Twenty Palaces (6 page)

Legs. They were legs. Something was crawling out of her.
 

Echo thrashed. The little woman could barely hold her still.

"If he gave you a weapon," the woman said, "use it!"

I didn't have a weapon. I didn't even have the ability to move.

Something wet and the color of new phlegm pushed past Echo's teeth. It looked like a grub or a maggot, but with those strange, crooked, spiny legs. And it was as big as a cat.

Wings uncurled from its back and began beating the air. Blood sprayed off them. Echo fell still.

The thing turned toward me and leaped.

CHAPTER SIX

I fell back. The creature landed on my chest, needle-sharp legs stabbing through my jacket. It snapped at my mouth with pincers and--

There was a tremendous flood of energy from the pocket of my jacket--it felt like I was hiding a high-powered generator in there. The worm was flung straight up into the air, and the energy subsided.

The creature beat its wings and stopped itself falling. It glanced at the tiny woman then turned and flew away, struggling to stay aloft.

"You let it get away?" the woman said, incredulous. "Why didn't you attack?"
 

I knew I should have answered her somehow, but I couldn't tear my eyes off the retreating creature.
 

It had been inside Echo. That
thing
had been inside her. I thought back to the batting cage--to Echo's amazing quickness and coordination. Macy had been just as gifted. And so had Jon.

Did Jon have one of those things inside him, too?

I reached into my pocket and felt what had given me that tremendous surge of power. I'd dropped the stolen blue ribbon in there at some point without realizing it.

"Hey, dipshit!" the woman said to me. "Is this your first time? It can't be."

I turned to her. The streetlights shone directly onto her face and I got my first good look at her. She was younger than I'd originally thought, probably under 25. Her plain face looked delicate. She had no makeup, no hairstyle, no jewelry that I could see.
 

She had turned her attention to me and it was like being stared at by a live wire. She was full of power, and she was irresistible.

"My first time? Yes, it was." Echo was absolutely still. Her lips were split and torn from the passage of the creature but she wasn't bleeding. Her neck was misshapen and collapsed like an empty bag. "She's--"

"Cured," the woman said. "As cured as her kind can be. Let's get after that thing or I'll have to cure the whole damn city."

I knelt beside Echo. She couldn't be dead. I touched her chin and her head rolled toward me. A pool of blood spilled out of her mouth onto the parking stripe. I jumped back.
 

Damn.

The strange woman grabbed the back of my jacket and pulled me along. "Come on," she said. "We'll help the others later."

Somehow she had the idea that I was on her side. I craned my neck to look at Payton. He was still breathing. I wanted to run back into the bar and call an ambulance for him, but I didn't. I kept my mouth shut and did exactly what the woman told me to do.

She marched me toward a high fence at the edge of the lot. The woman was alert and careful, watching for the return of the creature. She didn't seem concerned with me.

I considered cold-cocking her, but she had already smacked her skull against the metal lamp post. If that hadn't hurt her, nothing I could manage would. I looked at the back of her head and neck, half-expecting to see a set of switches there. All she had were more tattoos.

"It looked weak to me," she said. "I don't think it could have gotten far. Keep your eyes peeled."

"Are you sure it went this way?"

"Can't you see the blood?" She pointed to the parking lot. I almost said no, but then I saw it: A line of dark droplets barely visible in the light of the distant street lamps.

"What are you, undercover?" she asked. "What have you found out?"

"The world is scarier than I thought."

"Funny." Her tone suggested that she hadn't laughed in years. "He didn't give you a weapon?"

"No, he didn't." I had no idea who "he" was, so my answer was an honest one.
 

"Where are the others?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Jesus. He keeps you in the dark, doesn't he?"

"Oh, I'm in the dark, all right. What is that..." I couldn't say
creature
or
monster.
Those words were ridiculous. I was afraid that, as soon as I said the word
monster
aloud, I would stop believing everything I'd just seen. "... that thing?"

