Game of Cages

by Harry Connolly

  I turned back to the professor. “Where can I find the tattooed man?”

  “Forget him,” she answered. “He’s a big, bad grown-up and you’re just a little boy. And his boss is something else entirely.”

  “Let me worry about that. Where can I find them?”

  “Hah. What’s in it for me?”

  “She can’t tell you,” Kripke interrupted. “She won’t ever admit that she doesn’t know something or that she’s in over her head. That’s how she ended up like this.”

  Solorov sighed and closed her eyes. For a moment I thought she’d died, but when she spoke, her voice was whisper quiet. “Get out. Both of you. I don’t want you near me. Just go.”

  I grabbed Kripke’s shirt and pulled him out of the trailer. He complained about the cold and the drizzle and the mud on his shoes. The sound of his voice put me on edge, but I didn’t tell him to shut up. I wanted him in a talking mood.

  Ursula had come around and was working furiously at her cuffs, scraping them back and forth along the bottom of the axle. She was tenacious, if nothing else.

  I put Kripke in the backseat of my Neon and climbed behind the wheel. My muddy clothes were cold against my skin. Catherine sat up and looked at me in silence.

  “Before the cops get here,” Kripke said. “Five hundred bucks. I’m not kidding.”

  I took Ursula’s handgun from my pocket and gave it to Catherine. “If he does anything stupid, shoot him.”

  “Okay,” she answered.

  He was silent as I pulled out of the campground. I didn’t hear sirens.

  I glanced into the rearview mirror at Kripke. He was sulking. I’d interrupted my search for the pastor and the sapphire dog, and he was all I had to show for it. He’d better be worth it.

  I drove by the school and beyond that the little houses and cross streets. I looked at Kripke in the mirror again. “Where have you been staying?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Nowhere. I came to the auction. I was kidnapped. That’s where I’ve been staying, with my kidnappers.”

  I wanted to question him, but where? Steve Cardinal might look for me at the Sunset. The Grable was a wreck. It was late enough that the bar would have closed. I wondered how Steve would react if I showed up at his house.

  Kripke blew out a long, slow breath. “I shouldn’t have come anywhere near this place. I just want to go home and pretend none of this ever happened.”

  “What about your buddy?”

  “Who? Oh. Paulie. We weren’t close. Besides, he was supposed to be my bodyguard. It’s not my fault he blew it. Look, if you can get me out of town, I can get you two hundred dollars right away. That’s the ATM limit. I’ll send you a check for the rest.”

  I parked in front of a narrow house with a lopsided porch. A six-foot-long baby Jesus had been mounted on the siding, and it watched us with big blue eyes. I turned off the engine, then turned around, took the gun from Catherine, and dropped it into my pocket. She went back to doing nothing. I wished I had the real Catherine here. This next part needed an investigator.

  “I heard you talking to the professor outside the Wilbur house. Right before the floating storm was summoned. How much of that was true?”

  He ran his fingers through the hair above his ears, fluffing the frizzy tangle. His motions were sharp and annoyed. “Oh, come on. Really? Are we going to do this here, on a public street? Are you going to threaten to shoot me in your own car? Please.”

  “You don’t have to be impressed. Just answer my questions.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “More people will die.”

  He snorted. “Oh, noes! More people like the kidnappers who killed my bodyguard! Let’s do everything we can to prevent that!” His voice was raw with contempt.

  I’d had more of him than I could stand. “I don’t think you understand the situation you’re in.”

  “You don’t scare me any more than Paulie did,” he said. “You think this is still high school? You may have been King Dick among the jocks back then, but I have the money, the house, and the job. What do you have except a Walmart name tag?”

  For a moment I just stared at him, astonished. If he’d given that little speech to Arne or one of my old crew, he would have gotten a beating so ferocious he would never stand up straight again. He’d lived all his life in the straight world. He had no idea how to behave in mine.

  I took the pistol from my pocket and fired off a round. It passed through the back window about a foot from his head, but I’m sure it felt much closer.

  Catherine shrieked. Kripke slapped his hand over his face as if he’d been shot. He rubbed at his cheek, then checked his palm for blood. A fleck of gunpowder must have landed on his skin, but he couldn’t tell the difference between a burning speck and an entrance wound.

  “High school?” I said. “I didn’t go to fucking high school. While you were carrying your books in the halls and complaining about homework, I was on the street stealing cars and getting high. I was doing time in juvie for shooting my best friend. Don’t you brag to me about your money or your house, motherfucker. If I want anything you have, I take it. Understand?”

  His eyes were wide and blank, but there seemed to be a little spark of understanding in there. “Everything I said to the professor was true, but there was some stuff I left out.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Okay, um. The guy who baited his way into our server and gave us all that information? He was logging on from somewhere in Bozeman, Montana. And he called himself TheLastKing.”

  King? I knew someone named King. I hoped to God it wasn’t the same guy. “What was his real name?”

  “I don’t know. He always logged in from a public wireless network. We could never find out who he was. We were going to ban him, but his first posts were full of great stuff, so we voted against it.”

  “What did he teach you?”

