But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst part was the way Summer had looked when she’d dropped her invisibility—she’d looked like a doorway into the Empty Spaces. Nearly two years earlier, when I’d first come face-to-face with predators, magic, the Twenty Palace Society, and all the rest, I’d cast a spell that let me look into the Empty Spaces.
That had only been a peek, though. I’d learned enough to scare the hell out of myself, but not much more. And it wasn’t like the society was going to explain things to me; they didn’t exactly offer night classes.
What little I understood about the Empty Spaces was this: it surrounds the world we live on and is, at the same time, beside it. It’s a void of mist and darkness, and creatures live there.
The society calls them predators, but they aren’t like the animals you find here on the earth. Coming from this other, alternate space, they have their own physics and their own biology. Some are living wheels of fire, some swarms of lights, some massive serpents in which every scale is the face of one of its meals, some schools of moving, singing boulders. When they come to our world, they are “only partly real,” as my boss once explained. They’re creatures of magic, and can be used to do all sorts of strange and dangerous things … if the summoner can control them.
So they’re out there in that vast expanse, right beside us but unable to find us. And they’re hungry. One of them, allowed to run loose on our planet, would feed and feed and feed, possibly calling more of its kind, until there was nothing left but barren rock.
The entire reason the Twenty Palace Society existed, as far as I could tell, was to search out and destroy the summoning magic that called predators to our world, along with anyone who used that magic. They also kill predators when they find them.
But a human taking on a predator is like a field mouse trying to kill a barn owl. That’s why the society uses magic of its own. They don’t call predators—summoning magic is a killing offense, even for them—but as far as I could tell, everything else was fair game. The spells tattooed on my body and the ghost knife in my pocket were prime examples of that.
A car behind me honked, and I realized I’d been sitting at a stop sign for nearly a minute, lost in thought. I pulled through the intersection, blinking my eyes clear.
And although it had been nearly two years, I’d instantly recognized the Empty Spaces when Summer had dropped her invisibility. If she’d gotten this ability through non-summoning magic like mine, that would be bad enough. The society would want to check her out and hunt down the spell book she’d used. And … damn, I hated to think it, but they would probably kill her just to be safe.
When people learned magic was real they often became obsessed with the power it gave them, and they did dangerous things to get it, like summon predators they couldn’t control. I’d seen it more than once, and it was why I was so alarmed when Arne had said Wally King’s name. Wally hadn’t just summoned predators; he’d killed people to steal spells from them.
But were Caramella and Summer his accomplices or his victims?
In the end, that might not even matter. That vision of the Empty Spaces suggested that Summer got her power from a predator. Maybe it was inside her body like a parasite, maybe nearby, but it was connected to her somehow. I’d seen both. Maybe she didn’t know how dangerous it was, or even that it was there.
That predator, if that’s what it was, had to be destroyed. The big question was: could I destroy it, whatever it was, without killing my friends?
I kept driving west and pulled into the second park I saw. The grass was dead brown, but what did that matter to me? I carried the Ralphs grocery bag to a bench beneath a tree. There were two bottles inside: a liter bottle of water and a little blue bottle of liquid Maalox. The first thing I did was pour water over my wrist, washing away whatever acids Summer had left there. It didn’t stop hurting, but it stopped getting worse.
Then I guzzled some of the water. The heat was oppressive, and the sweat on my face made my eyes sting.
Once the water bottle had as much fluid as the Maalox did, I poured the antacid in and shook it up. It worked surprisingly well, and soon I’d rinsed off my face and hands completely.
I stood. It wasn’t enough. The faint, choking stink of tear gas still clung to my clothes, and my skin was beginning to crawl.
I used a clean shirt from my jump bag to wipe the drying Maalox from my face. The empty bottles went back into the grocery bag along with the cellphone. I wrapped them up and dumped them into the trash.
I drove back toward the freeway until I came to a Best Western half a block from an exit. The vacancy sign was lit.
My shirt still stank, but the clerk didn’t care. I don’t think she cared about anything except her air-conditioning. I rented a room on the second floor and trudged upstairs.
The room was clean and plain. I stood by the bed with the TV remote in my hand for a full two minutes and tried to convince myself to shower. The temptation to sit in front of the tube in a trance state was so strong it was like a death wish. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself watching TV while predators spread through the city, killing people. I couldn’t do that, no matter how much I wanted to rest. I carried my bag into the bathroom.
I stripped down and threw my clothes into the bottom of the tub. I had brought a small bottle of laundry detergent, and I scrubbed the sweat, stomach medicine, and tear gas by hand. The cold water felt good on my hands. Then I hung them by the window, turning off the air just below them.
Then I took a shower of my own. My skin was raw and red where Summer had touched me. I switched to cold water. It was uncomfortable, but I wanted it that way. I’d seen a predator on Summer and I’d backed off. I had to stand up and stay in the fight. I had to endure.
My clothes were not even close to dry when I finished. I took my last clean shirt, a white button-down, from the bag and put it on. Then I looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t look like a hungry ghost anymore, just a guy who needed a good night’s sleep. At least I had cleaned the sweat off my face. I’ve always hated the feel of dried sweat.
I got back into my car and drove to Silver Lake, giving a wide berth to the Bigfoot Room and the street where I’d parked Bud’s truck. I wasn’t ready to run into them again.
Caramella’s place was a little house, which surprised me. It had a lawn about the size of two postage stamps and a lot of Spanish stucco on the outside. As on just about every street in L.A., the houses on the block were a mishmash of styles, but hers was a basic A-frame that had been troweled over with a pueblo exterior. I took out my ghost knife.
A Corolla was parked in the driveway. There were two tall windows at the front of the house, and I nearly walked into the tiny flower garden to peep through the glass. It was just after 9 P.M., and I was planning to break and enter a friend’s house.
Instead, I pocketed the ghost knife and rang the doorbell.
No one answered. I fidgeted a little, then rang it again. Again there was no answer. My Escort was parked at the curb, but the idea of driving away felt like defeat. Where would I go after this? I didn’t know where Caramella worked. I didn’t know where she hung out. A detective might have started walking around the neighborhood, asking about her at every diner, deli, and bar, but I wasn’t a detective. I was a criminal.
I took out my ghost knife and slid it through the lock. The front door opened easily, and I let myself in, pushing the door closed behind me.
The house looked even smaller on the inside, but it was nicely furnished. Everything I owned had come out of a yard sale, but Melly’s tables and chairs were new if not fancy. The plaid couch and recliner matched the curtains, and there were tiny white throw pillows everywhere. A pair of lamps on either side of the couch threw a pale blue light around the room, and the ceiling light in the bathroom was on.