“My father,” Olga said, nodding into a living room where an older man in a stained T-shirt sat in a recliner in front of a television. When he squinted over at us, I raised a hand in greeting. He took a gulp from a mug and turned his face back to the glowing screen.
“Always drunk,” Olga explained, not bothering to lower her voice. “Give me pack. Phone is in kitchen.”
I did as she said and found the wall-mounted phone. Fortunately, it was a rotary dial, like my own. I pulled James’s number from my wallet along with a phone card. After a minute of dialing, the line began to ring.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“James, it’s Everson.”
“Dude,” he said over the scratchy line. “Holy shit.”
My heart thudded. “What’s going on?”
“Alright, so I drove up to the Catskills yesterday, and the house is toast.”
“Burned down?” I asked, already knowing.
“To the foundation. Neighbors said it happened a couple of years ago. They had no idea what ’came of Elsie. I went to the local police station and asked there, but they didn’t know anything either. Not what started the fire or wherever Elsie might have gone. Her body wasn’t found among the ruins. It’s like she just dropped off the map.”
I wondered if there was a clump of toadstools in Elsie’s shape somewhere on the property, Elsie’s soul in the pit with Lazlo.
“Did anyone talk about hauntings?” I asked.
“How did you know?”
“Just a hunch.”
“Yeah, police said that not long after the fire, a couple kids drove up there to neck in a convertible. Bodies were found the next morning, both of ’em strangled, necks black and blue. Something similar happened to a hiker.”
I rubbed the spot on my neck where the tentacle had lashed me.
“They never found the perp, so rumors about angry spirits started popping up,” he continued. “When I was walking around that place, something felt off to me, foul. Couldn’t nail it down, though.”
I could hear my blood swishing in my ears. Two high-level members of the Order slain in the last few years, houses burned to the ground, murderous creatures set loose. But still the same question: Lich or Marlow?
“What did you find in Romania?” James asked.
“Same thing,” I said hollowly. “Lazlo’s house had been burned to the ground. His remains were in the cellar. Something used them as a portal to attack me, shadow creatures from Dhuul’s realm. Probably the same things that killed those kids in the Catskills.”
James was lucky they hadn’t attacked him.
“What in the hell are we dealing with?” he asked.
“Whisperer shit,” I said. “Nightmares from that realm are coming through. Right now the seams are few and far between, and the shadow creatures seem to be staying in proximity to the bodies, but if whoever’s behind it completes the portal, it’s going to get really ugly. ”
“And you still don’t know whether it’s the bluff or the double bluff?”
“I don’t,” I admitted.
“And nothing from the Order?”
“Not a peep.”
“Maybe that’s your answer,” he offered.
“Or maybe that’s just the Order being the Order.”
“So what do we do?” James asked. “Just wait around?”
“I’m going to make another call. I’ll find you when I get back to the States.”
“I can send an update to the Order,” he offered.
“Yeah, please do.” Though I wondered if there was any point.
We hung up and I dialed Detective Vega.
“Croft,” she said. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”
“I must be out of satellite range.” I checked the pager—no signal—and put it away again. “Were you able to take a look at those files?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. For most of them, the names weren’t unique enough to be reliable identifiers. I couldn’t pull up anything on those. But on the ones that were unique, there’s nothing.”
“Nothing?” I said. “What do you mean nothing?”
“They’re not in the records databases. No addresses, phone numbers, voter registrations, utility bills, court records. There’s nothing, Croft. That’s what I’m telling you. It’s like they don’t exist.”
“They’re dead?”
“More like never born. Could this Chicory have, I don’t know, made them up?”
I felt my face screwing up as I considered the question. I’d found my file, James’s file. His wasn’t made up … or was it? “Hey, did the department do a background check on James before you contracted him?”
“Hold on.” Through the buzzing line, I heard a keyboard clacking. I bit my lower lip. After another few minutes, she said, “Yeah, he’s on here. And I just double-checked the public records. He’s legit.”
I released my lip. “Good. But the others…?”
“Nothing,” she repeated.
I tried to think about it from two perspectives. In the Chicory as Lich case, he would have left the files out, knowing I would track down James—whom he had warned of my arrival in advance. The remaining files would be fakes, denying me access to the magic-using community. But in the Chicory as Chicory case, my mentor might have done the exact same thing, knowing that if I was captured by the Front, I’d be carrying Whisperer magic. Like someone infected with a virus, I would have to be quarantined, possibly even killed, so as not to infect other magic-users.
By winning over James, had I done just that?
“There’s no info on Chicory’s license plate either,” Vega said. “It’s a made-up number.”
That didn’t surprise me. Knowing Chicory, he’d probably enchanted it into inconspicuousness to avoid the hassle of registration. But did I know Chicory? I blew out my breath in frustration.
“Dare I ask how things are going?” Vega asked.
“Not good,” I said, looking around the kitchen. Simple folk charms adorned several shelves, and I noticed someone had lined the window sills with salt. “How about there? I mean, apart from the files.”
