Game Of Cages (2010) (16 page)

She glanced at me without interest and started to close the door. Steve blocked it with his foot. "I'm sorry, Penny, but you do have a white something on the side of your face. Where did you get it?"

"I was baking earlier," she said, her voice flat and unpleasant. "It's flour."

"Is Little Mark here? I'd like to come in to talk some more. To both of you."

"It's a bad time, Steve."

"Please, Penny?" he persisted. "Folks have died."

That didn't interest her at all. "It's a bad time for me. Maybe tomorrow."

"Now, Penny, I'm afraid I have to insist."

She sighed again. "Fine. Give me a moment." She glared at his foot until Steve drew it back, then she closed the door.

Damn. This wasn't right. She wasn't curious about me, the trouble in front of her property, or the deaths in town. Something was very wrong.

"It's okay," Steve said, maybe sensing my unease. "Penny's my cousin and we get along very well." He wrung his hands nervously, looking from me to Justy and back again. Justy looked pinched and skittish. She stayed close to the top of the stairs.

In the window behind the fertilizer, I saw a curtain move. It was a boy, maybe fifteen years old, with brown hair in a ragged bowl cut. His eyes were big and brown and empty. He had a white mark on his face, too.

The door swung open suddenly. I heard a low growl and lunged forward.

Penny heaved herself through the doorway, swinging something over her shoulder at Steve. I caught hold of it even as I realized it was an axe and pushed. The blade passed over Steve's skull and thunked against the doorframe.

Steve cried out in a high voice. Footsteps thumped on the wooden stairs, leading away.

Penny jabbed the butt end of the axe at me. I ducked. The handle whiffed by my jaw. I put my shoulder against her hip, wrapped my arms around her knees, and upended her onto the floor.

The axe flew out of her hands and bounced across a dingy throw rug. She reached for me, hands curled like claws, but I caught her wrist and pulled her onto her stomach, then planted a knee in her back.

Steve was still standing in the doorway, his mouth hanging open. Justy was nowhere in sight.

"Bring your cuffs in here before someone gets killed!"

That jolted him into action. He fumbled at his back pocket.

I took my ghost knife from my pocket and slipped it through the back of her head. It passed through without leaving a mark the way it always does with living people. It didn't even cut her hair.

But it didn't stop her thrashing. It didn't cut away her anger and hostility the way it had for Horace. Damn. She was immune, just like Ursula. Was it something to do with the stain on her face, which Ursula didn't have? I didn't know, but I was pretty sure it wasn't my spell.

I glanced around, worried that the boy would come at me with a kitchen knife, but I couldn't see him.

Penny tried to wrench her arm out of my grip. I didn't want to hurt her, but I wasn't going to be able to hold her for long if I didn't do something drastic.

Which was the same choice I'd faced with Ursula. People had died and I'd nearly gotten myself killed because I couldn't be ruthless with a woman who wanted to murder me.

I leaned my body weight onto her, pinning her arms to her back. I could have broken them, hit her behind the ear, or stomped on her, but I held back, and my refusal to make that choice became my choice. If that made things difficult later on, so be it.

Steve knelt beside her but didn't cuff her. He pleaded for her understanding, apologized for what he had to do, and generally irritated me by trying to be reasonable with a person who had lost all reason. "Just snap them on!" I barked. I bent her arms behind her back, and he did it.

We heard a car engine rev outside.

"No!" Penny screamed. "Don't take him from me! You can't take him away from me!"

I sprinted through the door and across the porch. A dirty white pickup roared across the yard, heading downhill toward the street. It lurched and swerved in the mud. I raced after it.

The truck skidded on a steep part of the yard and slammed against a tree.

I ran around a thicket toward the truck, ghost knife in hand. Maybe the spell was useless against these people, but it made me feel better to hold it. The truck bed was empty, so I circled toward the driver's side. There was a strange sound, like a high-pitched keen mixed with a metallic scrape. I had never heard anything like it; I figured it was a damaged fan belt.

I reached the driver's window. The brown-eyed kid was behind the wheel, holding his bloody forehead--the pickup was too old to have air bags.

