The ghost knife was my spell, the only one I had.
Then I took my cellphone out of my sock drawer. After the mess in Washaway, an investigator for the Twenty Palace Society met me on the street and slipped me a phone number. They trusted me enough to give me a way to contact them, which was damned rare and I knew it.
The society was a group of sorcerers committed to one end: hunting down magic spells and the people who used them, then destroying both. They were especially determined to find summoning spells, which could call strange creatures to our world from a place referred to as, variously, the Empty Spaces or the Deeps. These creatures, called predators, could grant strange powers, if the summoner knew how to properly control them. Too often, the summoner didn’t know, and the predator got loose in the world to hunt.
I was a low-level member of that society, but except for my boss, Annalise, who had put the magical tattoos on me, I knew very little about it. How many peers were there? How many investigators? How many wooden men, besides me, did they have? Where were they based? Where did their money come from?
I had no idea and no way to find out. The Twenty Palace Society took its secrecy seriously. I hadn’t been invited to secret headquarters, hadn’t trained at a secret camp, hadn’t been given a secret handbook with an organizational flow chart at the back. When they wanted me to do something, they contacted me, and they told me as little as they could.
What I did know was this: peers live a very long time—centuries, in some cases—and the magic they use has left them barely human. Oh, they look human enough, but they have become something else.
And they were bastards, too—ruthless killers who took a scorched-earth policy when it came to predators and enemy sorcerers. As a group, they didn’t seem to care much about collateral damage.
They had their reasons. A single predator, let loose in the world, could strip it of life. I’d visited the Empty Spaces once and seen it happen. So maybe the peers were justified in their “kill a hundred to save six billion” attitude, but it was a slim consolation if your loved one was among the hundred.
Which was why I set the cell back on the bureau. Caramella had vanished right in front of me. It was magic, yeah, but calling the Twenty Palace Society and asking Annalise to meet me in L.A. was as good as taking a hit out on Melly and everyone else I knew. Annalise would first determine who, where, and how they had been touched by magic—spells didn’t strike people out of the sky like lightning. Magic powers, enchantments, and hungry predators were things people
After that, Annalise would kill them all just to be safe, and I would be the one who’d hung a bull’s-eye on their backs.
God, I couldn’t kill more people. It was too soon.
An overwhelming weariness came over me. Too little sleep and a full day’s work in the sun had left me exhausted. I smeared peanut butter on a slice of bread and ate it with all the enthusiasm you would expect, then climbed into bed. I wasn’t ready for a long trip south. I didn’t have the energy for it.
I closed my eyes and fell into a dead sleep. I dreamed of fire, and mobs of people coming at me in the darkness, and brutal violence. I woke screaming at five in the morning.
I grabbed my ready bag, my ghost knife, and my cellphone. I wrote a note to my aunt explaining that I would be away for a few days. Then I went out into the summer darkness, climbed into my rusty Ford Escort, and drove south.
It was a long trip, and I had plenty of time to think. Too much time, really. It had surprised me when Melly had said we didn’t have old times. I’d met her when I was seventeen, still stealing cars for Arne and feeling a little cocky about it. She’d been a couple of years older, and I’d tried to smooth talk her. It was the first time a woman had ever laughed at me without making me angry or ashamed. She took me under her wing, sort of, and we became friends.
Until then, I hadn’t thought men and women could really be friends—not that I’d become a man yet, no matter what I’d thought of myself. She had been kind to me when she didn’t have to, and she had yanked on my leash whenever I got too full of myself. I’d done things for her, too: fixed her car a dozen times, helped her move, and the one time an ex-boyfriend had threatened her, I’d broken his thumbs as an important lesson in good manners.
Never mind the times she’d lifted cash from my wallet. That’s how we’d lived back then. I always felt I’d never done enough to repay her for the things she’d done for me. And now she’d denied we’d had good times at all.
Maybe it should have stung more, but it didn’t. I’d spent three years in Chino, and the two years after that had been centered on the society and its work. Caramella was like a ghost from another life come to haunt me—a life where we’d told one another we were brothers and sisters but I’d had to sleep with my wallet in my pocket. I could barely remember how that felt.
I drove straight through, taking twenty-three hours with meals and bathroom breaks. Most of the time I was in a trance, but as I approached the city, passing through dry, brown hills wrinkled like unfolded laundry, I could feel my anxieties gathering strength.
Then I was inside the city in the cool, dry predawn, riding on an elevated highway with barriers along both sides. I could see treetops and the roofs of houses laid out around me; I was skimming above the city, and felt it beneath and around me. It gave me the same tingle I got standing outside a lion’s cage at the zoo.
I was exhausted. I pulled off the freeway into the parking lot of an IKEA, drove up to the top level, and shut everything down. I slumped in the seat and shut my eyes.
Everything was wrong. I was back in L.A., but I felt like a pod-person imitation of the man I used to be. Stealing cars, getting high, spending hours on the PlayStation or hitting the bag at the gym—none of that matched who I was now. Now I had bulletproof tattoos on my chest, neck, and arms. Now I had tattooed spells that obscured evidence of crimes I’d committed, plus others that did who knows what. Now I was a killer of men, women, and children.
Sleep overtook me and I woke up around ten-thirty feeling sore but without my usual parade of bad dreams. This level of the parking lot was still empty. Already sweating from the morning heat, I started the engine, filled the gas tank at a station on the corner, and drove to the Bigfoot Room.
It wasn’t really called the Bigfoot Room. It had changed names several times over the dozen or so years I’d spent as a member of Arne’s crew, and the latest name was the Dingaling Bar. I nearly laughed. I couldn’t imagine Arne in a bar called the Dingaling. I parked in the lot beside it and walked around to the front. The wall above the door was recessed slightly, and coated with dust. Years ago, Arne had brought a bar stool out front, climbed up, and written BIGFOOT ROOM in the dust with his finger.
