The Silenced Tale (The Accidental Turn Series Book 3)

by J. M. Frey

  He needs to know that Tristin and Vanna from the Shuttleborn trilogy are going to be able to find happiness after everything he’s done to them.

  “How’s Linux?” Elgar asks, because the silence has grown a bit strained over the line.

  “Bit of a terror,” Juan says. “He didn’t like the new environment at first, but once he had a good sniff around, he was fine. But, boss, I can tell you, he really doesn’t like my new beau.”

  “The book nerd?”

  “Yeah. Some people just really don’t like cats, I guess. And Linux can tell.”

  “Poor little buddy,” Elgar says.

  “Yeah. How you holding up, boss?”

  Elgar shrugs. “I’ve never been so on top of my admin. Riletti’s been good help— Jackson’s reading Hand of the Foesmiter now. They’re okay company.” Elgar pointedly doesn’t say anything about the rotating cast of men in suits.

  “So, when will you head out?”

  “I assume I’ll be going back to pack . . . tomorrow?” Impeccable Suit nods. “Yeah, tomorrow. Probably the morning, after rush hour.”

  “Tomorrow, after rush hour,” Juan repeats. “Okay. Oh! Also, I had Carmen come in, give it all a scrub after forensics left. I hope you don’t mind the extra bill.”

  “God, no!” Elgar says. “No, I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks.”

  “No worries, boss. You pay me to think about these things.”

  “That poor woman.”

  “The cops took most of it away as evidence. She said there wasn’t much left but, uh . . . stains.”

  Elgar bites his tongue hard to keep his gorge from rising. “Thanks for that. I don’t think I . . . I could have—”

  “Do you want me to come to the house with you, boss? I can change my plans. Let me call—”

  “No, no, it’s okay,” Elgar says. “I think I need some time with the house to myself. You know . . . get used to it again. But when this is over, as a thank you, I’d like to . . . I don’t know, cook? And the boyfriend? He can come—”

  Juan makes a noise. “No, I don’t think so. I’m figuring out that he’s kinda weird about authors. I’m not going to inflict that on you until I’m sure he’s a keeper.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  Quiet descends between them again, and as he always does when that happens, Juan feels compelled to fill it. Which, in the end, turns out to be worse for Elgar than sitting in the safe house alone, his mind spinning. Because, at least in the safety of his own head, Elgar can consider that magic and the world he created might have something to do with it all.

  With no reason to assume magic is involved, Juan’s imagination keeps running toward obsessive fans, or angry authors who’re jealous of Elgar’s success, or, god forbid, that myopic rabid faction of spec-fic fandom that tried to hijack the Hugo Awards. And while they might be good guesses, Elgar fears, deep down in his not-inconsiderable amount of gut, that they are dead wrong.

  What the real answer is, he still can’t admit to himself. He’s edging closer to it, mind circling like a vulture patiently coasting on updrafts, waiting for the wounded gazelle of thought to finally go still. It makes his head light—or maybe that’s the excess of coffee he’s been indulging in without Juan around to scold him. The rest of him is well-rested, as there isn’t much to do in this place but sleep and sit around, but his mind hasn’t stopped chugging the whole time. Like a perpetual motion machine, he can’t seem to find the brakes.

  The drive to his house the next morning is quicker than he remembers the drive to the safe house being, and Jackson parks the unmarked car in the alleyway behind Elgar’s home. Elgar leads them in through the backyard, and up to the kitchen patio door. Jackson insists on being the first to enter the house. Once he’s swept through each room, checking them for anything amiss, he returns to the kitchen to wave Elgar and Riletti inside. His face, however, is grim.

  “What did you find?” Riletti asks, as Elgar sets his bag down on the kitchen table.

  “You found something?” Elgar yelps, unable to hold in his surprise. “But I thought . . . what happened?”

  Jackson only waves down the hall, toward his—oh god, his office.

  Panic strikes like a fist to his solar plexus, punching all the air out of Elgar’s lungs. A jittering kind of energy seizes his limbs, and he jerks down the hall, filled with horrified anticipation that makes his gait disjointed and wobbly. He braces himself with one hand on the wall, leaning hard, pressing his palm into the textured wallpaper as he slides across it.

