There was a brief pause. Finally, Solorov spoke in a low, urgent, dangerous voice. “You will turn over your spell book to me, along with all copies, or I—”
“I don’t have a spell book,” Kripke snapped.
“—or I will kill you and everyone in your family. I’ll burn their houses down while they sleep at night. Do you understand me?” Her voice was urgent and, unlike the others in her group, completely free of
“I don’t have a spell book,” Kripke said. “I really don’t. If I did, I’d be a badass like them. I wouldn’t be letting you hold a gun on me.”
“Then where did you get this level of information? Or are you fabricating it?”
Kripke sighed. “A guy dropped by the server uninvited. He baited his way in, but before we could ban him, he offered up good information—very good.”
“What good information did he give you?”
“It’s too complicated to go into it now. Honest. We can review that later, if you want, but one of the things he gave us was a write-up of a couple of dozen spells and the outward glyphs that go with them. Mostly, they were protection spells like golem flesh and iron gate, but he also included odd things like the twisted path and the second word. No summoning spells. He listed the things the spells could do when they were fresh and when they weren’t.”
“I want to see that.”
“Okay.”
“And everything else you have.”
Kripke sighed again. “Okay. It goes against our TOA, but okay. Another thing: I know where the security guards went. I saw Mr. Yin approach the one at the front door, the lead. Yin flashed ID and ordered them to leave. The guard called someone, and after a couple of seconds, he shrugged and ordered all his men into their Expeditions.”
“The harpy hired one of Mr. Yin’s companies to provide security?” Solorov sounded amused.
“More likely Yin found out who she hired and bought them out. He’s really, really rich.”
The old man’s assistant returned. Everyone stopped talking. He handed a metal bar to the old man, who shuffled out onto the lawn.
I wondered who had given Kripke his information. I knew the society would be interested in that. I also wondered what he’d meant when he said spells could be fresh. Until Ursula shook off the effects of my ghost knife, it hadn’t occurred to me that it might have an expiration date.
I couldn’t help but think of my boss, Annalise. She wouldn’t have hidden in a dark basement, eavesdropping. She would have bashed heads together.
Would she have killed Kripke and the professor? The Twenty Palace Society killed people who used magic. Did they kill people who were just searching for it, too?
Not that it mattered right now. I wasn’t going to kill anyone I didn’t have to, and not just on Catherine’s say-so. I did need to grab hold of Kripke, though. Like the professor, I wanted information from him.
Tattoo returned with the sour-faced old housekeeper. He held her hand as they walked across the grass. Her scowl had been replaced by an empty, dreamy smile. Someone needed to give her a coat.
Tattoo steered her onto the lawn. The old man waited at the bottom of the slope, twisted iron bar in his hand. I had a bad feeling about that damn bar. I took out my ghost knife.
The old man was about fifty feet from me. I could have thrown my ghost knife and hit him easily. It goes where I want it to go—I don’t even really need to Frisbee it, although it moves faster that way. Still, the Fellows had shotguns. And I would have bet every penny I had that the old man was a sorcerer. My little ghost knife couldn’t take out all of them, but maybe I could disrupt things and get away.
Assuming it worked on him better than it had on Ursula.
Men crowded around Solorov to ask her questions, and their legs completely blocked my view. I could hear them muttering to one another, half excited and half envious. I needed to get to another window to see what the old man was going to do. I couldn’t throw my spell without aiming it, and if I was going to stop him, I’d need to hit the bar—and him—with my first shot.
The window to my left was blocked with garden tools. The window to my right was blocked by an old couch on its end. I leaned back to see if there was a better option farther down the room.
“Christ!” one of the men outside shouted.
I turned back to the window. The men had stepped to the side, clearing my line of sight.
The old woman lay on her back in the grass. The old man had just stabbed the metal bar through her chest into the ground. He stared at a carving on the top of the bar.
“He did that right out in the open,” one of the Fellows said. “Right in front of us.”
“Be quiet,” Solorov said.
I had expected him to consult a spell book, say a few words, maybe draw a circle. Something. But he hadn’t, and I had missed my chance. I should have just cut my way through to him, and to hell with what came of it.
Frail ran toward the house, putting a lot of distance between himself and the body. The old man only stepped back a few feet. He looked to the sky, but I couldn’t see anything up there besides night clouds and stars.
The metal bar wobbled. It was adorned with a variety of shapes, but at this distance I could only make out the one on top, a large eye.
There was a sudden flash of light. The Fellows leaped back against the building wall. A bolt of lightning had flashed out of the clear night sky and struck the trembling bar—a lightning rod, that’s what it was—engulfing the old