"Sit still," I said. "We're going to have someone take a look at that head."

He looked at me, his expression still empty. "I'll kill you," he said. "If you try to take him from me, I'll kill you."

I glanced over at the passenger seat. It was empty. The plastic lining on the passenger door had a discolored patch.

Goose bumps ran the length of my body. The sapphire dog was very close.

I stepped back and looked around. I couldn't see anything but trees, leafless bushes, and mud. Justy laid rubber peeling away down the street. Steve was running toward me as fast as he could, which wasn't fast at all. He had almost reached the back fender when he looked toward the passenger side of the truck.

And stopped. He gaped at something on the other side of the truck that I couldn't see.

I walked toward him. My guts were in knots, but I refused to be afraid. I had come here for exactly this moment.

You're not trained for this, Catherine had said. It destroys anyone who sees it.

Steve stood and gaped as I came around the back of the truck and saw the sapphire dog.

It was walking away from us, and I didn't think it looked like a dog at all. It didn't have fur, and its skin was a brilliant electric blue. Its body swayed as it moved, as though it was part cougar and part python. Its four legs extended and retracted in a disturbing, boneless motion, like a set of tentacles or springs. It didn't have wings, but it did have two rows of dark spots running down its back. A second glance showed that they weren't spots at all but actually faceted blue crystals embedded in its flesh. Its long, slender, whiplike tail snapped and wavered the way a stream of water might move as it flowed over a pane of dirty glass.

Then it reached a patch of grass about a dozen feet away from us, turned, and sat on its haunches. Suddenly, it looked very much like a dog. Its broad, oversized head tapered at the front to a snout that had no opening. There were more blue crystals on its forehead and around its impossibly narrow neck. Its ears were long and floppy, almost long enough to be rabbit ears. And its eyes ...

Its eyes were huge, as large as a cartoon animal's. Its pupils were shaped like eight-pointed stars, and there were five of them in each eye, all shining gold and arranged in a circle.

It stared at us with an unfathomable expression while its pupils slowly rotated. The effect was hypnotic.

The sapphire dog was beautiful. That's a simple word I've used to describe anything from a new car to a moment of karmic payback, but it could never capture the impact the sapphire dog had on me. Framed in bare trees and mud, the otherworldly beauty of it hit me like a punch in the gut. It didn't look solid. It didn't look real. I thought I might be having a vision.

"Lord, thank you for this day," Steve said. He was a few paces to my right. It took an effort to look away from the animal, but Steve was just as stunned as I was. He stepped toward it, and so did I. I didn't want him to be closer to it than I was. I didn't want to share.

The sapphire dog looked at Steve, and I felt a twinge of jealousy--I wanted it to look at me. I wanted to punch the old man in the back of his head and knock him cold, so the sapphire dog would want me and only me.

There was a familiar pressure against a spot below my right collarbone. It meant something, but I couldn't quite remember what it was.

The tip of the sapphire dog's snout began to recede, the way a person might suck at their cheeks to make them hollow. The snout changed color--first to a dark purple, then to shit brown. A nasty, puckered opening appeared--round, wrinkled, and toothless like a shit-hole.

We were in danger. I remembered that the twinge under my collarbone was a warning that I was under attack. There was a tiny feeling of unease deep inside me, but thoughts of the sapphire dog had crowded it out.

This wasn't right. I knew it wasn't right, and if I didn't wake up, I was going to be dead.

It lifted its snout toward Steve. I bolted toward him and knocked him into the mud just as the sapphire dog's long, bone-white tongue snaked out at him.

The tongue passed over us, swiping through the air near my shoulder. I felt Steve hit the ground hard, the air whuffing out of him.

A second wave of love-struck longing washed over me, but this time I recognized the twinge under my right collarbone. My iron gate, one of the protective sigils on my chest, was trying to block a magical attack.

These weren't my feelings. I had to focus on that. The animal--no, the predator--across from me was trying to control how I felt.

It turned its attention on me. I rolled to my knees in the freezing mud and cocked my arm to throw the ghost knife. Its eyes widened.

I threw the spell.