  What is it going to be this time? A jungle of threatening greenery? An ocean of blood? A body?

  “Watch where you step,” Jackson says, trailing after him. The door, which Elgar knows he left closed when he left, is now hanging open. Elgar doesn’t know what Jackson means by the admonishment until he looks at his office floor. Glass fragments litter the carpet, from where the big bay window that looks out onto his side garden has been broken in. No, not “broken,” that word isn’t forceful enough. It’s smashed. Shattered. Exploded. Fragmentalized. Shards are sprayed all the way to the far wall.

  The rest of the office is in a similar state. His precious cat-tunnel desk is in splinters so small, Elgar wouldn’t have been able to guess they used to be the desk if it wasn’t for the distinctive honey color of the wood. The paintings on his walls have been slashed and shredded with either parallel strokes from a knife, or some very sharp claws from a very large beast. His filing cabinet has been upended, the drawers pulled out and crumpled against the floor. Papers lie in ashy, smoldering drifts all over the floor. And the carpet is scorched; a section of fibers by the window is actually still smoking.

  It looks as if a bomb, an actual bomb, has gone off in here.

  And it must have happened when they were just blocks away, heading in this direction.

  “Oh god,” Elgar chokes as Jackson crosses the room to stomp out the last of the embers on the carpet. “Did my neighbors not call 911? I mean, look at how hard someone must have hit that glass! It looks like someone put a sledgehammer through it! Look at the scorch marks! There had to have been noise.”

  The only part of his office that is untouched is the bookshelf. The novels, comics, and reference books are all eerily, perfectly pristine, untouched by the blast that seems to have shredded the rest of the room, almost as if they had been shielded.

  Something about them looks wrong, though, but he can’t place what. The shelf just looks . . . funny.

  Jackson steps back out into the hallway, pulling his radio off his belt. Riletti, who’d followed them, steps around him and into the room to stand beside Elgar. Elgar moans, clutching at his hair like a distressed Regency suitor. It’s ridiculous. Laughable. Gelastic. But he doesn’t care what kind of picture he makes. God, he can’t breathe.

  “How did this happen?” Jackson is shouting down the line. “When did this happen? There were eyes on the house twenty-four-seven!”

  Elgar stumbles back, out of the office, hand over his eyes as if blocking out the sight of the wreckage can undo it. He gropes his way to his living room, folding onto the sofa with a miserable, terrified sense of déjà vu.

  Riletti follows him, making sure he doesn’t trip over anything, and sits on the coffee table. She grabs his chin, forces him to look up at her, checking his eyes and taking his pulse. She pulls Aunty Lilah’s throw off the back of the sofa and over his shoulders.

  Shock, Elgar thinks. Again. It’s funny, in a way. Twice in one week. And I put Kintyre through worse than this, over and over again, in every book. . . . Never once did I think that he would . . . would react. Like this. Like me. Oh god. What’s happening?

  “Good thing you brought your laptop and fire-safe with you,” Riletti says, tucking the blanket around him. “Or this could have been much, much worse. Stay here, I’ll get you some water.”

  “Yeah,” Elgar says, his whole body numb. Because at that exact moment, he realizes why the bookshelf looked wrong, lopsi
ded and strangely gap-toothed. “Yeah. You’re right. It can be much, much worse.”

  Because the books, his leather-bound, special-edition books, are missing.

  The Tales of Kintyre Turn are gone.

  CHAPTER 6

  FORSYTH

  Elgar texts me the next morning, and all it says is: GOIN 2 LA 4 2wks.

  I wonder that a man so dedicated to the English language would choose to slaughter it so brutally when smartphones allow for people to text in full sentences now. Then I wonder if it is wise to travel when one is being stalked and threatened with bodily harm. And then I realize that being elsewhere, especially when one has the support of the police force to help them vanish, is probably the best course of action one could take. It gives the stalker no satisfaction to watch an empty house, and perhaps, if we are lucky enough, it will bore them into giving up the chase.

