Down below, the gunfire fell silent. Marie wished she could take that as a good sign, but she knew better.
Nessa hit the button. The generators on the far side of the floor began to whine. Lights shone down from the tripods, casting the stone circle in a gathering whirlwind of color.
Their fingers twined, hands squeezing tight, as the faintest outline of a doorway began to shimmer upon the stone.
“What if we can’t come back?” Marie asked.
Nessa’s glasses captured the kaleidoscope of light, a circus carousel in her eyes.
“Is there really anything keeping you here?”
* * *
Scottie wasn’t surprised the guy with the cards turned and ran, bolting up the dead escalator. He knew when he was outclassed. No shame in that.
He was still going to kill him, of course. That was a given. He took his time, strolling up the metal steps, flames licking the edge of his blade as he brandished it in a two-handed grip. The generators were firing up as he reached the second-floor landing. They thrummed, chugging away under the flickering fluorescent tubes, and fed raw power along a tangled spiderweb of overhead cables.
A shape darted past in the corner of his eye. Feet pattered behind an empty display counter, then went silent.
So he wanted to play hide-and-seek. Perfect. He’d be good and scared by now, Scottie figured, and fear made the kill that much better. Suddenly he was back in the good old days. Him, Richard, the zoo, a sacrifice on the run. He eased his way along the desolate aisle and murmured under his breath.
“I consecrate this offering to the King of Wolves. Blessed be his delicious ruin.”
Another glimmer of movement flashed through a gap between the shelves. He was headed for the generators. Smart. They were loud, teeth-rattling loud at this range, and he probably thought he could use them for cover. Scottie figured the guy would be circling around, aiming to hit him from behind. That’s what he would have done. He kept his head on a swivel, every step placed firm and deliberate upon the grimy floor, as he stalked his prey.
Metal jarred off to his left, the legs of a clothing rack scraping against the tile as if someone had stumbled right into it. Scottie grinned. Dumbass just gave himself away, he thought. His wooden fingers twitched against the hilt of his sword, feeding on his eagerness. He braced himself at the corner of a display rack, grinning with hungry anticipation, then sprang out of hiding.
He stared at an empty patch of floor. A generator painted hazard orange chugged on the tile to his left, even louder now, rattling hard enough to rock on its metal frame.
“You’ve got to watch those things,” shouted a voice above the din.
Scottie whirled. The guy with the cards stood twenty feet down the aisle, in the opposite direction. A pair of gas cans lay uncapped and empty at his feet.
“From what I’m told,” he said, “it’s really dangerous to overfill a portable generator. Serious risk of causing an explosion.”
That was when Scottie noticed the book of matches in his hand. And the long, thin, razor-sharp trail of gasoline on the tile floor.
A single lit match sailed in a gleaming arc, flicked from the man’s fingertips. It hit the floor. The trail ignited, blossoming as the flames raced toward Scottie like the tip of a burning arrow. He had just enough time for one last breath, and he let it out in a single word.
“Shit,” he said.
* * *
As the cones of light from the tripod-mounted canisters shifted in hue, taking on depth and form, so did the blurry impression of an archway at the heart of the stone circle. The portal gazed out into a world blanketed in darkness. No electric lamps, no light pollution to drive away the cloak of stars above. The curve of a cobblestone street lined with dark and shuttered houses stretched away and vanished into perfect shadow.
Marie and Nessa stood at the edge of the ritual stone, side by side.
“You heard what Ezra told us about the other worlds they’ve visited,” Marie said. “Anything could be waiting for us over there.”
Nessa tilted her head as she stared into the foreign dark.
“The universe is a cruel place, Marie. Can you honestly say that this world has treated us well?”
“No,” she said, “but we could be walking into…I don’t know. A zombie apocalypse. Or that magical virus that made Carlo shrivel up like a mummy. Or…dinosaurs.”
“Look at it this way: my impostor went to a great deal of trouble to deliver that card into our hands. Either she’s a friend or a foe. If she’s a friend, we have little to fear. If she’s a foe, and the world on the other side is a death trap, that’s an exceptionally elaborate way of murdering someone, to say the least.”
