Circle of Enemies: A Twenty Palaces Novel

by Harry Connolly

  When she was done, she tossed the bin onto the carpet behind her.

  “Boss,” I said weakly. I wanted to die, and I thought I could make her do it for me. “Annalise. I’m going to kill you for this.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me at all,” she said as she sat back in the chair. She took a white ribbon from her pocket and held it up. I knew what her white ribbons did, and I was hungry for it. I looked at the sigil at the bottom and fell into unconsciousness.

  When I awoke, it was daylight. Annalise was sitting beside me.

  And my pain was gone. I sat up and looked down at my legs. There were no bandages on them, and the skin looked pale and healthy. And hairless.

  “We have clean clothes for you,” Annalise said. “Still want to kill me?”

  “Boss, I …”

  “Forget about it. You handled it better than I did, that first time.”

  “Golem flesh?”

  “I hate the name,” she said. “I don’t know who called it that, but it’s the name that stuck. Remember when I took that bullet in the eye?”

  I did remember. She’d gone on talking and walking around with a huge hole in her head. My throat felt thick at the memory. I nodded.

  “Well, you won’t be that tough. Not for a long time. Golem flesh takes a while to have its full effect. The spell is still changing for me, too. But here’s the deal: you need to eat meat every day. Your body will break down if you don’t. Also, you can heal injuries by eating flesh—the more recently killed, the more effective it will be. Over time—over decades, really—you’ll have less pain and less impairment from each wound. Eventually, massive injuries won’t do much more than make you look like an extra in a shitty horror movie. That’ll take a long time, but when it happens you’ll be like a person made of clay. Sort of.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. My hands were resting on my bare legs, and I pinched myself. Annalise noticed.

  “You aren’t dreaming. And I didn’t put this spell on you. Csilla did. I don’t have the power for it.” She took a long breath. “I called in a favor for this.”

  She had put another spell on me. She’d healed me. It had been hellish, but it wasn’t as bad as skin grafts, physical therapy, and a lifetime of scars. “Boss, we have a lot to talk about.”

  She gave me a quick nod and stood briskly from her chair. “Your new clothes are on the table. Put them on and come out to debrief us.”

  They were white briefs, faded blue jeans, a green T-shirt, and white socks and sneakers. The briefs would cramp my style, but what the hell. Beside them was a brand-new cellphone. Annalise hadn’t said it was mine, but she hadn’t said it wasn’t. I slipped it into the pocket of my new jeans; if she didn’t want me to take things, she was going to have to put them away.

  My room had a little bathroom, so I went inside for some water. I thought I really ought to be shaking and unsteady, but I felt strong. I felt like a man who’d slept. I touched my bare face and leg; it felt like skin, not clay. For now.

  There was a drinking glass on the sink, and when I unwrapped it, I realized it was made of actual glass, not plastic. I filled it, drained it, and filled it again.

  In the mirror, I found the new mark on my ribs under my left arm. It was in black, like my others, and the swoops and curls suggested images of …

  I looked away. It was dangerous to study magic too closely.

  My face was covered with dry sweat, so I brought my new clothes into the bathroom and took a quick shower.

  When I finally went out to the main room, Annalise, Talbot, and the old woman in the black shawl were sitting at the table under the chandelier. They were serving themselves from a platter of bacon, hard-boiled eggs, sausage patties, fried potatoes, and toast. No one spoke to me as I approached the table and began to serve myself, too.

  “Thank you, Csilla,” I said to the old woman.

  She looked up at me with a vague expression. “You’d better be worth it.”

  Worth what? I didn’t know what it had cost her to cast the spell on me, and I squelched the urge to ask. She had already started staring dreamily at an empty spot on the wall. I sat, cut a small piece of bacon, and put it into my mouth. I didn’t vomit or have a seizure. The flavor seemed muted, but I didn’t have the urge to spit it out.

  While I chewed, I tried to decide what to tell Annalise and the other peer. I knew them well enough to know what would happen if I told them about the drapes. It’d be like putting out a contract on Arne and the others.

