Twenty Palaces (23 page)

Without thinking, I leaped at Callin and caught hold of his torn pant cuff.

He leaped upwards, dragging me along with him. Cloth tore, but before his cuff could tear free, the world disappeared.
 

For a moment, I was alone in a silent white mist. There was no city below me, no sky above. I could smell icy wind and I held tight to that tiny piece of cloth.

The sound of city traffic washed the silence away and I felt myself falling. Before I had a chance to register that I was back in the world, I slammed down hard onto a flat surface. More tar paper and pebbles: Another roof. It was daytime, but still overcast. Was this the same day? Was I still in Seattle?

"Damned sunlight," Callin said from somewhere close. I rolled over and tried to scramble away, but Callin grabbed my arm and leg. I felt himself being lifted into the air.

"Time to tie a knot in you, my little loose end," Callin said. He marched toward the edge of the roof and I knew he was going to try to throw me off again.

Where was my ghost knife? It wasn't in my hand anymore and I couldn't reach my pocket to check. Had I lost it during the trip? I struggled, but I knew it was no use against someone as strong as Callin. I was panicking; I couldn't calm himself enough to
feel
for my spell.

Of course Callin had the strength to throw me off the roof from right where he was standing, but I guessed he wanted to see me hit the pavement. That thought did nothing to calm me down or help me focus. We passed close to the roof access door but not close enough for me to grab it with Annalise's glove.
 

Then we were at the edge of the building. "Goodbye, lively one." Callin leaned over the edge and threw me downward just as I grabbed hold of his hair.
 

Irena's glove held fast to it. For a moment I thought I wasn't going to go over the edge, but then the hair tore free of Callin's scalp with a nasty sound, and I fell over the edge of the building.
 

I slapped my palm on the stone face and my body slapped against the side of the building. I'd only fallen about five feet, and Callin was a flailing above me, holding his scalp and cursing like a madman. That couldn't be good.
 

He moved away from the edge of the building, and somehow I suspected that he wasn't heading off to take a relaxing hot shower. I looked down. Maybe if I let go of the wall and dropped a few feet at a time, I could do a controlled fall to the street without breaking any bones.
 

Above me, I heard the sound of tearing metal. Maybe I could reach a window instead....

Callin appeared at the edge of the roof holding the twisted roof access door. His eyes were wild with anger. He raised the door over his head to throw it and roared.
 

I was exposed and helpless and I had nowhere to go. That metal door was going to hit, and maybe the force of it would tear my arms off, leaving my hands stuck to the wall while my body splatted on the alley below.
 

But Callin didn't throw it. While my mind was racing, he took a deep breath, blew it out, and laughed. Then he tossed the door aside. "You are a most irritating boy!"
 

A smarter man would have said
yes, sir
but what came out of my mouth was "I think I'm an irritating man."

"This anger is invigorating. It's quite a gift for someone who has lived as long as I have."

"Happy belated," I said. "Glad it fits. Give me the cure for my friends and we'll be even."

He smiled at me in a way I didn't like. Then the world became a white blur.
 

Silence.

And the world returned and I found myself sprawled on the gravel roof with Callin standing above me.

"Lively one, I think you know by now that I don't have the cure or the curse."

"But there's no one else who--"

"You have no idea how much trouble you are in, do you? Did you make a copy of my book?"

That question took me by surprise, and I didn't call up my poker face fast enough. He shook his head and sighed.
 

For a moment I thought he was going to kill me. "Annalise destroyed them without reading them," I said, for no apparent reason at all. Were those going to be my last words, to help a killer get clear of the trouble I'd caused her?

"She wouldn't," Callin said. He squinted up at the sunlight. My skull stayed refreshingly un-smashed.

I saw the ghost knife lying on the gravel roof, about ten feet behind Callin. I wanted it, desperately, but that was only because I was afraid. I hate to be afraid. Besides, if I took up my ghost knife again, Callin might think the fight had started up again.
 

