Child of Fire: A Twenty Palaces Novel

by Harry Connolly

  “Don’t!” Emmett pleaded. “Please. He’ll die without it.”

  Annalise snorted in irritation and moved her foot to Luke’s skull. Luke let out a little shriek.

  “Boss, wait!” She did. I turned to Emmett. “Give me the spell, and tell me everything you know about it. Where it came from and who gave it to you. All of it.”

  Emmett looked nervously toward Annalise. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out an index card inside a plastic sleeve. He held it out to me. His hand trembled.

  “Toss it.” He did. I glanced at it. There was a complicated design on one side of it, and a four-line rhyming poem on the other.

  “My father gave it to me.” Emmett said. “He got it from the original Cabot Hammer, the man who founded this town, a long time ago. I don’t know much more than that, except that I’m supposed to say the words while the person getting the spell sits in the hoop and looks at the other side of the card. That’s the only copy, too. My father told me to never try to copy it.

  “We didn’t kill people every full moon or anything. It didn’t work like that. We-”

  Annalise stamped down on Luke’s skull. At the same moment, I slid the ghost knife through the sigil on Sugar’s chest. The magic rushed out of it, and his tortured breathing stopped.

  Emmett’s shoulders sagged. All the fight was gone from him. “Do it. Just go ahead.”

  Annalise looked me in the eyes. “Ray.”

  My turn at bat. I took Cabot’s gun out of my pocket and pointed it at the back of Emmett’s head.

  In the movies, you often hear actors say it’s hard to kill someone. They’ll say it’s the hardest thing in the world. Well, that’s bullshit. Prison is full of people who thought murder was some kind of achievement-I lived with some of them.

  And most of those guys wish they could take it back, because the truth is, the only thing a person needs to commit murder is a moment when they don’t care about the consequences, when they don’t think about what they’re doing and what it means.

  Most people spend their whole lives without thinking what it means.

  I couldn’t do that. I had done too much time and had too much conscience. I’d shot my best friend when I was just a boy, and I’d hated guns ever since. I knew exactly what would happen. I knew exactly what it would mean.

  I squeezed the trigger anyway.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Emmett’s corpse looked just the way I expected it to look. So did the room around me. So did Annalise.

  I saw a flannel shirt hanging on a coatrack and used it to wipe down Cabot’s gun. I tossed the gun onto the floor. It thunked as it landed. I wasn’t worried about Cabot, though.

  Everyone in town had seen me. There was no way I was going to avoid prison this time. I was a cop killer. He was a corrupt cop and a killer himself, but that wouldn’t matter once the manhunt began.

  But what choice did I have? I couldn’t let him walk free. What if he had another copy of the spell somewhere? What if he went looking for more magic? He would just move somewhere else and start killing again.

  With some difficulty, Annalise pulled a red ribbon off her vest and dropped it onto a stuffed chair. It burst into flame. She kicked over a desk, scattering a stack of papers onto the flames. The fire was already licking at the painted walls. Soon the station would be lit by orange firelight, just like the Dubois home.

  I returned Annalise’s debit card. I didn’t want anything of hers, especially not her money.

  “Stop moping,” she said. “You did something useful here, even if the work makes you feel dirty.”

  “Let’s just go.”

  I followed her toward the door. A small, framed photo hung on the wall, and while I didn’t want to look at it, I couldn’t turn away. It showed Emmett with his arm around Charles the Third. The youngest Hammer was about thirteen and tall for his age, but he was carrying an extra hundred pounds of flab. An older man with Charles’s narrow face and unruly black hair flipped burgers on a gleaming barbecue. That must have been Charles the Second, Charles Junior.

  While the fire grew behind me, I leaned close to the picture. The elder Hammer was the only one not smiling-his face was worn and sagging, his eyes rimmed with dark circles. He was a man with regrets. In the background, I could see the huge windows of an expensive modern house and a smooth, curved gray stone wall like the base of a castle.