Vega gave a tired snort. “You’d think it’s a full moon. Crimes are up across the city.”
“Monsters?” I asked, thinking of the shadow beings.
“Nut cases,” she replied. “All the perps have psych issues of one kind or another, and we’re running out of places to stick them. The hospitals’ lockdown wards are at full capacity. There was a riot over at Bellevue last night. The patients went full zombie, biting anything in sight. Not even sleeping gas could subdue them. The police ended up having to shackle them.”
“Jeez,” I said, imagining the scene. I remembered what I’d told James about things getting uglier if the main portal to Dhuul were to open. Were we witnessing the beginning?
“You might want to stay put,” Vega said dryly.
“I’m actually flying back tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know if I learn anything else about the case. Right now, we’re still looking at Marlow or Chicory.”
“Are you leaning more toward one or the other?” Vega asked.
I thought about it for a moment. Either Connell and Arianna had told me the truth or they had screwed with my head so badly that I didn’t know which way was up. I wanted to tell Vega I was still leaning toward Marlow. Instead, I banged my forehead against the plaster wall twice.
“No,” I said.
17
That night I had horrible, disjointed dreams of death and decay.
Lazlo’s wolf-torn eye appeared from a mound of toadstools. I hurt, he repeated in a wet, whispering voice. I hurt, Everson. Shadowy tentacles lashed and grabbed me. I struggled to fight through them, to burn Lazlo’s remains and close the portal.
And then the scene changed to a locked psych ward. Patients with blood-smeared faces and limp robes moaned and shrieked on all sides. I looked around for my cane, but I didn’t have it. My coin pendant was gone from my chest.
With insane eyes, the patients closed in. A stink of rot rose from them. I batted at their grasping hands, but there were too many of them.
Their eyes turned into fungus-filled sockets as they seized me and pulled me toward their gaping mouths. Mouths that became dark, fang-lined pits, plummeting to the very heart of madness.
I thrashed awake, blood roaring in my ears. I immediately sensed I wasn’t alone in the guest bedroom. I turned my head. A white T-shirt with a swollen belly seemed to float in the center of the room. As my eyes adjusted, the rest of Olga’s father emerged from the gloom.
He groaned as he hefted an axe overhead.
“Vigore!” I shouted, swinging my cane toward him.
The force blast caught Olga’s father in the stomach and propelled him into the far wall. The axe fell, the blade burying itself in the middle of the wooden floor. Olga’s father began to sob. A moment later, footsteps ran down the hallway, and the bedroom light flicked on. I looked from Olga’s father to Olga, who stood in the doorway. I’d placed a locking spell over the door the night before, but it must have come apart during my nightmare.
Olga rushed to her father and helped him to his feet. “Come, Papa,” she said in scolding Slovak.
“Holy hell,” I breathed, sitting up on the side of the bed, my heart still galloping at full tilt.
Olga walked her sobbing father from the room, bits of plaster falling from the back of his head. There was a bowl-shaped indentation in the wall where he’d impacted. Olga returned a minute later.
“I am sorry,” she said. “The drinking has made him sick up here.” She tapped her temple as she pried the axe from the floor.
“You think?” I asked, my voice hard and shaky.
“I fix your breakfast then take you to train.”
I checked my watch and nodded. It wasn’t like I was going to fall back to sleep anyway.
Thirty minutes later I sat across from Olga, bowls of porridge in front of us. We ate in silence for several minutes.
“So how long has he been like that?” I asked softly, feeling bad for having raised my voice at her in the bedroom. From the back of the house, I could hear her father snoring deeply.
“He has been drinking long time,” she said. “But he turned sick a week ago.”
“What do you mean ‘turned sick’?”
“Getting up at night. Chasing dogs around yard. This was first time he carried axe.”
Would have been nice if you’d shared the bit about his mental health before inviting me to stay the night, I thought, but didn’t say it. I was lining up the info on her father with what Vega had told me about the sudden rise in crimes back in New York, the riot in the hospital’s psych ward…
He turned sick a week ago.
That would have been about the same time I destroyed what I thought was Lich’s book. The act should have deprived Marlow of his power. But if Connell was telling the truth, if I had instead destroyed an Elder book that had been jamming Lich’s portal, then my act would have given the portal new life.
Allowing more Whisperer magic through, I thought.
But that was assuming the spike in insanity was a result of Whisperer magic. I could just as easily be seeing a connection where none existed. Or being made to see one. I thought.
“Why did you come?” Olga asked suddenly.
I looked up, only now realizing she had been watching me for the last minute. “I told you,” I said, picking through my milky porridge with a spoon. “I wanted to check on an old friend.”
“You needed his help,” she stated.
I started to nod, then caught myself. “What makes you say that?”
“It is in your eyes.”
Something in her forwardness made the skin over my chest prickle. I thought about how she had been waiting for me in the truck yesterday, how she had appeared with a shotgun armed with salt at Lazlo’s house, how she just happened to have a spare room for me to stay in. Like James, had she been warned about my coming? Beneath the table, I gripped my cane.