But I still wanted him to go away. "Are you going to go back there?" I asked. "Are you going to try to help her?"

"I am not. My first duty is to hide my spell book away so it does not fall into the hands of your infected friends. Protecting my book is a responsibility I have been neglecting lately. I have been sleepwalking through my life, I admit. Irena and Annalise will have to fend for themselves. They're somewhat capable.

"And now that you have destroyed my resting place," Callin continued, "I'm leaving the city. All this leaves me far too exposed. But I'm going to send someone to come and clean up this mess. Someone with
real
power and the will to use it."

"If you're going to send someone, send someone who can help, not just someone who wants to kill my friends because it's easy."

Callin crouched beside me. "My dear boy, your infected friends could do more harm than you can dream. We peers would destroy this entire city--and every innocent person in it, down to babes in arms--before we would let their infection spread. I'm sending someone with the wit and power to do just that."
 

"But if your friend is that powerful, why can't he just take off their curse?"

Callin laughed at me again. "You have no idea how much danger you are in, but not from me. I'm not going to kill you. In fact, I'm fighting a powerful urge to apologize to you and to offer you a large sum of money as compensation for all the trouble I've caused while fighting for my life. I'm sure you know what I am talking about. Besides, you are Annalise's wooden man, now, yes? You don't need me to kill you."

The world became a blur of silent white. When I opened my eyes again, Callin was gone.

The first thing I did was fetch my ghost knife. It felt damn good to hold it again, and I was happy that we had both come through the fight with a minimum of damage. Happy? It was a goddamn miracle.
 

A few hundred yards to the north, I could see a gaping hole in the side of Callin's hotel. I touched the side of my throat and my fingers came away spotted with blood. The spell Annalise had put there had blocked most of Echo's hatchet swing.
 

My hands started to shake, and I crouched low, moving toward the shadow of the roof access stairs. What if someone was looking out of that ruined hotel room and saw me?
 

I'd come through that fight with nothing more than a few bone-deep bruises and a set of fear-shakes so bad it made me sick. That was the power I'd hungered for. I'd stuck my neck out for my friend--and, if I was going to be honest, for a taste of the magic Annalise and Callin tossed around so casually--but not only had I failed Jon, I'd failed myself.

God, the fight in Callin's room was the most terrifying experience of my life. I was almost certainly going to be killed in the near future by someone in that room, and, despite everything, I still hungered for more magic.
 

This was a poison. It was like an addiction. I rubbed at the numb, enchanted flesh on the back of my hand. I had made myself part of the world behind the world, and I hadn't been invited in. I'd lied and tricked my way in. I'd stolen the key, and I had no idea how I was going to survive it.

I was alone now. I no longer had Annalise on my side, and Echo had tried to kill me a second time, despite the fact that Jon had told her I was off limits.
 

Were the six of them still fighting over there, inside that darkened room? Ordinarily, I'd have put my money on Annalise and Irena, but Callin had done a lot of damage to both of them.
 

The truth was, I didn't know who would be coming out on top, but I did know both sides were my enemies now. If I was still going to find a cure for Jon--and I was, nothing could change that--I'd have to do it without help.

But where was I going to find a way to undo the curse Jon had put on himself and his friends? I'd been so sure it had come from Callin, once I'd seen that Jon's spell had been copied onto blue legal paper. Where else could he have gotten that if he hadn't pulled it out of the stack of Callin's spells in my own backpack?
 

Suddenly, everything became clear. I ducked into the roof access stairway, avoiding the jagged edges of the metal hinges where Callin had torn the door off, then hustled down the stairs, heading for the street.

I knew exactly where the spell had come from.

#

I didn't have any bills small enough for bus fare, so I ducked into the nearest Starbucks. They had only just opened, and I pressed one of their light brown napkins against my neck while I waited in line to break a twenty by buying a cup of coffee.
 

"Did they get your wallet?"

I turned to the woman who'd spoken to me. She was about sixty and must have weighed nearly three hundred pounds. Her clothes suggested that she worked somewhere formal, like a bank or lawyer's office.
 

