Twenty Palaces: A Prequel

by Harry Connolly

  She sneered. Jon stepped through the doorway and slammed it shut. They were gone.

  I slumped against the wall. I'd screwed up in a big, big way. I held up my ghost knife. It cut through magic, ghosts and dead things. It had never cut a person's flesh before. Did that mean Payton was already dead? Had Jon's so-called cure killed him?

  That didn't make sense. I'd hit Jon with the ghost knife, and all it had done was cut his "ghost", not his flesh. I'd used it on Echo, too, while holding her with Irena's glove. There had been no black blood or sliced flesh then, either. Just another cut at her ghost.

  Not that I had any idea what that meant. In truth, I had no idea what I was doing. Everything that had happened to me since I'd arrived in Seattle had been like a waking nightmare. All I could do was rush from one moment to the next, hoping I could stay ahead of all the people who wanted to kill me long enough to save my friend.

  I crouched next to Payton's body. "I'm sorry, big guy."

  But not too sorry. Payton had tried to clean me like a fish, which meant this mess in front of me was self-defense. I tried to imagine explaining that to the cops, what with me being an ex-con who'd already broken out of jail after less than a week of freedom.

  No, no. Think about cops and prison later. For now, I had to cure Jon, stop Echo from summoning more cousins and head off the peer from the Twenty Palace Society who was coming to "clean up" the mess we were all making. After all that, I'd... What? Change my name and head to Costa Rica, maybe. I sure wasn't going to be a free man in my own country.

  And I would have to be more careful with Callin's damn spell. Truthfully, I had no idea what it was doing to the people I used it on. Maybe I'd seal it in concrete and drop it into Elliott Bay on my way to South America.

  Ghosts, magic and dead things. Which were the cousins?

  I looked down at Payton again, but he didn't look like a human being any more, not with his head deformed that way. And maybe that's what I was missing. The ghost knife had hit Jon in the chest and Echo on the arm, but Payton had been cut on the head. Maybe the cousins--and I might as well start calling them that--lived inside their victim's skulls.

  It was an ugly thought. If one did live inside Jon's skull, wouldn't it have destroyed his brain? Jon's personality and memories were still intact, so it didn't seem likely. Then again, when I'd grabbed Payton and Echo with Irena's glove, the weird branches had appeared around their faces and heads.

  So maybe they were inside Jon, Payton and Macy's skulls. If, as Annalise had said, the cousins were only partly real, it was possible that they could live inside someone's skull while leaving the person intact.

  For once I did not have to operate by empty guesswork. If I wanted to know if the cousins could share a space inside a human skull with that person's brain, I could just kneel down on Wally's disgusting living room floor and look for myself.

  I knelt beside the body, careful not to get any sticky black blood on my clothes. I did my best not to look directly at his deformed face, only the side and top of his head. I pretended that the hair wasn't really hair, the bone wasn't really bone. I was looking at an open shell, not a person at all.

  It was too dark. I took a tissue from a box on the end table and turned on a lamp. It seemed silly to worry about fingerprints now, but the fewer things I touched in this apartment the happier the rest of my life would be.

  I leaned over Payton's body again and peered into the split skull. I saw bone, hair and a shadow. It took me a moment to register what I was seeing, but I soon realized I was looking into Payton's empty skull.

  I felt woozy and backed away from him. I had the urge to laugh, but I was afraid that if I started I would never be able to stop. There was nothing inside Payton's skull. No brain, no meat, no blood. Not even a whole bunch of rocks. Nothing.

  I remembered him standing beside the french fries, saying: "You're wondering why she's with me."

  My stomach twisted and I retched against the wall, but I'd spent the whole day lying on the floor and nothing but a thin stream of bitter acid came out. I stumbled away from the body and lurched against the window.

  Payton had been acting like himself right up to the moment of his death, but he didn't have any gray matter at all. The cousin had replaced it, had mimicked it, and with it all of Payton's memories and quirks.