“You knew I’d show up here,” I said.
“Yes,” she admitted, taking a large bite of porridge.
I scooted the chair out and stood, pulling my sword from my staff. “Who told you?”
She finished chewing, unconcerned by my weapon. “Bones.”
“Bones? Who the hell is Bones?”
I flinched when she stood, but she walked the other direction into the kitchen, where she opened a cupboard. I watched her carefully. She returned with a small leather pouch, which she held out to me. No magic stirred around it. I hesitated before I moved my sword to my staff hand and opened the pouch with two fingers. It contained a pile of small animal bones.
“Oh,” I said, feeling foolish.
She had been referring to cleromancy, or bone-reading, a folk practice as old as human settlement. One many people still dabbled in. For the reading to be accurate, though, the diviner or the divination object needed to possess magic, and I sensed none in either.
Olga sat again. “I can do reading if you want.”
“What did you see?” I asked. “In your earlier reading?”
“I was told that a man of great power would come. That he was trying to know something.”
“I don’t know about the great power part,” I mumbled.
“I saw what you did at the house,” she said. “You made fire with voice.”
She was talking about the fuoco invocation, when I’d cremated Lazlo’s remains to close the vent to Dhuul’s realm.
“The bones said I would help this man,” Olga finished.
She had already pushed our bowls and coffee mugs to one side of the table. Now she opened the pouch and upended it. The assortment of bones from what looked like a large rodent spilled over the table. Olga’s brown eyes seemed to darken a shade as she gazed down on them.
“I see confusion,” she said, her fingers hovering over a configuration of rib bones.
You’ve got that right, I thought, though she could also have overheard my conversations with James and Vega last night. I’m sure I had sounded plenty confused then.
“You are torn between difficult choices.” Her strong, country fingers moved back and forth between where the bones seemed to have landed in two roughly equal quantities. “Is it this one, or this one?”
Lich or Marlow? I thought.
“And here is your answer,” she said.
I leaned forward despite that I still felt no magic around the ceremony. Olga was pointing at a small, solitary shoulder blade that had fallen in between the two groupings of bones.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“That when you understand what this single thing means”—she tapped the shoulder blade—“one choice will fall away.” In demonstration, she swept the bones on the right side off the table into her waiting palm and returned them to the pouch. “It will no longer be both.”
No more fifty-fifty, in other words.
I eyed the shoulder blade for another moment. The shape of it seemed to tug at something in my mind, but I couldn’t say what. Anyway, what was the point? There was nothing mystical at work here.
“Great … thanks,” I said.
She nodded and swept the remaining bones into the pouch and tied it off. How desperate had I become that I was looking to a mortal with a bag of rat bones for answers?
I pulled the pager from my pocket to see if it was getting a signal. Still out of range. I pocketed it again, hoping it would pick something up at the train station. James had planned to contact the Order, and in the off chance they’d responded, I wanted to know as soon as possible. I started to imagine James waving his message over his flaming cup and then stiffened.
The cups.
I thought of my own silver cup. Narrower at the bottom, wider as you approached the rim. From the side, it looked roughly like…
“A shoulder blade,” I said.
“You understand?” Olga asked.
I stared but without seeing her.
I had been told that our cups gave us access to an administrative branch of the Order. An office where communications were prioritized and then sent up the appropriate channels for decisions to be made, which were sent back down and shot to us as responses. But if there was no Order, then those same communications were more than likely going to the one person most interested in keeping tabs on us.
I thought of the gold cup I’d found in Chicory’s room.
When Olga’s face reappeared beyond my thoughts, a small smile was wrinkling the beauty mark above her lips. “Your eyes have changed,” she said. “You understand the meaning.”
“I think so, yeah,” I replied, my heart beating urgently. Like Olga’s rock salt, sometimes the best magic was no magic. “How soon can we leave for the train station?”
“As soon as you are ready,” she said.
I stood quickly. “Give me five minutes.”
I’ve got a gold cup to hack.
18
Somewhere over Spain it occurred to me that I might not have to hack Chicory’s cup. My own cup required an incantation to send messages, but not to receive them. As long as my cup was jetting a flame, the messages arrived on their own. Hopefully, Chicory’s cup operated the same way—in which case, it would just be a matter of igniting the oil crystal.
By the time the plane touched down at Newark International, I was running on unhealthy levels of adrenaline and caffeine and little else. I shouldered my way through the crowds and stood in the taxi line outside.
“Where to?” a cabbie asked when my turn came.
I climbed into his backseat with my pack. “Gehr Place. Near 495.”
He nodded and shifted his ample bulk as he put the cab in gear and reset the meter. “Where you coming in from?”
“Eastern Europe.”
He snorted. “Surprised you were in a hurry to get back.”
“What do you mean?”
“You haven’t been following? The city’s a flipping zoo. Last night, we had maniacs running around the streets, climbing buildings, breaking windows. A couple of ’em tried tipping over my taxi on East Fourteenth. Told dispatch I was done for the night. Screw that.”
“Who were they?” I asked.
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