  The firelight cast flickering shadows over the photo. The flames had reached the ceiling. Annalise stood by the front door, waiting for me silently. Time to go.

  We walked outside. The storm clouds had blown away, and I could see blue sky and sunshine for the first time in days.

  A crowd of people stood across the street. The van was parked around the corner. We walked toward them.

  “Next time, I’ll park closer.”

  “Good idea. You look like a mess.”

  I pulled at my shirt. It was torn, sopping wet, and it stank of gunpowder and antifreeze. “I needed more than four changes of clothes, I think.”

  “I didn’t think you’d live through that many. Are you going to vomit?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said to her. “But not right away, I think.”

  As we neared the crowd, the cook approached me nervously. I must have been quite a sight. “What’s happening?” he asked. “What’s going on in this town?”

  “The Dubois brothers killed Reverend Wilson.”

  There were gasps of astonishment from the crowd.

  “What?” the cook said. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Go away,” I told him. We pushed through the crowd and headed up the block. No one tried to stop us. “Charles Hammer is next, right, boss?”

  “He would be, if I knew where to find him. That’s all I’ve been doing is looking for him. He hasn’t been home or at his office since we were there last, and Karoly’s notes don’t tell me anything.”

  “Are your hands any better?”

  “No,” she said. “They’re worse. I expect I won’t be able to use them at all by tomorrow. They feel like they’re burning, and I can barely bend my fingers.”

  We reached the van. I opened the door for her and helped her in, not bothering with the seat belt. I climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine. “We could stop off at the butcher again-”

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “The last time it barely helped at all, and I don’t want to spend all day on it. It’s a waste of time.”

  “And your stomach?”

  “I’m starving.” She didn’t look at me. She just stared ahead. “I feel a little weak and disoriented, to tell the truth. I’m going to have to rely on you a little more than I would normally. Can I do that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I just killed a cop in cold blood for you. If that doesn’t prove I’m on your side…”

  Right then I felt like vomiting. Thankfully, I hadn’t eaten in hours.

  I pulled out of the parking space. I didn’t have anywhere to go, but I didn’t want to be near the scene of the fight any longer. I didn’t know where I was going, so I just drove.

  Hammer Bay was pretty in the sunlight. I thought of all the people who were not going to see this sunshine, from the woman in the hospital morgue to the reverend to Sugar Dubois, and I felt a twist of cold anger. I tried to aim it at Charles Hammer, or his grandfather, or Eli Warren, who had brought the spells to this town in the first place, but in truth, I was angry at everything, including myself. The world seemed to be full of killers and those who stood by and did nothing about them. I suddenly wished I was one of those who stood by.

  “If I don’t survive,” she said, “I don’t want you to go after Charles Hammer by yourself.”

  “Why not?” I sounded a little indignant, but she ignored it.

  “Because he’s too big for you, and I don’t want him getting a close look at the spells you’re carrying. If things go wrong, head out of town. One of the peers will track you down and debrief you.”

  “I’ll be in j
ail by then, right? Will the society get me out again?”

  She shrugged. She was dying, and she didn’t much care whether I went to jail or not. I’d have probably felt the same way.

  I drove toward Cynthia’s house, glad that it was my left calf that was throbbing, not the one I drove with. Maybe we could get Charles’s location out of her. Something was nagging at me. There was something I should have remembered but couldn’t quite recall.

  “You don’t think he left Hammer Bay, do you?”

  “I hope not,” Annalise said. “I don’t think so. He started this whole thing for his company and his town. I don’t think he’d cut and run.”

  I nodded. Cynthia had refused to leave, too. “What about a boat or something? He’s rich enough to have one.”

  “He does. Karoly’s notes told me which one. I sank it last night. He wasn’t there.”

  Then I remembered. “Cabot said that Charles has been spending all his time hiding in the tower.”

  “There’s a high, round room at their house.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, but no dice. That’s his sister’s bedroom.”