  “Well,” Kripke said, and swallowed. He lifted his hand close to his chest and pointed at my gun hand. “That’s the closed way on the back of your hand.”

  I felt goose bumps run down my back. He knew more about the spells Annalise put on me than I did. I scowled to hide my excitement. “He taught you to recognize spells? What did he tell you about the closed way?”

  “That it stops physical attacks the way a washed-out road blocks a traveler. That when a primary casts it, the marks are invisible and the skin can feel anything un-spelled skin can feel, but as you go down to secondary, tertiary, and so on, the spells become hard to hide and you lose sensation.”

  I stared at him. Months ago, during our time in Hammer Bay, Annalise had used the word primary to refer to a very powerful sorcerer, but at the time I couldn’t press her for more information.

  I couldn’t press Kripke, either. As soon as he realized I wasn’t testing him—that he had information I wanted—he’d want me to bargain for it.

  “TheLastKing, huh? Did he give any idea who he might be or where he got the information?”

  “Well, he had a spell book.” Kripke’s tone was almost disrespectful.

  “Are you playing with me?”

  “No,” he answered, almost swallowing the word. “He said he had a pair of spell books. He said he stole them, and that if we bought the sapphire dog for him, he’d share six of the spells with us. He didn’t say who he’d stolen them from.”

  “I want to meet him.”

  “I’ll bet, but I’m not going to be able to arrange that. The guys on the server already know I lost the auction. I texted them as soon as the price got out of reach.”

  “All right,” I said. “Then let’s narrow it down by which spell books he has. Can you recognize any of these?” I set the gun on the seat and stripped off my jacket and my shirt. My bare skin prickled in the winter air, but I felt warmer with my wet clothes off. After glancing around to make sure there were no cars coming toward us, I turned on the dome light.

  Kripke squinted at the spells on my chest. “Iron gate,” he sai
d and pointed just below my right collarbone. “It protects against different kinds of mental attacks.”

  “Is that it?”

  He pointed low on my left side, just at the bottom edge of my ribs. “The twisted path. It’s a shape-shifting spell for primaries, but as you go down the … um … chain, it doesn’t do much more than alter your fingerprints and the way people remember you. And you can’t control it. Um, hey, can you control it?”

  This guy was unbelievable. “Still want to know about magic? I guess you haven’t been kidnapped and shot at enough. There’s a lesson to be learned, if you have the brains for it.”

  He didn’t seem to get my point. “You’re part of the society, aren’t you? You’re the reason TheLastKing couldn’t come, because he said you were looking for him. You know who he is, don’t you?”

  “What about the rest?”

  He glanced over my chest and stomach. “I recognize the closed way around the edges, but the other spells … he never went over those. Most of the spells he showed us were for summoning.”

  “What?” If Kripke knew a summoning spell, I was going to drive him out of town and put a bullet in him immediately. There was no way I’d trust this idiot with that much power.

  “Only the written part!” he said quickly. “Only the visible part. He only gave us enough to recognize one. He said that summoning spells don’t decay the way other kinds do, so we’d be seeing more of them.”

  I believed him. He was too brain-damaged to lie this well. I picked up the gun. He winced but stayed silent.

  I laid my thumb against the safety. Should I kill him? A single predator loose in the world could call more of its kind and feed on us until there was nothing left. People who summoned them, or just wanted one, were risking everyone on the planet.

  And Kripke here had tried to buy a predator.

  So. Bullet to the head, right?

  He’d failed here in Washaway, but what if he hunted down a new spell, or bought one directly from his anonymous Internet buddy? Kripke was like a guy who’d tried to buy an A-bomb or a vial of anthrax. I couldn’t arrest him, but could I let him go?

  Annalise had warned me about this. She’d told me that, because I was part of the society, it was my job to make corpses. And yeah, if I’d been ruthless with Ursula, no one would have known I was on the estate and the floating storm wouldn’t have been summoned to hunt me down. I didn’t like it, but being soft on these people had cost lives.

  Kripke cleared his throat. “You’re trying to decide whether you should kill me, right? Because I tried to buy the sapphire dog.”

  “Hell, yeah,” I said.

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “I can help you find TheLastKing. I can even connect you to the others in my group. Some of them claim to have a full spell or two.”

  “You’re offering your friends to me to save your life?”

  I expected him to make excuses, but all he said was: “Yes.” At least he was as blunt with himself as he was with others.

  Kripke had given me an excuse to spare him, and I grasped at it. If someone in the society wanted to kill him later, they could do it after they’d collected his buddies’ spell books.

  “Give me your wallet.” He did. I took out his license and made a point of studying the address, then I tossed it back to him. “I’m not going to drive you out of town, and if you offer me money again, I’m going to punch you in the mouth, understand?”

  “I do.”

  After putting my shirt and jacket back on, I drove through the winding streets until I hit one I recognized. From there I made my way to the Sunset B and B. They had a VACANCY sign in the window. Yin might expect me to turn up here, but I doubted they’d be looking for Kripke.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “A place to hole up tonight. There’s probably a bus in the morning. Ride down to Sea-Tac and catch a flight home. Get a lawyer and tell the cops you came up here because you heard about the festival, but you got robbed. They’ll believe it. Just stick to your story.”