  But what could I leave out? It wasn’t just that Annalise would kill me if I tried to shield another friend—she would, but that wasn’t the important part. The important part was that protecting my friends would almost certainly unleash more predators on the world.

  And there was the thought that had been lurking in my mind ever since Melly was carried away. Luther had been lying at the bottom of the tub in his house the whole time I’d been there, and when he died, his drape carried him away and two more came through.

  That had to have been what happened, because that’s what happened to Melly. The only difference was that three drapes had come through when she died. Did that mean four would come through when the next one died? Five for the one after that?

  I tried to do some quick math, but the others were staring at me and the numbers jumbled in my head. Damn. I’d been lucky that the first two victims had died indoors and close to me. If Summer, Ty, or one of the others keeled over in a subway station, or outside a Starbucks, the drapes would be free to hunt in secret. In no time, people would vanish by the thousands until the whole world was empty.

  My friends were important to me, but were they more important than the survival of every living thing on the planet?

  I told Annalise, Csilla, and Talbot everything. I didn’t sugarcoat it, and I didn’t hold back any names. I even told them about the Bugatti, Wardell, and Steve Francois.

  While I spoke, Annalise stared at me the way a cat stares at a mouse hole. Talbot kept eating; he was paying careful attention, but he was trying to be casual about it. Csilla stared off into space and didn’t seem to know I was there.

  When I was done, I realized I still didn’t have my ghost knife. I asked for it. Annalise nodded at Talbot, and he resentfully fetched it for me.

  “These ‘drapes’ are minor stuff,” Annalise said.

  I was startled. “What do you mean, boss?”

  “The big question is this: Why is your old buddy Wally King making operatives in L.A.?”

  It was hard to imagine Arne or Fidel as an operative of Wally’s, but they owed him, and he could collect at any time.

  “He’s trying to end the world,” I said.

  “Seriously?” Talbot said, a crooked, swollen-lipped smirk on his face. “I’m sitting here squirting ketchup on home fries, and we’re talking about a guy who wants to destroy the world?”

  “He thinks it’s a mercy killing,” I said. “He thinks something worse is going to happen to us. He thinks the whole world is going to be—” Talbot was still smirking. “Is this funny to you?”

  “No no!” he said, smiling wide enough to show teeth. “It’s just …”

  “I know.” Talbot didn’t have to say it. He felt like a hero, fighting to save the world, and he loved it.

  “There is a dream in my eye,” Csilla suddenly said. “I see strangers and darkness and a thought as large as the universe.”

  After a moment of awkward silence, Annalise said: “We know what he wants. Why does he think he can make it happen here, in Los Angeles?”

  “I pressed him to find out what he was doing, but …” What was I supposed to say? He started calling me a rock star and I got distracted? “I’m sorry. I was focused on the predators. All he told me is that he needed people to get a puzzle. He had a simple plan to steal it, but he blew it.”

  Annalise put down her fork. “He had a simple plan?”

  “He’s not a smart guy, boss. I don’t think he could plan a meal, let alone
an elaborate crime.”

  “Have you seen this?” Talbot asked between bites of toast. He slid a newspaper across the table toward me. At the top was a notice about security preparations for the president to speak at the L.A. Convention Center about renewable energy or something. But below that was a follow-up article on the movie star break-in. Ms. Egan-Jade’s spokesperson said the actress was going to sell her house without returning to it. She’d also set aside a trust fund for the murdered housecleaner’s children. Apparently, the woman had died. To Egan-Jade’s credit, she also blasted unnamed media personalities who had expressed relief that “only” a housekeeper had been killed.

  I liked her just for that. At the bottom of the article, it stated that police had no leads but were investigating puzzling aspects of the case.

  I glanced up at the others. They were watching me, waiting impatiently for me to finish. “Puzzling aspects?” I asked.

  Csilla narrowed her eyes. “So many dreams that they come to life. Puzzling.” I couldn’t tell if she was responding to me or not.

