Twenty Palaces (13 page)

The porch creaked as we crossed it. "Whose place is this?" I asked.
 

"I told you. It's Macy and Echo's house."
 

I didn't see any point in correcting him. Jon grabbed the knob and strode right inside without knocking. I followed.

We entered a tiny foyer, with cracked, bulging walls that had been painted landlord white. A scarf had been tacked across the worst of the damage in an attempt to pretty it up.
 

Jon stepped aside, and there was Payton stretched across a yard sale couch. He was pale and covered with sweat and he didn't have a cast on his arm or leg. No one had taken him to the hospital.

Jon lunged at a knee-high pile of pizza boxes and took a slice from the top one. He dropped it when Macy entered.

"Found him," Jon said.

"What's that stench?" Macy said. She recoiled from me as if I had a loaded diaper. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion.
 

"Forget about that," Jon said. "He's helping us."

Payton stirred on the couch. "No more waiting. Let's do it now." His voice sounded weak.

Jon took Payton by the shoulders and Macy lifted his legs and hips. Both tried to hold his injured limbs motionless and stable, but Payton moaned in agony. The big guy would have screamed if he'd had enough life in him to make the effort.

Jon and Macy carried him into the dining room. I trailed along behind them.

All the dining room furniture had been piled against one wall and the rug had been thrown on top. The bare wooden floor had been painted in red designs, very like the one that made up my ghost knife.
 

But this spell was huge. It was a circle at least eight feet across, with four smaller circles evenly spaced around the perimeter and another in the very center. Between the circles were an assortment of swoops, symbols, glyphs and shapes.
 

It was Jon's cure spell, I realized. Years ago, I had fired a gun and crippled my friend. This thing had taken that moment away.

And there, lying in the very center circle, was Echo.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Echo looked twice as dead as she had the day before. I wanted to ask why her corpse was lying in the middle of a cure spell, but I was afraid of the answer I might get.

Macy and Jon set Payton carefully inside one of the perimeter circles. The groans he made as he settled onto the floor made my hair stand on end. Then Macy turned to me and pointed at a circle nearest the kitchen. "Take your spot, Ray."

My spot? Couldn't they tell she was dead? "I don't think we should--"

"Do it!" she roared and rolled forward onto the balls of her feet, her fingers curling into claws. She was about to pounce.

Jon touched her arm, calming her. "Sweetie, he just doesn't understand."

"Guys," I said, keeping my hand close to the pocket holding my ghost knife. "Payton needs a hospital. Echo--"

"Nobody needs a hospital," Macy said. "Not anymore."

"Echo was attacked because of this spell," I said. I already knew they weren't going to listen, but I had to keep trying. "People are trying to kill you."

"Fuck 'em," Jon said. "Bring it on."

"Jon, I saw what came out of Echo," I said, trying to think of some way to make him listen. "That woman drove out some kind of
thing
."

He took my arm. His expression was so calm and self-assured that I began to doubt myself. "Payton told us about the woman."

"Payton didn't see the half of it. Echo had this
thing
in her."

"The woman put it there."

That startled me. "What?"

"This woman had magic, right?" Jon was placid and confident. Nothing I'd said had surprised him. "And she was trying to kill Echo?"

"Trying?" I said. My voice sounded frail. I stared at a can of red paint and a crusty paint brush in the corner so I wouldn't have to look at Jon.
 

He continued as if I hadn't spoken. "
She
put the thing inside Echo, not us. Not this." He gestured toward the design on the floor.

I hadn't expected this and the confident way Jon was talking made me think he knew something I didn't. Annalise had draped her firefighter's jacket over Echo, and the creature had crawled out of Echo's mouth. I'd assumed that the sigil on Annalise's jacket had been some kind of exorcism, but it could have implanted that thing. Maybe.
 

Of course, she'd done the same thing to Payton and all that happened to him was a flash of light just before he passed out.
 

Had the jacket spell driven out the creature in Echo's body, and had it driven out Payton's... What? His consciousness? His ghost?
 

