“Okay, then.” I scratched at the spells on the back of my hand. “I guess that means that Wally already has the power to kill everyone, but he wants the power to do it a certain way. So his euthanasia plan is on hold. But if he becomes a primary, he’s going to realize he’s wasting his time and fall back on option b: summoning one predator after another.”
“Except by then he’ll be really hard to kill. So let’s hope he doesn’t wise up.” She glanced at her watch. “We should get back to Csilla. We don’t want to keep her waiting. But … go easy on yourself. Okay? Remind me sometime to tell you the story of how I got into this life.”
She started toward the elevator doors, and I followed. I wanted to hear that story. I just hoped I lived long enough to have the chance.
In the room, Csilla was back in her place at the table. Talbot hovered over her, draping a shawl over her shoulders, then setting a plate of crackers and cheese before her. She was oblivious to him, staring blankly into space. Talbot smeared a blue-and-white-speckled cheese on a cracker and passed it back and forth under her nose. She didn’t react.
He dropped the cracker onto the tray in disgust. He was trying to be a loyal flunky, but he was beneath notice.
Annalise waved him away as she sat opposite Csilla. Talbot suddenly had nothing to do, and I turned my back so he wouldn’t approach me. The suite had a balcony. I went out onto it.
A breeze off the ocean made the sun and dry heat tolerable. We were getting toward the middle of the day, but the air was actually pleasant.
Talbot ruined it by joining me. He closed the door behind him. I had the idea that he was going to tip me over the rail, and I backed away from the edge.
“Whoa,” he said. “I’m not your enemy here.”
“Okay.”
“I got off to a bad start, didn’t I?”
“Twice.”
“Yeah. Sorry about the RPG. I knew there was magic in the apartment, and I wanted to really take care of it.”
I didn’t respond to that. It would be great to have a way to destroy predators by hitting them from a safe distance, but I didn’t have a weapon that could do it. And neither did Talbot, probably. Predators were part real, part magic. Normal weapons didn’t hurt them—most of the time, anyway. Would the drapes be vulnerable to shrapnel or concussion? What about fire? It was possible, I guessed, but not likely.
Never mind that he could have killed Jasmin, Maria, or Violet. Never mind that I should be tipping
Talbot exhaled through pursed lips. I guess I should have responded right away. “I don’t know if an RPG would affect those predators,” I said. “I mean, we’ll never know until we try, but from what I’ve seen, most predators can only be killed with magic. Did they give you any?”
“Nope. Not a weapon, anyway. I got these, though.” He lifted his shirt and showed me a circle of tattoos on his chest centered over his heart. I didn’t recognize them, but I knew the same spells could look different depending on which spell book they came from. He dropped his shirt and looked at me. He seemed to be waiting for something.
I lifted my shirt, too. My spells were more extensive than his, but they were also darker and thicker, making my torso look like a nest of black lines. He looked down at them with a calculating expression, like a batter studying the positions of the opposing team’s fielders.
I dropped my shirt and turned away. I wished I had resisted the temptation to share my spells with him. No way was I going to show him my ghost knife.
“Hey,” he said. “A few years ago, do you know where I was?”
“No.”
“Iraq. I was serving over there. We had some real scary shit go down, stuff you don’t even want to think about. One time—Do you mind if I tell you this?”
“Go ahead.”
“One time, we had word that there was a dude with bomb-making equipment in his house. Not that he was making it himself, supposedly he let insurgents visit him for tea and explosives lessons, right? So we made a forced entry in the middle of the night, the way we do, and we’re shouting at them, scaring the crap out of them to intimidate them. Which is for their own good, really, because if they’re not intimidated, they might do something stupid, and that’ll get them killed.
“Anyway, we drag them out of their beds, and they’re screaming and pleading with us, but we have no fucking idea what they’re saying. And the mom is yelling at the kids, and it’s all the usual chaos.
“But one of the guys on my squad, a dude from Oregon named Park, was trying to control a fifteen-year-old kid, and the kid suddenly did a jumping, spinning kick at him. I saw it, and it surprised the hell out of me. Park lost his grip on his weapon—it didn’t fly up in the air like in the movies, but he did let it get out of his hands. Crazy, right?
“And see, when I come across a snobby fag like that Vela dude, who earns a living by wiggling a feather duster back and forth, I get pissed off. He’s doing nothing, and I’m out here feeling like a fucking teenage hajji in my pajamas taking on trained soldiers with nothing but moves I learned from a cabinetful of Jackie Chan DVDs.”
“Talk to Csilla about that.”
He smiled, measuring me. “You didn’t like my story, huh?”
“At least you got some Jackie Chan movies out of it, right?”
“Damn straight,” he said. “The reason I tell you that story is that I’m ready to do whatever now that I’m in this society. I’ll be that hajji. I’m ready to do whatever it takes.”
