Game Of Cages (2010) (28 page)

I stared at him. Months ago, during our time in Hammer Bay, Annalise had used the word primary to refer to a very powerful sorcerer, but at the time I couldn't press her for more information.

I couldn't press Kripke, either. As soon as he realized I wasn't testing him--that he had information I wanted--he'd want me to bargain for it.

"TheLastKing, huh? Did he give any idea who he might be or where he got the information?"

"Well, he had a spell book." Kripke's tone was almost disrespectful.

"Are you playing with me?"

"No," he answered, almost swallowing the word. "He said he had a pair of spell books. He said he stole them, and that if we bought the sapphire dog for him, he'd share six of the spells with us. He didn't say who he'd stolen them from."

"I want to meet him."

"I'll bet, but I'm not going to be able to arrange that. The guys on the server already know I lost the auction. I texted them as soon as the price got out of reach."

"All right," I said. "Then let's narrow it down by which spell books he has. Can you recognize any of these?" I set the gun on the seat and stripped off my jacket and my shirt. My bare skin prickled in the winter air, but I felt warmer with my wet clothes off. After glancing around to make sure there were no cars coming toward us, I turned on the dome light.

Kripke squinted at the spells on my chest. "Iron gate," he said and pointed just below my right collarbone. "It protects against different kinds of mental attacks."

"Is that it?"

He pointed low on my left side, just at the bottom edge of my ribs. "The twisted path. It's a shape-shifting spell for primaries, but as you go down the ... um ... chain, it doesn't do much more than alter your fingerprints and the way people remember you. And you can't control it. Um, hey, can you control it?"

This guy was unbelievable. "Still want to know about magic? I guess you haven't been kidnapped and shot at enough. There's a lesson to be learned, if you have the brains for it."

He didn't seem to get my point. "You're part of the society, aren't you? You're the reason TheLastKing couldn't come, because he said you were looking for him. You know who he is, don't you?"

"What about the rest?"

He glanced over my chest and stomach. "I recognize the closed way around the edges, but the other spells ... he never went over those. Most of the spells he showed us were for summoning."

"What?" If Kripke knew a summoning spell, I was going to drive him out of town and put a bullet in him immediately. There was no way I'd trust this idiot with that much power.

"Only the written part!" he said quickly. "Only the visible part. He only gave us enough to recognize one. He said that summoning spells don't decay the way other kinds do, so we'd be seeing more of them."

I believed him. He was too brain-damaged to lie this well. I picked up the gun. He winced but stayed silent.

I laid my thumb against the safety. Should I kill him? A single predator loose in the world could call more of its kind and feed on us until there was nothing left. People who summoned them, or just wanted one, were risking everyone on the planet.

And Kripke here had tried to buy a predator.

So. Bullet to the head, right?

He'd failed here in Washaway, but what if he hunted down a new spell, or bought one directly from his anonymous Internet buddy? Kripke was like a guy who'd tried to buy an A-bomb or a vial of anthrax. I couldn't arrest him, but could I let him go?

Annalise had warned me about this. She'd told me that, because I was part of the society, it was my job to make corpses. And yeah, if I'd been ruthless with Ursula, no one would have known I was on the estate and the floating storm wouldn't have been summoned to hunt me down. I didn't like it, but being soft on these people had cost lives.

Kripke cleared his throat. "You're trying to decide whether you should kill me, right? Because I tried to buy the sapphire dog."

"Hell, yeah," I said.

"You don't have to," he said. "I can help you find TheLastKing. I can even connect you to the others in my group. Some of them claim to have a full spell or two."

"You're offering your friends to me to save your life?"

I expected him to make excuses, but all he said was: "Yes." At least he was as blunt with himself as he was with others.

Kripke had given me an excuse to spare him, and I grasped at it. If someone in the society wanted to kill him later, they could do it after they'd collected his buddies' spell books.

"Give me your wallet." He did. I took out his license and made a point of studying the address, then I tossed it back to him. "I'm not going to drive you out of town, and if you offer me money again, I'm going to punch you in the mouth, understand?"

"I do."