Whatever had happened, Echo and Jon had both gotten themselves changed inside this spell. I tried to figure out why Annalise's spell had affected Payton and Echo differently, but my own ghost knife had the same effect on Jon and the library guard.
 

Too much. I clutched my backpack full of blue pages to my chest. It was too much to figure out with so little real information. I'd been operating on instinct and guesswork; what if my instincts were wrong?

"What did this thing look like?" Jon asked.

I held up my hands. "It was the size of a cat, maybe. It looked like a yellowish worm, but it had long, hard legs, like branches or needles. And it had wings."

"Christ, Ray." Jon shook his head. He looked amused. "If I had a
cat
with needles for feet inside me, don't you think I'd know it? Don't you think I'd feel it in there when I bent over to tie my shoes?"

"That's what I saw, Jon. I'm not making it up."

"I know that. I
believe
that. And I trust you. So the question is: who do
you
trust? Me, or--"

"You."
 

Jon smiled and clapped my shoulder. "Good. It's time to help Echo. You don't have to do anything at all except sit in that circle right there. That's all I'm asking."

"Jon, I--I just cast a spell, which you know, right? Will there be any fire?"

Jon looked confused for a moment. "What do you mean?"

"When we cast this spell on Echo. Will we burn?"

"Ray, I've done this three times already--"

"Because I'll do it, Jon, I will, but--"

"There's no fire, dude. This is healing magic. Okay?"

"Okay."

I turned and sat in the circle near the kitchen door then put my backpack on the floor behind me. The others sat in their spots, with Macy settling into the most heavily-marked spot opposite me.

Jon winked at me in the same way Arne used to when a job was going well. My stomach knotted. Jon wasn't as slick as Arne, but he'd coaxed and rationalized and played on my loyalty. And I had gone along with it. Jon had tried to kill me less than an hour before, and here I was still trying to pay off a debt.

I pushed those thoughts away. Jon was not Arne. Helping and protecting Jon was not the same as helping and protecting Arne.
 

Payton propped himself up on his good arm. His whole body trembled; sweat ran down his face. Macy held out her hand to Jon and he took a sheet of folded paper from his pocket and gave it to her. She unfolded it. It was a sheet of blue legal paper, just like the ones I'd used to copy Callin's spell book.

I glanced at the backpack behind me. Jon must have taken that spell while he was helping me pick up the sheets of paper. And the blue pages had come from Callin's spell book.
 

It was pretty clear that the spell needed four people to cast it on a fifth. Who had been that fifth person?
 

Someone had given or sold the spell to Jon, and someone had sat in the extra spot when they'd cast it. That someone had to be Callin. I couldn't imagine any other way for Jon to have a spell on the same blue paper except that he stole it from me after I stole it from Callin. I'd thought Jon was talking about me when he'd said "We're set," but he must have meant the spell he'd found.

I wondered how Annalise would feel if she discovered that the dude who closed a door in her face was the same one who had "infected" Echo. Callin was supposed to be on Annalise's side.
Unequal peers
, he had said. Did she know he had created the very situation she was trying to undo? Did she know he had betrayed her?

Macy studied the paper. My stomach was full of butterflies and I was perfectly happy to let her take as long as she needed to get it right. Despite Jon's assurances, I half-expected to burn again, and the prospect of putting my life in Macy's hands terrified me. If she screwed up, it would probably cost my life.

At least, I assumed so. It was possible the cure was completely different from the ghost knife and the steeled glass; Jon didn't seem worried at all. Maybe there would be no fire after all.

Macy cleared her throat. She was ready. She sang a few clear notes that seemed to harmonize and clash at the same time, then silence fell.

Macy's mouth kept moving but no sound came from her; I couldn't hear Payton's labored breathing, either. In fact, there was no sound at all from the whole house. I rubbed my hand against my whiskers and heard nothing. The vibrations didn't even travel along my bones to my ear drums. The silence was complete.

Several minutes ticked by. I glanced at the clock but in my nervousness immediately forgot what it said. I didn't burst into flame and as far as I could tell, neither did anyone else.
 

Payton's gaze never left Echo. He stared at her, his face deathly pale and sweaty, his mouth set in a grim line. He was enduring a hell of a lot for the woman he loved.