She gazed sidelong at her. Her hand tightened around Marie’s.
“You coming?”
Marie felt herself tumbling, falling into the labyrinth of Nessa’s eyes. Into a place where there was no room for doubt.
“Of course I am,” she said.
“Who knows,” Nessa said with a wink, “we might settle down on the other side. Maybe open a nice bed-and-breakfast.”
The floor rocked under their feet hard enough to send them staggering as the air split with a thunderclap roar. Marie clutched Nessa’s hand and hauled her close before she could fall. Waves of heat buffeted their backs and flames licked along the ceiling tiles, tendrils of black smoke wreathing around them. The lights went into a spasmodic death dance, flickering wildly, bulbs popping and raining broken glass.
No time to figure it out. The doorway quivered in a burst of static. One of the canister lights blew out and died.
“Now or never!” Nessa shouted.
Their eyes met. Marie nodded.
Now.
Hand in hand, they jumped through the portal.
Ceiling tiles shattered under the groaning, tortured weight of support beams. A chunk of concrete broke free and slammed down onto the console as another shift in the flooring sent a tripod crashing to the stone. With one last blinding flash of light, the gateway between worlds erupted. Then it sealed shut.
* * *
Rosales planned ahead. It was part of her job. She had built an emergency exit down on the first floor of the department store, at the far edge of a patch of boarded-up windows, over a month ago. While gunshots ripped through the stale air and her mercenaries died on the edge of Scottie’s sword, she was flexing her fingers around the edges of a chunk of plywood. She took a deep breath and heaved. The wood slowly pulled back, nails popping one by one, wrenched out of place by sheer brute strength.
The chunk of wood clattered to the floor. Behind it, a section of the old glass had been replaced with a simple latch and hinge mechanism that only opened from the inside. It swung open on oiled hinges and a gust of cool night air washed into the store.
“Out,” she told Ezra. Bran followed right behind him. The trio crossed the desolate parking lot, reduced to shadows under the dead lamps, and made a beeline for her getaway car: a vintage four-door Thunderbird, skewed at an angle along a row of empty parking spots. She jumped behind the wheel and fired up the engine while the men, both of them looking shell-shocked, piled into the back seat.
“Still got the thermals rigged under the foundation,” Bran said, showing Ezra his phone. “You want me to blow ’em now?”
“Put that away! God, no. We need Vanessa and Marie alive.”
“Don’t know if you were payin’ attention back there, boss, but we just got hit by a man-shaped Cuisinart. You sure they’re still in one piece as it is?”
Rosales gunned the engine. The car fishtailed as it swerved across the parking lot, away from the mall and aiming for the freeway.
“They’re resourceful. We have to hope,” Ezra said. He looked to Rosales. “And what was that, back there? About Saunders’s house being ransacked? Did you seriously not clean up after you snatched her?”
Rosales rolled her eyes. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you told me to hire a crew of hardcore motherfuckers, whe
n you actually told me to hire professional maids. I must have misinterpreted your instructions. My bad.”
“And now they’re suspicious. Listen to me, I need their cooperation. That door requires two sacrifices. The Witch and her Knight are the only two characters from the first story who come in a pair. That can’t be a coincidence.”
Bran’s fingers ran through the wiry strands of his rust-red beard. “I dunno, boss. You ever hear of pareidolia? Means seeing patterns where there ain’t any. Sometimes there’s no signal in the noise, you know?”
“You’re worried about nothing,” Rosales added. “You didn’t smell the pheromones washing off Reinhart. You want to control her, threaten her woman. She’ll jump in a meat grinder to keep her safe.”
“And her woman,” Ezra said, “happens to be made of black magic and raw spite.”
Rosales snickered as she hauled the wheel around, pulling a turn sharp enough to shove Ezra against the door. Her turquoise eyes glinted in the dark.
“Not a problem. I happen to know a magic spell that stops anyone from using witchcraft within five feet of me.”