  Had this already happened to Jon? Was Jon a corpse with one of these things inside him, driving his body like a stolen car?

  Or had Payton's brain been destroyed when the cousin was destroyed?

  That was a thought. Maybe the cousins became truly solid when they died or were forced out of the host's body. After all, when I grabbed them with Irena's glove, the parts I could see were ghostly, hardly real. Something like that could co-exist with an actual, physical thing, couldn't it?

  Maybe, up until the point the cousin was killed, their victims could be saved. Maybe if I could find some way to cut them out of their hosts while they were both still alive, I could still save Jon.

  I held up my ghost knife. I even had the tool for the job.

  There should have been a surge of satisfaction at the idea, but what I got was a sour hollow feeling. It seemed too tenuous, as if I was scamming myself because I just didn't want to face up to facts.

  What if Jon was gone, for real? What if the cousin inside him had killed him even before I'd gotten off the bus from L.A.?

  The truth was, I wasn't sure what I would do with him. I had too many memories of him and his family to think about cutting him open the way I'd cut open Payton. I wasn't sure I could do that.

  But I was getting ahead of myself. Maybe, despite what he said, Wally had a counterspell in his book. If not, I would try the ghost knife. I couldn't imagine how it would actually work, but I had to try.

  I was living on hope, and my supply had nearly run out.

  I glanced out the window. In the street below, Jon and Echo stood beside a telephone pole. Jon was struggling with his cell phone, as though the numbers were in a different language. Then he held it up to his ear and started talking. Echo stared up at the windows of Wally's apartment. At me.

  I bolted from the window. I had no doubt they were calling the cops on me. Jon might have been a cannibal with a monster living inside his brain, but at heart he was still a seat-belt person, and seat-belt people called the cops when they needed help. I yanked the stereo and speakers away from the wall. The stack of blue pages was gone. Wally had taken them.

  The copy I'd been reading was still on the coffee table. It was missing the spell Echo had grabbed, of course, but I didn't need that one. I picked up the stack and checked it for splatters of black blood. It was clean. I tucked it under my jacket.

  I felt dizzy again. I rushed into Wally's tiny kitchen and scanned the contents. The only thing I felt was safe to take was a plastic bag with four oranges inside. On my way to the door, I did my best not to look at Payton.

  There was a little dish on a telephone table by the door, and there was a single engine key inside it. There was also a wad of folded five-dollar bills and a sheet of torn blue paper. I unfolded the paper and saw it was a photocopy of a check written by someone named "Nettle Philips"--if that was a real person's name--with her address printed on it as clear as day. Handwritten beside it was the note: "No hard feelings. Wally."

  Wally had given me a motorcycle and the address of the woman he'd stolen the book from. What a pal. I stuffed the copied check, the key and the money into my pocket, then bolted out the front door and down a stairwell. I would have given Wally's apartment the same treatment Annalise had given Macy and Echo's house, if only to destroy any spells he might have left lying around, but I knew I didn't have time.

  What's more, I didn't know who else was in the building and if they'd be able to get away. I wasn't going to kill innocent bystanders just because I'd screwed up. I'd just have to believe that Wally was the type to have taken everything magical with him.

  There were few vehicles in the basement garage and n
o people. I passed a battered Toyota and an Isuzu minivan to reach an old Honda motorcycle that was so small it was nearly a dirt bike. I yanked the helmet out of the mesh net on the seat and pulled it on, then lowered the tinted visor.

  I revved it and raced out of the garage. As I reached the corner of Wally's block, three police cars raced by. One of the cops looked straight into my blank visor, then straight at my license plate.

  Shit. Now I'd have to ditch the motorcycle, and soon. If only I'd gone the other way. I rode away, staying just below the speed limit. Echo had the spell again, which meant I didn't have much time.

  Nettle Philips lived on the northern side of the University, in one of those secluded little streets that Seattle tucks away on the sides of hills. It was a wooded dead-end lane surrounded by greenbelt too steep for safe development--it didn't even have a sidewalk. Philips's house was set back from the road and hemmed in by bushes and blackberry vines so high you couldn't actually see it from the street.