  She didn’t react to that. “Did the sister tell you where he is?”

  “She wouldn’t. Not her own brother.” This was the point where I could have told Annalise about Cynthia’s iron gate, but we had more important things to discuss. “I want to ask her one more time.”

  Annalise didn’t say anything after that. I wondered what she would do to force an answer out of Cynthia. Had I saved Cynthia’s life so my boss could kill her?

  Then it hit me-the gray stone wall in Emmett’s photo, Cabot’s remark that Charles had been hiding in the tower…

  I switched off the turn signal and kept going south.

  We passed out of the business district. I looked toward the ocean and saw the sunlight sparkle on the water. It was a beautiful sight.

  And there, naked in the sunlight, was the light house. Except that with no mist or fog around it, it didn’t look like a light house at all.

  I pulled over and shut off the engine. “Where’s that bad map?”

  We searched the glove compartment and the spaces under the seats before I remembered that I had looked at the map in Ethan’s minivan. I found it in the inside pocket of my jacket, folded up into a tiny square. I unfolded it. The light house was marked with a number four. I turned the map over and found the entry for number four.

  “What’s all this about?” Annalise asked.

  “A light house that isn’t a light house,” I said. “Here it is: ‘In 1949, Charles Hammer the First bought a castle in Scotland and had it shipped to Hammer Bay, where it was rebuilt stone by stone. Sixteen years later, an earthquake toppled all but the southernmost tower, which still stands today.’”

  I stared at the tower. It didn’t have the battlements that I saw in old movies. It was slightly crooked, but it was a tower. This was the “Scottish thing” Bill had mentioned.

  “That’s where he is.”

  Annalise nodded. “Let’s finish this job.”

  “Boss,” I said. I wasn’t sure how to say what I wanted to say next, so I just blurted it out. “Do you think there’s a way to turn those worms back into kids? Do you think they can be cured?”

  She did not like that question. “Anything is possible, Ray.”

  I thought that, if I’d asked her if we could fly a candy-cane rocket to Jupiter, she would have given me the exact same answer in the exact same tone. “Boss, I had to ask.”

  “I know you did.” That was all she had to say.

  I drove to the waterfront and parked behind a seafood restaurant. The southward road turned east, away from the cliff and the ocean, leaving an unpaved driveway to go the last two blocks toward the edge of town. We walked toward it, seeing little more than a tumble of black volcanic rocks ahead. And the tower.

  It stood alone, well away from the rest of town and a dozen yards from the edge of the cliff. At the base, I could make out a low, modern house, with huge windows along each wall. And there was a broad asphalt platform where a person could turn a car around. I couldn’t see a driveway connecting it to the town, and I couldn’t see the ruins of the rest of the castle.

  “There,” Annalise said. She nodded toward a pair of Dumpsters a few doors down. The driveway to the tower was hidden behind them.

  We walked quickly back to the van. I pulled out of the parking lot and drove toward that driveway. We passed three identical burgundy Crown Victorias, but I chalked them up to someone’s desire to keep up with the Joneses.

  The gravel road was barred by a long gate. I stopped, climbed out, and cut off the lock with my ghost knife. The gate swung wide open. I drove down the sloping driveway and parked the van at the end. No one was going to be driving out of here unless they tipped the van onto the rocks, which, frankly, was not all that unlikely.

  I climbed out and opened Annalise’s door. We walked toward the house. It was much larger up close than it had seemed from the parking lot. The windows were all two stories tall. And none of the shades were drawn.

  Something was wrong.

  I slipped over to the garage and peeked into the window. Inside was the same elegant black S-class Mercedes I’d seen parked outside the toy factory door. It was a couple of years old. There were no other cars in sight.

  “This isn’t right,” I said to Annalise.

  She was too short to look in the window and didn’t bother to try. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “There’s a Mercedes in there. Charles Hammer drives a Prius.”

  “He’s rich.” She moved toward the front door.