"Don't know. Don't care. It has a physical form now. Mostly. Let's just kill it and move on." We reached the fence. The trail of blood continued on the other side. The worm had gone over here.
 

The woman grabbed the bottom of the chain link and pulled up. The metal groaned and warped. When she was done, the fence was twisted enough to allow us to slip beneath it. The thing had gone over; I was going under.

"Tell me what you found out so far," the woman said. "How many more were there like her?"

That was a question I did not want to answer. Or was she testing me? She had seen me at the house earlier. She probably knew about Jon already, but not that Macy and Echo had apparently received the same cure.

If you could call the thing in Echo's body a "cure."

It didn't matter. I wasn't going to inform on my oldest friend, or anyone else. I was loyal.

I still had to tell her something, though. I couldn't just lie, not without knowing how much she already knew. Hell, I still wasn't clear on what I "knew" myself.

The stranger had already slipped under the warp in the fence. I followed, taking my time as I slid on my belly over the dirt. I considered saying that the mysterious, non-weapon-distributing "he" deserved to hear the information first, but I just didn't know enough about the situation. What if "he" was this woman's boss? Her ex-husband? Her--

"Well?" she said. I had delayed too long.
 

A heavy piece of metal fell somewhere across the yard.

"That way," she said. I went in the direction she indicated, creeping around a low brick building while she went the other way. I was glad for every step that put distance between us.

The lights were now so far away that I couldn't tell if I was still following the trail of blood. I had to detour around a pile of something I couldn't make out in the dark. I laid my hand on it and immediately recognized a brake pad. They were auto parts. I didn't know for sure if the yard was still operating, but the rusty grime under my fingers suggested not.
 

I inched forward carefully, not wanting to trip and cut open my head on a lump of metal, and not wanting to run into either the strange woman or the...
thing
. The stolen blue ribbon had repelled the creature, but would it work a second time? Better not to gamble on it.
 

I couldn't hear the tattooed woman's footsteps anymore. I looked behind me; the parking lot was well lit and there were no silhouettes between it and me. Time to get the hell out of here.
 

There was a groan from up ahead. It was a man's voice, hoarse and trembling. I stupidly edged around a wrecked car toward the sound.
 

The old man lay on the asphalt, half-lit in a shaft of reflected light. My vision had adjusted well enough to make out his general form. He lay stretched out on his side, facing me, as though he'd tripped over one of the empty bottles by his feet.
 

I moved toward him. "Come on, dude. This is a bad place for you to be right now." God, he stank like a urinal, but I grabbed his arm and tried to lift him to his feet. With luck, I'd be able to get him back through the warp in the fence before I passed out from the stench.

As the old man shifted position, the reflected street light fell on the
thing
clinging to the back of his tattered jacket.

I grabbed the old guy's jacket and tore it off his shoulders. The huge worm jumped backwards before I could throw the jacket over it. It snapped open its wings and fluttered a foot or two off the ground.
 

I yanked at the old man's arm, dragging him across the concrete. The worm fluttered toward us, zeroing in on the old man. I heard a scuffled footstep behind us and turned to see the tiny woman approaching. She had a green ribbon in her hand.

"Wait!" I shouted. "Just wait!"

She didn't wait. She threw the ribbon straight at me.

I dropped to the ground, thinking I should have run away when I had the chance.
 

The worm fluttered toward me and the old man both, but the ribbon intercepted it, striking it dead on. There was an explosion of green fire. The
thing
burned up to nothing without making a sound.
 

A blast of icy air struck me just before I was engulfed by green flames.
 

But they didn't hurt. Again, the ribbon in my pocket hummed with power. Flames surrounded me, licking against my skin, my clothes, even my eyes, but they felt like a wintry breeze. Nothing painful.

The homeless man beneath me wrenched in agony, then seemed to dissolve. The flames suddenly receded.
 

The old man had been burned down to a pile of smoking bones. He hadn't even had time to scream.