After putting my shirt and jacket back on, I drove through the winding streets until I hit one I recognized. From there I made my way to the Sunset B and B. They had a VACANCY sign in the window. Yin might expect me to turn up here, but I doubted they'd be looking for Kripke.

"What's this?" he asked.

"A place to hole up tonight. There's probably a bus in the morning. Ride down to Sea-Tac and catch a flight home. Get a lawyer and tell the cops you came up here because you heard about the festival, but you got robbed. They'll believe it. Just stick to your story."

"On Christmas Eve? I'll never catch a flight!"

"Then stay in Washaway. I don't care. In the airport you'd have to eat overpriced food and wait around a really long time. I'm sure you'd rather be kidnapped again."

"You're right," he said, and for the first time I heard a note of humility in his voice. "Of course you're right. I ... I just ..."

"I don't care," I told him. "Get out." He opened the door. "And Stuart? You'll be hearing from me. Do I need to tell you not to mention our deal to anyone?"

"No, sir," he said, which startled the hell out of me. He left the car and walked up the gravel path.

I did a quick U-turn and started back toward town. Did I have enough gas to keep driving around looking for Dolan?

A pickup started its engine and pulled up next to me. I was reaching for my ghost knife when I recognized the driver. It was Ford, Steve's friend with the Wilford Brimley mustache who had gone to check on Little Mark's head injury. "By God, it's about time!" he said. His voice was deep and clear like a country-music singer's.

"What's going on?"

"Chief asked me to fetch you. He said there's some dead Chinese millionaire fellas you need to identify. You want to follow me?"

That changed things. "Give me a minute." I turned to Catherine. She was still staring at me with cow eyes. I couldn't keep dragging her around with me. Ursula could have killed her, and Catherine would have sat there and let it happen. Not to mention what the sapphire dog would do to her.

But if Yin was dead, the Sunset would be safe for her again. "Go up to the room and get some sleep." I gave her my key. I was going to say more, but she opened the door, shut it, and walked up the front path without asking for an explanation. She'd do whatever I asked without question. It was creepy.

Ford had his cellphone to his ear. He held up one fat finger without looking at me. Then he said, "Okay," and switched it off. "Change of plans," he said to me. "Follow behind."

He backed up and did a three-point turn. I followed him around the block, past Hondo's darkened garage to a street I hadn't seen before. There was a shoe store, a gift shop, and what could only be the town hall Steve had mentioned. It was made of red brick, but the window ledges were marble, and at four stories, it towered over the other buildings on the block. Four round steps led up to a pair of unlikely stone columns and a single cramped door.

We parked in the adjoining lot. Ford waddled toward the back of the building and down concrete stairs to a basement door. We were going in the back entrance.

The room we entered had three more chairs and one more desk that it could comfortably hold. Papers were jumbled everywhere, and the corkboard on the wall was six deep with tattered flyers.

As Ford shut the door behind me, a heavy wooden door across the room opened. A black woman with Coke-bottle glasses came in. It was Sherisse again, who had gone with Ford to pick up Little Mark. She was younger than I'd first thought, and she trundled forward to give Ford a quick kiss on the lips. "Thank you for coming," she said in a ragged, whispery voice.

"Of course, sugar kitten. What do you need?"

"I couldn't get through to Steve," she answered. "And I need him to know about this. Come on." She looked at me. "You can come too, if you think you can be useful."

She needed three steps to turn herself around, then she led us through the back door. The next room had a single desk and a huge boiler in the far corner. When Sherisse closed the door, I saw the jail cell.

It was only about seven feet by four feet. Inside was a bare wooden bench that someone had taken from a picnic table. Penny lay on the bench, her face slack. She was dead. One glance told me that.

Little Mark sat slumped in the corner. He was dead, too. Within the confined space of the cell, he was as far from his mother as he could be.

"My God," Ford said. "What happened?"

"I thought they would want to be together, so when I brought Little Mark here, I put him with his mother. He didn't seem to mind, but they didn't even talk to each other. They wouldn't even look at each other."

Ford cleared his throat. "Honey song, how did they die?"

