So she plans. She doesn’t have friends to rely on. She doesn’t have money. But she has things she’s good at and things she’s willing to do, and that’s even better than cash.
She can make this happen. She can get herself out of this abattoir, and she can take Sebastian with her. And after that, whatever happens happens.
She spots a pair of birds circling high above the hill. Too big to be gulls or hawks. Condors, maybe? But there’s something strange about their shape. The proportions are all wrong. She doesn’t make out that they’re part human until they break off from their circles and come diving straight for the window.
She has enough time to throw off the bedsheet and reach her jeans, crumpled on the floor. She retrieves one of her knives and flicks it open.
The creatures crash through the window.
Two of them, with gray-pink skin, round brown eyes rimmed with cloudy red, the feathers of their wings dragging on the floor. They shake their bodies, and shattered window glass flies like wind-blown hail.
Sebastian is on his feet, a pillow clutched over his crotch. He sniffs, taking in their scent. “These aren’t from around here.”
“No, I think they’re from home.”
“What do you want?” Sebastian asks them.
Agnes swallows a laugh. When two monsters crash through your window, it’s pretty clear what they want.
One of them brushes glass from its wing. It raises its chin in a lofty expression and manages to blend officiousness with murderous threat. Definitely from the home office.
Thumping footfalls sound above the ceiling, and the Cerberus wolf lands on the narrow window ledge. He carefully avoids broken glass and steps into the room.
Agnes was right about him. With all three of his heads fully formed, he’s a glorious sight.
“Carl, what’s this about?” Sebastian demands.
“Carl?” Agnes says, incredulous “His name is Carl?”
All three heads nod. “Yes. And your name isn’t Agnes Santiago. You’re Agnes Valdez.”
There’s only one way he could know her real name. “You’re working with the North.”
“No,” Sebastian says. “I’ve seen every page of his records. I’ve seen his birth certificate. He was born in Twenty-Nine Palms. He’s been in the Southern Kingdom his whole life.”
“I’m not here to talk about me,” the wolf says, its three voices in close harmony. “I’m here to supervise.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Sebastian says.
“He’s here to make sure I carry out my orders,” Agnes tells him, not taking her eyes off the wolf. “If I don’t, then he’ll take care of the job himself. And me as well. Do I have that right?”
“You do.”
“What did the manticore promise you? What do you get out of it?”
Agnes hopes that while they’re talking, Sebastian will manage to cook up some kind of impressive osteomantic attack. Two birds and a Cerberus wolf are more than she can handle on her own.
But Sebastian isn’t cooking anything or mixing anything. Right now he’s just a guy standing around with a pillow over his dick.
She turns to him. She adjusts her grip on the knife. “Well, thanks for the humping.”
She flings the knife, and it enters a birdman’s eye with a noise like puncturing frozen plum. If he were human, the blade would have penetrated the sphenoid bone at the back of the orbit and gone into the frontal cortex. But Agnes isn’t super-clear on bird anatomy, much less on osteomantic bird-human hybrids. So she takes the knife she secreted between the mattress and the box spring and chucks it into the birdman’s throat.
He sinks to the floor, his wings thumping the hardwood as they spasm. Otherwise, he sounds human as he dies.
Sebastian gulps a breath. Relief, maybe. Maybe he thought she was really going to kill him. Maybe, for a second, she considered it.
The second birdman hesitates, understandably since he just saw his cohort killed by a woman with no osteomancy. It turns out to be a fatal mistake, since it gives Agnes time to fetch the knife in her boot and send it rocketing into the space between his eyes. He squawks and falls backward out the window. Agnes doesn’t hear the expected thump of impact, possibly because he’s hollow-boned and lightweight.
The wolf has taken this all in with dispassion. Sometimes the best thing to do is let others fight. You get a chance to size them up, and it tires them out.
Agnes touches the tip of her tongue to her molar. The tooth tastes like metal. Like a bullet. She pushes to dislodge it and accepts the jolt of pain. She aims for the heart and spits. The ceramic shatters, just as it’s supposed to. Basilisk venom bubbles and sizzles on the wolf’s chest, and the wolf howls in triple-voiced agony. Gray fur yellows, turns orange as rust, and falls away in clumps to reveal raw, pink flesh.
But the wolf doesn’t fall. He doesn’t die. Snarling, he leaps on top of her before she can even move. His claws pierce her wrists. Something sharp rakes down the entire length of her leg. His weight compresses her lungs, so her screams are gruff whistling noises.
She feels teeth on her throat. They close down and rip.
The last thing she feels is a wave of heat, blasting her face. This fire is more than chemistry. It adheres to different rules. It’s a breath from the center of the earth, molten rock, liquid iron. It is dragon’s heart. It is the idea of dragon. It is magic, and it’s coming from Sebastian.
He is burning the world.
* * *
—
The cool tile feels good on her bare skin. She’s awoken on the bathroom floor with Sebastian kneeling beside her. She tries to sit up but surrenders to gravity when the movement makes her feel like thousands of matches have taken light beneath her skin. She touches her throat, astonished to find there’s flesh there. Claws shredded her nerves and arteries, she remembers.
