At the corner I dropped Wally’s cell into a trash can. It was painful to throw away resources, but it was Wally’s. I didn’t want any gifts from him.
I had three blocks to figure out what he wanted, but I couldn’t put it together. In junior high, a couple of guys from the baseball team had picked on Wally until I told them to lay off. It wasn’t that I liked him, but I hated to see the misery they were making.
Then I’d played with a handgun, and my life changed forever. I never went back to school and didn’t hear from Wally again until just before I got out of Chino. He wrote to me, offering me a joe job at his copy shop. I tried to remember how it felt to be grateful to him, but it was too long ago. Too much had happened since.
So I wasn’t sure what Wally owed me. An apology for what happened to Jon? For the predators he’d unleashed? As far as I was concerned, all Wally King owed me was his spell book and his miserable fucking life.
The Sugar Shaker turned out to be a storefront café with a counter along the back wall and ten round tables.
I took hold of my ghost knife before I walked through the door. The spell was quiet—just a sheet of laminated paper that I could sense—as it had always been. But if it still wanted someone to cut, Wally would do just fine.
A man sitting by the wall near the newspaper rack waved to me, and it took me a moment to recognize him. It was Wally, and he looked bad. His sallow skin sagged off his body. His skull seemed slightly misshapen, and his body was a formless mass. He’d always been fat, but now he looked lumpy, as though he was riddled with tumors. He wore green sweats that needed to be thrown into a hamper, but he’d spent a long time brushing and blow-drying his hair.
There were a dozen other people inside, talking, eating breakfast, or just reading. My adrenaline was still running, and I was jumpy and pissed off. Annalise, if she were here, would have smashed in Wally’s skull and burned him down to cinders without a second thought, and she would have written off anyone killed in the crossfire as an acceptable loss. I wasn’t ready to do that. While Wally needed killing—oh, how he needed killing, no one knew that better than I did—this wasn’t the place.
Unless it had to become the place.
Wally held up his pale, flabby hands. “Sixty seconds, right?”
“You don’t deserve sixty seconds.”
“But they do.” He gestured toward the crowd around him.
“You look terrible.”
“But I feel fantastic.” He rubbed at a piece of peeling skin on the end of his ear. “Ray, I know what you want to do—it’s written all over your face and I can see it in your glow—but I’m a different person, too. If you make your move here, all these people are going to suffer.”
I stared at him, picturing him with a split skull. Could I do it quickly enough? My ghost knife felt alive in my pocket. I remembered how it had felt when it tried to control me, and the killing urge dimmed just a little.
“Can’t we just talk?” Wally asked. “Have a seat.”
I sat and placed my hands on the table. “My friend died today because of you.”
“Which one?” I nearly snatched a knife off the table and stabbed him in the eye, but he kept talking, oblivious. “Was it the cute one with the big butt? I knew we were getting close to her time. She gave you my message, right? I mean, you’re here.”
“Why, Wally? What are you trying to get out of this?”
He sighed. “I’m not much for schemes, Ray. I think you know that. Some guys can come up with complicated plans to get what they want, but I’m not like that. I need things to be simple.”
A waitress stepped up to the table. She was a tall Asian woman with a broad forehead and long, straight black hair. She did her best not to look at Wally and didn’t seem all that impressed by my soaking wet clothes. “Can I take your orders?”
“I thought this table was in the other waitress’s section,” Wally said. He sounded a little whiny about it.
“Nope, I’m your waitress,” she answered in a tone that suggested she wasn’t happy about it and didn’t want to argue.
Wally sighed again. “I’d like three hard-boiled eggs, a side of bacon, and a side of sausage. And water. Ray? It’s on me.”
“Black coffee,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t drink a drop of it. I didn’t want to accept anything from him.
The waitress hurried away. “I thought this table was in the other waitress’s section,” he told me, as though I hadn’t heard him the first time he said it. His lips were rubbery and his teeth were gray. “I’m not into Asian chicks. I know some guys are crazy for them, but I like curly hair.”
I closed my eyes. I was not going to sit here and talk about women with him. “You need things to be simple,” I prompted.
“Right. I needed invisible people for my thing, and I wanted to do it in a way to get your attention.”
“What ‘thing’ are you talking about?”
“I’m trying to get my hands on a puzzle.… Actually, never mind about the thing,” he said. “I blew that, anyway. This is about you now. You remember what I told you last time, right before you tried to kill me? Well, nothing has changed. Bad shit is coming, Ray. Really, really bad shit.”
“But why is this about me?”
“I owe you, for all the good things you did for me growing up.”
“That doesn’t make us friends.”
“Oh, no. I’m well aware of that. Still, you did good things for me when no one else would, not even the actual friends I had at the time. Besides, I like knowing you. It’s like being pals with Stalin’s deadliest assassin or something.”
Even I knew who Stalin was. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The Twenty Palace Society, natch. They used to be really scary, you know, back in the day. I’ve spoken to some of the people who were around back when. Everyone was terrified of them, and hid like field mice. But they lost their spell books—the original spell books—and can’t produce primaries anymore. They’ve been in decline ever since.”
I knew all this. Zahn had bragged, and Annalise confirmed, that the society had once had and had lost two of the three “original” spell books. According to Annalise, they were the source of all magic in the world, and they weren’t really books with spells written in them.
Why they were still called spell books was beyond me. I learned the names of two of them—the Book of Grooves and the Book of Oceans—during the disaster in Washaway. I had no idea where they were, and as far as I could tell, no one else did, either.
Annalise said that anyone who read them had visions. The visions turned them into a “primary”—the most powerful kind of sorcerer—and they recorded their visions by writing them out as spells in an actual book. Those secondhand spells were what everyone thought of as spell books, and they were traditionally named after the primary and the source: Smith Book of Oceans or Jones Book of Grooves.
I’d seen one of those secondary books. Well, in truth I’d stolen it. I’d cast my ghost knife out of it and nearly died in the attempt. Annalise had taken it back, but I had a copy hidden away. In fact, it was so well hidden that I hadn’t gone near it since.
When a second person laid hands on the Jones Book of Whatever, that person became a “secondary.” The third person became a “tertiary.” Every time a book of spells passed from one hand to the next, the spells became weaker, because each new person was further and further from the original vision. It didn’t take many generations for them to become useless.
That’s why sorcerers guarded their spell books so carefully, because sharing them made them decay. Unfortunately, the spells that held on to their potency the longest were summoning spells.
I knew the society was losing power as their sorcerers died and their spell books were handed down, but it didn’t really matter to me. That was long-term thinking. I was in this game for the short-term fight. I was here for this enemy, and this danger. Someone else would have to worry about the next few centuries.