busy saving their kid to worry about their investments. I was starting to like Douglas and Meg, tire iron or not.

Considering the find I’d made in the closet, I decided to check the closets in the bathroom and the rest of the bedrooms, too. None of them held anything of importance, and nothing otherworldly bit my arm off. I supposed I shouldn’t have worried about the danger. If there was a predator in the house, Annalise’s piece of scrap wood would have detected it.

Whether she would have told me about it is another matter, of course.

Once, not too long ago, I’d cast a spell from a stolen spell book to give myself a vision of a vast expanse of mist and darkness. The Empty Spaces. The Deeps.

There I’d seen predators moving through the void: colossal serpents, huge wheels of fire, groups of tumbling boulders that sang to one another and changed direction like a flock of birds. All of them were searching for living worlds to devour.

Then I came face-to-face with a predator that had come here, to our world. It was a parasitic bug the size of a house cat, and it had a hunger for human flesh. If I hadn’t stopped it, it would have brought the rest of the swarm here to feed like locusts.

Before she’d discovered the truth about me, Annalise had told me a little about them. They were not demons or devils, with pitchforks and horns and contracts you sign in blood. They were simply creatures hunting for food- predators-and we were the food.

They were drawn to certain kinds of magic the way sharks were drawn to blood. People summoned and tried to control them for all sorts of reasons-to destroy enemies, to grant power, to guard, or even just to learn the secrets of the world behind the world. That house-cat-sized predator I’d destroyed had been brought here for its supposed healing powers.

The only thing the predators wanted was to be brought to a world where they could feed. They love to be summoned, Annalise had said, but they hate to be held in place.

She had told me that the second predator she’d ever seen was a strange, spongy lattice that was difficult to see even under bright light. The creature was only clearly visible when it was filled with the blood it fed on.

The man who had summoned it had killed derelicts and petty criminals for years to sustain it, prompting the press to call him “the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” and “the Torso Killer.” Annalise said she had no idea what that weird predator had done for him in return for all that blood, but she had personally burned them both to ash.

She wouldn’t talk about the first predator she had seen.

Any of those predators, summoned to Earth and allowed to run loose, could scour the planet of life. That was why we had come to Hammer Bay-to make sure that, what ever was happening here, it was stopped.

I thought about that old friend of mine again, the one I’d crippled and who’d loved the Mariners. I had loved him like a brother and I’d nearly helped him-and the predator inside him-destroy the world.

My hand fell against my jacket pocket, feeling the laminated paper inside. Of the three spells I’d cast from that stolen book, the ghost knife was the only one I still had. I had a copy of that stolen spell book hidden away, but I hadn’t decided what to do with it. There was power in it, absolutely, but spell casting was painful and dangerous, and if Annalise or one of the other peers found out that I still had it, they’d execute me on the spot. For the Twenty Palace Society, stealing magic was a capital crime.

I couldn’t think of anything else to do on the second floor and went downstairs, stepping carefully around the marks on the carpet.

There was a message on the answering machine. Since Doug and Meg didn’t seem likely to be coming back, I pushed Play. It was only thirty minutes old and was from someone named Jennifer. She sounded about fifteen. The message was for “Mom and Dad” and made clear her outrage that her parents were planning to pull her out of school-and away from all her friends in the dorm now that she’d finally made some-with only three weeks until finals. This, apparently, would ruin her chance to get into a decent college. Can anyone express contemptuous disbelief as purely and cleanly as a teenage girl? I pressed the Save button on the machine; I liked Doug and Meg too much to erase a message from their daughter.

Annalise stood in the dark kitchen, staring out the window. Her face was utterly blank. Something about her made me give her some space.

I looked away and noticed a crumpled sheet of paper in the corner. I picked it up but there wasn’t enough light to read it.

Annalise glanced at me, her expression still inscrutable. I approached her and looked out the window, too.

In the next house over, a woman sat at her kitchen table, crying over a small, framed photo. I wondered how long she’d been sitting there, and how long Annalise had stood silently in the darkness, watching.

“What did you find?” she finally asked.

“Douglas and Meg, who think they hadn’t been blessed with a boy until last whenever, have actually had five kids. Three boys and two girls. It sounds as if the older girl is at a boarding school somewhere. The younger girl died upstairs in her room, and the worms marked up this carpet as they made a run for the soil outside. I suspect the middle boy died in his car seat a while ago. They packed in a frantic rush, but only for the middle child. We saw what happened to him.

“They rushed off in such a hurry that they left jewelry and financial documents in the safe upstairs. It looks like they threw a bunch of clothes and crap into their car and took off.

“I didn’t find any evidence of a spell, or a spell book, or predators. Nothing except that scorched streak in the