“Wolf?” she croaks.
“I put out his embers with a bucket of water to make sure he doesn’t set my house on fire,” Sebastian says. “And then I…Well, I took care of his remains.”
“And why am I not just remains?” Her throat feels like it’s lined with fishhooks.
“Hydra.”
Sever a hydra’s head and another grows in its place. It’s priceless healing magic, and he used it on her.
“So,” he says, sitting on the floor beside her, “the North wants me dead, and the wolf is somehow connected with them. He was even protected against your basilisk venom. We don’t know how to formulate that kind of magic here.”
“I thought you said you were immune.”
“Well, I may have lied to you about that. I wanted to discourage you from spitting at me.”
Agnes closes her eyes and tries to concentrate. Despite the hydra saving her life, she feels wrung out and generally shitty. She raises herself on her elbows and with effort manages to stay up. “What I don’t understand is that if my people recruited the wolf, and if they want you dead, why even bother involving me? Why not just handle it through the wolf?”
Sebastian’s eyebrows suggest a shrug. “I have no idea. I can turn people into toads, but damned if I can figure out how toads think.”
“I want to find out more about the wolf. Can you get me a record of his movements and contacts?”
“Sure. And I can take you to his house if you want.”
“You’re very helpful.”
“Does that bother you?”
“You bother me. Everyone bothers me.” She takes a few deep breaths. “Can you really turn people into toads?”
He laughs. “No, not really.” Then his face gets serious. “Well, not yet.”
He gently lifts her to her feet, and she lets herself lean on him.
* * *
—
The wolf’s house is a mid-century classic ranch style in Burbank. The
re’s a green lawn, a brick porch with a white swing bench, and a basketball hoop mounted on the boathouse at the end of the parking channel. Agnes takes care of the burglar alarm and lets herself and Sebastian in through the back door.
“He definitely lived here,” Agnes says, noting shed fur on the sofa.
Sebastian wrinkles his nose. “You’d think he could afford a housekeeper on his salary.”
“You can talk about housekeeping once you get some actual furniture.”
She finds a den next to one of the bedrooms. Sebastian rifles through the desk drawers while Agnes checks out the coat closet. She finds a small safe bolted to the floor.
Sebastian comes over. He reaches into his satchel, where he keeps his osteomancer’s kit. “I might be able to work up some seps serpent acid to burn through the…Never mind.”
Agnes already has the safe open.
“Girls’ school, fifth year.” The safe contains a Breitling Swiss watch, a rubber-banded bundle of cash, a vial of cocaine, and a single sheet of paper. The paper is blank. Agnes hands it to Sebastian. “Smell this.”
Sebastian subjects it to his sniff test. “Mmm. Smells dry. Desert sand. Whispers. Riddles. Sphinx?”
“We use sphinx oil for coded messages in the North.” She takes the paper back from him. Then, from her bag she retrieves a nail polish bottle, unscrews the cap, lifts out the brush.
His nose twitches. “That’s not for fancy fingers.”
She lays the paper on the desk and begins brushing the bottle’s contents over it in light strokes. “With the matching formulation, you can decrypt a sphinx-coded message.”
“And you just happen to have the match?”
“They taught us to use ur-sphinx in year four. Quiet now. I have to listen.”
The brushed-on oil evaporates, airborne particles wafting over her face, into her nostrils, through her eyelashes, snaking deep in her ears, rising to her brain. She hears the whispers, hot wind piling sand into dunes, the small movements of scorpions hunting spiders on the eroded plains. Only natural noises at first. Then human sounds. Utterances. Murmurs. She listens the way she was taught all those years ago in another kingdom. The language is English, the dialect, Northern Californian. The voice is deep and rich and powerful. It is frightening and beautiful, and she listens.
Places.
Times.
When it falls silent she lifts her head from the page.
“Are you okay?” Sebastian asks. “You were in some kind of state for about twenty minutes.”
She doesn’t answer at first. Her throat is dry.
“Agnes?”
“The manticore is in Los Angeles,” she says. “She’s going to finish the job the wolf failed to. She’s going to finish the job I failed to.”
“We can do to this manticore what we did to the wolf.” Sebastian is so blissfully stupid.
“Not to the manticore, we can’t. Maybe if you ate another ten years of magic. But I know what you can do, and I know what she can do.”
“Okay, then we run to Mexico. We can take my boat.”
“You don’t run from the manticore.”
“No fighting and no running? It’s very discouraging when you knock down all my good suggestions. I hope you have an idea.”
“I do,” Agnes says.
She wishes she didn’t hate her idea so very much.
* * *
—
The Cerberus wolf looks pretty good, considering how dead he is. His fur doesn’t even smell singed. Agnes checks herself in her compact and decides that even if the wolf looked like a wad of melted hair, she’d have to go through with this. She pads between the garment-district warehouses, down a back-alley channel lined with loading docks. The only light comes from a weak lamp bolted over the doors of a three-story building, but it’s enough to reveal the hulking goons waiting there. The three of them have massive chests and arms, broad faces, angry little eyes, and sets of bullhorns with three-foot spans. She remembers picking tar off minotaur fossils a year ago. At least someone found her work useful.
