Twenty Palaces (15 page)

"I don't blame you," Jon said. "This is the worst pizza I've ever had in my life." He took another gigantic bite. His eyes were hooded and distant. He and Macy wandered into the empty dining room and stood beside the design, chewing blankly.

For a moment, I thought they might do more magic, but no. They had simply moved close to the design the way bored people stand in front of a TV without really watching--it seemed to comfort them as they chewed and gulped.

I glanced at the sideboard, knowing I couldn't retrieve the page with the "healing" spell while they were standing there. Maybe, while we waited for Echo and Payton, I should take another look at the pages I'd taken from Callin. Now that I'd seen Macy and Echo cast the spell, something new might jump out at me. "Is there a quiet place I could rest?"

"Yoga room would be the best thing," Macy said.

Jon swallowed the last bite and said: "My thoughts exactly."

He led me up the stairs. There were four doors in the hallway, one of which Jon said was the bathroom. He took me into the room at the back.

It was spare and nearly empty. Foam rubber mats covered part of the floor. In the corner, tiny dumb bells lay piled one on the other the way empty pizza boxes were piled up downstairs. Pictures clipped from magazines had been taped to the walls; all showed women in extremely difficult yoga poses. Any one of them would have eased my long prison nights.

"Will this be okay?" Jon asked.

"Great."

"Okay then." Jon hesitated at the doorway. "I just want to say thanks, buddy. And don't worry. It'll all be cool."

I nodded at him and he left. I sat by the window and watched light from the setting sun reflect off the polished hardwood floor. I was glad I wouldn't have to touch the light switch; I didn't want to touch anything here.
 

If Jon would only listen to my story, I'd at least feel like we were getting somewhere. I could get away from him and figure out what to do next. But Jon wasn't worried about what I needed or where I needed to go. He had his own agenda.
 

I sat on one of the foam pads, finding it surprisingly soft. I laid the pages in the sunlight. Echo and Payton would be back soon with more food, and I could explain the situation to all of them while they stuffed their faces.

I turned over the first of the blue pages and saw a spell I'd seen earlier that day.
To Look Into the Empty Spaces and See the Great Predators.
Below the title were the words
Your enemies are near. You will watch them as a ghost, as they are ghosts to you.

Design number two was a straight line with a simple curl at the left end. It looked like an easy spell, and I certainly had enemies. If I cast this spell, maybe I'd know where to find Callin and Annalise.
 

I had a quick mental image of the two of them staking out this house like a pair of cops. It made me uneasy, just as it made me uneasy to think what Jon and the other would do if they knew where to find Annalise. I couldn't picture Macy sneaking out a side door and vanishing into the night the way I would. She'd want to murder them both, and that would make me an accessory.
 

On the windowsill was a notepad and pencil. Someone had scrawled a list of exercises: weights and sets and reps. I flipped to an empty page at the back, turned it over and sat again.
 

I practiced the second design quickly. It was easy. Then I studied the first design, the one with "for the mind" written beneath it.

Nearly concentric circles, the smaller covered with crooked lines. A pair of weird squiggles.
 

The squiggles could be empty eyes. The sphere appeared to have crooked lines across its face. Were those continents? Was this a planet? Two circles could be
the world behind the world.

The image in my mind glowed silver, slammed together and erupted with power. I immediately began to draw the simple second design, waiting for the fire to hit. It never did. This time the concentric circles became a deep tunnel, and I fell through a long, black tunnel into darkness.

I was weightless. There was no floor beneath me and there was no sunlight, no window, no yoga mat. I was floating in darkness.

I tried to touch my chest but my hand passed through it as though I was made of shadow. There was darkness all around me but no stars, just faintly-lit mists swirling in the distance.
 

I looked up. The planet Earth slowly rotated far above me. It was also shrouded in darkness and mist.

Oh, shit. I was dead. I had killed himself--turned myself into a ghost--because I just
had
to fool around with one more spell. I wasn't even sure how it had happened, of if the "how" even mattered.

