Circle of Enemies

The Twenty Palace Society would make me its new poster boy.

No, I told it. No. I was a human being and I didn’t want to be changed into something else.

It said I was too damaged to make this choice for myself.

I swung one of my hooked arms at it, aiming for its center. I knew my attack was feeble, but I didn’t expect to kill the creature. I expected the creature to kill me.

And that’s what it did. There was a sudden sharp pain as the hook went in, then I was back inside the Hummer, staring down at the milky-blue liquid in my hand.

I carefully poured the liquid into the thermos and twisted the lid back on. I set the thermos into the cup holder. Spilling any of it would be a terrible thing. Terrible.

Then I began to scream.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I didn’t scream for long. For one thing, it didn’t make me feel better, not even a little bit. For another, it was a waste of time. I had predators in the back of my car. I didn’t have time to freak out.

I looked over at the thermos on the seat next to me. What the hell had just happened?

There was a sudden knock on my window. A chubby guy with a thick Vandyke was standing by my door.

The windows on the Hummer were electric, and I didn’t want to fumble with the controls trying to lower them—that would be a sure sign that the vehicle wasn’t mine. I opened the door a crack.

“Hey, man,” he said. “You okay?”

And here I thought nobody in L.A. cared. “No,” I answered. “I just got fired.”

“Oh. Um …”

“Thanks for asking.”

He accepted that and, his good deed accomplished, walked away. I was going to have to be more careful where I had my meltdowns.

I put my hand on the key in the ignition, then put it back into my lap. Where was I going to go? I had no plan, and no idea where to find Wally, Arne, or the others. I picked up the thermos again.

The liquid inside had sent me to some other place. Not the Empty Spaces, though—there was no air, no stone chambers, no caves there. It was all mists and nothingness. Another planet? This planet in the distant past or far future? I had no way to know for sure. What I did know is that those creatures were going to put thoughts into my head.

I have the Book of Oceans. The realization hit me like a medicine ball in the gut. The statue wasn’t a clue; it was a container. Every sorcerer and wannabe sorcerer in the world was looking for this, and 98 percent of them would be willing to nuke the city and sift the ashes for it.

Annalise wanted it most of all. The Twenty Palace Society was fading without its spell books; it was losing ground against sorcerers who summoned predators. If Annalise got her hands on this, she’d share it with the other peers. She’d share it with Csilla.

And she’d killed Lino without a second thought. She’d threatened the boat captain’s son. She wasn’t as big an asshole as Wally or Ansel Zahn, but could I hand over the spell book to her?

Hell, no.

I gripped the steering wheel with my left hand, rubbing it against the leather. That was my skin, touching. My face itched from the sweat and heat. My hair was damp. It felt good to be back in my own bones, and I was tempted to step out into the parking lot to dance, just to make sure everything worked. And yet, I could still feel those nine hooks wrapped snug around my middle, like phantom limbs.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember how I’d “seen” in my vision. Those alien creatures had been about to tell me something important. They’d brought me to that private place, and they were all about to share something with me at once.

Maybe that’s how the original spell books worked—they didn’t really give you visions, they sent you out of your body, where those things dumped the knowledge of the universe into your brain the way I’d throw old newspapers into a recycling bin. And Christ, they’d almost given that knowledge to me.

I set the thermos on the seat next to me, but when I realized I was about to belt it in, I moved it to the cup holder. The L.A. River was just a few blocks away. I could dump the contents of the thermos into the thin stream and watch it flow out to the Pacific. Hell, I could take the advice I gave Dale and stuff the whole thermos into a trash can by the curb. The book would vanish into a landfill somewhere.

Would that be enough to get it away from everyone, including myself? Part of the reason I wanted to trash it was that I wanted it so much. “Reading” the Book of Oceans would turn me into a primary, one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world. I would live for centuries. I could go back to Hammer Bay and destroy the predator I’d left behind. I could do things I couldn’t even imagine.

But if I didn’t trust Annalise with that much power, I certainly didn’t trust myself. Not that I was sure those aliens would accept me if I tried again. I laughed, and the sound echoed in the confines of the SUV. I hadn’t lied to the chubby guy after all. My alien host had taken me into a room to become a full sorcerer, and I’d gotten myself fired.

I was going to have to get by on what abilities I already had …

And suddenly I knew where to go. Wally had said: I know a little desert retreat that’s going to be abandoned soon. Arne had “broken into” a building in the desert—a building with security cameras on the outside—to steal that Bugatti, but he hadn’t bothered to go invisible first. The building must have been his.

And once Arne vanished into the Empty Spaces …

I started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. I drove aimlessly for ten full minutes, trying to remember the best way to get to the 15. Francois had been right all along; Arne was ransoming the man’s car back to him, not recovering it.