  I parked the motorcycle down the block and hung the helmet on the handlebars. There was no one around. I double-checked the address and then pushed through the high wooden gate.

  Then immediately stopped short. Whatever had happened here, it had been bad.

  Philips's house was a cozy little California Bungalow, but something had punched huge holes into the walls, making the roof sag in several places. The building leaned toward the greenbelt slope behind it and groaned like it might collapse at any moment.

  I took an orange from the mesh net behind me, peeled it and popped a section into my mouth. I immediately felt better. Whoever this Nettle Philips was, she might have parts of the spell book that Wally didn't, including a way to undo Jon's curse.

  There was no other way. I was going into that house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I finished the orange, letting the sweetness settle my stomach and give me strength. A strong wind ruffled my hair and made the little bungalow groan. I could picture myself crushed under the timbers in that house when it finally went down, but I shrugged the thought off. If I was willing to face Callin, I wasn't going to back down from this.

  The front door bowed out inside the tilted jamb; there was no way I could pull it open. The two front windows were miraculously unbroken, although they also looked as if they were squeezed shut by the crooked frame. The two holes that had been punched through the walls were on the second floor, well out of reach.

  I jogged around to the back of the house. The back door was splintering and squeezed shut, but the little kitchen window was sitting open.

  I approached it carefully, ready to bolt if it started to fall toward me. There was something strange on the wall above the window--five parallel gouges in the wood. I spread my fingers next to them; the scratches had been made by a claw three times the size of my hand.

  And there was something that looked like huge teeth marks on the window sill.

  A predator. Someone had summoned a predator. I drew my ghost knife and carefully climbed through the window.

  The kitchen was dark and chilly. I eased myself into the sink. Something crashed to the floor nearby. I stepped down from the counter into two inches of water.

  All of my thought and energy was turned outward, taking in everything around me. If there was a predator here, I couldn't see it.

  The house groaned. The floor shifted and plates slid out of the cabinets, smashing against the counter and bouncing across the wet floor. I jumped away from the rain of flatware and stumbled into the doorway.

  By the light of a single desk lamp, I saw that the entire living room was coated with ice. Icicles hung from the ceiling and light fixtures. Books, furniture, TV... everything was covered with a dripping coat of ice.

  "What the hell happened here?" I said aloud.

  As if in answer to my question, I saw it: Wedged into the wooden banister was a compact disc with a sigil drawn onto the blank side with a Sharpie.

  Wally must have been the one who summoned a predator to wreck the place. Had he been trying to destroy the other copies of the spell book, as Annalise had, or was he trying to cover his tracks?

  The ice on the stairs was different from the rest. It looked like a single, smooth tube of bluish-white, thicker at the bottom and tapering as it went up. It was shaped like a roll of uncooked dough, but I couldn't tell if it was made of ice or was something else covered with ice.

  I did know that it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. I laid my hand on the frost covered desk beside me and leaned over, craning my neck to look around the end of the sofa at the bottom of the stairs.

  There was more ice there, and it would have taken me a long time to work out the shape if some parts hadn't been stained in blood red. There, on the floor, was a huge hand. The long, curled fingers were like overturned icicles--and the sharp tips were streaked with red.

  The hand was palm up and attached to a slender, knobby arm with an extra elbow. The arm connected to the round body, which extended beyond the foot of the stairs to the front door. The body was a continuation of the long tube, without a feather, hair, scale, or other feature on the smooth ice. The end of it--the thickest part yet--looked like a rolled out tube of blue-white clay, and it took me a moment to realize the jagged crack with the red stains over it was not an injury, it was a mouth.

  I stared at it, transfixed by its eyeless face and smooth, melting form. For the first time I noticed that the red around its mouth--blood, it had to be blood--seemed to run down inside of it. I tried to puzzle out what it was, because I could not see a physical form beneath that ice--was it some kind of eel or snake?