"Well, Penny started yelling at me, but it was all gibberish. Her left arm was hanging at her side like she couldn't move it, her left eye was partly closed, and she started drooling. My Auntie Gertie had a stroke while she was teaching me to make piecrust, so I knew what was happening. I called 911 right away, but it was already too late. They were both ... like this."

"Strokes?" Ford said. "Well, Little Mark did bump his head...."

"But both at the same time?" Sherisse said.

She was right. That wasn't a coincidence. "Have they had any visitors?" I was suddenly sure that Pratt had killed them both with one of his sigils, just to be careful.

Sherisse seemed surprised by my question. She glanced behind her. There were two doors beside the cell: one had a sign that said RESTROOM hung on it, and the other was unmarked. She had glanced at the unmarked door. "No one that has anything to do with Penny or Little Mark."

"That's good," I said. "Who?"

Ford cleared his throat. "If Sheri says--"

I lunged between them, stepped up onto the chair, and jumped the desk. Neither of them reacted quickly enough to stop me. I rushed to the unmarked door and yanked it open.

The next room was dark, lit only by the glow of a small television. Fantasia was playing, and three small children sat in front of it, legs crossed, faces pale and serious.

The sudden light from the opened door made them all turn toward me. "Momma?" the smallest one said, but when he saw it was me, he turned back to the show. The sound was very low, and I realized that there were six or seven more kids bundled up in blankets and sleeping bags on the couch and carpet.

The child who looked oldest said: "It's you!" She jumped to her feet and came toward me. It was Shannon, the girl who had apologized for hiding from us. Staring up at me, her expression hidden in shadow, she grabbed hold of my wrist. "Did you kill it?" she asked. "Did you?"

"I'm sorry, but no. It got away from me. But I haven't given up. I'll keep after it."

"Please," she said. "Please kill it. I want my granma back. Please kill it."

"That's enough now," Sherisse said, and pulled me out of the doorway. "Shannon, this is the last video, okay? I need you to be the big girl and get the rest of them to sleep a little. Okay? Will you do that for me?"

"Please," Shannon said to me. "There's no one else I can ask. No one is listening. Please." She looked at Sherisse then, without saying anything else, and went back into the darkened room. Sherisse shut the door.

Ford's phone rang. He answered it, moving away from us.

I lowered my voice so no one but Sherisse could hear. "How many kids are in there? Is Shannon the oldest?"

"She is. There are nine in there right now. Most of them, their parents just vanished. They don't answer their cells, and no one knows where they are."

I was about to tell her to prepare for more when Ford cut in. "All right," he said in a sharper tone than I'd heard before. "That was Steve. You and I have to go right now."

I shrugged and followed him out to the cars.

We drove back toward the fairgrounds yet again, but well before we got there, the pickup turned onto a feeder road. Fallen trees made it looked blocked and abandoned, but Ford led me around a sudden turn and I followed him uphill.

The pickup was big enough that I couldn't see the road ahead, just a high back fender and cargo net. We turned sharply and drove up a switchback trail for another fifty yards or so before pulling into a small field. Steve's Crown Vic was parked at the far end, and there were two burgundy BMWs and the Maybach beside him. Ford pulled in behind Steve, blocking him in, but there weren't many other spaces left. I parked at the entrance, blocking everyone in.

The field wasn't very large, but it was tremendously muddy, even by Washaway's standards. To the left was a large log cabin with a shake roof. I'd have called it rustic if it hadn't been painted fire-engine red. A few dozen yards behind the cabin the mountains rose straight up for several hundred feet.

The front door swung open and Steve strode out. He moved quickly, but he looked tired. I was already walking toward him when he waved me over. As I slipped between the BMWs, I glanced inside. They were empty.

Before he could say anything, I called: "I don't know if they told you, but I found more dead bodies at the campground, and one woman who was near death. I haven't heard an ambulance, so you might want to have it checked out. One of Regina Wilbur's people, a woman named Ursula, shot up the place."

"Thank you for telling me. After we finish here, I'll head over there to look into the mess you ... found."