Doc gave her a curious look. “How do you know?”
“I called to Civic Hall on the talk-box and asked if anyone had reported a damaged walkway in a good neighborhood.”
Doc looked pained. “Angus Powrie’s attack. If I had been thinking . . . ”
“They said there was. And that there was blood on the walk not far away. Workmen will fix it all tomorrow.”
“After we look at it.”
Harris gave Noriko a disbelieving look. “Your city hall is open at this hour?”
“Of course. Why not?”
“Because it would be too convenient?”
Doc’s private elevator took them down to floor level and below, to a spacious basement garage filled with cars. All of them were the antiques Harris had come to expect, but they were otherwise of every imaginable type and color: a long, low two-seat roadster in an abusive glowing orange, a slab-sided panel truck in a shade of drab green Harris was already thinking of as comparatively inconspicuous, a pair of matching black-and-silver motorcycles, a long red monstrosity of a car with a decadently comfortable-looking interior, perhaps a dozen more cars in all. They settled on Jean-Pierre’s black-and-gold sedan, and the pale-faced, dark-haired mechanic on duty—Jean-Pierre introduced him as Fergus Bootblack—told them that it was fueled and ready.
Jean-Pierre drove them up the ramp out of the garage and onto the still-busy street with a disregard for traffic and the laws of physics that Harris found unsettling.
Ten minutes later, they were parked outside the walled estate Harris had fled earlier that night. There was the hole in the sidewalk made by Angus Powrie; there were the gates . . . hanging open.
And half an hour after that, as the sun began to send tentative shafts of light slanting between the tall buildings, Harris and the others prowled around the estate’s mansion. They looked at furniture long stored under dusty sheets and moved through echoingly empty rooms.
“Hasn’t been lived in for months,” Alastair said. He and Harris, in the kitchen, peered into the empty walk-in pantry and saw nothing but memories of crumbs. “I wager your friends hired it from the homelord, or moved in when he wasn’t looking. When you got away, they fled.”
“So what’s that ex-in-a-circle thing out on the front lawn?”
“A conjurer’s circle.”
“That’s what you called the circle in your lab. The thing with the paint.”
Alastair nodded. “Same principle. Same use. There are always two: one here, one there. What starts in one—”
“— ends up in the other. I get it. I did it.” Harris paused, worrying briefly about how easy it was for him to speak the language of the impossible when he was confronted with it. “Alastair, the other one of the circle out there is where I’m from, and that’s an awful long way away.”
“You want to return.”
“Right now. No offense. I have to find Gaby.”
A smile tugged at Alastair’s lip. “I doubt we can help you so soon. We have to know which rituals they used on this circle. But if anyone can help you find your way, it’s Doc.”
Harris asked, “Why?” Seeing Alastair’s blank look, he continued: “Why would he want to help?”
Alastair thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know too much about it. He’s almost the last of his kind, and he’d like for them to be remembered kindly.”
“Who is ‘them’?”
“Purebloods from a long time ago.” Alastair opened a floor-level cabinet and bent over to peer within it. “Amapershiat itifuwadda—”
“I can’t hear you.”
“Sorry.” Alastair straightened, looking dubious. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t bandy this about. A lot of it is public record, but Doc doesn’t care to have it discussed in his presence.”
“Sure.”
Alastair kept his attention on the door. “There was a bad one a while back. One of the Daoine Sidhe, like Doc. Did a lot of harm in the years leading up to the last war. Made their kind infamous. Doc fought him several times, but the people mostly remembered the bad that one did. If you said ‘Daoine Sidhe’ to the average man on the walk twenty years ago, he’d have bit his thumb and spat.”
“Whatever that means.”
“Well, it just means that Doc ended up being the heir to a very nasty legacy. That’s why the Sidhe Foundation. It’s all charities and philanthropies and fixing problems. Nowadays, you say Daoine Sidhe to the man on the walk, and he’s just as likely to think of the Foundation. Which is a victory.”
“I guess it’d kind of be like growing up with the name Hitler.”
“Whatever that means.”
The night had brought Gaby very little sleep, so she substituted caffeine for wakefulness and tried to keep her manner pleasant. She’d be dealing with people all day.
She called the police. There was no news about Harris or the old man.
She called work to tell them why she wouldn’t be coming in that day, or for the next several. She didn’t tell her boss where she’d be staying, and he said he understood. She hoped it was true. It would be monstrously unfair for her to be replaced for something that just wasn’t her fault.
She called in the theft of her credit cards to all the issuers.
That afternoon, she went for her first shooting lesson with Elaine’s husband Jim.
The directed explosions from the revolver rattled her nerves. Still, he complimented her on learning not to flinch with each pull of the trigger. Soon he was making approving noises at the way her wadcutter rounds punched holes in the paper silhouette of a target. “Not a bad grouping,” he said. “And we’re talking about self-defense here, not target shooting. That means closer range than this. You’ll do just fine . . . if you don’t let adrenaline mess up your reactions and your aim. You have to stay controlled.”
“Controlled,” she repeated, and flipped the switch on the booth to send the new target back on its mechanical rail. She steadied her aim, mentally superimposed the horrible image of Adonis over the target, and prepared to give it a chest full of holes. Then, in tones so low that Jim couldn’t hear through the protective earmuffs: “I’ll show you controlled.”
Through the open door of the bathroom, Harris could see late-afternoon sun angling into the bedroom. He lay in the claw-foot bathtub, legs drawn up—the thing was too short for him; he absently scrubbed at himself as the water cooled.
In spite of his worry and his intermittent nausea, he’d fallen asleep almost as soon as they got back to the Monarch Building.
Endless chiming noises had wakened him long after sunlight spilling over his eyes had failed to do so. Once he understood that the device that looked like a lizard’s arm with a balled fist at either end was the handset of a telephone, or “talk-box double,” he could answer it. On the other end was Doc, asking him to get ready for a trip in an hour or so.
Sitting in the tub, he reached out a finger and drew it over the cool tile of the bathroom floor, felt the texture, the roughness of the grout between tiles. The air just a little stuffy. Water nearly scalding hot when he’d drawn his bath, merely lukewarm now. It was all there with a level of detail he’d never experienced in a dream.
And it was so big. He’d found somewhere that no one else knew about. The map he’d seen suggested that this . . . place . . . was as big as the entire world he knew.
What the hell was he supposed to do about this? Go home and tell somebody? If he couldn’t bring people back—preferably guys with minicams and sound equipment—he couldn’t prove anything to other people.
And what if he could prove it? They’d want to come here, of course. There’d be a hell of a lot of press. Naturally, most people back home wouldn’t believe it no matter how much press there was. Except big business; they’d be setting up McDonald’s restaurants on every block as fast as they could bring in the yellow-arch signs. . . . That bothered him. It just didn’t seem that Neckerdam would be improved by an invasion of junk food, tabloids, and grunge rock.