Twenty Palaces (14 page)

"Payton needs to be healed," Macy said. "We need your help. You are going to help, or I am going to fetch a couple hammers and start breaking your bones."

"Babe." Jon's voice was hard. "Don't threaten my friend."

"Why not?" She sounded annoyed. "We can fix anything we do to him."

"Fuck no," I said. "No, no, no, no. I don't care what you do, I am not going to have one of those things inside me."

"Ray," Jon moved around Macy and helped me to my feet. "No one is going to force you. But listen: Payton wants this. Look at him. Echo nearly died last night, and Payton couldn't do a thing to protect her."

I tried to keep my voice down. "
Nearly
, Jon? Nearly? Echo died last night. The real Echo is gone."

"No," Echo said. She looked around uncertainly, as though feeling blindly toward something important. "I am here. I am just... adjusting to my sudden...."
 

I watched her search for the correct word. She didn't look confused. I'd seen guys in a drugged-out daze, or who had been beaten up and couldn't remember how they got to prison. I'd also seen my share of liars. Echo looked like a liar, and she wasn't good at it.

"Recovery, sweetie," Macy said. She caressed Echo's arm. "We healed you, and you must still be in shock."

"Yes!" she looked at Macy with a blank expression. "That's it. I was injured."

The others wanted to believe her, and the idea made me sick. "That's not Echo."

"Sure it is. She's in shock." Jon glanced at her again.
 

"Keep saying that," I said. "Maybe you'll convince yourself."

Macy moved toward me again, but Jon edged slightly closer to her, making her pull back. He was protecting me from her.

"I don't know why you're so afraid," Macy said. "Didn't you see the lights? Weren't they beautiful? Those were spirits of healing. They're the same spirits we put into Jon and me.
Jon can walk because of those lights.
What are you so afraid of?"
 

"A worm the size of a cat."
 

Macy shook her head, clearly exasperated.
 

Jon led me into the kitchen. As I left the room, I saw Echo standing beside the design, holding the can of red paint.

"I didn't see any worms," Jon said when we were alone in the kitchen.

"Is Echo your cousin? Is she Macy's cousin?"

"What?" Jon said. "No, man. She's not. She's just rattled. Confused."

"Jon, I don't have all the answers, okay? I don't. But I don't need all the answers to know there's a problem with this. Why can't we...."

I trailed off. I looked over Jon's shoulder and saw Macy standing in the doorway. She held a carving knife in her hand, and she had an expression I'd seen many times. She was going to kill me.

Jon had started saying something about letting me make my own choices, and how Payton wanted to do the same. Payton wanted the spell because he loved Echo so much, and I would be taking away Payton's choice if I refused to help.

It was bull, but it didn't matter. Macy was waiting for my answer, and she had a weapon ready if she didn't like what she heard. Would she break my arms and legs and pin me into a circle with the knife?
 

Or he could cut my throat and put me into the center circle. As soon as one of the "lights of healing" entered me, I'd be one of their cousins. My re-animated corpse would be happy to sit in for Payton's spell.

The back door was right behind me, but I knew I couldn't run, not with the way they moved. And while Jon seemed ready to protect me, was I really going to trust my life to him after what he did less than an hour ago on the campus?
 

They were going to get my help no matter what.

"I'll do it," I said, breaking into Jon's increasingly meaningless argument. "For Payton. I don't want any spirits entering me."

Jon was startled, but then smiled broadly. Macy was no longer standing in the doorway.

When we'd returned to the dining room, Macy and Echo had already moved Payton into the center of the design. "I would like to do the honors," Echo said. "I understand the procedure very well."

"Sure thing, sweetie," Macy said. She sat in Payton's spot. Jon and I took our places.

Echo held out her hand. "I will need to read the music. I can not hold music in my mind."

Macy looked surprised at that, but just bit her lip and handed over the blue sheet of paper.
 

I wanted that page. When I steal something it belongs to me, and I had to take it back. Callin had done this to my friends, and I needed the spell to figure out how to pay him back, or at least undo this mess.