There were greasy ashes stuck to the front of my clothes. I tried to brush them away and they stuck to my hands. My nostrils were filled with the stink of burned oil and charred meat. Revulsion flooded through me as I looked down at my palms, and that revulsion immediately changed to rage.
 

I leaped to my feet. "You killed him!"

The woman turned and started to walk away. "I saw the creature warded away from you. I assumed you were protected."
 

The stolen ribbon in my pocket... No. No, I couldn't think about that yet. The woman was still walking away. Hadn't she heard me? I followed, determined to make her understand. "You killed that old man! If you'd given us another second and I would have gotten him away."

She waved me off. "This was easier."

"EASIER!" I grabbed her elbow and spun her around.

Mistake. The woman slapped her hand over my face. She was small and as light as a child, but her hand squeezed me like a vice. Her strength astonished and terrified me. She could squeeze until my teeth broke off and fell into my throat. She could push until the hinge of my jaw shattered and the bones stabbed into my brain.

"If you don't change your tone," she said, "I'm going to mess up that pretty face of yours. I'm a
peer
in the society.
You
don't talk to
me
that way."

She grabbed my arm and marched me around the building. We weren't going to the hole in the fence; she walked straight up to the gate, grabbed the padlock holding it shut and twisted. The lock burst. A few seconds later, she was marching me down the street away from Jon, Macy and Payton.

"Where are you taking me?" My voice sounded thin and frightened. I hate being afraid.
 

She didn't answer.

Damn. If only I hadn't lost my temper. If only I hadn't tried to save that man's life. He would have been just as dead and I would have gotten away from this crazy fucked-up woman. For a little while, at least.
 

I wanted to shoot questions at her: What the hell was she and how could she do what she did? What had come out of Echo? What the hell was going on? But I kept my mouth shut because she'd mistaken me for someone else, someone in this society of hers. She seemed to think I was a junior member, something below "peer." If she found out I was nobody, she could do to me what she did to Payton....

No.

To hell with that. This strange, tiny, tattooed woman scared the piss out of me, and I hate being afraid.
 

"I changed my mind," I said, unable to hold back. "It's all right with me that you murdered that guy
in cold blood.
I'm totally cool with that. Seriously. Why don't we head down to the Millionaire's Club? You could probably burn a dozen guys to death for no damn good reason. Wouldn't that be fun?"

Her only response was to set her jaw. I was pissing her off, which was a stupid thing to do, but damn it felt good. Was that good feeling was worth dying for? Apparently.

She stopped at a motorcycle parked at the curb. It was a blue and gray BMW R1200GS--a nice bike and fairly new, but it was scuffed, scratched and generally misused and neglected. "On the back."

"And if I don't?"

"Then I'll tear your legs off and throw them up on the roof over there."

Her tiny, pale eyes stared at me and her lipless mouth was set in a thin, tight line. She was ready to do it and I didn't have anyone to back me up. I shrugged and climbed on the back.
 

She climbed on in front and kick-started the engine. "Hold onto my jacket," she said. I did. She peeled out of the street and onto the empty road.
 

Echo's corpse, Payton's mangled body, and Jon's wrecked van got farther and farther away. I had no idea what I'd say to him if I lived long enough to see him again. Would he believe that Echo had that creature inside her? Would he believe that this woman had forced him to come with her? Would he believe how strong and fast the women had been?

It was ridiculous. All these people needed were colorful spandex suits and they could fold themselves into the pages of a comic book.

I shifted my grip on the back of the woman's jacket, mainly to wipe greasy ashes off my hands. She should be the one wearing evidence of murder, not me.

Because, Christ, I'd been in town one day--one damn day--and I was already fleeing the scene of a double murder. I suddenly barked out with laughter as I pictured Karl's face when I told him what happened. I had ashes on my jacket--and probably Echo's blood from the thing's beating wings--and a story no one would believe. Probably it would be best if this woman broke my damn head open; it'd save me from a life sentence.