“You do?” Ezra squinted at her. “Since when? What is it?”
“Oh, it’s real easy,” she said. “I punch ’em in the throat. Magic.”
Ezra slumped back in his seat, both hands on his cane as it nestled between his legs.
“Have my jet meet us at the airport. We’ll head back to Pyramid Lake and regroup. In the meantime, I want a deep-dive intelligence sweep underway. If Vanessa and Marie are still alive, I’m going to need leverage on them once they resurface. All the leverage I can get.”
* * *
Savannah had been sparring with the dead. The ghosts came at her, one after another, begging for oblivion. And she delivered with claw and spear, tearing them into clouds of dust. As the sound of gunfire rattled into silence, she knew Scottie had finished clearing a path for her. She put her fist through an apparition’s cold heart, not even looking at him, and he billowed into nothingness as she strode through the plastic curtain of the quarantine wall.
Scottie had left a trail of bodies, and body parts, all the way to the escalator. She was headed for the second floor when prismatic light bloomed like a mushroom cloud in one shard of her ink-fractured vision. She saw the world in facets now, like an insect. Saw the worlds in facets, spotting places where they overlapped and intermingled, twisting like pretzels made of space and time.
Two of those facets slammed together like crystals turned magnetic. She saw the bridge, the tunnel, like the throat of a worm. And she felt Nessa and Marie sliding out of her reach.
Most of her body was ink now, knitting her shattered bones and holding her jellied organs more or less in place. And every drop of it thrummed, electric, the alchemical reagents in the drug resonating with Savannah’s will and desire. She had pursued Marie into a construct of the past, chasing her in spirit once before. Could she do it now, in totality, crossing worlds with nothing but her blighted body and her magic?
Only one way to find out, she thought. Her spine twisted as she tilted her head back and closed her midnight eye.
Her neurons sparked and her ink-clogged veins heated up, turning to trails of fire. She savored the pain and let it drive her hunger, fixing her focus on the faint iridescent trail Marie and Nessa had left across the wheel of worlds. A sphere of air around Savannah began to shimmer like a heat mirage, then boil.
Then her body and soul boiled along with it.
Thirty-Eight
A thunderclap spat Nessa and Marie out onto a cobblestone street. They landed hard, sprawling on the smooth-worn stone, as the gateway flashed at their backs. Then it imploded. Their ears popped as cool wind rushed over them, sucked in by the portal like a giant’s dying breath.
The portal collapsed, drawn down to a pinprick of light that mirrored the canopy of stars above. Then it snuffed out.
Marie groaned, shoulder aching, as she pushed herself up to sit. Nessa leaned against her.
“Well,” Nessa said, “we lived.”
The street was old, rustic, lined with humble houses, stucco walls, scalloped clay rooftops the color of salmon. It looked like a slice of old Tuscany, maybe, someplace off the tourist roads. Candles flickered, here and there, behind shuttered windows and heavy drapes. Just around the bend, where the street sloped downward and widened, black iron posts marked every corner. Oil lamps dangled from their hooks, warm yellow light pushing back the darkness.
Marie was more focused on where they’d landed. She pointed.
“That…could be a problem.”
Half of the ritual stone had come across with them, shattered down the middle and jutting from the cobblestones. A length of orange-jacketed electrical cord snaked from the rock and ended in frayed rubber and twisted copper wire. A patch of the tile floor, like the dirty scales of some exotic serpent, had fused with the street a few feet away. Half of the broken control console and a length of metal table stuck out from the dun-colored wall of a house.
“Whatever caused that explosion must have overloaded the portal,” Nessa said as she got to her feet. “Interesting side effect. Right now, I think our first priority is getting our bearings. We need to figure out where we are and find some shelter, in that order.”
Marie took a long, slow look around, turning in place. Her gaze fell upon a bell tower in the distance, rising up above the city streets, with the sliver of a crescent moon looming in the sky at its back.
“I…I think I know where we are,” she said. “I just have to make sure.”