Glancing down at the design on the floor, I thought it looked different. Was that curling line from the center circle to mine new or had it been there before? I reached out to see if the paint was wet but heard Macy clear her throat. She glared at me, warning me off. I withdrew my hand.

Echo held the sheet music up and began to sing. Her voice was clear and beautiful, but silence quickly fell over the room.
 

The spell proceeded as before: silence, the roar of a wind that disturbed nothing in the room, a succession of glowing sigils, then the floor opened up into a vast darkness. But this time, the sound of the wind went on and on. The spell kept building, but slowly, as though something was dragging at it. The new curling line, maybe?
 

When the swarm of lights appeared, they were already close. For a moment they moved back and forth as if lost, then they began to stream through the loop toward Payton's body.

The lights trickled into the space around him, swirling and swarming. Payton threw his head back and opened his mouth wide. A speck of light dove into his throat and disappeared.

This time the lights didn't drain back out into the void. They swam through the air inside the boundary around Payton, then struck the spot where the spiral line of paint connected my circle to the one in the center.

Then a stream of lights rushed along the twisting line of paint straight toward me. I was so startled that for a moment I couldn't move, and that was all the time it took them to come close.

The lights had faces. And teeth.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I rolled backward, throwing myself out of the circle. The "spirits" inside the spiral line dissolved in an upward spray of liquid light.
 

The floor appeared at the outer edge of the design, and the void began to recede toward the center circle. The lights still within Payton's circle rushed through the opening into the void as though fleeing a forest fire. After a few seconds, the void was gone, and so were all the lights.

Echo leaped to her feet and moved toward me. "You burning, lonely squat of shit! What have you done?"

I put my hand on the pocket with my ghost knife. If I survived her first attack, and maybe her second, I might have time to use it. "You tried to put one of those things in me!"

Suddenly, Payton screamed. He clutched his broken elbow and writhed on the floor. The flesh inside his arm shifted and realigned.

"You killed them!" Echo shouted. Her eyes were wide and her teeth bared. "You murdered them!"

Jon rushed to Payton and laid a calming hand on his shoulder. "Hold it together, big guy. I know it hurts--believe me, I know--but it won't take long."

Echo crouched low. Here she comes.
 

"Stop." One word from Jon was enough. She froze in place, but she still glared at me as if she wanted to tear me to pieces. "What happened, Ray?"

"She tried to cast that spell on me," I said, trying to keep my voice calm. "She tried to put one of those things inside me."

"I didn't see anything," Macy said quickly.
 

That was it. I'd stayed because I thought it would save my life and how stupid was that? I stood, grabbed my pack and bolted through to the kitchen just behind me.
 

Jon still beat me to the back door. "Ray, I'll keep them in line. Don't go."

"We're friends," I said, mimicking him as nastily as I could. "I won't force you."

"Sometimes friends fuck up."

Shit. I was suddenly warm with shame. "Who sat in the fifth spot the other times you cast the spell?"

"Ray, I can't tell you. I promised. I got my legs back and all I had to do was not spread around the name."

"Forget it."

"You know normally wouldn't hold out on you," Jon said. "But I
promised
."

I unzipped the bag and showed him the blue pages inside. "I already know who it was. We obviously got our spells from the same person."

"I guess we did. Look, out of the whole group, I got the cure first. That makes me alpha. I can keep everyone in line."

"Even Macy? What about her hammers?"

"That was just talk," Jon said. "Macy's a therapist. She takes care of people. She heals bodies and souls. That's her whole career. She's a good person, Ray. That hammer thing was just stress."

He hadn't seen her expression when she stood behind him with the knife, but I wasn't going to argue about his girlfriend. "Can I leave?"

Jon looked uncomfortable. "If you want to, of course, yeah. But I hope you don't. I'm so hungry I can barely think, sometimes. I need you here. Do you really want to go?"

"After that?" I said, pointing toward the other room, "more than anything." But Jon needed my help. I still hadn't told him about Annalise and Callin. Did Jon know that Callin planned to kill him and was allied with the woman who'd attacked Echo?