  I didn't know, but I could tell that it was dead, and that was good enough for me.

  A beam fell out of the ceiling and crashed against the kitchen floor, bringing a shower of ceiling timbers with it. Both front windows shattered.

  I suddenly realized the desk I was leaning over had an ice-coated stack of paper on the corner. My hand had been resting on it for support.

  I smashed it, shattering the ice. The pages at the top hadn't been copied onto blue paper; they were plain white letter paper. The top page was soaked and mashed against the five or six pages beneath it, but I could still read the handwritten ink. There were a lot of nonsense words that ended in "-um" and "-us" and I guessed it was Latin.

  I lifted the wet mass of paper, exposing a few copies that seemed to be complete and a spiral bound notebook, handwritten in English. There a swirly capital "N" on the cover of the notebook that matched the signature on Nettle's check. The mystery woman herself must have translated them.

  Something above me cracked. Time to go.

  I grabbed a canvas bag off the back of a chair and shoved all the pages into them, Latin, English and whatever else was there.

  The way out through the kitchen was blocked, so I crept over the slushy carpet toward a large broken window at the side of the house. I didn't like moving closer to that dead predator, but the only other option was to let the house collapse on me.

  As I crossed in front of a rocking chair and reached the window, I saw the body.

  She'd been a big woman, I could tell that much about her. Her shoulders and arms were muscular and her hair was thick with tight brown curls, but there wasn't much more of her. Every part of her below her ribcage was gone, and the carpet around her was shiny with frozen blood.

  Was this the woman who'd turned Wally down for a date? It seemed pretty clear to me that he summoned a predator to kill her, then killed the predator himself, but I had no idea why. Or why he hadn't just bought a gun. Maybe he thought doing this with magic would be cool. I hoped I'd get a chance to ask him about it, at knifepoint.

  The building shuddered and a splintering sound echoed around me. I planted one foot on the rocking chair, knocked away a couple shards of glass with the bottom of the canvas bag, then slipped through onto the grass outside.

  I was afraid that the pressure of my foot against the sill would topple the building
, but it didn't happen. I sprinted away from the house, glass breaking under my foot, until I was safely away.

  The house didn't fall. It creaked and groaned, but it held on. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out. There was no reason for me to stand here waiting for it to collapse, even though I thought someone ought to witness it.

  It felt as though I needed to do something else, but I wasn't sure what. Carry an axe back through the window and hack that big nightmarish thing to pieces? Annalise had burned down Macy and Echo's house, but I didn't have any matches, let alone something that would burn through all the ice inside.

  I knew how to set a fire as well as anyone, but so what? I wasn't an arsonist and I wasn't a surrogate Annalise. I didn't want to be her guy, rushing around the city doing her work for her.

  A sudden, visceral urge to get out of town burned through me. I wanted to head south and keep going until I hit Chile. I wasn't meant for this bullshit. I wasn't supposed to be stumbling over corpses of people torn apart by magic. I hated the world behind the world and I wanted nothing to do with it.

  But of course I wasn't going to do that. This urge to quit was just another enemy that had to be beaten bloody. I had a debt to repay.

  I slipped through the gate and pulled it shut behind me. There was no one on the street--in fact, there were no lights on in any of the other houses. I pulled on the helmet, started the engine and sped away, the little motorcycle buzzing like a chainsaw in the quiet night.

  The only problem was that I had nowhere to go. It was already late evening--soon the streets would be nearly empty, and Wally's little two-stroke bike was going to act like a neon sign that said Hey cops, pull me over.

  I didn't have the money to pay for a motel. With the money I'd taken from Wally, I could park in an all-night coffee shop, assuming I found one. That would give me a chance to read Nettle's pages.

  The memory of her body, and of the thing that killed her, flashed in my mind's eye and the motorcycle wobbled. Focus. It would have been monumentally stupid to survive so much only to smash my own brains out on the asphalt.