Catherine shrieked. Kripke slapped his hand over his face as if he’d been shot. He rubbed at his cheek, then checked his palm for blood. A fleck of gunpowder must have landed on his skin, but he couldn’t tell the difference between a burning speck and an entrance wound.
“High school?” I said. “I didn’t go to fucking high school. While you were carrying your books in the halls and complaining about homework, I was on the street stealing cars and getting high. I was doing time in juvie for
His eyes were wide and blank, but there seemed to be a little spark of understanding in there. “Everything I said to the professor was true, but there was some stuff I left out.”
“I’m waiting.”
“Okay, um. The guy who baited his way into our server and gave us all that information? He was logging on from somewhere in Bozeman, Montana. And he called himself TheLastKing.”
King? I knew someone named King. I hoped to God it wasn’t the same guy. “What was his real name?”
“I don’t know. He always logged in from a public wireless network. We could never find out who he was. We were going to ban him, but his first posts were full of great stuff, so we voted against it.”
“What did he teach you?”
“Well,” Kripke said, and swallowed. He lifted his hand close to his chest and pointed at my gun hand. “That’s the closed way on the back of your hand.”
I felt goose bumps run down my back. He knew more about the spells Annalise put on me than I did. I scowled to hide my excitement. “He taught you to recognize spells? What did he tell you about the closed way?”
“That it stops physical attacks the way a washed-out road blocks a traveler. That when a primary casts it, the marks are invisible and the skin can feel anything un-spelled skin can feel, but as you go down to secondary, tertiary, and so on, the spells become hard to hide and you lose sensation.”
I stared at him. Months ago, during our time in Hammer Bay, Annalise had used the word
I couldn’t press Kripke, either. As soon as he realized I wasn’t testing him—that he had information I wanted —he’d want me to bargain for it.
“TheLastKing, huh? Did he give any idea who he might be or where he got the information?”
“Well, he had a spell book.” Kripke’s tone was almost disrespectful.
“Are you playing with me?”
“No,” he answered, almost swallowing the word. “He said he had a pair of spell books. He said he stole them, and that if we bought the sapphire dog for him, he’d share six of the spells with us. He didn’t say who he’d stolen them from.”
“I want to meet him.”
“I’ll bet, but I’m not going to be able to arrange that. The guys on the server already know I lost the auction. I texted them as soon as the price got out of reach.”
“All right,” I said. “Then let’s narrow it down by which spell books he has. Can you recognize any of these?” I set the gun on the seat and stripped off my jacket and my shirt. My bare skin prickled in the winter air, but I felt warmer with my wet clothes off. After glancing around to make sure there were no cars coming toward us, I turned on the dome light.
Kripke squinted at the spells on my chest. “Iron gate,” he said and pointed just below my right collarbone. “It protects against different kinds of mental attacks.”
“Is that it?”
He pointed low on my left side, just at the bottom edge of my ribs. “The twisted path. It’s a shape-shifting spell for primaries, but as you go down the … um … chain, it doesn’t do much more than alter your fingerprints and the way people remember you. And you can’t control it. Um, hey, can you control it?”
This guy was unbelievable. “Still want to know about magic? I guess you haven’t been kidnapped and shot at enough. There’s a lesson to be learned, if you have the brains for it.”
He didn’t seem to get my point. “You’re part of the society, aren’t you? You’re the reason TheLastKing couldn’t come, because he said you were looking for him. You know who he is, don’t you?”
“What about the rest?”
He glanced over my chest and stomach. “I recognize the closed way around the edges, but the other spells … he never went over those. Most of the spells he showed us were for summoning.”
“What?” If Kripke knew a summoning spell, I was going to drive him out of town and put a bullet in him immediately. There was no way I’d trust this idiot with that much power.
“Only the written part!” he said quickly. “Only the visible part. He only gave us enough to recognize one. He said that summoning spells don’t decay the way other kinds do, so we’d be seeing more of them.”
I believed him. He was too brain-damaged to lie this well. I picked up the gun. He winced but stayed silent.
I laid my thumb against the safety. Should I kill him? A single predator loose in the world could call more of its kind and feed on us until there was nothing left. People who summoned them, or just wanted one, were risking everyone on the planet.
And Kripke here had tried to buy a predator.
So. Bullet to the head, right?