And whatever Macy and Echo had done, Jon wasn't to blame. He was still my friend, and had done the right thing by me at every turn. His family had practically rescued me from mine. I couldn't run out on him now.

"But I'll stick around," I said. "For a while, at least. There's a lot we need to talk about."

Jon beamed. "Perfect!" He clapped my shoulder hard.

Macy entered with a slice of cold pizza in each hand. She gave one to Jon and he bit into it greedily. "Echo and Payton went out for more food," she said. "I ordered another meat lovers'. What about him?"

She took a huge bite of the pizza. Jon talked around the food in his mouth. "He's staying to help us. When the others get back, we'll talk."

"Why not right now? I'll tell you and you can tell them."

Macy shook her head. Jon swallowed and said: "I might forget something. Or something might get changed in the telling. Or they might have questions I can't answer. Besides, they're family. It's not right that we should know something they don't."

I looked at them, hoping they were joking. They weren't. They seriously didn't want to know something the others didn't. It was a strange kind of loyalty, and it didn't make any sense.

"The woman who attacked--" I said, forging ahead anyway.

"Later, later. I need to look at these." Jon snatched the blue pages out of my backpack and walked into the other room so fast that he was already gone by the time I could react.

Macy stepped toward me. I had the urge to step back but I didn't. Her knife lay on the counter; Macy put her hand on it and slid it into the sink.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have threatened you. I know what I did was wrong, but I did it for a good reason. I never... I didn't mean to..." She raised the pizza to her mouth but the smell seemed to upset her and tossed it into the trash. She blinked slowly, her head sagging as though she couldn't organize her own thoughts.

"I've hated violence my whole life," she said. "My father was stabbed to death coming out of a bar. My third stepfather once beat my mom so bad that she bled out of her ears. I've always hated it, always did what I could to help people who had been victims of it."

She took a deep shuddering sigh. "But today, when the stress was intense, I...."

She didn't seem to know what to say next. After a short while, she said: "I'm sorry I forced you to do what I wanted. I've always tried to be a better person than that. So, I'm sorry. Anyway, I wouldn't have done anything to you that we couldn't undo right away."

I didn't answer. It seemed to me that her cure was worse than anything she could have done to me, including kill me, but there was no point in arguing. She didn't matter. I was here for Jon.

Judging by her expression, I didn't give her the response she was expecting. She moved away. I followed her into the dining room. Jon wasn't around.

But there was the sheet of blue paper sitting on the sideboard; it was different from mine because it had been folded small to fit into someone's pocket, then unfolded again. I wanted to look at it to see if it would match any of the handwriting in the book I'd stolen from Callin, just to make sure.

Macy's back was turned as she headed toward the front room. I picked up the paper.
 

Macy froze in place and tilted her head like a dog that heard a familiar sound. I didn't have time to pocket the sheet of paper and her body language suggested that she was about to turn around. With a flick of my wrist, I tossed it behind the sideboard.

She turned and studied my face. I tried to look nonchalant but I knew I wasn't doing a great job. She sniffed as though she could smell my fear. "Is there a problem?"
 

"You can't blame me for keeping a safe distance," I said. She blinked at that, and then moved toward the porch. I followed.

We found Jon squatting on the couch, his shoes squarely on the seat cushions. He was hunched over a slice of cheese pizza, gnawing and tearing at it without satisfaction.
 

The stack of blue pages sat on the floor, apparently forgotten. I picked them up.

"Get down off there!" Macy said. She swatted Jon with a little square pillow. "Or at least take your shoes off."

Jon climbed down, still chewing madly. He didn't speak or stop eating. Macy opened the top pizza box, found it empty, then shoved it into a corner with a bunch of others. She opened two more before she found a cold slice with grease congealed on the top.

"Do you want some?" Jon said. "It's terrible."
 

I hadn't eaten anything except Hank's muffins for most of the day, but seeing Jon and Macy hunched over their greasy food made my stomach twinge. "Pass."