  I can only hope that that will be the case here.

  As for why Elgar is headed to LA, that much is obvious.

  I’m not entirely certain how I feel about this adaptation of my brother’s life for the small screen. Though I do think it makes me feel better to know that this version of Forsyth Turn will be a peripheral character. Pip tells me that I only appear in the first, fourth, and eighth books of the series, and I do not even speak in the last of these. Whomever they cast to play me is therefore destined for a bit part.

  Unless, by some meddling on Elgar’s part, the role of this fictional Forsyth is expanded. That possibility, I don’t mind admitting, has me even more emotionally wibbly.

  I reply to my creator’s text, confirming that I got it, and then roll over in bed to watch my wife sleep. Though “sleep” might be a generous word for it. She is twitching, and mumbling, and I wonder if I ought to wake her, or if startling her would be unwise.

  I slide out from between the covers and stand by her side, observing—the burns and bruises from the day before have all but vanished. Either the magic that made them appear is withdrawing, taking the evidence along with it, or the person to whom the original injury occurred—which we are seeing mirrored in Pip—is using Words of Healing so steadily that he or she must be utterly drained of energy this morning.

  I have not yet told Pip about this second theory. I have no proof for it, and I do not wish to worry her with it when she has so much worry already. Deciding that waking Pip is the better option, especially with Alis’s own soft breaths coming through the baby monitor as proof that this round of horrible teething, at least, is finally over for her, I say, gently: “Pip?”

  She snuffles and flops, and when I repeat her name, a little louder, her eyes snap open. “Morning,” I say. “I think you were having a nightmare.”

  “I think I was,” she agrees, and sits up, groaning and wincing. She studies her palms, and then lifts her t-shirt to do the same to her ribs. “Nearly gone.”

  “Yes,” I agree.

  “Creepy.”

  “Yes,” I agree again.

  She holds out her arms to me, and I obligingly return to bed. She slides onto her side, pulling my arm across her so that she may be the “little spoon,” and I wonder at this gesture. I have never known my wife to be so desperate for consolation and comfort as she is this morning. She is a very sexual creature, yes, but cuddling for no reason but to cuddle hasn’t always been her preference.

  I feel my insides twist, my heart sink, and I press my forehead against the nape of my wife’s neck, because I cannot, I do not want to ask this next question out loud, let alone while looking her in the face. “Pip, I have something to ask you, and I . . . I wish I did not have to.”

  “Yeah?” Pip folds her arms across mine, and I squeeze her waist tight, screwing my eyes shut. I can feel her shaking. Or maybe it is she who can feel me shaking. I’m not certain which of us is the source. “Ask.”

  “Do you recall the exact wording you used when you bound the Viceroy’s magic?”

  Pip jerks in my grip, rolling down, curling herself over my arm as if clinging to the edge of a cliff. “Oh my god,” she chokes, and her voice is tight and terrible. “Did I get it wrong?”

  “I can’t recall the exact wording . . .”

  “Neither can I. I could have . . . did I leave a loophole?”

  “Perhaps?” I say, softly, quietly, every syllable an agony.

  “What have I done?”

  “It could be a copycat,” I say hastily. “It could be someone who knows us and is using this as ammunition against Elgar.”

  Pip frowns and turns into my chest. “I should have let Wyndam kill him,” she mutters. “Just to be sure. I should have . . . I should have done the smart thing, instead of the right thing. Why didn’t I do the smart thing?”

  “Because you are good, and kind, and compassionate,” I say, tucking my knuckles under my wife’s chin and lifting her head so that I may kiss her, comfort her. “Because you felt pity for the Deal-Maker.”

  “Bilbo’s pity got half the armies of Middle Earth killed,” Pip says, disdainfully. “I should know better. Why did I do it? I’ve never been . . . been affected by the tropes in your world before. I thought I was immune to them.”

  “You were never immune,” I correct. “Just aware.”

  Pip pauses, digesting this. “And I missed this one.”

  We are both thinking it, but neither of us is prepared to say it. Not out loud. Not yet.