"So long," I said to the Earth. It looked far away, only about the size of my fist. "It wasn't fun while it lasted." My voice sounded hollow in the darkness.

A sudden, oppressive pressure came over me. It felt as though something was rolling across me, like the mind of God had taken notice of me, and this incredible will was squeezing every thought every living thing was having everywhere into my mind at once. Then the feeling passed, and I was myself again, stunned and disoriented.
 

I had the odd sensation that something was moving behind me and I turned to look.
 

A massive
thing
passed by. It was close, only a few dozen yards away, and it was as long as ten aircraft carriers. Its hide was dark and splotchy, with patches of hair and weird, random stripes of black and red.
 

Oh, Christ, it was some kind of animal, fully alive and swimming through the void. I peered at it, trying to make sense of the patterns on its skin as it sped by. Then I saw them: Weird alien faces were embedded in the hide, and they looked like they were screaming.
 

The thing passed by and I watched its stumpy legs and scraggly dragon's tail recede into the distance. I was glad I hadn't seen its head. I didn't want to know what that thing had for a head.

In the distance, I saw wheels of fire rolling through the darkness. Then a group of boulders tumbled below me, and just as I realized the eerie singing was coming from them, they changed direction like a flock of birds.
 

I'm in hell
, I thought.
I died and now I'm in hell. I'm surrounded by demons and I'm in hell.
 

A cluster of glowing eel-like creatures approached from beneath my feet, growing larger and brighter with each second. There were no landmarks, and every time I thought they were almost upon me, I realized they were larger and farther away than I'd thought. Hundreds of them.

Then they finally swarmed around me, each as large as a school bus and each with hungry, gaping beaks and wide, searching eyes.

They swam right by as though I wasn't there.
 

They couldn't see me. If they had, one of them could have turned its head slightly and bitten me in half.

"Watch them as a ghost," I said aloud, testing my hollow voice again.
 

Maybe I wasn't dead. Maybe the spell had sent me into this void, these "Empty Spaces." I was on the other side of the so-called healing spell Macy and Payton and Jon had cast. This was where the cousins came from, although I didn't see any blue lights or fat worms with wings and spiny legs nearby.

I looked up at the Earth again. The school of eels passed it as though they couldn't see it, either.
 

Beyond the Earth, and in several other directions, I could see more worlds rolling through the mists. All were obscured and the creatures passed them by. Were the planets camouflaged the way I was, or was there something about the mists that diverted the creatures' attention? Or maybe they could see the worlds but didn't care.
 

There was a flash of silver light to the left. I glanced over and saw a glowing sigil shining in the darkness. It was a little like the spell Jon had used to summon the cousins, and it had appeared on the surface of a little purple planet shrouded in mist. The sigil burned like a flare.

The eels sped by me, swimming for the glowing sigil. The tumbling boulders changed course and headed straight for the planet. They plunged toward it, then began moving around it in swarms.
 

I willed myself to be closer and I was. The planet seemed to be growing darker and more of the eels were dropping to the surface. A sound seemed to flow out of the world below like a ripple in a pond, even though I knew it wasn't really a sound I was hearing. But somehow I knew people below were screaming. They were dying in pain and despair, and those emotions echoed out into the void. The little planet grew slightly darker.

Three wheels of fire rolled out of a cloud of mist, drawn by the strange sound. Now that they were close, I saw eyes within the flames. They struck, cutting through the world like buzzsaws. The planet began to burn.

A swarm of tumbling boulders slammed themselves against the world. Their eerie, joyful song halted as they destroyed themselves, but huge sprays of debris were thrown clear of the planet, and each one sang a new song.

The eerie screams finally died away. The purple world blackened and as life left it, I could see it vanishing, as though it would fall out of the Empty Spaces once it was devoid of life.
 

I'd just seen an entire world consumed and destroyed. These creatures weren't ignoring the worlds around them, they were searching for them, looking for their next meal. And the only way they'd find it was if someone sent up a call for them.
 

