I ran around the side of the house and let myself through the gate onto the sidewalk. There were no cop cars racing down the block, although I could hear more approaching.
I crossed the street and walked to the corner, keeping my pace slow and steady. People were coming out of their houses, and I stood at the curb in a knot of them as a cop car went by, sirens screaming. Sweat ran down my back, and my mouth was dry.
An old lady gave me a suspicious look as I stepped off the curb—I’d taken too many punches to be truly anonymous. I crossed the street, slipping through a crowd of lookie-loos, then I got into the Hummer and drove away. I took a deep breath for what felt like the first time in hours.
If those patrol cars had gotten there a few minutes sooner, I would have been trapped. For once I’d had a bit of luck.
But something was nagging at me, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Something Arne had said? I turned my attention to other things to let my subconscious work on it. Ty, Summer, and Fidel were on the loose, and whatever was left of Wally had gotten away. I couldn’t even catch a thought, let alone predators …
In a panic, I pulled into a strip mall and parked. I threw open the back door and poked into the empty cargo space with the base of the thermos. It wasn’t empty after all; the bodies of the guards were still there. All of them, I hoped, but I couldn’t tell unless I climbed in and started moving them around with my bare hands, and I wasn’t going to do that.
I took another deep breath and pressed my trembling hands on the back door. Annalise wasn’t around to burn the drapes to ash, which meant I needed to find the circle Wally had used to summon them, if it still existed. If it didn’t, I didn’t know what the hell I’d do. Could I stash them somewhere until Annalise got herself released? Although I was pretty sure she had run out of green ribbons and had no idea how long it took her to make new ones.
I leaned against the bumper and wiped my face with my shirttail. God, I hated sweat on my face. And I was thirsty, too. Of course Wally had come here in August; it was like he wanted to give me extra reasons to hate him. Why couldn’t he have holed up in that cabin in the woods? The breeze was cool there.
There was a Starbucks in the shopping mall, so I ducked inside and bought a bottle of water. It cost too much, but a little sign by the fridge promised that some of the money would go to help people somewhere get something. Clean water, apparently.
I was happy to spend some money on a well or whatever. I sure as hell wasn’t doing any good as a wooden man. Wally had gotten away, and so had all the others. I went back out to the car and sat behind the wheel, drinking the cool water slowly and thinking about all the things I didn’t do to stop them. I hadn’t threatened anyone’s children or torn someone’s limbs off. I hadn’t burned an innocent man to death.
Annalise was as ruthless as ever, and remembering what she’d done to Lino and Wally made me shiver in the sweltering car. Then again, next to Csilla she was practically a hero.
Damn, I was tired. The thermos lay on the seat next to me. I unscrewed the cap. The liquid was the same milky-blue color I’d seen in the fire-lit kitchen, even though it was at the bottom of the dark thermos. It was as though it had one color, no matter what light hit it.
For a moment I was tempted to gulp it down. Wasn’t that what people did on hot summer days? I swirled it around the cup instead. Whatever this was, it had been sealed in an iron container for decades, possibly longer, and I didn’t even like to drink a Coke that had been left out open overnight.
I poured a little into my cupped hand. It pooled like mercury—although it obviously wasn’t that—but even stranger was the thin line of milky blue that connected the stuff in my hand with the stuff in the now upright thermos.
It wouldn’t be divided. It flowed like a liquid but held together. I was glad I hadn’t drunk it. I still had my ghost knife, of course, but I left it in my pocket. I suspected that using it against this “clue” was another bad idea.
Now that I was touching the stuff—looking at it, too—I could feel the weird absence of it again. It was almost as if it wasn’t really there.
Actually, that wasn’t quite right. Just as the drapes’ portals were openings to another place, this liquid looked like an intrusion from another place. It felt oddly like it was pressing against me—against everything around me.
I was getting used to receiving strange impressions from magic, but I wished I understood them better.
The tiny pool of liquid in my hand swirled and rippled. I peered closer, trying to see what was making it move. Was something alive in there, but so small that I couldn’t see it?
I should have poured it back into the thermos, but I didn’t. There was something about the way it flowed upward from my hand to the thermos and back again that captured my attention. I was entranced.
My thoughts began to run free, growing and changing into something alien. It was as if they’d broken out of shackles that I hadn’t known were there. My mind felt huge and monstrous …
Then the world turned to darkness.
For a moment I thought I’d gone blind. A strange whistling trill of panic blasted at me from somewhere, and the weird echo it made told me I wasn’t in the Hummer anymore. I made myself still, trying to figure out what had happened. Where had that sound come from? What was I seeing?
Because I was seeing something, but I couldn’t get a mental grip on what it was. I could feel myself floating. Once, years before, I’d cast a spell that had sent me into the Empty Spaces. I’d floated then, too, but I could still see dark mist against an even darker background, huge predators gliding past, and whole worlds spinning below, obscured by darkness.
This wasn’t that. I could hear a continuous, confused trilling, and there were moving shapes nearby. I tried to reach forward with my hands, hoping to grab the steering wheel of Francois’s stupid Hummer, but there was nothing in front of me.
The shapes moved away, and I realized I was perceiving them with senses that were completely new. It was as though I was seeing and feeling them at once, and not just the edges, either. I almost laughed, and the trilling suddenly changed.
The noise was coming from me; with a sudden, dreamlike certainty, I understood that it was an expression of my own thoughts—my confusion, analysis, and emotional responses. I was broadcasting like a radio tower.
I forced myself to be silent, which wasn’t easy. My “arms” wavered in front of me like the tails of kites, if kite tails had large hooks on their ends. The other shapes had long arms with hooks for hands, but they kept them around their middles.
The shapes were round and soft, and they floated by without paying me much notice. Only one, darker and more dense than the others, approached me. It trilled a greeting, and hearing its voice was like thinking its thoughts. I knew my vision had changed, but obviously my hearing had as well.
It was surprisingly easy to send a greeting in return; I only had to think it without trying to hold it back. The sound left me and became a thought in the other creature’s head.
I was dreaming, obviously. Only a dream—and a fucked-up one at that—would have this kind of absurd certainty.
The dark, dense creature opposite me thought a warning into me, letting me know that calling someone unreal or absurd was a serious insult. I sent back an apology.
It moved away from me, trilling a burst of notes that told me it was my host and I should stay close. I complied without hesitation. Having someone else’s words appear in my mind as though they were my own thoughts made for a damn compelling request. After a moment of trying out my new body, I floated in its trail.
I was getting used to my new perceptions. I sensed that my host was dark and dense because he was scarred. I realized, with the sudden certainty that you get in a dream, that he’d fought in a war. My host had hooked arms, too, but only six of them. I had nine. I felt a twinge of envy at that, but it felt like someone else’s emotion and I held it in.