The designs around Macy began to glow. As I watched, the glow spread outward. Two more sigils, then three more, then all of them. Then the silence was broken by the sound of blowing wind that didn't touch anything in the room: no one's hair or clothes fluttered, no papers were carried into the air. The wind, so loud, was only a noise. The glowing designs flared, then turned black.

The floor turned black a moment later. I peered down at it, at nothing. The outer circle around the design was still there, painted onto the floorboards, and the circles around each of the four outer stations remained, but the floor and the designs beneath Echo's body had vanished. There was nothing below us except the void. It was as though a trap door had opened into space.

I leaned forward and squinted into it. Something glimmered down in the darkness. It was a tiny swirling light, growing brighter and arcing wider with each passing second.
 

After a few moments I realized that it was actually a collection of lights. They spiraled upward toward us, moving very much like a swarm of bees. They came closer and closer, growing brighter and brighter, until I could see that the swarm was huge. There must have been thousands of lights in it.

The lights gathered just below the design. Each was as big as a ping pong ball, and they were all the same icy blue-white color. Their light shone up onto Echo, casting her in a pale, eerie glow. The symbols around Echo, which had vanished when the floor vanished, were illuminated in the weird faerie lights shining from below.

I sat stunned. This was completely different from the dangerous little spells I had created in the library. That had been like forging a piece of metal. This was touching the unknown.
 

I was looking at the world behind the world, and it terrified me.

One of the swirling lights found a small loop at the edge of Echo's circle and slid upward, floating above the level of the floor. As soon as the first came through, others swarmed after it, streaming through like water droplets shooting up from a fountain. Many more gathered around the loop trying to push their way to the front.

The lights swirled around Echo's body, first moving clockwise, then reversing their direction. They stayed within the edge of her circle, and didn't rise higher than seven or eight feet above her. They spiraled back and forth, making beautiful streams of cool light. It was like watching a school of creatures at the deepest parts of the ocean exploring in a hot water vent. I couldn't look away.

Finally, one of the lights pushed into her mouth and vanished down her throat.

Echo opened her eyes.

The lights flushed out of the loop like water running down a drain. They flowed into the void beneath the floor, and the light they cast no longer illuminated the painted design. I watched them swirl in the darkness, seemingly lost and unable to find their way back.

Echo stood, her movements stiff and awkward; for a moment she seemed to be suspended over the void. Then the glyphs in the design and the hardwood floor began to reappear. In a couple of seconds, the room had become an ordinary dining room with a painted sigil on the floor.

Echo turned to look at us all, twisting at the waist as though she didn't know how to move her neck. She still looked like a day-old corpse. "Hello, cousins," she said in a flat voice. "Thank you for inviting me here."

The hairs on the back of my neck were standing at attention. "What the hell did we just do?"

Macy sprang to her feet and embraced Echo. "Echo! Are you okay? We were so worried!"

Echo seemed puzzled. She looked at Macy, then Jon, then me, then Payton. She was obviously expecting a different reaction.

Payton stared up at her like a love-struck puppy. Tears ran down his cheeks. He gasped, fighting the urge to cry.

Echo looked down at his face, at his ruined arm and leg, and turned away as if they meant nothing to her. "I am fine. You performed your duties perfectly."

"Jesus Christ, Jon," I said. "I barely know Echo and even I can tell this isn't her."

"Shut up!" Macy said.

Jon watched Echo warily. "She's just in shock."

"She's dead," I said. "Whatever you put inside her--"

"Move me into the spot," Payton said. "It's my turn."

I rolled out of the circle and grabbed my pack. As I started to stand, a powerful hand knocked me to the floor.

Macy's voice was low and angry. "You're not going anywhere."

Suffering a threat from Macy would have been laughable under other circumstances. I looked up at her, with her hair curled like a little girl's, and remembered how she'd hit the ball in the cage, and how Echo had moved in the fight with Annalise. I had reason to be afraid of her, and I hate being afraid. "I'm not doing that again. I can't believe I let you talk me into doing it once."