I glanced back at the Earth. A tiny sigil erupted on its face, glowing bright silver. A reddish bolt shot toward it, then the sigil faded. I didn't see the world grow dark and I didn't hear screaming. That time.

My pencil snapped.

I stared down at the broken pencil in my hand. I suddenly felt very heavy and real. I was made of flesh again. The floor was solid and the room was dim.

I was in the yoga room. The sun had gone down while I'd been in the Empty Spaces and the only light came from a shaft of moonlight that fell into the corner.

We were playing with something we didn't understand. Casting these spells was like laying a trail of raw meat from the jungle through the front door of our house. We were calling monsters, and I had fucking helped.

"What the hell have we been doing?" I said aloud.
 

"Preparing," a voice behind me said.
 

I jumped to my feet. A tall, slender figure stood in the doorway, lit by the dim hall light. Echo. Her sallow skin and sunken eyes looked healthy again. I'd never been one to go for the plain look in a woman, but she was beautiful.
 

There was enough light to see that her hands were empty; maybe she hadn't come to kill me. She glided toward me, staring intently into my eyes. "You are alone." Her body was as fluid as a tiger's. She moved out of the hall light and became a silhouette. I didn't move.
 

Of course I was alone. I'd just spent three years in prison and the only women I saw there were on TV or were taped to walls like a pinup. "Yeah, I--" She leaned toward me, as though she was about to kiss me. "Payton."
 

She breathed in, taking in the smell of me, and her body language was so smooth that a small part of me was suggesting that maybe she wasn't a monster after all.
 

"Payton does not matter," she said. "I don't like to share."

That didn't really make sense. I had the sudden intuition that I was being incredibly stupid. It may have been a long time for me, but I wasn't a damn fool.

She leaned close. The tip of her nose touched my cheek and it felt all wrong. I stepped back. "I need to talk to Jon," I said. I realized that I still didn't know where Annalise and Callin were. "We're all in danger."

Echo stepped toward me into the light. Her eyes were wild and starving, and she had a killer's deranged smile.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I fumbled for my ghost knife. Echo grabbed my arms, lifted me into the air and slammed me onto the hardwood floor.

It was a bruising impact and I cried out, partly because it hurt like six kinds of hell and partly because I immediately knew that she was too strong for me. The fight was already over, and I hadn't even had time to lift my hands.

I tried to will my ghost knife out of my pocket the way I'd
called
it out of the concrete stair, but I was too panicked to concentrate.

Echo smiled. "If you will not become one of us...." She leaned close to my throat, her teeth bared.

She was suddenly torn away from me, leaving me alone on the floor. She flew backwards and slammed into the wall, cracking the plasterboard.

She fell to the floor, an animal noise of rage and frustration coming from her. Jon picked her up and slammed her against the wall a second time. Plaster dust rained down on them.

"I told you! He's my friend!" Jon pinned her against the broken wall. She struggled, but could not free herself.

"Wake up in there, cousin!" Echo shouted at him. "Wake up!"

Jon shook her. "I
am
awake!"

Payton leaned in through the doorway and switched on the light.
 

Except for Echo, they were all covered in blood. Their shirts, their pants, their hands and even their faces were smeared with dark blood.

I snatched up my pages and hugged them to my chest. A chill ran down my back. Jon shoved Echo into Payton's arms; he embraced her and began to speak softly into her ear. She glared at Jon.

"Out." Jon slammed the door.

He stalked toward the window. I couldn't see a visible wound on him but, considering how casually he'd taken the loss of his finger, I wasn't sure if he'd even notice one. Had he been fighting? Had Annalise turned up while I was floating around in the Empty Spaces?

"Are you hurt?" I asked.

Jon threw open the window. "You're getting out of here." He climbed out onto the roof.

"That's not your blood," I said. I picked up my backpack, feeling as though I was a step behind everyone else. "Whose blood is that? Is it--"