They train their eyes on her. She trains her six eyes back.
“Is there a problem, Mr. Thompson?” one of them asks.
It sounds more like a sincere question than a challenge, so she stays loose, but she does wonder why they’re asking about a problem. She must have done something wrong.
“You tell me,” she tries.
The bulls exchange uncertain glances.
“Well, it’s just that…you usually use the VIP entrance, is all.”
“I wanted to see how the other half lives,” she deadpans. Should she have deadpanned it? Should she have said something else entirely? Nothing at all? Should she see if she’s capable of ripping out the throats of three towering minotaur guys? She’s off balance, and not just because she’s not used to carrying this mass and shape. But she better get used to it fast. Sebastian used shape-shifting magic from chimera vertebrae to give her the form and appearance and even smell of the Cerberus, but that’s only half the job. It’ll take more than osteomancy to convince the manticore. It will take all her training from girls’ school, and all her experience in the field.
Be a wolf, she tells herself. You are a wolf.
The minotaurs laugh uncertainly, and one opens the door for her. “Have a good evening, sir.”
She just grunts and steps inside.
She regrets it instantly. It’s a disco.
The air is a dark, smoke-choked haze flashing with strobes and stupid flickering lights. Reflections ricochet off the spinning disco ball, and she wants to cut the chain holding it up and punish it for being so twinkly. The music starts to put a little rhythm in her step, and for this reason, she deeply resents the music. But it’s what the customers come for. That, dancing, and magic.
Most of them show only essence of bone consumption, with narrow irises like cats, or slightly elongated incisors curving over black lips, or some ineffable qualities of satyr or serpent. But a few have feathers. One girl twirls around, dancing with a rainbow of spotlights playing off her spread wings. It takes a lot of magic to achieve these transformations, and the wolf can’t help but wonder what they had to do to get it. None of this stuff is street legal. And all of it is bank-breakingly expensive. Maybe they’re all just boring and rich.
Agnes is attracting notice herself. Some people move out of her way. Some pose, wanting her attention. A boy with fish eyes runs a green tongue over his blue lips. Agnes hates being so conspicuous, but she couldn’t find a three-hooded hoodie on such short notice.
Act like you belong here, she tells herself. She does it a little too well and has to turn down three dance invitations before she makes it to the double doors leading to the kitchen.
The cooks glance up and then look away as she passes through. They’re used to seeing the wolf here. Good.
“Is she in?” Agnes asks.
From their expressions, this isn’t a question they’re used to. But so what? They’re cooks. She’s the wolf, and she’ll ask whatever she wants. So, a cook tossing chicken wings in a bowl of hot sauce says, “She’s in her office, sir.”
“Take me there,” the wolf commands, putting a little growl in all three voices.
The cook gives the other kitchen staff a wide-eyed “isn’t one of you going to bail me out of this?” look, but they all become very busy with their food prep. One of them takes the bowl from the poor guy’s hands, and his fate is cemented. He swallows miserably, wipes his hands on his apron, and leads the wolf through a stockroom, down a hallway, and up three flights of stairs. Two birdmen on the landing stop eating ribs and make way for the wolf. One of them opens a door for her.
Agnes thought she was prepared for the sight of the manticore, but she was wrong. Maybe it’s the passage of time, or maybe it’s because the manticore has consumed more magic, b
ut the creature is even more grand and magnificent than ever. In the dull light from the lampposts shining through the window, her tousled mane gleams, spreading over her mountainous shoulders and down her back. She’s the height of a grizzly bear, and her feline eyes glow like emeralds.
The birdman shuts the door behind Agnes, sealing her inside the cramped office. She takes a seat across the desk from the manticore. The manticore is too large for the desk chair, and she remains standing, inspecting her obsidian claws. “Communication has not been good.”
Agnes doesn’t think the wolf would apologize, even to the manticore, so she doesn’t either. Instead, she reaches into her coat pocket, retrieves two fingers, and places them on the desk.
“Does this tell you what you want to know?”
The manticore’s nostrils flare. Agnes doesn’t know if she knows what Sebastian smells like, but if she does, she should be satisfied. The fingers are his.
“Where’s the rest of him?”
The fingers remain on the desk, curled up like white prawns.
“Safe.”
The manticore nods, as if she’s coming to understand something, and Agnes has no idea exactly what she’s coming to understand. “Do you want to tell me why you haven’t delivered him?”
“I’m not satisfied with the arrangement,” says Agnes. That could mean anything, which is why she said it.
The manticore sighs and stretches her tail so the barb touches the window with a little tink sound. “You want to revisit our agreement. Again.”
Sure, why the hell not? “Yes,” says Agnes.
“And you think you deserve this because…?”
“Because I risked a lot taking Blackland. Because it cost me. Because he had someone protecting him I couldn’t have foreseen.”
The last point seems to strike a note of sympathy with the manticore. “Agnes surprised me, too. I’ve known her since she was a child. I trained her myself.”
The Book of Magic Page 43