The sapphire dog seemed to move in three directions at once. It slid to the left and right at the same moment, and shot straight up from the ground. It was almost as if it was a still image that had split apart.

The three afterimages vanished. The ghost knife passed through empty air.

I jumped to my feet, stepped between Steve and the ghost knife, and called it back. Hopefully, he wouldn't see.

The sapphire dog was gone. Although it had split into separate still images before it vanished, there were footprints in the mud heading to the left and right for a few feet. Damn. At least it wasn't cloning itself.

I scanned the area around the house. The predator was nowhere in sight. I ran around to the other side of the truck, but it wasn't there, either.

I laid my face against the cold metal cab. I felt empty. I had a raw, hollow space inside where my adoration for the sapphire dog had been. I knew those feelings weren't mine. I knew they'd been forced on me, but I still felt their absence as a terrible ache. And I knew that, because of them, I'd missed my chance to kill a predator.

Steve was still on his back in the mud. He stared up at the overcast sky and muttered to himself.

A few seconds ago, I'd been about to put his lights out, and I'd been partly protected by the iron gate Annalise had given me. How much worse had it been for him?

I heard a crash from inside the house. The front door was still standing open, but I couldn't see Penny. Damn. Of course she couldn't just wait quietly to be taken to prison.

I kicked the bottom of Steve's shoe. "Get up," I said, my voice more harsh than I'd intended. "You have to call those ambulance assholes for the kid in the truck. You have to take your cousin to jail, too."

I jogged toward the house. The predator might have hidden inside. I didn't think it was likely, but I had to check. It's what I was there to do, after all.

Penny was not in the living room, but the axe still lay where she'd dropped it. I stepped carefully inside. I couldn't see anyone, but I did hear the far-off rasping of metal on metal.

I walked toward the sounds. The throw rug in the middle of the floor and the dingy brown sofa were coated with a fine layer of white cat hairs. Beside the sofa was one of those structures built of flimsy wood and cheap gray carpeting that are supposed to be fun for cats. This one was four and a half feet tall and three feet around.

A dead cat lay on the floor beside it. It had been stomped on, probably by someone with a heavy boot. Someone like Penny.

The kitchen was also coated with cat hairs. The smeary fridge had book reports and pop quizzes held on with magnets. The kid out front was a straight-A student--exactly the sort I used to beat up in my own school days.

Maybe, just maybe, the white stain on his face was temporary.

On the far side of the fridge was a set of stairs leading down to the basement. The sound of metal-on-metal sawing was coming from there.

The wooden stairs creaked under my weight. "Get out!" Penny screamed. "Get out of my house!"

The basement had a concrete floor and a low ceiling. There was a long workbench at one end and a stretching mat at the other. The mat had been repaired many times with duct tape.

Penny was beside the workbench. She'd managed to clamp a hacksaw into a vise and was rubbing the chain of the cuffs up and down the blade.

"Your son is outside," I said. I had a pretty good idea how she would react, but I had to be sure. "He's hit his head and is bleeding pretty badly."

"Get out!" she screamed again.

"An ambulance is on the way to pick him up."

"Get out of here before I kill you!"

Just as I'd thought. When she'd screamed not to take "him" away, she was talking about the sapphire dog, not her own son. It had touched her face and made her fall in love with it. It had fed on her.

She fumbled for a screwdriver on the bench. Her hands were still pinned behind her, and her charge was awkward and slow.

I yanked the screwdriver out of her hand and kicked her behind the knee. She fell onto the padded mat. I took a claw hammer off a hook on the wall. "That was a pretty little animal, wasn't it?"

"Are you a fucking moron? It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. If you try to keep me from it, I'll chop you into tiny pieces."

"Yeah, sure. It needs a ride out of town, right? I'll bet it wants to go to a city. Right?" She didn't answer, but the hateful look in her eyes was all the confirmation I needed. "Now listen to this: I'm going to put you in the back of Steve's car. If you fight me"--she began cursing at me, so I raised my voice--"if you fight me, I'll break both your legs."

I slammed the hammer on the concrete floor. She stopped shouting.