“Yeah,” she answered. “Unless I’m not.”
“Boss, let me take the lead here,” I said, without even realizing I was about to speak. “I owe this guy.”
“No offense, Ray,” Talbot said. “But I was the one kicking down doors for Uncle Sam. I should lead the team into the house.”
Annalise turned to him. “We don’t work that way. We don’t bunch up; we don’t charge in together.”
“But … what about covering each other?”
“These are sorcerers,” she said. “Taking them down is like taking down a suicide bomber, except without the suicide. This is how we do it: one wooden man comes at them from the front, and the others hit their flank.”
“Boss, you know I have history with this guy. I want him.”
“Ray, if you have history with him,” Talbot said, trying to be reasonable, “if it’s personal, you should probably not even be on this mission. Just saying.”
Annalise waved that off. “With Ray, everything’s personal.” She turned to me. “Go ahead.”
I started up the gravel driveway, wondering if I should feel stung. I shifted the gun to my left hand, holding it properly now. With my right, I took my ghost knife out of my back pocket. The revolver was loud, clumsy, and very, very solid, but the ghost knife was my weapon.
I wanted to head back to the boat. I wanted to be in L.A. Nothing was right and everything was wrong. My iron gate was aching like an old bruise. The spell on this property, Wally’s or not, was getting stronger. I lowered my head and bulled forward, determined not to let feelings I couldn’t control drive me away.
The brambles on either side of me were tall, well over my head. The path curved to the right, and after following it a few dozen yards, I saw a light in the trees up ahead. It was bright, not a lamp in a window—probably a security light.
I suddenly hit a spot where my iron gate flared with sharp pain. I flinched, bending over slightly as the pain hit. “Something is different here.”
Annalise hurried forward, and I could see she felt it, too. Talbot also flinched, but less than I had. Annalise took out her scrap of wood and held it in front of her. Immediately, the design started moving. A shower of dull gray sparks shot out, along with a jet of black steam.
Something had changed drastically in just a few steps. I had stepped from a magic-free area into one that set off Annalise’s detector like a siren. When I moved toward the house, my iron gate eased. I backed toward the spot where the pain had first started and moved side to side, trying to find out if whatever was hurting me was a single spot or if it had a shape.
It turned out to be a line that went across the driveway, down the stony gully into the brambles.
“The plants look thinner here,” Talbot said. He was right. Not only were the brambles thinner, they were shorter. They had been cut or burned away some time ago up. I knelt in the rocky dirt and tried to peer through the underbrush, but it was too dark even with this bright moon.
“It’s a circle,” Annalise said. “He surrounded the house with a circle and buried it.”
I scraped at the ground at the base of the gully, dragging my fingers through the loose and not-so-loose stones. Eventually I came to a piece of brick. I dug around it, exposing it and the two next to it. They had been broken at odd angles and fitted together …
“Leave it,” Annalise said. “We have more important things.”
I stood and brushed the dirt off my pants. “Are you sure it’s a circle, boss? It seems like a straight line to me.”
“It’s some kind of closed shape,” she said. She held up the scrap of wood. “It has to be to do this.”
We looked through the trees toward the single lonely light. It was about fifty yards away up the hill. Did Wally really make a circle this huge?
“Boss, do you want me to destroy it?”
“I told you to leave it. There’s no telling what he has trapped in here. Let’s go.”
Talbot bent his knees to lower his center of gravity as he raised his weapon. I started back up the driveway, my grip on my ghost knife tight.
After a few seconds, I heard Annalise say something to Talbot, and they both left the driveway, pushing through a stand of trees. I could hear their shoes quietly scraping on a wooden walkway.
Sound traveled far at night. I kept moving toward the house, trying to empty my thoughts of everything except what I could see, hear, and smell. When my iron gate twinged at the bottom of the drive, I’d been sure a sorcerer of some kind lived here. I was less sure it was Wally; it would have been just like him to lead us here to collide with some jackass he didn’t like.
But now that I’d crossed the circle—and knew what it could do—I felt more certain that this was Wally’s place after all. A huge buried circle a hundred yards across seemed like just the kind of crazy move he’d make. He was lazy and obsessive in nearly equal measures, and I believed a guy who would load himself with predators would set aside a private reserve for them, too.
I was letting myself get distracted. I focused my attention outward. I didn’t see or hear anything unusual as I approached the house.
He wasn’t here. The house was small, with a space beside it for a car and trees growing close behind it. The parking space was empty, and I couldn’t imagine Wally walking all the way here from the nearest ferry.
The real question was whether he had left predators behind to guard the place or taken them all with him.
And there was something else. During our little talk, Wally had said Don’t try that “turn over your books” crap with me, okay? It’s insulting. He’d said “books.” Plural. It had taken a while for me to realize what that meant, but I wasn’t here just to find him and pay him back. He had spell books, and spell books had to be destroyed.
The cabin had wooden walls that had been painted the color of bricks. It was bigger than I’d expected. The outside light was a floodlight, one of the newer ones that use very little electricity but give off a thin, bluish light. It lit the front door and two windows. One of the windows was shuttered, and the other was boarded over.
I almost knocked at the door, which was absurd. Instead, I held the gun so my index finger rested beside the trigger, then I pushed the corner of the ghost knife into the door between the knob and the jamb and slid it up and down.
My spell cut through the door and locks as though they were made of smoke. I pressed gently on the wood, and it swung inward a couple of inches. The physical locks had been cut, but did Wally have magical protection, too?
I forced myself to take a deep breath. Whatever was going to happen to me here would happen, and I’d live or I’d die, and there was nothing for me to do but get started.
I pushed the door all the way open. The light from the security lamp showed no one else was in the room. I turned on a table lamp by the couch.
The lamp was expensive, and so were the couch, table, and rug. I’d expected yard-sale furniture like the castoffs I had in my room, but the end table was made of solid dark wood. The couch was plump and new, and the rug was a mix of deep, beautiful colors. I supposed if I ever learned how to walk through walls the way Wally could, I’d have as much cash as I could carry.
Sometimes an empty house feels empty. Everything seems inert, like a vacant tomb. But I couldn’t tell with Wally’s place. It didn’t feel empty or full; it was just a space.
A quick scan of the room didn’t show any sigils or other signs of a spell. I kicked over the corner of the fancy rug, but it was just unmarked floorboards underneath.
To the left I saw a doorway to a room with counters and a tiled floor. I went in. It was a small kitchen, but it wasn’t lacking for gear. It had a four-burner gas stove top and a full-sized fridge. I went through and opened another door to a little mudroom, complete with washer and dryer.