Wygan’s approach to Dad had been too direct and had brought down the Guardian’s attention. So the Pharaohn had taken a more oblique approach to me, staying out of sight, using unsuspecting tools and cat’s-paws until I’d foolishly stumbled into his own hands.
Carlos was frowning at me. “Something bothers you?”
I shook my head. “No, just . . . lining up the pictures.”
He raised his chin a bit, half an acknowledging nod. “The coil is coming together.”
“Or just tightening around our necks.”
He narrowed his eyes as if considering his inclusion in the noose with curiosity. Then he turned his back and moved deeper into the house. “Come in and say your piece.”
Having no choice, I followed him into the living room. The furniture looked as if it had come with the house when it was new, but while the house had aged and darkened over a hundred years with whatever magic had soaked it, the furnishings had remained untouched—not even dust marred the upholstery and gleaming wood. Maybe the névoacria played housekeeper as well as lamplighter here, but it felt more like a stage set that no one lived in. Only the crammed-full bookcases that lined the walls looked used. Some of the volumes seemed to drip black and red gore that vanished into the charcoal haze over the hardwood floor. A darker shape of lines and curves radiated through the boards from below, incomplete to my eyes and incomprehensible with a baffling obsidian shine.
Whatever lay below sent a deep vibration through the house that twined into the remains of the voices in my head and made me dizzy. I reeled a little as I dropped into a chair in the deathly sterile sitting room.
Carlos sat down slower, watching me. “Something has changed in you.” He reached for me, one of his massive hands coming toward my face.
Faster than I could think of it, I knocked his hand aside. The crack of our bones against each other was sharp and red in the air. He froze, his eyes glittering. Then his hand went limp and he led it back toward my face by the wrist, leaving himself vulnerable to my grip if I chose. I steeled myself, but I didn’t stop him this time. The back of his hand barely brushed my cheek. Then he pulled his hand away and it seemed to drift through the dim light as if it wasn’t his at all.
“Changing, but incomplete. Where have you been, ghost-girl?”
“Where I’ve been isn’t as important as where I’m going. And where I hope you’re going to help me.”
“I warned you that further favors come with a price.”
“I think I have something you want.”
“Indeed. Which one will you offer?”
Fear chilled my bones and made my heart beat out of time. If I was miscalculating the importance of the knife, if he’d misled me or I’d misunderstood the complicated relationship between Carlos and Edward, I had nothing else to bargain with. At least nothing I was willing to give. I could try to draw him out and see if my guesses were good, but in the end it would come down to the heavy, silk-wrapped bundle in my jacket pocket, one way or another.
I felt queasy as I drew it out, the sudden protest of ghost-voices clogging in my throat as I choked them down. Carlos jerked back in his seat as I flipped the black covering away from the knife and the blade gleamed oily-black and radiant. Its exposure to the stygian air wrung a cry from the house, and the whole structure trembled, real and Grey, shivering in colors more numerous and flickering than the eyes of the seraphi-guardi. Carlos’s gaze locked onto the shadow-glowing broken blade with such intensity that, if he had not already been sitting down, I thought he would have fallen. The strange sound of the house echoed out of his mouth, strangled and horrible.
He stood up in a rush, the house howling and buckling as if with rage and anguish, though Carlos now made no sound at all. He snatched my wrist into his grip and hauled me forward, yanking me out of the writhing room, through a twisted doorway, and down a flight of unyielding stone stairs into the basement: the black heart of the house. I was completely in his territory, his power, and yet he let me go, dropping my arm as if I were made of fire and stepping away. “Put it down,” he demanded, pointing to the center of the cellar floor. “Throw it there!”
The basement was built of gray-and-white stone that looked charred, becoming glassy black as it met the floor. The floor itself was matte black, as if a smooth surface had been etched with acid and left blurred and rough. Lines and curves of glossy jet and carmine joined and crossed, containing and elaborating one another into a complex sigil on the floor. Some kind of magic circle, it was the actual version of the vision I’d seen upstairs, the shape that had shone through the living room floorboards. It radiated black and red energy straight upward, strong but incomplete, waiting, throbbing with potential, for something to close the circuit and make the circle whole.
“No,” I shouted back.
“Put it in the circle or the house will come down on our heads!” he roared. He didn’t touch me, didn’t move toward me, only pinned me in his black stare and shouted.
The house moaned as if it were collapsing. I tried to slide into the Grey, to slip sideways and out, but the house was solid in both worlds and still writhing as if in pain, no matter how I turned. At the center of the magic circle I could see a pool of calm that never moved or flickered, not a void like the emptiness at the center of the Hardy Tree or the hole where my father’s ghost should have been in Glendale, just stillness.
The little singing voices in my head bent themselves into a single melody and urged me toward the stillness—not the raging voices I’d been hearing off and on but the more cohesive chorus of something else.
A section of the subfloor above cracked and fell, collapsing against the stone walls of the foundation with a reverberating crash. I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake. . . . My heart raced so fast I couldn’t feel my legs and I stumbled into the circle, rushing for the center of calm. The lines on the floor burned and sent fire up my body in midnight sheets and spikes of scarlet that jabbed through my limbs and I staggered almost to my knees. I caught my balance and took two more steps, into the quiet at the heart of the circle.
The house went still and sighed. I stopped, relieved and slumping slightly as the charge of fear shook my body and burned low. Carlos leaned back against the closest wall. “Leave it there and come out.”
My silence told him I didn’t like the implications of that option. I had no doubt it would take him only a second to close the circle behind me and keep the knife inside if he wanted.
“Then put it away, for the love of life, but choose!”
Quivering, I rewrapped the knife in as many folds of the black silk scarf as I could make and tucked it back into my pocket. I edged out of the circle with care and a wary eye on Carlos. He didn’t seem angry, but I wasn’t sure what he was feeling or thinking and I didn’t trust him. Once I was out of the circle, he kept his distance, as suspect of me as I was of him, I thought.
He pointed into a corner where a table and two stools lurked in the shadows. “Sit down, Blaine, and I will tell you what you’ve brought into my house.”
I backed into the corner and onto one of the stools, not looking away from him. “I already know this is the knife Edward stabbed you with in Seville.”
“It is considerably more than that. I had been told that someone else had it. I would gladly sacrifice numberless virgins and goats to any god or monster you care to name in thanks that that is not true.”
SIXTEEN
Under any circumstances, perching on the stool in Carlos’s cellar would have been uncomfortable and creepy. In the present ones, it was surreal. The post-adrenaline burn left me feeling wrung out, but I didn’t want to lean against the stone walls of the foundation for support—knowing what they contained and what they kept out made me certain they wept invisible horrors the same way water condenses in a cold room. I hunched on the backless stool, keeping my feet off the floor, too. The darkly shining shapes of the magic circle etched into the surface gave me chills.