  Talbot smiled. If it stretched and hurt his fat lip, he didn’t show it. “See, that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s surprisingly hard to get information out of the cops in this town. Easy to get them to crack you on the head with a stick, but hard to get them to take a bribe.” He spoke like he was giving a performance, and he was so snide about it that I wanted to punch him again.

  “We are beautiful children swimming in the belly of the great fish,” Csilla said.

  “I found out some interesting things, though,” Talbot continued. I glanced at Annalise; she watched Talbot carefully, absorbed by what he was saying. Not two years ago, she had refused to tell me anything about the job we were on, and now I was allowed to sit at the grown-up table for the grown-up talk. It was a big change, and it felt good. Talbot kept talking: “For instance, Ms. Egan-Jade’s home had a state-of-the-art security system. Cameras everywhere, and even a guard with a twelve-gauge to look over things. The cameras were running, too. The cops have a digital video of the break-in.”

  “Who did it?” I asked.

  “Nobody,” he said, and he smiled as though he was pleased with himself. “I’ve seen the video. The lock on the front gate breaks apart and swings open a few feet, but no one is there. When the guard shows up to check it out, he collapses from no apparent cause. It was an hour before the cops found him, stretched out in some bushes. He’s in a coma now. Brain damage. They don’t think he’ll wake up, and you don’t hear anyone talking about him on the news, or his kids, but hey, he’s just a white male.

  “Anyway, the cops don’t have a recording of the attack, but it’s not the only one. There have been several different break-ins around the city—women’s homes, banks, jewelry stores, all sorts of places.”

  “Where? Do you have a map or something?”

  Talbot snorted. “No. I don’t have pushpins, either. But some of them take place at different locations at pretty much the same time, so we know it’s more than one of your friends doing it. The cops think someone has a new, superfast version of Photoshop, and the burglars are bringing a laptop to erase themselves from the video files, somehow. There were two break-ins last night, in fact. A jewelry store and a convent. Two women were killed.”

  I nodded. Was this Wally’s plan? To create people who could break in anywhere, stir up the cops with these crimes, and … And what? What would he get out of that?

  Nothing. Wally wasn’t the type to create chaos. Events were hard enough to predict under normal circumstances, and I couldn’t imagine him drawing more danger to himself.

  But he had brought me down to L.A., knowing I wanted to kill him. Caramella had said she was doing a favor by visiting me, and Arne said favors were what Wally expected in return for his “super powers.” Wally wanted me and the Twenty Palace Society to take care of the drapes, yeah, and the drapes allowed people to break in anywhere without getting caught, but what if Wally expected to be long gone by the time we got here?

  “Where was the first break-in?” I asked.

  CHAPTER NINE

  For once, we didn’t drive in Annalise’s battered Dodge Sprinter. Csilla had a black Grand Vitara, which was a little embarrassing, but at least Talbot had to drive. I sat in back.

  We skirted a country club, got lost for a short while as Talbot drove in circles, then finally pulled up to a house in Hancock Park. There were iron gates along the front, with heavy green foliage blocking the view of the house.

  “This is it,” Talbot said, sounding relieved.

  “What’s the story?” I asked.

  “This one we don’t know as much about, because my source wasn’t that interested. There was a break-in, same as the others, but the video was shut off two minutes in, which no one bothered with in later invasions. Another difference was that there was no one home at the time; the guy who lives here was in San Diego. The cops checked him out like they always do but couldn’t find anything suspicious. They think the invaders hit the wrong house, waited around for the person they expected, got bored, and finally split.”

  That sounded like crap to me. I opened the door.

  Csilla roused herself. “Where are you going?”

  “Where do you think?” I turned to Annalise. She had put on her fireman’s jacket and heavy boots; they were her fighting clothes, and they made her look a little wacky. “Um, boss—”

  “Ray, I’m going to wait here. I’ll keep Csilla company.”

  “Go with him,” Csilla told Talbot. She seemed almost lucid.

  “Ray.” Annalise stared at me intently. “Be extremely careful in there.” I nodded, wondering what the hell was going on.