  Not right. Not right. Not right. I took the ghost knife from my pocket and threw it, cutting the phone line.

  I was about to cut through the locks on the front door when Annalise clumsily turned the knob and pushed. The door swung open. It was unlocked.

  We entered. Golden sunlight filled the room. I could see storm clouds down at the edge of the horizon, but the sunlit waters were beautiful.

  I shut the door and noticed something hanging beside the hinges. It was a long, double-edged knife. The blade appeared to be made of silver. I suspected it was there on the off chance that the Dubois brothers turned on their masters. I took it off the hook and held it in my off hand.

  I followed Annalise toward the far end of the room. There was a flat-screen TV hung on the wall and a very low couch facing it. The coffee table was littered with a dozen empty cans of beef stew, bread crumbs, and torn-open baguette wrappers. It looked as though someone had holed up here, but then why were the shades wide open?

  “Through here,” Annalise said. She kicked open a door and entered another long room. I followed her.

  This room had plush carpeting. All the shades were drawn, and the air was thick. At the far end, about twenty feet away, was a long wooden desk. Heavy drapes hung just behind it.

  The high leather chair behind the desk was turned away from us. It moved slightly. I saw the sleeve of a dark suit jacket on the armrest.

  “Charles Hammer the Third,” Annalise said, with the tone of a judge passing sentence. She pulled a ribbon from her vest. “You-”

  “That’s not Charles Hammer,” I said. “That’s Able Katz.”

  Able Katz swung the chair around. He looked quite smug.

  The drapes fluttered, and four men stepped out. They were built like boxers, wore the brown uniforms of a private security force, and held Uzis in their hands.

  A door to the side opened, and six more guards rushed into the room. They fanned out along the wall to our left.

  “There are two more waiting for you by the front door,” Able said. “So don’t try to run that way.”

  I noticed a webcam on the desk, beside the computer. Charlie Three was watching us, but from where? I dropped the silver knife into my pocket.

  “Oh, no,” Able said. “Not your pocket, young man. That’s not good enough. You’ll have to toss that weapon away from you, onto th
e floor. In fact, please dispose of all your weapons that way.” He smirked at us.

  Annalise reached up and tugged a fistful of ribbons off her vest.

  “Wait,” I whispered to her. “They’re just guys doing a job.”

  “Their job is to let a child killer go free.”

  “That’s nonsense!” Able barked. “Charles has done nothing of the sort. You two are the ones who have been tearing this town apart.”

  I kept my focus on Annalise. “Emmett was a killer, but these guys were hired to protect someone. They aren’t evil.”

  She turned to me. “Of course they’re not evil,” she said. “I’m the one who’s evil.”

  The phone on the desk rang.

  Everyone seemed startled except for Able. He answered it. “Yes, Charles?” He listened. “I will.” He pressed the button on the handset and turned the phone to us.

  “Can you hear me?”

  It was Charles Hammer, talking over the speaker-phone.

  “Yes,” I said. Annalise looked impatient, but I wanted to hear him out.

  “Let me explain myself,” the voice said, “and I hope we can avoid any unpleasantness. I really, really would like to avoid violence, if that’s possible. More than anything.”

  I watched the guards. Hammer could have been delaying us until the state police arrived, or even more guards, but I doubted it. He had ten armed men in the room with us, and two more, if Able was to be believed, by the exit. “I’m listening.”

  “Able,” the voice said. “Do you trust me? Some of what we’re going to say will sound bad, and these people may make accusations against me that I don’t deserve. I want you to understand-”

  “There’s no need for that, Charles,” Able said. “I trust you.”

  “Great.” Charles took a deep breath as though he was about to cliff dive for the first time. “First I want to explain-”

  “Want want want,” I snapped. “Don’t tell me what you want. What about the kids you killed?”

  “I never killed any kids! The missing children are still alive, and I can get them back. I’ve been searching for a way to get them back.”

  “Looking through your book, huh? The one Eli Warren sold to your great-grandfather?”