“And I want to talk to him,” I said, and raced out of the lot. Summer stood by the entrance, watching me impassively. She was still there when I drove down the street.
I forced myself to take long, slow breaths. I looked down at my wrist. My skin had turned red and gotten inflamed where Summer’s little hand had touched me.
An idea occurred to me, and I lifted my arm toward the rearview mirror when I stopped at the next stoplight. My shirt was a henley, three buttons at the neck, no collar, and sleeves that reached just past my elbow. Both Summer and Bud had grabbed my arm where the sleeve covered it, but I couldn’t see any effect on my clothes. They weren’t sticky, discolored, or slowly dissolving.
The light turned green and I drove on. Could Bud turn invisible? I hadn’t seen him do it, and I hadn’t touched his skin, but something about the way he’d acted—as though he’d expected my reaction, just not so soon—made me think he could.
And Caramella. I thought she’d transported herself out of my room after that last, aborted slap, but maybe she’d hung around for a while, watching me sleep.
The idea gave me the shivers, and I almost blew through the next red light. Instead, I forced myself to calm down. Potato Face and his men hadn’t triggered this kind of response when they’d swarmed around me, but why should they? They were men. All they could do was kill me.
When the light changed, I parked the truck. I was only a block and a half away from the Bigfoot Room, and that was close enough. I didn’t like the idea of driving Bud’s truck when another drop of sweat could blind me.
I wiped my fingerprints off Summer’s gun. There was no reason to—the twisted-path spell on my chest altered the physical evidence I left behind, like fingerprints and DNA, making it impossible to pin me to a crime scene. It still felt good. Then I stuffed the weapon under the seat.
I opened the glove compartment. Sure enough, there was Summer’s purse. I flipped through it. There was no makeup—the only thing she had in common with her mother was her refusal to wear it. There was an address book and a billfold with a little cash inside. I was tempted to take the money to teach her a lesson about fooling around with magic, but I didn’t. Class hadn’t started yet.
I did take her address book. I flipped to the
There was only one more thing to do. I still had the cellphone the society had given me. If I turned it on and stuffed it into the back of the seat, the society would be able to locate them the same way they’d located me.
I didn’t do it. The risk that Bud or Robbie or someone else in the crew would find it and press REDIAL may have been slim, but I still wasn’t going to take the chance. Secrecy came first. I pocketed it, tossed the keys under the front seat, and picked up the grocery bag. Then I climbed out, leaving the driver’s window rolled down.
I walked back to the church and my car. There were police cars with flashing lights parked in front of the bar, and plenty of yellow tape on the sidewalk. I stopped at the corner to gawk a little; it would have looked suspicious if I hadn’t. A patrol cop looked at me, then looked away, uninterested.
I went to my car and drove away before a cop came close enough to smell the tear gas.
Summer and Caramella could turn invisible. Probably Bud could, too. I tried to figure who else should be on that list, but I didn’t know enough yet. I was sure Arne knew about it, even if he couldn’t vanish himself. I suddenly understood why there was sawdust on the floor of the Bigfoot Room.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst part was the way Summer had looked when she’d dropped her invisibility—she’d looked like a doorway into the Empty Spaces. Nearly two years earlier, when I’d first come face- to-face with predators, magic, the Twenty Palace Society, and all the rest, I’d cast a spell that let me look into the Empty Spaces.
That had only been a peek, though. I’d learned enough to scare the hell out of myself, but not much more. And it wasn’t like the society was going to explain things to me; they didn’t exactly offer night classes.
What little I understood about the Empty Spaces was this: it surrounds the world we live on and is, at the same time, beside it. It’s a void of mist and darkness, and
The society calls them predators, but they aren’t like the animals you find here on the earth. Coming from this other, alternate space, they have their own physics and their own biology. Some are living wheels of fire, some swarms of lights, some massive serpents in which every scale is the face of one of its meals, some schools of moving, singing boulders. When they come to our world, they are “only partly real,” as my boss once explained. They’re creatures of magic, and can be used to do all sorts of strange and dangerous things … if the summoner can control them.
So they’re out there in that vast expanse, right beside us but unable to find us. And they’re hungry. One of them, allowed to run loose on our planet, would feed and feed and feed, possibly calling more of its kind, until there was nothing left but barren rock.
The entire reason the Twenty Palace Society existed, as far as I could tell, was to search out and destroy the summoning magic that called predators to our world, along with anyone who used that magic. They also kill predators when they find them.
But a human taking on a predator is like a field mouse trying to kill a barn owl. That’s why the society uses magic of its own. They don’t call predators—summoning magic is a killing offense, even for them—but as far as I could tell, everything else was fair game. The spells tattooed on my body and the ghost knife in my pocket were prime examples of that.
A car behind me honked, and I realized I’d been sitting at a stop sign for nearly a minute, lost in thought. I pulled through the intersection, blinking my eyes clear.
And although it had been nearly two years, I’d instantly recognized the Empty Spaces when Summer had dropped her invisibility. If she’d gotten this ability through non-summoning magic like mine, that would be bad enough. The society would want to check her out and hunt down the spell book she’d used. And … damn, I hated to think it, but they would probably kill her just to be safe.
When people learned magic was real they often became obsessed with the power it gave them, and they did dangerous things to get it, like summon predators they couldn’t control. I’d seen it more than once, and it was why I was so alarmed when Arne had said Wally King’s name. Wally hadn’t just summoned predators; he’d killed people to steal spells from them.
But were Caramella and Summer his accomplices or his victims?