  Talbot followed me to the front gate. The lock had been broken—I could see the marks of the crowbar—and it hadn’t been repaired yet. A blue supermarket twist tie held the two halves of the gate together.

  I undid them and pushed the gate open. The heavy bushes and trees were as thick as a jungle. I was sure the owner received regular visits from the city to discuss his water use.

  “Smells nice,” Talbot said. “Big-money Los Angeleeze house. Comes with its own perfume.” He sounded as though he disapproved, but I didn’t know why and I didn’t care.

  The house had a stone foundation and green-painted wood above that. I couldn’t say exactly why, but the place looked like a haunted house. There were pry marks on the doorjamb by the dead bolt. That hadn’t been repaired yet, either.

  The trees and bushes were growing close enough to the house that I could have climbed up and broken in through an unlocked window upstairs. There was a thin trail that led to the side of the house. I didn’t circle around. Instead I knocked four times with the knocker, then looked up into the camera above the door. I didn’t feel like smiling.

  After a few moments, the door creaked open a few inches and a man put his face in the gap. He was short, with a trim black mustache and a flabby face. He squinted at us a bit, his dark eyes straining against the sun.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. He sounded nervous.

  “We’d like to talk to you about the break-in that happened at your house,” I said.

  “Are you police?” he asked, but it was clear he already knew the answer.

  Talbot started to say something that might have been yes, but I cut him off. “No. Can we talk? It could be important.”

  He looked uncomfortable. He didn’t like the idea, but he opened the door anyway. We followed him inside.

  Instead of opening into a room, the door led to a narrow hallway. The place was underlit, making everything seem dark and faintly unclean. The air smelled of unvacuumed carpet and Szechwan spices. “Thank you for giving us your time.” I extended my hand. “I’m Ray Lilly.” Someday, I was going to have to come up with a decent alias for society missions.

  He shook it. “Lino Vela. I don’t understand who you guys are or why you’re here. The police are already working on this.”

  This time, it was Talbot who cut me
off. “Anyone else in the house?”

  Lino was startled and alarmed by the question. “What?”

  “That’s not important,” I said to Talbot.

  He gave me an annoyed look. “Experience tells me it is. So how about it? Anyone else here?”

  “No,” Lino said out of politeness, but I could tell he resented it. Victim, I thought, but I shook that off. Those thoughts were a habit I didn’t need anymore.

  I tried to steer the conversation back to the job. “I understand nothing was taken?”

  “Who are you guys? Why are you here?”

  “That’s not important,” Talbot said.

  “We’ve been asked to look into these break-ins. We’re not with the police, and you don’t have any obligation to talk to us. But we’re hoping you’ll help us put a stop to this.”

  He’d been about to ask us to leave, which would have ruined my chance to get information from him, not to mention that I couldn’t tell how Talbot would react. Now he hesitated.

  “Who are you working for? Is it Jade?” The familiarity of his tone threw me for a second, until I realized we were talking about a movie star. He probably thought of her as a part of his extended family.

  “That’s not something we can talk about. I’m sorry. And if the police knew we were asking questions, that would make things hard for certain parties.”

  “It’s not her, I guess. Or is it?”

  I made an expression of regret. “Will you help us?”

  He sighed. “Let’s go sit down.”

  He led us into a front room. The lights in there were brighter, and there was so much furniture—chairs, shelves, desks, cupboards—that the room felt cramped. All of it was old, made of dark wood, and just about every horizontal surface had something on it. I walked past hand-painted plates, battered oil lamps, fabric dolls, hand-stitched leather balls, and an antique sewing machine with a foot pedal. It was all crammed together as though this was a showcase instead of a home.

  Lino offered us tea, but we declined. “Why don’t you guys take the sofa?” he said. He settled into a creaky wooden rocking chair beside the curtained window. Talbot and I sat on the red couch. The velvet had been worn shiny, but it was comfortable. Opposite us were the only modern touches in the room: a flat-screen TV, a mini-fridge, and an Xbox. A tiny end table was covered with coasters but nothing else. In the back corner was a desk littered with papers and stacks of books.