  “On Christmas Eve? I’ll never catch a flight!”

  “Then stay in Washaway. I don’t care. In the airport you’d have to eat overpriced food and wait around a really long time. I’m sure you’d rather be kidnapped again.”

  “You’re right,” he said, and for the first time I heard a note of humility in his voice. “Of course you’re right. I … I just …”

  “I don’t care,” I told him. “Get out.” He opened the door. “And Stuart? You’ll be hearing from me. Do I need to tell you not to mention our deal to anyone?”

  “No, sir,” he said, which startled the hell out of me. He left the car and walked up the gravel path.

  I did a quick U-turn and started back toward town. Did I have enough gas to keep driving around looking for Dolan?

  A pickup started its engine and pulled up next to me. I was reaching for my ghost knife when I recognized the driver. It was Ford, Steve’s friend with the Wilford Brimley mustache who had gone to check on Little Mark’s head injury. “By God, it’s about time!” he said. His voice was deep and clear like a country-music singer’s.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Chief asked me to fetch you. He said there’s some dead Chinese millionaire fellas you need to identify. You want to follow me?”

  That changed things. “Give me a minute.” I turned to Catherine. She was still staring at me with cow eyes. I couldn’t keep dragging her around with me. Ursula could have killed her, and Catherine would have sat there and let it happen. Not to mention what the sapphire dog would do to her.

  But if Yin was dead, the Sunset would be safe for her again. “Go up to the room and get some sleep.” I gave her my key. I was going to say more, but she opened the door, shut it, and walked up the front path without asking for an explanation. She’d do whatever I asked without question. It was creepy.

  Ford had his cellphone to his ear. He held up one fat finger without looking at me. Then he said, “Okay,” and switched it off. “Change of plans,” he said to me. “Follow behind.”

  He backed up and did a three-point turn. I followed him around the block, past Hondo’s darkened garage to a street I hadn’t seen before. There was a shoe store, a gift shop, and what could only be the town hall Steve had mentioned. It was made of red brick, but the window ledges were marble, and at four stories, it towered over the other buildings on the block. Four round steps led up to a pair of unlikely stone columns and a single cramped door.

  We parked in the adjoining lot. Ford waddled toward the back of the building and down concrete stairs to a basement door. We were going in the back entrance.

  The room we entered had three more chairs and one more desk that it could comfortably hold. Papers were jumbled everywhere, and the corkboard on the wall was six deep with tattered flyers.

  As Ford shut the door behind me, a heavy wooden door across the room opened. A black woman with Coke-bottle glasses came in. It was Sherisse again, who had gone with Ford to pick up Little Mark. She was younger than I’d first thought, and she trundled forward to give Ford a quick kiss on the lips. “Thank you for coming,” she said in a ragged, whispery voice.

  “Of course, sugar kitten. What do you need?”

  “I couldn’t get through to Steve,” she answered. “And I need him to know about this. Come on.” She looked at me. “You can come too, if you think you can be useful.”

  She needed three steps to turn herself around, then she led us through the back door. The next room had a single desk and a huge boiler in the far corner. When Sherisse closed the door, I saw the jail cell.

  It was only about seven feet by four feet. Inside was a bare wooden bench that someone had taken from a picnic table. Penny lay on the bench, her face slack. She was dead. One glance told me that.

  Little Mark sat slumped in the corner. He was dead, too. Within the confined space of the cell, he was as far from his mother as he could be.

  “My God,” Ford said. “What ha
ppened?”

  “I thought they would want to be together, so when I brought Little Mark here, I put him with his mother. He didn’t seem to mind, but they didn’t even talk to each other. They wouldn’t even look at each other.”

  Ford cleared his throat. “Honey song, how did they die?”

  “Well, Penny started yelling at me, but it was all gibberish. Her left arm was hanging at her side like she couldn’t move it, her left eye was partly closed, and she started drooling. My Auntie Gertie had a stroke while she was teaching me to make piecrust, so I knew what was happening. I called 911 right away, but it was already too late. They were both … like this.”

  “Strokes?” Ford said. “Well, Little Mark did bump his head.…”

  “But both at the same time?” Sherisse said.

  She was right. That wasn’t a coincidence. “Have they had any visitors?” I was suddenly sure that Pratt had killed them both with one of his sigils, just to be careful.

  Sherisse seemed surprised by my question. She glanced behind her. There were two doors beside the cell: one had a sign that said RESTROOM hung on it, and the other was unmarked. She had glanced at the unmarked door. “No one that has anything to do with Penny or Little Mark.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Who?”

  Ford cleared his throat. “If Sheri says—”

  I lunged between them, stepped up onto the chair, and jumped the desk. Neither of them reacted quickly enough to stop me. I rushed to the unmarked door and yanked it open.

  The next room was dark, lit only by the glow of a small television. Fantasia was playing, and three small children sat in front of it, legs crossed, faces pale and serious.

  The sudden light from the opened door made them all turn toward me. “Momma?” the smallest one said, but when he saw it was me, he turned back to the show. The sound was very low, and I realized that there were six or seven more kids bundled up in blankets and sleeping bags on the couch and carpet.