Nessa eyed her, curious. “Lead on, then.”
They jogged toward the lamplight. Marie hunted for a storefront, a business, anyplace that was still open after dark. She found what she was looking for down on the corner. Lights burned soft behind a long glass window, illuminating a carefully placed display. Maps stood posed upon artists’ easels, ornate and hand-painted, depicting distant lands and sea dragons to devour the blank spaces. A hammered-copper marquee above the front door read Lamon and Rossini, Cartographers.
A tiny bell chimed over the door, dangling from a length of string, as they stepped inside. A pair of desks took up most of the shop, each one with an easel and a clutter of inkpots and brushes, while more framed maps covered every inch of the navy-blue walls. A young woman, fresh-faced, humming to herself, swept the hardwood floor with a straw broom. She glanced up at the sound and adjusted one shoulder of her patched and pale cotton dress. Her welcoming smile faltered, just a bit, as she took in Nessa’s and Marie’s clothing.
“Good evening, friends,” she said. “I’m afraid Master Lamon’s gone home for the evening. I’m Zoe, his apprentice. But if there’s anything I can help you with…?”
Her question trailed off as she stared at the strange arrivals. Marie spread her open hands.
“We’re…traveling merchants,” she said, “and I apologize, this is a strange question, but it looks like the ship we booked passage on might have…misled us. Can you tell us where we are, exactly?”
Zoe’s eyes went bright, her amusement flooding back. “Of course! You’re in Mirenze. City of coin, tarnished jewel of the Empire. I confess, you gave me a start, dressed as you are—haven’t seen clothing of that cut before. Where are you from?”
Marie just stood there for a second, wobbly on her feet. Swords Against Madness had been her favorite novel ever since she was a little girl. Now she was living in it.
“We’re from, ah—” Nessa said, trying to fill the silence. She nudged Marie with her elbow.
“Belle Terre,” Marie said, snatching at the first distant name she remembered from Carolyn’s books. Distant enough, she hoped, that she couldn’t be proved a liar. “This look is all the rage right now. You’ll probably be seeing more of it soon. After all, like everyone says, all roads lead to Mirenze.”
“That they do.” Zoe laughed. “And even if you’re off course, there’s scarcely a finer city to find yourself off course in. You’ll be able to find
passage wherever you’re headed, land or sea.”
She paused, then flicked a glance to the darkness outside the window.
“Just to be certain, though. Does that mean you haven’t been told about our…nocturnal peculiarities?”
Marie shook her head. “Such as?”
“When night falls, a web of lamps stretches all the way from—here, let me show you.”
She pulled open a drawer filled to overflowing with maps, parchment rolled and bound tight with bows of string. She seemed to know them all by heart; she picked one up in her ink-stained hands, pulled the string, and unfurled it upon one of the easels. It was a map of the city, sprawling along the curve of a coastline, with tangled streets and lovingly detailed spires in sepia ink. Zoe pointed with the dry nib of a calligraphy pen.
“Here’s us. From Pepper Street to the Western Annex, lamps are placed at every corner. They extend to about…here.” She drew an imaginary line midway across the map. “The lights cover the entire waterfront and basically anywhere travelers like yourself might need to go after dark. Don’t leave the light.”
“Why not?” Nessa asked.
Zoe tapped the pen against her chin, thoughtful, like she was weighing a diplomatic response.
“There is an…unspoken arrangement in place. I don’t mean to be evasive, but it’s generally not something we discuss with outsiders. Suffice to say that the city militia doesn’t go beyond the lights, and neither should you. It isn’t safe. And dressed as you are…well, the militia is skittish around outsiders who look different. Especially women. Be careful, all right?”
“Thank you,” Marie said. “We’ll keep it in mind.”
The smile returned to Zoe’s eyes. “Wonderful. And for what it’s worth, I hope you enjoy your stay! Now, if there’s nothing else, I really should be locking up for the night.”
As they left the shop, Nessa leaned close and murmured in Marie’s ear.
Detonation Boulevard Page 26
