His face was too close, his eyes too hot. I brought my hand up in a defensive chop, twisting sideways. He released me for a split second, then grabbed again, catching skin, fabric, and a fistful of lucky charms. Blue and green static shot up in front of my eyes, nearly blinding me. Clay was suddenly crawling with eerie blue-green static-a fishnet made of Northern Lights. He shrieked and flung himself away from me.
Something quick and low to the ground slipped behind him and he toppled over the sudden obstacle, dragging me after him. Dad’s old chain broke. The charms scattered, dog tags and weird guitar pick thing flying away into the gloom of the hall. Clay ended up in an awkward heap on the floor.
Howard straightened from a crouch and grinned at me. “Thud,” he said.
I didn’t laugh. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from Clay. Strange static still crept over him. And in the whiteface, leotard, and tights he looked like a marionette with its strings cut. If we couldn’t find Cal and Goldie and get out of here, Primal might just have a whole troop of marionette mimes. A dream come true.
I put a hand to my throat. Viktor’s cross on its silver chain was still there. I thanked God for that and looked around for the other stuff. In the dim light of the hallway it wasn’t going to be easy to find, but I wasn’t about to leave it behind. I’d worn Dad’s tags since the day he was buried, and I suspected Papa Sky’s lucky chip had just saved my bacon.
Something tugged at my jacket. I spun, going for my knife.
It was only Howard. He held out my missing charms. “Yours.”
Dad’s Air Force-issue links were totaled. I slid the tags and the leather chip onto the chain with the cross. Then I tugged my shirt back into place and glanced down at myself. I had lost a couple of buttons and some skin; beads of blood stood up in a row of angry-looking welts across my chest. This wasn’t going to play well in Kiev. Ripping my knife out of its belt sheath, I headed for the fire exit.
Howard shadowed me so close I almost tripped over him. “What’d you do to him?” he asked.
“Just a little something I picked up.” I kicked the fire door open.
“But you’re a normal!”
I threw myself out onto the fire escape and came face-to-face with Viktor. I stared at him stupidly for a moment. “What’re you doing here? You shouldn’t be here.” I grabbed him and tried to force him down the stairs; he swung me around and headed up instead. I had no choice but to follow.
“The contract is broken,” he told me over his shoulder. “We came in through the garage as Papa Sky’s friend suggested. But then… something happened. Magritte flew off up there and Enid went after her.” He nodded at the layers of building above us.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Goldie and Cal are up there, too. There’s something about the seventh floor.” I snatched at him again, trying to slow him down. “Look, I’ll go. You take Howard and get-”
He shrugged me off, taking the stairs two at a time. I leapt after him, using every foul word I could think of.
Climbing four floors takes time. In this case, it took enough time for me to do the math. We were no surprise to Primal. How could we have been after weeks of wretched dreams, hours spent burrowing our way into the Loop, minutes ticking by under his hot eyes? I suspected he’d connected with us through Enid, found out what made us tick, and used it to pull us here like moths to a flame. If that was true, could Goldie’s taking off to the mysterious seventh floor be unexpected? For all we knew, Papa Sky might’ve been a mole.
And there was this: Why would a building that was all castle keep, with a moat at the front door and a dragon guarding the treasure, have unlocked doorways that let little old us waltz in and out? The answer was obvious: we’d been shuffled, cut, and dealt like a pack of playing cards. And the only question worth asking at this point-the $64,000 question, as Goldman would say-was: Why? What did Primal want? Really.
At the seventh-floor landing, we paused to survey the fire exit. The open fire exit.
Oh, this was just too damn convenient.
Doc caught my arm and turned me around to face him. He raised a hand to the torn front of my shirt, fingering the stained denim. “Is this blood?”
“It’s nothing, really.”
He pushed the fabric aside to bare the welts Clay had left. “These are claw marks. What in the name of God is in that place?”
“Nothing a can of mace wouldn’t cure. It’s fine, really. I just had a disagreement with somebody over my … charms.” Yeah, and I said it with a straight face, too.
Behind me Howard made a snuffling noise that sounded an awful lot like laughter.
I turned on him. “You got a problem?”
He shook his head.
“Good. Weapons?”
He just grinned at me, baring a mouthful of incredibly sharp teeth. Would’ve done a T-Rex proud.
“How about you?” I asked Doc.
In answer, he reached up under his jacket and pulled out his knife. It was about six inches long-a very effective weapon in the right hands.
“That’ll do,” I told him. “But only if you’re prepared to use it.”
The look he gave me was grim. “I am prepared.”
Yeah, but for what? I could’ve shared my certainty that we were stepping into a trap, that there were too many open doors in this place. I didn’t. What good would it have done? Instead I said, “Back at the Preserve … I wish I’d realized … I just wish there were more time.”
He smiled. “There is always time,” he said, then turned and walked into the darkness of the seventh floor.
God, let him be right, I thought, and stepped through after him.
TWENTY-SIX
DOC
We were smothered in cold, clammy darkness the mo-ment we entered the building, and made our way along a corridor that seemed to go forever up its north side. When at last we turned into the transverse hallway and the carpet ended, our footsteps made scrapes and whispers on the marble sheathing. Amplified and echoed by the escalator galleries, it seemed as if an army trod the halls. This was not such a bad thing, I reasoned. At least we should be able to hear as well as we were heard.
We turned from the escalators into a broad hallway that glowed with eerie green light and whose walls seemed to run wet with liquid. Colleen slid her crossbow out of its harness and set a bolt. I put a hand out to stay her.
“Don’t worry,” she said, her eyes probing the shadows between the tiny rivers of green light. “I’ll make damn sure what I’m shooting at before I empty this thing.” She turned her head toward me, green luminance washing across her face and into her eyes. “It looks like a haunted house. You ever been in a haunted house, Doc? Besides the Wishart place, I mean.”
“No. Never. I have been in field hospitals, though, in Afghanistan. When there was bombing, they would extinguish all the lights, and it would be this dark and this silent between explosions. It smelled like this. Like decay.”
“Cheery thought. We’re gonna have to work on that attitude, Viktor.”
I should not want to smile. Not here. “Thank you,” I said. “De nada.”
“I been in haunted houses,” Howard said. “Holy Family put on a good one at Halloween. Used to like ’em.”
Colleen let out a crack of laughter that echoed off the living walls. “The Holy Family put on a haunted house?”
Howard blinked at her, eyes like pale marbles in the wash of sickly light. “The church-over on Roosevelt.”
I found I could not tear my eyes from the strange green capillaries. They reminded me of blood vessels. A network of veins beneath the skin of …
Colleen was right. I needed to work on my attitude.
We went down the broad, bleeding hallway, Colleen at point, me slightly behind, Howard watching our backs. I could not say I was entirely comfortable with him there.