"Worse," I said. "My phone."

She took a smart phone from her pocket. "Do you need to call someone?"
 

"You know what? Thank you. But what I really need is to look up an address."
 

Ten minutes later, I was riding a bus out to West Seattle, with an address on napkin in my pocket. I had nothing in particular to think about and my mind was clear.
 

Forty-five minutes later I was standing at the door of an apartment building. I scanned the directory and pressed the call button.

While I waited for an answer, I noticed a small pile of folded newspapers lying in the bushes beside the stairs. The top paper obscured one with the headline: "JAIL."

With a sense of dread, I picked it up. The entire headline was "JAILBREAK!" Right beneath that word was a picture of me.

I threw the paper deep into the bushes without reading any further. Rush hour traffic raced down the street behind me, and I pressed the call button again.

I'd expected to hear a voice squawk at me through the little speaker, but instead the front door swung inward. Wally King stood there, wearing sweats and a bathrobe.
 

"Ray!" Wally said. "This is a surprise. What's up? Did you get that jay oh bee at the copy shop?"

I looked him straight in the eye. Wally looked different somehow, more haggard and a little wild. I'd seen that expression before, on one of Arne's crew who had been convicted of grand theft auto and was going into prison the next day. It was the look of a man who had lost interest in whatever living he had left.
 

"Yeah," I said. "I did, but I'm pretty sure I'm fired already. Sorry if I made you look bad."
 

"I don't give a fuck about that place. But I don't have any other job leads to give you--"

"I'm not here about that."

"Okay. What's up?"

"Can I have a copy of the spell you used to cure Jon?"

He shrugged. "Sure. Why not?" Then he turned around and walked into the building. I followed. "I guess I'm sorry I got you involved in this."

"Mind explaining that one a little more?" We trudged up a flight of stairs. Wally stopped at the first door and fumbled with his keys.

"When I heard you were getting out of the clink I thought you were the answer to my prayers. Stupid me. I was pretty screwed up."

"Because Macy had dumped you."

"Exactly." Wally opened the door and stepped inside, then held the door open for me. His place was a squalid mess. Hard tool calendars and NASCAR posters hung on the walls. The floor was littered with dirty dishes and discarded clothes. I stood in the middle of the floor and tried not to touch anything. Wally locked the door. "Who told you that?"

Echo, when she had still been alive, had said Macy's previous boyfriend had been a charity case, and at the copy shop Oscar had made a crack about Wally stalking his ex. "I saw you standing outside the building where she worked." If Wally was the guy with the spell, Macy was the logical path for it to get to Jon.

Wally was red-faced from the climb up the stairs. It was hard to imagine a loser like him with Macy, but stranger things had happened. Just this morning, in fact, stranger things had happened in Callin's hotel.

"It doesn't matter, anyway," Wally said. "I hoped you were going to reverse-Yoko Jon and Macy apart so I could win her back."
 

"How exactly was I supposed to break them up?"

"By being Jon's beer buddy. Get drunk and shout at football games with him. She hates that guy stuff because of her dad or whatever." He shrugged. He seemed tired and distracted.

This seemed to be the place where I should have said I was sorry, but there was no way I was going to say those words. "It didn't work."

"So much for my big plan. Guess I'm no Lex Luthor."

"What about the spell?"

He lumbered to the stereo. "It's back here." He shifted a speaker and took out a stack of blue pages. The stack must have been at least 18 inches high.

"Christ, that's a lot of reading."

"It's just copies, dude. I used to work at a copy shop, remember?"

Wally dropped the stack on the coffee table. I edged around him and began flipping through the pages.

"Here," Wally said. He had found the place where the top copy ended and the second began, then offered it to me. "Help yourself."

This stack of blue pages was hand-written like Callin's spell book, but it was thicker. "Thanks." I sat on the couch and pushed aside a plate holding old pizza crusts and a pair of cheese-encrusted scissors. I set the stack onto the cleared spot and began to go through it.