  But if we had left the Viceroy even the smallest ability to retain his magic . . . then, with the blood of a Deal-Maker, the blood of his mother, even the great archvillian may have been able to open a way to the Overrealm.

  We do not speak on it further. Pip, I think, needs time to adjust to the idea that the Viceroy may be here. May have followed us here. She leaves for work subdued, and returns, grim, after her morning classes, determined to do her grading at home rather than in her office. That she skipped her daily workout at the school gym is cause for only mild concern. She is, I assume, still too sore to contemplate exercise.

  I am glad she is here when she suddenly jerks back from the counter, where she’d been making a fresh pot of coffee, to stare at her hands in horror. Blood drips and pools around her feet, splashing against the tiles.

  “Dear Writer!” I gasp when I see what has happened. I jump up from where Alis and I have been reading to Library in the living room and rush into the kitchen. Pip seems too numb from the shock to know what to do about the gore running in small rivulets down her fingers, so I push her toward the sink. “Pip, are you hurt? How did this happen? What broke?”

  She makes no answer, and that’s when I realize that her eyes have rolled back in her head and she is having another fit. This one is smaller, more subdued, like the person wielding the magic on the other end of the tether can only cast small charms; a tether that seems to be connecting them more and more. I tuck myself behind my wife in case she faints on the spot, and turn on the taps.

  When I rinse away the worst of the blood, I can see that the cuts are shallow, deliberate strokes, weaving and curling up her forearms. They are not quite of Bootknife’s handiwork, not so clean or artistic as he would have done, but are very similar all the same.

  The cuts flare open and closed almost as soon as they’ve been made. Like flowers blossoming on her skin, the red gaps widen and shrivel into pink scars, which then flake away before ripping open again like hungry mouths, gasping for air, moist with crimson. The wounds are about the size of a quarter at their most distended, and they open in twos and threes, trailing up toward her elbow before snapping shut and a new wave begins. It is ghoulish and disgusting, and I cannot tell if Pip is in pain from them or not.

  Alis clings to the little pillar that divides the kitchen and living room and watches with wide gray eyes, bottom lip trembling.

  “Mama?”

  “Mama’s going to be fine, sweeting,” I tell her.

  “Help?”

  “Absolutely. Can you go to the bookshelf and fetch your da The Wizard of Oz?”

  “Yah
!” Alis says, and trundles away to pick the book out of the pile her shelf on the bookcase always becomes.

  With her safely out of the kitchen and away from us for a moment, I give Pip a hard shake, rocking her back against my chest. She blinks, convulsing a little, and a second shake has her lifting her head and looking around. She looks down at her arms.

  “Fucking fuck,” she groans.

  The gaps are all closed now, with none opening anew, but red lines run up and down her forearms. They look like nothing so much as scratches from a pet cat who got too playful. But the amount of blood on the floor, the counter, and still clinging to the sides of the sink, belays the idea that the cuts were ever inconsequential.

  “Sit,” I tell Pip, and she staggers to a chair by the table. I wipe down her arms with a damp dishtowel, and then start mopping up the blood on the floor.

  “’Ook, Mama,” Alis tells Pip from the doorway, holding up The Wizard of Oz.

  “Sure is, babycakes,” Pip says lightly, but her voice is tight and raspy. “Come on up here and read it to me?”

  Alis bounds over, flashing her dimples, and scrambles up onto Pip’s lap with her mother’s assistance. Pip winces and groans, but gets Alis settled, and together, they start to read the story. The cadence of the tale is familiar and soothing, and soon, my heart is back to its regular, staid rhythm. Alis loses interest in Oz and Munchkins as soon as I am finished cleaning the floor, and demands milk in both Mandarin and English, doubling, she thinks, her chances of getting it.

  As I scrub my hands clean, and then prepare Alis her bottle, Pip dozes in her seat.

  “It could be someone else,” I say after Alis is equally dozy in my arms, head resting on my shoulder as she sucks at her bottle. “It might not be him.”

  “Come on,” Pip says, stirring and raising an eyebrow at me. She offers a disdainful, skeptical look. “Freckles, you’re smarter than that.”